The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  It should be said in his favour that Canetti, by his own reluctant account, did manage to meet at least a few Englishmen who were not reduced to ‘desiccation’ by the national trait. Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell, Vaughan Williams, Arthur Wayley: each is forgettably evoked, with perhaps an extra touch of specificity for Wayley, because he had read Canetti’s novel in the original language. But as a general rule, Englishmen neither realised Canetti’s importance at first glance nor managed to conceal their arrogance even when adopting an elaborate guise of congeniality. Take T. S. Eliot (did we mention him?) as a case in point. The fact that Eliot had been born and raised in America was only a further proof of the pervasive nature of English arrogance: having gone native, he had taken on the local characteristic, and indeed would not have been a success in England had he failed to do so. But he probably managed to acquire it so easily because his ancestors had been English in the first place. It was ‘the acquisition, so to speak, of an American returned to the home country after many generations. It will be difficult to describe Eliot as the quite abysmal character he was . . . His costive-minimal work (so many spittoons of failure), the poet in England and among the Modernists of emotional impoverishment, which became fashionable through him . . .’

  The continually recurring diatribe about Eliot is made almost piquant by the fact that Canetti is talking about a time in his enemy’s career when the sequential poems later to be known as Four Quartets were being published to universal praise for their magnificence. There were plenty of English intellectuals who had no particular respect for Eliot’s conservative intellectual position but could see that he was writing the greatest poetry of his time. For Canetti, however, it was out of the question to separate man and work. The man was the work: it was the way, after all, that he felt about himself. ‘My chief trait, much my strongest quality, which has never been compromised, was the insistence on myself . . .’ Canetti measured himself against other men according to the adamantine strength of his self-regard, so it can be imagined what he was like when he was measuring himself against women.

  Or, rather, it can’t. Just when you thought you had been handed the complete picture of a louse, you read how he rewarded the young Iris Murdoch for having bestowed her favours on him. Here we need to make a distinction. His abusive opinions on her qualities of mind were delivered long after their affair was over, and might even seem reasonable to those of us less than convinced about her status as a philosopher. ‘I don’t think there is anything that leaves me quite as cold as that woman’s intellect.’ But his comments about her qualities as a mistress bring into question his own judgment at the time. ‘I could not ignore the ugliness of her feet. She had a bearlike walk, but it was a repulsive bear . . .’ It was also a passive bear, for whom love was ‘an indifferent act’. You might have thought that this drawback would have become apparent to him fairly quickly, but not so. ‘This went on . . . for a couple of years.’ Their love affair (one of the inspirations behind her second novel The Flight from the Enchanter) became famous as an event submissive on her part and dominant on his, but on this evidence he did his own share of the suffering, simply by having known her. ‘Everything I despise about English life is in her.’ Except, strangely enough, arrogance. With typical gallantry, he sums her up as being ‘ambitious as a master criminal. But she’s too fixated on love to be arrogant...’ The bitch, she couldn’t be depended on even for that.

  Regulars in Canetti’s extensive harem pop up wanly throughout the book, usually doing exactly what he wants and almost invariably being patronised for their compliance. The historian C. V. Wedgwood, as ‘the student who loves her teacher’, is given a few points for translating Auto da Fe but earns a conclusive demerit for not being enthusiastic about - for possibly (whisper this) not even having read - Crowds and Power: ‘she was unoriginal, had no ideas about anything.’ It could be said that she had enough original ideas to go to bed with an unmitigated creep, but it isn’t said by Canetti, who never awards women credit for choosing him. What choice do they have? It’s fate. Abject devotion from the poet Kathleen Raine is first welcomed (‘It did not seem to matter to her that she didn’t know the first thing about me’) and then scorned for the usual reason (‘I had no idea at the time of the arrogance there was concealed behind such modesty’). That was a close one.

  Intelligent beauties lined up to be treated like dirt. The International Man of Mystery was also the Man with Power over Women. In Hampstead there was only one Vienna-style coffee house. It was called the Coffee Cup. Canetti was still to be found hanging out there when I was introduced to him in the first summer after I got to London in the early sixties. He didn’t even pretend to be polite, and I couldn’t blame him. After only a few minutes in his company it was clear to me what attracted him about the passing parade: trainee bluestockings, of the stamp nowadays known, in Britain at least, as posh totty. Today they would be dressed exclusively out of the Toast catalogue, but even then they were dreams in suede and cashmere. He didn’t move his head to track them as they wafted by, but I could see his eyeballs swivel. Suffering from the same proclivities, I was in no position to despise him, and I might say that the same goes for the characteristic that he projected on to the local population because he had so much of it himself.

  Arrogance is the natural condition of a mind in exile. If history had never torn Canetti loose from his first context, he might have flourished as a type well recognised, and even cherished, in the European world of the literary cafe´s: half know-all, half clown. It was being a displaced person that made him preposterous, and those of us in the post-war peace who chose to roam the world could have no warrant to look down on those among our elders who had been forced to. For the German-speakers, especially, there was never any easy undoing of the damage. Of the two undoubted masters of modern German prose, the novelist Thomas Mann and the essayist Alfred Polgar, neither ever really came back to the main German-speaking lands. Each was offered every enticement, but they settled for Switzerland. So, in the course of time, did Canetti, if not to find a final home for his mastery, then at least to give one extra twist to his mystery, and to gain the perspective for writing a memoir so delightfully awful that it makes his self-satisfied literary personality palatable at last.

  Canetti had some reputation as an analyst who could skewer people in a paragraph. Here is the proof that he was too pleased about himself to be truly perceptive about others. The striking aphorism, said Polgar, requires a stricken aphorist. On the threshold of death’s door, Canetti saw nothing to be worried about when he examined his conscience. On this evidence, he couldn’t even find it. Instead, he wrote a book fit to serve every writer in the world as a hideous, hilarious example of the tone to avoid when the ego, faced with the certain proof of its peripheral importance, loses the last of its inhibitions.

  New York Times, October 2, 2005

  Postscript

  Ever since the imprecations of Coleridge failed to cure them of the habit, the second-rank literary editors of London have indulged their proclivity for ‘lively copy’, so Canetti always attracted more coverage than the Man of Mystery who really counted: W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald who used his years of exile in England to write European masterpieces. In his great book Austerlitz you get walking tours of London that show you what a foreign-born viewpoint could do to register detail and bring it alive. With a Leica lens in each eye, Sebald could turn Liverpool Street railway station into Chartres. Sebald, too, had his limiting quirks: he was all wrong about Germany’s post-war memories of the Allied aerial bombardment. He said that the Germans had wilfully repressed the traumatic recollection. In fact, the kind of pop magazines that he never read were full of stories about night-fighter pilots, and a whole generation of young men grew up dreaming of tearing Lancasters in half with the upward-angled cannon batteries of their Ju-88s while lakes of fire boiled far below. In that case, Sebald’s taste was too refined to catch the raw material. But on his own beat, with his Proustian gaze scanning phot
ographs, documents, abandoned fortifications and all the resonant detritus of the past, he had a generosity that left a posturing snob like Canetti next to nowhere.

  CAMILLE PAGLIA BURNS FOR POETRY

  Clearly designed as a come-on for bright students who don’t yet know very much about poetry, Camille Paglia’s new book anthologises forty-three short works in verse from Shakespeare through to Joni Mitchell, with an essay about each. The essays do quite a lot of elementary explaining. Readers who think they already know something of the subject, however, would be rash if they gave her low marks just for spelling things out. Even they, if they were honest enough to admit it, might need help with the occasional Latin phrase, and they will find her analysis of individual poems quite taxing enough in its upper reaches. ‘Having had his epiphany,’ she says of the sonnet ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, ‘Wordsworth moves on, preserving his estrangement and solitude by shutting down his perception.’ Nothing elementary about that.

  She flies as high as you can go, in fact, without getting into the airless space of literary theory and Cultural Studies. Not that she has ever regarded those activities as elevated. She has always regarded them, with good reason, as examples of humanism’s perverse gift for attacking itself, and for providing the academic world with a haven for tenured mediocrity. This book is the latest shot in her campaign to save culture from theory. It thus squares well with another of her aims, to rescue feminism from its unwise ideological allegiances. So in the first instance Break, Blow, Burn is about poetry, and in the second it is about Camille Paglia.

  One measure of her quality as a commentator is that those two subjects are not in the reverse order. In view of her wide knowledge, her expressive gifts, her crackling personality and the inherent credibility problems posed by looking too much at her ease on top of a pair of Jimmy Choos, it is remarkable how good Paglia can be at not putting herself first. From this book you could doubt several aspects of her taste in poetry. But you couldn’t doubt her love of it. She is humble enough to be enthralled by it; enthralled enough to be inspired; and inspired enough to write the sinuous and finely shaded prose that proves how a single poem can get the whole of her attention. From a woman who sometimes gives the impression that she finds reticence a big ask, this is a sure index of her subject’s importance to her, and one quite likely to be infectious. My own prescription for making poetry popular in the schools would be to ban it – with possession treated as a serious misdemeanour, and dealing as a felony – but failing that, a book like this is probably the next best thing. If she doesn’t make a poem sound like something dangerous, at least she makes it sound like something complicated. Students grown wary of pabulum might relish the nitty-gritty.

  The term ‘a poem’ is one we have to use, because our author is strong on the point that a poet should be measured by individual poems, and not by a ‘body of work’. To a reader from outside America, she sounds tremendously right about this, but inside America her view is likely to go on smacking of subversion for some time to come. One can only hope that the subversion does its stuff. Good poems are written one at a time: written that way and read that way. Even the Divine Comedy is a poem in the first instance, not part of a body of work: and even in Shakespeare’s plays there are passages that lift themselves out of context. (‘Shakespeare the poet,’ she says, ‘often burns through Shakespeare the dramatist, not simply in the great soliloquies but in passages throughout his plays that can stand alone as poems.’) The penalty for talking about poets in universal terms before, or instead of, talking about their particular achievements is to devalue what they do while fetishising what they are.

  This insidious process is far advanced in modern America, to the point where it corrupts not just the academics but the creators themselves. John Ashbery would have given us dozens more poems as thrilling as his jeu d’esprit about Daffy Duck if he had never been raised to the combined status of totem pole and wind tunnel, in which configuration he produces one interminable outpouring that deals with everything in general, with nothing in particular, can be cut off at any length from six inches to a mile, and will be printed by editors who feel that the presence in their publication of an isotropic rigmarole signed with Ashbery’s name is a guarantee of seriousness precisely because they don’t enjoy a line of it. Paglia, commendably, refuses such cargo-cult status even to Shakespeare.

  Working chronologically from then to now, the book starts with him: Sonnet 73, Sonnet 29 and the Ghost’s speech from Hamlet, each individually explicated. The Ghost’s speech counts as a poem because we not only experience it as an especially intense and coherent episode, we remember it that way. A poem’s demand to be held in the memory counts for a lot with Paglia. Notably sensitive to language, rhythm and technique as devices for getting meaning into your mind and making it stick, she persuades you, throughout the book, that she has her poems by heart, even if she doesn’t favour the idea of memorising them deliberately like a trainee spy scanning a room. Her readings of Shakespeare are close, fully informed by the scholarship, and – a harder trick – fundamentally sane, thus auguring well for her approach to Donne, whose Holy Sonnet XIV supplies the book’s title. But her sensitivity to George Herbert is the best early sign of her range of sympathy.

  With Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell she has merely to convince her students, fresh from their gender studies, that a poet could call a woman his mistress without belittling her. With Herbert she has to convince them that a poet could feel the same passion about God. (‘We follow the path of the all-too-human quester as he advances towards God, then retreats in confusion.’ That ‘we’ could be a bit optimistic, but she might get lucky.) One of her best attributes is well brought out: her refusal to modernise the past. Her thorough background in cultural history – the Italians, who should be proud of her parentage, would call her preparatissima – is always in play. Her entertaining wealth of up-to-date pop-culture allusion is merely the top dressing, and she is usually careful not to strain after a faddish point. In her exemplary analysis of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, for example, she could easily have referred to the last scene of Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston looks up at Liberty’s head just as the Traveller from an Antique Land looked up at the truncated legs of stone. I was rather expecting her to. Perhaps she has realised, however, that the pace of forgetfulness is always accelerating, and that we have moved from an era of people who have never heard of Shelley to an era of people who have never heard of Charlton Heston.

  When she calls Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’ ‘the greatest poem of the twentieth century’ she makes one of her few sweeping statements. It isn’t a bad one, but it doesn’t do enough to offset an equally sweeping question from us. When the book moves towards modern times it moves towards America. Whatever happened to the old world it left behind? After Coleridge (a bold and convincing interpretation of ‘Kubla Khan’), Yeats is the last European, living or dead, to get an entry. Still, there are probably copyright reasons for choosing nothing by, say, Auden, and meanwhile there is the compensation of the way she can treat great American poets as accomplished artists without merely abetting the worship of icons. This coolly enthusiastic emphasis shows up clearly in her detailed admiration for Emily Dickinson. Paglia can see the epic in the miniature: an especially important critical gift when it comes to a poet who could enamel the inside of a raindrop. One would be glad to have a complete Dickinson annotated by Paglia. An utter contrast of destinies, it would be a meeting of true minds. Paglia, too, has a kind of solitude, though it might not sound that way. The media attention she attracts does little to modify her opinions. That might be partly why she attracts so much of it. The proud motto of every suckerfish is: we swim with sharks.

  But the most threatening thing about her, from the American viewpoint, is that she refuses to treat the arts as an instrument of civil rights. Without talent, no entitlement. She has the powers of discrimination to show what talent is – powers that add up to a talent in themselves. A cri
tical scope that can trace the intensity uniting different artistic fields is not unprecedented in America, but she is an unusually well-equipped exponent of it. Making a solid attempt to pin down the sliding meanings of Wallace Stevens’s little poem ‘Disillusionment at Ten O’Clock’, she brings in exactly the right comparison: a piano piece by Satie. She compares the poem’s ‘red weather’ with a Gaugin seascape: right again. These comparisons help to define the post-Impressionist impulse from which all the verbal music of Stevens’s Blue Guitar emerged, while incidentally reminding us that Paglia, before she made this bid on behalf of poetry, did the same for painting, and with the same treasury of knowledge to back up her endeavour. But above all, her range of allusion helps to show what was in Stevens’s head: the concentration of multiple sensitivities that propelled his seeming facility. ‘Under enchantment by imagination, space and time expand, melt, and cease to exist.’ Nobody has a right to a creative mind like his. It’s a gift.

  Students expecting a poem by Maya Angelou will find that this book is less inclusive than the average line-up for Inauguration Day. But there is a poem by Langston Hughes; and, even better, there is ‘Georgia Dusk’, by Jean Toomer. A featured player in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1920s, Toomer transmuted the heritage of southern slavery into music. So did the blues, but Toomer’s music was all verbal. He was a meticulous technician, which is probably the main reason why his name has faded. Paglia does a lot to bring it back, but she might have done even more. She concedes too much by saying his ‘flowery, courtly diction’ was more Victorian than modernist. The same might have been said of John Crowe Ransom, and with equal inaccuracy. Toomer sounds to me like a bridge through time from Elinor Wylie, whom Paglia doesn’t mention, to Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, neither of whom she mentions either.