Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  It should be said that Friedell’s great book, for much of its enormous length, does not use wit for its texture. But it always has wit for a basis. The Viennese tradition of the enlightening wisecrack is there underneath, supporting a prose narrative that never loses its geniality even when talking about the Black Death. Friedell didn’t always feel compelled to be funny. But he was never unfunny, in the sense of straining to amuse, and missing the mark. For him the whole target was a bullseye, and he could let fly at his leisure. He saw the same quality in Shaw, whom he admired, perhaps to excess. When Friedell dedicated the English translation of The Cultural History of the Modern Age to Shaw, the dedicatee was already a known admirer of the dictators. Friedell would never have been capable of such a misplaced enthusiasm. He would have been a valuable voice in the English-speaking world if he had ever been taken up, but his name was never well-known in Britain or the United States except to the German-speaking refugees. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that he is not even listed in the excellent Chambers Biographical Dictionary, which finds room for Finnish playwrights of the second order, and is usually good about those who once were prominent but are so no longer. Friedell, however, was never there to be forgotten. But if we know nothing about him, he, true to form, knew a lot about us. He was a student of British cultural history and wrote one of the best appreciations of Lord Macaulay. Typically playing himself in with a witticism—Friedell the cabaret artist always knew how to buttonhole the audience—he said that Macaulay was so highly regarded in Britain that his book of collected essays was included in any list of classics. In the English-speaking countries, Friedell pointed out, a list of classics was regarded as a guide to books that should be read, and not, as in the German-speaking countries, to books that should be avoided. It’s easy to imagine that idea starting its life at a café table. Harder to imagine is how the giant could walk away from his laughing friends, climb the stairs to his apartment, and settle down for another day’s lonely work on his strange and wonderful attempt to get the whole of creation into a nutshell.

  Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.

  —EGON FRIEDELL, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, VOL. 3, P. 225

  In his great book, Egon Friedell regales us with thousands of lines like this. If they were fully separable from their context, they would be aphorisms: we could pick them out like jewels from a crown. But they are more like threads and knots in a tapestry, and can’t be pulled loose without violating the texture. Suitably aware, however, that we are doing his masterwork an injury, we can memorize some of his best moments and reproduce them in conversation, although morality demands that we should acknowledge the borrowing. After all, he did. This line is one of the many he lifted from someone else. Friedell gives the provenance: one Gustav von Bunge said it in his Lehrbuch (Textbook) der Physiologie, and it wasn’t his line either. He was quoting a professor of physics who said it in a lecture. Thus, all the way back to anonymity, we can follow the trajectory of a shining notion. The tapestry analogy breaks down. Friedell’s mighty gathering place of a text is a game park, a menagerie, an aviary and an aquarium. Sentences live in it as our dreams are populated with fragments of experience, often including experience we have not yet had, and may never have. It follows that the importance of always identifying a source lies not only in common justice, but in truth to life. Whether we like it or not, individuality is the product of a collective existence. Few writers have ever had a more identifiable tone of voice than Egon Friedell. But the tone was a synthesis of all the voices he had ever heard, and so is ours. If we had never heard anyone else, we would not sound more like ourselves; we would sound like Kaspar Hauser the savage infant, on the day he was rescued from solitude. In the matter of style, freedom lies in all the ways we have been a prisoner of someone else’s example. He might only have been a school bus conductor with a gift for sardonic verbal abuse. She might only have been the woman who stamped your card at the lending library. But they gave you the gift that comes next after the gift of speech: the gift to give it shape.

  Obviously, in wit, there are degrees of humour, from intense to non-existent. What is funny is a matter of dispute, but I have always found the anonymous humour of Hollywood immensely funny. Nobody knows who first said: “She’d be a nymphomaniac if only they could slow her down.” But whoever thought of that line knew a lot about humour: probably he worked in it professionally, in some branch of the film business, although I doubt if he was a writer. (If he had been, he would have a found a way of letting us know who he was.) One day, perhaps on the spur of the moment, he—or, come to think of it, more likely she—came out with a witty line that was also creasingly funny. Slightly lower down the scale of tickled ribs, there are witty lines that make you smile with appreciation—the smile that acknowledges how you almost laughed.

  On that level one can place many of Oscar Wilde’s best epigrams: the ones that are condensed without being leaden, and fashioned without being laboured. “Meredith is a sort of prose Browning, and so is Browning.” But much of the most valuable wit forms at a level where laughter is neither induced nor sought, and even a smile is not required: the level where a sense of rightness combines with a sense of neatness, and a nod of the head is enough to acknowledge the blend. It’s possible to say that on this level all wits sound the same. They are not monotonous—quite the reverse—but they do share a tone: the enviable tone of something put with sufficient cogency to make the listener feel that if he can’t remember exactly how the thing was said, he won’t remember exactly what the thing was. It is as if there were one precisely codified set of manners operating, which all its adepts know equally.

  As a result, it’s easy to mistake them for one another. As an illustration, I once quoted several aphorisms by Hugh Kingsmill, capped them with a single aphorism by Santayana, and defied the reader to spot the difference. In my memory, the one by Santayana is “A fanatic redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.” But I would not be surprised to be told that it is by Kingsmill. It is not so much that the memory plays tricks: rather that, in this area of distilled truth, there is not all that much difference between personalities. “We are asleep,” says Baptiste to Garance in Les Enfants du Paradis, “but sometimes we wake up just long enough to realize we are dreaming.” “If all the people who lived together were in love,” says Wittgenstein, “the earth would shine like the sun.” It is easy to imagine the attributions reversed; and indeed, without your permission, I just reversed them; it was in Jacques Prevert’s screenplay that the shining earth appeared, and the moonlit line about the dreaming sleepers came from the thin-lipped mouth of the sad philosopher.

  Vauvenargues the unlucky aristocrat is a larger spirit than La Bruyère the rising bourgeois, and both would have been more fun to meet for a drink than La Rochefoucauld, whose contempt for mankind would have been unlikely not to have included us. They were three very different minds, but you would need to know an awful lot about the treasury of the French aphorism never to misattribute a coup by one of them to either of the others. The same applies even on the dizzy level where wit becomes funny: in the brief span that the Italians usefully call a battuta there is not much room for an individual personality to show up, so all the wits sound like the one sparkling soul, and on our deathbeds—if we do much laughing there—it will probably be a matter of hearing the jokes that go past our ears rather than of seeing the people who cracked them go past our eyes. When forgetfulness confers anonymity, it could well be that justice will be restored. I doubt if Liberace was the first to say “I cried all the way to the bank.” It sounds like Old Hollywood, and could very well be Old Vienna. Dorothy Parker might not have been the actual inventor of the joke about the woman who injured herself sliding down a barrister. Except for Flann O’Brien, there was never a new pun, although always an alert plagiarist. Dorothy Parker could think the stuff up, but you can tell that it took ef
fort: in her theatre reviews, she could barely manage one real zinger each time, even when it was expected of her. A wit under pressure to produce is very apt to borrow on the sly.

  Friedell could go on and on being wise because he didn’t feel compelled to be funny. He thought it sufficient to be interesting: a desirable condition for a writer to be in. Comedians do not enjoy the same luxury, although they always aspire to it: given the chance, they will construct a framework in which character makes the points, so that they can relax. The necessity to go on throwing a double six is nerve-racking and eventually not even amusing. A commentator probably does better to accept that too many wisecracks are a mistake. Even Mark Twain soured some of his early travel writing in Europe by dragging in a vaudeville routine when he should have been focusing his observations, which were always the most interesting features of his pieces, and often the funniest.

  Friedell was one of those enchanted spirits who are observant over the whole range of human experience from everyday behaviour up to the most exalted level of creativity: indeed he scarcely recognized the hierarchy, and took it all as an isotropic universe of delicious excitement. Finding everything significant, he was in a good position to appreciate the perennial charm of the charlatan, whose expertise is to convince the hayseeds that they share the same propensity for universal insight. It is not enough for the mountebank to unleash a theory that explains everything: to be successful, he must convince his gormless onlookers that the same theory has always been in their possession, but now stands suddenly revealed. They reward him for what he has discovered in them, and buy his snake oil as a vote of thanks.

  Memories from childhood tell me that it can be deeply disturbing to be addressed by an adult in the grip of such all-encompassing certitude. It sounded like madness even before I could tell sense from nonsense, and ever since, through a life now blessedly stretching to some length, I have been periodically rocked to meet otherwise normal-sounding people who are suddenly taken over by the same rhythmic rant. Those in the grip of an all-encompassing Answer soon make it clear that the desire to be so enlightened has more to do with personality than intelligence. Few men were more intelligent than Arthur Koestler, for example. He was one of the first prominent international commentators to develop a case of clear-sightedness about what was going on in the Soviet Union. During the Spanish Civil War, savage maltreatment by the NKVD helped to open his eyes. He stopped believing in communism as an Answer. But he started believing in everything else: one fad after another until the end of his life. He thought the world was going to be put to rights by science fiction, by J. B. Rhine’s researches into the paranormal, by a Lysenko-like offshoot of Lamarckian evolution. Finally he asked his ageing but loyal audience of intellectual supermarket browsers to fall to their knees in wonder when they heard a word on the radio at the same time as they were reading it in a book—to be impressed, that is, by mere coincidence. Throughout this stentorian career of waxing and waning enthusiastic, Koestler always maintained his solid capacity for realistic observation and cosmopolitan savvy. He was hard to fool, except when the boondoggle was big enough, and sounded like science. If you want to read an essay whose humour attains the level of a cosmic joke, read P. B. Medawar’s demolition of Koestler’s theories about the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Medawar put his fastidious finger exactly on the throbbing point of the fervent amateur’s psychological problem: Koestler was science-struck. Untrained in science himself, he had a taste for it—the fatal proclivity for magnetism.

  As Robert Musil said in praise of Alfred Polgar, our only idée fixe should be the determination to avoid one. But the bonnet-filling bee is a tireless migrant, and can even show up in fields nominally concerned with the rational employment of the brain. Apart from the sharpness of the disappointment, there should be no surprise in the fact that the philosopher’s stone has always made its most prominent appearance in philosophy itself, where its looming outline is the surest mark of incompetence. But monomania would be easier to deal with if the sufferer were of one mind: we could just avoid him. Unfortunately it is quite possible for the subtle visionary and the shouting dunce to inhabit the same skull, so that Wagner the anti-Semite will always be there to help convince aspiring race scientists that they know something about politics, and perhaps even something about music. Newton’s celestial mechanics constitute a mental achievement sublime beyond estimation. But those same exalted capacities of ratiocination spent years plugging away at a system of chronology whose fraudulence was self-evident to any shopkeeper. From the evidence supplied by history’s teeming reservoir of minds simultaneously clear and crazed, the logical inference can only be that we probably all suffer—somewhere on the pathway winding through our heads there is a philosopher’s stone waiting to trip us up. But as long as we don’t hit anyone else with it, we are probably doing well. One of the loveliest women I ever knew was a believer in colonic irrigation as an aid to beauty. She was mad enough to think that it had worked for her. But she wasn’t mad enough to suggest that it might have worked for me. On that showing, I would have pronounced her sane, but I wouldn’t have wanted to stand surety for how she might have behaved if the Moonies had got hold of her. Fifty years before, it might have been Reich’s orgone box, and fifty years before that it might have been the theories of Madame Blavatsky. When the beautiful Magda Rietschel met her future second husband, she had just finished being passionate about Buddhism. Before that, it had been Zionism. In order to marry Josef Goebbels, she became equally passionate about National Socialism. Her latest and last enthusiasm made even less sense than the others, but there can be no doubt it convinced her: she not only killed herself for it, she made certain that her children died too. And so on, all the way back through history, in which the beautiful women, because they get written about, are forever cropping up in the grip of the latest explanatory fad, whose essential property is to console them for having been picked out from other mortals, and thus made to feel so mortal. Friedell caught the essential truth about people prone to catch-all theories: they aren’t in search of the truth, they’re in search of themselves.

  Mankind in the Christian era possesses one huge advantage over the ancients: a bad conscience.

  —EGON FRIEDELL, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit, VOL. 1, P. 132

  Friedell wrote this not long before the Nazis arrived in Vienna. Had he survived the onset of the new barbarians, Friedell might have modified an unwarrantably uplifting sentiment. He must have been revising it in his mind long before he went out of the window, because it had already turned out that he had chosen too confident a grammatical form for the verb. Mankind in the Christian era ought to possess a bad conscience. By the time of his wisely chosen suicide, the evidence had already been coming in from Germany for the previous five years that Christianity was in for a comprehensive rewrite, the main aim being to jettison its moral encumbrances, of which the bad conscience was the most burdensome.

  Even if the Nazis had stayed where they belonged, at the ragged edge of politics instead of in the centre, the same sort of evidence would still have been coming in from Russia for a full twenty years. A conscience of any kind, good or bad, was never listed as an item of a Bolshevik’s mental equipment. Loyalties beyond the state’s declared aims were thought to be inimical, and an a priori set of values carried within the mind could have no higher status than that of a psychological problem. Since Christianity was the main source of the problem, the elimination of Christianity was a state aim from the word go. The state could have lived with the icons and the incense. The icon, in fact, was about to come into its age of gold, even if the gold was the light gilded alloy of the badges that bore the images of Lenin and Stalin, and which always startled you by weighing no more that snowflakes when you picked them up.

  But the Soviet state could never live with spiritual values. Strangely enough, the Nazi state could, as long as the spiritual values were aimed in the right direction, along the path of Parsifal, or of Siegfried on his journey
down the Rhine. Compared with the Soviet state, which was a monolith, the Nazi state was a bucket of eels, with conflicting values of individual conscience having validity independently of the programmes of state power. Even near the top, departments were in contention. There were even different departments to interpret orthodoxy, so that Alfred Rosenberg, the cultural “expert” on policies towards foreign populations in the East, would have ideas on race that other top Nazis thought stupid. To get a ruling was hard: Hitler would have preferred it if all his subordinates were in conflict with each other, always. Only the paper-pusher Martin Bormann ever succeeded in imposing hegemony, and he could do so only as an exercise in pure bureaucracy, after Nazi power to influence events had ceased to be a reality. The Nazi state got its act together when it could no longer act. There was always room in the upper reaches of the Nazis’ earthbound Valhalla for dreamers to imagine they were following the true path—for an appeal to spiritual values of chivalric dedication. Himmler brought it down to pentagrams and runes, but even among the SS there were would-be Teutonic Knights in the picture. It was possible to dream of being Parsifal—Parsifal standing upright in the turret of a Tiger tank. Siegfried could carry a flame-thrower charged with Wotan’s magic fire. The mark of sentimentality it is to be all choked up with feeling about nothing, and the mark of black-and-silver ceremonial was to upgrade sentimentality to the religious plane by working towards a future in which nostalgia for the supposed purities of the heroic past would become real. The time and treasure that the Nazis put into mumbo-jumbo was one of the marks of their regime. Other racist regimes have been more pragmatic. In post-war South Africa under apartheid, when it became expedient to make the Japanese racially acceptable, they were simply declared racially acceptable. Under the Nazis, when it became expedient that the Japanese should be reclassified as Aryans, Himmler poured a lot of the Reich’s money and effort into proving the point scholastically. Cynicism could have worked the trick in an instant, but sincerity demanded evidence. Nothing except the fervour of religious belief can explain such a rush of blood to the head.