The decline of pleasure

by Walter Kerr

A theater critic with a eye for detail analyzes the discontentment of our age and slices through the superficiality of much we do.

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy, Essays, Sociology, Psychology

319 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Walter Francis Kerr was an American writer and Broadway theater critic. He also was a writer, lyricist, and director of several Broadway musicals.

He became a theater critic for the New York Herald Tribune in 1951, then began writing theater reviews for the New York Times in 1966. He wrote for the New York Times for seventeen years. Kerr won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1978.

In 1990, the old Ritz theater on West 48th Street was renamed the Walter Kerr Theatre in his honor.

Kerr's books include:
• How Not to Write a Play (1955)
• Criticism and Censorship (1957)
• Pieces at Eight (1958)
• The Decline of Pleasure (1962)
• The Theatre in Spite of Itself (1963)
• Tragedy and Comedy (1967)
• Thirty Plays Hath November (1969)
• God on the Gymnasium Floor (1971)
• The Silent Clowns (1975)

His wife, Jean Kerr, was also a writer. Together, they wrote the musical Goldilocks (1958), which won two Tony Awards. They also collaborated on Touch and Go (1949) and King of Hearts (1954). It must be said that Kerr did not have much of an ear for music, as many of the shows he panned over his long career included the musically ambitious shows of Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein's comic opera Candide and musically ambitious West Side Story, and Frank Loesser's "musical with a lot of music" [sic. opera], The Most Happy Fella.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Katrinka · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Kerr does have something legitimate, even important, to say-- that we must see the value in the so-called "useless", lest, essentially, we lose our souls-- I wish he would have been able to do it without comfortably buying into and proudly upholding establishment/chauvinist notions about gender at the time. He also makes huge assumptions about who "the average American" is (was), not seeming to understand that he's speaking about, to, and for a particular class of individuals. If nothing else, it's proof that even a mind capable of analyzing the heck out of a number of subject matters is just as unable as "the average person" to see the blinders he's wearing re: others.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite first line ever:

"I am going to start out by assuming that you are approximately as unhappy as I am."

[Bill FromPA · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first line sold the book ($2 at a used book sale):

I am going to start out by assuming that you are approximately as unhappy as I am.

But to keep reading to the end of the book was often a challenge. It turns out that Kerr's unhappiness does not speak to mine.
I'd just read the first section, "Some Observations on the Oddness of Our Lives", and I didn't recognize these Gradgrind-like children interested only in facts and didn't identify with the outcome-obsessed adults. Then I heard this Maureen Corrigan review of The Art of the Wasted Day that seemed to echo Kerr's observations about the concern to make every activity "count" in some preductive way. Corrigan's comments gave Kerr some apparent relevance, so I persisted.

Kerr sees the US as dominated by the dictates of utilitarianism; though he traces its 19th century philosophical origins, I am convinced that the thing itself would exist without the theoretical construct. I've known people who instinctually rate each action or activity on the basis of its yielding value, usually measured monetarily in the long- or short-term.

Kerr thinks this attitude is responsible for his, and probably the reader’s unhappiness. He seeks to re-introduce the pleasures of contemplation. Though occasionally mentioning food, such as bad ice cream, and, at the end, sex, he gives little time to pleasures of the flesh; the book might have been more accurately titled The Decline of Aesthetic Pleasure.

Early on, Kerr describes how artists responded to the increasingly widespread embrace of utilitarianism. They either embraced the irrelevance of art, producing “art for art’s sake”, or clumsily added relevance and, presumably, utility, to their works, portraying social problems or moral lessons. But, just as one thinks this is going to be a “what’s wrong with modern art” type of book like The Agony of Modern Music, Kerr leaves this topic. His argument is not with art but with the public’s attitude toward art, their approach to “get something out of it”, their inability to experience it for itself.

I found most of the book fairly irritating, as Kerr hammers at his points without, for me, managing to drive any of them home. There are some entertaining passages and a few memorable quotes, such as:

... we nod rather worriedly over everything Thoreau is quoted as having said without disturbing, in our souls, a secret conviction that death would be preferable to a week in the woods. (168)

Kerr quotes this from Charles Darwin's letters, which sums up his own ideas about modern Americans' attitude toward the arts rather better than he himself does:

I have said that in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too energetically on what I have been at work on, instead of giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it formerly did. On the other hand, novels which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily--against which a law ought to be passed. A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman all the better.

This curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on history, biographies, and travels (independently of any scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on all sorts of subjects interest me as much as ever they did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly organised or better constituted than mine, would not, I suppose, have thus suffered; and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.

One big problem with this book is that Kerr gives almost no citations. He quotes Aristotle or Pierre Teilhard de Chardin with no reference to the work that is the source of the quote. In attempting to introduce his readers to the pleasures of art, he should have allowed them, if they wished, to indulge in the pleasures of scholarship as well.

The final section, “The World with Both Eyes Open”, somewhat redeemed the book for me; it certainly made me glad I’d persisted. In it he talks about “taste” in matters artistic and how taste is formed – from the ground up, as it were, rather than handed down from on high by esteemed critics.

Another quote, this time from pianist Abram Chasins, outdoes Kerr in expressing the issue:

What is so bad is that the average man, who is more tolerant of art than at any other time in history, finds himself farther away from it rather than closer. He can’t respond emotionally … The men who sell music have implanted the theory in the minds of both the critics and the public: ‘Be very careful. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not great.’ The complexity of modern music frustrates the average music lover who listens, grins and bears it and says, ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s great.’ He’s never been more tolerant because he’s been intellectually conditioned to be careful.

Kerr adds:

He is, in short, unable to respond emotionally – even when the music is great – because he has repressed all response for fear of betraying his ignorance. (273)

Perhaps I particularly liked the last section because Kerr recommends, as a way of cultivating taste, something very much like my own aesthetic education. In my youth I feasted on comic books to repletion; then, as Kerr suggests will naturally happen, looking for more I went on to classic works of SF and Fantasy (for which I’d been somewhat prepared by early moviegoing), and, as these grew overly familiar, broadened my search into other types of literature. Kerr is rather scornful of comic books, at least as adult fare, but, in the hands of children, sees them as a reliable gateway drug to Literature. No doubt scorning the pictures, he may have been surprised that they would lead me to an interest in fine art as well; I really don’t think it a great leap from Jack Kirby to Michelangelo.

In speaking of youthful addiction to a single type of reading, Kerr coins a phrase which nicely captures the addiction to book series, “… riding the waves of an appetite that is uncritical because it is insatiable.”(279)

At the risk of misrepresenting the book as a whole, I’ll dilate a bit on the issue of taste since it was the issue that caused me the most reflection.
On acquiring taste:

The most serious danger is that the long-isolated specialist, choosing his words more carefully and with some consideration for his listener’s ears, might succeed in reaching the “average man” before the average man was ready to be reached. He might be able to enunciate a set of standards so clear and so imposing that the inexperienced listener would nod in cerebral comprehension and accept them – without having arrived at any of them for himself.
That is what is always wrong with the deliberate attempt to acquire taste by reading books in which men of acknowledged taste tell us what is good and what is not. It is easily possible to come to know what is most admired by the well-informed and even to grasp – in a rational way – why it is so admired. Study of this sort will keep us from making social gaffes; it will also place at our finger tips a sort of musical scale in which the higher and the lower will fall intelligibly into place. More than that. By establishing a hierarchy of all values, with Goya a “must” and Latour an interesting “maybe,” it may very well send us in search of the best – with what is established as the best already clear in our heads. By going to Michelangelo first, it is hard to see how we can go far wrong.
But we may very well have gone wrong because we have elected to act upon someone else’s “taste’ rather than upon any joyous choice of our own. It is one thing to admire Michelangelo’s Moses, a rectitude that does not look at us but bids us attend only to the law, because a hundred authorities have already admired it. It is another to admire it out of a spontaneous uprush of awe and affection, a swelling of the heart and mind that would have come if no authority had ever noticed the work.
For taste is either personal (yours, mine, Henry’s) or it does not exist. (275-6)

Kerr addresses the idea that everyone has taste without having cultivated it:

We have all long since dismissed with contempt the once belligerent phrase, “I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.” We know that the phrase is a bromide and the man who uses it a buffoon. But when we pause to consider what is wrong with the statement, we generally get the wrongness wrong. What is most often dismaying about the man who mouths the sentiment is not that he doesn’t know anything about art but that, in point of fact, he doesn’t know what he likes. He hasn’t been there – not lately, perhaps not ever. Challenge him to speak for a moment about whatever he says he does like and chances are ten to one that, after a struggle with his memory, he will mention something he half liked a dozen years ago and has not submitted himself to since. (292)

And those comic books, “the lowest conceivable level” according to Kerr.

I am disturbed by a recent memory of a figure who seemed strangely contemporary. He was a well-groomed, well-dressed young man, between twenty-five and thirty years of age. There seemed nothing in any way underprivileged or retarded about him. He looked as though he had come from a reasonably responsible junior-clerk job in a central Manhattan bank, or law office, or large stationery-supply store. He did not look married or fatherly; he looked placid and composed and unhurried. He was standing at a Grand Central magazine rack quietly leafing a comic book.
I would like to have asked him why, but of course I didn’t, and so still don’t know the answer. What dim memory of something that had once interested him, truncated almost at its inception and never openly responded to since, could have lured him now, so soberly, to attend to the immature with such calm absorption? Had he never had his fill? Had he never found anything more interesting? If he had ever been handed a “good” book, it clearly hadn’t taken or he would scarcely have been confessing his tastes in so public a place. But there was no stir of embarrassment, or even of self-consciousness, about him. There was only a clear brow that might have meant innocence and might have meant intellectual checkmate. (284)

[Serdar · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book's a mixed bag, emphasis on both "bag" and "mixed". The topical references in it have dated, and the social situations Kerr describes are from a sample size of 1 (and biased heavily towards Upper Crust New York, too). But every now and then there's a moment of revelation, and so I kept reading.

Kerr's premise is a good one: Whatever it is we've made our modern world for, it isn't the human being. And one of the corollaries of that is how even the things that are supposed to be fun aren't very much fun anymore. Normally when confronted with a premise like this I reply "What you mean 'we', mister?", but I stuck around to see how much of an argument he marshaled for it.

It's a worthy subject that deserves a better book, and not just because of Kerr's POV or his limited selection of examples, but because his notions of what could be done are blinkered and inconclusive. At one point he seems to be circling the idea of what amounts to cultivating some non-sectarian, self-imposed discipline of mind and spirit, but that gets swept under the rug with the term "Oriental quietism" (!).

I don't really blame Kerr for not touching down on such things completely; Buddhism and Zen in particular were still considered beatnik crazes at the time he wrote the book. But those are but one example of how the book was meant to be a perennial, and instead merely became an artifact of its immediate moment. If also an intriguing artifact.

[Harley · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a great guy, reminding us way back in the early 1960s that we're getting a little too serious here, that our received idea of what we should be doing/reading/watching/indulging in spoils our enjoyment of life sometimes. The thing I remembered the most was this: if you ban something you enjoy from your life because you are told it's not worthy (kids and comic books was one example) you will always crave it. Let yourself exhaust it and your "taste" will automatically reach for the next thing. Or something like that. I do think it would be dangerous to apply this to baked goods though.

[CORSAK fan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I am going to start out by assuming that you are approximately as unhappy ad I am."

The first line of this book has now become my favorite first line of any book. I, too, am generally unhappy, for part of the reasons which Kerr goes over and partly for differing reasons. However different our root causes may be, he explains and observes sharply what the causes of emotional malaise are.

And while he inevitably gets some things wrong, or maybe just not quite right, like assuming what the average person living in the U.S is like / is experiencing, he at least manages to explain why unhappiness occurs and attempts to offer an explanation for what can be done about it. Sure, some of this is from its time, but I believe part of it is still worthwhile and worthy of a read.

We need breaks, and we also need things to do. Is paying someone else to stain your wood table really better than learning how to do it for yourself? How much free time do we really need, and is it really free if we spend it for feeling guilty for not working, and then getting bitter that we'd rather be doing something other than working?

We are introduced to utilitarianism and its flaws. How do you exactly measure pleasure and pain? Is one type of either worth more or less than the other? Who decides? And if it can, in fact, be measured, how do we then pursue it?

Later in the text, bad ice cream and sex are brought up. What value do we put on things, even if they serve no medical or mental benefit to us from consuming them? Is one experience more important because of how it makes you feel or from how it ends up affecting you later? Many questions to think about, which I like.

[Nikki · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great voice that made for a charming read, though dated.

[Iyxon · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most brilliantly shining non-fiction book I have ever read. I dare say nothing than, if the title intrigues you, take some time and meet with this book.

[Georgia]

Didn’t want to finish it! Read it many years ago

[rogue · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable book that is still relevant today. Walter Kerr, a theatre critic (with a good eye for details and narrative flair), writes concretely about the world around him. He describes a problem that he sees (the decline of pleasure), traces it back to the fallout of utilitarianism, and offers a possible solution. Along the way he gives some very interesting insight into why Latin declined as a language, why the theatre is the slowest of the arts to innovate, and why children are such little know-it-alls. The first half of this book (a description of the problem, based on observation) is much more enjoyable than the second half of this book. I think that's because in the first half you're saying to yourself, "Oh yes, I know people like that. I'm one of those!" but in the second half, when he tells you what you should do, you think to yourself, "I know. I know. I need to be mindful and live in the present moment. But I can't TELL myself to do those things. Thanks for the advice."

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Kerr, in The Decline of Pleasure, analyzes the discontentment of our age. In doing so he slices through the superficiality of much we do. He notes that the very things that we do that should be pleasurable for us are void of joy. Why? Because they are being used as a means to an end. We do not treat them as enjoyable in and of themselves rather we evaluate them only with regard for their practical usefulness. He wrote, "We are all of us compelled to read for profit, party for contacts, lunch for contracts, bowl for unity, drive for mileage, gamble for charity, go out for the evening for the greater glory of municipality, and stay home for the weekend to rebuild the house." This book raises challenging questions about the way we do or do not engage thoughtfully in the act of pleasure.

[Lauren Albert · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is dated. I disagree with many things he says--I think his discussion of abstract painting (which he clearly, intensely dislikes) is silly. But the book gets a 5 for being incredibly thought-provoking while being very readable. I especially like his discussion of the way we are likely progress from simpler to more complex pleasues if left alone--if no one presses on us things we are not yet ready for or interested in.

First read in 1983

[lyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Walter Kerr, who David Niven portrayed in the movie "Please Don't Eat the Daisies", was a perceptive social critic and assiduous literary and art historian. His perspective remains applicable today, especially because consumerism has taken an even greater toll on pleasures than it had in the early 1960's.

[Olean Public Library · Rating 3 out of 5]

An old book (1962) but still relevant. Kerr’s thesis is that we are in serious trouble because our lives lace pleasure with out guilt. He maintains that our recreations do not re-create. We must learn to enjoy books, art, music, etc. with no regard to the utility. Enjoy!

[Erik]

Recommended by James Schall in Another Sort of Learning, Chapter 18, as one of Seven Books on Sports and Serious Reflection.

[Ian Elimanco]

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