Raymond Williams: the humanist and the sage

In Interviews with New Left Review, Raymond Williams’s socialism is shown to be full of conflict and qualification.

Raymond Williams had a lifelong desire to explore a human version of socialism.

It would be true to say that Raymond Williams, born in 1921, was one of the most lucid and engaged British thinkers of the 20th century, if not for the fact he was Welsh. British, he said, was a term that was only ever linked with empire when he was growing up in the tiny agricultural village of Pandy.

Pandy was border country — in Monmouthshire, a mile from the English border, a region where the indigenous language had been long suppressed yet nationalism was inspired by proximity to the ruling tongue — and it is fair to say that a democratic temperament and essential nonconformism resulted from Williams’s accident of birthplace.

His origins were modest. His mother came from a long line of agricultural labourers; his ­father too — except that his paternal grandfather, having quarrelled with his farmer boss, ended up a road worker. So it was that the celebrated academic, novelist and critic, a key figure in the creation of the field of cultural studies in Britain, grew up the son of a railwayman rather than a dairyman: wedded to place but linked by an ­industrial internet to the expanding world of politics and ideas.

Interviews with New Left Review consists of a compendious Q&A session. Think of a volume’s worth of Paris Review interviews that investigates every nook and cranny of a fascinating life and broad intellectual career. The original impulse of the project seems to have been a stern and doctrinaire investigation of Williams’s adherence to and deviations from the British Communist Party line, conducted by the journal during a series of meetings in Cambridge during 1977 and 1978.

At least that’s how it sometimes feels, reading the interviewers’ long and hectoring questions. Yet these questions elicit measured, honest and extensive responses from Williams. Literature, politics, history and society: all the tributaries of his thought are arranged, chronologically and thematically, and flow from his Welsh childhood to his mature thoughts on the landscape of British politics just before Thatcher’s rise to power.

As English writer Geoff Dyer observes in a generous and pithy introduction, both the ­quality of Williams thought and his lifelong ­allegiances emerge from his early experience. He was born and reared in an isolated agricultural community, far from the industrial heartland of England, in a community lacking those rigid hierarchies that tended to create acute class-consciousness in others like him: grammar school boys and girls who won a place to Oxbridge (in Williams’s case, Trinity College at Cambridge).

His upbringing and origins rather gave him confidence. Williams relates the famous story of a lecture given by LC Knight during which the eminent literary critic argued that the term neighbour no longer had any meaning under the atomising pressures of industrial civilisation. To which the young man responded from the crowd that he was Welsh and knew exactly what a neighbour was. This sense of belonging at once to an old and distinct culture, as well as to a wider European culture via the continent’s interlinked socialist movements, would remain a constant throughout his life. And similarly, after a callow undergraduate career during which Williams briefly joined the Communist Party (along with fellow students Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson) and wrote and spoke with more passion, perhaps, than knowledge, he became an academic for whom hesitancy, qualification and thoughtfulness became hallmarks. As with his great contemporary, literary critic Frank Kermode, Williams’s intellectual habit was to perform a series of careful turns before settling on his bed.

This change came about because of World War II. Williams left Cambridge early to become an ­officer in the Guards Armoured Division. He spent the following years leading a tank ­regiment through the battlefields of Europe. The experience of sitting blind in a vast metal case, surrounded by high explosives and diesel, marked him for life. You might say that the special quality of care he brought to intellectual considerations in his postwar life was a kind of recompense for the savage narrowing of perspective he was obliged into by conflict.

And these interviews recall us to the quality and extent of those signal creative and theoretical works: the fictionalised origin story of ­Border Country (1960), his first and best novel; the extraordinarily consequential works of cultural theory including The Country and the City (1973), The Long Revolution (1961) and Culture and Society (1958); and the later literary-political considerations of figures such as George Orwell, of whom he is fascinatingly sceptical, arguing that he impersonates ‘‘the plain man who bumps into experience in an unmediated way and is simply telling the truth about it’’.

Yet when Williams complains of the gap ­between Orwell’s avowed socialism and his conservatively-inflected writings, the reader hears the sound of a kettle calling.

On the evidence of these pages, Williams’s socialism was also full of conflict and qualification; his writings attracted to figures such as Thomas Carlyle, whose politics were of a powerfully opposite stripe. It is Williams’s rejection of vulgar Marxism, his lifelong desire to explore and espouse a complex, circumspect, human version of socialism, that makes him worth reading today. His intellectual honesty is of a piece with Orwell, at least.

“First-person testimony is notoriously unreliable,” Dyer writes in summation. The conventions of memoir encourage — perhaps even require — “a self-serving drift into the fictive”. If the fierce interrogation Williams was subjected to in these interviews has any remnant virtue, it is this: the interviewers kept their subject on the straight and narrow. The resulting work “bears little resemblance to a memoir or literary biography”, writes Dyer.

Even Williams, when shown the proofs, said, “It feels like a whole new form.” As Dyer approvingly concludes:

This, to put it in the style of his interlocutors, is well said — and not simply because of the book’s formal originality. What is so unusual is that a volume that might be regarded as a postscript or addendum to the main body of the work turns out to be an integral part of it.

Geordie Williamson is The Australian’s chief literary critic.

Politics and Letters: Interviews With New Left Review

By Raymond Williams

Introduction by Geoff Dyer

Verso, 452pp, $32.99