why dave bergman is neat

Any readers interested in art, faith, life, and the intersection of the three might want to check out a recent Weekly Standard review (well, I guess they call it a ‘preview’) of Arthur Kirsch’s book Auden and Christianity by Wilfred M. McClay, professor of humanities and history at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga. Auden moved from left-wing sympathies back to Anglicanism, though in influences (two of the most important being Reinhold Niebuhr and Soren Kierkegaard) and many sympathies he seems to have been a modernist liberal Protestant (by the way, I don’t claim expertise on Auden’s theological pedigree; these are just some off-hand remarks and a summary of some parts of the article), and he held many unorthodox views. Of course, however, he was most influential as a poet and critic, not as a theologian, and that is probably the way he would’ve wanted it (though Kirsch also notes that he would have wished to be remembered ‘as a man who sought to live a Christian life’). Still, the book seems to contain an interesting analysis of this part of his life. As a teaser, here are the first two paragraphs of the (p)review:

IT'S A SAFE BET THAT W.H. AUDEN would have been suspicious of the idea behind this book. True, he was forthcoming about his attraction to the Christian faith, an attraction that remained strong even during his years of professed atheism, and became explicit after his formal return to the church in 1940. He was equally forthcoming in lamenting what he called the "prudery" of "cultured people" who treat religious belief as the last remaining shameful thing, and find theological terms "far more shocking than any of the four-letter words." Furthermore, there can be no doubt that Auden was, and deserves to be known as, a Christian writer, rather than a writer who merely happened to be Christian. Many of his most distinguished works of poetry and criticism, especially in his American years, are not only indebted to, but positively enveloped in, the riches of Christian narrative, language, imagery, allusion, and moral insight.

The notion that religious faith and serious thought are mutually exclusive categories always struck Auden as risible and unintelligible. But he would have bristled at an effort to separate out his religious beliefs and restate them as systematic propositions, or examine them independently or thematically, rather than see them as players in his rich and various inner symbolic drama. Such an undertaking would probably have struck him as unspeakably vulgar and, moreover, an invasion of his privacy, putting his devotional life on display and forcing him unwillingly to be judged by the public standard of a "religious" man, a role for which he felt singularly ill-equipped.

Auden was primarily a poet. Let’s move on now to someone who was primarily a critic: F.R. Leavis. The Weekly Standard also has a review of F.R. Leavis: Essays and Documents, edited by Ian MacKillop and Richard Storer. The (p)review is by Brooke Storer. Leavis was a great contributor to the professionalization of the study of English literature, a polarizing figure who was ‘not only dogmatic but belligerent and paranoid’. He wished to educate his students in how to study and analyze literature; on a less sympathetic reading, he wished rather to indoctrinate them:

Leavis's effect on educational standards was so pervasive that his inimical colleague, the literary historian E.M.W. Tillyard, complained that his students were trained rather than educated; they came up to Cambridge, he said, already armed with "a repertory of labels and phrases to be attached, by cunning, to the proper exhibits," and fully informed as to "the proper authors to admire or despise." Patrick Harrison, a former student of Leavis's, has spoken not only of "OK texts" for Leavis's students to read and approve, but "OK words"--"poise," "immediacy," "sharply realized"--for them to bandy about in examination papers.

Toward the end of the (p)review, we read the following:

To reexamine Leavis's career is to return to the question he thought he had definitively answered: that is, whether it is really desirable to "professionalize" literary criticism at all. Perhaps Leavis's Victorian and neo-Victorian predecessors (George Saintsbury, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Lord David Cecil) had it right, and the study of literature must remain the province of the erudite amateur. Literature simply cannot be judged or examined by scientific standards; if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.

I admit that one would be hard-pressed to successfully apply scientific standards to literature. I’m still, however, the follow-up to that leaves me a bit unsettled: ‘...if it could, it would not be literature at all but science or philosophy.’ Are boundaries between types of writing really this hard and fast? If they are, then what do we do with, say, the ancient Greeks, who wrote science as literature, philosophy as literature (and, of course, literature as philosophy)?

Anyway, the book sounds like a good read, even including class-notes taken by his students. If you’re interested in literary criticism and its history, it might be worth perusing.

(Links via ALDaily.)