by Clive James
The blunt truth about all the attendant writings of even the greatest writers is that we must almost wholly rely on the machinery of scholarship, publishing and reviewing to draw our attention to the little things that piece out the big picture. Somebody had to edit at least seventeen volumes of Sainte-Beuve’s general correspondence, and somebody else had to read them with reasonable thoroughness, before a piece could appear in the TLS from which I could seize this paragraph and copy it out into my journal. I did so for two reasons: for the truth of what it said, and because it reminded me of Proust. At the time—more than a quarter of a century ago—I had not yet lived with Proust long enough to realize that the connection might go a long way beyond mere coincidence, or the fact that the two men wrote in the same language. As the years went by, however, the way Proust’s mind worked became a more open book—his book, always, but less puzzling, if even more daunting. Proust the great writer stood more and more revealed as Proust the great critic. He was a great critic because he responded to all the arts at the level of their creation. He could not see a painting, hear a piece of music or read a stretch of prose without joining in with the painter, the composer or the writer. It was always as if he had been there, collaborating.
He had been there even with the despised Sainte-Beuve. In Sainte-Beuve’s prose, the vehicle for opinions Proust found fatuous, he had found something profound that he could use, as he found something he could use in everyone to whom he paid attention, even if all they did was make cakes. With Sainte-Beuve I think it was the additive measure: the way the paragraph steadily unfolds an argument. In Sainte-Beuve’s weekly grind of journeyman judgement, most of the arguments did not reach very distinguished conclusions. He said himself that he praised the dullards because “for me it is truly an affair of equity.” A pretty damning confession.
But a judge’s opinion can be wrong and still have distinction in the way it incorporates observations about life. The distinguishing mark of Sainte-Beuve’s opinions was the confidence of generalization he could put into them. In that, the young Proust saw a possibility. He would not have seen it in this letter, which he could not have read: but the letter—and this is why I seized on it—is a distillation of Sainte-Beuve’s characteristic manner, which Proust might have abominated but could not avoid, because it was part of the landscape. Somewhere in Sainte-Beuve’s steady outpourings that chugged away reliably like les égouts beneath the streets, Proust saw a way forward for himself. Later on he might have forgotten where he saw it. He was not a mean man and would not have belittled Sainte-Beuve just to discredit the source of a debt. It is a diverting mind game to imagine how Sainte-Beuve would have reviewed the complete (more accurately, the never-completed) À la recherche du temps perdu. He probably would have missed its significance. But he might well have spotted the rhythm of his own prose, transformed in the taking over and put to a more ambitious use, yet undeniably, in his opinion, pinched.
Great writers get away with absorbing the discoveries of lesser writers. If the great writer is great enough—T. S. Eliot, for example—he can even get away with saying outright that he steals them. The person stolen from is seldom heard to complain, being already dead; but sometimes he is almost the star’s contemporary, and on a few occasions there is no almost about it. Robert Graves went through an embarrassing phase of being hopping mad about how W. H. Auden had helped himself to the cadences of Laura Riding. Graves, who had the misfortune to be Riding’s husband, was thought to be slightly potty on the subject, but it is quite possible that Auden had seen her verses, absorbed some of her rhythmic quirks, and incorporated them into his upcoming work. Only one critic ever blew the whistle on Hugh MacDiarmid’s flagrant thefts from E. E. Cummings: the Scottish critics thought their man had droit de seigneur, and hardly anybody else cared. MacDiarmid was probably speaking the truth when he said he never consciously stole from anyone. He could steal hundreds of lines without batting an eyelid. Only the psychopathic plagiarist counts on getting caught. Most plagiarists are just submitting themselves to influence. It isn’t even necessary for the raptor to lift a finished idea: a mere suggestion can be enough. Among my acquaintances, there are at least two novelists who will nick any good phrase they hear in conversation, and at least one who knows he is doing it. His justification, as far as I can make out, is that he would have thought of it eventually anyway. He is probably right. Proust would have ended up writing like Proust even if he had never read Sainte-Beuve. But without reading Sainte-Beuve, Proust would have been a bit slower to realize the way that Proust was meant to sound.
JOSÉ SARAMAGO
José Saramago (b. 1922) is a Portuguese writer who won the Nobel Prize, whereas Fernando Pessoa was a Portuguese writer who didn’t. Since Pessoa was without question the outstanding literary figure in his language, the anomaly tells you all you need to know about the true value of the prize: but Saramago is not without an importance of his own. His novels present the kind of straightforward allegorical provocations that journalists enjoy treating as problems. In The Stone Raft, Portugal breaks off and puts out to sea, thereby demonstrating its isolation: in The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, the Jesus story is rewritten to give him a sex life, thereby anticipating Martin Scorsese in the challenge to standard religious sensibilities; and in Blindness almost nobody can see what life is really like, thereby supporting the notion that bourgeois society demands blind obedience. The rehashed gospel did most to set a Catholic country by the ear, but the book about mental myopia was really the more outrageous statement in a country waking up from military dictatorship, because Saramago was still proposing what he had always proposed: that liberal democracy wouldn’t be democratic enough, and only communism could give life its full value. This latter conviction on his part should be kept in mind when reading his notebooks. Written in his idyllic retirement on the island of Lanzarote in the Canaries, the Cadernos give us a beguiling account of how a literary giant handles his life. But the enchantment ought to carry a health warning. Saramago joined the Communist Party in 1969. The Party had been banned under the military dictatorship, which no doubt seemed a good reason for joining it once the regime had melted away, but to join up in the year after the Soviet Union had stamped on Dubcek took a brass neck on Saramago’s part. There is no reason to think, however, that Saramago has ever especially admired the coercion exercised by all Communist regimes, without exception, against the common people they claim to champion. He just seems never to have heard of it. What he has heard of is the inadequacy of democracy. His Nobel Prize in 1998 might have been awarded for his proven inability to advance his position by so much as a nuance. In Le Monde Diplomatique for August 2004 he published an article pointing out that no ruling party elected by the people ever truly represents them. The possibility that an unelected ruling party would represent them even less he left unexamined. “I am not against parties (I am a militant member of a political party). . . .” Yes, but that party is against parties, isn’t it? One could go on: almost everything he so confidently states to be true would be thought to need less absurdly guileless language even by those who share his views. Politically, Saramago is a writer whose fluent readiness to explain the world is unimpeded by the embarrassing fact that he has somehow managed never to hear the real news. A functioning democracy represents the people mainly by ensuring that no one group can maintain its power over them without being subject to displacement at their whim. Saramago’s impressive reluctance to consider this principle is perhaps evidence that a military dictatorship is a bad place in which to get an education in the politics of either wing, but there are plenty of Portuguese intellectuals among Saramago’s contemporaries who would say that the native land of Pessoa didn’t cease producing intelligent people just because the thugs were in charge. With Saramago, as with so many other writers and intellectuals of his stamp, we should be careful about attributing a deep seriousness to inflexible error. To be reasonable is not to be frivolous: it’s the very opposite. Saramago the Nobel laureat
e, however, deserves credit for making sure, especially in his highly readable notebooks, that the reader never loses sight of the turbulence where culture and politics meet.
I am a Eurosceptic who learned his scepticism from a professor called Europe.
—JOSÉ SARAMAGO, Cadernos de Lanzarote (1993–1995), P. 486
AT THE TIME he wrote this, Saramago was a distinguished old man snugly busy with his notebooks (cadernos in Portuguese, cuadernos in Spanish) on Lanzarote, his volcanic island in the Canaries. He was only a few years short of winning the Nobel Prize in literature for Portugal. No doubt it was Portugal’s turn: by the same standard, Fernando Pessoa should have won it six times, once for each of his multiple personalities. But some of us who enjoy Saramago’s expository prose found it hard to suppress a snort of derision at the general agreement by the international culture-page press that the prize committee, in paying its respects to literature, was justified in tacitly conceding that his political stance might have had something to it. It was a false equation: Saramago is a charming diarist, but his political stance has nothing to it beyond a formidable inbuilt capacity to gloss over its own consequences. Europe might have taught him Euroscepticism. There was a whole ruined world that should have taught him to be sceptical about communism. He never got the point. As a diehard believer who had refused to give up his faith even in the face of limitless evidence that it was a pack of lies whose first victims were the people it claimed to benefit, Saramago was reminiscent of Pablo Neruda and Nicolás Guillén: he had to be taken seriously because there was no other way to take him.
Beyond the ludicrous, the scale of the preposterous starts coming back in the other direction, so that we return to the point where a mind can be granted a kind of dignity for its persistence in folly. (This was the defence that was often made for the Scottish nationalist poet Hugh MacDiarmid, who joined the Communist Party after the repression of the Hungarian uprising in 1956, at the precise moment when everyone else was leaving: you can’t deny that he stuck to his principles.) Neruda and Guillén can both be given points for sticking with communism if you concede that democracy might never be capable of bringing justice to Latin America: and there will probably continue to be dark moments when we want to concede that. But as in the case of Africa, these are moments of despair on our part, and by succumbing to them we grossly patronize the people on the spot, for whom a drastic solution will be no relief at all for their suffering, and will almost certainly intensify it. Similarly, Saramago’s long intransigence was a measure of the fix Portugal had got itself into with its tenaciously self-renewing tradition of salon fascism, a tradition that was by no means extinguished by the retirement of Salazar in 1968. When democracy finally arrived in 1974, Saramago didn’t trust it.
Saramago had good reason to suspect that justice would never come by reasonable means. But when it finally showed signs of doing so, he did nothing in his discursive writings to justify his position in the only way it could have been justified. He could have said that without the critique mounted from people like him who had been driven by exasperation to the far left, the far right would never have been eroded in its confidence. It would have been partly true. But it was wholly untrue to go on claiming that the far left offered an alternative in itself. The price of sticking to such a proposition was to restrict his frame of reference to the size of his own study. There was a world elsewhere in which the common people, all around the planet, had been massacred by the million over the course of decades, and all in the name of the cause he remained proud to represent. None of that taught him anything. It couldn’t because he didn’t want it to. Europe taught him Euroscepticism because he did want it to: because he thought that the idea of a united Europe was a stratagem for capitalist hegemony. But the people who hatched the idea had more creative aims in mind than that. They wanted an end to violent conflict. The people who hatched the ideas at the base of Saramago’s declared faith never wanted anything of the kind. For any deliberately withdrawn writer who would like to be encouraged in his isolation, Saramago’s journals make pleasant reading, but if you compare them to the journals of, say, Gombrowicz, the difference comes howling out of the page. When Gombrowicz ignores the world, he knows what the world is. Saramago doesn’t want to know. It wouldn’t matter if he were just a creative writer. But he wants to be taken as a political philosopher. It is a pose about which we are entitled to be sceptical, having learned our scepticism from a professor called history.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Radiating contempt for its bourgeois liberal conformity, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) looms in the corner of this book like a genius with the evil eye. For the book’s author, Sartre is a devil’s advocate to be despised more than the devil, because the advocate was smarter. No doubt this is a disproportionate reaction. Sartre, after all, never actually killed anybody. But he excused many who did, and most of those never actually killed anybody either: they just gave orders for their subordinates to do so. There is a moral question there, of the type with which Sartre was well equipped to deal, had he chosen to do so. He was a brilliant man: the first thing to say about him, although unfortunately not the last. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 he called, in his capacity as a Resistance fighter, for punishment to be vented on those among his fellow literati who had collaborated with the Nazis. The question of how much Resistance fighting he had actually done did not impede his post-war climb to prominence. As philosopher, novelist, playwright, social commentator and political analyst, Sartre was the pre-eminent French left-wing intellectual of the Fourth Republic and beyond, reigning supreme in the Left Bank cafés with Simone de Beauvoir the queen at his side. The pair made intellectual distinction into a media story: the celebrity enjoyed now by a glamour-boy philosopher such as Bernard-Henri Lévy has its precedent in that post-war connection between serious thought and media dazzle, a Parisian microclimate which helped to give France a sense of luxury at a time when food and fuel were still in short supply. After Camus died prematurely in a car crash, Sartre’s true rival, Raymond Aron, was a long time in attracting the allegiance of the independent left, and in the meanwhile Sartre’s gauchiste vision was the style setter of French political thought, founding an orthodoxy that still saturates French intellectual life today, and, to a certain extent, continues to set a standard of engagement (the word, especially when detached from any real connotation, looks better in the original) for intellectual life all over the world. A key principle in this vision is that the Communist regimes, no matter how illiberal, had serious altruistic intentions in comparison with the irredeemably self-serving capitalist West. (Academics in the capitalist West greeted this brainwave with awed approval, failing to note that their society could hardly be self-interested if it allowed them to do so—unless, that is, freedom of expression is a sly trick played by capitalism to convince the gullible that they are at liberty.) When Sartre broke with the Communists, he retained respect for their putatively benevolent social intentions, and was ready to say something exculpatory even if what he was exculpating was the Gulag network, whose existence, after he finally ceased to deny it, he never condemned as a central product of a totalitarian system, but only regretted as an incidental blemish. This manoeuvre, implying a powerful ability to deny the import of a fact even after he had acknowledged it, was hard to distinguish from duplicity.
Sceptics might say that a knack for making duplicity look profound was inherent in Sartre’s style of argument. Students who tackle his creative prose in the novel sequence The Road to Freedom or the play Kean (his most convincing illustration of existentialism as a living philosophy) will find clear moments of narrative, but all clarity evaporates when it comes to the discursive prose of his avowedly philosophical works. It should be said in fairnesss that even the English philosopher Roger Scruton, otherwise a severe critic of Sartre, finds Sartre’s keystone work L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness) a substantial work; and Jean-François Revel, who took Sartre’s political philosophy apart br
ick by brick, still admired him as a philosopher who earned his own credentials, without depending on the university system for his prestige. But those of us unfettered by being either professional philosophers or patriotic Frenchmen can surely suggest that even Sartre’s first and most famous treatise shows all the signs not just of his later mummery, but of the mummery of other pundits who came to later fame. Foucault, Derrida and the like shouldn’t have needed scientific debunking to prove them fraudulent: the pseudo-scientific vacuity of their argufying was sufficiently evident from the wilful obfuscation of their stylistic hoopla: and the same could have been said of their progenitor. Where Sartre got it from is a mystery begging to be explained. It could have had something to do with his pre-war period in Berlin, and especially with the influence of his admired Heidegger. In Sartre’s style of argument, German metaphysics met French sophistry in a kind of European Coal and Steel Community producing nothing but rhetorical gas.
But the best explanation might have more to do with his personality. Perhaps he was over-compensating. It would be frivolous to suggest that Sartre’s bad eye was a factor determining personality, like Goebbels’s bad foot; and anyway, Sartre’s physical ugliness in no way impeded his startling success with women. It might be possible, however, that he was compensating for a mental condition that he knew to be crippling. He might have known that he was debarred by nature from telling the truth for long about anything that mattered, because telling the truth was something that ordinary men did, and his urge to be extraordinary was, for him, more of a motive force than merely to see the world as it was. This perversity—and he was perverse whether he realized it or not—made him the most conspicuous single example in the twentieth century of a fully qualified intellectual aiding and abetting the opponents of civilization. More so than Ezra Pound, who was too crazy even for the Fascists; more so even than Brecht, a straight-out cynic who kept his money in Switzerland. Sartre was never corrupt in that way. Like Robespierre, he had an awful purity. Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize. He was living proof that the devil’s advocate can be idealistic and even self-sacrificing. Minus his virtues, he would be much easier to dismiss. With them, he presents us with our most worrying reminder that the problem of amoral intelligence is not confined to the sciences. It can happen to culture too, which suggests that on some level being a humanist means not being like Sartre. His admirers might say that we are in no danger of that. But usually, when they admire him that much, they make his sort of noise. The tip-off is the sentence that spurns the earth because it fears a puncture.