Dear Rosa Luxembourg:
I can sympathize with your need to wreak some divine vengeance with the aid of a gun on those nattering nabobs of negativity at the UC Berkeley Press, but can you blame them, really? They're just suffering a case of academic penis envy you know, and all appear to be victims of what William James, that distinguished polymath, psychologist and humanist in 1903 called "The Ph.D. Octopus". It was his contention that the degree itself not only conferred an inappropriate and overblown reputation for erudition and scholarship within the academy but outside it to the point that even then it was looked on as an advertising gimmick, "a manner of throwing dust in the Public's eye." It was moreover playing into the disturbing trend Americans already had to revere titles which sounds familiar enough to us when confronted with the variety of ph.d programs in everything from physical therapy to real estate management today; and you really wonder what in hell they really mean (viz. Newt Gingrich, the present [1996--Ed.] Speaker of the House, has a ph.d. in history but you'd never know it, to hear him talk or maybe it's just a matter of modifying his medication so it works.)
Of course James was referring to an earlier more innocent academic age when in American colleges and universities there was a dearth of homegrown scholars, where the prestige doctorates still came from the great old universities in Germany. Back in those dear dead days, the ph.d. was distinguished by its scarcity, the MA, less so, and teaching and scholarship proceeded for the most part without anything other than perhaps a BA. It was innocently thought 100 years ago in that characteristic American quantifiable way that the more ph.d's one had on the faculty, the better the school, but having a doctorate is no guarantee that one may not be an asshole (see above). Then as now there were individuals who did the dance gracefully and easily as well as those who succeeded by sheer intentional fortitude and thick skin "...not without baleful nervous wear and tear and retardation of their purely inner life, but on the whole successfully, and with advantage."
The octopus's main victims were all the other candidates, in fact the great majority for whom the doctoral degree dance was (and is) a humiliating intellectual experience. To James' mind, the journeyman scholar and scholar "...without marked originality or native force, but fond of truth and especially of books and study, ambitious of reward and recognition, poor often, and needing a degree to get a teaching position, weak in the eyes of their examiners", it was a poisonous hell which one survived damaged and temporarily enervated of intellectual curiosity in the short term. I bailed on the scene in the late Sixties but only after I learned the basics, i.e. " where to look it up". Once you know that, all the rest is commentary, as they say. Ironically, these poor schlubs, once they make the cut and as damaged goods, perpetuate unconsciously the humiliations they underwent on future candidates, a little bondage, a little humiliation in the exercise of dominance, just like a fraternity hazing. Is there any progress or understanding? Don't bet on it, and god help you if one is a freelance scholar (or as Ishamel Reed would say a freelance pallbearer).
For James, not only was this state of affairs insupportably dishonest and outrageous, but it also undercut the tenants of scholarship and free inquiry he had always championed throughout his long and productive life. He put it this way, and sorry for being footnotey, but it's important you can read this in its full text version:
"To interfere with the free development of talent, to obstruct the natural play of supply and demand in the teaching profession, to foster academic snobbery by the prestige of certain privileged institutions, to transfer accredited value from essential manhood to an outward badge, to blight hopes and promote invidious sentiments, to divert the attention of aspiring youth from direct dealings with truth to the passing of examinations such consequences, if they exist, ought surely to be regarded as drawbacks to the system, and an enlightened public consciousness ought to be keenly alive to the importance of reducing their amount." (Wm. James: Writings 1902-1910 (New York: The Library of America, 1987; p. 1114)
You have no idea how modern academics hate it when you trot out the old guys, but the old guys are the best. And if you're going to beat up on them with their own bat, it better be a Louisville Slugger, and god knows James was one hell of a slugger. Rest assured he would have approved of and supported your efforts at independent scholarship. He'd have been jumping up and down with you in your rant too. Being in a feisty mood and semi-computer literate, I'd suggest that you send a copy of your review to the editor's boss, or if he's the boss of that division, to the uber head, or better send the review to his underlings so that they will get a good laugh at his expense and every time he walks past the water cooler (or wherever they go at UC Berkeley) there will be snickers of derision.
So, my dear, unchamber your rounds and stow that gatt. Conserve your energy, those schmucks, or that editor schmuck can't help it. You can't stop them, "sorrow, sing sorrow" and all that, but you can get them back with the attitude, "The present day scholar refuses to die". Fortitude!
David
(BTW. and so who is Ben Reitman? I know a writer named David Reitman who once wrote an article called, "I Dreamed I Interviewed Frank Zappa in my Maiden Form Bra" a relation perhaps?)
Dear David --
You ask about Ben Reitman. He was a sort of freelance anarchist (is there any other kind?) who organized hoboes and came crashing into Emma G.'s life and turned it ass-over-teakettle, causing her to write him some great letters. I'm sure he would have had no use for the folks at the Mark Twain Papers, or for anyone who looked like them. He, like Emma, believed in direct action. I sometimes wonder if my love of writing about literary figures isn't at distinct odds with my directness in other matters. But I will take your advice under advisement, and promise to make my revenge poetic as well as effective, if those unreconstructed Pootmeisters aren't in fact dead to poetry.
Before I leave the subject of my pique with the MTP cabal, perhaps you wouldn't mind indulging me on the topic of George Williams III. One afternoon, during a jaunt in the Mojave, I stopped by the Randsburg General Store for a cherry phosphate. Randsburg is located a hundred miles or so from Death Valley and is something of a rarity in the Mojave, a genuine working mining town (although mining being what it is, the bulk of the citizenry subsists on Social Security). Circumspection is needed in navigating the main street, which beneath its adobe hardpan still bears traces of the original Nicholson pavement, and you generally have to swing wide in your 4x4 to avoid mangling the oblivious greybeards staggering along toward the public park (two uncovered picnic tables in a dirt lot), alternately swigging from and expectorating into their cans of lukewarm Coors. If sufficiently intrepid, you can tour the Yellow Aster mine, Randsburg's claim to fame, on alternate Tuesdays and Fridays from noon until 1:15 p.m., but only if the month has has an "r" in it, and only if Clement's hangover is bearable. The architecture is a jumble of weatherbeaten 19th century cottages and Airstream trailers. When I was writing the final chapters of "Sagebrush" I contemplated checking in at the White Horse Inn, above the municipal saloon, and it's probably fortunate that I didn't.
The Randsburg General Store is not only the teetotaler's refuge in that dipsomaniacal town, but also the supply depot and jumping-off place for prospectors who have read in Westways and the L.A. Times about roughing it in Death Valley and are bravely bound for the Furnace Creek Inn. After sitting down at the fine old lunch counter and ordering my phosphate and a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich (no charge for the detailed update on the medical problems of the store's elderly owners, who claimed to be on the verge of selling the place, just as they have since I first went there in 1969) I strolled over to the guidebook section, where a pile of small books or large pamphlets caught my eye. These were all about varying aspects -- highly varying -- of Mark Twain's life in the West, and they had all been personally signed by the author, one George Williams III, evidently proprietor of a multinational publishing concern in Riverside, or San Diego, or Bridgeport (the locale of his imprint varied over a remarkable range of geography during that six-month period). On the back cover of each of these several editions was a Christian fish symbol, and the matter between the covers was marked by repeated earnest exhortations for the reader to discover the New Testament, and to get to know Jesus. I found these volumes quite engrossing, especially when I began stumbling onto places where the author had 'cabbaged' whole paragraphs from my two previous books on Mark Twain without bothering to list the source. But when I read on the back cover (along with the ingenuous statement that "Like James Michner [sic], Williams is widely known for his ability to transform scholarly research into entertaining and informative Americana") that the author had been "nominated for the Nobel Prize" for his earlier work, "Rosa May: The Search for a Mining Camp Legend", I forgave him his seemingly slipshod bibliographic methodology. He clearly had far weightier matters on his mind than keeping track of his research sources.
For some quixotic reason I purchased two of Mr. Williams's Mark Twain volumes. I had no cause to think further of them until I received the Mark Twain Papers' annotated edition of "Roughing It" previously mentioned, and underwent the emotional exertion with which you have been so patient and understanding in the past couple of days. As I have mentioned, I was conspicuously absent from the bibliography but George Williams III wasn't. Probably that Nobel thing, I reasoned. I cannot truthfully say that I have ever been nominated for the Nobel Prize, so I can understand why the MTP editors might have felt me to be unworthy of their mention. But it struck me as somewhat unfair that Mr. Williams should be included in the bibliography for material which he had borrowed from me, when I wasn't considered deserving of citation Ah well, the lot of a freelance pallbearer is an ignominious one.
Your bemused
Digger O'Dell
