Cultural Amnesia (69 page)

John Motley’s
Rise of the Dutch Republic
is the only long book that I have
ever read right through to the finish in the certain knowledge that it would never come good. In three tremendously uninspired volumes, Motley never writes a memorable sentence until the end,
where the little children weep in the streets. I have never forgotten that sentence, but perhaps I set myself that task too, to compensate myself for the insane plan of reading ten pages a day
until it was all over. It was an extreme case of what a long work can do for us: etch its highlights into our tired brains by the pressure of its average weight. It helps if the average is high:
a passage in Dante about nothing except dogma is still fascinating for its craft. But an average is something any tolerable epic is bound to have, because it can’t do without low points. An
epic must have historical sweep, in its frame of reference if not in its narrative sequence; and exposition, beyond a certain level, can’t be made exciting. The question will always arise
more acutely about the poetic epic than the prose epic, because if we find a prose epic disproportionately dull we tend to dismiss it, no matter how good an argument can be made for the longeurs.
(Joyce’s
Ulysses
would be a less successful prose epic if it had an even longer stretch of deliberately dud prose brilliantly reproducing the
mannerisms of hack journalism.) Our tolerance of the uneventful poetic epic is more elastic from the start, because we have learned to expect less. Spenser is only the third most gifted exponent
of the stanza named after him (Byron comes first and Shelley second) and his vast poem
The Faerie Queene
has a way of concentrating the reader’s
attention on everything except itself. When I was reading it I had to sit facing away from the window, or I would find myself counting the people on a passing bus. Whether by Ariosto, Tasso,
Camões or Mickiewicz, an intermittently fascinating poetic epic might need explication and excuse, but no defence. Scholars must go on defending
The Fairie
Queene
because no common reader can get through it without setting himself a daily quota. Other epics in English are easier on the eyelids, but they all leave Dante safe. Tennyson’s
The Idylls of the King
is nothing beside Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
, and even in Malory
there are roads of dross between the golden castles. Browning’s
The Ring and the Book
is as unspeakable as
Paradise Lost
: the same greatness, yet the same resistance to being incorporated into memory. But the catalogue could go on, like Homer’s list of ships, except
that all the ships are holed below the waterline. The only serious epic that is entirely, lyrically successful from line to line is
Eugene Onegin
, which is
really a verse novel. All the other entirely successful epics are comic: in English, they are
The Canterbury Tales
,
The
Dunciad
and—the pick of the bunch, and the Cullinan Diamond of poetry in English after Shakespeare—Byron’s
Don Juan
. An epic that
mocks itself can make virtues of its own mechanisms. Otherwise it is doomed to creak forward like a siege engine in a landscape short of citadels. Any attempt to divest it in advance of its
necessary dullness will destroy its coherence. An epic compiled from nothing except images is a contradiction in aims. Ezra Pound tried it, and the
Cantos
is, or are, there to remind us that nobody can make a meal out of condiments, or a statue out of sparks.

Last night I finished reading Heinrich’s
Henry IV
, a unique book . . .

—THOMAS MANN,
Tage bücher 1935–1936
, P. 179

Thomas Mann could be generous even about his older brother: something worth remembering when we face
the persuasive evidence of just how self-centred the great writer could be. On page 413 of
Tagebücher 1937–1939
we find the Pacific Palisades
Hausherr
and his brilliant children locked in a delightfully catty argument about which of the émigré writers should be awarded
die Palme der Minderwürdigkeit
—the palm for mediocrity. Should it be Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig, Lion Feuchtwanger or Erich Maria Remarque? Even in exile,
they all had big sales. It was easy for Mann to feel threatened. Contrary to the opinion about him that has since become commonplace, it took Mann some time to establish himself as the
unchallenged literary representative of the eternal Germany. During his first Amercan years, he was often prey to the fear that things were going too slowly for him and too smoothly for others.
(This was before Remarque won the affections of Paulette Goddard, but
All Quiet on the Western Front
had already been a best-seller
in
English on a scale that Mann was never to know.) Emil Ludwig alone was more than enough to make all the other exiled German writers feel that they were bound for oblivion. Ludwig’s
biographies of the great made him famous, influential and rich. They also inculcated in their author the preposterous notion that he was some kind of great man himself, a delusion he backed up by
living in an appropriate style. Ludwig’s Wagnerian standards of comfort were evoked scathingly by Alfred Polgar, an incomparably better writer with an incomparably smaller bank balance. But
Polgar was not the only observer to spot the discrepancy between Ludwig’s self-esteem and a just measure. Mockery for Ludwig’s pretensions was standard throughout the emigration.

It is sad, however, to find Stefan Zweig’s name on the list of mediocrities. Zweig thought Mann was
an admirer. Mann was the master of the diplomatic letter that took people at their own estimation. He could effortlessly mislead them about his true opinions. But at his best, the diplomacy
was
his true opinion. He was generous about the importance of other writers in the emigration even if he did not much admire their individual works. The
Palm for Mediocrity game is a useful reminder that shared adversity did not necessarily make people into saints. But the adversity was the culprit: the characters were its victims. Among the less
immediately spectacular of Hitler’s cruel tricks was his ability, at long range and by remote control, to drive different personalities into the same airless trap, where, struggling for a
share of oxygen, they found out the hard way that they had never belonged together. After all, for writers to help each other beyond the bounds of friendship is no natural condition. In normal
life, they are more likely to be at odds, and if they don’t much like each other’s work the usual response is not to talk at all. In the emigration, gifted people whose normal destiny
would have been to despise each other were put at each other’s mercy. Some, like Joseph Roth, were kind to those in adversity. But some behaved badly. Walter Mehring, whose memoir
Die verlorene Bibliothek
was one of the many inspirations for the book you are reading now, acquired a reputation for accepting financial help but
forgetting to be grateful for it. Whether or not the reputation was earned, it still follows his memory. No such accusation has ever attached itself to Thomas Mann. Chronically behind schedule on
his latest enormous novel, he hated to be bothered, but he did his duty.

Given all that, Mann deserved his status as a lion. He showed he had the heart for it, and
all the more so because it was against his nature. One of his many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was. Left undisturbed, he would have
been a monster of conceit. But when thoughtfulness was forced on him, he rose to the occasion, and it would be conceited on our part to assume that the perennial thespian was just being careful
not to look bad in the eyes of posterity. Literary pygmies are always making pronouncements about what goes on in the head of a giant, and the pronouncements always sin through over-confidence.
They can’t really tell what’s going on up there. The worst you can say about Thomas Mann is that his ego was so big he took even history personally; but at least he knew it was
history. “Poor Čapek!” he lamented during the war, “He died of a broken heart . . . and Menno ter Braak, the Dutch creator of precious criticism, shot himself on the night
Hitler’s troops occupied Amsterdam. Two friends, who were lights of my life—and National Socialism murdered them” (
Altes und Neues
, pp. 11
and 12). This is actually made stronger, not weaker, by the German reflexive verb:
und der Nationalsozialismus mordete sie mir
. Murdered them for me.
Michael Burleigh’s admonition in his marvellous book
The Third Reich
should not be forgotten: the destruction was not just of the creative and the
prominent but of the ordinary and the unknown—millions of them. It can be said, safely from this distance, that Thomas Mann did not think enough about them. But he could certainly think of
anyone who was a bit like him. Possibly, like most egotists, he thought everyone else was an egotist too. If he had been the egomaniac he is sometimes painted as, however, he would have had no
concern even for the prominent: especially not for them, since they were rivals for the limelight.

Heinrich always spelled trouble for Thomas, and not just because Heinrich had made so much noise in earlier times. In fact
Thomas would probably have liked it better if everything Heinrich did had scored a hit like
Professor Unrat
, the book that eventually gave us
The Blue Angel
. Artistically, however, the older brother, by the fastidious standards of the younger, was pathologically facile: a geyser with its own self-renewing
supply of soap. All too wearily often, Thomas had to strain his criteria of worth to say that Heinrich had done well. There
was also the problem of Thomas’s bourgeois
propriety: his domestic stability and prosperous façade were essential parts of his armour. Heinrich was a bohemian by comparison, and the more so the older he got. Later on, in Los
Angeles, Heinrich’s batty mistress was regarded
chez
Mann as an even bigger embarrassment than Heinrich’s indigence, which could be judiciously
compensated for, whereas there was no disguising her fathomless capacity to throw scenes. It would have suited Thomas to write off the crumbling Heinrich as a liability who had brought ruin on
himself. But Thomas was too aware that Heinrich has come to his final grief only with Hitler’s help, and finally there was always the consideration that Heinrich had done some good things
despite all. Thomas had thought
Henry IV
was one of them, had said so, and continued to rate Heinrich at that level of possibility, if not of consistent
achievement. In honour of artistic standards, Thomas Mann could put even his own ego into perspective: a Mount Everest yes, but with a picture of itself as only one mountain in the Himalayas,
although admittedly the tallest. We should restrain our scorn then, when in Donald Prater’s excellent biography of Thomas Mann we see, on page 237, the master spirit praising “my
worried modesty.” It sounds like comic self-deception, but it was justified by his behaviour. Even without his behaviour, it would have been justified by his art: nobody incapable of
humility bothers to rewrite a sentence. Careful composition is an act of renunciation in itself. Thomas Mann wrote too well to be a true monster of self-regard. But with the help of the
invaluable diaries we soon find out that in his everyday dealings he could be selfless too, and didn’t always need that to be known. After his death, journalistic opinion tried to make an
ogre out of him, but that said more about journalism than it said about him. He was one of the first victims of a modern cultural trend: mass therapy for the semi-cultivated, transmitted through
supposedly edifying examples of the idol with feet of clay.

MAO ZEDONG

The full evil of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) is continually being rediscovered, because it is
continually being forgotten. In 2005 it was rediscovered all over again when Jung Chang, previously the author of
Wild Swans
, the book that blew the
gaff on the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, brought out, together with her husband, an account of Mao’s career that pitched the body count of innocent civilians where it belonged, far
beyond the total achieved by Hitler and Stalin put together. Jung Chang’s Mao biography was greeted as ground-breaking in the Western press. But with due credit for its passion, there
was little about the book’s factual material that was new. Most of it had been in the previous book that rediscovered Mao’s perfidy, Philip Short’s
Mao: A Life
, published to wide acclaim (“A ground-breaking biography”—
The Sunday Times
) in 1999. As one who
thinks that
Wild Swans
is an essential twentieth-century book for which Jung Chang deserves our unending gratitude, I nevertheless think that
Short’s book about Mao has the edge on hers, mainly because it is ready to contemplate the awkward possibility that Mao’s thirst for blood might have been acquired over time,
rather than inbred. Short, whose languages include Russian and Japanese as well as Chinese, is also
much sounder in the field of foreign policy. As to the bottomless
squalor of Mao’s personal behaviour, especially in his lethal old age, Jung Chang is pre-empted by
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
(1994), a
stomach-turning memoir by Mao’s personal physician, Zhisui Li. None of this means that Jung Chang and her husband do not deserve credit for their long endeavours. But the idea that they
stand at the beginning of a studious tradition, instead of at a further stage in one well established, is itself a straw in a sad wind. Why doesn’t this story stick when told?

Those of us who were at university in the 1960s can remember the vociferousness with which otherwise sane and
sweet-natured students professed to believe that the Cultural Revolution was a message to the corrupt West. Yet the facts about Mao’s China had already, at that stage, been rediscovered
several times. Quite early on after Mao took unchallenged power, the true situation could easily be deduced from the way that useful idiots like Edgar Snow endorsed the regime’s
official lies. Always, however, the rediscoveries were succeeded by a further forgetting, and the same holds true today, not just in the West, where the pseudo-left has too great an
investment in anti-Americanism to admit that there can be a reason for evil independent of Washington’s control, but also, and tragically, in China itself, where Mao’s image is
still not to be mocked without penalty. Eventually Lenin’s statues went the way of Stalin’s, to the scrapyard. But Mao might well stay up there forever, simply because there is
such a thing as horror so great that it can’t be assessed even when the facts are known. The truth sinks down when it sinks in, leaving the mind free to operate a more tolerable
economy. From the art lover’s viewpoint, this might even be a good thing. The catchy opera
Nixon in China
, for example, could never have been
written if its authors had fully realized that the picure they were painting of Nixon’s relative lack of dignity vis-à-vis Mao was hopelessly compromised by the real discrepancy
between the two historic figures. Nixon, when he killed innocent people, did so as the price of political success. Mao killed them as the condition of
it, and killed more
by many, many times. Why Mao should have been the more difficult one to despise is a key question for an as yet untapped academic subject: the sociology of the international
intelligentsia.