by Clive James
Even his social climbing was dedicated to his art. There can be no doubt that he found the high life fascinating, but nothing is too mundane to get into the book, and its true aristocrats are artists. In Britain up to the present day, even in the work of such a clever critic as John Carey, it is often assumed that the concept of high art, because it was once the property of the landed gentry, is part of a traditional mechanism to repress the common people, and should therefore be denied its prestige. The Americans suffer less from that idea, but if it ever needed countering, the mere existence of Proust would be enough to do it. He places art firmly in the possession of those who love it, whatever their origins might be. His gentry, in fact, are those most likely to succumb to the epidemic Philistinism of the prejudice against Dreyfus. Zola was the most famous liberal commentator on the Dreyfus case but it was Proust who saw the matter through. In foreseeing the corrosive effects of licensed anti-Semitism on the civil order, Proust opened yet another door, the one leading into the accumulating political disaster of France between the wars. How so frail and troubled a man could have had all this strength and wisdom in him is a mystery. The mystery has been often explored, but George D. Painter’s two-volume biography Marcel Proust is still the book to read about his life. (William C. Carter’s single hefty volume is a valuable corrective but not a replacement.) The best single critical book is Jean-François Revel’s Sur Proust, if only because Revel firmly warns us off the standard wild goose chase of looking for the novel’s structure. It might have one, but only in the sense that we think we have learned something about the structure of the universe when we are told that space is curved.
“There is no man, however wise,” he said to me, “who has not, at some time in his youth, said things, or even led a life, of which his memory is disagreeable and which he would wish to be abolished. But he absolutely should not regret it, because he can’t be assured of becoming a sage—to the extent that that is possible—without having passed through all the ridiculous or odious incarnations that must precede that final incarnation.”
—MARCEL PROUST (ELSTIR’S ADVICE TO MARCEL), À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur, P. 457
IN PROUST THERE are few figures that the narrator finds lasting cause to trust, but Elstir, the veteran and venerable painter, is one of them. The sage, said Elstir, must forgive himself his past faults. Elstir forgot to add that the sage should also correct them. Proust says it for him elsewhere: those we like least are those most like us, but with the faults uncured. It is always dangerous to say “This is what we read Proust for.” There are people who read Proust just for the clothes. But those of us who read Proust for his remarks about life will always be wondering whether À la recherche du temps perdu is really a work of art at all. A work of imagination: yes, of course, and supremely. But is it a novel? Isn’t it a book of collected critical essays, with the occasional fictional character wandering in and out of it? After the composer Busoni read Du côté de chez Swann, he complained to Rilke that although he had quite enjoyed the opinions about music, he thought the rest of the book was a bit like a novel. Isn’t it a work of encyclopaedic synthesis? Thomas Mann, in his diaries, took notes on the way that Proust had taken notes. He especially praised the detail of Proust’s interest in flying beetles. Isn’t it a work of philosophy? Jean-François Revel, in his brief book Sur Proust—the commentary on Proust that almost gives you the courage to do without all the others—is clearly fascinated with the possibility that Proust might have restored philosophy to its position of wisdom. Often, in the long shelf of his writings, Revel argues that philosophy, having ceased in the eighteenth century to be queen of the sciences, has, in modern times, no other role except to be wise. In Sur Proust he casts his author as a character in a drama: the drama of philosophy reborn. Revel calls À la recherche one of the rare books that even in their weaknesses offer an example of “totally adult thought.”
Proust’s example drives Revel to philosophical aperçus of his own. Passion, says Revel, consists of seeing in the finite an infinity that doesn’t exist. Revel floats the notion that Albertine might have been an even more interesting jailer had she been faithful: the thin end of a wedge into Proust’s view of sex and jealousy. (E. M. Forster, from closer to home, had similar reservations, and erected them into a principle designed to cover Proust in general: he said that Proust’s analytical knife was so sharp it came out the other side.) On the political plane, Proust is praised by Revel for keeping a level head against collective barbarism through his moral intransigence and his perspicacité psychologique. The collective barbarism was the anti-Semitic nationalism already poisoning French politics when Proust the social butterfly was preparing to write his novel. Revel is only one reader of Proust, but his readings are enough to hint at the richness that À la recherche would offer us even it were only a collection of critical remarks. It is, of course, much more than that: but one of the reasons it is much more than that is that it is never less. These qualities of non-fiction are useful to remember when we realize how many qualities of fiction the longest of all novels does not possess. It has, for example, no structure worth speaking of, and probably would not have attained to one even if Proust had been given another ten years to work on it. Characters would still have shown up twenty years too young at the last party, or twenty years too old, or simply still alive when they should have been dead. Devotees who say that À la recherche du temps perdu reminds them of a cathedral should be asked which cathedral they mean. It reminds me of a sandcastle that the tide reached before its obsessed constructor could finish it; but he knew that would happen, or else why build it on a beach?
Q
Edgar Quinet
EDGAR QUINET
Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) was born in the aftermath of the French Revolution and lived out his life in its long shadow. Nowadays he is hardly ever read for himself, and only rarely cited, and then usually for a single remark. In his lifetime, however, he was a public intellectual of the type we know today, his opinions argued over by everyone who had an opinion. An admirer of religion who drew the line at the Jesuits, he gave lectures on the latter subject that caused so much controversy they were suppressed by government order. In the next revolution, in 1848, he was on the barricades, and voted with the far left in the National Assembly. Exiled to Brussels after the coup d’état, he settled in Switzerland in 1857, not returning to Paris until the fall of Napoleon III. During the siege of Paris in 1870 he was conspicuous as a patriot. Before he died in bed, five years after the Commune, he had written a shelf of books about the philosophy of history. Apart possibly from his autobiographical fragment Histoire de mes idées, published in 1855, most of his books now excite no-one. But a single line, the one quoted below, made it all the way to the 1990s, because it had presaged an idea whose time had come.
But this success, where is it?
—EDGAR QUINET, QUOTED BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL IN Fin du siècle des ombres, P. 246
QUINET’S CELEBRATED single line came from a less celebrated single paragraph, but the paragraph is worth quoting in full, because it evokes a specific context that has refused to go away. He wasn’t just giving us a handy witticism to trot out every time somebody made a mess and called it a triumph. He was talking specifically about the connection, in the absolutist mentality, between claims and crimes.
The persistent illusion of the terrorists is to invoke a success in order to justify themselves before posterity. In effect, only the success can absolve them. But this success, where is it? The terrorists devoured by the scaffolds that they themselves erected, the Republic not only lost but rendered execrable, the political counter-Revolution victorious, despotism in place of the liberty for which a whole nation swore to die: is that success? How long will you go on repeating this strange nonsense, that all the scaffolds were necessary to save the Revolution, which was not saved?
But we need the paragraph only to remind us of the context. With that given, the line stands alone, ready to be imported i
nto any argument about the event that did most to shape modern poltical history. Quinet’s unsettling sound bite about the French Revolution was echoed by Jean-François Revel and François Furet, both of them careful to give Quinet the credit. “Far enough from the revolution to feel only fleetingly the passions that troubled the view of those who made it,” said Tocqueville in L’Ancien Régime et la révolution, “we are yet still close enough to be able to enter into and comprehend the spirit that brought it about. Soon one will have difficulty doing so: because the great revolutions that succeed make the causes that produced them disappear, thus becoming incomprehensible through their very success.” But the question “Where is the success?” was already being heard under the Second Empire, from a few awkwardly sceptical voices of which Quinet’s was one. There had always been aristocrats to ask it, but Quinet was an intellectual. Had the French Revolution been worth the agony?
“Where is the success?” is another version of Orwell’s answer to the contention, vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Orwell asked: “Where’s the omelette?” Nobody sane seriously doubts that in the case of eighteenth-century France, democracy had to come: but was the Revolution the best way, and didn’t it help to ensure that the democracy was incomplete? The question has always turned on whether the Jacobinist terror was inevitable. (The most gargantuan expression of Jacobinist terror, the massacre in the Vendée, did not become a question until late in the twentieth century: the bones were a long time coming to light. Nowadays, mass graves can be seen by satellites.) The same question divided the gauchiste left and the independent left in modern France, and still does divide them everywhere in the world. If you can’t have a revolution without Jacobinism, then it becomes a matter of how to have reform without revolution. Anyone who “accepts the necessity of Jacobinism” wants to try his hand at it. When François Furet hinted at this conclusion in his truly revolutionary book on the French Revolution, he found himself immediately tagged by the left as a diehard spokesman of the reactionary right. It was assumed that if he was against the Terror, he was against the people. His contention that the Terror had been against the people was not accepted. More than a hundred years had passed since Quinet had contended the same thing, and the idea was still considered too paradoxical to be entertained. One can safely conclude that the impressive combined death toll of revolutions in the last century will go on being considered as justifiable well into the next.
R
Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Jean-François Revel
Richard Rhodes
Rainer Maria Rilke
Virginio Rognoni
MARCEL REICH-RANICKI
Marcel Reich-Ranicki (b. 1920), by far the most famous critic in Germany between World War II and the millennium, continues, into the twenty-first century, to exercise, over the German literary scene, a dominance which some writers prefer to regard as a reign of terror. Actually there can be no real argument about the fairness of his judgements—a fact which, of course, makes his disapproval feel even worse for those found wanting. He writes so well that his opinions are quoted verbatim. Victims of a put-down are thus faced with the prospect of becoming a national joke. Most of those writers whose later books were savaged by him had their early books praised by him: those are the writers who become most resentful of all against him. Well equipped to look after himself, he is hard to lay a glove on. Watching magisterial figures such as Günter Grass vainly trying to get their own back on Reich-Ranicki is one of the entertainments of modern Germany. Even those wounded by him would have to admit, under scopolamine, that he can be very funny when on the attack. Hence their intense enjoyment of the moment when history caught him out. Deported from Berlin to the Warsaw ghetto in 1938, Reich-Ranicki survived the Holocaust but stayed on in Communist Poland after the war, and first pursued literary criticism under East German auspices. When he finally defected to the West he forgot to tell anyone that he had been a registered informer under the regime he left behind. Almost everybody was, but he made a mistake in letting someone else say it first. The scandal whipped up on this point did something to offset his impeccable wartime track record as a Jew on the run from the Nazis. But despite the extra animus aroused by what was taken to be his lack of contrition when discomfited, common sense eventually prevailed and his story as a survivor of Nazi horror returned to the centre of attention, especially after he published, at the turn of the millennium, his autobiography Mein Leben, which became a best-seller. There was an English translation, called The Author of Himself: but understandably it made little impact, his name being so little known outside Germany. Within Germany, he is as well-known as any chancellor, and more likely to last in office. Few critics in any country have ever so outstripped the poets and novelists in being literature’s living representative, but there is no mystery about the reason. Vastly and yet vividly learned, his judgement alive in every nuance, he writes with a wonderfully seductive clarity which will be especially appreciated by the beginner in German, who could learn the language from this one writer, just from the way he writes about other writers. His favourite form, the short essay, makes for an easily digestible bite-sized chunk. Collections of these short pieces fill a shelf, and there couldn’t be a better way into German literary culture, from the poetry to the politics and vice versa. He writes even better in praise than in dispraise, but, as usually happens, the dispraise is more fun. Reich-Ranicki, well aware of that fact, has often pointed out that a literary culture deprived of rigorous criticism would soon die of niceness. He is obviously correct, but that doesn’t stop other writers hoping that he will be nice to them, and from protesting loudly when he isn’t.
We shouldn’t call a critic a murderer just because it is his duty to sign death certificates.
—MARCEL REICH-RANICKI, Die Anwälte der Literatur, P. 88
AT THE VERY END of the twentieth century, Germany caught a lucky break. The best-seller lists were dominated for an entire year by Mein Leben, the autobiography of Marcel Reich-Ranicki. Germany’s toughest literary critic had written a life story to entrance the nation, but the lucky break didn’t come just from the remarkable fact that a man of letters with an unchallenged title to a marble plinth was encamped on top of the best-seller list as well. It came also from the fact that he was a Jew. A large part of his story was about the quirk of chance by which he had survived the Nazi era. It became part of Germany’s story, however, and against all the odds, that the most dreadful century of its history was rounded out by an act of redemption. New generations were rushing the bookshops to find out about the crimes that the older generations had committed. Anti-Semitism had been officially over since 1945. Now, in 2000, it was culturally over as well. It might still be said to taint the culture, or even to permeate it: but not to dominate it. A Jew was in the driving seat. So that, at last, was the end of that.
Reich-Ranicki himself was unlikely to burst into tears of joy at these signs of atonement. One of the factors that made his best-selling triumph so satisfactory to the onlooker was that here was no figure of affection being handed a lifetime achievement award. Throughout his career as a critic—which, if you count in his first journalism written in Poland and East Germany, covers the entire post-war period—he has been notoriously unbiddable. A characteristic collection of pieces was published in 1984 as Laute Verisse, which pretty well means “Naked Hatchet-Jobs.” In actuality he has a wide range of literary sympathy and is one of the rare critics in any language who can be as enjoyable in approbation as in the opposite. He has always had a way of recommending a book that sends you flying to find it: try not to read Theodor Fontane’s nineteenth-century classic novel Effi Briest after Reich-Ranicki has got through praising it. But there can be no denying that he is a tough customer, and some of the living writers on whom he has passed negative judgement have made their wounded feelings known. There have been pitiable whimpers and loud squeals from the injured, and when MR-R (just as the Kaiserliche und K�
�nigliche Austro-Hungarian Empire used to be called k.u.k. in print because it had to be mentioned so often, Reich-Ranicki is customarily referred to by his monogram) was caught up with by his pre-Western past, there were plenty of literary onlookers who found it hard not to enjoy his discomfort. The facts said that he had never done much for the Communist government of East Germany except to go through the motions of informing on people who had no secrets to keep, but for once MR-R was on the back foot, and fellow scribes who had been decked by him were glad to see it, especially if they lacked his gift of being vitriolic. One of his abiding flaws is to suppose that writers offended in their dignity have the expressive power to answer him if they wish. Commendably eager to avoid praising himself, he is slow to realize that his easy habit of buttonholing an audience through a newspaper is more than just a trick, it’s a talent.
But the gift for being vitriolic counts for nothing unless it is contained within the larger gift of being appreciative. Nobody minds being knocked by the kind of critic who does nothing but knock. What hurts is being knocked by the critic whose praise you would like to have, and every living writer in the German-speaking countries would like to have MR-R’s endorsement. The same would probably go for the dead, if their opinion could be consulted. MR-R is a critic who has always written as well as any writer, so even his most bitter enemies are aware from the starting gun that his own literary status is already settled, although he has never claimed such a thing for himself. He has always held to the principle (which was also favoured by Stefan Zweig) that great artists are disqualified from being objective critics, because they are always thinking of how they would have done it. Following Friedrich Schlegel, MR-R said it of the greatest German writer, Goethe. To say of the author of Faust that he was too much of a poet to know much about the arts was pretty bold, when you consider how much Goethe knew about everything, but it was characteristic of MR-R to take on the biggest example and make his argument stick. What he really meant was that Goethe’s critical judgements were all self-serving, and that the fact should be remembered when you are under the intoxicating impression that Goethe, to make a single point, is invoking the whole aesthetic world. MR-R has always held that the business of judging a book is strictly ad hoc: he professes not to like the criticism that sets itself up as “an alternative airfield” and uses the subject as a pretext to stage an airlift of everything the critic wants to bring in to prove himself powerful. For MR-R to take this line was an act of self-denial, because he himself was very well equipped to play the uomo universale. Just because he has an incurable knack of making himself sound arrogant shouldn’t deafen us to the truth of his humility. Advancing the principle that the great artist can’t criticize with a pure heart, he has been ready to live by the unspoken corollary, that no objective critic can be a great artist. He has been ready to live by it, but he could never make it stick. He writes too well. No wonder he is feared.
