Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  The politically exiled artists thus proved, under laboratory conditions, that the concept of the Weltbürger has its limits. Borges was not in the same position. In 1979, when he wrote his homage to Victoria Ocampo (the founder of the cosmopolitan magazine Sur) in which this revealing passage appeared, the Argentinian junta was doing its obscene worst. Surrounded by horror, either he hadn’t noticed or—a hard imputation, yet harder still to avoid—he knew something about it and thought it could be excused. But even if he was confident that the political Brahmanism he favoured could be pardoned for imposing itself by extreme means, he might well have detected an incipient challenge to his conscience. He had good reason—i.e., a bad reason but an urgent one—to suggest, if only to himself, that what was happening to his country was of secondary importance, because his first loyalty was to the world. But the world, not one’s country, is the abstraction: an ideal that means nothing if one’s first loyalties to truth, justice and mercy have been given up. The old man was pulling a fast one. I read the book, and made my marginal note, in 1999. But it was the date on the article that tipped me off: 1979. A reprinted article should always carry its original date, but you can see why writers and editors should sometimes find it expedient to leave it out. Otherwise an apparently impeccable sentiment might stand revealed as an opportunistic stratagem, or at the very least as a sign of obtuseness.

  Self-exiled to Paris from his repudiated Romania, the fragmentary philosopher E. M. Cioran gushingly admired Borges’s world citizenship. On page 1,606 of Cioran’s monolithic Œuvres, we learn that the irresistible example of the Argentinian séducteur (“Everything with him is transfigured by the game, by a dance of glittering discoveries and delicious sophisms”) helped the Romanian philosopher to formulate the device on his own mental shield: “Not to put down roots, not to belong to any community.” But at the time Cioran said this (it was 1976), he was keen to give the impression that his native country had never meant much to him, while not keen at all to reveal that he had played a part in his native country’s unfortunate fascist past. (The nice way of putting it is that he had been close to the Iron Guard, and the nice way of putting it when it comes to the Iron Guard is that their anti-Semitism, by Hitlerite standards, was hit-and-miss, although not many people they hit got up.) Cioran had even better reasons than Borges for suggesting that none of the rough stuff had ever had anything to do with him. Borges was never more than equivocally complicit in nationalist mania. Cioran, in that conveniently forgotten youthful period before he prudently took out citizenship in the world, had been in it up to the elbows. It is interesting that he thought a spiritual alliance with Borges might help to wash him clean.

  At this point there is a key quotation from Ernesto Sábato that we should consider:

  From Borges’s fear of the bitter reality of existence spring two simultaneous and complementary attitudes: to play games in an invented world, and to adhere to a Platonic theory, an intellectual theory par excellence. (Ensayos, p. 304)

  In Buenos Aires after World War II, there were two literary voices of incontestable international stature. The main difference between them was that only one of them was known to possess it. The whole world heard about Borges. But to get the point about Sabáto, you had to go to Argentina. Both inhabitants of a beautiful but haunted city, both great writers, and both blind in their later lives, Borges and Sábato were linked by destiny but separated in spirit: a separation summed up in this single perception of Sábato’s, which was penetratingly true. Borges did fear the bitterness of reality, and he did take refuge in an invented world. When Gombrowicz called Borges’s virtuosity “iced fireworks” he was arriving independently at the same judgement. There are no iced fireworks in Sábato, whose fantastic novels were dedicated to including all the horrors of the real world, and raising them to the status of dreams, so that they could become apprehensible to the imagination, which would otherwise edit them into something more easily overlooked. (His rationale for this process of saving reality from its own forgetful mechanisms is spread throughout his books of critical prose, but see especially El escritor y sus fantasmas.) Sábato’s characteristic image is the tunnel. The tunnel is the area of concentration for the dreams. Most of the dreams we recognize all too clearly. He didn’t need to search very far in order to find the stimulus for them. All he needed was the recent history of Argentina. In Sábato the reader is faced with that history often, but in Borges hardly ever. In Borges the near past scarcely exists: in that respect his historical sense, like his Buenos Aires, is without contemporaneity. His political landscape is a depopulated marble ghost-town remembered from childhood, spookily hieratic like the cemetery in Recoleta. Before he went blind he would still walk the streets, but usually only at night, to minimize the chance of actually meeting anyone. In his stories, the moments of passion, fear, pity and terror belong to the long-vanished world of the knife fighters. Death squads and torture are not in the inventory. The timescale ends not long after he was born. Why did he hide?

  Probably because of artistic predilection, rather than human cowardice. There are always artists who place themselves above the battle, and in retrospect we don’t regret their doing so. In World War II, André Gide took no overt position about the Occupation, the biggest moral dilemma that France had faced since the Revolution. Yet we would not want to be without his journals of the period. Safe in Switzerland, Hermann Hesse said next to nothing about the biggest events of any twentieth-century German-speaking writer’s life: his dreamy novella Morgenlandfahrt (The Journey East) was the closest he ever came to making a comment on nationalist irrationality, and there was nothing in that skimpy book to which a Hitler Youth idealist could have objected. Borges openly loathed Perón, but fell silent on everything that happened after Perón was ousted—fell silent politically, but artistically came into full flower, an international hit even as his nation entered the tunnel of its long agony.

  Though it would be foolish for an outsider to quarrel with his enormous creative achievement—one might as well take a tomahawk to a forest—there is reason to sympathize with those native Argentinians, not all of them Philistines, who can’t help feeling that it was an accumulation of trees designed to obscure the wood. So much ancillary prose by and about Borges has been published since his death that it is a professional task to keep up with it all, but a casual student should find time to see Antiborges, a compilation of commentaries edited by Martin Lafforgue. (The contribution from Pedro Organbide, “Borges y su pensamiento politica,” is especially noteworthy.) An instructive picture emerges of a visionary whose vision was impaired in more than the physical sense. Borges, alas, had no particular objection to extreme authoritarianism as such. The reason he hated Peronismo was that it was a mass movement. He didn’t like the masses: he was the kind of senatorial elitist whose chief objection to fascism is that by mobilizing the people it gives them ideas above their station and hands out too many free shirts. When the junta seized power in March 1976, he took the view that they weren’t fascists at all, because the helots weren’t in the picture. Most of the intellectuals of the old conservative stamp declined to cooperate with the new regime, and Sábato behaved particularly well. (That a man as out of tune with the regime as Sábato should nevertheless have seen merit in the Malvinas adventure is a token of how indisputable the claim to the islands looked from the Argentinian side.) It need hardly be said that to behave well was not without risk: when everyone was aware of the hideous lengths to which the regime would go against ordinary people whose names meant little, there was never any guarantee that people of prestige would remain exempt. Fear took its toll in a fall of silence.

  But there is no evidence that Borges ever felt the need to be afraid. His name and growing international renown were lent to the regime without reserve, either because he approved or—the best that can be said for him—because he was clueless. As the time arrived when not even he could claim blindness to the junta’s war against the innocent, lack of information was wh
at he claimed as an excuse for his previous inertia. Signing the round robin of protest that signalled the end of the regime’s tacit support from the enlightened bourgeoisie—when their children were taken, they woke up—he said that he had not been able to find out about these things earlier. His impatient statement “No leo los diarios” (I don’t read newspapers) became famous among his critics as a shameful echo of all those otherwise intelligent Germans who never heard about the extermination camps until it was all over. It was pointed out with some pertinence that his blindness had never stopped him finding out about all the literature in the world. There was a torture centre within walking distance of his house, and he had always been a great walker. It could be said that by then his walking days were over; but he could still hear, even if he couldn’t see. There was a lot of private talk that must have been hard to miss, unless he had wilfully stopped his ears. He might well have done: a cocked ear would have heard the screams.

  In 1983, after the junta fell, he was finally forced into an acceptance of plebeian democracy, the very thing he had always most detested. A decade of infernal anguish for his beloved country had at last taught him that state terror is more detestable still. It was a hard lesson for a slow pupil. On an international scale, Borges can perhaps be forgiven for his ringing endorsement of General Pinochet’s activities in Chile: after all, Margaret Thatcher seems to have shared his enthusiasm, and John Major’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Norman Lamont, now wears a medal hung around his neck by Pinochet without any visible sign of chest hair set on fire by burning shame. But within Argentina, there are some distinguished minds that have had to work hard to see their greatest writer sub specie aeternitatis without wishing his pusillanimity to be enrolled along with his prodigious talent. Pedro Organbide, fully sensitive to the eternal literary stature of Borges, was being restrained when he noted—with a sad finality it is hard to contest—that his tarnished hero’s behaviour was a living demonstration of how political elitism depends on ignorance. There are not many great writers who oblige us to accept that inattention might have been essential to their vision. Jane Austen left the Napoleonic wars out of her novels, but we assume that she heard about them, and would have heard about them even if she had been unable to see. Sábato’s blindness, unlike Borges’s, was confined only to the last part of his life, but it was complete enough. His ears, however, remained in good working order, and when the time came he was able to take on the cruel job of writing about the Disappeared—the innocent people whose vanishing took so long to attract Borges’s attention.

  ROBERT BRASILLACH

  Robert Brasillach was born in 1909 in Perpignan and excecuted as a traitor in 1945. He is sometimes thought of, by wishful thinkers in France, as perhaps the most conspicuous example of the promising young all-rounder whose career would have been different if the Nazis had never come to Paris, although he had already been beguiled by what he thought of as their glamour when he visited Germany. But they arrived, and his nature took its course. As a regular contributor, during the Occupation, to the scurrilous paper Je Suis Partout (I Am Everywhere), he stood out for his virulence even among its staff of dedicated anti-Semites. His Jew-baiting diatribes were made more noxious by his undoubted journalistic talent. Most of the prominent French collaborators with the Nazis got into it because they were disappointed nationalists who thought their country had a better chance of becoming strong again if it stuck with the winning side. Comparatively few of them actually admired the Nazis. Brasillach was one who did. When the winning side became the losing side, he paid the penalty for having guessed wrong. Though there have been attempts, not always unjustifiable, to rehabilitate his reputation as a critic, few tears have ever been shed over his fate. By his rhetoric of blanket denunciation, he had been handing out death penalties for years. Whether the death penalty was warranted in his own case, however, is bound to be questioned by anyone who believes in free speech, however foul it might be.

  It is among them that I have found the most passionate defenders and they have shown a generosity which is in the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature.

  —ROBERT BRASILLACH, Remerciement aux intellectuels, FEBUARY 3, 1945, QUOTED IN PIERRE ASSOULINE’S L’Épuration des intellectuels

  PREPARING HIMSELF FOR his imminent death, the condemned Robert Brasillach showed courage, but unless remorse had renovated his character it is doubtful if he realized just how generous his defenders had been. At the eleventh hour and the fifty-ninth minute, he can be heard enrolling himself amongst the greatest and most beautiful tradition of French literature, as if he still believed he had been its servant, instead of its betrayer. Whether he was a traitor to France was, and remains, a fine point of legal interpretation. There were plenty of people, including Marshal Pétain himself, who sincerely believed that to serve Vichy was the only legitimate loyalty, and later on they were able to argue from conviction that they had broken no laws. (During François Mitterrand’s presidency it was revealed that his supposed career as a Resistance hero had been preceded by a verifiable career as a Vichy functionary. He contrived to imply, without being toppled from office, that there had been no alternative at the time, although of course he had been preparing himself for Resistance all along.) There were fewer people, although still far too many, who actively cooperated with the Nazis in the belief that the Third Republic had deserved its fate and that the alliance with Germany, even though compelled, would have been worth making voluntarily in the interests of European renewal and a France purged of liberal equivocation. There were very few people who behaved like Nazis themselves, although even in the literary world there were still more than a handful. Brasillach was one of them.

  He was given carte blanche by the Nazis to wield his poisoned pen in the pursuit of Jews. On any scale of crime and punishment, a firing squad could scarcely exact payment for the damage he had caused. But he was shot anyway, and got out of his debt early. If the blindfolded angel of Justice could have intervened, she would have sent him to Sigmaringen, the appropriately fantastic cliff-side haven on the Danube where Louis-Ferdinand Céline and all the other unrepentant enthusiasts, taken away to safety by the Nazis, were even then sitting around in plush chairs and boring each other to tears with the tatters of their madcap theories. Their haven was soon overrun but the reprieve had lasted long enough to save most of them from a death sentence. In his disgusting book Bagatelles pour un massacre, Céline had murdered a thousand times more Jews with his foul mouth than Brasillach had ever accounted for by publishing names in the crapulous weekly newspaper Je Suis Partout so that the Gestapo and the Vichy militia could add to their lists over breakfast. Locking Brasillach in the same cell with Céline for the next ten years would have been a far tougher punishment than shooting him. But the vigilantes, as always, were in a hurry, so Brasillach died before he had time to entertain the possibility that his real treason had been to the French humanist tradition he thought himself to be part of.

  He could have argued back, and said that Voltaire loathed Jews too. But what would he have said about Proust? What did he think that a pipsqueak like himself amounted to beside a man like that? Proust might have been only half a Jew, but Brasillach was barely a quarter of a literary figure, and in normal times would probably have measured even less: the Zeitgeist lent him a dark lustre. He had some talent as a critic, and could write forceful prose, even against the common run of his own political position, whose banalities did not escape him. As late as his 1937 visit to Germany, though he was impressed by the vault of searchlights (the Lichtdom) at the Nuremberg rally and bowled over by the sexy energy of the Hitler Youth, he could still describe Hitler as a sad vegetarian functionary. (After the Nazis took over in Paris, Brasillach had to censor some of his own stuff.) But his fateful attendance at the 1941 Weltliteratur pan-European get-together in Weimar put him over the top. It was the combination of poetry and daemonic power that did him in. No tenderness without cruelty! In occupied Paris, Brasillach knew that t
he Germanophile French writers were being had by the Propaganda Abteilung. But Brasillach wanted to be had. The Jewish Bolshevik peril was still there, and now it was there for the crushing. Here was the organized violence that could do it, and he could be part of it. Anger drove him, as it always drives the resentful. He had the kind of energy that could never widen its view. But it could certainly widen its scope, and the Occupation gave him the opportunities of a big game hunter set loose in a zoo: the targets had nowhere to run. His short career was the logical outcome of the nefarious, microcephalic intellectual trend that had started with the Dreyfus case and the foam-flecked symposium of Action Française: the idea that a cleaned-up, non-cosmopolitan, Jew-free culture could restore the integrity of France as the natural leader of Europe. Whether this glowing future was envisaged with the Germans or without them, it was always without the Jews.

  But France was already the natural leader of Europe, and exactly because it had outgrown pseudo-hygienic notions of cultural purity. Paris had played host to Heinrich Heine when there was no home for him in Germany. As Nietzsche himself insisted, Heine was the greatest German poet since Goethe and one of the greatest in any language. Heine’s presence in Paris had been a foretaste of the only cultural integrity that would ever matter: the hegemony of the creative mind that enriches nations but makes their boundaries transparent. The French anti-Semitic right was not just a political freak show, it was a cultural anachronism. From the veteran arch-nationalists Maurice Barres and Charles Maurras downwards to such bright young things as Drieu la Rochelle and Brasillach, its fluently virulent mouthpieces raved on about their nation’s poisoned blood without ever realizing that they were the poison. Brasillach’s goodbye note to a cruel world is just one more piece of evidence that they never got the point. Literature should have taught them better: but the real treason of the clerks has always been to suppose that their studies confer on them a power beyond the merely mortal, instead of revealing to them that merely mortal is all they are. If Brasillach had lived to repent, he might have found that out: although if he had, his conscience would have killed him anyway. He had too much blood on his hands. Thanks to his accusers, his is on ours. Some of them, like his defenders, were men of letters. They should have put it in writing. People who don’t think that’s enough shouldn’t write.