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THOMAS R. EDWARDS
last ten years; it's been a busy life for a man who calls himself a slow
writer, and no doubt some thinness and repetition was inevitable, but
About Society
is not, on the whole, enlivening reading.
I'm disappointed too by Hoggart's seeming determination to stay
pretty aloof from what, at least to an American eye, seems most in–
triguing about Britain in the sixties. Though it's a cruel thing to sug–
gest about so scrupulous and honorable a writer, and "Off, off, you
lendings" is easier said than done, Hoggart does seem in some danger
of becoming the captive of his honors and additions, the victim of the
respectability that turns so many academics, whatever their social ori–
gins and political outlook, all cautious and conservative inside their
own professional nests. He is mainly concerned with older, institutional–
iz,ed concepts of cultural diffusion - BBG vs. lTV, the state of the
national press, the expansion of the universities, the psychological effects
of advertising and sex-and-violence - and his relation to the new pop
culture, insofar as he has one at all, is mostly suspicious and condescend–
ing. He seems to think "youth culture" a mere fraud of the media
manipulators like the Swinging London stuff, somehow
American
and
thus somehow unreal, certainly without the explosive political potential
others think they detect in it. While it's just as well to go slow in claim–
ing lasting importance for this culture, still Hoggart's remarks about uni–
versity students "living out their sense of the virtue
of
knowledge" in
their rebellious styles - the closest he gets to sympathetic interest in that
brave new life - sanction those styles only by finding them new ver–
sions of the safe old academic pieties. It's an idea one reaches for when
Spiro T. Agnew rides into town, and in the long run it may turn out
to be true, but those students, in England and elsewhere, don't
think
they're living out a new form of donnishness, and I doubt that such
assumptions help to understand them very well.
This is a perhaps small case of what seems to me a large difficulty
in Hoggart's situation. He knows intimately what the personal transition
from working class to clerisy feels like, the terrible dangers that lurk
in
either sentimentalizing or rejecting one's origins, the ways in which a
stratified social order uses its own tolerance of mobility to justify the
status and privilege it means to perpetuate for
someone.
And it's to the
immense credit of Hoggart and others like him that success hasn't ap–
peased their sense that something is wrong in British society, in society
itself. But that success exacts a price even so.
It
leads to the assumption
that academic disinterest, because it made possible one's own achieve–
ment of critical perspective, provides an adequate perspective on
any
situation now or to come; because it showed the way out of Leeds with–
out making one forget that Leeds was still there, Hoggart (under-
