I have a well-read friend who is impatient with beauty, at least in the literary realm. He is strictly an ideas man. His ideal novel is probably 1984 or one of Dostoevsky’s potboilers. If a book or even a sentence is artful, that’s fine so long as it doesn’t get in the way of the “message,” whereas my idea of a great novelist is Henry James of whom T.S. Eliot famously said, “He had a mind so fine that no idea could violate it.” Do James’ novels contain ideas? Of course. But they never vulgarly push themselves to the front of the line.
Not wanting
to offend my friend and having no interest in arguing with anyone about much of
anything, I remembered something the late Terry Teachout wrote years ago that clarified
my thinking on the subject. Like me, Terry was an aesthete who wanted nothing
to do with aestheticism. I found his 2014 essay “Confessions of an Aesthete,”
published in Commentary:
“It’s not
that aesthetes are hostile to ideas. But it’s part of aesthetic wisdom that
there is great danger in allowing ideas alone to take the reins and ride
mankind, since too often they end up riding individual men and women into mass
graves.”
For some of
us, art gives pleasure. That’s why we read Nabokov, listen to Mingus and watch
John Ford movies. But America, Terry observes, remains to some degree a “can-do,
no-frills culture,” and for some of us, “It’s not enough that art should please
us: We want it to improve us, to make
us smarter and richer, and maybe even thinner.” I hear the Teachout voice in that,
loud and clear, and perhaps an echo of the man whose biography he wrote, H.L.
Mencken. His essay is rich – here it comes – in ideas:
“If the
characteristic error of conservatives is to be indifferent to serious art, then
the characteristic error of liberals is to instrumentalize it. Not since the
days of the Popular Front has there been such widespread suspicion on the left
of the notion that great art can exist in a realm independent from that of
politics.”
Not only can
but must. Do you see why I miss Terry?
1 comment:
Hear hear. Perhaps there is a middle way. Speaking of literature, specifically, Italo Calvino called it "a search for the book hidden in the distance that alters the value and meaning of the known books." I like that. The notion of a book as a kind of talisman. Pleasure in the reading, pleasure in the knowledge that both the reader and the art are participants in a kind of game spanning ages.
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