`Man Ray had an important position in Montparnasse because of his inexhaustible inventiveness, his friendliness, and the new use he made of the camera. He dazzled us all with his cars. And the girls he went out with were beautiful.'
Since time began, or at least since the formal education of children began, teachers have bemoaned the low state that learning has come to in their age, and expressed the darkest misgivings for the future. Even in the days when knowledge was knocked into the young with threats, fists and big sticks - what Irish male over the age of 40 will not feel a shivery tingle in the palms of his hands, or even in the seat of his pants, when passing by a school gate? - those set in authority over us considered that the schools they had the misfortune to be running had sunk into the very abysm of ignorance and indiscipline. Educators do seem to be the profoundest pessimists - but who, on a moment's reflection, will blame them, considering the human material that shuffles into their classrooms and lecture halls each year, like so many aimless autumn leaves? Even those tiny tots destined for adult greatness rarely display the marks of precocity: did Aristotle know whose bottom he was playing the taws on, as Yeats picturesquely put it, when he stretched the boy Alexander over his knee? Yeats himself never learned to spell, and the young Einstein was a dunce.
Roger Shattuck is a teacher, and also one of America's leading critics. Born in 1923, he served as a combat pilot in the Pacific war - what a bitter oxymoron that is - then worked for UNESCO in Paris, and in journalism and publishing in New York, before becoming a Junior Fellow at Harvard. He has taught at Austin, Texas, at the University of Virginia, and Boston University. He was one of the founders of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, and has published poems and translations, and a number of highly regarded works of criticism, including Marcel Proust, which won the National Book Award in 1975, and the more recent The Innocent Eye and Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography.
His speciality is French culture, particularly literature but also painting - he writes with passion and deep insight on Impressionism and Cubism, the latter of which he regards as a crucial movement in the history of art: in a review of Norman Mailer's book on the young Picasso, included in Candor and Perversion, Shattuck writes of the "wrenching shift visible along the central axis" of Picasso's extraordinary painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, which "Some see . . . as the major fault line of Western art since antiquity", that some including, one assumes, Shattuck himself.
He is, then, a man who takes the matter of culture seriously, is not afraid to engage the big themes, and is unapologetic about his commitment to what he considers to be the eternal verities of civilised discourse. The first essay included in this big, solid collection of essays, addresses, book reviews - perhaps a little too big, a little too solid - is "Nineteen Theses on Literature" - more properly, on the teaching of literature - which were formulated in an address to the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. He gives the reasons for posting his theses on the door of (American) academe:
At the close of the twentieth century, we should reasonably expect a liberal education in our high schools, colleges and universities to serve two principal goals. The first goal is to present the historic basis of our complex culture and the political and moral standards that have evolved from it. The second is to offer students the intellectual basis for an evaluation of that culture, its ideals, and its realities. The first explains and even justifies the status quo. The second questions it. In a democracy, both are necessary.
These are certainly reasonable goals, which surely, one might think, no one would argue with. In fact, however, many educators nowadays would argue vehemently with a large number of Shattuck's theses. Although he does not say so specifically, what he is urging is nothing less than a return to traditional methods of education. His stance, he insists, is in no way reactionary. "Some of us," he writes, "have come to believe that it is possible, even necessary, to be liberal in political matters and conservationist in cultural matters." In the context, "conservationist" may be a little coy; more straightforward is the formulation of the same sentiment he quotes from E.D. Hirsch, author of the provocatively titled The Schools We Need: Why We Don't Have Them: "I would label myself a political liberal and an educational conservative, or perhaps more accurately, an educational pragmatist."
To an extent, indeed, Shattuck himself is an American pragmatist, in the tradition that comes down from Emerson and Peirce through John Dewey to the likes of Richard Rorty today, although Shattuck, one suspects, would have little sympathy with Rortian "fuzziness". In Candor and Perversion Shattuck is no less forthright than he was in previous works in condemning the weasel words of the fashionable extremists of our day. "Second thoughts on a Wooden Horse", for example, is a ringing rejection of the post-humanist barbarism of Michel Foucault, while "Scandal and Stereotypes on Broadway: The New Puritanism" is a measured but passionate denunciation of the "wisecracking intellectually fashionable evil" of Tony Kushner's successful Broadway play on AIDS and related issues, Angels in America, Part One. It is refreshing in these confused times to find a critic who can recognise a spade when he sees one, and is ready to name it for what it is.
ONE would not wish to give the impression that Shattuck is a curmudgeonly nay-sayer and nothing more. The majority of the pieces in this book fairly coruscate with enthusiasm. In a brief foreword, the author hopes that the collection "bobs brashly and loyally in the wake of the great literary journalists I admire, among them Hazlitt, Baudelaire, and Edmund Wilson". Certainly Shattuck shares the cosmopolitan outlook and intellectual inclusivity of Wilson, or Lionel Trilling, or Randall Jarrell. Unlike Jarrell, though, Shattuck does not seek to seduce with wordplay and barbed wit, and he is free equally of that faint, self-justificatory whining quality detectable in Trilling, and the occasional bombastics of Edmund Wilson at his most imperial. Shattuck is a plain speaker, and a plain dealer.
The book is divided, rather grandly, into three sections. "Intellectual Craftsmanship" - the term is a coinage of C. Wright Mills - deals mainly with contemporary culture, and in particular with the future of the humanities in US schools and colleges, with references that range from Tarantino's Pulp Fiction to Proust's celebration of the pleasures of reading. Shattuck is as much against the "new idolatry - the idolatry of art" as he is against the "dumbing down" that passes for cultural studies in what used to be called our great universities. His position on education is simply but strongly stated, and can be applied as well to Ireland as to the United States: "Today . . . our schools will serve us best as a means of passing on an integrated culture, not as a means of trying to divide that culture into segregated interest groups."
Part Two, "A Critic's Job of Work", is subtitled Tracking the Avant-Garde in France, and deals not only with major figures such as Baudelaire, the Impressionists, and Picasso and Braque, but also with less obvious ones: the essay on Manet is a small masterpiece of enlightened enthusiasm, while the piece on that troubling confidence man, Marcel Duchamp, is admirably clear-eyed ("[His works] could be collected in an equivalent of the Smithsonian Institution"). He even has a good word to say for Cocteau. This section ends with a brief but provocative essay, "From Aestheticism to Fascism", which raises a number of intellectual hares that it would do us well to pursue on this side of the world, as the political skies over Europe begin to darken yet again.
The final part, "America, Africa, and Elsewhere", is a bit of a rag-bag, though there are splendid things in it, in particular the piece on Man Ray which gives the collection its title, and which quotes this "most succinct of all biographies" by Andre Thirion: "Man Ray had an important position in Montparnasse because of his inexhaustible inventiveness, his friendliness, and the new use he made of the camera. He dazzled us all with his cars. And the girls he went out with were beautiful." Inventiveness, friendliness, and a lens-like clarity of attention are qualities that Roger Shattuck also possesses, in abundance.
John Banville is Associate Literary Editor and Chief Literary Critic of The Irish Times