Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  CHAMFORT

  Known, to his contemporaries and to posterity, always and only by his pseudonymous single name, Chamfort was born Sébastien-Roch Nicolas in 1741 and forecast the modern age by the reason for his death. He committed suicide in 1794 because the Revolutionary authorities had made it clear that they planned to reward his irreverent wit with a visit to the guillotine. In the rich tradition of French aphorists, Chamfort was the one who paid with his life for the knack of getting reality into a nutshell. It was because he lived at the wrong time. The Revolution had given birth to ideological malice in a form we can now recognize, but it was not recognizable then. It was still discovering itself. Chamfort, by the time that he ran out of luck, had already defined some of its characteristics, but not even he had guessed that it couldn’t take a joke. In the twentieth century both of the main forms of totalitarianism were united in promoting the jokers to the head of the death list.

  If it wasn’t for me, I would do brilliantly.

  —CHAMFORT, QUOTED IN JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL’S Fin du siècle des ombres (AT THE END OF THE CENTURY OF SHADOWS)

  Sans moi, je me porterais à merveille. Chamfort said this after a bungled attempt to kill himself. His real name was Sébastien-Roch Nicolas, but he lived, and lives on, as Chamfort the wit. He had other ambitions, some of which brought him worldly success. His theatrical works were well enough thought of to gain him admission into high society. Tall, handsome, and a mighty lover of women, he said that he would never get married, “for fear of having a son like me.” He was admitted to the Academy in 1781. In today’s textbooks, however, Chamfort’s sentimental plays are remembered for the thoroughness with which they have been forgotten, and he is classed with Rivarol as one of those pre-revolutionary minor philosophers who haunted the salons, made a night of it, and put too much of their effort into clever talk. But Chamfort’s posthumously published Maximes took their place in literature for those connoisseurs of the aphorism who positively liked the idea that there was a wasted lifetime behind the wisdom. Though initially all in favour of the Revolution, Chamfort would probably have had the same chance as Camille Desmoulins of surviving the Terror, and for the same reason: he was a known critic and parodist of the hypocrisy prevalent among humanitarians, and the humanitarians were in charge. Desmoulins was executed because he had made a joke about Saint-Just. (In the tumbril, Desmoulins was heard to say “My joke has killed me,” and his last witticism was already spreading by word of mouth even as his clever head fell into the basket.) Unlike Desmoulins, however, Chamfort tried to anticipate the guillotine. In a piquant forecast of Egon Friedell’s flight from a window in Vienna 144 years later, Chamfort chose himself as an executioner. He made a frightful mess of it, but luckily died of his wounds, leaving the memory of his deliciously sardonic intelligence free to do its work. Chamfort was the one who supplied the lasting definition of fraternité: “Be my brother or I will kill you.” That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he was arrested soon after making it.

  Jean-François Revel is only one of the many subsequent students of politics to admire Chamfort. Mirabeau borrowed from him freely, and Talleyrand more than freely, because Talleyrand didn’t even acknowledge the debt. In London, Chateaubriand read Chamfort’s complete works. Pushkin, the Goncourt brothers and Schopenhauer all thought Chamfort exemplary. From Ernst Jünger’s Caucasus notebooks we can tell that he was reading Chamfort attentively in November 1942, with American bombers already over Germany in broad daylight and the Stalingrad disaster in the final stages of preparation. In de Gaulle’s memoirs, Chamfort is quoted to fascinating effect: “Those who were reasonable have survived. Those who were passionate have lived.” Evidently Chamfort helped de Gaulle to believe himself a bit of a devil. It is possibly the secret of the attractive wastrel, as a type, that reasonable men see in him the road not taken: his seemingly effortless charm allays momentarily the consideration that for them the road might never have been open. Some of the admiration heaped on the talented goof-off is gratitude to the sacrificial goat. Writers in general are happier if one of their number wastes his gifts, especially if the gifts are conspicuous: the way is left open for his tone to be borrowed, not to say plagiarized. But Chamfort might not have needed his overdeveloped taste for social life in order to marginalize himself. Purporting to find the whole business of securing a reputation sufficiently off-putting to justify a career of cynicism, he seems to have suffered few agonies of shame in writing his romantic entertainments. It was the serious literature that he found, or claimed to find, repellent. “Most books of the present have the air of being made in a day from the books of the past.” It will do as well as anybody else’s aphorism as a warning against making books out of books, although—as I have tried to argue elsewhere in this book made out of books—there is something to be said for the practice, as long as what is said is something true.

  Chamfort had a way of getting something true said memorably without making it look laboriously chiselled. “I am leaving a world,” he said, “in which the heart that does not break must turn to bronze.” Few wits bow out with a throwaway line, and if they try to, the line is seldom as good as that. Even from such masters of elision as La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère and Vauvenargues, too many French aphorisms come equipped with a marble slab. Chamfort favoured the paper dart. There is an easy, wristy flourish to his phrasing, which an artist-journalist like Revel is qualified to appreciate, because he can do it himself. “Systems of literary criticism,” Revel wrote in his little book Sur Proust, “are made to satisfy the devouring lack of interest in literary works that calls itself a thirst for culture.” If that sentence turned on “calls itself a thirst for culture” it would just be a Wildean paradox. But dévorante gives it savour, because the consuming energy of the deafness to art that goes into a critical system is always one of its distinguishing features—distinguishing it, that is, from the decently reticent poise of a sensitive response.

  Chamfort got the vital extra word from his lyrical talent. With the aphoristic statement as with any other measure of prose, a nose for poetry helps. “For this magician of the epigram,” wrote Revel of Chamfort, “the crystal and the music of a phrase are what matter most.” A hidden corollary might be that the truth and the justice are what matter least; but there can be no doubt that a suggestive enchantment, always in shorter supply than rational exposition, is more likely to get our attention first, if not to hold it longest. Chamfort reaped all the rewards open to the quick wit, and almost convinces us that it was the only way to live. But if he had really believed that, he would have written down nothing at all. He did do brilliantly in the end, and all because he was himself, and not in spite of it.

  COCO CHANEL

  Never pretty but always beautiful, Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel (1883–1971) embodied, during the course of her career, two important themes relevant to the story of the humanities in the twentieth century: one of them was the capacity of the popular and applied arts to influence culture at its highest level, and the other was the frailty of creativity under moral pressure. As a designer, her invention of the “little black dress” shifted the centre of attention from haute couture to prêt-à-porter: before her, the height of fashion had been priced out of the reach of any except the wealthy. From the fortune she made from her inventions, she was able to further exercise her infallible taste by patronizing the avant-garde: she wrote cheques for Diaghilev and Stravinsky. During the Occupation, however, her tastes, if not her taste, led her to accept the protection of a German official, with consequences for her reputation that would have been disastrous if her talent had not been regarded, correctly, as a national treasure. She lives on as a brand name: a perpetually bankable guarantee of elegance. The name tells something of the truth, though not all of it.

  Luxury is a necessity that starts where necessity stops.

  —COCO CHANEL (ATTRIB.): A LINE WRITTEN FOR HER BY PIERRE REVERDY, AS QUOTED IN Chanel, BY EDMOND CHARLES ROUX

  CHANEL MADE A profi
table habit out of keeping a tame poet on hand to coin aphorisms that could be put into circulation attributed to her. As a general rule, the best aphorisms are truisms, but are true about subjects too scandalous to receive regular treatment. The truth of this one was most piquantly confirmed in Chanel’s capital city. In Paris under the Occupation, the rationing of luxuries did not stop the women dressing as well as possible. Indeed they tried harder: it was something to take their minds off the grinding boredom, and the competition for the few available men was fierce. Paris was probably the first wartime capital in which the shortage of sheer stockings was compensated for by painting the legs, with a seam pencilled up the back of the leg for verisimilitude. The outbreak of fashion extravagance after the war—the New Look made far more news all over the world than the New Deal ever did—was a generational revenge for shortages of cloth, colour and silk lining.

  When I was young enough to be dressing up in my mother’s clothes while she was out—I had my transvestite phase at the age of seven, as I remember—the next most fascinating thing after the propelling lipstick was the look of the sequins on her one and only best dress for evening. Their glitter still affects the way I see Sydney Harbour in oblique sunlight. My mother’s clothes were her sole connection with a better life, and they were vital. Her clothes and mine: the day when she left the hot iron for too long on the trousers of my first proper blue suit was one of the worst days of our lives. We had enough, but not a lot: not enough for it not to matter. Although Sydney was a long way from the worst of the war’s hardships, it did not escape the global law that elevated everything pretty to the status of a rarity. It was only decades later, however, that I fully realized how those few fine things my mother had to dress in had been the true expression of a spritual value. “Philosophy is about people in clothes,” said the British philosopher T. E. Hulme, “not about the soul of man.” It’s about both those things, but he was right to insist that the first mattered.

  The next level up from bare necessity is where the life of the soul begins. As the war neared its end, the goods of the American military PX were the world’s first international currency. Girls in Germany could be bought for a bar of chocolate. Less directly but just as effectively, cartons of Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes bought the affections of women in Britain and Australia. For our fighting men, the superior uniforms of the American service personnel amounted to one of the most soul-destroying aspects of the war. American enlisted men were better dressed than our officers. It hurt worse than German bombs or Japanese bayonets: with those you could take your chances, but the opulent small change of American culture you simply had to take, and taking it was hard.

  Years had to go by before those discrepancies ceased to be painful. People’s morality was judged by how long they had held out against the lure of material goods. Chanel’s borrowed axiom had a wide and lasting application—a sociological principle raised to the level of science. Unfortunately her own principles were too easily compromised by it. During the Occupation she chose the easy path. She took on a powerful German protector. It paid off in a big way in the early stages: she would not have wanted for butter and sugar. Later on, when the Germans themselves ran out of luxuries, the deal no doubt held less attraction at the material level. Perhaps she deserves some credit for sticking with him. The censorious committees of l’Épuration (the Purification) would not have seen it that way. If she hadn’t decamped to Switzerland she would undoubtedly have had her head shaved: a new hairstyle that even she would have been hard-pressed to make fashionable. The film star Arletty spent two years in purdah for collaborating a lot less blatantly. Finally Chanel was allowed back, because she was one of the keepers of the great secret of couture, which the French correctly saw as the first chance of national recovery. A perennial guarantee to the world that Paris held the secret of a stylish life, couture was already helping to regenerate the French economy when the Citroën DS19 was still being designed. No matter how elegant the cars and airliners (and there was never a more classy looking aircraft than the Caravelle), it was the clothes that sold the world on the idea of a uniquely French combination of artistry and design. Nevertheless, Chanel sensibly kept her head down until, in 1954, inspired by the presence in Paris of the beautiful American model Suzy Parker, she went back into the rag trade.

  In the West during the twentieth century, the blockade of the German-speaking countries in World War I, the post-war waves of inflation, the Depression throughout the free world, the war in Europe and the Pacific and its long rationed aftermath everywhere except in America—they all contributed to a laboratory for the study of the connection between materialism and the spirit. But it was in the heartland of dialectical materialism that the laboratory provided measures for the whole of existence. In the Soviet Union, nothing mattered more than access to the special stores, which were reserved for the nomenklatura and its chosen favourites. The special stores were where the luxuries were, some of them poignantly elementary: toothpaste that did not corrode teeth, toilet paper that did not cut, scissors that did. The vast majority of the people were condemned to the ordinary shops, where the command economy proved its efficacy by providing a standard of living only one rung up from the Gulag. Except for the brief burst of the New Economic Policy under Lenin, it was like that for seventy long years: the society that had proposed to abolish the gap between rich and poor made it an unbridgeable chasm. In Moscow in 1976 I was with a party of tourists who stayed at the Metropol hotel, famous scene of many a midnight visit in the late 1930s, when foreign Communist dignitaries would go to bed with all their clothes on in case their number came up. One of my fellow tourists, a lecturer in sociology at an English university, told me solemnly at dinner that it was a relief to be in a country where the gap between rich and poor was not blatant. He didn’t see our Intourist guide slipping some leftover blinis into her plastic leather-look handbag. In Cuba in 1986 the security man in charge of my party of journalists—we were there to help generate publicity for the Varadero resort project—told me that if I really wished to reward him for his help I could use a few of my dollars to buy him a bottle of good rum from the special store. He was a government agent in a country famous for manufacturing the stuff, and in his whole adult life he had never been able to get a taste of it except at the lowest grade.

  Except in periods of deliberately induced famine, nobody starved in the Soviet Union, or died of thirst or went unclothed. But they ate, drank and dressed at a level too low to leave them untouched by a desolate envy of the capitalism they were supposed to despise, and finally it was that corrosive spiritual deprivation that brought socialism down. The deprivation was comparative, not absolute: but the comparison was real. Thoughts of it filled the day, the week, the month, the year and the whole wasted life. In the West, someone obsessed with material things is correctly thought to be a fool. In the East, everyone was obsessed with material things from daylight to dusk. It was the most sordid trick that communism played. Killing people by the millions at least had the merit of a tragic dimension. But making the common people queue endlessly for goods barely worth having was a bad joke. At the Paris prêt-à-porter collections in 1982 I met Viktor Sichov, a photographer who had managed to defect from the Soviet Union and bring his whole archive with him. He thought he had spent his life photographing Soviet women in their moments of joy, passion, suffering and defeat. In Paris he finally realized that the true subject of his photographs had been their clothes. The edge of the crime, where it shaded into ordinary life, was the area in which the sadness became most palpable. In the centre it was too intense to grasp. Soviet consumer goods were the small-arms fire of the government’s relentless economic assault on the people. Soviet consumer goods were an insult. They were already rubbish when they were fresh from the factory, and the fate of the people who had slaved, saved and stood in endless lines to buy them was to find that they could not even be cherished, because they were already falling apart. Meanwhile, the tastes of the ruling elite gave
the game away. No Soviet diplomat based abroad ever returned to his homeland without a few bottles of Chanel No. 5. So Coco Chanel, who had rolled over for the Nazis, played her part in discomfiting the next dictatorship that came along.

  CHARLES CHAPLIN

  For most of his life, which stretched from 1889 to 1977, Charles Chaplin was world-famous, and for much of the early part of his career, up until the end of the silent movie era, he was, if measured in terms of recognizability and media coverage, by far the most famous person in the world. Readers of his stilted My Autobiography might assume that it all went to his head. The facts say that it didn’t. The object of adulation on a scale that would have embarrassed Louis XIV, Chaplin nevertheless maintained his identification with the common people from whom he emerged. His progressive politics were genuinely felt, and his embarrassment at the hands of Red scare witch-hunters during the McCarthy era—the persecution drove him into exile—was an episode in modern American history of which his adopted country had no cause to be proud. In his later and less successful movies of the sound era, there were signs of disabling conceit in his determination to take every major credit including that of composer, but nobody had a better right to consider himself an artistic genius. He knew, however, that he wasn’t a genius about everything else as well. Hitler, who awarded himself credentials for peculiar insight even into science, was thus a perfect subject for Chaplin’s comic gift. The Great Dictator (1940) was a study of megalomania by an essentially humble man.