Cultural Amnesia (129 page)

Damon wasn’t quite like that. If he had been, he would have taken his chance with McLaren after
Frank Williams let him go. McLaren offered a relatively low basic salary but a bonus for each win. Though the wins would never have been a sure thing, in the McLaren he might have got them. In
the Arrows he couldn’t possibly, but he listened to his financial advisers and went for the guaranteed stipend. It made financial sense—with a family to protect against the press, he
could not forego his estate and its upkeep—but it didn’t make racing sense. For the true, compulsive winner, no other kind of sense comes into question. Even for Michael Schumacher,
who makes more money than anybody, the money is a tool: if Ferrari had not come through for him with a winning car, he would have left them flat.

In his racing years, Alain Prost was a thinker—“the Professor” was the right
nickname—but he never let ratiocination get in the way of winning. Towards the end of his career, when he dealt himself out of a race in Japan because of the heavy rain, it was a sign that
he was done with it. Ayrton Senna didn’t live long enough to reach the reasonable moment. He had winning like a disease, and one of the secrets of his mastery was the realization by the
other drivers that he would drive right through them if they didn’t give him room. He thought it was God’s will that he should ram his rival for the championship (it was Prost),
remove both Prost and himself from the track, and so, while losing the race, win the championship on points. Schumacher behaved the same way early on, to the cost of Hill among others. Later
Schumacher behaved differently, but he still felt the same way. Leaving Nuvolari and Fangio aside, Schumacher is probably the greatest driver we know about, but one of the reasons is that he has
so little difficulty imitating an automaton. Even Senna was more complex. At one point Senna interrupted his colloquy with the Almighty and got off with Elle McPherson. The chances of Schumacher
doing such a thing are the chances of his being the driver of the next cab you hail.

To my mind, and not just because I am Australian by birth, Jack Brabham was the most interesting of all
the drivers because he won championships in a car he had designed—a car that revolutionized the sport. (If you see a list of world-beating Australian expatriates that
leaves Brabham’s name out, throw it away: its compiler has no imagination.) But that made Brabham interesting as a driver. As a man, he lived in a motor-racing world. The
interest of a man like Damon Hill, when he was still driving, was that he lived in a world bigger than his profession. It can be a handicap. Argentina’s Carlos Reutemann, a Williams driver
well capable of pushing the car to its dizzy limit, was such a philosopher that he could walk away, look at the sunset, and decide not to race again. Frank Williams found to his horror that he
had hired Diogenes. Damon was never quite like that, but life eventually got into his mind even when he had the hammer down, and when life does that it brings the thought of death with it. You
can’t get one of those cars out of second gear unless you feel immortal.

Not that a great driver is reckless. There have been some quite good ones who were, but they moved into
the past tense at an early stage. Usually they got fired before they could get killed, or else just never made it into Formula One in the first place. An F1 car costs millions if you count in its
share of the development outlay, and the owners never like to see one of them scuffed up without good reason. As a passenger in the front seat of a car you can afford to buy, I have been driven
on the road or on an empty track by several of the FI drivers. Three of them were world champions: Nelson Picquet, Alan Jones, and Damon Hill. Derek Warwick’s career was cut short when
Lotus reneged on his contract because Senna wanted no rival in the team. (In his last year alive, I missed the chance to be driven by Senna in a Honda NSX: he turned up a day late at Goodwood,
and I thought there might be another time.) Warwick drove me on the highway from his hotel to Monza. The following year I watched him at Le Mans driving the Jaguar racing sports car at 240mph on
the Mulsanne straight at dead of night, but his driving then didn’t look any faster than how it felt to me that day on the highway. It was like being the narrator in Nicholson Baker’s
The Fermata
: all the cars we went past seemed stationary. Moss was an education in ordinary English motorway traffic: his little Peugeot threaded between
the lorries like a magic bullet through an undulating canyon. On the Adelaide Grand Prix circuit, which had been closed down for our appearance, Alan Jones drove me in a Lamborghini Diablo he had
never touched before and hated on sight: top gear was the only one he could find except reverse, and I got
several chances to study the Armco as we slithered towards it at a
hundred plus. Picquet sometimes looked like a madman on the track but on the road he drove as if he wanted to live, so that he could sleep with more women.

What united all the great drivers, when they were driving on an ordinary road with normal human beings,
was that they made you feel safe even as the landscape outside the window turned into a smear. They were so in synch with the car that they could let it perform at its optimum while keeping all
their attention on the road ahead. I even felt safe with Jones in the Diablo: he had to wrestle the beast, but he knew exactly what was going on. As the great Australian poet Kenneth Slessor
wrote about the effect of Captain Cook’s navigational magic on his crew,
Men who ride broomsticks with a mesmerist / Mock the typhoon.
The same went
double for Damon Hill, who gave me the fastest ride of all. After the Hungarian Grand Prix in his championship year, we were hurrying to the airport to catch a private jet to Bulgaria. There was
a police motorcycle escort to clear our side of the road so that Damon could keep his foot down. Though I pretended, on the soundtrack of the documentary, that I thought of nothing but imminent
death, the truth was more complicated. He was too good at his job to take even the tiniest risk off the track. On the track, he upped the ante, as they all do until the day comes when they want
to get up from the game and go home.

It might even have happened to Senna one day. All the talk about how his early death preserved him in his
glory is just bad poetry. It isn’t the responsibility of the racing drivers to have our deaths for us. They have their work cut out leading part of our lives for us: the part, deep in our
dreams, where the brave not only deserve the beautiful, but become the beautiful. There was a morning in Adelaide when I was crouching beside our camera crew as they got a low panning shot of
Senna’s McLaren coming out of the garage. There was traffic in the pit lane so he had to stop for a few seconds right in front of me. While the car yelled with the clutch out, he dipped his
yellow helmet to my camera. I could have reached out to tap his visor. He gave me a little wave with the tip of his glove. Then there was the heavy crunch of the clutch coming in on the full
eight hundred horsepower, and he was gone in a clap of thunder. It must have been like that at Troy, when Achilles came
out of his tent. But Achilles could only fight or sulk.
A less classical and therefore more civilized breed of hero, Damon Hill had a full life coming to him, and eventually he chose to lead it. It was his bravest day. Of him I remember a hundred
moments. In some of them he was racing, but in most he was being human: playing with his children, putting up with the sponsors, or—perhaps the most characteristic—pointing out, in
the most polite possible way, that his team had bungled a pit-stop, cost him the race and quite possibly the championship. There was his flaw on full display: he was reasonable and well-mannered
when he should have been shouting and screaming. But he always let the car do that.

—
Sunday
Times
,
March 18, 2007

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

Many thanks are due Ruth Mandel at Images Sought and Found for her outstanding
photograph research and perseverance in uncovering images of even the most elusive subjects.

Overture: Vienna, © Collection Roger-Viollet

Anna Akhmatova, © Collection Roger-Viollet

Peter Altenberg, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Louis Armstrong, Library of Congress

Raymond Aron, © Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

Walter Benjamin, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Marc Bloch, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet

Jorge Luis Borges, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Robert Brasillach, © LAPI/Roger-Viollet

Sir Thomas Browne, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Albert Camus, © Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

Dick Cavett, Frank Capri/ Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Paul Celan, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Chamfort, © Collection Roger-Viollet

Coco Chanel, © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

Charles Chaplin, The Granger Collection, New York

Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

G. K. Chesterton, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Jean Cocteau, © Yousuf Karsh/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

Gianfranco Contini, © GIOVANNETTI Giovanni/GRAZIA NERI

Benedetto Croce, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet

Tony Curtis, ©John Spring Collection/CORBIS

Ernst Robert Curtius, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Miles Davis, © Bettmann/CORBIS

Sergei Diaghilev, © Bettmann/CORBIS

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet

Alfred Einstein, Smith College Archives, Smith College

Duke Ellington, © Bettmann/CORBIS

Federico Fellini, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

W. C. Fields, © Bettmann/CORBIS

F. Scott Fitzgerald, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Gustave Flaubert, © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

Sigmund Freud, © CORBIS

Egon Friedell, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

François Furet, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA

Charles de Gaulle, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Edward Gibbon, Portrait of Edward Gibbon (1737–94) (oil on canvas) (b/w photo) by English School
(18th century). © Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

Terry Gilliam, © Corbis

Josef Goebbels, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Witold Gombrowicz, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA

William Hazlitt, National Portrait Gallery, London

Hegel, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Heinrich Heine, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet

Adolf Hitler, © Bettmann/CORBIS

Ricarda Huch, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Ernst Jünger, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA

Franz Kafka, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

John Keats, © Corbis

Leszek Kolakowski, Courtesy of the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress.

Alexandra Kollontai, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Heda Margolius Kovaly, © John Foley Photographe Studio Opale

Karl Kraus, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Städtisches Museum Göttingen.

Norman Mailer, © Mark Gerson/Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

Nadezhda Mandelstam, © Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum

Golo Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Heinrich Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Michael Mann, AP Images

Thomas Mann, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Mao Zedong, AP Images

Chris Marker, Source: British Film Institute

John McCloy, W. Eugene Smith, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Zinka Milanov, The Metropolitan Opera Archives

Czeslaw Milosz, AP Images

Eugenio Montale, © Ferdinando Scianna/Magnum Photos

Montesquieu, The Granger Collection, New York

Alan Moorehead, © Getty Images

Paul Muratov, reprinted from Neulovimoe sozdane: vstrechi, vospominaniia, pisma; by Inna Andreeva.
Courtesy of the Slavic and Baltic Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

Lewis Namier, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Grigory Ordzhonokidze, © Sovfoto

Octavio Paz, Steve Northup/Timepix/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

Alfred Polgar, Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Beatrix Potter, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Jean Prévost, © Albert Harlingue/Roger-Viollet

Marcel Proust, Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Edgar Quinet, © Collection Roger-Viollet

Marcel Reich-Ranicki, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Jean-François Revel, © Sophie Bassouls/CORBIS SYGMA

Richard Rhodes, Courtesy of Gail Evenari

Rainer Maria Rilke, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Virginio Rognoni, AP Images

Ernesto Sábato, Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Edward Said, © Jerry Bauer/Grazia Neri

Sainte-Beuve, Adoc-photos/Art Resource, NY

José Saramago, © 1998 Nobel Foundation

Jean-Paul Sartre, © Lipnitzki/Roger-Viollet

Erik Satie, © Collection Roger-Viollet

Arthur Schnitzler, Imagno/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Sophie Scholl, Reprinted from Scholl, Inge, Die Weisse Rose: Erweierte Neuausgabe, Fischer Taschenbuch
Verlag, Frankfurt am Maim, May 1955

Wolf Jobst Siedler, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Manés Sperber, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Tacitus, The Granger Collection, New York

Margaret Thatcher, © Camera Press/Retna Ltd.

Henning von Tresckow, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Leon Trotsky, Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Karl Tschuppik, Reproduction of the title page of his work Marie-Thérèse, Éditions
Bernard Grasset, Paris.

Dubravka Ugresic, © Jerry Bauer

Miguel de Unamuno, ullstein bild/The Granger Collection, New York

Pedro Henríquez Ureña, reprinted from Obra Fotografica en la Argentina; by Greta Stern. Art
& Architecture Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations