'The Aesthetic Value of Some Aesthetic Judgments'

Stanley Kauffman tells a story about the comedic centenarian George Burns, whose song-and-dance partner in vaudeville stuttered when speaking but was fluent when singing. Kauffmann writes: 

“One night, when they were on tour and were sharing a hotel room to save money, they got back to the hotel after the last show. George stopped in the bar for a drink, and Harry went up to their room. Two minutes later Harry came running into the bar, trying to tell George something but stammering badly. ‘Sing it, Harry,’ said George. Harry paused, took a deep breath, and warbled: ‘We’ve been robbed.’”

 

Kauffmann’s gloss: “Somewhere in this anecdote is a point worth remembering by the writers and readers of criticism.” He tells the story in his essay “The Critic As Writer: Four Notes,” published in the Winter-Spring 2003 issue of Salmagundi. Kauffmann (1916-2013) was the film reviewer at The New Republic from 1958 until his death.

 

I touched on this theme in a post last week and a reader objected, arguing for the centrality of criticism regardless of how well or poorly it is written. It’s not a subject I choose to debate except to say I try to avoid lousy writing in any form. If our intent is reading for pleasure, whatever we mean by that, why would we choose to read the literary analog of atonal feedback? Criticism will always be secondary and parasitic, maintaining its existence by feeding off a host. The least we can ask is that it be written in clear, interesting prose. Explaining the title of his essay, Kauffmann writes:

 

“The distinction rankles. Once again I’ve read on a book jacket that the author is ‘a writer and critic.’ This distinction between writer and critic is not only a jolt to the critical ego, it is an astigmatic obstacle to the reader’s full appreciation of the best criticism, and it softens the demands that the reader ought to be making on the critic.”

 

The poet Joshua Mehigan tells us Edgar Bowers once wrote to him in a letter: “I don’t know much about [the magazine] Poets and Writers (though one doesn’t have to know much to find the name amusing) . . .”

 

Kauffman’s first culprit in the metastasizing of unreadable criticism is, obviously, the academy. “Academics in every humanistic field,” he writes, “rank readability low among their criteria. Partly this is a case of untalented persons safeguarding their lack of talent.”

 

Kauffmann, a career journalist, next blames journalism: “The chief defect in journalistic criticism is a mirror-image of the academy's chief defect. Flossy writing, sprightly or sulphurous or both, is journalism's counterpart of professorial sludge. Readability is held to be the prime asset, sometimes the only one.” Kauffmann unfairly identifies Beerbohm as an aesthetic dilettante when he writes criticism, but let it pass. I would rather read Beerbohm over George Bernard Shaw any day.

 

“The venerable gibe that critics are failed artists is true, but incomplete,” Kauffmann writes. “The good critic is not a failure in the art of critical writing.”

 

The names of superior literary critics come promptly to mind: Dr. Johnson, William Hazlitt, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, V.S. Pritchett – academics, journalists and otherwise. Kauffmann concludes his essay:

 

“[A]ll the above is not an argument to view even the best criticism as equivalent to the best art. It is an attempt to underscore the aesthetic value of some aesthetic judgments. It is to maintain – again -- that one can read some critics as one reads any good book. Publishing people can forget the ‘writer and critic’ distinction. ‘Writer’ will do.”

 

[Salmagundi has been published since 1969 by Robert Boyers at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. That’s where I earned my B.A. in English at age fifty in 2003.]