Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer’s ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his rebuilt motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured, disconsolate tread of the blue reverie. Jazz was a brimming reservoir of these contending qualities. Eventually I was listening to so much classical music that I left jazz aside, but I never thought that I had left it behind. Later on, when I took holidays from classical music, it was Tin Pan Alley and Broadway that attracted me, and there were years on end when I listened to everything happening in pop and rock. The second lustrum of the sixties was a particularly good time for that: you could slide a coin into a jukebox and hear Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” and wonder whether there had ever been, or would ever be again, anything quite so addictive as the triumphal march of a Tamla anthem.

  Jazz, however, was always there underneath all that, and begging to be revisited. I couldn’t muster an affection for John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins—I don’t think I was meant to—but the tradition that led up to them still had many glories to reveal. The great period of Duke Ellington was a constellation of glories that made Berg and Webern seem very thin gruel. Listening on the same day to the Lester Young quintet and a string quintet by Ravel, I could hear no incongruity: they seemed comparable events to me, although there was not much evidence at the time to suggest that the same was true for anybody else. Such catholicity of taste has only recently become respectable. At the time when the divinely gifted and cruelly doomed cellist Jacqueline du Pré was breaking our hearts with Elgar, the boys around her were thought rather daring when they vamped and jammed a few jazz figures on their strings. But the argument about a supposed hierarchy of genres would have continued much longer if Leonard Bernstein had not put a stop to it. In the first chapter of his television series about music, after giving brief, instantly enchanting examples from the classical repertoire, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, rock and pop, he said the only thing that mattered: “I love it all.” He had jazz in his blood. His show song “Lonely Town” is a melody that Bix Beiderbecke would have loved to play, and it would not have been composed in quite the same way if the broken heroes of jazz had not first lived their dangerous lives. The paradox was that the most persuasive witness to the lyrical distillation of Bix’s broken life, Louis Armstrong, was a man whose life was never broken, even by the full force of America’s most tenacious social malignancy, white prejudice. If it is a political nightmare no longer, Armstrong’s shining trumpet certainly contributed to the wake-up call. But there is only so much art can do against injustice, and the blues, from which jazz took flight, were an embodiment of the sad truth that much beauty begins as a consolation for what can’t be mended.

  RAYMOND ARON

  Raymond Aron (1905–1983) began as a sociologist but made it clear from the start that the subject would not restrict him to social facts. Instead, it would release him into political analysis, and from there into general philosophy on the scale of Durkheim, Pareto and Max Weber. The strength of his voluminous theoretical work, however, would always be that his wider views were backed up by minutely observed concrete detail: his journalism was his bedrock. One of the few French thinkers who were equally at home in Germany, he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse. As George Orwell did later, Aron realized that the professed enemy of Nazi totalitarianism was itself totalitarian. He carried this insight with him into exile in London during World War II.

  After the war, he emerged as the great opponent of the French left wing, and especially of its most illustrious figurehead, Jean-Paul Sartre. Beyond their respective deaths, the contest between the two great names continued to define the frontiers of argument in French political thought right up to recent times. “Better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron” is still meant to be a slogan testifying to political seriousness, rather than to intellectual suicide. For French gauchiste thinkers, even after they had given up hope on the Soviet Union, liberal democracy was fundamentally suspect because it had capitalism for an economic motor. For Aron, liberal democracy was the only way ahead to social justice: it could be, and had to be, criticized in detail, but never dismissed in its entirety. Since ideologists of every stamp would always attempt to do so, that made ideology itself the perpetual enemy of realism. Liberal democracy, based on an historic consciousness, could afford to reveal even the most unpalatable truths, whereas ideology was bound to conceal them. Of the comparatively small proportion of Aron’s enormous body of work that has been translated into English, The Opium of the Intellectuals (1955) can still be regarded as the best introduction to his thought, and indeed to modern intellectual history in its entirety. For readers of French, he can be met more briefly, but almost as effectively, in Le Spectateur engagé (1981), a long interview of the type that French publishers do so well.

  . . . the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.

  —RAYMOND ARON, L’Opium des intellectuels, P. 292

  SUCH WAS THE central belief that put Aron on a collision course with all the radical thinkers in Paris after World War II. He couldn’t have put it more clearly; and if he couldn’t, nobody could. Essayists who stake everything on writing the kind of spangled style that glitters in the limelight near the top of the tent must sometimes wish, as they sweat to keep a sentence alive, that the tightrope could be laid out along the ground. There are essayists who write plainly and yet are duller still because of it. But the most enviable essayists are those who can write plainly and generate an extra thrill from doing so, demonstrating a capacity to clarify an intricate line of thought in their heads before laying it out sequentially on the page. Always matching a decorum of procedure to their weight of argument, they can make the more spectacular practitioner look meretricious. Foremost among these cool masters of expository prose must be ranked Raymond Aron.

  Most of Aron’s vast output remains untranslated in the original French, but enough of his books have been brought into English to give some idea of his importance, and some of those books are indispensable—most prominently The Opium of the Intellectuals, which remains to this day, after all the years since it first appeared in 1955, the best debunking of Marxism as a theology, and the most piercing analysis of why that theology, during the twentieth century, should have had so pervasive and baleful an influence in the free nations. Even now, every first-year university student in the world should read that book, if only because the poised force of Aron’s prose style gives such a precise idea of the strength and passion of the consensus he was trying to rebut.

  It should be said straight away that his clarity of view was not attained from a right-wing viewpoint. Though many a prominent figure of international anti-communism paid tribute to him after his death—Henry Kissinger, McGeorge-Bundy, Norman Podhoretz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were amon
g the Americans who acknowledged his example—Aron himself began on the left and stayed there until the end. But he was always disgusted by the thirst of putatively humanitarian intellectuals for the lethal certitudes of Marxist dogma. As early as the 1950s he was proclaiming the need for a new party, de la gauche non conformiste. A sizeable party of the nonconformist left never really arrived, but the massed ranks of the conformist left were not fond of the idea that somebody so prominent had called for one. Many of his fellow French intellectuals never forgave him for his heresy. (Sartre, who respected Aron’s credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.) A few of them were grateful, and they were among the best. Jean-François Revel, François Furet, Alain Finkielkraut and the small handful of other French writers on politics who have managed to defend their independence of thought while surrounded by a tenaciously lingering pseudo-progressive consensus have all had Raymond Aron as a forebear, and have usually been polite enough to acknowledge his pioneering faith in the strength, and not just the virtues, of liberal democracy.

  There had always been plenty of intellectuals ready to pay lip service to the virtues, but they doubted the strength. Because, from the French viewpoint, liberalism had been able to do so little in staving off the Nazi brand of totalitarianism, it was thought that only another brand of absolute power—the Soviet brand—could fill the vacuum. The erroneous view that the Red Army had won the war all on its own helped to reinforce this illusion. In Czechoslavakia, in 1948, the same misguided humility led the whole liberal intelligentsia to abdicate from its responsibilities in advance. It never came to that in France, but it came close enough. At this distance it is hard to conjure up just how thick and poisonous a miasma of bad faith a man like Aron was trying to fight his way through, and just how honest, patient and brave he had to be in order to do so. He succeeded in the end. Though the French will probably go on thinking proudly of Sartre as the Victor Hugo of political philosophy—the most mentions, the most mistresses, the biggest funeral—Aron’s name is nowadays quite often invoked by those who believe that there is an alternative to getting everything brazenly wrong. The alternative is to get a few things modestly right. Bernard-Henri Lévy will probably not find it expedient to drop his posturing slogan that it was better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Aron, but to the extent that Levy’s political arguments are considerable, he sounds like Aron, not Sartre.

  Aron is consequently the best reason for continuing to think of Paris as a capital city of political philosophy. As a Jew, he would not have survived the German Occupation long had he remained in France. Any possible illusion about what the Nazis were up to had been removed for him when he stood beside the historian Golo Mann in the Berlin Opernplatz in 1933 and watched the storm troopers burn books. But when the Nazis reached Paris, Aron exemplified the one advantage of being a designated victim. His moral choice was made for him, and he could spend the war in London, with a relatively clear conscience. Sartre and Camus were only two of the many thinkers about politics who, being gentiles, could stay in Paris and think about politics there if they chose. It was a dubious privilege. The Nazis, operating with a subtlety rare for them, managed to corrupt nearly everyone in the Parisian literary world to some degree. The essential trick was to offer the intellectuals the opportunity to continue their careers if they kept their protests suitably muted. The first result was a widespread but tacit collaboration. The less common, overt collaboration could safely be denounced when the Germans packed up and ran. Claiming to be the instruments of l’Épuration (the Purification), self-appointed tribunals—“tribunal” is always a bad word in French history—dealt out the punishment. Such blatant collaborators as Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle had been asking for it, and one way or another they got it. But many of the denouncers had themselves collaborated in a less flagrant way. A pervasive sense of having been implicated, however passively, led to the second result: a long silence that really amounted to a cover-up.

  What really happened under the Occupation is a story that, even sixty years later, is still coming out. For decades it didn’t come out at all. The first accounts of any scope didn’t appear until the 1980s, and the general conclusions have not yet been fully drawn. But one of them should be that the Propaganda Abteilung (Propaganda Division, also often called the Propaganda Staffel) succeeded in its main aim. Apart from the brave few who went underground and fought at the risk of their lives, the French intellectuals gave the Nazis little trouble, and were morally compromised as a consequence. Not even Camus, a writer whose stature depended on his very real capacity for translating his ideals of authenticity into action, was entirely untouched. But at least Camus had the grace to admit that his Resistance activities had not amounted to much, and at least he had the humanity to deplore the excesses of the post-Liberation witch-hunt against the more shameless collaborators. Sartre, whose underground activities had never amounted to anything except a secret meeting on Wednesday to decide whether there should be another meeting the following Tuesday, not only claimed the status of Resistance veteran but called down vengeance on people whose behaviour had not really been all that much more reprehensible than his own. The sad truth was that he, even more conspicuously than Camus, owed his wartime fame as a writer and thinker to Nazi tolerance, for which a price had to be paid. The price was to lace one’s eloquence with a judiciously timed silence. The trick was to pay up and make it look like compulsion. So it was, but only if you considered your career as indispensable—something artists find it all too easy to do. They are even encouraged to, in the name of an ideal.

  When you consider the mental calibre of the people involved, Paris under the Occupation thus becomes the twentieth century’s premier field of study in which to reach the depressing conclusion that even the most liberal convictions buckle very easily under totalitarian pressure, unless there are extraordinary reserves of character to sustain them. The further consideration—that to deplore the absence of such fortitude might be illiberal in itself—is more depressing still, but should be faced. Apart from permanent outsiders such as homosexuals, petty thieves, and the very poor, only young people on their own had a real opportunity to be brave under the Occupation, and even they had to be saints to take it when death was the likely result. Behind the Nazi show of tact in Paris was the threat of absolute violence. The threat rarely had to be made actual. The threatened were too smart. Their smartness was well-known to the Nazis who ran the show, some of whom were great admirers of French culture. Receptions were held regularly at that most fashionable of restaurants, the Tour d’Argent. French cultural figures who turned up met Nazis who seemed well aware that Cocteau was more refined than anything they had at home. Cocteau, who attended more than once, was slow to realize that once should have been enough.

  Wartime Paris was a moral crucible. Aron was out of it, and we don’t even have to ask ourselves how he would have behaved had he been in it. (We have to ask ourselves about ourselves, but not about him.) He would have been dead. Untouched and untainted in England, he could prepare his comeback. He came back as a commentator in the newspapers and magazines, deploying his rare gift of making a nuanced, learned and unfailingly critical analysis attractive as journalism. Because of him, the advocates of the seductive fantasy that the imperialism of the West was the most ruthless imperialism affecting Europe did not have it all their own way. But it took a long, hard slog before the illusion began to be dispelled that somehow Sartre was the serious thinker about politics and Aron the dilettante. At the heart of the anomaly was the almost universally shared assumption that those who favoured the declaredly progressive consensus were working for the betterment of mankind, while those who believed that liberal democracy was a better bet were working against it. Helping to make Aron even more unpalatable to the entrenched pseudo-left was his expertise in sociology: he actually knew something, for example, about ho
w industries ran, how houses got built, and how ordinary people earned the money to pay for their groceries. A respect for humble fact is one of the qualities that keep his prose permanently fresh. He could, alas, be very grand. All too often, and especially towards the end, he was a bit too fond of drawing himself up to his full height. But he never lost contact with the earth. He never lost sight of the imperfection that debars mankind from utopia.

  Communist interpretation is never wrong. Logicians will object in vain that a theory which exempts itself from all refutations escapes from the order of truth.

  —RAYMOND ARON, L’Opium des intellectuels, P. 144

  After World War II, Raymond Aron was the French philospher who did most to offset the more famous Jean-Paul Sartre’s support for communism. Albert Camus tried to offset it also, but his scholarly qualifications were held to be dubious. Nobody doubted Aron’s. From the moment he published L’Opium des intellectuels in 1955, the French left-wing thinkers knew that they had a real fight on their hands. They didn’t give up easily. Some of them still haven’t. Aron was obliged to go on plugging away at the same theme. He had already said, before the war, that the Communist version of socialism was a secular religion. What remains puzzling is why he said so little about it while the war was on. Self-exiled to London, he wrote a long series of brilliant articles for the Free French periodical La France Libre, which were collected after the victory into three books, nowadays themselves collected into a single volume, Chroniques de guerre. In the entire text, Stalin is mentioned exactly twice, and neither time derogatively. Writing in the same city at the same time, George Orwell risked his reputation and income by insisting on a distinction between the Red Army, which was making such a great contribution to defeating Hitler, and the lethal regime behind it, which was bent on the extinction of all human values. Why did Aron not do something similar?