‘A double life?’ I asked. ‘A double life of course,’ said Criminale, ‘Over there in those days we lived in a time when the only rule was to lie. By the wrong emotion, the wrong gesture, you betrayed yourself. But if you knew how to lie, if you supported the regime in public, you were allowed your thoughts in private. If you allowed them to use your reputation, you were not called to the police station. If you stood up for their history, they permitted you your irony. We were a culture of cynics, we were corrupt and base, but it was the agreed reality. Those people loved great political thoughts, they loved Utopia, totality. The revolution of the proletariat, a madhouse. I had a higher life, I was better than that. But cynicism moves everywhere, even into love.’ ‘And thought too,’ I said. ‘Possibly,’ he said, ‘I see now what you want me to say. That my work is wrong, as corrupt as my world. Well, I cannot. Maybe the experience of a bad world also makes us think.’
‘I ought to go,’ I said, getting up, ‘I really do have an interview.’ ‘Wait,’ said Criminale, taking my arm, ‘You escape too lightly. I will teach you about betrayal} Let me tell you this: we all betray each other. Sometimes from malice, or fear. Sometimes from indifference, sometimes love. Sometimes for an idea, sometimes from political need. Sometimes because we cannot think of a good ethical reason why not to. Are you different?’ ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘But don’t you think betrayal is all round us now?’ asked Criminale, ‘Isn’t this also a time of j’accuse, j’accuse?’ ‘I’m sorry?’ I said. ‘J’accuse, my father abused me, my mother failed me,’ said Criminale, ‘J’accuse, he invaded my sexual space, he made me an innuendo. J’accuse, I am his lover, he owes me a fortune. Go to America now. Three hundred million naked egos all trying to make a claim. Even rich celebrities like to be victims. What their parents did to them, terrible, they could even have become failures in life. No, as Nietzsche said, when an epoch dies, betrayal is everywhere. To make ourselves heroes of the new, we must murder the past. He also told us each time we try to become authors of ourselves, we become only the more alone. So my story is not perhaps so far away from your story.’
But that seemed far too easy. The past has to answer,’ I said, ‘In your story-real crimes were committed.’ ‘Yes, wrongs were done, but how is it now?’ said Criminale, ‘You tell me, you come from a-media-world.’ ‘Not any more,’ I said, ‘Actually I find I’m a verbal person not a visual person.’ ‘That is not how I mean,’ said Criminale, ‘You live in the media age, the age of simulation, as they all say at that congress. The age of no ideology, only hyperreality. Well, go to New York now, the Beirut of the Western world. The streets are filled with gangs and terrorists, the women rage with anger, everyone lives for themselves. You sit high in some fine apartment, great paintings on the walls, and down in the street people kill for drugs and kicks. Too little reality, also too much. Everywhere, wild fantasies, everyone wants a violent illusion. Life is a movie, death is a plot ending, no stories are real. And even the philosophers think in unrealities, they describe a world of no ethics, no humanism, no self. I know my age had bad ethics, now show me yours.’
‘You remember in your quarrel with Heidegger . . .’ I said. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘You said his mistake was thinking thought could evade history and stay pure. But if it can’t, what then?’ ‘Of course, if you like to think so, thought is corrupt, and nobody wins,’ said Criminale, Then of course there are no ethics, no realities, no philosophies, no myths, no art. The world is as empty as some people say, only chaos and randomness. We are non-existent selves, we start at the beginning again, with nothing at all. There is no Criminale, no one to blame, no anyone. But that is your problem,-not mine. Excuse me, I must go, I have lost my luggage. But I have met this very nice Russian lady who likes to take me shopping. See you about, as they say.’ He stood up and pulled on his jacket; I watched him go off, down the bendy path and through the clotted woods. I despised him, I admired him. I hated him, I loved him. I was outraged, I was charmed. When he spoke, I still wanted to listen.
As it happened, I didn’t talk to him again. There he was at the seminar dinner that night; his shopping trip had plainly gone well. He wore a very expensive new lightweight suit, a smart new shirt, gold cufflinks that had not been on his wrists that afternoon. Despite, maybe even because of our conversation then, or perhaps because of the companionship of the Russian lady, he was in excellent humour. His form was back; the Russian lady was at his side at table, touching his arm from time to time. I passed him as I moved towards a table in the further corner. The great trouble in Russia, you know, is their condoms are too thick,’ he was saying, ‘You need Western aid immediately.’ Later I saw him talking on and on, as he did, no doubt flitting, as he also did, from Plato to Gramsci, Freud to Fukuyama. The usual respectful crowd sat silent round him; I never saw him again.
In the morning, when I checked at the desk, Criminale’s luggage had still not been traced. He would not be leaving quickly, I had enough for my article, and now I could not keep on avoiding him. I left Schlossburg that morning and flew off home. I wrote my Po-Mo piece, which appeared in the Po-Mo supplement, which is why in their cottages in Provence everyone chatted Postmodernism over the Piat d’Or that summer. Then I thought again about whether I should write about Criminale. I had said I would remain silent, but what I had in mind now was not exactly about Criminale at all. The Schlossburg conversation half changed my mind. He had said his story was, perhaps, not so very far away from being my own story, though of course his story seemed to stop more or less where mine started; that was what I thought about.
And Bazlo Criminale’s story did stop, just about a week after the end of the Schlossburg seminar. For, back in Santa Barbara, California, where he had returned, Criminale died – knocked over by a helmeted bicyclist in a Sony Walkman, so engrossed in some orgasmic peak of the latest Madonna hit that he failed to notice the great philosopher abstractedly crossing the green campus path in front of him. Criminale was struck in the temple by the rim of the cyclist’s safety helmet; they took him to the finest of hospitals, but he never regained consciousness. The best that can be said about it is that he died with his lapel badge on – for he was, of course, attending a conference, on ‘Does Philosophy Have a Future?’, which was at once abandoned as a mark of respect for a great late modern thinker.
You may well remember the obituaries, which were plentiful and generally very respectful. The usual confusions surrounding him survived; several quite different dates and places of birth were given, and his career, fame, and his political views and ideological attitude explained in quite contradictory ways. His public celebrity was, well, celebrated, and much was said about the greatness of his literary work. Less was said about the philosophy, except that it was both advanced and obscure. ‘The Philosopher King Is Dead: Who Is the King?’ asked one piece, speculating about the succession. Very little was said about his personal life, except in very general terms. And nothing at all was said directly about any feet of clay. Even so, there was a general note of caution, as if there might be worse things to come out.
Someone who knew him better than most wrote the piece in the London Times. ‘His birthplace was Bulgaria, his passport was Austrian, his bank account Swiss, and his loyalty perhaps was to nowhere,’ it said – pointedly, I thought, There is no doubt he was a great man, amongst the leading European philosophers of the postwar era, but at times a flawed one. He was a thinker of genius and a pillager of women. He was loved by many for his charm and presence, and made friends in high places everywhere in the world – a friendship he sometimes exploited, in a familiar Mitteleuropean way, though those who knew him best well understood how to forget and forgive. He once famously described philosophy itself as “a form of irony”, and that quality is what we will continue to find in his quite probably enduring work.’ These were the only real hints, if they really were hints, of trouble to come. However in various small American papers there were a few rumours that his death was not entirely accidental, that reaction
ary Eastern European forces had decided he was a liability. But, as you know, we live an an age of conspiracy theories, some people preferring to believe that nothing is ever what it is but an elaborate plot by powers elsewhere.
A week after that came the attempted coup against Gorbachev and reform in the Soviet Union; three days, as the press said, that shook the late modern world. The hands of the coup leader, Gennady Yanayev, visibly shook on the television screens as he announced the taking of emergency powers and the ‘illness’ of Mikhail Gorbachev, isolated at his holiday dacha in the Crimea. It was not only Yanayev’s hands that shivered; a whole era, a whole epochal direction of history (my history, by the way – yours too, perhaps), a whole set of promises and half-curdled hopes, seemed to be shaking too. Even some of those who had taken the brave step beyond the old imprisoning world began to fear and doubt, as they saw the age turning backwards again. The rules of blame and confession, of guilt and betrayal, seemed once again to go into reverse.
Three days later, it was the coup itself that died – of courage and determined human spirit, of incompetence and contradiction. So did two of its leaders, and more followed after. Then came the obscure days of defiance and confession, as those arrested proclaimed their error, their deception by others, their absence on the day, their historical mistake. To me, as they were filmed, talking, it seemed, without coercion, they all seemed strangely innocent, people from a simpler world. Nobody had told them to blame their parents, discrimination, PMT or passive smoking for what had gone wrong. They said I as if they meant it; they said they did it. They had made an error and they announced it. Then as they fell, as others did after them, the statues of the long century once more began to tumble. Tall, black, phallic Felix Dzherzhinsky came down from his slim pedestal outside the Lubyanka. Stalin toppled, Lenin was swung upside-down, the bust of squat-headed Karl Marx came off the stand.
*
Three weeks after that, I attended yet another conference: in Norwich, England, ‘a fine city’, as the signs said as you drove in (and so it had better be, after you’ve struggled for hours across heath, fen, and breckland to reach it). This was the summer’s big one: 650 teachers of English from universities across Europe were gathering in the University of East Anglia’s Sixties concrete bunkers to found a truly European association. Most came from the European Community; some were from Eastern Europe, highly relieved to be there at all. George Steiner spoke, and Frank Kermode. Seamus Heaney read from his poems, and three British novelists read sections from their novels in progress, new stories whose ends they seemed not to know. And this time I spoke myself, in the small section on ‘The Writer as Philosopher’. I had been invited along to make my address at the very last moment. My topic, topical of course because of his death, was Bazlo Criminale.
Quite honestly I had no wish at all to turn up at the event. As you know, I’d been to far too many of that kind of thing lately, and, whatever the impression you might have, I have never been all that keen on solemn gatherings of studious specialists. In fact I had firmly decided to refuse the invitation of the organizers when a slightly disconcerting thing occurred. A few days before the congress began, an odd little letter came through the post. It had a Hungarian stamp on it, and was stuffed with newspaper cuttings. Of course I could not read these, since they were in Hungarian, which really is one of the world’s more obscure languages, but it was clear enough from the headlines and the photographs that they were the Budapest obituaries of Bazlo Criminale. With them was a brief handwritten letter. It said: ‘So he has gone now, our great philosopher. I hope it will make you like to write something about him. You know about him – perhaps not such a big lot, but more than most of those in the West. And now I hear you will go to this big Norwich congress to speak of him. I hope you speak well. Remember, he was a good man, of course a little bit flexible like I told you, but he did always his best. I am going to come there too. I like very much to see you again, and I think in Norwich they do not have goulasch. Are you still just a little bit Hungarian? I hope so. I tried hard to show you how. Love + kisses from Ildiko H.’
Of course, I was wildly delighted to get a letter from Ildiko. I was also surprised and mystified. For one thing, I couldn’t imagine how she could possibly have got my home address. Admittedly she’d had plenty of time working with the contents of my wallet, and could have found one. But since then, my career improving, I’d moved, to Islington – so far into Islington that I can’t tell you how we despise Camden. And then I couldn’t imagine how she knew I had been asked to the conference. I’d been approached late, I hadn’t even accepted, and my name wasn’t on the advance conference programme. It’s true that, when I got the telephone call inviting me to speak, I’d been told my name had been suggested by a Hungarian delegate, who called me one of the few people in Britain equipped to speak on Criminale. Perhaps this had become the chatter of the Budapest bars and bazaars. The letter bewildered me, but it did settle one thing. I picked up the telephone, called Norwich, and left a message on a machine to say I accepted their invitation.
In my opinion a university campus is a rather strange place, out of time, into space, away from the drab urban grey, in the lush urban green, caught in a separate world that seems to have little to do with everyday history. In fact it all seemed rather like the strange, happy timeless time Ildiko and I had spent together at Barolo, until at last we were ejected from paradise and thrown back on real things again. But this one was a strange form of paradise. Not so long ago, in a lush river valley some pre-postmodern architect had started pouring concrete; great staggered residence blocks, huge teaching towers, rose from the grass, speaking of mass and monumentalism and eternity. Maybe it was home to some; it was not to me. It was already history, the white cement slowly pitting and greying with age – just like the hundreds of professors of English whom I found at the opening conference reception. There they were, pressed tightly together amid breeze-block walls, looking mystified at one another, as if they had never understood before they belonged to a species that had been replicated so often, all clutching their conference wallets, inspecting each other’s lapel badges, sipping fizzy Bulgarian Riesling, and chattering extremely loudly. I pushed my way through, past fat structuralists and thin deconstructors, denimed feminists and yuppified postculturalists, past the great bookstalls and the long publishers’ tables, past the bulletin boards fluttering with news of yet more conferences, looking everywhere for Ildiko. But, though there was a sign for everything else, there was no sign of her, not a sign at all.
Every new morning I checked the mailbox in the lobby; her pigeonhole, H., was conveniently placed close to mine, J. Only an empty I. intervened. She hadn’t arrived; her conference wallet and lapel badge, her ticket for the conference trip, her gilt-edged invitation to the final conference dinner, the little touches of identity that such events are kind enough to confer on us, stayed lying there uncollected. And she certainly didn’t appear at my lecture, which frankly went quite well and attracted a small but reasonably interested audience. I rather enjoyed standing up there and giving it. As I told you, I’m a verbal person, not a visual person. Criminale at Schlossburg was perfectly right; there is no way a small flickering screen can ever really bring mental deeds to life. But perhaps, up to a point, words can. I was no scholar, and I certainly didn’t know him all that well. I had read him in snatches, seen him in brief glimpses, and I was not a literary theorist. I did not entirely understand; but I did have something to say.
What did I say? I didn’t, as I might have done a year before, talk about his mystery, his deceptions, or betrayals. I spoke about his work – the great fiction, above all Homeless, the fine drama, the elaborate gestures of his philosophy. One advantage of my travels was that I now had some useful words (like Foucault and Derrida, Horkheimer and Habermas) that are calculated to unlock the hard hearts of academics. I pointed to his place of historical importance, describing him as the philosopher not of the age of the Cold War and the atomic spy,
but of the time of chaos theory, the rock video, and the Sony Walkman. In fact, I described him as a Great Thinker of the Age of Glasnost. No one better expressed, I claimed, the problematics of contemporary thought, the collapse of subjectivity, the crisis of writing, the self-erasure and near-silence of the era after humanism (a fate academic audiences always take gladly in their stride). I spoke of his great gift of irony, the final bridge for healing the contradictions and emptinesses the world has left us. I hinted, but only vaguely, as another form of irony, at his own flawed self, the head in the sky, the feet in the mire, the gap between thought and historical need, the irony that, I said, so often strikes us when we consider all the modern and postmodern masters.
As, afterwards, I gathered my notes and left the grey seminar room, a small dark-haired woman came up and shyly suggested we might take a plastic cup of coffee together. I checked out her bosom – this is a well-accepted convention in the conference world – and grasped from her lapel that she was Dr Ludmilla Markova, from Veliko Turnovo in Bulgaria. The name – of the place, not the person – rang bells; I accepted at once. She walked me off to some far more buoyant and postmodern building overlooking a pleasant broadland view, and we sat under indoor trees in the coffee bar together. ‘Yes, very good lecture, quite deconstructive, I think,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Only one thing. You understand nothing.’ ‘Very likely,’ I said, ‘I see you come from Veliko Turnovo, where he came from. Did you know him?’ ‘I am so much too young,’ said Miss Markova sharply, ‘But yes, you are right, he was born there, son of a metalworker, in a time of terrors.’ ‘Do they remember him?’ I asked. ‘Not so well,’ said Miss Markova, ‘Father supported the Nazis, so was shot for fascist after the war. After this his family was not so happy. His mother paid him to go to Budapest, to make a new life. I think he never came back.’
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