Cultural Amnesia

by Clive James

  Ravel refuses the Legion d’Honneur but all his music accepts it.

  —ERIK SATIE, QUOTED BY ROLLO MYERS, Erik Satie

  AND RAVEL WAS one of his friends. At the height of his productive period that stretched from the teens of the twentieth century until the early 1920s, Erik Satie would throw his completed compositions behind the piano, either trusting the important ones to emerge from the mulch by themselves, or just not caring. The composer important enough to influence both Ravel and Debussy had no regard for his own dignity. He was ready to insult even himself. In our time, Barry Humphries is a Satie figure, but one who is glad to incorporate the conventional life even while making war against it: one of the secrets of his creative longevity. Satie incorporated the war. Self-destruction was the surest sign of his rebellion. Among the tanning factories and market gardens of Arcueil, Satie looked up to no-one except the phantom Madonna he called Notre-dame Bassesse: Our Lady Lowness. Like Baron Corvo (real name: Frederick Rolfe), Satie would sign his name as a bishop, but just for the gag. Unlike Baron Corvo he had no hankerings to be Pope. All the facts are in Myers’s book, but many of them—according to Robert Orledge, our best qualified scholar of that effervescent period in French music—were lifted with insufficient acknowledgement from an earlier book of the same title by Pierre-Daniel Templier. Satie would probably have approved of the misappropriation. In every department except his compositions, even in their performance, he was out to sow the seeds of anarchy.

  Lydia Sokolova in her memoir of the Russian ballet records the meeting of Satie and Cocteau for Parade: the conjunction of two hierarchs in the minor but vital French tradition of taking frivolity with uncompromising seriousness. For Satie, however, there was no hierarchy: his superiority was unassailable. “Those who are unable to understand are required by me to adopt an attitude of complete submission and inferiority.” He said it before the premiere of Socrate, and the “by me” tells you everything. This confidence in the importance of his mereness—the melody unadorned, stripped even of harmony—remains the most shocking thing about him, though the confidence was justified. Today his music is a case of once heard, never forgotten. But he was determined to be forgotten first, and succeeded. His written directions to the performance of his pieces (“Play like a nightingale with toothache”) were designed to help them go out of date. He knew that nothing takes on verdigris faster than a determined novelty. By a trick of coincidence—surely it was not a planned echo—Ring Lardner exactly reproduced the cracked tone of Satie’s surreal annotations in the stage directions of his, Lardner’s, little plays: “The curtain descends for seven days to denote the passing of a week.” In that regard Satie, like Lardner in the same mood, was out to make nothing but mischief. Edmund Wilson hated it when Lardner called a book of short stories How to Write Short Stories. Why put up barriers of nonsense? In Satie’s case, it was probably a dread of having so transparent a secret penetrated by the solemn. Nobody unqualified to open the casket should clap eyes on its contents of water-drop jewellery. Here the precursor of Dada outflanked the whole movement, because the Dadaists had no secret: the protection was all there was. Satie’s defences marked the route to treasure. No writer who has heard and loved Satie’s piano pieces (they came back in a big way only in the early 1960s) will be proof against the urge to strip from prose everything except its melody, as if, in the necessary interplay of word and thought, there could be a purely lyrical essence. There can’t. But in music Satie made a vivid reality out of the hopeless ideal of a central, primal thread. He makes babies of us, except if we are distracted by his words, in which case we do not qualify.

  ARTHUR SCHNITZLER

  Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was the giant of literary Vienna in its most fruitful era. A practising physician before he turned professional writer, he brought a view steeped in the harsh realism of the consulting room and the surgery to his stories, novels and plays. The most conspicuous, and most enduringly controversial, element in this clinical realism was his exploration of the erotic. As a physician he knew a lot about it at second hand. At first hand, he was an energetic young man physically attractive to women of all classes. The addition of fame to his natural advantages made him hard to resist, and one of the commendable things about his private life is that he somehow managed to forge a moral sense out of limitless opportunity. It was the plays that made him famous: as a man of the theatre he ruled the city. Though he is still respected internationally as a dramatist, the plays remain notoriously difficult to capture in English, even though playwrights as accomplished as Tom Stoppard have tried. (Some of the plots from his plays turn up constantly in the movies.) Schnitzler is probably most easily approached through his stories, but one of his full-length novels, Der Weg ins Freie (often translated as The Road to Freedom, although The Path into the Clear is less likely to get him mixed up with Sartre), should not be ignored by anyone studying the relationship of culture and politics at a key place in a crucial time: none of his writing, in any genre, was more penetrating about the Jewish identity crisis in Austria. A Jew himself, Schnitzler was not blinded by his own huge success to the pervasive nature of anti-Semitism in Viennese polite society: his play Professor Bernhardi dealt with that very subject. But the glittering theatregoers sat still to watch the play. Schnitzler was quick to notice, however, that he had another bunch of overdressed spectators who were less disposed to sit still while their prejudices were examined. The Nazis, vocally active against Jewish cultural Bolshevism long before they took power in Germany, found it easy to calumniate Schnitzler as a cosmopolitan pornographer. Schnitzler was much quicker than Freud to spot that the Nazis would bring everything in Viennese civilization to an end. There is a lingering misapprehension about Schnitzler: because his memoirs of youth are so unflinchingly realistic, he is thought to have been irredeemably coarse. But his realism, even about previously unmentionable matters, was made possible by sensitivity, not by obtuseness. He had a lyrical awareness that penetrated everywhere, even into the truly sick minds of those who called his honesty an illness, and wanted to kill him for it.

  There are all kinds of flight from responsibility. There is a flight into death, a flight into sickness, and finally a flight into stupidity. The last is the least dangerous and most comfortable, since even for clever people the journey is not as long as they might fondly imagine.

  —ARTHUR SCHNITZLER, Buch der Sprüche und Bedenken, P. 78

  WHEN RAYMOND ARON, in Le Spectateur engagé, said it was a mistake to underestimate the role of obtuseness in human affairs, he was merely making a useful statement. These lines from Schnitzler amount to a true aphorism, and all his warnings against the aphorism as a literary form duly apply. (Shake an aphorism, he said, and in most cases a lie falls out, leaving only a banality.) But Schnitzler’s own aphorisms are guarded and enriched by his lifelong distrust of the merely paradoxical. If they were not, they would be more popular, like Wilde’s. Schnitzler was really out to get at the truth, and this bold linking of cleverness and stupidity is typical of how bravely truthful he could be.

  Is stupidity a mere absence of mind, or has it a mind of its own? If the second thing is true, then stupidity is a force in itself. But it would be a hard force to study, because it always seems to be mixed up with something else: cleverness, for example. In the field of geopolitics, Hitler provided at least one glaring case of what seems, at first glance, to be stupidity in its pure state. After the launching, in June 1941, of Operation Barbarossa, he terrorized millions of people in the Soviet Union who had already been terrorized for years by their own government, and who would willingly have smoothed the path for his armies and administration if he had behaved with even the bare minimum of benevolence. A light hand would have been in his interests as a conqueror; but the heavy, murderous hand was the only one he would contemplate. It was one of the many points at which he guaranteed the loss of his own war. But there’s the hint: the many points can all be traced back to the beginning, and their root found in his ir
rational obsession with racial hygiene. For him, by his nature, mass extermination was an end, to which the creation of a Greater Germany was only a means. His opening anti-Semitic campaigns after the Machtergreifung in January 1933 subtracted the Jewish effort from the German physical sciences—a self-inflicted handicap which would have ensured that he could never have been victorious in the long run. Even that basic point, however, although hard to argue with in retrospect, needs qualification. Though Germany’s pure science was crippled, applied science and technology still got an awfully long way under the Nazis, and it is an act of retroactive trust to suppose that Heisenberg and the other Aryan physicists would never have been able to build an atomic bomb if they had been given time, although they would not have been able to deliver it before the Allies did, because Germany’s long-distance bombing capacity had not kept pace. Hitler’s Germany had all the potential for world domination. Leaving aside the question of whether world domination is a sane aim—we usually don’t call Alexander crazy—Hitler need not necessarily have pursued it in an insane manner. It is just our dubious luck that he did. It was his principles that dished him. If he could have sacrificed them to expediency, he might have won.

  Within the parameters of his apoplectic Weltanschauung, Hitler could be ingenious and even brilliant. His ideology depended on extermination, but some kind of ideology it undoubtedly was, and although, as Raymond Aron said many times, no ideology can be realistic, that does not necessarily mean that an ideologist need be stupid in all areas. Hitler’s abiding fault, indeed, lay in his cleverness. Demonstrably clever in the machinations of mass politics, he was encouraged by his own success to embrace the delusion that he was omniscient in any field of which he possessed knowledge. Far from being ignorant of what a Russian campaign had done to Napoleon, Hitler had made a study of the subject, and had seen merit in the general agreement among historians that Napoleon should not have occupied Moscow. Hitler also knew enough about Germany’s requirements for raw materials to decide that the oil fields in the Caucasus were a more important target. His reasoning was clever on the level of grand strategy. But on the level of military strategy it ignored a fact which had had no relevance in Napoleon’s time, but was now crucial: Moscow was the Soviet Union’s communications centre. If Hitler had concentrated his forces and gone all out for Moscow in the autumn of 1941, he could have had all the oil and minerals he wanted not long after. But he was too smart: or, if you like, too stupid, except that it strains the meaning of the word.

  Schnitzler’s point about one of the flights from responsibility being a flight into stupidity looks clearer cut when we move from Hitler to Stalin. Admirers of Stalin always liked to think that he was never stupid. There was some evidence to back up their faith. Long before the final accounts came in, it should have been obvious that Stalin’s rule was self-defeating for socialism. But if we can grant that he had nothing like socialism in mind, and thought only of an exercise in pure power, the regime he perfected looks like a work of genius. So acute an observer as Isaiah Berlin gave him credit for a master plan behind his succession of purges. Aleksandr Zinoviev, in his The Reality of Commu nism, overstated the later Soviet regime’s coherence—a coherence inherited from Stalin—only in suggesting that it could incorporate, while still remaining stable, all recalcitrant phenomena up to and including dissidence. (If Zinoviev had really believed that, of course, he would not have written his dissident books; but he felt it, and wrote them from deep pessimism.) While Stalin ruled the Soviet Union, however, his one and only creation, the Party apparat, showed few faults as a mechanism for preserving a single aim: that he should rule. He even seemed to have heeded Seneca’s warning that you can kill as many people as you like but your successor will be among those who survive. Stalin acted as if he intended nobody to survive.

  Mao Zedong acted the same way. It can be called stupidity only if you think such behavour threatens the state. But it didn’t threaten his state. On that measure, Ho Chi Minh showed Pol Pot the way, and Pol Pot was the stupid one because he failed to pay heed. Ho’s delayed and selective ruthlessness against his bourgeoisie—actual, potential, or notional—weakened his economy but preserved him in power. Pol Pot’s instantaneous wholesale massacre of anyone who could read and write destroyed the state he had created before he had a chance to rule it. Attacking with a chainsaw the branch he sat on, he was a figure from a diabolical cartoon. But few of the longer-lasting Communist despots were so dense. Ceauşescu was a maniac, but so is an ordinary serial killer; an ordinary serial killer doesn’t run a state. It could be said that Castro is the cleverest person in Cuba because anyone cleverer swam to Miami, but it’s a joke. Castro is not stupid and it is most unlikely that the material decay of his country has surprised him. He simply preferred personal rule to national prosperity, and stifled the second in order to reinforce the first. As Lenin proved, you can’t have a socialist economy without the occasional NEP (a New Economic Policy that allows a measure of free enterprise); you can’t continue as a socialist dictator without the dexterity to dismantle the NEP as soon as it becomes productive; and to balance the resultant hope against the inevitable deprivation is the secret of success. Maintaining yourself in power is the only thing you succeed at, but the time soon comes when the balancing act becomes your raison d’être. Castro had the knack, and remained in power while his beard grew grey.

  If the United States had been able to find a way of burdening Castro’s early socialist aspirations with help, the Communist regime in Cuba might never have formed in the first place. But America had committed itself to a foreign policy which viewed any hint of socialism as an invitation to communism. The policy was stupid, but here again it was not necessarily the product of stupid men: the East Coast foreign policy elite constituted the cleverest collection of political brains in America. Otherwise known as the Wise Men, after World War II they gave an unwise policy its initial impetus because there was no other way of getting a genuinely beneficial measure—the Marshall Plan—through Congress. They needed a Red scare as an appeal to the masses: always an uncomfortable position for any intellectual elite to be in. Appeals to the masses are better managed by big business.

  Schnitzler’s flight into stupidity might look like the only explanation for the sort of newspapers, magazines, television programmes and movies that make us ashamed to be living in the West. At first blush, the mass media seem to offer the ideal chance of examining stupidity in isolation. But once again the trick is not easily worked. There is a possibility, amounting to a probability when the really big money is involved, that the stupidity is being manufactured by clever people whose commercial motives put their taste, scope and integrity into abeyance. This non-anomaly becomes most obvious in the case of Hollywood’s blockbuster movies, where the long haul of creative intelligence takes a spiral route towards the big haul at the box office. Every onlooker who fancies his powers of discrimination has a wonderful time when a blockbuster flops on the opening weekend. But the blockbuster that we actually have a wonderful time watching is a more equivocal case. Where Eagles Dare has always been my favourite example: since the day I first saw it, I have taken a sour delight in rebutting pundits who so blithely assume that the obtuseness on screen merely reflects the stunted mentalities behind the camera, and I go on seeing its every rerun on television in order to reinforce my stock of telling detail—and, all right, in order to have a wonderful time. There is something precious about the intellectual squalor of Where Eagles Dare: it is a swamp with a surface of green pulp squeezed from emeralds. You can’t get the same charge from Delta Force movies, or from the adventures of Jean-Claude Van Damme in the brainless universe where men with guns are helpless against a man fighting with his feet. Where Eagles Dare is the apex of a form: it shows that there is somewhere to go beyond The Guns of Navarone, a numbskull stratosphere in which not even The Wild Geese could fly. Where eagles dare, the sense of the ridiculous winks out to a dot, and the vision is filled with the vaulting pretensions of lat
terday schoolmen who believe, if only ad hoc and pro tem, that cinematic sense can exist in vacuo: detached, that is, from any other sense; a voluntary brain-death. The whole complex phenomenon is epitomized by Richard Burton’s hairstyle.