Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  When the talent-mind of the artist exists and has the conditions to express itself, it seems to develop with great speed and daunting ease. On this subject, scholarship can be misleading, and the formal history of the plastic arts can be especially misleading. For long periods and over wide areas, primitivism reigns, but that might only mean that the wrong people are painting the pictures, carving the logs and throwing the pots. The idea is hard to kill that the natural condition of graphic art is to be not very impressive: after all, the idea fits what we ourselves can do, who can barely draw a man standing sideways. But those cave paintings in France, if they didn’t come out of nowhere, certainly came out of a very short tradition. In the eye of history, perfection was reached in a trice. The animals on the walls make ruins of all developmental theories. No higher development is possible: there is nowhere to go except abstraction. There are good reasons for thinking this to be the natural condition not just of graphic art but of all the arts, even music: that something which needs to be expressed will quite rapidly gather towards it all the technical means it requires. It might be said that it takes a while to marshal a symphonic tradition to the point where Beethoven can write the Eroica. And so it does, because there are practical considerations: for one thing, all the instruments have to be invented, and very few instruments were invented just to be in an orchestra—most of them were invented for separate purposes. But Bach needed few predecessors in order to write The Well-Tempered Clavichord, and he didn’t even need a very highly developed clavichord: it just had to be well tempered.

  None of this line of thought is meant to simplify the question of the individual talent and its composition. On the contrary: one is trying to complicate it, by rendering it even less explicable than it was. Explicability is inimical to it. Talent can be dissected, but not alive. The elegant yet conversational cadence of Fitzgerald’s prose is unmistakable precisely because it can’t be analysed.The creative talent is probably the most complex phenomenon a non-scientist will ever have to deal with, and to deal with it the non-scientist needs first of all to realize that there is only one thing he can borrow from the scientist, but borrow it he must—the scientist’s unsleeping attention to the question of what constitutes evidence. Just because someone says that he has been influenced by someone else, for example, doesn’t mean that he has, and just because someone doesn’t say that he has doesn’t mean that he hasn’t. In philosophy, an area where gifted people try hard to tell the truth, few practitioners have ever been able to provide plausible reports of their own interior workings. In the creative arts, where fantasy is at a premium, introspection is even less likely to be reliable. Advice, rules of thumb and cautionary tales from established artists are always worth hearing—Goethe certainly thought that such talmudic material was worth providing—but there is no guarantee that those artists ever followed the same path themselves. What they are giving you might be the sum of their experience, but could just as well be a schematized form of what they had by nature. They might be trying to teach you what they had no need to learn.

  There is no small print, unfortunately, to warn us it might be impossible to teach. We guess, and probably guess correctly, that if an artist acquires technical ability beyond the requirements of what lies within him to be expressed, the result can only be mannerism. The same guess should lead us to the possibility that the technical expertise artists really do need they will be driven to acquire by the demands of talent. If there is a class, whether for music or for painting, the best students in it know what they want; and it is doubtful whether a class for creative writing can teach anything at all except remedial reading. We shout “yes” to Fitzgerald’s advice because what he recommends is what we were doing anyway: reading dozens of the best writers we could find, including him. As things turned out, Fitzgerald’s daughter did become a writer: but never one like him, because what he had could not be transmitted.

  The same was true for Rilke and his letters to a young poet. Briefe an einen jungen Dichter is a toy-town book for the magic doll’s house of the mind, but before we choke up with twee gratitude for its impeccably balanced cracker-mottoes we should remember that the young poet to whom they were addressed turned into a boring old businessman whose only masterpiece was his impeccably balanced account book. Rilke and Fitzgerald were two different versions of the same neurotic wreck, and both would have given a lot, in their darker hours, to be blessed with the ordinary ambitions of the youngsters they advised. But the avuncular advice, as always, ran exclusively in the wrong direction, from those in need of consolation to those who could not benefit. An effective letter from Fitzgerald’s daughter to her desperate father would have had too much to cover: it would have had to tell him to get out of Hollywood, to go back in time, to stop imagining that he could hold his drink, to visit the fashionable world for material but never think that he could live in it, and above all to marry someone else—someone he could not damage, and who would therefore not damage him.

  He wouldn’t have listened anyway. When a man on a cross is told to save himself, he can do so only at the price of seeming to admit that it was all for nothing—he knows better than that. Concerning Fitzgerald, there is a principle that can’t be taught in a creative writing class and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it’s worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night, but we wouldn’t have those if he hadn’t been like that. Fitzgerald’s prose style can be called ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when, by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.

  GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

  Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was adopted by twentieth-century modernists as a precursor, especially if the modernists wrote in English. Among his fellow French writers, Flaubert’s first fame was for his bad grammar. But his untiring quest for factual accuracy and the right word (the untranslated French expression le mot juste got into English mainly because of his influence) eventually, and justifiably, formed the basis of an international reputation, mainly because Madame Bovary can be seen to be charged with meaning in every sentence even when translated into Japanese. The reputation was buttressed by the lengths he would go to in order to keep his art uncorrupted by the allegedly sentimental expectations of the bourgeoisie. Flaubert himself looked on the bourgeoisie as the sworn foe of art, even though he and most of his readers were of bourgeois origin. In the following century his hatred of cliché was eagerly taken up by right-wing critics—principally Ezra Pound—disdainful of democracy’s supposedly weakening influence on language, and his view of the bourgeoisie as the class enemy of art was equally eagerly taken up by left-wing critics with an anti-capitalist programme. The most conspicuous among the latter was Jean-Paul Sartre, who devoted much of the later part of his career to a mountainous critical biography of Flaubert which should certainly be sampled by any student of ideology on the rampage, but not before that same student has read Madame Bovary and at least one of Sartre’s own novels, which prove, although not quite as thoroughly as Flaubert’s do, that a living work of fiction is a vision of what the world is, and not just of what the author thinks society should be.

  No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn’t exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone.

  —GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN 1861 LETTER TO MME. ROGER DU GENETTES (TRANSLATED INTO SPANISH BY MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO IN Ensayos, VOL. 2, P. 1022)

  THIS PASSAGE IN one of Flaubert’s letters has fascinated two great essayists, Miguel de Unamuno and Gore Vidal. For Unamuno, the apostate Catholic in a permanent spiritual crisis about his repudiated faith, it was one of the great texts of his life. In interviews, Vidal has said several times that Flaubert’s godless hiatus was the histor
ical period in which a sane man would have been glad to live. Obviously the idea appealed to Unamuno in the same way. It never appealed much to me, which is probably why I didn’t underline it in Francis Steegmuller’s magnificently edited translation of Flaubert’s letters. (A well-edited translation of such an archive is often more useful than the original, because the editor is more likely to supply copious annotation: witness our privileged access, in English, to Mozart’s letters and Cosima Wagner’s diaries.) But because it appealed to Unamuno, suddenly it appeared striking, so I underlined it there. Unamuno preceded Vidal in his distrust of the religious impulse, and Flaubert preceded both of them. Those of us who came easily to our paganism will find it hard not to think all three of them correct.

  But really the idea that mankind would do better if atheism were universal is only an idea. Some of us would now like to think that Islam will destroy itself, and possibly us along with it, unless it develops a secular culture strong enough to offset the comforting strictness of fundamentalism: but we had better be right. There is also the question of whether Flaubert was factually correct. The two questions are linked. In his preferred interregnum between polytheism and monotheism, it is more likely that people believed everything than that they believed nothing. Flaubert has pinpointed a brief age in which superstition, far from being absent, was almost certainly paramount. In those circumstances, the last thing you could say, whether in French, English or Spanish, is that man was alone. Even theoretically, man had no refuge from the judgement of his fellow men. You can’t be less alone than that. A society in which all the pressures are social is the one dreamed of by totalitarians. In Julius Caesar, one of them pricked Cicero’s name on a list. Shakespeare, with typical sensitivity to an historic turning point, recorded the sub-zero temperature of the unique moment, although he did not show us how Marc Antony made the proscription: he only showed us how Cassius heard about it, rather put out that Brutus already knew. If Shakespeare took such a roundabout course to make the point, it could have been because of his irrepressible awareness that he was living at a totalitiarian period in history, all the more insidious for being apparently exuberant. In the time of Good Queen Bess, it meant death to be Catholic.

  Eventually, in the West, we emerged from the age in which people paid with their lives for a religious allegiance. We emerged into another age in which they were murdered by the million for other reasons, but not for that one. Though the religious might hate to hear it said, the West graduated from its nightmare only because religion ceased to matter in any way except privately. At the time of writing, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that the same thing can come true for Islam, and do so in a briefer time than the span of centuries it took to come true for us. While we are waiting, it might be of some help, although of little comfort, to realize that an Islamic fundamentalist doesn’t have to share the psychotic certitudes of Torquemada in order to be dangerous: it is enough for him to share the civilized attitudes of Queen Elizabeth I, who wanted every invading priest tortured as soon as caught, and gruesomely executed soon after that. It’s the general view prevailing within a religious culture—the general view usually described as being “moderate”—that matters most. When she was growing up in Somalia, Ayaan Hirsi Ali was taught that Salman Rushdie deserved death because he had blasphemed against the holy book. She was taught it, and she believed it, as did everyone she knew. It was the moderate view. Now, as a member of parliament in Holland, and after her Dutch friend Theo van Gogh was murdered in the street by an Islamic extremist, she believes differently. But how extreme was the extremist? Until the whole of the Islamic world repudiates him, we will be forced to believe that its moderate views are dangerous in themselves, if only for what they condone. We will be forced to believe that there is something crazy about all those people actually believing all that stuff; and wish that their belief could become more unbelieving, like ours; and not a few centuries from now, but right now. Such a quick transformation doesn’t seem very likely. Perhaps it would be better to wish that their religion could be reinforced, in that area where, so we are told, Islam means peace and tolerance. Certainly there were times in history when Islam meant that, much more than Christianity did. But our understandable hope that every Muslim male of fighting age, if exposed to a sufficiency of Western culture, might transform himself into Flaubert sounds very like wishful thinking; and it is quite likely that Flaubert was thinking wishfully in the first place, when he posited a wonderful ancient time in which nobody had any Gods to worship. He searched the far past, and lo! He found a new dawn.

  SIGMUND FREUD

  Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was first a neurologist, then a psychopathologist, in which second role, and based in Vienna, he developed the technique of conversational “free association” that we now recognize as the distinctive feature of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and counselling in whatever form we might happen to encounter them. Since at one time or another most of us will spend hours telling our troubles to somebody we hardly know, this is a very widespread influence for a single thinker to have had. On an academic level, Freud’s theories about human personality will always be argued over, as they were when they were being developed. The quarrels of his disciples with him and among themselves are interesting studies in how animus and outright hatred can arise from purely mental differences. The driving force of any ideology stands revealed: it can’t be coherent without being intolerant. What there can be no argument about is Freud’s stature as an imaginative writer. Quite a lot of it comes over into English—The Psychopathlogy of Everyday Life (1904) is a good place to start—but in the original German his body of prose is poetically charged almost without equal. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they banned psychoanalysis straight away. After they took over Austria in 1938, Freud was lucky to escape. In London he lived for a further year before succumbing to cancer. His house in Hampstead retains his wonderful collections of books and sculpture. The Freud name, through his descendants, is still prominent in British cultural life.

  Finis Austriae.

  —SIGMUND FREUD, AN ENTRY IN HIS DIARY, PROBABLY MADE ON SATURDAY, MARCH 12, 1938

  ALL THE ENTRIES in Freud’s diary of his last decade are short. Very few are more than one line long. On the day he began to keep the diary in 1929, he signalled his intention on the first page with the underlined heading “Kürzeste Chronik” (Shortest Chronicle). The entries are explicated ably in a Hogarth Press coffee table book, The Diary of Sigmund Freud 1929–1939, edited by Michael Molnar: a punctilious effort which can be recommended, not least for its lavish iconography. As picture books go, it’s a page-turner. But a longer and more sensitive explication of this particular entry would have been useful. Austria’s chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, had resigned, Hitler was already in Linz, and the Anschluß was inevitable. Its advent could be measured in hours. This was indeed the end of Austria. But why did the great seer say so in Latin?

  One reason might have been that The Times of London had already said it in Latin. True to the paper’s appeasing form in that period, the Times leader writers had behaved despicably right up to the crucial moment, but when the catastrophe finally looked inevitable even to them, they summoned the courage to admit that the end might indeed be near. (Up until then, they had run endless assurances about Hitler’s benevolence.) Because The Times was read religiously in Vienna, and especially by the Jewish intellectuals, the imported Latin tag had been circulating for a week. But there was no reason for Freud to pick up on it. He probably did so to give the moment an automatic historical perspective, and thus claim for himself, through speech, an oracular viewpoint. Shakespeare did the same for Julius Caesar: Et tu, Brute? At the moment when all is lost, Caesar reverts out of his everyday language (which in the play, of course, is English) to the formal language of his schooldays, which for Shakespeare would have been Latin. Shakespeare, a psychologist far more intuitive that Freud himself, knew that people revert under pressure. (Even trained singers
, when things are going wrong, will suddenly retreat into the shallow breathing that was once all they knew, and any professional in whatever field could tell a similar story.) In the case of Caesar, Shakespeare was probably helped to the idea by Suetonius. In Suetonius’s account of Caesar’s life, Caesar, when he receives the last blow, reverts out of Latin into Greek: kai su, teknon. The effect is not just of a retreat to youth but of a distancing, as if history has inevitably led to this, and the moment must be given its dignity as a point in the flow of time.