by Clive James
In reality, when something makes a splash there is always a set of ripples. There can never be just one circle. But the playwright needs only one, so he leaves the others out. If he had been concerned with rendering the natural event, he would have got in the road of the Homeric simile. The simile, not “the object,” was his object. More than two thousand years before, the same was true for Homer, who could render an object in passing (the twanging string of a silver bow is rendered in a single onomatopoeic stroke, argurioio bioio) and was always hunting bigger game. Ezra Pound, typically, was hammering away at a nail whose head was already flush with the wood. There is the occasional good writer who is not a good describer, just as there is the occasional good painter—Bonnard, for example—who can’t draw a horse, but in general the ability to register the reality in front of him is a donnée for anyone who writes seriously at all. When Joseph Conrad said the aim of the writer was “above all, to make you see,” he meant a lot more than what the writer saw in front of his eyes. He was also talking about what was going on behind them: the moral dimension. In the novella Typhoon, when the narrator is thrown suddenly sideways, Conrad makes you see how the stars overhead turn to streaks: “the whole lot took flight together and disappeared.” A scintillating descriptive stroke, but for him not hard. In Lord Jim, he makes you see Jim’s shame: much, much more difficult.
It is better to err on the side of too much scrupulosity than too little, but it remains a fact that good writers are occupied with more than language. The fact is awkward; and the most awkward part of it is that for metaphorical force to be attained in a given sentence, the metaphorical content of some of its words—which is an historic content provided by their etymology and the accumulated mutability of their traditional use—must be left dormant. Our apprehension of the Duchess of Gloster’s mighty line in Richard II, “Thou show’st the naked pathway to thy life,” would be blunted, rather than sharpened, if we concerned ourselves with the buried image of a naked person instead of with the overt image of an unprotected path, and our best signal for not so concerning ourselves is that Shakespeare didn’t, or he would have written the line in a different way. (Simultaneity of metaphor becomes a feature of his later plays, but the complexity which is almost impossible to understand at first hearing—and surely, as Frank Kermode boldly notes, must have been so at the time—would not be worth picking at if we gave up on our conviction that Shakespeare himself must have understood the strings before he tied the knots.) To make an idea come alive in a sentence, some of its words must be left for dead: the penalty for trying to bring them all alive is preciousness at best. If such preciousness is not firmly ruled out by the writer, there will be readers all too keen to supply it. In modern times, critics have earned a reputation for brilliance by pushing the concept of “close reading” to the point where they tease more meaning out than the writer can conceivably have wanted to put in; but it isn’t hard, it’s easy; and the mere fact that their busy activity makes them feel quite creative themselves should be enough to tell them they are making a mistake.
With the majority of bad writers the question never comes up. As Orwell points out in his indispensable essay “Politics and the English Language,” they write in prepared phrases, not in words, and the most they do with a prepared phrase is vary it to show that they know what it is. Usually they are not even as conscious as that, and their stuff just writes itself, assembling itself out of standard components like a spreading culture of bacteria, except that most of the components are too faulty to be viable. Our real concern here, however, is not with the writing too bad to matter, perpetrated by writers who have nothing in mind except to fill a space. What troubles us is the writing imbued with enough ambition to outstrip its ability. It faces us with the spectacle of a failed endeavour. Somewhere back there, we wanted a world in which everybody would be an artist. Now we are appalled when the duffers actually try. But there is still some point in striving to provide, by precept and example, the kind of free training that the veteran Fleet Street literary editors used to dish out as part of their jobs. When suitably trained, a decent writer edits himself before the editors get to him. An outstanding creative talent is always an outstanding critic, of his own work if of nobody else’s. Pushkin lamented the absence of proper criticism in Russia not because he needed help in judging his poems, but because he wanted to write them in a civilized society. Eugene Onegin is a miracle of lightness in which every word has been weighed. When Pope called genius an infinite capacity for taking pains, that was what he meant. The greatly gifted have almost everything by nature, but by bending themselves to the effort of acquirement they turn a great gift into great work. Their initial arrogance is necessary and even definitive: Heinrich Mann was right to say that the self-confidence of young artists precedes their achievement and is bound to seem like conceit while it is still untried. But there is one grain of humility that they must get into their cockiness if they are ever to grow: they must accept that one of the secrets of creativity is an unrelenting self-criticism. “My dear friend,” said Voltaire to a young aspirant who had burdened him with an unpublished manuscript, “you may write as carelessly and badly as this when you have become famous. Until then, you must take some trouble.”
It is a common failing of all people with little talent and more learning than understanding, that they call more on an artistic illustration than a natural one.
—LICHTENBERG, Aphorismen
Lichtenberg was late to the game with this manifold idea, although he might have been the first to get it into a nutshell. Shakespeare’s clever dolts, spouting their studious folderol as if it were wit, provided a lasting measure of how erudition can drive out sense. Love’s Labour’s Lost offers not the only, merely the mightiest, confrontation between brain-sick bookmen, as Don Adriano de Armado and Holofernes spend four-fifths of the action warming up for the showdown in which they bury each other with verbiage. (“They have been at a great feast of languages,” says Moth, “and stolen the scraps.”) In play after play, the typical encounter between two or more such zanies is a disputatious colloquium in which each participant levitates on a column of hot air. A hallmark of Shakespeare’s people of substance is never to do the same except in jest. Iago, wise when not jealous and “nothing if not critical,” scorns “the bookish theoric” whose talk is “mere prattle, without practice.” Clearly Iago speaks for Shakespeare even as he plots against Othello. Ben Jonson’s plays teem with mountebanks who raid the tombs of scholarship while picking the pockets of the suckers. The great playwrights infused our language with a permanent awareness of the difference between desiccated eloquence and the voice of experience. English empirical philosophy began in the inherited literary language. That was how the English-speaking nations, above all others, were armed in advance against the rolling barrage of ideological sophistry in the twentieth century. The Soviet craze for assembling a viewpoint out of quotations from Marx and Lenin reminded us of men in tights defending the indefensible with chapter and verse.
Even without Shakespeare (supposing that such a precondition were possible) subsequent English literature would have been well populated with satirical examples to ward off casuist flimflam. In Restoration comedy, the division between true wit and false turned on the same point: true wit might have contributed to a new book, but false wit was always quoting an old one. Molière’s typical scam artist talked like a library, but Molière on his own was not enough to inoculate the French language against the pox of learned affectation. The English language had the benefit of repeated injections. The folie raisonnante that ruled Swift’s flying island of Laputa was fuelled by book learning, and Thomas Love Peacock, the great student of the connection between high-flown diction and mental inadequacy, made post-romantic nineteenth-century England the focus of the topic: just as Peacock in real life undid Shelley’s vegetarianism by waving a steak under his nose when he fainted, so Peacock in his quick-fire novels riddled the inflated language of romantic soul-searching. In Peacock’s crackpot mast
erpiece Melincourt—one of a whole rack of strange books, it stands out by being even stranger than the others—that compulsive classicist the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub, poised on a high rock with Lord Anophel Achthar as they both face imminent death, quotes Aeschylus in the original Greek and Virgil in the original Latin, while Lord Anophel curses him in the original English. (Peter Porter, himself a mighty quoter, though a sane one, has a soft spot for the Rev. Mr. Grovelgrub.) The idea—an idea built into the English language over centuries of comic richness—is that learning and knowledge must be kept in balance. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s King of Navarre summarized it in advance when he commended Biron: “How well he’s read, to reason against reading!”
In Lichtenberg’s language, which was the lightly conversational version of German, Schopenhauer extended the same idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first. German is a language supposedly given to the airy building of conceptual castles, but there is a use of German given to the opposite: those who find Hegel wilfully impenetrable would do well to look at his art criticism, where they will find him down-to-earth, fixed on the object and responding to a work of art as if it were an event in nature. (Kant could never do that: he conjured Spanish castles about aesthetics without ever having seen a painting.) In Italy, the vast edifice of Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic theory was erected on the basic proposition that true creativity is a primary function, not to be derived from formal knowledge. He thought the same about formal knowledge: unless acquired through passion, it would count for nothing. Egon Friedell, perhaps the biggest bookworm of all time, deplored bookworms. He could make it stick: he read, and wrote, from a personal hunger that had nothing to do with emulation. But knowing himself to be vulnerable on the point, in his crowning work Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (The Cultural History of the Modern Age) he was always careful to identify sclerotic erudition as a sure sign of decadence in any historical period. In our time, Philip Larkin warned against the consequences of trying to make art out of art. Larkin thought the later Auden had done that, and there is evidence that Larkin was right. But Auden, both the earlier and the later, always presented his artistic enthusiasms as if they had forced their way into his busy head: he wrote as if learning had pursued him, not he it. In his critical compendia, even the most abstruse speculations are given as the workshop know-how of a master carpenter. If he wrote a poem about a painting, it was because the painting had hit him like a force of nature, as an everyday event. Stefan Zweig, in his book Begegnungen (Meetings), squeezed the theme into a single antithesis when he said that in Goethe’s life and career there was seldom a poem without an experience, and seldom an experience without the golden shadow (ohne den goldenen Schatten) of a poem. First the experience, then the golden shadow. It would be easy to contend that the same is so for all of the art, and all of the thought, that has ever mattered. But is the thought itself quite true?
If it were, this book would be a folly. It might well be the product of more Belesenheit (bookishness) than Talent: as I remember it across the decades, I wrote more fluently when I knew nothing, and may have been talentless even then. But a primary impulse and a lifelong disposition are the very things that tell me Lichtenberg is fudging a point for one of the few times in his life: in a naked proposition there is a hidden assumption. He assumes that an explanation drawn from art can’t be natural. The antithesis is false. Art is a part of nature. Art is one of the most natural things we do, and to care about art, and to draw our examples from it, is as natural as caring about our personal experience and drawing our examples from that. It can even be more natural, because it gets more experience in: other people’s as well as ours. If we were to say, “I almost had it figured out but Nola Huthnance from next door interrupted me and by the time she finished yakking I lost my train of thought,” we would be speaking from personal experience. But if we were to say, “I almost had it figured out but I was interrupted by a person from Porlock,” we would be speaking not only from our experience, but from Coleridge’s; and being more specific instead of less, because we would have incorporated a recognition that such an event is universal. We would have also conveyed the suggestion that the thing we were on the verge of figuring out was pretty important, perhaps on the scale of the masterpiece that Kubla Khan might have been if Coleridge’s flying pen had not been stopped short by a passing dullard. If we didn’t want to lose Nola Huthnance, we could just add the poetic reference to her prosaic name (“. . . but Nola Huthnance from next door did a person from Porlock . . .”) and get two benefits for one. Increasing our range need not cost us our focus: quite the reverse. The person without a range of reference is not more authentically human for being so. He is just more alone.
The root of the matter lies in whether art and learning are loved, or merely used. Among the thirty or forty missing plays of Aristophanes, it would be surprising if there were not three or four well populated with pretentious halfwits: there were men of learning in those days too, and wherever learning is valued there are arid scholiasts who seek merit by flaunting its simulacrum. Pointless erudition has always been ripe for parody. Proust’s Norpois puts his audience to sleep by quoting endlessly from diplomatic history, but what makes him funny is that he knows nothing about life, not that he knows everything about diplomacy. (We conclude that he must have been a bad diplomat, but that’s by the way, and might not be right.) If Talleyrand had quoted from diplomatic history at the same length as Norpois, Talleyrand could have sold tickets. People who crank out their knowledge of the arts in a mechanical manner gained it the same way. Some of them came to it late, as a social accomplishment. Others were unfortunate enough to be born as Philistines into a cultivated household. (At Cambridge I met one of these: he knew everything about all the arts in many languages, but had a way of proving it that made you want to enlist in the Foreign Legion.) Most of us were luckier, and took in our first enthusiasms as we took in our first meat and drink, with a scarcely to be satisfied hunger and thirst. Choosing one case out of a possible thousand, I first encountered Toulouse-Lautrec in Sydney, in the year 1957. He had died in Paris in the year 1901, but suddenly, and with overwhelming enchantment, he was alive again for me. There were no actual paintings by Lautrec on public display in Australia at that time, but the Swiss publishing firm Skira had just produced its first series of little square books bound in coarse white cloth, with tipped-in colour plates. Eventually I owned them all, but the Lautrec was the first. Not much bigger than postage stamps—big postage stamps from South American countries, but still postage stamps—those little reproductions occupied my eyesight for a week. I could see nothing else. But when I was finally ready to see the world again, I kept meeting Lautrec’s characters from the cabarets of Paris—Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and la Goulue—in the streets of Sydney. I saw the rubber-legged dancer Valentin le Desosse bonelessly jumping off a Manly ferry at Circular Quay. It wasn’t art instead of life: it was as art as well as life, and the art in life. Years later, when I got to Europe, I was ready for the real Lautrec paintings because I already had some idea of what was coming. And I was immeasurably more ready for Paris itself than I would have been without my scraps of book learning that had given me the living ghosts of Montmartre and Montparnasse. It had never been book learning, really. It was passion: a sudden, adolescent, everything-at-once passion for shape, colour, the permanent registration of the evanescent, the singing stillness of a captured movement, the heroism of an injured man who had forged a weapon to fight time. And fighting time, it collapses space: because of the sumptuous concentration of capital works by Lautrec in the Art Institute, the streets of Chicago are haunted for me by his small, bent but unbroken form. Twenty years ago, filming there very late one night by the lake, I thought I saw him. A beautiful set of roller-skating blonde twin girls came hurtling out of the dark along the esplanade, streaked carelessly through our laggard lights, and were gone before we could catch them. He would have caught t
hem.
And that was just Lautrec. Gauguin did the same for me before I could pronounce his name. (I called him Gorgon.) Degas I gave an acute accent over the “e,” not realizing that the “De” was an honorific prefix: “duh” would have been closer to the right sound, and certainly would have conformed to my general reaction when faced with his genius. Adding tear sheets from magazines to a small stack of thin books, I built up an archive of reproductions, calling him Day-ga until a kind woman from Vienna at last corrected me. (She ran a little coffee house in the Strand Arcade. How young and foolish of me not to quiz her on the story of her life.) From then on, I never laughed at anyone who mispronounced an artist’s name, because it usually only meant that what he had read had run far ahead of what he had heard, and I knew too well how that can happen. When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naïve. But it was when we were still naïve that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection. Art will always want us. It finds us infinitely desirable. Beethoven’s late quartets waited for me for more than thirty years after I first went mad for the Eroica symphony, and when I finally deigned to notice them they didn’t even look peeved.
For anyone who loves it, art is as personal as that. The works of art have personalities: they are another population of the Earth. They even behave like people. After Barbirolli prepared the way with his Berlin concerts at the end of World War II, Mahler’s symphonies, which had never been played while Hitler ruled, entered the conversation of music lovers in Berlin and were gossiped about as if their sumptuous attractions were a delicious scandal. Under Stalin, one of Shostakovich’s most sublime creations took on a secret identity and hid out until the world got better. It holed up in the soundtrack to a Soviet film called The Gadfly, where I finally tracked it down only a few years ago, after hearing it by accident as the theme of a television series entitled Reilly, Ace of Spies. A middle-aged man by then, I found it to be the dreamed-of companion of my youth, a melody I would have been pleased to hum and whistle to an early girlfriend, although whether she would have been pleased is another question. But if the works of art have personalities, their creators are a human race in themselves: one that never ages, nor, unlike the Struldbruggs, grows tired of immortality. When you are young, and first meeting them, the artists seem more than human. But to hail the superhuman is always to keep bad company. (Yeats not only should have known better, he did know better: but he couldn’t resist the cadence—the reason that Plato wanted to banish poets from the Republic.) Luckily a more thorough acquaintance is bound to teach us that the artists are more than human only in the sense of being even more human than us. It is an important lesson to learn because there is a severe penalty to be paid for the belief than an artist should be beyond personal reproach. We are paying it now, in the cultural press, where too many half-qualified reporters are continuously busy proving to us that our idols have feet of clay. The fault, a double fault, is in the arrested psychological development and the ruinously abbreviated education of the reporter: a propensity to vindictiveness drives him to the task of cutting down to size people who were never giants in the first place—not in that sense, anyway.