A Voice from the Attic

A Voice from the Attic

Essays on the Art of Reading

Robertson Davies

Rosetta Books New York, 2019

A Voice from the Attic

Copyright © Robertson Davies, 1960, 1972, 1990

Copyright renewed Robertson Davies 1988

Cover art and Electronic Edition © 2019 by RosettaBooks LLC

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Cover jacket design by Lon Kirschner

ISBN e-Pub edition: 978-0-7953-5231-7

ISBN POD edition: 978-0-7953-5247-8

A book is a mirror. When a monkey looks in, no apostle can look out.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

Contents

Preface

Prologue

I A Call to the Clerisy

Defining the Clerisy

Reading a Private Art

Reading and Time

Ends and Means

The Decorums of Stupidity

Fiction and Feeling

The Means of Reading

An Age of the Eye

The Inward Voice

Authors As Readers

Reader As Interpreter

A Critical Instrument

Critical Heresy

The Great Experiment

Its Present State

The Clerisy As It Was

The Coherent Audience

Reviewers and Critics

Sciolists and Opinionated Bitches

The Doll’s House

Dwindling Leisure

Ignoring the Highbrows

The Shame of Brains

The Cozy Bookman

An Awakened Clerisy

II Enjoying and Enduring

Smiles on Self-help

Bennett’s Crowded Hours

Thinking for Everybody

For the Hypochondriac

Obesity Is Sin

Length of Days

Right Thinking Means Success

Wishes in Overalls

Scientific Weather Control

Lifemanship and Wifemanship

The Power of Dr. Peale

Who Approves Peale?

Self-help by Self-examination

Freud Misunderstood and Misused

The Industrious Apprentice Rejected

God Not the Only Listener to Prayer

The Literary Test

III Ovid Is Not Their Master

Fowler the Phrenologist

A Pioneer in Sex Instruction

Female Beauty Defined

Platonic Love Man’s Normal State

In Search of the Angel Child

Dr. Chevasse and Associates

How to Control Desire

Havelock Ellis a Man of Letters

Good Breeding Means Passivity

Queens, Elephants, and Clergymen

A Great Work

After Ellis

Bliss with a Chemical Engineer

The Era of the Erotic Novel

Victorian Psychologists

Depth-psychology and Reason

Sex in the Modern Novel

The Problem of the Good Woman

The Cult of the Meaningless

Which Is Sex?

Divided Desire

IV From the Well of the Past

Not the Best, But the Most

Henry Cockton

The Private-asylum Abuse

Victorian Novel and Theater

Unthinkable without Illustration

The Era of Crim. Con.

Suppers and Somnambulism

London Low Life

A Digression on Henry Mayhew

Inconsistency of Julia

Gusto for Death

A Victorian Proposal

A Victorian View of Marriage

The Greatest Plague of Life

The Comic Valet

The Cynic in the Pink Coat

The Author in the Middle

The Image of Soapey’s Soul

A New Vision of the Present

V Making the Best of Second Best

Drama vs. Theater

Plays As Literature

The Next Best Thing

Making a Start

Telling Situations

An Evening at Covent Garden

Truth in Melodrama

Drawing-room Theater

Victorian Shakespeare

Shakespeare Novels

Puzzle of Published Criticism

Dramatic Imagination

VI The Hue and Cry after a Good Laugh

Laughter Need Not Mean Humor

Good King Charles’s Golden Days

The Original Joe Miller

Heyday of the Pun

Hitard’s Theme

True Humor Uncontrollable

Pitfall of Humorous Writing

The Scholarly Humorist

Humor a Dangerous Profession

Career of a Popular Humorist

Humorist’s Climacteric

Growth in Waugh and Huxley

Tragedy Rises to Balance Comedy

The Many Faces of Humor

Snobbery and Humor

Humor Short-winded

Failure on the Highest Level

A Neglected Masterpiece

By Lo Possessed

The Greatness of Cary

Hunting the Unicorn

VII In Pursuit of Pornography

Books for Prestige

Collecting Condemned

A Plea for Private Libraries

Private-press Books

Private Presses Crudely Imitated

The Inscrutable Portrait

Hidden Books

My Search for Pornography

Don Quichotte or Dirty Hankey?

Pornographic Tedium

What Is Obscenity?

Thrill of the Forbidden

Prurient and Pornographic

Fanny Hill and Male Vanity

Purpose of Pornography

Books Are for Reading

VIII Spelunking on Parnassus

Rebellion against Mediocrity

Do the Other-directed Enjoy It?

Is the Gloom Justified?

An Elite Exists

Fortunate Time for Writers

Amateur Autobiographers

The Kingdom of This World

Writers and Money

Nothing But Masterpieces?

The Ogre of the Nursery

What Writers Think about It

Gushers and Tricklers

Lust to Be Creative

The Handy Method

La Littérature Engagée

Experiment and the Antinovel

Dangers in the Avant-garde

Puzzle of the Best-seller

Neglected Works of Quality

A Best-seller Considered

Another View of Ancient Rome

Pleasures of Identification

Where Are You?

Charms of Romantic Despair

The Yahoo Hero

The Echo in the Cave

More Confusion to Come

A Millenary Parallel

Epilogue

An Informal Bibliographical Note

Preface

This book was first published in 1960 and reprinted in 1971; I do not think that much in it needs bringing up to date, excepting the comments on pornography. The past quarter century has seen a revolution in this sort of publishing, and writers now enjoy a freedom that would have roused the astonishment and envy of some of the greatest Victorians, and perhaps of Joyce and Lawrence. Whether the arts of the novel and the play have been correspondingly enlarged we cannot yet know, but it is plain that pornography as a genre in itself has entered on a new life. If I were to rewrite Chapter VII, I do not think I would strike anything out; rather, I should add some additional comment, but as I make no claim to being an expert in this realm, and write of pornography rather as an area for the collector than as a genre in itself, the reader will be just as well off without any extension of my opinions. There are references, also, to writers who were avant-garde when the book was written and who are so no longer, though I do not think their work has lost much in value for that reason. Books of the avant-garde either establish themselves as books of lasting value, or they slip from the rear guard into the discard, and I believe the writers I mentioned have not proven trivial. This is, after all, a book about reading, and the kind of reader I am addressing does not care primarily about being in fashion.

Robertson Davies

Prologue

A voice, certainly—any book is a voice—but why from the Attic?

In this book I want to comment and digress on some aspects of the world of books today, by no means always seriously and certainly not with any desire to impose my taste on anyone; rather, I expose my taste hoping that it may provide diversion for the reader. I do this as one who, for twenty years, reviewed books for a living (or part of a living, for I never found that it provided a whole one) and as one who has given hard knocks as a reviewer and taken them as an author. Because I am a Canadian, my outlook may possess some novelty for readers in the United States, for my country sees not only the greater part of the books produced in yours, but those published in Great Britain as well—not to speak of our own books. Canada is, I believe, the only country so blessed.

Statesmen are fond of stressing Canada’s role as a mediator between the United States and Great Britain. Sometimes for us in Canada it seems as though the United States and the United Kingdom were cup and saucer, and Canada the spoon, for we are in and out of both with the greatest freedom, and we are given most recognition when we are most a nuisance. If, in these reflections, I seem not to be committed to either side, it is because I am a Canadian, and of Canada one of our poets, Patrick Anderson, has said:

… I am one and none, pin and pine, snow and slow, America’s attic …

—and that is why this is A Voice from the Attic.

I

A Call to the Clerisy

Layman is a word which has gained a new and disquieting currency in our language. For much of the five hundred years or so that it has been in use it meant simply one who worshipped, as opposed to a priest, who had knowledge of the sacred mysteries. Then, by extension, it came to mean the client or the patient, in his relation to the lawyer and the physician. But nowadays the word is used loosely for anybody who does not happen to know something, however trivial, which somebody else knows, or thinks he knows. The meat-eater is a layman to the butcher, and the seeker for illumination is a layman to the candlestickmaker. Most reprehensibly, the word is used among people who should meet as equals in education and general knowledge, within wide bounds. The layman is the nonexpert, the outsider; the implication is still that the layman’s opposite has not merely special knowledge, but a secret and priestlike vocation.

It is particularly displeasing to hear professional critics using the term layman to describe people who are amateurs and patrons of those arts with which they are themselves professionally concerned. The fact that the critic gets money for knowing something, and giving public expression to his opinion, does not entitle him to consider the amateur, who may be as well informed and as sensitive as himself, an outsider. Admitting that there are triflers hanging to the skirts of the arts it is generally true that we are all, critics and amateurs alike, members of a group which meets on a reasonably equal footing. The critics have their special tastes and firm opinions and are, in some cases, more experienced and sensitive than any but the most devoted of amateurs. But they should never assume that it is so; they, of all people, should know the humility which art imposes and avoid the harlotry of a cheap professionalism.

That is why I address this book, which is about reading and writing, to the clerisy, knowing that many in that large body will be my superiors, but not, for that reason, contemptuous of me, any more than I presume to dismiss those who are not so widely read, or so particular in their tastes, as I am.

Defining the Clerisy

Who are the clerisy? They are people who like to read books.

Are they trained in universities? Not necessarily so, for the day has long passed when a university degree was a guarantee of experience in the humanities, or of literacy beyond its barest meaning of being able, after a fashion, to read and write.

Are the clerisy critics and scholars, professionally engaged in judging the merit of books? By no means, for there are critics and scholars who are untouched by books, except as raw material for their own purposes.

Then does the clerisy mean all of the great body of people who read? No; the name can only be applied with justice to those within that body who read for pleasure and with some pretension to taste.

The use of a word so unusual, so out of fashion, can only be excused on the ground that it has no familiar synonym. The word is little known because what it describes has disappeared, though I do not believe that it has gone forever. The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for idleness; who read for pastime but not to kill time; who love books, but do not live by books. As lately as a century ago the clerisy had the power to decide the success or failure of a book, and it could do so now. But the clerisy has been persuaded to abdicate its power by several groups, not themselves malign or consciously unfriendly to literature, which are part of the social and business organization of our time. These groups, though entrenched, are not impregnable; if the clerisy would arouse itself, it could regain its sovereignty in the world of letters. For it is to the clerisy, even yet, that the authors, the publishers, and the booksellers make their principal appeal.

Has this group any sense of unity? It had, once, and this book is written in the hope that it may regain it. This is a call to the clerisy to wake up and assert itself.

Reading a Private Art

Let me repeat, this is a call, not a roar; it is an attempt to arouse the clerisy, but not to incite it to violence or rancorous controversy. Anything of the sort would be bound to fail, for by its very nature the clerisy is not susceptible of such appeals. Moral causes, good and bad, may shout in the ears of men; aesthetic causes have lost the fight as soon as they begin to be strident. Reading is my theme, and reading is a private, interpretative art. Let us have no printed shrieks about reading.

In 1944 a book by B. H. Haggin was published, called Music for the Man Who Enjoys Hamlet; some parts at least of this book might be called Reading for the Man Who Enjoys Music, for I want to write about the actual business of reading—the interpretative act of getting the words off the page and into your head in the most effective way. It is not the quickest way of reading, and for those who think that speed is the greatest good, there are plenty of manuals on how to read a book which profess to tell how to strip off the husk and guzzle the milk, like a chimp attacking a coconut. There are remedial reading courses for adults who are dissatisfied with their speed, which show you how to snatch up clumps of words with your eyes, and how to bolt paragraphs at a glance, so that a determined zealot can flip through War and Peace in five hours, and, like a boa constrictor, gobble up all Plato in a week. But if you read for pleasure, such gormandizing will not appeal to you. What musician would hastily scan the pages of a sonata, and say that he had experienced it? If he did so, he would be laughed at by the others. Who among the clerisy would whisk through a poem, eyes a-flicker, and say that he had read it?

The answer to that last question must unfortunately be: far too many. For reading is not respected as the art it is.

Reading and Time

Perhaps it would be more just to say that most people, the clerisy included, are impatient of any pace of reading except their fastest, and have small faith in their interpretative powers. They do not think of themselves as artists. But unless they make some effort to match their interpretative powers to the quality of what they would read, they are abusing their faculty of appreciation. And if they do not mean to make the most of their faculty of appreciation, why are they reading? To kill time? But it is not time they are killing; it is themselves.

What is time? Let the philosophers and the physicists say what they will, time for most of us is the fleeting instant we call Now. Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives.

Yet how many people there are who read as though some prize awaited them when they turned the last page! They do not wish to read a book; they want to have read it—no matter how. The prize they seek is to have done with the book in hand. And so, as they read, they are always straining forward toward the goal of completion. Is it astonishing that they experience so little on the way, and that while they may be great readers quantitatively they are wretchedly poor readers qualitatively, and that they reveal by the poverty of their minds how ill-read they truly are?

Ends and Means

Doubtless there are philosophical terms for this attitude of mind, of which hasty reading is one manifestation, but here let us call it end-gaining, for such people put ends before means; they value, not reading, but having read. In this, as in so many things, the end-gainers make mischief and spoil all they do; end-gaining is one of the curses of our nervously tense, intellectually flabby civilization. In reading, as in all arts, it is the means, and not the end, which gives delight and brings the true reward. We laugh at tourists who dash through the Uffizi, to say that they have done it; we know that if they have any serious feeling for pictures, fifteen minutes with one masterpiece would far outweigh the pleasure of such dashes. But do we not dash through books, to say that we have done them?

The Decorums of Stupidity

Not all rapid reading is to be condemned. Much that is badly written and grossly padded must be read rapidly and nothing is lost thereby. Much of the reading that has to be done in the way of business should be done as fast as it can be understood. The ideal business document is an auditor’s report; a good one is finely edited. But the memoranda, the public-relations pieces, the business magazines, need not detain us. Every kind of prose has its own speed, and the experienced reader knows it as a musician knows Adagio from Allegro. All of us have to read a great deal of stuff which gives us no pleasure and little information, but which we cannot wholly neglect; such reading belongs in that department of life which Goldsmith called the decorums of stupidity. Books as works of art are no part of this duty-reading.

Books as works of art? Certainly; it is thus that their writers intend them. But how are these works of art used?

Suppose you hear of a piece of recorded music which you think you might like. Let us say it is an opera of Benjamin Britten’s—The Turn of the Screw. You buy it, and after dinner you put it on your record player. The scene is one of bustling domesticity: your wife is writing to her mother, on the typewriter, and from time to time she appeals to you for the spelling of a word; the older children are chattering happily over a game, and the baby is building, and toppling, towers of blocks. The records are long-playing ones, designed for 33 revolutions of the turntable per minute; ah, but you have taken a course in rapid listening, and you pride yourself on the speed with which you can hear, so you adjust your machine to play at 78 revolutions a minute. And when you find your attention wandering from the music, you skip the sound arm rapidly from groove to groove until you come to a bit that appeals to you. But look—it is eight o’clock, and if you are to get to your meeting on time, Britten must be choked off. So you speed him up until a musical pause arrives, and then you stop the machine, marking the place so that you can continue your appreciation of The Turn of the Screw when next you can spare a few minutes for it.

Ridiculous? Of course, but can you say that you have never read a book in that fashion?

One of the advantages of reading is that it can be done in short spurts and under imperfect conditions. But how often do we read in conditions which are merely decent, not to speak of perfection? How often do we give a book a fair chance to make its effect with us?

Fiction and Feeling

Some magazine editors say the public no longer enjoys fiction; it demands informative articles. But informative writing requires less effort to assimilate than does fiction, because good fiction asks the reader to feel. There is no reason to suppose that people today feel less than their grandfathers, but there is good reason to think that they are less able to read in a way which makes them feel. It is natural for them to blame books rather than themselves, and to demand fiction which is highly peppered, like a glutton whose palate is defective.

The clerisy at least want to feel. They have reached that point of maturity where they know that thought and reason, unless matched by feeling, are empty, delusive things. Foolish people laugh at those readers a century ago who wept over the novels of Dickens. Is it a sign of superior intellect to read anything and everything unmoved, in a gray, unfeeling Limbo? Happy Victorians! Perhaps their tears flowed too readily. But some of Dickens’s critics—by no means men of trivial intellect—wept. If this should meet the eye of any modern critic, let me ask: When did you last weep over a book? When did you last give a book a fair chance to make you do so?

Feeling is a condition of appreciation, and there can never have been a time when people were so anxious as they now are to have emotional experiences, or sought them so consciously. On the North American continent today sensual experience is frankly acknowledged as one of the good things of life. The popularity of mood music shows how eagerly we seek to deepen the quality of our experience. Any shop which sells phonograph records can supply long-playing discs and tapes to accompany a dozen activities with supposedly appropriate music. There is even one called, simply, Music For——, and the picture on the envelope—of female bare feet, toes upward, bracketing a pair of male bare feet, toes downward—makes plain what it is music for. Everywhere there is evidence of this anxiety that no shade of sensual enjoyment should be missed; the emphasis, indeed, is on nursing sensual enjoyment to its uttermost power, and advertising of all sorts reveals it. Do great numbers of people feel that they are missing some of the joy of life? Who can doubt it?

Like all anxiety, this is end-gaining, and carries the seeds of its own failure. Not ends, but means must be the concern of those who seek satisfaction in the pleasures as well as the obligations of life.

The Means of Reading

As this is a book about reading, let us consider the means of satisfactory reading. If we look after the means, we may be confident that the ends will take care of themselves.

It is a truism that we shall find nothing in books which has no existence in ourselves.

Bookes give not wisdom where none was before,

But where some is, there reading makes it more

says Sir John Harington, Elizabethan epigrammatist (and, blessed be his name, the inventor of the water closet); what is true of wisdom is true also of feeling. We all have slumbering realms of sensibility which can be coaxed into wakefulness by books. Aldous Huxley tells us that writers influence their readers, preachers their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. But do they know what they themselves are? Is not that what they are reading books to find out?

The best of novels are only scenarios, to be completed by the reader’s own experience. They do not give us feeling: they draw out such feeling as we have. If fiction is going out of fashion (which is said from time to time but which I do not believe), it is not because fiction is any worse than it was; apart from the pepper and curry fiction already referred to, the general level of it is probably better. But great numbers of people find fault with fiction because they do not give themselves a chance to respond to it.

It is the way they read which is at fault. The great success of Emlyn Williams in reading Dickens and Dylan Thomas to large audiences showed us where the trouble lies. I have seen Mr. Williams hold a large audience spellbound as he read, in two and a half hours, an abridgment of Dickens’s Bleak House. He had their undivided attention, and he read with all the resources of a consummate actor. He and his hearers were, for the evening, giving the best of themselves to Bleak House; his audience was moved to curiosity, to laughter, to horror, to tears, as audiences are not often moved by plays. Sir John Gielgud moves audiences similarly by reading Shakespeare. Thomas’s Under Milk Wood comes to life on phonograph records, and the catalogues of the large recording companies contain many examples of recorded plays and excerpts from books. Ah, you may say, but those are performances by actors. Yes, and if you want the best from reading, you must learn to give the best performances of which you are capable, sitting soundless in your chair, with your book before you. The gifts demanded of a good reader are less those of the critic than of the actor. You must bestir yourself, and above all you must cultivate the inward ear.

An Age of the Eye

We live in an age when the eye is feasted and the ear, if not starved, is kept on short rations. Special merit is accorded to the cartoon which makes its effect without a caption. In the theater we expect a higher standard of scenic design, aided by elaborate lighting, than playgoers have ever known. It is not uncommon for a stage setting, at the rise of the curtain, to be greeted with a round of applause. But how long is it since you heard an actor applauded because he had delivered a fine speech particularly well? This calls attention to our comparative indifference to fine speech; it is not altogether lacking, but we do not insist upon it as we insist on the gratification of the eye. But how do the books you read reach your consciousness? By words you hear, or pictures you see?

Unless you have a visualizing type of mind, by words. And how do those words reach you?

Teachers of rapid reading are opposed to an inward vocalizing of the words read, and some of them write about it with the asperity of a Puritan divine condemning lace ruffles. But so far as I can find out, they oppose it only because it decreases reading speed. They say it adds nothing to understanding. That may be, but we are concerned here with something more subtle than simple understanding: we are talking about reading for pleasure, for emotional and intellectual extension, for the exercise of the sensibilities. For these things, some measure of vocalizing is indispensable.

In the Middle Ages readers spoke aloud the words they read, and a temporary hoarseness or loss of voice was a sufficient reason for a scholar to suspend his studies. In monasteries it was the custom for someone to read aloud during meals, and this practice persists in many religious houses. In universities a principal means of instruction was the lecture—literally a reading aloud—in which the master read to the undergraduates from a work of his own composition: the custom persists still, though many lectures are, in effect, speeches and exhibitions of personality—not necessarily the worse for that. Holy Writ was read aloud in churches, and a point which was greatly emphasized during the Reformation was that it should be read in a language known to all the hearers and not only to the clerisy. The reason for all this vocalizing of what was read was that it might strike inward not only through the eye but through the ear; even the most learned did not trust to the eye alone, simply because they could read. It is voicing things that makes them real, said Miss Ivy Compton-Burnett; it is a psychological truth neglected in our day.

Neglected by readers, but not therefore unknown. Television advertisers do not scorn the medieval aids of repetition and rhyme, assonance and rhythm, in selling their goods. Whatever the content of their compositions, their techniques derive from the anonymous composer of Beowulf, the unknown makers of folk song, and the originators of such mnemonics as:

Thirty days hath September

April, June and November.

Our emphasis on the eye as the high road to the intellect is a new thing, and we all use our ears readily when we are asked to do so. Even when we do not desire it (as with advertising jingles), what enters our consciousness through the ear is likely to stick.

The Inward Voice

Certainly it is not my purpose to suggest that we should return to all this reading aloud, creating in every library a hubbub like that which one hears when walking through the corridors of a conservatory of music. But are we not foolish to give up that inward voice in which books can speak to us? And in the pursuit of speed, of all things! What has speed to do with literary appreciation? Speed, unless some real, defensible good is achieved by it, is nothing but end-gaining, which is the death of all enjoyment of the arts. Not ends, but means bring delight and fulfillment to the reader, and his means of reading is listening to the inward, reading voice.

What is that voice like? Its quality depends on your ear. If you have a good ear and some talent for mimicry, you can read to yourself in any voice, or as many voices as you please. You have seen Sir Laurence Olivier’s film of Richard III? Very well, can you hear him again when you read the play? If you can, and if you are a playgoer and a filmgoer, you should be able to find voices for all the characters in the books you read. James Agate, the English theater critic, amused himself by casting the novels of Dickens, in which he delighted, with the actors whom it was his professional duty to watch; his favorite Mr. Dombey was Sir John Gielgud.

This is a game, and a very good game, but it asks for a good ear, and makes heavy imaginative demands upon the reader. You may not be able to play it; perhaps you have no desire to do so; it is not for all temperaments. Your taste may be more austere. Besides, it only works with novels and plays. What about reading history or poetry?

The inner voice is of your own choosing, of your own development. It may differ greatly from the voice in which you speak. To read Trollope in the tones of Kansas, or Joyce in the cadences of Alabama, is as barbarous as to read Huck Finn with a Yorkshire accent, or Edith Wharton in the voice of Glasgow. One of the most dismaying experiences of my college days was to hear the whole of Hamlet read by a professor whose voice was strongly nasal, and whose vocal range was well within one octave. Did he, I wondered, read to himself in that voice? Or did he hear, inside himself, a full, rich, copious, nobly modulated sound unlike the dispirited drone which came out of his mouth? There are, one presumes, utterly tone-deaf readers.

Authors As Readers

But what does literature mean to them? Good writing sets its own tune, insists on its own cadence. Joyce presents a particularly interesting example. Nothing of his, and Finnegans Wake least of all, can be read comfortably except in the Joycean mode. There exists a phonograph record which illustrates that mode, with Joyce himself reading, but thousands of readers have found it, or some part