At the start of his new memoir, British literary theorist and left-wing political apologist Terry Eagleton recalls how as a boy he had a special responsibility at the local Carmelite convent. Whenever a family came to say its farewells to a newly admitted nun about to enter permanent enclosure, the young Eagleton was charged with manning the parlour door where such meetings took place. The role of gatekeeper is undoubtedly an apt metaphor for someone who feels he has spent much of his life occupying in-between places. Yet its adoption by Prof Eagleton also bespeaks the presumption that will characterise the rest of the book. He devotes most of his energy to lumping people into various categories and then slamming the door of understanding in the faces of those he deems ideologically suspect. Even the chapter titles reveal this sheep-and-goats approach to the world: people are sized up and then dumped into the categories of "Lifers", "Catholics", "Thinkers", "Politicos", "Losers", "Dons", and "Aristos".
Still, one man's dogmatism is another man's intellectual rigour, and Eagleton is not only conscious of his monochrome outlook but proud of it. He regards it as a natural result of his upbringing, which consisted of "a Catholic aversion to subjectivism" coupled with "a working-class allergy to emotional ostentation". With a sort of pre-Vatican II machismo he celebrates the old-fashioned Catholic education he received because it instilled in him such a hearty contempt for ambiguity, which in turn enabled him as an adult to "move fairly freely from Catholicism to Marxism without having to pass through liberalism".
His journey from Lancashire scholarship boy at Cambridge to prominent Oxford intellectual is related episodically, with little reference to chronology. He is more concerned with making intellectual associations that span his whole career, and, one suspects, with constructing a narrative that emphasises his working-class beginnings over the rather less romantic process of climbing the ladder to academic prominence. Like liberalism, professional development appears to smack of a gradualism he cannot abide.
For if there is one thing The Gatekeeper makes plain, it is that Terry Eagleton hates liberals, or more precisely, middle-class Protestant liberals living in suburbs. He never tires of heaping contempt on those whom he sarcastically refers to as "idle utopianists" and "bright-eyed liberal modernizers", but as the repetition of hackneyed phrases makes obvious, such people never really exist for him save as symbolic abstractions in his own mind. Indeed, the writing would be a lot better generally had it not been treated so often as a mere packhorse for the author's many prejudices and pet ideas. Public school boys invariably "bray", Mancunian accents are always "flat" and anyone else about whom Eagleton cannot say something more interesting is direct from "Central Casting".
These verbal tics are irritating, but they pale in comparison to his addiction to analogies and similes. After circling over 50 of them, I stopped counting and tried to reconcile myself to their maddening frequency.
Yet these habits magically evaporate when Eagleton forgets he has an Important Point to make and simply tells a story or paints a character portrait. We are treated, for example, to a picture of the dynamic Catholic intellectual, Laurence Bright, whom Eagleton knew while a student. Similarly, he introduces us to people such as the waiter Fergus and the warehouseman Henry, whose personalities come alive on the page. There is also an entertaining account of his abortive visit to a seminary as a young teen to test whether he might have a vocation as a priest. Unfortunately, such passages are all too fleeting, and the ham-fisted analogies always return whenever Eagleton resumes his propaganda war against the complacent bourgeoisie.
These glimpses of the man beneath the ideologue are ultimately what make The Gatekeeper such a frustration to read. The book demonstrates repeatedly its author's wit and sensitivity, his feeling for language and his talent for seeing how ideas are at the heart of everyday life, and yet at the same time it makes plain that Eagleton does not trust or even respect these gifts.
Only when he stops having all the answers and admits to having a few questions do we get some genuine insight into what has motivated all this resistance: "What if others win for you by their sacrifice the very largeness of mind which might tempt you to betray them? Is this not a tainted gift? Is it bread or stone?" And so it appears that this dogged determination to remain a closed mind has, for all its invocation of political philosophy and theoretical constructs, been from the start an intensely personal struggle over questions of loyalty and loss. It may surprise Eagleton to learn that he is not the only one to have entered the Oxbridge system feeling like an outsider with reservations about participation within it. Yet by the same token it is simple fantasy to insist in this day and age that such places continue to be dominated by characters from Brideshead Revisited.
The memoir closes with the author recounting how he learned of his father's death while waiting for his admission interview at Cambridge. The symbolism is not lost on him, and he renders the scene well. It is only a shame that he has chosen to regard the moment as the end of something, rather than as the start of something else.
Robert Tobin is a graduate student in Irish history and literature at Merton College, Oxford
Terry Eagleton will be reading from The Gatekeeper in Eason/Hanna's Bookshop, 1 Dawson Street, Dublin 2, on Wednesday, November 28th at 6.30 p.m.