Another find for The Proud Tower was Richard Strauss, who served as a prism for a view of Imperial Germany on the eve of 1914. I did not want to do the usual portrayal of Wilhelmine Germany in terms of Wilhelm II and the militarists and the Agadir Crisis and all that. The business of rewriting what is already well known holds no charm for me. I would find no stimulus to write unless I were learning something new and telling the reader something new, in content or in form. I have never understood how the English manage to interest themselves in turning out all those lives of Queen Victoria, Wellington, Cromwell, Mary Queen of Scots—the large and the hackneyed. For the writer, plowing through the material for such a book must be like sitting down every day to a meal of Cream of Wheat: no surprises.
The choice of Strauss, which meant writing familiarly of music, of which I have no special knowledge, seemed almost too challenging. The reason for it was that, since I knew myself to be frankly prejudiced against Germans, I thought that both for me and the reader it would be fresh and interesting to approach them through the best they had to offer rather than the worst; through the arts, rather than through militarism, and through the one art in which they excelled—music. The result was that I enjoyed myself. Strauss proved satisfactorily Teutonic, and his wife, with her fanatic housekeeping and screams of wrath, even more so. Like Coucy, Strauss led everywhere: through his Zarathustra to Nietzsche, a key to the period; through his Salome to fin-de-siècle decadence; through conductorship of the Berlin Opera to Berlin and the beer gardens and German society and the Siegesallee with its glittering marble rows of helmeted Hohenzollerns in triumphant attitudes; to Wilhelm II in his fancy as “an art-loving prince”; to Vienna through Strauss’s collaborator Von Hofmannsthal; to the brilliant explosion, as the new century opened, of Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet, of the Fauves led by Matisse, the dance of Isadora Duncan, the sculpture of Rodin, the Rite of Spring of Stravinsky, the scandal of Nijinsky’s performance as Debussy’s Faun, and to all the frenzy and fecundity of that feverish eleventh hour that was seeking to express itself in emotion and art. I did not have to labor Strauss to carry out the theme; it was all in Romain Rolland’s uncanny prophecy after hearing Strauss conduct Zarathustra: “Aha! Germany as the All-Powerful will not keep her balance for long. Nietzsche, Strauss, the Kaiser—Neroism is in the air!” Equally perceptive, the Austrian critic Hermann Bahr heard in Strauss’s Elektra “a pride born of limitless power,” a defiance of order “lured back toward chaos.” Thus is biography welded to history.
The life of “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell was the nearest I have come to a formal biography, although I conceived of it from the start as a vehicle to carry the larger subject of the American experience in China. Stilwell was not a lucky find like Coucy; he was the natural and obvious choice. His career had been connected with China throughout the period of the modern Sino-American relationship from 1911, the year of the Chinese Revolution, to the penultimate year of World War II, when he was the commanding American in the China Theater. He represented, as I believe, the best that America has tried to do in Asia, and he was in himself a representative American, yet sufficiently non-typical to be a distinct and memorable individual. The peculiar thing about him is that he left a different impression on different readers; some came away from the book admiring and others rather disliking him, which only proves what every writer knows: that a certain number of readers will always find in one’s book not what one has written, but what they bring to it.
Or it may be that I failed with Stilwell to achieve a firm characterization, which may reflect a certain ambivalence. I certainly admired him, and critics have said that I was, indeed, too energetically his champion. Yet I was never sure that I would have actually liked him in real life, or that he, to put it mildly, would have approved of me. Perhaps it is fortunate that, although I passed through Peking in 1935 when he was there as military attaché, we never met.
This raises the question: Who is the ideal biographer? One who has known his subject or one who has not? Boswell, I suppose, is generally credited with the most perfect biography ever written (or, rather, personal memoir, for it was not really a biography), and the other biographies that stand out over the ages are mostly those written by friends, relatives, or colleagues of the subject: Joinville’s Memoir of Saint Louis; Comines’ Memoirs of Louis XI; the three monuments by sons-in-law—Tacitus’ Life of Agricola, William Roper’s Sir Thomas More, John Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott; Lincoln by his two secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay; Gladstone by his colleague Lord Morley.
Such biographers have a unique intimacy, and if in addition they are reasonably honest and perceptive, they can construct a life that those of us not acquainted with, or not contemporary with, our subject can never match. If the contemporary biographer is blessed with Boswell’s genius as reporter and writer, the result may be supreme. On the other hand, he may distort, consciously or unconsciously, through access to too much information, and produce a warehouse instead of a portrait. Lockhart’s work fills four thousand pages in nine volumes; Nicolay and Hay’s about the same in ten volumes. Unfortunately, in the matter of superabundance, the secondary biographer of today is not far behind.
The most immediate life is, of course, autobiography or diaries, letters and autobiographical memoirs. These are the primary stuff of history: the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean Jacques Rousseau; Pepys’s Diary; Ben Franklin’s Autobiography; the Memoirs of Saint-Simon; the letters of the Marquise de Sévigné; the journals of John Evelyn, Charles Greville, and the Goncourt brothers; the Apologia of Cardinal Newman; and, I suppose I must add, that acme of self-conscious enterprise, the Education of Henry Adams. Even when tendentious or lying, these works are invaluable, but they are in a different category than biography in the sense that concerns us here.
When one tries to think of who the great secondary biographers are, no peaks stand out like the primaries. There are, of course, the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, who closely followed but were not acquainted with their subject. Although they tell us what we know of the life of Jesus, their motive was not so much biographical as propagandistic—a spreading of the gospel (which means good news) that the Messiah had come. Since then one may pick one’s own choice: Carlyle’s Cromwell, perhaps, Amy Kelly’s Eleanor of Aquitaine, Sam Morison’s Christopher Columbus, Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale, Leon Edel’s Henry James, Justin Kaplan’s Mark Twain and Steffens. With apologies to them, however, I think the primary biographers still have the edge.
I shall never be among them because it seems to me that the historian—whether or not the biographer—needs distance. It has once or twice been proposed to me that I write a biography of my grandfather, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a man of great charm and accomplishment, but though I loved and revered him, I shrink from the very idea. Love and reverence are not the proper mood for a historian. I have written one short piece on a particular aspect of his life,*1 but I could never do more.
In the subjects I have used I am not personally involved. The nearest I came was in the course of working on the Stilwell papers, then housed in Mrs. Stilwell’s home in Carmel, when I became friendly with members of the family, who were, and are, very nice people and, I am happy to say, have remained my friends even after publication. Friendly relations, I have to acknowledge, inevitably exerted a certain unspoken restraint on writing anything nasty about the deceased General, had I been so inclined. However, I cannot think of anything I really toned down, except possibly the foul language to be found in Stilwell’s diary. Restraint in that case, however, was less concerned with the family’s sensibilities than with my own. Not having been brought up with four-letter words and explicit scatological images, I found it impossible to bring myself to repeat them, and yet to omit what I then took to be an indication of character violated my conscience as a historian. I eventually worked around that problem by a generalized, if non-specific, reference to Stilwell’s vocabulary. Exposed as we have all been since to the polite and d
elicate language of the last decade, I think now that I took the problem too seriously. I had no idea then how common and banal these words were in male conversation.
More difficult was Stilwell’s horrid reference to Roosevelt as “Rubberlegs,” which truly shocked me. That he was a normal Roosevelt-hater of the kind in Peter Arno’s famous cartoon, “Let’s go to the Trans-Lux and hiss Roosevelt,” and that he had a talent for inventing wicked nicknames, I knew, but to make fun of a physical infirmity seemed to me unforgivable. In a real agony over whether to include this usage or not, I conducted considerable research among people of Stilwell’s vintage into the phenomenon of Roosevelt-hating, and even found an entire book on the subject. It showed that, compared to many things said in those circles, Stilwell’s usage was run-of-the mill, so I put it in, though it felt like picking up a cockroach. Though minor, this episode shows how a biographer can become emotionally involved with her subject.
Whether in biography or straight history, the writer’s object is—or should be—to hold the reader’s attention. Scheherazade only survived because she managed to keep the sultan absorbed in her tales and wondering what would happen next. While I am not under quite such exigent pressure, I nevertheless want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning to the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research whether significant or not.
Unhappily, biography has lately been overtaken by a school that has abandoned the selective in favor of the all-inclusive. I think this development is part of the anti-excellence spirit of our time that insists on the equality of everything and is thus reduced to the theory that all facts are of equal value and that the biographer or historian should not presume to exercise judgment. To that I can only say, if he cannot exercise judgment, he should not be in the business. A portraitist does not achieve a likeness by giving sleeve buttons and shoelaces equal value to mouth and eyes.
Today in biography we are presented with the subject’s life reconstructed day by day from birth to death, including every new dress or pair of pants, every juvenile poem, every journey, every letter, every loan, every accepted or rejected invitation, every telephone message, every drink at every bar. Lytton Strachey, the father of modern biography at its most readable, if not most reliable, and an artist to the last pen-stroke, would have been horrified to find himself today the subject of one of these laundry-list biographies in two very large volumes. His own motto was “The exclusion of everything that is redundant and nothing that is significant.” If that advice is now ignored, Strachey’s influence on psychological interpretation, on the other hand, has been followed to excess. In pre-Strachey biographies the inner life, like the two-thirds of an iceberg that is underwater, went largely unseen and uninvestigated. Since Strachey, and of course since Freud, the hidden secrets, especially if they are shady, are the biographer’s goal and the reader’s delight. It is argued—though I am not sure on what ground—that the public has a right to know the underside, and the biographer busies himself in penetrating private crannies and uncovering the failures and delinquencies his subject strove to conceal. Where once biography was devoted to setting up marble statues, it is now devoted, in Andre Maurois’ words, to “pulling dead lions by the beard.”
Having a strong instinctive sense of privacy myself, I feel no great obligation to pry into a subject’s private life and reveal—unless it is clearly relevant—what he would have wanted to keep private. “What business has the public to know of Byron’s wildnesses?” asked Tennyson. “He has given them fine work and they ought to be satisfied.” Tennyson had a point. Do we really have to know of some famous person that he wet his pants at age six and practiced oral sex at sixty? I suppose it is quite possible that Shakespeare might have indulged in one or both of these habits. If evidence to that effect were suddenly to be found today, what then would be the truth of Shakespeare—the new finding or King Lear? Would the plays interest us more because we had knowledge of the author’s excretory or amatory digressions?
No doubt many would unhesitatingly answer yes to that question. It seems to me, however, that insofar as biography is used to illumine history, voyeurism has no place. Happily, in the case of the greatest English writer, we know and are likely to know close to nothing about his private life. I like this vacuum, this miracle, this great floating monument of work that has no explanation at all.
* * *
Address, Symposium on the Art of Biography, National Portrait Gallery, November 14, 1978. Telling Lives: The Biographer’s Art (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979).
*1 See “The Assimilationist Dilemma: Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” this page.
II
The Yield
Japan: A Clinical Note
EVER SINCE THE MANCHURIAN INCIDENT, Japanese foreign policy has been reaping the world’s condemnation. Unlike an individual, a nation cannot admit itself in error; so Japan’s only answer has been to tell herself that her judges are wrong and she is right. To strengthen this contention she has built up the belief that she acts from the purest motives which her fellow nations willfully misunderstand. The more they disapprove, the more adamant grows Japan’s conviction that she is right.
This conviction of righteousness, and its corollary, the feeling of being misunderstood, find daily expression in the speech and press of the country. An example is the following passage from an editorial on the Ethiopian conflict: “There must be some reasons that justify Italy in attempting to solve the Ethiopian situation by force, but Premier Mussolini seems to have been misunderstood by the other Powers.… Our country went through bitter experiences as a result of such misunderstanding at the time of the Manchurian Incident.… The world attributed that Incident to the Japanese military and denounced it harshly. This was the outcome of lack of correct knowledge about the situation on the part of the other Powers.”*1
Not only are other nations delinquent in understanding. The next most frequent charge made against them by the Japanese is that they fail to show sincerity. An instance is the stand Japan takes concerning her refusal to sign a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union. She justifies her position by carrying the attack into the enemy camp. “The Soviet Union is laboring under a mistaken notion about Japan,” says an Army spokesman. “If they really want peace in the Far East they should show us the sincerity of their intentions … before seeking to conclude a non-aggression pact with this country.”*2
Injured innocence is an attitude which Japan frequently assumes in answer to foreign disapproval. Last summer when the League Council adopted a resolution condemning Germany’s denunciation of the Versailles Treaty, the Soviet delegate suggested that a similar resolution might be applied to the Far East. A Japanese editorial on the subject stated: “It is clear that the Soviet representative had Japan in mind,” and then asked blandly, “Has Japan done anything in contravention of international treaties?”*3 Needless to note, the editorial made no mention of the Nine-Power Treaty. Again, Japan points with fine indignation at one of her foreign critics who, during the Manchurian Incident, “went so far as to charge Japan with occupying Chinese territory.”*4
With its implied horror at the accusation of having occupied Chinese territory, as if it were an act of which Japan had never dreamed, a statement like the above seems to foreign readers incredible. In real bewilderment the foreigner asks himself what purpose the Japanese believe could be served by such obvious pretense. The only answer is that to the Japanese it is not a pretense. So completely divorced is the Japanese mental process from the Occidental, so devoid of what Westerners call logic, that the Japanese are able to make statements, knowing they present a false picture, yet sincerely believing them. How this is accomplished it is impossible for a foreigner to understand, much less attempt to explain. That appearances mean more than reality to the Japanese mind is the only clue the writer can provide. A fact as such means little to a Japanese
; should he be forced to face certain unacceptable facts, he will cut them dead, just as we might cut an unwelcome acquaintance on the street.
Responsible for this attitude is the conception of “face.” Everyone has heard of the importance of face to the Oriental, but unless one has lived in the Orient one cannot realize just how vital a part it plays; how it enters into every word, thought, and act of existence. The appearance put upon an act, and not the act itself, gives or causes loss of face. To draw an example from ordinary life, a Japanese taxi-driver will never ask the way to an address he does not know, although he knows he is lost and you know he is lost. He prefers to cruise around helplessly for hours, using up gasoline and time at his own expense (for in Japan the fare is a flat rate and not by meter), simply for the sake of preserving the appearance of knowledge, thereby saving his face.
It is the ability to disregard facts without feeling any sense of inconsistency which allows them to make statements like the following, apropos of Japan’s imminent departure from the League of Nations: “Japan has been a constant supporter of the League and her membership in it has been a powerful factor in maintaining peace in the Far East and on the Pacific.”*5 It is not hypocrisy, certainly not deliberate hypocrisy, which is responsible for so strange a remark, any more than it is hypocrisy that allows a devout religious mind to believe in miracles or a child to believe in fairy tales.
Because their mental processes are not alike, Japan and the West find diplomatic intercourse a difficult matter; and what augments the difficulty is the fact that, from the foreign point of view, the Japanese have no understanding of the word “negotiate.” Negotiation between two Western states is the mutual attempt to approach common ground. Its essence is compromise. But the concept of compromise is quite foreign to the Japanese. To them, diplomatic negotiation means the effort of each national representative to put over his own plan intact, the end in view being that one shall win and the others shall lose. The Naval Conference this year has been an illustration of Japan’s attitude. Arriving at London with a fixed determination to obtain parity or nothing, the Japanese were not prepared to yield a single ton, regardless of what was proposed. So inflexible were their minds that they finally withdrew, having contributed nothing to the Conference and having gained nothing for themselves. The following passage from a pamphlet issued by the Navy shows how the Japanese miss the purpose of international negotiation. “Victory,” it says, “is dependent on relative strength, and there is no better way to assure relative strength than to obtain absolute superiority.”*6 So irrefutable is the statement that it defies comment, but it helps to reveal how little understanding of the principle of compromise there is in the Japanese mind.
Practicing History: Selected Essays Page 11