Raymond Williams 1921 - 1988

The death of Raymond Williams was a great loss for both the British and the European Left. He was the most important thinker on society and culture in Britain; indeed, he decisively transformed our understanding of those two concepts and of the ways in which the realities they offer to describe relate to politics and ideology. He was born in the Black Mountains of Wales, the son of a railway signalman. His childhood was passed in a closely knit rural working-class community and it was this community that provided him with the values and concerns which were to inform his whole life’s work.

After attending the local grammar school in Abergavenny, he went up to Cambridge just before the outbreak of war. The connection with the Cambridge English Faculty was to be the central institutional relationship of his later life, and he was much influenced at this early stage by Leavis and the emphasis on the value of literature as a critique of contemporary capitalist-industrial society. At the same time he was also, in a response that was never to leave him, shocked by Cambridge’s arrogant appropria- tion of a literary tradition as a confirmation of class privilege. His studies were interrupted by the war and it was after some four years‘ service as a tank captain that he returned to Cambridge to complete his degree in 1946. For the next fifteen years, as a staff tutor in literature in the Oxford Univer- sity Extra-Mural Delegacy, he taught for the Worker’s Educational Associ- ation, and this experience on the periphery of the academic establishment was crucial for the development of his work; and in the first instance, for the task he set himself of analysing the idea of culture as it had been complexly proposed by a line of English writers from Coleridge through to Leavis, and as it had been taken over in the contemporary situation in an argument against democracy and socialism.

It was this analysis which became the enormously influential Culture and Society (1958). While working on that book, Williams also began, as a necessary extension of its thinking, a series of studies of cultural production, attempting to understand the development of industrial capitalism in relation to the new forms of communication that were an integral part of it: the press, advertising, education, etc. The Long Revolution (1961) brought these studies together and marked at once the political insistence on the central importance of struggles for the ownership and control of ‘com- munications’ and the theoretical commitment to defining and describing cultural production as a primary activity within the whole social process,

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as determinate with and not simply determined by economic and political instances. The reflection on culture in these two books was taken up, differently, in the novel Border Country (1960) which explored the relation- ship between a metropolitan intellectual and the working-class community from which he had come and to which he returns as his father lies dying. Writing across a range of forms - novel or television play as well as essay or critical study - was a continual feature of Williams’s work, an aspect of his immense creativity and an indispensable factor in the portrayal of the real complexity of social process.

In 1961 Williams moved back to Cambridge as a university lecturer in English and a fellow of Jesus College; he was subsequently appointed Reader and then Professor of Drama. For some twenty years his lectures and classes were the key teaching in the Faculty, representing Cambridge English in what historically had been its originality as a modem subject: English now in Williams’s work not as simple assumption and canonisation of ‘English literature’ but as critical cultural study, boundup with the analysis of forms of writing in their historical conditions of emergence and effect, of con- ventions and determinations of reading, of the construction and trans- mission of culture. Generations of students responded to this teaching and to the strength of the lived intellectual commitment from which it came.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Williams pursued the questions that he had raised in his initial writings, producing work both on the forms of contemporary culture (for example, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, 1974) and on the ways in which the objects of the traditional culture had to be understood in relation to the wider society that had formed them (for example, The Country and the City, 1973 J. The period saw him moving towards an ever greater re-engagement with Marxism, after membership of the Communist Party as a student and post-war distance from the dominant Stalinist interpretation of base and superstructure. The re-engagement was at once from within the logic of Williams’s own project of grasping cultural relations in social process and in dialogue with newly available alternative traditions in European Marxism (Marxism and Literature, 1977, is a fine summary account). Of particular personal importance was the discovery of the writings of Lucien Goldmann and the brief but intense exchange with him in Cambridge in 1970. The theoretical dialogue was equally - the two were never fundamentally distinct - political dialogue and agrowing sense of the European dimension of British politics, and the possibilities of socialism in Britain became a key element in Williams’s thinking. His now famous self-description as a ’Welsh European‘ was characteristic: the commitment to the cultural themes and the political struggles of Welsh nationalism, asserting the primacy of local identities and values, coupled

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with a crucial awareness of a wider radical tradition and context, asserting a necessary international movement - with the former drawing its energy from the latter and vice versa. His developed political position found expression above all in Towards 2000 ( 1983); his deeper personal project in relation to that position in the long historical novel on his beloved Black Mountains, on which he was working when he died.

Williams’s achievement in its public record is exceptional enough: major works in a wide variety of fields and disciplines, a series of major novels, the shaping definition of cultural studies, an unsparing willingness to contribute in every way to the development of socialist politics. But in all of this we can remember too the immense character of the man, the deep sense of purpose in every aspect of his life, the authenticity of his cornmit- ments, the abiding generosity of his conduct, his warmth, the strength of the collaboration with his wife Joy. It was our good fortune to have been his students and to have had his support and advice throughout our adult lives. We had discussed the new editorial arrangements in Critical Quarterly with him (he was a member of the Honorary Committee of the journal when it was founded in 1959 and contributed to its first number] and he had promised to participate in the debates we hoped to initiate. That will not now happen and we shall miss his writing. and his example, as will so many others who knew him, his work.

Stephen Heath Colin MacCabe