Terry Eagleton: ‘Keir Starmer? He’s a classic petit bourgeois’
Nobody ever erected a statue to a critic, goes the truism. But it’s a measure of Terry Eagleton’s impact on British culture that he’s just received a comparable honour: a hospital ward has been named after him in his hometown of Salford. “Why? I suspect they name them all after well-known Salford lads and lasses. But the uncharitable answer is: it’s a psychiatric ward,” he says with a gleeful laugh.
Many people over the years seem to have thought a padded cell a more suitable environment for Eagleton than the ancient universities where he spent the bulk of his career. Among them may be counted the King, who once asked a group of Rhodes scholars at Oxford: “Who teaches you? Not that dreadful Terry Eagleton, I hope.”
Eagleton was chiefly responsible for introducing the continental practice of Critical Theory to British universities, bewildering traditionalists with his focus on structuralism, semiotics and reception theory. In his heyday he was a self-described “shamelessly unreconstructed Marxist”; and – the ultimate sign of mental confusion, his enemies argued – he combined this with being a Roman Catholic.
He was a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, before leaving to lecture at Oxford in 1969. “I’ve perhaps never really come out about how very roughly treated I was by the English faculty at Oxford, not in any practical way but in terms of sheer unfriendliness,” he tells me. “They couldn’t have isolated me more if they’d met around a table to conspire to do so. The problem was I had lots of ideas, and Oxford was absolutely antagonistic to ideas: it was as bad as having lots of mistresses, or lots of concealed bottles of whisky around your room.”
He packed the lecture halls, however, and his 1983 book Literary Theory sold three-quarters of a million copies. In 1992 his star quality secured him promotion to the prestigious post of Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford. “Should this man be a professor?” ran a headline in this newspaper, above a profile that concluded in no uncertain terms: “No”.
Now 80, Eagleton was the subject of press attention again in November, when his son Oliver, a 26-year-old New Statesman columnist, was revealed to have been among the group of pro-Palestinian protesters who launched chants of “Shame on you” at Michael Gove in Victoria Station, resulting in the Levelling Up Secretary being taken home in a police van. Memories of the Theory War years came flooding back as Eagleton Senior’s credentials as a subversive influence were rehearsed in the papers for the first time in years.
Eagleton insists that reports that Oliver “led a mob” to intimidate Mr Gove are inaccurate. “He doesn’t think anything very major or dramatic happened. He’s a very straight guy. Of course, in order to make sure that he grew up a good Leftist I never mentioned the Left at all – he’s very much his own man in that respect.”
Oliver is the oldest of three children from Eagleton’s second marriage; he also has two sons from his first. He is separated from his second wife and these days lives alone, “but with family nearby”, near the North Antrim coast. As we talk over coffee and biscuits in Derry, about 20 miles from his home, he reflects on the days when he was routinely spoken of as dangerous: “That was the first shot in the culture wars, perhaps.”
What’s his response to those who say that the educational establishment has now been captured by Marxists? “They can’t have set foot in a university recently! Or if that’s their idea of Marxism, it’s a very odd one. It’s half a century now since the Left was in the ascendant in any sense of the term.”
With his ready laugh, Eagleton comes across as more of an amused observer of the world than a firebrand reformer. Does he still stand by the assertions he made about critical theory in the 1980s: for example, “any method or theory which will contribute to the strategic goal of human emancipation, the production of ‘better people’ through the socialist transformation of society, is acceptable”?
“I’m not sure I would defend that any more actually. There’s something in it, but I think it’s over-emphatic.” He doesn’t even necessarily identify as a Marxist these days: “What matters is that people call themselves Socialists, or at least anti-Capitalists. Marxism is mainly a theory of history, historical materialism mainly – I wouldn’t defend that to the death.”
Eagleton’s latest book, The Real Thing, reminds us that for all the innovations of his criticism, he differs from other reforming academics in acknowledging the primacy of the established canon of English literature. Typically lively and witty, it is a study of traditional literary realism, and by and large a defence of its achievements – “I’m awaiting the reviews from outraged avant-gardists” – in celebrating ordinary life and showing the social context in which people live and their relations to institutions. As so often in his work, he takes the opportunity to lay into postmodernism, which he sees as “too captivated by the marginal and off-beat to find the life of the majority anything but uncool.”
The book salutes the efforts of Dickens, George Eliot and Tolstoy to encompass the world as it really is: but is it possible to write realist literature worthy of the name in our post-post-(if not post-)modern age? “In a much lower key. One thinks of Ian McEwan, Colm Toibin: often a very fine realism, but it almost self-consciously lacks the ambition of its forebears.”
His favourite living novelist is John Banville, “because of the way he plays with language. It sounds a terribly fusty thing to say, but I can’t read a lot of American fiction because I just find it doesn’t play with language to my satisfaction – they like their fiction rather plain. It’s the Puritan tradition. I think that’s responsible for Wokery in the States too - there’s a long Puritan tradition there of a small, inquisitorial group scrutinising the language of others for flickers of moral impurity.”
By contrast, “one of the nicest things about Ireland is that it’s not morally self-righteous at all. I’m afraid to say I once nicked a salt cellar from a cafe in Dublin - I was in dire need of one – and as I was furtively sliding it under my napkin, I noticed the guy at the next table was staring with great interest at what I was doing. But I knew straightaway that he would never shop me. You wouldn’t do that in Ireland.”
Born into a working-class family of Irish heritage in Salford, Eagleton was a sickly boy, bedridden with asthma: “I could really tug at the heartstrings of your readers here. That isolation led in some way to being an intellectual, I think – because that involves a distance from the world, allowing you to question the taken-for-granted.”
He got into Cambridge even though he had to return home before finishing the entrance exams, as his father had died. For many years he drank heavily – “although I gave it up 30 years ago” - dogged by a sense that “although it was what my father wanted for me, going to Cambridge represented a break from him, perhaps even a betrayal. But I must have come to realise that in a sense a lot of what I’ve achieved has been in his name or the name of people like him.”
Does he think that Labour winning the next election will be a boon for the arts and for education? “I’d be astonished if that came from Starmer. His first name is about as inappropriate as calling an anti-fascist Adolf. I think Starmer is a classic petit-bourgeois.”
Another of his bêtes noires is the celebrity atheist Richard Dawkins. “I’ve heard that his communications officer – he has such a posh thing – advised him against debating with me. I think Dawkins tended to debate with religious rednecks which was rather convenient for him. He’s gone quiet these days.” Eagleton no longer describes himself as a Catholic; his faith, he says, is “probably more like Rowan Williams’s, whatever Rowan’s self-description would be.”
Eagleton also famously rowed with Martin Amis, criticising him for calling for harsh treatment of Muslims as a response to 9/11: “I was effusively thanked by various Muslim academics for responding to his rather outrageous statements. What he said showed the limits of Liberalism, it just wasn’t strong enough to deal with this matter. ” He admits, however, that those who think he went too far in saying that Amis had inherited his views from his father Kingsley – whom he described as “an anti-Semitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and liberals” - have a point: “I think I regret some of those comments. It’s a cliche, but they came in the heat of the moment.”
Eagleton once urged somebody to invent a “contrascriptive” to stop him writing so much, but he says now that after 50-odd books he will soon publish his last: on death. “I had intended it to be published posthumously, with a note denying that my recent death was a publicity stunt to promote sales. But,” he chuckles, “the publishers didn’t much like that.”
The Real Thing by Terry Eagleton is out on January 23 (Yale University Press)
