AUTO-DIDACTITUDE

The serious scholarly activity of PhD poets, sane and measured as it is, or purports to be, is simply professionalism, ventriloquism, transvestism. In the arts there are no rational theses, just the dressed up rantings of hallucinating primitives. Poets are witch doctors in suits, shamans with TVs, witches who ride old Volvos instead of broomsticks. Even in this day of eternal doubt, our twi-lite of habitual dogmatic skepticism, the poet scholar is engaged in the old skunky business of creeping about at night, eating small fry and spraying dogs.

A few of my favourite autodidactical poets and writers:

Robert Graves is a mass of eccentricities and resentments. He erects an entire anthropology on personal grievance. I have loved few books more than The White Goddess. I came to it on the wings of I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The cover promised an historical grammar of poetic myth. Immersed as I was in Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Jung, this seemed like an amazing treasure trove. I didn’t know I would be reading an exceedingly difficult book, a book that was in fact a poem in prose with footnotes. Graves wrote the book based largely on his Irish grandfather’s library. (These titles can also be ferreted out of Finnegans Wake, where much of the same lore, particularly tree alphabets, has been found by Guy Davenport, another prodigious projector of dreams). Graves was pained by criticisms of his scholarship; he wished to be beyond the reproach of the professors he felt were destroying culture. (Pound always reserved his greatest vitriol for professors, while Joyce laid in wait for them, fangs bared and dripping, at the umbilicus of a labyrinthine joke). Graves’ thesis is that the myths of Europe record the systematic destruction of Paleo-Matriarchy by Aryan, trinitarian patriarchs from the steppes of Russia. Like Soviet apparatchiks these horse riding Patriarchs were airbrushing out all references to the Great Goddess and her rituals. The ritual was out of another amazing anthropological myth maker with a great library, Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough (where on earth did Frazer find the time to write it?) Graves felt didn’t go far enough. The myth was the ritual murder, later wounding, of the god-king consort of the goddess. There is nowhere in the storehouse of myth and lore from Europe, Western Asia and North Africa that Graves doesn’t find this pattern, and any syllable that deviates from it is an interpolation by devious Aryans. Thus there is a second order of myths, that of the dispute or war between devotees of the goddess and the Apollonian quislings of patriarchal priest-kings. Had his thinking remained in the bewitching yellow cover of The White Goddess it might have slept undisturbed except for the occasional curious and vulnerable poet. But it found its way into his novels (King Jesus, Hercules, My Shipmate, Watch the North Wind Rise) and then, Graves wrote The Greek Myths 1&2. This book was so encyclopaedic and well written it was duly assigned to generations of college students, with the proviso that they totally ignore his interpretations! I love Robert Graves. He taught me everything I needed to know about being a poet, except for how to write poetry. That task fell to another autodidact, Ezra Pound.

Pound wasn’t content with a single theory, nor was his autodidacticism confined to traditional poet subjects. Economic theory, a theory of history, a theory of language, a theory of translation, all these and more were duly adumbrated by Pound in angry, sarcastic essays. If Marx introduced the tone of polemic into social theory, and Freud into psychoanalysis, it is Pound who discovered the war-path in all things literary. Remember, Pound had a Masters Degree. His Master’s Thesis is still in print, The Spirit of Romance. The Spirit of Romance contains his translations from Provencal, and it is as a translator that Pound is both controversial, and brilliant. Controversial because he did not do literal translations, or even scholarly ones, but poetic ones. Unfortunately, Pound was always willing to extend his expertise way beyond what the situation warranted. His translations from Latin and Chinese are amazing, but his theory of the Chinese language, which informed so much of his poetic output, from Imagism, through Vorticism, to the Cantos, was wrong. I didn’t know that, being an autodidact, and I came to learn that, when my auto-didactitude led me to read the Chinese language scholar John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1984. If a poet tells you that Chinese is an ideogrammatic language, built on images and single ideas (which fits in nicely with Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism), cry, Nonsense! And cite DiFrances. The Chinese, whatever the historical origins of their characters, read language and think the way all people do, with the characters representing the sounds of words and parts of words. Despite all of this Pound made great use of Fenollosa’s cribs and a comparison of any of his translations with scholarly ones holds up. Does he get words and ideas wrong? Sure. But his translations are great English poetry that wouldn’t have existed had he not carried them over from a language he badly misunderstood. Anyway, I believe Pound’s greatest poems are his mis-translations. I don’t care if they are fidele or not. Which brings me Kenneth Rexroth, another great liar and autodidact who mistranslated the Chinese and Japanese classics. Pound’s theory of translation is now standard for poets, many of whom undertake translations in languages they don’t know. Pound himself said, “I’m no great shakes as a Latinist.” I don’t know if he said it before or after Homage to Sextus Propertius. I don’t care. You don’t have to agree with his theory that you can judge the greatness of a civilisation by the quality of its coinage, or that Jewsevelt was destroying said civilisation to be moved to tears each time you read the final lines of Exile’s Letter. And it is the path beaten by Pound that Rexroth follows, more consistently, brilliantly and accurately. Rexroth is a treasure trove of prejudice and opinion based on an enduring auto-didactical attitude.

From Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel:

“At the Bug Club I met a man who I suppose was then a small determinative influence in my life. His name was Walter Freeman Cooling. He had once been a police magistrate and was always referred to as Judge….He had created singlehanded an all-encompassing system of dissent. With the intelligence of an Aristotle or an Aquinas he disagreed all along the line with all organized thought.

“He had elaborated a system of total eccentricity which encompassed practically every department of thought known to man from ontology to mechanics to cookery. Philosophically he called himself an Aristotelian, but his interpretation of Aristotle was as odd as a cabalist’s interpretation of Genesis. The core of his system was a fantastic cosmology. This involved his own special physics, astronomy and geology and led to a religion which was outlandish beyond belief….He wasn’t just a crackpot who thought these things up out of thin air. For most of his life he had been writing a great book of many volumes—a complete exposition of his system, organized with the rigor of the Summa Theologica. He kept this in about a hundred old-fashioned letter cases and several steel files. They were chock-full of photographs, diagrams, mathematical equations, thousands of quotations in all the civilized languages past and present, most of which he read fluently. It was wonderful to hear him in the twilight, under the trees in the park, get up and attack a Catholic or a Socialist or a Darwinian. He would rattle off a series of hair-raisingly incongruous ideas, all tied together in a sorites of irrefutable syllogisms and end with a long quotation from Homer, the Rig Veda, or the Zend Avesta in the original language and in the sonorous tones of a Welsh revivalist or labor leader. I might mention that he had special dissident theories on the correct pronunciation of Greek, Sanskrit, and ancient Persian, and I must admit that he always sounded better than the professors at the university. One night, to make a point, he quoted a long passage that sounded vaguely like Hiawatha in Japanese. “What is that, Judge?” I asked. “Why,” he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize it. That’s the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic.” I have known a lot of polymaths in my life, but I don’t believe even Carl Jung, who was always talking about the Kalevala, ever bothered to learn Finnish to read it.”

Well, today almost everyone in the arts has been tamed by college and post-graduate work. Knowledge can be checked instantly. Jonathan Lethem is the only prominent novelist today who didn’t complete college.