“I stand for the un-Academic: the anti-Academic.”
As do most of the better sort among writers and readers. Something vital was lost when the profs colonized and laid claim to literature. John Gross puts it like this in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (1969; rev. ed. 1991):
“Isn’t there
a certain basic antagonism between the very nature of a university and the very
spirit of literature? The academic mind is cautious, tightly organized,
fault-finding, competitive – and above all aware of other academic minds. . . .
Discipline means compulsion, and an interest in literature thrives on
spontaneity, eager curiosity, the anticipation of pleasure . . .”
The anti-academician speaking at the top is that perennial outsider Ford Madox Ford. His provocative line comes from a lecture, “The Literary Life,” he delivered to a female audience in the early nineteen-twenties at University College, London. It was first published in the Summer 1989 issue of Contemporary Literature. Ford had already published some fifty of the eighty books he would bring out during his lifetime, including The Good Soldier (1915). At the time of the lecture he was working on Some Do Not . . ., the first novel in his Great War tetralogy, Parade’s End.
Lately a lot
of high-toned claims have been made for Literature, especially poetry – that it “heals,” that it encourages empathy, that it is “therapeutic” and “spiritual” -- but seldom that it reveals truth and ought to be well-written. Ford is bracing in his dismissal of schoolmarmish notions of books, reading and writing:
“Literature
is not utilitarian: its purpose is not to make you better housekeepers, or
better companions for husbands or old ladies, or better citizens or workers or
employers of labour. It may do all that: but those are the by-products.”
Nor is
literature a proper employment for social justice warriors: “Do not try for the civic
crown of the Municipal Reformer or for the social prestige of the
philanthropist, the preacher or the founder of Empires.”
With all of
that and more out of the way, Ford offers simple, commonsensical suggestions to writers: “Be
then yourself; write as you speak; ask no honours; strive, when you are
writing, for no reward. What will your reward be? . . . Ah, we haven’t come to that yet. . . .”
"It is interesting to consider for a moment this increasing domination of opinion about classical literature by professional scholars. The thing is, on the face of it, surprising. For, though sprightliness of taste and imagination are not – happily – always checked by weight of learning, one would have supposed it common knowledge that men whose authority in scholarly matters must pass unquestioned are often men endowed with a more limited sensibility than is needed to ensure reliable opinions about literature." (Kenneth Quinn, “Horace as a Love Poet,” Arion, 1963)
ReplyDeleteIsaac
ReplyDeleteToday's post brought my attention back to one of my favorite, anti-academic poems. Thank you.
Andrew Reinbach
April Inventory
W. D. Snodgrass
The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.
The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.
I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.
I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.