In his final months, Anthony Hecht hoped to write an essay, “De Gustibus,” on a rich, contentious subject: “how deeply personal, and often irrational, are our judgments of taste.” In a letter to the literary scholar Eleanor Cook, dated August 10, 2004, Hecht reveals his recent diagnosis with lymphoma, the disease that would kill him two months later. He doesn’t linger on the news but reports he is assembling notes for the essay, which he hopes will distinguish between taste and critical judgment. About taste, he says,
“[W]e we are sometimes
very defensive, and about which we sometimes feel vulnerable, residing as these
judgments do in some highly private inwardness, deeply severed from what we
normally think of as our faculty of judgment.”
All of us are conflicted and
even guilt-ridden about at least some of our literary tastes, or the lack there
of. At the most blatant, think of the guy who publicly proclaims Joyce or James
his favorite novelist while privately relishing Stephen King. Face it: we all
go slumming on occasion and we’re all guilty of self-protecting snobbery. There’s
another, subtler form. Just the other day, a reader told me he has been reading
Turgenev and Chekhov this summer. We exchanged thoughts and suggestions on the
latter and he mentioned having read Fathers and Sons and The Torrents
of Spring by the former. It was time for confession:
“I’m not a great admirer
of Turgenev. The failing is mine, I understand. I often find him dull — a
heretical statement in some quarters.”
I can’t raise a critical defense of my taste and won’t waste time trying. I read Chekhov every week. I haven’t returned in years to Turgenev. I don’t think he is a “bad” writer. Henry James loved him – the man and his work. My inability to read his fiction with pleasure and admiration reveals some kink in my “private inwardness.” When I was young and still cared about “image,” what people thought of me, I could never have made such an admission. Now I realize no one gave a damn, and they still don't. Literature is not a science, and readers and critics are not scientists. We bring to the page a deep reservoir of weaknesses and strengths, knowledge and prejudice. In my experience, bookish tastes can change but only after years of reading.
[You can find Hecht’s letter to Eleanor Cook in The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht (ed. Jonathan F.S. Post, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).]
Related: Terry Teachout likes to say that there's really no such thing as a "hidden pleasure." In other words, one likes what one likes and one doesn't like what one doesn't like, and there's an end on't (as Dr. Johnson would say). Just be upfront about what you like. No need to be embarrassed about your personal tastes.
ReplyDeleteTurgenev strikes us as dull because we usually read him around the same time we discover Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Chekov, Pushkin and Gogol. Turgenev is a gentler soul than these. His reputation, as it comes down to us, is inflated, because he was the first Russian novelist to be widely translated into English (I assert this without looking it up, but I believe it's true.)
ReplyDeleteHenry James and others praised him, I suspect, partially out of surprise that a barbaric country like Russia could produce a writer of such subtle artistry.
It wasn't until 1912 that Constance Garnett published the first of the translations that introduced Europe and America to the big guns of Russian literature. The author of "Sportsman's Sketches" suffers greatly by comparison.
Turgenev is well worth reading, but he is not of the stature of his monumental Russian contemporaries and those who followed. He was just first out of the English-translation gate.
Or, dear Faze, perhaps you just don't like Turgenev? I say this with a genuine feeling of understanding. I think one loses the plot, so to speak, when one starts speaking with "we" and "us" and diagnosing societal or cultural or linguistic values (and other things likely to be far beyond one man's purview). When it comes to taste, I think it's wise to speak only for ourselves and let our arguments stand on that.
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