Quarrel & Quandary (2 page)

I mean by all this that I resist the political, and am reluctant to take on its spots and stripes: the focus and deliberateness of political engagement, its judgments and its zeal, are so much the opposite of loafing and inviting one’s soul. This collection, for instance, includes an essay on essays, wherein the form of the
essay is defined, and defended, as follows: “If there is information in an essay, it is by-the-by, and if there is an opinion in it, you need not trust it for the long run. A genuine essay has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use.” This was only the latest in a string of similar formulations—or call them wardings-off; what was being warded off was any tincture of the topical or the tendentious. In 1983, in a foreword to my first non-fiction collection, I wrote, comparing essays to stories, “Sometimes even an essay can invent, burn, guess, try out, hurtle forward, succumb to that flood of sign and nuance that adds up to intuition, disclosure, discovery. The only non-fiction worth writing—at least for me—lacks the summarizing gift, is heir to nothing, and sets out with empty pockets from scratch.” In a 1988 preface, this time dubbed a “forewarning,” I continued along the same line, or tightrope: “Nearly every essay, like every story, is an experiment, not a credo. What I am repudiating,” I persisted, “is the inference that a handful of essays is equal to a
Weltanschauung;
that an essay is generally anything more than simply another fiction—a short story told in the form of an argument, or a history, or even (once in a very great while) an illumination. But never a tenet.”

Can I make that stick here? Or, rather, can I claim that I have stuck to this credo-contra-credos? Or have I, despite these defensive and sometimes slippery declarations of resistance, fallen, after all, into the distinctly educational, polemical, and sociopolitical? How can I deny that I have willfully entered the lists of tenet and exigency in writing here on Anne Frank; or, contemplating the rights of history, on so-called Holocaust fiction; or on the responsibility of public intellectuals; or on Dostoyevsky’s Unabomber; or on Central European politics and policies, ancient and modern, as a framework for Kafka’s familial and personal history?

George Orwell, in “Why I Write,” asserts that “the opinion
that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.” There are times when one is tempted to agree with him, and in my discussion of E. M. Forster’s views on art in the terrible year of 1941, I do mainly agree—or, in Forster’s own formula (“Two Cheers for Democracy” is one of his celebrated phrases), I am willing to give the idea two cheers at least. Yet inserting politics into literature has, as we have seen, led to the extremist (or absurdist) notion that Jane Austen, for instance, is tainted with colonialism and slave-holding because Sir Thomas Bertram in
Mansfield Park
owns plantations in eighteenth-century Antigua. This kind of thinking fits nicely with James Thurber’s tale of the bear who leaned so far backward that he fell on his face. It asks a novel of country-house manners to become a tract on British imperialism. Then must the soldiers and sailors in Jane Austen’s fiction supply the occasion for a discourse on the Napoleonic Wars, or may they be left to their romantic employments in the minds of Austen’s marriageable young ladies? (It is politics, of course, that accounts for the presence of those soldiers and sailors.) “No book is genuinely free from political bias,” Orwell plausibly remarks—which is different from saying that every book ought to be politically acceptable to contemporary sensibilities. If that were our objective, then scores of European classics, beginning with Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale”—the theme of which is responsible for centuries of calumny and bloodshed—would have to be thrown out with the bath water. (Which is what some readers of “Who Owns Anne Frank?” concluded I was seriously recommending for the
Diary
in the closing paragraph of that essay; these same readers may possibly believe that Dean Swift meant it when he suggested, as a way of ameliorating famine in Ireland, that the Irish babies be eaten.) The writer’s subject matter, Orwell goes on, “will be determined by the age he lives in—at least that is true in tumultuous, revolutionary ages like our own.” If Orwell is completely
right, then both Jane Austen and E. M. Forster in 1941 (he was speaking at a writers’ conference) are completely wrong. She declined to engage with colonialism, slavery, and the Napoleonic upheavals; he declined to engage with Hitler, anti-Semitism, and the German upheavals. Both were determined to be undetermined by the politics of the age they lived in. (And yet Forster, in 1924, had already published
A Passage to India
, arguing against Britain as a colonial power.) If I feel less critical of Austen than of Forster (and I do), it is not only because there is a difference between a novel and a speech, but also because undoubtedly I am, as Orwell insists, determined by my own tumultuous age. Never mind that we are launched now into the twenty-first century; as my essay on the contentions of history and imagination may signify, the twentieth is not yet done with us, nor we with it.

The central question, perhaps, is this: is politics a distraction from art, or is it how we pay attention to the life that gives rise to art? And might not the answer be: both, depending on the issues and the times? A reflection on a ladle in a kitchen drawer can outweigh what the President is up to when what the President is up to is too trivial to bear serious contemplation. The essential point has to do with the idea of the ephemeral. History is and is not ephemeral; situations and events evaporate, but their moral and intellectual residue does not. A century afterward, contemporary incarnations of Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards are plainly recognizable. In a post-theological era, a romantic paganism (sometimes labeled “spirituality”) freely roams. What Saul Bellow calls “the oceanic proliferating complexity of things” sweeps the mind away from concentration. Concentration on what? On the non-transient. And it is on that negative ground that I set my purpose.

In a recent issue of one of those Internet magazines (I read it in the paper version), a pair of reviewers in e-mail dialogue
faulted an esteemed young critic of earned authority for writing about the old moderns—Chekhov, Flaubert, Mann, Woolf—as if to say that ripeness isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. (They were this-generation reviewers, and appeared to regard the critic as a traitor to his cohort.) What was clearly in play was the journalistic conviction—a kind of noose—that there is only so much space on a page (even on a cybernetic page), so it had better be filled up with Now: Now being the politics of the current literary marketplace. Generations, yours and mine, are broader and roomier and more flexible than that. Commenting on the beautiful heads of unschooled TV anchormen, Bellow notes, “These crowns of hair contribute charm and dignity but perhaps also oppress the brain with their weight.” Journalism is a necessity, but it is not a permanence. When I hear someone (seventy-plus or twenty-something) utter “my generation,” I know I am in the vicinity of a light mind. This is not what Orwell intended when he spoke of being determined by the turbulence of one’s own time. When we allude to “our age,” either we include our predecessors and their travail (and also their bold genius) or we show ourselves to be minor in brain and intuition.

Two cheers, then—when there is no choice—for being engagé; but three cheers and more for that other bravery, the literary essay, and for memory’s mooning and maundering, and for losing one’s way in the bliss of American prose, and finding one’s way, too, when politics is slumbering, in the surprising atlas of all that is not benign, yet (somehow, sometimes) stirring.

June 1999

Soon after dawn on a very cold winter morning in 1849, fifteen Russian criminals, in groups of three, were led before a firing squad. They were all insurgents against the despotism of Czar Nicholas I. They were mostly educated men, idealists in pursuit of a just society. They felt no remorse. Several were professed atheists. All were radicals. A priest carrying a cross and a Bible accompanied them. The first three were handed white gowns and shapeless caps and ordered to put these on; then they were tied to posts. The rest waited their turn. Each man in his own way prepared to die. The sun was beginning to brighten; the firing squad took aim. At just that moment there was a signal—a roll of drums—and the rifles were lowered. A galloping horseman announced a reprieve. Although the condemned were unaware of it, the execution was staged, and the reprieve was designed to demonstrate the merciful heart of the Czar. Instead of being shot, the criminals were to be transported in shackles to a Siberian penal colony.

One of the men went permanently mad. Another, fifteen years afterward, wrote
Crime and Punishment
, an impassioned assault on exactly the kind of radical faith that had brought its author to face the Czar’s riflemen that day. It was a work almost in the nature of double jeopardy: as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky in middle age—a defender of the Czar, the enemy of revolutionary
socialism—were convicting and punishing his younger self yet again for the theories the mature novelist had come to abhor.

A new type of crime is on the American mind—foreign, remote, metaphysical, even literary; and radically different from what we are used to. Street crime, drunken crime, drug-inspired crime, crimes of passion, greed, revenge, crimes against children, gangster crime, white-collar crime, break-ins, car thefts, holdups, shootings—these are familiar, and to a degree nearly expected. They shake us up without disorienting us. They belong to our civilization; they are the darker signals of home. “Our” crime has usually been local—the stalker, the burglar, the mugger lurking in a doorway. Even Jeffrey Dahmer, the cannibal sadist who kept boys’ body parts in his kitchen refrigerator, is not so very anomalous in the context of what can happen in ordinary neighborhoods—a little girl imprisoned in an underground cage; children tormented, starved, beaten to death; newborns bludgeoned; battered women, slain wives, mutilated husbands. Domesticity gone awry.

All that is recognizable and homespun. What feels alien to America is the philosophical criminal of exceptional intelligence and humanitarian purpose who is driven to commit murder out of an uncompromising idealism. Such a type has always seemed a literary construct of a particular European political coloration (
The Secret Agent, The Princess Casamassima
), or else has hinted at ideologies so removed from tame Republicans and Democrats as to be literally outlandish. Then came the mysterious depredations of the Unabomber. Until the melodramatic publication of his manifesto in major newspapers, the Unabomber remained an unpredictable riddle, unfathomable, sans name or
habitation. In garrulous print his credo revealed him to be a visionary. His dream was of a green and pleasant land liberated from the curse of technological proliferation. The technical élites were his targets: computer wizards like Professor David Gelernter of Yale, a thinker in pursuit of artificial intelligence. Maimed by a package bomb, Gelernter escaped death; others did not.

In the storm of interpretation that followed the Unabomber’s public declaration of principles, he was often mistaken for a kind of contemporary Luddite. This was a serious misnomer. The nineteenth-century Luddites were hand weavers who rioted against the introduction of mechanical looms in England’s textile industry; they smashed the machines to protect their livelihoods. They were not out to kill, nor did they promulgate romantic theories about the wholesome superiority of hand looms. They were selfish, ruthlessly pragmatic, and societally unreasonable. By contrast, Theodore Kaczynski—the Unabomber—is above all a calculating social reasoner and messianic utopian. His crimes, for which he was found guilty as charged, were intended to restore us to cities and landscapes clear of digital complexities; he meant to clean the American slate of its accumulated technostructural smudges. At the same time, we can acknowledge him to have been selfless and pure, loyal and empathic, the sort of man who befriends, without condescension, an uneducated and impoverished Mexican laborer. It is easy to think of the Unabomber, living out his principles in his pollution-free mountain cabin, as a Thoreauvian philosopher of advanced environmentalism. The philosopher is one with the murderer. The Napoleonic world-improver is one with the humble hermit of the wilderness.

In the Unabomber, America has at last brought forth its own Raskolnikov—the appealing, appalling, and disturbingly visionary murderer of
Crime and Punishment
, Dostoyevsky’s masterwork of 1866. But the Unabomber is not the only ideological
criminal (though he may be the most intellectual) to burst out of remoteness and fantasy onto unsuspecting native grounds. It was a political conviction rooted in anti-government ideas of liberty suppressed that fueled the deadly bombing of a Federal building in Oklahoma City. God’s will directed the bombing of the World Trade Center, and the Muslim zealots who devised the means are world-improvers obedient to the highest good; so are the bombers of abortion clinics. The Weathermen of the sixties, who bombed banks and shot police in order to release “Amerika” from the tyranny of a democratic polity, are close ideological cousins of the Russian nihilists who agitated against Alexander II, the liberalizing Czar of a century before. That celebrated nineteen-sixties mantra—to make an omelet you need to break eggs—had its origin not in an affinity for violence, but in the mouth-watering lure of the humanitarian omelet. It was only the gastronomic image that was novel. In the Russian sixties, one hundred years earlier—in 1861, the very year Alexander II freed the serfs—a radical young critic named Dimitry Pisarev called for striking “right and left” and announced, “What resists the blow is worth keeping; what flies to pieces is rubbish.” Here was the altruistic bomber’s dogma, proclaimed in the pages of a literary journal—and long before
The New York Review of Books
published on its front cover a diagram of how to construct a Molotov cocktail.