Cultural Amnesia (103 page)

Ravel refuses the Legion d’Honneur but all his music
accepts it.

—ERIK
SATIE, QUOTED BY ROLLO MYERS,
Erik Satie

A
ND RAVEL
WAS
one of his friends. At the height of his productive period that stretched from the teens of the twentieth century until the early 1920s, Erik Satie would throw his completed
compositions behind the piano, either trusting the important ones to emerge from the mulch by themselves, or just not caring. The composer important enough to influence both Ravel and Debussy had
no regard for his own dignity. He was ready to insult even himself. In our time, Barry Humphries is a Satie figure, but one who is glad to incorporate the conventional life even while making war
against it: one of the secrets of his creative longevity. Satie incorporated the war. Self-destruction was the surest sign of his rebellion. Among the tanning factories and market gardens of
Arcueil, Satie looked up to no-one except the phantom Madonna he called
Notre-dame Bassesse
: Our Lady Lowness. Like Baron Corvo (real name: Frederick
Rolfe), Satie would sign his name as a bishop, but just for the gag. Unlike Baron Corvo he had no hankerings to be Pope. All the facts are in Myers’s book, but many of them—according
to Robert Orledge, our best qualified scholar of that effervescent period in French music—were lifted with insufficient acknowledgement from an earlier book of the same title by
Pierre-Daniel Templier. Satie would probably have approved of the misappropriation. In every department except his compositions, even in their performance, he was out to sow the seeds of
anarchy.

Lydia Sokolova in her memoir of the Russian ballet records the meeting of Satie and Cocteau for
Parade
: the conjunction of two hierarchs in the minor but vital French tradition of taking frivolity with uncompromising seriousness. For Satie, however,
there was no hierarchy: his superiority was unassailable. “Those who are unable to understand are required by me to adopt an attitude of complete submission and inferiority.” He said
it before the premiere of
Socrate
, and the “by me” tells you everything. This confidence in the importance of his mereness—the melody
unadorned, stripped even of harmony—
remains the most shocking thing about him, though the confidence was justified. Today his music is a case of once heard, never
forgotten. But he was determined to be forgotten first, and succeeded. His written directions to the performance of his pieces (“Play like a nightingale with toothache”) were designed
to help them go out of date. He knew that nothing takes on verdigris faster than a determined novelty. By a trick of coincidence—surely it was not a planned echo—Ring Lardner exactly
reproduced the cracked tone of Satie’s surreal annotations in the stage directions of his, Lardner’s, little plays: “The curtain descends for seven days to denote the passing of
a week.” In that regard Satie, like Lardner in the same mood, was out to make nothing but mischief. Edmund Wilson hated it when Lardner called a book of short stories
How to Write Short Stories
. Why put up barriers of nonsense? In Satie’s case, it was probably a dread of having so transparent a secret penetrated by the solemn.
Nobody unqualified to open the casket should clap eyes on its contents of water-drop jewellery. Here the precursor of Dada outflanked the whole movement, because the Dadaists had no secret: the
protection was all there was. Satie’s defences marked the route to treasure. No writer who has heard and loved Satie’s piano pieces (they came back in a big way only in the early
1960s) will be proof against the urge to strip from prose everything except its melody, as if, in the necessary interplay of word and thought, there could be a purely lyrical essence. There
can’t. But in music Satie made a vivid reality out of the hopeless ideal of a central, primal thread. He makes babies of us, except if we are distracted by his words, in which case we do
not qualify.

ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was the giant of literary Vienna in its most fruitful era. A
practising physician before he turned professional writer, he brought a view steeped in the harsh realism of the consulting room and the surgery to his stories, novels and plays. The most
conspicuous, and most enduringly controversial, element in this clinical realism was his exploration of the erotic. As a physician he knew a lot about it at second hand. At first hand, he was
an energetic young man physically attractive to women of all classes. The addition of fame to his natural advantages made him hard to resist, and one of the commendable things about his
private life is that he somehow managed to forge a moral sense out of limitless opportunity. It was the plays that made him famous: as a man of the theatre he ruled the city. Though he is
still respected internationally as a dramatist, the plays remain notoriously difficult to capture in English, even though playwrights as accomplished as Tom Stoppard have tried. (Some of the
plots from his plays turn up constantly in the movies.) Schnitzler is probably most easily approached through his stories, but one of his full-length novels,
Der Weg ins Freie
(often translated as The Road to Freedom, although The Path into the Clear is
less likely to get him mixed up with Sartre),
should not be ignored by anyone studying the relationship of culture and politics at a key place in a crucial time: none of his writing, in any genre, was more penetrating about the Jewish
identity crisis in Austria. A Jew himself, Schnitzler was not blinded by his own huge success to the pervasive nature of anti-Semitism in Viennese polite society: his play
Professor Bernhardi
dealt with that very subject. But the glittering theatregoers sat still to watch the play. Schnitzler was quick to notice, however, that he had
another bunch of overdressed spectators who were less disposed to sit still while their prejudices were examined. The Nazis, vocally active against Jewish cultural Bolshevism long before they
took power in Germany, found it easy to calumniate Schnitzler as a cosmopolitan pornographer. Schnitzler was much quicker than Freud to spot that the Nazis would bring everything in Viennese
civilization to an end. There is a lingering misapprehension about Schnitzler: because his memoirs of youth are so unflinchingly realistic, he is thought to have been irredeemably coarse. But
his realism, even about previously unmentionable matters, was made possible by sensitivity, not by obtuseness. He had a lyrical awareness that penetrated everywhere, even into the truly sick
minds of those who called his honesty an illness, and wanted to kill him for it.

There are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a
flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long
as they might fondly imagine.

—ARTHUR SCHNITZLER,
Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken
, P. 78

W
HEN RAYMOND ARON,
in
Le Spectateur engagé
, said it was a mistake to underestimate the role of obtuseness in human affairs, he was merely making a useful statement. These
lines from Schnitzler amount to a true aphorism, and all his warnings against the aphorism
as a literary form duly apply. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie
falls out, leaving only a banality.) But Schnitzler’s own aphorisms are guarded and enriched by his lifelong distrust of the merely paradoxical. If they were not, they would be more
popular, like Wilde’s. Schnitzler was really out to get at the truth, and this bold linking of cleverness and stupidity is typical of how bravely truthful he could be.

Is stupidity a mere absence of mind, or has it a mind of its own? If the second thing is true, then stupidity is a force
in itself. But it would be a hard force to study, because it always seems to be mixed up with something else: cleverness, for example. In the field of geopolitics, Hitler provided at least one
glaring case of what seems, at first glance, to be stupidity in its pure state. After the launching, in June 1941, of Operation Barbarossa, he terrorized millions of people in the Soviet Union
who had already been terrorized for years by their own government, and who would willingly have smoothed the path for his armies and administration if he had behaved with even the bare minimum of
benevolence. A light hand would have been in his interests as a conqueror; but the heavy, murderous hand was the only one he would contemplate. It was one of the many points at which he
guaranteed the loss of his own war. But there’s the hint: the many points can all be traced back to the beginning, and their root found in his irrational obsession with racial hygiene. For
him, by his nature, mass extermination was an end, to which the creation of a Greater Germany was only a means. His opening anti-Semitic campaigns after the
Machtergreifung
in January 1933 subtracted the Jewish effort from the German physical sciences—a self-inflicted handicap which would have ensured that he could
never have been victorious in the long run. Even that basic point, however, although hard to argue with in retrospect, needs qualification. Though Germany’s pure science was crippled,
applied science and technology still got an awfully long way under the Nazis, and it is an act of retroactive trust to suppose that Heisenberg and the other Aryan physicists would never have been
able to build an atomic bomb if they had been given time, although they would not have been able to deliver it before the Allies did, because Germany’s long-distance bombing capacity had
not kept pace. Hitler’s Germany had all the potential for world domination. Leaving aside the question of whether world domination is a sane aim—we usually don’t call Alexander
crazy—Hitler need not necessarily have pursued it in an insane manner. It is just our dubious luck that he did. It was his principles that dished him. If he could have
sacrificed them to expediency, he might have won.