Even as We Speak
Authors: Clive James
To Christopher Hitchens in affectionate disagreement
Mankind is conservative. When this tendency weakens, however, revolutions devote themselves to its renewal.
Ernesto Sabato,
Uno y el universo
The generations work within each other in the most amazing way, and it doesn’t need the Kingdom of Death to bring people of profoundly different times together in
speech.
Golo Mann,
Friedrich von Gentz
Just as to the eyes of the emigrant who goes home after a long exile the familiar appears stripped clean, so the assimilated man possesses a particular acuity of gaze: the
cultural manifestations with which he lacks an intimacy become the frozen material of his absorption, and thus reveal their structures all the more clearly.
Jürgen Habermas,
Philosophische-Politische Profile
Bertrand Russell Struggles After Heaven
Les Murray and His Master Spirits
George Russell: a Reminiscence
Preface to an Australian Classic
Presenting the Richard Dimbleby Award
Anzac Day Dawn Service Address
A Note from the Official Programme of the Opening Ceremony of the Sydney Olympics, 2000
2. Thorpie, Hoogie and the Golden Lolly
‘A man either has a picture of the world, or he lives in a world of pictures. In the first case, he has only to report the facts, and his report will have style.
In the second case, he may strive for a style all he likes, but he will never have one.’
Anton Kuh,
Luftlinien
Finally, it is a writer’s way of putting things that gives unity to his work. There is no other unity that the fugitive pieces in this book can claim, but I don’t
need telling that it is a large claim to make. It is like saying that fragments can add up to an edifice. None of the pieces here collected, however, felt like a fragment at the time. They all felt
like something to which I was giving everything I had, even when the subject seemed trivial. And some of the subjects, alas, didn’t seem trivial at all.
They never have. Six decades after I was born into its years of triumph, the Nazi era is still here, still at the centre of intellectual discussion, still demanding, insatiably, to be dealt
with. The same applies to the Soviet Union, which is gone but not forgotten – a lot less forgotten, in fact, than it was when it was still in business. In the year of my birth, Stalin’s
terror was at its frenzied height: in the year I turn sixty, scholars are still trying to find out exactly what went on. The scholars who finally figure it all out will almost certainly have come
into the world long after those particular horrors happened. My only claim to expertise is that I was
there
, when all those innocent people were being obliterated. It was clever of me to
be less than four feet tall and to have chosen Australia as my birthplace, a good way away from the nearest mass graves, but I still got a solid dose of the insecurity that radiates from historical
disaster and works its most arresting mental distortions on minds of a tender age. (Nor, indeed, were the nearest mass graves all
that
far away: while I was running in baggy shorts around
the back garden, blasting the sugar-ants with my wooden machine-gun, the Imperial Japanese Army was still busy reminding the Asian and Pacific countries it had promised to liberate from colonialism
that they had been wrong to suppose there could be nothing worse than European arrogance.) When you grow up in an epoch seemingly dedicated to extermination, it influences your world view for life.
Opinions can change – they are on the surface of the mind – but a world view is part of the soul, as fundamental as your sense of what is fair or funny. When we shy from a man who tells
tasteless jokes, it isn’t his wit that we don’t like, it’s his
Weltanschauung
. Hitler, after all, could be quite a card.
Throughout my six collections of non-fiction, it is thus no mystery that there is a consistency of outlook: nobody else would be unable to say the same. The only mystery is why I should have
bothered to express it. I could say that for anyone who earns his living by being unrelentingly
allegro
it is hard to resist the temptation of proving himself
penseroso
as well:
we all like to be thought deep. But there has always been more to it than that, or anyway it has always felt to me as if there has. If I had wanted to be thought deep, I would have spent the last
thirty years proposing something a lot less scrutable than the elementary proposition that democracy is even more important for what it prevents than for what it provides. Some quite complicated
issues grow out of that proposition – the most troublesome being that a free nation is bound to provide opportunities for incitement to the very kind of suffocating orthodoxies whose hegemony
it exists to prevent – but there is nothing complicated about the proposition itself, beyond the consideration that historic circumstances drilled it into my head almost before I could spell
the words in which it is written. The best justification for plugging away at the self-evident, it seems to me, arises from the lurking fear that for too many people who should know better it
doesn’t seem to be self-evident at all. My first book of essays,
The Metropolitan Critic
, was assembled in 1974 in the immediate aftermath of the counterculture, which some of its
illuminati
fancied as the Cultural Revolution of the West. (Their notions of what the Cultural Revolution of the East had really been like, it must be said in mitigation, were of the
haziest.) Many of the pieces in the book had been written when the idea was still in vogue that youthful values represented some kind of political vision all by themselves. Still feeling quite
youthful myself at the time, I thought there was something to it, and said so: there
was
a new generosity in the air, and American foreign policy, with the disaster in Vietnam as its
stellar achievement,
did
need opposing – the patent decency of some of its American opponents was sufficient evidence of that.
But here already the difference between mere opinions and a world view showed up with awkward clarity. The undoubted fact that democracy was currently making a murderous fool of itself
couldn’t make me forget that totalitarianism was still the enduring and implacable antagonist. I had opinions about what a democratic state should do in the circumstances – pull out of
Vietnam, decommission the CIA, put Henry Kissinger on trial for sedition, stop subsidizing the kind of dictators who exported their own economies to Switzerland – but it was part of my world
view that a totalitarian state was unjustifiable in any circumstances. The boat people hadn’t yet set sail, but I was already with them in spirit. It bothered me that there were so many of
our bright young people eager to buy the whole radical package, up to and including the potentially lethal notion that if the representative political structure could be reduced to a state of
nature, paradise would ensue.
We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden
. The universities, in particular, were stiff with young enthusiasts who plainly had no idea of what could
be lying in wait for them at the bottom of the garden, especially at night. Even worse, some of the loudest enthusiasts were on the faculty, actually
teaching
that the tenure they
themselves had safely attained was not worth having, that the modern democratic state was the repressive mechanism of late Capitalism, that – but there was no end to it.
There never would be an end to it. Such was the realization that completed my battle with the eggshell. To find ourselves, we all have to fight our way out of isolation, because it is only in
the community outside that individuality is to be had. The role of the freelance man of letters (the personage on whom I so blithely conferred the title of Metropolitan Critic) is to accept –
and to act on the acceptance – that he is engaged in a perpetual discussion, an interminable exchange of views in which he cannot, and should not, prevail. If he could prevail, and the
discussion did terminate, he would have become his enemy, the dogmatist whose only answer to opposition is annihilation – a response which, for a mercy, he is usually allowed only to dream
of, but which he would put into practice if he could.
Not even Orwell ever dared to suggest that the reason why so many professional intellectuals sympathized with totalitarian regimes was that they themselves were born totalitarians, but looking
back from the end of the century there seems reason to think that the state of mind all too often goes with the territory. In 1936 Stefan Zweig, characteristically employing his wide cultural range
to focus an acute political perception, traced the tendency back to sixteenth-century Geneva. In his book
Castellio gegen Calvin, oder Ein Gewissen gegen die Gewalt
(‘Castellio
against Calvin, or A Conscience against Power’) he convincingly demonstrated why Calvin’s natural mode of argument against a preacher of religious tolerance was to burn him. Clearly
Zweig had aimed his book at Hitler, although it would also have fitted Stalin, whose own mode of assertive philosophical discourse was already well in train, with the death toll running far into
the millions. More disturbing, in the long term – more disturbing because less immediately obvious – is the way it fits generations of modern thinkers. Comfortably domiciled in academic
institutions or on the heights of literary prestige, they never actually killed anyone but didn’t seem to mind much when other people did. It is perhaps not my place to make too much of this
(there is always a chance that my view of twentieth-century history is not only dark, it is neurotically so), but I do sometimes wonder why, in the continuing discussion about, say, Heidegger, the
possibility is not more often entertained that he actually
liked
the idea of helpless people being kicked in the mouth. As I go on reading deeper into our era’s mental background,
more and more often I find myself needled by the unsettling suspicion that there is an intellectuals’ version of ‘If only the Führer knew’ and ‘Someone must tell
Stalin’. It is the consoling assumption that if Sartre, for example, could have been brought to
imagine
what the Gulag system was really like, he would never have granted the Soviet
Union the prestige of his loftily withheld condemnation. But what (whisper it) if he
did
imagine it?