From Cheese to Disaster
Any Number Can Play.
by Clifton Fadiman.
World. 404 pp. $5.00.
In his recent book of essays, which ranges genially over many subjects from cheeses to social disaster, Clifton Fadiman once more uses the elastic, optimistic, civilized voice that has often disarmed our college-bred Americans. For those of us who get nearly as much excitement from the verbal as from the physical universe, he enacts an agile ceremony, fusing something old, 17th-century playfulness, with something new, TV zip. He keeps us in touch with great writing, offering bracing whiffs of Pepys’s and Samuel Johnson’s London, and even an informal tour of Dostoevsky’s underground, in the course of which he points out what will be strange and what familiar to Western eyes. Making allowances for our discontent, he ruefully observes the “modern stunned look” that comes of overstimulation, jumps to the defense of intellectuals and eccentrics, speaks up bravely “in praise of quotation”—yet he is destined to have no enemies.
It is more than a lucky knack, it is a real sense of vocation, this constant winning and conveying of friendly sympathy. Of his radio program, “Conversation,” Fadiman says: “We sit around a table for a short time, talking as well as we can on some non-controversial, non-timely topic.” We imagine him benignly steering his guests away from argument, heated comment, even excessive erudition, in order to make their talk more graceful. Like many urbane persons, he is convinced that a healthy natural impulse needs to be consciously perfected into an art. He regards communication more as a question of mellow atmosphere than of actual content. In intellectual life, as on his program, the adversary he fights is bad temper, the philosophy he serves, to admit no impediment to the marriage of clashing minds.
There is an amusing chapter about children in Any Number Can Play, in which Fadiman reminds us that it is foolish and purposeless to talk down to youngsters, who only respond with bewildered pity to this compulsion. But when it comes to adults, he cannot drop his condescending airs, and in the cause of making all things acceptable to all men, patronizes not only his readers but himself. “An intellectual,” he explains apologetically, “is simply a man in whom is writ large what makes you and me specifically human.” For the benefit of anyone suffering from highbrowphobia, he tries this gentle metaphor: “There are fewer cassowaries than there are sparrows, but both are equally part of nature, though the cassowary seems a little queer because we don’t see him much.”
For a writer who uses language with tremendous facility, it is surprising how often Mr. Fadiman hits an embarrassed and embarrassing note. If one has ever been involved in a private conversation on a bus and suddenly become aware that a third person might be listening, one can easily understand the source of Fadiman’s archness. Although he takes many opportunities in this book to complain of the incursions that mass entertainment has made upon the individual spirit, a reader feels that the third listener to his conversation is precisely some colleague of his from the “communications” industry. It is these cronies who silently watch him, and to whom he must prove that he has a foot in both worlds, that he is really no snob. What else could account for expressions like “idea man,” for saying of Shakespeare that “Like any other pro he had to learn the tricks of an exacting trade”; and of Dr. Johnson, “He is the greatest public relations man the city [London] ever had.” Mr. Fadiman is of course always pleasantly bookish, and often shows excellent taste, but far from being a defender of the arts against the power and values of mass culture, it seems to me that he represents exactly what that culture has come to today: he is the man of letters awed by the appeal of TV and radio, the man of learning pandering to ignorance, the public man paying obeisance to privacy, and the man of material focus throwing bouquets to the spirit.
Now that intellect is in more demand and in better repute, we are fated to have every variety of its endeavors. Out of these riches, we had better find out how to reject softness and facility, and to hold out for the tougher, spinier intellectual virtues. In a chapter entitled “Life’s Minor Pleasures,” Mr. Fadiman, who is always cutting bread and biting off cake, describes the pleasure of making a ball out of rubber bands for his son. To indicate the reminiscent nature of this experience, he refers in passing to the famous “madeleine” at the beginning of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Now, this is fun, sharing with Fadiman a triple-deckered satisfaction: the ball, the resurrected past, and the familiarity with Proust’s novel. But for the most part, those of us who do not make transitions as easily as he does must settle for a more exclusive choice: minor pleasures or major efforts.
The two best chapters of the book are devoted to wines and cheese. Mr. Fadiman guides us masterfully among Chablis, Niersteiner Rebach ’43 (a drink of “delicate uncertainties”), and Piesporter Goldtropfen Schloss Marienlay ’47. He is closest to poetry when he gets to cheeses, and no reader can fail to work up some passion for Edam’s crimson balls, the lachrymose moisture around the eyes of Gruyère “which announces its readiness to be yours,” or the beautiful, soft, odorous Lieder-krantz. But even here, sophistication soon loses its charm, and after all this bounty, we long for black coffee and a slice of plain white farmer cheese.
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