by Clive James
Last night I finished reading Heinrich’s Henry IV, a unique book . . .
—THOMAS MANN, Tage bücher 1935–1936, P. 179
Thomas Mann could be generous even about his older brother: something worth remembering when we face the persuasive evidence of just how self-centred the great writer could be. On page 413 of Tagebücher 1937–1939 we find the Pacific Palisades Hausherr and his brilliant children locked in a delightfully catty argument about which of the émigré writers should be awarded die Palme der Minderwürdigkeit—the palm for mediocrity. Should it be Stefan Zweig, Emil Ludwig, Lion Feuchtwanger or Erich Maria Remarque? Even in exile, they all had big sales. It was easy for Mann to feel threatened. Contrary to the opinion about him that has since become commonplace, it took Mann some time to establish himself as the unchallenged literary representative of the eternal Germany. During his first Amercan years, he was often prey to the fear that things were going too slowly for him and too smoothly for others. (This was before Remarque won the affections of Paulette Goddard, but All Quiet on the Western Front had already been a best-seller in English on a scale that Mann was never to know.) Emil Ludwig alone was more than enough to make all the other exiled German writers feel that they were bound for oblivion. Ludwig’s biographies of the great made him famous, influential and rich. They also inculcated in their author the preposterous notion that he was some kind of great man himself, a delusion he backed up by living in an appropriate style. Ludwig’s Wagnerian standards of comfort were evoked scathingly by Alfred Polgar, an incomparably better writer with an incomparably smaller bank balance. But Polgar was not the only observer to spot the discrepancy between Ludwig’s self-esteem and a just measure. Mockery for Ludwig’s pretensions was standard throughout the emigration.
It is sad, however, to find Stefan Zweig’s name on the list of mediocrities. Zweig thought Mann was an admirer. Mann was the master of the diplomatic letter that took people at their own estimation. He could effortlessly mislead them about his true opinions. But at his best, the diplomacy was his true opinion. He was generous about the importance of other writers in the emigration even if he did not much admire their individual works. The Palm for Mediocrity game is a useful reminder that shared adversity did not necessarily make people into saints. But the adversity was the culprit: the characters were its victims. Among the less immediately spectacular of Hitler’s cruel tricks was his ability, at long range and by remote control, to drive different personalities into the same airless trap, where, struggling for a share of oxygen, they found out the hard way that they had never belonged together. After all, for writers to help each other beyond the bounds of friendship is no natural condition. In normal life, they are more likely to be at odds, and if they don’t much like each other’s work the usual response is not to talk at all. In the emigration, gifted people whose normal destiny would have been to despise each other were put at each other’s mercy. Some, like Joseph Roth, were kind to those in adversity. But some behaved badly. Walter Mehring, whose memoir Die verlorene Bibliothek was one of the many inspirations for the book you are reading now, acquired a reputation for accepting financial help but forgetting to be grateful for it. Whether or not the reputation was earned, it still follows his memory. No such accusation has ever attached itself to Thomas Mann. Chronically behind schedule on his latest enormous novel, he hated to be bothered, but he did his duty.
Given all that, Mann deserved his status as a lion. He showed he had the heart for it, and all the more so because it was against his nature. One of his many reasons for hating the Third Reich was that it forced him to be a better man than he really was. Left undisturbed, he would have been a monster of conceit. But when thoughtfulness was forced on him, he rose to the occasion, and it would be conceited on our part to assume that the perennial thespian was just being careful not to look bad in the eyes of posterity. Literary pygmies are always making pronouncements about what goes on in the head of a giant, and the pronouncements always sin through over-confidence. They can’t really tell what’s going on up there. The worst you can say about Thomas Mann is that his ego was so big he took even history personally; but at least he knew it was history. “Poor Čapek!” he lamented during the war, “He died of a broken heart . . . and Menno ter Braak, the Dutch creator of precious criticism, shot himself on the night Hitler’s troops occupied Amsterdam. Two friends, who were lights of my life—and National Socialism murdered them” (Altes und Neues, pp. 11 and 12). This is actually made stronger, not weaker, by the German reflexive verb: und der Nationalsozialismus mordete sie mir. Murdered them for me. Michael Burleigh’s admonition in his marvellous book The Third Reich should not be forgotten: the destruction was not just of the creative and the prominent but of the ordinary and the unknown—millions of them. It can be said, safely from this distance, that Thomas Mann did not think enough about them. But he could certainly think of anyone who was a bit like him. Possibly, like most egotists, he thought everyone else was an egotist too. If he had been the egomaniac he is sometimes painted as, however, he would have had no concern even for the prominent: especially not for them, since they were rivals for the limelight.
Heinrich always spelled trouble for Thomas, and not just because Heinrich had made so much noise in earlier times. In fact Thomas would probably have liked it better if everything Heinrich did had scored a hit like Professor Unrat, the book that eventually gave us The Blue Angel. Artistically, however, the older brother, by the fastidious standards of the younger, was pathologically facile: a geyser with its own self-renewing supply of soap. All too wearily often, Thomas had to strain his criteria of worth to say that Heinrich had done well. There was also the problem of Thomas’s bourgeois propriety: his domestic stability and prosperous façade were essential parts of his armour. Heinrich was a bohemian by comparison, and the more so the older he got. Later on, in Los Angeles, Heinrich’s batty mistress was regarded chez Mann as an even bigger embarrassment than Heinrich’s indigence, which could be judiciously compensated for, whereas there was no disguising her fathomless capacity to throw scenes. It would have suited Thomas to write off the crumbling Heinrich as a liability who had brought ruin on himself. But Thomas was too aware that Heinrich has come to his final grief only with Hitler’s help, and finally there was always the consideration that Heinrich had done some good things despite all. Thomas had thought Henry IV was one of them, had said so, and continued to rate Heinrich at that level of possibility, if not of consistent achievement. In honour of artistic standards, Thomas Mann could put even his own ego into perspective: a Mount Everest yes, but with a picture of itself as only one mountain in the Himalayas, although admittedly the tallest. We should restrain our scorn then, when in Donald Prater’s excellent biography of Thomas Mann we see, on page 237, the master spirit praising “my worried modesty.” It sounds like comic self-deception, but it was justified by his behaviour. Even without his behaviour, it would have been justified by his art: nobody incapable of humility bothers to rewrite a sentence. Careful composition is an act of renunciation in itself. Thomas Mann wrote too well to be a true monster of self-regard. But with the help of the invaluable diaries we soon find out that in his everyday dealings he could be selfless too, and didn’t always need that to be known. After his death, journalistic opinion tried to make an ogre out of him, but that said more about journalism than it said about him. He was one of the first victims of a modern cultural trend: mass therapy for the semi-cultivated, transmitted through supposedly edifying examples of the idol with feet of clay.
MAO ZEDONG
The full evil of Mao Zedong (1893–1976) is continually being rediscovered, because it is continually being forgotten. In 2005 it was rediscovered all over again when Jung Chang, previously the author of Wild Swans, the book that blew the gaff on the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, brought out, together with her husband, an account of Mao’s career that pitched the body count of innocent civilians where it belonged, far beyond the total achieved by Hitler and Stalin put toget
her. Jung Chang’s Mao biography was greeted as ground-breaking in the Western press. But with due credit for its passion, there was little about the book’s factual material that was new. Most of it had been in the previous book that rediscovered Mao’s perfidy, Philip Short’s Mao: A Life, published to wide acclaim (“A ground-breaking biography”—The Sunday Times) in 1999. As one who thinks that Wild Swans is an essential twentieth-century book for which Jung Chang deserves our unending gratitude, I nevertheless think that Short’s book about Mao has the edge on hers, mainly because it is ready to contemplate the awkward possibility that Mao’s thirst for blood might have been acquired over time, rather than inbred. Short, whose languages include Russian and Japanese as well as Chinese, is also much sounder in the field of foreign policy. As to the bottomless squalor of Mao’s personal behaviour, especially in his lethal old age, Jung Chang is pre-empted by The Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994), a stomach-turning memoir by Mao’s personal physician, Zhisui Li. None of this means that Jung Chang and her husband do not deserve credit for their long endeavours. But the idea that they stand at the beginning of a studious tradition, instead of at a further stage in one well established, is itself a straw in a sad wind. Why doesn’t this story stick when told?
Those of us who were at university in the 1960s can remember the vociferousness with which otherwise sane and sweet-natured students professed to believe that the Cultural Revolution was a message to the corrupt West. Yet the facts about Mao’s China had already, at that stage, been rediscovered several times. Quite early on after Mao took unchallenged power, the true situation could easily be deduced from the way that useful idiots like Edgar Snow endorsed the regime’s official lies. Always, however, the rediscoveries were succeeded by a further forgetting, and the same holds true today, not just in the West, where the pseudo-left has too great an investment in anti-Americanism to admit that there can be a reason for evil independent of Washington’s control, but also, and tragically, in China itself, where Mao’s image is still not to be mocked without penalty. Eventually Lenin’s statues went the way of Stalin’s, to the scrapyard. But Mao might well stay up there forever, simply because there is such a thing as horror so great that it can’t be assessed even when the facts are known. The truth sinks down when it sinks in, leaving the mind free to operate a more tolerable economy. From the art lover’s viewpoint, this might even be a good thing. The catchy opera Nixon in China, for example, could never have been written if its authors had fully realized that the picure they were painting of Nixon’s relative lack of dignity vis-à-vis Mao was hopelessly compromised by the real discrepancy between the two historic figures. Nixon, when he killed innocent people, did so as the price of political success. Mao killed them as the condition of it, and killed more by many, many times. Why Mao should have been the more difficult one to despise is a key question for an as yet untapped academic subject: the sociology of the international intelligentsia.
Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.
—MAO ZEDONG, APRIL 1956, AS QUOTED BY PHILIP SHORT IN Mao, P. 455
THE PRETTY RUBRIC looks so harmless even today, now that we have some idea of what it cost. Halfway between a poem and a slogan, it is a small thought that would fit on a big T-shirt. It doesn’t even sound wrong. Mao designed it to sound right. For the trick to work, millions of people had to believe the words meant what they said, even though the Party, within long memory, had never rewarded a contentious voice with anything except torture and death. Anyway, the suckers fell for it. The flowers bloomed, the schools of thought contended, and Mao’s executioners went to work. The slogan had the same function as the Constitution of the Soviet Union, which Aleksandr Zinoviev tellingly defined as a document published in order to find out who agreed with it, so that they could be dealt with.
The hideous outcome of the Hundred Flowers campaign is described in Philip Short’s book about Mao, a political biography from whose long march of horror no student should excuse himself a single step. You can get the essence of Jung Chang’s Wild Swans in a few chapters, although you owe it to yourself and the author to read the whole thing. But Short’s book has no essence; or, rather, it is all essence; you need to ponder the whole lot. For one thing, Mao was not the same man in the beginning as he was later on. Hitler and Stalin both were: in the early days, all they lacked of their later, epidemic awfulness was the power to exercise it. But Mao, who ended by killing a greater number of innocent people than both of them put together, started off as a benevolent intellectual: a fact which should concern us if we pretend to be one of those ourselves. Mao was no Marxist when he began. He scarcely could have been: Marx was not translated into Chinese until 1918, and Mao had no foreign languages. Nor, it seems, did he have a violent streak. He seems to have believed in a sort of peaceful anarchism. When he took up communism, he was the first Communist leader to break out of the orthodox view about the revolution depending on the urban proletariat. He saw the importance of the peasants, and in 1927 published a thoughtful document on the subject, Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan. When the fighting started, he made his troops behave well, apparently in the belief that a measure of decency would earn credit for the movement.
His first attack on his own Party members did not occur until 1931–1932, by which stage Stalin was exterminating whole populations. Mao was a long while cranking himself up to anything on that scale, but when he really got going he kept up the tempo. The Hundred Flowers campaign was rare only in that it depended on a trick. At all other times, the state just went steaming on with its permanent purge. It didn’t need trick questions, because nothing a potential victim thought of saying could possibly be of any use anyway. At the time of the Cultural Revolution, when Liu Shaoqi published his How to Be a Good Communist, it was greeted as “a big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao-Zedong-Thought poisonous weed.” No good Communist could be good enough. Liu was sixty-seven years old when he was driven to his death by the Cultural Revolution, after a dedicated lifetime of carrying out Mao’s homicidal orders to the letter. All this was happening while some of my fellow undergraduates in Cambridge were under the impression that Western values were being challenged by whatever was happening in China. They were indeed, and I, for one, had sufficient suspicion of absolute power to guess in what way: but I nowhere near guessed the full horror of the reality. The only explanation is that Mao had even less imagination than we did in the matter of fatalities occurring among Chinese. There are so many of them, so how much does it matter when a few hundred thousand of them go missing?
Perhaps our best hope of understanding what was going on in his mind is to suppose that it was a version of what goes on in ours. Old men continue in their sins because to stop would be to admit them. But to concentrate on Mao’s late-flowering monstrosity is surely a misleading emphasis. His early-flowering humanitarianism is a much more useful field of study. When it became clear that there were no democratic means by which it could attain its object, he started thinking about the undemocratic means. The message seems to be that when the possibility of critical discussion is withdrawn, anything can happen, and everything is altered. Among the things altered is logic itself. As Swift foretold and Orwell analysed in detail, totalitarian obsession distorts the logical element within language, cancelling and even reversing its power to specify. Towards the end of Mao’s reign, when there was—as there had to be by then, with the whole country in ruins—yet another version of a Leninist New Economic Policy, it was once again discovered that “small scale production engenders capitalism.” Any moves towards rehabilitating the unjustly condemned were attacked as a “right deviationist wind of reversing correct verdicts.” Correcting reversed verdicts would have been more like it. When Zhou Enlai died, there was true grief: at least he had not been insane. When Mao died, the grief was mainly feigned, except among the young, who knew nothing. It needs to be remembered, however, that to have some idea of what had gone on it was not enough to be older, and to hav
e survived. One needed information, and Mao had so organized his colossal abattoir of a state that information rarely travelled further than a scream could be heard. But that was inside China. Outside China, the story went everywhere, and there was never any excuse for not hearing it. The idea that there was is part of the lie—the part fated, it seems, to last longest.
CHRIS MARKER
The name Chris Marker (b. 1921) is a fiction. His real name was Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve but he preferred to operate under a false identity. Fiction and falsity, by some alchemy never fully explained, conferred on him, according to his many admirers, a greater power to handle his raw material, which was made up of fact and truth. It was a tribute to his talent that this absurd proposition looked quite plausible when you saw his first documentaries on screen. (Some commentators prefer to call a Marker movie an “essay,” but they are perhaps too influenced by their memories of when the word “documentary” meant box office death.) Cuba Si! (1961) was especially effective. Framed closely in black and white, the Bearded Ones looked wedded to authenticity. Marker struck foreign observers as being by far the best mind of the movement that became internationally famous as the nouvelle vague. Admittedly the competition wasn’t strong. From the political angle, Jean-Luc Godard was an obvious featherbrain, and François Truffaut had more sense than to make any overt political statements beyond the usual ones about alienation: The 400 Blows incited rebellious youths to become film directors, not to revolution. Later in the decade, when the Paris événements were making world news, Marker came readily to mind as one of the serious voices that prepared the way. Even those of us who suspected that his Marxist world view was as frivolous as everybody else’s were impressed by his tone of voice, most notably rich and confident in his must-see movie Letter from Siberia (1957). His documentaries sounded great. They therefore had a big influence on some of the young writers who would later earn a crust in British television. When I was a TV critic in the 1970s I tried to point out, armed by my memories of how Marker had bewitched me, that the filmed documentary was a blunt instrument. Later on, when I was filming documentaries of my own, I took care to disclaim, by making my commentary as self-deprecating as possible, the apparent omniscience that the written voice-over automatically conferred.