Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  For the narrator of The Castle, the girl Frieda is his only connection with a sane order of events as he reluctantly but steadily realizes, in the opening section of the book, that the castle has a mind of its own, and the mind will marshal infinite resources to shut him out. In Frieda’s arms he can momentarily believe that she, at least, is not doing what the castle wants. The lovers soon find that they can’t go to sleep together without expecting to find spectators gathered around them when they wake up. Even during their first sexual encounter there are probably other people in the room: it is hard to tell, but one of the novel’s mechanisms is not to permit us to rule out such a possibility. Much later, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Orwell reprised the same relationship of physical love to hopeless odds. Orwell wanted the tenderness reduced to raw sex: Winston Smith presses Julia to admit that the act itself is enough, as if Orwell was looking for a touchstone, an irreducible impulse that the totalitarian state cannot eliminate even by control. But for Kafka, the touchstone is the tenderness. Presciently, Kafka’s nightmare state is even more controlled than Orwell’s. “You ask if there are control officials?” asks the Vorsteher (superintendent) rhetorically. “There are only control officials.” But Kafka creates Frieda as a whole personality, not just a symbol. As a personality, she wilts under the pressure of what she and K. are up against: her beauty fades. Under the influence of the Wirtin (innkeeper’s wife), Frieda reinterprets K.’s involvement with her as a stratagem for getting nearer to the castle. K. rebuts her, but he can’t refute her. How can he be sure? All he can be sure of is that he is robbing her of her vitality. Merely from the psychology of Frieda’s accusations—which any man who has stood accused by a woman will recognize—it would be one of the great scenes in Kafka, and thus in all modern literature. But to see how magnificent it is, we should look through it, into Kafka’s heart. K. hates having reduced her to this, and it is because he loves her. Rather than see her destroyed, he is even ready to contemplate that she might regain her position with Klamm—the inexorable and suitably mysterious figure of authority—thus to restore her credit with the castle. K. knows that he spells danger for Frieda, and he wants her safe.

  Allegorical interpretations of Kafka’s major novels are no doubt valid—with the usual proviso that if they are all valid they might all be irrelevant—but for once the biographical element begs to be brought in. In real life, Kafka sent his imagination to rest in the minds of women. If he had not done so, his fiction would have been less different: more like ordinary fiction, and less like fact—the facts that were yet to happen. There are good reasons for believing that he could prophesy the nature of the totalitarian state because as a Jew he had already lived with its mechanisms of exclusion, the first parts of the totalitarian state to develop: he knew them so intimately, and thought them to be so pervasive, that he came to agree with them, providing one of our most tragic examples of self-directed Judenhass. But much of the prophetic element in Kafka comes from his extreme sensitivity to evanescence, and that sensitivity was centred squarely on what time could do to a woman’s life. Milena Jesenská, the woman worthy of his intellect, was wooed from the distance at which she was kept. Felice Bauer (on whom the Frieda of the book was probably based) never had a chance: even if a marriage had followed upon the repeated engagements, nothing would have happened. Kafka thought sex was a disease. But he also thought that it was a gift, or he would not have asked himself, only a short time before his death: “What have you done with the gift of sex?” (Was hast du mit dem Geschenk des Geschlechtes getan? You can hear the integrative rhythmic force of his prose even at the moment of resignation.) We hope that Dora Dymant, with whom he shared a brief spell of happiness in Berlin, would have said that he had done at least something with it. And he would never have written to Milena with his desperate complaint about the certainty of their never living together Körper an Körper (body to body) if he had not wanted that above all things, even in his consuming fear of the wish coming true.

  JOHN KEATS

  John Keats (1795–1821) exemplifies the difference between the past and yesterday. Wordsworth and Coleridge are in the past. Even Browning, who came later and who in so many ways was a prototype of what we call the modern, is still in the past. But Keats, like Byron, is just yesterday. Every modern poet is obliged to have a view on Keats, as if he were part of the living competition. Sometimes an adverse view is even more packed with cherished information than an approving one. (Collected in his deliberately provocative book What Became of Jane Austen? And Other Questions, Kingsley Amis’s essay on Keats is a fine example of the critical attack that brings out every virtue.) A searching critique of Keats could be built up just from what he wrote about himself, especially in his Letters, collected into a book which outstrips even Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet as a document that goes to the centre of the poetic life. Keats’s observation on the unnecessarily high quality of Shakespeare’s “bye-writing” is an example of how the young writer could bring to the examination of language the same analytical intensity with which he examined the world. It was a quality he shared with Pushkin: their lives overlapped, but they didn’t know about each other. They might, however, have shared the one mind when it came to precocity of technique, the technique beyond technique, the technique that includes every modulation of the natural speaking voice; and with both it is necessary to remember that they died at the beginning of their careers, not at the end. The forbearance that we bring to Shelley; the astonishment that we bring to Büchner and Radiguet; the sense of being robbed by fate that we bring to Masaccio and Bizet; we must bring all these things to Keats, or miss the full point about the arbitrary fate that leaves us thinking of him as a promise only partially fulfilled. We should also remember that Keats, like Chekhov and Schnitzler later on, was trained in medicine at a time when medicine could not yet cure tuberculosis: he lived and died, that is, in a time when it was normal for talent to be killed at random. In the modern age we don’t regard that as normal, even when it is common. Hence our outrage when it happens, and the permanent indignation with which we find it so much harder to come to terms than our ancestors did with mere regret.

  Nothing is finer for the purposes of great productions than a very gradual ripening of the intellectual powers.

  —KEATS TO HIS BROTHER, JANUARY 23, 1818

  COMING FROM KEATS, the remark was either generous or nervous. On any objective estimate, he was a prodigy: and a prodigy not just on the level of raw verbal talent, but in the breadth and reasonableness of his mind. (There is a striking contrast here with Shelley, who was rarely reasonable even when brilliant.) Given all the qualities at a young age, it would have been large of Keats to envy the plodders who acquire them, if at all, only over time. Or it would have been large of him had he known how blessed he was. But perhaps he thought he wasn’t, in which case he was being jumpy. We tend to think he was jumpy, because we tend to believe Byron had something when he mocked Keats for letting bad reviews get to him: the mind, that very fiery particle . . . snuffed out by an article. (Because the rhyme clicked, the barb stuck: a couplet, like a caricature, can set the terms of discussion far into the future.)

  But nobody who lacked a solid inner artistic confidence could have written the Odes. When I was first in London, a fair copy in Keats’s best hand of the “Ode to a Nightingale” was on display in a glass cabinet in his house. His best hand was a thing of sculptural beauty, like Petrarch’s, Rilke’s or Rimbaud’s. Though the ink looked barely dry, the ode might as well have been chiselled into a slab of marble. Lack of confidence was not his problem. He would just have liked to live, thrive and grow wise. There is no good reason to believe that he would not have gone on developing: there are reasons, but they are all bad. Kingsley Amis left that consideration of Keats’s possible future development aside, as if it didn’t matter. Not normally prey to obtuseness, Amis should have taken warning from a previous example. F. R. Leavis had done the same for Shelley, with plainly ludicrous results, because the un
astonishing conclusion of Leavis’s essay was that Shelley was not as good as Shakespeare. A Swiftian method of textual comparison was used to establish this. Leavis’s owlish judgement obviously meant nothing without a consideration of whether Shelley, had he lived, might not conceivably have got a bit better. Amis at least conceded that Keats’s initial charm was Shakespearean in its buttonholing melodic effect. Amis, indeed, said that no English reader could know much about poetry who did not think at some time in his life that Keats, because of the initial impact of his verbal music, was the greatest poet in English after Shakespeare. But Amis definitely meant that it had to be an early time in the reader’s life: that an enthusiasm for Keats was a callow enthusiasm, because the poetry was callow poetry. Even if Amis was right on the point, it is hard to see why Keats’s poetry, had he lived, should not have grown more mature. Keats might have had everything, but he still needed time. He knew that within himself. Only twenty-six years old, he died knowing it, and should surely be granted the validity of his own insight. Today’s young tourists of a literary bent, when they pass, on the Spanish Steps in Rome, the window of his last resting place, are being granted an insight into the fearful realities of a world without antibiotics.

  Degas said he was more interested in talent at forty than in talent at twenty. We think the remark good because of our general conviction that anyone who credits himself with a vocation should prove it by staying the course. Keats’s remark fits into that view, so it, too, wins our approval. But in fairness we should not forget the artists who reached such an intensity and complication of achievement at an early age that we can think of them as fulfilled even if they died young. Masaccio and Seurat are the two clearest cases in painting. In literature the French seem to specialize in the phenomenon of the nonpareil prodigy: during the Revolution they had André Chénier, whose neo-classical measures were certainly the complete product even if he himself was not, and in modern times they had both Radiguet and Alain-Fournier. The German language boasts the most amazing literary prodigy of all: Büchner, whose Dantons Tod sums up the lifetime’s political experience of a man sixty years older than its author—Burckhardt might have written its last act. In music, Mozart and Chopin were old stagers compared with Schubert and Bellini, dead at thirty-one and thirty-three, respectively. Speculation about what Schubert and Bellini might have done had they lived can continue for ever, but despite Alfred Einstein’s warning that we ought not to think of the brilliant young dead musicians as in any way complete, we do in fact think of them as complete artistic personalities: we don’t think, “Well, that was a beautiful piece from the man who one day would have been Schubert” or “What a pity that ‘Prendi l’annell’ ti dono’ betrays none of the restrained coherence that a fully developed Bellini might have given it.” We think of them, that is, in the same way as we think of Rimbaud, who lived out his life; but who, as an artist, really was frühvollendet, to use Einstein’s word—completed early. The question is whether Keats would have been the same: a prodigy who, had he lived, would have gone no further. Surely our only reason for entertaining that notion is that he was so very, very good, and we find it uncomfortable to contemplate how rich his career might have been had he been allowed to live it through. It might have realigned the whole history of English literature by giving it a second apex: a turn-up for the books.

  There is also the consideration that when we go back even so short a distance as to the early nineteenth century—only a few generations—we have already moved out of our time, the time of arbitrary premature death from politics, and entered something even more frightening by our standards, the time of arbitrary premature death from disease. The American philosopher Charles Pierce, in the title of his best-known book, had a phrase that captured the resulting dilemma: Values in a Universe of Chance. Looking back to the long pre-modern human era when life was valued at a pin’s fee, we should be careful, as critics of the arts, not to take with us our sense of a reasonable expectation of health and longevity. We need to cultivate a feeling for the suddenness and randomness of God’s wrath, because it is almost certainly true that the urge of genius towards artistic coherence was in reaction to exactly that. With Keats, though the age of preventive medicine was arriving—as a physician, he would have been part of it—we are still in that old continuity. When we see, as his powers of evocation make us bound to see, the mental picture of his nymph’s filmy clothes sliding down her body on the Eve of St. Agnes, we are seeing the living body with such intensity because of the intensity with which he saw dead bodies in the dissecting room. The dark knowledge behind his light moments was once the constant background radiation behind all creative life. As Louis MacNeice said of the ancient world, “It was all so unimaginably different, and all so long ago.” But we have to imagine it, or else lose our grip on the past. What we need is a trick of the mind, unobtainable with any known drug, by which we can imagine how it must have felt when the only possible way to view reality without the benefit of religious faith was to despair. Imagining that, we will find it easier to realize why Lucretius committed suicide, although even harder to believe that he should have composed the presciently realistic De rerum natura before he subtracted himself from the game of chance whose full arbitrariness he had so bravely faced. Many poets before Keats had caught his tone of realism, but he sustained it, and one of the most remarkable of his many precocities is that he intensified it, all the way to the end. The end came too soon and much of his realism was veiled in romance, but underneath the romance he saw things as they were, and wrote them down as if to record the texture of life were his deepest compulsion. He probably felt the same way about dying, but he could no longer lift his pen.

  LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI

  Leszek Kolakowski was born in Radom, Poland, in 1927. As an unduly inquisitive professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw he was first of all ejected from the Communist Party in 1966 and finally expelled from academic life in 1968. In exile he was variously a visiting professor at the universities of Montreal, Yale and California (Berkeley), and, in the long term, a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford. His three-volume treatise Main Currents of Marxism is one of the most important, and luckily also one of the most readable, twentieth-century books on the theory of politics. (Students who find Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies a hard and repetitious slog will have no such difficulties with Kolakowski.) The three volumes of Main Currents progress chronologically from Marx’s own lifetime to those crucial years after Stalin’s death when the dream, somehow deprived of energy by the subtraction of its nightmare element, was already showing signs of coming to an end, in Europe at least. In its third volume, entitled The Breakdown, theory is backed up with the harsh realities of practice, because Kolakowski is talking about the period he himself lived through, and was lucky to survive. In this repect, Kolakowski’s observational scope will remind the reader of the Russsian professor of sociology Aleksandr Zinoviev, another academic who was obliged to carry with him into exile a bitter first-hand knowledge of his subject. Kolakowski’s analysis of Marxist logic is as penetrating as Raymond Aron’s in The Opium of the Intellectuals but it attains a wider resonance by extending itself to the individual personalities of those thinkers who espoused the cause and were distorted by it. Prominent among these was Georg Lukács: the potential student could start with the pages on Lukács and arrive straight away at the fulcrum of Kolakowski’s view. Like many a political analyst who was born to serve a socialist hegemony but lived to question it, Kolakowski developed and harboured an increasingly rich nostalgic regard for the lost civil order. His slim but rich Le Village introuvable (1986) puts a Burkean emphasis on the indispensibility of an inherited social fabric and insists that the so-called global village will always remain a pipe dream: a cautionary message that applies to our cybernetic future just as much as to his collectivist past. The beginning reader should not be too quick to assume, however, that an argument billed as an anti-Marxist polemic must automatically favour s
ocial conservatism: some of Kolakowski’s principles are radical enough, the most subversive of them being that the individual intellect, whatever its learned scope and range of interpretation, has no inbuilt safeguards against a hardening into sclerotic orthodoxy. He thus gives any university student not just a licence, but an imperative, to stay on the alert against authority.

  Lukács is perhaps the most striking example in the twentieth century of what may be called the betrayal of reason by those whose profession is to use and defend it.

  —LESZEK KOLAKOWSKI, Main Currents of Marxism, VOL. 3, P. 307

  IF KARL POPPER had not traced the irreparable faults in the circuitry of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski would have done it. In his Main Currents of Marxism, the third volume (the one to read first) sums up what happened to Marxism in the twentieth century, and proves it to be a case of Marxism happening to defenceless people. Georg Lukács was Hungary’s gift to the international delusion (slow to die even though Stalin didn’t like it either) that serious literary studies might serve progressive ideological ends. In the Communist world there were hundreds of thousands of intellectuals who were doomed to the status of victim, but Lukács rated even above the Soviet cultural commisar Lunacharsky (who, in the 1920s, was first of all given the job of encouraging the avant-garde artists and then, later on, the job of bringing them to heel) in the sad category of intellectuals doomed to the status of perpetrator. What made Lukács doubly pathetic was that he could never quite stop trying to talk himself into it even after he had done it: a trick of the mind which Kolakowski analyses with a fine touch. Kolakowski makes such an example of Lukács because Lukács was a true intellectual: an intellectual of real culture in a context of dogmatists without any. Bukharin counted as a thinker among the old Bolsheviks because he could make a general statement about the connection of music to economics: nobody would be able to play the piano, he pointed out, if there were no pianos. Compared with that sort of thing, Lukács was a humanist. But he was a Jesuit humanist, which was what Thomas Mann made him in The Magic Mountain, where the character called Naphta reflects Lukács’s insatiable need for a totalitarian system in which he could immerse himself by developing a theoretical justification for its hegemony. (Briefly serving as minister of culture in the Imre Nagy government of 1956, Lukács was duly deported to Romania by the Russians and had a ringside seat while almost all his colleagues were murdered. His conclusion was that Stalinism was a mere aberration in the triumphant story of socialism.) Kolakowski can assess the range of Lukács’s culture, and therefore measure the depth to which he sank.