Raymond Williams

Making Connections

Elizabeth Eldridge, John Eldridge

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9780415040884
• eBook ISBN: 9781134953226
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a critical introduction to the full range of Williams' work - fiction and non-fiction. It assesses the significance of his contribution in understanding culture, politics and society. Fair-minded, accurate and sensitive, the book makes crucial connections between the different aspects of Williams' work and the underlying concern for a democratic polity which informed it.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Raymond Williams was sixty-six when he died in 1988. In the obituaries that followed, the intellectual left underlined his accomplishments as writer, academic and cultural critic. They also expressed a sense of personal loss—of guide, mentor and inspiration. His long-time friend and colleague, Stuart Hall, wrote:

In this age of Philistine barbarism over which Mrs Thatcher is pleased to preside, the loss of Raymond Williams is irreparable; and those of us who had the privilege to know him personally, to read his work, to talk and argue with him, to be formed, intellectually and politically, in his shadow, hardly know how to express or where to put our sense of the enormity of that loss.

(Hall 1988a:20)

Hall went on to celebrate the range and stubbornness of Williams’ critical intelligence, the variety of his modes of writing and his seriousness of purpose in seeking to understand and communicate to others the ‘central processes of our common life’. For Hall, Williams was a socialist intellectual who refused to be captured by any tendency:

There wasn’t the usual rift between thought and feeling, idea and life, which characterises so much ‘politicised’ intellectual work. His practice was that of ‘dialogue’—with other traditions, positions, other ways of seeing and feeling, as a ‘pointed response to a particular orthodoxy’ because ‘the society of dialogue’ was his way of imagining what socialism would be like.

(ibid.: 21)

To lose such a person when New Right ideologues were still rampant following Margaret Thatcher’s third election victory and when the socialist project worldwide was looking charmless and shop-soiled and at its worst brutally repressive, was to lose someone who always saw socialism and democracy as mutually interdependent if both were to flourish for the common good.

Anthony Barnett who, like Stuart Hall, has been closely associated with the New Left Review, wrote in the Listener, where in the early 1970s Williams had been the television critic:

When I try to answer the question of what Raymond Williams was… my answer is that he was a thinker. When you talked with him, his thinking was almost palpable: a deceptively slow delivery allowed a tremendously impressive body of mental capital to go into action. Above all, he grasped what few of his political associates realised: that we are far from understanding the processes of social change. He proposed a new general approach that he termed ‘cultural materialism.’

The significance of this, as Barnett points out later in the piece, was that it required a reassessment of the terms of the argument in which socialism was conducted: ‘He insisted that “culture”, which was regarded as “superstructure” by Marxists, was in fact central to structures of change, control and democracy’ (Barnett 1988:15).

Whereas Hall drew attention to Thatcherism, Barnett reminds us of the fact that a large part of Williams’ life was experience of the Second World War (where he served with a tank regiment in Normandy) followed by the cold war. Williams actively sought to reconstruct the terms of the ideological debate. To oppose anti-communist hysteria in the USA was not to endorse Stalinism; to oppose Stalinism was not to reject socialism. From his egalitarian perspective Williams was suspicious of leadership. Even to talk in those terms could contribute to a politically and culturally subordinated people. Barnett comments: ‘He wanted people to be at home with themselves and each other. He knew that this could demand an extremely tough and complex struggle for power, yet people had to undertake it for themselves’ (ibid.: 15).

To be an egalitarian among the privileges of Cambridge University was not without its ironies, even contradictions, as Frank Kermode recalled in his obituary of Williams:

He once told me of a preliminary visit to his new college, on a day when a newly-instituted feast was to be held in honour of the patron saint of servants. This seemed an untypical, even a promising development, until he discovered that it was the fellows who were going to feast while the servants waited on them as usual.

(Kermode 1988:25)

A former student, Terry Eagleton, writing in the Independent on the same day, referred to the range and versatility of Williams’ writings and the originality and independence of his thought and claimed that ‘Almost single-handedly, he transformed socialist cultural studies in Britain from the relative crudity of the 1930s Marxism to an impressively rich, subtle and powerful body of theory’ (Eagleton 1988:25).

There was more in this vein, notably from Fred Inglis, who wrote explicitly about the loss of a father-figure for British socialists. What he particularly emphasizes is Williams’ hope for a socialist future despite all the forces ranged against it and the sectarian, sometimes self-destructive politics of the left itself:

In Britain, Williams was a singular figure, a socialist intellectual whose beliefs and whose work came together in an extraordinary integrity. The only other figure of that same stature with the same features is Edward Thompson. Both men are striking in that they command a wide, popular affection. The conditions for socialist parties being presently so unpropitious, it is no surprise that their conduct is marred by rancorous differences. Williams and Thompson alike stand outside these, and yet both men address themselves straightly, passionately and in the real language of men to the fretting, chafing and usual uproar of everyday politics.

(Inglis 1988)

Yet it is notable that the obituaries refer to the loss of the intellectual left. Michael Rustin, writing for the periodical Radical Philosophy (Summer 1988) drew attention to the gap between theory and practice in the politics of the left, as reflected in the differing responses to Williams’ death:

Looking back, one can see now that the mainstream Labour tradition in Britain should have embraced Williams as the central figure of his generation, as it had been earlier able to acknowledge G.D.H.Cole and R.H.Tawney. T.H.Marshall’s trilogy of citizenship rights—civil, political, social and economic—has its proper extension in Williams’ idea of a cultural entitlement, and it is an index of the deep failure of British labourism that it has so far been unable to recognise this, or to absorb Williams’ work in any significant way into his politics. It is notable that while his death has been widely mourned by intellectuals—and not only of the left—it seems to have been scarcely noticed publicly by any figure from Labour’s mainstream political institutions.

(Rustin 1988:47)

This leads Rustin to conclude that Williams’ central concern with a democratic culture seems far from realization:

The distance between a vigorous practice of cultural criticism and dissent, on which Williams has had a great influence, in education and elsewhere, and a still predominantly utilitarian politics, remains seemingly as wide as ever.

(ibid.)

In Politics and Letters (1981a) Williams referred to what he called a comic episode. When the Labour government was elected in 1963 the Sunday Times ran a feature on ‘The New Establishment’ including photographs of Peter Townsend, Richard Hoggart, Brian Abel-Smith and Raymond Williams:

These were supposed to be the people who would be giving the intellectual orders to the Labour Ministers. In reality, throughout the entire six years of Labour Government in the sixties, I never had one enquiry, formal or informal, private or public, one invitation to a committee or conference, from anybody in the Labour government or Labour machine. Not one line. On the other hand, following a private leak from a man in the Civil Service, Hoggart and I and the Musicians’ Union had to fight a plan by Benn to set up a reported chain of commercial radio stations. In the case of the Open University, which combined my interest in communications and in Adult Education, there was no consultation whatsoever.

(Williams 1981a:37)

So all was not sweetness and light. On the academic front, Williams was no stranger to hostile criticism. Let us recall some examples:

Mr Williams is a dull writer who expresses himself in a tone of heavy and persevering piety.

(Anthony Quinton, review of Culture and Society, Spectator, 26 May 1961)

It is easy to get irritated with Raymond Williams. His politics, as revealed in the last 50 pages of the book, seem to me to be mostly wishful thinking and romantic fervour. He describes himself as having been ‘absolutely solid’ with the May events in 1968, as if anyone can be absolutely solid with something as frothy and insubstantial as that insurrectionary carnival.

(Alan Ryan, review of Politics and Letters, New Society, 20 September 72)

The most interesting feature of Mr Williams’ writing is its violence. He seems incapable of talking of any change, movement or effort, except in violent language. Tightening, breakthrough, crisis, struggle, revolution, pressures, drives, forces, tensions, stresses: these are the descriptive words which come naturally to him; and to anyone who is used to reading social and political theory, they are warning signals. Those who habitually see political or social situations, or political or social movements in such terms usually end as either apostles of despair or apologists of authoritarianism. Mr Williams is a knotted figure, greyer than most of them, and his argument, certainly, is not a blueprint for an authoritarian regime. But it is a hand knitting pattern for it.

(Henry Fairlie, review of Communications, Encounter, August 1962)

We may pause a little longer with Henry Fairlie. Later in the review he contrasts a ‘great academic sociologist like Professor Morris Ginsberg’ with the ‘easy sensationalism which is accepted as serious criticism’. Here, Williams is placed with the latter:

It is sensationalism which is the mark of the quasi-sociologist or quasi-social critics who today are so quickly translated into paperback pundits. We are not, as yet, so infested with them as America, but it cannot be long before others realise that, like Mr Wright Mills or Mr Vance Packard in America, Mr Raymond Williams and Mr Richard Hoggart have cottoned on to a good thing. As sociologists they do not qualify, because they observe no strictness in the use they make of sociological methods, even when equipped to use them; as social critics they do not qualify, because they ignore the diversity of human experience, so that they may concentrate on aspects of it which will serve for their sensational generalisations and ignore also the different depths of different kinds of experience, so that they may convince us that anything which happens to anybody in this long night of the 20th century is a matter for alarm if not despondency, and certainly matter for a book.

(ibid.: 84)

We will take one more illustration for our present purposes. Two years after Williams’ death a clutch of books by or about him appeared. These were reviewed in the London Review of Books (8 February 1990) by R.W.Johnson, who referred to them as ‘essentially fan club books’. In the review, Johnson claims that Williams was not a major or even a very coherent theorist and that his political writings represented what Michael Walzer had called the failure of English political writing. In Johnson’s opinion, Williams ‘never actually spells out what socialism is for him. It seems, in the great tradition of British wooziness, to be all about values and community and wholeness; in a word, Christian socialism and brown bread.’ The review essay is consistently hostile to Williams throughout. We get the measure and tone of it from the last paragraph:

I must confess that I simply do not understand the claims made for his political writings, which seem to me to be repetitive, ritualised, empty and downright evasive. Their significance surely lies in the exemplary way in which they display the exhaustion of a tired political tradition, a final anguished charge into a cul de sac. There is a very real sadness to this but it is better to be frank. In the new, post-Communist world of the 1990s the Left has much hard thinking to do—about its own roots and identity as well as about where it goes from here. The inspiration that can be gained from a backward look to the heroes of the Sixties has now a merely nostalgic quality to it. A whole new intellectual beginning is required and the greatest danger to that process will be to get trapped within the rhetoric of an exhausted tradition.

(Johnson 1990:6)

Let us recall the scope and nature of Williams’ work. He wrote six novels. Border Country (1960), Second Generation (1964) and The Fight for Manod (1979), which constitute a trilogy; as well as The Volunteers (1978), Loyalties (1985) and People of the Black Mountains. The last of these was published posthumously in two volumes, The Beginning (1989) and The Eggs of the Eagle (1990). Novel writing was a continuing and for Williams a significant part of his work. In response to a question, in Politics and Letters (1979; Williams 1981a)—‘Is there a major difference for you between discursive and fictional works in your practice as a writer?’—he replied:

It is certainly true that I have given relatively more time, in comparison with what became visible and valued, to fiction, than to any other forms of writing. In the late forties, I regarded the novels as the work which I most wanted to do. Now I feel differently about them. All along there have been certain things pressing on me, which I could simply find no alternative way of writing; today, however, fiction is something I’m prepared to work on a long time without feeling any urgency to finish quickly.

(Williams 1981a: 271)

The non-fictional work does not easily fit into conventional disciplinary categories. Still, Williams was closely associated with English at Cambridge as both a student and a teacher, and some of his books focus more closely than others on issues of literary theory and criticism. These include Reading and Criticism (1950), Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952) later extended to Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (1968), Modern Tragedy (1966), Drama in Performance (1954), The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), The Country and the City (1973), Marxism and Literature (1977) and Writing in Society (1983). This last was a collection of essays culled from published papers and lectures. There is another group which deals centrally with issues of cultural change and communication. Among these can be numbered Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom) (1954), Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), Communications (1962), Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974), Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays (1980), Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976), Culture (1981) and Towards 2000 (1983). There were two short monographs, Orwell (1971) and Cobbett (1983), both authors who had been discussed in Culture and Society. Perhaps his most explicit political writing was May Day Manifesto (1967). This he co-edited with Stuart Hall and Edward Thompson, but the Penguin version of 1968 was produced under his editorship.

After Williams’ death a number of edited books were published containing papers, lectures and reviews that had been written throughout his life and published in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Perspectives on Williams
• 3. Culture—and society
• 4. The Long Revolution
• 5. The critique of media culture
• 6. Drama and literature: Williams’ analytical and theoretical approach
• 7. The trilogy
• 8. The Volunteers and Loyalties
• 9. The Country and the City: hidden and knowable communities
• 10. Politics: shifts and continuities
• Bibiliography
• Index