A Critical Mind: On Sam Goldberg

‘I’ve changed my attitude in fighting the name “Leavisite”, ’ Sam Goldberg told Richard Freadman in the 1980s. ‘As I’ve said it’s like the word “Jew”. Name-calling is the stupid person’s substitute for reason and argument; and I now take the line that if you want to call me a “Leavisite” call me a “Leavisite”. Why should I be ashamed of learning from such a man?—or reject the other names you might call me—Arnoldian, say, or Joycean? I take the same view about “elitism”. In my belief that some people are finer in spirit, deeper and more intelligent, more creative and courageous in action, than others, I am an elitist: in my belief in democratic institutions, I am not. But why repudiate or run from the name, as though it as unspeakably vile to be any sort of elitist?’¹

At a time when deconstruction and postmodernism were considered cutting edge in English departments across Australia, such an open expression of admiration for the Cambridge critic F.R. Leavis was deeply unfashionable. Australia was never really comfortable with the evaluative, elitist critical approach delineated by Leavis. But Professor Samuel Louis Goldberg was always provocative, and not easily reduced to a disciple. Combative, challenging, ‘at times imperious’,² in the 1960s Goldberg was considered ‘the most brilliant academic teacher of English in the country’.³ His distinctive, humanist voice survives in The Classical Temper, An Essay on King Lear, the posthumous Agents and Lives, and the essays he wrote in the Melbourne Critical Review, the journal he founded and edited from 1958 until his death in 1991.

In the 1970s he left Melbourne for a research position at the ANU, yet teaching rather than writing was always his most powerful medium. Goldberg thrived on dialogue, argument and collaboration, and as a young lecturer at Melbourne University in the 1950s he was at his most dynamic: the full force of his intellectual energy was felt by a singular generation of students, many of whom, such as Ian Donaldson, Wilbur Sanders, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Margaret Walters, Germaine Greer, Jenny Gribble and Phillip Martin, would in turn become academic teachers of English and go on to distinguished national and international careers.

Although a sustained examination of the interplay between the life and work must wait for the biography that Goldberg’s intellectual contribution so richly deserves, it is necessary to touch on some of the tensions that continue to unsettle his reputation. For, literature was ‘a distinctive and irreplaceable form of moral thinking’.⁴ He believed it to be more suited than philosophy to the exploration of moral codes and principles and to the expression of the unique, individual experience of being human that his conception of the moral encompassed. If Goldberg never presumed to see his own life as exemplifying the finer spirit of what he termed ‘conduct morality’, by today’s uncompromising standards of pedagogical ethics he is in many ways a troubling figure.

Former student and later colleague Chris Wallace-Crabbe thought Goldberg was driven by a ‘kind of intellectual Eros’. While Goldberg’s love for the intellectual was a mark of his vocation as a teacher, he gave far more attention to students he thought worth encouraging than to others. The overlooked and intimidated kept quiet, moved to other courses, or dropped out. Some students, in the process of developing their own critical voices, found his authority and influence too insistent. Increasingly, students felt alienated by the Melbourne department’s narrow focus on the moral and frustrated by the absence of political and historical perspectives. For James Simpson, Professor of English at Harvard and a former student of the Melbourne department in the early 1970s, ‘every class became a ghastly test of the students’ moral probity’.⁵

‘Intellectual Eros’ might also be an interesting way of engaging with Goldberg’s infatuations with female students over the course of his career. Smaller classes made for a more intimate relationship between teacher and student, and further charged by the intensity of the literature they were reading there was bound to be some blurring in the boundaries between the professional and the personal. For Goldberg, as for other intellectuals and artists, Eros may well have been an aspect of the creative drive. Goldberg was a complex man. If in the end he is by no means a heroic figure, as he wrote of Antony in ‘The Tragedy of the Imagination: A Reading of Antony and Cleopatra’: ‘To see in him only a man weakened by self-indulgence and divided attentions is to miss the greater part of the truth. His stature is larger than that and his fate correspondingly more complex.’⁶

Goldberg was born in 1926 to Jewish immigrant parents and grew up in then working class Carlton and Brunswick, suburbs that before the Second World War had a strong Jewish presence. Later Goldberg told Freadman that ‘Jews have been traditionally far more readily embedded in Australian culture than they have been in America’ and that he’d ‘never found it necessary or even helpful to think of myself as a specifically Jewish intellectual in this country’,⁷ and yet what he felt about growing up Jewish is unknown. Anti-Semitism, albeit in a far less violent and more casual form than in Europe, was also embedded in 1930s Australia, and it seems unlikely that the boy would not have experienced it. His intelligence certainly marked him as different from his peers. Educated at Faraday Street Public School, Coburg High and University High, Goldberg’s final school year examination results were so brilliant that, according to Ian Maxwell, ‘the Scholarship Selection Committee set him up as a standard—the sort of man one might expect to find in the whole Faculty of Arts only one in six or eight years’.

His undergraduate results were equally impressive. As Maxwell recalled, Goldberg was ‘no mere pot hunter, or champion examinee, but followed his intellectual interests where they led him—often well beyond the syllabus’.⁸ Goldberg was such a serious student that in his final year Maxwell had to ‘restrain’ himself from telling the young man to leave some of Dr Johnston to ‘read after his final year examinations’.⁹ He was also reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, at that point banned under Australia’s strict censorship laws and very difficult to obtain. In 1947, two years after the war, its humanism resonated deeply. While Goldberg would come to see the novel’s exiled protagonist Leopold Bloom as an everyman, in an early essay, ‘The Conception of History in James Joyce’s Ulysses’, published in the student-run journal Present Opinion in 1947, Goldberg yokes Leopold Bloom’s exile more forcefully to his Jewish heritage. The essay’s struggle to reconcile ‘the nightmare of history’ with an ‘affirmation of life’ also suggests that Goldberg was already reading Leavis’s journal Scrutiny in the university library.

Joyce and Leavis were formative influences operating on the young Goldberg but reconciling them would be complex. For Leavis, great literature was marked by a moral seriousness that affirmed human life. He excluded Joyce from his literary canon, writing of Ulysses that ‘the extraordinary technical devices … and exhaustive rendering of consciousness for which Ulysses is remarkable … is rather I think a dead end, or at least a pointer to disintegration’.¹⁰ Drawing on the more sympathetic understanding Goldberg found in the American critics Harry Levin and Richard Blackmur, Ulysses would be a major focus in the decade that followed. His study of the novel, The Classical Temper, was published in 1961.

In 1947 Goldberg graduated from his combined honours degree in English and History with first class honours and was invited by both departments to tutor the following year. Mentored by the ‘eccentric, wilful and charismatic’¹¹ Ian Maxwell, he chose English. Maxwell would be a steadying influence on Goldberg, responsible not only for his first permanent lectureship in 1953 but later in the 1960s, after Goldberg had resigned from the Chair at Sydney, smoothing the way for Goldberg to return to a Chair at Melbourne.

Maxwell was ‘conservative but not bourgeois’.¹² As a young law student at Melbourne he was foundation president of the student Liberal Club before deciding to study for a BLitt at Oxford and pursue an academic career in English. Despite his political conservatism, Maxwell was a pluralist who in the early 1950s would be an outspoken opponent of the Menzies government’s attempts to ban the Communist Party. He was equally tolerant of the intellectual divisions and positions that would emerge in his own department. The Friday evening sherry parties where Maxwell delighted in singing Border ballads and Australian folk songs not only encouraged a more relaxed atmosphere in the department, but also closer social relationships between final-year students and their teachers; as did the camping trips he took students on at Howqua near Mansfield, where on at least one occasion Maxwell’s claim to know all of Paradise Lost by heart was put to the test.

He liked Goldberg, whose sharp sense of humour was perhaps surprising in such a serious young man. And yet, fond as he was of Goldberg, he was alert to the young man’s self-absorption and the difficulties he had relating to people not on the same intellectual plane; qualities Maxwell thought incompatible with being a good teacher. ‘So young and so brilliant,’ Maxwell wrote of Goldberg as a tutor in the late 1940s, but ‘a bit wrapped up in his affairs and apt not to notice that older people did not have a chair when he had’.¹³ At twenty-two, Goldberg was ‘a superficially self-confident but really diffident young man’. Although Maxwell was very impressed by the lectures Goldberg delivered on James Joyce, the young tutor was ‘not genuinely popular’, and did not ‘easily bridge the gap with most of his students’.¹⁴

Goldberg could be distant, but his personality was not the only reason he had problems engaging with students. In the late 1940s, his classes were very large and filled with a particularly challenging group of students. Between 1946 and 1948 returned servicemen and women taking up government scholarships at the university more than doubled the population to 9000 students. These students were older and more experienced than many of their tutors. Some held strong ideas about what sort of society should emerge in the aftermath of the war and demanded a great deal of their education. As Maxwell noted, Goldberg ‘was intelligent enough to realize his shortcomings and to take advice from more experienced people and soon learned to show his real friendliness in consideration for others’.¹⁵ Goldberg’s insecurities, however, would not be so easily resolved. Perhaps he was partly talking about himself when he wrote of King Lear needing ‘others to respect his external “authority”, the “marks” of his familiar self’. It wasn’t ‘self-ignorance’ Goldberg saw in Lear ‘but rather of self-mistrust, as if he cannot believe, fully, securely and patiently believe, in his mere self as worth the love and respect it needs’.¹⁶

In 1950 the proper destination for Australians in pursuit of an academic career in English literature was Oxford or Cambridge. Although Melbourne had introduced the degree of PhD in 1945, a combination of prejudice and a focus on scholarship in a discipline defined as English maintained a steady exodus of postgraduate students. As late as 1958 Maxwell boasted that the department had never had ‘a PhD because I have succeeded in deflecting them’. In Maxwell’s opinion ‘the main point of a PhD is the work done in the great libraries while the thesis itself seems to me likely to kill criticism, and do some damage to scholarship. So often it means combing over a “field”, pigeon- holing the results, and stunning the examiners into acquiescence—instead of flowing out an interesting thought and writing to entertain and instruct the educated public.’¹⁷

Maxwell was not alone in thinking this aggressive breed of critic was antipathetic to the civilised good manners of the scholar. In 1950 his friend and colleague in the department A.D. Hope satirised both the English critic and the American researcher in the satiric poem ‘Dunciad Minimus’. In Hope’s tribute to Alexander Pope, the Cambridge critics are ‘Arnold’s nightmare children’, while the American PhDs are more grotesquely imagined as insect creatures spawned in second-rate universities: ‘There they pupate, and doctors all they lurch / Uttering their parrot cry Research! Research!’

Goldberg took Maxwell’s advice and left in 1950 to study for a BLitt at Oxford. Originally he had wanted to write his thesis on Joyce but his topic was declined on the grounds that someone else had very recently written on the author. Instead, Goldberg wrote on the Elizabethan historian Sir John Hayward. His supervisor was the retired Merton professor of English David Nichol Smith. It was at Oxford, Goldberg would later tell Richard Freadman, that ‘I became really interested in Leavis’s writing’ and began to see ‘appraisal, judgment, evaluation’ as the ‘key elements of criticism’. In the 1950s he read Leavis critically, disagreeing with him on Joyce and thinking much of the content of his social criticism as well as his idealisation of pre-industrial England ‘nonsense’.¹⁸ What excited Goldberg were ‘the general principles and structure of his thinking’ and their potential for developing a more rigorous and discriminating approach to literary studies in Australia.

Maxwell would later admit that Goldberg’s 1953 appointment in the Melbourne department was ‘premature’.¹⁹ Goldberg had not yet submitted his thesis when he applied, and Maxwell thought him too young. He believed strongly that Goldberg needed the experience of working in an English university, both for ‘scholarly opportunities’ and more pressingly for ‘personal development’.²⁰ Candidly, Maxwell wrote, ‘I don’t think Sam is the man for us.’ While he wanted someone ‘warmer’ and ‘a bit more man to man and hail fellow well met’, he also feared that Goldberg ‘might be a little bit above the pass man’s head’. On the other hand, Maxwell recognised that Goldberg had ‘very great lecturing ability’ and noted ‘that Nichol Smith seems quite sure of his academic quality’.²¹ Already Maxwell felt a great sense of responsibility for Goldberg. He would later say he appointed him because ‘I wanted to keep him with us’,²² but as Maxwell noted in private correspondence, academic jobs in the early 1950s were extremely hard to get and he realised Goldberg’s chances of obtaining a position elsewhere were slim.

The English department Goldberg returned to at the start of 1953 was not quite the genteel enclave of scholars he had left behind. Although Vera Jennings, Gaye Tennant, Bill Scott and Associate Professor Keith McCartney with his ‘amazing stammer’ and his very ‘entertaining’²³ lectures on drama and language remained, Leonie Gibson (later Kramer) had departed for Oxford and Alec Hope to the University College in Canberra. Goldberg would form close friendships with the two newer and younger members of staff, senior tutor Maggie O’Keefe and lecturer Thomas (Jock) Tomlinson. After their marriage the Tomlinsons would be loyal supporters of Goldberg, their more straightforward admiration for Leavis contributing to the Cambridge feel of the department that students would soon start to observe. It was, however, the discussions Goldberg was having with the young senior tutor Vincent Buckley that would have the more profound influence in defining and refining his own critical approach.

Many of their conversations were on Joyce. Buckley would write his thesis on Joyce at Cambridge and later consider Goldberg’s The Classical Temper the best study of Ulysses he had ever read. The young Buckley was also interested in Leavis, while Goldberg—lecturing in Renaissance literature and thinking deeply about Shakespeare—was beginning to see Leavis’s ‘moralistic-humanistic’ approach as ‘inadequate in addressing’ tragedy. ‘Vin Buckley and I (partly under his impact) were more interested than Leavis was in the ways literature opened up large, as you might say metaphysical, questions,’ Goldberg told Richard Freedman. ‘We wanted to take tragedy more seriously, or at least to explore it more than he had.’²⁴

In the 1950s Buckley was another dynamic force in the department. As Ian Donaldson, a student in the department between 1954 and 1958, remembered, Buckley ‘would suddenly be engaged by the complexity of something which you had thought was quite simple. And he would say “this is diffeecult”, he had a particular way of pronouncing that word and suddenly you realised it was much more diffeecult then you had ever realised.’ Donaldson found Goldberg equally challenging: ‘a lot of things he would worry about, a lot of good questions that would be asked, but not fully answered’, which led to ‘those loose ends and … the intellectual excitement’.²⁵

‘Dialogue was essential’ to Goldberg, Jenny Gribble reflected. ‘I now think his famous combativeness was a way of thinking aloud, and an invitation to show him where he was wrong.’²⁶ In Joanne Lee Dow’s opinion ‘nobody else in the English department was subtle in the same way he was … What you saw in lectures was a mind making propositions, asking questions, raising counter points of view, the inner dialectic of the lectures’, while Chris Wallace-Crabbe saw in him ‘a kind of charisma … the charisma of intellectual edge that drew people in’.

Goldberg demanded ‘solid preparation’²⁷ and brought an uncompromising rigour to discussions. Fourth-year poetry seminars often started in silence. Everyone was smoking, ‘the air was thick … it gave you a chance to get your thoughts together as you became very busy with a match’. Goldberg was ‘tough’, Ian Donaldson recalled.

He was tough in a way that no other tutor I had was tough in that he treated you as an adult, there would be no concessions and he wouldn’t help you at all at getting a conversation started … he would say,it is up to you, you can start this any way you like … It was very intimidating because when you did get going very often he’d slam you down for saying something facile. But facile seemed better then long silences.

Tensions soon emerged between the older and younger members of staff. Ian Maxwell had little time for the Cambridge school of evaluative close readings unanchored to historical scholarship that were being promoted by the ‘young bloods’ in his department. The lean English tradition defined by Leavis, which discounted Milton and traced the novel’s line of significance through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and D.H. Lawrence, was anathema to a professor who ‘preferred to treat established authors with as much sympathy as I can muster’.²⁸ Maxwell’s own taste ranged across Old Norse sagas, Milton and Izaac Walton to the modernist poetry of T.S. Eliot and a ‘very Scottish menu’ of Burns, Scott and the Border ballads. The historical novel The White Company by Arthur Conan Doyle was one personal favourite that he would often refer to in lectures. ‘We read some funny stuff, such as George Borrow’s Lavengro,’ Ian Donaldson reflected. ‘It was usually because Ian found something to like in them … He would give you an intriguing lecture, and then you would struggle with the book and wonder what you were going to say about it.’

Donaldson ‘was dimly aware that there were parties in the department and that the Ian Maxwell approach was being viewed rather sceptically by the Cambridge people and that they didn’t all agree amongst themselves’. As Maxwell observed, Goldberg ‘is a man both sensitive and deeply concerned with academic standards. This means he has sometimes trodden on the toes of older colleagues and even sometimes on mine, fond as I am of him’. Goldberg had in fact been extremely angry with Maxwell when he learned that changes had been made to the first-year English course without consulting him. These ‘minor clashes here and there’, Maxwell conceded, ‘were largely due to his abilities being somewhat cramped in a department which remains old-fashioned at the top’.²⁹

‘If there were confrontations between the generations they were more like standoffs than the wars the theory warriors brought on,’ David Moody recently reflected on the department at the time of his appointment as lecturer in 1958.

The establishment was rather vague about what it collectively and genteelly stood for; and the younger and newer just had some fairly strong and clear ideas about what should be on the syllabus and how they would teach it. There was co-existence of distinct spheres of influence, rather than aggression and belligerence. Differences were felt, of course, and occasionally sharply, even bitterly. But civilized manners, did, on the whole, prevail.³⁰

Leavis was an important marker of the generational divide. It was ‘almost impossible to write an essay, or get through a tutorial without trying to engage with Leavis,’ Ian Donaldson recalls. ‘Leavis would be worked into every semi- nar and after a while by us, because we felt we had to stay ahead of the game … One had the complete works of Leavis on the shelves, even as a student they were the holy texts … It did seem to turn the authors into rather different creatures. Lawrence became a very large moral figure … I couldn’t always get the Leavis lens. He seemed to me to be much more a vitalist writer.’

Joanne Lee Dow, who graduated in 1959, could see ‘a kind of orthodoxy’ developing in the department, and one student in her year whom she thought ‘not well served’ was David Johansen. His ‘natural impulses were towards the literature which was out of fashion … He had tried to argue for Tennyson in tutorials and realised there was no way he could do it.’ Looking back, Lee Dow thinks it ‘ridiculous … that if you were writing a defence of Milton you would have to write as well as if you were writing an attack on Shakespeare’. Some of Goldberg’s most provocative positions, such as dismissal of Spenser and Milton, came directly from Leavis. One seminar in which Ian Donaldson ‘felt very uncomfortable’ was on Spenser:

Goldberg obviously didn’t care for Spenser and couldn’t read more than a few verses. So the whole class for the whole hour concentrated on the first stanza of The Faerie Queene: ‘A Gentle Knight is pricking on the plaine’, and Sam’s line about this was that it was an absurd poem. Every adjective was a stock adjective, and he went through every adjective and every noun. I was too young and scared to say what I felt, which was: hang on, this is a much longer poem, it’s not just one stanza … you have to take the reader through it. Shouldn’t we be talking about something other than the adjectives? Aren’t there other narrative qualities? What about the allegory, or the politics? There are so many other things to this very rich poem, which Sam tried to destroy.

For Chris Wallace-Crabbe, however, Milton ‘was his weak point. I thought it was because Leavis’s early essay on Paradise Lost was hostile and he just fell in with it a bit lazily. Because Paradise Lost is so intellectually complex and debating with everything, I thought that it was a phony position. Whereas I thought that any number of other positions may have been combative but they weren’t as phony as that.’

Goldberg ‘tended to coopt rather than to fight’, Joanne Lee Dow observed. ‘He credited you with being righter than you realised and somehow you came of his party rather [than] he of your party.’ Being treated as an adult and intellectual equal by Goldberg was also, as Ian Donaldson recalls, ‘enormously flattering to a nineteen-year-old’. Donaldson would graduate with first class honours in 1958, a year that included ‘the formidably clever’³¹ Wilbur Sanders, who would ‘make history’³² when Goldberg awarded him twenty out of twenty for an essay; and ‘the fragile … very bright’³³ Andrew Deacon. All three would become tutors in the Melbourne department, and Sanders and Deacon would join Goldberg in Sydney as tutors when he was appointed Professor of English in 1963. Goldberg’s tenure in Sydney would, however, be brief: his decision to import the Tomlinsons, Andrew Deacon, Wilbur Sanders and another young Melbourne tutor, Peter Nicholls, would be seen by some as a Leavisite insurrection. By then Donaldson, feeling ‘the need for critical distance from Sam’, had already left for Oxford.

In the late 1950s, Maxwell noted that Goldberg had ‘kept up his eager, natural ranging interest in good books’.³⁴ He read obsessively. Nabokov and Saul Bellow were two of his favourite writers—each creators of sexually troubled protagonists. Goldberg the reader, as opposed to the critic, was also less discriminatingly drawn to detective fiction. In 1957, with a view to encouraging wider reading and debate, he was instrumental in re-establishing the University Literature Club. The monthly meetings in the Student Union, held in the evenings so part-time students could attend, were an opportunity for staff and students to deliver papers and, unlike the texts they were teaching and reading, the focus here was mostly on contemporary literature and criticism. For students it was also a chance to test arguments that would feed back into their academic work.

A paper Ian Donaldson delivered at a Literature Club meeting on a recent argument between the Oxford literary critic F.W. Bateson and Leavis would prove to be an intellectual turning point. English at Melbourne was ‘often curiously de-contextualized, absorbed in the New Critical fashion with the literary work as a timeless object of contemplation’,³⁵ and Bateson’s position that Leavis gave insufficient attention to the historical context of literature was persuasive. In Oxford, Donaldson would be closely associated with Bateson and his journal Essays in Criticism, working, along with Christopher Ricks, as a co-editor. Looking back, Donaldson continues to feel that Bateson’s critique of Leavis’s methods was in large measure justified, and that it might well have been directed with equal force against some of Goldberg’s own writing and teaching at this time.

In 1957 second-year honours student Jenny Dallimore (later Gribble) was secretary of the Literature Club and worked with Goldberg planning its meetings and conferences, which were held over weekends at Healesville and Warburton. The first conference in 1957 was on ‘The Angry Young Men’ and featured, Gribble thinks, the first Australian performance of Look Back in Anger, a year after its London première. Kafka, Arthur Koestler and Graham Greene were the subjects of the second conference, ‘Axe Grinding Muse’, while a later conference would include the first Australian play reading of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape. Although Goldberg and Maxwell enjoyed ‘crossing swords’, for younger students the meetings were ‘intimidating’.³⁶ As Chris Wallace-Crabbe recalls, ‘one of Sam’s great tricks was to seem to fall asleep during the papers and then ask the first question when question time came’.

Goldberg’s interest in developing a more professional approach to literary criticism in Australia led naturally to his thinking about the need for a journal whose focus, unlike that of Meanjin or Southerly, would be exclusively on criticism. Great literature, he believed, would flow from more exacting criticism. The Melbourne Critical Review would be forged the year before Melbourne University established a course in Australian literature; the journal informed and shaped by the debates between Goldberg and Buckley over whether there was an ‘Australian Tradition’ and whether it was worth considering. ‘Even at its fin- est,’ Goldberg wrote, ‘our literature has very, very seldom achieved the intense penetration of its subject that demands expression in some vitally original form.’ Australia, he thought, was

so anxious to create art of our very own, so obsessed with counting every hair on our own cultural chest, that we have been too ready to forget that fundamental dependence. What is more, we have been too ready to forget the hard, uncompromising integrity of spirit, on which the highest artistic and intellectual achievement depends.³⁷

The Melbourne Critical Review would also foster a spirit of collaboration between staff and students and, for undergraduates and very recent graduates such as Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jenny Gribble, Margaret Walters, Joanne Lee Dow, Wilbur Sanders and Ian Donaldson, a rare opportunity to hone their work for publication. Students were also actively involved in the production and editing of the Melbourne Critical Review. Between 1958 and 1960 Jenny Dallimore was credited as co-editor, although other students such as Joanne Lee Dow would also assist with editing.

The year 1959 was a difficult one for Goldberg. His divorce to his first wife Muriel (Hill) was in the process of being finalised, and in addition to a ‘hellish teaching load’³⁸ he was editing the Melbourne Critical Review and finishing the writing of The Classical Temper. Ambitious to have his own department to run, he was nonetheless ‘dithering’ about applying for the Chair of English at the University of New South Wales. As he told Maxwell: ‘At the moment, on the whole, weighing one thing with another. Looking at it all round, ceteris, paribus, mutabis, mutandis, interalia, without prejudice, with much said on both sides, and wishing someone would damn well make up my mind for me—I think I shall apply since I can always withdraw later.’³⁹

To Maxwell, Goldberg admitted that he was having trouble ‘keeping up’ with the fourth-year class and seminar, calling them ‘the best year we’ve ever had’.⁴⁰ The year was impressive. Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Jenny Gribble, Joanne Lee Dow, Philip Martin and Margaret Walters would all obtain tutorships in the English department. David Johansen would continue on in history rather than English, working as a tutor in the Melbourne history department and later lecturing at ANU and La Trobe, while Germaine Greer would move away to tutor in English at the University of Sydney before her departure for Cambridge.

Greer was a lively presence. Goldberg thought her ‘eccentricity’ both a strength and a weakness, and while he appreciated her ‘animated discussion’ and ‘remarkable perception’, he thought she relied ‘too much on her sharp chatty manner’ and ‘did not take the time to gather her thoughts into coherent shape’.⁴¹ His respect for her would deepen after she had worked for him in Sydney as a tutor; his influence on her perhaps also there in Greer’s own provocative, challenging positions. The Melbourne students, however, worked prodigiously hard. Poetry seminars were held every Thursday morning, and every Thursday evening the class would collect again across the road at Greer’s loft on the corner of Barry and Grattan streets where they would replay the tutorials without the staff and where, as Wallace-Crabbe recalled, ‘someone usually gave a reasonably serious introduction to our discussion there too’.

As a supervisor Goldberg was far less combative than he was in the seminars. While he recommended that Gribble ‘look at Women in Love in the context of Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus’, she felt ‘under no pressure to toe the line … he recognised that I didn’t know what I thought till I had said it, and he was prepared to let that form’. Nonetheless ‘Sam’s stringency and attention to detail could be inhibiting to the ways in which one was different to him. I could see I needed to build up strengths he’d enabled me to find in myself and listen to other voices.’⁴² Although Goldberg thought Gribble a ‘shade too self-critical’, he was impressed by her ‘originality, intelligence and scholarly integrity’⁴³ and included her long essay in issue 2 of the 1959 Melbourne Critical Review under the title ‘The Ambiguous Life of Doctor Faustus’, an issue that included work by fellow student Margaret Walters.

Overshadowed by the so-called theory wars, Goldberg’s legacy is not always easy to see. And yet, as Ian Donaldson’s intellectual trajectory illustrates, embracing the challenge Goldberg laid down ‘to show him where he was wrong’⁴⁴ is one of the most fascinating and significant aspects of his influence. In the culture of Melbourne University’s English department of the 1950s, the young Goldberg emerges as its galvanising force; the Melbourne Critical Review and the Literature Club vital expressions of the dialogue, collaboration and argument he saw as so essential to intellectual life. The Review, Lee Dow recalls, was put together in a room in the Arts Faculty ‘on two long big tables’ where ‘sheets were collected around the room and stapled’. The Club ‘was feeding into it … It was extraordinarily alive, and that meant that there was a huge interchange, and there wasn’t that kind of distance that there can be between staff and students: it was very much intersecting worlds.’

Editor’s note: This article was originally published in the March Meanjin 2010 (69.10). A draft version which differed from the print version was mistakenly published on this website in June 2010. The version posted here is the correct final version of the article.

© Jane Grant