There are all sorts of reasons to become an habitual reader of books in your youth, and I am discovering one of the best of them right now. (A little later in the essay I shall touch upon possible dangers in doing so.) But when age and infirmity begin to attack your physical energy and dull your mental acuity, you can very easily retire to a comfortable chair in your library, physical or electronic, and read to your heart’s content. And since you may have forgotten some of the crucial details of that Conrad story you read thirty years ago, you can read it with the pleasurable shock of eventual recognition. I recently had a satisfying experience in this genre, one that links good books with good friends.
I have a younger friend, John Raimo, a one-time undergraduate student here, who is at an advanced stage in completing an ambitious doctoral dissertation in the Department of History at NYU. His topic is a broad one, dealing with some major trends and figures in modern European intellectual history; and it involves a good deal about academic writers and their publishers. He is a great polylingual reader himself, and every couple of months or so he sends me a report on current studies, and not infrequently a sample of it in book form.
That is, we exchange news about our current reading and writing. In a recent email John reminded me of a book that I believe I had once recommended to him some years ago but had hardly entered my mind since: the late A. D. Nuttall’s charming though trenchant study of some works of English literature dealing with “Scholars and Scholarship in Literature and the Popular Imagination.”*
Nuttall must have been an undergraduate at Oxford at the time Joan and I were there, though I never met him. He was, I think, a classicist, who went on to become one of the leading scholars of English literature. He was wide-ranging in his interests and very original in his approach, especially to Shakespeare. His early death was a real loss to literary scholarship.
I suppose it is the easy target pedantry presents that has attracted so many clever writers to poke fun at teachers and scholars, but there are certainly a large number of their satirical victims, from Shakespeare’s Holofernes to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. I have trouble thinking of prominent counter-examples. Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxford, perhaps, or Mr Chips?
The intriguing title of Nuttall’s book -–Dead from the Waist Down--is a line from Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “A Grammarian’s Funeral”. The unidentified speaker is an old student of the likewise unnamed defunctus, who was a probably Italian expert in Greek philology. The dead scholar emerges as a dry-as-dust pedant, like Edward Causaubon in Middlemarch, one of the other satirized fictional scholars to whom Nuttall gives extensive attention. The temporal setting of the poem is “shortly after the renewal of learning in Europe”—so, probably the fifteenth century at a guess. The improbable setting is a funeral cortege bearing the body up a steep rise to an elevated gravesite explicitly symbolic of the scholar’s above-it-all separation from normal life. The situation approaches the surreal. This is Browning, so that a certain amount of obscurity is inevitable, but the major issue raised in the poem is quite clear. It is in essence the conflict of the Active and Contemplative lives. The adjudication of their ordering has been a major occupation of Western literature. The dead grammarian’s choice has been clear: “This man decided not to Live but Know.”
Of him Browning writes that “He gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De / Dead from the waist down.” You hardly need to master the arcane linguistic jargon to realize that a doctrine of the ancient Greek enclitic De, whatever that might be, is unlikely to be as important as the law of supply and demand. The grammatical definition of an enclitic is “a word pronounced with so little emphasis that it is shortened and forms part of the preceding word”, as the not in can’t, for example. It is the mere hint or shadow of a word, as the grammarian is a hint or shadow of a man. The achievements of the grammarian are puny except to other pedants. That he is dead from the waist down in another poet might hint at a sexual meaning, but Browning is even crueler, suggesting a comprehensive rejection of action in the world, a spiritual crippling and voluntary immobility.
The hierarchy of the Active and Contemplative lives is an old one much discussed by early philosophers and especially ascetic theologians of the early Christian centuries. The biblical prototypes are Mary (contemplative) and Martha (active) in a well-known passage in the gospel of Luke (10:42) in which Jesus says that Mary has chosen the “good part.”—the parallels in the Hebrew Scriptures being Leah and Rachel. Medieval art and literature are rich in these “types”, as for example in Dante’s Commedia (Purgatorio, 27). There is small comfort in this pronouncement for secular scholars like myself who are likely at times to question the efficacy of the “life of the mind”—Greek enclitics and all—in a troubled world in which so many human bodies are in distress or danger. Things need to be done, and not merely thought about. The words engraved upon Marx’s tomb, the famous apothegm from the Theses on Feuerbach, are these: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.” But one hopes that the change will be for the better. The history of the twentieth century suggests that the enactment in political fact of what is thought of in the mind is not always positive. There are so many things that seemed like a good idea at the time.
The treatment of the theme of the contrasting modes of life in modern literature, though seldom frontal and direct, is ubiquitous. Many years ago another dear friend introduced me to Hermann Hesse’s remarkable novel Narcissus and Goldmund. (1930). This book with its medieval setting and almost violently modern treatment of the ancient theme, is among the most intellectually provocative novels I have ever read.
Nuttall’s book is of course witty, urbane in its erudition, and it does not deal explicitly with the contemporary Anglo-American arena of higher education. Nonetheless I find it highly relevant to that subject. The modern university, however “engaged,” “woke”, or “activist" its denizens be, is still housed in its Ivory Tower. There are just below the surface the clearest filiations of attitude between the ascetic organization in which the Parisian schools incubated and contemporary Anglo-American academia. While most professors today hardly follow the ascetic life, most of us silently believe that we have sacrificed the power and emoluments we could have for the asking in the world of business and high affairs for the self-abnegation of high cultural service to the world at large. There is of course no external evidence for that comforting belief, but never mind. After all, mastering the enclitics is so much fun.
*A. D. Nuttall , Dead from the Waist Down (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.)
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