Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  For Stalin, liberal democracy was always the chief enemy, with Nazism coming a distant second. Stalin never cared what crimes Hitler committed, as long as they were committed against the democracies. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was designed to keep the Soviet Union safe while Hitler wiped out the democracies in the west. Furet is particularly good (i.e., subversive) about the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz in January 1945. The Soviets said nothing about what they had found there, and when they were finally obliged by British pressure to make an announcement in August, the Jews didn’t get a mention. Stalin didn’t think they mattered. It was a perfect example of how the two totalitarianisms were aspects of each other. Furet’s most important book, the book about the passing of an illusion that still hasn’t passed, is crammed from beginning to end with such unsettling perceptions. But making it even richer is his answer to your question of why anyone was ever fooled. He was. How? Not just because he was young and clueless, but because he cared so much about humanity that he couldn’t believe that the destruction of innocent millions could be without a constructive result. Having grown older and learned better, he put his finger on the reason otherwise decent and compassionate thinkers could stick with a discredited ideology so long: their reluctance to accept that so much suffering could be wasted.

  G

  Charles de Gaulle

  Edward Gibbon

  Terry Gilliam

  Josef Goebbels

  Witold Gombrowicz

  CHARLES DE GAULLE

  As the single most dominant figure in twentieth-century France, Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) has inspired a whole library of commentary, much of it written by him. After absorbing William L. Shirer’s classic The Collapse of the Third Republic, the student of modern French politics, in order to follow everything that happened afterwards, could safely settle down to read nothing but books by, about, for and against de Gaulle. The argument about whether the so-called Man of Destiny was a despot or a guardian angel will never be over. But there can be no argument about his status in French literature. He was a prose stylist in the grand manner, with a force of argument that was held in respect even by his most bitter opponents. His four volumes of autobiography are all available in English. A beginner with French, however, could do worse than become acquainted with them, although he might get the impression that French is a language for and about demigods. All four volumes can be kept easily on the bathroom shelf in the neat little Pocket Presse boxed set from Plon. Jean Lacoutre’s three-volume biography De Gaulle is likewise available in a boxed set. It makes a good story: misunderstood youthful genius, the proof of battle, the rebuffed redeemer, years in the wilderness, eventual triumph. The three volumes of the general’s wartime speeches, Discours de guerre, are likewise a compulsive study, although they should be sipped at rather than wolfed down: the reader doesn’t want to end up talking in that style. Reading in that style is already grand enough. It is a good rule in life to be wary of the company of people who think of themselves in the third person, no matter how well justified they might seem to be in doing so. We can spend only so much time with the sculpted busts of Louis XIV and Napoleon before our own heads start to swell. In almost all his aspects, de Gaulle had a marmoreal momumentality. But he did have one vulnerable point, and it helped to keep him in touch with the ordinary human world.

  A spirit has been set free. But the disappearance of our poor suffering infant, of our little daughter without hope, has done us an immense pain.

  —CHARLES DE GAULLE, WRITING TO HIS DAUGHTER ELISABETH ABOUT THE DEATH OF HER SISTER ANNE; QUOTED BY JEAN LACOUTRE IN De Gaulle, VOL. 2: Le Politique, P. 326

  AFTER A LIFE OF misery, Anne de Gaulle, who had a severe case of Down’s syndrome, died choking in her father’s arms. She was twenty years old. At her funeral, de Gaulle is reputed to have said, “Now she is like the others.” The awful beauty of that remark lies in how it hints at what he had so often felt. Wanting her to be like the normal children, the ones who couldn’t help noticing that she was different, must have been the dearest wish of his private life. Knowing that the wish could never come true must have been his most intimate acquaintance with defeat. For us, who overhear the last gasp of a long agony, there is the additional poignancy of recognizing that the Man of Destiny lived every day with a heavenly dispensation he could not control. But to be faced from day to day with a quirk of fate not amenable to human will is sometimes the point of sanity for a man who lives by imposing his personality—the point of salvation, the redeeming weakness. Hitler’s will power was sociopathic: his instinct, when faced with frailty, was to kill it. Stalin’s will of iron came from a heart of ice: his response, when asked to consider what his son might be suffering in German hands, was to blame his son. Roosevelt and Churchill were both paragons of will power but they had great, living countries behind them. De Gaulle’s country was dead. He had to resurrect it, providing an example of political confidence unmatched in the democratic politics of the twentieth century. (Undemocratic politics, alas, was staffed by a full range of would-be national leaders who had the same virtue of never giving up until their dreams came true; but when the dreams did, the virtue tended to be offset by what happened next.)

  Establishing himself in London after the French defeat in 1940, de Gaulle had few resources beyond his prestige—he always said that prestige counted for more than anything—and his gift of persuasion. He drove Churchill to distraction and Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with him, but the antagonism he aroused in foreign leaders served his purpose as long as it helped to rally his countrymen. Once he had secured their allegiance, he extended his intransigence even to them. Intellectuals of the French left wing who had seen the Communist element in the Resistance as the precursor of a post-war socialist France were doomed to disappointment. So were the Algerian pieds-noirs who expected, when he came back to power in 1958, that France would retain its sunlit colony. Having ruthlessly and correctly decided that Algeria had been kept only through weakness and that giving it away would be an act of strength, he gave it away. When the Secret Army tried to assassinate him, he never doubted that they were traitors to their country. Je fais don de ma personne à la France. Who did he think he was? This is my body, which is broken for you!

  The presidential system he bequeathed to his successors had the flaw of placing more power in the hands of friends and favourites than of elected officials. The flaw showed up early, and the constitutional set-up of the Fifth Republic already looked like a well-tailored tyranny even during the reign of its founder. De Gaulle decided off his own bat to pull out of NATO in 1966: he told only three ministers, and consulted not even them. The French have a word for it: égocratie. Such an identification of man and nation would have been monstrous if it had been made only by the man, but the nation, on the whole, thought the same, including a large part of its liberal element, which had not been the case in the love affair between Hitler and Germany. When the French nation ceased to make the identification, the Man of Destiny fell from power. In 1968 he used television as a megaphone instead of an ear trumpet. It was a miscalculation, but it lay within his nature, and whether his ascendancy had ever amounted to more than a protracted constitutional crisis remains a moot point. What can’t be disputed is his grandeur. Had he been a true megalomaniac, he would have been less impressive. Napoleon, owing allegiance to nothing beyond his own vision, was petty in the end, and the fate of France bothered him little. De Gaulle behaved as if the fate of France was his sole concern, but the secret of his incomparable capacity to act in that belief probably lay in a central humility. This might have been imposed by his awkward height, progenitor of the shyness that made him seem aloof. (Even in the communal bathhouse of his World War I prison camp, nobody ever saw his private parts—he must have been as dextrous with a skimpy towel as Sally Rand was with her fans.) A more likely answer, however, is that the touchstone of his humanity was his poor daughter. Nothing is more likely to civilize a powerful man than the presence in his house of an
injured loved one his power can’t help. Every night he comes home to a reminder that God is not mocked: a cure for invincibility.

  EDWARD GIBBON

  Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) wrote a book that inadvertently raises the question of whether English prose style can be, or even should be, an end in itself. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire encapsulates—in a very large capsule—his idea that history is “little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind.” The reader can decide whether it is or it isn’t, and might very well decide that it is both. But about the style of the book, the question is not so clear-cut. Praised already at the time as one of the unchallengeable artistic creations of the eighteenth century, Gibbon’s prose style was still held up as example in the nineteenth century even when Lord Macaulay became popular for writing history in a far more conversational manner. In the twentieth century, there were still historians who praised Gibbon’s style as their true model. But in fact they all tried to write like Macaulay, and by now nobody could expect to echo the balanced Gibbonian period without being laughed at. Since much of the most substantial expository prose of modern times can be found in the writings of historians, it is perhaps worth looking in detail at the characteristic innovations within Gibbon’s prose, and at least entertaining the possibility that the reason most of them did not catch on was that they did not deserve to. At a time when one of the dangers facing liberal democracy is a loss of confidence, there is an easy reflex by which it is assumed that the powers of expression of the English language are in decline. A possible, and desirable, contrary opinion would be that the worst writers do indeed write worse than ever, but that the best writers write better. If they do, one of the reasons they do is that they have learned from ancestors who had an ear for ordinary speech. But to call that a desirable object, we have to do something about Gibbon, whose desires were quite otherwise.

  To resist was fatal, and it was impossible to fly.

  —EDWARD GIBBON, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, P. 73

  ONCE READ, IMPOSSIBLE to forget; and I have used this line ever since, but always in the sad knowledge that Gibbon provided very few like it. I expected him to. I came to him late, and spoiled: spoiled by Thucydides and Tacitus, by Machiavelli and Montesquieu, by Pieter Geyl and Lewis Namier, by Mommsen and Gregorovius, by Napier’s History of the War in the Peninsula and Prescott’s Conquest of Peru, by Stephen Runciman’s set of books about the Crusades and finally by—one of the great long historical reads in the world—Shelby Foote on the American Civil War. I expected Gibbon to provide me with a heap of those readily detachable judgements that all the serious historians seem able to generate at will as a qualification for their trade.

  No such luck, alas; and after twenty years I am still getting to the end of Gibbon’s long book—longer than its admirers admit, I think, because not as good as they claim. No doubt the quoted sentence translates itself from the eighteenth-century page to the twentieth-century mind with such ease because the modern condition is in it. Gibbon was talking about an empire that filled the known world, so that when a tyrant was in charge there was nowhere for the victim to run: and that was the kind of empire that Stalin, Hitler and Mao all brought into existence. Mao’s version, indeed, though admittedly in attenuated form, is still here to distort the lives of more than a thousand million human beings. But the modern condition is in any pregnant sentence from any time: current possibilities are what a classic sentence is pregnant with. In Tacitus and Montesquieu there are few paragraphs without a sentence that seems written with us in mind, and few chapters without a paragraph. Sometimes there is a whole chapter: even in Tacitus, let alone Montesquieu, there are times when time collapses and the past seems very near. You would swear, when some vengeful emperor’s proscription is raging in the Annals of Tacitus, that you were reading the secret diary of the daughter of a Prussian landed family after the botched attempt against Hitler’s life on July 20, 1944—the atmosphere of prying doom is so similar. One way or another, the modern age is always there in the best moments of the old historians: we can tell by the way the construction of the prose suddenly ceases to sound anachronistic, or even constructed.

  Gibbon, unfortunately, seldom ceases to sound any other way. From him, this quoted sentence is rare first of all for its relatively natural cadence. Yes, it is consciously balanced around its caesura and makes us feel that it is: but no, it is not typical of him, because his usual classicism was neo-classical by way of the Baroque, and what he wrote rarely lets you forget that it has been written. Had he been an architect, his buildings would never have ceased to remind you that they had been built. He is one of the four master dwarves of the Rococo, but unlike the other three—Pope, Lichtenberg and Cuvilliés, the court architect of the Wittelsbachs—he can’t make you forget his injuries, which dulled, instead of sharpening, his sense of proportion. Would his capital work have ever acquired its huge reputation if it had not been a harbinger of imperialist dominance, a proof that Britain could own, not just all the new worlds, but the ancient world as well? Now that the wave of history has retreated, the book is left looking like a beached whale. A more compact version could have been the written equivalent of Sir John Soane’s Museum. Instead, Gibbon produced a hulking forecast of St. Pancras Station. But a shorter book, to seem so, would have needed less elaborate sentences: at their original length, even a single page of them is a long haul.

  There are parts of Gibbon’s autobiography to prove that a simple declarative sentence was not beyond him. In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for some reason, it was. Having chosen a tall theme, the small man got up on stilts, and stayed elevated for twenty years. Not the least of his heroism was that he could make a single page seem like an eternity. His secret was—we had better say is—to make you read so many of his sentences twice even while you think you are reading them only once. His aim might have been compression and economy, but the compression was a contortion and the economy was false. In a single sentence, two separated adjectival constructions often served the one noun, or two separated verbs the one object, or two separated adverbs the one verb, and so on through the whole range of parts of speech: it was a kind of compulsive chess move in which a knight was always positioned to govern two pieces, except that the two pieces governed it. Whether this conspicuous stroke of ingenuity ever really saved time is debatable, but when properly done it added the value of density, or at any rate seemed to. Take this observation about the two sons of Severus and Julia, the “vain youths” Caracalla and Geta: “Their aversion, confirmed by years, and fomented by the arts of their interested favourites, broke out in childish, and gradually in more serious, competitions . . .” (volume 1 of the Modern Library edition, p. 111). There is more to the sentence, but all we need note here is that “childish” and “more serious” both qualify “competitions”; and that there is no great hardship in following the train of thought, because we don’t imagine that a noun to fit the adjective “childish” will fail to arrive eventually. Gibbon worked this forking manoeuvre over and over, but it was a dangerous habit, especially if the first adjectival construction could be mistaken for a noun. After Caracalla’s oppressive tax had made a mess of Rome’s finances, the “prudent liberality” with which Alexander restored them attracted Gibbon’s admiration. But Alexander was still left with the problem of how to meet the expectations of the troops, and Gibbon with the problem of how to mirror Alexander’s perplexity. Gibbon would no doubt have packed my previous sentence into a smaller space, but he might well have made it as awkward in its compactness as this one of his: “In the execution of his design the emperor affected to display his love, and to conceal his fear, of the army” (vol. 1, p. 133).

  By now the danger needs no explaining, because you have just tripped over it. Until you read further, there is nothing to say that the first comma might not as well be a full stop; and the same applies to the second comma; so you must get all the way to the end before you read back ag
ain and make the proper sense of what you previously mistook. When you have been long enough with Gibbon you learn not to mistake it, and always wait for a re-reading before settling on what must be meant; but it is a tiresome necessity, and makes for the kind of stylistic difficulty which leads its admirers to admire themselves, for submitting to the punishment. There was never much to the assumption that a sentence is only ever read diachronically from left to right with never a backward glance: the eye doesn’t work like that and neither does prose. But there is still something to the assumption that a sentence, however the reader gets to the end of it, should be intelligible by the time he does, and that if he is forced to begin again he has been hoodwinked into helping the writer do the writing. Readers of Gibbon don’t just help: they join a chain gang, and the chain gang is in a salt mine, and the salt mine is reached after a long trip by galley, during which they are never excused the feel of the oar or the snap of the lash.

  Gibbon was quite capable of working his favourite bipartite effect of pretended compression twice in a paragraph and sometimes three times. In one of his best early chapters of summary, chapter XVI (A.D. 180–318), he has a paragraph that begins very promisingly. “History, which undertakes to record the transactions of the past, for the instruction of future ages, would ill deserve that honourable office if she condescended to plead the cause of tyrants, or to justify the maxims of persecution” (vol. 1, p. 453). This is almost good enough to remind you that Montesquieu was alive at the same time, although by now the reader has recognized Gibbon’s favourite stylistic device to be a nervous tic, and the tic has transferred itself from the writer’s quill to the reader’s face, so that he flinches while wondering if the word “future” should not have a comma after it too, in case “past,” like “future,” is not a noun but an adjective sharing the task of qualifying the noun “ages.” I suppose that if Gibbon had meant that, he would not have put a “the” in front of “past,” but it gets hard to give him the benefit of the doubt after you have realized that he was in the grip of mania. The proof is only a little way away in the same paragraph, where three sentences in a row are all lamed by the same hobble.