This is a book of 10 lectures by a literary critic generally considered to be one of the greatest of his age. That age has now passed: Eric Griffiths died in September, having been a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge for more than 30 years.
Griffiths was an old-school don who would certainly fare ill in an age of student feedback forms and an academic culture of publish or perish. He published just one complete book, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989), which consists of a series of detailed readings of the work of Tennyson, Browning, Hopkins and others, and attends to the challenges faced by both writers and readers in interpreting the concept of “voice” in its various meanings and implications. His own tone and intent could be difficult to interpret. Ferocious and exacting, he could be fabulously rude: 20 years ago he became momentarily famous after he was accused by an applicant to Trinity of mocking her accent and being rude about her home county of Essex. He was probably joking – or drunk. Neither, clearly, is any kind of excuse, and he reduced many students to tears. But he could also be extraordinarily kind.
If Not Critical serves both as a memorial and a fitting companion piece to The Printed Voice: it is the printed voice of Griffiths. Compiled and edited by a former student, Freya Johnston, it’s not exactly a work of scholarship, nor indeed of literary criticism or literary history – it is far too various and unorthodox to be summarised. It is a demonstration, rather, of the art of thinking aloud, on paper. The novelist Will Eaves, who was Griffiths’s editor at the Times Literary Supplement, has described his reviews as more like sermons than standard critical prose, which is exactly what If Not Critical sounds like, though perhaps with added bite: a cross between hearing Cardinal Newman preach and Christopher Hitchens harangue.
The bravura performances contained here cover the subjects of, among other things, Lists, Timing, Timeliness and Beasts, and feature discussions of the work of an astonishing range of writers, from Dante to Racine to Primo Levi, alongside endless barbs and asides on all manner of subjects. Renowned for his Cambridge-style close reading, Griffiths was also the master of the pithy summing-up and the aperçu: “All books, having themselves histories, are in that sense history-books”; “you can’t check the facts in fiction against the evidence, because what makes it fiction is that there is no evidence for what it says”; “Literature consists to a great extent of telling people what they want to hear, and that is something quite different from telling them the truth about their lives.”
Griffiths is perhaps at his best – which is to say, the best, since his best is better than just about anyone else’s – when discussing the finer points of comedy and tragedy. Not surprisingly, he’s excellent on Kafka, whose work, he writes, helps “to slow our transit through our selves”. Slowing down and paying attention is exactly what Griffiths does, time and again – and occasionally the extravagant rallentandos can become rather tiresome. “Comparing different kinds of texts should help promote alertness to the differences between them, and keep literaturists aware that the kinds of writing they mostly read (imaginative fictions) are only a fragment of a much larger landmass of language-use, a landmass with which the literary parish remains continuous, and without attention to which even the literary works can’t be understood, as an oasis is unintelligible without thought of the dunes which surround it.”
Critic is often used as a dirty word, as in Waiting for Godot when Estragon famously outdoes Vladimir in a back-and-forth battle of insults: “Moron!” “Vermin!” “Abortion!” “Morpion!” “Sewer-rat!” “Curate!” “Cretin!” “Crritic!”, at which, according to the stage directions, Vladimir “wilts, vanquished, and turns away”. Griffiths was not a wilter: he never flinches or turns away, which can make for uncomfortable reading and means that he can come across as sewer-ratty. Tom Stoppard might not want to read the lecture “A Rehearsal of Hamlet”, for example, but there’s never any doubt that Griffiths is simply taking literature as seriously as it demands to be taken, and indeed sometimes more seriously than it deserves. In the Hamlet lecture he insists on making a culminating point about the number of hypometrical lines in the 174 lines of Act I, scene i, compared with the one hypometrical line in the first 164 lines of Act I, scene ii. For all his efforts, it seems a little inconclusive.
Which is how he would have wanted it. One can perhaps pay no finer tribute to a book of criticism than to say that it opens up rather than shuts down its subjects. The last lines in If Not Critical are from Griffiths’s translation of Heine’s ‘Zu “Seraphine”’: ‘I’ve always been fond of the sea / - its edges, depth, and lather / have often stood me in good stead./ A couple of swells together.’ Brilliant swells altogether.
• If Not Critical by Eric Griffiths, edited by Freya Johnston, is published by Oxford. To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
