by Gore Vidal
Moro was kidnapped by a mysterious entity known as the Red Brigades. Whoever they were or are, their rhetoric is Marxist. If Italy was shocked by the Moro kidnapping, the intellectuals were traumatized. Since Italy’s intellectuals are, almost to a man, Marxists, this was the moment of truth. Moro was the leader of the party that serves the Agnellis, the Pope, and the American (somewhat fractured) hegemony. If the leader of this party is really being tried by a truly revolutionary Marxist court, well….Although any communist party is a party of revolution, the Italian party long ago dropped its “to the barricades” rhetoric, preferring to come to power through the ballot box. Until the Moro affair, the Communist Party was prospering. In the previous election they had got well over their usual 30 percent of the vote and it looked as if a coalition government was possible. Christ and Marx were, if not at the altar, getting their prenuptial blood tests. But, suddenly, prenuptial blood tests turned to bloodletting. Why, asked a number of political commentators, are the intellectuals silent?
Eventually, Italy’s premier man of letters, Alberto Moravia, admitted to a feeling of “sorrowing extraneousness” while the young Turks at Lotta Continua (a radical newspaper of the left) proclaimed: “Neither Red Brigades nor the state.” But the real polemic began when it came time to try a number of Red Brigadeers in Turin. So many potential jurors received death threats that sixteen refused to serve. When Eugenio Montale said that he “understood” their fear, Italo Calvino took him to task. “The state,” said Calvino, “is all of us.” Calvino chose to cling to what Taoists call “the primal unity.” So did the Communist Party. Contemptuous of Montale’s unease, the Communist leader Giorgio Amendola declared: “Civil courage has never been in great supply among Italian intellectuals.”
With that Sciascia went into action. “I intervened,” he said later, “because of Calvino’s article, in which he expressed embarrassment and concern when Montale said that he ‘understood’ the sixteen citizens of Turin who refused to be jurors. I felt that I ought to contribute to the debate: I, too, understood the sixteen citizens, just as I understood Montale…even I might have declined the honor and the burden of being a juror. What guarantee, I asked, does this state offer when it comes to the protection of those citizens who put themselves at risk by becoming jurors? What guarantee against theft, abuse of power, injustice? None. The impunity that covers crimes committed against the general public and the general good was worthy of a South American regime.” As for the Red Brigades: “All my life, everything that I’ve thought and written makes it clear that I cannot take the side of the Red Brigades.”
Sciascia then turned on Amendola. “For him the state must be a sort of mythical and metaphysical entity….” Sciascia’s own view of the state is less exalted: a state is a system of well-coordinated services. “But when those services are inadequate or lacking then one must repair them or make something new. If this is not done, then one is defending nothing but corruption and inefficiency under the pretext that one is defending the state.” As for Amendola (and, presumably, the Communist Party), he “was simply animated by the desire for an authoritarian state…and from a visceral aversion to non-conforming writers.”
Ultimately, Sciascia has taken the line that “the Italian Communist Party has become a precise mirror-image of the Christian Democrat Party.” Consequently, “one can only make two hypotheses: either the Communist Party has not the capacity to make a valid opposition, and Italians have credited the party with qualities that it never had, or the Italian party is playing the game ‘the worse things are the better’ or ‘to function least is to function best.’…These two parties seem to be intertwined and interchangeable not only in their existence today but in their future.”
Now, in 1979, Sciascia has moved toward new perceptions if not, necessarily, realities. To the statement, “We cannot not be socialist” (the famous paraphrase of Croce’s “we cannot not be Christians”), he replies that things have changed as “it is plain that, at the level of collective humanity, socialism has known failures even more serious than those of Christianity.” For Italian intellectuals of Sciascia’s generation, this is a formidable heresy. But he goes even further. Contemplating those who speak of Marxism with a human face, he responds, “I respect their position, but I retain the idea that ‘an authentic Marxism’ is a utopia within a utopia, a dream, an illusion.” Nevertheless, he cannot be anti-communist. This is the dilemma that faces any Italian who takes politics seriously. To the question: what would you like to see happen next? Sciascia replied, perhaps too simply, “The creation of a social democratic party.” But then, less simply, he acted upon his own words, and stood for parliament in the Radical Party interest. Like a growing number of Italians, Sciascia finds appealing a party which compensates for its lack of ideology with all sorts of ideas. In the last election, the party tripled its vote.
Although the Radical Party stands for such specific things as liberalized laws on abortion, divorce, drugs, sex, as well as the cleaning up of the environment and the removal of Italy from NATO (something the Communist Party has not mentioned since 1976), the party is constantly being denounced for representing nothing at all. But then, for most Italians, a political party is never a specific program, it is a flag, a liturgy, the sound of a trombone practicing in the night.
“Remember,” Sciascia said to Marcelle Padovani, “what Malraux said of Faulkner? ‘He has managed to intrude Greek tragedy into the detective story.’ It might be said of me that I have brought Pirandellian drama to the detective story!” Often disguised as detective stories, Sciascia’s novels are also highly political in a way quite unlike anything that has ever been done in English. While the American writer searches solemnly for his identity, Sciascia is on the trail of a murderer who, invariably, turns out to be not so much a specific character as a social system. That Mafia, which Americans find so exciting and even admirable, is for Sciascia the evil consequence of a long bad history, presided over by The Kindly Ones. Whenever (as in Il Giorno della Civetta, 1961)*2 one of Sciascia’s believers in justice confronts the Mafia (which everyone says—in the best Pirandellian manner—does not exist), he is not only defeated, but, worse, he is never understood. Particularly if, like Captain Bellodi from Parma, he regards “the authority vested in him as a surgeon regards the knife: an instrument to be used with care, precision, and certainty; a man convinced that law rests on the idea of justice and that any action taken by the law should be governed by justice.” Captain Bellodi was not a success in Sicily.
A decade later, in Il Contesto,*3 Sciascia again concerns himself with justice. But now he has moved toward a kind of surrealism. Sometimes the country he writes about is Italy; sometimes not. A man has gone to prison for a crime that he did not commit. When he gets out of prison, he decides to kill off the country’s judges. When Inspector Rogas tries to track down the killer, he himself is murdered. In a splendid dialogue with the country’s Chief Justice, Inspector Rogas is told that “the only possible form of justice, of the administration of justice, could be, and will be, the form that in a military war is called decimation. One man answers for humanity. And humanity answers for the one man.”
Although moral anarchy is at the basis of this ancient society, Sciascia himself has by no means given up. The epigraphs to Il Contesto are very much to the point. First, there is a quotation from Montaigne: “One must do as the animals do, who erase every footprint in front of their lair.” Then a response from Rousseau: “O Montaigne! You who pride yourself on your candor and truthfulness, be sincere and truthful, if a philosopher can be so, and tell me whether there exists on earth a country where it is a crime to keep one’s given word and to be clement and generous, where the good man is despised and the wicked man honored.” Sciascia then quotes Anonymous: “O Rousseau!” One has a pretty good idea who this particular Anonymous is.
It is Sciascia’s self-appointed task to erase the accumulated footprints (history) in front of the animal’
s lair (Sicily, Italy, the world). The fact that he cannot undo the remembered past has not prevented him from making works of art or from introducing a healthy skepticism into the sterile and abstract political discourse of his country. No other Italian writer has said, quite so bluntly, that the historic compromise would lead to “a regime in which, finally and enduringly, the two major parties would be joined in a unified management of power to the preclusion of all alternatives and all opposition. Finally, the Italians would be tranquil, irresponsible, no longer forced to think, to evaluate, to choose.”
Rather surprisingly, Sciascia seems not to have figured out what the historic compromise ultimately signifies. When he does, he will realize that Italy’s two great unloved political parties are simply the flitting shadows of two larger entities. As any Voltairean knows, the Vatican and the Kremlin have more in common than either has with the idea of a free society. Once each realizes that the other is indeed its logical mate, Sciascia will be able to write his last detective story, in which the murder will be done with mirrors. Meanwhile, he continues to give us all sorts of clues; reminds us that criminals are still at large; demonstrates that life goes on todo modo.
The New York Review of Books
OCTOBER 25, 1979
*1 This was said in an interview given to Il Messaggero. All other quotations—not from his books—are taken from a series of conversations that Sciascia had with the journalist Marcelle Padovani and collected in a volume called La Sicilia come metafora (Mondadori, 1979). The un-beautiful English translations are by me.
*2 Published by Knopf in 1964 as Mafia Vendetta.
*3 Published by Harper & Row in 1973 as Equal Danger.
V.S. Pritchett as “Critic”
Thirty-three years ago in a preface to The Living Novel, V. S. Pritchett described how it was that he came to be the “critic” that he is. I put quotes around the word critic because that is what he himself does when, with characteristic modesty, he tells us how he stopped writing novels and short stories during World War II and turned to criticism. “Without leisure or freedom to write what I wanted, I could at least read what I wanted, and I turned to those most remarkable men and women: the great novelists of the past, those who are called the standard novelists.” As he read, he made notes. These notes or reports or reviews were first published in the New Statesman and Nation; then collected in The Living Novel. Since 1946 he has continued to report regularly on his reading, and The Myth Makers is his latest collection of literary essays.
It is interesting to read what Pritchett had to say in 1946 about the impression made on him by “what are called the Standard Novelists [who] have the set air of an officially appointed committee. We had fallen into the error of believing that they were written for critics, for literary historians, for students or for leisured persons of academic tastes; and people who read only the best authors usually let one know it. We had easily forgotten that the masters, great and small, remembered or neglected, were the freshest, the most original, the most importunate and living novelists of their time; that they stood above their contemporaries and survived them, because they were more readable, more entertaining, more suggestive and incomparably more able than the common run of novelist.”
There are certain truths so true that they are practically unbelievable.
“We have only to glance,” Pritchett continues, “at the second-rate novelists to see how they differ in this sense [of contemporaneity] from the masters. The second-rate are rarely of their time. They are not on the tip of the wave. They are born out of date and out of touch and are rooted not in life but in literary convention.”
One thinks of all those busy teachers of English whose spare time is devoted to re-creating yet another version of dead Finnegan and his long-since celebrated wake; or of the really ambitious teacher-writer who wants so much for literature to achieve the pure heights of music (an aside, by the way, not a goal of Joyce); or of the would-be master of the two cultures who wants to encompass within a construct of narrative prose all the known laws, let us say, of thermodynamics. Our universities are positively humming with the sound of fools rushing in. The odd angel bleakly hovers; casts no shadow.
During the last third of a century, V. S. Pritchett has continued to be the best English-language critic of…well, the living novel. How does he do it? And what is it that he does? To begin with, unlike most critics, Pritchett is himself a maker of literature. He is a marvelous short-story writer; if he is less successful as a novelist, it is because, perhaps, he lacks “the novelist’s vegetative temperament,” as he remarks of Chekhov.
At work on a text, Pritchett is rather like one of those amorphic sea-creatures who float from bright complicated shell to shell. Once at home within the shell, he is able to describe for us in precise detail the secrets of the shell’s interior; and he is able to show us, from the maker’s own angle, the world the maker saw.
Of Dostoevsky: “Life stories of endless complexity hang shamelessly out of the mouths of his characters, like dogs’ tongues, as they run by; the awful gregariousness of his people appears simultaneously with the claustrophobia and the manias of their solitude.” Plainly, Pritchett’s negative capability is well developed. He has a remarkable affinity for writers entirely different from that tradition of comic irony which has produced most of the best of English literature—including his own—and quite a lot of the bad. It is eerie to observe with what ease Pritchett occupies the shell of a writer who “is a sculptor of molten figures….If anyone took up alienation as a profession it was [Dostoevsky].” Finally, “Dostoevsky’s style: it is a talking style in which his own voice and the voices of all his characters are heard creating themselves, as if all were narrators without knowing it.”
The first job of a critic is to describe what he has read. This is a lot more difficult than one might suspect. I have often thought that one of the reasons why there have been so few good American literary critics is that those Americans who do read books tend to be obsessed with the personality of the author under review. The politics, sex, class of the author are all-important while the book at hand is simply an excuse to discuss, say, the anti-Semitism of Pound, the homosexuality of Whitman, the social climbing of James. Since the American character is essentially tendentious and sectarian, the American critic must decide in advance whether or not the writer he is writing about is a Good Person; that is, one who accepts implicitly all the going superstitions (a.k.a. values [sic]) of the middle class of the day. If the writer is a GP, then what he writes is apt to be good. If he is a BP, forget it.
In the Forties, the New Critics faced up to this national tendency and for a time their concentration on the text qua text provided a counterweight. But these paladins of the word have long since faded away, and the character of the United Statesman seems immutable. Or as the founder of The Nation put it more than a century ago: “The great mischief has always been that whenever our reviewers deviate from the usual and popular course of panegyric, they start from and end in personality, so that the public mind is almost sure to connect unfavorable criticism with personal animosity.” Today, our critics either moralize ad hominem or, most chillingly (an “advance” since Godkin’s time), pretend that the art of literature is one of the physical sciences and so in desperate need of neologisms, diagrams, laws.
The personality of a writer obviously has some relevance to what he writes, particularly if he is dead and the life has been publicly examined. But it takes great tact to know how to use gossip. Pritchett seldom loses sight of the fact that he is writing about writing, and not about writers at home. In a review of a life of Tolstoy, he observes, “Like the Lawrences and the Carlyles, the Tolstoys were the professionals of marriage; they knew they were not in it for their good or happiness, that the relationship was an appointed ordeal, an obsession undertaken by dedicated heavyweights.” This is personal; this is relevant…at least when discussing a book about the life of a major nove
list. Pritchett rarely judges a living writer whose character cannot be known for certain, as opposed to his literary persona, which is fair game.
Pritchett’s only American lapse occurs in his discussion of Jean Genet, a writer whose luminous stupidity put Sartre in mind of the saints. Pritchett remarks that the brilliance of Genet’s prose is often undone by the “sudden descents into banal reflection and in overall pretentiousness” while “the lack of charity is an appalling defect and one rebels against the claustrophobia.” But then he remarks that “there are scarcely any women in Genet’s novels and although this is due to his homosexuality, which is passive and feminine, it has an obvious root in his rage at being abandoned by his mother, who was a prostitute.”
We don’t know what either “passive” or “feminine” means in this context. As for “obvious root,” is it so obvious? And why bad-mouth poor old Mrs. Genet? No guesswork about living writers unless they decide to tell all; in which case, caveat lector.
In The Myth Makers, Pritchett deals with nineteen writers entirely outside the Anglo-American tradition: seven Russians, five French, five writers of Spanish or Portuguese, Strindberg and Kafka. In other words, Pritchett has removed himself from ancestral ground. Although he is as familiar with French literature as he is with English (in this he very much resembles another Tory critic, the splendid, no longer read George Saintsbury), it must have been a considerable stretch for him to deal with the likes of Eça de Queiroz. If it was, he shows no strain.