Frank Wojciechowski

Shelley Frisch *81, a full-time translator, has been honored by the Modern Language Association and the PEN Center for her work.

There always have been independent scholars; for people of a certain aristocratic class and intellectual bent, it was not at all unusual to pursue their scholarly interests far from any college quad. Darwin, surely, was an independent scholar, laboring away in his greenhouses at Down House. So were Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Johnson, and so, too, was Princeton’s own Edmund Wilson ’16.

Wilson, in fact, occupies a special place in the annals of independent scholarship. He seems to have been, if not the first, certainly one of the first, to use the term, which he applied to the classical scholar Paul Elmer More in an essay on the occasion of More’s death in 1937. More, a former editor of The Nation, today is a somewhat forgotten figure, but in the 1920s and ’30s, he was a friend and colleague to many top classical and religious scholars. When More died, T.S. Eliot wrote an appreciation of him in PAW that is notable for being at least as dry as it was appreciative.

More lived in Princeton and maintained a symbiotic relationship with the University, lecturing occasionally on Greek philosophy and the history of Christianity, advising students, and moving in the same social circles as many faculty members. Indeed, it was in the company of Dean Christian Gauss that Wilson paid the visit to More on which he based that 1937 essay, “Mr. More and the Mithraic Bull” (included in Wilson’s book The Triple Thinkers). “He was himself not really typical of the American academic world,” wrote Wilson. “He was an independent scholar, who had denounced in the most vigorous language the lack of sincerity and the incompetence of the colleges.” The identity of an independent scholar seems to have been formalized in the late 1970s and early ’80s, as a practical response to the fact that universities were producing far more Ph.D.s than the job market could absorb. “I think it came about because the university system was turning out people who had certain expectations, certain training, that the times frustrated,” says Erlich. “I don’t think Paul Elmer More was frustrated. I think he had the best of both worlds.”

Some independent scholars note that academia is not kind to generalists. Freed from the demands of a university, the scholar is free to pursue whatever is of interest at the moment, and to move on when interest wanes. Variety is one of the great pleasures Frisch takes from her work as a freelance translator. Among the books she has translated are a history of Zionism; a cultural history of eunuchs and castrati; and biographies of Nietzsche, Einstein, and Kafka, the last of which won her the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize. Each of these books required considerable background research, which means that Frisch has had the pleasure of exploring new fields. This year she has three books coming out: German entertainer Hape Kerkeling’s diary of his walk along Spain’s Camino de Santiago, which has sold 3 million copies in Germany; The Girls of Room 28, about a group of girls who lived together in the Theresienstadt concentration camp; and a biography of Julius Fromm, a Jewish manufacturer of condoms in Berlin, whose business was seized and “Aryanized” by Hermann Göring, who gave the company to his godmother as a gift. Most academics don’t range that far in a lifetime.

Before turning to translation full time, Frisch spent 20 years teaching at colleges, including Columbia and Haverford. While she doesn’t miss the politics of the academic world, she does miss the camaraderie — or she did, until she joined the Princeton Research Forum and the PEN American Center. “I welcomed any umbrella organization that would have me — sort of the opposite of Groucho Marx,” she laughs. She recently was chosen to sit on the PEN Center’s jury for its annual translation prize and had the thrill of announcing the winners at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. “Just being able literally to stand up for my profession in such a public setting was really wonderful,” she says.

Still, despite the success she has enjoyed as an independent scholar — in addition to the freedom, she says, she still earns substantial lecture fees and is asked to submit articles for journals — Frisch finds her thoughts turning to teaching. “Sort of crablike, I move sideways toward the academy,” she allows.  

Harrison, the subject of Jeff Perry’s life’s work, surely would have appreciated the labors of these independent scholars and recognized the obstacles they face. A lifelong autodidact, he worked almost entirely outside the academy, acknowledging its existence only in order to chastise those academics he regarded as pompous frauds. Indeed, one of the most moving passages in Perry’s biography of Harrison is his description of the lengths to which working people were willing to go in order to learn about fairly abstruse subjects. In Harrison’s day, New York City bustled with night schools, lyceums, and parlor discussion groups. It was nothing for Harrison to give 10 or even 20 lectures in a single week, and he never seemed to lack for an audience of independent scholars.

So why isn’t Harrison better known today? Partly it’s due to his rejection of Christianity, which meant turning his back on the most powerful institution in the black community. He also was an independent thinker who did not hesitate to criticize the people who might have championed him and his work after his sudden death, from a ruptured appendix, in 1927 at the age of 44. (Referring to Booker T. Washington’s willingness to tolerate abuse, Harrison said that some black leaders “have a wishbone where their backbone ought to be.”)

For Perry, Harrison’s lack of notoriety today could be an opportunity: It means there is a wealth of rich but little-known material to use in the second volume of his biography. Perry plans to spend the rest of his life finishing that and working on a biography of his own mentor, the late independent scholar Theodore Allen, whose work argues that race — whiteness and blackness — was “invented” as a means of social control. “Ted Allen’s work utterly threatens 95 percent of the historians in this country because he challenges their work,” says Perry.  

Prepared for the day that the second volume of the Harrison biography is done, Perry’s basement contains a large archive of various collected papers touching upon matters of race and class. He has some 400 file boxes stacked to the ceiling — literally — that include papers dealing with his own life of activism, the singer Alberta Hunter, and communism. Perhaps most intriguingly, he has 10 boxes of papers from the Weathermen, from the time the 1970s radical group went underground. He got them from an old friend and onetime Harvard student who was national secretary of Students for a Democratic Society.  

It’s all enough to keep Perry busy for years. And, like any self-respecting independent scholar, he really can’t imagine life any other way. 

Merrell Noden ’78 is a frequent PAW contributor.

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