MAINLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL

I was taught not to like Joyce. The semicolonial experience I shared with him did not count for anything in the literary education I received during the 1950s at an all-white English-medium South African high school, which – in spite of being in the state education system – modelled itself on a certain idea of the Victorian public school. I remember being taught Shakespeare and Shaw, George Eliot and the Georgian poets, but little that could be called ‘modernist’. (However, I used school prize money to buy anthologies of recent poetry, and discovered in the work of a writer named Dylan Thomas a linguistic exuberance that at once baffled and excited me.) The English department at the university to which I proceeded in the early 1960s, also in South Africa, broadened my horizons considerably, but still within strict bounds. As was the case with many colonial English departments, its guiding spirit was the English critic F. R. Leavis, and the curriculum was based, for poetry, on the winnowed canon he presented in Revaluation and New Bearings, for fiction, on the equally circumscribed list of writers celebrated in The Great Tradition, and, for methodology, on ‘close reading’ or ‘practical criticism’ (for behind Leavis was the influential figure of I. A. Richards).