There's a debate being had between Norm Geras and Damian Counsell on the subject of Terry Eagleton, specifically T-Bird's odious essay in the Guardian about the dearth of radical literature. All the left has got left is — wait for it — Harold Pinter! Among his other offenses, Eagleton mischaracterized the views of Martin Amis on British Muslims, and the opinions of Salman Rushdie with respect to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. I'm not sure he even got Rushdie's take on Afghanistan right either since Eagleton used the phrase "criminal adventures" to describe the wars against both the Taliban and the Ba'ath.
Anyway, Norm was appalled by his fellow Marxist's drivel, as well he should have been. Damian's only problem was that Norm hasn't quite been appalled enough by Eagleton over the years: the mocking if gentle title of Damian's post, "Professor Wakes Up At End of Seminar," did the bulk of his work for him.
Norm has fashioned a counter-response to the effect that, well, yes he has profited from Eagleton's scholarship in the past and does admire the literary theorist's wit and humour when it's on display. Though he's by no means an uncritical admirer. Damian wrote back, "[T]he impression I get is that Norm is more forgiving of Eagleton’s errors of reasoning than he should be (and they’re grave ones). This is a credit to Norm’s intellectual generosity and loyalty, but it doesn’t mean he’s right," which in turn begged the question of "loyalty."
Both scholars teach — or taught — at the University of Manchester, making them colleagues. But unless the academy has grown into much a cuddlier place than I remember it, I see no reason to suspect a code of professional courtesy that asks one professor to talk well of another who talks balls. Is it the shared Marxism, then, that makes Norm "loyal" to Eagleton? Evidently not, though even that is beside the point. That Norm unhesitatingly called out someone he professes to admire when principle demanded it is enough to satisfy me. A writer's work would never be done (and he'd be much less trustworthy) if he repudiated everything about those who no longer impress him, or who fail him in some crucial way. However, another kind of questionable motivation is at the heart of the affair–it belongs to Eagleton.
It is by now banal or point out that a sinister twit in politics can demonstrate great talent in art, literature or poetry. One thinks immediately of Eliot, Yeats and Waugh. The same must also be true of a literary critic. Yet this allowance is precisely the one Eagleton himself is incapable of making toward his chosen subjects, no doubt upholding the finest aesthetic standards of the commissar class he so misses. You're either with the proles (and now the suicide-bombers), or you're against them so far as your artistic credibility is concerned.
I recall reading not too long ago a LRB review Eagleton wrote — typed is more like it — of Author, Author!, David Lodge's fictional account of the repressed life of Henry James, who must have transferred his difficulties below the waist to his bogus Boswell. Here was a Catholic socialist calling out another (former) member of the faith for sex-obsession, the result of — can you feel the Theory gearing into overdrive? — vestigial guilt from Holy Mother Church. Catholic apostates like Lodge make the best sublimated panty-sniffers, according to Eagleton, finally discovering the tie that binds The British Museum is Falling Down to "Like a Virgin." Also, his cliched stupidity in approaching the complicated ideology of Philip Larkin was best dynamited by Christopher Hitchens — in New Left Review, no less — during the infamous mid-90's "row" over the poet's legacy::
[Eagleton] opens his J’accuse by saying of Larkin that ‘few poets of his stature have been so remorselessly concerned to negate rather than affirm, diminish rather than enhance.’ I had not before understood that Professor Eagleton believed in poetry as uplift. Nor did I gather, until I read that ‘the Hull setting was symbolically apt for Larkin: as the twentieth century unfolded its wars and revolutions, he cowered behind the book stacks in this remote provincial outpost’, that the ivory tower or the academy were to be hawked upon from the height of a dreaming spire. Nor would I, as a tutor even in Oxford, have given high marks to an undergraduate submission which said that: ‘if Larkin hadn’t existed then he would have to have been invented’.
Now toss onto this already smoldering reputation Eagleton's stone-faced assertions in that latest Guardian piece that
1. Virginia Woolf was to the "left of almost every other major English novelist." Yet the radical author of Three Guineas harbored rather orthodox establishment opinions of Jews;
2. Byron "scourge[d] the corruptions of the ruling class" despite also reveling in those same corruptions and composing epic verse about the Eastern cultures that no modern theorist worth his tenure would fail to describe as "Orientalist";
3. Thomas Carlyle "denounced a social order in which the cash nexus was all that held individuals together," but also wrote sentences like this: "The very falsehoods of Mahomet are truer than the truths of [an insincere man]," which Bertrand Russell and others viewed ominously as the relativist underpinnings of fascism.
4. H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw were mere "socialist writers," despite their glowing endorsements of Stalinism.
Eagleton's crimes of ideology are nothing compared to his crimes of criticism.