Amateur Humanism

            The long-term social and institutional dislocations likely to be caused by the current medical pandemic are by no means all predictable, but they certainly will involve higher education.  Just as the medical crisis has brought to the surface and made visible numerous imperfections and weak points in the social fabric, such as a dangerously low national level of family financial savings, so also has it thrown light upon the highly iffy finances of many of our colleges, quite a few of which are simply going to go belly up.  No such fate awaits the rich ones—some of them, like my own, almost obscenely rich—but they, too, are likely to experience significant change.  I suspect that one crisis area will be post-graduate education in the humanities: historical studies, language and literature, the arts.

            Around 1960, on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan (at a retreat conference of Danforth Fellows) I heard a once-famous dean of Harvard College explain that the daunting challenge facing the humanities departments of our great graduate institutions for the rest of the twentieth century would be producing Ph. D. scholar-teachers fast enough, and in sufficient quantity, to supply a rapidly expanding academic “market” of indefinite duration.  This was the orthodoxy of the day, and it commanded a huge expansion in humanities graduate programs.  In retrospect, this sort of thing is why people want to ask college professors, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”   In my first year of teaching, 1963-1964, I believe I was one of eight beginning “hires” in the English Department at the University of Wisconsin.  These days if one in eight finishing graduate students gets an academic appointment commensurate with her training, it is regarded as a good year for the credentialing department.  In economic terms, supply vastly exceeds demand.  It has been this way for many years now. 

            We are likely to see a significant and difficult reduction in the size and number of graduate humanities departments—difficult because of entrenched faculty expectations and because so many institutions have depended on graduate students to do the heavy lifting of large undergraduate courses.  I am leery of making specific predictions, but I allow myself to dream of the return of the amateur scholar and poet.  Want to be a famous intellectual and literary person?  Well, instead of mastering a dialect of opaque jargon in a Ph. D. program in literature at Yale or sitting around pretentious workshops in your M.F.A. program at Iowa, how about getting a good liberal arts bachelor’s degree at a prestigious university in Boston and follow that up with a career in the insurance business?  It is perhaps not likely that you will gain the scholarly fame of Benjamin Lee Whorf or the literary celebrity of Wallace Stevens, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?

Whorf (1897-1941), perhaps the most important theoretical linguist America has ever produced, took an engineering degree at MIT and put it to good social and personal use as an expert in fire prevention at a large insurance company.  That is, he increased public safety and he kept bread on his table.  On the side and of an evening he studied old and new languages and, more importantly, thought profoundly about the nature and implications of human language itself.  I have only recently come to appreciate the importance of his revolutionary thinking through my highly credentialed linguistically anthropological son Luke.  If this interests you, check out the “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of Linguistic Relativity.”  

            It is impossible to imagine American poetry of the twentieth century without Wallace Stevens (1879-1955).  He did study a good deal of literature as an undergraduate at Harvard, and he did take a graduate degree (Law) at NYU, but he spent most of the daylight hours of his adult life in an executive office at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity company.  It is worth pointing out that neither Whorf nor Stevens thought of their day jobs in the spirit of the star-struck would-be actress “temporarily” waitressing until her big break comes along.  Both of these guys were really into insurance.  They were no less into linguistic theory and poetry, but didn’t seem to think that it had to be a “professional” activity.

Both the professional poet and the professional scholar—especially the latter—are relatively new cultural developments.  There have doubtless been bards, scops, and singers of tales since time immemorial; but few of these were without a real day job.  And in the Old World deep, scholarly learning was generally ancillary to religious vocation.  There is some debate about the identity of the first English professional man of letters, one plausible candidate being Doctor Johnson in the eighteenth century.  The English woman of letters must appear considerably later, after a series of brilliant female amateurs had in effect created the novel.  It is not easy to imagine Jane Austen or Charlotte Bronte applying for a Guggenheim grant.  Charles Dickens, it is true, was a commercial writer in something like the modern sense.  He was an early “famous author” who milked the lecture and reading circuit for all it was worth.  But Anthony Trollope, who was as fully invested in the fiscal bottom line as was Dickens, did his prodigious writing in the early morning hours so as to be able each day to be at his desk in the Post Office on time.  So also was it with scholars, most of whom either enjoyed the benefits of family money or were gainfully employed in decorous professions of Church or State.

Most of the huge efflorescence of scholarship in nineteenth-century England, humanistic and scientific alike, was the work of amateurs working outside any formal academic setting.  The amateur scholarly work of possibly underemployed Anglican clergymen alone was staggering.  Their contributions to my special bailiwick, medieval English literature, really created the “field,” but amateur scholarly erudition was no clerical monopoly.  We might consider the example of Sir E. K. Chambers (1866-1954), for instance, among the greatest literary scholars who ever lived.  He was a parson’s son with a studious bent and a flair for research.  After an early rich education in a highly cultivated household he went on to school at Marlborough College and took his undergraduate degree at Corpus Christi, Oxford, about 1890.  He very early developed a special interest in Shakespeare, and while still at Oxford brought out an edition of Richard II.  Though he would today be thought a natural for a professional academic career, his thoroughly Victorian view was that the highly pleasurable activity of literary study was an amateur avocation, not a profession.  He made his career as a civil servant with the Board of Education, rising, by the time of his retirement, to be its second-in-command.  In the evenings and on week-ends, he did very little else than read and write, producing among many other things stunningly erudite studies of The Medieval Stage (2 vols., 1903), The Elizabethan Stage (4 vols, 1923), and William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (2 vols. 1930)—and these are only the encyclopedic works.  He also excelled at editing, at criticism, and at literary biography.  As the first President of the Malone Society, he was a major force in Shakespeare scholarship in the first half of the twentieth century.  Chambers had no Ph. D. and didn’t need one.  After all Shakespeare, the object of his life-long researches, didn’t even have a B.A., and he turned out OK.

We know from the memoirs of various friends that when the Chamberses entertained, as they not infrequently did, Sir Edmund would join his wife and guests for a single glass of sherry in the library before going into dinner.  When the dessert course was ready to be served he would say to his guests: “I hope you will now excuse me.  I leave you to be entertained by my excellent wife.”  He then retreated for three or four hours to his research and writing.  By all accounts Lady Eleanor was indeed excellent, and most entertaining, eager to conspire in her husband’s amateur exertions, knowing that existentially as etymologically what is amateur is motivated by love.