A Critical Mind: On Sam Goldberg

Jane Grant June 15

Sam Goldberg was one of Australia’s foremost literary minds. Many of his students, including Ian Donaldson, Wilbur Sanders, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Margaret Walters, Germaine Greer, Jenny Gribble and Phillip Martin, would later go on to shape much of Australian writing and culture today. In the March edition of Meanjin, Jane Grant takes a look at this charismatic and sometimes troubling figure, and his lasting legacy. A brief extract is below, and you can read the full essay on our editions page.

‘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. But Professor Samuel Louis Goldberg was always provocative, Australia never really comfortable with the evaluative, elitist critical approach delineated by Leavis, and Goldberg 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 surviving in The Classical Temper, An Essay on King Lear, the posthumous Agents and Lives, and the essays he wrote in the 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 and 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 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.

Notes

1. Richard Freadman (ed.), Literature, Criticism and the Universities: Interviews with Leonie Kramer, S.L. Goldberg and Howard Felperin, Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, p. 19.

2. Vincent Buckley, ‘The Goldberg Variations’, Bulletin, 30 October 1965.

3. Ian Maxwell, to Vice-Chancellor, University of Jamaica, 7 May 1962, English Department Records, University of Melbourne.

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