'Art Must Be Giving Pleasure'

A reader asks if I can identify the quality in a work of literature that most quickly causes me to stop reading and put the book away. An interesting question, one that is not trivial and may help to define critical standards otherwise unexamined. My first thought was merely sloppy, dull writing – indifferent poetry or prose that lies inertly on the page like a cadaver. There’s no energy, no spark of life. The reader is given no encouragement to sacrifice his time and attention to work not even on life supports. 

To answer my reader’s question more directly, I think the quality described above, when combined with pomposity, kills any good will I can bring to a work of literature, even an individual poem or story read in isolation. Pomposity can be a matter of style or content. To cite a writer who combines both: Ezra Pound. His brand of literary Modernism has emboldened generations of poets and critics to write badly and hold readers in contempt. In his conclusion to Lectures on Shakespeare, perhaps as an antidote to any suggestion of artistic smugness (on his part or Shakespeare’s), W.H. Auden says this:

 

“I find Shakespeare particularly appealing in his attitude toward his work. There’s something a little irritating in the determination of the very greatest artists, like Dante, Joyce, Milton, to create masterpieces and to think themselves important. To be able to devote one’s life to art without forgetting that art is frivolous is a tremendous achievement of personal character. Shakespeare never takes himself too seriously.”

 

I hadn’t thought of this until reading Auden’s observation. After more than four centuries, Shakespeare sounds “natural” – not contemporary, exactly, but without pretensions. He sounds like a reasonable guy talking to us.

 

Auden delivered his Shakespeare lectures in 1946-47 at the New School for Social Research in New York City. He is the poet of the divided self, and he recognizes in Shakespeare a kindred poetic spirit. In addition, Auden was deeply immersed at the time in Kierkegaard, the most incisive psychologist.

 

When Lear calls man a “bare, forked animal,” he hints at our divided nature, and that is Auden’s starting point. Richard II, he writes, “is interested in the idea of kingship rather than in ruling. Like a writer of minor verse -- he is good at that – he is interested more in the idea than the act. He is good at presiding over a tournament, not at taking an action that means something, and his passion for ritual even embraces self-humiliation.”

 

We all know such people. Some of us recognize ourselves in Auden’s analysis. Among bloggers, poets and self-styled bohemians, the type is common – “interested more in the idea than the act.” In his lecture on the play he most admired, Antony and Cleopatra, Auden writes:

 

“Antony and Cleopatra’s flaw, however, is general and common to all of us all of the time: worldliness – the love of pleasure, success, art, ourselves, and conversely, the fear of boredom, failure, being ridiculous, being on the wrong side, dying. If Antony and Cleopatra have a more tragic fate than we do, that is because they are far more successful than we are, not because they are essentially different . . . Every day we get an obsession about people we don’t like but for various reasons can’t leave. We all know about intrigues in offices, museums, literary life. Finally, we all grow old and die. The tragedy is not that it happens, but that we do not accept it.”

 

At the end of his concluding chapter, Auden writes his final sentence: “But in order to continue to exist in any form, art must be giving pleasure.”

 

 [See Auden’s Lectures on Shakespeare (ed. Arthur Kirsch, Princeton University Press, 2000).]

'Moving at Times Into Purpose or Direction'

When Dr. Johnson agreed to write The Rambler essays, he told friends they would serve as “relief” from the all-consuming work on his great Dictionary. For two years, beginning March 20, 1750, Johnson turned out essays every Tuesday and Saturday – 201 of them -- while continuing his solitary labor on the dictionary, which wouldn’t be published until 1755. Johnson’s wife died in 1752. 

Anyone who has written to a regular deadline – a column, blog post or review – will understand the peculiarly unremitting nature of the task Johnson assumed. The work nags and readily becomes obsessive. It also lends purpose and structure to one's life. If not writing, you think about what you will write. Johnson was famously plagued by a fear of idleness, which he associated with madness and defined as “laziness; sloth; sluggishness; aversion from labour.”

 

The title of the essays may sound unusual, perhaps even un-Johnsonian, suggesting self-indulgent incoherence, though others had produced The Tatler and The Spectator earlier in the century. The name should not suggest that Johnson wished his prose “to ramble” without direction. In his biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate notes that he “never tired” of three books we still read today – Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe. Bate writes:

 

“Between a pilgrim, who travels with ‘settled direction’ or aim, and the ‘straggler’ he at bottom felt himself to be (‘one who rambles without any settled direction’) – the definitions are from the Dictionary – there was a middle position, a ‘rambler,’ which would not be claiming too much but which would also not preclude moving at times into purpose or direction.”

 

The best essays mingle waywardness with a plan. Nearly anything can find a place in a good essay, including Johnson’s, but the choices can’t be too rigid or too arbitrary. Johnson navigates this deftly in his periodical essays, as do such later practitioners as William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, Michael Oakeshott and Guy Davenport. Bate characterizes the distinctive tone of The Rambler as one of “psychological shrewdness and somber elevation, of humor and weight of experience, or irony and compassion.” Consider The Rambler #72, published November 24, 1750:

 

“Without good humour, learning and bravery can only confer that superiority which swells the heart of the lion in the desert, where he roars without reply, and ravages without resistance. Without good humour virtue may awe by its dignity and amaze by its brightness, but must always be viewed at a distance, and will scarcely gain a friend or attract an imitator.”

'They Knew More Then Than I Do Now'

More than forty years ago a newspaper editor warned me that the average American reads at a fifth-grade level and will stop reading a sentence if it exceeds fifteen words. Whether or not these statistics were accurate, his point was clear: Keep it simple, keep it brief, make Hemingway your stylistic ideal, not Faulkner. Define your terms. Don’t assume readers will understand your more arcane allusions (Who's “Faulkner”?) or rarified vocabulary (“Rarified”?). Ever since I’ve tried to remain sensitive to the uncertain nature of audience. We can never know precisely its identity, what readers know, and what constitutes “arcane” anyway. 

Not long ago I made a passing reference to Spinoza in a post and a reader wrote to say he didn’t know who that was and had to consult Wikipedia to find out. My reaction was mixed. I assumed the identity of the seventeenth-century Jewish philosopher was sufficiently well known not to require a footnote. Likewise, I further assumed that once a reader learned his identity, he would dig a little deeper in order to learn more about the author of the Ethics. My reader, instead, basically accused me of making a snobbish faux pas.

 

A counter example: earlier this week another reader in an email referred to “brackets.” The context was no help. Why was he referring to an article of punctuation? I wrote back, confessed my ignorance and learned that “brackets” refers to college basketball, a subject about which I know nothing. Nor am I interested in pursuing it. For my reader it is a subject of intense interest.

 

I can’t think of an infallible rule to resolve this dilemma. On the one hand, I don’t wish to insult readers by reiterating what seems obvious (“Montaigne, a French writer”). My impression is that my readers are a rather intelligent bunch, often well-read and inquisitive. This is a site that advertises itself as “a blog about the intersection of books and life.” It’s not Twitter. On the other hand, I don’t wish to lose a reader because I’m being too obscure. Arthur Krystal addressed this situation in a 1999 American Scholar essay, “What Do You Know?” (collected in Agitations: Essays on Life and Literature, 2002). He asks:

 

“Whence came the defiance required to face down facts, to regard with impunity what formerly was part of a traditional humanities education? A number of possible explanations come to mind: the decline of literacy; the ascendancy of technology; the recondite nature of modern science and the increasing specialization of all disciplines, including the humanities; the fall of the public intellectual and ‘man of letters’; the difficulty of texts that seek to explain why reading is so darned difficult; the popularization (and concomitant simplification) of ‘great’ writers; and the fact that many educators have no problem with putting quotation marks around the word great, even when referring to Shakespeare.”

 

Reading literature assumes a balance of confidence and humility on the part of the reader. You agree to read a text that may be alien, sophisticated, difficult. It may challenge your understanding and previous assumptions and exceed your present knowledge. At the same time, it’s an act of faith, especially if the writer is previously unknown to you.

“Inadequacy, of course,” Krystal writes, “can be rectified; the real problem is knowing whether one actually is inadequate where knowledge is concerned. Express dismay that I don’t know the title of the latest self-help book, the name of the hot new rock band, the CEO of some huge corporation, the capital of Mississippi, and my head remains high. Not my bailiwick, I respond cheerily. I don’t need to know that.”

 

Krystal doesn’t claim to supply an easy resolution. Ignorance can be a goad to learning while insulting and angering others. A reader needs to know what’s important to him. Krystal defines some of my my perplexity:

 

“With the exception of a few noted men of letters, we do not know the dead writers, and if we do, it’s a toss-up whether we know more than they did. Whenever I go back to Montaigne, Robert Burton, and Samuel Johnson, it occurs to me that they knew more then than I do now, despite my knowing them.”

'The Messiness of Detail That Life Presents'

My nephew, still in his thirties, writes: “I just finished reading Anna Karenina for the first time. I love it! I am glad that Levin and his wife got to be there with his brother as he was dying.” A friend, closer to my age, has read the first three chapters of Ulysses, and writes the same day: “So far, Stephen Daedalus strikes me as a priggish, navel-gazing jerk. I'll be glad to meet Mr. Bloom tomorrow.” Both appreciate the fundamental appeal of first-rate fiction: scenes of human character and behavior, closely observed. 

I paid attention as a kid when critics and other readers proposed that Tolstoy and Joyce perhaps ranked supreme among novelists. I took that not as pomposity but as a proposition to be explored. Somewhere, while in junior high school, I found a two-volume translation (Maude? Garnett? I don’t know) of Anna Karenina. I remember starting to read it in study hall. After some initial difficulty keeping the Russian names straight, I read it with the alacrity of a potboiler. I was hooked.

 

Ulysses I started reading, I remember, during Israel’s Six-Day War. I was not yet fifteen and by reputation the novel had the allure of being both difficult and dirty. Much of it was lost on me but I liked Joyce’s prose and Leopold Bloom. He seemed like a regular guy, a working stiff like most of the adult males I knew. I would have to read it several more times in subsequent decades. My old Random House copy is crowded with annotations, including notes on paper taped to pages. The book is swollen but intact. It’s no longer a usable reading copy. I keep it more as evidence of early infatuation. I’ll probably never read the novel again, whereas I do reread Tolstoy periodically.  

Early in The Novel, Who Needs It? (Encounter Books, 2023), Joseph Epstein writes: “Critics speak of novels of ideas, novels of character, psychological novels, historical novels, adventure novels—the novel can be all these things, but above all it is the book of life. More than any other literary form, the novel is best able to accommodate the messiness of detail that life presents.”

 

That’s it. Life is messy and orderly, happy and miserable. The novel, with its eighteenth-century lineage and nineteenth-century flourishing, more deftly handles life than other forms of writing, including psychology and philosophy (consider Wittgenstein’s reliance on Tolstoy). Epstein writes:

 

“For the true novelist, self-esteem and so much else in the therapeutic realm is tosh. Life is more complex than the analyses and panaceas of the therapist or the dream of future happiness of his patients. Fate, the great trickster, offers no couch for the resolution of life’s problems. Morality is richer than any fifty-minute session, even twelve years of such sessions, can hope to comprehend. Surely Proust, in this single sentence, came closer to the truth of human existence than all of therapeutic culture: ‘We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey which no one else can make for us, and no one can spare us.’”

 

That’s why we read and reread Conrad, George Eliot, Melville, Giuseppe Tomasi, Henry James, Willa Cather, Proust, Vasily Grossman, Italo Svevo – and Tolstoy and Joyce.                                                                                   

'Of the Mind or of Memory or Invention'

What’s to become of the mildly introverted, privacy-loving, non-aligned personality? He has no taste for soapboxing. Perhaps he doesn’t vote and likely has never joined a political party, a church or even a bowling league. He is happiest reading, enjoying the company of family and friends, and pondering (often mistaken for doing nothing). He has no social media presence and is the diametric opposite of an “influencer.” 

Such thoughts are prompted by Irwin Edman (1896-1954), a name unknown to me until Sunday when Isaac Waisberg sent me a link to Edman’s book Under Whatever Sky (1951).  Isaac is among the internet’s quiet benefactors and asks for nothing in return. His IWP Books publishes volumes long out of print, including titles by Desmond MacCarthy, Jacques Barzun and John Jay Chapman. Edman was a prolific writer and throughout his adult life taught philosophy at Columbia University. Under What Sky collects the columns or brief essays he wrote for The American Scholar, starting in 1945.

 

Edman takes the title of his volume from George Santayana, whose The Philosophy of Santayana (1936, enlarged 1953) he edited for the Modern Library. Like the Spaniard, Edman seems to have been one of nature’s spectators, happiest when observing, not joining the swelter. In his first column, “All Time, All Existence,” he writes:

 

“‘Under whatever sky I had been born, since it is the same sky, I should have had the same philosophy.’ Nothing could better express than this sentence of Santayana’s the ambition and the illusion of the philosophic mind, the aspiration to survey the scene of nature and of life with such candor and exactness that the prejudices of time, place, and temperament will vanish and that the thoughts one speaks will be the thoughts of Nature herself. I have no such illusion.”

 

Edman tells us he will try to attain “the philosophical ambition to see even contemporary things under the aspect of eternity.” He writes “familiar essays” and usually avoids academic sententiousness. In the column titled “Dial Tone,” he describes the reassurance he feels when hearing a dial tone on the telephone, “a pleasure in the recognition, a sense that all is well.” This he likens to the pleasure he sometimes takes in a book:

 

“I have long cherished the belief that in reading one has a similar experience. In the first page, sometimes in the first paragraph, of a writer whom one has never read before, one is aware, in the tone and cadence of the sentences themselves, that one has the dial tone, or, perhaps, that the connection has been made. There will doubtless be a good deal about the book that will be a disappointment: perhaps the tone will be lost or the connection broken. But what a thrill it is to come upon it, if for the moment only.”

 

In the final column, “Conclusion,” Edman refers to his essays as “meditations, these incidental causeries” [OED: “an informal piece of writing, typically humorous and published as a short essay or newspaper column”]. That’s about right. A column written by an academic philosopher today would likely be pretentious, jargon-ridden, vogueish, preoccupied with politics and unreadable by a person outside a university. Edman fashions himself an Everyman, a sort of mid-twentieth-century Montaigne with a hint of Santayana. In “Conclusion,” Edman speculates about the world in 1994 and reveals himself as something of a prophet:   

 

“We are by all the signs moving into an era of standardization, of suffocating order, not altogether caused by external threats of tyranny. Soon play of mind and freedom of imagination may be completely suspect. . . . and tolerance may come to be the sign not of a just but of an empty mind. Only such literary works may be permitted as teach a wholesome doctrine, such as equality or justice, dogmatically defined by government edict. Only such treatises may be permitted as communicate facts it is considered urgent and timely to know. The reflective essay may be forbidden by public opinion if not by law. The merely playful exercises of the mind or of memory or invention may be regarded as truancy from rational behavior. The book that is merely harmless may be judged by that time the most harmful of all.”

'I Shall Not Be Here When You Are Gone'

Some very bright people I know pay attention to dreams, taking them seriously and interpreting them the way they might interpret a poem written in their honor. When I worked half a century ago in a Cleveland bookstore, we sold little pamphlets of dream interpretation, mostly to black customers. The books decrypted dream imagery. The presence of a cat meant thus and such . . . A regular customer explained to me that some people relied on the books when they played the numbers. This was alien to me but I understood it as yet another manifestation of the human urge to make sense of the world. 

My tendency is to think of dreams as intriguing or banal little peeks into the unconscious, but essentially a random firing of electrons, unaccompanied by a definitive scholarly gloss. In other words, entertainment, like an interesting new television streaming service. The other night my brother, who died in 2024, showed up in one of my dreams. We were in the woods behind the house where we grew up. Recounting a dream can be deadly dull, I know, and this one was hardly more than a flickering image. We were going somewhere, not wandering aimlessly, and I was not aware that he was dead. In other words, there was a veneer of realism mingled with fantasy about this brief narrative.

 

I woke in a mood of wonder and sadness. The primal part of me wanted to be comforted, as though Ken had come for a visit and wished to reassure me – of what? The more stringently rational part of me said: “Nope.”

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson returned to his home in Maine from Harvard in July 1892, in time for his father’s death. The poet was twenty-two and would live until 1935. As his biographer Scott Donaldson writes, “EAR would never be entirely quit of his father’s ghost.” In 1921 he wrote a sonnet, “Why He Was There”:  

 

“Much as he left it when he went from us

Here was the room again where he had been

So long that something of him should be seen,

Or felt–and so it was. Incredulous,

I turned about, loath to be greeted thus,

And there he was in his old chair, serene

As ever, and as laconic and as lean

As when he lived, and as cadaverous.

 

“Calm as he was of old when we were young,

He sat there gazing at the pallid flame

Before him. ‘And how far will this go on?’

I thought. He felt the failure of my tongue,

And smiled: ‘I was not here until you came;

And I shall not be here when you are gone.’”

'Clear Away the Obligations in Your Life'

“In order to write, you clear away the obligations in your life. No visits, no meals outside, no fencing practice, no walks. Now you can work, produce something worthwhile. And, onto the wide gray sheet of the day, your mind projects – nothing.”

 

I wish I had logged the number of times someone I interviewed – cop, nurse, musician, plumber – prefaced his conversation with: “I could write a book . . .” I understand this is not a thought-out literary aspiration; rather, an endorsement of one’s experience, a declaration that one’s life has been interesting and worth recounting. Customarily, nothing gets written. I recall only one exception. I interviewed a professor of psychology who also worked as a dance instructor. He actually wrote and self-published a memoir, which I agreed to edit. Often, I wonder how many people ever read, cover to cover, that little book.

 

The passage above is an entry from Jules Renard’s journal dated March 15, 1905. In his commonsensical way, Renard understood how our will subverts our best intentions, how good we are at lying to ourselves. How else to get through life? I mean, if I’m willing to give up fencing practice, shouldn’t I be able to write like Montaigne? Renard concludes his journal entry:

 

“I abolished at a stroke so many things that were important to me: poetry, fencing, fishing, hunting, swimming. When will I abolish prose? And literature? And life itself?”

 

[The Renard passages are taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]