Hell and Back

by Tim Parks

  Somewhere between Browning’s Caliban and Beckett’s Mol-loy, Malpelo differs from Verga’s female victims in glorying in his alienation. Physically strong despite all deprivation, he takes beatings and gives them, to man and beast. His philosophy is as brutal as it is appropriate: when you hit, hit hard enough so that you won’t be hit back. In any event you will end up like the pit donkey whose corpse the boy likes to visit, dumped in a ravine, eaten up by dogs and rats, beyond suffering. The world after death holds no secrets, no terrors, ‘because nobody who has to live alone should ever be afraid of anything’. His favourite expression in the face of any adversity is the proudly solipsistic, ‘I am Malpelo.’ This, one feels, is how Maria or Nedda would have had to become if they were to survive. They lacked Malpelo’s brutal selfishness, which in the end is no more than a grotesque escalation of the gesture the young musician made when he abandoned his shop-assistant girlfriend.

  But Malpelo does have one weakness: a residual sentiment of solidarity. A cripple is put to work beside him in the tunnels. Malpelo beats him brutally: ‘if you haven’t the spirit to defend yourself from someone who isn’t against you, you’ll let your face be stamped on by anyone.’ But he helps the boy when the work gets too much for him. And when the cripple is dying of consumption, Malpelo goes to visit him. The mother is weeping. Malpelo doesn’t understand and asks the boy why the woman is crying over someone who earns less than it costs to feed him.

  Ultimately, the pathos of Verga’s stories is not the individual suffering and death of this or that person, but the collective failure - is it Verga’s failure too? - to imagine the world as anything other than a long and ruthless power struggle. The victims see nothing unnatural in the avarice and cruelty of those who destroy them. Compassion is reduced to the dubious aesthetic experience of the engineer who hurries back from mining disaster to theatre to be able to see his favourite scene in Hamlet: Ophelia’s burial.

  Once we have established that he distrusts ideals and ideologies, considered as vehicles of hidden interests … one may wonder whether there was anything he really cared about, anything he believed in unshakeably. To which one answers that there was at least one thing he believed in: the struggle of everybody against everybody else.

  These words were written by the French anthropologist Louis Dumont. The man described is Hitler. But had Malpelo had an education he might well have written Mein Kampf. Certainly he would have made a good squadrista in Fascist Italy. Verga’s deep sense of outrage has to do with the fact that the fine sentiments of life, love and compassion intersect with reality only when art turns them into money. ‘The cheers of the triumphant drown the cries of the trampled. But seen close up, isn’t the grotesque gasping of those faces inevitably artistic to the observer?’ These frightening words were written as part of the preface to the novel I Malavoglia, then cut. They would hardly encourage sales.

  For Verga needed the money. He liked to cut a figure. In his mid-forties he was still borrowing from whoever would give him credit. So the terms of a loan would always be important to him. He never married, either a poor wife or a rich. But he was determined not to join “the Defeated’, not to be the object of a mining engineer’s aesthetic appreciation. Denied the royalties for the opera Cavalleria rusticama based on a script Verga himself adapted from his own short story, he fought a long court case and won. At last he had fame and cash together. But now the writing was going badly. He couldn’t get past the second novel of the projected five-work cycle, and though those first two, I Malavoglia, and Mastro Don Gesualdo, were to become classics of Italian literature, and are indeed rich and remarkable narratives, still the extraordinary impact of the short stories, novellas so-called, is dispersed in their huge accumulation of detail.

  Then, in his fifties, it occurred to Verga that the principles of verismo were false. It was impossible to represent reality. The whole thing was a farcical charade in which words were always manipulative. All a writer could do was to explode life’s fictions and be a fool to no man. So his last collection of published stories, Don Candeloro & Co., gives us a grotesque rereading of the earlier work where love triangles, betrayals and the rest are now seen as the merest and most cynical manoeuvrings. But Verga had been most effective when the yearning that the world not be absurd was still intact; it had reached its greatest intensity in stories like ‘Rosso Malpelo’, where the boy’s humanity, expressed in his compassion for his crippled companion, is still just there, but only as something residual, anachronistic, quite mysterious in the modern world. In ‘Don Candeloro’ compassion has finally been eliminated. It may be a relief, but the narrative loses its force. If, as Cioran maintained, cruelty is a sign of election in a writer, we now discover that it is so only when held in tension by its opposite.

  ‘Poor old Verga went and died exactly as I was going to see him in Catania, wrote Lawrence. The Sicilian was eighty-two. He had spent the last twenty years sensibly looking after the family estates in grumpy isolation, writing very little, perhaps because he could no longer find any cover for his distressing vision. Made a senator in 1920, he succumbed to a stroke in January 1922. Just nine months later, the terrifying combination he had ever described, a ruthless will to power dressed in grotesque rhetoric, stepped out onto the world stage in the stalwart form of Benito Mussolini.

  But young Malpelo perished thus: ordered to explore a labyrinth of abandoned mine shafts under the slopes of Etna, he boldly took up his father’s pick and lantern. I am Malpelo, if I don’t come back, no one will look for me.’ And no one did. Defiantly alone, he disappeared for ever, as though swallowed up at last in the dark logic of pure individualism and commercial exploitation. Needless to say, his ghost haunts.

  Voltaire’s Coconuts

  [Ian Buruma]

  As I set out to write this piece on Ian Buruma’s book Voltaire’s Coconuts Italy has just come to the end of another referendum campaign. Two general elections ago a new system of voting was introduced. Instead of the extreme form of proportional representation in force since 1948, a first-past-the-post system was introduced for 75% of the seats in the lower house, while 25% would continue to be allotted on a proportional basis. The recent referendum proposed to eliminate that 25% and base voting for the lower house entirely on the British system.

  The idea behind these changes is the same that was dear to Voltaire’s heart and that inspires the title of Buruma’s book: the notion that those institutions that have proved successful in one country, in this case Britain, might, like coconuts, be transplanted elsewhere with the same positive results. Dogged by a combination of chronically unstable governments and long-term political paralysis, the Italians hoped that by importing the British system they might also import the opposite and, as they perceive it, peculiarly British combination of stable governments coming alternately from different sides of the political spectrum.

  As yet the scheme hasn’t worked. Rather than being reduced, the number of parties has considerably increased. The pattern of unstable and shifting alliances, of governments held to ransom by small minorities in hung parliaments, has remained much as it was. The pressure for this new referendum, then, came from those who feel that this failure is due to the fact that the British system was not introduced in all its brutal extremity. The 25% of seats still handed out on a proportional basis, they claim, has been used to keep tiny parties alive and unpresentable members of the old guard in parliament. Its elimination will finally produce British results.

  Those who opposed the referendum and voted against its proposal (or in most cases did not vote at all, since without an overall 50% turnout a referendum is declared void) maintain that British stability has little to do with the British electoral system and may rather come in spite of it. The first-past-the-post system, they insist, encourages a low turnout, as those who know they can’t win in any given constituency don’t participate, and this alienates them from the democratic process. A totally British system, they conclude, could lead to serious unrest in
Italy.

  Astonishing and certainly ingenuous is the assumption, on both sides of the debate, that the results of such major changes would come sufficiently rapidly as to be perceptible after just one or two elections. For if Voltaire chose, of all plants, the coconut for his analogy of transplanting institutions, it was precisely because the coconut takes so very long to bear fruit. All the same, the lapse of time - how much time? - allows the debate to rage: are institutions universally applicable, or are they intimately related to circumstances of history and race, or to what is more vaguely referred to as ‘national character?

  In Voltaire,s Coconuts Buruma sets out to present us with the visions of a number of European intellectuals who have come to Britain over the last three centuries and reflected on its traditions and institutions. In doing so he finds himself almost obliged at some point or other to define them either as ‘universalists’ who believed in the possibility of exporting the best they found in Britain, or ‘nativists’ who either did not believe things British could be successfully exported or, perhaps more commonly, did not wish them to be so. Pierre Coubertin, founder of the modern Olympic Games, saw no reason why the ethos of the Arnoldian public school could not be profitably transported to France and indeed all over the world. The Games, for him, were to be an expression of that ethos. His ideological and anglophobe enemy, Charles Maurras, present at the first of Coubertin’s Olympics in Athens in 1896, rather than acknowledging defeat, rejoiced in the observation that ‘when different races are thrown together and made to interact, they repel one another, estranging themselves, even as they believe they are mixing’.

  Dreaming of a future Jewish homeland, Theodor Herzl charmingly imagined it as having British institutions, an English style upper class and even Jewish cricket on trim Palestinian, or indeed - did it matter? - Ugandan lawns. This was at a time when significant sections of continental Europe were engaged in identifying Jews as alien, hostile and by nature unassimilable to the German or French cultures (logically, the extreme nativist no more believes in the possibility of someone’s assimilating another culture than he does in transplanting its institutions elsewhere). The British were thus to be stigmatised for their perceived sympathy with Jewish positions. 'L'anglais est-il un Juif?' Buruma quotes one French tract as demanding in 1895. Clearly the danger of arguing against Voltaire and his optimistic universalism is that one may open the way to the merest and most obtuse racism. It is the lure of this trap that makes it so important for us to understand what we mean by national character.

  Buruma’s book is largely and unapologetically anecdotal. He introduces us to a cast of prominent Europeans from Voltaire and Goethe in the eighteenth century to Nikolaus Pevsner and Isaiah Berlin in the twentieth, with the central (and best) chapters dedicated to the revolutionaries and dreamers of the mid-nineteenth century, so many of whom were to find themselves obliged to flee to the safe if perplexingly unrevolutionary climate of London. Each character’s association with Britain is briskly sketched in, Buruma astutely pointing out that their positive or negative visions of the country can only properly be understood in relation to the circumstances they are coming from. Indeed much of the comedy he is eager to offer arises from observing how difficult it is for those who stay in Britain for any length of time to sustain a view initially prompted by a personal agenda elsewhere. Unable to publish an anti-clerical poem in France, Voltaire praises the English for their love of reason and liberty, their respect for the artist, but he will later be obliged to leave the country in a hurry after some ambiguous money transactions. Inspired by Tom Brown’s Schooldays Coubertin will need all his considerable reserves of enthusiasm to overlook the less attractive aspects of the British public schools he visits. The intellectual traveller, and even more so the refugee, lives in a constant tension between his desire to abstract what he finds abroad and use it in an argument with those back home, and the pull to engage in the society that surrounds him on its own terms. Accordingly, the long-term immigrant’s vision of his host country will very largely depend on whether he genuinely chooses to stay there, or is merely physically present while spiritually embattled abroad. One of the most touching pictures in Voltaire’s Coconuts is that of the ageing Russian revolutionary and idealist Alexander Herzen finding himself after ail not so unhappy in the mercantile and irretrievably bourgeois stability of Victorian London.

  Buruma’s sketches, for the most part in chronological order, are interspersed with complementary anecdotes about his own family - an intriguing Anglo-German-Dutch-Jewish mix - anecdotes which allow us to understand where he is coming from and why the characters he speaks of are important to him. Nothing in this personal and generally engaging approach need detract from serious consideration of the matter in hand, especially since, with the present acceleration of moves towards a united Europe, the question of national character is one that is of general, even urgent, interest. Buruma has frequently shown himself to be a formidable essayist on this subject. Yet something in the whole slant of the project seems to prevent him from giving his book real weight, or even coherence. As if writing the script for some Channel Four documentary, he appears to be more interested in popping up in prima persona at Fingal’s Cave, or Prince Ludwig’s Walhalla, or Highgate Cemetery, than in seeking to define his terms, or push his argument on.

  With regard to the debate announced by his title, Buruma’s sympathies are clearly with the universalists. He rightly criticises nativists for their tedious use of the ‘native soil’ analogy, the idea that institutions have grown naturally from the organic intertwining of race and place. It is a ploy that precludes argument and leads at best to immobility, at worst, as has been said, to racism. Conversely, he enjoys much humour, though always kind-hearted, at the expense of the wilder universalist dreamers, those who would see Tom Brown in Paris, or the aristocracy of a Jewish state sipping tea at four and being nice to the servants.

  But despite his brilliant asides and exciting intuitions - and they are many - he seeks to offer no reasoned middle ground between the two camps, even when the authors he quotes, Tocqueville and Pevsner in particular, seem to be inviting him to do so. Less forgivably, he himself has a habit of slipping into a use of national stereotypes which inevitably detracts from establishing a more sophisticated approach to the conundrum of national character. Thus of Hippolyte Taine we read: ‘In his twenties, Taine was attracted to German idealism: Hegel, Herder and so on. He grew out of that, however, and turned to more practical English ideas instead.’

  Whether the disparaging ‘grew out of is to be attributed, ironically, to Taine or, more problematically, to Buruma is unclear and perhaps unimportant. To many readers it will pass unobserved. We are in the realm of received ideas where the use of ‘national character’ amounts to no more than a hasty appeal to presumed experience and shared sentiments before the argument is hurried along elsewhere.

  A few pages later the need to define terms becomes even more urgently evident. Rightly remarking how Taine’s nativism - his refusal to believe that one country could be a model for another -allowed him to be more candid than other anglophiles about England’s shortcomings, Buruma concludes: ‘He could observe the stability of the British government and contrast it to the violent upheavals in France, but if national character was indeed the key, such observation could serve no political purpose: The world is what it is, because it grew that way, like a tree, and there is nothing much we can do to improve it.’

  Here it seems that national character is being used almost as a synonym of race - or at least as something necessarily immobile -with the implication that the universalist cannot admit the existence of a national character at all. ‘The definition of national identity,7 Buruma announces elsewhere, “is largely the project of intellectuals and artists who wish to find a role for themselves.’

  When these sweeping statements are seen together with the previous comment on German ideas - a comment that accepts not only the stereotypes regarding British and German thinking
but also the spin the British like to put on them - our author presents himself as a confirmed, even dogmatic universalist who occasionally falls into a use of nativist national stereotype, perhaps because in the end it is so attractive. Like caricature, national stereotype contains an element that is immediately recognisable or felt to be so, and again like caricature it allows for the rapid establishment of a topography - Teutonic efficiency, Anglo-Saxon pragmatism, Gallic passion - within which the various parties concerned can enjoy a sense of immediate and mutually confirming identity, together with the security, which is also the comedy, of predictability: when the Brits do this, the Krauts will undoubtedly do that and the Frogs, of course, the other. Although this oscillation between opposing positions - universal-ism, nativism - is understandable (in the way we understand perfecdy when someone says it’s only caricature, while at the same time enjoying a secret complicity in its reductive panache), it does not really help clarify the issues under discussion.

  Why has the introduction into Italy of a British inspired electoral system not given the desired results? It cannot be merely because of this or that trait in ‘the Italian character’, since, despite the popular image of the excitable, talented, unreliable Italian, the country clearly has as wide a range of personality types as any other. The expression ‘poles apart’ would seem entirely appropriate to describe such pairs as Cavour and Garibaldi, Mazzini and Victor Emanuel II, or to bring things up to date, D’Alema and Berlusconi. Thus one can no more - the reflection is obvious - be Italian (or English or French) on one’s own, than one could be human, or indeed inhuman, on one’s own, or a son without a mother.