6
‘I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.’
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899)1
‘I can almost believe that I came to Shepperton 30 years ago knowing unconsciously that one day I would write a novel about my wartime experiences in Shanghai, and that it might well be filmed in these studios. Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences.’
J. G. Ballard, annotation to The Atrocity Exhibition (1990)2
In 1962 Watt left the University of California, Berkeley, where he had taught for ten years, to take up a new position as founding Dean of the School of English Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. His appointment was made by the university’s first Vice-Chancellor, Frank Thistlethwaite, a British scholar of American history who had known Watt ever since they were undergraduates together at Cambridge. At the moment of Watt’s appointment, the University of East Anglia was due to admit its first students in the autumn of 1963, but so far had mainly a fiscal and civic rather than material status in the world. Watt’s task was to imagine into existence English Studies at a university whose most important feature was precisely that it was new, and would not follow the pre-existing Oxbridge and Red Brick models.
Looking back almost forty years later, Thistlethwaite wrote that Watt’s ‘role in the founding of UEA was both powerful and beneficent and he is to be ranked among our principal founding fathers’.3 He had given Watt the job of determining what ‘English’ should be, of appointing colleagues and designing a curriculum accordingly, and even of assisting with the architectural designs that would allow Watt’s vision for the subject to be realized.4 But this massive assignment was not Watt’s first experience of humanities administration, for he had been among the founders of a ‘university’ in the Japanese prison camps. One conclusion he drew explicitly there was the need ‘to accept the dull fact’ that institutions matter, because ‘the continuity of human affairs will not happen of itself’.5 This concluding chapter considers how the unusual view Watt’s earliest and most urgent experience as a humanities administrator gave him of English as a discipline carried over into the creation of one of Britain’s then most distinctive universities for the study of literature. Although as a critic he resisted systematic theorizing about literature, Watt was driven in wartime to formulate, and in peacetime to institutionalize, a coherent programme for literary studies.
In her absorbing study of the recreational activities of British prisoners in the Second World War, Midge Gillies quotes George Haig’s view that prisoners of war fall into ‘one or more categories: escapers, creators, administrators, students and sleepers’.6 Watt was an administrator of a special kind, since the administration with which he was concerned was of the ‘university’ that he helped to found at the Changi camp where Allied prisoners were held when Singapore fell. Some prison camps in Europe were places of extraordinary intellectual productivity; for example, Gillies describes Allied prisoners of the Germans sitting formal exams through distance learning.7 Where highly advanced study is concerned, we might think of Annales historian Fernand Braudel drafting his panoramic multi-volume masterpiece The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philippe II (1949) in a camp near Lübeck. The picture was entirely different in the Far East, albeit with one astonishing exception. While he later dismissed the final product as ‘worthless’, the mere fact of prescriptivist philosopher R. M. Hare, captured at Singapore with his Indian regiment, writing an entire philosophical monograph in captivity on the Burma–Thailand Railway (‘a page or two every few days’) speaks to positively superhuman resilience.8 Hare was an anomalous figure among the Far East prisoners, but Watt’s friend John Durnford must have known of numerous productive incarcerations in Europe when he wrote sarcastically that the Japanese camps ‘were not ideal places from which to take a correspondence course in law, aerodynamics or the humanities. No one emerged from them after three years with a postal degree.’9
In the first essay he published about his imprisonment, Watt refers in passing to the ‘Changi University’ as ‘a fairly successful attempt to build up the system of organized study classes that are a regular feature of most prisoner-of-war camps’, and he also mentions the almost prohibitively difficult revival of the university later in the war, when the railway was finished (‘we had lost most of our books, and the Japanese would not allow us to write’).10 Watt never mentions his own leading part in these enterprises. However, we learn from the memoir of Stephen Alexander, one of Watt’s ‘students’, that Watt and his friends Guthrie Moir and Henry Fowler were the ‘instigators’ of the 18th Division University in the spring and summer of 1942, which took shape when a forced work party outside the camp found books that had been abandoned at the fall of Singapore and Moir used them to create a library at Changi.11
The Changi enterprise appears also in John Coast’s memoir, Railroad of Death (1946). Coast uses pseudonyms, perhaps because the very early date made him uneasy about naming other prisoners, but he alters his friends’ names only so slightly that readers can identify everyone quite securely when they already know who these people are likely to be. Ian Watt has become Ian White:
The English faculty was run by three friends of mine. Henry was the administrator of the faculty and one of the chief lecturers. Then we had a young and charming Professor of English from Raffles College, whose lectures on the 19th century novel were amongst the most delightful one could wish for. And also there was Ian White. He was one of the brightest young men Cambridge had seen for some years. From the University he had won a double scholarship, one in England and one at the Sorbonne. He was an example of a very good brain in an equally robust body; there was little frail about him.12
Of course, to describe as a ‘university’ the ad hoc improvisation of informal, bookless, and predominantly oral learning that Watt and his friends initiated perhaps sounds exaggerated; and yet to say that what was created in the prison camps was not a university at all is to move too quickly over the question of what a university really is.
Even UEA was less a university than a funded concept when Watt took up his post. When it opened a little over a year later in 1963, its physical existence was merely as a cluster of portable temporary buildings on the site still known as University Village, ten minutes’ walk from what became UEA’s distinctive Denys Lasdun campus. Watt wrote of a first year in post during which ‘much of our time is spent worrying about whether there will actually be a roof over our heads when the students arrive’; he had already left the university years earlier by the time its first permanent building was opened.13 Intriguingly, the first candidate approached as a possible Dean of English Studies was Raymond Williams, in 1961; he instead took up his appointment at Cambridge that year. Thistlethwaite writes that Williams was ‘sympathetic but did not feel drawn to it’.14 But among all the products of interwar Cambridge who could have considered giving up their tenure elsewhere to create an English department from scratch, Watt would have found it easier than most people to imagine a university as something less sturdily material than the bright concrete of the future UEA. His wartime experience had shown him that learning could go on in incalculably more pressured and provisional settings than these.
Literature in History
In unconscious tribute to UEA’s earliest years, ‘Literature in History’ has for decades been the core first-year English course there. The most distinctive feature of English Studies, UEA’s first humanities department, was its founding as a single academic unit comprising both English and History. (UEA acquired a separate School of History only in 1994.15) Watt’s sole-designed curriculum required all first-year English students to take courses in ‘Historical Method’ as well as ‘Practical Criticism and Expository Writing’; the degree regulations that Watt wrote allowed students to emphasize either English or History after the first year if they wished, but made it impossible to specialize entirely in either subject. Reporting in 1964 on UEA’s inaugural year, Watt was explicit about the opportunity that the university’s newness had given him to institutionalize his view of English and History as substantially the same area of enquiry: ‘Many people had thought about it; but the combination had not been formally instituted anywhere, presumably because it would have been virtually impossible where there were several separate departments and professors already established.’16 More forthrightly, he wrote: ‘At Norwich, English Studies means English History and English Literature. It would no doubt be generally agreed that anyone teaching English Literature ought to know a lot of English History, and vice versa. The two fields are complementary: literature both has a history and is a part of history; while history uses literature, and often is itself literature.’17 His leadership of the School elicited many uncharacteristically direct statements of first principles of this kind: writing in August 1962, shortly after his appointment, he wrote that UEA would reflect ‘the direction which I believe English studies in general should take; that is, developing the empirical tradition of English thought so as to combine literary criticism with historical and sociological scholarship’.18
This was a decisively new approach for a British university, but Watt appears to have been thinking along similar lines for decades. What emerges most powerfully from Alexander’s account of studying in Watt’s prison-camp English department is that his classes were not meant to supply merely a psychological escape or distraction from the protracted tedium of imprisonment. Rather, Watt apparently emphasized the miserable conditions that he and his ‘students’ shared in order to get them to consider the importance of historical and sociological context for literary studies.
We learned from Ian that literary works are not things to be enjoyed unthinkingly, but dissected and related not only to their own social background but to ours, too. Would Wordsworth have been so trusting of Nature if, instead of reclining above Tintern Abbey, he had been caught in the monsoon in the Malayan jungle? Would Dorothy have slept in William’s sacramental hammock and mosquito net when he had had to paddle down a tropical river to report to the DC?19
This is a revealing insight into Watt’s apparent belief in situational reading: the poet’s social context matters, but so does the reader’s. Accordingly, the ideological dimension of poetry that the prisoners’ experience had laid bare was also fair game, and Alexander recalls Watt wondering ‘was there not a class feeling in the more traditional kind of war poetry that invalidated it as art’.20 Apparently Watt classed Byron on Waterloo as interested only in aristocrats; Henry Newbolt’s schoolboy heroes must have been economically insulated young gentlemen; and poet Julian Grenfell contemplated the First World War trenches from the perspective of a country squire.21 The only counterexample the students offered was ‘The Private of the Buffs’, the famous Victorian jingo poem about the Chinese execution of a young English private in the Opium Wars (‘Yes, honour calls!—with strength like steel | He put the vision by. | Let dusky Indians whine and kneel; | An English lad must die.’22), to which Watt pointed out that the hero may have been working class but ‘the poet saddled him with colour prejudice’.23
Obviously it is problematic to have to rely on the single extended record that survives of Watt’s wartime teaching; and it is hard to believe that a summary of our own views from a former student decades later would represent them as we would. Still, Alexander’s account resonates very believably with what we know of Watt’s interwar left politics and also of his Cambridge education, as when we find how I. A. Richards’s work made it into the prison camps.
‘Margaret are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?’ intoned Ian Watt, and we were invited to guess the author of this and other poems, giving them a sort of points system of merit. I was impressed alike by the eclectic choice of poems and by the critical analysis applied to them, and it wasn’t until much later that their provenance in I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism was revealed, and the book itself, with its fold-out appendices, made available to us.24
It seems almost too good to be true that, in conditions of such scarcity, the teaching mode should rely on ‘practical’ criticism.
But William Empson, another former student of Richards and also (more famously) a wartime university lecturer in difficult conditions in the Far East, had also turned to practical criticism as the necessary mode for an almost bookless English department. In his 1940 poem ‘Autumn on Nan-Yüeh’, parenthetically subtitled ‘(with the exiled universities of Peking)’, Empson wrote about lecturing in the late 1930s in China’s ‘Temporary University’ in flight from the Japanese. The poem reflects wittily on the business of lecturing without books, when ‘the soul remembering’ is no longer a Wordsworthian conceit but a pedagogical necessity thanks to the ‘abandoned libraries’ of the Far East:
And men get curiously non-plussed
Searching the memory for a clue.
The proper Pegasi to groom
Are those your mind is willing to.
Let textual variants be discussed;
We teach a poem as it grew.25
Most of us could reassemble some poems from memory, particularly if they were short lyrics of the kind that had served as the basis of Richards’s best-known interwar work. We could not necessarily remember them perfectly, hence Empson’s joke about ‘textual variants’ (he was notorious for misquoting from memory even in more convenient circumstances).26 Looking back at this period in the inaugural lecture he delivered on taking up his chair at Sheffield in 1953, Empson explained that ‘the chief interest of this university teaching was that there were practically no books or lecture notes’.27 Academics had crossed the Japanese lines ‘with the clothes they stood up in and maybe some lecture notes; a fairly dangerous business, and you certainly couldn’t take a library’, but ‘lectures went on sturdily from memory’.28 It is in the nature of public occasions like inaugural lectures to invite high-flown humanist sentiment, but there is no reason to suppose that Empson was being insincere when he said that undertaking literary studies in his depleted wartime circumstances had been a useful experience because of its ‘great effect in forcing you to consider what really matters, or what you already do know if you think, or what you want to get to know when you can’.29
Evidently practical criticism was not simply practical in wartime but downright pragmatic. But what is quite striking about Empson’s and Watt’s post-war careers is how little interested either critic was in making the case for reading ‘the text in itself’—or, for that matter, how unconvinced they were that any such thing existed. In his invaluable biography of Empson, John Haffenden writes that it is ‘surprising, and ironic’ that Empson has been characterized so often as ‘the founding father’ of New Criticism.30 Empson could hardly have been more dismissive of its best-known principles, as when, in his published response to a 1976 questionnaire from the influential poetry journal Agenda, he decried ‘the absurd veto’ on considering the intentions of the author.31 I have already quoted from one of his denunciations of what he saw as the preciousness of New Critical procedures: ‘To say that you won’t be bothered with anything but the words on the page…strikes me as petulant,’ he wrote in a 1955 review essay. ‘If you cared enough you would. For one thing, you might want to know whether the author has really had the experience he describes.’32
Empson’s most substantial statement on the matter came not long after the war in ‘The Verbal Analysis’ (1950), which went further than merely defending, as he always did, the interest of authors’ aims and circumstances. Here, historical contexts are not the extrinsic points of reference that they typically were for contemporary formalists but already immanent in the bare words on the page:
I should think indeed that a profound enough criticism could extract an entire cultural history from a simple lyric, rather like Lancelot Andrewes and his fellow preachers, ‘dividing the Word of God’, who were in the habit of extracting all Protestant theology from a single text. A critic obviously does not need to do this kind of thing often, if at all; it is not really a convenient way to teach cultural history. But it is not my fault, or the fault of any other analytic critic, that our equipment threatens to make us become bores; it is wonderful how many ways there are to be a bore, and almost any line of intellectual effort, however true and useful, presents this threat.33
None other than Raymond Williams spotted a similarly reconstructive quality in Empson’s notoriously demanding The Structure of Complex Words (1952), which he reviewed as ‘an example of that kind of literary criticism which, beginning from analysis of language, proceeds not only to specific judgements on works, but also to generalizing judgements in the history of language and of society’.34 Williams had some misgivings about Empson’s method: ‘a combination of close and vigorous analysis with the retailing of a considerable amount of miscellaneous information’.35 In the hands of Empson or Watt, so-called close reading proved to be historically capacious and inclusive reading.
Close reading in its canonized mid-century forms spoke to neither of them. When Watt was asked in 1959 to deliver a lecture on textual explication to an audience of non-university teachers of English, he began with an account of the institutional modes of close analysis then available. First, he discounted the traditional French model of ‘explication de texte’ with an arrestingly macabre comic analogy: ‘a sort of bayonet drill in which the exposed body of literature is riddled with etymologies and dates before being despatched in a harrowingly insensitive résumé’.36 Meanwhile, he found that the main effect of reading linguistic criticism ‘was to deprive [him] of the innocent pleasure that comes from imagining you know the names of things’.37 More soberly and at greater length, he discussed the Cambridge model of practical criticism in which he had been educated. He considered it ‘a technique of supreme value for teaching and examining students’, but it nonetheless had three main drawbacks: first, it aspires to a bogus objectivity; second, it is of little use for speaking about novels; and, third, ‘its exclusion of historical factors seems to authorize a more general antihistoricism’.38
The one mode of uniting the textual with the historical that he recalled in this lecture was that of Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach. ‘I yield to no one in my admiration,’ Watt wrote, but theirs was ‘not so much a Method as a small group of isolated, though spectacular, individual triumphs’: ‘If I am tempted to emulate the bravura with which they take off from the word on the page to leap into the farthest empyreans of Kulturgeschichte, I soon discover that the Cambridge east winds have condemned me to less giddy modes of critical transport.’39 This was an obviously self-deprecating way of insisting that there are important calling points—for example, national, economic, and social—on the journey from the words on the page to the whole history of civilization. In practice, Watt was never averse to extrapolating a historical world view from a stylistic detail, as when we learn in an elegant discussion of the eighteenth-century development of the periodic sentence that this ‘is the extreme example of the sentence as the intellectual imposition of order upon the items of experience’; as with its poetic counterpart, the closed or heroic couplet, ‘the effort is for the speaker or writer to contain or stabilize order, in some way impose a pattern, on the miscellaneous multifariousness of experience and individual attitudes’.40
Empson’s and Watt’s understanding of textual analysis as a way of accessing cultural history anticipates the kind of analysis that Edward Said praised in ‘The Return to Philology’, one of the late lectures collected as Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004). For Said, ‘a true philological reading is active; it involves getting inside the process of language already going on in words and making it disclose what may be hidden or incomplete or masked or distorted in any text we may have before us’.41 On the face of it ‘about the least with-it, least sexy, and most unmodern of any of the branches of learning associated with humanism’, philology means undertaking ‘acts of reading and interpretation grounded in the shapes of words as bearers of reality, a reality hidden, misleading, resistant, and difficult’; it moves outwards from ‘detailed, patient scrutiny’ of the words on the page ‘to the often obscure or invisible frameworks in which they exist, to their historical situations and the way in which certain structures of attitude, feeling, and rhetoric get entangled with some currents, some historical and social formulations of their context’.42 Textual analysis is not an end in itself, but a way of accessing through the close reading of the textual fragment worlds that are otherwise irretrievably lost. Or, as Tzvetan Todorov described Watt’s mode, making him sound a little like Williams’ version of Empson: ‘patient commentary, the restitution of the meaning of words and syntactic constructions, a search for information of all sorts’.43
Literary language, then, is an archive. Writing about the ‘total war’ historical background of interwar fiction, Paul Saint-Amour has brilliantly unpacked the connections between interwar apprehensions of absolute disaster and encyclopedic modes of writing. 44 As a mode of reading, philology might be seen as a critical counterpart to the war-anxious literary encyclopedism that Saint-Amour describes, a salvage job to replenish a depleted world. This is certainly what Said seems to suggest when he summarizes Auerbach’s wartime Mimesis as ‘an attempt to rescue sense and meanings from the fragments of modernity with which, from his Turkish exile, Auerbach saw the downfall of Europe’.45 Famously, each chapter of Mimesis consists of a short passage of a primary text followed by chapter-length explication of its meaning as a phase in literary, social, and intellectual history, from Homer and scripture all the way up to the interwar period.
In the same lecture series, Said names Watt in passing as an example of ‘humanistic heroism’ for how far he went beyond his Cambridge education under the charismatic figures of Richards and Leavis.46 Although he does not mention the book here, Said’s praise for a patient attention to language that yields up a lost historical world is obvious in a work he had admired decades earlier, Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979)—‘worldly in the best sense of that term’47—in which we find a chapter on Heart of Darkness that is, as Herbert Lindenberger has pointed out, ‘about twice as long as the novella itself’.48 Said’s laudatory review had noted Watt’s ‘encyclopedic approach’, but it was with some unease as well as admiration that Samuel Hynes marvelled at the book’s exegetical detail when he also reviewed it on its first appearance: ‘But what sort of historicism is Watt demonstrating, that takes nothing for granted, but chooses to reconstruct the whole historical background, as though modern criticism were a city or a state that had suffered some terrible calamity—a war or a natural disaster—and had to be built again from the ruins?’49 Hynes intended only to suggest that Conrad in the Nineteenth Century was symptomatic of a newly problematic phase of literary criticism in the age of theory, with an older critic like Watt seeming unsure what kind of historical knowledge could now be taken for granted. By chance, though, he found a startlingly apt way of evoking the limit-case deprivation that had helped to form Watt’s intellectual orientation all those years earlier. Conrad’s whole lost world has been reassembled in Watt’s book: it has been ‘built again from the ruins’.
Creative Writing on the River Kwai
Decades earlier on the Burma–Thailand Railway, Watt and his friends and students in the prison-camp university had tried to leave traces of their own precarious way of life as they buried comrades in the all-encompassing, all-concealing jungles. Introducing his wartime drawings for publication decades later, Ronald Searle explained what these illicit sketches had meant to him at the time:
These drawings were not a means of catharsis. Circumstances were too basic for that. But they did at times act as a mental life-belt. Now, with the perspective and detachment that a gap of forty years or so can achieve, they can be looked on as the graffiti of a condemned man, intending to leave rough witness of his passing through, but who found himself—to his surprise and delight—among the reprieved.50
Watching men exactly like them dying around them every day, prisoners could not expect to survive to bring their writings and drawings home. Ian Denys Peek remembers asking himself, ‘what records concerning us prisoners will survive to tell the world what has happened to us?’51 Their documents—Searle’s ‘graffiti’—were almost posthumous in spirit for many prisoners, ways of registering after their likely deaths in captivity what had happened to them in their final months. This was the ‘need to record and testify’ that Watt saw as the main lesson for the humanities of those who had risked their already vulnerable lives in order to keep writing in the face of the Japanese prohibition.
And so it is revealing that Watt’s prison-camp English department was a place not only of academic literary study, but also where creative writing was produced and workshopped. When Watt, Moir, Alexander, and Durnford found themselves together again at the Tamuang and then Kanchanaburi camps after the building of the Burma–Thailand Railway, they revived their former literary studies with new recruits from among Alexander’s injured friends (one of them injured by Watt himself, an amused Alexander specified, because Watt had dropped a rail on his foot on a forced working party).52 By then, there was no doubt that intellectual activities had to be conducted in secret—pencils or paper were still strictly forbidden, and even movement among huts was intermittently prohibited—because the downturn in Japan’s military fortunes had made guards, in Alexander’s words, ‘ever more explosive and brutal’.53 ‘People wrote poems and stories on surreptitious bits of paper,’ Watt mentions in passing in ‘The Liberty of the Prison’.54 What he does not say is that he himself was guiding these activities.
‘In his dry way he was a patient inspiration to us,’ Alexander writes of Watt’s literature teaching, but he was ‘such a stern critic of our verse that we challenged him to show us a poem of his own’.55 The poem that he showed them survives. The typescript is dated ‘Chung’kai 1943’ and is titled ‘P. O. W. Song’:
O the amazing elegance,
And the painted faces,
The surrealist extravagance
Of prewar places.
From our escalator time
We glimpsed Edwardian graces,
But now the garden suburbs
Vanish from our gazes.
What doctrinaire ascetics,
Will mould our future phases
With streamlined economics
Exterminate the lazy?
I don’t much like the present,
And I can’t believe the past,
At the grimaces of the future
Idler, stand aghast.56
‘P. O. W. Song’ is an almost perverse poem for a forced labourer to write: a witty, deflationary poem about laziness and the awful prospect of being made to work on his homecoming.
Watt’s eschewal of sentimentality and self-dramatization was very much a public position, not to mention a brave one. On prisoner Terence Charley’s poem about the beauty of Thailand, for example, Alexander tells us that ‘Ian doubted if it would do much for Terence’s post-war image as a tortured hero of the Burma–Siam railway’.57 Durnford writes of his own poetic contributions (‘no technical purity and too much feeling’) as an embarrassment to the others in their copiousness and effusion.58 In fact, Watt kept copies of some of them, albeit alongside a satirical poem by an unnamed member of the group teasing Durnford’s productivity: ‘No war deters our poetaster | The mills of John turn ever faster.’ More soberly, Watt recalled that the psychological riskiness of expressing real emotion (‘the inner private world that was still full of nameless fears’) ‘set very strict limits to what we could accomplish. I can certainly remember no poem or story which got to grips with what our life was really like.’59 His efforts with the creative writers seem to have been focused on steering his students away from using poetry to express what were liable to be unmanageably painful feelings.
But here in the middle of the war, in a prison camp in Thailand, was the embryonic model for the kind of English department—with its historicizing literature seminar and the creative writing workshop—that found institutional expression only much later in the new universities of the 1960s. To institutionalize a subject is a matter of mode as well as content, and one democratic innovation that Watt introduced at UEA was the break with the old tutorial-and-exam system in favour of a degree course consisting half of assessed seminars; prior to the opening of UEA, he had described the undergraduate seminar as ‘the most satisfactory method of teaching that I have ever encountered’ (by then he had encountered it formally at Berkeley as well as by necessity in Thailand).60 The main problem that Watt identified with the seminar—‘It can more easily produce the egalitarian form than its substance’—would become notorious thanks to a scholar and novelist appointed a year after Watt’s departure.61 In Malcolm Bradbury’s memorable caricature of the 1960s universities in The History Man (1975), the seminar is a mere pseudo-democracy where radical sociologist Howard Kirk can bully his students. This is where
an apparently casual remark about one’s schoolboy stamp collection, or a literary reference to the metaphoric significance of colour, will lead to a sudden psychic foray from a teacher who will dive down into your unconscious with three shrewd enquiries and come up clutching something in you called ‘bourgeois materialism’ or ‘racism’. Howard’s classes are especially famous for being punitive in this way.’62
As a distinguished Americanist, a prolific comic novelist, and an academic critic of modern literature at a time when some British universities were still struggling with (in Watt’s sardonic phrase) ‘the giddy modernity of Thomas Hardy’, Bradbury is undoubtedly an important figure in UEA’s first half-century.63 But Watt deserves a good deal of the credit for introducing creative writing into British universities via UEA. Michelene Wandor’s history of British writing programmes recounts the conventional story when she writes that in 1970 Bradbury introduced creative writing from the United States. Along with colleague Angus Wilson, Bradbury established Britain’s first creative writing MA in 1970 because he ‘had regularly visited and taught in American universities’: ‘the immediate influence of the US’ was ‘explicitly evident in the MA at UEA’.64 But, as Kathryn Holeywell has been the first to point out, creative writing at UEA has a ‘longer, more complex, and more organic history’ than this.65 Watt was already back in California by the time Bradbury arrived in 1965, but everything hinged on Watt’s earliest personnel choices when, before the university even opened, he courted and appointed Wilson, then approaching the height of his reputation: this was the first time a creative writer had been hired as a creative writer into a British department of English.66 Holeywell attributes Wilson’s appointment to the fact that Watt had spent years in the United States, where writers in residence were already fixtures of university campuses. In this respect, her argument is continuous with those crediting Bradbury: that it was simply an American import.
But Watt had been conducting creative writing workshops—and writing fiction and poetry himself—both back in the Thai camps and soon after demobilization, years before he set foot on American soil, and twenty years before he arrived at UEA. Creative writing at the University of East Anglia had been on Watt’s mind from the start. Aside even from his appointment of Wilson, there is additional evidence in the university’s first undergraduate prospectus. Under the entry for the School of English Studies that Watt alone authored, we find that ‘the examiners may take into account any writings such as poems or novels which the candidate may wish to submit’.67
The Uses of Literature
In the moving memorial resolution that his colleagues at Stanford drafted on Watt’s death, we learn that ‘Watt once said, insisting that he was being hard-headed, not sentimental, that he was sure that, in his World-War II internment, it was the fact that works of literature existed and could still touch him—and his awareness of what that fact said about humanity—that enabled him to survive’.68 It is impossible to generalize about what the humanities meant in the camps of the Second World War because, while we would expect almost everything to depend on people’s physical state and the conditions under which they were living, even these can be an unreliable guide to the conclusions that individual prisoners drew.
For example, to take two men I have already discussed together because their wartime hardships seem comparably atrocious—Jean Améry and ‘my barracks mate Primo Levi’, as he designates him in an essay on the very topic of the humanist in Auschwitz—we find discussions of literature in their memoirs that point in diametrically opposite directions.69 A whole chapter of Levi’s If This Is a Man is devoted to (the chapter’s title) ‘The Canto of Ulysses’, canto 26 of Dante’s Inferno. This is an expressively disjointed chapter, its pages a choppy patchwork of quoted lines interspersed with the fragmentary story of Levi’s struggle to remember the poem for a French friend who does not know it. Levi’s desperation is such that he would ‘give today’s soup’ to connect the lines.70 ‘For a moment I forget who I am and where I am,’ Levi writes.71 But then there is Améry, for whom in Auschwitz ‘the intellect very abruptly lost its basic quality: its transcendence’.72
I recall a winter evening when after work we were dragging ourselves, out of step, from the IG-Farben site back into the camp to the accompaniment of the Kapo’s unnerving ‘left, two, three, four’, when—for God-knows-what reason—a flag waving in front of a half-finished building caught my eye. ‘The walls stand speechless and cold, the flags clank in the wind,’ I muttered to myself in mechanical association. Then I repeated the stanza somewhat louder, listened to the words sound, tried to track the rhythm, and expected that the emotional and mental response that for years this Hölderlin poem had awakened in me would emerge. But nothing happened. The poem no longer transcended reality. There it was and all that remained was objective statement: such and such, and the Kapo roars ‘left’, and the soup was watery, and the flags are clanking in the wind.73
Améry wonders if the problem was that there was no one he could share the poem with, for he no longer knew anyone whom aesthetic experience could even potentially touch. In this, as in many other respects, British prisoners of war of the Japanese had the advantage of their common language and culture, although there are obviously many other reasons why it would be hard to conceive of a ‘university’ at Auschwitz.
What did literature do on the Burma–Thailand Railway? Watt is not an illuminating reporter about how his teaching in the prison camps might have helped him or others. Even in chatty private references to the prison-camp English department, his default mode is self-deprecating comedy, as when he and Brigadier Toosey corresponded about a common acquaintance from Watt’s Shakespeare seminar: ‘I well remember how, at the very end of the course, he purloined the notebook of Colonel Hingston. He had apparently only thought worthy of note the information “Shakespeare, William. 37 plays. Perhaps 39”.’74 Watt tells the story as if it were a joke as much against his own tutorial failings as the academic deficiencies of Colonel Hingston.
Shakespeare also makes a comic appearance in Alexander’s memoir, when we learn that Japanese guards took exception to some of the prisoners’ plays, and ‘did not warm to Ian Watt’s assertion that “gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here” ’, a darkly funny gloss on the disparity between the prisoners’ unromantic situation and the heroisms called up in Henry V’s legendary peroration.75 A half-French, Shakespeare-teaching prisoner of war might also have recalled a less celebrated aspect of Henry V’s conduct at Agincourt, his massacre of the French soldiers whom his troops took prisoner there. Obviously Watt could not have known of the iconic propaganda use to which Laurence Olivier was putting Henry V back in Britain in the same years. He may have known of This Sceptred Isle, though, the patriotic Shakespeare revue that G. Wilson Knight performed from the summer of 1940 through to a culminating week in London a year later: heavy on the best-known passages of the history plays, it inevitably included the speech from which Watt mockingly quoted.76 In any case, Watt certainly knew that there was a Shakespeare more appropriate to the camps than the military virtues conjured up by Henry V, or even by disarmed warriors such as Coriolanus and Othello (‘Othello with his occupation gone’ is Hynes’s summary of the prisoner of war)—or, to take one of the truly eccentric uses of Shakespeare in the Second World War, the improbably ‘heroic, masculine, and American’, ‘virtuous and soldierly’, uniformed Hamlet of the famous morale-building production that Maurice Evans staged for GIs in Hawaii in 1944.77 Instead, it was from Measure for Measure that Watt took the title of the first piece of writing that he published about the camps, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’. This was an especially relevant play to recall in the context of prison camps, given Vivian Thomas’s summary of the problem plays as texts about ‘the relationship between human behaviour and institutions’; they are ‘concerned with authority, hierarchy, decision-making and the consequence of these decisions for the society as a whole and for particular individuals’.78
‘The Liberty of the Prison’ never names Measure for Measure, but Watt nonetheless mentions his reading of Shakespeare as a prisoner:
Below a certain level no intellectual interests can survive. In the camp where I had come down with malaria, I had lain with my head on pack in a kind of coma, only getting up to collect my rice, hardly talking and hardly thinking. But one day I had suddenly realized that inside my pack I had the works of Shakespeare: and for a week I read them all through with enormous pleasure, and had gone through half way again before relapsing into my previous apathy. It wasn’t till many months later that I understood what had happened: the same battalion doctor rejoined me in one of the base camps, and explained that my brief spurt of intellectual energy had begun and ended with a small supply of vitamin B which had come into the camp, and which I’d taken for the few days it had lasted.79
This battalion doctor appears earlier in the essay diagnosing the malaria that had left Watt ‘for about two months in a state of dull insensibility’.80 Watt’s references to the mind-killing effects of sickness and malnutrition suggest that there is something even more complex and troubling going on in this essay than its declared argument about the difficulties of ceasing to be a prisoner and having to make choices again. After all, choicelessness as a consequence of catatonic indifference to your own fate sounds very little like meaningful liberation. Put back in its original context, the paradoxical phrase ‘the liberty of the prison’ tells this much darker story.
The phrase appears in Measure for Measure when the Duke, incognito, asks about the prisoner Barnadine, who has been condemned to death:
duke. Hath he borne himself penitently in prison? How seems he to be touched?
provost. A man that apprehends death no more dreadfully but as a drunken sleep:careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come: insensible of mortality and desperately mortal.
duke. He wants advice.
provost. He will hear none. He hath evermore had the liberty of the prison: give him leave to escape hence, he would not. Drunk many times a day, if not many days entirely drunk. We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it. It hath not moved him at all.81
‘We have very oft awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and showed him a seeming warrant for it’: the criminal Barnadine is actually intended to die, but mock execution is an established form of torture precisely because of the psychological agony it is meant to inflict—and, in most cases, surely does. Yet imprisonment has left Barnadine so unreachably far gone that not even the prospect of his imminent death can touch him. We remember Watt’s references to his own ‘state of dull insensibility’ and ‘a kind of coma…hardly talking and hardly thinking’. The obvious contrast to Barnadine’s indifference (‘careless, reckless, and fearless of what’s past, present, or to come’) is in the play’s previous act, when the condemned Claudio pleads with his sister, Isabella, to sleep with the corrupt regent Angelo in order to save his life. Claudio’s courage completely fails him as he confronts his own execution: ‘The weariest and most loathèd worldly life | That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment | Can lay on nature, is a paradise | To what we fear of death.’82 Claudio’s moral collapse in consequence of his fear of dying is altogether human whereas Barnadine’s numbed, stupefied fearlessness is terrible in a completely different way.
Watt’s thinking when he took his title from this moment in Measure for Measure is hard to reconstruct. Perhaps he thought that ‘the liberty of the prison’ was an appropriately contradictory phrase in its own right and either forgot its origin or supposed that the reader would—it hardly supports the essay’s ostensible argument about how much easier it is to be imprisoned than free. Or perhaps Watt understood that the reader would catch the reference; he would certainly have known that the most intuitive way to approach what is so obviously a quotation is to restore its original context. Either way, the allusion tells an unbearably painful story about knowing how close you came to losing yourself and never coming back. I think Watt recognized this a decade later when he wrote about a return he had made to Thailand in the late 1960s: ‘I’d sometimes thought of our life here as the liberty of the prison; at least we’d been freed of the burden of choosing our own lives. But day after day, just keeping away from our own fear must have blunted our capacity to feel. We hadn’t noticed these slow lobotomies at the time, but they’d happened; and afterwards, whatever it was that made you able to live freely couldn’t be put back.’83
Finally, Watt’s interest in the continuities and discontinuities of a life story encourages us to ask who came back at all after this kind of imprisonment. Whereas the postmodernist Ballard found a shape to his post-war life that allowed him a faintly paranoid but pleasing illusion of necessity (‘assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences’), the realist Watt stressed the ways in which we are, like characters in eighteenth-century novels, hostages to contingency. ‘Looking back on our lives it seems inconceivable that things could possibly have been otherwise, or that they should actually have been mainly determined by accident or momentary convenience; and yet such is often, perhaps usually, the case,’ or so he wrote of the painful ruptures of Conrad’s biography (C. 15). But the imagined lives that we were never allowed to live always shadow in our minds the one that we actually lived, Watt suggests, when he writes that ‘to be pleasantly surprised at what we have become does not efface the imprint of what was not to be’ (C. 24).
Eric Lomax wrote that his time as a prisoner ‘had put a huge distance between me and my previous life, yet I behaved—was expected to behave—as though I were the same person. In the legal and civil senses I suppose I was, but that was about all.’84 Watt likewise believed that the war had changed him; but he also knew that one ironic effect of the change was that by definition it could never be quantified. In an unpublished poem titled ‘Kanburi 1945’, he cast his years of imprisonment as already an ending:
The man I was stopped being
so many years ago
that what and who I was before
the man I am can’t know.85
All Watt’s major criticism is about subjectivity in history, and the contingent shape of an individual life in time. I hope to have shown in this book that his own war experience helped to give him an unusual perspective on this topic, exorbitant though its price clearly was. And as the author of those seemingly self-cancelling terms ‘formal realism’ and ‘realism of assessment’, Watt would know better than anyone that to speak of ‘perspective’ is to identify not only someone’s personal vantage point, which may be accidental, but also the quality of his or her perception, which is probably not.
1 Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 35.
2 J. G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition: New Revised Edition (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1990), 11.
3 Frank Thistlethwaite, Origins: A Personal Reminiscence of UEA’s Foundation (Cambridge: Frank Thistlethwaite, 2000), 27.
4 On Watt’s architectural input, see Michael Sanderson, The History of the University of East Anglia, Norwich (London: Hambledon & London, 2000), 158–9.
5 Watt, ‘The Humanities on the River Kwai’, 251.
6 Midge Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University: The Real Lives of Allied Prisoners of War in the Second World War (London: Aurum, 2012), xvi.
7 Gillies, The Barbed-Wire University, 275–90.
8 R. M. Hare, ‘A Philosophical Autobiography’, Utilitas, 14/3 (November 2002), 283, 282.
9 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, xiii.
10 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 525.
11 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 78.
12 Coast, Railroad of Death, 45.
13 Ian Watt, ‘The University of East Anglia: Some Notes on Progress’, Critical Survey, 1/4 (Summer 1964), 247.
14 Thistlethwaite, Origins, 23.
15 Sanderson, History of the University of East Anglia, 90.
16 Watt, ‘The University of East Anglia’, 248. Leavisite and Left-Leavisite versions of the English–History combination—that is, based more or less on ‘criticism’ and ‘values’ rather than the scholarship Watt had in mind—were in circulation decades earlier, as in L. C. Knights, ‘The University Teaching of English and History: A Plea for Correlation’ (1939), L. C. Knights, Explorations: Essays in Criticism Mainly on the Literature of the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946). F. R. Leavis, ‘Sketch for an English School’ (1943), proposed a required paper on—rather inevitably—the seventeenth century, where students would study topics such as ‘Church and State’ and ‘The Rise of Capitalism’. To the objection that this is History and not English, Leavis’s defence is substantially a deflection: that students would also be required to achieve competence in practical criticism. F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’ (London: Chatto & Windus, 1943), 48–65.
17 Watt, ‘The University of East Anglia’, 250.
18 Ian Watt, ‘The Idea of an English School: English at Norwich’, Critical Survey, 1 (Autumn 1962), 45.
19 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 79.
20 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 79.
21 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 79.
22 Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, ‘The Private of the Buffs’, in Sir Francis Hastings Doyle, The Return of the Guards and Other Poems (London: Macmillan, 1866), 106.
23 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 80.
24 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 82–3.
25 William Empson, ‘Autumn on Nan-Yüeh’, in William Empson, Collected Poems (London: Hogarth, 1984), 73.
26 John Haffenden, William Empson, i. Among the Mandarins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 280.
27 William Empson, ‘Teaching English in the Far East and England’, in Empson, The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 211.
28 William Empson, ‘A Chinese University’, in Empson, The Strengths of Shakespeare’s Shrew, 190.
29 Empson, ‘Teaching English in the Far East and England’, 212.
30 Haffenden, William Empson, i. 2.
31 William Empson, ‘On Criticism: Questionnaire’, Agenda, 14/3 (Autumn 1976), 24.
32 Empson, ‘Still the Strange Necessity’, 125.
33 William Empson, ‘The Verbal Analysis’, Kenyon Review, 12/4 (Autumn 1950), 599.
34 Raymond Williams, ‘The Structure of Complex Words’, English, 9/49 (March 1952), 27.
35 Williams, ‘The Structure of Complex Words’, 27.
36 Ian Watt, ‘The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors: An Explication’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 194.
37 Watt, ‘The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors’, 197.
38 Watt, ‘The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors’, 195.
39 Watt, ‘The First Paragraph of The Ambassadors’, 196.
40 Ian Watt, ‘The Ironic Voice’, in Watt, The Literal Imagination, 44.
41 Edward Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 59.
42 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 57, 58, 61.
43 Todorov, Literature and its Theorists, 107.
44 Paul Saint-Amour, Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
45 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 115.
46 Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 68.
47 Said, ‘Conrad in the Nineteenth Century’, 23.
48 Herbert Lindenberger, ‘The Singular Career of Ian Watt’, Stanford Humanities Review, 8/1 (2000), 6.
49 Said, ‘Conrad in the Nineteenth Century’, 23. Samuel Hynes, ‘Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, by Ian Watt’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 35/4 (March 1981), 536.
50 Searle, To the Kwai—and Back, 10.
51 Peek, One Fourteenth, 377.
52 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 170.
53 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 188.
54 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 526.
55 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 169, 172.
56 Ian Watt, ‘POW Song’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994–106, Box 22, Folder ‘Jap. Stuff Misc’.
57 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 175.
58 Durnford, Branch Line to Burma, 162.
59 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 527.
60 Watt, ‘The Idea of an English School’, 43.
61 Ian Watt, ‘The Seminar’, Universities Quarterly, 18 (1964), 377.
62 Malcolm Bradbury, The History Man (London: Picador, 2000), 137.
63 Watt, ‘The University of East Anglia’, 247.
64 Michelene Wandor, The Author is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 8, 81.
65 Kathryn Holeywell, ‘The Origins of a Creative Writing Programme at the University of East Anglia, 1963–66’, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, 6/1 (2009), 16.
66 Holeywell, ‘The Origins of a Creative Writing Programme’, 17. On Watt’s appointment of Wilson, see Drabble, Angus Wilson, 312–15.
67 ‘University of East Anglia Prospectus, 1963–4’, University of East Anglia Special Collections, ‘UEA Collection’.
68 ‘Memorial Resolution: Ian Watt’, Stanford Report, 8 March 2000, <http://news.stanford.edu/news/2000/march8/memwatt-38.html> (accessed 21 August 2017).
69 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 3.
70 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 114.
71 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, 113.
72 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 7.
73 Améry, At the Mind’s Limits, 7.
74 Letter to Brigadier Philip Toosey dated 9 August 1967, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 24, Folder 1.
75 Alexander, Sweet Kwai, 186.
76 The early text was published as G. Wilson Knight, This Sceptred Isle: Shakespeare’s Message for England at War (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1940); the programme from the final week at the Westminster Theatre, London, is published as an appendix to G. Wilson Knight, Collected Works, vi. Shakespearian Production (London: Routledge, 2002), 314.
77 Hynes, The Soldiers’ Tale, 234. Anne Russell, ‘Maurice Evans’ G. I. Hamlet’, in Irena R. Makaryk and Marissa McHugh (eds), Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 235, 238.
78 Vivian Thomas, The Moral Universe of Shakespeare’s Problem Plays (London: Routledge, 1991), 15.
79 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 525.
80 Watt, ‘The Liberty of the Prison’, 522.
81 William Shakespeare, The New Cambridge Shakespeare: Measure for Measure, ed. Brian Gibbons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 166 (4. 2. 123–34).
82 Shakespeare, Measure for Measure, 143 (3. 1. 129–32).
83 Watt, ‘Reunion on the Kwai’, 711.
84 Lomax, The Railway Man, 207.
85 Ian Watt, ‘Kanburi 1945’, Stanford University Special Collections, SC401-ACCN 1994-106, Box 22, Folder ‘Jap. Stuff Misc’.