Can the Gods Cry?

by Allan Cameron

  Perhaps I would have let the whole matter rest, had the Observer not brought out the following day the crassest possible provocation of the Left that could be imagined. Too strong a statement, you say. Of course, there will be provocations more violent, more dishonest and more illogical, but as crass as this? I doubt it. The reviewer (whose name we need not mention) was examining Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects, and the accusatory title screams, “That’s typical Chomsky – still happy to bite the hand that feeds him.” No one wants to join the ranks of nostalgic old writers – or at least do this too publicly – but such an argument would never have been used thirty years ago or possibly just fifteen. We’ll leave aside the crassness of the reviewer’s argument that even the bad policies US and Western governments implement are done by people who genuinely believe them noble things to do. Surely anyone with a modicum of experience of the world must know that people even guiltier than Bush and Blair always believe that they are motivated by noble sentiments. Evil is not the product of demonic thought but of banal self-interest, self-belief and self-deception. We’ll leave aside the crassness of the journalist’s claim that Chomsky “dismisses vast tracts of history in a few splenetic paragraphs, as if no alternative interpretation is worth considering,” when actually he appears to be doing just that in relation to Chomsky’s book. But we cannot overlook the crassness of the idea that an author should write about his own society as though that society were a medieval patron who has to be flattered and grovelled to, because society pays the bill – whatever that means. And the reason why that title would not have been used thirty years ago was that, at the time, the West was rightly (but also hypocritically, as time has now shown) criticising the Soviet Union for adopting just such arguments. In those days, the West made every effort to display a convincing image of high moral standards, and demanded the application in the Soviet bloc of the very laws we now play fast and loose with in the name of the “War against Terrorism” or whatever the current term is.

  It is true that here indigenous dissenters are not imprisoned or tortured. Whatever slights are inflicted are entirely bearable, but that does not mean that we are obliged to provide “some occasional flicker of admiration for the achievements of western civilisation”, as the Observer reviewer demands of Chomsky. That is not our job. I might very well admire the achievements of the Enlightenment (particularly the early English one) – in fact I do – but I am not in the habit of shouting about it or considering it an entirely unique moment in history. Moreover, I am slightly unsettled by all this shouting about the Enlightenment by people who are bent on bringing it to an end. The Enlightenment is being waved around as the flag of our supposed superiority, but if it has any worth then it is universalist. Voltaire, perhaps the first truly European writer, was unstinting in his satire of every European society, even the English one he so often admired, but Candide can only find bucolic peace in Turkey. I’m sure Voltaire had no illusions about the Ottoman Empire, but he fought his battles at home. Nobody thinks him less French or European because of that; in fact, we are very glad to have him, given our fair share of monsters produced over the intervening period.

  Wolfe Henry and the Observer reviewer are typical of the modern intellectual. Well, we all want to earn a crust and enjoy a little bit of comfort, but surely in Henry’s case, there is no more need to butter up the establishment. Success should bring freedom, even in these conformist times. In any event, I am determined to have a chat with one of these two enlightened gentlemen, and it seems sensible to try it out with the more subtle of the two. It is, of course, a fearful task and Henry’s wit is as quick as mine is dull. I ask the reader to hold my hand, which she is quite capable of doing as it will only be a fictional conversation. A real one would be terrifying and Henry might take me for a political stalker and splatter my brains over the interior decoration of a Burger King, as he dreams in The Revolting Cubiculum of doing to stalkers more generally. I have read the book of course, and am going in well prepared. Let’s see where it takes us.

  § § §

  We arrive at the house one bright summer morning, and I knock at the door. A dainty Filipino maid appears, or is it a young man working on a Ph.D. and acting as the great man’s secretary in his spare time. My eyesight is deteriorating fast. I declare my presumptuous intention, give the person my card and introduce the reader, “This lady has kindly agreed to take notes of the conversation.” Here I offend the forty-five per cent of my symbolic reader who find the term “lady” condescending and the thirty per cent who are men and dislike being excluded even from such a minor thing. Then Wolfe Henry appears. He has a round, masculine head with fierce little eyes that contrast with his well-rehearsed sardonic grin. Actually I am probably just remembering him from his television days. From the back cover, he looks trim and thoughtful. Now I’ve put on my bifocals, he does look trim and thoughtful. Like all celebrities, he looks after himself. He has perhaps a private gym, and watches his calorie intake, but nevertheless keeps a good cellar. A question of balance. You wouldn’t want to argue with such a substantial fellow as that. He looks so much more in the world than anyone else. In fact he gives the sly impression that he had a hand in designing it. It all makes so much sense to him.

  He is actually very amiable. He smiles. “I’m probably going to regret this,” he says, “but come in. Why not? Who are you anyway? … Very sorry, never heard of you. But I am so ignorant about many things. It’s hard to keep up.”

  He is American and retains very little of his American accent, but just enough to give a pleasant timbre to his sonorous voice. Americans come over to Europe either to escape the idiocy of American political discourse or to search for and identify with some old-world snobbery. In other words, we get the best and the worst. I was never quite sure which category he belongs to. American manners are good, exquisitely good, but is that because that most parochial melting pot tries too hard to make a nation of its diversity – rather than enjoy the fact that it contains the rest of the world within itself? Everyone is on their best behaviour because they don’t want to be misunderstood. There are simple good manners and complex good manners; the Americans engage in the first and the Indians in the second (beware of an Indian who pays you an excessive compliment, and remember to keep rejecting those offers of a third helping of Chicken Biryani: you’re not meant to say yes). It’s the difference between syrup and an impenetrable spice. Maybe Henry came over here to get away from all that syrupy niceness; he looks like a man who could publicly insult you so understatedly that you don’t realise it until two weeks later. I am now thinking it would have been much better to interview the critic from the Observer.

  “Fire away,” he says or orders, after we have slightly stiffly found our respective seats in his tidy and beautifully arranged study (it must have been a Filipino maid I saw).

  “Well, it seems to me that you are very concerned about how posterity will judge your opus.” Why have I said opus? I never say opus. Shouldn’t I have said opera? That’s silly. Perhaps I should have said opera omnia? Of course not, I’m looking at the wrong language; I should have said oeuvre. He likes the odd Latinism though. No, I should have just said “your work”. I must have lost my knack for this conversation business. It’s so difficult: you can’t cross out and start again. “Would you like to enlarge on that?” I end my question weakly. I don’t sound like myself at all.

  Henry smiles thinly and slyly. I think he has secretly taken offence. “Of course it concerns me. It concerns all writers. You write, I think you said,” he adds to emphasise the dubiety that surrounds this circumstance. “I expect it concerns you too.” He’s right that we all want it to some degree, but I have to be realistic. Mostly I am concerned with finishing the work and paying the bills. I would prefer to ask other questions: will there be books? Will there be readers? Will there be anyone who knows what a hanging participle is?

  I move on, “Mr. Henry, you suggest in your book that people find it easier to empathise with
others, if they live in a democracy. Could you explain why this is the case? I would have thought that in repressive situations, people can often empathise much better. They are less self-obsessed and more reliant on mutual assistance. We all know what a competitive lot poets are, and this is confirmed by some of your comments. If you read the poems by Russian poets on other Russian poets in The Page and the Fire, selected and beautifully translated by Peter Oram, you discover how close they were. Surely if that was true of poets, then it must be even truer of other professions and circles in the Soviet Union.”

  “In a democracy, I thought it would be clear, people have to negotiate everything. Civil society engages individuals from all walks of life and they need to understand and mediate other people’s needs,” he looks at me sternly.

  “Isn’t that a common sense argument that ignores observation of real behaviour? Can you really put your hand on your heart and say that people empathise more with each other than they did thirty or fifty years ago?”

  “We were a democracy then too,” he smiles condescendingly.

  “You’re right. But I have lived under a dictatorship and I never noticed any sudden dearth of empathy.”

  “Your argument is a little unscientific and anecdotal, don’t you think?”

  What do I know of his brilliance? What right have I to pronounce on the wonders of his brain? I might ask, in my silly way, how much his fame was based on his ability to humiliate those he interviewed – often people whose first language was not English and whose understanding of his overblown and ironic flattery could never match that of his viewers, who were entertained, thank God. That is the most important thing – a good belly laugh in a good belly.

  It is generally agreed that the idiot’s lantern, as the television business likes to call the box in the corner that keeps it in business, can turn idiots into geniuses, but on occasions it can turn geniuses into idiots. Or perhaps it just makes everyone brilliantly and reliably mediocre. Its Midas touch is quite indiscriminate, and works as well on the clever as on the stupid. Isn’t there something a little ersatz about every emotion it produces? Isn’t there something a little empty about all the loud and extravagant claims made day after day after busy day to feed those bellies that have to laugh? And wasn’t it Wolfe Henry who really taught us to laugh at other cultures we barely understand? Those mirabilia from countries whose televisual cultures cannot challenge the sophistication of our own – how they made us laugh and feel so much better about ourselves.

  Once a philosopher lived in a tub, but now this great philosopher whose enlightened works excite jiffy bags and critics alike, has become one – filled to the brim with judgements on everyone from Montgomery to Elias Canetti, for whom he has great contempt, although I believe that this world would be poorer in very different ways if those two had not come into it. And can I get to know anything about them through a dab of tittle-tattle from Henry? But he does like politicians and how smoothly he flatters them. The autobiographer enjoys their autobiographies.

  Now I am as mad as Don Quixote – mad eyes, mad mind filled with mad thoughts – and I tilt at politicians, because I think they are giants… But there is a difference: Quixote’s windmills did a good job of milling the corn, especially on a windy day, and they never thought too much about whether they were giants or not. My targets, on the other hand, also think they are giants, and they always need other giants to reassure them that they really are giants too.

  These political giants of ours are not like the ones in fairy tales who merely get on with the business of crunching the bones of lesser people, while endlessly repeating insane rhymes in a gruff voice. Yes, of course, our giants do this too, but they also keep a measuring tape attached to the wall of one of their very high rooms. Because our giants are sensitive souls. They have a terror that one day they will wake up and find that they are giants no longer. Their being giants resembles having to pump hard to keep inflated a balloon with a slow leak. And one day that microscopic hole – that tiny weakness or blemish – will rip and with what terrible result?

  A tiny piece of crinkled rubber, a little like a used condom.

  § § §

  “This dialogue is unfair,” Henry says quite justifiably. “No dialogue at all, in fact. You are in complete control and choose to caricature me. And I don’t share your right to gloss this dialogue with erratic thoughts. If you were successful and mixed with politicians, you would like them too, I’m sure. You know they’re very likeable and good company. It’s a cliché to go on about politicians.”

  “You’re right”, I admitted. “I caricature you because for me you are a caricature of your own making. We rarely know our close friends that well; what can we possibly know about celebrities who are synthetic constructs mass-produced electronically in every home and no less artificial than the plastic wrappings that fill our overflowing bins. You – that is the individual you – are probably a very fine person. Most persons are. Whereas most crimes or mere acts of badness are committed in the family or, what concerns us here, professionally, because family and work are institutions in which we become inured by habit to our own badness or rather the badness expected of us. That is why writers should of course be skilled craftsmen and women, but never professionals. A professional must learn to be practical and place each human phenomenon in its correct professional box, while a writer must always observe the particular truth and magnify it in relation to the general one. A writer must retain a degree of wonderment, even in cynical old age.

  “Yes, I’m sure you’re a fine fellow,” I effervesced. “And I’m sure that better writers than us are morally more reprehensible when they are not writing, but when they write – when they hurl their reckless souls into that wild current of fantasy, thoughts and troubling truths that speak with their own voices, then they are better people than we are.”

  “So you admit it. This is just a vile caricature – a personal attack from some no-hoper.”

  “I admit it, but do not feel a moment’s guilt. I repay you with the same coin – but, forgive me, with a little more subtlety.”

  “The same coin? I’ve never heard of you. Why would I attack you? Why would I pay you such a compliment?”

  “This is not personal. You have placed yourself up there and pass judgement in a manner that will never unsettle the powerful, who should club together and buy you a golden gargoyle blowing a raspberry.”

  “That is quite uncalled-for,” says my reader firmly. “You invite yourself into this man’s home and you insult him. Have you no manners?”

  “I apologise, and anyway quite a few golden gargoyles would have to be handed out. You are not alone,” I mutter contritely.

  “Yes,” says Wolfe Henry, who is hardly in need of being emboldened, “you take a lot on yourself. You really think you know it all.”

  “I don’t even know what it is to know,” I retort, emboldened in turn by the logic of argument. “I have no real sense of reality. I can only approach conviction by negation. Those who are convinced I distrust; those who believe in themselves strike me as lacking all credibility and those who show contempt come the closest to being contemptible.”

  “How very liberal!” he mutters wearily to underscore his complete faith in the power of sarcasm – his own above all others’.

  “‘Liberal’ is no insult for me, whatever the tone it is pronounced in,” I am now in full flow. “Of course I know that ‘liberal’ is a word that, like most political terminology, wriggles around as does a fish caught on a baited hook. It leaps and darts, and if the fisherman has no skill, it still has a chance of breaking free – of eluding all useful definition. We define something by what it is not, because in politics, too many people are motivated by what they detest and not by what they desire for the public thing. And yet all the other desired outcomes – even the opposites – have their part of the truth. Globalism, regionalism, localism – all have valid demands on us. Collectivism and individualism – who can deny the need to respect them
both? Although we might disagree over the proper balance. Only with the racist one cannot talk, because by dividing humanity along mythical distinctions racists irredeemably cut themselves off from the humanity they wish to mutilate.”

  “You’re all over the place. It’s difficult to pin you down. Try talking a little sense for a change,” he drawls.

  “Yes, I am a chameleon – to some extent. Put me in a room with a nihilist and I will try to be understanding of his nihilism. My default position is indeed somewhat liberal and humanistic, but I can see why someone might despair of humanity and ultimately find our whole species a canker on the planet. It does not offend me that nihilists exist; in fact, I delight in them…”

  “Oh God! I’m arguing with some ‘peace and love’ hippy,” Henry leans forward, his eyes blazing. “Get this! Nihilists are narcissistic wankers who believe that the world has neglected their supreme talents. They project their paranoid sense of rejection onto the universality and affect a contemptuousness that fails to conceal their desire to be loved by those they reject. They are not cuddly fellows who have taken a slightly mistaken route for understandable reasons; they are monsters. I’m very much a liberal but if there’s a depraved side to liberalism, then you’ve become its spokesperson.”

  “Yes, we disagree on the definition of most things; liberalism isn’t the only one.”

  “So what else have you got up your sleeve?”

  “Most of all I hate that old lie: that communism and Nazism are identical. One could forgive an ambitious young man in the sixties and seventies for repeating such drivel to secure a post in journalism or at the BBC, but now? – twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union when we are meant to be so busy detesting Islamists of various hues. Of course, the innocents who went into the gas chambers and the innocents who were driven without their coats and boots in an open lorry in sub-zero temperatures to dig their own graves in some featureless Russian forest suffered the same fate. But the category of executed innocents – a torrent of blood that flushes out of that slaughterhouse called history – is no more informative than the category of famine victims or of war dead. Clearly these acts should be condemned by all civilised people – to use an adjective you like to use; I would prefer to say ‘all human beings’.”