Cultural Amnesia (13 page)

But there is no evidence that Borges ever felt the need to be afraid. His name and growing international
renown were lent to the regime without reserve, either because he approved or—the best that can be said for him—because he was clueless. As the time arrived when not even he could
claim blindness to the junta’s war against the innocent, lack of information was what he claimed as an excuse for his previous inertia. Signing the round robin of protest that signalled the
end of the regime’s tacit support from the enlightened bourgeoisie—when
their
children were taken, they woke up—he said that he had not
been able to find out about these things earlier. His impatient statement “
No leo los diarios
” (I don’t read newspapers) became famous
among his critics as a shameful echo of all those otherwise intelligent Germans who never heard about the extermination camps until it was all over. It was pointed out with some pertinence that
his blindness had never stopped him finding out about all the literature in the world. There was a torture centre within walking distance of his house, and he had always been a great walker. It
could be said that by then his walking days were over; but he could still hear, even if he couldn’t see. There was a lot of private talk that must have been hard to miss, unless he had
wilfully stopped his ears. He might well have done: a cocked ear would have heard the screams.

In 1983, after the junta fell, he was finally forced into an acceptance of plebeian democracy, the very thing he had
always most detested. A decade of infernal anguish for his beloved country had at last taught him that state terror is more detestable still. It was a hard lesson for a slow pupil. On an
international scale, Borges can perhaps be forgiven for his ringing endorsement of General Pinochet’s activities in Chile: after all, Margaret Thatcher seems to have shared his enthusiasm,
and John Major’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, now wears a medal hung around his neck by Pinochet without any visible sign of chest hair set on fire by burning shame. But
within Argentina, there are some distinguished minds that have had to work hard to see their greatest writer
sub specie aeternitatis
without wishing his
pusillanimity to be enrolled along with his prodigious talent. Pedro Organbide, fully sensitive to the eternal literary stature of Borges, was being
restrained when he
noted—with a sad finality it is hard to contest—that his tarnished hero’s behaviour was a living demonstration of how political elitism depends on ignorance. There are not many
great writers who oblige us to accept that inattention might have been essential to their vision. Jane Austen left the Napoleonic wars out of her novels, but we assume that she heard about them,
and would have heard about them even if she had been unable to see. Sábato’s blindness, unlike Borges’s, was confined only to the last part of his life, but it was complete
enough. His ears, however, remained in good working order, and when the time came he was able to take on the cruel job of writing about the Disappeared—the innocent people whose vanishing
took so long to attract Borges’s attention.

ROBERT BRASILLACH

Robert Brasillach was born in 1909 in Perpignan and excecuted as a traitor in 1945. He is
sometimes thought of, by wishful thinkers in France, as perhaps the most conspicuous example of the promising young all-rounder whose career would have been different if the Nazis had never
come to Paris, although he had already been beguiled by what he thought of as their glamour when he visited Germany. But they arrived, and his nature took its course. As a regular
contributor, during the Occupation, to the scurrilous paper
Je Suis Partout
(I Am Everywhere), he stood out for his virulence even among its staff of
dedicated anti-Semites. His Jew-baiting diatribes were made more noxious by his undoubted journalistic talent. Most of the prominent French collaborators with the Nazis got into it because
they were disappointed nationalists who thought their country had a better chance of becoming strong again if it stuck with the winning side. Comparatively few of them actually admired the
Nazis. Brasillach was one who did. When the winning side became the losing side, he paid the penalty for having guessed wrong. Though there have been attempts, not always unjustifiable, to
rehabilitate his reputation
as a critic, few tears have ever been shed over his fate. By his rhetoric of blanket denunciation, he had been handing out death penalties for
years. Whether the death penalty was warranted in his own case, however, is bound to be questioned by anyone who believes in free speech, however foul it might be.

It is among them that I have found the most passionate defenders
and they have shown a generosity which is in the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature.

—ROBERT BRASILLACH,
Remerciement aux intellectuels
, FEBUARY 3, 1945, QUOTED IN PIERRE ASSOULINE’S
L’Épuration des intellectuels

P
REPARING HIMSELF FOR
his imminent death, the condemned Robert Brasillach showed courage, but unless remorse had renovated his character it is doubtful if he realized just how generous his defenders had been. At the
eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute, he can be heard enrolling himself amongst the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature, as if he still believed he had been its
servant, instead of its betrayer. Whether he was a traitor to France was, and remains, a fine point of legal interpretation. There were plenty of people, including Marshal Pétain himself,
who sincerely believed that to serve Vichy was the only legitimate loyalty, and later on they were able to argue from conviction that they had broken no laws. (During François
Mitterrand’s presidency it was revealed that his supposed career as a Resistance hero had been preceded by a verifiable career as a Vichy functionary. He contrived to imply, without being
toppled from office, that there had been no alternative at the time, although of course he had been
preparing
himself for Resistance all along.) There were
fewer people, although still far too many, who actively cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that the Third Republic had deserved its fate and that the alliance with Germany, even though
compelled, would have been worth making voluntarily in the interests of European renewal and a France purged of liberal equivocation. There were
very few people who behaved
like Nazis themselves, although even in the literary world there were still more than a handful. Brasillach was one of them.

He was given carte blanche by the Nazis to wield his poisoned pen in the pursuit of Jews. On any scale of
crime and punishment, a firing squad could scarcely exact payment for the damage he had caused. But he was shot anyway, and got out of his debt early. If the blindfolded angel of Justice could
have intervened, she would have sent him to Sigmaringen, the appropriately fantastic cliff-side haven on the Danube where Louis-Ferdinand Céline and all the other unrepentant enthusiasts,
taken away to safety by the Nazis, were even then sitting around in plush chairs and boring each other to tears with the tatters of their madcap theories. Their haven was soon overrun but the
reprieve had lasted long enough to save most of them from a death sentence. In his disgusting book
Bagatelles pour un massacre
, Céline had murdered a
thousand times more Jews with his foul mouth than Brasillach had ever accounted for by publishing names in the crapulous weekly newspaper
Je Suis Partout
so
that the Gestapo and the Vichy militia could add to their lists over breakfast. Locking Brasillach in the same cell with Céline for the next ten years would have been a far tougher
punishment than shooting him. But the vigilantes, as always, were in a hurry, so Brasillach died before he had time to entertain the possibility that his real treason had been to the French
humanist tradition he thought himself to be part of.

He could have argued back, and said that Voltaire loathed Jews too. But what would he have said about Proust? What did he
think that a pipsqueak like himself amounted to beside a man like that? Proust might have been only half a Jew, but Brasillach was barely a quarter of a literary figure, and in normal times would
probably have measured even less: the
Zeitgeist
lent him a dark lustre. He had some talent as a critic, and could write forceful prose, even against the
common run of his own political position, whose banalities did not escape him. As late as his 1937 visit to Germany, though he was impressed by the vault of searchlights (the
Lichtdom
) at the Nuremberg rally and bowled over by the sexy energy of the Hitler Youth, he could still describe Hitler as a sad vegetarian functionary. (After the
Nazis took over in Paris, Brasillach had to censor some of his own stuff.) But his fateful attendance at
the 1941
Weltliteratur
pan-European get-together in Weimar put him over the top. It was the combination of poetry and daemonic power that did him in. No tenderness without cruelty! In occupied Paris, Brasillach knew
that the Germanophile French writers were being had by the Propaganda Abteilung. But Brasillach wanted to be had. The Jewish Bolshevik peril was still there, and now it was there for the
crushing. Here was the organized violence that could do it, and he could be part of it. Anger drove him, as it always drives the resentful. He had the kind of energy that could never widen its
view. But it could certainly widen its scope, and the Occupation gave him the opportunities of a big game hunter set loose in a zoo: the targets had nowhere to run. His short career was the
logical outcome of the nefarious, microcephalic intellectual trend that had started with the Dreyfus case and the foam-flecked symposium of Action Française: the idea that a cleaned-up,
non-cosmopolitan, Jew-free culture could restore the integrity of France as the natural leader of Europe. Whether this glowing future was envisaged with the Germans or without them, it was always
without the Jews.

But France was already the natural leader of Europe, and exactly because it had outgrown pseudo-hygienic notions of
cultural purity. Paris had played host to Heinrich Heine when there was no home for him in Germany. As Nietzsche himself insisted, Heine was the greatest German poet since Goethe and one of the
greatest in any language. Heine’s presence in Paris had been a foretaste of the only cultural integrity that would ever matter: the hegemony of the creative mind that enriches nations but
makes their boundaries transparent. The French anti-Semitic right was not just a political freak show, it was a cultural anachronism. From the veteran arch-nationalists Maurice Barres and Charles
Maurras downwards to such bright young things as Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach, its fluently virulent mouthpieces raved on about their nation’s poisoned blood without ever realizing that
they were the poison. Brasillach’s goodbye note to a cruel world is just one more piece of evidence that they never got the point. Literature should have taught them better: but the real
treason of the clerks has always been to suppose that their studies confer on them a power beyond the merely mortal, instead of revealing to them that merely mortal is all they are. If Brasillach
had lived to repent, he might have
found that out: although if he had, his conscience would have killed him anyway. He had too much blood on his hands. Thanks to his accusers,
his is on ours. Some of them, like his defenders, were men of letters. They should have put it in writing. People who don’t think that’s enough shouldn’t write.