'Amateurism (in the Original Sense of the Term)'

Autodidact as a noun and adjective arrived in English in 1534 via French, from a Latinized form of the Greek for “self-taught.” The range of the word’s uses in our university-smitten age is vast. Some academics apply it to anyone without an advanced degree who presumes to have an opinion on anything. In their view, autodidact is a one-word oxymoron. For some of the rest of us, autodidacticism is an ideal, a way of life. As Dr. Oliver Sacks writes in Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood (2001): “A polymath and autodidact himself, Grandfather was passionately keen on education.” That is, keen on education in the ongoing, self-generated sense, not accumulating degrees. Degrees and learning are not incompatible but neither are they synonymous. 

I had forgotten that Guy Davenport reviewed Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (1977) for The Hudson Review. He never republished it. Sir James Augustus Henry Murray (1837-1915) was the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, from 1879 until his death, and the biography was written by his granddaughter, K. M. Elisabeth Murray. James Murray is one of those intimidatingly learned and industrious Victorians, like Darwin, Carlyle and George Eliot. Davenport describes Murray as a “largely self-educated philologist,” and adds:

 

“[S]erious study of the English language and its literature developed in an atmosphere of amateurism (in the original sense of the term), and was thus for a long time free of the blasé professionalism that has come to characterize the discipline.”

 

The “original sense,” meaning something done for the love of it. “A James Murray could have flourished as he did only in an age when self-development was respectable,” Davenport writes, “for until fairly late in his life he lacked the sort of credentials routinely demanded of a scholar nowadays. By the time (age 33) that he reluctantly decided to pursue a baccalaureate . . .”

 

I have a friend from high school who grew up in a tri-lingual household: Slovak, German, English (in that order). Back then we were Thomas Pynchon fanboys. He went to work after university as a stockbroker but gave it up in his thirties to teach high-school German. When the need for language instruction began to shift, he taught himself Spanish thoroughly enough, with books and tapes, to begin teaching it at his school. As Davenport writes of himself as a boy in “On Reading,” collected in The Hunter Gracchus (1996): “And then I made the discovery that what I liked in reading was to learn things I didn’t know.” And I dropped out of the university we both attended after my junior year and only earned my B.A. in English thirty years later, at age fifty, after a quarter-century working as a newspaper reporter. Mike and I often speak of ourselves as old-school, working-class autodidacts.