Orson Welles to Peter Bogdanovich:
The truth is, Peter, I really am one of those I-don’t-know-anything-about-art-but-I-know-what-I-like people. If there’s no pleasure for me in it, I feel no obligation to a work of art. I cherish certain paintings, books, and feels for the pleasure of their company. When I get no pleasure from an author, I feel no duty to consult him. My interests and enthusiasms are pretty wide; and I do keep trying to stretch them wider. But no strain. No. I am, indeed, quite shameless, as you say, about not straining to encompass what doesn’t truly speak to me.
Boy, do I love those sentiments. I’ve never been eager to ignore my own perceptions in order to embrace that which others tell me I should like. I don’t mean I’m not open-minded, but, after a while, you learn to recognize your own taste, and to know what is going to paddle your canoe–and what never will. Of course, there are always surprises.
DBW – I love the sentiment, too. I always resented some of my old readers who assumed that I talked about Joyce because I “had” to. Ooh, the contempt I was shown. They don’t show their faces round these here parts anymore and for that I am very grateful. It is a total misunderstanding of who I am and where I am coming from. I like what I like because I like it. Same as everyone else.
Sometimes I definitely read something out of a sense of obligation – either because I want to participate in a current conversation (same thing with movies, I guess) and want to have an informed opinion – or because I feel bad when there are “gaps” in my reading. Like my sense of obligation to read Evelyn Waugh. I picked up Scoop for the first time because I felt embarrassed I had never read any Waugh, that’s basically the reason – and within 5 pages I was laughing so hard that my face froze into a mask of grimacing laughter and now I am a fan for life and have read everything he ever wrote. So sometimes those “duty” reads lead you into real surprises.
But again: if I didn’t like Waugh, I wouldn’t have felt embarrassed or ashamed to say so.
Henry James and Edith Wharton don’t do anything for me. I have read their stuff, I know others disagree – I can certainly see the skill and the writing qualities – but they never became passions, I never was swept away. I struggled with boredom. I trust my own responses enough to take note of that. There’s nothing wrong with not liking Henry James.
I certainly think there is something very wrong with dismissing something out of hand because you “don’t get it”. I find that a very lazy outlook. Boring, too. But then I’m a person who reads The Leviathan for fun. And those Russians. That was my problem with a lot of those old comments from that old cast of characters. How many of them had even read a word of Joyce? They were basically annoyed that I was passionate about something that they had not experienced, and so assumed that I was only “into” them because I felt I was “supposed” to be. That’s even worse snobbery, in my opinion. far more odious and tiresome.
But that’s neither here nor there. I love Orson’s honesty here, and I’m right there with him.
For example: I cannot WAIT for the Cher/Christina Aguilera burlesque movie and I hope that it is just as campy awful as I imagine. I am not looking forward to it in order to make fun of it. I am looking forward to it because I hope it is AWESOME.
/no shame
Now THAT is shameless. LOL.
Seriously. I don’t mess around.
There’s nothing wrong with not liking Henry James.
I believe it was Kurt Vonnegut who wrote something to the effect of, had Mark Twain been saddled with the characters from a Henry James novel, he would have promptly maneuvered all of them to the bottom of a well.