by Clive James
There is no surer sign of a great writer than when whole books could be made out of his passing remarks. Each in his way, Tacitus and Sterne are both masters of this quality.
—LICHTENBERG, Aphorismen
When Lichtenberg wrote this, Sterne was practically his contemporary, so by yoking Sterne with Tacitus he was perpetrating a deliberately shocking boldness, as if we were to say that same lessons could be drawn equally from the letters of Madame de Sévigné and the diaries of Bridget Jones. It is an attention-getting way of promulgating a truth, but the truth had better be true. This truth was. Making marks in the margin of his Shakespeare, Keats noted the quality of Shakespeare’s “bye-writing”: the local intensities that were better than they needed to be. The awkwardness of Lichtenberg’s principle—and really all his principles are awkward—is that it subverts any idea of artisitic unity. Ideally, nothing in a written work should show signs of wanting to hive off and start another work. Practically, it happens all the time, and not always in expository prose, although naturally a discursive argument is more likely to provide instances of a subsidiary statement that asks to be followed up. In The Gulag Archipelago, there is a great moment when prisoners are sweltering in a black Maria while Jean-Paul Sartre is standing a few feet away on the footpath proclaiming the wonders of the Soviet Union. It could conceivably be the start of a different book about the stupidity of philosophers, but in fact it fits. There is another great moment, however, that doesn’t. On a prison train, Solzhenitsyn is jammed into the floor of a compartment with about an inch of air to breathe in, and suddenly realizes he is happy. It doesn’t fit at all: it is the start of another work, about mysticism—a work that could have been written by the mystical philosopher Nikolay Berdyayev. It could be said that if Solzhenitsyn had not been capable of such moments, The Gulag Archipelago would not be one of the great books about lost possibilities, so it fits after all: but it dangerously leaves the way open to the thoroughly misleading conclusion that extreme conditions have a justification in mystical experience.
The problem of the passing remark crops up most often in novels, and especially in the greatest novels. Theoretically, a great novel should meet a poem’s standard of containing nothing extraneous. In practice, great novels are always sinning against that standard, and are usually the better for it. In Madame Bovary, the socially aspiring Emma, invited to the grand ball at the country house, notices that aristocrats are glossier than ordinary people. The observation begs to be the starting point for a sociological treatise on differential nutrition, but it just doesn’t sound like her conclusion: it sounds like Flaubert’s. If he had said that she didn’t notice, and had made the observation his, he would have been telling us more about her. In The Great Gatsby, the scene where Gatsby shows Daisy his beautiful shirts fits as perfectly as the shirts. Gatsby has nothing else to woo her with except the proofs of his wealth: flaunting the shirts, he makes the material spiritual—the key to his character, and the clue to how Fitzgerald can get poetically interested in the Philistine he has chosen as a hero. (The putative mystery of Gatsby’s identity is no mystery at all: he is what Fitzgerald would have been if he had had no talent.) When Daisy’s coldly amoral friend Jordan Baker moves her golf ball, she tells you everything you need to know about her character. But Fitzgerald was also capable of the passing remark that doesn’t fit at all. His narrator Nick Carraway’s gift for the aphorism makes you wonder if he was studying Pascal when he was learning to sell bonds. “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures,” Nick says of Gatsby, “there was something gorgeous about him.” It was the first line of the book I learned, but I learned it because it broke off from the book. Similarly, Nick’s avowal that “Any display of complete self-assurance draws a stunned tribute from me” is a bit too good, because the man who says it is displaying complete self-assurance. None of this means that The Great Gatsby is less than what it is: a masterpiece. But it does mean that one of the characteristics of a masterpiece might be its composer’s ability to get in extra stuff without us noticing the strain of the shoehorn. Even in The Great Gatsby, you can tell that Fitzgerald was a notebook writer. Things would go into the notebook that were too good to leave unused, and one way or another he would get them into the novel. Hemingway worked in the other direction. A really good Hemingway short story is an episode from the novel he did not make the mistake of trying to pack around it. By extension, a really bad Hemingway novel is the accumulated sets of notes for short stories he did not write.
In Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, there is a tremendous moment just after the lumbering anti-hero Widmerpool, at the height of his pomposity and power, has delivered a boring lecture about an immensely valuable vase. The beautiful but dangerous Pamela comes along and vomits into it. You need to have followed both characters through several novels of the sequence to see the perfection of the coincidence. It fits together like the components of a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine from two different shadow factories. But I can remember a line from the narrator, Nicholas Jenkins: something like “Nothing beats the feeling of an interesting woman being interested in us.” I thought it sounded like an aphorism from one of Powell’s notebooks. I have searched the novels and can’t find it, and I can’t find it in the notebooks either. Perhaps I heard him say it. I knew Powell well enough at one stage for us to have talked about such things. He was terrific on the mechanics of his craft, but it should be remembered that he found almost everyone clumsy except himself. He has been mocked for that. The truth is that most writers feel the same, because they read other writers professionally and are always on the lookout for a muffed trick.
In Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis is consistently wonderful at separating Jim’s particular viewpoint from the narrative. The French have a term, style indirect libre, for the narrative prose that is coloured by the character’s viewpoint because the character is in the scene; but the trick of the technique is that the writer’s frame of reference must not get into the character’s head. In the tour de force comic scene near the end of Lucky Jim when Jim, if he is not to lose Christine forever, must get to the railway station and everything conspires to stop the bus, we are laughing too hard to notice that Jim makes the wrong conjecture about why the bus driver is apparently slumped at the wheel. Had he been struck, Jim asks, by the idea for a poem? Jim does not write poems and so would not know that getting an idea for a poem can render a poet catatonic. It is something only the narrator would know. But at the time, for one reader at least, the anomaly didn’t matter, and indeed it still doesn’t. I think it is probably the funniest scene in all of literature, so if there is a blemish, it must be part of the beauty. Written works of art aren’t perfect. They create the air of being so, but they are too full of life to keep all their own implications within the perimeter. Lichtenberg was warning us against a Procrustean ideal of perfection. No writer, not even Chekhov in his short stories, can be Vermeer. A painter can leave you with nothing left to say. A writer leaves you with everything to say. It is in the nature of his medium to start a conversation within you that will not stop until your death, and what he is really after is to be among the last voices you will hear.
M
Norman Mailer
Nadezhda Mandelstam
Golo Mann
Heinrich Mann
Michael Mann
Thomas Mann
Mao Zedong
Chris Marker
John McCloy
Zinka Milanov
Czeslaw Milosz
Eugenio Montale
Montesquieu
Alan Moorehead
Paul Muratov
NORMAN MAILER
Norman Mailer was born in Brooklyn in 1923, educated at Harvard, saw action in the Pacific, and returned to write one of the three American novels that made the war the subject of a serious best-seller, with the word “serious” used in both senses. James Jones wrote From Here to Eternity, Irwin Shaw wrote The Young Lions, and Mailer wrote the book that was
most commonly, and correctly, greeted as a modern classic, The Naked and the Dead. The unarguable stature of his novel established him immediately in the twin roles of media celebrity and literary hope: an inherent conflict which it suited his personality to dramatize, and which it suited his talent to make a subject, thus opening up a whole new avenue of creative expression that can be summed up by one his titles, Advertisements for Myself. Ever since his dazzling beginnings, for a half century and more of unceasing fame, Mailer the holding company and corporate brand-name has mainly been in competition with himself, pitting Mailer the novelist against Mailer the anti-novelist, whose principal incarnation is the writer of non-fiction. The novelist Mailer, as if in flight from his own talent, has always made a point of writing barely readable books—from Barbary Shore to Ancient Evenings, they stretch out in a line that only a tenured academic could love—but he occasionally re-emerges from disaster with a substantial new success: Harlot’s Ghost was the fictional effort most like a complete return to form. If there had been a whole row of such completely worked-out novels he would have ranked unquestionably with Philip Roth, John Updike and Saul Bellow among the novelists giving us the imaginative account of America’s post-war emergence as the world’s dominant cultural power. It could be said that he chose to do something more interesting, although it is possible that burgeoning alimony requirements chose his course for him. For whatever reason, he preferred to extend the career of the other Mailer, the journalist. Unlike his television sparring partner Gore Vidal, he has never—to his loss and ours—bothered to master the standard set form of the pointed and reasonably brief essay. But he has invented other forms in profusion, some of them running to volume length. In his books of non-fictional prose, such as The Armies of the Night and Of a Fire on the Moon, are to be found some of his most astonishing stretches of imaginative prose. Tom Wolfe, in his entertaining book of essays Hooking Up, is within his rights to contend that his own novel A Man in Full, which took him ten years of research, well deserved its commercial success, the hit parade result that the average, dashed-off novel or glorified think-piece by Mailer fails to achieve. But Wolfe is on dangerously yielding ground when he supposes that the assiduous fidelity of his own social observation is automatically a more interesting quality than Mailer’s irresponsible extravagance. Wolfe’s diligent reportage is good at observed detail, and he knows how to dress it up with exaggeration, invective and mimesis, but Mailer’s prose, even at its most slipshod, has access to moments of poetry beyond the ken of a busy dandy in a white suit. Everything that the cult of celebrity in America can do to destroy an artistic gift has been done to Mailer. Much of the damage he has either connived at, or else has taken an indecent pleasure in recording, as in the wonderfully awful The Prisoner of Sex. But the fame machine is right to recognize him as a talent, as if talent can exist as a potential, without solid achievement. It can. As when Orson Welles sat on television doing nothing except reminisce about films that were never even made, the creative imagination can prove it exists merely by suggesting itself. Literary talent, especially, will out even when its owner goes nuts. It might come only in flashes, but without the flashes there was never a true fire. It must be firmly said, however, that the hints demand to be followed back to their source: every student should be familiar in detail with The Naked and the Dead, the book in which an abundant gift fulfilled its duty to history, at the precise moment when American cultural imperialism became, for good or ill, the world’s most pervasive political fact.
In the middle classes, the remark, “He made a lot of money,” ends the conversation. If you persist, if you try to point out that that money was made by digging through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil, you are met with a middle-class shrug.
—NORMAN MAILER, The Presidential Papers, P. 233
IF HE HAD never written a single novel, we would have to call Norman Mailer a great talent, and even a great poetic talent, simply for the richness of his prose. If he had made himself the protagonist of twice as many embarrassing scenes, we would still have to call him disciplined: because in even the most fatuous of his written opinions he is capable of a phrase that opens up the depths of a subject on which he seems determined to sound shallow. He couldn’t be trivial if he tried, and sometimes he tries hard. Mailer tried especially hard when he was young, with the result that no considerable writer sounded young so long. Henry Miller, whom Mailer generously elected as a precursor, was less a case of protracted adolescence than of premature senility. Miller, doddering and drivelling before his time, drooled much low-flown foolishness but never volunteered himself as a teenage fantasist. Mailer did, and well into what should have been his mature years: when he suggested, in cold print, that he had met Sonny Liston and seen fear in his eyes—meaning fear of the physical violence that the coiled Mailer might unleash—there was a sort of brilliance to it. (There might also, it should be said, have been an element of truth, although not in the way Mailer intended: professional fighters will go a long way to avoid a brawl with a civilian, because a human skull is exactly the wrong sort of thing to hit with an unprotected hand.)
But there is nothing very brilliant about Mailer’s standpoint in this paragraph: it is the same blanket rejection of the bourgeoisie that Sartre tried to wish on Flaubert, and is self-refuting in the same way, by the social background of the man writing it. There is everything brilliant, however, about the comic illustration contained within it. The illustration is not even placed or timed for comedy: it is just thrown in, as if it were being thrown away. (Its introduction is decidedly casual, and even careless: he could have put “that the” for “that that,” thus avoiding an awkward mouthful that always looks more mistaken than intended.) The illustration takes off from a cliché: the man who would sell his grandmother is already in the language. But Mailer’s man digs though his grandmother’s grave to look for oil. You get the sense that Mailer thought of that on the spot—on a flat spot that he saw needed livening up. Somewhere among his many writings about writing—perhaps in Advertisements for Myself—he speaks about the delight he felt when he revised a sentence in the last draft of The Deer Park and hit on the extra few words that brought it to life. With his usual combination flurry of modesty and conceit (Mailer’s verbal version of the old one-two) he is enunciating a principle. The principle is simple, but only because its complexity is irreducible. It is the poetic principle. Mailer is no better at analysing it than any other poet who possesses the same gift. All he can do is tap into it when it comes. When it doesn’t come, he has to wait; and he has said and done some silly things while waiting. But he has never had to wait long.
Randall Jarrell said that a poet must wait to be hit by lightning. Even in an otherwise demented essay, Mailer can be hit by lightning so often that you can hear his hair fizz. The effect is of brilliant conversation. You are having a drink with him, and he wants to describe someone who will do anything for money. The standard idea comes into his head of a man selling his mother or grandmother. Instantly he sees that the idea needs improvement. Sell her into white slavery? Not good enough. What about if she’s already dead? Hallowed ground. Where is the money? Under the hallowed ground. So the man digs through his grandmother’s grave to look for oil. Like the inspired talker, Mailer can put it all together in a moment. In jazz, the improvisation that most satisfies is the one that comes out better than it could be written. The quickness of the creative power deceives the intellect. No wonder the young Mailer saw himself as a jazz soloist. Writing like this, he is at his most American, and shows why America is at the heart of modernity—which would be arid if it were merely a sophisticated development, but is at its most rich when the sophistication returns to the emotions. One never stops writing about Mailer and neither does he. In both cases, however, the best reason to do so is that he takes us so close to the awkward reality about talent. It does not belong to its possessor. Its possessor belongs to it, and can find freedom only by accepting that he is a slave.
NADEZ
HDA MANDELSTAM
Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina, known to us as Nadezhda Mandelstam (1899–1980), would have been sufficiently famous as the heroic wife and widow of Osip Mandelstam, one of the finest poets of twentieth-century Russia, and therefore one of the most illustrious of Stalin’s victims among those luminaries of the old intelligentsia who had stayed on in Russia in the mistaken belief that the Soviet regime would be an opportunity for culture. As the naïvely non-political lyric poet soon found, it would have been an opportunity for him to starve, if Nadezhda’s scholarly ability to translate easily out of the principal European languages had not helped to pay for the groceries. After the poet was arrested in 1934 (his “crime” had been to write a few satirical lines about Stalin), Nadezhda’s translations from English were her only means of sustenance during her long banishment to the provincial towns, during which time, in 1938, her husband finally perished in the Gulag. Only after she was permitted to return to Moscow, in 1964, did she begin to write Hope Against Hope, the magnificent book that puts her at the centre of the liberal resistance under the Soviet Union and indeed at the centre of the whole of twentieth-century literary and political history. Some would place her book even ahead of Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man—unforgivably known, in America, under the feel-good title of Survival in Auschwitz) and Jung Chang’s Wild Swans as required preliminary reading for any prospective student enrolled at a university. A masterpiece of prose as well as a model of biographical narrative and social analysis, Hope Against Hope is mainly the story of the terrible last years of persecution and torment before the poet was murdered. Nadezhda and her husband are the most promiment characters, although there is a vivid portrait of Anna Akhmatova. The book’s sequel, Hope Abandoned, is about the author’s personal fate, and is in some ways even more terrible, because, as the title implies, it is more about horror as a way of life than as an interruption to normal expectancy. Both volumes are superbly translated into English by Max Hayward. Until the collapse of the regime, they were available in the original language only in samizdat or else from printing houses situated outside the Sovet borders. As with Akhmatova’s permanently banned poem “Requiem,” their final, free and full publication in Russia marked the day when the Soviet Union came to an end, and freedom—which Nadezhda, against mountainous evidence, had always said would one day return of its own accord—returned.