PARTISAN REVIEW
573
standably) continues to hope that serieus, henest, decent intellectual dis–
interest is eneugh fer ceping with the new. I hepe so teo, but in S
peak–
ing to Each Other
(a title which fairly exudes serieus, honest, decent
disinterest) I fear that Hoggart may be imagining the werld with meta–
phors that no longer quite fit it, that in his detennined sebriety he has
tee sternly resisted the apocalyptic leanings he cenfesses he semetimes
feels, that goed sense, even in Britain, may be nearer the end of its
tether than he or anyene wants
to
suppese.
Still one does what ene can, and while we still can speak to each
other, it's good to have semeene like Hoggart deing so. The essays in
About Literature
are on the whele mere readable than these in
About
Society;
Heggart is not an innovative er showy literary critic, but he
sees what he sees clearly, as in the fine essays on Graham Greene, Or–
well and the uses ef "tone" in autobiegraphy. But the best things in the
two velumes are the reminiscences of Heggart's childheed and of the
teaching of Bonamy
Debn~e,
which when added to. the persenal passages
in
The Uses of Literacy
make up a scattered but absorbing persenal
histery that is also a histery ef what may be the most impertant social
develepment in Britain since the advent ef Methedism: the entrance of
werking-class censcieusness into. the last sanctuary of privilege, the in–
tellectual and cultural aristocracy ef the natien. I do
think
that Hoggart's
work is more successful as representative histery than as particular cul–
tural analysis - why wen't he see his career and (say) the Beatles'
as having, objectively, something impertant in common? But his life
and writings quietly dramatize a crucial area of British experience in our
time, and one is willing to be bered eccasienally in erder to see what
that is.
Thomas R. Edwards
ELIOT IN PERSPECTIVE:
A Symposium
Edited by Graham Martin
Including essays by F. W. Bateson, Harold F. Brooks,
Donald Davie, Ian Gregor and Richard Wollheim
306 pp., index. (1970
J
HUMANITIES PRESS
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