Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  Unable to believe in either the incarnation or the resurrection, Muggeridge can only loosely be described as a Christian himself, yet except in a cantankerously paradoxical mood he would probably be ready to admit that he is fairly civilized. The question of how he got that way would have given him pause long ago if he had ever been any good at self-examination, but the evidence suggests that he can contemplate his navel endlessly without drawing much enlightenment from it. He can read God’s mind better than he can read his own. He knows that God regards things like contraception and legal abortion as gross interference. Muggeridge, it will be remembered, could tell which women were on the Pill by the dead look in their eyes. Those nineteenth-century women who had a baby every year until they were worn out doubtless had a dead look in their eyes too, but Muggeridge was not around to see it. Nor has he ever been able to grasp that the alternative to legal abortion is not Christian chastity or even the edifying responsibility of bringing up an illegitimate child. The alternative to legal abortion is illegal abortion. Contraception and legal abortion were brought in to help eradicate manifest injustices. They might have created other injustices on their own account, which leaves us with the not unfamiliar problem of how to stem the excesses that arise from freedom, but only a fool would have expected life to grow less complicated just because fate had been made less capricious.

  Dealing in the millennium, Muggeridge never feels obliged to admit that for mankind there is no natural order to go back to, and never has been. Human beings have been interfering with nature since the cave. That’s how they got out of it in the first place. Most religions of any sophistication find some way of attributing humanity’s meddlesome knack of creativity to a divine impulse, but Muggeridge would rather preach hellfire than allow God the right to move in such mysterious ways. While reading Professor Hunter’s book I also happened to be renewing my acquaintance with Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, and was often struck by the superiority not just of Darwin’s intellect but of his religious sense. Humbled but not frightened by nature’s indifference to our fate, Darwin still marvels at the way purpose works itself out through chance – as if it were trying to discover itself. With due allowance for scale, if our wish is to contemplate reality while staying sane at the same time, then we probably do best to follow Darwin’s example and look for harmony outside ourselves. If there is a divine purpose, then our attempts at understanding are perhaps part of it and might even be its most refined expression, but the universe cares little for us as a species and nothing for us as individuals. That much is entirely up to us. Some people will always find this an inspiring thought. Others it will reduce to despair. Muggeridge is plainly among the latter.

  These things come down to personal psychology in the end, which means that they are the opposite of simple. One gains little by objecting to a man’s mental condition if his mental condition is what gives him his worth. But Muggeridge’s career would have been worth more had he not set his hopes on being vouchsafed an Answer. Muggeridge’s real quarrel is not with the modern age but with his creator. For all the looseness of its formulation, his concept of the supreme being is painfully narrow. God is not allowed much dignity. When invoked, he seems to resemble a less tormented version of Muggeridge, whose torment arose in the first place from an incompatibility between his spiritual pretensions and the physical material they had been given to work with. ‘Fornication,’ Professor Hunter quotes Muggeridge, ‘I love it so.’ Muggeridge struggled heroically, if unsuccessfully, with his baser desires, but apparently without ever quite seeing the joke. There is no point in being shocked that God gave healthy male human beings ten times more lust than they can use. He did the same to healthy male fiddler crabs. He’s a deity, not a dietitian.

  Muggeridge’s seriousness is incomplete. In God’s name he is able to react against a popular fallacy, but he can never give the Devil his due. The result is that he is not even good at attacking a specific abuse. He is concerned but irresponsible. ‘Shadows, oh shadows.’ Thus Muggeridge on the subject of other people. America is full of people ‘aimlessly drifting’. Most people look as if they are aimlessly drifting if you don’t know what their aims are. Muggeridge rarely stops to find out. In his later phase he has been heard to contend that whereas the West leads nowhere, the Soviet Union might at least lead somewhere. ‘The future is being shaped there, not in the lush pastures of the welfare state.’ What does he think the Soviet Union has that the West hasn’t, apart from a certain neatness? Perhaps he means belief. But what kind of belief? He can’t even remember his own lessons. And if he means that the repressed learn the value of life, surely he underestimates how much they would like to be excused their schooling.

  If you are talking to aimless drifting shadows you can say anything. Muggeridge canes television for its superficiality but he never seemed to mind being superficial when he appeared on it. ‘Television,’ opines Professor Hunter, ‘a medium that inevitably takes first prize in the fantasy stakes.’ On the contrary, the television personality who condescends to his audience soon unmasks himself. Despite his undoubted and much-missed willingness to say irritating things, Muggeridge stood revealed on television as someone who would rather make a splash with a bogus epigram than worry at the truth. Remorse struck only to the extent of making him blame the medium for his own histrionics. Similarly he never drew the appropriate conclusions from the fact that a good number of those old Manchester Guardian leading articles about moderate men and wiser counsels had been written by himself. ‘Already I find leader writing infinitely wearisome,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but it is easy money, and the great thing to do is just not worry about it.’ Times were hard and Muggeridge had every excuse to do what paid the bills. It is even possible to imagine George Orwell doing the same – but not to imagine him not worrying about it, or regarding such an injunction as good advice. No real writer can think of his writing as something separated from his essential being. It shouldn’t be necessary to state such an obvious truth, but when dealing with Muggeridge you find your values sliding: you have to spell things out for yourself. Like many people who have lost their innocence, he can make you feel stupid for wanting to be elementary. Yet without a firm grasp of the elementary there can be no real subtlety. When Muggeridge tries to make a resonant remark the facts don’t fit it.

  Muggeridge forgives himself for doing second-rate work in the press and television by calling them second-rate media. This self-exculpatory technique has been found to come in handy by those of his acolytes grouped around Private Eye. Already absolved from trying too hard by a public school ethos which exalts gentlemen above players, the Private Eye writers are glad to have it on Muggeridge’s authority that if a thing is not worth doing then it is not worth doing well. Recently I found myself being praised by Richard Ingrams for my radio quiz performances, which evinced, he said, a properly contemptuous attitude for the job. I have no such attitude, but I have no doubt that Ingrams, despite his notoriously eager availability for such assignments, has. He burns to be on the air and yet he despises the whole business. The conflict would be hard to live with if Muggeridge had not already provided so conspicuous an example of how to become a household name while expressing the utmost contempt for the means by which one attains such a position.

  Nevertheless Muggeridge deserves praise for having, while on television, been himself, even if that self is so shot through with falsity. At least he resisted the usual pressure to wheel out a mechanical persona. If he camped it up, he did so in his own manner. As a prose stylist he also deserves some praise, although not quite as much as the doting Professor Hunter thinks. Muggeridge has always overworked the trick of biblical pastiche. Hacks think him a good writer because he writes a refined version of what they write. Nor have his jokes been all that funny. There is some wit to be attained through knowingness but not as much as through self-knowledge. The human comedy begins in the soul but for Muggeridge it begins somewhere outside. In this he is like his mentors Kingsmill and Pearso
n, just as his Private Eye disciples are like him. ‘Laughter belongs to the individual, not to the herd,’ Professor Hunter explains, ‘and is therefore repugnant to the herd and to those whose concern is the welfare of the herd.’ But there is no such thing as the herd. There are only people, and until we have made some effort to prove the contrary it is usually wiser to assume that they are like us.

  People who will say anything are often the victims of diminished self-esteem, but Muggeridge suffers from the opposite condition. He is stuck on himself. It isn’t all that easy to see why. He is, after all, only a literary journalist. Even his obviously heartfelt admiration for Mother Teresa of Calcutta has its component of arrogance. Mother Teresa cares for those who suffer, which fits Muggeridge’s idea of God’s plan for the world. He would find it hard to express the same admiration for, say, Jonas Salk. Indeed he would probably regard immunization as part of the modernizing process which has led the herd astray. Yet when you think of what polio can do, to forestall such pain seems no lesser an act of mercy than to care for the dying. Preventive medicine is surely a development that the modern age has a right to be proud of, even in the light of some of its unintended consequences.

  From the law of unintended consequences no human activity is exempt, not even holiness. Muggeridge has consistently belittled many original people who have brought lasting benefits to mankind. He has been helped in this by the fact that the benefits have brought liabilities in their turn. But benefits always bring liabilities. Christianity is a clear enough proof of that.

  Original people do great things. Ordinary people do the world’s work. Both kinds of people are apt to lose track of what their efforts add up to. The news they make needs to be made sense of as it happens. If the literary journalist thinks himself too grand to do that, he is unlikely to be much good for anything. The literary journalist keeps faith with himself by saying what is so and betrays himself by saying anything less, however powerful his reasons. Not many writers are prophets, and those who are foretell the future by the accuracy with which they report the present.

  London Review of Books, 1981: previously included in

  From the Land of Shadows, 1982

  Postscript

  Re-reading one’s own work can be a bad habit if it interferes with the initial reading of someone else’s. But there are two benefits that ought not to be ruled out. To keep in mind what you have already written is the best safeguard against writing it again. On top of that, it doesn’t hurt to stay in touch with your winning streak: somewhere back there, you were writing the way you were meant to, and it had a lot to do with pulse and pace. Ever since I wrote it, the foregoing piece has remained my personal measure for length of sentence, balance of sentences within the paragraph, and progress from one paragraph to the next. If I can say it without sounding as conceited as Muggeridge, on the day I worked him over I was worth the money.

  Muggeridge made my job simpler by his practice of expressing himself in a series of flat assertions that he must have known to be false. He thus invited a series of flat assertions that I knew to be true. There was an element of luck, as when a duck waddles in front of one’s gun and adopts the sitting position. But there was also a time element. Early in his career, a prose writer tries to get everything into a sentence, and each sentence grows subordinate clauses that have to be laboriously rooted out and recast as further sentences, because the thing as its stands is an unreadable mishmash. Later in his career, because he has so much more to say, the same thing happens again. All kinds of parentheses – between pairs of commas, semicolons, or, like this one, dashes – come crowding in to pack the sentence out. The trouble is that by this time he knows exactly what he’s doing. Sentences the size of paragraphs form, with other sentences nesting inside them, like Chinese boxes or those hollow Russian wooden dolls the shape of Krushchev’s wife. His readers can read them – the syntax all checks out – but can’t say them. Speakability has been swamped by style.

  The moment has come for the writer to go back to his middle period and find out how he used to do it, in that blessed interval between trying vainly to get too much in and trying successfully. He will find that in those days his writing was easier to read out, because the units of meaning were arranged one after the other rather than all in the one place. (The validity of this paradigm isn’t absolute; there is such a thing as a perfectly good sentence that needs to be read forwards, backward and sideways; but it probably won’t be one of his.) He will also find that his style sounded much less like a style. One of the things I had against Muggeridge was that everything he said and wrote was characteristic. If writing were just self-expression, a child could do it. Muggeridge’s conceit was indeed monumental, but in that respect he was too modest. The conceit of the artist is to get something done that will last, even at the cost of leaving himself out of it.

  2001

  NIGHT, FOG AND FORGETFULNESS

  PRIMO LEVI’S LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT

  The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, Michael Joseph

  Primo Levi’s last book, The Drowned and the Saved – published in Italy before he committed suicide – is the condensed, poised summation of all his written work, which includes novels, memoirs, poems, short stories, and critical articles. All his books deal more or less directly with the disastrous historical earthquake of which the great crimes of Nazi Germany constitute the epicentre, and on whose shifting ground we who are alive still stand. None of the books are less than substantial and some of them are masterpieces, but they could all, at a pinch, be replaced by this one, which compresses what they evoke into a prose argument of unprecedented cogency and force. If the unending tragedy of the Holocaust can ever be said to make sense, then it does so in these pages. The book has not been as well translated as one could wish – Levi’s supreme mastery of prose is reduced to something merely impressive – but its status as an indispensable guidebook to the infernal cellars of the age we live in is beyond doubt from the first chapter.

  That we need guidance is one of the things Levi was always insistent about. He insisted quietly, but on that point he never let up. In a tough joke on himself, he acknowledged his kinship with the Ancient Mariner – the epigraph of this book is from Coleridge’s poem – but he didn’t apologize for telling his ghastly tale. The mind will reject this kind of knowledge if it can. Such ignorance doesn’t even have to be willed. It is a protective mechanism. Levi was in no doubt that this mechanism needs to be overridden. Not knowing about what didn’t suit them was how people let the whole thing happen in the first place.

  A powerful aid to not knowing was the scale of the horror, hard to imagine even if you were there. The SS taunted the doomed with the assurance that after it was all over, nobody left alive would be able to credit what had happened to the dead, so there would be nothing to mark their passing – not even a memory. Levi’s argument, already a summary, is difficult to summarize further, but if a central tenet can be extracted it would have to do with exactly that – memory. Beyond the evidence, which is by now so mountainous that it can be challenged only by the insane, there is the interpretation of the evidence. To interpret it correctly, even we who are sane have to grasp what things were really like. Levi is trying to make us see something that didn’t happen to us as if we remembered it. There are good reasons, I think, for believing that not even Levi could fully succeed in this task. We can’t live with his memories, and in the long run it turned out that not even he could. But if he has failed he has done so only to the extent of having been unable to concoct a magic potion, and in the process he has written a classic essay.

  In Auschwitz, most of Levi’s fellow Italian Jews died quickly. If they spoke no German and were without special skills, nothing could save them from the gas chambers and the ovens. Like most of the deportees from all the other parts of Nazi-occupied Europe, they arrived with small idea of where they were, and died before they could find out. Levi’s training as a chemist made him
exploitable. The few German words he had picked up in his studies were just enough to convey this fact to the exploiters. In the special camp for useful workers – it is fully described in his first and richest book, Survival in Auschwitz – Levi was never far from death, but he survived to write his testimony, in the same way that Solzhenitsyn survived the Gulag, and for the same reason: privilege. If Solzhenitsyn had not been a mathematician, we would probably never have heard of him as a writer. But if Levi had not been a chemist we would certainly never have heard of him as a writer. In the Soviet labour camp, death, however plentiful, was a by-product. The Nazi extermination camp was dedicated exclusively to its manufacture. Luck wasn’t enough to bring you through. You had to have an edge on all the others. The proposition sounds pitiless until Levi explains it: ‘We, the survivors, are not the true witnesses.’ The typical prisoner did not get out alive. Those at the heart of the story had no story.

  Shame, according to Levi, is thus the ineluctable legacy of all who lived. Reduced to a bare ego, the victim was under remorseless pressure to ignore the fate of everyone except himself. If he had friends, he and his friends were against the others, at least to the extent of not sharing with them the extra piece of bread that could make the difference between life and death within the conspiratorial circle but if shared outside would not be even a gesture, because everyone would die. During a heatwave, Levi found a few extra mouthfuls of water in a rusty pipe. He shared the bounty only with a close friend. He might have told others about this elixir of life, but he did not. Luckily, his self-reproach, though patently bitter, helps rather than hinders his effort to re-create for us the stricken landscape in which feelings of complicity were inescapable.