William Whyte at Literary Review:
Arriving as an undergraduate at Cambridge in 1961, Terry Eagleton was both overawed and underwhelmed by his supervisor, a man he calls Greenway in his memoir. ‘Greenway was the first truly civilised man I had ever encountered,’ Eagleton recalls. ‘He knew all about cheeses, wisteria, Rubens’s brushwork, herbaceous borders, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird-life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibniz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles, 17th-century military strategy, breeds of North African dog, the vowel-sounds of Afrikaans, the vegetation of the Minho valley.’ But ‘he had no more ideas in his head than a hamster’ and his comments on English literature, the subject he was ostensibly responsible for teaching, ‘seemed the kind of thing that Princess Margaret might say’.
Eagleton was probably a little unfair to Theodore Redpath, the polymathic model for this caricature. Although the playwright Simon Gray also thought him insipid, others disagreed. Gazing at Redpath over coffee, Sylvia Plath was so attracted by his ‘rich, chastened, wide mind’ that she ‘practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father’.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.