Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Memory tests: in Michael Frayn’s novel Towards the End of the Morning, what does the hero say to reassure himself when he notices the rust eating the paint-job of his car? (It’s the good strong brown undercoat showing through.) (But what is the name of the hero?) In Portnoy’s Complaint, what does Portnoy say his real name is when he is trying to convince the Wasp girl skater that he is not Jewish? (Porte-Noir.) And what is his name for the fantasy girl who puts out every time? (Thereal McCoy.) (But what is the real name of the fashion model he calls the Monkey, and why can’t you remember that, if you can remember the title of the Yeats poem he recites, or half recites, to win her favours?) (It was “Leda and the Swan.”) You can remember the name of the weekly show that J. D. Salinger’s Glass children appeared on (It’s a Wise Child) but was it radio or television? And at the end of Franny and Zooey, how many of the Glass children are dead? Is it “Sergeant X” or “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor” that features the Dostoevsky quotation “Gentlemen and teachers, I ask you, what is Hell? I submit it is the agony of being unable to love”? Was it inscribed by a Nazi official, by his wife, or by the protagonist? In which novel by Evelyn Waugh does Mrs. Stitch drive her little car down the steps of the men’s lavatory? What kind of little car?

  In the paragraph above, there is not a novel, novella or short story mentioned that I have read fewer than three times, and in every case I am not only dimly aware of things I half remember, but painfully aware of things I have forgotten. It gets even more painful when it comes to painting. When the Courtauld collection was still in Bloomsbury I must have looked at Manet’s A Bar of the Folies-Bergère at least a hundred times. There is a man in the mirror: probably he wants her for a mistress. On which side of her head does his image appear? I am damned if I can remember. But perhaps, if one could remember everything, one would be damned indeed. In the last weeks of a slow dying, it might be better to forget. One hopes that there will be a saving mechanism to it, a kind of mental economy. In my prime I thought that H. L. Mencken’s fate—semantic aphasia—was the most cruel possible affliction for a man who had given his life to words: a punishment for love. But from the inside looking out it might have felt like a release.

  A release from memories of beauty might be just the ticket: what else, after all, would they make you do, except long for what you can’t have, more life? Perhaps we will forget what was lovely and remember what was true. Already, at no great age, I sometimes fancy that I can feel that happening. Recently, for the tenth time at least, I sat through a video of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Winter Dreams, in the brilliantly sensitive television production by Derek Bailey. All over again I was ravished by what MacMillan did to make Darcey Bussell and Irek Mukhamedov dance as if they were mad about each other. Yet once again I am already forgetting the steps, while remembering better than ever what I have never forgotten since I first saw the work: the unsensational and quietly desperate pas de deux in which Darcey Bussell and Anthony Dowell act out the extinction of their marriage. When the lovers dance, they fly: they fly into a passion. When the married people dance, they die—almost nothing happens. But their doomed little movements are the work of MacMillan’s choreographic imagination at its dizzy height. At one time, by his invitation, I was going to write for him a spoken ballet about Nijinsky. I suppose the project never really had a chance, but it paid off in that I saw a lot of him. Since the first time I saw Mayerling I had always thought he was a genius, and in the other full-length ballets evidence went on accumulating that any MacMillan pas de deux for lovers was an ignition point of modern art—a floodlight on the possibilities of human movement as a plastic equivalent for poetry. He was an easy man to embarrass, so I had to be careful how I told him what I felt, and when he declined into his last illness I shamefully ran out of things to say. I would like to think that this is a way of saying them. (A tip to young writers for when they grow old: if you have felt gratitude for a fellow artist’s life, don’t content yourself with telling him personally: say it in public—someone who knows neither of you might take heart.) I thought MacMillan’s talent so great that it got beyond the beautiful. When his lovers danced sublimely, you could take it for granted. But when he found a steady poetry for slow heartbreak, he gave us something to remember at the point of death. You get no prizes for seeing that his first pas de deux for the lovers in Mayerling is beautiful. But there is a prize for seeing, in Isadora, that his pas de deux for Isadora Duncan and Paris Singer grieving for the accidental death of their children is beautiful too. If it ever came to the point where a lifetime’s memories of artistic exaltation shrank to nothing except a single image, an image of dignity would be a good one to see. One would want to retain at least that much. But Montale must have had that idea in mind, or he would not have talked about the inevitability of forgetting in a way that emphasized the quality of what is remembered.

  MONTESQUIEU

  Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755) is one of our ambassadors in history. Like Thucydides, Tacitus and Montaigne, he represents us in the depths of time, as if his mind were a space station built by the modern world and positioned in an observational orbit above the surface of the past. His well-known commemorative medal, on the other hand, makes him look like a projection into the future from the Senate of ancient Rome. The real man was a creature of his age, and very good at being so. Noble birth helped, but his brilliance was not of the kind that precluded sociability. He was a hit in the grand salons and no stranger to frivolity. The Persian Letters (1721), his first famous book, started as something of a joke. A measure of his success is that today we regard its central trick as commonplace: foreigners observe our society and find it strange. The French society that Montesquieu’s two imaginary visiting Persians described was in fact heading downhill towards revolution, but it was delighted to be so wittily told that it was in a mess. Montesquieu was a Persian visitor himself when he spent two years in England, moving at the highest level, fêted everywhere: a period of observation that was to yield crucial results for his later work. First, however, came his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734), a thriller which is probably the best port of entry for the new reader. His undoubted masterpiece is heavier going: The Spirit of Laws (1748). One of the formative books of the modern world, it is still, in a hundred different ways, relevant today. Perhaps, at the moment, it is most conspicuously relevant in the critique it implicitly delivers of its ostensible subject, multiculturalism. Montesquieu had practically invented the concept that all cultures evolved in different ways from separate imperatives; and in The Spirit of Laws he continued that theme, but by then he had seen the danger. In allowing the suggestion that all cultures might be equally valuable, room had been left for supposing that they might be equally virtuous. To guard against this, he advanced the further proposition—buttressing his argument with reference to the British constitution he had studied at first hand—that beneath cultural variety there were, or should be, values that did not change. In modern terms, he was concerned that a legitimate delight in the multiplicity of cultures should not develop into an ideology, multiculturalism: an ideology that would entail the abandonment of any fixed concept of justice. Seemingly in the face of his own cultural relativism, Montesquieu declared that justice was eternal. There is a fine introductory essay to Montesquieu by Isaiah Berlin (collected in his Against the Cur rent), but Berlin strangely failed to see that Montesquieu’s point had deep consequences for liberalism, which Berlin thought a matter of contending values. Montesquieu thought the same, but he thought there was a fixed point. Proposing, at least by implication, a liberalism dependent on a hard core of principles, and not just on tolerance, Montesquieu thus made a decisive pre-emptive intervention into the debate that we are having now.

  It is not impossible that the things which dishonoured him most served him best. If he had shown a great soul from the start, the whole world would have distrusted him; and if he had been har
dy, he would not have given Antony time for all the extravagance that led to ruin.

  —MONTESQUIEU, PLÉIADE EDITION, VOL. 2, P. 137

  AFTER FINALLY LEARNING enough French to put myself in a condition where he might teach me more, I found Montesquieu too big to begin at the beginning. The above citation was the passage that addicted me to him. Dipping at random into one of his Pléiade volumes, I chanced on this characterization of Augustus, and knew very soon that I would be occupied with Montesquieu for a long time into the future, so I put the books away in full confidence that when I came back to them later I would be reading nothing else for days on end. That was how it worked out, except that the days turned to weeks. (I own two complete sets of the Pléiade Montesquieu now, one to be occasionally carried with me on my travels, the other to be kept always safe at home against a rainy day, such as might happen at the end of the world, an event that would have left him sad but not stunned.) Decades before, when I was first a student in Sydney, North’s Plutarch had had the same effect. The big, ugly Modern Library edition was hard to love from the outside, but hard to leave once you were in. I could see straight away what Plutarch had done for the posters on Shakespeare’s marquee. Even today, I can’t believe that the lists of dramatis personae for Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra—my favourite plays on a Shakespearean roster in which almost all are favourites—would strike us as quite so rich if Shakespeare had not already found Plutarch to be a crowded bench of well-established characters all looking for what Hollywood used to call Additional Dialogue. Beyond that obvious connection, would all the other Shakespeare plays be the same as they are without Plutarch: that is, without the idea and the example of character being destiny? Montaigne, said Stefan Zweig (in his Europäisches Erbe—The European Heritage), read history not in order to become learned, but to see how other men had handled events, and so set himself beside them. By assessing the behaviour of prominent characters in history we find a measure for ourselves. But one of our first assessments of ourselves is that we would be unlikely to attain such a magnificent objectivity on our own: we need our guides to the human soul, and among them Montesquieu is hard to beat, because he can withhold his moral judgement to the cracking point without letting go of it. Obviously he does not much admire Augustus as a man; but he can see Augustus’s greatness as an emperor; and finally he can see the connection between Augustus’s greatness and his not being much of a man. This is quite a feat of detachment. Most of us would table our decision long before that.

  Montesquieu can delay his judgement on Tiberius: a forbearance that not even Tacitus could show. Montesquieu, it should be said, thought the world of Tacitus, “qui abrégeoit tout parce qu’il voyoit tout.” (“He abridged everything because he saw everything.” Perfect.) Tacitus was charmed by Tiberius, but only as a maiden with a soft neck is charmed by the approach of a trained vampire. Like Tacitus, Montesquieu could appreciate Tiberius as an artist of bastardry. “There is no crueller tyranny,” said Montesquieu, “than the one exercised in the shadow of the law, and with the colours of justice.” A connoisseur of murderous casuistry, Montesquieu was impressed by the efficiency Tiberius brought to the business of perverting the judicial system. From a distance of sixteen hundred years, Montesquieu rewarded the imperial perpetrator with the quality of his prose: “les couleurs de la jus tice” is a magnificent phrase, one of those perfect formulations that should be left in its original language as a tribute to the culture from which it emerged. Tacitus had seen that Tiberius not only wanted the Senate to be servile, but despised it for flattering him. Yet Tacitus, as much fascinated as repelled, had his sense of irony exhausted by a satanically gifted individual. Montesquieu, less emotionally involved, saw a point about Tiberius that extended to all mankind. “Like most men, he wanted contradictory things; his general politics were nowhere in accord with his particular passions. He would have liked a Senate free and capable of making its government respected, but he also wanted a Senate to satisfy, at all times, his fears, his jealousies and his hatreds: finally the statesman gave way contentedly to the man.” We are left free to deduce a universal principle. Unless constrained to do otherwise, the statesman will always give way to the man. Lord Acton’s later observation about the corrupting nature of power is already there, and already expounded in apprehensible human terms. Part of the impact comes from our recognition of what has happened so often within ourselves: the feeling of relief and release as we slip from a rigid civic obligation into a spastic self-assertion.

  Montesquieu was well aware, however, that the dolorous road of arbitrary imperial power led far past the point set by the demoralization of the sane, and that beyond the corruptible personality there was such a thing as the outright psychopath, demented from the womb, or anyway from the cradle. Montesquieu had no doubt that Caligula was crazy. But Montesquieu is able to enrich his condemnation—to make it an analysis, and not just a bleat of anguish—by examining how Caligula’s blatant insanity did not preclude subtlety of intellect, and might even have encouraged it. He drew Caligula as a sophist of cruelty. Descended from both Antony and Augustus, Caligula said he would punish the consuls if they celebrated the day of rejoicing established in memory of the battle of Actium, and that he would punish them if they didn’t. (For the puzzled or the innocent, here’s how it worked: Antony lost the battle of Actium to Octavian, the future Augustus. Therefore, those who celebrated the battle dishonoured Antony, while those who didn’t dishonoured Augustus. The way was thus left open to punish everyone.)

  By entertaining the possibility that cruelty could be allied with a kind of artistic ingenuity, Montesquieu pioneered a field of study that we by no means exhaust by reading the Marquis de Sade: if only it were so. Many of de Sade’s effects were merely cumulative, and anyway they were almost all fictional. They were ideas he masturbated to in gaol, and the quill was the only conduit between his imagination and reality. He didn’t have an office with a telephone. In the twentieth century, alas, one of the ways that the same brand of madness proved itself in power was by the ingenuity which added, to physical tortures unseen since medieval times, a range of psychological tortures which had been thought to have died with the nuttier Roman emperors. If Saddam Hussein needed to acquire by education what he did not have from instinct, he could have learned from Stalin the techniques of mentally destroying parents by attacking their children. (“My handsome son Uday,” we can imagine him saying, “is looking forward to meeting your daughter.”) But not even Stalin’s ingenuity was without precedent in ancient times, and Hitler’s fondness for Sippenhaft—the German term for punishing the innocent family along with the guilty criminal—was a direct hand-on from Tiberius. (Stalin’s penchant for obliterating the entire family of an Enemy of the People was not really Sippenhaft, because he was cleaning up a whole bourgeois element anyway: i.e., they couldn’t not be guilty, so there was no arbitrariness to the punishment.) On a less exalted level in the infernal Nazi world, Victor Klemperer, in his diaries—I Shall Bear Witness and To the Bitter End—records the exquisite dilemma of the Dresden Jews in the years when they supposedly still had a life, before the Final Solution officially got under way.

  Victor Klemperer is sometimes given a niggling press because he seems lost in everyday detail. But when everyday detail was so horrible, to record it was an act of heroism, and nobody who has read his diaries should lose an opportunity of pointing out to anyone who hasn’t that they constitute one of the great documents of the twentieth century. At the heart of the document is the perception that the Jews were placed under designedly intolerable psychological pressure from the first day of the new regime. When they were still granted the luxury of travel by tram to their increasingly distant places of decreasingly remunerative work, they were permitted to ride only on a platform which could not be reached except though a compartment they were forbidden to enter. Their dilemma was between either walking to and from work, which was steadily less possible, or boarding the tram and facing almost certain pun
ishment. The “almost” made things worse: if there had been no alternative to staying at home and starving yourself and your family to death, it might have been easier to face. But there was an alternative. The alternative, however, was to face the dilemma. A more delicately calibrated mechanism for inducing neurosis in human beings could scarcely have been devised. But devised it was: though it would be a relief to hear that the idea had simply evolved without a creator, there can be no doubt that some perversely talented Nazi factotum sat down to a desk and thought it out. Like Tacitus only more so, Montesquieu deserves our thanks for preparing us to face our own time. Tacitus thought that there were arguments for the use of torture. Montesquieu agreed, but said that there was something in our nature that cried out against it. Tacitus predicted what we have to face, but Montesquieu predicted us facing it, and thus ranks even higher among those men of the past who tell us that the future was always there—or anyway that enough of it had already happened to reassure us that the rest was not really unprecedented, just anachronistic. There is thus a kind of solace in reading them, saddening though it is; and with Montesquieu the solace becomes an inspiration, as if our doubts had met their voice.