Joys of Scholarship

I confess that I am not a scholar. I have the necessary credentials, but I lack the temperament. I have friends who are scholars, and I have spent time among scholars, but the best I was ever able to muster was a passing fancy and a few accidental publications. That does not mean, however, that I lack appreciation for scholarship and the life scholastic, which I certainly was well prepared for, and which I lived briefly before abandoning myself to more mundane pursuits.

All of this came back to me while I was reading, somewhat belatedly, the Fall 2012 number of The Sewanee Review, an issue devoted to books and the love of books. Michael Mott's essay recalling his own life adventures with books, libraries, and reading, particularly as a young man living in London, reminded me of several summers I spent as an American scholar among the British. In my youthful fantasies, that was the way I always pictured myself. Somehow the English just seem more scholarly than Americans. And my still youthful head had been filled with stories from fiction and film, from Lucky Jim and Changing Places to Butley and Educating Rita.

By the time I got the opportunity to live out my fantasy, I was a bona fide professor of English (well, actually, an associate professor) in a small southern college that participated in a summer program called British Studies at Oxford. My turn to spend a summer in England came in 1982. I was paid a small stipend to teach in the program (they even called us tutors!), and with that and a modest contribution from our savings, both my wife and I were able to take a six week holiday that included excursions to Edinburgh and St. Andrews, as well as York and Stratford and several days in London. The rest of our time was spent living in college rooms at St. John's University in Oxford. We even had our own scout, Bill, who knocked us up every morning.

But there was little time for scholarship on that first summer visit. I was much too busy with my teaching -- i.e. tutoring -- duties, with playing tourist and going to the theater (or theatre) -- when not contending with a series of summer colds that first my wife and then I caught during that rather chilly and (for us) unhealthy summer. There were some sunny days, and we made the most of them, but we were glad we brought our rain gear and wool sweaters and that tweed sport jacket I wore everywhere.

Still, our appetites had been whetted, and we determined we would return the following year with more serious resolve. And so I applied for some research funding, and when that came through, rented a room in a little house on Walton Street in Oxford. My plan was to spend about a week there doing research on seventeenth-century science at the Radcliffe Science Library, and then return to London. But while I was able to get a lot of reading done that summer, I somehow felt I could have done just as well in any American research library. Still, it was fun being back in England during a more pleasant summer that did not include summer colds for either of us.

In fact, we enjoyed ourselves so well, we returned again in the summer of 1984 for several more weeks, although this time we spent little time in Oxford, and more time in London going to plays and museums. Then in 1985 I learned that my life as an academic was about to end, at least for a time, and I  decided to take one more opportunity to experience the life of a scholar working in England. By this time I was concentrating on John Tradescant, a famous English gardener whose life and work was the focus of a key chapter in my never-to-be-completed book on discovery in the English Renaissance. During this final summer in England I was on another research grant, and I secured reading privileges at both the Bodleian Library in Oxford and the British Library when it was still a part of the British Museum in London.

I particularly remember the time I spent reading in the North Library at the British Museum, not the more famous main reading room, but much quieter and less crowded. They held my books for me at the circulation desk, and each morning I collected them for my day of research. I had an entire table to myself, where I read and took my notes on various rare editions of seventeenth-century English essayists. Not much came of all that research, although I enjoyed my time reading and studying in the North Library, which I suspect no longer exists as a functioning reading room. Eventually I published a long essay that outlined my thesis on the idea of discovery and the seventeenth-century English essay. But the main thing was I found out what it felt like to be an American scholar among the British. I wonder if it's still the same in the new British Library?