Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Marcel Reich-Ranicki writes so well that he can point a critical judgement and make poetry of it, so that you remember the prose aperçu like a balanced line of verse. In his book Nachprüfung he calls Joseph Roth a “Vagabund mit Kavaliersmanieren” (p. 210). A vagabond with the manners of a cavalier: the perfect way to remember Roth, of whom we can be sure that when he was drinking himself to death in Paris in the late 1930s, he made no disturbance. Here is something more about Joseph Roth from the same source, and this is even better, because it captures what made the texture of Roth’s writing so enchanting: “He always made it easy for his readers and often made it hard for his interpreters.” But in the German the antithesis is less ponderously arranged: “Er hat es seinen Lesern immer leicht und seinen Interpreten oft schwer gemacht.” MR-R, as you can see, does the same: his German is so plainly carpentered that a beginner feels at home in it, and so neatly joined syntactically that it is hard to translate without pulling it to pieces. To round out the subject of MR-R’s admiration for Roth, it should be said that MR-R also possesses the creative critic’s essential gift of being able to quote from any source but always to the purpose. The man of letters Karl Heinz Bohrer said that Roth was a moralist out of stylistic purity, and a stylist out of moral sensitivity. Not even MR-R can improve on that, so he quotes it: just what a good critic should do, but it takes humility to do it—the kind of humility that needs an air of arrogance to protect its Delphic mission.

  MR-R has never been just a stylist judging style, although there are worse things to be than someone who can do that. He can get to the heart of a writer and stay there, sometimes for decades. In the heart of Thomas Mann he set up shop. His book on the Mann family is the first thing to read on the subject (although first you should read the subject, which takes a good chunk of a lifetime) but if he had never talked about any of them except Thomas Mann he would still have done a lot to get the titan in context—and from the inside, which is the hard part. “Er hat fast nichts erlebt und fast alles beschrieben.” He experienced almost nothing and described almost everything: it was too true to be cruel. MR-R takes that truth as an invitation to extend his enquiries, not to shut them down. He has never stopped being interested in, or being interesting about, Thomas Mann; but always on the understanding that Thomas Mann devoted his life and art to needing no such assistance. So why is a critic necessary? Well, there are all those other critics who aren’t, and they will hardly shut up unless contested: someone has to speak plain sense. There was a lot Thomas Mann could do, but he couldn’t always do that. In the style of a great creative writer, too many clarities collide and make rainbows: sorting out the spectral maelstrom is a long job.

  There have been other great names that MR-R has felt no compulsion to cling on to. He has always been a great one for echoing Tallulah Bankhead’s vocal judgement during a self-consciously advanced production of a play by Maeterlinck: “There’s less in this than meets the eye.” Admirers of Walter Benjamin were disconcerted to find that MR-R thought him short of the very thing he was supposed to have in abundant stock: profundity. MR-R thought Benjamin the critic made a mistake in trying to think like a writer. MR-R skewered Benjamin’s character on the basis of Benjamin’s snobbish remarks about Walter Mehring’s social background. (Mehring was a catchpenny writer of lyrics and sketches under the Weimar Republic, and in exile he was a bit of a liability, but he was also a genuine lover of books, as his lament for his lost library, Die verlorene Bibliothek, subsequently revealed.) When you consider that Benjamin’s prestige as a pundit continues to be almost as high within Germany as outside it, you begin to grasp just how brave MR-R can be, or at any rate how cocky he can sound. On his ZDF television talk show Das literarische Quartett he regularly advances the outrageous opinion that no contemporary novel longer than 500 pages can possibly be worth reading. (A book of transcripts from the show, collected under the snappy title “. . . und alle Fragen offen,” comes in at 768 pages, but is very much worth reading.) Though his fellow panellists and most of the television audience secretly agree with him, they all delight in ascribing such opinions to his choleric impatience, and indeed he always looks as if he is about to bite the book he is holding in half, even if he says he likes it. But the short shrift he customarily extends to the profundities of Kunstwissenschaft ought not to be ascribed to the supposed brevity of his attention span. He has taken the time to understand what the higher criticism is on about. He just doesn’t agree with it.

  MR-R wants the critic’s job kept down to earth. Really he wants the writer’s job kept down there too. In a culture where the sublime has always seductively beckoned, his has been a useful corrective emphasis: a shift of direction towards talking turkey and away from Mumpitz, that useful German word for exalted twaddle. There is a danger of know-nothing savagery, but he offsets that by knowing everything. Politically clued up, he has always been able to approach contemporary German writers through what tends to be their blind spot, which is their attitude to liberal democracy. In a cockfight whose flying feathers have not yet settled, MR-R leapt on Günter Grass for flirting with the notion that at least the old DDR had had a system of belief. (Graham Greene used to peddle the same line about the West’s deficiency in faith, but apart from Dwight Macdonald there was no Reich-Ranicki to tear into him.) Contrary to the received opinion among MR-R’s more embittered opponents in Germany, he has always been hospitable enough to any writer who has found the capitalist West deficient in human values. He just punishes any lingering suggestion that the totalitarian East might have had a surplus of them. His credentials were impeccable: the East was where he came from. The credentials looked less impeccable when it turned out that part of the price he paid for staying in the East at the end of the war was that he had to turn stoolie, but his personal history—though he made a mistake in not admitting it before it was revealed—couldn’t invalidate the attacks he launched on writers in the East after he himself had made it to the West. Regretfully but firmly, he dismantled the claims to seriousness of those East German writers who did not, as he did, take it on the lam, but who stayed on, compromised with the State, and flourished. He argued, surely correctly, that the compromise not only turned their opinions to apologetics, it turned their literature to propaganda. But the unyielding strictness with which he said so has understandably been held against him, and raises the question of whether a critic should ever throw a stone without remembering his house is made of glass.

  When we look at the quoted statement carefully, however, we see that MR-R is claiming no such right. The death certificate is signed by a doctor. It is the death sentence that is signed by a judge. The judgement MR-R is talking about is the diagnostic one about whether the work presented to him is alive or dead, not about whether it should live or die. As long as this is borne in mind, it seems to me that the irascible arch-critic is on strong ground. He is often called Henker, hangman, but it’s a nickname. At most he is a grave-digger, and what would we do without those? We have a right, though, to ask grave-diggers for a modicum of tact. Hamlet met one with the saving grace of humour. MR-R’s humour is real and often hilarious, but he would do better to make his fellow-feeling more obvious more often. In old age, heaped with honours and uncontested in his position, he continues to write as if he had not yet made it. One of the most piquant complaints in his autobiography is how he was not made to feel at home in the German literary world: it is a complaint that goes all the way back to Jakob Wassermann, whose case is cited in MR-R’s indispensable pocket book Der doppelte Boden (The False Bottom). Under the Weimar Republic, Wassermann was nationally famous but felt he did not belong. MR-R, nationally famous in a democractic Germany half a century after the Holocaust, still feels the same. If it is the condition of the Jew in Germany, then the condition is historically incurable. (There is a lot to prove that the German intellectual world has done everything in its power to make amends.) But it might be just personal. Not many artists feel secure in their posts, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki is an a
rtist if anybody is: an artist of criticism if you like, but for anyone who can write a sentence the way he can, the option to rule himself out is not open. As MR-R has always been the first to insist, a critic is not a scientist, because there is no Golden Yardstick: no Metermass. That leaves the critic as either artist or factotum. MR-R claims the lower status, but the way he writes condemns him to the higher. I came to German late, and it has sometimes been a hard tussle with my thick wits: but knowing what I know now, if I had never learned it to read anyone else, I would have learned it just to read him.

  JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL

  Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out. The best way of defining his style as a writer is to say that there is something as good as that in every paragraph. No political commentator anywhere is so consistently entertaining on such a high level. Revel’s youthful beginnings were as a courier in the Resistance. After trading in his thorough academic preparation as a philosopher for a career as a working journalist, he set out on a long attempt to bring French political journalism back towards philosophy, by developing, over the course of twenty-five or more books, a dense consistency of liberal views always underpinned by both a deep background in historical reading and a close observation of daily events. The close observation fed a good memory, which made him the bugbear of his gauchiste opposite numbers, because he remembered things they preferred to forget: to the end, he retained an impressive knack for tracing the latest progressive fad back to its roots in the orthodoxy before last.

  In succession to Raymond Aron, and on a par with the eloquent ex-Communist François Furet, Revel was part of France’s comeback from the depths of glamorous but perilously self-deceiving radical chic. Several of his books, most notably How Democracies Perish, earned international fame. It could be said that in the United States at least one of his opinions made him too famous: his notion that democracy might have to give up some of its liberties in order to protect itself was, when translated into English, far too popular on the American neo-conservative right, as Hendrick Herzberg pointed out at the time. But Revel is at his most rewarding when read in his own language, which he writes in a style that the beginner will find gratifyingly clear in its structure, memorable for its vivid imagery, and consistently funny. Revel is brilliant in attack, but always remembers to dismantle the man’s position and not the man. He has a lively appreciation of how people can get stuck with a view because it has become their identity. In 1970 his book Without Marx or Jesus was an early guess that America would not be universally admired for making a totalitarian hegemony impossible. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Revel was prescient about how nostalgia for a collectivist social solution would continue to infect the left. By extension, he foresaw the crisis that would be brought to liberal democracy by an ideology of multiculturalism, because it would automatically undermine liberal values at home without even needing to pay allegiance abroad. Perhaps Revel’s single best book about the world picture is L’Obsession anti-américaine (2002, translated as Anti-Americanism), which ranges far more widely than its title suggests, persuasively tracing the development of globalized terror from its origins in the threat, not that the Palestinians might be denied their own state, but that they might gain it in a way that accepted the existence of the state of Israel. The best book about him is by him: his 1997 autobiography Le Voleur dans la maison vide (The Thief in the Empty House). It is impossible to imagine any of his dogmatist opposite numbers writing anything so human, self-deprecating and charmingly troubled. No wonder they loathe him. Outwritten, outpointed and outraged, French gauchiste commentators have always consigned Revel to the far right, but they find it hard to make the classification stick. When it comes to the welfare of the common people, he was all too clearly more to the left than they are, never having succumbed to the intellectual opportunism that cherishes a non-existent class struggle as the motor of social progress.

  During the preparation of this book for the press, Jean-François Revel, full of years and honours, died at the age of eighty-two. Though the pseudo-left throughout the world went on calling him a right-winger to the very end, it was always apparent, to anyone with an ear for his sardonic music, that he was a popular champion in the very best sense of the term. He began on the left, and, in the only sense that really matters, on the left was where he finished: vigilant against all powers that hold the common people in contempt, including the power that claims they can be coerced into being free.

  There are no genres, there are only talents.

  —JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, Le Voleur dans la maison vide, P. 311

  REVEL, WHEN HE wrote this in the late 1990s, was defending the status of journalism against lofty minds who presumed to despise its immediacy. In France, the philosophers, the sociologists and the savants in general had always enjoyed an automatic superiority to journalists, because for the savants the unit of thought was the book, whereas for the journalists the unit of thought was only the article. Books outweighed articles. Revel had good personal reasons to question this hierarchy. The philosophers in particular, with Sartre always in the ascendant, had an impressive record of getting the post-war world wrong, whereas Revel and some of his fellow journalists had been getting it right. Revel was too modest, however, to quote from his own works in order to demonstrate that the mainspring of this talent was a capacity for compression that left the philosophers sounding vapid. They weren’t just peddling falsehoods, they were pumping the life out of the language while they did so. Revel pumped the life in. He could do so from an historical perspective, which always helps. On the matter of Malraux’s inflated prestige as an omniscient pontifex of the visual arts, for example, Revel could go all the way back to Hegel for evidence that real knowledge about art sounded less like a tinkling cymbal. Hegel, said Revel, actually looked hard at paintings and judged before he theorized. Revel found the French art-history tradition critically short of of Jewish scholars. Elie Faure, august author of that platitudinous tome L’Esprit des formes, had emerged not from a proper scholarly tradition but from a vacuum, and Malraux represented the same vacuum with better publicity. Revel scorned that kind of highfalutin cultural globetrotting for its second-hand world-historical verbiage (“le verbiage historico-mondial de deuxième main”—the sandbag swings more elegantly in the original). He called it vulgarization in an ampule. But the phrase that counted was déclamatoire prétentions métaphysiques. It was the claim to philosophical status that riled him.

  Well schooled in philosophy himself, Revel thought the philosophy that mattered most had always begun from the level of well-written journalism, which was in touch with the world and had a professional imperative to keep the contact while making specific propositions. He put a premium on the thinking that did not give itself a licence to get above writing. The danger of that position is to overvalue simplicity: its proponent had better be able to suggest everything else while he zeroes in on a neat precept. Revel could, and can: we need the two tenses because he gets better as he gets older. His prose, right down to the epithet, demands to be unpacked, and it is a long time before we see the bottom of the suitcase. He is the master of the non-moronic oxymoron. In any language, practitioners of broadsheet commentary love the oxymoron as a device, because it hints at a pipeline to profundity. But an oxymoron from Revel always pays its way. He was the first to come up with a two-word formulation for the miraculous ability of pundits to deduce that a past event had been inevitable: “retrospective clairvoyance.” In an everyday piece for a newspaper, he called terrorism “systematized delirium.” Most authors of a treatise on the subject would be very glad to think of an expression as rich with implication as that.

  Even in straight expository prose—no rhetorical devices, no tricks—he has the gift of putting a large argument into a small space, usually when he is summarizing what he has just been expounding. In a searing article on the delib
erate dumbing-down of the French education system, he encapsulates the possible consequences: “a non-selective diploma is a passport to unemployment.” (Note the resonance of the buried metaphor: a passport implies a foreign land, which is what unemployment is.) In Britain, Kingsley Amis got into the language with a phrase about the same theme: More will mean worse. (He actually wrote it in italics, which helped the op-ed journalists to home in on it without the tax to their poor brains of reading it in context.) But the strength of Amis’s point depended on his treating education specifically, as an absolute; and the strength was also a weakness, because he had no inclination to extend his view to a social tendency. Revel’s phrase leaves the way open for an argument about whether a proposed cure for social ills might not exacerbate them. Always characterized by the bien pensant left as a diehard right-winger, Revel was fruitfully obliged to go on pointing out that he was in fact a liberal democrat who was genuinely concerned that doctrinaire gauchiste measures would leave the underprivileged less privileged than ever. Being misrepresented can be a stimulus, and in France Revel could depend on being misrepresented from all directions. He was energized by a vivid knowledge of what the states in the East had been like when their official thinkers had been in a position to translate their vilification of a dissident into practical action.