The insularity of F.R. Leavis
     F.R. Leavis was an unlikely source of new ideas for the discipline of English in Australia by the 1960s. His own career at Downing College Cambridge was by that time moving into tragedy. Two of the young recruits whom Goldberg brought to Sydney were direct from Downing: John Wiltshire came in 1964, aged just 23, and Howard Jacobson, aged 22, a year later. They had behind them undergraduate careers marked by the decades-long resentment of wider Cambridge towards Leavis and the gathering pains of self-destruction of the Leavises' own world, whose bleak narrative has been related in a recent biography of Leavis4.
     At Sydney in 1965, the passions aroused on all sides made the stakes seem enormous: as an extreme example, members of Goldberg's first honours class talked of tutoring for him without pay the next year, if that would help the cause. In retrospect, those debates seem almost irrelevant. Apart from the belatedness of the appearance of Leavisism at Sydney, there was much in what Leavis represented that was not just untimely but alien in the Australian context. In the period of expansion of the university system marked by the Murray Report of 1958, the main impetus for change in the English curriculum was the demand for Australian content. This desire had little to do with the introduction of a body of work which laid powerful emphasis on the centrality of English literary canons. But the barrenness of the traditional humanities ethos that ruled at Sydney before Goldberg's intervention (I rely on Riemer's own account here) might well have made Leavis look like the latest thing.
     The watershed year for revolutionary hope in Europe was, of course, 1968; the place, Paris. In England, Perry Anderson wrote 'Components of the National Culture', a sober and much-read essay5. This was a first attempt to specify the significance of the work of Leavis; it inaugurated an ongoing critique of the place of English in the academy and in the wider culture. Anderson concurred with the Leavises that, in the middle decades of the century, native English intellectual culture was sorely in need of rejuvenation, and pointed to the salutary influence for many disciplines of European émigrés such as Wittgenstein, Malinowski, Popper, Gombrich and Klein. The exception was English: in the field of literary studies, he argued, it was the achievement of the home-grown journal Scrutiny to occupy a vacant space in the national culture, vacant because England, unlike Europe and the United States, had failed to develop a discipline (a sociology, for example) for the analysis of society as a totality, leaving an absent centre in the culture. Literary studies were to England what sociology was, say, to Germany. It was the ethical-political inclusiveness of the Leavisian project and its anti-Establishment aggression which earned a kind of respect from British Marxists (a respect, incidentally, never reciprocated). At the same time, Leavisism was to play a part in shifting English away from a narrow conception of the literary towards a wider critique of 'life-values' and society at large. It is even possible to trace the growth of Cultural Studies, now resurgent in the academy and nowhere more than in Australia, back to elements in the Leavises' program. For all that, Leavisism itself remained insular.
     Leavis' claim to 'centrality' was made in the name of values and traditions specifically English. In the between-wars period, what was being contested was the ownership of cultural authority under the conditions of new class formations and the broader base of the literate public. In championing the new discipline of English, Leavis showed how its pedagogical rigour enabled its proponents to distinguish clearly between great and mediocre works and -- especially if one keeps in mind the pioneering work of his wife, Q.D. Leavis, on pulp fiction --between Literature and popular culture. He argued that this rigour was moral, judgments of literary taste being irreducibly moral judgments. The melding of moral and aesthetic had the effect of diluting the content of the moral, so that 'vulgar' became for Leavis as damning a label as, say, 'evil', strange as that may seem.
     The hybrid form of the novel with roots deep in popular culture became the acid test for Scrutiny's claims. Nowhere is this clearer than in Leavis' uncertain relationship with Charles Dickens, where the popular and vulgar came hard up against Englishness. Not only did the category of the moral require special understandings: the very idea of 'Englishness' became matter for contestation, even if its jingoistic potential was overlooked. Despite the missionary intensity of Leavis in asserting that the values identified by Scrutiny were both normative and transparently true, his complicated idealism masks a gloomy knowledge that these values were anything but commensurable across the globe and up and down the social classes: they were and would remain the property of a closed and increasingly embattled inner circle, just a different one from earlier cultural elites.
     Leavis, then, was certainly an unlikely bearer of new ideas for Australia in the 1960s. Leavisism had little progressive to say about the social issues that were beginning to impassion students around the world, issues like nationalism, decolonisation, the Vietnam War and women's liberation. Leavis himself knew almost nothing about Australia and showed little interest in the place. Which meant that his work and thought would have to be radically re-packaged for Australian consumption. Enter Sam Goldberg.

Sam at Sydney, Gough in the Lodge
     The strange thing about Goldberg, Leavisism's chief missionary in Australia, is that he is not remembered for his ousting from the Sydney English Department. That's an event which, mutatis mutandis, I have often thought bears more than a fanciful resemblance to the dismissal of the Whitlam Government just ten years later. In their different ways, each tells us something about our Australianness, above all the way Australians negotiate change. (For the purpose of this comparison, in Goldberg's case I shall pass over the academic question, Did he jump or was he pushed? The answer is, simply, both).
     Like Whitlam, who was accused of the very un-Australian crime of Too much/Too soon, Goldberg's 'tragic flaw' was, according to Riemer, his impetuousness. Both were said to have been ideologically driven and evangelistic in their zeal and methods; they failed to take people with them in their visions of wider horizons. The personality of each as leader was seen as crucial to the sorry outcomes of their short regimes: intellectually brilliant but arrogant, bullying; casual over the fears and desires of their enemies, while careless to the point of ignorance about the limits of their own power.
     Their enemies too show similarities: both Malcolm Fraser and G. A.Wilkes could be described as stolid, anti-inspirational and conservative, ideally qualified to lead their constituencies back to the happier past that had been momentarily, aberratively, lost sight of. So Fraser got rid of Medibank (for the moment) while Wilkes reintroduced compulsory Spenser. One problem was that such simple and innocent acts of Restoration were more than a little blood-stained: the struggles had been nakedly political, about careers and power as much as ideas and ideals, and tainted by an atmosphere of backroom conspiracy, sexual scandal and loud public rancour.
     To strain the comparison just a little further: the role of the Governor General in Canberra was played at Sydney (behind closed doors) by faceless but identifiable figures in the upper echelons of the University Administration. Both Kerr and the Sydney Administration which supported Wilkes' push to split Goldberg's department acted in ways that would be seen as constitutionally dubious.
     From our present vantage point, various retrospective attempts to come to terms with our troubled pasts can be read as anxious fin de siècle meditations on that most significant decade (politically and culturally speaking) of our times: the '60s. Should we now curse that decade for ever having happened? or, like Wordsworth looking back to 1789, the revolutionary moment of his early adulthood, quietly reflect: 'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!' One thing is certain: when any one of us offers interpretive constructions and judgments about that past, we are really arguing about how the present is to be read. And another: in the cultural battles that have gone on since that decade, the combatants ritually divide along lines laid out in those times or otherwise formed in reaction to 'The'60s'.

Goldbergism
     Goldbergism, the Australian version of Leavisism, was both a hothouse growth and an unhealthy-looking hybrid. Most Australian Leavisites of the time were to register the discomfort, this awkward fit, by firmly marking their differences from Leavis while at the same time quoting him endlessly. Goldberg typified this tendency, though, interestingly, in his most famous book on Joyce's Ulysses Leavis barely gets a mention.
     Naturally enough, migrating Leavisism first touched these shores at Perth, with the professorial appointment of a veritable 'Scrutineer', Allan Edwards. The word was brought across to Melbourne by Jock Tomlinson in the early 1950s, and Leavis was more or less the sign under which the brilliant younger brigade of the department (Goldberg himself, Maggie Tomlinson, David Moody and Vincent Buckley) set about revamping its pedagogy. The purists, the 'true believers', of the group were Goldberg and the Tomlinsons, and it was they who carried most influence with the honours students. Buckley was a special case: he himself had written a book on Leavis, but would not call himself a Leavisite; his personal influence, in Irish and Catholic circles, extended well beyond the English department and has been well recorded.
     Goldberg was the rising star in academic English in Australia at this time. This was his hey-day as a teacher, attested by Germaine Greer and others who gravitated to English Honours at Melbourne in the '50s. From the start his teaching took in wider agendas: he set up a 'Lit. Club' for staff and students to discuss books and issues and it was from papers presented in that forum that a serious critical journal, The Melbourne Critical Review, was established. Despite the worrying repetition of the name of Leavis, early numbers of the journal reflected the liberal pluralism of the department of Ian Maxwell, and included critics as diverse as A.D. Hope, Leonie Kramer, Andrew Taylor and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. Undergraduates, many like Wilbur Sanders and Ian Donaldson to go on to distinguished academic careers abroad, found space for their first publications in the Review, an astonishing fact in an otherwise strictly hierarchised Australian academy. Further, as the recalling of these names might indicate, English at Melbourne was by no means cut off from the literary community of the 1950s: the department housed, as it has right up to the present time, many a 'creative writer'.
     All this might suggest that one of the collective errors of judgment in those halcyon days was the abortive attempt to translate Australian Leavisism to Sydney, where for the Sydney natives it had all the appearance of a violent act of colonial appropriation. In Melbourne, Goldberg and the other Leavisites could live in a state of civilised friction within the greater department while achieving a high degree of hegemonic authority; in Sydney, they were greeted with a mistrust that quickly degenerated into collective paranoia. Besides, the overlooking of Wilkes for the Challis Professorship (the real Chair) while simultaneously appointing him to the newly-established Chair of Australian Literature laid the foundations for the struggle to the death that ensued.
     When Gerry Wilkes, with the support of the Administration at Sydney, set up a rival course to the one Goldberg thought he had sole authority over, the move to split the department was defended in the name of pluralism, a corrective to the proselytising rigidities of Goldbergism. Once Goldberg had returned to Melbourne, less than four years after his arrival at Sydney, this pluralism was abandoned and a new/old monolithic course set in place. All traces of Goldberg's values were expunged. Thus Andrew Riemer could finally settle down to enjoy his rightful inheritance, complete with a room in the old sandstone building that is the impressive quadrangle of Sydney University. Academic English at Sydney, to adopt Terry Eagleton's favourite description of Oxford, would revert to a state of 'pre-Leavisian' innocence. But only as long as the world allowed, and the inhabitants of Sydney English could go on forgetting.
     Writing just a few years after Goldberg's demise at Sydney, Ian Lennie provided the following epitaph to the Goldberg years at Sydney:

Thus the virulence, bitterness and keen energy of Leavis is gradually fitted into the Australian complacency ...Whatever life Leavis gave to Australian culture he does not seem capable of making a lasting impression. If there was a battle, Australia seems to have won -- a pretty disheartening victory.6