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From Media Relations, Communications Group
Copy from The Independent, 14/02/04
February 14, 2004, Saturday
SECTION: OBITUARIES; Pg. 48
LENGTH: 1121 words
HEADLINE: OBITUARY: GRAHAM MARTIN;
PASSIONATE SCHOLAR OF LITERATURE AND A FOUNDING ACADEMIC OF THE
OPEN
BYLINE: DENNIS WALDER Martin: eloquent argument
BODY:
ONE OF the founding academics of the Open University, Graham Martin was
invited by Arnold Kettle in 1970 to join the team who went on to write the
university's first, ground-breaking, interdisciplinary Arts Foundation Course.
This became the platform on which a series of carefully structured, high- quality
arts courses were subsequently built, spanning the period from the Renaissance
to the present, and including interdisciplinary courses on the Enlightenment and
Romanticism, as well as specifically literary courses such as "Twentieth Century
Poetry" and "Literature in the Modern World" - the textbooks, videos and
audiocassettes of which were soon to be found in university libraries everywhere,
and which went on to reach a mass audience.
In 1978 Martin was appointed Professor of Literature and in 1981 took over as
Head of Department. It was his profound conviction that university teachers
tended to address their peers rather than their students in what they wrote. His
own practice, as a writer, editor and the leader of a team of academics at the
Open University, was to create a way of writing "teacherly" material that gently
invited readers to join in the exploration of texts, without imposing any singleminded or narrow views.
Tens of thousands of adult students will remember with gratitude the clarity and
authority with which he brought them to think about and enjoy literature and
culture in this tentative, yet searching, spirit. Generous, accessible, innovative,
yet intellectually demanding, Martin seemed to know what you were trying to say
better than you yourself did, and how to help you to say it. A passionate advocate
of "openness" in literary study, he made both texts and their contexts available
without compromising the importance of either.
Coming from a long-established Glasgow business family, Graham Martin
attended Glenalmond College in Perthshire, a Scottish Episcopal establishment
founded (as Trinity College) by W.E. Gladstone for the sons of ministers. There he
shone academically, played rugby for the First XV, and sang in the choir (he later
confessed to knowing the Psalms by heart). He was expected to join the family
tannery firm, and took a BSc in Chemistry at St Andrews University.
An exchange visit to Union College, Schenectady, in upstate New York, kindled an
interest in English literature. After graduating, he taught science in a London
school, where the headmaster, realising his young teacher's true avocation,
encouraged him to apply for a scholarship to Oxford, which he won. He read
English at Merton College but, as was the practice then, was "farmed out" to a
tutor at Corpus Christi, the remarkable F.W. ("Freddy") Bateson, under whose
spell he developed a lifelong passion for literary study.
With his close friend Al Alvarez, Martin founded the Critical Society, aimed at
providing undergraduates with approaches to English not then available in
Oxford. Invited speakers included Wallace Robson, Rene Wellek and F.R. Leavis.
The influence of the last upon Martin proved a lasting challenge.
Meanwhile, he fell in love with and married his young widowed landlady Molly
Yardley, taking on the responsibility of being father to her two sons with
characteristic energy and commitment. It was a relationship that was to last a
lifetime; and many students, colleagues and friends will remember the warm
welcome they received from the Martins, at home or at OU summer schools, as
Graham launched into yet another lengthy, eloquent argument (like many Scots,
he believed a day without a good argument was like an egg without salt), only to
be checked by a snort of affectionate derision from his wife.
After obtaining a First at Oxford, Graham Martin set out upon an academic career,
obtaining a temporary post in English Literature at Leeds University and then a
Lectureship at Bedford College, London University. Charismatic, left-wing yet
undogmatic, he had already begun teaching adult evening classes, and publishing
critical work - notably on W.B. Yeats in Essays and Criticism, and on T.S. Eliot in
a symposium he edited, Eliot in Perspective (1970). His relative slowness to
respond to the growing "publish or perish" pressures now a familiar feature of
academic life led to difficulties that might have proved disabling if he had not
been appointed to a university in which deadlines were (and are) absolute.
Martin was a supporter of the New Left, CND and later of Amnesty International,
and his politics were an integral part of his approach to literature, which was none
the less consistently tolerant and undoctrinaire, and aimed at the "common
reader" rather than any pre-selected or defined elite. His first OU teaching text
began with English nursery rhymes and "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and
ended with Kafka, Lukacs and Adorno. He went on to produce compelling material
on King Lear, Great Expectations, A Portrait of the Artist, D.H. Lawrence and
Industrialisation, and the poetry of Yeats, Eliot, and Auden.
As he observed in one of his contributions to Boris Ford's Pelican Guides to
English Literature, those whom we come to call "great writers" give us access to
"different ways of living in a human world, different ideological shapings of
human experience"; thereby challenging the "provincialism of the present"; a
point to be remembered when beset by theoreticians, whose inroads upon the
study of literature Martin felt must be understood (he once devoted a year to
"reading theory") if they were to be sensibly countered. He never felt there was
any final answer when dealing with literary texts, any more than with the latest
critical or theoretical approach to them; and remained suspicious of those who
claimed there was.
Martin's appetite for ideas was enormous; as was his interest in poetry (he was
an active board member of the Poetry Society), popular culture (he was Deputy
Chair of the OU's widely influential Popular Culture course), and music - a last,
incomplete project involved collaborative work on music and writing in the
European context. He believed in the importance of literary study as an aspect of
the broader social and cultural life. His legacy is to have increased the love and
understanding of literature.
Charles Graham Martin, English scholar and teacher: born Glasgow 19 September
1927; Assistant Lecturer in English, Leeds University 1955-56; Assistant Lecturer,
Department of English, Bedford College, London University 1956-58, Lecturer
1958-69; Reader in Literature, Open University 1970- 78, Professor of
Literature 1978-92, Head of Department 1981-92; married 1956 Molly Yardley
(died 2002; two stepsons); died London 21 January 2004.
LOAD-DATE: February 14, 2004