Cultural Amnesia (74 page)

Dollink, either you got the voice or you don’t got the
voice: and I got the voice.

—ZINKA MILANOV
(ATTRIB.)

T
HE VOLCANIC SOPRANO
had
grown stroppy with an interviewer who badgered her too long on abstruse questions of vocal technique. In her moment of impatience, Milanov produced a nice variation on Duke Ellington’s
“It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.” I have never been able to find out when she actually said it, or to whom: a standard item of operatic folklore, it had
gone from mouth to ear a million times before it got to me. Perhaps every word was wrong. But the idea had clearly remained unaltered, because any artist will say roughly the same thing if bored
too long. At the National Film Theatre in London in the early 1960s I heard Jean Renoir say something similar to a questioner who had burdened him with a long analysis of one of the crane shots
in
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
. Renoir said
that he made a point of forgetting about technical problems once he had solved them.

In a later generation, film directors became less inclined to forget anything. When a pyramid of
explanatory journalism builds up around an art-form it is easy for a practitioner to become so impressed by his own entombment that he starts breathing the rarefied air and relishing the dust. It
would happen to trail-bike champions if the media cared. It happens to film directors because the media care about almost nothing but the movies. The movies are as fascinating as a war, and the
directors are the generals. There are very few people with the logistic ability to organize a battle between a bunch of averagely talented actors and a computer-generated army of trolls: when
such a man is told that he is Michelangelo reborn, he finds little evidence to help him disagree. He soon forgets that he has almost no detectable talent beyond getting other people to combine
their talents in accordance with his wishes. Singers, on the other hand, have the advantage of being kept fundamentally humble by the personal, individual and directly physical nature of their
gift. Zinka Milanov had a gold-rush chest-voice that practically brought her body along with it when it soared into the grand circle. Quite a lot of that she could do when she was fifteen.

Apart from the very rare exception like Rosa Ponselle, singers must have their voices trained if they are
ever to sustain a career beyond the first week. But there is still such a thing as talent, and finally, as initially, it is what matters. There were plenty of singers in Callas’s generation
who could do what she couldn’t: make a transition from the upper register to the middle register without showing the join. But even in the later part of her life, when her upper register
was in tatters, she could come powering back into the middle register with a hot roar that boiled the wax in your ears. She made a drama of it, and that was her talent. In her master classes she
would try to show how it was done, but her pupils could never learn her unique trick of turning up the voice’s darkness like a light as she plunged like a returning space shuttle into the
stave.

Nijinsky got all his master classes over in a single line of explanation. When he was asked about the technical secret of
his jump, he said: “I merely leap and pause.” (Either you got the pause or you don’t got the pause.) With all this said and insisted on, however, it should be remembered
that the idea that there can be an unstudied, perfectly spontaneous art is an idle dream. Zinka Milanov was merely seeing off a pest when she made her most famous statement. It was
true that she had been born with a beautiful voice. But her voice had been trained from the moment its quality was detected. At the Zagreb Academy of Music she spent an entire year on nothing but
exercises. For her first
Trovatore
Leonora, sung in Croatian, she prepared for two years, working on each page a hundred times, note by note. This hard
curatorial work went on all her life, even after her retirement from the stage: as a teacher, she stayed in training. She was right to say that she “got the voice,” but the essential
counter-statement was given in an interview she granted to the magazine
Étude
in 1940, when she said, about singing well, that “the attainment
of this goal is a full life’s labour”: a dull truth, but true for all the arts. (Prodigies like Rimbaud merely have their full lives early.) It’s more fun to talk about amazing
talents, and indeed they exist. But the real miracle is the work that goes into fostering them. In movies about artists, that aspect is usually dealt with in a montage sequence two minutes long,
because even a hint of the real labour that goes into improvement would take an hour of screen time at the very least. For that one reason, there will never be a credible movie about the making
of an artist. Interior concentration doesn’t translate to the screen. Exterior impact does. For just a moment, Zinka Milanov was a Central European actress delivering a line in a Hollywood
movie, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. The line played well but it was only half true. The true version, however, wouldn’t play at all. “Artistic talent is indeed a gift from God, which the
artist is obliged to match with the gift of his life.”

CZESLAW MILOSZ

Czeslaw Milosz (1911–2004) was born in Lithuania and grew up speaking Polish. In 1934 he
reinforced his career as a poet and freelance writer by taking a law degree. As a contributor to radio he got into trouble under the pre-war right-wing government for his left-wing views.
Under a more ruthless regime, his experience at dodging official opprobrium came in useful when he wrote for the underground press in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Representing post-war Communist
Poland, he was a diplomat to the United States and, in 1950, to Paris, where he asked for political asylum. He spent ten years in Paris, and students of his writings will often get the sense
that he was later more comfortable having his Polish translated into French than into English. In 1953 he published
The Captive Mind,
a bitterly
disillusioned analysis, from the inside, of the influence of Marxist orthodoxy on his generation of idealists. The book, which students should regard as essential reading even today, can now
be seen as an early blow at the foundations of the Warsaw Pact. Written before the Berlin Wall went up,
The Captive Mind
was a key factor in eventually
bringing it down. At the end of his decade in Paris, Milosz left for California, where he became established as professor of Slavic languages
and literature at Berkeley.
In 1980 he received the Nobel Prize, and after 1981 his writings began to be published in Poland: not all at once, and seldom without official doubts, but inexorably. For the regime in its
long final crisis, Milosz’s international prestige was just too big to ignore, like the Pope’s. Milosz wrote poetry, essays and political analysis as if they were all in the one
medium, a genre beyond a genre. From the technical angle, this now looks like the next breakthrough after Ortega, early in the century, identified the newspaper article as a vital medium for
serious thought. The genre beyond the genres had already been established by Milosz’s fellow Polish-speaking exile Gombrowicz but nobody pursued it with quite the copious fluency of
Milosz, whose poems and esssays flow into each other as if they belong to the one river system. John Bayley, in his useful introductory essay on Milosz collected in
The Power of Delight
, says, “By writing in every form, he writes virtually in one: and he instructs in all.” Milosz had a wealth of personal experience
to base his instruction on, much of it tinged with remorse. As with Marcel Reich-Ranicki, another future liberal who was a servant of the Polish Communist regime after the war, the supposed
puzzle of Milosz’s unfortunate allegiance can be quickly solved: the Poles had no reason to trust anyone. With his background so thoroughly poisoned, the miracle of Milosz’s
writings is his range of fellow-feeling: he can talk about modern history and the contradictions within liberalism as if we, his listeners, had been made wise by the same childhood.

The scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics
and atheists.

—CZESLAW MILOSZ,
Visions de la baie de San Francisco
, P. 224

T
HAT THE BIBLE,
for a
Western civilization, is the common good of believers and non-believers ought to be obvious, but for some reason it is a truth hard to see except when that same civilization
is at the point of collapse. Milosz had seen a civilization collapse: like any of the post-war Polish writers awarded the privilege of growing to adulthood, he had been obliged to
wonder whether a national culture can be said to have any roots at all after the nation itself has been obliterated. It has to be remembered that the typical Polish writer was Bruno Schulz. But
for that to be remembered, Bruno Schulz has to be remembered, and the main reason he was so easily forgotten is that a Gestapo officer blew his brains out. It happened in the Drohobycz ghetto in
1942, when Schulz was only fifty, with the best of his career ahead of him. Schulz’s little book
The Cinammon Shops
had the promise of a genius that
would take time to realize itself, because the nature of time would be one of the things it would define. Even if he had never written a word, he would have been a hope for Poland’s future
just for how he could paint and draw. He was a walking fountain of talent, and the flow was stopped almost before it started, by one bullet in the right place. But at least he was heard of. Among
the younger elite obliterated by the Russian firing squads before the Nazis even arrived, there were probably more like him. There were certainly more in the Warsaw ghetto, where the cultural
life (plangently evoked by Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his long interview
Der doppelte Boden
) was like a university of dreams. Alas, the university had a direct
rail connection with the slaughterhouse, and all that beautiful promise went into smoke. It took Roman Polanski, by his very existence, to remind us of what had ceased to exist: a whole
generation of young talent was destroyed, and if Polanski had not been blessed with an inconspicuous personal appearance even he would have shared the fate of his mother. When the war was over,
the memory of all this was not: for the artists who had come through, the pit was only a step behind them. When they looked over their shoulders, they could see right into it. In that direction,
there was little else in view, except rubble. Milosz was living with that knowledge when he said this about the scriptures.