Sir Christopher Ricks is one of the most important and influential critics active today. Described by W.H.Auden as ‘exactly the kind of critic that every poet dreams of finding’, he has continuously been a leading figure in literary criticism since the Sixties, famous not only for his sensitive essays but also as a captivating lecturer.

He is the author of such renowned works as Milton’s Grand Style, The Force of Poetry and Dylan’s Visions of Sin as well as the editor of the still authoritative edition of Tennyson’s poetry. A staunch defender of traditional approaches, he was noted for his vocal opposition towards theory during Cambridge’s ‘Theory Wars’.

He has held the post of Professor of Poetry at Oxford and now teaches at the Editorial Institute at Boston University. Recently he has become involved with the new T.S.Eliot Research Project, a major new initiative that is funding the development of the first scholarly annotated editions of Eliot’s poetry, prose, letters and plays.

The Literateur caught up with Christopher Ricks to discuss everything from his childhood influences to his recent work on Eliot. He proved to be as charismatic and incisive in person as his public lectures suggest. He remains unashamedly hostile towards “theory”, particularly those advocates of it who he feels are foolishly dismissive of their predecessors. Whether one agrees or disagrees with him, theorists will ignore this formidable adversary at their peril. Now in his seventies, the concept of resting on his laurels is clearly alien to him; even during this interview he continued casting his keen critical eye over unexamined assumptions.

Interviewed by Kit Toda

PART I

The Literateur: You are at the moment involved in the complete and annotated edition of Eliot’s poetry. Is there any particular aspect of it that you find most exciting?

Christopher Ricks: I mostly enjoy parallel passages and sources, though this can clearly be overdone – my edition of those early unpublished poems, Inventions of the March Hare, was deplored by many reviewers for being over-annotated in this respect. But it intrigues me to think of what goes to the making of a poem.

In my opinion, what goes to the making of a poem doesn’t necessarily go into the meaning of the poem. But one should be interested in it all; one should be interested in the process as well as the product, though I myself belong to the old school that thinks that the product is more important than the process.

TL: One would have thought that’s sort of obvious…

CR: William Arrowsmith the eminent classicist used the word ‘palimpsest’, which suggests of course that in some way the strata are as interesting as what you might think of as the surface. There are claims you can make for the geology, the archaeology of the thing. But it’s a different thing to be interested in: equally interesting, but raising different questions.

TL: Do you foresee any hurdles in the project?

CR: No, I don’t think so. I am, as you know, a co-editor – Jim McCue and I are editing this together. Jim has done an immense amount of work on the manuscripts and indeed he’s done more work on the manuscripts than I would have been willing or able to bring myself to do. He is at work full-time on this now.

A lot depends for us on the efficiency of the edition of Eliot’s letters that is in progress. There’ll be a big edition of the letters and a big edition of the collected prose as well, and this edition of the poems. (There’ll also be an edition of the plays but that is on hold for the moment; this will turn the enterprise from being a triangle to a quadrangle.) As to the prose, Ronald Schuchard has very valuably found some rare items not in Gallup [Donald Gallup’s bibliography of Eliot’s works]. That’s the very phrase, not in Gallup:  Ron has found things, sometimes in typescript, sometimes hitherto unrecognized as Eliot’s – but with the exception of these we have been able already to read all the prose. What we can’t do is read all the letters until they are made available. (The letters in some respects are more important than the new edition of the poems because they will for the first time be available to be read.) So the edition of the letters is the opposite of a hurdle, it’s a desideratum. It’s early days. I caught myself saying this the other day and then realized it’s actually early years. There’s a huge amount of work to be done on this. Partly, just to take one instance, that the translation of St.-John Perse, Anabasis, hasn’t been attended to as closely as many others of Eliot’s poems.

TL: You said last night [at the British Academy in conversation with Hermione Lee] that having a favourite Eliot poem would be debasing to both Eliot and yourself but that you thought ‘Gerontion’ was Eliot’s best poem.

CR: Yes, I do think the game of picking one under either epithet is a bit of a mistake. The point I wanted to make about favourites is that it has a certain cosseting ‘Favourite’ goes with one’s feeling affectionate towards something. I suggested by way of comparison that you shouldn’t really have a favourite book of the Bible. So I think there’s a slightly different sense to the word. I don’t quite see the point of, as it were, the Balloon Game in which you throw out from the balloon all but one poem. But I do think that ‘Gerontion’ is very very extraordinary and more immediately compelling to me even than The Waste Land.

‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is superb and – this is something I’ve said before – as the first poem in someone’s first published book of poems, it is an astonishment. I’ve asked people to suggest candidates for a better first poem in a first book of poems and nobody can ever think of any. So that would be the poem I suppose I would start with if I wished to persuade people much younger than I am to love Eliot. Read that poem, and particularly read it aloud. It has so much which is the best of Victorian verse in it.

I think ‘Gerontion’ – if one is playing this strangely competitive game – is even deeper than ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Yet this is sort of idle –  I don’t mean to be rude about the question and I probably shouldn’t have said anything last night when asked it.

TL: I was wondering do you feel it permissible to have a favourite among your own books?

[pause]

CR: Well I think one shouldn’t feel affectionate towards oneself! I’ve written an essay on self-congratulation and how odd it is because of the prefix ‘con’. ‘Self-condolence’ would be very strange. How do you condole with yourself? I mean the point of it is that you’re doing it with somebody else.

One can think that one of one’s books is better than the others. And my edition of Tennyson might be more continuingly useful and valuable than anything else that I do. That’s alright.

TL: Robert Crawford criticised you last night for not engaging with the King Bolo poems [a series of humorous sexual and scatological verses] in your book Eliot and Prejudice. I was wondering whether you had anything to say in response to that?

CR: I hadn’t read the unpublished King Bolo poems then, and I haven’t read all of them even now. I did include some of them in Inventions of the March Hare, which came out long after Eliot and Prejudice – those of them that figure in the leaves that were torn out from the notebook. I was editing that particular body of poems, you’ll remember, from one particular notebook, and those leaves were torn out and sent to Pound, ‘Chansons Ithyphalliques’.* I had read them by then because of that. But Eliot and Prejudice is about what Eliot published, and he didn’t publish the King Bolo poems. A few of them later got into the Faber Book of Blue Verse, and of course when the first volume of the Letters came out, you met some of them there. Crawford is right to say that if you are going to have a thorough-going account of all of the prejudices that might be in Eliot, racism in some form or other might be one of them. It may be there in ‘Hakagawa bowing among the Titians’ [‘Gerontion’], though it’s deliberately very elusive. You have to think about that. I believe that Eliot raises the question of prejudice often in order to disabuse us of the idea that prejudices are simply bad. We all have preconceptions; we can’t see anything without preconceptions. Richard Gregory says very finely that ‘To see is to read the present in terms of the past in order to predict and control the future’. So in order to see, there is a movement from preception to perception. You cannot perceive without preceiving. You never know what to do about things that people didn’t publish. If he or she didn’t publish it, this may be what he or she most meant and then didn’t dare say; self-censorship or prudence comes in. On the other hand, you could take the opposite view and say: well, if he or she didn’t publish this, it was because it wasn’t in the end what he or she really believed. It’s tricky, that.

TL: I think there is also an aspect of… it’s very hard to talk about, particularly joke about sex and be – I don’t like this term but – ‘politically correct’.

CR: I am not sure what to do about ‘politically correct’ because of its particular historical conditioning. That is, in general having to be correct or needing to be prudent about certain kinds of risks has always been the case; the Beckett remark about ‘the quantum of wantum does not vary’. So it irritates me when people make out that now there are constraints of cultural/political/social situations, as if there used not to be. I don’t know a society in which there aren’t pressures to conform. And anyway I don’t think conforming is a bad thing. So I’m not one of those people who use the word ‘subversive’ as if it’s automatically a good thing: ‘The great thing about literature is that it’s so subversive’. There are lots of things which should not be subverted. The idea that you have shown that someone is a good writer because you have shown that he or she has challenged the orthodox opinion… Orthodox opinion is often immensely to be valued. But then all great religious art is accusable of blasphemy, yet those accusations should not stick. So all erotic art is accusable of pornography. If the question doesn’t even arise then, it must have played safe, and nothing is more dangerous if you want to create great art than playing safe. You’ve got the relation of blasphemy to religious art, pornography to erotic art, of sexism to all art that deals with relations between the sexes – which could include same-sex relations and so on. Any engagement with matters Jewish and so on will be accusable of anti-Semitism. Sometimes in Eliot’s case the accusation does, I’m afraid, I believe, stick. But very infrequently. ‘Gerontion’ to me is not an anti-Semitic poem because I’ve never met anybody who would wish to be Gerontion, who, reading the poem, would think: What a wise voice this is that I’m hearing, what a healthy consciousness this is that I’m meeting here.

TL: I was struck by your argument in Eliot and Prejudice against those apologists for Eliot who say, ‘well…this was written before the Holocaust…’ and make the excuse that when Eliot was writing his earlier poems, antisemitism was, regrettably, common and widespread.  Do you not then differentiate between before the Holocaust and after it? You pointed out that pogroms had occurred before the Nazis and so forth but despite that, I think it undeniable that the Holocaust attitudes changed people’s opinions as to what was acceptable in society regarding antisemitism.

CR: Well, we have to do justice even to people who are unjust. Prejudices are a form of injustice. It’s odd that in one sense of the word ‘discriminate’, discrimination is indiscriminate. The paradox is that when we accuse someone of discrimination we mean that he or she lacks discrimination, that they don’t differentiate this person who happens to be French or Italian from another person who is; it’s a kind of lumping-together of people. I don’t see any way out of that generally. I think one is always having to avoid making excuses for things, that is, tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner, which has been called the devil’s sentimentality.

It is a minefield. I don’t think anybody has written about this and remained unaccusable.

TL: You have described your memory of the thrill of getting hold of the latest book by Beckett and other such great writers who have written within your lifetime. Are there any current writers for whom you feel the same excitement?

CR: Well, I feel it certainly with Geoffrey Hill. A new book by Geoffrey is a matter of immediate excitement; I want to get it the minute it comes out. There are, of course, sometimes new things from dead writers. Living at the same time as Bob Dylan is for me very very exciting.

When Empson, interviewed by Karl Miller, was asked about new poetry, he said ‘It’s the first thing to go’, partly as if it were like a failing sense (your hearing is not what it was and so on) which is sort of true, and partly as if it were like a grand piano and you’ve moved into a smaller room. Not being able to hear new literature or see new paintings imaginatively and generously is commonplace. As one gets older, one more and more re-reads books rather than start new ones. So I don’t think there is anybody, except for Geoffrey Hill… no, not for me.

TL: You just mentioned Bob Dylan and you have famously written a book-length literary analysis of his lyrics and music. Are there any other popular musicians whom you think would stand up to such close literary scrutiny?

CR: I don’t know them well enough. I do think The Beatles are very good and so on, but. One of the reviewers said that ‘Ricks has never met a Dylan song that he doesn’t like’ which is not true: I don’t write about the ones I don’t like. I know which they are. ‘Neighborhood Bully’ I don’t think is a good song.

I was brought up in a Leavisite** world. I was very lucky. I had two schoolteachers, Mr. Swan and Mr. Harrison. Mr. Swan was a Leavisite; he’d been educated at Cambridge and very valuably thought you should read James Joyce and Eliot. Remember this is the mid- to late forties when I was fifteen or sixteen. (I was born in 1933.) It was a bit of luck to have Mr. Swan and it was also a bit of luck to have Mr. Harrison who was rather old-fashioned and knew that Milton and Tennyson were very good poets who shouldn’t be accusable in Leavisite terms. There was that feeling of valuable disagreement.

I was thinking on the whole that unless you are Leavis – and even if you are Leavis – most of the time you do well to write about things that you think well of rather than things you think ill of. – though it may be necessary every now and then to do that sort of work, which is in Leavis’ word hygienic. You may think that something is a portent. You attack C.P. Snow because there are people going round thinking he’s very good when they should be reading George Eliot.

I listen to Dylan and I listen to Haydn. I listen to quite a lot of music but I never have any ideas about it.

TL: Talking of writing about things you like, you were lamenting last night the recent tendency towards ungratefulness in literary criticism, in that critics seem increasingly to glory in ticking-off writer. Does it seem to you then that there is something perverse in choosing to write about work that they don’t admire?

CR: No, but I think it’s very easy for the pleasure of repudiation and the pleasure of discrimination – of being more stringent than other people – to become addictive.

The Leavis danger was to so elevate stringency as to make the best the enemy of the good. If you take a certain view of the Great Tradition, then anything not in the Great Tradition is somehow not worth bothering with. Edgell Rickword, who started the Calendar of Modern Letters [a literary review 1925-7], forming part of what became Leavis’ world of Scrutiny [a literary quarterly 1932-53], explicitly attacked minor poetry – there was no point in reading minor verse or light verse. That seems to me very foolish. We have wonderful minor accomplishments. It’s part of what’s good about them, that they don’t aspire to certain things. To despise them would be like thinking that only fortifyingly nutritional food was worth eating.

So there’s always this double duty, neither to make the best the enemy of the good, nor to make the good the enemy of the best. Scylla and Charybdis. The reason I admire Johnson and Eliot and Empson so much – the thing that holds them together – is that they all think that doing the right thing is steering between two equally dangerous opposite bad things.

Do you remember that Eliot was billed as giving a talk on ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ and he’d realized that they’d simply misunderstood. That is, when he was asked what he was going to talk about, he’d said that these things were always a matter of Scylla and Charybdis and so forth, and this became the title of the talk so that we got a talk on this subject because they’d slightly misunderstood what he was saying. But it’s true to him.

And Samuel Johnson is profound on this. He asked why are we more lenient towards foolhardiness than towards cowardice. If you think of them as being equidistant from the right thing, two opposing faults. Why are we more lenient to the one? And the answer is because it is self-correcting. If you’re foolhardy, you bruise your shins. You find out, you learn from it. If you’re spendthrift, you learn as the miser never does. The spendthrift runs out of money, the miser never runs out of anxiety about money. Equidistant from the true course but one may prove preferable.

We need people to remind us that the good is the enemy of the best and we need people to remind us that the best is the enemy of the good. We need to protect ourselves from the dangers from both flanks.

* Chansons Ithyphalliques: Eliot sent some of the King Bolo poems to Ezra Pound who sealed them in an envelope marked ‘Chansons Ithyphalliques’.

** F.R.Leavis (1895-1978) A highly influential literary critic instrumental in the shaping of the study of English Literature. Author of such works as Revaluation (1936) and The Great Tradition (1948). The Great Tradition set out a canonizing view of literature that singled out such writers as Jane Austen and Henry James as the best novelists.

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