Raymond Williams

• 1. Introduction

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  Raymond Henry Williams was born on the 31st of August 1921 in Pandy, a village just north of Llanfihangel Crucorney, near Abergavenny in Wales. His father worked on the railway. Every railwayman in that village voted Labour, while the small farmers around them mostly voted Liberal. That division, between working people and landed interest, would follow Williams for the rest of his life.

  By the time he died on the 26th of January 1988, some 750,000 copies of his books had been sold in UK editions alone. He had founded a field of academic inquiry, coined terms that scholars still use today, and written novels, plays, pamphlets, and film scripts. He had also served as a tank officer in the D-Day landings, refused a call-up to Korea as a conscientious objector, and written a political manifesto alongside Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall.

  Who was this man, and how did a railway worker's son from a Welsh border village end up as Cambridge's first Professor of Drama and one of the most translated scholars of the twentieth century? The answers begin with a teenager, a Left Book Club, and a Soviet pavilion in Paris.

• 2. A Border Village Education

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  Pandy, the village where Williams grew up, was what he himself called "Anglicised in the 1840s". Welsh identity persisted anyway. Williams liked to tell a joke that captured how the community saw itself: someone mentions that their family came over with the Normans, and the locals reply, "Are you liking it here?"

  At King Henry VIII Grammar School in Abergavenny, Williams came of age during a period saturated with political crisis. He was fourteen when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936. His awareness of what was unfolding came through the local Left Book Club, of which he was a member. The club also brought him Edgar Snow's Red Star Over China, first published in Britain under its imprint.

  His father served as secretary of the local Labour Party, but Williams did not join the party himself, though he did attend meetings around the 1935 general election. He was pacifist enough to distribute leaflets for the Peace Pledge Union and to support the League of Nations. In 1937, he attended a League-organised youth conference in Geneva. On the return journey, his group passed through Paris, and Williams stepped into the Soviet pavilion at the International Exhibition there. He bought a copy of The Communist Manifesto and read Karl Marx for the first time.

  In July 1939, weeks before war broke out, he was helping with the unsuccessful Labour campaign in the Monmouth by-election, backing candidate Frank Hancock, who was himself a pacifist. The coming years would test every conviction Williams held.

• 3. Cambridge and the War

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  Williams won a state scholarship to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, matriculating in 1939. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain there. One early assignment placed him alongside Eric Hobsbawm: the two were tasked with writing a Communist Party pamphlet about the Russo-Finnish War. Williams later reflected, in his book Politics and Letters, that they "were given the job as people who could write quickly, from historical materials supplied for us. You were often in there writing about topics you did not know very much about, as a professional with words."

  In 1941, Germany invaded Russia, the same month Williams sat his exams. Joining the military now conflicted with Communist Party policy, but Williams enlisted in the British Army in late 1940 and stayed only to complete his exams in June 1941. His party membership, as he later described it, simply lapsed without any formal resignation.

  Assigned initially to the Royal Corps of Signals, a standard posting for university undergraduates, he was then reassigned to artillery and anti-tank weapons. He became an officer in the Anti-Tank Regiment of the Guards Armoured Division from 1941 to 1945, and was sent into the Invasion of Normandy after the D-Day landings. He commanded a unit of four tanks in the bocage, fighting against Waffen-SS Panzer forces. Two of his tanks lost contact during the fighting and a withdrawal followed. He never discovered what happened to them. "I don't think the intricate chaos of that Normandy fighting has ever been recorded," he wrote in Politics and Letters.

  By 1945, he had fought through Belgium and the Netherlands into Germany, where his unit was involved in liberating a Nazi concentration camp later used by the Allies to detain SS officers. In Hamburg, he found that the Royal Air Force had not, as he had been told, confined its bombing to military targets and docks. The saturation of the civilian city came as a shock. He had expected to be sent to Burma next, but because the war had interrupted his studies, he was granted Class B release and demobilised. He returned to Cambridge to find the left-wing culture of 1941 largely gone.

• 4. Life Outside the Walls

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  After completing his degree in 1946, with first-class honours in part two of the tripos, Williams did not stay at Cambridge. He became a tutor in adult education at Oxford University's Delegacy for Extra-Mural Studies, a post he held from 1946 to 1961. Moving to Seaford in Sussex, he taught Workers' Educational Association evening classes across East Sussex in English literature, drama, and later culture and environment.

  He wrote in the mornings. That discipline, carved out of the time before teaching, produced novels, essays, and what would eventually become the discipline of cultural studies. He also founded a journal in 1946 called Politics and Letters, editing it with Clifford Collins and Wolf Mankowitz until 1948. His Reading and Criticism appeared in 1950.

  In 1951, he was called up as a reservist to serve in the Korean War. He refused, registering as a conscientious objector. He expected to be jailed for a month. Instead, the Appeal Tribunal panel, which included a professor of classics, accepted his case and discharged him from further military obligations in May 1951.

  During these years he also collaborated with the film-maker Michael Orrom, whom he had known at Cambridge. They co-wrote Preface to Film, published in 1954, and Williams wrote the script for an experimental film called The Legend in 1955. The script was rejected in July 1956, and the collaboration ended shortly after. Williams also wrote several novels during this period, but only one, Border Country, would reach publication.

  His years in adult education left a permanent mark. Asked to contribute to a book called My Cambridge, he opened his essay with a plain statement: "It was not my Cambridge. That was clear from the beginning."

• 5. Culture as a Concept

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  T. S. Eliot's 1948 publication Notes towards the Definition of Culture set something moving in Williams's thinking. He began tracing how the very concept of culture had formed and changed. His first public statement of the argument appeared in an essay called "The Idea of Culture", where he contended that the concept had emerged with the Industrial Revolution. That argument, developed further, became Culture and Society, published in 1958. In it, Williams coined the term "structure of feeling", a phrase for the lived texture of a particular moment in time, something between formal ideology and private emotion.

  The Long Revolution followed in 1961, and both books were taken up by the New Left. Williams was also a regular reviewer for The Manchester Guardian throughout this period.

  His interest in vocabulary grew into a separate and influential project. He had originally planned to include notes on sixty significant words as an appendix to Culture and Society, but it was not possible. An expanded version, covering 110 words with short essays, appeared as Keywords in 1976. The entries ranged across "aesthetic", "bourgeois", "hegemony", "organic", "romantic", "violence", and "work", among others. A revised edition in 1983 added twenty-one new words, including "anarchism", "ecology", "liberation", and "sex". Williams was explicit that his project differed from the Oxford English Dictionary, which he described as "primarily philological and etymological". His aim was "meanings and contexts".

  In 1977, he published Marxism and Literature, a tightly written work aimed primarily at specialists. It set out his approach to what he called cultural materialism and was partly a response to structuralism and to critics who saw his position as a humanist Marxism resting on unexamined assumptions about lived experience. Williams drew heavily on the ideas of Antonio Gramsci, while writing in a voice distinctly his own. A more accessible companion, Culture, appeared in 1981-1982, where he defined culture as "a realized signifying system" and expressed hope that cultural sociology would become "a new major discipline".

• 6. Return to Cambridge

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  On the strength of his books, Williams was invited back to Cambridge in 1961 and elected a fellow of Jesus College. He joined the Labour Party the same year, but resigned in 1966 when the Labour government broke the seafarers' strike and introduced public expenditure cuts. He joined the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and, together with Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall, wrote the May Day Manifesto, published in 1967.

  At Cambridge he rose through the Faculty of English, first as Reader in Drama from 1967 to 1974, then as the university's first Professor of Drama from 1974 to 1983. In 1973, he spent time as a visiting professor of political science at Stanford University, an experience he channelled directly into Television: Technology and Cultural Form, published in 1974.

  That book included a chapter called "The Technology and the Society", written partly against Marshall McLuhan's arguments about technology. Williams argued that determination in social life "is a real social process, but never... a wholly controlling, wholly predicting set of causes. On the contrary, the reality of determination is the setting of limits and the exertion of pressures, within which variable social practices are profoundly affected but never necessarily controlled."

  His 1973 book The Country and the City alternated chapters on literature with chapters on social history. His Modern Tragedy can be read in part as a reply to The Death of Tragedy by the conservative literary critic George Steiner. He was drawn to the work of Pierre Bourdieu in his later years at Cambridge, though he found Bourdieu too pessimistic about the possibilities for social change. Cambridge's first Professor of Drama retired in 1983, but the writing did not stop.

• 7. Final Work and Legacy

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  Williams retired to Saffron Walden after leaving Cambridge in 1983. There he wrote Loyalties, a novel about a fictional group of upper-class radicals drawn to Communism in the 1930s. He was also deep into a more ambitious project: People of the Black Mountains, an experimental historical novel about people who lived, or might have lived, in his own part of Wales, told through flashbacks featuring an ordinary man in modern times searching for his grandfather who had not returned from a hill-walk. The narrative began in the Paleolithic. He had brought it forward to the Middle Ages by the time he died in 1988. His wife, Joy Williams, prepared the full work for publication, and it appeared in two volumes, with a postscript describing what the remaining sections would have covered. Almost all the stories were complete in typescript, mostly revised many times over. Only one chapter, "The Comet", was left incomplete and required small additions.

  In the 1980s, Williams extended his thinking beyond orthodox Marxism. He concluded that, given the variety of societies in the world, there would not be one socialism but many. Drawing partly on critical readings of Sebastiano Timpanaro and Rudolf Bahro, he called for convergence between the labour movement and the ecology movement, then a newer political formation.

  The Raymond Williams Society was founded in 1989, the year after his death, to carry forward intellectual and political work in areas connected with his writing. Since 1998 it has published Key Words: A Journal of Cultural Materialism. The Raymond Williams Centre for Recovery Research opened at Nottingham Trent University in 1995. A collaborative research project called the Keywords Project, initiated in 2006 and supported by Jesus College, Cambridge and the University of Pittsburgh, continues his investigation into cultural vocabulary. In 2007, a collection of his papers was deposited at Swansea University by his daughter Merryn, herself a poet and author.