THE UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN was published for fifteen years by a brilliantly cranky professor named Richard Mitchell. By the end of its run, in 1991, the pamphlet would be known as the first desktop-designed sheet to have subscribers on six continents; but it was born in 1976 (before the Mac revolution), when the good professor bought a printing press and learned to set type by hand. Mitchell’s burning lacerations of abuses of English by people in the public-schooling racket — their sloppy grammar, slippery logic, and bureaucratic doublebabble — are polemical classics. He started with satire of administrators at New Jersey’s Glassboro State College (now called Rowan University), where he taught, and ended with four expansive essays on the Eros and Psyche chapters in Apuleius’ Golden Ass. His theme, from start to finish, was education, and anyone interested in what’s wrong with American schools should read him.
Why a schoolmarmish name like “Grammarian”? Well, a passage from Ezra Pound c. 1929 touches what Mitchell is driving at: “It has to do with maintaining the very cleanliness of the tools, the health of the very matter of thought itself. Save in the rare and limited instances of invention in the plastic arts, or in mathematics, the individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws, without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati. When their work goes rotten — by that I do not mean when they express indecorous thoughts — but when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.”
Mitchell died of diabetes complications on December 27, 2002. Our editor has dedicated a novel to him.
THIS PAGE IS OLD! THE NEW AND REALLY MUCH BETTER VERSION IS OVER HERE.
I never took a course from Mitchell, but I did hear the old man give a fiery speech once in California, and afterwards I made a point of dropping in on Mitchell’s classes whenever I found myself near Philadelphia. One of Mitchell’s former students gives a good description of his “Adolescent Literature” class, which I guessed had more to do with happy stories of the birth of kings than with zits and slumber parties:
“Quite right — nothing adolescent about it!” answered Karen Nolan. “The focus was on the child’s search for his or her own fire, and then the struggle to keep it from being stolen. The same themes ran through all three classes I had with him, and those were all the big topics — freedom, the individual, love, happiness. He seemed to always be thinking of those things, and it didn’t matter if we were reading A Tree Grows in Brooklyn or Antigone. I loved that.”
Peter Hoh writes: “I remember his theory that books too dangerous to the established order always ended up bearing the stigma of ‘children’s literature.’ This was a way to keep the books from being taken too seriously, lest they actually prod adults to reexamine their lives, and the culture in which they lived. I think we were reading Huck Finn at the time.”
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These essays are designed to be printed:
We owe the images of the first Underground Grammarian, above, to Mark Alexander. Alexander has scanned in all of Mitchell’s writing — the full run of the Grammarian, and all four books.
We owe the snapshot of Mitchell signing a book at a “Grammarian picnic” to a Radio Free Mike reader from a few years ago, whose name we’ll be glad to attach to this page if he identifies himself again.
Other links:
Ursula Stange’s visual reproductions of a few Underground Grammarians in Adobe Acrobat
Torsten Seeman’s collection of (almost all) the books in a couple of formats
Robert Kern Curtis’ collection of a few later essays
Mitchell’s books have also been republished in paperback by A Common Reader’s Akadine Press. Simply search for his name. Thanks to everyone who signed the Guestbook in favor of reprinting his stuff, though I’m not sure how much credit we can take.
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