Cultural Amnesia (30 page)

PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945) was the tall blond darling of the French right between
the wars. Brought up in a bourgeois family with royalist beliefs, he emerged from World War I with with the kind of loathing for capitalism that found the right more congenial than the left.
Later on he said that he had been a fascist all along, Although he didn’t officially declare his allegiance until 1934, he had decided quite early that there were only two sides,
fascism and communism. A much-admired poet when young and an effective prose stylist always, he would have been regarded as an adornment of French culture if not for his politics. As things
turned out, only his politics lend him lasting interest. (A direct route to the centre of his agitated political consciousness is
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle:
Secret Journal and Other Writings
, translated and introduced by Alastair Hamilton, a valuable student of the fascist intellectuals right up until the day of their total disappearance
at the end of World War II.) Drieu was convinced that French culture had been toppled from its rightful pre-eminence by the corrosive influence of liberals and Jews. Giving a warm welcome to
the idea that France might be restored to strength by an alliance with Germany, he saw France as the woman and
Germany as the man in a partnership that for him always had
sexual overtones. His personal beauty was important to him. He was the kind of man who takes it to heart when he loses his hair. Since he looked more like a blond barbarian Nazi god than most
of the Nazis did, his alliance with the invader had the stamp of destiny. More than ready to collaborate with the Nazi Occupation, he accepted the editorship of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
after the parent publishing house, Gallimard, made a deal with the Germans by which it would censor itself in order to stay in
business. To do him what little credit he had coming, Drieu became disillusioned with the occupiers, but his annoyance was mainly because they proved themselves less keen about the strength
of French culture than he was. The measures against the Jews didn’t bother him.

Nevertheless he must have been aware that he had not only chosen the losing side, but behaved badly
enough to attract vengeance, because when the Liberation came he attempted suicide instead of standing up to argue for his views. The failure of his quest to eliminate himself raised the
question of what to do with so embarrassingly gifted a leftover, but finally he managed to do the right thing, although scarcely for the right reason. “We played and I lost,” he
said in the farewell address he called Final Reckoning. “Therefore I demand the death penalty.” But we don’t demand the death penalty because we lose. We demand it because
we have done the wrong thing.

And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them
encumber my last days.

—DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, QUOTED
IN PIERRE ASSOULINE’S
L’Épuration des intellectuels

O
N THE FACE
of it,
Drieu’s valedictory testament was absurd. It was 1944, after the liberation of Paris; he had never made any secret of collaborating with the Nazis; his deeds were done and his time had run
out. And his whole personal disaster had been because of
his interest in polics. Already resolved to suicide, he was attributing a deficiency to himself in the very area where
he had been most obsessed. It is an instructive demonstration of the lengths to which self-deception can go. In the thirties he had been the golden boy and even looked like one. His hulking
personal beauty was certainly enough to make some extremely civilized women forget his politics. (Visiting from Argentina, the bluestocking heiress Victoria Ocampo, future editor of the literary
magazine
Sur,
welcomed him into her bed, and decades later she was still forgetting his politics, writing fond articles of reminiscence in which his
intellectual proclivities featured as charming quirks at worst.) But his political passions, which included a visionary anti-Semitism, had led him all the way to treason, by a series of steps
that had begun with his disgust at the inability of France to unite Europe in a crusade against the liberal democratic heresy. Since he thought Nazi Germany could do a better job, he welcomed the
German invasion. It is important to remember, on this point, that he was not coming from the direction of Action Française. Maurras hated the Germans. What united the two different strains
of collaboration was that they both hated the Jews.

As editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Française
under the
tutelage of a compromised regime, Drieu was effectively a collaborator for as long as he held the chair. But here the difficulties begin. The picture becomes less clear than we might like. Drieu
found out, on closer acquaintance, that he didn’t think much of the Nazis either: they weren’t really serious about the transformation of culture. Feeling that, he was able to nurse
within himself the belief that he still had the interests of a greater France at heart. (The fate of the Jews, it need hardly be said, he was able to ignore: i.e., tacitly approve.) Had he chosen
to live, he might eventually have been able to put up a case for his past behaviour. As a collaborator on the practical level, he had not done much more to favour the oppressive power than many
of the late-flowering literary
résistants
had done against it. It had been Rebatet and Brasillach, after all, who had helped to direct the hunt
against the Jews. Punish those two, by all means. But Drieu had been a cut above all that vulgarity, had he not?

He might even have been able to carry the point about politics: the thoroughness with which he had got them wrong was,
after all, a kind
of proof that they had never held his interest, which had been expended on his purely intellectual vision of a properly authoritarian Europe. In other words,
he might have proved himself incompetent. Some of his contemporaries later ventured the cynical but all too plausible opinion that if he had stayed hidden for a couple of years he might have
resurfaced as a minister in the provisional government, where he had friends and admirers. It wasn’t just his old Nazi pals who tried to get him to safety. When he revived in hospital after
his first suicide attempt through an overdose of Luminal, he found a passport good for Switzerland under his pillow. The documents were almost certainly put there by Lt. Gerhard Heller of the
Propaganda Abteilung. Heller was still busy in the corridors of Paris even as the German troops were pulling out and the high-echelon collaborators were settling into their supposedly safe new
billets in Sigmaringen. But Heller’s efforts were duplicated by Emmanuel d’Astre de la Vigerie, minister of the interior in the provisional government, who also thought that Drieu and
Switzerland were a good match. There were plenty of eminent literary figures who considered Drieu as one of them, and thus too important to be sacrificed on the altar of
l’Épuration
. They had a point, about it if not about him. All too quickly it had emerged that the purgative courts would be used as a means of settling old
scores. The unspeakable Louis Aragon (a long-time apologist for state terror as long as Stalin was in control of it and not Hitler) shamelessly tried to nail doddery old André Gide.
Gide’s collaboration had amounted to not much more than a judicious reticence, eked out with the occasional soirée for Ernst Jünger where both men could deplore the barbarism
that made it so hard to concentrate on one’s art. But Aragon, as a Communist bonze, had never forgiven Gide for his pioneering pamphlet
Retour de
l’URSS
, which had revealed Stalin’s regime for what it was.

Luckily Aragon’s vindictive spite did not prevail. Nor, thank God, did Picasso’s stupidity: to his everlasting
shame, the greatest of all modern painters allowed his studio to be used as a meeting point for vigilantes preaching havoc against those who had compromised themselves with the foe—a
strictness that came oddly from Picasso, who had eaten in black market restaurants throughout the Occupation and never run a single risk. It was a time for fake virtue: a time in which there was
no sure sign of real virtue except diffidence. The fair-minded François
Mauriac (some said he had to be fair because his brother had been a
collabo
) put in a good word for the unsavoury Henri Béraud, who throughout the Occupation had kept up an unrelenting barrage of vituperation against Communists,
the Popular Front, England and, always and above all, Jews. Mauriac was brave enough to defend even the choleric Jew-baiter Robert Brasillach as “
ce brillant
esprit
,” large praise for someone who had asked for his fate in open print by telling the Gestapo which doors to knock on. Brasillach’s execution by firing squad was generally
regarded at the time as the least he had coming, but Mauriac was prescient in guessing that a saturnalia of rough justice would produce a lasting hangover. Mauriac simply disliked
l’Épuration
, and in retrospect he seems right. A good moral test for the business is that while Camus saw that there had to be a reckoning but thought it
should be done regretfully, Sartre was an untroubled enthusiast. If Drieu had faced trial straight away, a death sentence might well have been on the cards. But it could be that he had already
sentenced himself. In March 1945 he finally succeeded in committing suicide. He used gas. Since he almost certainly knew the truth about what had happened to the Jews deported from Drancy,
perhaps he thought the means of his own exit appropriate.

Alfred Einstein

Duke Ellington

ALFRED EINSTEIN

Not to be confused with his physicist cousin Albert Einstein, the musicologist
Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) was born in Munich and went into exile after 1933, first in Italy and then in London. He devoted much of his life to scholarship, of which the principal
results were his three-volume history
The Italian Madrigal
and his reworking of Köchel’s Mozart catalogue. He also produced the standard
monograph on Mozart—still the best single book to read on the subject—and an authoritative survey of the golden period in Vienna,
Music in the
Romantic Era
. Abetting these major works were some superbly compressed essays, the best of which are collected in
Essays on Music
(1958), the
book through which he is most easily approached. At a time when biographies of great composers so often run to many volumes (the trend began well with Ernest Newman’s
Wagner
, but by now it is out of hand) it can be a revelation to discover how much Einstein could say in a single paragraph. He had both wit and a sense of
proportion. The second thing is not always accompanied by the first, but the first is impossible without the second.

If we let our imagination roam, it is difficult to conceive what
might not have happened in the realm of music if Mozart had lived beyond the age of thirty-five, or Schubert beyond thirty-one.

—ALFRED EINSTEIN,
“
Opus Ultimum
,” IN
Essays on Music

L
ATER IN
THE
same essay, the musicologist gives a brief list of what Mozart did with the few years of extra life he had that Schubert hadn’t: “
Figaro
,
Don Giovanni
,
The Magic Flute
, the three great Symphonies and the last four
quartets.” The musicologist thus refocuses an eternally nagging question. The question isn’t about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is
about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart. Einstein doesn’t actually ask the question in that form, but he makes sure that we do. Einstein says that the word
frühvollendet
(too early completed) is often “strangely and mistakenly” applied to composers who were never completed, because they were
interrupted.

For the twentieth–century Jewish scholars of the arts, the idea of a truncated
creative life was an ever imminent reality. First in a disintegrating Europe and then later in American exile, Alfred Einstein wrote his books about musicology in the shadow of a looming threat
to culture. With persecution always a danger, his view of the past was inevitably tinged with pessimism. One of the elements that make his monograph about Mozart a great book is this projected
sense of cultural fragility. He makes Mozart’s prodigious outpouring a race against fate. He treats Mozart the gentile as a
Luftmensch
with a tenuous
claim to a place on Earth. He did the same for Schubert, and was surely right. Schubert’s career—what in German would be called his
Laufbahn
,
the road he ran—was one of busy contentment. Though the occasional romantic radical of today sometimes paints him as an embattled rebel, Schubert was in fact very much at home in bourgeois
Vienna, surrounded by friends, a byword for merriment. But he was also an avatar. If he had climbed out of a flying saucer, he could not have been less of this world.

How do we account for such genius? The first question to deal with is how its prodigality did not interfere in any way
with its quality. In a
conversation I had with the Australian poet Peter Porter, who has a vast knowledge of classical music, he argued that this is nearly always so with the
great composers. Modern literature since Flaubert might lead us to cherish the paradigm of a few perfect products slowly refined over a lifetime, but the main tradition of music from Bach through
to Mahler allows of no such ideal. The composers churned the stuff out, and it was all good. There would have been no better Bach cantatas if he had written a hundred fewer of them.

But even among his prolific ancestors and heirs, Schubert was something else. My own way into his sonic
universe was through the piano sonatas, played by Artur Schnabel. Theoretically my main interest was in the
Lieder
, but I found that the words got in the
way. The better I got at understanding German the less I liked most of the texts. (With the French
chanson
tradition at its height there is no such
restriction, because Fauré, Hahn, Duparc and the rest took care to set first-rate texts; but with Schubert that was less often so.) Schubert’s wordless works presented no such
barrier: there was no verbosity to interfere with the eloquence. After a while I could place any phrase from any of the sonatas to the correct sonata, and the time arrived when I could do the
same for the symphonies. At Cambridge I knew the future musicologist Robert Orledge. We were in Footlights together—he was musical director for several of the revues I produced on the
Edinburgh Fringe—and it would not have surprised me at the time to be told that he would one day be one of our leading musical scholars. (It was a pity he did not compose more: the future
student of Duparc could write melodies fully as beautiful as those of his hero.) One evening we had a long discussion about music in which we brandished at each other the names and opus numbers
of all our favourite works by the great composers. Orledge admired them all, but Schubert, he said, was beyond admiration. He was surprised that I had not yet heard the Quintet in C Major, and
predicted that when I did hear it for the first time it would be one of the great days of my life.

He was right. I heard it played by the Amadeus quartet plus one, in a performance that I later judged to be too lush with
the
rubato
; but a certain amount of over-interpretation probably helped the initial impact. (Over-interpretation does some of your reacting for you: you
hate it later, but it can help you on the way in.) I had thought that nothing
could be more wonderful than Beethoven’s late quartets, but the
adagio
of the Schubert Quintet in C Major contained them all with room to spare. Thirty years later, I listen to the Quintet only rarely: it takes me back too far and
too deep, and anyway I already know it note by note. But I can already see that I might listen to it many times in my last years, and might even die to it—during the
adagio
for preference. I was not surprised, merely satisfied, to find Wittgenstein referring to the Quintet in C Major in one of his letters to the British linguist C.
K. Ogden. In language unusually fervent for so cool a hand, Wittgenstein hailed its “
fantastic
kind of greatness.” The italics were his, and
well judged. No more measured words will do. But here, at the moment of rapture, is the exact time to return to Einstein’s formulation. If Schubert had lived even four more years—the
difference between his lifetime and Mozart’s—he would have written not just a few more works of the same complexity, but dozens, perhaps hundreds. It is like thinking of the Bellini
operas we lost because of a simple sickness. (The same sickness took Bizet, but he was three years older: if he had been the same age, it would have cost us
Carmen
.) It is not like thinking of the Aristophanes plays we lost because someone mislaid them, or of the missing books of the
Annals
of Tacitus that took with them the story of how Sejanus came to ruin: those works were composed, they existed. But Bellini’s lost operas, like
Masaccio’s lost frescoes and Seurat’s lost paintings, were lost because they never happened. Their creators were not early completed: they were interrupted.

And the creator who was most catastrophically interrupted was Schubert. It could be said that Masaccio, who died at
twenty-six, was an even more grievous loss. Young trainee appreciators of art who stand astonished in front of Masaccio’s frescoes in Florence can comfort themselves with the thought that
Michelangelo once stood in the same spot and was equally daunted by Masaccio’s transformative genius. Masaccio’s untimely death switched off a miracle. But there is the consideration
that he had probably already worked all the revolutions he could, and what we would have been given had he lived would have been more of the same—bigger and better, perhaps; even monumental
on the scale of Michelangelo’s ceiling and the Raphael Stanze; but surely within the limits of representational art. He would not have gone all the way to impressionism, cubism and
abstraction. But Schubert
might have gone anywhere. There is just no telling. Einstein’s contribution to criticism was to remind those of us who practise it that we have
an inbuilt tendency to freeze the past into position with an injection of the shaping spirit.

Poetic sensitivity, like poetic creativity, is fraught with the sense of an ending. But the tradition we
cherish could have been very different: a fact that the twentieth century brought home to us with anachronistic violence. The whole of modern Polish literature, in which Witold Gombrowicz and
Czeslaw Milosz are only two of the most luxuriant flowers, might have had an utterly different layout if some Nazi thug, in 1942, had not put a bullet through the head of Bruno Schulz, who,
although already fifty, was probably only at the beginning of what he would have written. And as a painter, Schulz was only one of a whole Jewish generation who never got as far as their first
exhibition. When we look at the single easel painting by Schulz that survived, we are clearly looking at the start of a magisterial creative outpouring. But the start is all we get to see. Such
possibilities were always on Alfred Einstein’s mind. As a young scholar, he had the Nazi nightmare still in his future, but he had the eastern pogroms in his memory. It’s the Jewish
contribution, and a very dubious privilege: to restore to the past the sense of happenstance that its great works contrive to obviate. But of course the great works contain it too, or they could
never have been created. Proper criticism brings it out: the play of chance, the capricious fate that energized the inevitability, the number of strokes of luck it takes to make something that
will last.