Cultural Amnesia (22 page)

But with contemporary classics we are involved with the same dichotomy from the jump. It is hard to think of a creative
mind so pure that it would not be affected by popular notions to some extent. Also it is hard to think of any modern classic in any field that has not been affected by the popular arts. Some
modern classics began as popular arts, and in very recent times an assumption has grown up—not easily to be laughed off—that there is no better way for a modern classic to begin.
Certainly, in the English-speaking countries, a modern classic song is more likely to come out of a centre for a popular genre—Tin Pan Alley, say, or Broadway, or the Brill Building, or
Nashville—than out of the “art song” tradition. In France, the “art song” tradition has
some important classical composers at the foundation of
it (Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, Duparc, etc.) and carries prestige as a consequence; but one of the reasons the
chanson
heritage is relatively strong is
that the popular genres have always been relatively weak; and anyway, Prevert, Brel, Brassens and a dozen other names are scarcely thought of as members of an academy. In literature, a writer as
good as W. G. Sebald is safe from selling millions of books, but he would not be disqualified from seriousness if he sold hundreds of thousands, which he is nowadays quite likely to do, given
time. No theorist about literature could any longer get away with the proposition that best-sellerdom is an automatic disqualification from quality. Louis de Bernières’s
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
might not be quite the masterpiece it was thought to be by many of those who chose it for their one hard read of the year, but it is
not inconsiderable either: millions of man-hours on the holiday beaches were well enough spent in reading it, although the heart quails at the thought that those same readers later fell for the
unalleviated stupidity of
The Da Vinci Code
. In Germany, the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s uncompromisingly taxing autobiography
Mein Leben
was at the top of the best-seller list for most of the millennium year. No doubt there was a fashionable element in its reception—some of the people
who bought it to decorate the hall table might have been establishing their tolerance, refurbishing credentials vis-à-vis the cloudy past, etc.—but there was no fashionable element
to the book itself, a literary work of the first order. Chesterton was actually alive when his principle was used against Puccini, and if Chesterton had been active as a music critic he might
well have used it himself. Apart from Shaw, most of the writers on opera at the turn of the century loftily regarded the Italian operatic heritage as a branch of popular music. (“The
music’s only Verdi but the melody is sweet.”) Puccini’s overwhelming popular success was interpreted as a fashion by his detractors. Until very recently it still was. When I was
an undergraduate at Cambridge, a prominent Wagnerian among the dons tried to tell me several times that Wagner’s stature as a classic confirmed Puccini’s as a fashion.

The same don has since turned into one of our best, most receptive and conscientious opera critics, but he didn’t do
it by following up on Chesterton’s principle, which turns out, for its second half, not to be a
principle at all. Either in life or in the mind, there can be no such
rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige. Prestige alone was never enough to keep an acknowledged
classic alive: if it had been, Petrarch’s long poems in Latin, which he thought were his real claims to fame, would still be read today. The response to vitality brings us back to the first
part, and reveals it, at last, to be an even bigger conundrum than the second. Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift
for criticism can’t be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment. (Being mad about Mantovani is
not
a good qualification for the appreciator of Beethoven: Albert Einstein, who in his role as a dinner-party guru enjoyed introducing ignoramuses to classical music,
would use Mantovani as bait, but he never thought the bait was a living fish.) On the other hand, those who are too critical are apt to run out of appreciation at the crucial time. Stravinsky,
who was never comfortable about attention paid to other composers even if they were long dead, took most of his adult life to get around to the appreciation of Beethoven’s late quartets,
and gave the impression that his own life had to be almost over before he could hear what Beethoven was trying to do at the end of his. (It was also Stravinsky, however, who finally and
incontrovertibly gave Tchaikovsky the praise that was due to him, and thus rescued him from a hundred years of being denigrated as Easy Listening.) All we can be certain of is that such
oscillations between praise and blame, whatever their amplitude, show no discontinuity. Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment.
They don’t have to be kept in touch with each other. They are a single propensity that has to keep in touch with itself. Chesterton’s plain statement is like one of his paradoxes
without the simplicity: but that’s a paradox in itself. It’s an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He
was serious, always. He just didn’t seem to be.

JEAN COCTEAU

The role of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) in French twentieth-century culture was to be the
wonder boy in perpetuity. He should be commended for it: some of his untiring precocity continues to amaze. Diaghilev’s famous instruction to him (“Astonish me”) was one he
fulfilled by astonishing everybody. For Diaghilev, during World War I, Cocteau put together the ballet
Parade
, with music by Satie, décor by
Picasso and choreography by Massine. No single production did more to advance all the arts at once. That they needed advancing was a principle Cocteau never questioned. In that sense, he was
dedicated not to the private experience of art, but to its public impact. Unlike other troublemakers such as the Dadaists, however, he was not making up for shortage of talent. Cocteau went
on astonishing everybody in a dozen different fields. He was poet, dramatist, graphic artist, novelist and film-maker, practising every art form at a high level. His love for the doomed young
novelist Raymond Radiguet resulted in a cycle of tragic poems fit to dispel any illusion that he might have been a dilettante. But he had a dangerous taste for showing off to the exalted, and
during the Nazi Occupation of Paris it led
him astray. Receptions thrown by the Propaganda Staffel of the occupying power at the Tour d’Argent were too often graced
with his exquisite profile. Compounded with an addiction to opium, his compromised reputation led to a spiritual decline after the war. Even then, though, he managed to produce the work by
which he is most easily approached now: the film
Orphée
, which after sixty years still looks original despite all the originality it inspired
from everybody else. (“Cinema is the form of modern writing whose ink is light” was a typical epigram.) There were other Cocteau films, most notably
Beauty and the Beast
, but
Orphée
gives the best sense of
tout Paris
making a
home movie. If not the first, it was certainly the most sensational updating of a classic myth into modern dress. Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played
by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus’s mistress. French intellectual life was the world’s biggest small world, and
everyone in it thought of Cocteau as the arbiter of elegance, even when they despised him. Sympathetic biographies by Francis Steegmuller and Frederick Brown have the facts, and the right
judgement. Cocteau’s all-embracing multiplicity was a kind of unity, even if moral weakness was one of the things that it embraced. The best writer of all on “the banquet
years,” Roger Shattuck, often brings Cocteau on as light relief, but doesn’t underestimate his importance. By and large, the well-funded and often highly qualified American
students of French culture after the Belle Époque were ready to forgive all in their aim to understand everything. A humane attitude, as long as it doesn’t lead us into the
illusion that a man as intelligent as Cocteau didn’t know what collaboration meant. He did: he just thought he could find a style for it. After the war, Cocteau’s old friend Misia
Sert (the tasteful patroness who serves as the nominal subject for one of the best of the many books about
tout Paris
, Arthur Gold and Robert
Fizdale’s
Misia
) threw a string of soirées for which she invited both those who had collaborated and those who hadn’t. She invited
the two groups on different nights. So Cocteau never had to meet the people who wouldn’t stay in the same room with him, because they weren’t there.

Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once
a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.

—JEAN COCTEAU,
Le Potomak

I
UNCONSCIOUSLY
PLAGIARIZED
this idea on two separate occasions before discovering, when searching through my journals, that it belonged to Cocteau. If I had remembered, I would have flagged the
borrowing: it is bad manners to do otherwise, and bad tactics too, because usually you will be found out. My excuse would be that Cocteau, though no end of a dandy and in many respects a
posturing water-fly, had the knack of hitting on expressions that were so neat they seemed without a personal stamp, like particularly smooth pebbles on a pebble beach. He once said to an
interviewer that you couldn’t teach a young artist anything: all you could do was open the door and show him the tightrope. I loved that idea and kept it in my memory. In his film
Orphée
there are ideas that I loved and kept in a different way: the cryptic phrases used by the angels—the phrases were based on coded BBC
radio calls to the French Resistance—became recognition signals for my group of writers at Sydney University in the late fifties. “The bird sings with its wings,” we would
intone to each other, in smug ecstasies of knowingness. No doubt we were being very precious, but so was Cocteau:
Orphée
is the apex of preciosity,
and therefore, appropriately, the distilled projection of Cocteau himself. In life, far from being Orpheus, Cocteau was an Osric with an infinite range of hats, too many of them by Schiaparelli.
In World War I, when he visited the front in a party led by Misia Sert—muse and patroness to all the artists—Cocteau wore a nurse’s uniform of his own devising. In World War II
he was a cocktail-party collaborator, mainly because he couldn’t bear to be out of the swim. At the Propaganda Staffel receptions, with cocktails and finger
food,
Cocteau was a fixture, if a chameleon crossing a swastika can be called that.