Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Alfred Brendel put me on to Polgar. Brendel knows everything about the Viennese coffee-house wits, and carries in his pocket an anthology of their best sayings, individually typed out on slips of paper. Away from the piano, Brendel’s fingertips are usually wrapped in strips of Elastoplast. (So would mine be, if they were worth ten million dollars each.) When you see those bits of paper being hauled from his pockets by his plastered fingers, you realize you are in the presence of a true enthusiast. Brendel gave me the name of every card in the pack, but told me to be sure of one thing: Alfred Polgar was the ace of diamonds. The advice saved me years. I probably would have got to Polgar eventually, but by getting to him early I was granted the entrée to a whole vanished world, because Polgar is the gatekeeper. Though a shy man, he knew everyone, because everyone wanted to know him; and he had their characters summed up. As for his own books, they put me on the spot. The way he wrote about everything at all levels confirmed me in what I had been trying to do, but the quality with which he did it was a poser. A single dull page would have been a relief, but there wasn’t one. Travelling a lot at the time on filming trips, I found his titles in second-hand bookshops all over the world: wherever the refugees had gone to die in peace, and their children had sold the books because the old language was the last thing they wanted to hear again. On Staten Island I found half a dozen, and there was a bunch of three in Tel Aviv. Strangely enough, Munich teemed with them: despite instructions, fewer Jew-infected books were burned than the Nazis would have liked.

  The original Polgar volumes are delectable to look at. Usually they are bound in light cardboard of a primary colour made pastel by time, and the format is small enough to fit the pocket. But the bindings are fragile, and easily crack. It was encouraging to discover, in the 1980s, that Rowohlt was putting out a multi-volume complete edition on thin paper, strongly bound. The editor could not have been better chosen. It was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a long-time admirer of Polgar who was unlikely to muff the job. Nor did he, but the edition is unsatisfactory in one crucial respect. Each piece comes to an end without a sign of its provenance: to find out when it was written, you have to turn to the critical apparatus at the back of the volume. There was some reason to divide his work into its genres, although it would have been better arranged in a pure chronology, to show how his diversity was operating all the time. But to leave the dates off the pieces was to connive at a trick of wish fulfilment. German literature in the twentieth century was fated to lose its self-sustaining monumentality. The point came when everything depended on which year a piece was written, and then which month, and even which day. Glossing that over, you miss the story of how politics invaded art and came close to killing it. The complete edition would be a tomb if Polgar did not have a spirit that can shine through marble. You can see that I am unable to stop borrowing his tricks. But the real trick is to borrow his tone. Nobody should try who can’t write English as well as Polgar wrote German, and I’m afraid that lets me out. It was hard enough, for this note, taking him on a sentence at a time. But he could write a whole essay like that: joined-up writing in excelsis.

  BEATRIX POTTER

  Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) is as much belittled as flattered by her reputation of being the children’s author that adults should read. What child would be impressed by that? She herself was not amused when Graham Greene wrote a semi-serious article about her. She wasn’t interested in being a semi-serious subject. W. H. Auden was nearer the mark when he praised her outright as an artist of prose. So she was, and her little books would have been treasurable even without her drawings. Her stories attract tweeness towards them—the Peter Rabbit ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child—but are never winsome in themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language. She could luxuriate in the polysyllabic without making froth of the meaning: a rare, and strictly poetic, discipline. Some of the post–World War II writers for children got their poetry from rhyme and rhythm: James Thurber in The Thirteen Clocks, Dr. Seuss passim. Others got it from atmospherics: Maurice Sendak notably, Roald Dahl less tastefully, and J. K. Rowling by ransacking a sorcerers’ warehouse stocked with all the magic gear since Grimm’s first fairy tales. (In Harry Potter’s world, it’s only rarely that the language is magic, although Durmstrang would sound like a witty name for a school to any twelve-year-old reader familiar with the history of German literature.) Beatrix Potter got her poetry from prose: which is to say, from speech, concentrated. Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going by just overhead, and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children’s books, even at their worthily meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan. In the old Soviet Union, there were children’s books that preached the virtues of informing on one’s parents. Beatrix Potter had her own ideas of civic virtue, and most of them are still ours, although we might be more inclined than she was to ask what happens to those animals who go to market involuntarily.

  Pigling Bland listened gravely; Alexander was hopelessly volatile.

  —BEATRIX POTTER, The Tale of Pigling Bland, P. 25

  PEOPLE WHO DID not have Beatrix Potter read to them as a child soon learn to envy their own children. The luxury of her diction seems an unfair treat for the young to those of us who meet it for the first time in later life. My daughters didn’t mind being compared to the hopelessly volatile Alexander, as long as I kept saying it. Children like to hear good things said a thousand times, so it helps if the good things are as good as this. The Tale of Pigling Bland is especially rich in pointe-shoe examples of Potter’s gift for exquisitely elevated linguistic deportment. In the next paragraph to the one in which this sentence occurs, we find that Aunt Pettitoes gives to each piglet a little bundle, “and eight conversation peppermints with appropriate moral sentiments in screws of paper.” Bright young listeners will savour the “appropriate moral sentiments” as if they were the peppermints. More important, they will savour the appropriate moral sentiments even when they aren’t quite certain what appropriate moral sentiments are. If you, as an adult, happen to be there when the meaning teeters on the point of sinking in, it can be quite a moment. Poets, especially, are likely to be humbled: this is the transitional point where the art they practise begins and ends.

  The only flaw in The Tale of Pigling Bland is that the piglets are going to market, yet there is no mention of the probability that they themselves will one day be on sale there in altered form. Bacon is frequently mentioned, but its significance is not alluded to by the author, which rather leaves it to the reciter: a difficult moral decision. In the story of Timmy Tiptoes, Potter is more straightforward about the fate of mice: cats kill them. With that much admitted, the deus ex machina that saves Timmy Tiptoes is saved from sentimentality. Timmy Tiptoes gets stuck in the trunk of a tree because the Chipmunk has tempted him to eat too many nuts. Potter finds two ways of being unforgettable about Timmy’s nut-eating. The Chipmunk “ ’ticed him to eat quantities.” The reciter will find that his audience is suitably curious about “enticed” being reduced to “ ’ticed,” but is fascinated beyond delight by the “quantities.” (For days afterwards, hopelessly volatile small people will be discovered to have eaten “quantities” of whatever it is they eat at all.) The deus ex machina is “the big wind” that blows the top off the tree. There is no suggestion that a big wind could save Timmy from a cat. There is, however, an implicit suggestion that something will save Pigling Bland and the hopelessly volatile Alexander from becoming bacon. No doubt there had to be such a let-out. Potter was, after all, writing children’s books. It is a mark of how good the books are, however, that the merest hint of ordinary uplift is a shock, as if Ja
ne Austen had forgotten to mention money.

  JEAN PRÉVOST

  Of all the casualties among the French Resistance, Jean Prévost (1901–1944) was possibly the most damaging loss to the future of French culture. Before the war he had stood out as a journalist with a wide range of enthusiasms, and, in a startling number of them, solid credentials: someone who could write so well had every reason to consider himself a literary figure, but his writings about sport were given additional weight by the fact that he was a sportsman as well. He enjoyed every aspect of a productive democracy and might, had he lived, have run into trouble with the left, because his range of enjoyments suggested that a capitalist society might be more fruitfully various, and less alienated, than Marxist theory allowed. Alas, the question of his future never arose. He joined the Resistance as an active member and was killed in the fighting. As I try to contend in the following note, his brave death, and not his conformist history, might have been the real reason his name took so long to come back to life. Jérôme Garcin’s Pour Jean Prévost is the essential, and still virtually the only, book devoted to a career short of time but long on implication. Suggesting as it does that one of the duties of a writer might be to place himself in danger, his life is probably fated to be more of a curiosity than a model.

  But my soul is a fire that suffers if it doesn’t burn. I need three or four cubic feet of new ideas every day, as a steamboat needs coal.

  —JEAN PRÉVOST, QUOTED BY JÉRÔME GARCIN IN Pour Jean Prévost, P. 111

  JEAN PRÉVOST WAS forty-three years old when he was killed in battle against German troops in the Vercors on August 1, 1944. He was one of the few writers who were verifiable heroes of the Resistance and thus he was fated to die a double death, because in the post-war period the French intellectual world’s climb back to health was long and slow and at a shallow angle. Figures who had been compromised were found less challenging to deal with than those who had been truly admirable. The admirable, indeed, became the negligible. Neither Prévost nor Marc Bloch was granted a tenth of the attention lavished on such flagrant collaborators as Drieu la Rochelle, Rebatet or Brasillach, whose graves were heaped with wreaths of understanding, sympathy and, all too often, outright approval, as if to have had friendly dealings with the enemy had somehow been evidence of an adventurous commitment. I wish I was exaggerating the case, but anyone who doubts it would only have to measure the short list of material written about Prévost against the whole shelves written about Drieu.

  Before the war, Prévost had combined within himself, and seemingly without effort, two different writing careers, one as a student of literature and the other as a journalist writing at a high level on subjects which had not previously always enjoyed the quality of attention he brought to them. His studies of Stendhal and Baudelaire remain important to this day. (He had not yet quite finished the book about Baudelaire when he died fighting.) His journalism about cinema and architecture was better informed than most academic opinion on the subject, and far more engagingly written. He was a champion boxer who knew sports from the inside. As Jérôme Garcin notes in the study that rescued Prévost’s reputation from its oubliette, “he was not pardoned for wanting to talk about everything and to be read by everybody.” As the junior prodigy at Gallimard, as the whizz-kid of the Nouvelle Revue Française, he was looked down on by the established writers even when they were honest enough to admire his verve. Mauriac piously warned him against “cette prodigeuse facilité.” To get a picture of Prévost’s personality, you don’t have to put together all the ways his contemporaries approved of him. All the ways they disapproved of him would do it. Prévost was humanism reborn: its hunger, its scope, its vitality and its inner light—an inner light produced by all the aspects of life illuminating one another, in a honeycomb of understanding. As Garcin says, for Prévost encyclopédisme was a way of being. Behind the relaxed good looks, his interior mood was “a ferocious appetite nourished by a permanent anguish.” None of it would have worked without his pure heart. A passion for justice and a genuine sympathy with the common people—much of his concern about architecture was on their behalf—ruled out any ideological commitment. After the war, pure hearts were hard to find. Sartre had the unmitigated hide to look down on Prévost’s memory. The reason for Prévost’s “failure,” opined the all-comprehending philosopher, was that Prévost had not been confident enough to follow his star.

  Unlike his fellow Resistance hero Sartre, Prévost had been confident enough to follow his star in the direction of the German soldiers, but Sartre left that bit out. There was a lot, after the war, that everyone wanted to leave out. The spontaneous universalism that Prévost had so ably represented in the thirties was irrevocably passé. The division of labour once again became the rule in clerical work. What a man like Prévost had once integrated into a single joyous effort was now broken up into separate specialities, each with its resident panel of shamans and charlatans. The once very real prospect of a widely curious humanism had decayed and separated into literary theory, bogus philosophy and ideological special pleading on behalf of political systems which had, as their first enemy, the irreducible complexity of a living culture. The separate practitioners in these fields all had their own reasons to forget that a man like Prévost had ever existed. But the single thing about him that everybody wanted to forget was his clear, clean decision about fighting the Nazis. That decision had been of a piece with the unpretentious nobility that marked all his work, including the popular journalism, which never flattered his readers except by making them feel talented. You can see what Sartre was afraid of. First of all, Prévost really was the Resistance fighter that Sartre only pretended to be—a pretence we could forgive him for, if he had not later on accused others of cowardice. But what must really have scared Sartre was the lingering memory of Prévost’s literary personality: the liberal, humanist, democratic gusto which would have ensured, had he survived the war, his ascent to the status that Sartre, after the accidental death of Camus, was able to enjoy unchallenged—the savant, the philosopher, the critic of life and literature. On that last point alone, the point of literary criticism, the books that Prévost did not write after the war are a lost library to break the heart. As with Marc Bloch in the field of history—but even more sadly because a gift like Prévost’s is harder to come by—a gap opens up that the imagination can’t fill. You find yourself unable to calculate the damage. Perhaps we can get an idea by trying to imagine what would have happened to critical journalism in English if Orwell had been killed in Spain.

  MARCEL PROUST

  Marcel Proust (1871–1922) wrote a long book that even the most casual reader usually makes longer by adding notes on the endpapers. À la recherche du temps perdu exists to be annotated. A commonplace book in the classic sense, it is, itself, a set of annotations to all the works of art that Proust has read, looked at, listened to or otherwise enjoyed—and to everything he knows about nature, natural science, love, sex and the workings of the mind. This book you are reading now could easily have been ten times as long if it had contained nothing else but expansions on the notes I have made from reading Proust in several editions over the course of forty years. (In view of that threat, I have confined myself to a single short essay at this point, but you will have noticed, elsewhere in the book, that reflections on Proust tend to creep in when other writers are under consideration: a ubiquity of relevance by which, when it is acknowledged, one of his admirers will often spot another, whereupon they will start discussing Proust in lieu of the previous topic.) Forty years and no end in sight. War and Peace is big book too, but you are through it comfortably in a week, and all set to start again one day. À la recherche du temps perdu is never done with, because it keeps growing while you are reading it. Like no other book in the world, Proust’s book leads everywhere: a building made of corridors, and the walls of the corridors are made of doors. The student can happily find an entrance through the Modern Library’s six-volume In Search of Lost Time. This covetably
handsome set, bravely decorated with photographs of the author, is basically the 1920 Scott Moncrieff translation (published serially throughout the 1920s under the title of Remembrance of Things Past) which was revised in the 1980s and 1990s by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright. The whole enterprise took three-quarters of a century fully to materialize in English, and no student’s bookshelf should be without it. But it might not be long before the urge arises to read the text in the original.

  This urge should not be resisted. Pedants and snobs are fond of declaring that only accomplished French speakers can catch Proust’s tone. That might be so, but the tone is only one of the things to be caught. There are whole levels of complexity that can be opened up by an elementary knowledge of written French, and the elementary knowledge is likely to expand usefully as the recherche goes on. I myself learned what French I have from reading Proust. It took me fifteen years before I could read confidently during the day without a dictionary, and even then I took home a list of words to be looked up in the evening. (A Larousse is essential to back up an ordinary dictionary: as Pasternak said of Pushkin, Proust is full of things.) But the mental improvement was well worth any feelings of inadequacy. The idea that your French needs to be perfect in the first place if you are to appreciate France’s greatest writer is as absurd as the idea that you need to be able to read music in order to appreciate Beethoven’s late quartets. If Beethoven had thought that, he would never have written them. Similarly, with Proust, a book entirely dependent on its language would not have interested him. When he was younger he was preoccupied with style, but always as a measure of compression and intensity; and he put the preoccupation behind him when he matured into a freedom that was all discipline, and a discipline that was all freedom.