by Clive James
But to spot that would have taken a crystal ball. There were bigger issues where all the trends were already running but you just couldn’t believe they would go on that way. My brilliant friend who had instructed the fleet to turn back gave up writing about British politics. Another brilliant friend still wrote about British politics but now did it from America. With Reagan and Thatcher triumphant, everything was blamed on their unscrupulous populism. No other reason than public gullibility could be adduced for their success. It had not yet become fully clear that the real reason for the success of the Right was the collapse of the Left. Throughout the West, the dream of the socialist state was already well embarked on its long day’s dying, but you had to be a cynic to believe it.
In the East you had to be a fanatic to believe anything else, and the really big news of the year was precisely that – they were running out of fanatics. The most tremendous event of the year was the one that didn’t happen. Lech Walesa was allowed to live. Jaruzelski locked him up but didn’t kill him. Brezhnev checked out, Andropov checked in, and still the Russians let the Poles get away with it. In December, Walesa walked free. The Soviet tanks didn’t come. The will to rule by terror was gone. With that gone, the whole thing was doomed. Looking back from now, it is easy to see how everything followed from that one non-event. Looking forward from then, we didn’t dare even guess. Full of happenings, it would have been a big year anyway. But what made it the biggest year of the late twentieth century was something that didn’t happen at all.
From Picador’s 21st Birthday Anthology, 1993
DESTINATION EUROPE
To introduce a special issue on the subject, the New Yorker asked me to sum up the history of Europe in a thousand words. For my next trick, I will run a mile in four seconds.
Suppose the world were an animal curled up into a ball, like a threatened armadillo, and you wanted to blow its brains out: the best way to do so would be to put the barrel of your gun against Europe and pull the trigger. The United States might be nettled by this dubious favouritism; in the century now waning, it has been called upon to save Europe from itself twice – three times if you count Stalin’s opportunistic incursion. But even the United States would have to admit, if pressed, that it is itself a largely European creation, a giant offshoot of the most productive piece of geography in the planet’s history. Behind that admission would be a tacit acknowledgment that, although America may have the power, the energy, and most of the money, Europe has the pedigree. As David Copperfield (the Broadway illusionist, not the Dickens character) is reported to have said to Claudia Schiffer while they were touring the Louvre and reading the dates on the paintings, ‘Talk about your old!’
As a word, Europe goes back a long way: Assyrian inscriptions speak of the difference between asu (where the sun rises; i.e. Asia) and ereb (where it sets). As a place, Europe is old even by the standards of dynastic China and Pharaonic Egypt. As an idea, though, Europe is comparatively new: the word European didn’t turn up in the language of diplomacy until the nineteenth century, and to think of Europe as one place had always taken some kind of supervening vision. Whatever unity existed within it came not through a unifying idea but through the exercise of power, and did not last.
The Pax Romana prevailed for more than two centuries: it left us the Latin language and all its rich derivatives, and it left us the law – and slavery, and militarism. Dante spent the best years of his life in exile: a member of a political faction, he was exiled from his beloved Florence not by another faction but by another faction of the same faction. The university system pioneered the notion of intellectual unity, but intellectual was all that it was. Erasmus the wandering scholar was at home everywhere he went in Europe, but his wanderings were forced on him, and his humanism would have died young if he had been caught napping where the knives were out. The Church united Europe in the one faith – Christendom is a peaceful-sounding word – but finally the faith itself split. Nothing could stop the rise of the nation-states, or stop them from fighting once they had arisen. And those states whose destiny it was to fight one another had been forged from fiefdoms and principalities that had warred upon one another, from walled cities that had laid siege to one another, and from fortified hill towns that had laid siege to one another for the valleys in between. The colossal efforts of Charlemagne, Louis XIV and Napoleon – though they gave us, respectively, the restoration of learning, the apex of the comfortable arts, and the crucial new reality of the career open to the talents – all depended on military might. Kaiser Wilhelm II’s similar dreams seem more explicitly violent only in having left behind little that was constructive; and Hitler’s demented venture, though it united an unprecedentedly large proportion of Europe, left nothing in its wake – nothing except destruction, and this: the idea of European unity stopped being an intoxicating vision and started being a mundane necessity.
The centrifugal effect of the Nazi regime in Germany scattered the best brains of Europe all over the planet. Exiled to faraway New Zealand, the philosopher Karl Popper developed his argument that there could be no such thing as universal fixes – that the most that society could or should hope to do was to correct specific abuses. This perception surely applies to a united Europe: speculation about what utopian goals it might achieve counts for little beside a firm grasp of what it sets out to avoid – any recurrence of the internecine conflict that was already ancient when Athens fought Sparta and that reached its hideous apotheosis in the Second World War. In the middle of the twentieth century, it had become plain for all to see that Europe’s glories – justly renowned even when they had to be rebuilt stone by stone – were merely its structure. Beneath them was the infrastructure – a network of burial mounds linked by battlefields – and it stank of blood. Hegel said that history was the story of liberty becoming conscious of itself. European history has culminated – at last, and in our time – with Europe becoming frightened of itself.
As happens so frequently in human affairs, fear has accomplished what neither reason nor culture ever could. Cultural unity was no illusion – had it been one, Hitler would not have been so eager to dispel it – but cultural unity had not been enough. When the musicians played for Mengele in Auschwitz, it did not mean that art and civilization added up to nothing, but it did mean that they did not add up to everything. Beside the broken bodies of the tortured innocent, the life of the mind was felt to be irrelevant – as, indeed, in any forced comparison it is.
To make sure that no such forced comparison happens again is the task in hand. It is not an easy one. In place of the conquerors’ fevered dream of a Europe united by the sword, the peaceful commercial republics of the New Europe make do with such cultural manifestations as the Eurovision Song Contest – a kitschy classic that every year draws a huge television audience, whose more sophisticated members amuse each other with jokes about how dumb it is. The jokes keep changing. For years, Norway’s songs reliably lost (‘Norvège . . . nul points’); then they started winning. More recently, much derisive hilarity has attended the earnest efforts of Turkey. Between laughs, though, the less sophisticated but more thoughtful viewers should take heart: there was a time when the Turks stood at the gates of Vienna and bristled with the armed intention of getting into Europe by less tuneful means.
What the snobs are really afraid of is a United States of Europe that mirrors what they imagine the United States of America to be: an agglomerate dissolved into homogeneity, a consumer society consumed by mediocrity, or, at best, a mindless mimicry of Euro-savvy in which a dauntingly exact copy of Michelangelo’s David presides over Forest Lawn’s departed Angelenos and an actual-size Parthenon wows visitors to Nashville. But they are wrong about America, which is more than that; and they are wrong about the New Europe, which, as the millennium looms, bids fair to attain a last, unprecedented, and very welcome greatness, through a just peace. Talk about your new!
New Yorker, 28 April and 5 May, 1997
A VOICE IS BORN
; If you love music, you can’t be tone-deaf: the only reason you can’t hold a tune is that you haven’t got the notes. More than a year ago, this was one of the first things my singing teacher Ian Adam said to me when I edged through his door like a dental patient. Ian Adam is famous within the showbiz world for his ability to turn actors into singers so that they can star in musicals and thus do what actors like to do best – stunningly reveal a hitherto unsuspected talent. Ian’s lack of fame outside the showbiz world is due not just to his innate modesty, but to the touching reluctance of the stars in question to concede that the hitherto unsuspected talent was ever less than fully formed. Yet almost invariably the talent was scarcely there to be suspected before Ian Adam helped them reveal it, or – in the majority of cases, but let’s keep that a secret – supplied it in its entirety.
The latter is certainly what he is doing for me. I was never an actor, but still less was I ever a singer. In the forty-five years between the demoralizing month in which my once pure alto voice broke and the blessed day I slunk up to his door in South Kensington, there was hardly a tune I could carry, with the possible exceptions of the first phrase of ‘Che gelida manina’ (all on the one note) and selected fragments of Cole Porter’s ‘True Love’ (written specifically for Grace Kelly after it was discovered that she had the vocal range of a mouse trapped under a cushion). I couldn’t even sing ‘Happy Birthday’ successfully. With the arrogant humility of the wounded animal, this was the first thing I confessed to my new mentor, and he began the necessary soothing process by saying he was not surprised: ‘Happy Birthday’ is actually quite hard – something about the interval leading up to ‘birthday’ in the third line being impossible to manage if you haven’t got the notes in between. ‘But that’s why you’re here, dear boy. Now let’s breathe.’ And he started showing me how to breathe.
Learning how to breathe was the nominal reason for my attendance. I had been told by several musical people that some singing training might help stave off a problem with my speaking voice which was starting to show up with advancing age. When I go to market in television, my speaking voice is the only thing I’ve got to sell. Nobody stays tuned for the bewitching symmetry of my features: if I can’t address the audience in my trademark effortless drone, I’m a dead duck, and I had begun to notice that after a two-day studio rehearsal for a big show, when I got to the taping session on the second evening I was a bit short of puff, and hoarseness threatened. A hoarse effortless drone could be a switch-off.
Having been assured that the antidote lay in diaphragm breathing, and that this was something only a singing teacher could teach, I fronted up for the cure, and in no time started feeling the benefits of breathing deeply for the first time in my life. The secret is to get all the air out by pulling your diaphragm in, and then, by letting your diaphragm out, filling your lungs entirely with brand-new air. If you breathe with only your chest, the way most of us do all the time, you’re running on just the top half of a fuel tank, and the bottom half might as well contain marsh gas. The technique is soon learned, although it takes years, starting young, to master it completely. (Any of those three tenors can take on a full load with a single twitch and you won’t even see it happen unless you’re ogling his abdomen instead of the soprano’s cleavage.) But you don’t have to be that good. After your first week of proper breathing, your teacher has already established the basis on which he can start cleaning up the mess you made of your singing voice after it broke. Women don’t have the same problem, but they, too, have to learn to breathe properly if they want to add a few soaring notes above the squeak they always thought they were stuck with, and the main reason they squeak is that there isn’t any air coming out, because they haven’t taken any in.
You will have guessed already that behind the nominal reason there was a real reason. Wanting to be Jussi Björling or Giuseppe di Stefano and sing all those wonderful arias into the adoring face of Victoria de los Angeles or Maria Callas – that was a dream. But just wanting to sing a pretty popular song – that seemed a real, legitimate possibility, except that it was impossible, seductively near yet cruelly out of reach. After four bars of my ‘Strangers In The Night’ strangers were talking about noise pollution. And now here was this kind gentleman telling me it didn’t have to be like that. Yes, I would be able to sing those golden standards and even a few carefully selected arias too. But first I had to realize the crucial importance of the magic word ‘support’. He pointed to my nether regions. The focus of the whole business, he explained, is not up there in the head and throat, but down there behind the scrotum. With singing, the standard military exhortation in times of danger applies in all cases: you have to keep a tight arsehole. The only tension should be in your tripes, not in your gullet. Try to sing exclusively from the throat and you’ll bust a gut.
Clenching the fundament as you expel your full tank of clean air upwards over the vocal chords, you support the voice. That way, the few notes you’ve already got won’t crack or slide about, and you are creating the opportunity to add new ones on top of them. The initial work of augmentation is done through vocal exercises. Ian has perfected a set of these which are niftily designed to circumvent your perennial expectations of failure by springing on you by surprise the missing note he has decided you are just about ready to hit. When you first hit it, it sounds lousy, but this is the precise point where he reveals himself as a master psychologist. Well aware that a honking klutz like me dreams of unfurling shimmering skeins of melisma in the upper register like Tito Schipa, he knows that the main psychological inhibition is the fear of sounding less than perfect. He convinces you that when you hit the note in any form, however horrendous, the job is already done.
The rest is just the mechanical work of lifting the roof of the mouth, keeping the lower jaw back, hoiking it up at the sides, flattening the back of the tongue, maintaining the support, and so on ad seemingly infinitum. Just all that, but lesson by lesson you can hear the new note sounding more natural. Flatteringly – and, wonder of wonders, believably – he assures you that it sounds far less forced than any notes you’ve already got. Meanwhile he is already helping you build the next note up the scale. Again it starts off sounding like an alley cat in a trouser-press, but week by week that dreadful noise is climbing higher and higher, the new notes underneath it are becoming usefully available, and the repertoire of melodies that remain recognizable, even while you murder them, is steadily increasing.
Of Ian’s psychological strokes, the masterstroke is to slake your clandestine ambitions by giving you a few of your so-long-dreamed-of chansons and arias right from the jump, so you can take something home to sing in the bathroom. (If the bathroom door starts caving in under protest, you can always test your new stuff out in a deserted park on a rainy day.) Knowing by heart every decent melody that has ever been written in any genre, he knows exactly which ones to pick that will fit your burgeoning range without straining it too much at the top. (It doesn’t hurt to strain it a little, just to go on reminding yourself that there’s a note up there you can soon have, as long as you remember that it can’t be had by wishing, only by work.)
After the first few weeks I was making something better than a cry for help out of Donaudy’s pretty lament, ‘O del mio amato ben’, and in less than three months I could hit all the notes of Fauré’s gorgeous ‘En Prière’, even if most of them were sans overtone and the desired legato line showed a few rough welds at the joints. Best of all, inside four months I had my first aria, ‘Prendi l’anel ti dono’, a surefire showstopper from Sonnambula. Sounding challenging enough to chill the blood, but in fact far more easily negotiated than ‘Dancing in the Dark’, it was cunningly designed by Bellini so that the tenor, with minimum effort and maximum parade of daring, could bring the house down. All I brought down with it was the bathroom, but I was singing an aria!
But, as Ian kept on patiently explaining, it’s seldom the tessitura that makes things tricky: more often it’s the intervals. A lot of good st
uff is written entirely within the stave, but a song can demand only a narrow range and still flummox you by the jumps you can’t make from one note to the next without grinding to a halt, consulting your mental tuning fork, and starting again. While never precisely forbidding the project, he pointed out that my self-assigned task of getting on top of the ‘Flower Song’ from Carmen was asking for trouble. After one unsolicited hearing he pinpointed where the trouble was, but didn’t tell me until I figured it out for myself. My own candidate for the most ravishing of all tenor arias, a love-letter to enslave Circe, the ‘Flower Song’ is a relative doddle throughout except for a vicious booby-trap in the seventh line: in ‘De cette odeur je m’enivrais’, the interval between the two last syllables is a killer. I went on killing myself with it in private for about six months before he told me the cruel truth. I was trying to sing the consonants ‘vr’ instead of the vowel ‘ais’. When he got me to sing the syllable without the consonants I could hit it with ease. ‘Practise that for a while, dear boy, and you can fudge the consonants in later. It’s admirable how much you care for the words – you really are amazingly sensitive to language, it’s a privilege to hear you speak on the television, so articulate – but if you try to pronounce the consonants too accurately when you’re singing you’ll have trouble jacking your gob open to do the vowel. We have to be a bit ruthless.’