Williams, Raymond 1921–1988

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Williams, Raymond 1921–1988

(Raymond Henry Williams)

PERSONAL: Born August 31, 1921, in Llanfihangel Crocorney, Monmouthshire, Wales; died January 26, 1988, in London, England; son of Henry Joseph (a railway worker) and Gwendolene (Bird) Williams; married Joyce Mary Dalling, June 19, 1942; children: Merryn, Ederyn, Gwydion Madawc. Education: Trinity College, Cambridge, M.A., 1946, Litt.D., 1969. Politics: Socialist.

CAREER: Oxford University Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies, Oxford, England, staff tutor in literature, 1946–61; Cambridge University, Cambridge, England, lecturer, 1961–68, fellow of Jesus College, 1961–88, reader, 1968–74, professor of drama, 1974–83; visiting professor of political science at Stanford University, 1973, and Open University, 1975; member of the Arts Council, 1976–78. Military service: British Army, Guards Armored Division, 1941–45; became captain.

AWARDS, HONORS: Welsh Arts Council prize for fiction, 1979, for The Fight for Manod; honorary D.Litt. degrees from University of Wales, Open University, and University of Kent.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

Reading and Criticism, Muller (London, England), 1950.

Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1952, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1953, revised as Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1968, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1969.

(With Michael Orrom) Preface to Film, Film Drama (London, England), 1954.

Drama in Performance, Muller (London, England), 1954, Dufour (Chester Springs, PA), 1961, 3rd edition, Penguin (New York, NY), 1973, published with a new introduction and bibliography by Graham Hoderness, Open University Press (Buckingham, England), 1991.

Culture and Society, 1780–1950, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1958, published with a new postscript by Williams, Penguin/Chatto & Windus (Harmondsworth, England), 1963, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

The Long Revolution, Columbia University Press (New York, NY), 1961.

Communications, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1962, 2nd edition, 1976.

The Existing Alternatives to Communications, Fabian Society (London, England), 1962.

Modern Tragedy, Stanford University Press (Stanford, CA), 1966, revised edition, Verso (London, England), 1979.

The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1970.

Orwell, Viking (New York, NY), 1971, revised and enlarged edition, Fontana (London, England), 1984.

The Country and the City, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Fontana (London, England), 1973, Schocken (New York, NY), 1975, revised edition, 1992.

Drama in a Dramatized Society, Cambridge University Press (New York, NY), 1975.

Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1976, revised and enlarged edition, Fontana (London, England), 1983, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985, new revised edition published as New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2005.

Marxism and Literature, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1977.

Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, Schocken (New York, NY), 1979.

The Welsh Industrial Novel: The Inaugural Gwyn Jones Lecture, University College Cardiff Press (Cardiff, Wales), 1979.

Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, Verso (London, England), 1980, Schocken (New York, NY), 1981.

Culture, Fontana (London, England), 1981, published as The Sociology of Culture, Schocken (New York, NY), 1982.

Democracy and Parliament, introduction by Peter Tatchell, Socialist Society (London, England), 1982.

Socialism and Ecology, Socialist Environment and Resources Association (London, England), c. 1982.

Cobbett, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1983.

Towards 2000, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1983, published as The Year 2000, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1984.

Writing in Society, Verso (London, England), 1983.

(With Maureen Williams) The Defenders of Malta, Raymond Williams (Newby Bridge, England), 1988.

Raymond Williams on Television, 1921–1987, edited by Alan O'Connor, Routledge (New York, NY), 1989.

Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by Robin Gable, Verso (London, England, and New York, NY), 1989.

The Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists, edited by Tony Pinkney, Verso (London, England, and New York, NY), 1989.

What I Came to Say, Hutchinson Radius (London, England), 1989.

The Raymond Williams Reader, edited by John Higgins Oxford, Blackwell (Malden, MA), 2001.

NOVELS

Border Country, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1960, Horizon (New York, NY), 1962.

Second Generation, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1964, Horizon (New York, NY), 1965.

The Volunteers, Methuen (London, England), 1978, Hogarth (New York, NY), 1986.

The Fight for Manod, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1979.

Loyalties, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1985.

The People of the Black Mountains, Chatto & Windus (London, England), Volume 1: The Beginning, 1989, Volume 2: The Eggs of the Eagle, 1990.

EDITOR

May Day Manifesto 1968, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1968.

Pelican Book of English Prose, Volume 2: From 1780 to the Present Day, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1969.

(With Joyce Williams) D.H. Lawrence on Education, Penguin Educational (Harmondsworth, England), 1973.

George Orwell: A Collection of Critical Essays, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1974.

(With Marie Axton) Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1977.

(With Marie Axton) English Drama: Forms and Development; Essays in Honour of Muriel Clara Bradbrook, Cambridge University Press (Cambridge, England), 1978.

Contact: Human Communication and Its History, Thames & Hudson (London, England), 1981.

Roger Sales, English Literature and History, 1780–1830: Pastoral and Politics, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1983.

(With Merryn Williams) John Clare: Selected Poetry and Prose, Methuen (New York, NY), 1986.

OTHER

A Letter from the Country (teleplay), British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1966.

Public Inquiry (teleplay), BBC, 1967.

Also author of The Country and the City (television documentary), produced for the Where We Live Now series. Author of introductions to books, including Dombey and Son, by Charles Dickens, Penguin (Harmondsworth, England), 1970; Racine, by Lucien Goldmann, Rivers (Cambridge, England), 1972; and Visions and Blueprints: Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth-Century Europe, edited by Edward Timms and Peter Collier, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 1988; author of foreword to Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature, edited by L.J. Jordanova, Free Association Books (London, England), 1986. Editor of Politics and Letters, 1946–47; general editor, New Thinkers' Library, 1962–70. Contributor to Revue des Langues Vivantes and Science Fiction Studies.

SIDELIGHTS: In the Dictionary of Literary Biography, an essayist described Raymond Williams as "a major figure in the world of English letters," and cited his "rare combination of right-of-center Marxism and a moral passion akin to that of F.R. Leavis" as the explanation for why the author's "massive interdisciplinary output [had] commanded the respect of both the New Left and the traditional literary establishment." For Robert Christgau of the Voice Literary Supplement, Williams was not "just a fecund and significant and immensely useful writer. [He was] an enjoyable and even exciting one." Among the writings for which Williams will be remembered are the sociological studies Culture and Society, 1780–1950 and The Long Revolution; his widely studied text of dramatic theory, Drama from Ibsen to Brecht (originally published as Drama from Ibsen to Eliot); and the trilogy of popular novels Border Country, Second Generation, and The Fight for Manod.

Often considered one of the founding fathers of the field of cultural studies, Williams was governed by certain consistent principles in his sociological and political writings. His The Sociology of Culture explores an idea the author termed "cultural materialism"—a way of analyzing art that mandates the analysis of the process behind the production of that art, as well as the recognition of the art as product, in order to understand its social significance. "One of the distinguishing features of Williams's 'cultural materialism,'" Anthony Giddens wrote in the Times Literary Supplement, was "his uncompromising insistence upon the diversity of cultural forms, that always have to be studied in the contexts of their creation and reception." Among the forms Williams insisted must be studied were television and other examples of popular art that had traditionally been shunned in studies of "culture."

Williams also discussed cultural materialism in several of the essays collected in Problems in Materialism and Culture: Selected Essays, along with another issue of central importance to his life and work: Marxism. In the Times Literary Supplement, Robert Hewison offered an explanation of the notion of "structure of feeling," one of the tenets of the Marxism Williams espoused: "The term describes the empirical and imaginative perception of the world by a group or class, but not an individual, and though this collective world picture finds its most coherent expression in the highest works of literature, the ideas, images and values these express permeate all perceptions of the world, thus constituting a particular ideology. The great works are created, of course, by individuals, but they reflect the group consciousness." While Hewison felt that Williams's prose made his complex ideas even more difficult to comprehend, the reviewer noted that Problems in Materialism and Culture did "demonstrate that culture is a material product and therefore economically and politically is as significant as the organization of the steel industry," thus lending greater meaning to the term "cultural revolution."

In a London Times review, Richard Holmes described Contact: Human Communication and Its History as "an admirable and provocative compilation" of essays. Of the texts—which range from explorations of the fundamentals of communication to the authoritarian element of radio—Holmes found special favor with the piece Williams, the book's editor, contributed to the collection, an analysis of the future of telecom-munications that Holmes called "a masterly essay of summary." Williams's essays, lectures, and reviews collected in 1983's Writing in Society explore the study of literature and the changing role of literary criticism from the perspective of Marxism. For Christgau, five of the collection's essays were "superb."

The Year 2000, originally published as Towards 2000, picks up where Culture and Society and The Long Revolution leave off, continuing what Bryan Appleyard called in the London Times "the drive … towards a benevolent, free socialism in which production will once again be directed towards use rather than consumption." It was Appleyard's opinion that, in The Year 2000, Williams had ceased to be "a critic, tossing his socio-political nets over art," and had become instead "a prophet, making unfashionable attempts to make his mind the compass of the world"—attempts the critic felt to be very persuasive. Reviewer Janet Morgan was not quite as convinced, however. Despite writing in the Times Literary Supplement that she found Williams's "anecdotes … so endearing, [his] speculations about trends and relations so interesting and his effort to explore contemporary vocabulary so admirable an enterprise," Morgan took great exception to the methodology behind the author's argument. For her, the methods Williams proposed for analyzing his subject were inconsistently followed through and bore little connection to the author 's ensuing proposals, ultimately raising more questions than Williams could answer by the book's end. Robert Bendiner expressed a similar opinion in the New York Times Book Review, asserting that though Williams's goals were admirable (the author "would remake world politics along … gentler lines"), his proposals were unrealistic at best.

Resources of Hope, published the year after Williams's death, gathers writings from the last thirty years of the author's life. Peter Ackroyd described its contents in the London Times as being representative of "the kind of life that can essentially be defined in parochial terms…. Very much a life built upon exclusion, within a small community which implicitly or actively denies the values of the larger world beyond." Critics like Ackroyd and Times Literary Supplement writer Denis Donaghue felt that though this final collection was lacking in spots, "Williams's work [is] indeed already honourably if not impeccably complete."

Williams's fiction, however, was left incomplete at the time of his death. His final writings were collected in the two posthumously published volumes that made up The People of the Black Mountains (The Beginning and The Eggs of the Eagle), which were well received by critics. The success of Williams's fiction with the public began with the 1960 publication of Border Country. The first of a trio of linked novels sometimes referred to as his "Welsh Trilogy" (Second Generation and The Fight for Manod followed in 1964 and 1979, respectively), Border Country tells the story of Matthew Price, a lecturer in London who returns to the Welsh border village of his birth when his father falls ill. Considered autobiographical by some, the novel took as its theme "the conflict between alienation and reintegration," according to Weis, a theme revealed in Price's struggle to link his working-class past to his intellectual present. Second Generation picked up its predecessor's border imagery, tracing the lives of two generations of a family relocated from a Welsh border town to a university city. For Weis, Second Generation suffered in comparison to its predecessor, though the critic saw a poignancy in the "depiction of the emotional struggle" of the main characters. Matthew Price returns to the trilogy in its final volume, The Fight for Manod, in which he is caught up in a battle over a government project that would forever alter the border country. Weis called it "a strange, almost nightmarish, evocation of what happens when the connections between economic figures and human beings are ignored." According to Patricia Craig in the Times Literary Supplement, the three novels amounted to "a densely written, thoughtful and evocative trilogy."

In the London Times, Elaine Feinstein described Williams's Loyalties as "one of his best novels." The story of Norman Braose and the socialism and espionage into which he is swept over the course of fifty years, Loyalties met with a largely positive critical response. Howard Jacobson, who called it "a novel of ideas; more specifically a novel of socialist ideas" in the Times Literary Supplement, found the book "altogether more gripping" than a novel of ideas should be. "Altogether a tough, thoughtful, haunting novel" was the way Seon Manley described it in the New York Times Book Review. Williams's next novel, The Volunteers, was also an intellectual study beneath its tale of murder and political intrigue. For one Washington Post Book World reviewer, this was a successful combination: "Like all really good thrillers, [Volunteers] deals … with man's inward life and the difficulties of moral choice."

The People of the Black Mountains moves episodically from a modern narrative to times in Wales's history ranging from 82 A.D. to 1415 A.D. (Williams had planned to take the unfinished text into the twentieth century as well). In a review of The Eggs of the Eagle, the second volume, Terence Hawkes wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "Raymond Williams devoted much of his academic effort to changing the nature of 'English' by undermining the reductive boundaries which it constructed across a complex history and culture." The critic explained what he saw as the consistent idea underlying the "borders" that recurred in Williams's fiction: that "although walls father cultural restriction they must also be the mothers of creative transgression." For Hawkes, Williams managed to achieve his goal of transgressing those borders with The People of the Black Mountains, mounting "his final assault on the political and cultural walls."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Contemporary Literary Critics, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1982.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 14: British Novelists since 1960, 1982, Volume 231: British Novelists since 1960, Fourth Series, 2000, Volume 232: Twentieth-Century European Cultural Theorists, First Series, 2001.

Inglis, Fred, Raymond Williams, Routledge (New York, NY), 1995.

Prendergast, Christopher, editor, Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1995.

Stevenson, Nick, Culture, Ideology and Socialism: Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, Avebury (Brookfield, VT), 1995.

Wallace, Jeff, Rod Jones, and Sophie Nield, editors, Raymond Williams Now: Knowledge, Limits, and the Future, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Art Journal, fall, 1997, Jonathan Harris, "Art Education and Cyber-Ideology: Beyond Individualism and Technological Determination," p. 39.

New York Times Book Review, May 6, 1984, p. 27; March 22, 1987.

Times (London, England), January 7, 1982; October 20, 1983; September 26, 1985; February 23, 1989.

Times Literary Supplement, February 27, 1981, pp. 215, 239; December 10, 1982, p. 1362; November 4, 1983, p. 1223; January 13, 1984, p. 29; February 8, 1985, p. 147; October 11, 1985, p. 1125; February 12-18, 1988, p. 172; March 3-9, 1989, p. 217; November 3-9, 1989, p. 1205; October 19, 1990, pp. 1131, 1137.

Voice Literary Supplement, November, 1982, p. 10; April, 1985, p. 1.

Washington Post Book World, February 23, 1986, p. 12.