Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Archives

The search for the meaning of . meaning by KE. Garay John Paul Russo. I.A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns Hoplcins University Press, 1989. Pp. 843. US$39.95. "FUNDAMENTALLY, I'M AN inventor"; such was LA. Richards' typically terse yet insightful summation of himself. Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893-1979) played a seminal role in the invention of modern literary criticism, helped establish the English School at Cambridge University, contributed significantly, through the co-authotship of The Meaning ofMeaning (1923), to the invention of a new international language: Basic English, pioneered new methods of language teaching firs't in China and then at 184 Russell wimer 1990-91 Harvard, and, in old age, turned [Q inventing poetry. Such a long, crowded and multifaceted life makes heavy demands ofa biographer, and Richards made no attempt to lighten the load. It was a primary article of his critical canon that the biographical element served only to deAect attention from a work of art: "and words it is, not poets, make up poems"'; he refused to write his own memoirs or even [Q discuss the lives of the many great writers he had known. Thus John Paul Russo, a former student and friend of Richards, now a professor of English at the University of Miami, has had [Q range wide and dig deeply in the writing of this book; although he secured Richards' cooperation and has had access [Q an impressive body of unpublished material, both manuscripts and correspondence, this is no standard "authorized" biography. LA. Richards had a particular affection for the word "daunting" which he used in an approving way, close to the opposite of its standard meaning, reAecting the excitement and magnitude of a challenge. This 843-page biography would almost certainly have earned the epithet from him; the footnotes alone extend to 130 pages. There are three main thematic divisions: "The Preparation of a Critic"; "The Theory and Method of Criticism" and 'The Later Career: Education and Poetry". The "Preparation" section and the first two chapters of the middle section, which trace Richards' career to the mid-1920S, are of the greatest interest to Russell scholars, for it was at Cambridge, "the garden ofgreat intellects", that Richards first felt his inAuence. Having lost his father at the age of nine and survived a nearly fatal attack of tuberculosis at fourteen, Richards was eighteen when he won a his[Qry scholarship [Q Magdalene College and went up to Cambridge in October 19II, an auspicious year in which G.E. Moore returned after a seven-year absence, in which Wittgenstein arrived, and one year after Russell had begun a five-year Triniry fellowship. By 1913 Richards had changed his course of study "by accident to philosophy" (p. 36), from whence he turned brieAy to medicine, then [Q the teaching of literature and then (but still not finally) to careers in literacy and language instruction. Throughout, howevet, he continued [Q consider himself a philosopher, and during more than two decades of indecision in the United States before his final return [Q England in 1974 he frequently admitted that his "main preoccupation is [Q find the right people to hand it [the promotion of Basic English as a language instruction tool] all over [Q, so that I can ger back to philosophy" (p. 466). In some of the book's most lucidly written passages, Russo deftly places Richards, during those days when "the world seemed hopeful and solid">, within the context of Cambridge Humanism, which was: characterized by directness in speech and writing: rarionalism; a strain of idealism which envisages rhe ulrimate harmony of the good, rhe true and the beautiful: agnosricism: personalism: anti-authoritarianism: dedication to work; and a meliorist faith in human endeavour . McTaggart expressed certain of these rhemes in his metaphysics; Russell and Moore in their ethics: Keynes in his economics; Forster in his novels; Dickinson, Russell and Leonard 1 John Paul Russo, I.A. Richards: His Lift and Work, p. 203. 2 Betteand Russell, "My Mental Development", The Philosophy ofBertralld Russrl~ cd. P.A. Schilpp (Evanscon , Ill.: Northwestern University, 1944), p. 9. Cited in Russo, p. '5. Reviews 185 Woolfin their social criticism and politics; F...