'An After-Hope to Please'

Several readers have quibbled with the late Oscar Mandel’s assertion that “literature exists to make men happy.” Oscar celebrates the “pleasure-giving capacity” of books, as I quoted him writing in Thursday’s post. I knew such statements would provoke certain categories of readers. Many confuse pleasure derived from reading with titillation, escape or distraction, something like the marketing pitch for so-called “beach books,” what my father would have called “a stupid waste of time.” Rudyard Kipling said in his lecture to students, "The Uses of Reading" (1912): 

“There is, or there was, an idea that reading in itself is a virtuous and holy deed. I can’t quite agree with this, because it seems to me that the mere fact of a man’s being fond of reading proves nothing one way or the other. He may be constitutionally lazy; or he may be overstrained, and so take refuge in a book to rest himself. He may be full of curiosity and wonder about the life on which he is just entering; and for that reason may plunge into any and every book he can lay hands on, in order to get information about things that are puzzling him, or frightening him, or interesting him.”

 

I understand a priggish suspicion of pure pleasure and pleasure-seeking. Unregulated hedonism is no solid foundation for a life well-lived. Pleasure is complicated. I find varying sorts and degrees of pleasure in books as miscellaneous as Ecclesiastes, Montaigne, Spinoza’s Ethics, Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War stories, Yeats’ poems and the Parker novels of Donald Westlake. Perhaps a redefinition of pleasure is called for. Walter de la Mare writes in his essay “A Book of Words” (Pleasures and Speculations, 1940):

 

“[O]ne is tempted — though it might be dangerous — to maintain that the best books in the world were written chiefly for pleasure and with an after-hope to please.”