English Voices

by Ferdinand Mount

  Like Salvo, le Carré has a mynah’s ear for dialogue, from the breezy philosophizing of Maxie à la John Aspinall – ‘no point hanging around the back of the herd when your time’s up’ – to the hypnotic, hectoring discourse of the Mwangaza, the incorruptible Enlightener, who is to chase out the rascals and liberate the Eastern Congo but who has, alas, already cut a deal with the rascals in Kinshasa while he was still in his ten-million-dollar villa in Spain with plasma TV screens in every toilet.

  Half a century ago, before he became John le Carré and was still teaching me German at Eton College, David Cornwell was already in full command of that gift which goes beyond mere mimicry. He would tease the yobs in the back row of the class and cow them into bemused acquiescence by catching not merely the accents of their insolent drawl but the spoiled arrogance behind it. He was the most brilliant of teachers, crisp, imaginative, authoritative, but also sensitive to both the potential and the limits of his pupils.

  And he is a teacher still. No other modern writer I can think of has such a hard didactic streak running through his most playful passages. His own rackety upbringing – his fraudster father in and out of jail, his mother disappearing from his life for years – has given him an implacable sense that actions have consequences and extravagances will have to be paid for by someone. And the links of the chain run on remorselessly across enormous distances. As the Mwangaza is belabouring the fat cats who have stolen the People’s Portion and Salvo is rendering his words with his usual mellifluous agility, the interpreter still finds time to reflect on the desperate shortage in Britain of PlayStation toys at Christmas a couple of years back. This was caused not by the incompetence or malevolence of the manufacturers or distributors but by the genocide that had engulfed the Eastern Congo, thereby interrupting the supply of the mineral coltan, which provides a tiny but essential speck in every cellphone and electronic gizmo.

  Both in his books and in the public prints, le Carré remains the flintiest of controversialists, giving no quarter to the ungodly from Rushdie to George W. Bush. Not for the first time, it is the ugly Americans who really get it in the neck, making Graham Greene’s efforts in the same line seem positively half-hearted. In The Mission Song, ghastly as the local warlords are, a far more sinister threat to the Eastern Congo is posed by the Union Minière des Grands Lacs, a ruthless conglomerate which is ultimately controlled by ‘a Who’s Who of American corporate and political power, A-list neoconservatives’. The true heart of darkness now is to be found at the HQ of Bechtel or Halliburton.

  In literary circles, preaching went out of style with George Eliot, or at the latest with E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence. These days we esteem novels for their multivocal ambiguity, their crosscutting and undercutting, for being ludic and parodic and subversive, in short for being so complicated you could not possibly extract anything so kitsch as a message out of them before they disappear up their own ironies. Messages are for politicians and other merchants of the banal.

  Yet le Carré’s undiminished anger is as bracing as an east wind. It is provocative in the true sense of that overworked adjective. Almost every book of his makes me want to argue in a way that other modern novels don’t. Is spying really any more deforming as a profession than soldiering or being a lawyer or policeman, let alone a politician or a journalist? And if le Carré’s novels really persuaded you that it was, would so many spooks be such fans of his, just as senior civil servants adored Sir Humphrey and lawyers love John Grisham (there’s a fortune awaiting the novelist who can come up with a page-turner about creative accounting)? Aren’t the Arabs just a little too noble in The Little Drummer Girl, and isn’t there just a whiff of an international Jewish conspiracy in the final pages of that enthralling novel? Are the big pharmaceutical companies quite so Machiavellian as depicted in The Constant Gardener? Ever since Harry Lime started cutting penicillin, Big Pharma has been a convenient villain, but would life expectancy in the Third World have improved so quickly without it?

  Perhaps my habit of rebelling against the message is a rare and shameful quirk. Perhaps I am the only reader of Middlemarch who actually wants Mr Casaubon to discover the key to all mythologies so he can say snubs to that annoying Dorothea. Perhaps I am the only reader of Lady Chatterley’s Lover to identify with Sir Clifford. So it may be that I shall be the only reader of The Mission Song who has a sneaking hope that Maxie’s plot actually succeeds and the Mwangaza is parachuted into power ahead of the elections. Poor Salvo complains that the Congo is a land dying of neglect by the outside world, a country in which 4 million dead can finish up ‘on page 29, next to the quick crossword’. So is intervention always hopelessly misguided? After all, as I am writing this review, I read reports in the newspapers, on page thirty-one of The Times for example, of bodies littering the streets of Kinshasa as fierce fighting breaks out in advance of the second round of presidential elections. Might not a tiny coup have forestalled the anarchy?

  But of course such a shameful thought is total fantasy, and it is part of le Carré’s cunning to have lured me into thinking it. To see that no good could ever have come of such an intrinsically squalid enterprise, you have only to look at the real-life counterpart of Maxie’s little caper, the aborted coup in Equatorial Guinea (Sir Mark Thatcher prop.), and to watch the real-life Maxie, Simon Mann, the son and grandson of England cricket captains, being led away in irons, filthy, dishevelled and disgraced. And to those who fondly believe that HMG could never get mixed up in such a disreputable business, we need only recall the warm enthusiasm expressed by Our Man in Sierra Leone for the latest regime change there. This is darkness visible, and it is John le Carré’s abiding mastery to make us see it even if we would rather not.

  ELIAS CANETTI: THE GOD-MONSTER OF HAMPSTEAD

  Some quite bad writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Pearl Buck is the most notorious. So have some great men who are better known for other, not strictly literary endeavours, such as Churchill and Sartre. Many more laureates have written in small-circulation languages which you wonder if the judges are qualified to judge.

  But I can think of only one Nobel literary laureate of whom you might be tempted to ask: what exactly has he won it for? When Elias Canetti was awarded the Nobel in 1981, he had published only a scattering of assorted things, mostly rather slight: three farces, a travel book, a few essays, one novel published forty-five years earlier, two-thirds of an autobiography (his most evocative and attractive work), plus what I suppose might be described as a work of popular social anthropology, Crowds and Power.

  Yet nobody much at the time gainsaid Canetti’s claim to the Nobel. For it was tacitly (and sometimes openly) agreed that his supreme work of art was himself. When he arrived in England, as Jeremy Adler remarks in his introduction to Party in the Blitz, a posthumous montage of Canetti’s writings about England, ‘initially he did not owe his reputation to his publications but rather to the force of his personality’. And that remained the case even as his fame grew. For his lover Iris Murdoch, he was the magus, both the subject and the dedicatee of her second novel, The Flight from the Enchanter. Her husband, John Bayley, less enchanted by Canetti, particularly by his cruelty to Iris, christened him the God-Monster of Hampstead. Canetti himself says, ‘My chief trait, much my strongest quality, which has never been compromised, was the insistence on myself . . . It may be a sort of virtue.’ Or it may not.

  This self-centredness reaches marvellous heights in his contempt for other living writers. T. S. Eliot was a ‘miserable creature’. Kathleen Raine was a tedious whinger who committed the unforgivable sin: ‘Not for a moment did she see me as a writer, the little she was able to read of mine struck her as tasteless, though she was careful never to tell me so. I, however, always knew it, and thought with some satisfaction how little her poems did for me.’ As for Iris, ‘she has not one serious thought . . . Everything I despise about English life is in her . . . I don’t think there is anything that leaves me quite so cold as that woman’s intellect.’
Except perhaps her body – which he nonetheless took advantage of whenever she offered it. His descriptions of their lovemaking are so chilling that you have to read them twice to make sure you have read them properly.

  There is one shining exception to these bilious denunciations of his literary contemporaries and supposed friends and lovers: the great Chinese scholar-translator Arthur Waley. No prizes for guessing why. Waley was the only man in England who had read Canetti’s novel before the war and loved it.

  At times, Canetti reminds me disgracefully of the Russian novelist Vladimir Brusiloff in ‘The Clicking of Cuthbert’: ‘No novelists any good except me. Sovietski-yah! Nastikoff-bah! I spit me of zem all. No novelists anywhere any good except me. P. G. Wodehouse and Tolstoi not bad. Not good, but not bad.’ He was born in 1905 into a cultivated Sephardic family of a line long settled in Turkey but more recently in Bulgaria. En famille, he and his wife Veza spoke Ladino, the Spanish dialect amazingly preserved among Jewish families expelled from Spain four centuries earlier. But English was the first language he learnt to read in, though he always wrote in German, and he first came to England in 1911, to Manchester, where his father died of a stroke the day after his wife had told him she had fallen in love with her doctor – a crucial trauma in Canetti’s life and movingly recounted in his first memoir, The Tongue Set Free. After fleeing the Nazis, he and Veza finally settled in Hampstead in February 1939, amid the large refugee community which at that time constituted nearly half the borough’s population. Apart from a brief intermission in Chesham Bois during the Blitz, they lived there until Veza’s death. In his last years he moved to Zürich with his second wife, where he died in 1994.

  Throughout the war and for some time afterwards, he was deeply admiring of the fortitude and tolerance of the English, and he became a British citizen. In 1951 he declared, ‘I now feel completely at home in England, especially in London. I can now become an Englishman with a good conscience.’ But this fellow feeling curdled with the passage of time. He began to detect ‘a smell of weakness’ in the English. He had come to loathe the insipidity of their conversation, the coldness of their manners, their awful stodginess. Even their famous tolerance was linked to their Gefühlsimpotenz. Above all, he loathed their parties, those appalling Nichtberührungsfeste. Professor Adler calls this term utterly untranslatable, but I think ‘non-contact sports’ will do quite nicely. These post-war gatherings in Hampstead or Chelsea or Kensington struck him as ‘senseless and heartless, every bit in keeping with such cold people’. There was no touching, no intimacy, no curiosity. Adler points out that Canetti failed to take in (or did not live long enough to see) the kissing, hugging, crying, confessing post-Diana England. One can, however, be sure that he would have abominated that too.

  Canetti’s portrait of England is frozen in time, as most such portraits of national character tend to be. It took me a while to think what it most closely recalled. Then I realized that it was just like The British Character, that series of drawings by Pont of Punch first collected in book form in 1938. There they all are, the qualities first admired and then denounced by Canetti: Refusal to Admit Defeat, Importance of Not Being an Alien (the squat, underdressed Continental amid the horse-faced English in white ties even bears an eerie resemblance to the younger Canetti), Love of Keeping Calm, Absence of the Gift for Conversation, Importance of Not Being Intellectual and, above all, Reserve.

  The actual party in the Blitz took place in Roland Penrose’s house in Downshire Hill. It was a lascivious, unbuttoned affair, not at all a Nichtberührungsfest. On each floor there were couples embracing and dancing, while down in the basement sweating firemen were passing out buckets of sand to protect the houses that were burning in the neighbourhood. The firemen and the dancers seemed quite oblivious of each other. One can imagine one of Pont’s furiously crowded, smoky, crosshatched drawings depicting the scene, entitled no doubt The Blitz Spirit.

  This then is a period piece which suffers from being written at the end of Canetti’s life, half a century after the period it describes. It is assembled from a jumble of shorthand manuscripts, notes and diaries, although it excludes (wrongly, I think) those passages that Canetti explicitly classified as ‘Diaries’ and stipulated were not to be published until thirty years after his death. So the book has a thin, spatchcocked feel. Adler candidly tells us that there was some discussion as to whether the book should have been published at all. Moreover, Canetti himself in extreme old age confesses, ‘When I talk about England, I notice how wrong it all is.’ Wrong quite often in details. He speaks of a Church of England clergyman who begins to doubt the Thirty-Seven Articles of his Faith. He admires Bertrand Russell for nobly declining the dukedom of Bedford. He tells us equally breathlessly and erroneously that Enoch Powell was one of only two Tory MPs from humble backgrounds and had distinguished himself by his bravery as a brigadier in Montgomery’s Desert Army. No doubt Powell would have, given half a chance, but in fact he served out the war as a staff officer of Widmerpoolian assiduity.

  For all that, Canetti’s description of Enoch discoursing unstoppably on Dante and Nietzsche at a staid Tory soirée has a bite and vivacity to be found in others of his vignettes of English intellectual life, of dinner with Bertrand Russell with his ‘goatish chuckle’, of visiting that tragic Professor Branestawm figure, Geoffrey Pyke, who almost persuaded Mountbatten to build battleships out of blocks of ice, to be known as Pykrete.

  These portraits achieve that pithy, abrupt quality that Canetti so admired in Aubrey’s Brief Lives. And for them alone Party in the Blitz was well worth publishing, even though it is spoiled by Canetti’s irrepressible habit of generalizing from insufficient evidence. For instance, he repeatedly curses the English obsession with saving time, giving as his prime example the Labour politician Douglas Jay saying to a woman, ‘I’ve got five minutes’ before taking off his trousers. But that is surely the impatience of lustful politicians the world over. Why else is President Chirac nicknamed ‘Fifteen-minutes-including-the-shower’? Marlene Dietrich claimed that JFK fitted her into a half-hour slot. Mussolini too was no slouch, given any convenient flat surface to lay a woman on.

  In the end, Canetti only seems to like people in England to the degree that he can identify them as not English, for example, the historian C. V. Wedgwood, who, he says, had none of the sluggish reserve of so many English people, her dark looks, warmth and quickness coming from her Celtic ancestors. Of course, ‘I do not think much of her own writings, she was unoriginal, had no ideas of her own about anything’, and – this was the limit – she adored Mrs Thatcher (Canetti never quite abandoned his leftist politics, though he kept his pre-war association with Brecht rather dark). However, Veronica could be forgiven much because she was an enthusiast for Canetti’s novel, persuaded Jonathan Cape to publish it and volunteered to translate it herself.

  And it is her translation which Harvill has used in reissuing, for Canetti’s centenary, Auto da Fé as it was called when it came out in Britain in 1947. The book was first published in 1936 as Die Blendung – The Blinding or The Deception – and later in the US as The Tower of Babel, this variety of titles suggesting a smidgeon of uncertainty as to what the book was actually about. Veronica Wedgwood’s translation is stilted and clumsy and now and then, I think, mistakes the sense. I doubt whether this matters. Even if Englished by a master craftsman like Michael Hofmann (who has done Party in the Blitz beautifully), Auto da Fé would still be unendurable.

  I do not mean that it is impossible to be carried along for a few pages by Canetti’s prose, which is never less than lucid and fluent. It is just that the story is at the same time so whimsical and so crass, its allegorical subtext so leaden and brutish that it subverts its own subversion, or, to put it less politely, disappears up itself. A distinguished Sinologist, Peter Kien, who lives a crazy, reclusive life obsessed by his enormous library, is tricked out of his inheritance by, among others: his housekeeper, later wife, a lubricious, greedy peasant woman; an evil, chess-playin
g, hunchbacked dwarf; and a lecherous blind man. From time to time he is abused and beaten up by a crowd of Bosch-like lumpenproles. And all this happens over and over again, quite relentlessly, for nearly 500 pages.

  The blurb claims that Auto da Fé still ‘towers as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century’. I find it hard to believe that it towered as one of the greatest novels of 1936. The epithet ‘Kafkaesque’ will no doubt be trotted out for the occasion. But if Kafka had treated the theme, he would have done it in twenty light, haunting, allusive pages which would have left the reader dangling in an exquisite uncertainty. Another point much insisted on by Kafka’s compatriot Milan Kundera is that Kafka manages in some mysterious way to be very funny. Auto da Fé is no joke.

  Those drawing up the Nobel citation obviously had some difficulty deciding precisely what Canetti was on about, referring cautiously to ‘his broad outlook’ and ‘his wealth of ideas’. In fact, I think that his outlook was quite narrow and his governing idea was a relatively simple one. In all his work he is haunted by the fear of the crowd.

  In Crowds and Power, he purports to offer a typology of crowds, dividing them up into the open crowd, the closed crowd, the baiting crowd (or lynch mob), the lamenting crowd (or cortège), the flight crowd (or panic-stricken mob), the feast crowd and so on. Then he moves on to draw analogies between these modern types of crowd and the war packs of the Amazonian Indians, the rain dances of the Pueblo Indians, the kangaroo hunts of the Australian Aborigines, the Bushmen, etc. Except that he does not actually draw such analogies, but for the most part merely displays his examples alongside one another, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions. These examples are collected from a wide variety of sources – the book took more than twenty years to write, but despite this long gestation it is remarkably free from analytical thought. Large parts of it read like an up-market version of Desmond Morris’s books in which the behaviour of chimps and hyenas is assumed to throw important light on human behaviour, but only by a loaded reasoning that selects only those features of animal behaviour that resemble human behaviour and discards those that do not.