Enthusiasms
Mallon, Thomas
enough is the common lot; the difficulty is to strike the balance. "This is the sort of English up with which I shall not put," Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, reminding us that...
...Levin's communiques of gusto have a nourishing specificity...
...Levin has trouble stopping himself from spraying great clouds of perfume upon every chapter...
...In fact, we live in an age in which the social norm is the ostentatious pursuit of the perfect croissant, the best quadrophonic reproduction, the most high-minded framed poster...
...We've got to be told something new, and be treated less fike ladies in a reading club if your enthusiasms are to seem attractive and convincing...
...Crying out loud, incidentally, is something the enthusiastic Mr...
...But if he would onlS' cease being sentimental about places like Calcutta, and stop indulging in this new tendency to write alarmingly like Dr...
...And one occasionally gets it--even inthis book...
...This is unfortunately what Bernard Levin has managed to do in much of Enthusiasms, his hymn to painting, books, music, food, walking, cities, and other delicacies of civilization...
...There are three paintings in the Uffizi that clamor to be my favourites, all of them quite justifiably, and to all of them I swear A basic assumption about enthusiasm is that one man's meat will be another man's poison...
...But Mr...
...Levin's combative premise is wrong...
...Has anyone ever pointed out what a huge proportion of graffiti in modern cities consist of the names of the graffitinieri and their friends...
...One expects something more of Bernard Levin...
...Levin's stated purpose in writing his book: "to try to convey my enthusiasm, not to lecture my readers or to provide them with useful knowledge or instruction...
...But until then readers will have to content themselves with a book that could have been a series of insightful overstatements, in the manner of Paul Fussell, but instead wound up being a collection of truisms and list of faves...
...It is a harmless book that Mr...
...With all due respect, I would assert that the purpose of writing is to take a stab at making the indescribable effable, the indefinable plain...
...Kilpatrick, now a grandfather, has and I, pink-cheeked, still lack...
...Levin barely presents examples, much less a ',study...
...Levin is, after all, talking about his earthly deities here, and there seems little point--and perhaps even some selfishness--in having a preacher whip himself into frenzies of delight while remaining indifferent to whether the congregation gets religion or not...
...Levin's discussion of Shakespeare is typical of what he does throughout Enthusiasms...
...Levin on the job against the "idiot 'structuralist' or parlour-Marxist," and to hear him state unabashedly that the arts are supposed to reveal the universe...
...For one thing, Mr...
...Sometimes expertise is the best testament of enthusiasm, and one only wishes Mr...
...Levin, they have...
...His definition of enthusiasm as "the taking of great pleasure, the feeling of great ardour, the experiencing of great excitement, in the presence or contemplation of the object that arouses the enthusiasm" is reasonable, as is one of the tests he proposes for enthusiasm--namely, "the desire to communicate it...
...There are portions of his book I wouldn't dream of commenting on: I am, for example, generally indifferent to what I eat, and I cherish an active hostility to that barking freakshow of glandular irregularity called opera...
...To avoid them takes the years of experience that Mr...
...We are so eager to be (and, above all, to appear) enthusiastic that we buy hideous art, endure terrible theater, and display overpriced books on ugly high-teeh cocktail tables all because we've been told that these are things we must be enthusiastic about if we're to lay any claim to good taste and cultural soundness...
...Like the country singer, Bernie believes in children...
...In The Writer's Art, James J. Kilpatrick shows just how enjoyable the journey can be...
...The sections that deal with his childhood reading, growing up in a Jewish household in London's Camden Town, his first pair of eyeglasses, schooldays in wartime, and the marvelous lift the Royal Festival Hall gave to grimly rationed postwar London are all very good reading and make on e look forward to a full volume of, memoirs, even though he says he won't write one...
...Leo Buscaglia, he might, for crying out loud, get around to it...
...But as I wandered among whole streets and squares of houses and shops that were nothing but facades, the very bricks made of foam rubber, I could understand why Hollywood's magic-lantern show so entirely captured the imagination of the whole world, and has not quite let go yet...
...He tells us about "Shakespeare's unique ability to understand the human soul and its needs and powers" and other such THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984 39 undivided allegiance, hoping that they will not get together and compare notes until I am out of Florence and on my way to Venice, where there are a score more...
...Levin is emphatically for...
...Finally, Mr...
...I just don't think this will do...
...it is, it's not the same Puritanism Mr...
...Levin feels himself up against...
...This is the sort of English up with which I shall not put," Winston Churchill is alleged to have said, reminding us that there are traps on the right as well as on the left...
...40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1984...
...But what happens when a man takes his meat and pounds it into the sort of mush that couldn't kill or fortify any of those to whom he serves it...
...The food section has the additional quality of being a travelogue, since in order for Mr...
...to be icky-sticky is quite another...
...I am delighted to see Mr...
...Levin bnds his story of a walk with a friend in London with the following sentences: "There was nothing special about the evening--we had had many others like it--but it lingers in my memory, in an almost unbelievably rich gallery of such memories, as a few hours of happiness with a friend, in which hours the true nature of friendship, though not defined and indeed indefinable, stood revealed...
...Levin might actually have done a better job of conveying his enthusiasms--which, after all, is rather like conveying one's values--if he'd given us less brio and more bio...
...Levin had looked longer and more penetratingly at the things he knows best...
...Too much here is too obvious and too familiar...
...I believe even such dutyladen savants as Norman Mailer have managed to notice this...
...To be impressionistic is one thing-and an admirable thing--in criticism...
...This pseudo-enthusiasm may be the vulgar hallmark of our age, but had as Thomas Maiion teaches English at Vassar College...
...Actually, Mr...
...tLevin has written, one ironically distinguished by enthusiasm's opposite--namely, laziness...
...Enthusiasts should be expected-especially when they're going about their life's work--to try harder than this...
...For anything that is specifically enlightening and even moving--such as his recollection of walking home four miles after seeing John Gielgud in Hamlet and being in such a state of oblivious rapture that he was astonished to find himself putting his key in his door--there is unfortunately a good deal more in the way of gush and boilerplate...
...One can hear this sort of thing for free, each April, from Gregory Peck, as he introduces Christie Brinkley to present an Oscar to Sylvester Stallone...
...But since I share many of Mr...
...but if he is really going to provide a useful deterrent to the Yale boys so intent upon torturing literature before they destroy it finally, he's going to have to be a good deal more bracing than this...
...Far from fearing to enjoy, we are desperately afraid to be caught failing to enjoy...
...Well, yes, Mr...
...He nicely weasels out of having to make his case by stating: "The active hatred of pleasure and excellence, however, though more important, and certainly more sinister, than the indifference which is so fashionable today, deserves a study in itself, though one which I am not much inclined to embark upon, if only because I would find it too depressing...
...But if these standards are reasonable, they're also minimal, as is Mr...
...Levin, an Englishman, to get many of these dinners he must venture outside the confines of the blandly mephitic oxymoron that even the gustatorially indifferent recognize as English cooking...
...On his very first page he states that "to be passionate in appreciation of the good things of life, especially the nonmaterial things, is to c o u r t . . , stern denunciation as an irresponsible h e d o n i s t . . , behind much of the contempt for joy lie a deep fear and hatred of enjoyment...
...Some ofMr...
...His tug at the connection between walking and optimism, and his ardor for fire provoke the reader profitably: "Once, at dinner among friends, our host asked what crime we would each commit if all legal, though not moral, sanctions against it were abolished, and after my fellow guests had decorously limited themselves to such sins as embezzlement, smuggling and cat burglary, I robustly declared that my choice was a r s o n . . . "And there is one wonderful gluttonous sentence that goes on for pages cataloguing his most memorable meals...
...ENTHUSIASMS Bernard Levin/Crown Publishers/S12.95 Thomas Mallon things that make nineteenth-century bardolators look like models of restraint and precision by comparison...
...Levin's loves, and still find myself unmoved by his well-meant book, I think he would want me to tell you why...
...Levin made me want to see the Vigeland sculptures in Frogner Park, Oslo--even if he did insist on showing them with little Norwegians romping about...
Vol. 17 • October 1984 • No. 10
