The Revolt of the Pendulum

by Clive James

  Vidal has never admitted, let alone explored, the question of whether his criticisms of the American power elite might not be compromised by his membership of it. Does he really think, when he argues that FDR tricked Japan into World War II, that the Japanese right wing, currently making a come-back, will not take this as an endorsement of its views? And does Updike think we will never ask how his basket-balling Rabbit can have the sensibility of Proust, or whether Bech, the character he created to embody his fame as a writer, was not calculated to increase it?

  Finally it is only Roth who takes himself entirely to pieces. Has he been cruel to leave recognizable the outlines of discarded loved ones? Yes. Has he made a subject of that? Yes again. That’s why his father keeps on coming back. Even less inclined to be shaken off than the awful Kliman, the fathers of Roth’s leading men walk the platform by dead of night. But does even Roth complete the peeling of the artichoke? To look for the answer, we must go back again to the beginning of this new novel, and try, this time, to finish up somewhere beyond the start. For Zuckerman, if not for Roth, potency is gone. Has desire gone with it? You bet your life it hasn’t. Listen to this.

  And so I set out to minimize the loss by struggling to pretend that desire had naturally abated, and I came in contact for barely an hour with a beautiful, privileged, intelligent, self-possessed, languid-looking thirty-year-old made enticingly vulnerable by her fears and I experienced the bitter helplessness of a taunted old man dying to be whole again.

  But she’s been there since Goodbye Columbus, and as long as he can imagine her, he is whole again. The wholeness is in the style, which even now, as he (wait a second: as Zuckerman) prays for the collagen injection to take effect on his slack urethra, proceeds with the delicious complexity of dream baseball. ‘I write a sentence and then I turn it around,’ Lonoff once said in The Ghost Writer. ‘Then I look at it and turn it around again. Then I have lunch.’ Roth can still do that. It’s still all there. Only the big jokes are gone. He doesn’t laugh that way much any more. The style that sprang from sexual energy has moved up too far into the head to permit any more gut-busting inventions like Thereal McCoy. She’s still lurking in the bathroom in Portnoy’s Complaint, waiting to blow the minds of the next generation of horny male adolescents: but the man who thought of her has moved on. A long way from the entrance now, he is near the exit: or he says he is.

  When the Ghost exits, he leaves us asking whether he is real. But he is real as long as Hamlet thinks so. Lonoff was the ghost of Zuckerman’s father the way that Portnoy’s father was the ghost of Roth’s father, who, we may deduce, was pained by the way his brilliant son won fame. But we deduce it from one of his novels. In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman emerged as the author of Carnovsky, a book as scandalous to the older generation of Jews as Portnoy’s Complaint. Zuckerman went on to became further established as a writer with a career path very much like Roth’s, except of course, it isn’t. Or what if ‘isn’t’ isn’t the word? Only the stage directions confirm that the speaker was ever there.

  Exit Ghost. Great title. The book of a great writer. A great book? Maybe it’s just another piece of a puzzle. A great puzzle, and true to life in being so. In these strange and wonderful books that he writes under or about another name than his, Roth has been mapping the geography in an area of life where only his literary heroes – Kafka, of course, is one of them – have ever gone. The labyrinth of consciousness is actually constructed from the only means by which we can find a way out of it. It’s a web that Ariadne spins from her own thread. You don’t get to figure it out. You only get to watch it being spun. And if you are Nathan Dedalus (it was Zuckerman’s name for himself in the running heads to the second chapter of The Ghost Writer) you are in love with her for life, even if it kills you.

  New York Times, October 7, 2007

  Postscript

  Some of my fellow critics thought I had been far too soft on Exit Ghost. But I wasn’t just making up for having had to be so hard on The Plot Against America, which I reviewed for the Atlantic Monthly. (The review is collected in my book The Meaning of Recognition, and I hope it shows that I found Roth’s book weak only in the context of a strength that I had always revered.) I really do think that Roth’s later follow-up novels, the ones that pick up on themes he treated earlier, are valuable even when the action seems thin. They give us his later views on earlier conclusions, and show that they were never concluded. They project the author into time. When the day comes that he is projected into time all the way, even his merest afterthoughts will be seen to enrich a picture which he, after all, was solely responsible for having brought into being. And if Roth’s voice seemed less vigorous as time ran out, well, wasn’t that part of the story too? As with Kingsley Amis and Lucky Jim, Philip Roth, the inventor of Portnoy’s Complaint, was fated to spend his career on a long march through his own shadow, because that single, early, violently funny book had changed the sensibility of the generation who would read everything he subsequently wrote, and they could never go back to a state in which he seemed so new. But the penalty for knowing only the formative book (what Martin Amis calls ‘the talent novel’) is to miss the full spiritual development of the author, and, as Martin Amis said again, we don’t read books, we read authors.

  CULTURE

  THE FLIGHT FROM THE DESTROYER

  Artists in Exile: How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts,

  by Joseph Horowitz

  Imagine Balanchine watching a bunch of cheerleaders and you’ve got this book in a flash. Vignettes are its basic strength, as was bound to be true. The subject of the twentieth-century European artists in exile is too big for one book. Jean-Michel Palmier proved it by publishing his pioneering compendium Weimar en Exil as two books, one of them called Exil en Europe and the other Exil en Ame´rique. Since there could easily have been others – Exil en Australie would have been interesting – it will be appreciated that Palmier himself felt obliged to limit his purview.

  Joseph Horowitz gets the story into a single volume by concentrating on a single destination, America, and even then he trims the field. His subtitle ‘How Refugees from Twentieth-Century War and Revolution Transformed the American Performing Arts’ leaves out the writers, painters, photographers and architects, which means we aren’t going to hear much about any of the Mann clan, and nothing at all about Mondrian, Ernst, Leger, Moholy-Nagy, Mies, Gropius, Andreas Feininger, Lyonel Feininger . . . but let’s stop. Horowitz gives us mainly those exiles who worked in music, theatre and film. Even then, there are more than enough names to be going on with: Balanchine, Stravinsky, Koussevitsky, Toscanini, Stokowski, Kurt Weill and Rouben Mamoulian are only the most prominent.

  Horowitz provides biographical sketches for them all, each sketch studded with quotable illustrations. (Otto Preminger, hearing a group of his fellow e´migre´s speaking Hungarian, said, ‘Don’t you people know you’re in Hollywood? Speak German.’) The result is a rich assembly, an unmasked ball teeming with famous names, but you always have to remember – and our author, to his credit, never forgets – that in too many cases their attendance was compulsory, a fact which can lend a sad note to the glamour.

  There was a trend towards America anyway. Market forces did their stuff, and even if there had been no wars and revolutions there would have been a transfer of creative power. Horowitz is right to feature Dvorak prominently at the beginning of his line-up of the musicians. In the late nineteenth century, Europe wasn’t trying all that hard to drive Dvorak out, but he could see how America was trying to pull him in. The ‘New World Symphony’ was written not just out of appreciation for America’s plantation melodies and rolling landscapes, but out of gratitude for America’s readiness to employ him. Mahler, too, went to America for the job opportunities. Caruso could have stayed in Europe but he wanted to sing at the Met, correctly estimating that it was the centre of his world.

  In the twentieth century not even the Nazis could send P
icasso transatlantic, but after his 1939 MOMA retrospective exhibition New York became the centre of Picasso’s financial empire. If Horowitz had been following the money, Picasso would have got a mention. But our author can be excused for following only the physical freedom, which was the thing that the combined totalitarian assault from Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany made obviously crucial. There had always been a flight from Eastern Europe. The flight increased after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Even before the Nazis came to power in 1933, the flight had turned into an exodus. Between 1931 and 1945, fifteen hundred European musicians arrived in America. Most of them would have been superfluous to requirements if there had not been a demand to match the supply.

  There was, on the whole, but what America most wanted was the performers, not the composers, who would always be up against it unless, like Korngold, they went to Hollywood because they already had Hollywood in their souls. Stravinsky is famous now mainly for what he composed before he got to America in 1939. Horowitz can make such judgments boldly, out of deep knowledge. The quondam New York Times music critic and executive director of the Brooklyn Philharmonic knows the American classical music scene inside out, which is a good thing because that’s largely what the European influence did to it, although part of his central point is that the switch had already been worked before the main influx arrived.

  Horowitz has a paradox to deal with here, and out of it he makes his most useful general argument. According to him, the American home-grown composers were up against it too. The pressure was always on them to produce a uniquely American equivalent of the European serious musical tradition. This being so, they tended to ignore the implications of the American popular music tradition that had already burgeoned in the jazz joints, in Tin Pan Alley and on Broadway. George Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, both of Russian parentage, would be exceptions in seeing a way ahead in the Broadway musical show. Copland, also of Russian parentage, was more typical in finding no time at all for jazz: he sought a more elevated way of sounding American. Most of the immigrant composers, however, were impressed by the native vernacular energy, just as Dvorak had been, although he was in America for only two years and wrote the Negro Spiritual themes in the ‘New World Symphony’ well before he had ever travelled far enough outside New York to hear them being sung in their locations of origin.

  For the new arrivals in the twentieth century, most of whom made landfall with nothing but their luggage to call their own, the upsurge of American popular music was so clamorous that they had to be theorists to miss it. Adorno ran true to form by dismissing jazz out of hand, but he was only an intellectual. Kurt Weill, Adorno’s bete noire (the feeling was mutual), immersed himself in the new vitality. It had already reached him at long range when he was still in Weimar Germany, composing the music for Bertolt Brecht’s words. Closer now to the source of the theatrical exuberance he felt himself cut out for, Weill embraced Broadway with an intensity that most of the American native big names - they included Sessions and Ives as well as Copland - never dreamed of.

  George Gershwin, the most gifted of all the home-grown American composers, was similarly open to the demotic allure of his birthplace, but he died young. Weill himself was dead when he was fifty, but in his time alive in America he exemplified how a newcomer was more likely to be impressed by his new country than anyone who was born and raised there. Weill built up an achievement with his Broadway show music but after the war the achievement was put in the shade by the arrival in New York of a Threepenny Opera production, starring Lotte Lenya, that enabled his critics to say he had expressed his real strength in the old country and had been dissipating it ever since he arrived on the Great White Way.

  Horowitz rather agrees with them, saying that Brecht’s lyrics had given Weill’s music the ‘distance’ it needed not to sound compromised by the desire to please. Horowitz doesn’t say what Lotte Lenya once said on television in her old age. (She said, ‘What was Brecht without Kurt?’) Most of us rate the Mahagonny music above, say, Lost in the Stars, but surely we should avoid the kind of determinism that would blame America for restricting Weill’s range. Weill himself thought his range had been increased, and only a snob would call him materialist for viewing the cash-flow that rolled in from a hit show like One Touch of Venus as hard evidence that it had.

  Bartok wrote some of his best music in America. In 1945 he died broke, but only after a wave of artistic success that included the Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin, the Concerto for Orchestra, and the Third Piano Concerto. If he had accepted either of the posts offered to him by the Curtis Institute and Tanglewood he might even have had some money in the bank. Krenek, Eisler, Dessau and Zerlinsky all flopped in America but they would have cared less about that if they had really thought that the odds were stacked against art. The odds were stacked against a free ride. When Krenek, who had made his name in Europe as the composer of Jonny Spielt Auf, denounced the American requirement of ‘comprehensibility’ as an automatic diluent, he was really saying that there was nobody to pay him for incomprehensibility. By the time he died, at ninety-one, the day had already arrived when American cultural foundations were ready to pay for anything, down to and including John Cage composing passages of modified silence, but for Krenek that final expansion of American hospitality had come too late. Even when the last door was still shut, however, all the other doors were open. Schoenberg, Hindemith and Bartok couldn’t make a living like Stravinsky, but at least they had the chance. Sometimes it must have seemed tantalisingly close. In Hollywood, Schoenberg played ping-pong with a neighbour. It was George Gershwin.

  The case of Schoenberg raises the character issue: he actually had to concentrate quite hard to stay unpopular, cursing himself whenever he lapsed from the atonal back into something that a non-expert audience might have liked. Not even the basket cases could honestly say that they had fallen among Philistines. They had fallen into a larger competitive market than the one that they had been driven out of, and even if they failed in it they would have liked to succeed. Korngold’s success might have seemed silly and Weill’s meretricious, but the possibilities were there: more possibilities than most of them could handle. Weill welcomed the chance to work without subsidy in a country where he had to make his luck. Weill phrased these opinions in press releases that now sound like publicity material for a right-wing think-tank, thereby handing his latter-day critics large sticks with which to beat him. But none of those critics could have written ‘September Song’.

  All six of Martinu’s symphonies came from his time in the US, between 1941 and 1953. In sum, even when they failed, the non-American composers did a more thorough job than the home-grown Americans of being turned on by America. Some of them felt limited by the indifference of the audience to anything labelled as art, but there was always a minority audience for that. There was a minority audience even for Schoenberg. On a world scale, Schoenberg’s audience, for his atonal music that came after Verklarte Nacht, is still a minority today, but most of the minority is in America, where the minorities are larger. As for the American majority audience, they wanted music they could enjoy on the night. They wanted to go home whistling the tune. (Horowitz could have made a lot more of this point. There was a crisis going on in serious music, not just in world politics.) They wanted a show.

  They so much wanted a show that they rated performers over composers. Performers stood out from the orchestra and could be admired for their virtuosity. The financial rewards for virtuosity were so huge that they needed satirical apology: Heifitz had a cash register standing on the bar of his apartment. The conductors stood out more than anybody and could inspire cults. Horowitz is particularly good on the conductors. Koussevitsky and Toscanini come out of the book as towering figures, as we might have expected. But Horowitz, always with his fine ear turned towards the quality of the music, generously lets Stokowski do a bit of towering too. The Stokowski paragraphs add up to a box of chocolate-dusted truffles.

  As opposed to some of the ot
her European con-men, Stokowski was fake to the roots. Erich von Stroheim at least knew how to pronounce the word ‘von’ before he stole it. ‘Leopold Antoni Stanislaw Boleslawowicz Stokowski’ undoubtedly had a Polish background back there somewhere, but his real name was Leopold Anthony Stokowski and he was born in England. His first wife, Olga Samaroff, was really Lucy Hickenlooper. She had met the right man. Stokowski made up the whole thing. Even his accent was made up.

  Yet Stokowski, where it counted, was the real McCoy. Arriving in Philadelphia in 1912, he built up its orchestra into a sensationally effective musical instrument all on its own. Rachmaninov thought it was the finest orchestra he had ever heard. And whether or not Stokowski ever slept with Greta Garbo – his personal testimony on the subject might be comparable to the Hollywood restaurateur Mike ‘Prince’ Romanoff’s personal testimony that he was a Russian nobleman who shot Rasputin – there can be no doubt that the conductor could read the dots. Admirers of Furtwa¨ngler must always deal with accusations that too much rubato alters the score. Stokowski practically rewrote the score. (After every performance, all the parts had to be returned to his safekeeping, as if they were atomic secrets.) But the results were stunning.