'Mere Gall Is No Better Than Mere Sugar'

“The attendants at literary tea-parties are not, as a rule, readers of books. Reviews of books are more to their taste.”

In my younger years I was an occasional attendee at such gatherings, though most were less tea-parties than beer-and-a-bump soirées. Sometimes a writer was present. I remember Jerzy Kosinski and Anthony Burgess out-drinking everyone and remaining at least technically conscious. But Max Beerbohm identifies the essential quality of such shindigs: book chat, ass-kissing, and more talk of publishers, agents and critics than of actual books. I outgrew my taste for literary stargazing pretty quickly.

Beerbohm is reviewing Maxim Gorki’s play “The Lower Depths” in the December 5, 1903 issue of the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art. Russian literature was in vogue at this time in English society. Constance Garnett was translating Tolstoy, Goncharov, Turgenev and Chekhov, among others. Before taking on the Gorki production, Beerbohm indicts the fashionable crowd:

“Last week I wrote harshly about the English people’s contempt for the things of the mind. But I think I prefer that stolid contempt to the gushing superficial curiosity evinced in certain little private circles. The attitude which may be called ‘the literary tea-party attitude’ seems to me of all attitudes the most dreadful.”

Beerbohm’s experience is true to my own. He recalls “those brief and frantic little conversations into which the guests at literary tea-parties plunge as though they had something worth saying and as though there were something worth hearing” I remember. The rage du jour was Gorki. When young I read his strident stories and plays and remember mercifully little about them. So it is with Beerbohm and his demolition of “The Lower Depths”:

“There must be some kind of artistic unity—unity either of story or of idea. There was be a story, though it need not be stuck to like grim death; or there must be, with similar reservation, an idea. Gorki has neither asset. . . . Enough that he gives us, honestly and fearlessly, ‘a slice of life’? Enough, certainly, if he did anything of the kind. But he doesn’t. ‘The Lower Depths’ is no ‘slice.’ It is chunks, hunks, shreds and gobbets, clawed off anyhow, chucked at us anyhow.”

Beerbohm’s indictment remains pertinent, for ours is an age in which propaganda often supplants the artistically rendered in any form. He dismisses the imitative fallacy:

“We are not at all squeamish. But we demand of the playwright who deals with ugly things, just as we demand of the playwright who deals with pretty things, something more than the sight of his subject-matter. Mere gall is no better than mere sugar. It is worse. Mere sugar is not disgusting. Nor is gall disgusting if it be rightly prepared. In other words, horrible subject-matter ceases to be horrible when it is treated by a fine artist.”

I think first of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Gorky later became one of Stalin’s toadies. In a note to his edition of The Letters of Anton Chekhov (1973) Simon Karlinsky writes:

“Gorky’s anti-intellectualism became more pronounced in subsequent years. One of its ugliest manifestations is described in Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope, in which we find Gorky using his august position in the post-revolutionary literary life to deprive the freezing and starved poet Osip Mandelstam of the pair of trousers he needed to survive through the winter. ‘The trousers themselves were a small matter,’ wrote Mandelstam’s widow, ‘but they spoke eloquently of Gorky’s hostility to a literary trend that was foreign to him.'”

Elsewhere in Hope Against Hope, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports that when informed of the poet Nikolay Gumilyov’s pending execution in 1921, Gorky did nothing. With Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova, Gumilyov was founder of the poetic movement called Acmeism. In 1932, Gorky was decorated with the Order of Lenin, as were, later, Fidel Castro, Erich Honecker, Enver Hoxha, Josip Broz Tito, Ho Chi Minh, Nelson Mandela, Nikita Khrushchev and Stalin.