Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  I pressed harder. What about the admiring caresses lavished by the camera on Mathieu marching into Algiers?

  —EDWARD SAID, Reflections on Exile, P. 286

  ANNOYINGLY UNDATED except for its opening phrase, “A few months ago,” Said’s essay on Gillo Pontecorvo is the account of a personal meeting that probably took place in the late 1990s, by which time Pontecorvo had not made a film in many years. But he had once, in 1966, made a film that Said continues to admire as a masterwork of political analysis: The Battle of Algiers. I feel the same, but for different reasons, and by focusing on the second of these two quoted sentences it is easy to make the difference plain. Said wants the film to be an outright condemnation of imperialism, with no concessions made to the forces of oppression. Said thinks that the French claims to have extended civilization to Algiers had nothing to be said for them, and that the rebellious native Algerians, whatever atrocities they might have committed, were well within their rights, considering the magnitude of the atrocity that had been committed against them. I want the film to be what it is. It certainly does condemn imperialism, but it shows that the French imperialism in Algeria was the work of human beings, not automatons. It need hardly be added that Said is right about how their apparently successful colonial efforts in Algeria corrupted the French into illusions of manifest destiny. Elsewhere in the same book, Said gives an exemplary caning to Tocqueville, who was respectful enough about the repressed minorities in America, but who chose to despise Islam when he became gung-ho for a French Algeria.

  Said’s only mistake, but a crucial one, is to question Pontecorvo’s directorial emphasis at the exact moment when Pontecorvo is being most sensitive. At his most sensitive, he is at his most comprehensive, and comprehending. In letting the camera, and thus the audience, be impressed by the French general’s heroic stature as he marches into Algiers at the head of his paratroopers, Pontecorvo shows why he ranks with Costa-Gavras as a true auteur of the political film. In Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, there is a similarly penetrating moment when Yves Montand, released from gaol, meets his torturer in the street, and can show nothing except embarrassment, while the torturer (Gabriele Ferzetti) assumes that the victim will join him in blaming the whole episode on unfortunate circumstances. These are human reactions, in all their ambiguity. In The Battle of Algiers, the paratroopers’ commander, Mathieu (in real life he was General Jacques Massu), is greeted with rapture by the pieds noirs as he leads his soldiers down the main street. They cheer, weep, do everything but lay palm fronds before his polished boots. He is greeted with hosannas because he looks like a saviour. Here is the man who will take the necessary measures to ensure that our innocent children are no longer blown to pieces in the nightclubs and restaurants. When the camera is on him, it has the eyes of his worshippers. If the camera bestows admiring caresses, it is because the crowd is doing the same.

  Since 1834, generations of the French in Algiers had grown up believing they inhabited part of France. In 1963 they believed de Gaulle when he said that Algeria would stay French. To them, the paratroopers looked like the guarantee that it would do so. The paratroopers believed it too, and the film, in its tragically logical unfolding, shows that belief being undermined by horror at the tenacity of the other belief that they encountered, and at what they must do to fight it. “Non siamo sadici,” the general tells the press: “We are not sadists,” and one of the measures of the film’s unique subtlety is that we believe they are not, even as they set about doing sadistic things. There is a key moment when a couple of the paratroopers say a respectful “Courage!” to the man who is about to be tortured. Said might legitimately have objected to that. In any military group conducting interrogation by violence, no matter how reluctantly the policy is pursued, there are always a few genuine enthusiasts who relish the opportunity to make their sinister dreams come true. But Said’s objection is directed elsewhere, at the very idea that the French in Algeria might have had a point in thinking that they had something to protect.

  Wedded to his conviction that imperialism is always and exclusively a force bent on destruction, Said writes as if the French could have had no reason to believe in their mission civilisatrice. He writes as if they would only have had to take thought to see the truth. But they had been bred to believe that there was something to it. In the opening sequence of the movie, Pontecorvo showed that their belief was an illusion. As the future insurgents look on silently from the gaol window, an anonymous colleague, with frightening efficiency and speed, is executed in the courtyard. Civilization means the guillotine. But the pieds noirs thought the repression of the natives was incidental, not fundamental. They had developed a culture, had some reason to believe in its superiority, and were concerned to protect it. (There is a constant assumption behind Said’s writings that multiculturalism, in imperial times, was an a priori view that had to be suppressed by propaganda, rather than a view which grew out of the imperial experience as a result of the contact.) For the French in Algeria, their mission to rule by right was an understandable belief. Even Camus shared it to a certain extent: he could be single-minded in despising Nazism and communism, but he was in two minds about Algeria until his last day. How would Said have had Pontecorvo film the scene in question, the one about the paratroopers arriving in Algiers like redeeming heroes at the striding heels of their suave commander? Should the actor playing him have been uglier, even though Massu looked like a film star in real life? Should his dialogue have been less subtle, even though Massu was well aware that a holding action was the best that could be hoped for, and said so? Should he have been wearing a swastika armband?

  Said has similar objections to the glamour of the Marlon Brando character in Pontecorvo’s other big political statement, Quemada!. The imperialist looks too good. This bothers Said even though Quemada!, like The Battle of Algiers, is scrupulous in attributing all the impetus and justification of history to the insurgents: scrupulous, relentless and disturbingly convincing for those of us who doubt the efficacy of the outcome. Said doesn’t doubt it, yet he detects in Pontecorvo a lingering tendency to admire the envoys of established power. The same tendency can’t be imputed to Said. One detects in him a puritanical determination to remain unsullied by the blandishments of his own cultural sympathies. As a critic and man of letters he has an enviable scope, but it is continually invaded by his political strictness. It would be foolish to blame him for this. If he had a secular Islamic intelligentsia behind him, he could leave a share of his self-imposed task to others. But he is pretty much on his own, and needs his absolutism if he is to fight his battle. Though his aesthetic judgements are often finely nuanced, there can be few nuances in his basic political position, so he is easily put out when the same turns out not to be true for an established Western radical he would like to admire without reserve. At the end of his encounter with Pontecorvo, he is disappointed to discover that Pontecorvo has been making commercials without telling anybody. The implication is that if Pontecorvo had lived up to the seriousness of his early masterpieces, he would now be living in a tent, and proud of it. But Pontecorvo, until 1956, was a Communist, and Said has underestimated—or, rather, overestimated—the grandees of the Italian Communist intelligentsia. Few of them ever embraced the privations of the proletariat. The Italian intellectuals of the post-war sinistra might have paid lip service to Gramsci but their true models were among the perennial left-leaning artists of Europe: the Picasso who disguised his limousine as a taxi, and the Brecht whose rough-looking blue work-shirts were tailored for him out of matted silk. The luminaries of the Italian left were concerned with taking their place in a current society, not a future one. Fundamentalism was corrupted by the temptations of civilization, and Said might eventually reach the conclusion that it would be better if the same thing could happen in the Islamic world.

  In his fine long essay “Nationalism, Human Rights and Interpretation” (appearing as chapter 36 of Reflections on Exile) there is an encouraging sign that he has
already reached it. He notes that the Lebanese writer Adonis, like Salman Rushdie, was reviled for suggesting that a strict literalism in the reading of sacred texts kills the spirit. Said is only a step away from saying that no text is sacred. He is brave enough to take that step: he is used to having his life threatened. His other fear is the disabling one: the fear of giving aid and comfort to the automatic enemies of Islam. But one is not necessarily an enemy of Islam for saying that although all good books are holy, no book is the word of God. Even the greatest books are the work of human beings, in all their frailty. Without the frailty, there would be no art, or even any thought. When Said saw the general up there on the screen looking so seductive, he thought that he had caught Pontecorvo in a weak moment. But the weak moment was a moment of strength. Pontecorvo had asked himself: “How would I have reacted, if I had been a French Algerian, and had been there in the street for the arrival of the strongman who had come to reassure me that my life had not been wasted?” By looking into himself, he was able to see everything else: the sign of the artist. As for Pontecorvo the ex-artist, he made those commercials in order to maintain his way of life as a figure of prestige, a man who counts. And after all, the prestige was impressively brought into play when Pontecorvo strode forward as a headline act in the demonstrations against the bombing of Afghanistan. There he was, up there on the screen: the great director, being lavished with the camera’s admiring caresses. One imagines that Said was pleased enough to see that.

  SAINTE-BEUVE

  Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (1804–1869) was the illustrious nineteenth-century French man of letters who got a bad press from a long line of good writers, from Flaubert through Proust to Vladimir Nabokov: it was his bad reputation, rather than his renown, that outlived him. The student should be slow to join in the denigration. Sainte-Beuve really was the greatest literary critic of his time, even though he sometimes gave too much praise to mediocrity, and not enough to genius. Nor did he miss out on every genius. His advocacy and understanding of Victor Hugo led to a close friendship, although his love affair with Madame Hugo was not calculated to reinforce it. That was probably the best thing about Sainte-Beuve’s multifarious energy (he was poet and novelist as well as critic): he was willing to live outside the categories. He had a nose for the everyday, and he found the everyday everywhere. For such a writer to make criticism his main creative effort was without precedent. Throughout his life, the weekly essay was his characteristic form, and finally it was the wealth of observation, invention and reasoning that he was ready to pour into an apparently casual piece that marked him out. Read today, his volumes of weekly pieces are still a good way of building up strength in one’s reading of French, because even when the subject was ephemeral he gave it permanence with his registration of contemporary detail, so the reader is usefully driven to the dictionary and the Larousse. (The presence of that latter volume on your desk is a sure sign that you are on the right track.) As a literary grandee, Sainte-Beuve took a prominent place at the celebrated Parisian restaurant Magny’s, where all the literary world came to dine and the brothers Goncourt surreptitiously wrote down the conversation. (Dinner at Magny’s, by Robert Baldick, can be recommended as ranking high in the sumptuous genre of gossipy books about Parisian artistic life.) The concept of a literary world—a milieu which surrounds the outstanding literary figures, ameliorates their natural isolation and incidentally provides an honourable and useful life for those who are not outstanding—was represented for nineteenth-century France by Sainte-Beuve, as it was represented for eighteenth-century England by Dr. Johnson. The literary world turns the café into a campus, with conversation as a permanent seminar. Sainte-Beuve’s triumph was to have his conversations with the public as well as with the writers. In the universities he was less uniformly successful. Appointed by Napoleon III as professor of Latin poetry at the College de France in 1854, he was shouted down by rebellious students. Later on, as a senator, he retrieved his reputation as a champion of liberal thought. He had set the style for the public intellectual speaking through a newspaper column to an audience of those either literate or aspiring to be so. The role was open to abuse, but it became the natural centre of critical energy, and modern civilization owes Sainte-Beuve a permanent debt for having played his part without stinting his talents.

  Every circle of society is a little world apart; to the extent that one lives in it, one knows everything and believes that everyone must know the same things; and then, ten years, twenty years, thirty years having gone by, the circle is broken and vanished, not a sign is left, nothing is written down, and one is reduced to guessing about the whole thing, to bringing it back on the basis of the vaguest hearsay and through feeble echoes.

  —SAINTE-BEUVE, FROM A LETTER COLLECTED IN VOL. 17 OF HIS Correspondence générale, AS QUOTED IN THE Times Literary Supplement, OCTOBER 3, 1975

  QUITE APART FROM its manifest truth, this is Sainte-Beuve at his best: a best we can’t afford to ignore. Plenty of his critics—critics of the critic—have striven to help us forget all about him. Ernst Robert Curtius thought that Sainte-Beuve’s long critical career had given French literature a coherence and a continuity that were absent from German literature because no comparable figure to Sainte-Beuve existed. But very few figures comparable to Curtius have ever shown the same enthusiasm about Sainte-Beuve, and many of them have decried him as a shameless puffer of journey-work, the exemplar and protector of the second-rate. Nabokov, always on the lookout for novelists unjustly praised, loathed him, and with some reason. Sainte-Beuve certainly had a gift for slighting the gifted while rabbiting on endlessly in praise of mediocrities. Flaubert poured the energy of genius into the job of demonstrating how thoroughly Sainte-Beuve had misunderstood him in the matter of Salammbô. As for Proust himself, it can be said that his whole career was one long version of his polemic Contre Sainte-Beuve. The music critic Edward Hanslick carried a comparatively slight burden: as the object of Wagner’s scorn, he was the involuntary model for Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, but at least he had only one opera aimed at him. Sainte-Beuve was the target for the whole of À la recherche du temps perdu. He was lucky to be dead.

  But in literature there is, or ought to be, such a thing as a right of precedence, and the chronological facts say that Sainte-Beuve sounded like Proust before Proust did. At one stage I read all the way through the collected Causeries du lundi columns in a bunch of disintegrating paperbacks I bought from a bouquiniste on the Left Bank. With torn and faded yellow wrappers thinner than their pages, the books were sadly battered little bundles that fell open anywhere and eventually fell apart. It was one of the ways I learned French: a lundi a day, underline every word you don’t know, keep going for as long as you get the sense, look up the hard words afterwards. Later on I replaced those tatty collections of Sainte-Beuve’s weekly output with a glistening Pléiade set, and although I never took the Pléiade volumes down from the shelf with the same alacrity, they had their use, principally for checking up on just how completely the star critic had missed the point of most of the great writers of his time. Had Nabokov exaggerated about Sainte-Beuve’s peculiar tolerance for the uninspired? Not really. Eventually, in a fit of madness, I supplemented the set of Sainte-Beuve’s literary criticism with a complete Pléiade three-volume set of his unwieldly sociological masterpiece Histoire de Port-Royal, just in case I ever wanted to get on top of whatever he had had to say about Jansenism. It hasn’t happened yet, but might. My point now is that with all these books of his on my shelves, I still would have missed this particular paragraph, because even though I read him for his tone rather than as a guide, and therefore could have read him writing about anything, it still would have been unlikely that I would have read the correspondence through. I have all the correspondence of Voltaire, and enjoy dipping into it: but I will probably never read it through. You need to be very mad about an author to follow him down all his alleys, because you will be spending time on his minutiae that you could be d
evoting to someone else’s main event. (Sometimes the correspondence is the main event: Madame de Sévigné put everything she had into her letters, and there is nowhere else to find out who she really was.)