It’s 50 years since I turned up at Downing College, Cambridge, to read English under FR Leavis. I ran into him on my first day, as I was pushing my case through the college gates. I hadn’t met him before but knew what he looked like.Howard Jacobson, ‘Howard Jacobson on being taught by FR Leavis’, The Telegraph, 23 April 2011.
Upon being nervously greeted by me, he suggested I go into the porter’s lodge and make myself known. Thereafter, in the week before term began, I continued to run into him, by the gates. I summoned the courage to tell him I was rereading The Dunciad and enjoying it. He looked, I thought, disapprovingly at me. The following day I told him I had finished rereading The Dunciad but had not in the end, enjoyed it all that much.
He still looked disapprovingly at me. He was not, I realised, going to be easy to please.
The next week term began in earnest and a person not at all like the person I’d been talking to turned up and distributed practical criticism sheets. If this was Dr Leavis, then who had I been discussing The Dunciad with? I discovered, in due course, that it was a college porter, I believe called Tony.
Wednesday 20 March 2024
FR Leavis
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Education