Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

  Then the temperature rises sharply. In 1800 Wordsworth spoke of emotion recollected in tranquillity; Coleridge and Robert Lowell left voluminous notes, and there are plenty of scattered remarks from recent interviews. They do not offer a convincing image, however, of what happens. The muse of poetry is inviolate.

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  There is still the commonplace book, largely abandoned since the seventeenth century but potent as a symbol as well as a practice among Renaissance poets, as in Shakespeare’s 77th sonnet.

  A commonplace book was a notebook usually set out under familiar headings like the seven deadly sins or the cardinal virtues. Ideally alphabetical, it is distinct from a journal or diary, which is chronological, and it could gather personal reflections as well as allusions and quotations. A humanistic form, it makes no claim to originality, being based on the assumption of the unchanging human heart, and it avoids, or tries to avoid, any charge of heresy or multiculturalism. Montaigne’s essays are plainly the product of one or several such notebooks, and Ben Jonson owned a copy of the first edition of 1580, which appeared when he was a boy; the copy survives, his signature proudly inked on the title-page. He kept a commonplace book himself, which survived his death in 1637 and appeared a few years later as Timber: or Discoveries. The order may not be his, however, and there is no way of knowing if he authorised it.

  That makes the commonplace book look like an extinct sub-species of data-processing, and extinct long before Internet. Its intermediary form known as tablets or tables, however, may be familiar to any age. A table was made of thick waxed cardboard leaves, the wax rendering it erasable; the 1581 example at Harvard is handsomely bound in stamped leather, with brass clasps to keep it closed. Shakespeare refers to tables twice in his plays, the more famous being Hamlet’s distracted ‘Meet it is I set it down, that one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.’ An earlier instance, similarly metaphorical, is in Two Gentlemen of Verona, where Julia amiably calls her maid ‘the table wherein all my thoughts/Are visibly charactered and engraved’ (II.7). Such notes might be discarded, or duly copied into a commonplace book for later use, marshalled under headings.

  In the eighteenth century the fashion faded among writers, along with a taste for proverbs and wise instances. They had begun to sound hopelessly countrified. The conversations reported by Boswell in his life of Johnson did not much use them, and poets of any sophistication mocked them. In The Dunciad (1728) Pope envisioned a king of the dunces presiding proudly over his own works, and ‘a folio commonplace/ Founds the whole pile, of all his works the base’ (I.139-40). Ten years later, in Polite Conversation, Swift derided those who imagined they could pass off familiar sayings as wit. Proverbs were banal, by then, and proverbs decorated with classical precedents merely pretentious. In Tom Jones (1749) Fielding tells how Squire Western’s chaplain Mr Supple helplessly struggled to pacify him with classical instances ‘enriched with many valuable quotations from the Ancients, particularly from Seneca’ (V.9), but of course he only makes things worse. Jane Austen called proverbs ‘base and illiberal’. When Robert Southey died as poet laureate in 1843 several volumes of his Common Place book appeared, but to no acclaim. The commonplace, with or without instances, had had its day, and nowadays ‘What I always say…’ can start a stampede for the door.

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  The death of the commonplace in recent centuries has left a lot of literature looking opaque, however, and not only Montaigne. The first great novel in Europe, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605-15), contrasts the proverbial wisdom of Sancho Panza with the follies of his learned master. Quixote is a fool because he has read too many books: a victim of the introduction of printing more than a century before, and advance warning of what can come of radio, TV and Facebook. The growth of higher education, too, must bear some responsibility here. Montaigne and Shakespeare did not change their minds down the years but successively enriched them. The pace of dogmatic change began to race after the French Revolution, notably with those who, like Wordsworth and Coleridge, were disillusioned with Napoleon. Victorian writers had religious doubts, and in the wake of those doubts ideologies like Marx and Darwin began to thrive. Writers born after 1900 are likely to have entertained far more illusions than theology or the classless society, and in 1953 Isaiah Berlin sounded a warning in The Hedgehog and the Fox. The metaphor is a little misleading, since hedgehogs know only one thing all their lives – how to save themselves if a predator attacks. The modern hedgehog, by contrast, believes in a succession of things, as Ronald Dworkin illustrates in Justice for Hedgehogs, and that is just the trouble. Many poets, in an age of advancing longevity, now look back on the follies of their youth and middle age with shame and distaste. Ezra Pound lived to call anti-semitism a vulgar suburban prejudice, and W.H. Auden used to madden his publisher by insisting in his later years on more and more revision when asked for a reprint. So we know a lot about what poets eventually came to think of their poems. But what did they think as they first wrote?

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  The rebirth of the commonplace among poets is an unlikely prospect, however, and the commonplace book will remain an extinct species firmly anchored in another age.

  It has lost its habitat, after all, and its food supply. T.S. Eliot achieved it occasionally, as in ‘Death by Water’ in The Waste Land, which commemorates a commonplace called mortality: ‘A current under sea / picked his bones in whispers’; but it is rare and lonely triumph. Two modern cults stand firmly in the way – originality and spontaneity – and for the time being they look unshakeable. In a revelatory essay known as Three Good Wives (II.35) Montaigne insisted his stories and instances had all been true, forbade invention and recommended Ovid’s Metamorphoses as a model to writers, since Ovid trimmed and restitched old stories rather than making them up. That is another world. Originality has now been relabelled creativity, and it would be a rash critic who tried to belittle that. It is the god of the new millennium. Ben Jonson’s reputation suffered a sharp decline a century ago when editors of Timber painstakingly demonstrated it was not an original work, as Swinburne had enthusiastically assumed, but largely a mass of quotations and allusions from ancient authors and modern humanists. It is an example to give pause.

  As for spontaneity, it is hard to discredit because poets often appear to believe in it themselves. That is deeply puzzling, since they seldom practise it. But all aspire, probably because the great poems that are familiar in anthologies look totally achieved, as if by a single act. ‘The master poets must come down at their poems as a hawk on a pigeon in one dive,’ Archibald MacLeish once remarked, adding sadly that he could not do it himself. ‘I chip away like a stone-mason.’ No wonder poets sound so sad. They should try thinking of Shakespeare, or rather Hamlet. Or even Virgil.

  10. No Marx for Engels

  Long ago, when Marxism was fashionable, I used to lecture on the Marxist tradition of genocide.

  That was in the 1960s, and the reception was usually indignant and incredulous. The word itself was recent – an invention of 1944 widely used a year or two later in the Nuremberg trial of war-criminals. Genocide means killing by category, such as racial or religious category. It is rather common in history, especially in tribal societies; at least attempts at it are common. As a political programme or dogma, however, it is still less than two centuries old, first proclaimed in January-February 1849 by Friedrich Engels in Marx’s journal Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung in an article called ‘Der Magyarische Kampf’. Engels’ vision was global, though mainly European, and he proposed the extermination of unhistorical peoples such as Bretons and Basques on specifically Marxist grounds. As feudal survivals in a capitalist age, he argued, they would be two steps behind with the coming socialist revolution; and since no people can take two steps at a time, they would have to be killed.

  Student reaction, half a century ago, was one of outrage. How could anyone suggest – how could anyone ever have suggested – that the coming socialist revolut
ion would be genocidal? I explained, to little effect, that the proposition was not reversible. Among political prophets and analysts all genocidists in the past century and more had been socialists, that is, but not all socialists had been genocidal. None the less the outrage is easily understood. Fascism had long since been a term of abuse, and anyone who suggested that Hitler and Goebbels were sincere and (worse still) accurate in calling themselves socialists committed something barely short of blasphemy. Inviting students to read the works of Marx and Engels was in any case of little use. They are for the most part boring authors, after all, and voluminous, and there were always better things for a teenager to do.

  A recent biography of Engels, Tristram Hunt’s The Frock-Coated Revolutionary, confirms that the mood has lasted. Engels’ article on genocide is not mentioned, and it is unaware that socialism could be a way of feeling unguilty which often appealed to the rich. Instead we are told in whimsical style of his wealth as a Manchester employer, of his love-life, and of his passion for fox-hunting, and you are left wondering why anyone ever took him seriously at all. Stalin did, however, in The Foundations of Leninism in 1924; so, it seems likely, did Adolf Hitler when he told a confidant that ‘the whole of National Socialism’ was based on Marxism. So, earlier still, did Franz Mehring when in 1902 he edited the 1849 article in Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Marx, Engels und Lassalle. But the New Left, unlike the old, did not read the classics of Marxism. Somebody called it Know Nothing Marxism, and he was right.

  In the 1970s the ground shifted. In 1972 the United States left Vietnam, and the draft was eventually abolished. Capitalism, meanwhile, had transformed itself. It had exported its work-benches to south Asia and turned creative in its opportunities; feminism, meanwhile, taught women to think a professional job more glamorous than housework. In such an atmosphere it was hard to interest anyone in Marxism as a doctrine of mass-murder or indeed at all, and fresh evidence that Hitler’s holocaust had socialist origins was largely ignored or forgotten. I shall offer two instances from the 1970s, that decade of fading Marxism.

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  In 1974 the secret speeches of Heinrich Himmler were published in Frankfurt: Geheimreden 1933 bis 1945, edited by B.F. Smith and A.F. Peterson. The book includes typescripts of carefully prepared speeches delivered in October 1942 by Himmler: one a speech to Gauleiters in occupied Poland, another to the SS. They were both heard behind locked doors in the town hall of Poznan, in a famous building I unwittingly visited on my first visit to Poland fifteen years later with other matters in mind. The battle of Stalingrad had already begun when Himmler spoke, but his speeches gave no hint of any prospect of defeat, and they were delivered to audiences which, a year after the holocaust began, had no need to be told what was happening.

  They may have had some curiosity, however, about what it was for. Difficult decisions, Himmler explained, had been taken, and there could be no survivors left to avenge themselves or to tell. So he had decided on a clear-cut solution – to kill them all, women and children included: ‘to see a whole people vanish from the earth.’ One had to be consistent – ‘konsequent zu sein.’ Some day, perhaps, the German people would be told what had happened, after victory had been won. But by then, in a world without Jews, the death-camps would have been razed, and harmless euphemisms like disappearance and liquidation would be heard. As for the methods employed, that was a matter for the SS.

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  By the 1970s, however, the German New Left did not need to be told. Almost two years before Himmler’s secret speeches were published Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Fraction had publicly praised Hitler in a court of law, and her speech was reported in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on 15th December 1972. Germans supported her Marxist terror-group, she explained, because at heart they were anti-semitic, like her, and she applauded Auschwitz as a scrap-heap for six million capitalistic Jews. So the admiration of the German New Left for Hitler was not a secret. It was openly declared. But by the 1970s the world had stopped listening to it. It had its own problems, by then.

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  The case illustrates how difficult it can be to interest historians, and those who read them, in political justifications and causes. Political theory can live and prosper in a world apart from the history of events, and events from theory. Since the 1960s the holocaust has engendered an enormous and ever-mounting literature of reminiscence. But the question why Hitler and Himmler wanted it at all is seldom raised – still less how they justified it to themselves – and the details are presented as acts of mindless barbarity. ‘Hier ist kein Warum,’ an Auschwitz guard told Primo Levi, who was desperately thirsty, ordering him to drop an icicle. In holocaust studies there is no Why. There is only What.

  But Engels proposed a Why in 1849 when he signed a death-warrant on unhistorical peoples, and Himmler proposed another in October 1942 when, in a closed session for Gauleiters and the SS in occupied Poland, he explained that the fear of revenge meant there could be no survivors, even among women and children. The business of historians, Eric Hobsbawm said, is to remind people of what they have forgotten. In the interval between Engels and Himmler, in the 1920s, Stalin and Hitler announced in print what they would do. The arc that overshadows them is less than a century, from 1849 to 1942, and under that arc millions died. But who now cares why?

  II More Heresies

  11. Americanophilia

  To be an americanophile is to love America – its literature, its music, its films – without belonging to it.

  Americans are largely unaware of it as a European state of mind. In fact they seem reluctant even to contemplate it; and its climax, in the twenty years or so after the second world war, came and went unregarded in the United States. Perhaps it is not too late, however, to mark it down, or too soon to sum it up. By now the world has changed. Cultures are no longer clearly national; a global economy has internationalised the arts; the young seldom think in national terms at all; and the phenomenon has inevitably faded, much like anglophilia and francophilia. But if the past is a foreign country, as somebody remarked, it may be none the less interesting for that.

  Odd, though, that americanophilia should have been once so powerful and yet, in its day, so unnoticed in the United States. I suspect Americans did not notice it because, for reasons well worth unravelling, they could not believe it was true and, in some profoundly secretive way, did not want it to be true. So when Europeans proclaimed their admiration they were simply unheeded. The reasons for all that are bound to be fascinating, but they will have to wait.

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  The story, though essentially a twentieth-century one, has its prehistory. The thirty-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson so charmed Thomas Carlyle, on a visit to Scotland in September 1833, that Carlyle thought his New World innocence little short of supernatural. Emerson seemed like an angel. ‘What I loved in the man,’ Carlyle wrote to John Stuart Mill, who had sent him on, was ‘his health, his unity with himself,’ so that everybody and everything found a ‘peaceable adjustment,’ always spontaneous and humble. That strikes the right note of enchantment; but most of the infatuation in the last century was inevitably through books. Clement Shorter, a London critic born in 1857, tells in his 1927 autobiography how for him and other English boys in the 1860s and 1870s ‘American books played a far larger part’ than British books – especially the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bret Harte and Mark Twain – if only because, before the days of international copyright, they were cheap. ‘Every novel-reading boy of my generation owes much to America.’ It is easy to forget, in an academic age that all too often measures literary tastes by curricular requirements, that fiction was written to be read rather than studied, and you do not need courses in American literature to know it or to value it.

  London, as the main publishing centre of the English-speaking world, sometimes pre-empted American masterpieces to ensure copyright. Twain’s two great novels, Tom Sawyer and Huckle
berry Finn, were initially published there – the first some six months before it appeared in the United States, the second a few days before – and they were more highly esteemed in Britain than at home. So was their author. Oxford conferred an honorary doctorate on Twain in 1907, three years before his death; it was an honour grander than any he ever received in his native land. The following year Ezra Pound settled in London, where he remained (more or less) until 1920, creating as a young American of fresh, iconoclastic views an admiring coterie and inspiring W.B. Yeats, in his middle years, to remake his poetic diction. Shortly after, in 1912, Robert Frost settled in England for three years, seeking and gaining recognition as a poet and publishing his first two volumes of verse there. In 1915 D. H. Lawrence began writing Studies in Classic American Literature, which he finished in New Mexico; in his last chapter he hailed Walt Whitman as ‘the first white aboriginal’ of America who offered ‘the heroic message of the American future.’ America was a liberator, for Lawrence, and John Addington Symonds had daringly anticipated him in that view. In 1893, a year after Whitman’s death, he published an entire book in his praise, and here the emphasis is openly sexual, since Symonds admired Leaves of Grass for its candid avowal of ‘manly attachment’ and ‘athletic love.’ That was two years before the trial of Oscar Wilde. Through Whitman, Symonds concluded, he had been enabled to fraternise with ‘men of all classes and several races,’ including manual workers and sons of the soil. So the liberating spirit of America was seen in Europe in more aspects than one.