Enjoy yourself; it’s later than you think

When I was about 13, I overheard a piece of music in the background of a Radio 4 programme and found myself desperately needing to know what it was. I held on to the tune long enough to pick it out on the keyboard for my piano teacher a few days later. Happily, she was able to identify it: it was Erik Satie’s ‘Gymnopedié No. 1’.

I rang around specialist shops in London to find out who had the sheet music in stock, and then I travelled into Wardour Street to pick it up. As soon as I got home I flipped it open (it’s a very thin volume) and started to play.

None of this was exactly like lugging a sack of coal up a steep hill, but by my standards it was an impressive level of commitment.

You either fall in love with the Gymnopediés on first hearing, or you’re never going to love them at all. If you don’t like them immediately — which is fine, it’s allowed — there is no point in trying harder, because you won’t discover anything that you didn’t understand the first time. As Jonathan Coe says of the first Gymnopedié in a recent piece in the London Review of Books:

‘The wistful main theme develops over simple (but, for their time, unusual) major seventh chords. This theme never develops; instead, it is repeated. There are no changes in dynamics. The tune is stated, and then it’s gone.’

The Gymnopediés are, in a word, entirely legible. They come onstage, announce clearly what kind of thing they are, and perform exactly as advertised. There are no surprises or tricks; there is no particular work for the audience to do, except to like them or not like them. They are even pretty simple to play — although, as with all extremely simple pieces, playing them well is a whole different story. (The temptation, which I’m sure I succumbed to at 13, is to get carried away with the pathos and deliver something absolutely dripping wet.)

The thing about this kind of legibility is that it stands or falls entirely on audience response. There is nothing to hide behind, just a bald proposition that you either do or do not find interesting. What sets the Gymnopediés apart is the simplicity of their form and the eerie beauty of their construction. And that’s it. There is nothing in them that requires further reading or the furrowing of brows. Not everyone does love them, but anyone can.

I’ve been thinking about this quality of ‘legibility’ in art since watching the Robert Redford film The Candidate (1972) with Tobias. We had chosen it because Redford had just died; it had good reviews; and we enjoy a good political thriller, which is what we thought it was going to be.

But The Candidate isn’t a thriller at all; it’s an angry satirical swipe at modern political campaigning. Given that it was made over 50 years ago, it’s surprisingly relevant; its targets — dishonest public messaging, an obsession with political polling, a meretricious focus on appearance — are very much still with us. But I say that grudgingly, because everything was overshadowed by the fact that I couldn’t hear the damned dialogue. Everyone mutters; characters are forever talking over each other; almost all of the speech is muddy and muffled, as though recorded through a sponge.

At first I thought there was an issue with the telly, but nope: the longer it went on, the more it became clear that these were intentional choices. The Candidate is a meta-portrait of a curdled political culture, and the opaque sound design contributes to the picture of dishonest effacement; it is an aural metaphor for the way our political culture deliberate conceals significant information.

The alienating inaccessibility of the sound design is replicated in other parts of the film’s structure. You are not, frankly, supposed to pay close attention to the rather sparse plot; you look in vain for any kind of dramatic arc. None of the characters are attractive, or even meaningfully distinguishable from each other.

The Candidate has none of the qualities that make for easy enjoyment in cinema: a driving narrative, a victory over difficulty, someone to identify with and root for. Unlike the Gymnopediés, it is not intended to be particularly legible. It can only be really enjoyed by those who have already developed a certain level of cinematic literacy: people like Tobias, who loved it.

Tobias is a cinephile, and I very much… am not. When presented by something like The Candidate, Tobias is able to comprehend it in a way that I simply can’t, and that means he’s also able to enjoy it in a way that I simply can’t. Films that I find difficult, he finds joyful. This kind of deep enjoyment springs from cultural literacy: the hard-earned ability to cross-reference, spot influences, read symbols, skip explanations.

Joy is both upstream and downstream of understanding; as well as being a product of expertise, enjoyment also produces more expertise. It is very difficult to develop an advanced understanding of something you don’t particularly enjoy in the first place. The fluency necessary to love complex things comes about because you have an initial level of instinctive enjoyment, which motivates you to spend your time consuming (and learning) more. Tobias has become a minor expert on cinema because he truly loves watching films, and by extension he also loves reading about them and listening to podcasts about them and subscribing to newsletters about them and watching decades-old documentaries about them on YouTube.

This virtuous feedback loop of enjoyment and increased understanding — whether it’s in cinema, woodworking or astrophysics — keeps building until you hit your own personal barrier or become an academic, at which point you can no longer enjoy any popular culture in your subject area at all.

At the end of The Candidate I was both confused and irritable, a sensation that was only compounded when Tobias said he loved it. I’ve noticed the same response when I tell people that I genuinely love The Mirror and the Light, the third and most obscure book in the ‘Wolf Hall’ trilogy. if you’ve been baffled and annoyed by something, and then someone better-versed than you quietly says they rather enjoyed it, there is a strong sensation of insult being added to injury: not only have you just consumed a confusing thing that you hated, but it’s being implied (accurately, let’s face it) that your dislike is the result of your own incomprehension. And you could have spent your time doing something else that you liked more.

We only feel like this when we can tell — as any reasonably competent reader of culture can — that the artefact in question is considered ‘good’ by people of elevated taste. (Nobody feels bad because they don’t like U2 or Dirty Dancing or ‘Prison Break’, because nobody gets Smart Points for liking these things.) But I think we also feel particularly injured when the artefact in question is deliberately complex; that is, when it has been made with the intention of being difficult to read. It adds to the sensation that we have been deliberately wrong-footed, and that somebody is laughing at us. I’m not making an argument against high culture here, really; I, too, very much enjoy some kinds of difficulty. But exclusivity is the price that we pay for it, and exclusivity lands very differently when you’re on the wrong side of the door.

Perhaps this is why highly legible art tends to carry an air of glad-handedness and generosity, though the medium be dark or the key be minor. Even if you didn’t like that Satie piece, I bet it didn’t prompt self-loathing. Legible art has an open quality; it embraces a near-limitless audience.

Despite being able to rationalise all of this to my own satisfaction, I still can’t shake the guilty feeling that I should put more effort into trying to enjoy difficult things that I don’t like. At some deep (and probably Protestant) level, I believe this would, in some mysterious way, make me a better person. Conversely, when I’m re-reading the entire Jack Reacher series for the fifth time or doing my annual Band of Brothers rewatch, I worry that my IQ is actively falling.

But I enjoy them both so much, and life is short, and I already do plenty of things that I don’t like: laundry, picking up dog poo, reviewing quotes for car insurance. Even supposing that watching Le Chien Andalou would make me measurably more intelligent and sophisticated and righteous, what exactly is the benefit of that, at my time of life? If I’m not a cineaste yet, it’s hardly for want of exposure. I love individual films (usually, films that could have been radio plays). I just don’t love ‘cinema’. I don’t enjoy it. I could expend hours of effort working my way through the BFI Top 100 (a gruesome prospect) and still not like The Candidate at the end of it all.

So I think my proposal is that anything good about culture, anything valuable, springs from enjoyment. All any of us need to do, as individuals, is make and consume the things that we enjoy, and abstain from repressing the things that other people enjoy. Human variety will see to the rest.

In the Jonathan Coe piece I quoted at the beginning of all this, Coe writes about Satie’s sly sense of humour, which Satie himself attributed partly to his English mother; he ‘would remind people that his birthplace, Honfleur in Normandy, marks the point where the Seine flows into the English Channel.’ Some years ago Tobias and I had a holiday in Honfleur. It’s a lovely place, and as a bonus we spotted David Hepworth from out of Smash Hits in a local bistro. (He’s probably not there all the time, so don’t make the trip purely for that reason.)

Out to the west of the town, looking out across a nature reserve at the grey Channel, the house in which Satie grew up has been turned into the strangest little museum you ever did see, complete with a giant mechanised monkey, a huge pear with flapping wings, and a bicycle carousel that plays music when you pedal. I don’t, as a rule, enjoy museums, but this one made me laugh out loud.

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There was music Rowan heard in the early ‘80s that she did not enjoy as much as Satie: