MICHAEL WOOD
353
They really don't enjoy it. The criterion, then, must simply be
enjoyment itself-of whatever you enjoy. This must come before
any thoughts of social relevance or moral depth or critical
significance.
Second, I hope we're not telling artists what to do, asking
them to write or paint as we would if we were in their shoes and
had their talent. Every year, for example, I find myself defending
the art of Pound and Eliot, with its elaborate allusions and vast
cultural pretentions, against students who are put off by the
whole name-dropping enterprise. I defend it not because I would
write like that if I were a poet, but because I admire the results of
the enterprise, and because a poet must do just as he likes. None
of us is forced to read him, and if we want to read him, we must
take the trouble to learn his language. I say this with real
conviction; but it doesn't stop my wishing that so much modern
poetry were not so arcane, were not so remorselessly high.
On the other hand (I think it's on the other hand), I'm
regularly shocked by the promotion of popular artists into the
ranks of high artists. It's a form of lazy critical inflation, and it
happens particularly in film studies, where critics and students
talk about Hawkes and Nicholas Ray as if they were the Dickens
and the Henry James of the cinema. I hope it's not merely a
literary man's prejudice to think that they 're not.
In
my book on
American films , I wrote that Robert Rossen's
The Hustler
is "a
very great movie." I was reproved by a friend, who said, "It's a
good movie, but it's not a great movie.
If
The Hustler's
a great
movie, what's
Battleship Potemkin?"
I'm tempted to shuffle
here, and talk about different kinds of greatness, but it won't do.
Once a critical term has been stretched that far, it's been
stretched too far. "Very great movie," for
The Hustler,
is simply
an exaggeration.
Third, and finally , I hope we are responding as fully as we
can to whatever we are watching or reading or listening to. And
by fully here I mean with a plurality of mind which will seem
very slack to many people. We need standards, but we don ' t have
to rush to clap them on the piece of art which is our victim. We
have to be ready for art to do all kinds of things, high and low;
we have to recognise skills where we find them; and we have to
make some sort of sense of the messages we receive. But we have
