D. D. Home Getting a Rise Out of His Aucience
One of my two academic children,
the anthropological one in Montreal, recently approached me to voice concern
about my scholarly Nachlass. I use the German term, which is slightly less
spooky than the English relics or remains.
Luke knows that I have written quite a lot of stuff over the years,
including boxfulls of still unpublished papers, just lying around. What is worse
from a scholar’s perspective is that I do not even have a complete list, or
bibliography, of published works. He
wants all this to be available to the world; and it speaks eloquently of his
character that the legacy that concerns him is this one.
This is where Academia.edu comes
in. Luke suggested it is the solution to
the Nachlass problem. Academia.edu is a huge platform, a single
vast composite scholarly journal where academics can display their work,
completed or in progress, and discover interesting work by other scholars. It is a showcase of brainy Zuckerbergian
“connectivity”. Many famous scholars participate, include numerous of my
friends and old students. It seems to be
particularly well-patronized by younger scholars, for whom it can serve as a
professional showcase. The Academicians
tell you how many readers you have, how many times your name has been mentioned
by others. It’s sort of like Tinder, as
I understand it, except that position aimed for is not temporary and horizontal
but vertical and tenured.
I actually had signed up a long
time ago, though I had forgotten. I
forgot, too, that I had even published an essay there—a piece about Delmore
Schwartz’s short story “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”. I won’t tell you how I came to write
that. But since I clearly didn’t
understand the system, my method of presenting it was as effective as filing it
in a locked drawer. So I needed to begin
again. The first scholarly squibs I
committed to posterity are probably in the pages of Notes & Queries around 1963.
Pending further searching, I can do nothing more on that score. But my
very first published essay I did remember well.
It dealt with philological minutiae in Browning’s dramatic dialogue “Mr.
Sludge the Medium”. The model for the
satirized subject of this poem was a famous Hiberno-American spiritualist, D.
D. Home (1833-1886), who had a sensational international career as a psychic,
clairvoyant, levitator and table-rapping medium. Browning obviously thought him a humbug. Home had emigrated to America as a boy and
spent his years of linguistic formation in upstate New York before returning to
Britain to conduct séances for the rich and famous. It occurred to me in reading “Mr. Sludge”
that among other objects of Browning’s scorn were possible Americanisms in
Home’s English. They are the subject of
“Browning’s Yankee Medium”, which was published in the journal American Speech, vol. 29, in 1964. Were I to write a précis of this brief essay it would go something like this: “A seminar
paper dealing with some minor philological points in a poem you have never read
by a Victorian poet most people have forgotten.” I mounted this paper into my barren niche at
Academia.edu.
What happened next was
dramatic. Within twenty-four hours my
paper had attracted one thousand, three hundred readers from all over the
interconnected world. Academia.edu
congratulated me upon being, at the moment, among the top 1.6% humanistic
scholars in their whole outfit. They
further suggested that I upgrade from the free service to “Academia Prime,”
which I could do for the mere pittance of a hundred bucks. The advantages of Academia Prime, though
actually a little opaque to me, clearly promised yet more cossetting of the
ego, and I sprang for it. Maybe I could
get it down to 1.5%? Having satisfied the demands of historical
priority, I then set out more seriously to implement Luke’s suggested plan,
which was to begin by posting now and again a previously unpublished essay in
conjunction with one that, though published, was to be found only in a rather
obscure place. As the example of the
former I mounted “The Many Musics of Luís de Camões,” a literary-musico study
of the Portuguese epic poet. From the
latter group I sought out an underappreciated essay on the relics of Thomas à
Becket in his medieval shrine at Canterbury.
The first of these is merely brilliant, the second transcendentally so.
You can accordingly imagine my
puzzlement at what can at best be described as a muted response from the
Internet. I did not attract thirteen
hundred new readers. Five people took a look at the Camões
essay; that was the same number that over a period of probably three years had
read my essay on dreams. However, nobody had looked at the masterpiece on
the Becket relics.
A few nights ago, at a friend’s
book-launching party, I talked with an eminent nonagenarian colleague with whom
I had not conversed in many months. He
told me he was writing a book. That did
not surprise me. He has written many
fine books, one of his themes in retirement being his youthful military service
as an aviator in World War II. But the
subject of the work-in-progress did surprise me: Shakespeare’s King Lear. He said he had at last understood the essence
of Lear’s tragedy, as crystallized in a terrible scene (iv, 7) in which the
King in his insanity is able to recognize neither his loving daughter Cordelia
nor his faithful liegeman Kent. The King
says I am a very foolish fond old man,
fourscore and upward…a likely prospect for a upgrade, I’d say.
