The Record 2009 - Keble College - University of Oxford

Keble College: The Record 2009
But none of this, needless to say, extricates me from the moral
grimpen which, like so many other kinds of contradiction and
impasse, largely, though by no means wholly, results from one’s
own contradictions, weaknesses and general incapacity.
Having published in 2008 my Collected Critical Writings, a volume
of 814 pages, covering the work of forty-eight years, I once more
acknowledge this important aspect of my human existence.
Yet I would still quibble with the term ‘pursue’. I plodded on,
stubborn and apprehensive, and over the years things accrued
and gathered, and rather to my surprise, as I reached old age, I
found that I had an ‘oeuvre’.
It is true, though, that from the first my great desire has been
to create books: I have an almost mystical reverence for the
alienating effect they have on one’s own inarticulacy even
while they may at times embody the ‘life-blood of a master
spirit’ [Milton, Complete Prose Works, vol. 2, p. 493 (Areopagitica).]:
Emerson’s marvellous phrase ‘alienated majesty’ [Ralph
W Emerson, Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York:
Viking, 1983), p. 259 (‘Self-Reliance’).] comes to mind though
I am employing it in a sense other than that with which he
employed it. Like Machiavelli, I wish to enter my ‘library’
(which in actuality I don’t possess) clad in curial robes [Cf. the
letter to Francesco Vettori of December 10, 1513.].
I am cursed with a virtually insuperable strain of vis inertiae:
to overcome this I found it essential to accept invitations to
lecture, as with my Clarks at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1986
(The Enemy’s Country), the Tanner Lectures on Human Values,
Brasenose, Oxford, 2000 (Inventions of Value) or the Ward-Phillips
at Notre Dame in the same year (Alienated Majesty). I undertook
their preparation with the full intention of establishing —
eventually — the foundations for a book or books. This was
essential to my vision of myself rather than to any project
for professional advancement. Indeed when, in 1980, I left
an administrative chair at Leeds, into which I had gravitated
by misadventure, for a lectureship at Cambridge I effectively
demoted myself and, since no dispensation was allowed for my
twenty-six years teaching experience, found myself once more
without security of tenure.
I have always taken part (when permitted) in the physical
preparation and presentation of my books — an aspect of
things which I also considered academically in my teaching
for the Editorial Institute. Title pages and dust jacket design
particularly attract my attention and I give much thought to
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