The Cambridge Quarterly: Vol. 50 Retrospective Virtual Issue

The completion of 50 volumes does not always line up neatly, as one might expect, with the completion of 50 years. Cambridge Quarterly turns 57 in 2022, but has just completed the milestone of vol. 50, owing to some irregularities in the pace of publication in the earlier decades of its history. These growing pains now behind it, the journal has grown in strength, scope, and standing to become a permanent and distinctive feature of the landscape of British literary criticism. Conceived as the child of Scrutiny, Cambridge Quarterly was launched in 1965 with an editorial board drawn from among F. R. Leavis’s students and younger colleagues: R. D. Gooder, Harold Mason, J. M. Newton, W. W. Robson, Morris Shapira and G. W. Strickland. But it turned out, as children often do, to have a mind of its own, and an article by Newton criticising its progenitor (“Scrutiny’s Failure With Shakespeare”, vol. 1, issue 2) quickly set it on its own course. While keeping a foot in Cambridge, the Quarterly has broadened its reach over the decades to become an international vehicle for literary inquiry. Its distinctive emphases have evolved: fresh readings of familiar texts, creative leaps between literature and the other arts, intellectual provocations, and a commitment to comparative and global literatures have all been characteristic aspects of a journal that has sought to place expertise and scholarship in the service of critical generalism. The essays selected and introduced here by the current editors are personal favourites rather than an attempt to represent every phase and facet of the journal’s history. Nonetheless, they offer a sampling of the variety and brilliance that are both the reason for celebrating Cambridge Quarterly’s past and the grounds for confidence in its future.

- The Editors

Contents

F. R. LEAVIS, ‘Anna Karenina: Thought and Significance in a Great Creative Work’, 1.1 (1965). 
The fact that the first issue of The Cambridge Quarterly opened with an essay by F.R. Leavis is no accident.  One of the journal’s founders was H.A. Mason, who had previously been an editor at Scrutiny, the journal Leavis and L.C. Knights set up in 1932. Scrutiny folded in 1953 and Leavis wondered if The Cambridge Quarterly might pick up where it left off; he even suggested the title. But the journal’s editors did not want to produce ‘a Scrutiny clone’ (as another founding editor Richard D. Gooder put it) and The Cambridge Quarterly went on to develop its own distinct identity.  (For the full CQ version of events, see the 1996 F.R. Leavis special issue, volume 25, no. 4). Reading Leavis’s essay today, I am struck by how much has changed in the world of literary criticism, but also how little.  Leavis was always concerned with what today we call relevance: Anna Karenina is valuable because it is ‘the great novel of modern - of our - civilisation’; Tolstoy’s ‘essential problems’ are ‘ours’.  Critics today are likely to be more self-conscious in their use of ‘ours’, but, while their concerns might be different, there is no sign that they’ve lost that belief in the moral and political force of literary fiction. What has changed, however, is the style of engagement: the confident voice (as Philip Rhav observed, Leavis was ‘not one to beat about the bush’); the lack of interest in what other scholars have said (he restricts himself to critical lacunae in Matthew Arnold, Henry James and D.H. Lawrence); and the intense yet wide-ranging absorption in a ‘Great Creative Work’. 
—Kasia Boddy

KENNETH COX, ‘Address and Posture in the Poetry of Robert Creeley’, 1.3 (1969). 
Cox was first (and perhaps always) a cryptographer, then after the War had a thirty year career with the BBC. He started publishing literary articles around the age of 50: this was one of his first. It was picked up again by avant garde journal Boundary 2 in the late 70s, and more recently Chicago Review have set out to rekindle interest in his distinctive work on 20th c. poetry. A new Selected Essays was published in 2016. Creeley is a sparse, laconic and microscopically focussed poet; Cox’s prose is as lean and hyper-attentive as its subject. Superficially, the tone resembles the voice-over of a BBC public information film, shot through with Cold War apprehensions; the reader ‘is in the position of an eavesdropper or wiretapper’, and the monochrome mise en page will be abruptly  illuminated by phrases seldom used in discussion of poetics, for example ‘the wavelength of orange light from pure krypton 86’. However no criticism was more attuned to Creeley’s wavelength. And this is more than a period piece: the demands that the prose makes of poetry, of itself and of our readiness to read closely are unremitting, and unwilling to settle. What Cox says of Creeley could be applied to his own approach: ‘The poems apply their own corrections, each step or phrase evading a slide into what is merely expected of it.’ Creeley’s work emerged from an era of bright experiment in poetry - fellow Black Mountaineer Edward Dorn was also reviewed in an early issue of The Cambridge Quarterly. Meanwhile American Literature itself was now being taken seriously in universities, and Tony Tanner (another Quarterly contributor) would become the holder of Cambridge’s first Professorship in that field, to which the journal has been a critical friend for over half a century.  
 —Geoff Ward

JEAN GOODER, “The Awkward Age: a Study in Ephemera?”, 13.1 (1984). 
‘The Awkward Age is one of the least read and most consistently disliked of all James’s novels’, Jean Gooder admits, and it is true that The Awkward Age (1898-1899) is a betwixt-and-between work, coming after What Maisie Knew and before The Sacred Fount and the more famous late work (The Wings of the Dove; The Ambassadors; The Golden Bowl). ‘The subject is a degraded world: the artistic medium full of a fierce integrity’, Gooder continues, and her 1984 account brilliantly exposes the very deliberately constructed awkwardness of this novel: a formal experiment that James remembers in his later Preface as ‘the neat figure of a circle consisting of a number of small rounds disposed at equal distance around a central object.’ The ‘central object’ is eighteen-year-old Nanda Brookenham’s ‘coming out’ into society and onto the marriage market, a banal event which becomes, in James’s telling, ‘a tragedy of modern life’. Gooder’s energetic curiosity about the specific materials ransacked to create the book’s ‘vague depths of moral ugliness’ includes discussions of Goya’s painting, French naturalism; Racine’s Phèdre; Greek tragedy; a fin-de-siècle fascination with decadence and corruption; and a proto-modernist ear for voice (most of the book is written in dialogue). Gooder’s Cambridge Quarterly article delivers us back to a time of more ample readings, when James was not pinioned by an Anglophone curriculum, but was still read in a conversation with European culture, both contemporary and classical. Reading Gooder took me back to my yellowing paperback copy of the novel to enjoy again its devastating navigation of morally shaky choices and post-justifications, watching, for example, Nanda’s mother as she ‘seemed to stand with little snipping scissors in a garden of alternatives.’ 
 —Clare Pettitt 

TOM MASON, ‘Abraham Cowley and the Wisdom of Anacreon’, 19.2 (1990). 
This isn’t the kind of essay that is often published now, in Cambridge Quarterly or anywhere else. It’s thirty-six printed pages long, with not a single footnote; takes a leisurely approach to its subject, quoting lavishly; and rests much of its discussion on the evaluative comparison of different poets. Its aim is to rescue two writers, Anacreon and Abraham Cowley, from the eclipse their reputation had suffered since the eighteenth century, and to show the reader how to enjoy them. That doing so involves arguing against F.R. Leavis, who deemed Cowley ‘insensitive’, ‘coarse’, and ‘heavy’, is an echo of the fraught relationship to Leavis at the journal’s inception. Lessons in appreciation make up one of the strands of Cambridge Quarterly’s half century, and this is a particularly successful one. Despite the lack of scholarly apparatus, it demonstrates considerable erudition in tracing the reception history of Anacreon in the Renaissance and seventeenth-century England, and of the waning of Cowley’s star. But its learning rests lightly on the prose and progress of the argument: the aim is less to inform the reader, than to provide the context necessary to enjoy reading Cowley, and to form an impression of him distinct from the cerebral metaphysical reputation established by Johnson, or the ponderousness complained of by Leavis. Mason finds in Cowley’s Anacreontiques – poems of wine, women, and song, of the relish of today and the infinite postponement of tomorrow – a ‘joyful carelessness’ which is also characteristic of the essay’s lack of hurry or intensity.
—Kathryn Murphy 

JOHN WILKINSON, ‘Enthusiastic Reading’, 23.4 (1994). 
‘To blur the focus a little, what is the movement of this poem?’ John Wilkinson asks this question at the midpoint of this essay of two halves. First, a collage of literary-historical evaluation, a poetics of reading, of lyric as ‘eidolon’, and a dose of disciplinary pontification, preserving in aspic some of the method wars of the 1990s. Late modernists set the stage for lost modernists and for the particular act of recovery that occupies the essay’s second half: Wilkinson’s graceful, assiduous commentary on the lyric particularities of Clere Parsons, the Oxford contemporary of Auden, who died at 23, leaving ‘behind him few people to remember and care for his poems’ (Grigson). Wilkinson performs a reading of a single poem by Parsons, the first of a sequence opening ‘Never before has seemed any / Event’. It is an energetically fond tracing, ‘for no gloss can be anything be partial (in both senses)’, as Wilkinson elsewhere notes. It pays attention to the ‘wild sound’ of Parsons’s lyric, and marks his work as a ‘turn not taken’ in a larger history of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry. This sense of possibility on the edge of loss holds, too, for the essay’s place within the history of Cambridge Quarterly. It is billed as a contribution to an ‘occasional series’, ‘Poet to Poet’. The essay makes much of its mode: writers’ readings, Wilkinson argues, are distinguishable from ‘academic accounts’ by their enthusiastic yielding to the blur, swerve and swing of lines, can produce a rare movement of meaning between poem and reader. More intense, too, than any temporary dizziness first readers of this essay, might also have been experiencing on the roundabouts of deconstruction’s ‘safe playground’. Yet the series shared Parsons’s sad brevity: no more contributions followed—or have followed yet. Enthusiasm remains.
—Helen Thaventhiran

XIE MING, ‘Reactualising the Unfigurable: Difficulty and Resistance in Translating J. H. Prynne’, 41.1 (2012). 
The special issue of Cambridge Quarterly entitled ‘Cambridge English and China’ (vol. 41, no. 1) was based on a conference held the year before. This event was an ambitious and unusual undertaking for the editors of the journal, and its success was the result, most of all, of sterling efforts by the late Richard Gooder. The conference had a number of strands, focusing mostly on the interactions of some key figures in the history of the Cambridge English Faculty (such as I.A. Richards, William Empson, and Raymond Williams) with Chinese scholarship in their own time and afterwards. One strand concerned the then imminent Chinese translation of the poems of J. H. Prynne: he and his translators contributed to the event, and Xie Ming gave a paper which developed into this essay. Its rich examination of multiple layers of conversation between languages and genres, and its discussion of the difficulty of poems and the bearing of difficulty on translation, have ramifications for a wide range of readers.
—Raphael Lyne

JANE WRIGHT, ‘The Princess and the Bee’, 44.3 (2015). 
Una apis nulla apis runs the saying: ‘one bee is no bee’. The same goes for articles on bees, at least in Jane Wright’s case: ‘The Princess and the Bee’ is one of a small swarm of essays (on Tennyson, the Brownings, and Wilde) in which Wright makes the case for the bee as a site and symbol of nineteenth-century poetry’s buzz of allusion and intertext. ‘The Princess and the Bee’ is both a part of this larger project, and one of the best stand-alone essays ever written on Tennyson’s most troublesome long poem. And on its troubled reception, too, since Wright’s critical attention is turned on her fellow readers almost as much as on The Princess itself, showing how criticism has generated forms of buzz that sometimes drown out what the poem actually says. Why, asks Wright, do we so easily assume that the eponymous heroine marries her prince, when the text says no such thing? Why is it that, in pointing out the poem’s fraught gender politics, critics of Tennyson have so readily replicated sexist assumptions? To answer these questions Wright makes an unexpected move, looking closely at the poem’s preoccupation with bees – newly understood in the nineteenth century to be largely female societies – and showing how the questions about reading and listening that are dramatized by their swarming and humming, browsing and fertilising, amplify rather than distract from the social and sexual relations that inform feminist criticism. ‘The Princess and the Bee’ is a vindication of the conviction that close reading can elevate, rather than sidelining, the critic’s social and political commitments, as well as one of a handful of essays on Tennyson that has the capacity permanently to change how we read a familiar work.
—James Williams 

LAURA MARCUS, ‘E. M. Forster and the Character of “Character”’, 50.2 (2021). 
‘Will [his love] ever be complete? Is the enigma him or his nationality?’ agonised E. M. Forster in his ‘locked’ diary in 1909 about his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood; three years later, from Dublin, he observed, ‘The Irish view of the English character resembles the Indian’. Matters of both the heart and nationality inform his ‘Notes on the English Character’ (1912). ‘Character’, notes Laura Marcus, is for Forster ‘ambiguously situated between the nation and the individual’, but what is the relation between real, national and literary ‘character’? What constitutes ‘character’? What I particularly like about this essay is Marcus’s capacious, self-effacing style, her emotional acuity, and what David Trotter has called her ‘love of connection’. She immerses us, through close investigative readings, in Forster’s musings on character across a range of material and places them in different contexts – national cultures of ‘feeling’; the English public-school experience (through Cyril Connolly and George Orwell); reflections by European writers (George Santayana, Salvador de Madariaga, André Maurois); and, finally, in conversation with Virginia Woolf, including her ‘Character in Fiction’. What we have is a process of accretive intensity. The essay builds up a pan-European cultural-critical hinterland which reframes individual contexts and current debates, allowing Marcus to historicise the idea and provide a series of powerful insights – from relating Forster’s interest in (deceptively) ‘flat‘ characters to his conception of ‘the English character‘ with their ‘slowness’, to how developments in psychology had thinned the partition between ‘real’ and ‘fictive’ characters, to the prevalent hope that literary criticism might provide a more ‘rounded’ model in national contexts. A time-worn concept emerges in a wholly new light. Seldom has the Forsterian motto ‘only connect’ been used so rewardingly as critical method.
—Santanu Das