LONDON TO LEURA: A CRITIC'S JOURNEY.(Giles Auty)(Critical Essay)

PART 1

MY LATE FATHER, Roland Ainsworth Auty, died of a heart attack in 1967 when living in England on the Isle of Wight. If more modern intensive care facilities had been available locally at the time I suspect he might have lived a further ten or even twenty years.

At the time of his death, he had been working for the previous decade as a senior reader and contributor to the Complete Oxford English Dictionary. A supplement which contained a large proportion of his work was published in 1970. He had previously worked part-time, almost since he was an undergraduate, on revisions to other dictionaries.

When my father's last editor, Robert Burchfield, retired he described my father in a radio broadcast as one of the funnier and more brilliant men he had met. My father certainly had many of the characteristics of a true eccentric.

Those of us who suffered from his frequent fits of absentmindedness knew that these arose largely from the singlemindedness of his love for language and its ability to convey precise meanings. By the end of his life, my father had read a great swathe of the world's finest writing from all ages, whenever possible in the language in which it had been written.

While he was admittedly unusual, my father belonged nonetheless to a breed of men with whom he had a number of important things in common--the experiences of the Depression, for instance, when schoolmasters in England were required to take a 30 per cent cut in their already meagre salaries, and of two world wars. If the totality of his life's experience served to teach him anything it was a dislike of humbug. On a professional level, he loathed poorly argued theory and academic ignorance.

Putting all of the foregoing together, the question I raise here is what my father would have made--if he had lived a further ten or twenty years--of the theory of deconstruction and the assault on any agreed canon in the teaching of English literature--or other postmodern initiatives. Might he have thought that he would rather be dead than to have witnessed the attempted destruction of a tradition of which his entire professional life had been an integral part? Or would he have put his tenacious mind to work, discovering and then exposing whatever flaws he found in the new theories?