Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Generosity, however, can be gush when uncalled for. Even in Dante’s time, Italian ran easily to gush. Dante pretty well invented the Italian language we read and hear today. The ideal version of the Italian language, say the Italians, is Florentine Italian spoken by someone from Siena. The Sienese are less likely to murder the “c” sound by aspirating it. But the language they speak with such melody is the one invented by Dante and his friends in or near Florence. Even then, though, it could be a torrent like the Arno in flood, and especially when aspiring to the lyrical. As Contini explains, Dante saw how part of the task would be to keep his lirismo in check rather than to let it rip. Much later on and in another country, we find that Laforgue liked the same thing about Tristan Corbière, who was a wild man, but used common speech—sometimes very common, from the gutter or the brothel—to chasten the worn-out lyrical effects that not even Victor Hugo was able to render obsolete all by himself. Poeticized poetry will always crop up again of its own accord; you can tell it is a weed because it looks too obviously like a flower, and grows again during the night. Ernst Robert Curtius (in his book of collected essays, Gesammelte Aufsätze, p. 312) borrowed Laforgue’s idea to praise the prosaic stretches in Eliot’s East Coker, the poetry that was not like poetry. In our time, the greatest exponent of deliberately prosaic poetic diction was Philip Larkin. Recently in Melbourne, when I was trying to tempt a young admirer of Larkin’s poetry to begin learning enough Italian to make a start with Dante, I told her that the dialogue in the Paola and Francesca scene in Canto V of the Inferno sounds as natural as Larkin’s narrative tone in “Dockery and Son,” and that when Dante stands back to deliver a clinching moral, the sonorities are just like Larkin’s: magisterial because unaffected, the same language intensified without being notably heightened—a dignified squaring of the shoulders rather than a climbing onto stilts. With so finely calibrated a control of tone, Larkin could have written verse forever without rhyming even once. It is very interesting that he usually chose otherwise, and rhymed solidly throughout the poem. The big, matched stanzas of his showpiece poems like those in The Whitsun Weddings are, without striving to prove it, technically challenging beyond anything attempted by the Thomas Hardy he so much loved. Larkin got them, in fact, from Yeats: another self-disciplinarian on the grand scale. In some of Larkin’s later poems, he will take the ottava rima stanza and deliberately make the rhymes approximate, but the structure is still strictly present behind the altered façade. Compare Larkin’s “Church-Going” with Yeats’s “Among School Children” and look for the contrast. There isn’t one.

  BENEDETTO CROCE

  Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) was the philosopher of twentieth-century Italy. One says “the” philosopher because nobody else came close, and even those intellectuals who disagreed with him most violently—Giovanni Gentile, who pledged allegiance to Fascism, was one of them—were obliged to take account of what he said. A practising politician as well as a political theorist, Croce was impressed by Mussolini in the beginning but soon saw the threat to liberalism. He went into internal exile and continued with his writing. After the war Croce was offered the presidency of Italy but declined, although in other respects he was crucial to the rebuilding of the country’s liberal institutions. Lending him almost irresistible force as a thinker was the riverine flow and clarity of his prose style, fully equal to Shaw at his best, but without the paradoxes. Unfortunately no comparable stylist ever tried to translate him, and although some of his central works were brought over into English, they never had the influence that was their due. (An admirer of R. G. Collingwood would object to these assessments, but few admirers of Collingwood are aware that his indebtedness to Croce attained the level of mimicry, which always belittles the original.) In the 1960s I learned quite a lot of Italian by reading almost everything Croce wrote, and emerged from the experience with a lasting admiration for his range of understanding. When he didn’t understand something, however, he brought all his powers of expression to bear on saying the wrong thing: a salutary lesson in the relationship between style and substance.

  Attempts to determine the place of art have, until now, looked for that place either at the peak of the theoretical spirit or in the vicinity of philosophy itself. But if, so far, no satisfactory result has been obtained, might it not be because of the obstinacy of looking too high? Why not turn the attempt on its head, and instead of proposing the hypothesis that art is one of the highest grades, if not the highest grade, of the theoretical spirit, propose instead the inverted and opposite hypothesis, that it is one of the lowest, even the lowest of all?

  —BENEDETTO CROCE, Problemi di estetica (PROBLEMS IN AESTHETICS), P. 13

  AS ALWAYS, CROCE defeats ordinary expectation by looking for the creative impulse in the natural instinct rather than in the developed mind. The secret of his fecundity as a thinker was to open up possibilities rather than close them off, and he always did so by demoting the adept. According to him, a heart in the right place, rather than a mind in a high state of training, was the more likely source of truth, and the only source of creativity. Art, far from being the furthermost refinement of intelligence, came before thought, and was as natural as breathing. Croce’s guess was that the first human beings sang before they spoke. He was certainly right that they drew before they wrote, and wrote poetry before they wrote prose.

  Such propositions from Croce, when taken all at once, can sound like paradox-mongering. But he made them consistent. Over the vast range of his fundamental works—leaving the incidental works aside, which it takes a separate room to do—the key concepts are thoroughly and concretely worked out, abetting each other without friction. The best way of summing up their effect is to say that they show how the instinct to live and grow is channelled through creativity towards mentality. If he had given the mind the precedence over art, he would have been inhibited in his explanatory powers. He did the opposite, and released them. Released, they could give a reasoned account of what he saw in the street: all the busy littleness that was so astonishing in its prodigality and variety of imagination. He always thought that there must be something wrong with an overarching concept if a necessary mental activity withered in its shadow. For a philosophy to be true, he believed, its proponent had to be able to write history. (One of the reasons he thought religions were incomplete philosophies was that no religion can tell the truth about the past.) For an aesthetic to be valid, its proponent had to be able to write criticism. That second idea was especially valuable to his successors. Its effect was to humanize in advance the Italian critical tradition as it extended without a notable break into the modern period. Italy’s left-wing theorists, for example, unlike those in other countries, have always felt obliged to show due tact when treating the arts as a political expression, thereby acknowledging Croce’s warnings against doing such a thing to any degree at all. (Not even the red radical Gramsci could afford to ignore Croce.)

  One of Croce’s precepts was paraphrased by Eugenio Montale when he said: “It isn’t the man who wants to who continues the tradition, it’s the man who can, and sometimes he’s the man who knows least about it.” It was one of the sentences that made Montale almost as famous a critic as he was a poet, but he would not have been able to write it if he had not read Croce first, and Montale’s very next sentence was one that Croce could have written himself. “To this end, programmes and good intentions are of little use.” Montale’s echo of Croce—or, if you like, Croce’s presaging of Montale—is an example of the continuity that makes Italian literary culture so satisfying in its coherence. We should remember, however, that there are Italians who find it too coherent, to the point of being hidebound. They would prefer a story big enough to get lost in, in the way that we get lost in ours. We don’t feel obliged to read our philosophers before we read our critics. In Italy there is one philosopher whom everyone has to read before they read anything else, down to and including the instruction manual for a new washing machine.

  TONY CURTISr />
  Like many film stars, Tony Curtis (b. 1925) was already pretending to be someone else before he landed his first Hollywood role. As a Jew raised in the New York Upper East Side district he later called “Nazi land,” Bernard Schwartz already knew what World War II was about before he went to it. He emerged from the war with his first professional credentials already established. He had kept his buddies laughing. A further education in drama was made possible by the GI Bill: once again he was the class clown. As an apprentice Hollywood leading man, under his new name Tony Curtis, he caused more laughter for his accent and his hairstyle, but his box office appeal for a young audience was immediate. The rest of the story—mainly about his long and eventually successful quest for credibility—is told in a better than average ghosted autobiography (Tony Curtis, 1993). Necessarily it leaves out the wider context, which would concern just how the equivalents of Tony Curtis in the European countries failed to make the same impact internationally. American cultural imperialism might look like the answer, but the term explains nothing in itself. American dominance of the world’s big screens worked by consent. The effort that went into the product was hard to match. Part of the effort was the quality of the human material that was actually on view. Behind the camera there were refugees from all nations, but most of the faces on screen were Americans. The newer faces, however, knew more about the world than any previous generation. The war changed everything, even the pitch of performance from the established leading men. James Stewart came home from the war a more naturalistic actor than he had been before he left, and the younger men, for whom the war had been not an interlude but an overture, avoided histrionics from the start. Paul Newman and Lee Marvin were conspicuous examples. This naturalism was apparent even in the otherwise frenetic exuberance of Tony Curtis. In his first movies, he looked human even when he hammed it up. He had “only in America” written all over him. But also written all over him was “America is everywhere,” and that infinitely exportable quality of confident savvy stayed with him to provide the basis of his charm in the distinguished roles of his later career.

  Yonder lies the castle of my father.

  —TONY CURTIS (ATTRIB.),The Black Shield of Falworth

  NO, OF COURSE Tony Curtis didn’t write his most famous line. It was written by the otherwise unsung screenplay writer, Oscar Brodney. But Tony Curtis said it, in the accent of the only recently reconstructed Bernie Schwartz, and nobody ever forgot the high-flown speech bubble from a chivalric comic book recited in the cadences of the Bronx. “Yonder lies duh castle of my fuddah.” Back there at the Rockdale Odeon in Sydney I heard him say it, and I didn’t laugh. Along with the girls in the audience, I was too struck with his beauty. I had already guessed that only America was big enough to produce Gene Kelly, and here was another living god, not quite as good-looking perhaps, but with an even more acute case of the stylish energy that the Americans had so much of they could hand it out virtually free to the less lucky nations. If I knew that Australia was an almost equally lucky nation—and in some respects even luckier—I forgot it that day. I even liked the way he said the line. I was practising his intonation when I went home to my muddah.

  Actually there were already good reasons for admiring Curtis’s way with the words. He might not yet have been getting some of the consonants right, but he was always spot on with the emphasis and the impetus. (From his first movies, I assumed that it was an Italian ethnic background he was surpressing. It didn’t occur to me that it was a Jewish one, and that Bernie Schwarz had become Tony Curtis for the same reason that Julius Garfinkle became John Garfield. Nothing mattered except the enchanting way that the tormented phonemes seemed to give an extra zing to the American demotic.) In the last year of the war, trapped in the Pacific on a submarine tender, Curtis had entertained his fellow sailors by supplying voices for the movies that they were running with the sound off because they were sick of them. For men whose expectations of life varied between endless boredom and a kamikaze attack, he must have been good to have around, if harder to stave off than a Japanese suicide plane flown by someone with a different idea of glory. Bernie Schwartz was relentless. Like the character in the epigraphs to The Waste Land, he did the police in different voices.

  The practice stood him in good stead. With due allowance for the castle of his fuddah, his work in the movies was always marked by his precise way of pointing a line. When he made the whole world laugh in Some Like It Hot, it was surprising to find that some of the critics were surprised. He was also very funny in Operation Petticoat. Playing opposite Cary Grant, no mean speaker himself, Curtis held his own in a mentor-prentice interchange that was worked out in dialogue as much as in action. (Later on, in The Great Race, the same director, Blake Edwards, stuck Curtis with a role that had very few good lines, so we have nothing to remember except his white driving suit and the starry glint superimposed on his smile—an early case of a special effect substituting for the effects that really count.) Curtis always excelled as the apprentice: he was in the same relationship with Burt Lancaster in two more films, Trapeze and The Sweet Smell of Success. Since Lancaster was a genuine athlete and Curtis knew how to look like one, the first film is ridiculous only when Gina Lollobrigida pretends to fly; and the second film is a masterpiece, with Curtis, in his role as the hustling press pimp Sidney Falco, raising sleaze to the status of poetry. Burt Lancaster once told me in an interview that in his position as co-producer of The Sweet Smell of Success he had come close to firing the director from the movie. The director was Alexander Mackendrick, who worked meticulously with the director of photography James Wong Howe to give the film’s visual style a fluency unseen since the heyday of Max Ophuls, who set the standard for filming a whole scene in one elaborate—and therefore expensive—take. But such workmanship took time, and Lancaster, who was counting the financial cost, grew impatient. If he had fired Mackendrick, he would have removed the only force that could rein him in. Lancaster gave a controlled performance because for once someone else was in control. (In Atlantic City it happened again, thanks to Louis Malle.)

  But Curtis needed no control. His Sidney Falco is one of the definitive performances of the American cinema: the galvanic answer to the perennial question of what makes Sammy run. There is something marvellous about the way he varies the pace of his dialogue between the cockiness he parades among his fellow grifters and the servility he lavishes on Lancaster’s magisterially ruthless J. J. Hunsecker. It takes a lot of self-discipline to develop such possibilities, and they are mainly developed through his way of pointing the line. Doing so, Curtis helped to found a classic school, in which serious delivery avails itself of comic timing. In Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman is meant to be desperate when he delivers the speech about the endive salad: but he doesn’t let his desperation get in the way of the words, and sounds all the more panic-stricken for the precision of his delivery. Curtis would have delivered the speech the same way: words first, emotion second. Robert De Niro, coming from the method school, works in the opposite direction. Though he can turn in a precise verbal performance when tightly directed—Wag the Dog is a good example—he can swallow the script when left to himself, especially when he doesn’t trust it. The two different emphases are glaringly on view in that wreck of a blockbuster The Last Tycoon. Curtis’s cameo as the swashbuckling hero of silent movies who has lost his confidence works perfectly in two registers: he falls apart when he is closeted with the studio boss, and he jumps in and out of powerful automobiles when he is on public view. De Niro works in one register, and the puzzled audience spends the whole picture trying to figure out which one it is. The effect is of Tony Curtis giving Robert De Niro an acting lesson. Alas, the ingénue, Ingrid Boulting, who really did need an acting lesson, was never given one. But she might have got one later, when she saw Curtis up there showing what can be done with a few lines.

  When it comes to Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder’s justly celebrated hit comedy of 1959, we find out why a screen star like Curtis is worth a
ll that money. First of all, there is what he does on screen. Again, his way with dialogue is the key factor. Hobbling in a pair of 1920s high heels along the station platform, he looks as funny as Jack Lemmon, but so would Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not even Lemmon, however, could deliver the lines like Curtis. By that stage Lemmon was already indulging himself with the stuttering false-start technique that less funny actors have since made the mistake of thinking funny in itself. (In Ally McBeal, Calista Flockhart restarts every sentence half a dozen times before she gets through it: she isn’t just padding the part, she is picking up on a mannerism that Lemmon helped to launch.) Curtis delivers his lines with a clean bite that would have made Cary Grant proud of his pupil. When Curtis is actually imitating Grant, in the seduction scene opposite Marilyn Monroe, his story about the two astigmatic lovers whose bodies had to be brought up from the canyon by mule is a copybook example of how to pace and point a comic extravaganza. Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, his screenwriting partner, must have been hugging each other as Curtis brought it off. He would have had to bring it off many times, because Marilyn Monroe is often in the two shot. Her presence reminds us of the second reason Curtis was worth his money. As Wilder told him, with Monroe on the case there would be multiple takes, and he, Curtis, would have to get it right every time, because the take when she finally got it right would be the one they would print. Like Lemmon, Curtis had to keep on delivering the goods over and over in every scene that involved Monroe throughout the movie. Curtis’s scenes with her are far more complicated than Lemmon’s. In private, Curtis execrated Monroe for her lack of professionalism, but on the set he never wavered. He might easily have been worn down. Marlon Brando, a kind of male Marilyn Monroe when it came to the actual business of learning the lines or getting the shot, always dominated the screen no matter how strong the cast, but he dominated it for a single reason: he needed so many takes that the other actors got tired. He just wore them to a frazzle. Opinions differ about whether he did it deliberately. There is only one opinion about Monroe: she was helpless. But Curtis wasn’t, and he is the actor at the centre of one of the funniest pictures ever made.