R. J. Hollingdale

There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the literary scholar George Lyman Kittredge--who, despite never taking a Ph.D., was both the greatest Shakespearean scholar and the greatest Chaucer scholar of his time--being asked why he had never gotten a doctorate.

"Who would examiner me?" he is said to have replied.

I've just become aware of an even more extreme instance of a resume that is, not in the usual direction, misleading.  If, like me, you sometimes nose around the Philosophy section of the book store, you might have noticed that almost all the Penguin editions of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer are introduced and translated by one R. J. Hollingdale.  I own one of them, Schopenhauer's Essays and Aphorisms, which, having begun rereading recently, made me curious about the author of the introduction.  I googled him and soon found myself reading this obituary in The Guardian.

Kittredge had an M.A. and taught at Harvard for nearly fifty years. Hollingdale dropped out of school at age sixteen, found work as a journalist, served in the Royal Air Force, and then, while earning a living, took private German lessons, studied German literature and philosophy, and began making significant contributions to scholarship, including a book, Nietzsche: The Man and His Philosophy, that revived Nietzsche's reputation in the English-speaking world.  Despite lacking a degree of any kind, he was elected the founding president of the Friedrich Nietzsche Society and was a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne.  He also worked steadily as an editor at The Guardian and as a critic for The Times Literary Supplement.  Of the biographical details in the obit, I think I like best a line he evidently liked to deploy at parties.  "A drink?  Oh, ok, just a big one."

The obit says he was a self-made man.  Despite being modified by the phrase "in every sense," it seems an understatement.

 

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