Cultural Amnesia (125 page)
Authors: Clive James
The most seductive thing about literature is the books. They are a token of how self-contained it all is,
or at any rate appears to be. A printed book is actually a miracle of technology that took more than five hundred years to develop, but it does not look or feel impossibly far from the notebook
and the pen that are all it takes for us to get a printed book started. For the musician, things are not always so portable. Some of the instruments are beautiful, and increasingly the
instrumentalists are beautiful too—female violinists get spreads in
Vogue.
But a composer can’t carry his orchestra around with him, and there
were no good old days in which the composer for even a single instrument, except perhaps if he concentrated on the piccolo, could pull it out of his pocket. Chopin never pushed his piano into a
café. The painters used to draw in the café but were rarely allowed to paint there. Not only can the writer read in the café, he can write. And the day might always come when
the book he reads in the café is the book he wrote. When he looks at his own sentences in print, he will find them transformed. The better they are—let us suppose that he can tell
bad from good even when reading his own stuff—the more they will sound as if he didn’t write them. They will sound as if they were written by the single voice that all good writers
seem to share when at their closest to the truth.
When children carefully inscribe their names at the front of their school-books they add their address to the name, and
then add the information that the address is in a certain country, which is in the world, which is in the universe. They are trying to raise their names to universality. Print does all that for
you. Print leaves your sedulously practised signature behind, along with your personal handwriting. Strangely enough, this process does not feel like the weakening of
identity, but the strengthening of it. We must tread carefully here, because that feeling of having one’s identity strengthened by being absorbed into a mass is at the heart
of fascism’s appeal in all its varieties. But the writers don’t cease to be themselves: far from it. They aren’t marching anywhere, they look implausible in uniform, and they
have a petulant reluctance to give up responsibility for what they say. They might blend together in print, but they become, through being printed, more individual than ever. My heroes and
heroines in this book would not only have been less famous if they had never been published, they would have been less defined as characters. It was being published, even after his death, that
brought Franz Kafka alive: otherwise he would have been just a man who got nowhere with women. As things are, he defines the anguish of an epoch. Albert Camus would have been just a man who got
everywhere with women. As things are, he is the exemplar of liberalism as the awkward truth. Anna Akhmatova would have been just a woman who broke men’s hearts. As things are, she is
remembered forever as the poet who answered the prayer of innocent victims to define the nightmare that had broken the heart of her country.
You can say, if you like, that in every case the private person was the real one. But it would be a very
thin conception of what a person is, and a hopelessly impoverished version of reality. Our lives are enriched by people who create works of art better than their personalities: the best excuse
for the rogues among them, and the best reason for our raising the virtuous to the plane of worship. The latter reaction might seem extravagant, but we should watch out for those who say so: they
are much more short on reverence than we are on judgement. There is an unmistakeable continuity between holy scripture and the accumulated secular text we call literary culture. All we have to
remember is that infallibility plays no part in it. On the contrary: fallibility is of the essence. The phrase “it is written” is automatically suspect, especially when the written
words are printed. The authoritative typeface might be devoted to an insidious lie. Or there might simply be a misprint. My final quotation, the only anonymous one in the book, is chosen with
that possibility in mind.
Kun-Han-Su
ECKSTEIN AND THE EGYPTIAN
KINGHOPPER
Kun-Han-Su
—AN ANONYMOUS
TYPESETTER
W
HEN THE
V
ienna newspaper
Presse
carried a story about the latest poem by Kun-Han-Su, nobody in the Café Imperial had ever heard of Kun-Han-Su except
for Eckstein, who knew all about him. Eckstein, referred to always and only by his last name, was famous for knowing absolutely everything. Eckstein told his young admirers about the creative
heights to which Kun-Han-Su had carried some of the ancient verse forms under one of the last emperors of the Ming dynasty. Next day the
Presse
regretfully announced that “Kun-Han-Su” had been a misprint for Knut Hamsun. It transpired that Eckstein had known all about the misprint, and indeed could give an account of
misprints, in all languages, throughout the ages.
Eckstein’s universal knowledge was also memorably proved when he was out walking with Hofmannsthal
and Hofmannsthal’s beautiful daughter, Christiane. They saw a hopping bird. Eckstein identified it as an Egyptian kinghopper. “It can’t fly,” he expatiated. “It
can move forward only by hopping. It spends the winter in Egypt, hence the name.” Hofmannsthal looked around, saw no persuasive evidence that
this conversation was
taking place anywhere except in Vienna, and mildly objected: “You said only just now that the bird couldn’t fly.” Eckstein said: “
That
far it can fly.”
These stories about Eckstein are told by Friedrich Torberg in his
Die
Tante Jolesch
, with due acknowledgement that Eckstein really was a very learned man. In his youth Eckstein was a pupil of Anton Bruckner, and later on he wrote an important monograph
about his teacher. Eckstein was enormously well read. He just couldn’t bear to admit that there was something he had missed. It is very easy to get that reputation. When strangers know
that your speciality is books, their usual way of breaking the ice is to ask you if you have read such-and-such a book. The penalty for saying no is to hear a précis. The quickest way
out of a potentially boring conversation is to say yes. But it only takes one smart-arse to test you with a fake title and you’re cooked.
As the alert reader will have often noticed, this has not really been Eckstein’s book, even when it most seems to
be. I have not read everything, nor have I remembered everything I have read. What I tried to do was keep some of it with me and draw lessons from it. Hegel once said that neither a people nor
its government could learn much from history. Had he lived to see the twentieth century, he would have found his belief confirmed after World War I, when the victorious powers, pooling their
wisdom in the conference at Versailles, carefully laid down the conditions to ensure that the catastrophe which they had barely survived would be soon repeated. There were observers—John
Maynard Keynes was one—who guessed what would happen next. But even among them, few were prescient about the scale of the horror. Thinkers who had seen a million soldiers die concluded
that the enemy was war itself. They didn’t foresee that millions of innocent civilians would die next. They thought that peace could be made a principle. But peace is not a principle:
merely a desirable state of affairs. The only answer to Hitler was a contrary violence. There were intellectuals who refused to believe it. There were still more intellectuals who refused to
believe that in the Soviet Union the real enemy of the people was the Communist Party: the enemy of its own people, and of any other people living under democratically elected governments. It
would be wrong to conclude, however, that there was something about being an intellectual that precluded the seeing of the truth. There wasn’t then
and there
isn’t now. For all but the born prodigy of common sense, opinions are arrived at by the sifting of opinion. The process might occasionally lead to error, but ignorance will lead to error
always. So we seek out the best of what is said on weighty matters, and naturally assume that the very best resides amongst what is said well.
There is a danger there, as I have tried to point out. Any effective writer of expository prose is an
artist of a kind, and artists give shape to the facts. But facts are recalcitrant, and often they refuse to fit, especially when political. The artist who fancies himself above politics is
tacitly conceding that the world is too much for him, even as the concession gives him freedom. It can be a fine freedom, but it counts for nothing beside the freedom of the common people, and
when the discrepancy shows up with tragic force, we are right to call a halt to our admiration, and ask: is this really so well expressed, if reality is so very different? We question, that is,
the earthbound soul behind the transcendental work. To say so might seem to let in the incubus of biographical enquiry, and thus issue a licence to every dunce who wants to make a living out of
the elementary revelation that our idols have feet of clay. But there was never any humanism without humans. The only peril is that we will stop short, by failing to realize that the
personality of the creator is a created marvel in itself, and all the more so for its weaknesses, which are close to the source of its inspiration. Fame is not the spur. Fame is the result.
Creativity starts in the well of human feeling which for want of a better single word we call the soul. It is more glamorous and exciting to believe that creativity starts in the gift; but by
what has happened to some gifts we can see that the soul is where they came from, and is what reaches us even when we fight shy of reaching it. Among my hero Alfred Polgar’s fellow
émigré writers who praised his accomplishments, most felt compelled to frame their encomia as aphorisms that would equal his for brilliance, as if style were the thing in
question. And so it was, but the style came from a cast of mind, which the comparatively unspectacular journalist Hans Sahl had the simple boldness to define. He said that Polgar had a
spiritual superiority that could transmit the terrible, and that he was not only clever and witty, but wise.
The getting of wisdom is a hard road. Most of us are not equipped by nature to travel it at high speed, and some of us
must crawl like
babies. Our chafed hands and knees can easily make us wonder if the journey is worth it. If I could go back in time and design my own birth, I would
introduce the genetic material that might have made me a bit less of a dunderhead. Even today, in my seventh decade, I meet people forty years younger who are patently more sensible than I was
when I set off on my great adventure. I was their age then, but they are my age now: old heads on young shoulders. What I had to learn by trial and error, they seem to have been born knowing.
But perhaps they have had the luck to be born into a better time. If so, and if they are to stay lucky, the worse time had better not come back. For those it didn’t kill or maim, it
injured the air. Uncertainty was something we all breathed in, back then. The horrors of the past and present made us nervous about the future, and the habit is hard to shake. The young might
do well to tie a handkerchief over the rear-view mirror and just get on with it. The world is turning into one big liberal democracy anyway. Terrorism will punch angry holes in it, but in the
long run nothing will stop the planetary transformation. Even if armed with a second-hand atomic bomb, an obscurantist can do nothing for the poor. Most of the poverty on Earth is caused by the
number of people being born who would ordinarily have never been conceived. Prosperity gave them life. All too frequently the life seems not worth living, but when we cry out at the injustice
we are asking for more democracy, not less. Subsidiary populations that migrate into the liberal democracies are seeking a legitimate economic advantage in comparison to the homelands they
left. They are understandably reluctant to accept that their economic disadvantage in the homelands they left might have been at least partly due to the culture they grew up in. In their
adopted countries they are often encouraged in this reluctance by local humanitarians who think it illiberal for an imported culture to be criticized for its backwardness. But when the zealous
young men of the imported culture begin to practise terrorism under the encouragement of their religious leaders, even the local absolutists for human rights come to see the point of
restricting the freedom of religious leaders to preach violence against the adopted state. So eventually the rule of law under an elected, replaceable government will have even the
humanitarians behind it. It can’t lose. Why, then, bother to ponder how we got out of the maelstrom? Why be an Ancient Mariner, who stoppeth one in three and
boreth
them to tears? The only answer comes from faith: faith that the rule of decency—which at last, and against all the odds, looks as if it might prevail—began in humanism, and
can’t long continue without it.
How will we know if our earthly paradise is coming to pieces, if we don’t know how it was put
together? It was the human mind that got us this far, by considering what had happened in history; by considering the good that had been done, and resolving to do likewise; and by considering
the evil, and resolving to avoid its repetition. Much of the evil, alas, was in the mind itself. The mind took account of that too. The mind is the one collectivity that the free individual can
thrive in: which is lucky, because live in it he must. Even within ourselves, there are many voices. Hegel, when he said that we can learn little from history, forgot about Hegel, author of the
best thing about history that has ever yet been said. He said that history is the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself.