Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  Every religion and every philosophy must, of course, be based on the assumption of the authority or the accuracy of something. But it may well be questioned whether it is not saner and more satisfactory to ground our faith on the infallibility of the Pope, or the infallibility of the Book of Mormon, than on this astounding modern dogma of the infallibility of human speech. Every time one man says to another, “Tell us plainly what you mean?” he is assuming the infallibility of language: this is to say, he is assuming that there is a perfect scheme of verbal expression for all the internal moods and meanings of men. Whenever a man says to another, “Prove your case; defend your faith,” he is assuming the infallibility of language: that is to say, he is assuming that a man has a word for every reality in earth, or heaven, or hell. He knows that there are in the soul tints more bewildering, more numberless, and more nameless than the colours of an autumn forest; he knows that there are abroad in the world and doing strange and terrible service in it crimes that have never been condemned and virtues that have never been christened. Yet he seriously believes that these things can every one of them, in all their tones and semi-tones, in all their blends and unions, be accurately represented by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals. He believes that an ordinary civilized stockbroker can really produce out of his own inside noises which denote all the mysteries of memory and all the agonies of desire.

  Paradoxically, in words like these, written against the power of words, Chesterton raises the reader’s trust in that same questioned power.

  What gave coherence to his eclectic curiosity, and provided him with a unified mythology and vocabulary, was the Catholic Church. Its vast intricacies allowed him a verbal caper that stern Protestantism would have frowned on. And confronted with the dépouillement of Cromwell’s temples, his rumbustious soul was joyfully drawn to the gold and pink and white of Rome, which he saw as depicting the Church’s great optimism. “Jesus Christ was crucified,” he remarked, “not because of anything he said about God, but on a charge of saying that a man could in three days pull down and rebuild the Temple.” And added: “Every one of the great revolutionists, from Isaiah to Shelley, have been optimists.” In his late twenties, the numinous became his grammar, and after his marriage to Frances Blogg (a Roman Catholic and an assiduous church-goer), he found in the strictures of ritual and the mysteries of the Old Religion a context and a purpose to his prose and a sense to the world. “The world is a problem, not a theorem,” he wrote, “And the word of the last day will be Q.E.F.”—“Which was to be done.”

  As an adolescent, brought up an Anglican, he had suddenly found himself in a mood of seemingly fathomless morbidity, which he later called a state of “moral anarchy.” This bleakness expressed itself in “an overpowering impulse to record or draw horrible ideas and images; plunging deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide” which lasted intermittently until his conversion. What exactly these ideas and images might have been we don’t know, but it isn’t impossible that a shadow, an echo, well after he had become a Catholic, found its way into his later work—in the horrors listed, for instance, in The Man Who Was Thursday, such as the man “who had dreamed all night of falling over precipices and had woke up in the morning when he was to be hanged” or the face that seemed so big as one approached it that it filled one with the fear that in the end “it might be too big to be possible.” These became, like the inaccurate facts in his essays, accurate inklings of what Chesterton called “the dark side of the heart.”

  But there is a bleaker side in his writings of which he seems not to have had any inkling at all. It is impossible to read Chesterton thoroughly and not come across clumsy anti-Semitic, antifeminist and racist remarks that wear lightly the same rhetorical devices that make his essays intelligent, moving and brilliant. It is as if a deeper, uglier side of society’s collective madness suddenly held sway, forcing the writer to pay a debt to his time and to those in power in his time, overpowering the language of recollection, making his words stilted, superficial, obscene. These are the moments when one senses that his fruitful memory, the epiphany of wonder that he said was at the source of his imagination, comes not from Chesterton himself, the individual, but from the man of his age, from the member of the class that spoke derisively of “our friends the Israelites,” of “the primitive Negroes” and of “the weaker sex.” Then his eclectic politics lose their individuality, paradox becomes contradiction, and his bons mots read as mere conservative slogans. He spoke against Hitler but made ugly anti-Jewish pronouncements:

  I am fond of Jews

  Jews are fond of money

  Never mind whose

  I am fond of Jews Oh,

  but when they lose

  Damn it all, it’s funny.

  He opposed the imperialistic Boer War at a time when even Shaw and H. G. Wells were for it, but his anti-imperialism stemmed from the belief that nothing foreign could be part of England; English minds would not be broadened, he thought, “by the study of Wagga-Wagga and Timbuctoo.” He passionately believed in every person’s free will but laughed at women’s efforts to become free: “Twenty million young women rose to their feet with the cry ‘we will not be dictated to’ and proceeded to become stenographers.” Funny as the phrasing may be, the joke is spoiled by being spoken in an age of brutal suffragette repression, late and voracious imperialism and the rise of the Third Reich. And here language no longer rings true. Chesterton must have known this, since he himself wrote, in admirable contradiction to these utterings, of the implied moral danger: “There is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again.”

  There are writers who, in their most compassionate, sensitive passages of writing, read like poseurs; only in their vilest remarks do they seem humane: Lautréamont, for instance, describing the deliberate torture of a child and Jonathan Swift, in his brutal satires. Others, for all their ranting, let their humanity be seen almost unwillingly, as a slip or a mistake, in their very misanthropy: Léon Bloy, Ezra Pound, Philip Larkin. There is something contrived about their tantrums. Chesterton belongs to neither sort: instead, he will refute himself, again and again, with deadly accuracy. Once, when his adversary at a debate failed to make an appearance, Chesterton took both stands and argued brilliantly both for and against the question of the evening. In the same way, his most bigoted remarks are demolished by his own arguments a few pages later. The man who makes fun of a man for being black or of a woman for wanting independence, is the same man who writes: “I can well imagine a man cutting his throat merely because he has stood by and seen a woman stripped and scourged quite late in the history of England and Ireland, or some negro burnt alive as he still is in the United States. But some part of this shocking shame lies in us all.”

  It is curious that, for such a fruitful and thought-provoking writer, Chesterton should have had almost no followers. The English once read him and then forgot him or shelved him among the ancients; the French admired him (admire him still) but at a distance. One of the few writers who consciously adopted Chesterton’s voice was Borges. Borges devoured and digested Chesterton, and paid him the homage of retelling him in Spanish, modelling on the Father Brown stories his own detective fictions and applying to his essays the Chestertonian style of discourse. In 1960, Borges wrote a short fable, “The Plot,” in which the fate of Julius Caesar, who dies uttering the words “You too, my son!” directed to his best-beloved Brutus, is compared to the fate of an Argentinian gaucho, cornered and knifed by a handful of other gauchos. As he falls, he recognizes among the assailants his godson and says “with gentle reproach and unhurried surprise” (Borges adds the warning: “These words must be heard, not read”), “Pero, che!” The story ends: “He is killed and he doesn’t know he must die for a scene to be repeated.” “Pero, che!” is untranslatable, except that some forty years earlier Chesterton, searching for a comparison, had written: “As if Caesar’s ‘Et tu, Brute’ might be tran
slated, ‘What, you here?’ ” Borges’s Argentinian expression exactly reflects that laconic incredulity.

  That events and their causes change according to the telling, mirroring common features or dark oceans of difference; that our understanding of the world may depend on the arrangement of words on a page and on the inflection given to those words; that words, in the end, are all we have to defend ourselves with and that the worth of words, like that of our mortal selves, lies in their very fallibility and elegant brittleness—all this Chesterton knew and incessantly recorded. Whether we have to courage to agree with him is, obviously, another matter.

  The Irresolutions of Cynthia Ozick

  Fiction is all discovery.…

  Essays know too much.

  CYNTHIA OZICK,

  Foreword to Art & Ardor

  CHILDREN KNOW WHAT most adults have forgotten: that reality is whatever seems real to us. That though the external world cannot be denied (as Dr. Johnson demonstrated by kicking a stone) it can be relighted and rearranged to mean anything we choose. The rules for the creation of our individual realities are magic rules: they depend on belief and must be obeyed with utter rigour and seriousness. Writers have in common with children and lunatics these quotidian acts of creation which, at their best, come to stand for our accepted view of the world. Dickens is the author of Victorian London, and Mark Twain created the Mississippi.

  In 1985, I was preparing a CBC radio series (never completed) on the pretentious theme of the Writer and God. My list of writers included Bernard Malamud, Borges (who told me that of God’s literary tastes we can know nothing), Elie Wiesel, Angela Carter (who roared with laughter into the microphone after my first question, said she had no idea what I was on about, and happily put an end to the interview) and Cynthia Ozick.

  Ozick arrived at the studio looking slightly incongruous: short, shy, a Richard III haircut framing a pair of dark-rimmed glasses. “I’m divided in two,” she said, and then, as if apologizing, “Most people are.” She explained, “Half of me is a citizen who lives in the world, and half of me is a writer. The citizen has one relationship with God, and the writer has an entirely different one. As a citizen I am awed by Deuteronomy 29:29, which says, ‘The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children for ever.’ As a citizen, I am not allowed to reflect upon those secret, mystical things. I am a Jew; I must therefore be agnostic. But as a writer, I can’t. As a writer I am gnostic, and the unknown is my wonderful meat and drink.” Later she extended the definition: “I am a pagan. The writer in me flies from God and goes to the gods.”

  In Judaism, only God is the Creator. Creation by a hand other than God’s would seriously infringe on His essential unity. God is a jealous Author who admits no competition. The Divine Craftsman, the Demiurge of the Platonists, must be One. But among the pagan gods there is always room for one more: the divine craftsmen are many.

  The theme of creation (who creates? what is created? how does creation take place?) runs through Ozick’s work like a scarlet thread. It makes her wonder, in her superb books of essays, such as Art & Ardor and Metaphor & Memory, how writers and readers create their fictional worlds. It leads her in exquisite long and short stories (collected, for instance, in The Pagan Rabbi and The Puttermesser Papers) to the visionary activities of her characters. It takes her, in her novel The Cannibal Galaxy, into the budding groves of parenthood and education. It forces her, in The Messiah of Stockholm, to build an infinite progression of creations, of literary chickens and eggs.

  Ozick’s essays often stem from a review, usually for the book pages of the New York Times and the New Republic. Most reviewers, in my experience, make the reader wonder: what in the world is the use of these self-appointed Virgils who pretend to guide us through this hell of a novel or that purgatory of a memoir? Who needs someone reading over our shoulder, giggling, sobbing or going into raptures of glee or disgust? Nothing can replace our own reading, and yet the preamble or postface to a text that a reviewer provides can, and in some cases does, turn a book on its head in a refreshing and illuminating way. For me, this has always been the case when reading one of Ozick’s reviews.

  Take, for example, Ozick’s review of Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, included in Metaphor & Memory. First she gives the bare facts: who Primo Levi was (“an Italian Jewish chemist from Turin”), the peculiarities of his life (“he was liberated from Auschwitz by a Soviet military unit in January of 1945, when he was 25”), and what his written work consisted of (“from that moment of reprieve … until shortly before his death in April of 1987, he went on recalling, examining, reasoning, recording—telling the ghastly tale—in book after book”). So far, so good. But immediately after this Ozick makes her first leap. She quotes the Coleridge epigraph Levi chose for his last book:

  Since then, at an uncertain hour

  That agony returns,

  And till my ghastly tale is told

  This heart within me burns.

  And, after commenting that these words “have never before rung out with such an antimetaphorical contemporary demand, or seemed so cruel,” Ozick concludes that Levi’s death, hurling himself down a spiral staircase four stories deep, must have been suicide. “The composition of that last Lager manuscript was complete, the heart burned out; there was no more to tell.”

  Now, readers owe no justifications to anyone except themselves, and then only upon demand. But a reviewer is a reader once removed, guiding the reader, not through the book, but through the reviewer’s reading of that book. So Ozick needs to explain her explanation.

  The way she does this is by counterpointing by shadow-reading. She quotes Levi on the suicide of another Jewish writer, Jean Améry, also a victim of the Nazis. Levi assumed that Améry took his life as a belated consequence of “trading punches” with a Polish criminal in the concentration camp. “Those who ‘trade blows’ with the entire world,” wrote Levi, “achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it because they are sure to be defeated.” This, Ozick says pointedly, must be borne in mind when approaching Levi’s suicide. Because, as storytellers know, every story has another side which the storyteller does not always see. And, through an association of quotations from and reflections on Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, Ozick places in front of us Levi’s shadow text. Levi, she concludes, who felt he was “a man somehow set apart from retaliatory passion,” must have suddenly awakened to the fact that his rage was dormant. “I grieve,” she says, “that he equated rage—the rage that speaks for mercifulness—with self-destruction.” Ozick has offered the reader another light by which to read Levi’s story.

  This is what I mean by Ozick’s intelligence, an intelligence that shone so clearly on our first meeting. She does not try to replace the reader’s relationship with a book, or colour the reader’s emotions. Her task (and in this she succeeds admirably) is to put to new uses the text’s own metaphors, to enlarge meanings, to shine light from other angles, to test for reverberations and echoes. After Ozick’s review, Levi’s book is not only a testimony on Auschwitz, but an interrogation on the quest for truth, on the value of aggression, on the sense of revenge, on solutions that reveal more about the quest itself than on the trivial matter of success or failure.

  This is something to which we, in our time, have grown accustomed but upon which we don’t seem to have reflected sufficiently. In our stories, the hero seldom reaches his goal. The test itself is the hero’s epic, independent of the often unhappy conclusion. Failure, these days, seems truer to life than success.

  The chronicle of one such life is the ostensible theme of Ozick’s novel The Cannibal Galaxy. The hero is Joseph Brill, a schoolmaster. We meet him at the age of fifty-eight, the principal of the Edmond Fleg Primary School, which he has founded somewhere in the United States. We are led back through his life to his childhood in Paris, where his fishmonger father seemed more sympathetic than his somewhat distracted mother to young Brill’s love
of literature, being able to delight “in the iridescent scales of an ordinary morue? We are made witnesses to the boy’s escapades into culture—the Musée Carnavalet, a trip to London and a meeting with an old E. M. Forster-like writer. Finally, the war: Brill escapes the Nazi roundups and is hidden by nuns in a cellar while, unheard by him (but we, the readers, know more), his youngest sister screams throughout the infernal day in the Vel’d’Hiv. After the war, he comes to America and founds a school. Then the novel begins.

  Ozick’s biographical intent is made clear in two epigraphs—one by Yehuda Amichai, asking where his place might be between the two well-matched halves of this world, those who love and those who hate, and another by Emily Dickinson: “The Rest of Life to See!/ Past Midnight! Past the Morning Star!” Yet Brill’s biography is only the apparent subject. Throughout, like the scarlet undercoat the Dutch painters applied to their canvases, a fiercer story shines through: a story of devoured galaxies, engulfed traditions, changing generations and lost souls. Brill’s life becomes a vantage point from which Ozick shows us an epic fresco, ageless and endless. And because the author is Cynthia Ozick, the epic is, of course, the history of the Jews.

  Brill is one of the many faces of the surviving Jew, a man who tries to compromise and fails, not because his task is doomed by fate (fatalism would be “contrary to our teaching,” says Brill) but because his task is impossible. Compromise, the middle way, leads nowhere. And Brill is essentially a creature of compromise.