AN INTERVIEW WITH ARNOLD KETTLE 6l I wouldn't write differently but not that I reject the whole thing. I hope it has been useful and its great advantage is that students understand it. XIV. On whether An Introduction to the Novel would be his claim to fame. More than anything else, I would like to be associated with the material I have prepared for the Open University. That has been my most productive period and a task I was suited to do. 1. The biographical details have been supplied by Margot Kettle. Elmer Borlund has documented ihem briefly in Contemporary Literary Critics (Hong Kong : Macmillan, 1982), p. 326. 2. This may not necessarily be the general opinion among academics, but among those holding radical left-wing positions, for example Terry Eagleton, this would normally be believed. 3. Kettle, The Nineteenth Century Novel: Critical Essays and Documents (Milton Keynes : Open University Press, 1982), p. 6. 4. George Steiner, 'Marxism and the Literary Critic*, Language and Silence (Harmondsworth : Pelican, 1969), p. 273. 5. Ibid, p. 273. 6. Ibid., p 271. 7. Ibid., p. 276. 8. Kettle says in *The Artist and Polities', Marxism Today, Vol. 3, No. 5, May 1951. p. 3 : A Communist Party cannot remain indifferent or neutral in ideological or cultural matters ... It doesn't do much good simply to tell what they ought to write, but that doesn't mean that the pressures of a society should not be consciously exerted to try and convince artists that they should be responsible. . . and indeed more so. because their very articulatencss imposes an extra obligation. Here then is a marriage of the Soviet socialist realist position and British bourgeois liberalism. 9. Kettle, Foreword. Crisis and Criticism, Alick West (London : Lawrence and Wishart, 1975), p. 2. A select bibliography of the works of Arnold Kettle has been compiled by W.R. Owens, in Douglas Jefferson and Graham Martin (eds.), The Use of Fiction (Milton Kcynes : Open University Press, 1982).