`Sense and Cheer'

What attracted me to Oscar Mandel’s The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation was the title. In the last year I’ve looked at a lot of Dutch and Flemish paintings, especially 17th-century still lifes, because they give me quiet but intense pleasure. The paintings of gooseberries and asparagus spears by Adriaen Coorte, for instance, seem to me perfect in their numinous composure, and I enjoy looking at them for the same reason I enjoy reading, say, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Matsuo Bashō. In addition, writers important to me – Zbigniew Herbert, Guy Davenport, Theodore Dalrymple, among others – have expressed admiration for Dutch still-life painting. I enjoy being in such company, while avoiding the company of most art critics and historians. Like wallflowers at the dance, they don’t seem to know how to have a good time.

Mandel’s book is unapologetically polemical – or, rather, polemically anti-polemical. Born in Belgium, he is emeritus professor of literature at the California Institute of Technology and, apparently, an old-fashioned polymath. In The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art, he takes on the academic wet blankets who have sought to turn beautiful paintings into coded moralistic tracts (or, in some cases, “prurient innuendo,” in Mandel’s words) which only they, with the gift of art-historical insight, can accurately decode. In the first chapter, Mandel, dismisses these decoded messages “rank platitudes.”

Mandel calls these prigs “the betekenis school.” The Dutch word means simply “meaning.” He accuses them of forever uncovering “odious subtexts” or expressing “indignation at [the painters’] failure to cope with the horrors and miseries of real life.” In the spirit of pleasure and common sense he writes:

“In short, the counter-offensive must continue. We need to search out the basic fallacies of betekenis reasoning, and not rest easy until, moving across the boundary between learned monographs and public life, we have restored sense and cheer to the museums.”

Then Mandel really gets going:

“Does a painter show a person enjoying his pipe in a tavern? Beware! We are looking at a sermon on the evanescence of life and mortal joys. Is a young couple sharing a pretzel at table? Grim! The crookedness of human nature is meant. Do the edibles on a kitchen table and the maid at work look singularly luscious? That is only to warn us against voluptas carnis. Are we tempted to smile at the depiction of a mother wiping her baby’s bottom? Halt! We are being taught that life is no better than dung. Is there charm in the portrayal of a child playing with a toy windmill, and of another fishing in a river? Anything but! Windmills mean foolishness, and fishing means sinful idleness. Does the artist paint a scene of villagers playing with rackets and ball? Look out! We are being lectured on the uncertainty of life. Are we shown an astronomer gazing at the stars, a globe and candle at his side? Only to instruct us that Learning is vanity. Has the artist portrayed a rambunctious kermis? Here comes the Prodigal Son again.”

Mandel memorably refers to “the characteristic twentieth-century aversion to euphoria.” The Pleasure Police are earnestly on the job. Permit me to quote something I wrote last year:

“In The Art of Celebration (1992), the Nabokov scholar Alfred J. Appel Jr. proposes that we devote four or five of our bookshelves exclusively to what he calls “the life-affirming, celebratory works of the twentieth century.” Along with recordings by Louis Armstrong, Ruby Braff and Henry `Red' Allen, and the movies of Astaire-Rogers, Laurel and Hardy, Chaplin and Keaton, Appel suggests appropriate books:

“`Ulysses should occupy a place of honor on the top, shortest Yes Celebratory Shelf, flush left against the varnished wood. Nabokov, a writer whose works I happen to love, should have seven or so inches to himself there, next to Joyce. Hardcover volumes of the collected poetry of W.B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Richard Wilbur will be conspicuous for their handsome, durable spines.'

“Appel is not suggesting we judge literature with a Happy Meter: Life-affirming, good; Nay-saying, bad. In fact, he admires Kafka while placing him, rightly, on the “No” shelf, probably next to Beckett. But assigning Moore to the Yes-saying shelf is appropriate. In 1966, in a letter to Writer’s Digest, she quoted John Cheever approvingly: `I have an impulse to bring glad tidings. My sense of literature is one of giving, not diminishing.’”

(The edition of The Cheerfulness of Dutch Art: A Rescue Operation I’m reading was published in 1996 by Davaco Publishers, in The Netherlands. The company specializes in books devoted to16th and 17th Century Dutch and Flemish Art, and their catalog looks expensively tempting.)