The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [67]
The recent attack in The New York Review of Books on the Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modern Language Association of America raises complex questions of taste and emphasis. It must be obvious at the same time, however, that this attack derives in part from the alarm of amateurs at seeing rigorous professional standards applied to a subject in which they have a vested interest. Here, at least, the issue is not in doubt. As the American learned world has come to full maturity since the Second World War, a similar animus has shown itself and been discredited in field after field from botany to folklore. In the long run professional standards always prevail.17
Ray’s own scholarship was focused on the life and work of William Makepeace Thackeray, whose letters and private papers he edited (in four volumes) and about whom he wrote a two-volume biography. His reply to Wilson, which stands as the epigraph to an MLA pamphlet called Professional Standards and American Editions, is clearly both personal and professional, since his was apparently the kind of scholarship Wilson thought the world would be better off without. But Ray’s riposte, and the prominent place given it in the pamphlet, is symptomatic of a particular time in intellectual and professional history. The quarrel of the amateurs and the professionals seems at that moment to have erupted in a way both vivid and virulent. What was at stake? Ray mentions “the alarm of amateurs” at the arrival of “rigorous professional standards,” and the newly achieved maturity of the “American learned world.” After World War II, with the expansion of the state universities and the G.I. Bill, a wave of comparative democratization hit the U.S. academy, together—not altogether paradoxically—with a growth in graduate programs, a sophistication of editorial practices, and (as Wilson notes dismissively) the need for more, and more varied, projects for dissertation students to undertake. What he calls the “boondoggling of the MLA editions”18 and what Gordon Ray calls “professional standards” are two sides of the same coin.
The tension felt, the challenge detected and resisted, was not only between amateurs and professionals, between self-made critics and PhD-bearing scholars, but also between the New York world of books, magazines, and intellectual life and the rest of the country. The corridor traversed by the old Pennsylvania Railroad, with all paths leading to or from New York, had long tacitly, and sometimes explicitly, been the province of arbiters of taste and intellectual leadership. In The Fruits of the MLA, Wilson had begun by mildly mocking a letter from an unnamed correspondent, the editor of one of the MLA volumes, which presumes to say something about the climate of the East Coast, where Wilson spent his summer vacations: “he professes to envy me my enjoyment of spring on Cape Cod—which is actually rather bleak—since the part of the Middle West to which he is at present condemned cannot be said to have a spring.”19 Gordon Ray, though by then the head of a New York–based foundation, was a graduate of the University of Indiana and had been an administrator at the University of Illinois. The other contributors to Professional Standards and American Editions (which bore the subtitle A Response to Edmund Wilson) included two scholars based in Iowa and one from Berkeley, California.
The original idea for what became the MLA editions had been generated by the American Literature Group of the MLA, headed by a Princeton professor, Willard Thorp, in 1947–48. But by the time of these editions, produced by a team of five Emerson scholars, appeared from Harvard University Press (to be immediately lambasted by the critic and journal editor Lewis Mumford in an article called “Emerson Behind Barbed Wire”)20, the series had garnered financial support from the National Endowment on the Arts and Humanities and smaller grants from