'A Magnetism, an Ardor, a Refusal to Be False'

 “It’s against his nature to be a critic—he is too grateful.” 

That’s from one of Elias Canetti’s notebooks, collected in Notes from Hampstead (trans. John Hargraves, 1998). While I admire the work of a handful of critics – Dryden, Johnson, Winters, Cunningham, a few others – criticism has always seemed secondary, almost beside-the-point. It’s assumed that if you write about books you are a critic, and that’s a mistake. I’m no critic and have no theories. Temperamentally, I prefer to write about good books or even mediocre books with good passages. I feel grateful when I read something funny or incisive, or that sparks a previously unsuspected insight. I like the mingling of surprise with the established and traditional.

 

The world is overrun with lousy books. They vastly outnumber the good ones. That’s true of all human creations. I’m happy to briefly dismiss rubbish but I don’t want to linger over it. Canetti’s observation is without context. He may be dismissing his grateful critic or he may be writing in admiration. He reminds me of something Marianne Moore (surely a grateful critic) writes in the forward of her first and perfectly titled collection of prose, Predilections (1955):

 

“Silence is more eloquent than speech – a truism; but sometimes something that someone has written excites one’s admiration and one is tempted to write about it . . . one feels that what holds one’s attention might hold the attention of others. That is to say, there is a language of sensibility of which words can be the portrait – a magnetism, an ardor, a refusal to be false . . .”

 

What a joy and privilege it is to read and write whatever one wishes, with the reasonable hope that others, a few, will share your enthusiasm – “ardor.” Moore’s point, made almost half a century before blogs mutated into being, is that literature is a shifting network of affinities among readers and writers.