Putting on the Ritz Crackers, Conclusion

I am not saying I would not, under the right circumstances, attend an Orvis school, and I am certainly not going to claim that I have never bragged about my meager fishing exploits.  But the time comes when you leave the lodge, go home, and return to the round of work, family, and petty pleasures that make up ordinary life.  There are a few good books on fishing worth taking off the shelf and an occasional novel or set of stories—my buddy Bill Mills’  book Deep Hunting, Shallow Fishing is, in my view, outstanding, and far better than Caroline Gordon’s stories that are also worth reading.  But even a devoted fisherman like Mills has other interests—in his case, literature and history, philosophy and theology.  In any event, he does not have to join a club or take lessons to establish his credentials as a fisherman.

So far as I am concerned, a club is a fat stick you use to hit a ball or beat an enemy’s head in.  A distinguished historian of my acquaintance (John Lukacs) was approached by one of his students who observed that since they both drove the same make of automobile, they ought to form a club.  “Tell me,” said the professor, “Do you own a toothbrush?”  

“Yes, I do,” replied the unsuspecting student.

“Then why don’t we form the toothbrush club?”

No one today, it seems, can pursue a hobby, escape a vice, or suffer a tragedy without submitting himself to the ministrations of “professional” experts.  Talking to friends and relations who have gone through rehab, it sounds like these institutions are designed for two purposes:  first, to transfer your addiction from alcohol to AA, and second, to encourage you to make a career out of substance-abuse counseling.  There are clubs for mother who have lost children to drunk drivers, clubs for parents who have lost  children gun violence.  I wonder if Iraqis or Afghans or Russians and Ukrainians  of Palestinians have clubs for relatives of the victims of “collateral damage.”  No soccer stadium, unfortunately, could hold the members.

Support groups and hobbyist clubs are only a symptom of a much larger problem.  We Americans have become dependent on other people to organize our lives for us.  We used to boast of our independence, our rugged individualism.  Now we cannot grieve without professional support or drink whiskey without professional instructions, though I was pleased to see that when the grievance counselors showed up in a small Texas town that had suffered a mass murder, no one showed up. It makes you wonder how such people ever voted for George W. Bush.

My generation is bad enough, but the next group down, in their thirties and forties are much more hopelessly dependent, while kids in their teens and early twenties are distinctive, according to adolescent psychologist Mel Levine, not so much for their addiction to cell phones and computers as for their complete dependency on institutions.  Stuck in day care before they had learned to speak, they have spent their lives in school: elementary, middle, and high school, of course, but also soccer league, music camp, and tennis lessons. 

I learned of a travel agency  that constructs psychological profiles of its clients before choosing a compatible vacation destination.  This way you never have to experience anything unexpected or exotic, anything that might expand your mind.  It reminds me of the unspeakable Dick Cheney, who as Vice President, has a list of travel requirements that stipulated a cooler full of diet Sprite and all radios and TVs tuned to FOX News. 

There is no such thing, any more, as a simple pleasure or a naïf experience.  Most of what we experience has been programmed, designed, and digested.  I recall a passage in one of Jack Kerouac’s later books, where he complained that by the 1960’s you never saw anyone with his hands in his pockets, walking down the street whistling.  Everyone was too self-conscious, too busy being cool.  A more profound meditation on self-consciousness was offered by Walker Percy in his essay “The Loss of the Creature,” included in The Message in the Bottle.  How, he asked, could a late-modern man view the Grand Canyon without putting on the blinders of everything he had read, seen, and heard about the number one tourist attraction in America?  

When Percy was writing his essay in the mid-Seventies, the issue was, as it had been for the existentialists, one of authenticity, a morally and aesthetically sincere approach to life that is spoiled by the expectations imposed not only by experience but by artificial conventions and commercialized conscience.  If you read guidebooks and watch a commercial video of Florence, as many people do, before going to see the city, it may be impossible to discern an authentic Florence under all the layers of guidebook clichés and hyped cinematic images complete with soundtrack and (to give you the real flavor of typical Florentine restaurants) scratch-and-sniff patches of burned garlic powder and cheap acidic wine.  One may as well send Rick Steves on the honeymoon trip or, better yet, hire him to stand in for the bride groom.

Connoisseurship, whether in paintings or cigars, is only another expression of this phenomenon, the displacement of the authentic, the sincere, and the naïve, by the artificial, the hip, and the professional.  Perhaps I am the last man in the world to feel this way, but I find most art critics, including Bernard Berenson and especially Hilton Kramer, a little creepy.  (The second time I met Hilton, he was wearing a velvet jacket.)  

In their effusions over beauty, critics of art, music, and food remind me of older men who are just a little lavish in their attentions to your teenage daughter. What does Shaw’s Don Juan tell the Devil, after enduring his praise of music and poetry?  “You sound like an hysterical woman fawning on a fiddler.”  Interpretations of art are even worse than effusions. I do not want someone telling me what to think or how to feel.  I hate the miscalled literary critics that want to tell you why and how you should read Pound’s Cantos or Shakespeare’s sonnets, and I do not much care which school of criticism they belong to, New-Critical, Projectivist, Neo-formal, or Deconstructionist.  A murrain on them all.

I am sure someone will declare that "Art historians and even some literary critics have not made valuable contributions to our understanding etc. etc. etc."  (just fill in whatever obligatory weaseling you like), but would it not be fun, just once, to go to a new city and get lost in it, without map or guidebook or any burden of expectations.  Or walk into a Church you have never heard of and admire a painting without being told who painted it?  Or pick out a book of poems off the shelf and read a poem without knowing anything about it?  Perhaps this all sounds too Navrozovian. 

During WW I Robert Bridges, the poet laureate, put together an excellent anthology of verse to lift the hearts of the British people.  In the first edition of The Spirit of Man he did not include so much as the authors’ names, though in later editions he put them into an appendix (for which I am grateful).  Still, it is a wonderful thing to stumble across a poem you like without knowing in advance if you should like it or not.  Recently I read a few fine lines only to discover that they were by, ugh, our own version of a poet laureate Archibald Macleish, whom I should never have willingly read.  Finding a good poem or story by a writer you despise is like watching a Hollywood celebrity  perform a selfless good deed.  Such experiences remind us of the power of God.

Most people eventually want to know a little something about what they have seen or read, and, if you are like me, you might spend days, weeks, and months studying the history of Rome in the 19^th century.  But the object of studying history, languages, and literature is not to cobble together a ready-made patter to repeat to yourself before entering the Sistine Chapel or to wow your friends with such gems as “Look at how the eyes follow you across the room,” or “Bernini’s statue is holding up his hands in horror to show his contempt for his rival Borromini” or  the beauty of La Gioconda, “wrought out from within upon the flesh—the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.” That final gem is from Walter Pater, the greatest argument for unlettered barbarism produced in the past two centuries. 

For the most part critical jargon, both in art and literature, consists of clichés and labels whose primary purpose is to reduce the work to the level of the critic’s understanding, and once a painting or poem has been papered over by criticism, we can no longer see it or hear it. Serious study of history or music composition is another matter.  Our studies (like our reading and listening to music) are really only a more concentrated form of experience, and the gap between knowledge gained from experience and mere connoisseurship is as broad and as deep as the Grand Canyon.