Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Famous while he lived, Kraus is cited now as a byword for hard-headed wit by people who have never read more than few paragraphs: his name is invoked rather in the way that Cole Porter invoked Dorothy Parker’s, as shorthand for a quality. It’s the same sort of lazy journalistic reflex that once made him spit tacks. So was his career a waste of time? Not really, although he might have died thinking so. Though to read him for long at a stretch is like trying to make a meal out of Mexican jumping beans, some of his aperçus are more than enough to make you see why the scholarly commentators should enrol him honoris causa among the Vienna school of philosophers. Anyone who reads a few random pages of Kraus will write more carefully next day, with fear of his blue-pencil eyes as the spur to revision. He knew how to cut the inessential. “Female desire is to male desire as an epic is to an epigram.” Try saying the same thing quicker. It was a production in English of The Last Days of Mankind that led Niall Ferguson to learn German, and so helped him towards laying the learned foundations of his fine book The Pity of War, in which Kraus’s debunking of patriotic rhetoric is frequently acknowledged. The whiplash speed and snap of Kraus’s reasoning can be heard even through the language barrier.

  But his negative example is the one that lasts. He embodied the unforeseeable tragedy—made actual only by a cruel trick of history—of those bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who caught out Jewish artists for their bourgeois vulgarity: by helping to undermine the bourgeoisie as a class, and by helping to establish Jewish origins as a classification, the intellectuals unwittingly served two future masters whose only dream was to annihilate them. Above all, his supreme mastery of verbal satire served to prove that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist hasn’t either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world. The secret of a sane world view is to see virtue in others, and the roots of chaos within ourselves. Kraus had the secret right in front of him, in the soul and body of Sidonie. She was his best self, come to save him. He had his arms around her, but he lost her. We will never know quite how, but there is something about this deadly little aphorism to make us think it more plausible to blame him than to blame her.

  L

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

  GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

  Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) stands at the beginning of German modernity, and right in the centre of the country’s post–World War II concern with the recovery of liberal thought from historical catastrophe. If it was felt necessary to pump the mystique out of the whole idealistic heritage of German philosophy, Lichtenberg was the prototype of a German thinker who could be seen as the level-headed smallholder waiting back at the beginning, looking once again like an attractive prospect, now that the smoke had cleared. Mainly owing to Hegel and his long influence, German, as a language of thought, had acquired a bad reputation for the higher nonsense of self-generating transcendentalism. In truth, however, German has as good a right as French to be thought of as essentially terse. (All of its most able prose writers, from Goethe through Schopenhauer to Freud, Schnitzler, Kafka and Wittgenstein, found the aphorism a natural form.) Just as Pascal, in French, began a tradition of compact concrete statement even about the spiritual, so did Lichtenberg in German. He came later, but then the whole of Germany came later. Germany is a young country, and Lichtenberg is one of the reasons that it can still feel that way for anyone who can push back through the curtains of tosh, much of it woven by patriots who believed that only the solemn could be truly serious and only the impenetrable profound. One of those valuable faculty members (he was a professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at Göttingen) who never lose the trick of talking like a brilliantly amusing graduate student—we can imagine Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, or Richard Feynman at CalTech—Lichtenberg was critically minded about the language of others, unfailingly scrupulous about his own, and never content to settle into a formula. Barred by physical deformity from any easy participation in the passionate emotional life he saw as central to existence, he was nevertheless wonderfully sympathetic to the realities of love and sex: with every excuse to turn away from the real world, he kept its every aspect always in plain sight. Finally it is his detailed and unflinching awareness that astonishes the reader. Scattered through his scores of “Waste-Books” and manuscript notebooks, Lichtenberg’s innumerable observations add up to a single demonstration of his guiding principle: that there is such a thing as “the right distance,” a sense of proportion. He is the thinker against hysteria, the mind whose goodhumoured determination to avoid throwing a tantrum provides us with a persuasive argument that the tantrum might be the motive power of political insanity. In German there are numerous selections and collections, but most of the very best moments are in J. P. Stern’s excellent Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959). Nutshells packed as cleverly as an old soldier’s kitbag, Lichtenberg’s sayings are quoted in the original where that seems helpful, are always sensitively translated into suitably colloquial English, and are thoroughly annotated, from the body of humanist knowledge about shattered Germany that Stern built up after the war. (Born and raised as a Czech, Stern also wrote one of the best short books about the man who shattered it, Hitler: The Führer and the People, in 1975.) Stern first encountered Lichtenberg’s name in the pages of Karl Kraus’s magazine Die Fackel. It would be a mistake, however, to confine the question of Lichtenberg’s long delayed but highly welcome influence merely to the sardonic paragraph. His clarity and concision set a standard for expository prose, at whatever length, in the whole of his language, and, by extension, in all languages.

  It was impossible for him not to disturb words in the possession of their meanings.

  —LICHTENBERG, Aphorismen

  LICHTENBERG IS DESCRIBING a bad writer. There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: it has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. From a made-for-television film called The Movie Murders I noted down this perfectly bad line of dialogue: “A fire is a Frankenstein when it’s let out of its cage.”

  A fire can be a caged animal if you don’t mind a cliché. But a caged Frankenstein is worse than trite. Frankenstein was not the monster, he was the monster’s creator: so the use of his name is an inaccuracy. By now the inaccuracy has entered the language, like the juggernaut that serves us for Juggernaut’s car: but one of the things good writing does is to fight a rearguard action against this automatic absorption of error. For example, a competent writer would look twice at “rearguard action” to make sure that he means to evoke a losing battle, and check “automatic absorption” to make sure that it falls within the range of phenomena against which a battle might conceivably be fought. He had better also know that “phenomena” should not be used in the singular, although that knowledge, too, is becoming rare. Competent writers always examine what they have put down. Better than competent writers—good writers—examine their effects before they put them down: they think that way all the time. Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world.

  In a television interview, Francis Ford Coppola said “hoi polloi” when he meant “elite.” There is no reason to think that he would not commit similar solecisms in one of his screenplays if he were to put himself beyond the reach of expert advice, which the more bankable film directors—the ones whose films are marked as being “by” them— are increasingly apt to do. (This tendency, by the way, arises less from the conceit of directors than from the paucity of writers:
screenplays depend more on construction than on dialogue, and experienced writers with those priorities are hard to find.) Most of us write “the hoi polloi” when we should leave off the “the” because “the” is what “hoi” means, but that is a point of usage. Using “hoi polloi” to mean “elite” is an outright error, indicating that the speaker has either misunderstood the term every time he has read it, or, more likely, that he has not read much. Unblushing semi-literacy is quite common among film directors, especially those who fancy themselves to have so powerful a vision that they grant themselves not just the final word on the structure of a script but the privilege of creating its language from line to line. We have to forgive them for this: the ability to put a movie script together takes such rare qualities of generalship that the person who can do it is almost bound to succumb to hubris. James Cameron’s screenplay for his film Titanic is no doubt a mighty feat of construction. It is also linguistically dead from start to finish. If pressed on the point, he would be able to say that his film made more money faster than any other film in history. He could also say that the visual narrative matters far more than the dialogue, and that his mastery of the screen image would be alone sufficient to refute the charge of inattention to the texture of reality. But there is a clear connection between the film’s infantile characterization—which for any adult viewer entirely undoes the effect of the meticulously reproduced period detail—and the dud dialogue the characters are given to speak. None of this would be germane to the issue if the director did not consider himself a writer. But he does, and he is a bad one: a bad writer by nature.

  Macaulay’s review of the hapless poetaster Robert Montgomery is the classic analysis of the naturally bad writer who gets everything wrong because he is sensitive enough on the question of style to attempt to lift his means of expression above the ordinary. When Montgomery evoked a river that “meanders level with its fount,” Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount can’t even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay had uncovered the connection between the inability to notice and the inability to transcribe: the double deficiency that Montgomery’s highfalutin diction was invented to conceal. Mark Twain did the same for, or to, James Fenimore Cooper, who thought that “more preferable” was a more impressive way of saying “preferable”: the clumsily elevated language, Twain argued, was closely linked to the deficient power of observation that made the action of Cooper’s Leatherstocking books absurd. When a bad writer borrows locutions from past authorities, he characteristically takes the patina but leaves the metal. Biblical pastiche is a standard way for a mediocre stylist to attempt distinction. Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcom Muggeridge came up with the slogan “Give us this day our daily story.” A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer was better written than an article by Muggeridge. He would have been better off just saying that the press needs a new story every day. Gombrowicz in his Journal (specifically, vol. 2, p. 164) notes that when a writer complicates a truism it is a sure sign that he has nothing much to say.

  Julius Caesar wrote with invariable clarity, whether about Gaul being divided into three parts or about building a bridge. Frederick the Great wrote about falconry from direct observation, with no hearsay, and in a plain style. Queen Victoria’s letters are models of compact accuracy: she wrote better than Queen Elizabeth I, which is saying a lot. Such practical expository prose by people with non-literary day-jobs should give a measure for would-be professional writers wise enough to build a solid base in their craft before trying to make an art out of it. They will soon discover that even the most down-to-earth of practical writers can scramble their meaning when they are in a hurry, so it must be a craft, and not just a gift. In addition to A Genius for War, his excellent biography of Gerneral Patton, the eminent American military historian Carlo D’Este wrote two essential books surveying whole campaign areas in World War II, Decision in Normandy, about Operation Overlord, and Bitter Victory, about the Allied invasion of Sicily. But a third book, Fatal Decision, is much less satisfactory than the other two because it squanders their chief virtue, which is to record and weigh the facts in a transparent style. D’Este knew all there was to know about the Anzio campaign, but while trying to tell the reader either he got so excited he forgot how to write or else—more likely, alas—he received less than his usual quota of editorial help. Thus we are regaled with his paraphrase of Churchill’s strategic view “that the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Mediterranean is Germany’s Achilles heel” (p. 12). But such a blatantly mixed metaphor at least enables you to divine what is meant. Metaphorical content is mixed more inextricably when a standard idiom is unintentionally reversed in meaning, thereby infecting the whole sentence. “For the next eight weeks there was a standoff in the northeastern corner of the beachhead as the 504th were forced into trenches that for sheer misery had nothing on their World War I counterparts” (p. 176). Here “had nothing on” is used for “yielded nothing to,” but they do not mean the same thing. When an important book is infested with deeply lurking solecisms, it has to be read twice while you are getting through it once. A less important book, of course, is quickly cast aside.

  If language deteriorates in journalism, the damage will be felt sooner or later in writing that pretends to more distinction. In my time, to take one out of a hundred possible examples, it has become common among cultural journalists to use “harp back” for “hark back.” If “bored of” should succeed in replacing “bored with” there will be no real call to object, except from nostalgia: “of” does the job at least as well as “with” and anyway such changes have happened in the spoken language since the beginning. But “harp back” scrambles the separate meanings of “harp on” and “hark back,” and thus detracts from the central, hard-won virtue of the English language, which is to mean one thing at a time. The solecism gets into the paper because the subeditors no longer know the difference either, so to see it cropping up in books is no surprise, although a great disappointment. David McClintick’s Indecent Exposure is one of the best books about moral turpitude in modern Hollywood. The constant and unavoidable struggle between creative freedom and the necessity for cost controls, with the consequent oscillation between daylight robbery and ecstasies of bean-counting precision, could not be better explained. But the otherwise savvy author uses “flaunt” for “flout,” thereby injuring two words at once: “To Cliff Robertson, Columbia’s reinstatement of Begelman was not only a brazen flaunting of justice, but also a deep insult to Cliff personally.” In a single sentence, an author who has convinced you that he could write anything leads you to suspect that he has read nothing. In the normal course of events, a tactful copy editor might have corrected the error. But by now the barbarians are within the gates, and there seems to be no stopping the process of deterioration even in America, whereas in Britain the cause is lost irretrievably. Backs-to-the-wall raillery from established authors is fun, but won’t work. As Kingsley Amis acutely noted, the person who uses “disinterested” for “uninterested” is unlikely to see your article complaining about the point, because the person has never been much of a reader anyway. There is evidence, however, that writers can read a great deal, among all the best exemplars, and still not take in the power to discriminate on critical points of grammar, derivation, usage, punctuation and consistency of metaphor. Prescriptive initial teaching probably helps, but the capacity for such an alertness may be more in the nature of an inborn propensity than a possible acquisition.

  The propensity can even appear in hypertrophied form, to the writer’s detriment. A good writer of prose always writes to poetic standards. (One of the marks of poetry in modern times is that the advent of free verse opened the way for poets who could not write to prose standards, but that’s another issue.) The good prose-writer’s standards, however, should include the realization that he is not writing a poem. Henry James was not being entirely absurd when he complained that Flauber
t was unable to leave his language alone. (Proust’s qualified praise of Flaubert comes down to the same point.) It is possible to be an admirer of Nabokov while still finding his alertness to cliché overactive, so that passages occur in which we can hardly see for the clarity: and with James Joyce it is more than possible. Somewhere between Tolstoy, who was so indifferent to style that he did not mind repeating a word, and Turgenev, who would sooner have died than do so, there is an area where the writer can be economically precise without diverting the reader’s whole attention to his precision. Lichtenberg would have included that area in his key concept of “the proper distance,” which he thought crucial to the exercise of reason. Rembrandt, in a reported statement Goethe was fond of, said that people should not shove their noses too close to his paintings: the paint was poisonous.

  One drastic side effect of an overdeveloped vigilance is the counterproductive attempt to make description answer the totality of observation. In Troilus and Cressida, Alexander has a phrase for it: “purblind Argus, all eyes and no sight.” Attention is necessarily selective: if it were not, we would spend most of our waking hours paralysed by the impact of what we see. The secret of evocative writing is to pick out the detail that matters, not to put in all the detail that doesn’t. Consider Joan la Pucelle’s lines in Henry VI, Part 1: lines which might not be by Shakespeare, but which were certainly written by someone who knew what he was doing.

  Glory is like a circle on the water,

  Which never ceases to enlarge itself,

  Till by broad spreading it disperse to naught.