The Basement of Enjoyment

"Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can't be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment."

CLIVE JAMES
Cultural Amnesia, p. 127

One of the high points of last week's Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing for me was attending John Wilson's discussion of book reviewing. Wilson, amiable and erudite, is the editor of Books & Culture, making him both a reviewer and a master of reviewers. (His re-cap of the festival is now online.) In the session, he read an essay of Orwell's on book reviewers, then unloaded a stack of prospective volumes onto the table, explaining how he'd approach the problem of reviewing each one -- whether it should be noticed, and if so what kind of notice it should receive (and when), and to whom the review should be assigned. As an inveterate reader of reviews -- a fan of the genre, if you will -- I was in heaven. One thing was clear. In the house of reading enjoyment, Wilson is nowhere near the basement. The task of criticism is a labor of love.

This is sharply at odds with the idea of critics as a bitter lot, working out their spite at the expense of hapless authors whose only crime was to create. It also gives the lie to the notion that critics are, first and foremost, failed or frustrated artists, operating on a hatred for the success of other writers rather than a love for the written word. Wilson was quick to point out that there's little money to be made in book reviewing, especially at the entry level. The only reason to persevere is because you enjoy reading and writing about good books.

When you write a book, you hope for good reviews, realizing that in many cases you'll be lucky to receive any at all. You want praise, not criticism. So the pressure for authors to "play nice" with one another is considerable. You don't trash your friends' books in public, obviously, and you avoid criticizing anyone you happen to know (or are likely to meet).

I find myself operating more on more on these principles. I used to be quick with a critical observation, back when the possibility of being the butt of someone else's observations seemed more remote. With a book out and more to come, I've grown reticent, aware of my own vulnerability. When asked over dinner recently whether I'd liked a particular book (not written by a friend, not even by someone I'd met in person), I answered in the negative and then spent the next five minutes sputtering out qualifiers, so that by the end I'd made it sound like, no, I hadn't liked the book, but the problem was surely with me, since any reasonable person would have admired it.

In private, though, I still blame the sterile, if only to preserve my capacity for praising the vital. I'm convinced that the critical faculty is essential to reading pleasure -- that the joy grows as the "gift for criticism" is exercised. Greater knowledge breeds deeper appreciation. People who lack such knowledge -- whether writers or readers -- are like spectators at a game whose rules they understand imperfectly. When a startling play impresses the crowd, they are likewise impressed, but the subtleties of play are lost on them. The only problem with the analogy is that, when it comes to sports, such spectators rarely abandon the bleachers for the field, attempting to play. In art they often do, passing their bland, basement aesthetic on to those who know no better.