Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Metternich, who dismantled and reassembled kingdoms according to his personal judgement, called the state a divine expression: about as far as hypocrisy can go. Yet nobody now could surface from Metternich’s book of reflections without a sense of loss. Those were the days; when men who could do things like that could write like this. You could see why such books were printed to be cherished in the years after World War I. Their publishers and editors were putting a world back together, in the hope that the new world would be something like it. Their publishers and editors thought that love and criticism would be enough. But the storm came. Not many of the books slept through it. They were strewn to the winds along with their owners, or were burned in the libraries their owners left behind. The library at Castolovice was lucky: the vandals passed it by. The family defied the Nazis but its castles were spared. When the Communists took everything, the family scattered to the outside world. Castolovice was turned into a factory for repairing refrigerators. Thought to be useful, the roofs were repaired too, after a fashion: so the acid rain of the red East did not get in, and nothing attacked the books except the dust of bad cement.

  After the Velvet Revolution—which was less a revolution than a restoration of the old republic—one of the many commendable impulses of Vaclav Hável’s civic order was to restore faith with the cultural heritage. Dispersed all over the world, some of the historic families were invited back to rebuild their castles, tend their estates, and thus, by offering employment, regenerate the villages which had grown up around their lands in the past. On a Machiavellian view, it was a neat way of getting the aristocrats to put their hard currency into the economy, if they had any. Some didn’t: the patriarch of the Kinski family is back in his castle, but it will remain a ruin, because he spent the lost years not abroad but in the mines, paying the long price for never having fled. The plan has been only a partial success. It costs more than money to put a culture back together: it takes dedication and patience, because the old craft skills have all disappeared. Castolovice is one of the few success stories. The castle and the lands thrive, employing people for miles around. It was early spring when I was reading Metternich. The deer in the fields had dropped their horns, the imported emus were sitting on their eggs, and the castle was getting ready for the tourist season.

  On a fine day in summer, it is not unknown for more than a thousand people to turn up. Most of the visitors are from the Czech Republic. They come to see what life was like a hundred years ago, under the old emperor: the era in which the future republicans grew up, nourishing their democratic dreams with the rich traditions that lay around them. The books I had been reading dated from the time of Masaryk and Bene, whose own books were produced to the same standard. While a guest of honour at the Olomouc Festival of Documentary Film in 2001, I searched the second-hand bookshops and found a two-volume set of Masaryk’s writings dated 1925, and matched it with a two-volume set of Bene dated 1927. Each set carried the word Revoluce in its title, but of course it was not a revolution at all. Revolutions trample the past. The republic of Masaryk and Bene grew out of the past organically, bringing the established cultural wealth along with it. You can see it in the look of their books: the proportion of the printing, the lustre of the linen bindings. When I got the four volumes back to London, I laid them out on my library coffee table and drank their appearance in. I opened them and caressed the thick, good paper that will never grow brittle. I did everything but read them. I can’t read Czech: not yet, anyway. I am told that once you master the alphabet it is not as hard as Russian. It is certainly easier than Polish to pronounce. The prose of Bene is famously unreadable but I would like to be able to judge that for myself, and Masaryk was such a man as few countries are given for a spiritual father: I would like to relish what he wrote in the way he wrote it. If I had the knack of Timothy Garton-Ash, I would be reading it by now. Those of us with more pedestrian powers of assimilation have to find the time, and at my age I am feeling a bit short of time altogether. But the books will go into my shelves anyway, where one day, if my library stays together, someone like me might come along and take them down—I hope without having to brush them free of cement dust, or whatever residue might characterize the next barbaric age.

  U

  Dubravka Ugresic

  Miguel de Unamuno

  Pedro Henríquez Ureña

  DUBRAVKA UGRESIC

  Dubravka Ugresic (b. 1949) might have been put on Earth for the specific purpose of reminding us that there is never anything simple about the Balkans. She was born in Croatia into a family of mixed ethnic origin, with a Bulgarian mother. She spent time at Zagreb’s forbiddingly entitled Institute for the Theory of Literature. A graduate of Moscow State University, she did academic work on the Russian avant-garde. In 1993 she left Croatia, staying first in Holland and Berlin before taking up a succession of posts in American universities, among them Wesleyan and UCLA. Her novels, which I have not yet read, are usually described as the work of a writer’s writer, or perhaps of someone who has been to the Institute for the Theory of Literature in Zagreb. One of them has, at least in English translation, the best title of the twentieth century’s twilight years: The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Her journalism, which I have read with respect, despair and delight, is essentially a refusal to surrender to the historically determined chaos of the area where she was born and grew up. As brave as Oriana Fallaci ever was but less burdened by ideology (so far she has not stuck herself with any large theories that she might need to repudiate, except possibly for the Theory of Literature), Ugresic is unbeatable at explaining the inexplicable entanglements of Balkan cultural traditions, particularly as they relate to the hellish position of women.

  One hot summer’s day I stopped in the New York subway hypnotized by what I saw. A middle-aged couple was dancing an Argentinian tango, describing around them an invisible circle in which only the two of them existed, the man and the woman, and a dusty cassette player on the ground beside them. The man and the woman were neither ugly nor beautiful, neither young nor old. They were dressed in black, their clothes were tidy but worn, the man’s black trousers shone with a greasy sheen. They danced seriously, modestly, without emotion, without superfluous movements, with no desire to please. The crowd around them was becoming steadily larger.

  —DUBRAVKA UGRESIC, The Culture of Lies, P. 131

  THIS IS WHAT the tango can give you: an atoll of bliss in a sea of turmoil. Just to watch it, let alone dance it, is a holiday from the accidental, and a free pass into the realm where the inevitable, for once, looks good. The dance is beautiful all by itself: the dancers don’t have to be, and in this passage they obviously aren’t. Ugresic goes on to ask rhetorically why a couple of tango dancers can make hard-bitten New Yorkers, who would otherwise hurry past, stop to watch and miss their trains. She deduced that they were being taken out of themselves. It was true for her. Like the moment it describes, the passage is an interlude made doubly sweet by what the rest of life is like. Her book is a cautionary tale for anyone who might think he can guess something about the Balkans without having been there. The Culture of Lies is really a collection of observations, many of them focused on the official abuse of language: the ghost in the background is Karl Kraus. What Kraus did for Austria and Germany in the pre-Nazi period, Ugresic does for Croatia in the Tudjman period, with the Bosnia of Milosevic looming in the wings; and she does it at least as well. Whereas Kraus’s real measures of normality lay in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose last phase he lived through and never forgot, Ugresic’s, unlikely though it may seem, lay in the vanished Yugoslavia of Tito. For her, Yugoslavia lingers in the mind and heart as the dreamed reality, whereas Croatia is the living nightmare. Tito’s iron hand at least kept the ethnic minorities from each other’s throats. The new iron hands want something else, and throats are their first target. Their second target, however, is the one that fascinates her, for reasons that become steadily more obvious. Whatever faction a man represents, the uninvited pen
etration of a woman seems to be his main reassurance of personal power. Beside and scarcely below the threat of murder, rape becomes a part of a woman’s life expectancy. It is hard to think of another book in which a climate of casual violence incubates such a lucid concern for women’s rights. Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two books of memoirs add up to the great twentieth-century record of everyday frightfulness, but Nadezhda wasn’t thinking about women’s rights. She probably found Alexandra Kollontai absurd. Kollontai campaigned for women’s rights to be granted by a state dedicated to the principle that nobody of either sex had any rights at all. Nadezhda would have been glad to have the old repressions back, and male chauvinism along with them.

  But Ugresic is in a different place, a different time, and a different frame of mind. She knows what has come true for women in the West, and is ready to blame the whole mess in her country exclusively on the strutting male. She calls him Yugo-man and sometimes the Yugomaniac. She makes a very convincing job of it. Whether Serb, Croat, Slav, Muslim, Bosnian this or Herzogovinian that, all the men in the book carry on like wild animals whenever they see a skirt. She doesn’t make enough of one of the saddest facts of all, perhaps because it didn’t fully emerge until much later: Muslim women who had been gang-raped by Serbian men were scared to tell the Muslim men, lest they be punished for having submitted to dishonour. Apart from that, however, her readiness to distribute her scorn evenly makes her the writer she is, and surely she is one of the most interesting to come out of Eastern Europe in modern times. (Ugresic attended the trial of Milosevic, and I can hardly wait to see what she writes about it.) She comes from one of what Kundera memorably called the Kidnapped Countries, and she has given it its voice, which is the voice of a woman. The woman carries plastic bags full of the bad food and the thin supplies she has queued for by the hour while the men sit around in the square scratching their crotches and dreaming up their next war. In the course of their dimwitted conversations, the men refer to any given woman as a cunt. The twin functions of the cunt are to put dinner on the table and lie down when required. Most male readers will find this an uncomfortable prospect, as they are meant to. Multicultural ideologists, if there are any left, will find it even less comfortable than that. According to Ugresic, multiculturalism in rich countries abets ethnic cleansing in the poor ones. Try this:

  Proudly waving its own unification, Europe supported disintegration in foreign territory. Emphasizing the principles of multiculturality in its own territory, it abetted ethnic cleansing elsewhere. Swearing by European norms of honour, it negotiated with democratically elected war criminals. Fiercely defending the rights of minorities, it omitted to notice the disappearance of the most numerous Yugoslav minority, the population of a national, “nationally undetermined” people, or the disappearance of minorities altogether.

  Residents of Britain will find such passages particularly embarrassing. It was British foreign policy, as propounded by men who thought they were acting for the best, that kept America from dropping its bombs on Slobodan Milosevic until it was almost too late to save anyone. The idea was to leave the area alone while things worked themselves out. (Long before, with regard to Biafra, Harold Wilson’s government had pursued the same policy, and with the same results.) From those helpless civilians who were left alone while things were working themselves out, and who somehow managed to survive the experience, anger is the least we can expect. Ugresic’s tone can be taken as a commendably moderate expression of the opinions she must have held while searching the sky in vain for the NATO aircraft that are held to be the worst thing in the world by those who have no idea how bad the world can get. If that’s the way she wrote it, that’s the way it probably felt, at the very least. No wonder then, if, on a brief holiday in New York, she found the tango dancers a holiday from history. If the Twin Towers had been hit at that very moment, it would have been no surprise to her. It would have been just a bigger version of the routine gang rape, or of a woman taking a hit from a sniper and falling on her plastic bags.

  MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

  Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) was a Basque, born in Bilbao. From 1891 he was professor of Greek at the University of Salamanca, but his writings and influence extended far beyond the academic world. In 1897 he had a spiritual crisis in which he lost his faith: the most important personal event in his life. From then on, every idea was a new struggle, which he dramatized in his prose, on the principle that his mind was the main character in a drama. With a twenty-year head start on Ortega, Unamuno pre-empted the title of the most style-setting philosopher of modern Spain, although Unamuno’s philosophy was avowedly anchored in a literary context, whereas Ortega prided himself on an apparently broader scope. But Unamuno’s more diffident range gave him a sharper focus. (And his humility gave him a deeper realism: the son of a baker, Unamuno would never have been capable of Ortega’s contempt for the masses.) Unamuno’s sensitivity to what was vital in literature not only allowed him to redirect the traditional evaluation of the literary heritage of the Spanish mainland, it allowed him to detect that it was about to be re-energized by what was happening in the Americas, the key factor in the thrilling story of how the Spanish world, in the twentieth century, came back from the dead. That was the vital analytical breakthrough, which we can now see should be counted as political as well as cultural, because the literary confidence in Latin America was the vehicle, for the countries below the Rio Grande, of a workable nationalism, a connection which the philologist Pedro Henríquez Ureña, one of the men on the spot, was able to establish from direct participation. Unamuno had enough to deal with in the mother country. Of Republican sympathies, he was exiled in 1924 to the island of Fuerteventura. After the founding of the Republic he returned in triumph to Salamanca. His mental independence, however, was incurable. He was soon at odds with the Socialist regime, whose doctrinaire aims and methods, he thought, confused the issue of a nationalist struggle; and he loathed the idea of foreign interference in Spain’s affairs. Since the two biggest totalitarian powers on Earth, at the invitation of the infinitely cynical Franco, were both intent on interfering in Spain with no thought at all to the country’s interests, he was thus in the position of being a witness to a tragedy. Luckily, in December 1936, he died before he could see the worst of it. But he might already have heard the worst. His death from a heart attack was brought on by a confrontation with a fascist general who drove the old professor out of his beloved university at gunpoint. The physical insult might have been bearable but the rhetoric wasn’t. “Death to intelligence!” screamed the general. “And long live Death!” The general was living proof that his two propositions were valid; especially the first one.

  Rather than reading a book in order to criticize it, I would rather criticize it because I have read it, thus paying attention to the subtle yet profound distinction Schopenhauer made between those who think in order to write and those who write because they have thought.

  —MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, Ensayos, VOL. 2, P. 1013

  ANYONE WHO HAD ever done any book reviewing will recognize the importance of the distinction Unamuno is making here. For a young writer, being asked to review books is an exciting business. Unless he is an unusually dedicated novelist with a well-organized budget—including, for preference, private means—he will find time to review a book when asked. He will also find that the time can be a dead loss: the book wasn’t worth the effort. He might write a funny piece saying so, and the funny piece might lead him into a useful sideline: but even if for the best, his career will already be distorted. Further down the line, the man of letters who draws his principal income from book reviewing will find himself wasting his main asset. His main asset is to be well read, but if he spends too much time reading secondary books only for the sake of reviewing them, he will be adding little to his initial stock of useful erudition. Worse, he will be adding much that is useless. The activity dilutes itself automatically. In any literary editor’s stable of regular contributors, the man who can be counted on
for a thousand words by Friday about absolutely anything is always the most pitiable figure. The deadly combination of facility and impecuniosity did him in. In the 1930s, in Enemies of Promise, Cyril Connolly had already codified the dangers lurking in Grub Street for the too biddable bookman.

  As often occurs, the worst case defines the ideal. Anyone faced with the deadly task of first reading, then writing about, a book he would not ordinarily have read in the first place, is brutally reminded of what he was really born to do: read books that can be felt, from page to page, to do nothing for his wallet but everything for the spirit. (At a publishing house, the best editor is always the one who physically suffers at the thought of how his daily labours are ruining his capacity to read for pleasure.) A good sign is the constantly welling urge to underline, to make notes in the margin, or to sketch a commentary in the endpapers. In the book you are reading now, almost any book mentioned has passed that test. Unamuno’s pages cry out to be defaced. One hesitates, because his books are usually very pretty physically. Invariably published by Aguilar, his early collected editions on thin paper are hard to find now. I found most of mine in two very different Spanish cities: in Madrid, where they cost a bomb in the specialist bookshops, and in Havana, where they can be found on the open-air stalls in the bookshop square. In Havana they cost little but are seldom in good shape. Buying two sets of the essay volumes, one set in each city, I was well equipped to make marks in the damaged volumes and keep the pristine ones for the bookcase. Mine were by no means the first marks Unamuno’s margins had ever received. At his potent best he could put the aphorisms one after the other like the wagons of an American freight train stretching from one prairie rail-head to the next.