A Voice from the Attic

Robertson Davies

• Publisher: RosettaBooks
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780795352478
• eBook ISBN: 9780795352317
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A collection of essays "filled with pleasantly rambling opinions about everything from self-help books to erotica" from the celebrated Canadian author ( The Chronicle Journal).
 
An urbane, robust, and wonderfully opinionated voice from Canada, sometimes called "America's attic," speaks here of the delights of reading, and of what mass education has done to readers today, to taste, to books, to culture. With his usual wit and breadth of vision, Robertson Davies ranges through the world of letters—books renowned and obscure, old and recent; English, Irish, Canadian, and American writers both forgotten and fondly remembered.
 
"Sweet reason in the raiment of well-woven prose? Most assuredly. Good humor agraze over broad literary demesnes? No doubt of it. Forgotten popular favorites rescued and rehabilitated? Certainly. A parade of agreeable prejudices? He would not be a true Canadian if he did not have them. Lightheartedness where needed? Yes. Seriousness where it counts? Yes. Wit, satirical touches, firm indignations, sound sense, good taste, judiciousness, cosmopolitan breadth of view, urbanity, sanity, unexpected eccentricities, educated humanism? By all means. It is indeed by all these means and more that this book of essays and observations bestows its multiple benefactions, and anyone picking it up is bound north to pleasure and profit."— The New York Times

VIII
Spelunking on Parnassus

If this were a book about writing, it would be almost obligatory to end it with a chapter called The Writer Today, or perhaps The Writer’s Position. But it is principally a book about reading, and the reader of today is not often so self-conscious as to ask himself whether he is different from the reader of yesterday. As for his position, he is not aware that he has one. His modesty is to be praised, and perhaps I should not tamper with it. For twenty-five hundred years the writer was similarly innocent. When Ovid was exiled to Tomi by Augustus, he did not think that the writer’s position had deteriorated; he simply thought he had been kicked out. When the plague closed the theaters, Shakespeare did not prate about the writer’s position; he thought business was bad. But in the past century critics and literary journalists have made the writer a present of this mysterious Position, and writers who (in William Faulkner’s phrase) enjoy being writers have taken a simple delight in it. It asks nothing of the mind or the creative powers; it is a form of class-consciousness. Those who love not the art in themselves but themselves in art are pleased with such gauds.

The reader has as yet no Position, and God forbid that I should put it into his head that he needs one. The only result would be organization and hubbub of a sort which could do nothing but discourage the clerisy, who, as I hope I have made clear, cannot exercise their influence by gang methods. But in this final chapter I want to discuss several things which concern both writer and reader. The process will not be a dignified ascent of Parnassus, but an exploration of some of its caves. Such ill-lit and sometimes dangerous scrambling through the bowels of mountains used to be called spelaeology, but of late it has become a sport more cheerfully called spelunking. I propose to do some spelunking on Parnassus. Where shall we begin?

Rebellion against Mediocrity

Let us turn again to the clerisy. If this description applies, as I have said, to people who read with some degree of seriousness but who are not personally engaged in the production or criticism of writing, can the clerisy be considered to have any existence? Is it anything more than a flattering name for the vast disorganization of middlebrows? And even though it can be shown that it existed once, can it ever again be an influence in North American life?

It exists, but is not conscious of its power. If it had to express the taste of its majority, and if that taste were determined by ballot, probably it would emerge most of the time as upper-middlebrow. But no such necessity weighs upon the clerisy; freedom and individuality of taste are among its distinguishing marks. Its power is not that of the pressure group, the national organization with covens of zealots in every city of twenty-five thousand or over, engaged in formal discussions and the passing of resolutions. The clerisy does not nag its elected representatives or send urgent telegrams to its government. It is an element which exists, only as individual men and women, in every part of the population, and its action is that of a leaven. It is a leaven which has often in the past, and may once again, leaven the whole lump. Acting simply as individuals, the clerisy could be influential if it chose to assert itself in the rebellion already well begun by a number of serious American thinkers against the lumpishness, the dowdy triviality, the shoddy expertise, and the lack of foundation which bedevils so much of North American education.

This rebellion, the campaign of which has been set forth in Jacques Barzun’s The House of Intellect, to name but one important book, has dwelt on the dark side of North American intellectual life. Doubtless such emphasis on what is wrong is necessary if we are to be aroused to put it right. But there is a danger in concentrating on what is wrong. It tempts us toward a luxury of despair; the people of the United States, perhaps more than any other nation in history, love to abase themselves and proclaim their unworthiness, and seem to find refreshment in doing so; let us not wallow in a deliciously frightening sense of intellectual inadequacy and then pass on to some new and more fashionable mortification. That is a dark frivolity, but still frivolity. We must avoid the temptation to regard our conviction of sin as an end in itself, and not as a preliminary and a means to redemption. Are things really so black as they are painted?

Do the Other-directed Enjoy It?

A widely read and much discussed book was published in 1950 by a professor of social science at the College of the University of Chicago, and two associates, called The Lonely Crowd; it was a study of the changing American character. Its range and implications are wide, but what has stuck in public consciousness is its concept of the “other-directed person.” Professor Riesman and his colleagues took pains to define their concept, which was by no means so alarming as the sense in which it is now popularly used. The “other-directed person” has come to mean the man or woman who is influenced in the important and unimportant things of life by the attitudes of his “peer-group”—the people of his own age and status—more than by any personal sense of morality or responsibility. In The Lonely Crowd it is made clear that the “other-directed person” is emerging, and at the time of writing was to be found only in a few big cities. The authors have taken pains to write of him as neutrally as possible, saying only what he is, rather than what he may become or what he may do to society. But such is the desire to be in the swim, even when the water is dirty and the current is going in the wrong direction, that the notion of the “other-directed person” has achieved a continental popularity, and it is almost a matter of civic pride for every modest settlement to claim a few, just as it must have its delinquents. There are fashions in anxiety and even in degradation.

The other-directed person undoubtedly exists; he has always existed, in some degree, but nobody has thought him sufficiently numerous or significant to arouse disquiet. In less nervously democratic ages the other-directed person was recognized as second rate and unworthy of much notice. Is he utterly sunk in his other-directedness? Does he really like being other-directed? If so, why are books about notably inner-directed persons—Clarence Day’s father, and Auntie Mame, to name but two—so popular? Maybe the other-directed person would like to be inner-directed but does not know how. What accounted for the success of a series of movies about an inner-directed and awesomely intellectual man called Mr. Belvedere, who shamed and rasped all the good, simple folk with whom he came in contact? In those movies not merely was Mr. Belvedere endured by the people around him; they were convinced that he was really a “good guy.” If intelligent, self-determined individualists can be popular heroes in books and on the screen, who doubts that a great many Americans really admire them? They may not admire them to the point of wishing to be wholly like them, but they acknowledge their existence and their value.

Gloom always confers prestige on the gloomy. Lashing the follies of the time, and prophesying woe are impressive pursuits that appeal to our North American masochism. It is immeasurably more difficult to hold the balance truly, and it is the hardest thing of all to avoid underestimating the intelligence of other people. I do not suggest that Jacques Barzun or David Riesman do so; their attitudes have been clearly stated. But the people who seize upon their ideas, without troubling to understand them fully or to make them their own, are apt to underestimate the intelligence of others, and to exaggerate threats which are too often projections of their own anxiety and sense of insufficiency.

Is the Gloom Justified?

The dismay which is so often expressed about the low estate of reading on this continent may well be such an exaggeration, such an underestimation. Statistics are frequently offered on this subject. One “survey” says that only seventeen per cent of people in the United States and eighteen per cent in Canada are reading books at any given time; the same “survey” says that in England fifty-five per cent are so occupied. It is easy to feel humiliation when we are told that Denmark has seven times as many bookshops per capita of population as the United States—but the humiliation does not seem to call into being more bookshops, or better ones. In 1958, it appears, a nonesuch called the Average American read only seven books. Paul Blanshard says that buying books is “almost a monopoly of the cultural upper ten per cent of the population.”

Well, what about it? This is a matter on which statistics are of little use. Would the statistically minded be happier if the seventeen per cent who are reading were to be raised to England’s fifty-five per cent by a greater consumption of the billion comic books which are printed on this continent yearly? Or by a few more millions added to the twenty million copies of the works of Mickey Spillane which are said to be now in circulation? Statistics on reading are of no value unless we know what is being read.

Over half a billion books in hard covers are produced on this continent every year, and at least a quarter of a billion paperbacks. By no means all of this huge production is trash, and among the paperbacks which must be considered the reading of the young and the people with small incomes, the standard is often very high. A paperback edition of Shakespeare’s Tragedies has sold over a million copies, and a Pocket Book of Verse edited by M. E. Speare has sold more than two million. The paperback section of a good bookshop presents a splendid array of classics, and comparatively new books which have proven their worth, at prices substantially lower than their hard-back originals; a young reader could be fully literate without ever buying a book in hard cover. The great experiment of universal education is advancing, and although some of its effects, as Mr. Barzun so trenchantly describes them, are shocking and dispiriting, a greater part of the population is certainly reading today than was the case, proportionately, a century ago, and there is evidence that they are reading more good books.

(What is a good book, says the sophist, smiling like a wolf trap. Any book is a good book which feeds the mind something which may enlarge it, or move it to action. A book is good in relation to its reader.)

It is not the purpose of the present work to grapple yet again with the problem of modern education, or to agonize about the other-directed person. Anybody who has been taught to read at all may feel moved to teach himself to read well. Other-directed persons may, if the clerisy will wake up, find themselves directed by “others” who read books. The revolution in communications which was described by Marshall McLuhan cuts two ways; if reading is now on a level with film or television, and if those who set greatest value on reading must realize it, is it not also true that those who chiefly value film and television may come to be interested in reading? The mere convenience of reading as a form of entertainment and instruction gives it an advantage over the other two.

Let us deny ourselves the eerie delights of despair about the shortcomings of others, and get on with our own reading. It is a personal art, and one which we shall spread most rapidly and effectively by doing it ourselves. The first task of the clerisy is not to belabor others to read more, but to improve their own performance. The influence which the clerisy can exert will come by doing, not by exhorting others to do.

An Elite Exists

This sort of argument, I realize, will arouse in some people another of the fears in which the anxiety of our time evinces itself—the fear of an elite. There is, of course, an intellectual elite at work in the world of letters now, and it is principally composed of academic critics. So far as I can see, there is nothing much wrong with it except that it is too small, and too professionally narrow in its concerns. If it can be expanded by the addition of a million or two of the clerisy, literature and criticism will both benefit. There are a hundred elite groups of one sort and another at work in North America today, and without them much necessary work would never be done. It is only when democracy is in the grip of reversed peristalsis that it fears that an elite will rob the Common Man of his presumably God-ordained rights in matters relating to art and letters. The Common Man does not care the toss of a button for such cobwebs. The growth and spread of intellect cannot do a country anything but good, and the Common Man, who is not a fool, knows it.

This book did set out, however, to consider some aspects of writing in the light of the North American world as it is now, after a century of the move toward general literacy. It may be, as Peter De Vries says, that “if there is any one major cause for the spread of mass illiteracy it’s the fact that everybody can read and write.” It could also be that the other-directed person is merely a glossier version of that section of the populace which used to be called weak-minded. Need we dread it if we are ourselves reasonably strong-minded? But whatever the truth of the matter, writing and the writer have obviously been influenced by the growth of literacy, and it is of interest to look at some of the ways in which this influence has been exerted.

Fortunate Time for Writers

The writer’s chances of having his work published are better today than they have ever been. Nobody knows this better than the book reviewer. It is said by Paul Blanshard in The Right to Read that seventy-five per cent of the books published today get no reviewing attention; even the small number of publications which do nothing else cannot hope to consider more than a few of the books which reach them. What are literary editors to do? Only their wildly variable best. It was suggested by the late Alfred Knopf that books should be graded like eggs, and that publishing houses should not offer as First Class what they well know to be Fifth. But of course publishers cannot agree about standards for grading, and even if they could, writers would shriek like mandrakes uprooted if their work were sent into the world marked anything less than Strictly Fresh.

Anything which is not ridiculously incompetent has a chance of being published. Part of the reason is economic; publishers must bring out a certain number of books in order to operate efficiently, and when good books cannot be had, books which are less than good get their chance.

There has been a remarkable increase in journalistic books, which deal with immediately important aspects of politics, or record some new feat of exploration. They have their popularity, if any, within a few months and die. Similarly, there has been a rise in the production of books of the type discussed in the chapter called Enjoying and Enduring, which offer new hope for the fat, or the arthritic, or the heartsore. Some of the writers of such books must do well out of them, for they sell in large numbers, and a really valuable one, like Dr. Edmund Jacobson’s You Must Relax, may hold the market for twenty-five years and run through several editions.

Amateur Autobiographers

Then there are the amateurs, usually people who have lived the greater part of a life of some distinction and want to tell about it. They have been politicians, and they are greatly concerned about keeping the record (where is this potent “record” about which politicians feel so much concern?) straight, which means favorable to themselves. Or they have been great physicians, or sportsmen, or generals who have fought the enemy with their swords and now want to fight their colleagues with the mightier pen. Or they have been actors, or singers, or society hostesses whose recollections are a welter of great names and wilted witticisms. There is an increasing number of Revenge Books, in which ex-husbands, ex-wives, and children tell of their agonies with somebody well-known and generally respected. Some are the work of ghosts, and as even with the best ghosts, we see through them. But most of them are the almost unaided work of people who have no true skill in writing.

This is not to say that they are all bad or ill-written books. Some are hopeless, of course—the depressing products of trivial minds. But many are the work of people who have a talent which they have not troubled to cultivate or refine, and though their books are readable, they are disappointing. Most of them have a good story to tell, and a few have some grace of expression, but they do not know how to shape a book. Like amateur paintings, their work often has a surface charm but lacks enduring interest; it is not talent that is lacking so much as professional skill, practice, and application.

Their commonest fault is that they are short-winded; they begin well, but they cannot stay the course. The early chapters of their books are often excellent. Scores of them begin their books with descriptions of childhood which make us catch our breath again and again with their felicity and sympathy and humor, but as soon as maturity and fame have been reached, the books trail off into catalogues of names, experiences dully and cautiously described, and reticences which irritate the reader, however desirable they may seem to the writer.

Does the fault lie in the pattern of life itself? Are we so much more perceptive and individual as child...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Prologue
• I A Call to the Clerisy
• II Enjoying and Enduring
• III Ovid Is Not Their Master
• IV From the Well of the Past
• V Making the Best of Second Best
• VI The Hue and Cry after a Good Laugh
• VII In Pursuit of Pornography
• VIII Spelunking on Parnassus
• Epilogue
• An Informal Bibliographical Note