by Clive James
But if I had ever felt the necessity to say such things in print, I would have tried to remember the Ferrari. His wealth was his whip hand. The concept can be recommended to aspiring artists in all fields; it is the same principle that applies to feminism; if you are vulnerable economically, you are vulnerable all along the line. If you have pleased the public enough to have transferred some of its money into your own bank account, however, you can afford to ignore your detractors. Humphrey Bogart called it his “fuck you” money: with enough in the bank, he wouldn’t have to take a bad deal. The point ought to be obvious, although it is not often enough made when the question comes to a sad turn in an artist’s career: he might have been forced into it by lack of the wherewithal to give Bogart’s instructions to the proponents of a doomed project. What I like about the way Davis put the axiom is the neatness of the illustration. The Ferrari says what matters: he’s got one and his critics haven’t. A similarly vivid illustration marks the standard anecdote about the Manchester United soccer star George Best. So brilliant that he was marked out of the game by opponents who had been specifically assigned to kick him in the ankles, Best might have taken to drink anyway, but it is more likely that he was simply a born alcoholic. To him the stuff was poison, and that’s it. In the sad aftermath of his glory he was a reliable sad-sack act on television talk shows: a wreck who thought he was a rascal. But he had a story up his sleeve that always gave him the victory even if he looked as if he had fallen into the chair he was threatening to fall out of. It is doubtful if he made the story up all by himself: it is too well crafted, and Best’s talent, though enormous, was never for words. But one way or another the story got written, and its hero got to recite it. The story is about a room-service waiter in a luxury hotel who pushes a trolley laden with caviar and lobster into Best’s VIP suite, only to find Best in bed with Miss World and a bottle of Bollinger. The waiter says: “George, George, where did it all go wrong?”
On closer examination, Miles Davis and George Best were not saying quite the same thing. Davis was talking about the invulnerability conferred by his money. Best, by that stage, had no money. But he had the right to imply that his remembered glory ensured he would still do better than a waiter. A wise artist, however, will be careful to bank his windfalls, because any glory he acquires will soon be compromised if the cash runs out. Money buys control over your career. Without money, your career will control you. But money can’t buy you a career in the first place, and inheriting wealth is almost invariably a bad way to start one. Among the screen stars, Jan Sterling and Cliff Robertson were both born rich, but neither would have got anywhere without talent. Jan Sterling, indeed, didn’t get as far as she should have, and is nowadays forgotten: later on, Grace Kelly found it easier to be a Lady in Hollywood. The poet James Merrill, who had Merrill Lynch behind him for a rainy day, was free to write exactly as he liked. His poetry might have been less demanding, and more in demand, if he had had to establish himself in an open market. The point can’t be pushed too far, of course: Carly Simon, who was brought up as a privileged child in a publishing family of enormous wealth, nevertheless deserved her hit songs, and no doubt took genuine satisfaction out of making money by herself.
But if too much money is made on the job, it can be almost as dangerous as an inheritance. When popular musicians turn to self-indulgence, it is because they can at last afford to do what they would have done anyway. Their early hits, written under the constrictions of compulsory crowd-pleasing, are usually seen in retrospect to be their best work, and often the most adventurous as well. (With the singers, it is always a very bad sign when they start to talk instead of sing. Diana Ross’s recorded speeches became the litany of Tamla-Motown in its downhill phase. She was proving that she no longer needed to please the public: a point all too easily made.) Higher up the scale, serious artists are too often exempt from enquiries about the role of money. Tom Stoppard was refreshingly candid when, after the successful premiere of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he was asked what the play was about: “It’s about to make me a lot of money.” Those of us who attend upon artists with our scholarship, criticism and admiration are apt to forget that the gifted people who give us a glimpse of the sublime are not immune from mundane cares, which, by no paradox except the deviltry of economics, can multiply with success. Mainly because of the glamour involved and the ever present temptations, the arts in all fields seem exactly designed to vaporize even the most exalted practitioner’s stipend as fast as he earns it, and the larger the faster. The mere cost of having your money professionally looked after, for example, instantly becomes an overhead. In his Paris Review interview, S. J. Perelman enjoyed showing how hard-headed he was about the writing business. The trick in Hollywood, he said, wasn’t to make the loot, but to get it out. He said that the “fairy money” they paid you had a way of evaporating as you headed east.
Books about the finances of the painters are often written, because the money involved is big if the painter becomes fashionable—especially, strangely enough, if the painter belonged to the anti-bourgeois avant-garde before he clicked with the buyers. Painters have to buy materials and pay a large percentage to their galleries, so they are rarely as rich as we tend to think, but when they do break through, they break through on an industrial scale. For writers the financial rewards are comparatively small-time, but a good book dedicated to nothing except the money would be very useful. It might help to explain behaviour that is puzzled over on the metaphysical level when there are concrete explanations that have not been considered. When Nazi Germany cancelled the distribution of Hollywood movies, MGM faced a loss of only a small proportion of its income. Thomas Mann, when he finally realised the necessity of cutting himself off from publication in his homeland, faced the loss of nearly all of his, because although he was internationally famous, his central audience was in Germany. In the Soviet Union, royalties existed only in the form of privileges—an apartment, a dacha, the chance to be published at all—but the privileges were decisive. The threat of their being withdrawn was enough to make almost anyone think twice about speaking against the state. Without this point in mind it is fruitless to go on speculating about why Pasternak, for example, was so slow to dissent in public, and was so equivocating when he did. Lovers of the arts should be slow to despise the cash nexus on the artist’s behalf: the niggling difficulties of securing and handling one’s personal finances are nothing beside the pressures of state patronage. Going to hell in your own way has everything over being sent there at a bureaucrat’s whim.
Was Miles Davis speaking for black America? Yes, of course, although he shrugged off the black man’s burden: he wasn’t Martin Luther King Jr. But Martin Luther King couldn’t have recorded Kind of Blue. Davis had his real trouble not with acceptance as such, but with drugs. In the past—the immediate past, let’s not forget—black musicians were robbed blind by white businessmen as a matter of course. Davis robbed himself, incidentally showing us the difference between a weakness and a vice. He had a weakness for women, but nobody has ever proved that he played worse for his prodigious sexual appetite. His appetite for drugs was another matter, and it would be a brave defender who claimed that drugs never affected his playing. Charlie Parker was explicit on the subject: “Anyone who says he is playing better either on tea, the needle, or when he is juiced, is a plain, straight liar.” Sadder than a falling phrase from “My Old Flame,” the line is quoted on page 379 of Hear Me Talkin’ to Ya. Edited by Nat Hentoff and Nat Shapiro, it is a book as rich in precepts as in anecdotes, and one which should never be allowed to go out of print. Students in all fields of creative endeavour need a copy of it nearby, to instruct them in the unyielding nature of bedrock. Not long ago I heard a man playing the most beautiful tenor sax. I could tell he had absorbed everything Ben Webster and Lester Young had to teach, but his gift for assembling his phrases into a long legato line was all his own. He was terrific. But he was playing at the bottom of the escalators in Tottenham Court R
oad tube station. No Ferrari for him.
SERGEI DIAGHILEV
Born in Novgorod and buried in Venice, Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) became famous to the world as the impresario of the Russian opera-and-ballet export drive that turned fashionable Paris upside down before and during World War I. He was already famous in Russia as the brilliant young connoisseur whose lavishly mounted exhibitions rediscovered the country’s tradition of religious icons and secular portrait painting, and as the editor of the truly wonderful magazine Mir Iskusstva (The World of Art), in which Benois, Bakst and other Russian names that later became bywords made their first appearances. The gift Diaghilev demonstrated in Paris of attracting all the most celebrated artists of the day (Picasso, Stravinsky, Cocteau, Satie, Poulenc and many more) to join his enterprises had already been demonstrated at home. But at the height of his powers, home was lost to him. After the Revolution he stayed abroad, and the Soviet authorities, once it became obvious that he could not be lured back, condemned him in perpetuity as an especially insidious example of bourgeois decadence. Soviet historians of art wrote him out of their picture of the past for more than sixty years. When, in 1982, a two-volume collection of his pre-revolutionary writings on art was published in Moscow, it was a sign that the confident rigidity of official ideology was starting to bend, because any move towards telling the truth about the past was likely to be a prelude to telling the truth about the present. But it was just a sign. Only in retrospect was the change certain. What the astonished reader could be sure of at the time, however, was that Diaghilev had been a great critic—the discriminating impulse at the heart of his uncanny ablity to bend the talented to his will. They felt that he understood them. He almost always did.
Why should I waste my imagination on myself?
—SERGEI DIAGHILEV (ATTRIB.)
AS A LIFELONG admirer of Diaghilev I am easily impressed by anything he is said to have said, but when I first read this I was so impressed that I neglected to make a note: I knew I would remember it always. I could have sworn that I read it in Theatre Street, Tamara Karsavina’s radiant little sheaf of memoirs. (Karsavina, previously the darling of the Maryinsky company in Petersburg, danced the very first Firebird, in Paris in 1910.) Probably the best single book ever written about dancing, it also has general application to the whole world of the arts: if I were making a list of ten books that art-crazy young people should read to civilize their passion, Theatre Street would be on it. But when I searched through the book to find this quotation, there it wasn’t. The conversation was there, but only in reported form: no inverted commas. Did I read it in that mighty balletomane Richard Buckle’s book about Diaghilev? I couldn’t find it there, either: nor in the fascinating interview with Karsavina contained in John Drummond’s fine compendium Speaking of Diaghilev. Anyway, unsourced though it is, the remark is too resonant to leave out. The location was Diaghilev’s small apartment in Petersburg—as the city was then still called, and now, happily, is called again. Karsavina, very young at the time and bowled over by Diaghilev’s sophistication, noticed that his tiny bedroom had almost nothing in it except a bed. She said she was surprised, and Diaghilev replied with the rhetorical question quoted above. The remark comes straight from the centre of his personality and helps to define it, as the arthritic Renoir defined his own personality when he said, “Tie the brush into my hands” and the senescent Richard Strauss when he screamed at the orchestra, “Louder! Louder! I can still hear the singers!”
Diaghilev, an artist whose art-form was to combine the art-forms, gave everything to the world and kept little for himself. His hotel bills could be immense and he dressed to kill, but otherwise he did not need artistic surroundings in his personal life. Other impresarios have been less monastic. Lincoln Kirstein, whose taste made possible the whole coruscating pageant of Balanchine’s career at the New York City Ballet, kept his Manhattan apartment full of beautiful things. Widening the scope to directly creative artists, we can see the same contrast. At one extreme, some pour all their creativity into their art and don’t care how they live. At the other, there are those who have to arrange their personal lives at a certain aesthetic level before they can function. Perhaps the most easily chosen paradigm case of the first kind would be Beethoven, whose working environment was elementary, not to say squalid. (In Erica Jong’s debut novel Fear of Flying, which does not deserve the neglect that has followed its best-seller status, there is a convincing passage where the narrator, visiting a mock-up of Beethoven’s music room, is “moved by the simplicity of his needs.” I quote from memory, but a writer has always done well when you feel the urge to do that.) Keats exemplified the second kind, if only for one memorable moment, when he put on his best clothes before he sat down to write a poem. In order for inspiration to strike, Wagner had to be living in velvet splendour, no matter what it cost him and others. He lived beyond his means on principle, as if imbued with the divine right of kings. It took a king, Ludwig II of Bavaria, to keep him in the style to which he had no intention of becoming unaccustomed. Verdi, on the other hand, paid his way and expected his possessions to do the same: he lived in comfort and the vineyards he could see from his house were all his, but they were a business proposition. Comparable figures in the imperial magnitude of their achievements, the two giants are at odds in this: Verdi could have slept in Diaghilev’s spartan bedroom and got up in the morning to compose. Wagner would have thought he was in gaol.
Goethe kept a grand drawing room to impress his guests and a spartan bedroom because he did not need to impress himself: in him, the economy of imaginative effort attained the level of poetry. Yet he might have lived chaotically and written no less well. The connection between highly organized work and an impulse towards a life of order is frequent, but not necessary: a fact amply proved by the slobs. Ford Madox Ford’s accumulated literary achievement is a shambles of scrappily realized catchpenny projects dotted with masterpieces, but two of those—The Good Soldier and the first three volumes of Parade’s End taken as a totality—are triumphs of precise arrangement. Yet his personal circumstances were so disorganized they looked like a deliberate challenge to Oblomov. Ford would spend all day in a dressing gown stained with bacon fat. That same ingredient of breakfast food was also a theme in the life of Cyril Connolly, an important critical writer whose once high reputation is in a continuous position of never quite being restored, and partly because his epicurean tastes are found repugnant. Connolly’s books (mainly collections of essays) were testaments to the cultivated high life, which he tried to live in reality, mortgaging a notional future income to keep himself in champagne, foie gras, upmarket women and first editions. But he could use a cold rasher of cooked bacon as a bookmark, especially if the book belonged to someone else. In all of literary history as we know it, perhaps the most outstanding slob was W. H. Auden. The man whose lyrics were showpieces of carpentry—try to imagine a poem more accurately built than “The Fall of Rome”—kept a kitchen that could have doubled as a research facility for biological warfare. Worse, he treated other people’s houses the same way. Mary McCarthy, when a guest, earned a bad reputation by taking a long shower with the curtain outside the bath instead of inside: the host would receive no apology for the subsequent inundation. From Auden, a mere flood would have counted as a thank-you note: he left his benefactors under the impression that they had been visited by the Golden Horde. Auden lived long enough for me to see his tie. I thought it had been presented to him by Jackson Pollock until I realized it was a plain tie plus food. It put the relationship of writer to the written in a new light. How could his poems be so neat and clean, and he so otherwise? Rimbaud, of course, had raised the same question long before. His teenage masterpiece Bâteau ivre, among all the other things it is, is a perfect construction, architecture on paper. But the young man who wrote it was also capable of composing a poem on a café table using, as a substitute for ink, his own excrement, delivered fresh into his hand specifically for the purpose. When any acquaintance
made the mistake of offering him hospitality, he trashed the place on principle. Why Verlaine waited so long to shoot him is a great mystery. (In his biography of Rimbaud, Graham Robb—whose books on Balzac and Victor Hugo are likewise models of the form—does his best to give us an answer, but I still don’t get it.) Later on in a short life, the prodigy sobered up sufficiently to suggest, by example if not in a written testimonial, that while an adolescent he might have been a crackpot. Certainly it would be nice to believe it. Auden, however, although on a less destructive scale, was a mess for the long haul: a career scumbag.
Exquisite work is no sure sign of a fastidious worker. If you knew them only from what they wrote, you would expect both Proust and Rilke to be dandies. Proust wasn’t: his clothes sense was considered weird even before he started to pad his shirts with insulation, and his handwriting was barely legible. Rilke was, except that the word “dandy” is inadequate to the fanaticism of his everyday display of taste. Everything about him, right down to his notepaper, was faultlessly chosen. His handwriting was so beautiful that his merest thank-you note would look like a work of art even to someone who couldn’t read. The whole performance of his personal life cost money, some of which he had. When he had to cadge, he was a lot more subtle than Wagner. A supreme master of the bread-and-butter letter, Rilke was continually invited by great ladies to honour their estates by creating his poems in rent-free accommodation. Once again, the way he managed his circuitous trajectory from one finely appointed ambience to the next was a work of art in itself. Taste justified everything. Taste was his world. He behaved as if art were taste elevated to the highest possible degree. The armigerous chatelaines who played hostess were happy to believe it, since the idea made them artists too.
