|
|
‘That dreadful Terry Eagleton’
The Gatekeeper: A Memoir
By Terry Eagleton
Penguin, 2003, £6-99
Reviewed by
Niall Mulholland
TERRY EAGLETON’s memoir, The Gatekeeper, is a witty and
serious book from the leading academic Marxist commentator on literature and
culture in Britain.
At just 192 pages, Eagleton follows a policy of less is more
when it comes to setting down his past, which I think works very well. Rather
than lose the reader’s attention with too much details of his life, Eagleton
draws on themes, such as religion, politics, culture, philosophy and the
academic life.
The book’s title comes from the ten-year-old Terry
Eagleton’s role as a ‘gatekeeper’ at a Carmelite nuns convent in Salford in
England. He was part of the ceremony that saw 19-year-old novices enter convents
for life. Eagleton is critical of the Catholic church hierarchy, but he has
sympathy with the ideals of its nuns. Their hard conditions of life were a
rejection of the outside world of materialistic capitalism. Eagleton was so
impressed by this devotion he even considered becoming a priest but decided
instead to pursue an academic career and by the 1960s he was a student activist
of the ‘Catholic Left movement’.
Salford during Eagleton’s upbringing, in the 1940s and
1950s, was desperately poor. Terry was the son of Irish immigrants and the
family suffered from poverty, illness and child deaths. He recounts how Salford
school children stuffed themselves with beetroot during lunchtime, as a way to
stave off hunger with cheap food, and in the afternoon classes often puked it
up.
As an antidote to the physical and intellectual poverty
found at school, the young Eagleton dived into literature, reading, for example,
all of Dickens’ books. He won a place at grammar school, opening up a new life
unthinkable for his parents’ generation. Later, as an undergraduate, he lapped
up the works of philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein. Eagleton says he has
fortunately enjoyed a life of writing for a living while his father slaved for
30 years in an engineering factory "which never yielded him a single pleasant
moment".
At Cambridge University the undergraduate Eagleton came
under the influence of Raymond Williams, the hugely influential Marxist literary
and cultural critic. Soon the young protégé was publishing his own opinions on
literature. Eagleton’s Marxism has been marked by its breadth of learning and by
its inclusiveness, unlike previous Marxist academics that were fellow travellers
of the Stalinist Communist Party of Great Britain. Eagleton, for example, openly
embraced the contribution of Leon Trotsky on literature. He wrote that the
Russian revolutionary’s book, Literature and Revolution, first published in the
1920s, is "a classic of Marxist criticism, recording the confrontation between
Marxist and non-Marxist schools of criticism in Bolshevik Russia". (Marxism and
Literary Criticism, Routledge, 1976)
Terry Eagleton has published a great amount over the years,
and always presents ideas that are thought provoking and insightful. But I find
his prose style can sometimes be heavy going and convoluted, which is a shame,
given the important opinions he wants to express. Much more accessible, and
humorous, are his shorter works, and those produced for a wider audience.
Marxism and Literary Criticism (1976) is one of the best introductions to
Marxist literary and cultural analysis. It summarises the various Marxist
interpretations of these disciplines, including the ideas of Karl Marx and
Frederick Engels, Georgy Plekhanov, VI Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Georg Lukacs, Lucien
Goldmann, Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht.
Eagleton has also published polemical works against
post-modernist ideas, written on Irish literature and society, and even found
time to produce a novel and a play. His latest publication, Figures of Dissent
(Verso, 2003), is a stimulating collection of short reviews and articles written
over the last decade.
While Eagleton made good use of his place in academia – he
was Warton Professor of English at Oxford University and a Fellow of St
Catherine’s College, Oxford – the memoirs make lacerating attacks against the
privileged and elitist institutions of Oxford and Cambridge Universities
(Oxbridge). He says of his former fellow dons: "Petulant, snobbish, spiteful,
arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centred, they were pretty a squalid
bunch".
Oxbridge was "full of people who were there largely because
they could not conceivably be anywhere else, as some people can only be in
top-security psychiatric institutions… There is a kind of lumpen intelligentsia
in Oxbridge who have no real jobs".
Unsurprisingly Eagleton is none too popular with the
Establishment for holding these views. Perhaps what annoys them most is his
continuing commitment to radical politics and the need for social change. Prince
Charles is reported to have referred to the author as, ‘that dreadful Terry
Eagleton’.
This does not stop Eagleton from honestly recalling his
experiences of the ‘far Left group’ he was an active member of during the 1980s
(he does not name the organisation). Eagleton found many of his former comrades
middle class, abstract and contemptuous of the working class. He attacks ultra
left groups that proclaim revolution and take no account of the real situation
in society. He hilariously sends up types who attend Left conferences, including
the "Most alienated Person in the Conference, as well as the
Real-World-Out-There, prolier-than-thou participant…"
The Socialist Party has always argued that socialists must
base themselves on the interests and needs of the working class, if they are to
avoid the pitfalls of the middle class ultra left, which Eagleton so caustically
describes. At the same time, though, Eagleton says it is necessary to be
principled and to do something about the state of the world. He finds the "most
dispiriting stereotype of all" is "the militant young leftist who has matured
with age into a sceptical liberal or stout conservative".
In fine passages, Eagleton outlines how we live in a
‘revolutionary age’ where the desire of people for even modest change to global
capitalism means becoming a revolutionary. "Anyone who imagines otherwise is an
idle utopianist, though they are more commonly known as liberals and
pragmatists".
The Fellows of St Catherine’s College must be spitting fire
over Eagleton’s memoirs. Amongst them, no doubt, are ex-Marxists who have jumped
to the side of the ruling class and who like to prove their worth by mocking the
Left. Terry Eagleton resisted this well-worn path. He quips: "Sheer horror of
cliché, if nothing else, has preserved me from this fashionable fate".
|