The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  On stage, the women who loved Larkin in real life are neither present nor specifically referred to, except perhaps in the beautiful poem about the footprints in the snow, which has recently cropped up even in some of the tabloids, with the addressee duly named and shamed. Normally the tabs are not open to poetry, but all evidence of Larkin’s amatory duplicity can now be assured of maximum exposure. This, again, is a huge subject that would be hard to fit on stage even in skeletal form. Just as the man who complained about his shy diffidence was actually an efficient bureaucrat at the top of his profession, the man who complained so often about missing out on love was actually surrounded by it. If Larkin was not exactly Warren Beatty, he certainly bore, in his multiple liaisons if not in his personal appearance, a striking resemblance to Albert Camus. In the week before Camus met his death in a suitably glamorous car-crash, he wrote to five different women pledging eternal fealty to each, and he was probably telling the truth every time. Larkin had a similar network of affectionate loyalties, but always with the proviso that his life had to remain undivided. Not even Monica Jones, who was the closest to being a companion, got a share of his solitude. When he said ‘Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth’ he left open, beyond the simple statement, the complex implication that if he had not been granted sufficient deprivation he would have had to seek more of it. The play depends on the assumption that the life shaped the work. The proposition that the work shaped the life would be too difficult to discuss in the theatre, and would be hard enough to discuss for a panel of professors locked up together for a year. If we accept all these limitations as inevitable, Pretending To Be Me can be hailed for what it is. It gives us a bravura performance by an actor who understands that bravura must be in service to emotion, and not just a display of technique. It shows a curmudgeon doing what curmudgeons do best: being sardonically funny about life. Above all it brings to the theatre the primal exultation of language; the very thing that has made the English theatre thrilling since Mercutio first told Romeo about Queen Mab; the thing from which it can stray only so far before ceasing to be substantial.

  The only question now is who will play Larkin next. Courtenay can’t keep it up forever: for only one set of vocal cords, the piece must be like trying to sing the whole of Aida on your own. The perfect lookalike, Eric Morecambe, is sadly not available, and anyway he was too merry. Alexei Sayle could do it: he’s the wrong shape, but he can do the right kind of humour, which is the curmudgeon’s humour, and thus not very merry at all, because it makes jokes about the world falling apart only on the understanding that the man making them is falling apart as well.

  Recasting the leading role in your own mind is a good sign: it means you think the script is alive. Recasting it for Hollywood is a bigger challenge, but it will have to be faced. Courtenay has been a fine film actor at every stage of his career (if you think nothing could be better than his appearance in Billy Liar, see him in The Dresser) but Miramax will probably want an American. Miramax won’t relocate Larkin from Hull to Harvard: Harvey Weinstein knows by now that British literary life has a solid appeal on the art-house circuit and a pipeline to the Oscars. But Weinstein will want a bankable star. According to my own sources, Robert De Niro has already declared his interest, but to prepare himself for the role he wants to spend fifty years in a library. Bruce Willis wants the library to be taken over by terrorists. Seriously, it has to be Jack Nicholson. Jack has been in training as a curmudgeon since the campfire scene in Easy Rider. Remember Five Easy Pieces? ‘Hold the mayo.’ The scorn, the bitterness! Nobody does sardonic better. There is nobody like him for disillusioned. When Jack gives it the bared teeth and the arched eyebrows, he could recite his own death sentence and still sound funny.

  The beauty part is that Jack has just played an irascible old bastard and will probably get an Oscar for it. In About Schmidt he’s Philip Larkin without the bifocals. Admittedly Schmidt doesn’t write poetry or do anything very much. The movie, which you should see unless you have a chance to visit a molasses factory, asks us to believe that Schmidt has wasted his life in an insurance office. But since there is no residual evidence of any personal qualities that he might have wasted, Jack is left to convey little except an unspecific sense of having achieved nothing. To put it another way, he is left to convey nothing. He does this by impersonating a stunned mackerel with a comb-over. But at least there are no mannerisms. Jack is ready to begin again, after Stanley Kubrick set him on the wrong track by convincing him that there could be an acting style beyond naturalism. There is no acting style beyond naturalism except ham, as Jack proved in Prizzi’s Honour, where he pioneered his latterday schtick of clenching his lips with difficulty over an object he was reluctant to identify. By the time he got to As Good As It Gets, you would have thought he was concealing a live mouse in his mouth. But when he bared his teeth at Helen Hunt like a wolf with its eye on a new-born lamb, we got a reminder of what this man could do, and can still do. That killer drawl is ready for its greatest workout. And he only wants a few changes. ‘Your mom and pop, heh heh. They fuck you over, right?’ Coming soon to a multiplex near you.

  Postscript

  Ian McEwan said that he would never forgive me for having written this piece, because it persuaded him to break his personal rule of staying away from the theatre. Choosing his words with care, he told me that he had disliked the evening very much, and that he thought me demented, if not criminal, for having encouraged people into the theatre with my review, instead of standing outside the theatre and encouraging them to go home. Speaking as one who loved Larkin’s poetry at least as much as I did, he wanted to know how I could be a party to a theatrical presentation that might have been designed specifically to render the poetry less meaningful, by promoting the idea that such a concentration of emotion needed acting out. I tried to tell myself that Courtenay’s performance might have gone off a bit since I first saw it, but on second thoughts I had to admit that McEwan might have had at least the ghost of a point. Hadn’t I, while watching the play, been thinking that it would be a good introduction to Larkin’s poetry for young people who had never read it? And hadn’t I, who knew his work well, also been thinking that to hear even the best actor read the words aloud was nothing like as good as becoming acquainted with them in the silence of print? In other words, I had been thinking of what might be good for others: a sure-fire formula for distorting one’s initial response. But my first thoughts were the ones I wrote down in that same week, and I was glad to have done so. One young lady said that my review led her to the play, that the play led her to Larkin, and that his poetry became part of her life. She recited the last lines of ‘Dockery and Son’ to prove it. There had to be something good about that chain of events, at a time when accredited arts experts were lining up in print, on radio and on television to insist that the old fool had never been worth bothering with.

  Now it can be revealed: the phrase of ‘Aubade’ that Courtenay hammered was ‘This one will’, and it had the effect of dropping a mortar bomb into the adagio of Schubert’s C major string quintet. The anomalous uproar was especially unfortunate because ‘Aubade’ is the poem that so many of Larkin’s literary admirers think of when they hear the creaking of death’s door. ‘Aubade’ unites other writers in a common worship. People agree about its quality who agree about nothing else. Harold Pinter can recite the whole poem from memory while seated at the dinner table. The poem is a point of reference in Simon Gray’s The Smoking Diaries. Very few poems have that kind of currency. Tom Courtenay probably thought the same: the reason that he gave it special treatment. He should have copied Pinter, who dials down the histrionics. But finally the poem outclasses even the most beautiful voice that tries to recite it. One is reminded of what Schnabel said about Beethoven’s late piano sonatas: music better than can be played.

  THE IRON CAPITAL OF BRUNO SCHULZ

  As a writer, a painter and a man, Bruno Schulz believed that the aim of life was to mature into childhood. In th
e peachy light of the recent me-speak compulsion to get in touch with one’s inner child, Schulz’s belief might look like yet another reason for not getting in touch with him. He didn’t write a lot, and a lot of what he did write was in a Polish difficult even for Poles: he is hard to translate. Nearly all of what he painted went missing. He is one of those creative spirits from what Philip Roth called ‘the other Europe’, the Europe beyond the Elbe, whose reputations tend to stay there because it is hard to airlift them out. If we add to all that the notion that he was a toy-cuddling advocate of infantilism, he could be lost to us indeed. But the truth of his mentality was anything but infantile: it was a penetrating realization that the perceptual store of our early childhood forms what he called ‘the iron capital’ of the adult imagination.

  The realization was itself realized in his two little books of short stories, Cinnamon Shops (otherwise known as The Street of Crocodiles) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass: the two little books that constitute the bulk of his writing as it has come down to us, and which are enough by themselves to make him a weighty figure. Nobody quite matches him for seeing everyday objects in three dimensions, and evoking them as if the fourth dimension, time, had been erased. Making a mythology from the actual, he convinces us that the actual is made from myths. Reading him, we feel as our own children must feel when we are reading them the words of Maurice Sendak while they are looking at the pictures. Colours breathe. Textures pulse. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker loom like totem poles. And it is all done in such a short span, in paragraphs worth chapters, and chapters worth a book. There might have been another, longer work – the novel usually called The Messiah – but if the manuscript ever existed it vanished like the paintings; and all other possibilities of future work vanished along with his future. On a scale measured by his potential achievement, he died young.

  In fact he had already turned fifty when he was murdered, but we are right to think of him as still beginning, because it was always the way he thought of himself. So it was an untimely end, as well as a terrible one. If only it had been uniquely terrible. Alas, it was a commonplace. He was one more Jew rubbed out by the Nazis. The circumstances, in his case, were merely unusual. In the Drohobycz ghetto, a Gestapo officer with good taste, one Felix Landau, had made a pet of him so that he could paint murals. In November 1942, on a day of ‘wild action’ – that is, a day when the Nazis ran around shooting people at random instead of rounding them up to be shipped off in batches, as on an ordinary day – Schulz’s protector took his eye off his human property. Landau had a jealous rival, another Gestapo officer called Karl Günther. Landau had once shot Günther’s pet dentist, so Günther took the opportunity to get square. He put two bullets through Schulz’s head. If we find ourselves hoping that the first bullet did the job, it is because it is so hard to bear the idea that Schulz might have had even a split second to reach the false conclusion that his life had come to nothing.

  It was a conclusion he had always been apt to reach even in normal circumstances. One of the many ironies of his life was that the Nazis made actual the torment of uncertainty in which he had lived and worked since his adolescence. Insecurity, indecisiveness and diffidence were marks of his personality. He was one of those geniuses blessed with an uncanny creative ability and cursed with an almost equally uncanny inability to do anything practical about it. From Jerzy Ficowski’s biography this pitiably tentative personality emerges so sharply that it is likely to make us impatient, but decency and a sense of proportion demand that we should rein our impatience in: it was after all the condition for his inventiveness, which was the opposite of tentative, and indeed looks bolder as time goes by. By extension, it would be wise not to become impatient with this biography. It has been a long time getting to us. The first version was published in 1967. This translation is of an expanded version, but it still has some of the marks of a thesis. ‘The attainment of the Schulzian artistic postulate led me to a state of feverish ecstasy’ is not a heartening sentence to meet early on.

  Luckily there are better sentences to be met later, when we are told that Schulz’s jeweller’s glass was a kaleidoscope, and that he had a way of being mathematically precise about myth. If such statements are not perfectly transparent, they are at least usefully suggestive, and thus fall into the realm of true criticism. A more worrying feature is not the presence of jargon, but the absence of a complete historical context. The Nazis are on parade but the Communists are not. Introducing the book, which she translated, Theodosia Robertson tells us that Ficowski kept Schulz studies alive in Poland during the 1950s and 1960s despite ‘enormous obstacles’, but she doesn’t tell us what those obstacles were. More remarkably, Ficowski doesn’t tell us either. We presume that the obstacles were political. Communist Poland found it hard to be proud of the great modern Polish writers, because they would not cooperate. There were attempts to lure Gombrowicz home, but they failed. Czeslaw Milosz remained resolutely unavailable and indeed his masterly long essay The Captive Mind can now be seen as one of the first wedges driven between the planks of the Warsaw Pact. Schulz, being safely dead, might have been more pliant, but there was something subversive about him. Any graduate of the Polish film and acting schools in the 1970s can tell you what it was. ‘What we got from him,’ says a Polish actress of my acquaintance, ‘was luxury.’ She didn’t mean the high life. She meant the way he brought out the riches of the ordinary life he led in the few hundred square yards of Drohobycz that he knew intimately and almost never left. He brought out the quality of things: things to eat, chairs to sit on, curtains of different weaves, the cart rattling out of the dark. And he brought out the diversity of people, all observed minutely as individuals, sometimes elevated to the status of mythical beings, but never classified as types or members of a class. He was about as far from socialist realism as you could get. In preserving and furthering Schulz’s reputation, Ficowski was ploughing a lonely furrow. Active in the intellectual movement that helped prepare the advent of Solidarity, he himself was an underground writer from 1977 onward. He is amply qualified to tell the story of the Communist state’s attitude to his touchy subject, but he doesn’t.

  Perhaps he is worn out from trying to ride two horses at once. After it turned out that a few of Schulz’s murals had survived after all, Ficowski was on the spot, and understandably put out, when agents of Yad Vashem intervened to pack up some of the most precious fragments and ship them back to Israel. A cultural version of the Raid on Entebbe, the caper raised not only a scandal but a false question: had Schulz been a Pole or a Jew? Ficowski, surely rightly, wants Schulz to be both, but runs a danger of tipping the balance if he puts too much emphasis on the possibility that his country might have been, in the recent past, a bad host to the writer’s memory. It isn’t now, of course, but the recent past refuses to lie down and die, and for the less recent past that goes double. Doomed to the margins in an anti-Semitic culture, weren’t the Jews oppressed even before the Nazis got there? Wasn’t Schulz a born victim?

  He probably was, but not in the historical sense. Frustratingly missing in the area already noted, Ficowski’s sense of history is present and correct where it matters most: he sees the Drohobycz shtetl of Schulz’s childhood as a creative incubator, and not just as a trap. Drohobycz was in the old Galicia, so Schulz was born and raised under the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until the Russians moved in and made it part of the Ukraine, his home town was part of a civilization. For Jews, that civilization certainly had its difficulties, but the coming nightmare kept nobody awake, because it seemed unthinkable. Jews had a future. Schulz’s helpless fatalism has to be sought in his personality, and it is too much to assume that his personality was determined by his circumstances, or else we would have to say that his talent was too. The fatalism and the talent went together.

  Part of the fatalism was a counter-productive propensity to be a good man at every moment, with never a thought for his own long-term interests. The boy who was caught by h
is mother feeding flies so that they would be safe for the winter grew to be the man who would give all he had to a beggar. He gave everything of himself, as if there were no tomorrow. (There wasn’t, but not even Hitler was sure of that yet.) As an art teacher, Schulz would enthral his pupils with his chalk-talk stories, caring for them far beyond the demands of the job, and consuming the time he might have spent on his own art. He was consumed by the moment in the same way that his attention was consumed by an object. It was a miracle that he got anything at all drawn or written. He always needed someone to discover him because he had no energy left over with which to discover himself. Cinnamon Shops began in his letters to a woman friend, Debora Vogel. Without her, the book might never have happened. Women looked after him because he so obviously needed to be mothered. In his graphic work the dominatrix was omnipresent, and the figure most like him was usually on its knees. (All the women were real: when he drew them nude, their husbands recognized them, and raised a ruckus.) His life was like that. The trap was in his mind. To call him a Jewish historic victim is to diminish him, the Jews and history itself, which shrinks to a cartoon when read through hindsight, thereby encouraging the hopeless notion that the Jews of Europe were born only in order to die. But they were born in order to live: hence the tragedy.

  Even with his tremendous powers of hesitation, Schulz managed to become a member of the Polish Academy of Letters. By the time of his real entrapment, he was famous enough for other literary notables to attempt a rescue. He might have got away, but typically he was unable to face the choice. The choice might have come down to the impossible decisions involved in packing a bag: socks first, or a spare sweater? He was like that. By giving us the man in all his frailty, Ficowski has helped to explain the artist in all his strength, but for the full measure of that strength we need to see those brilliant little books.