Eric Griffiths
Cambridge academic known as ‘Reckless Eric’ whose lectures appeared in entertainments listings
ERIC GRIFFITHS, who has died aged 65, was an English literature lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge, known to some of his students as “Reckless Eric”; very much the bachelor don, he was demanding, charismatic, passionate, witty and humorous, capable of great kindness – but also famous for having the sharpest tongue at the university.
Griffiths published only one full-length book, but in the 1980s his faculty lectures in practical criticism were so popular that a Cambridge student newspaper featured them in its entertainments listings. Over 30 years as a teacher his Svengali-like influence spread far and wide through former students into publishing, journalism, literary criticism, theatre and television.
One of the dwindling number of academics who lived in college, Griffiths exerted an influence on student life which ranged far beyond supervisions and lecture halls. In his heyday, often clad in Prada or Armani worn with trainers, he threw parties to which students were invited to “Come and be louche”, where alcohol flowed and Wagner or Talking Heads was played at full volume.
He always had something fresh to say, and his lectures might feature a brilliant impression of a denizen of Albert Square speaking an Eastenders script in pentameters, or an analysis of how the condition of a poet’s teeth influenced his poetry. Though he was a leading practitioner of the “close reading” approach to criticism, he was always witty and illuminating: the word “Divina” of Dante’s Divina Comedia, Griffiths would maintain, was publisher’s puff that meant something like “fabulous poem, darling, loved it loved it loved it”.
His supervisions, often conducted over large gin and tonics, were unorthodox, and stories of his bracing sense of humour were legion. On one occasion a student disappointed by an exam result opened his door to find a block of hard cheese. Another was surprised when, after he had handed in a particularly dismal essay, Griffiths turned up at his rooms and started pacing up and down. Asked what he was doing, he replied: “I’m on the warpath.”
Griffiths was once declared the “cleverest man in England” by the Guardian, while Vanessa Feltz, a former student at Trinity, found him “devastatingly attractive”. But as Jonathan Bate recently observed in the Times Literary Supplement, he “attracted groupies and opprobrium in equal measure”.
He could be Swiftian in the savagery of his approach to sloppy thinking. The Reverend Jessica Martin, a former student, now Canon of Ely Cathedral, has recalled how “if you were not up for the project of absolute attention, or too ready to hide behind convention, or fashion, or guesswork, he would demolish every fragile defence you had until you saw something truer.”
Stronger souls recognised Griffiths’s ferocity (always worse after a drink) as a sign that he cared. He expected his students to demonstrate the same passion for reading and seriousness of purpose that he himself showed. A former pupil, Robert Douglasfairhurst, now professor of English literature at Oxford, recalled how Griffiths “scattered ideas like gifts in conversation – I simply tried to catch as many as possible”.
Those admitted to the cult responded with passionate loyalty, but not everyone could take it and Griffiths was good at making enemies. He was making a name as a television don in the 1980s until, on a late-night arts show, he dismissed AS Byatt’s Booker Prize-winning novel, Possession, as “the kind of novel I’d write if I didn’t know I couldn’t write novels”, reducing the author to tears.
His reviews in the Guardian or the TLS could be devastating, but he regarded taking authors to task for poor quality work as a “duty”. “It is a real pity that argued dissent is regularly caricatured as ‘hatchet job’, ‘savage attack’ and other such bulking agents,” he told the Observer in 2003. “What I feel about the authors of pretentious and misleading books is well expressed by the fact that Dante put the fraudulent below adulterers, gluttons, bad-tempered gits, suicides, sodomites, hypocrites, heretics and other riff-raff in his sketch of hell.”
In 1998 he became involved in a media furore after a state-school applicant to Trinity complained that she had felt “belittled and humiliated” by Griffiths during a one-to-one interview in which he asked her if she had ever heard of Adolf Hitler and observed, when discussing a line from TS Eliot which included some Ancient Greek, that “being from Essex, you don’t know what those funny squiggles are”, before saying unkind things about her home town, Harlow, mimicking her accent and accusing her of talking “gibberish”.
Griffiths disputed the girl’s account, but found himself described as a “sneering English don” and portrayed as a snob and a misogynist. He apologised, but never again interviewed candidates.
The historian and feminist Lisa Jardine, however, detected something other than plain misogyny: “He’s … very perceptive about women … which is why he’s so good at getting up women’s noses,” she observed, adding, pertinently, that he was “classically Right-wing in his intolerance of stupidity.” His tongue-lashings to either sex were generally designed to provoke a spirited response.
Yet Griffiths was capable of great kindness to weaker students and people struggling with personal problems. When one girl returned to Trinity having taken a year off following a suicide attempt, Griffiths not only took care of her, but lent her money for medical expenses. The charge of social (as opposed to intellectual) snobbery was wide of the mark, and Griffiths’s own career was a testimony to the power of education to transform the lives of bright students born on the “wrong side of the tracks”.
Eric Griffiths was born in Liverpool on July 11 1953 into a “Welsh-speaking, chapel-going family”. His father worked in the Liverpool docks and his mother as a shop assistant. “Eric,” he would bewail, “of all the names they could have chosen, why did they have to call me Eric?”
He won a scholarship to the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys (Paul Mccartney’s alma mater) and in 1971 arrived at Pembroke College, Cambridge, to read English.
He excelled as both an undergraduate and graduate student, and after a short stint at Princeton his doctorate was supervised by Christopher Ricks. His thesis, “Writing and Speaking: The work of Eliot, Yeats and Pound”, was an account of the poet’s “printed voice” that he would develop and publish in The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (1989).
A witty, pugnacious book, this examined the way Tennyson, Hopkins and others responded creatively to the ambiguities involved in writing down their own voices and the melodies of speech. In insisting that the poetic page conveyed the author’s authentic “elocutionary” voice, he took up arms against the fashionable deconstructionism that for some years threatened to break the Cambridge English faculty apart. Griffiths submitted his thesis in 1980 and was immediately given a teaching fellowship at Trinity, where he stayed for the rest of his career.
The Catholicism to which he converted in the mid-1980s, and a love of TS Eliot, took him to Dante and in 2005 he edited an anthology from the whole history of English translation of Dante, from Chaucer to Heaney, which was published in Christopher Ricks’s Poets in Translation series for Penguin.
Griffiths was said to have modelled his Cambridge personality on the ebullient Ricks. His Liverpudlian vowels acquired a Cambridge precision, but according to Jonathan Bate he always felt like an outsider. Some felt that this, combined with his failure to produce another major work of literary criticism, and growing doubts over his ability to mould the minds of the young, exacerbated his tendency to use his erudition to destructive effect.
In a despondent 2002 article in the Guardian Griffiths wrote that he had recently marked 64 examination scripts in which third-year students offered their comments on the opening of Dickens’s Bleak House (“London. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather …”). The examinees, he wrote, had been “over-excited by the ‘imagery’, as they had been taught in school that ‘imagery’ is what counts in literature. Very few observed the prime syntactical fact about the novel’s first page: it has no finite verbs in what traditional grammar used to call the ‘main clause’, and so the reader cannot tell whether what is being described is a past or a present state of affairs.”
In 2011 Griffiths, then 57, suffered a stroke which largely robbed him of the power of speech. Prone to despair (he was said to have taken up smoking in the hope of dying sooner), he told a friend that he was glad that the last lecture he had been able to give was on “the important semantic differences between ‘alas’ and ‘alack’”.
Earlier this year a selection of 10 of his lectures, edited by Freya Johnston, was published as If Not Critical.
Eric Griffiths, born July 11 1953, died September 26 2018