'Entertain As Well As Illuminate'

“I was the sort of boy who always connected life and art, mixing them up, feeling the way art lives in time and out of it, just like the human mind and imagination.” 

Spend enough time reading enough books and you will encounter a strangely familiar character: a funhouse mirror reflection of yourself. He is not identical but close enough, like the image fashioned by a forensic sketch artist. It’s more than mere agreement in tastes. It’s affinity, a brotherly sense of kinship with an author when it comes to language and literature. The American poet David Mason and I share literary sympathies – Yeats, for instance, and Montaigne. Like me, Mason’s approach to books is less unacademic than anti-academic: How does this book touch me? What can I learn from it? Why does thinking about it feel so right? Because the book resonates with an absence in us, not necessarily solving a problem but reassuring us we are not alone. With such writers we feel a metaphysical solidarity.   

 

The sentence at the top is from a lecture-turned-essay “At Home in the Imaginal” collected in Mason’s prose collection Incarnation & Metamorphosis: Can Literature Change Us? (Paul Dry Books, 2023). One is tempted when reading his essays and reviews to transcribe or underline something on every page. This is taken from his introduction, in which Mason defends what he calls the “thisness” of literary works:

 

“Insisting that literary works toe anyone’s political line is not freedom, nor is attacking the human beings who made them. The rush to judgement must be resisted. Literature asks us to slow down, take pleasure in the words that make us who we are, and hopefully be more aware of the planet on which we’re privileged to live.”

 

Another writer with celebrative instincts, one who like Mason (and me) prefers reading and writing about good authors, the grateful, articulate ones who honor the language, is the late Clive James. In “Two Poet-Critics,” Mason takes on James and John Burnside. I have read nothing by the latter but James is an instructive model for anyone writing about books. Mason begins:

 

“Here’s a thought: literary criticism ought to entertain as well as illuminate. That puts most critics out of business on two fronts. So much of our exegesis reads like the minutes of a country club meeting in which we are all agreed on the value of this and that, so little of it chases the vitality literature itself is devoted to. Readers easily offended ought to toughen up and face the world in all its bloodiness. No one has permission to do anything in this life, so you might as well see what you can see, say what you can say, and do so as beautifully as possible.”

 

Entertainment is a dirty word among certain critics and readers, especially academics. Stridency and humorlessness do literature (and readers, especially young readers) no favors. I suspect many dislike James out of envy over his learning, prolific output and quasi-bestseller-dom. They are snobs. With V.S. Pritchett (and now Mason) he is the model for anyone writing a review that will actually be read. I bought James’ Cultural Amnesia in 2007 when it was published and return to it often. In his essay on Eugenio Montale, he writes: 

 

“In any kind of bad art, it is when the gift is gone that the experiment really does take over – the eternally cold experiment that promises to make gold out of lead, and bricks without straw. Leaving coldness aside (and we should leave it aside, because barren artistic experimentation can also be done in a white-hot frenzy), it might be useful to mention that Montale, in another essay, came up with the perfect term for a work of art that had no other subject except its own technique. He called it the seasoning without the roast.”

 

I’m not critic but I do write about books. Mason quotes a well-known line from James that suggests why I miss him: “A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing.”