Writers and Politics

by Conor Cruise O'Brien

  The corresponding contemporary figure in England was not Tennyson—nothing is more misleading than to think of Hugo as in some sense the Poet Laureate of France—and obviously not Browning or Arnold.

  The English Victor Hugo, the prophet and the incarnation of the century, was not a poet but a politician: Gladstone. It is not just that both became respected old men who had uttered more emotive words than any of their contemporary fellow-countrymen. Nor was it that they shared a power for expressing and arousing moral indignation, answering to a great need of the age. It was not even that each was a medium, through whom inarticulate masses found a voice. The essential was that both were artists, and artists of the same kind: If love of liberty, that ambiguous and powerful emotion, was the force that drew their great audiences to them, those audiences desired that liberty to appear in an acceptable form, not inchoate and anarchic, but ordered, rich and beautiful. Gladstone and Hugo had the souffle, the mastery of language, and the legend-focussing personality that could confer a formal order on a general release of emotion. In the case of the orator, it has been held that this faculty was daemonic and annunciatory of disasters to come. The road to Nuremberg, on this view, begins at Midlothian. It might be truer to say that it was the nation which had no Midlothians that found itself a voice at Nuremberg. The relevant metaphor, for the age, is still that of “letting off steam”: that was, in part, the function for their nations, and in their very different ways, of Hugo and of Gladstone. It is hardly wise to regard the process with suspicion because another nation, in a later day, blew up the boiler.

  Frenchmen, on the very rare occasions when they think of Gladstone at all, think of him as a symbol of English hypocrisy. Did he not veil his face in affected horror at the discovery of Parnell’s adultery, about which he had already known for years? And did he not indulge in a life of vice with the pretext that he was reforming prostitutes? (It is of no use to reply that in reality he did neither of these things.) The proper comparison, in the French view, would be with Tartuffe and Félix Faure, certainly not with France’s greatest poet: how compare the fustian of a politician with verses that are among the glories of the French language? The argument has weight when one places the works of Hugo beside the collected speeches of Gladstone; it has very much less weight when one thinks of the two men, living, in relation to their communities. It is probable that many of the two million who followed the corbillard des pauvres to the Panthéon were there because Hugo had written:

  Je ne fais point fléchir les mots auxquels je crois:

  Raison, progrès, honneur, loyauté, devoirs, droits,

  On ne va point au vrai par une route oblique.

  Sois juste; c’est ainsi qu’on sert la république;

  Le devoir envers elle estl’équité pour tous;

  Pas de colère; et nul n’est juste s’il n’est doux.

  It is possible to regard these lines as less successful poetry, but more successful politics than: “That cloud in the West! That coming storm! God’s minister of vengeance upon ancient and inveterate and still but half-atoned injustice!” For Hugo, in pleading in very flat verse for mercy for the Communards, knew that his words would find an echo in hundreds of thousands of French hearts. Gladstone could have felt no corresponding confidence; the accent of his words, as the first intuition of his Irish task comes on him, is genuinely tragic, in marked contrast to the hollow and perfunctory eloquence of Hugo on the Commune. The poet and the tribune are here in the wrong places.

  If we think of the two men of genius as being of the same prophetic race, both poet-tribunes, then we may also think it no accident that in France the prophet turned his face to literature, in England to politics. Gladstone was an engine in which great forces at a high temperature were concentrated to make changes in English life, for good or ill. Hugo changed nothing, except the personal lives of those around him, and his style. And, since a human being who becomes an engine becomes less as well as more than human, Hugo’s personality remained the richer and his life the more exemplary—although certainly not in the vulgar moral application of the last term. It is not a question of contrasting M. Maurois’s ageing faun, seducer of servant-girls, with the self-dedicated redeemer of fallen women, but of seeing how, in Gladstone, all emotion tends to turn to controversy, to engage in public work; while with Hugo, a series of magnificent emotions, in a life filled with drama, found, within and without the limits of his art, free and spectacular play. The two men seem almost like complementary colossal figures—not devoid of cliché—designed to express the contrasting genius of the two peoples, art governing and art living. Prodigious creatures, concentrating and revealing the essential character of the life around them, one feels, before their force and mystery, something of what Hugo felt, seeing comparable portents, at the zoo:

  Moi, je n’exige pas que Dieu toujours s’observe,

  Il faut Men tolerer quelque exces de verve,

  Chez un si grand poète, et ne point se fâcher

  Si Celui qui nuance une fleur de pêcher

  Et courbe l’arc-en-ciel surl’Océan qu’il dompte,

  Après un colibri, nous donne un mastodonte!

  C’est son humeur à lui d’être de mauvais goût,

  D’ajouterl’hydre au gouffre et le ver à l’égout,

  D’avoir, en toute chose, une stature étrange

  Et d’être un Rabelais d’où sort un Michel-Ange.

  C’est Dieu; moi, je l’accepte …

  * Olympio: The Life of Victor Hugo.

  MONSIEUR CAMUS CHANGES HIS CLIMATE

  Monsieur Camus’s earlier novels—L’Étranger, La Peste—were set in his native North Africa. The sun shone brightly and pitilessly, and underneath it the Latin logic too was as bright and pitiless as M. Camus’s generous temperament would allow. His new book marks, in more than one way, a change of climate. It is set in Holland, land of clouds and doves and omnipresent water; there is a slower tempo, a new distrust, not of society or destiny, but of the corrupted heart of man. Have we met something like this evolution before? A similar eclipse, surely, occurred in M. Mauriac’s development, when the burning pagan sun of Thérèse Desqueyroux and Destins began to disappear behind the penitent mists of Les Chemins de la mer. The analogy is far from perfect. M. Mauriac had never quite ceased to be a Christian: M. Camus has not quite begun to be one. M. Mauriac, as he became more deeply Christian, lost in imaginative intensity and in precision. M. Camus, on the other hand, has never written better than he does in this magnificent monologue, in which every sentence has the inflection of a living voice, in which the printed word can convey the resonance of a quayside or a sickroom, and can respond to the specific melancholy lyricism of Dutch gin. No one can deny to La Chute the character, at least, of a tour de force: many will think it, as I do, a small masterpiece. But some serious people, among M. Camus’s former friends, will regard it as a betrayal. In this darkest hour of the Algerian struggle it is to M. Camus, lonely eminence among the French of Algeria, that many look, not so much for a polemical lead—that M. Mauriac has given with much more enthusiasm than M. Camus—but for an imaginative expression of colonial reality. On their theory, which was once M. Camus’s theory also, this expression would not need to be propagandist, but it would of necessity be revolutionary. This theory is of course very similar to the favourite defence of the Christian novelist, that “all truth is of God,” and therefore—unstated corollary—what I write is Christian since I believe it to be true. It was a little hard to extract the necessary implications from M. Camus’s previous novels. A not very bright disciple could read L’Étranger as a satire on bourgeois justice: one slightly more intelligent could take it as depicting the tragic isolation of the individual in capitalist society. The friendly but patronizing Marxist read it as a significant expression of the simultaneous bankruptcy of bourgeois social relations and bourgeois thought. La Peste was easier if one didn’t look too closely: the plague was fascism. M. Camus helped this on by the dramatized version, which
was localized in Spain. This was clear enough and if M. Camus’s metaphysical and historical speculations rather confused the picture—especially in L’Homme révolté —it was easy to tidy up. “Camus is no philosopher” has become an article of faith on the Left Bank. Therefore everything Camus says in treatise form can be ignored, Le cas est classé. But his “creative” work was another matter; there, according to the theory, his artistic integrity was a guarantee that his work would be objectively revolutionary. The critic could bring into action the convenient principle: “I know what he thinks; it doesn’t matter what he thinks he thinks!”

  Critics of this sort will find La Chute hard going. What are they to make of this half-anguished, half-ironic confession of a French lawyer, self-exiled in Amsterdam—why Amsterdam?—and calling himself a penitent judge? Jean-Baptiste Clamance, protagonist and narrator of La Chute, had been a pretty decent sort of fellow, as people go. He was never at any time a judge by profession, but a lawyer specializing in defence in criminal cases. He even mentions that he found it hard to conceive how one could be a judge, although he concedes the existence of judges “as one concedes the existence of grasshoppers.” In his work he is a champion of the oppressed, an enemy of a vicious legal system; in his private life he is kind and generous; in his opinions progressive—he asserts that property is murder. Apart from that, witty, eloquent, amorous, successful: a favourable and attractive example of a left-wing intellectual. The trouble is that under his own self-criticism, as he walks along the canal banks of Amsterdam with his unrecorded listener, the whole lighting of the picture changes. His acts of kindness and his love affairs, his progressive words and gestures, everything in his life fits into a new picture, that of a man carrying on, as he says, a long love affair with himself. It is to his own conception of himself that he pays tribute when he defends a case, when he makes love, when he helps a blind old man across the street. And it is when he is humiliated, when he can no longer admire himself wholeheartedly, that he sees what he has been doing and takes flight to Holland. (Why Holland? We shall see.) The crisis of his humiliation is a double one. Crossing one of the Seine bridges one night, he sees a girl throwing herself into the river; he hears a cry from the water, then another cry, further off and fainter: he makes no move to save her, telling himself that it is too late. A little time later, again crossing a bridge, he hears a laugh, un bon rire, a not unfriendly laugh: looking round he sees no one, no one on the bridge or the bank, no passing boat; then he hears the same laugh again, off down the river, and fainter.

  The laugh that strips Clamance of his moral comfort may be thought of as a hallucination, or an image by the narrator, or as a reality: the point is left open. We are reminded, at any rate, of the conception, dear to some French Catholic writers, of laughter as par excellence the Satanic means of expression. Such a comparison may seem surprising: we are accustomed to thinking of the world of Bernanos or Bloy as being a very long way from that of Camus. It certainly is from the Camus of, say, L’Homme révolté. But the Camus of La Chute is quite a different matter. The very title of the book is theological; it refers not only to a particular fall—that of a conceited lawyer—but to the fall of man, whose corrupt condition is exemplified in Clamance. This is not a mere conjecture—Clamance in his confession makes it clear (for some of M. Camus’s admirers it will be painfully clear) that original sin is his subject. Again the name which the narrator has chosen for himself has an obvious significance; Jean-Baptiste Clamance —vox clamantis in deserto—the name and description of the forerunner. Irony? Perhaps. Clamance himself warns his listener that he will find it hard, in this confession, to distinguish the true from the false. But the tutelary presence of John the Baptist, with whatever degree of seriousness we take it, is appropriate, for the frame of mind of the book is in important ways not so much Christian as immediately pre-Christian. There is a deep conviction of the weight and universality of sin, a deep desire for forgiveness and redemption. And there, for the moment at least, it ends. “God” is a word which is sometimes on Clamance’s lips, after his fall, in order, as he explains, to mock his humanist friends. He confesses that he can attach no particular meaning to the word. As for the redemption, Clamance can see only the crucifixion, of which he speaks near the end of his narrative. Above all, he hears the words of abandonment spoken from the cross and of these he has his personal interpretation. Christ, as he imagines, although perfect in his life, experienced the sense of guilt because the very fact of his existing had been the cause of the massacre of the Innocents. The conception is a strange one, and it is perhaps better to relate it to Clamance’s biography, and his particular obsession, than to M. Camus’s system of thought. Yet it does recall another and perhaps a nobler interpretation of these same words by a French writer who long thought himself, like M. Camus, to be in love with justice, and who long hesitated before becoming a Catholic. Charles Péguy in Le Mystère de la Charité de Jeanne d’Arc took the words from the cross as expressing despair at the fact that even this sacrifice was not enough to save the damned. This divine despair was in itself to be the means of reconciling saints, racked by a similar horror:

  Clameur qui sonne au coeur de toute chrétienté

  O Clameur culminante, éternelle et valable.

  Clamance has not reached this conception—which for Péguy was the hinge of conversion—but he seems to be groping for something similar, for something in short that would make the Messiah less remote from sinning men. We are all, he tells his listener, looking for “grace, that is to say irresponsibility.” And it is this wry and mocking thirst for grace that has made Holland his elected residence. True, following the convention in which he has been brought up, he speaks of Holland as “a soft hell”—Voltaire called it “a phlegmatic hell”—and he compares the concentric canals of Amsterdam to the circles of the Inferno. And certainly if with his guilty memory he has come to this city of water and bridges, it is in part to punish himself. Yet it is not really an Inferno but a sort of Purgatorio; there is hope here, however muffled by irony and dandyism. “The newspaper-readers and fornicators”—as he calls our contemporaries—“cannot go any further than this place. They come from all over Europe and they stop around the inner sea, on the colourless beaches. They listen to the sirens, they try in vain to make out the shapes of boats in the fog, then they go back across the canals and go home in the rain.” This is not very exhilarating, but it is not a description of hell. Its reference surely is to metaphysical anguish, which implies hope. Elsewhere hope, though grey-haired and in mourning, is more plainly visible. “I am sure you have noticed,” says Clamance to his silent companion, “that the sky of Holland is full of millions of doves, so high up that they can’t be seen, rising and falling in a single movement, filling the heavens with thick waves of greyish feathers carried to and fro by the wind. The doves wait up there. They turn above the earth, watch, would like to come down. But there’s nothing, only the sea and the canals, roofs covered with advertisements, and no head to settle on.” This Holland clearly is the frontier of the natural world, the barrier, perhaps impassable, beyond which grace perhaps is waiting. Curiously enough Claudel has had exactly the same thought —naturally more positively expressed—about the same country and even the same city. Amsterdam, he has told us, is “the border of two worlds,” the visible and the invisible. In the reflections of its canals he saw “that beseeching of the full by the empty, that continual ambiguity of permanence and contingence, that delicate echo in which all that exists becomes the thought of that which exists.”

  Bernanos, Péguy, Claudel … Some listeners will cock a suspicious ear. Are these comparisons really necessary, or is this an attempt to annex a great humanist writer to the Catholic camp? The comparisons are, I think, necessary: we know that Camus has read these writers—he cites them elsewhere—and here he shows, in several instances, their kind of feeling and of apprehension and in certain passages even their style. The passage, for instance, which begins “La Hollande est un
songe, monsieur, un songe d’or et de fumée, plus fumeux le jour, plus doré la nuit …” is straight Claudel—and Bols. It is necessary to insist on the direct literary relationship, because it probably gives us a truer idea of what La Chute actually represents. We cannot affirm, on the strength of La Chute, that M. Camus’s conversion is imminent or even vaguely probable. What we can safely affirm is that he has moved closer in style and feeling to a certain tradition of French writing, rich in insight and in eloquence, peremptory in form and contemptuous of all that is schematic. This tradition is identified with the names of men who were or are Catholics, but whether or not by attaching oneself to it one moves in the direction of Catholicism is another matter.

  What M. Camus is moving away from is clearer than his goal. What he leaves behind is the possibility of moral indignation “in the name of humanity”: that moral indignation with which he was once lavish, and which still occasionally flashes from him in L’Express. For if humanity, even moralizing and generous humanity, is itself corrupt, how then can you denounce corruption in the name of humanity? Either, it seems, you must stop denouncing, or you must find something outside humanity in the name of which to denounce. It is true that Clamance himself finds a third way: that of unsparing and exhaustive self-denunciation, with the growing implication that, vile as he is, his listener in his heart knows that he is just as vile. This technique, here described as that of the repentant judge, is older than Rousseau and need not here be taken very seriously. The clearest thing about it, and about the implications of La Chute generally, is that this is not in modern conditions a revolutionary doctrine. The bonne conscience that it insidiously destroys is not the bonne conscience of the possessing class—the section of that class which reads people like M. Camus has long since ceased to number among its possessions an easy conscience. No, what is ruined here is the morale of the progressives: most of the capital of the intellectual left has long been rewardingly invested in moral indignation, and now M. Camus, having transferred his own capital to an unspecified destination, engages in inflationary manoeuvres. The shareholders are justifiably incensed.