'The Writers and the Great Amateurs'

“If I am to learn anything about English--and this is my passion and despair--I can only do so by going to the Masters of that glorious language. Seeing how a word is used in a line by Dekker or Swift is a replenishing experience.”

Just last week I was reading something by Swift in which I learned a new word, clarified an old one and closed the book replenished. Writers don’t read like other people. Our pleasure is at the same time on-the-job training. Years ago Bob Dylan said he couldn’t sing eight bars without referring to Charley Patton or Hank Williams. It’s the same with writers. Who can write anything worthwhile without a subconscious or wide-awake nod to – who? Our free-lance, unpaid, unofficial tutors. Reading their books is like auditing a class. No good writer works in a vacuum.

The writer quoted at the top is Edward Dahlberg, one of my teachers but one who must be heeded skeptically and measured against common sense. In the Winter 1964 issue of Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and the Classics, the editors published almost one-hundred pages of answers to a questionnaire they sent to dozens of writers and scholars. In their introduction to “The Classics and the Man of Letters” they write: “These answers show once again--what only classicists have ever doubted--how much the classics and classical  studies owe, and will go on owing, to the writers and the great amateurs. Lector, intende: laetaberis.” Here’s a sampling of the responses:

Guy Davenport: “Real continuity is metamorphic. The molds grow and in growing change. To say that there is a continuity from Greece and Rome to the United States is to say that there is an obvious continuity to all history, and our strain is particularly closed and neat. I cannot think of an example of my or my neighbors’ life that cannot, sometimes with a little strained ingenuity, be traced to the classical world. The world simply isn’t that old.”

Marianne Moore: “Vanity of pedagogy is fatal. Enjoyment has to be achieved or study is useless.”

Anthony Powell: “I had a ‘classical education’ (not much Greek) and do not think I write a line without semi-consciously forming a Latin prose sentence in the first instance.”

Frederic Raphael: “One of the main problems of the prose writer--apart from just trying to do good work, which is tough enough--is to find a language for himself. I find myself more and drawn to a kind of precision which exact words give (T. E. Hulme influenced me here, with his talk of precision being poetry) and so one tries to get a word to do as much work as possible, studies echoes and so on.”

And Dahlberg again: “A good teacher is an awakener; he must also be a patient Buddha, giving his pupils the Rig-Veda or the Bhagavad-Gita one week, and should either fail to rouse somniferous flesh, he can offer them Hazlitt’s essays on the English comic writers or Goncharov’s Oblomov.”

A sad note: after fifty-five years, almost every writer on the list whose name I recognize is dead.