'His Aesthetically Driven Words on Reading'

Yet another vaguely menacing warning from a reader who knows better than I what I should be reading: “You seem intelligent. Why waste your time reading this racist shit? Read Frantz Fanon if you want to learn something.” This was in response to something I had recently written about H.L. Mencken. I remember when Fanon was fashionable, when people who carried around the Grove Press edition of The Wretched of the Earth also conspicuously displayed a copy of Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Though they wished to give the impression that they were readers, these were not the sort of people who enjoyed or had a gift for the art of conversation, so I tended to avoid them.

In his introduction, titled “A Little Book,” to Max Beerbohm: A Kind of Life (Yale University Press, 2002), N. John Hall brings up another reader who seldom had compunctions about telling others what they should and should not read:

   

“In reading Max we might also take a cue from Harold Bloom on reading, even while we acknowledge that Bloom holds no special brief for comedy, is himself not a Maximilian, and has become something of a crank. Yet his aesthetically driven words on reading seem pertinent.”

Hall quotes Bloom quoting Dr. Johnson: “Clear your mind of cant, i.e. of sectarian thinking,” and then quotes Bloom himself (from How to Read and Why – a title that has always offended me): “[H]e urges, Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by your reading.”

For once, Bloom is right on the money. I would add to his proviso: “and by your writing.” Leave people alone. Most are not stupid. Let them make up their own minds. We don’t want to be sermonized. We're not children. Such presumption is an ugly vice. In a review published in First Things, John Wilson correctly notes that “didacticism in fiction is all the rage.” Didacticism, in fact, is the enemy of not just fiction but most of literature. Also its enemy is humor, as exemplified by two of its masters, Mencken and Beerbohm. Hall writes in his introduction:

“A caveat, if you will, about reading Max or looking at his caricatures: you and I must try not to be lulled into acceptance of the received idea that because a thing is amusing, or light, or comic, it is not serious or important.”