by Clive James
As things are now, it is getting hard to imagine just how reluctant the French intelligentsia was to give up on its righteous commitment to the international anti-capitalist dream. “A school of thought that knows itself to be in decline,” said Revel in La Connaissance inutile, “fights all the more furiously to conserve its identity.” As it became clear that the West, in order to bring communism to ruin, didn’t have to do anything except exist, the French left became more vindictive, and not less, against liberal democrat commentators of Revel’s stamp. The left actually intensified, instead of diminishing, its insistence that the Communist world was beseiged by hostile forces. Revel got his answer into a nutshell: “The Communist world is indeed a fortress besieged, but from within.” His critics might conceivably have one day forgiven him for thinking like that. But they have never forgiven him for writing like that. They would prefer to call his way of putting things irresponsible: mere journalism. At the end of 2001, Bernard-Henri Lévy published his portentously titled Réflexions sur la guerre, le mal et la fin de l’histoire. A commentator with philosophical credentials, Lévy is so madly fashionable that his new book appeared in the vitrines of the fashion boutiques along the Boulevard St. Germain. More than three decades having elapsed since the events of May 1968, Lévy has had the time, and the good sense, to work his way to an acceptance of liberal democracy. But from the way he states the position he now holds you wouldn’t know that it had been held from the beginning by men like Revel, who never gets a mention.
Later in the same passage from Le Voleur dans la maison vide, Revel goes on to confess that whenever he wrote an article he was always thinking of how it would fit into a book. This confession might seem contradictory: if talent matters and genres don’t, why should a journalist publish books at all? But the question answers itself. The attraction of journalism is that one runs no lasting risks. But that’s just what encourages the sloven. I prefer to be encouraged by a man like Revel, who has always written even the most fleeting piece as if he might need to defend it on the day of judgement—and for any craftsman proud of his work, of course, the day of judgement is always today. Ce jour: journalism. In French the connection is obvious. In English, we tend to forget that journalism means today, and we are seldom encouraged to remember that history is made of nothing else except one today after another.
Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.
—JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL, La Connaissance inutile, P. 153
This is an example of Revel restraining himself, rather than letting fly. The propensity of left ideologists to argue from a sense of history while lacking a sense of fact has always got his goat, but he has managed to stay coherent. Sometimes one wishes that he would sideline the suave sarcasm and give way to a bellow of rage. On the same page of the same book, Revel quotes Regis Debray’s ringing assurance, dating from 1979, that “the word Gulag is imposed by imperialism.” (The italics are there in the original French, where they have even more the effect of a proud smile from a man in tights who has just farted a blue flame.) Debray’s confident pronouncement would have been bizarre enough in 1959, when even Beauvoir must have been having doubts, but for 1979 it was a striking example of the determination of the French far left to call their retreat an advance. Revel was the first to spot that those ideologists who did give up parts of their position became very angry if it was suggested that they had done so in response to criticism. “Those who hold the monopoly of error reserve to themselves the monopoly of rectification.”
Revel had always been good at cutting a section through the mechanism of the totalitarian mind so that you could see the cogs turning. Raymond Aron had begun the job in his L’Opium des intellectuels, where he pointed out the essential difference between a sense of history and an ideology. A sense of history reveals variety, and an ideology conceals it. Revel made an advance on Aron by picking up on the bullying aspect, the set of coercive mental habits that made an ideologist a totalitarian even in his way of thought. On a later page of La Connaissance inutile––and also, with the appropriate scholarly back-up, in Pourquoi des philosophes—he pinpoints Heidegger as a case of totalitarisme dans le démarche discursive, tirelessly and needlessly accumulating affirmatives: “terrorist tautology” in the style of Hitler and Stalin. In Le Voleur dans la maison vide, Revel drew sad conclusions about the ideologists in general: “The intellectuals have the opportunism of the exterminator” (p. 231). After the verbal battle of a lifetime, he had come to accept that the reason for the readiness of the intellectuals to connive at mass extermination was that their language was itself a totalitarian instrument. Hence the hollowness of what he called the eternal dream of the bien pensant left: un totalitarisme végétarien (p. 557). The reluctance of ex-ideologists like Bernard-Henri Lévy to acknowledge their debt to Revel is quite understandable. He isn’t telling them that they were bad writers because they thought that way. He is telling them that they thought that way because they were bad writers.
RICHARD RHODES
An American journalist with showbiz status, Richard Rhodes has a diva-like shyness about revealing his precise age, but the records show that he graduated from Yale in 1959, which probably means that he was born somewhere around 1938. Like many of us who were children during World War II and found out while we were growing up that the world we inherited had been shaped by technology to an unprecedented degree, Rhodes pursued a fascination with machines and systems. Most of the eighteen books published under his name are about technical matters at a high level of complexity, which he can talk about with professional expertise. At various times he has been a visiting scholar at both Harvard and MIT. On subjects other than science and technology he can fall prey to catch-all sociological theories—for the machine buff, there is always the temptation to think that society is a machine too—but on purely technical matters he has a rare knack for putting difficult topics in clear, and even self-effacing, prose. He is also a novelist. With his work in that area I won’t pretend to be familiar, but at least two of his non-fiction works are compulsory reading, and one of those is a book that every student of liberal democracy should know in detail. The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) depends on a thoroughness of research that would scarcely have been possible without the author’s being supported for five years by the Ford Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. (The availability of aid on such a scale is probably the chief reason that the United States produces so many more of this type of writer than say, Britain: it isn’t just their unabashed can-do attitude, it’s the depth of their back-up.) Rhodes deserves personal credit, however, for having done an unusually judicious job in tying the story together.
In a still rarer feat, he has managed to dramatize a technical story without fudging the science. The spectacular nature of some of the human material on display might have helped in this dramatization. The minds assembled at Los Alamos were often histrionic characters even when they shrank from human contact, and the way Robert Oppenheimer marshalled their talented and sometimes temperamental efforts was a theatrical event. But finally the object they were all after depended on physics and engineering, and Rhodes’s real triumph is to make a drama out of those things too. The narrative catches the reader up in an excitement that is unlikely to suit his proclivities, unless he believes in advance that it was necessary not only to build the bomb, but to drop it on a city.
On the latter issue, Rhodes lays out the case without fudging the arguments on either side. Those who think there is only one side, against the bomb’s use, will discover that Oppenheimer was never among their number. Even though the war against Germany was over, he thought there was a case for using the bomb to bring about a quick and certain end to the war against Japan, and he presented the case with logic hard to fault. Oppenhimer’s sensitivities about the nuclear weapons he had been instrumental in bringing into existence were concentrated not against the uranium bomb but against its
successor, the hydrogen bomb. Rhodes, again with the aid of a couple of large foundations, tells the story of the hydrogen bomb too, in Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995). The second book is as uncompromisingly thorough as the first but necessarily less fascinating, because the moral problem remained notional. The hydrogen bomb was too destructive to be used in war, and the fact was plain to any given government, which would rein in its own military leaders if they thought it could. As it happened, it was in the United States, during the Cuban missile crisis, that the military got closest to starting a global thermonuclear war on its own account, when the air force, and especially its Strategic Air Command, tried to provoke the Soviet Union into action, against John F. Kennedy’s clear orders as commander in chief. The Constitution held, but only just. Since the end of the world came that close, it is easy to argue that the development of nuclear weapons was evil in itself: even those ready to contemplate that the nuclear strike against Japan might have been an acceptable price for shortening the war are usually less ready to concede that the threat of a fried planet might have been the price of freedom. But liberals should face two uncomfortable possibilities; first, that it was a necessary evil; second, that nothing else, in the Cold War years, could have stopped the two major powers from fighting. The left is always at its weakest when it argues for an alternative past, administered by better men. They can only mean men like them. (This assumption of personal superiority is where the perennial left comes closest to the classic right.) But the past was administered by men as clever as they were at the very least. The chief virtue of Rhodes’s book about Los Alamos it to give you the feeling of how a group of the cleverest men on Earth combined their best efforts in the belief that building a bomb to kill a hundred thousand people at a time was the only thing to do. There can be moral discussions of the modern world that don’t take that fact in, but they won’t be serious.
Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller were not, however, the first to conceive of using a nuclear chain reaction to initiate a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen.
—RICHARD RHODES, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, P. 375
IN HIS The War Against Cliché, Martin Amis hilariously demolishes—nukes, to use one of his favourite verbs—a book about sex written by this same Richard Rhodes. On the evidence of the quotations adduced by his reviewer, Rhodes’s sex treatise must indeed be a disaster. I can’t bring myself to read it, but partly because I would like to retain my respect for the author of two of the best books I have ever read about science and technology, The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun. Though it might not apply to sex, where some of the secrets are buried deep, Rhodes has a nose for the enriching detail. The immediate consequence of reading the above quotation is to find out who was the first to conceive of a thermonuclear reaction in hydrogen, and thus of the device that we later came to know as the hydrogen bomb. Guess forever and you will never guess.
It was the Japanese physicist Tokutaro Hagiwara. He gave a lecture on the subject in Kyoto in May 1941, seven months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Hagiwara was also very early in the field on the subject of uranium isotope separation, with particular emphasis on plutonium (Dark Sun, p. 77). Later on, the plutonium option was to become the biggest single Allied secret of the war, outranking even the secret of the code-breaking operations. Though Rhodes doesn’t say so—he doesn’t need to say so—Hagiwara’s precocity raises interesting questions about what Japanese physics might conceivably have achieved if the initial strategic plan of Japan’s armed forces had worked out and America had been quickly brought to terms. We can tell ourselves that the strategic plan would never have worked out. We can also tell ourselves that Japan would never have been able to match its physics with a concerted technological effort comparable in its vastness to the one with which the Americans were able to back up the brain-work in Los Alamos: but we can’t tell ourselves the second thing with quite the same confidence that we can tell ourselves the first. Post-war, after a defeat amounting to total destruction, Japanese technology got itself together again well enough. If there had been an early truce, leaving time to get organized, there is no telling what might not have been accomplished, although even the Japanese now commonly say that there would have been no fully modern reform of their science and industry if it had not been for the defeat and the occupation. Rhodes is probably right, however, to stay off those paths. His best gift is to present the facts and let the reader do the awed speculating. (The disqualification of justly forgotten techno best-sellers like Robert Jungk’s Brighter than a Thousand Suns is that their authors, short of information but long on excitable prose, stifled the reader’s reaction by trying to echo it in advance.) Rhodes, aware that he is dealing with genuinely high drama, goes easy on the theatrical effects. We learn that when Niels Bohr was in Cambridge he brushed up his English by reading David Copperfield. When Fermi was building the first reactor in Chicago, the graphite slabs were hefted into position by the college football team in mufti. (Captain Future, block that kick!) At Bikini on March 1, 1954, the Castle Bravo H-bomb shot was a fifteen-megaton runaway. The merit of Rhodes’s books is that he withholds moral judgement long enough to bring out the creative atmosphere generated by brilliant people working together on vast, novel projects. In The Making of the Atomic Bomb he can even make you see how an ugly customer like General Leslie Groves might be just the man to have around if you are trying to build an atomic bomb that will work. The awkward implication is that if you want to do without the company of General Groves, you must organize a world free of conflict. Such a world is hard to imagine, but perhaps Rhodes thought that establishing the principles of stress-free sex was the way to start.
RAINER MARIA RILKE
For those who look on the arts as a kind of celestial sports competition, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) is up there with Bertolt Brecht for the title of German Poet of the Twentieth Century. The standard view of the contending couple is that Brecht’s poetic art was dedicated to social revolution, whereas Rilke’s poetic art was dedicated to art. There is a lot to be said for that view as it applies to Rilke, because few writers who have died so young covered so much aesthetic ground. Born in Prague, he studied art history there and also in Munich and Berlin. The personalized melancholy of his early verse gave way to an overt quest for God after he made two trips to Russia, where he met Tolstoy and the Pasternak family. (Lou Andreas-Salomé, a recurring figure in his life as she was in the lives of many other famous men of his time, was along for the ride up the Volga.) In Paris he got himself appointed secretary to Rodin. An ideal aestheticism took over from mystic revelation in the poems of Neue Gedichte (1907). Some would say that his strongest and least self-consciously ethereal verse was to be found in that volume. Showing signs of believing that he had arrived at the apotheosis of art, he ascended to the empyrean in his annus mirabilis of 1922, when he wrote all of The Sonnets to Orpheus and all of The Duino Elegies: works in which the Poet is elected (some might say self-elected) as the only shaping force capable of dealing with natural energy. Rilke’s verse is hard to translate but some of the middle-period verse comes across in parts. The prose is a better bet, especially the deliberately approachable Letters to a Young Poet. When he actually had so much to say that he wanted to be understood, Rilke turned out sentences that you could write a book about.
Fame is finally only the sum total of all the misunderstandings that can gather around a new name.
—RAINER MARIA RILKE, Gesammelte Werke, VOL. 5
THE MOST OFTEN quoted thing Rilke ever said in prose, this was his equivalent of Mae West’s “Come up and see me some time.” She never said it quite that way, just as Bogart never quite said “Play it again, Sam.” But Rilke did say, pretty well exactly, this. He said it, of course, in German, where it sounded even more stately, because in German “fame” and “name” do not rhyme, so there is no cheap chiming of start and finish. Neat as it is in either language, however, here is a good example of a sentence begging to be misunderstoo
d. The idea behind it is at least half right, although it would have no force unless it was partly wrong. To take an example: the actress Marion Davies remains famous only for being the mistress of William Randolph Hearst. The facts, however, say that she was an extremely talented comedienne, well capable of earning a high salary in her own right; and that she genuinely loved Hearst, who was in awe of her. It did him credit: though he could have had any woman who was available for money, he loved talent.
