Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  To mangle Tolstoy, while every economic boom is the same, every economic bust implodes in its own peculiar way, throwing up gobs of squalor in its wake. In Britain we have long told ourselves that, while we may be a bit frayed at the edges, by God we know how to run a parliamentary democracy. But now the culture that gave us Gladstone versus Disraeli has sunk into the taxpayer-funded dredged moat where bottom-feeders lurk in terror of the exposing hook and line.

  In Ireland the capacity of the moral bog to swallow public trust may be even more profound. The official report, published last month, on the maltreatment of children in Ireland’s ‘Industrial Schools’ was all anyone wanted to talk about in Dublin. From 1940 through the 1980s, tens of thousands of children were victims of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of lay staff and teachers in institutions run by Christian congregations. In its dry understatement, the report is one of the most horrifying documents of systematic social cruelty to be published since the war. Children despatched there by the Irish courts as ‘unruly’ were treated as feral beasts, beaten with instruments designed to inflict maximum pain.

  The betrayal of public trust amounted to a shocking collusion between Church and state to look the other way. Lay perpetrators would be reported to the Gardai, but seldom prosecuted, and members of religious orders known to have committed atrocities on their wards were dealt with within the Church. But now all the sweaty procrastination has been swept away in a great tempest of public fury, not least because Irish taxpayers are going to have to foot the €1.3 bn (£1.12 bn) bill for reparations to traumatised victims. This is the collateral damage of great social and economic implosions. When one kind of public credit – the assumption that investment trusts are not frauds; that commercial banks can actually cover their obligations to depositors; or that the people’s representatives aren’t slurping at the public trough – comes apart, the entire social contract can unravel at dizzying speed.

  Which was a good reason to go to Normandy for the sixty-fifth anniversary of D-Day and register the unequivocal good of which democracies are equally capable along with habitual acts of infamy. Historical commemorations are always tricky things, never more so than in the case of great battles. Those who fought them often tell us who didn’t how hard it is to convey the reality in narratives, be those reports a day or a half-century later. And so we euphemise. Military history maps with their arcing arrows trap the unbearable reality of dismembered boys within a code of antiseptic graphic conventions. Those little shaded boxes shadow-box with the truth.

  Added to this is the muffling effect of ceremonious decorum. But in this particular case, expectations that our new American Pericles would soar above funerary platitude ran the opposite risk of turning the occasion into yet another exercise in Obamania. Posters in the window of the local tourist office featuring Potus in cool threads and proclaiming – apparently the idea of the mayor of the city – ‘YES WE C(AEN)’ only added to the foreboding.

  The biggest invasion was by re-enactors. On the evening of 5 June, the front at Grandcamp-Maisy, between Pointe du Hoc and Omaha Beach, had D-Day-vintage Jeeps in tan paint parked opposite the sea wall. Inside the Brasserie du Guesclin, Frenchmen and young women impeccably uniformed for 1944 tucked into their foie de lotte marine and turbot grillé. From GI uniforms there came, disconcertingly, voices that hailed from Bremen or München-Gladbach. It’s a well-meant gesture against oblivion, but somehow deaf to the music of time. Most of the re-enactors – in their late twenties and thirties – are too old, their trousers too sharply creased, too fabulously buff to impersonate the skinny kids of D-Day, in the grip of animal instincts of self-preservation. When it comes to the bidding of memory, less is more.

  Later that evening, I stretched out on a wooden chaise in a Norman manor-house garden, fleshy roses blooming on the limestone walls, and let the emptiness carry me back to the tens of thousands packed in the transport ships sixty-five years ago – trapped, panicky and seasick – on the bobbing tide while Eisenhower decided it was go; to silk parachute gear dropped over the heads of tow-haired quarterbacks from Milwaukee. As the first stars came out, a wind soughed through the Normandy oaks and then, suddenly, the fading horizon eerily flared and the stillness was struck by the dull boom of fireworks from distant Utah Beach. But the dogs of the Calvados didn’t know the noise was innocent thunder, and yipped and yowled as their forebears did all those Junes ago.

  Weather was a famous obsession of the D-Day planners, forcing Ike to postpone the landings by a day. But the meteorological gods were kind to the veterans, many in wheelchairs, some magnificently spry and upright, crowding into the American Cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer. So the sun shone on the affable curls of Tom Hanks; the band struck up ‘Moonlight Serenade’. The ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ followed, rendered with such mournful beauty that our hearts were already in our mouths. Anticipation hung in the air along with Potus’s chopper which, heralded by rotor wind, spinning eddies of new-mown grass over the heads of the crowd, finally descended.

  Speech Idol then got under way with Nicolas Sarkozy delivering a blinder, full of unembarrassed poetic passion; summoning up images of twenty-year-olds on their ships caught in silence; silence hanging as well over the German machine-gun nests that awaited them. Was this Sarko, invoking the tears of parents bidding their sons farewell? Was this the gigolo of the Elysée forcing us to see bodies rolling in the soaking sand? Evidemment. The peroration was even more astonishing coming from a successor of Charles de Gaulle, as Sarkozy laid a rhetorical bouquet of heartfelt gratitude on the graves of the dead and the heads of the living.

  So truth, in the tragic genre, had against the odds already been spoken, and was only briefly forced to take a back seat to gung-ho platitude when the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper quoted a soldier whom, he claimed, couldn’t wait to get to Omaha Beach. Gordon Brown rallied with a moving vision of the liberating armada, but then scuttled it with large invitations to honour their memory by Making the World a Better Place. Exit Thucydides, enter Hallmark Cards.

  As usual it fell to the Historian-in-Chief to get to the heart of the matter: asking why D-Day still meant so much to us. It was, he said, the sheer improbability of success. However appalling the cock-ups of that day, this could not be true when the immensity of the American and British industrial smash-machine was brought to bear against the overstretched Reich. But Obama’s second answer nailed it: that, for all the imperfections and flaws of the Allies, the absolute moral clarity that bound together the men of 6 June, the obligation to resist and uproot a regime that had been fed on the appetite for ‘subjugation and extermination’, radiated a redemptive glory over the human condition. Mirabile dictu, decency is possible. And such historical outcomes, said the Historian, summoning his own inner Tolstoy, do not happen according to any grand historical design. They are merely the aggregated acts of countless individual human agents who for one moment were lit by the simplicity of moral purpose.

  So, when you are all losing your cornflakes on the unedifying news of the day, just hold that imperishable event close, honour the wrinkles that were once just twenty-year-olds trying to make it to the end of the beach and, while they were at it, made the world a better place.

  Gothic Language: Carlyle, Ruskin

  and the Morality of Exuberance

  London Library Lecture, 12 July 2008

  When Ralph Waldo Emerson was giving a course of lectures in London in 1831, Carlyle did his new friend the honour of going to hear him and, of course, chaffed him for being so cowardly as to read from a prepared text instead of facing the terror and exhilaration of impromptu – Carlyle’s own preferred style. No terror, no life force. So, I thought, in honour of one of the Presidents of the Library I should do the same and then I thought, well, no, the occasion is quite terrifying enough already, and besides that kind of life force may not be what the patrons of the London Library need on an evening in July, or at any rate such a lecture, even though it might take unanticipated and
thrilling twists and perhaps even on occasion rise to a Carlyean level of romantic vehemence but go on and on rather like this Carlyleo-Ruskinian sentence and feel in the end quite as long as The French Revolution. So apologies in advance for this quasi-reading.

  This is probably the only audience in London to whom the question ‘why does no one read Ruskin and Carlyle any more?’ would be a gross impertinence. But then we know that London Library readers aren’t exactly the common clay, so just to confirm my suspicions about everyone else I went round the corner to Waterstone’s and asked if they happened to have anything, anything at all by Carlyle? ‘FIRST NAME’ was the response of the kindly person at Information as she tapped the computer. And there was every single title with a big fat Zero by their side indicating not on shelves, not in inventory, no orders placed; no demand. Ruskin fared only slightly better with a travellers’ edition of Stones of Venice and that was it.

  Though Kenneth Clark, sixty years ago, made a valiant effort to prescribe ‘Ruskin for the Modern Day’, no one paid it much heed and the green volumes of Modern Painters, never mind Fors Clavigera and Munera Pulveris go on gathering title dust. There are I suppose plenty of reasons NOT to read Carlyle. In particular, it probably doesn’t help that his biggest fan in the 20th century was Hitler. And Carlyle was an equal opportunities hater, detested Jews as much as Negroes . . . (he called them something different) – so it was rather delicious when I discovered that Hotel Carlyle in New York (itself a wondrous oxymoron when you think about it) was named in honour of the great man by its builder Moses Ginsberg. Ruskin is a byword for sniggering about sex; and preciousness. But when I nonetheless assign both of them to students at Columbia what they gag on right away is the language. In a course on what I loosely call Earth Writing, I assigned them the page on Slaty Crystalline in volume 4 and they probably hadn’t expected to read this:

  And behold as we look farther into it, it is all touched and troubled like waves by a summer breeze, rippled far more delicately than seas or lakes are rippled; THEY only undulate along their surfaces, – this rock trembles through its every fibre like the chords of an Eolian harp – like the stillest air of spring with the echoes of a child’s voice. Into the heart of all those great mountains, through every tossing of their boundless crests, and deep beneath all their unfathomable defiles, flows that strange quivering of their substance.

  Or how about Carlyle in the introduction to Cromwell, attacking Drysasdust antiquarianism:

  Dreariest continent of shot rubbish the eye ever saw, confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon’s edge, obscure, in lurid twilight as of the shadow of death, trackless, without index, without fingerpost or mark of any human foregoer – where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude peopled only by somnambulant Pedants, Dilettants and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, Norroys, griffins, wyverns and chimeras dire . . .

  ‘“What the hell is that?” is pretty much the usual response: ‘Prose run mad’ as Thackeray put it – and he was a friend; embarrassing poetry? Yes in both cases perhaps. For it was precisely this determination to make the distinction between the poetry and prose moot, to create what some of you might still think of as a Frankenstein of a genre – poetic non-fiction; but at any rate a style of prose writing that concerns itself with some of the defining characteristics of verse: an attention to cadence, to the sonorities of words, sentences leaping from the matrix of syntax to do their own thing in aid of what Carlyle praised in Ruskin as ‘melody of utterance’ and in another moment as ‘poetic indignation’. What bound them together as a ‘minority of two’ (Carlyle’s characterisation in 1865) was their impatience with empty grammatical decorum. Such writing – very often the writing of their critics – amounted they thought to a kind of literary embalming, a film laid over the raw vitality of history, or painting. Both Ruskin (the young Ruskin at any rate) and Carlyle struggled for years with what we might call a problem of translation: how to catch and fix that subject matter without rendering it inert. Doing justice to the original meant, they romantically thought, more than simply total immersion in its lived reality but as much as a muscular re-enactment – of the French or Puritan Revolutions; or the construction of a painting by Tintoretto or Turner, or even, when Ruskin fancied himself privy to the design of God (which was much of the time), entering into the mystery of his terrestrial creation and producing something as oxymoronic as lyric geology. The issue for both of them was not so much that writing about history and art was second-hand; almost all non-fiction would share that quality; but that revelling in the second-handedness was prized by the guardians of the trade as a model of the report well-written, the work well done. To be distant was, in that view, elegant, trustworthy, sound; when to be close, they believed, was to be true. Their passion was engaged in the redefinition of clarity: to replace the reliability of distance with the unreliable but more faithful experience of proximity. The clarity of distance proceeded from the superiority of hindsight. But Carlyle in particular yearned to make the reader humble in the face of ultimately inscrutable providence and thus recover through rude force, the uncertain outcomes of history and art, to set the reader down again on the edge of undetermined possibility. And this, for Carlyle and Ruskin, was always more than an aesthetic challenge. To make readers exult, tremble, panic once more, whether in the workshop of Tintoretto or the National Convention, was to rescue them from the besetting sin of intellectual complacency; history as the unfolding of inevitability. It was also to remake the historian’s vocation as resistance to disappearance; ‘the etiolation of human features into mouldy blank’, as Carlyle put it of the seventeenth century.

  To put it another way; the writing rules of the Johnsonian eighteenth century had been above all committed to transparency and harmony. The brute chaos of the world mastered as knowledge. That knowledge was cool in its dispassion. What Ruskin and Carlyle wanted to generate was a different kind of knowledge; one that proceeded from warm-bloodedness; one that proceeded from total absorption in its subject to the point of letting go of the usual mechanics of perception. What was commonly taken to be vision, comprehension, they believed was – a word they both liked – ‘owlish’; a form of blindness, for it did no more than measure surfaces. It was not so much sight as surveying. Though they revered the masters who had ventured afresh with language – Wordsworth and Coleridge above all, and with some reservations Hazlitt – they still felt that none of the conventions was capable of pulling the reader into uncomfortable, attentive, proximity; the abolition of body space between past and present, subject and object. On the other hand, if some sort of diction could be fashioned that attacked the automatic quality of reading, the reader might be provoked into a kind of creative partnership with the writer, become sparring partners in a battle for the recovery in language of lived experience. Only that way, Carlyle believed, could what the Dryasdusts had doomed to be the ‘grand unintelligibility of the Seventeenth Century’ become audible once more. And the writing that did this work might itself be read as confrontationally heroic; its scars and scrapes, nicks and cuts, all unapologetically registering the force of the travail needed to make it. In some sense, the rugged endeavour of that work itself was meant to become a moral exemplum for readers. For both of the seers, noble handwork was the only salvation to a culture otherwise in thrall to the die-stamp of the machine, the aim of which was uniformity.

  Carlyle is always wanting, as a preliminary tactic, to obliterate the mediocre; scorch through its defensive primness. So it’s not surprising, then, that fire is the natural element of what he imagines to be a resurrection of the lost Gothic-native vigour of old English prose. When you read The French Revolution you smell smoke. Images of fire – bituminous, carboniferous – lick through its pages. Sometimes its very words seem printed in hot soot; the world consumed by the revolution, as Carlyle writes, is ‘black ashes’. Mirabeau is a ‘fiery fuliginous mass which could not be
choked or smothered but would fill all France with smoke. And now it has got air, it will burn its whole smoke substance, its whole smoke-atmosphere too, and fill all France with flames’ . Paris doesnt just fall to the revolution in July 1789, it burns: ‘Let conflagration rage; of whatsoever is combustible! Guard rooms are burnt, Invalids mess rooms . . . straw is burnt three cartloads of it hauled thither, go up in white smoke; almost to the choking of Patriotism itself; so that Elie with singed eyebrows had to drag back one cart . . . ’ An entire chapter is – for no reason the subsequent narrative clarifies – called ‘Flame-Pictures’ . Revolutionary events do not just happen, they ignite, and in a great climactic passage just before the onset of the Terror (though admittedly the book has more climaxes than it does pages) France itself becomes a ‘kindled Fireship’. The Girondins and the Jacobins ? ‘Here lay the bitumen stratum, there the brimstone one; so ran the vein of gunpowder of nitre, terebinth and foul grease.’

  You might say it was a Romantic commonplace, this playing with fire, when speaking and writing of epic events, though you won’t find it in Wordsworth’s version of the French Revolution nor in Romantic history before Carlyle because he single-handedly invents the genre. Critics habitually (and sometimes without quite sensing what they’re doing) characterise Carlyle’s style as pyrotechnic; the simultaneous blazing forth of vehement heat and blinding light springs from what we might call his Presbyterian Zoroastrianism; the sense that fire is the element of destruction and rebirth. Remember that he learned German in the first instance to read geology and it seems likely to me that in the great debate over the origins of the world, and in particular its mountains, Carlyle is certain to have been a vulcanist rather than a neptunist. He loved it when metaphors turned material, so naturally he was among the massive crowd (which included Ruskin’s hero Turner) watching the Houses of Parliament burn down the evening and night of 16 October 1834. It was about a month after Carlyle had begun work on The French Revolution and on that particular day he’d been working (reluctantly) with the Dr Dryasdusts in the British Museum, returning home to Cheyne Row with his usual ‘museum headache’. Looking from his back windows he noticed the angry red glow, opened them, inhaled the acrid smoke and hurried off as fast as he could to join the crowds on the Embankments. Though he heard some of the spectators complain that ‘it didnt make a good fire’, it was certainly hot enough for Carlyle’s – as for Turner’s – imagination to see the incineration as a cleansing of the fetid sty of corruption, from which phoenix-like some purer form of British constitution would surely arise. That the destruction of the house of Old Corruption had been caused by the burning of tally sticks, the record as Carlyle saw it of accumulated iniquity, only made it all the better. It seems likely, then, that he transferred the ‘flame-picture’ he had directly witnessed to the conflagration of the French monarchy.