Just as this book is going to press, events are drawing our attention to the quality of words used in political discourse. First there is the explicit case of the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, which focuses our attention on the aggressive and puerile level of political debate in America, but we should not delude ourselves that ours is that much better. Second there is the more complex and equally disturbing case of the secret policeman Mark Kennedy, an agent provocateur who was affecting the way in which legitimate debate was being developed in our society, presumably with the aim of making protesters appear dangerous and erratic, and thus making their repression more palatable to the public. Of course, secret policemen have always existed and their noxious behaviour produces similar results under very different regimes. The ex-Stasi officer in “No Such Thing as a Free Lunch” typifies the psychopathic detachment that necessarily lacks all compassion. The secret policeman undercover is somewhat different – more loquacious, more extrovert and perhaps even more devious: he becomes a caricature of the people he is trying to destroy but never fully understands because his mindset is so different from that of his prey. And yet, quite absurdly, he does become a mirror image of his quarry, rather like the daemon in “Escaping the Self”, a story primarily inspired by the idea that only by getting away from the tyranny of our own needs and desires can we obtain a few crumbs of happiness – an idea as ancient as writing itself.
The degradation of political discourse is not as new as some people think. In the past, the demonisation of the left or of minorities has often been crude and has incited violence, but what is unusual in America is that it characterises discourse between two mainstream parties whose political policies are not very different. The congresswoman became the tragic victim of a gun culture she on the whole supports, although her comments on political discourse were to prove distressingly prophetic. It is that mix of vicious quarrelling over an increasingly limited political spectrum and the ready availability of firearms that makes the United States such a tinderbox, but the infantilisation of political debate is also a problem here.
It appears (we can say no more than that) that our language is becoming less nuanced, less varied and less respectful of others. Manners – once considered an insincere and artificial barrier to discourse, which to some extent they were – have now been partly replaced by an etiquette of unmannerliness or a cult of the brusque, epitomised by the television programme The Apprentice. Many believe that the demise of literary culture is not a matter for concern and has played no part in this, because they do not understand what its function has been over the last five hundred years since printing was invented. We are the stories we tell ourselves, and we are also the way we tell our stories. Even those who in another age would never have read a literary novel or opened a collection of poetry would have been affected by the literature of the day. Literature puts ideas out into society where they circulate in different forms. Tolstoy, not only a great writer but also a most “political” one, affected people far beyond his readership and also those amongst his readers who found him and his lifestyle vaguely ridiculous. Much less exalted figures also instruct far beyond their time and their place. Two highly political examples amongst the many from the immediate post-war period are Hans Fallada’s masterly examination of the morality of subversion and the relationship between the individual and an oppressive political ideology, Alone in Berlin (in a brilliant translation only available to the Anglophone reader since 2009) and Gwyn Thomas’s recently republished The Dark Philosophers, in which the brutality of his highly political writing sometimes shocks and its stylistic cleverness surprises. And literature brings to political debate the ability to increase the diversity of opinions rather than reduce them, because each literary work is interpreted by the reader in the light of what the reader has thought and read in the past. The reader of fiction has more control than the reader of non-fiction. The novel in particular is or should be an exercise in empathy, albeit for non-existent people. It is an exercise in “escaping the self” and ultimately changes people’s behaviour. It can increase compassion. It can also increase vocabulary and exercise the mind in more nuanced language. Could it also lead to a more mannerly approach to conversation and even political discourse?
Alongside the growth of the cult of unmannerliness, there is the related growth of the cult of success. The last story in this collection should be dedicated to Victor Serge, a man whose failure should be his greatest boast, because there are times when no decent man can succeed. His courage and his stamina had no limits, and his isolation was almost total. When French intellectuals finally secured his release from Stalin’s gulag, the Soviet authorities destroyed three of his manuscripts. Few writers could survive and keep writing in the conditions he suffered not only in Russia but previously in France where he had been arrested by a slightly apologetic policeman for publishing an anarchist newspaper. His years in prison there are described in Men in Prison. Only in very recent times has an English version of his Unforgiving Years been published, some sixty-one years after he wrote it shortly before his death in 1947 (by New York Review Books, which is possibly the most effective organisation in maintaining the range of contemporary literary novels available to the reader of English). It stands alongside The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a masterpiece and a monument to a man who shames us with his steadfast loyalty to the idea of humanity.
“The reactionaries,” Victor Serge wrote, “have an obvious interest in confusing Stalinist totalitarianism – exterminator of the Bolsheviks – with Bolshevism itself; their aim is to strike at the working class, at Socialism, at Marxism, and even at Liberalism. … I have found that the writer cannot even exist in our decomposing modern societies without accommodating himself to interests that forcibly limit his horizons and mutilate his sincerity.” Those words seem very relevant once more, and we should remember that, long before other dissidents, he denounced not only Stalin’s crimes but also those committed earlier in the Soviet Union. He was not listened to, because he held firm to his belief in socialism.
I started this afterword with the first two lines of Michelangelo’s famous sonnet: “The best artist cannot come up with any idea that is not already encompassed in a block of marble.” As I reread these short stories before publication, my principal emotion was one of disappointment at their inability to live up to the original idea. I had not been able to chisel out of the English language what I thought was the full glory of my original concept. The reasons for this failure probably lie in that original concept itself and in my limitations as a writer. It also reminds me of an episode in the very short story, “This”, which is entirely written in an iambic/ trochaic metre. It was an unplanned story, and actually started as an introduction to “Outlook”, the only story not written for this collection. Its style and rhythm were entirely different from the earlier piece and it took off in its own direction. When it came to the creative aspect of life, I was guided by a television programme on Peter Howson in which the artist attacks his own painting with a brush loaded with black paint. My similar attitude to these stories now is one of wishing they more faithfully portrayed the complexity of some thoughts I sometimes fail to control. I lack, however, that brilliant artist’s boldness and lack of vanity. I cannot say that I would like to these stories to be destroyed. I want them published, and I am vain enough to want them flattered, while being only too aware of their shortcomings.
In his Hold Everything Dear, John Berger discusses despair as opposed to mere misery, from which it is distinguished by a sense of betrayal, as in the case of the poverty suffered during the Civil War that followed the Russian Revolution. He mentions Platanov’s use of the term dushevny bednyak, “which means literally ‘poor souls’. It referred to those from whom everything had been taken so that the emptiness within them was immense and in that immensity only their soul was left – that’s to say their ability to feel and suffer” (pp. 94–95). In Scotland we also have a frequent but less profound and calamitous use
of the expression “poor soul” as well as the very slightly condemnatory “poor soul, really”. Whatever connotations, good or bad, may be contained in this expression, it ultimately emphasises that the person referred to is a sentient and deserving entity, and perhaps something more, depending on your religious beliefs or lack of them. It has at least a modicum of compassion, the essential attribute we may be losing; some might say that it is what makes a soul a soul. Then we have another word, its American “synonym”, which has achieved success in southern England and will, no doubt, colonise all of our island (in my brain I hear the word with an Estuary accent and not an American one). The word is “loser”. It is shorter but carries even more baggage (the amorality of dismissiveness and its implications is heavier, I think, than the subtlety of dushevny bednyak or “poor soul”). Not only is it entirely bereft of compassion and indeed denies the existence of such a useless commodity; it also condemns the subject outright for his or her inability to engage in the fierce and supposedly wonderful struggle for riches, fame and a home in a gated community.
Words are made of infinite shades that bring their own intense pleasures, but they have no worth in the age of the market and numbers. Indeed, they are subversive and must be destroyed. Our age of supposed freedom and democracy has found a more effective way of destroying words than the Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984.
Have you seen him shuffle by? His whitened flesh and sickly eye? He brought it on himself. Old man he is, and old before his time; for who could credit what he did? He did so little but what he did was stubborn foolish, a folly fixed upon a whim, a childish thing. He said all men are equal, when it was still the modish way to play with all these grand ideas that no one really holds for true within their soul, within the inner order of their ordered minds. He did, and then continued to believe when all around had meekly admitted to the error of their ways, and their fond youth was little more than youthful go and get up to another place, more comfortable to our increasing needs. And yet he fell apart, and headstrong held to that one truth, while falling and parting for his way, his lonely way of wanting justice for the damned.
“The Loser”, Presbyopia
Allan Cameron, Isle of Lewis, January 2011
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Allan Cameron’s In Praise of the Garrulous
About the book
This first work of non-fiction by the author of The Golden Menagerie and The Berlusconi Bonus, has an accessible and conversational tone, which perhaps disguises its ambition. The writer examines the history of language and how it has been affected by technology, primarily writing and printing. This leads to some important questions concerning the “ecology” of language, and how any degradation it suffers might affect “not only our competence in organising ourselves socially and politically, but also our inner selves.”
Comments
“A deeply reflective, extraordinarily wide-ranging meditation on the nature of language, infused in its every phrase by a passionate humanism” – Terry Eagleton
“This is a brilliant tour de force, in space and in time, into the origins of language, speech and the word. From the past to the present you are left with strong doubts about the idea of Progress and the superiority as a modern, indeed at times postmodern, society over the previous generations. Such a journey into the world of the word needs an articulate and eloquent guide: Allan Cameron is both and much more than that.” – Ilan Pappé
I like In Praise of the Garrulous very much indeed, not only because it says a good many interesting and true things, but because of its tone and style. Its combination of personal passion, observation, stories, poetic bits and serious expert argument, expressed as it is in the prose of an intelligent conversation: all this is ideal for holding and persuading intelligent but non-expert readers. In my opinion he has done nothing better.” – Eric Hobsbawm.
Price: £8.00 ISBN: 978–0–9560560–0–9 pp. 184
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Allan Cameron’s Presbyopia
About the book
Cameron’s collection of bilingual poetry is introduced by an essay on the distinction between myopic and presbyopic poetry: the former focuses on the self, its emotions and its immediate vicinity, while the latter focuses on what is distant in space and time. Poetic myopia is not as negative as the name might imply, nor presbyopia the only desirable form of poetry, but now that two centuries have passed since Wordsworth, whom Heaney has described as the “an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern writing, a finder and keeper of the self-as-subject”, the time has perhaps come to put aside our prejudices against the presbyopic. In reality, all poetry reflects a mixture of the two, and Cameron’s poetry is no exception. He writes on politics and philosophy, but always with the passion that comes from a humanist sensitivity.
Comment
“Cameron confesses to a weariness with poetry’s old forms and old concerns, particularly the perennial Romantic subjects of love and exploration of the self. As a corrective he steers clear of personal topics, turning his presbyopic gaze outward in a sequence of poems that takes in eco-vandalism, press barons, George W. Bush and death. One admires this determination to reject … pretension and obscurantism …” The Sunday Herald
Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978–0–9560560–3–0 pp. 112
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Allan Massie’s Klaus and Other Stories
About the book
Allan Massie, the prolific novelist and non-fiction writer, is here revealed as a consummate master of the short story. This should not surprise, given his dense and highly effective style. Some of the short stories come from his early career, and some are the product of a recent return to the genre.
Klaus, the novella that opens and, to some extent, dominates this collection, tells the story of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas, and in spite of the long shadow of so famous a father, an important novelist and political activist in his own right. His struggle against Nazism gave him a focus, but its demise and what he perceived as Germany’s inability to change led to depression and an early death.
Massie succeeds in evoking that period of courage and hypocrisy, intellectual fidelity and clever changeability, sacrifice and impunity, personified by the tragic Klaus and the mercurial and indestructible Gustaf Gründgens, his former brother-in-law and ex-lover. Between these two lie not only those broken relationships but also a novel – Klaus’s novel Mephisto, a thinly disguised attack on Gründgens that for many years could not be published in West Germany. Massie’s subtle prose merely suggests some intriguing aspects of this network of relationships and the self-destructive nature of literary inspiration.
Comments
“Allan Massie is a master storyteller, with a particular gift for evoking the vanishing world of the European man of letters. His poignant novella about Klaus Mann bears comparison with his subject’s best work.” Daniel Johnson, editor of Standpoint
“The tale of Klaus Mann’s final days is, however, tremendously interesting, a warning and an example. Aspiring authors should read it. They’d do worse than study Massie’s craftsmanship.” – Colin Waters, Scottish Review of Books
Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978–0–9560560–6–1 pp. 208
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Allan Cameron’s Berlusconi Bonus
About the book
“Allan Cameron’s intriguing novel is set in a near future where the predictions of the US theorist Francis Fukuyama have been taken to their logial conclusions. Fukuyama declared that, with the collapse of the USSR and the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism, history has come to an end. In Cameron’s book, history has indeed been halted by decree and the citizens live in a permanent present of spurious consumer choice and endless material consumption, their bovine lives ruled by the embedding of Rational Consumer Implant Cards in their brains. A cardless underclass exists in the Fukuyama Theme Parks, vast squallid concentration camps on the outskirts of cities. At the pinnacle of this society sit those luck
y individuals who, because of their dedicated pursuit of stupendous wealth, are awarded the Plutocratic Social Gratitude Award, popularly nicknamed the Berlusconi Bonus as it effectively puts the recipient beyond the law.
“The book take the form of a confession by Adolphus Hibbert, a recent recipient of the Berlusconi Bonus, who is recruited by the sinister police officer Captain Younce to spy on dissident elements. Adolphus embarks on a dizzying journey among the clandestine opposition, in which he finds love, betrayal and violence; discovering terrifying truths about himself and his society.” – New Internationalist
Comments
“… a profound, intelligent novel that asks serious, adult questions about what it means to be alive.” – The Herald
“The Berlusconi Bonus is an adroit and satisfying satire on the iniquities of present-day life from insane consumerism to political mendacity, globalisation to the War on Terror. It is both very funny and an extremely astute analysis of the evil results of a philosophy that which sings the victory song of extreme free-market economics.” – New Internationalist
“It makes you think.” – The New Humanist
Price: £10.00 ISBN: 978–0–9560560–9–2 pp. 208
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Renzo Llorente’s Beyond the Pale
About the book
Whence the condemnation of loitering? Why this aversion to what is, after all, the definitive metaphor for “the human condition”? To loiter: to remain in an area for no obvious reason (Merriam-Webster)
And this is a book for loitering and loiterers. You can ramble through, or simply dip in at will. It says something about our times that the aphorism has almost but not quite disappeared from contemporary English literature, and the reason must, at least in part, be our attitude to time:
Can the Gods Cry? Page 24