This review was commissioned by the Irish Journal of Sociology. When the editors saw the final result, however, they returned the article on the grounds that their book review policy had changed to require much shorter texts. Curiously, the next issue of the journal included several reviews of at least this length....
This book opens with Raymond Williams' death, or more precisely with the orations and valedictories that followed it, here cleverly analysed in terms of 'laying claim to an inheritance' (p. 11).This is of course what's at stake in a biography of someone regularly described as a founder of cultural studies, more interestingly 'perhaps the only English [sic] Marxist able to hold his own with his continental peers' (Jay 1984, p. 9), and certainly a defining figure of the New Left in Britain: the appropriation of a body of writing and a particular history for one's own academic, intellectual and political purposes.
Inglis grounds his choice of biography in the rejection of meta-narratives and the belief that 'political theory begins at home':
'If the life itself signifies something, and if its story is well told, then the tale will comprehend more than a life-story; it will enclose history herself [sic] and make her intelligible' (p. xi).
If anyone can carry this off, it should be Inglis: himself Professor of Cultural Studies in Sheffield and the author of Radical Earnestness, a Culture and Society-like attempt to locate Williams and others within a tradition of 'English [again!] dissenting thinkers' (Inglis 1982, p. 5), yet to my mind his account, despite drawing on an extensive collection of interviews and letters, fails comprehensively to make that history intelligible.
Some part of the difficulty, obviously, is simply what to say. The bulk of Williams' life, it seems, is what readers already know from his strongly reflexive and often occasional writing; the details of which jobs he took when or what houses he lived in add very little to the story. If there was a private Williams, he remains private at the end of the book. The refrain of how much he kept his emotional life to himself recurs throughout the book, as if to excuse this:
'The deep structure of Williams' life was practical and factual. The facts are the man. That is to say, what mattered first was his writing...' (p. 216).
But the 'real Williams' is then to be found elsewhere: in the numerous overviews of his writing (Eldridge and Eldridge 1994, Ward 1981); in critical analyses such as Eagleton (1989) and O'Connor (1989); and perhaps most of all in the brilliant collection of interviews by the New Left Review board that make up Politics and Letters (Williams 1979).
So much of Williams' life was public, as writer and activist, that to try and privatise Williams, to treat the public work as secondary to a 'personal' life, is both to lose touch with the context that made 'Raymond Williams' possible as a public life and to present a curiously thin and trivialised version of the 'personal' life. Yet this is what the bulk of the book reads like: a consistent attempt to reduce intellectual activity to the working-out of personal quirks and to reduce political choices to status anxieties. It comes as rather a surprise that the opening and closing chapters (by far the best) are full of praise: Inglis' Williams-as-wished-for (to borrow Stuart Piggott's (1974, p. 3) distinction) is simply stubbornly distant from his Williams-as-known, so that Williams is eulogised in general and damned in detail. This is clear above all in two areas: the experience in which Williams grounded his project and the direction of that project.
In terms of origins, Inglis seems to have a double agenda. On the one hand, he wants to reduce Williams' orientation to the experience of a working-class Welsh community to status claims internal to English academia. On the other, he wants to validate his own background in the way that Williams, among others, taught academics to do. Looking closer at this, both of these seem part of a single move: to set up his own lifeworld as a standpoint for judgement, and to bring Williams within its terms of reference. This brings to mind the distinction Hakamaya Noriaki (1997) draws between Vico's philosophy of topos, of the 'original' ground of everyday life, to Descartes' philosophy of critica, of the rational challenge to the given. Both Williams and Inglis take epistemological stands on topos, on given ways of life, but with a difference. For Inglis, it seems sufficient to claim a relationship to the everyday, any everyday, to be sure of what one is saying. For Williams, as for the Marxist sociology of knowledge, the problem is rather to find which topoi - which ways of life - can most usefully ground present critica, and conversely to criticise existing topoi from the most general standpoint available.
Williams' own relation to class and ethnicity, as his novels show, was never an uncritical embracing of a romantic fantasy, whether of country or of class (while for Inglis, 'nostalgia has much to be said for it' (p. 53)), but rather a slow, sane coming-to-terms with the complex historical relationships of exploitation and domination, and the resources offered by resistance to both for understanding the present and constructing future possibilities. With Williams, as with Gramsci, the combination of critical experience of community with the commitment to locate that community within the capitalist totality is central: 'not Border Country by Raymond Williams but Raymond Williams by Border Country' (Emyr Humphreys, quoted in Williams 1989a, p. 65).
Neglecting gender is more explicable given Williams' failure to interrogate his own experience directly. And yet, that strong passage in Towards 2000 where he speaks of 'a basic orientation to the world as available raw material' in an analysis which goes on to take in not only the more easily assimilable (to Marxism) contexts of economic exploitation but also ecological and feminist analyses of the situation in which 'there is nothing but raw material: in the earth, in other people, and finally in the self', grounds just such a critique: 'relationship is precisely an alternative to the use of others as raw material' (1985, pp. 261-263). Nor does Inglis' dismissal (p. 130) of Joy Williams' contribution to what must ultimately have been the joint production of 'Raymond Williams' seem entirely convincing.
Inglis seems as uncomfortable with Williams' intellectual project as he is with the experience he grounds it in. Much of the more 'engaged' part of the book is devoted to alternately damning him for collusion with a radical left that apparently includes everything from Stalin to 1968, and berating him for rejecting Fabianism (although in 1982, Inglis remembered why: Fabianism 'made such hospitable accommodation to the present that it lost its powers of movement' (p.159)). Both miss the point: one of Williams' major engagements, over three decades, was to formulating the positions of a Left which would be neither Stalinist nor social-democratic, organised around a commitment to democracy from below and a rejection of economism of any kind. Here again, Inglis seems determined to bring his subjects within his own frame of reference. His New Left consists only of the the endless committees and just-as-endless parties' (p. 198); he lacks EP Thompson's ability, in his Morris and Blake biographies (1977, 1994) to see the lines of force, the structural conflicts and the hard choices in the trivia of small meetings. As O'Connor observes,
'Williams' resources for hope include the organized working class but also the new social movements: ecology, peace, and women's organization. He writes this but these political intentions and movements write him.' (1989, pp. 125-126, my emphasis)
Just as Inglis seems a bit out of touch with Williams' political world, so he is uncomfortable with Williams' theoretical points of reference. Thus, for example, one of Williams' most important contributions, the concept of cultural materialism, is described brusquely by Inglis as 'a ringing oxymoron' (p. 249), as it must be if by "materialism" one means a static opposition of 'matter' to 'mind' rather than the process of active engagement with and production of the world. Williams, though, stands consistently with the creativist side of Marx on this, in a sustained development from the opening chapter of The long revolution (1961, pp. 19-56) to Problems in materialism and culture (1980). (Inglis, incidentally, described the same concept as a 'useful phrase' in 1982 (p. 180).) As with the politics, one gets the sense that Inglis (in 1998, at least) is put off by the surface and the look of the words to the extent of being unable to engage with the substance, while leaving some of the real difficulties in Williams' work (such as the tendency to a Parsonian recourse to 'systems') on one side.
What is lacking, finally, is a sense of Williams as in some sense a movement intellectual, trying to articulate standpoints in the shifting contours of the post-war West around which radical movements (and not simply static consensus) could be organised. The distant and often isolated relationship between Williams and specific political struggles was not a product of personal choice but of the fact that achieving organisational independence was intensely difficult for the New Left, and characteristically only possible at a cultural level, in periodicals or in academia. This very distance led to the capture of entire generations of organic intellectuals (working-class intellectuals such as Williams and Hoggart, later the intellectuals of 1968 and the women's movement) by traditional intellectual institutions. What is then needed is the ability to grasp the nature of this relationship.
Without this sense of an intellectual project intimately tied to a social experience and a political project, Williams' work is bound to seem as odd and arbitrary as it does in Inglis' presentation. Part of the value of examining Williams' life is to remind ourselves that the projects of teaching and writing, of theory and research, can have alternative roots to the simple ratification of future elites and provision of knowledge to state and market: in the urgent matrix of movement activity and the central intellectual challenge of making connections. As Williams said in another context,
'the history and practice of these same general movements, reviewed to disclose in some new ways the profound connections between formations and forms, remain sources of inspiration and of strength' (1989b, p. 80).
Inglis' project is a different one, however:
'to turn his theory into morality ... to do him great honour, to put him in a line stretching back to Mill as public moralist, and with Dickens as maker of culture' (p. 301).
Indeed: the process of mummification involves the removal of brains and guts and the preservation of the image for religious purposes. If you want a sense of the living Williams, read Politics and Letters instead. Then put in on your reading lists.
Eagleton, T. (ed.) 1989. Raymond Williams: critical perspectives. Cambridge: Polity.
Eldridge, J. and Eldridge, L. 1994. Raymond Williams: making connections. London: Routledge.
Hakamaya N. 1997. 'Critical philosophy versus topical philosophy,' pp. 56 - 80 in J. Hubbard and P. Swanson (eds.), Pruning the bodhi tree: the storm over critical Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Inglis, F. 1982. Radical earnestness: English social theory 1880 - 1980. Oxford: Martin Robertson.
Jay, M. 1984. Marxism and totality: the adventures of a concept from Lukács to Habermas. Cambridge: Polity.
O'Connor, A. 1989. Raymond Williams: writing, culture, politics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Piggott, S. 1974. The druids. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Thompson, E.P. 1977. William Morris: romantic to revolutionary. London: Merlin (2nd edition).
Thompson E.P. 1994. Witness against the beast: William Blake and the moral law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ward, J. 1981. Raymond Williams. Cardiff: University of Wales / Welsh Arts Council.
Williams, R. 1961. The long revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Williams, R. (ed.) 1968. May Day Manifesto. Harmondsworth: Penguin (2nd edition).
Williams, R. 1979. Politics and letters: interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left Books.
Williams, R. 1980. Problems in materialism and culture: selected essays. London: Verso.
Williams, R. 1985. Towards 2000. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Williams, R. 1989a. What I came to say. London: Hutchinson.
Williams, R. 1989b. The politics of modernism: against the new conformists. London: Verso.