Walter Kerr (1)Critiques

Really good advice from an esteemed critic.

This is not a quick read. However, Mr. Kerr, otherwise the Theatre critic for the New York times, tries to analize the tastes of the USA at large from a New York stand point. As a place to regard the North American mindset, especially that of the very materialistic 1950's and early sixties it will do as well as any. In analysing the differences between "British" concepts of culture, and American concepts of the same, this "Decline" is a useful book. He does trace a coherent line from the assumption that all virtuous activities must be in some fashion useful, to a rather arid and joyless society where "Art" should tick off a number of boxes to be seen as a legitimate activity. What Kerr comes to, in the end is a realisation that the element of playfulness is a far more important element in sanity and engaging artwork, and that Americans of his time found it hard to accept. It was their loss. The sixties were to be a necessary corrective.

A thick book that has left no doubts in my mind what genre I am currently reading. Mr Kerr was a keen student of Literature, and polished his skills in writing and perception as a theatre critic for the New York Times. If you want to know the differences he discerned, this is the book for you. It has been reprinted since my reading.

(Original Review, 1981-05-25)

Here’s a quiz on “sex in literature”. The problem is I don’t know the answers. This comes from Walter Kerr’s 1962 book “The Decline of Pleasure.” He doesn’t present it as a quiz, but merely describes incidents in recent novels and plays that he evidently expects the reader to recognize. I’ve numbered the entries for ease of response.

What do our novels and our plays show back to us? Almost without exception, an image of sex that is violent, frustrated, shabby, furtive, degrading, treacherous, and – more and more – aberrant.

1) The heroine has taken lovers on the lawn beyond counting; she ends in an asylum;
2) The countess requires the ministrations of a homosexual if her nerves are not to give way; his give way, and he hangs himself;
3) The hero finds gratification with a twelve-year-old child, who is more accomplished than he is; she ends a slattern and he a convict;
4) The virile ex-soldier is close to being spastic because he knows that all women want to “cut it off,” the suburban husband is hopelessly and impossibly enamored of the baby sitter, the wife of a distinguished lawyer futilely says “yes” to a stranger in an elevator, one teen-ager is being raped near a wire fence and another is returning from the abortionist, and there is no lasting love in a summer place;
5) The little college teacher hops on one foot outside his best friend’s bedroom, asking in a piping voice, “Are they doing it?” while a girl abandoned by the sailor who has made her pregnant asks snickeringly of a homosexual friend, “But what do they do?”

[2018 EDIT: Let me see. OK, 3) is obviously Lolita. Is 4) all from one single work as it is in a single sentence? Despite the hint at the end, I’m not sure that it is Sloan Wilson’s “A Summer Place,” which I haven’t read; I’m basing my doubts on the Wikipedia summary, which may have left out the sordid details Kerr emphasizes. Remember, this is a book from 1962, so all the examples come from that year or earlier. I imagine most, probably all, are post-WWII.

Is 1) "A Streetcar Named Desire"? Blanche ends in an asylum for sure. Were there countless lovers on the lawn? (I saw the movie but never read the play, so only know the Hays Code version).

Could 5) possibly be A Taste of Honey? I think the last past of 5) is A Taste of Honey and the first
part with the little college teacher is something else.

2) Tennessee Williams: “Suddenly Last Summer”? It’s not “Sweet Bird of Youth” because Chance doesn't die.]

I was rather lukewarm on the Kerr book – it looked at a familiar issue: the reluctance of Americans to undertake any activity purely for its own sake without the end goal of deriving some value from it, usually monetary, in the long range if not immediately. Kerr traced this to the philosophy of utilitarianism from the 19th century and analyzed mainly how it affected people’s interest in and understanding of the arts. My favorite parts had to do with his ideas about the formation of taste, which was not the main thrust of the book and only looked at in the final section.

Two quotes:

"The most serious danger is that the long-isolated specialist, choosing his words more carefully and with some consideration for his listener’s ears, might succeed in reaching the “average man” before the average man was ready to be reached. He might be able to enunciate a set of standards so clear and so imposing that the inexperienced listener would nod in cerebral comprehension and accept them – without having arrived at any of them for himself.“

“That is what is always wrong with the deliberate attempt to acquire taste by reading books in which men of acknowledged taste tell us what is good and what is not. It is easily possible to come to know what is most admired by the well-informed and even to grasp – in a rational way – why it is so admired. Study of this sort will keep us from making social gaffes; it will also place at our finger tips a sort of musical scale in which the higher and the lower will fall intelligibly into place. More than that. By establishing a hierarchy of all values, with Goya a “must” and Latour an interesting “maybe,” it may very well send us in search of the best – with what is established as the best already clear in our heads. By going to Michelangelo first, it is hard to see how we can go far wrong. But we may very well have gone wrong because we have elected to act upon someone else’s “taste’ rather than upon any joyous choice of our own. It is one thing to admire Michelangelo’s Moses, a rectitude that does not look at us but bids us attend only to the law, because a hundred authorities have already admired it. It is another to admire it out of a spontaneous uprush of awe and affection, a swelling of the heart and mind that would have come if no authority had ever noticed the work."

This is powerfully perceptive stuff. Has me thinking of Howard’s End where poor Bast sees reading as a means to social advancement. It also helps to explain the popularity of Ken Follett or even Dan Brown; people feel better about spending time reading good yarns if at the same time they are learning something, however unlikely.

Kerr believes that any appetite for literature, if it’s allowed to be indulged, will lead eventually to better books and the formulation of taste – he maintains that this is even the case with comic books which he considers “the lowest conceivable level”. Since I consider myself a youthful connoisseurship of comic books my first step on the road to my present tastes, I can’t disagree with the result he projects, though I do not share his disdain for the medium. He describes a young reader addicted to mass produced tales of adventure “riding the waves of an appetite that is uncritical because it is insatiable.”

Consumerism is bad, intellectual pleasures are good. I've seen the same thing dozens of times before. The author deserves some credit for seeing this in the 1950s-60s, just when the modern consumer culture was booming.

Kerr is a witty teacher and dramatist/critic, and thinks pleasure is important. His thesis is that Pleasure is missing from our lives. He assumes we are utilitarian, and do nothing useless. Not having much fun. He proposes there is a "use' for uselessness. Pleasure could re-create us, and pleasure comes from Contemplation . Pleasure is restorative and restful, not exhausting. [158]

Although Kerr does have something legitimate, even important, to say-- that we must see the value in the so-called "useless", lest, essentially, we lose our souls-- I wish he would have been able to do it without comfortably buying into and proudly upholding establishment/chauvinist notions about gender at the time. He also makes huge assumptions about who "the average American" is (was), not seeming to understand that he's speaking about, to, and for a particular class of individuals. If nothing else, it's proof that even a mind capable of analyzing the heck out of a number of subject matters is just as unable as "the average person" to see the blinders he's wearing re: others.

Walter Kerr, who David Niven portrayed in the movie "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", was a perceptive social and literary critic. His perspective remains applicable today, especially because consumerism has taken an even greater toll on pleasures than it had in the early 1960's.

The only thing I'd add to the review below is that the book includes a very valuable discussion on the projection speed of silent films.

One of my favorite opening lines of all time:

"I am going to start out by assuming that you are approximately as unhappy as I am."

Kerr is genial and pleasing company. Droll, his observations spot on...

An excellent reference work on the films of the silent comedians, including critiques of their movies and an abundance of photographs. A must for the fan of the silent comedy (as I am), this book includes sections on Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Fatty Arbuckle, Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Raymond Griffith and Laurel and Hardy.½

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