inexperienced attempts failed to carry the Leavis creed intonliterary London through editing little journals in the mannernof Scrutiny (though Politics & Letters managed to print annarticle by George Orwell), and Williams became an extramuralntutor in Oxford, Hastings and Oxford again, where hisnreputation was one of a carefully minimal performance ofnhis duties. (He would give his classes, that is, but seldomnlinger to converse with students or colleagues.) And so on tona Cambridge college fellowship and a chair . . . Not thenworst or direst of careers in a century marked by greatncatastrophes, but a privileged education and a privileged lifenending in affluence. Williams was an insider who alwaysnpreferred to deny he was that.nThe contradictions multiply. Though a professor ofndrama, he disliked theater, and I can never forget hisnastonishment when he heard I had just been to see a play fornfun — or the alacrity with which he left a promised performancenby an experimental theater company in a Cambridgencollege because one glance suggested the room was full.nThough avowedly a proletarian, his personal manner wasnfaintly grand, almost ducal, and his thick tweeds andngarrulous voice suggested a country gentleman. Thoughnproud of his polemics, which were always thick with thenpromise of an intellectual defiance of established customnand political “challenge” (a very favorite word), his publishednprose was abstract, bookish, polysyllabic, andneiderdownish, so that one felt less challenged than soothed.nThe famous parliamentary phrase about being savaged by andead sheep might have been made for his longer writings.nThough radical in curricular terms and hostile to thenconventional teaching of English, as he imagined it, henpassionately favored an interdisciplinary system that wouldnnecessarily involve the subjection of pupil to teacher. Andnthough a successful teacher, he did not exactly teach.nHis cult was other. Though he seldom, if ever, stooped tonread or mark a student paper, delegating such humblenIn the forthcoming issue of Chronicles:nVictims of Governmentn”Karl Marx always maintained that capitalists would readilynsacrifice family life to the quest for short-term profit,nand the great captains of industry seldom disappointednhim. In the 1920’s, for example, the National Associationnof Manufacturers struck up an alliance with the NationalnWomen’s Party, the radical wing of the American feministnmovement. Today, they embrace state subsidized dayncare.n161 CHRONICLESn— from “Charity Begins at Home: The Family andnthe Welfare State” by Allan Carlsonnnnchores to graduate students, and though he seldom if evernread the drafts of a graduate thesis, being too busy with hisnown works, he was more often loved than hated, and hisnstudents found his personality gratifying. Even those whonvolunteered the view that he wholly neglected his teachingnduties could do so in an indulgent and forgiving tone, as ifnsheer acquaintance compensated for any dereliction of duty.nTo ask why is to pose a question at once literary and political.nThe literary aspect is that Williams, as a Leavisite, neverndoubted that teaching was a coterie activity in 1945-46, in anfashion total and unquestioning, even picking up his master’snhabits of style and use of key terms like “central.”nWilliams’ elaborate syntax was Leavis’, as Leavis’ (innderivation at least) was Henry James’s: a system of controlledninterpolations suddenly emerging in a resolutionnwhich one is given no choice to rebut. As a teacher, Insuspect, he knew no other style. Teaching had nothing to donwith the passage of information, and little to do withnimparting a technique. It was a moral position taken up andnstruck—“Here I stand . . . ” — to be admired and accepted.nWhen Leavis died in Cambridge in 1978, Williams gavenan admiring lecture on his dead master in which henconcluded that, with all his faults, Leavis compelled admirationnbecause he was intransigent. All that is faintly unusualnin British academic life, which is marked rather by ancontinuous readiness to discuss and to argue than by anpropensity to pontificate, and I sometimes felt that the life ofna French literary maitre like Jean-Paul Sartre, whom hengreatly admired, might have suited Williams better than anlife in academia. He sought not the curious or the studiousnbut the admiring. A university is less a place to learn, in hisnview, than a place to join a side, as he had joined the left andnLeavis in their day, to promote a cause. That view found itsnanswering call. Many an adolescent believes there are twonkinds of professors—those who merely do the job, year afternyear, and those who make history. There were acolytes to benhad.nThe literary aspect was always marginal. The political wasnplainer, and no one ever doubted that all Williams’ preferencesnarose out of that: his lifelong adoration of the sacrednname of socialism. “Nothing matters but the reality ofnsocialism,” as he wrote in an article in 1961, in a phrasensuggesting the dedication of an early Jesuit or of the Moslemnhordes that swarmed across the Mediterranean in thenseventh century. It is understandable if Americans find itnhard to understand the moral prestige of the word in westernnEurope, since no socialist government has ever honored itsnpromise of freedom without poverty, and few enough havensucceeded in advancing the living standards of workingnpeople. The two Germanics tell another story. Perhaps thenquestion may now be relegated to history, since History (asnMarx capitalized the word) has by now so signally failed.nMore and more parties in Europe called socialist arendecaffeinating, so to speak, and abandoning the contents ofntheir Victorian faith; even those in Russia and China are saidnto be experimenting daringly with private and competitivenenterprise. The socialist day is done.nTo adolescents of the 1960’s, however, no such argumentsncounted. To be a socialist in that age was to benvirtuous; and to incarnate the supposed values of a workingnclass in manner and dress was to invest oneself with a secularn