Quarrel & Quandary (17 page)

The term “public intellectual” has been in fashion for some time now, but its embodiment has always been with us. Socrates was what we would call a public intellectual; and Isaiah; and Maimonides; and Voltaire; and Emerson. But observe: presumably not Aristotle, not Montaigne, not George Eliot, not Santayana. George Eliot presided over a salon, of which she was the undisputed center and engine; and still we would not cite her as a public intellectual. Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy were certainly public intellectuals; Lionel Trilling was not.

If there are public intellectuals, it must follow that there are also private intellectuals. What is the difference between them? It cannot be a difference of substance or subject matter. William James, despite countless public lectures, was not really a public intellectual; Emerson, who confronted many of the same themes, was. Nor could it have been simply reticence of temperament that separated Lionel Trilling from, say, Irving Howe, an almost prototypical public intellectual. And if we could clearly define the difference, is it important, would it matter?

There recently came into my hands a thin little chapbook, bound in the pallor of an aging blue and entitled “The New Disorder,” containing remarks set down in 1941 by E. M. Forster. Now you may instantly object: why bring up Forster, a novelist, an artist, in the context of the public intellectual? The reason is
this. Before we had the dispassionate phrase “public intellectual,” there was a simpler name in common use that appeared to cover everyone who attends to, and rallies around, and pokes at and palpates ideas. That name was “thinker.” No one can deny that Forster, though distinguished for fiction, was also a thinker. He surely addressed literary issues, but now and then he touched on political issues, the hallmark of the public intellectual.
A Passage to India
is inevitably read as a protest against British colonialism in India; that it is a masterwork able to escape the fate of a tract is a measure of Forster’s both delicate and robust art. And the indelible epigraph of
Howards End
, “Only connect,” is a slogan as political in its intention as it is private.

Beyond the novels there are the essays—pre-eminently “On Liberty in England,” a talk delivered at an international writers’ conference in Paris in 1935. Here Forster defends freedom of expression and attacks censorship, particularly of homosexual writing. And here also he situates himself as any number of writers and intellectuals situated themselves in the nineteen-thirties: “As for my politics,” he tells his audience, “you will have guessed that I am not a Fascist—Fascism does evil that evil may come. And you may have guessed that I am not a Communist, though perhaps I might be one if I was a younger and braver man, for in Communism I can see hope. It does many things which I think evil, but I know that it intends good.” Lately, it goes without saying, these latter words are achingly hollow; and there were some for whom they were terribly hollow even two-thirds of a century ago.

But let us return to my little blue pamphlet. It is now 1941; England has been fighting Hitler for two years; in December Pearl Harbor will catapult America into the war. Fascism’s evil, recognized as such by Forster six years earlier—the force that “does evil that evil may come”—is furiously at work. In Germany and elsewhere the Jews have been stripped of citizenship
and are now official prey, ready candidates for a destiny which, while perhaps not yet overtly revealed as murderous, has already plunged whole populations into unspeakable suffering and degradation. Once again the occasion is a writers’ conference, this one the seventeenth International PEN Congress. “We had with us,” Forster wrote afterward, “representatives from about thirty nations, many of whom had suffered, all of whom had cause for fear. Politics had not ignored them, so how could they ignore politics?… They valued literature only if it helped their particular cause or what they regarded as the good of humanity.” He granted that his speech was politely dismissed; the Congress “reverted to what it considered important and did not discuss the issue raised.”

And the issue Forster raised, in 1941, was this: “Art for Art’s sake? I should just think so, and more so than ever at the present time. It is the one orderly product which our muddling race has produced.” He offers history as proof: “Ancient Athens made a mess,” he says, “but the ‘Antigone’ stands up. Renaissance Rome made a mess—but the ceiling of the Sistine got painted,” and so on. He ends by citing Shelley—the usual quote about poets as the unacknowledged legislators of mankind.

As an adolescent English major in college, I know I would have warmed to this, and taken it as my own life’s credo. I did, in fact, do exactly that. But now, when I look at this date—1941!—I can only wonder how, with all of torn-up Europe dangling from German jaws, Forster could dare to take the view from Mount Olympus. Did Forster in 1941 not remember the political impulse out of which he conceived his Indian novel, published in 1924? Yet no one can tell him he is in error: the Sistine Chapel
did
get painted, the “Antigone”
does
stand up (though Forster seems to have forgotten what it stands
for
). But suppose Sophocles had been run through by a tyrant’s sword, or suppose Michelangelo had been taken off and shot? Then there would be
no play and no painted ceiling. Art may well be the most worthy of all human enterprises; that is why it needs to be defended; and in crisis, in a barbarous time, even the artists must be visible among the defending spear-carriers. Art at its crux—certainly the “Antigone”!—doesn’t fastidiously separate itself from the human roil; neither should artists. I like to imagine a conversation between Forster and Isaac Babel—let us say in 1939, the year Babel was arrested and tortured, or early in 1940, when he was sentenced to death at a mock trial. History isn’t only what we inherit, safe and sound and after the fact; it is also what we are ourselves obliged to endure.

And just here, you may conclude, is the distinction between the public intellectual and the other kind. Public intellectuals know that history is where we swim, that we are
in
it, that we can’t see over or around it, that it is our ineluctable task to grapple with it; and that we may not murmur, with Forster, Look: the past came through, and so will we. Thinkers, after all, do not simply respond to existing conditions; in the buzz, confusion, and chaos of the Zeitgeist they strive to sort out—to formulate—the cognitive and historic patterns that give rise to public issues. That, we may presume, is what Forster thought he was doing when he picked out art-for-art’s-sake as the salient issue of 1941. Why this choice was a disappointing one hardly demands analysis. “I realized,” he had admitted that same year, living in Cambridge, protected by the British Army, “that as soon as I myself had been hurt or frightened I should forget about books too.” Still, he continued, “even when the cause of humanity is lost, the possibility of the aesthetic order will remain and it seems well to assert it at this moment … I hope it is not callous to do this, and certainly no callousness is intended.”

Intended or not, the callousness was there. Not because Forster was in any way a callous man; the absolute opposite is true. Yet even in 1949, when Forster appended a postscript to
that talk—at an hour when the ovens were scarcely cooled and the D.P. camps were filled with wandering ghosts—he did not acknowledge that his 1941 formulation had been inadequate to its own context. Out of the turbulence of a Europe in extremis he had formulated an issue, as thinkers are wont to do, and he had formulated it badly. He put an ideal above immediate reality: the reality that kills. You might protest that Primo Levi did the same when he recited Dante in Auschwitz; but that was because he had the privilege of being a slave laborer rather than a gassed corpse. If you are still barely alive in Auschwitz, it is barely possible that poetry will salve your soul; but if you are comfortably alive well beyond the inferno, the exaltation of art as exclusive of the suffering of your own time does take on the lineaments of callousness.

How do we know when a thinker formulates an issue badly? In just this way: when an ideal, however comely, fails to accord with deep necessity. In 1941, “blood, sweat, and tears” is apropos; in an era of evil joy—Mark Twain’s chilling phrase—a dream of the “possibility of aesthetic order” is not. Only a fantasist will not credit the reality of the contagion of evil joy; the world engenders it; it exists. There are those—human beings both like and unlike ourselves—who relish evil joy, and pursue it, and make it their cause; who despise compromise, reason, negotiation; who, in Forster’s words, do evil that evil may come—and then the possibility of aesthetic order fails to answer. It stands only as a beautiful thought, and it is not sufficient to have beautiful thoughts while the barbarians rage on. The best ideal then becomes the worst ideal, and the worst ideal, however comely, is that there
are
no barbarians; or that the barbarians will be so impressed by your beautiful thoughts that they too will begin thinking beautiful thoughts; or that in actuality the barbarians are no different from you and me, with our beautiful thoughts;
and that therefore loyalty belongs to the barbarians’ cause as much as it belongs to our own.

Some will say, how is it you have the gall to use so unforgivably denigrating a term as “barbarians”? Must you despise your opponents as other, as not of your own flesh? What of the humanity of the other? Are we not all equally flawed, equally capable of mercy? Are we ourselves not in some respects worse? Shall we not be decent to the other?

But—in a jurisprudential democracy especially—a moment may come when it is needful to be decent to our own side, concerning whom we are not to witness falsely or even carelessly in order to prove how worse we are. Without such loyalty—not always a popular notion among the global sentimentalists—you may find you are too weak in self-respect to tell the truth or to commit yourself to the facts. The responsibility of intellectuals ought to include this recognition, or it is no responsibility at all.

The responsibility of intellectuals includes also the recognition that we cannot live above or apart from our own time and what it imposes on us; that willy-nilly we breathe inside the cage of our generation, and must perform within it. Thinkers—whether they count as public intellectuals or the more reticent and less visible sort—are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence. “I have seen the enemy and he is us” is not always and everywhere true; and self-blame can be the highest form of self-congratulation. People who are privileged to be thinkers are obliged to respect exigency and to admit to crisis. They are obliged to expose and war against those rampant Orwellian coinages that mean their opposite and lead to purposeful deception. And political intellectuals who have the capacity, and the inclination, to reflect on fresh public issues from new perspectives are obliged to reflect on them in so careful a way that their
propositions will not seem callous or morally embarrassing or downright despicable decades on.

At the end of the day, a verge can perhaps be measured out: those who favor the guarded life should not risk contemplation in public. Contemplation in public is what political intellectuals commonly do, and what the quieter private thinkers on occasion slip into doing, not always inadvertently. The private thinkers have the advantage of being written off as bunglers when they do speak out, or as cowards when they don’t. But for the public thinkers, who are always audible in the forum, the risk is far more perilous, far more destructive to the honor of a generation: they risk being judged mistaken.

Biography, or call it life, attaches to certain writers—but only to certain writers—with the phantom tenacity of a Doppelgänger: history clouding into fable. Who can think of Scott Fitzgerald, say, without the leap into the Plaza fountain, or minus Zelda’s madness and Scott’s crackup? These emblematic truths are as indelible as the invented parties in the imaginary Gatsby’s fictional mansion. And how to contemplate the Brontës in the absence of cramped parsonage, desolate heath, drunken Branwell? Bring George Eliot to mind, and you summon up the drama of her illicit “marriage” to George Henry Lewes. Here sits Jane Austen, eternally in her parlor, hiding her manuscript under her blotter when someone intrudes, as someone eternally does; and over there, in literary fame’s more recent precincts, are Virginia and Vanessa and Leonard and Lytton and Clive, and Hemingway and his trophy mammals, including Gertrude Stein, and Alice Toklas, Gertrude’s wife and slavey. Incidents, images, archival fragments dissolve into legend. The private life is rival to the work.

Among the great luminaries, Henry James has been relatively free—until lately—of the accretions of personal shock, underground gossip, and the speculations of academic sleuths; he is immaculately sealed, for the most part, within the enameled status of Master. The term Master, of course, is his own (as in
“The Lesson of the Master”), but it is doubtful that he anywhere applied it to himself. It was Leon Edel, in his five-volume biography—a labor of decades—who gave this appellation its contemporary currency, and its lasting aura of literary heroism. Edel’s James is heroic in art and heroic in virtue: the virtue of persistent aspiration; the transcendent courage of obsession. Two generations of writers (by now perhaps three) have turned to Edel for the model of an artist committed, through thick and thin, to what James named “our task,” “our passion.” The celebrated lines continue to reverberate: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

In his many tales of writers and painters, James was adamant in separating the deliberate and always sacral space of art from the vagaries, contingencies, and frustrations of the artist’s life. He did not often speak in his own voice of this demarcation—but once, in the autumn of 1904, during a visit to America (from England, where he had long ago settled), he submitted to a journalist’s interview. It was, she reported in the
New York Herald
, the first interview he had ever agreed to—“the marvel is how he has escaped”—and in her description of the “kindly if bewildered welcome from this man who is called intensely shy,” we can glimpse him again looking to escape, or at least to elude his interlocutor’s more intimate inquiries. “One’s craft, one’s art, is in his expression,” he warned her, “not one’s person, as that of some great actress or singer is hers. After you have heard a Patti sing why should you care to hear the small private voice of the woman?”