Re-reading John Carey's salty and provocative book, 'What Good Are The Arts?' I am struck by this eminent Oxford professor of literature' s authority—so different to an air of authority-- as he slices with his keen blade into so many assumptions surrounding critical discussion of the Arts. His ruthless if never less than human sense is of how easily outwardly valid commentary can topple into absurdity, his eye very much on the irrelevance of all forms of debate concerning religion. He has no truck with the supernatural which he sees as a distortion of the logic and precision underlying a valid and sensible discussion of literature.
I met him on one occasion(though I attended many of his lectures) when he came to a friend's pre-wedding party. On being told that I was a friend of his student and had also read English at Oxford he asked about my research project. When I told him it was on D.H.Lawrence he wanted to know my opinion of the short story, 'Samson and Delilah. A discussion ensued that was stimulating and engaging. and while I would never presume to cross swords with such a formidable intellect, that clear sighted contempt for the fanciful or high-faulting, and his concern for the common man, I would like to challenge what I see as a fundamental limitation in his argument regarding music.
For Carey the only valid critical debate concerns literature, the art of words on words. Thus, he dismisses the discussion of words on music where the response, however appealing or even seductive, can never be more than a personal or subjective effusion. There is a radical difference between one thing and another.
If, for example, to quote George Steiner, Cambridge academic and polymath , the line 'brightness falls from the air' taken from the poet Thomas Nashe(1567-1601) shows 'the hope to outreach time by force of creation' through 'a trick of darkening sound' that has 'outworn three centuries' he is offering a potent example of the power of words on words, a power that will send readers, given a renewed sense of stature and creation, back to both Thomas Nashe and to Steiner's critical writings.
Yet if words on sound, on music, can hardly achieve the same authority, I feel that Carey under- estimates a field outside his own expertise.. I myself can recall innumerable instances when words have led me back to their musical inspiration. How can you resist Schubert's A major Piano Sonata K.664 when told that it is 'succinct'( as an innocent teenager I reached for my dictionary) and 'like the smiling lights and colours of a spring day.' If Walter Gieseking's way with Debussy evokes 'The Gardens of Givenchy' then you are surely open to another' person's wonder. Then there is Ernest Newman on Grandos's 'Goyescas.' for him 'pianoforte music of the purest kind' giving 'the voluptuous sense of passing the fingers through masses of richly coloured jewels.' There is Afred Cortot, for whom the central section of Faure's Third Impromptu is 'like an avenue of fans, folding and unfolding.' For Donald Tovey there is that moment in Brahms's Second Piano Concerto when 'you seem to hear the beating of mighty wings.' Less positively you sense the power of the written word. For Edward Sackville-West Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies show a 'hasty workmanship, a shallowness and expensive glare' and regarding performance, for New York's waspish but acute Virgil Thomson, 'Horowitz is a master of musical distortion.'
I could stun and bemuse you with the number of musicians who have felt impelled to express their thoughts and feelings; whether elegant, perceptive or tart , as they set you up to seek out, listen and think again.
There are, of course, a greater number of writers who confirm Carey's accusation of dilettantism. There is James Huneker for whom Chopin's F sharp major Nocturne is 'inseparable from champagne and truffles' and for whom the second subject of the G minor Ballade evokes 'the slender hipped girl with the midnight blue eyes.' As he himself adds, his reader may well be 'agahst at what he writes.' Even so, no reader, whether of wisdom or nonsense, will remain unaffected, their curiosity aroused.'
I should like to end with a return to the sort of reflection or speculation that can alert Doubting Thomases, or, more particularly, even Doubting Careys. For William Ritter, Brahms late piano works, his opus 116-119 Capricci and Intermezzi are 'like the golden lustre of parks in autumn, and the austere black and white of winter walks.'
You cannot claim that such words are irrelevant in the sense that they are not grounded in a verbal reality, are simply and finally the poetic meanderings of a wholly personal and subjective mind. As Afred Brendel puts it, writing about music(and he has written acutely and extensively) may be ' a necessary evil' but it remains both an impulse and a necessity.
Bryce Morrison