Even as We Speak

by Clive James

  Admittedly the thin could be very thin. There weren’t that many mistresses, but he formed the habit of keeping several on a string at once, so that a few would have looked like a lot if he had wanted to present himself as the Warren Beatty of the literary world. Instead, through his poems and every other available means of communication, he complained endlessly about being rejected by the women he wanted, accepted only by those he didn’t, and never getting enough love. This was damned ungallant of him and he was lucky to be forgiven.

  It seems he almost always was. The woman to whom he did the most lying, Maeve Brennan, was annoyed enough after she found out to say that she was bitterly disappointed, but apparently still didn’t believe that she had wasted her time. Even more convincingly, Monica Jones, to whom he told most of the truth, was there till the end, although the jealousies she suffered along the way must have been almost as great as her love.

  Yet his misery was real, and they loved him in spite of it, not because of it. They all had to cope as well as they could with the certain knowledge that he was even more scared of marriage than he was of death. You don’t need Freud’s help to guess that the primary lesion might have had something to do with his parents. ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ is clearly one Larkin line that can be taken as what he thought. Andrew Motion tells us more than we knew before about Dad, who admired the Nazis, although he could scarcely have admired them for helping Germany to achieve its economic recovery in the 1920s (Motion must mean the 1930s). When young Philip confessed his shyness, Dad’s reply (‘You don’t know what shyness is’) can’t have helped with his son’s stammer. He did help, however, with his son’s reading: Dad was a well-read man.

  On the evidence of this biography, a more likely source of horror at home seems to have been Mum. She could never let go of him or he of her, despite her inability to express herself in anything except platitudes. Mercifully only one fragment of one of her thousands of letters is quoted. It works like one of those revue sketches featuring Terry Jones in a headscarf talking falsetto: ‘Here we seem to have a succession of gloomy evenings. It looks as though it will rain again, like it did last night. Have at last heard from Kenneth. He has written such a long and interesting letter thanking me for the handkerchiefs. I have written to thank him . . .’

  Somewhere back there, we can safely assume, lay the source for a feeling of failure that could overcome any amount of success. But finding out more about how Philip Larkin was compelled to solitude can only leave us less impressed by how he embraced it – the most interesting thing about the man, because it was the key to the poet. It would be obscurantist to want the work of post mortem explication stopped. But Larkin’s executors, in their commentaries, need to be much less humble on his behalf, or else they will just accelerate the growth of this already burgeoning fable about the patsy who has been overpraised for his – we have the authority of Mr Brian Appleyard on this point – minor poetry.

  Andrew Motion has done something to show that Larkin chose the conditions in which to nourish his art, but not enough to insist that art of such intensity demands a dedication ordinary mortals don’t know much about. To suggest, for example, that Larkin’s last great poem Aubade broke a dry spell of three years is to ignore the possibility that a poem like Aubade takes three years to write, even for a genius. Those who revere Larkin’s achievement should be less keen to put him in range of mediocrities who would like to better themselves by lowering him to their level, matching his feet of clay with their ears of cloth.

  Independent Sunday Review, 4 April, 1993

  UN-AMERICAN FILM DIRECTORS

  PIER PAOLO PAIN IN THE NECK

  Renaissance man is a description tossed around too lightly in modern times – actors get it if they can play the guitar – but for Pier Paolo Pasolini nothing less will do. From the moment he hit Rome after the Second World War until the moment his own car hit him in 1975, Pasolini single-handedly re-embodied about half the personnel of Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. He was poet, novelist, scholar, intellectual, sexual adventurer, reforming zealot, creator of large-scale visual spectaculars – and all these things equally. To make a comparable impact, Raphael would have had to be elected Pope. To make a comparable exit, Michelangelo would have had to fall out of the Sistine Ceiling. Pasolini was a front-page event in every field he entered, including death. A boy he picked up in his Alfa Romeo sports car ran him over with it and left him helpless in the dust. Beat that, Renaissance! Not even Cola di Rienzo got trampled by his own horse.

  Pasolini’s sensational demise happened at Ostia, once the port where Julius Caesar took ship and Cleopatra came ashore. The ancient location widens Pasolini’s frame of reference still further, to include the whole of Italian history. He was such a national figure that it becomes easy to lose sight of the individual. In a new biography (Pasolini Requiem, Pantheon) Barth David Schwartz mercifully doesn’t, but his whopping book isn’t helped by the bad practice of cramming in all the incidental research to prove that it has been done. European reviewers like to call this an American habit, but really it is a virus with no respect for borders. A more specific stricture to place on Mr Schwartz might be that a prose style so devoid of verve is no fit instrument to evoke a hero who crackled with energy even when he was being stupid. But Mr Schwartz, though a plodder, plods briskly enough to make his subject breathe, and some of the specialized knowledge was well worth going to get. In addition to his prodigious archival burrowings and the conducting of interviews on the scale of a door-to-door electoral canvass, Mr Schwartz seems to have acquainted himself personally with the sexually ambiguous (though unambiguously violent) Roman low life that was Pasolini’s stamping ground, or prancing ground. The biographer is to be congratulated not least for coming out alive. The biographee, after all, got killed in there.

  As for what he was doing in there, the first answer is obvious: he was cruising, although that word understates his predatory celerity. Better to say that he was pouncing. Quick off the mark and dressed to kill, he was a cheetah in dark glasses. In the borgata, the slumland of the Roman periphery, the population was mostly immigrants from the south who had come in search of prosperity and found misery. Petty theft and casual prostitution made up most of their economy. For a well-heeled and voraciously promiscuous homosexual like Pasolini, it was a dream come true. There were boys to be had for a pack of cigarettes or just a ride in his car.

  He did his best to have them all. It remains astonishing, when you look at the shelf of books and rack of films signed with his name, that he found the energy to copulate even more prolifically than he created. People who knew him well were astonished, too. On location in North Africa for a film, his colleagues would retire exhausted to their tents after a long day and meet him coming out of his, all set to cruise the dunes.

  But the spontaneous and seemingly everlasting abundance of sexual gratification was also the wellspring of his politics. The second and less obvious answer to the question of why he spent so much time in the lower depths was that he found them ethically preferable to the heights. He thought the truth was down there. Unlike other articulate, well-paid enemies of bourgeois society, Pasolini could actually point to an alternative. It wasn’t a pretty alternative, but that was one of the things he hated about the bourgeoisie – its concern with mere appearances.

  He hated everything else about the bourgeoisie as well, but in that respect he holds little interest except as an especially flagrant example of the modern middle-class intellectual blindly favouring, against common reason and all the historical evidence, a totalitarian substitute for the society that produced him. Valued by the PCI, the Communist Party of Italy, for the publicity he brought it, Pasolini was allowed more latitude than any other mouthpiece. He often spoke against Party doctrines, and used the space given him by the Party’s own newspapers to do so. But he was reliable, not to say predictable, in his denunciation of capitalism, neo-capitalism, consumerism, the bourgeoisie, bourgeo
is consumerism, bourgeois democracy, neo-capitalist democracy, consumerist democracy, and, for that matter, democracy itself, which he thought, or said he thought, could never achieve anything more than ‘false tolerance’ so long as it was infected by bourgeois consciousness.

  It hardly needs saying that Pasolini had bourgeois origins himself: you don’t get that kind of stridency except from someone in a false position. Raised under Fascism in a small town in Friuli – a province in the north-east of the country, where it bends towards Trieste – young Pier Paolo, a natural student, picked up the firm grounding in the etymology of the Friulian dialect which underpinned his lifetime achievement as a scholar and master of the Italian language. But he picked up no grounding at all in the life of the proletariat. He never did a day’s manual labour then or later.

  This is a standard pattern for revolutionary intellectuals and can’t usefully be called hypocrisy, since if there is such a thing as a proletarian consciousness then it is hard to see how any proletarian could escape from it without the help of the revolutionary intellectual – although just how the revolutionary intellectual manages to escape from bourgeois consciousness is a problem that better minds than Pasolini have never been able to solve without sleight of hand. On this point Pasolini never pretended to be analytical, or even consistent. He was content to be merely rhetorical, in a well-established Italian tradition by which political argument is conducted like grand opera, with the tenor, encouraged by the applause or even by the mere absence of abuse, advancing to the footlights to sing his aria all over again, da capo and con amore.

  Another aria Pasolini kept reprising was a bit harder to forgive. Mr Schwartz could have done more to disabuse the unwary reader of the notion that Pasolini might have had something when he not only awarded himself credentials in the wartime resistance but claimed the resistance as the alma mater of the postwar revolutionary struggle. Pasolini’s resistance activities were confined mainly to writing obscure scholarly articles that the censors would have had to go out of their way even to find, let alone interpret. Again, there is no dishonour in this: people were shot for less. As in France, there was an understandable tendency in Italy after the war for people who had been helpless civilians during it to award themselves battle honours retroactively. Pasolini was just another schoolboy raised under the Fascist system who had the dubious luck to become a questioning adolescent at the precise moment when Fascism fell apart, and was thus able to convince himself that he had seen through it.

  A more serious piece of mental legerdemain – and one that Mr Schwartz doesn’t do half enough to point out – was Pasolini’s lifelong pretence that the resistance was the prototype of the future Communist state, and for that very reason had been throttled by the ruthless forces of capitalism, bourgeois democracy, etc. Again as in France, most of the first and many of the bravest resistance fighters in Italy were indeed Communists. But the resistance movement soon became too broadly based to be called revolutionary; a better parallel is with Yugoslavia, Poland, or those other East European countries where not even opposition to the Nazis could unite the partisan movement, whose Communists regarded its bourgeois democrats as the real enemy, to be wiped out when the opportunity arose. This actually happened to Pasolini’s brother, an active partisan who was liquidated by a Communist kangaroo court busily anticipating the postwar Socialist order. In most respects ready to concede that Pasolini was so cold a fish that even his passions were impersonal, Mr Schwartz seems not to have fully grasped that Pasolini was callous about his brother, too, claiming his death as a sacrifice in a historic struggle that, since it existed only in the minds of intellectuals, was never truly historic but always, and only, literary.

  It could be that Mr Schwartz, for all he undoubtedly knows about Italy now, doesn’t know quite enough about what it was like then. He is especially shaky in the crucial area of Italy’s messy emergence from the war. A reference to German ‘Junker 25 transports’ might just be a misprint for what they ought to be, Junkers 52 transports, but his apparent belief that a German bomber could be called a Macchi – famously an Italian aircraft company – undermines confidence in his knowledge of the period, especially since he is making such a parade of specific references in order to evoke it: ‘On April 6 [of 1944] Klaus Barbie’s Gestapo in Lyons arrested fifty-one Jews . . .’ etc. If this is meant to be an ironic comment on the terrible bedfellows Mussolini had acquired when he agreed to set up the Republic of Salò under German tutelage, it scarcely seems adequate. Why is there nothing about the Nazi assault on the Jews of Italy? It would not only have been more pertinent to the subject; it would have created a more realistic context against which Pasolini’s later vapourings about the revolutionary resistance could have been judged. That the Nazi attempt to render Italy judenrein was a comparative failure was due at least partly to the historic reluctance of the Italian people to follow fanatics of any stamp further than the parade ground. There were plenty of bourgeois elements, including the rank and file of the Church, who risked their lives to save Jews. Mr Schwartz might have made more of this, especially since Pasolini himself made so little.

  Pasolini’s theatrical fantasies about a formative period of his own and his country’s history were not casual. Like Sartre’s quietly misleading suggestions that he had been a Resistance fighter in the thick of the action, they were fundamental to a political career of posturing histrionics. Pasolini never went as far as Sartre, although Mr Schwartz is kind to believe his claims of having escaped from the Germans in a hail of bullets. Pasolini’s story was that when the regiment into which he had been drafted was ordered by the Germans to surrender its arms he and a friend threw their rifles into a ditch ‘and then, in a burst of machine-gun fire, dove in after them’. The story continued, ‘We waited for the regiment to march off, and then made our escape. It was completely an instinctive and involuntary beginning to my resistance.’ Thus Pasolini, quoted by the English journalist Oswald Stack in 1970, and reprinted by Mr Schwartz without comment.

  Well, it might have happened: German machine gunners missed, occasionally. A more plausible version is that Pasolini, like many others, managed to desert unnoticed in the confusion. Sartre let people believe that he had escaped from prison camp. In fact he had been allowed to go home. The heroism came later, in the telling of the tale. So it does for most of us. The best reason for not believing that there was any machine gunner, however, is that Pasolini said so little about the incident later on. If it had really happened there would have been essays, epic poems, movies, operas. A fabulist on Pasolini’s scale could never leave unexploited a fact that had actually occurred.

  Pasolini respected facts. He just didn’t respect their context. You couldn’t take his word about the meaning of things. But in his early days in Rome he was unbeatable at pointing out things that other people – bourgeois people – preferred to ignore. For a while, he had the only game in town. Propelled by the postwar economic recovery, Roman high life regained all its old extravagance. Out at its edge, in the periferia, Roman low life grew ever more malodorous, and for the same reason: the wealth that fuelled the party had drawn the poor people to the glowing window. Pasolini’s mission was to remind the high life that the low life existed, to tell the dolce vita about the malavita.

  He did it first as a novelist. His 1959 novel Una Vita Violenta has just been republished, by Pantheon, as A Violent Life, in the 1968 translation by William Weaver, of whom it should be said that the international reputation of modern Italian literature wouldn’t be the same without him. Like Max Hayward with Russian, Weaver has been vital to the job of transmitting the cultural force of an off-trail language into the world’s consciousness. (It remains a terrible pity that Weaver didn’t find time to translate all of Primo Levi’s books instead of only a couple of them.) But not even Weaver could translate the full impact of Una Vita Violenta, because the book depends on the shock effect of being written ugly in a beautiful language. Though Weaver’s translation is rendered in the most
faithfully squalid English, it is no more horrifying than Last Exit to Brooklyn, whereas it ought to turn the mind’s stomach like the invective of the damned in Dante’s Hell. Pasolini went searching for boys among the rubbish dumps and came back with a picture of how they lived. His Roman borgata was like a Rio favela without the flowers. In Black Orpheus, Marcel Camus’s film about Rio, which was a worldwide art-house hit at about the same time, unquenchable poetry steams out of the garbage to meet the rising sun. In Pasolini’s novel there is just the garbage, and human beings are part of it. When a flood comes, one of the characters finds it within himself to punctuate a career of theft by acting selflessly. But that is the only note of hope. The book was designed as a kick in the teeth for Pasolini’s hated bourgeois enemy. It worked. His reputation as a teller of the awkward truth was rapidly established, and not only among the radical intelligentsia. After all, the awkward truth was true. You didn’t have to be a Marxist to spot it.

  Pasolini, however, did have to be a Marxist. Though never much concerned with elaborating a coherent social analysis, he never gave up on the class war. That became part of his tragedy, because the class he championed finally realized its only ambition, which was to be absorbed by the class he attacked. But at the time he was a recognized type of radical intellectual, valued even by the nonradical because of his dazzling verbal bravura, forgiven his excesses because he was such an adornment to the scene – a word hard to avoid, considering the theatricality of Italian political discussion. Again, Mr Schwartz might have made more of just how much forgiveness was required: ‘He knew nothing about Stalin’s purges’ is a needless concession to Pasolini’s wilful obtuseness. Italian Communist intellectuals knew all about Stalin. The best of them were trying to establish a brand of Communism that left him out – the hope that we later learned to call Euro-Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face. The best possible construction to put on Pasolini’s polemical writings is that he was trying to do this, too. He had a promising model to follow – Gramsci, about whom Pasolini wrote the most sustained of his many remarkable poetic works, The Ashes of Gramsci.