The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  Surprisingly few, very few indeed, avoided the difficult questions to slip into gossiping about nothing in particular, or else lost their concentration and interest in their partner. The method has also been used by corporate bosses to improve collaboration in their organisations, and by heads of government ministries so that they could get to know their colleagues better. On the 22nd of August, an annual Feast of Strangers is held in public parks where tourists and natives can converse with the aid of the Menu to discover one another, the opposite of a carnival, with no need to pretend.

  A hunger for more profound conversation can be a gnawing misery in all walks of life, in love, in the family, at work and in communities, but so far humans seem to have struggled largely in vain for both the right and the ability to speak freely. None of the declarations of human rights has proclaimed the right to be listened to. Even the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution only protects the citizen from limitations on free speech imposed by the state; nothing protects against restrictions by employers and nothing obliges the free media to publish what it does not want to hear. The first duty of love is to listen, said the theologian Tillich, but how many people does each person love and how many lovers listen? How many people have mastered the art of talking about themselves without breaching modesty or honesty, and without being boring or misunderstood? If everyone weighed their words before speaking, and wrote only what they were sure they wanted to say, there would be long silences, and most would write nothing at all. But if a conversation is recorded and made the basis of a draft written self-portrait, it can be corrected and added to and gradually shaped into a coherent picture of what one wants others to understand about one.

  Enormous courage is needed for ordinary people to reject the tyranny of despots, and just as much courage is needed to escape from the worry that one might reveal oneself, by what one says, as being inadequate or despicable. If, ever since my youth, I had made a habit of having a conversation with one different stranger every week, a ritual like taking my clothes to the laundry, cleaning my mind of prejudices, I might eventually have been introduced to 15,000 individual visions of the world. That would be a small inroad into the seven billion people I would ideally need to know to feel that my visit to the planet earth has not been superficial. But if people made self-portraits, I could read and see and be puzzled by many more. A gallery of self-portraits is slowly being formed not as a collection of the gems of high art, but to give all human beings a place where they can have a conversation and then make and display a self-portrait combining any medium, film, photography, sculpture, painting, music and text, which says not simply ‘This is who I am’, nor ‘I am not what I appear to be’, but also ‘This is what I can contribute, this is what I have not yet done’. Parents are often mysteries to their children and vice versa. A student who showed his self-portrait to his father found that it led to the first real conversation they had ever had. I wish my parents had left me self-portraits; there is so much more I wish I knew about them.

  Diderot complained when an oil portrait was painted of him: ‘I warn you it is not I. I had in one day a hundred different appearances, as determined by what was affecting me. I was serious, sad, pensive, tender, violent, passionate, enraptured. But I was never as you see me here.’ In each of the chapters of this book, you see me from a different angle, confronted by a different puzzle and by the concerns of different individuals. Lucian Freud’s gaze awoke sensitivities and sharpened ideas of which I may otherwise not have been aware. The distinction between a portrait and a self-portrait is misleading. There needs to be another word in between them.

  A conversation and a portrait are not magic solutions for the enmities that regularly ruin the best-laid plans. I am not seeking solutions, only paths to explore.

  [4]

  What alternatives are there to being a rebel?

  ONLY HUMAN BABIES CRY when they first see the world. Do they instantly realise that though they belong to a species that has defeated all others, subjugating nature to its whims, they do not like what they see? Some may spend their life protesting and rebelling, while others will eventually shut up and tell pollsters that they are quite or very happy with their lot, but what other options are there for crying babies, for bewildered adolescents, for frustrated adults, and the countless other categories who have reasons for rebelling?

  A century ago, the cinema was heralded as the great technological innovation destined to transform the mind-sets of the masses by opening their eyes to worlds they had never seen. One of Russia’s most gifted film directors, Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948), believed he could use the cinema – which he hailed as a ‘new Muse’ – to ‘shock the audience’ and convert the ‘ignorant peasants’ so that they would abandon centuries of custom for a socialist utopia. Interpreting art as a revolutionary act, and putting his faith in the ‘Army of Art’, he developed brilliant techniques for producing ‘collisions’ between images, and extraordinary visual metaphors, at once poetic and disturbing, to stimulate new ideas. However, for all his inventiveness, he did not know how to escape being another classic rebel, retreading the path of history’s long line of frustrated original geniuses.

  He had the traditional background of a rebel. He hated his ‘tyrannical’ and ‘bourgeois’ father while admiring his frustrated, rebellious mother, who divorced her husband to lead an independent life, travelling abroad alone: ‘She was eccentric. I was eccentric. She was ridiculous. I was ridiculous.’ (Nobody has yet counted the mothers, seemingly corseted in conventional roles, who have guided their children into unconventional paths.)

  Though trained as an engineer like his father, he abandoned that profession to become first a caricaturist – expressing his contempt for all authority – and then a reformer of the theatre. But he was a bit too rebellious and was expelled from his drama school for ‘incompatibility’. Fascinated by revolution, violence and conflict, he rejected religion, though he con-tinued to be haunted by its rituals. Despite his extraordinarily wide culture, living ‘knee-deep in books’, absorbing the thinking of all nations, making friends with the greatest artists of his time from all over the world, inheriting a mixture of Russian, Latvian, German and Jewish origins, speaking five languages, studying Japanese during his military service, he was nevertheless unable to get himself understood beyond a limited circle: the masses liked his films only when they saw them as reinforcing their traditional patriotism. France and England both banned the showing of his first masterpiece, Battleship Potemkin. Hollywood rejected him for not being commercial enough. The Soviet government persecuted him and ordered him to remake his films to fit Stalinist ideology. So he banged his head against almost every possible obstacle. His oppressor Stalin also banged his head against the obstinacy of old habits, and killed many millions of people, terrified that he would never have enough power to defeat all his enemies.

  Eisenstein ended up humiliated, forced to obey Stalin and listen politely to his pontificating about how films should make the masses happy workers: that was the only way he could continue to be allowed to film. He found himself in the same dilemma as Galileo, threatened with death by the Inquisition, forced to recant. ‘In my personal, too personal history,’ he wrote, ‘I have had on several occasions to stoop to these levels of self-abasement.’ He died at his desk, composing a letter which said: ‘All my life I’ve wanted to be accepted with affection, yet I’ve felt compelled to withdraw . . . and thus remain forever a spectator.’ He never pursued the insight he had into why this was so. In The Glass House, a film he planned but never had a chance to make, he had wanted to show how people do not see each other, because ‘it never occurs to them to look’, they do not have curiosity, they do not know how to look. He was a long way from the architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) who, at around the same time, believed that modern houses with glass walls were enough to bring about ‘the freedom of the individual’ and a new way of life. How to look at others, and how to develop a curiosity in others so that they would
enjoy looking at others, was something Eisenstein did not discover, mainly because there were limits to his own curiosity; he saw the peasantry as a class, not as individuals. He filled his films with types, not individuals, choosing as his actors people who looked like caricatures of the part they played. Not that he was unaware of the complexity of individuals – he once used three people to appear on stage simultaneously playing different sides of one person – but his ambition was to escape from the distraction of detail, to make generalisations about humanity as a whole, to reach the ultimate goal of the dissatisfied, ‘to change the world’.

  How could Eisenstein believe he could convince huge masses of people to think as he did himself, or make them have new thoughts, or even enjoy thinking? The history of his predecessors, who like him have wanted to make big changes, is discouraging. Humanity’s brilliant triumphs of ingenuity are counterbalanced by revolutions that have seldom achieved the hoped-for results, or have created unforeseen problems. When despotisms have been overthrown, they have often been replaced by other kinds of dictatorship, concealed behind populist slogans. Peasant revolts, slave revolts, tax revolts, famine riots, strikes, revolutions, youth movements, women’s movements, and protests against war or military conscription, even when they seem to be successful, can find their achievements disappearing in the mazes of bureaucracy or reversed by reactions which surreptitiously turn the clock back to where it was before. Despite the innumerable protests of the oppressed and the frustrated over many centuries, almost everyone still has a grievance or a regret of some kind. Hardly anyone can avoid having some elements of a troubled conscience, which neither prosperity nor hygiene have been able to wash away. Almost no-one can escape being disadvantaged because of their sex, their appearance, their background, their peculiarities or the stereotypes into which they fall.

  ‘The distance that separates the rich from the rest increases daily, poverty is becoming more unbearable and hate is growing more bitter’: these words, written twenty years before the French Revolution by L. S. Mercier (1740–1814), remain largely true today – except perhaps for the phrase about hate, the privileged having become increasingly skilful masters of the alchemy that turns hate into acceptance of what is presumed to be inevitable. Mercier was the author of a utopia, The Year 2440, in which he foresaw the abolition of prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters, priests, pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea, tobacco and immoral literature. None of these predictions have been fulfilled.

  Rebels have not become more efficient at attaining their goals, because by their very nature they are prone to disagree amongst themselves and it is inconceivable that the rebels of the world should unite. Even when revolutions occasionally do succeed, it is frequently by betraying themselves, adopting the weapons of their opponents, becoming violent and repressing dissent. Moreover, everyone is taught obedience at school, whereas rebellion is an untutored instinct, rarely rewarded. No wonder that by middle age so many young men and women have packed their idealism away in a bottom drawer, like clothes that have gone out of fashion. But the fact that big revolutions occur only rarely, at most once or twice in a century, should not make one forget the many thousands of lesser, local uprisings not commemorated in school textbooks, which emphasise that discontent is a dormant volcano that can suddenly erupt as easily in prosperous times as in moments of depression. How can it avoid once again spewing no more than a greatcloud of smoke? That is the question that Eisenstein provokes.

  Rebellion is not the only alternative to obedience or stagnation. Independence or eccentricity are not the only ways of not being totally nondescript. Just as there is a rebellious streak in most people, so there is also an artistic one, and art can be a subtle way of revealing one’s attitude to reality. Westerners normally think of artists in the narrow context of paintings and objects collected in museums, or of geniuses setting standards of beauty that few can attain. But there is a very ancient tradition that everybody who wishes to live fully needs to be a practising artist. In China, the very act of writing, using a brush, made one aware that every brushstroke could be a thing of beauty. Literacy and artistry were one. All literate people were encouraged to be painters, poets, calligraphers and musicians. Bureaucrats in cities, imprisoned by office routines, were urged to nourish their spirit by going on ‘imaginary journeys through landscape paintings’. Millions of Confucian officials became ‘the largest group of art patrons the world has ever seen’.

  The first history of art ever written, The Record of Famous Paintings of Successive Dynasties (A.D. 847) insisted that art ‘perfected civilisation’ and ‘supported human relationships’. To be an artist in China meant not just finding beauty in nature, but discovering one’s place in it. Painting involved viewing nature from many different angles (rather than through the single perspective Westerners adopted) and illuminating the relationships between seemingly disparate elements. Relationships were at the heart of art. The passion for landscape was supplemented by an intense interest in portraits, seeking not a likeness but a revelation of where a person stood in relation to the world. Painting could also be a cooperative activity among friends, joining to improvise pictures together. There was room both for spontaneity (including throwing ink on paper, long before Jackson Pollock) and for the precise scientific observation of individual plants. Being an artist meant investigating life and developing aesthetic criteria to supplement moral ones.

  In ancient India, people were likewise urged not to be just passive admirers of the arts but to be artists themselves. The Kama Sutra advised not only on how to be a good lover, but also on the need to supplement that by being a painter, sculptor, woodcarver and clay modeller, and to participate in the poetry parties which were one of the chief pleasures of the educated. The ideal woman was not only the dutiful and obedient housewife: there were also admired professional courtesans whose servile occupation was to satisfy men, but who were educated and talented and skilled in ‘the sixty-four arts’ which included not only music, dancing, singing and acting, but also logic and architecture, fencing, archery and gymnastics, carpentry, chemistry and gardening, teaching parrots to talk, writing in cipher, making artificial flowers, conjuring, and much more. The Indian ganika, the Japanese geisha, the Greek hetaerae, the Italian cortigiana onesta the Korean kisaeng and the Babylonian naditu, despite their differences, showed how women, though often abused, could introduce art into the prosaic lives of men.

  Though much art may appear to have been the opposite of rebellious, offering obedience to the taste of patrons or to academic rules or to tradition (Veronese said, ‘I am obliged to do what my predecessors did’), it has also shown that there is more to the world than meets the ordinary eye. But too many artists, like Eisenstein, are still battling against being misunderstood, just as rebels are, which happens when art becomes a soliloquy of self-expression instead of a conversation between two imaginations. The celebration and commercialisation of a small number of outstanding artists, raised to the status of geniuses, diverts attention from this other function of art, to encourage a reciprocal exchange between people inhabiting different fragments of reality and having different sensibilities. But the traffic between imaginations seldom runs smoothly. How to pass through the ever more numerous barriers and checkpoints that divergent tastes and prejudices raise up is the question that demands an answer. Eisenstein was foxed by Russia’s peasants because he was so absorbed in constructing his marvellously imaginative inventions that he never got round to discovering what each one could tell him that he did not know, what fantasies, personal to themselves, distinguished them from their superficially similar neighbours, and why they could find no room for his ideals.

  The dichotomies of politics, the calculations of economics, the promises of ideologies and the ingenuities of technologies do not suffice to teach people how to understand one another. Eisenstein could make no impact on the mentalities of the masses because people have always feared c
hange, and when they have felt the need for it, they have usually looked back to the past, and demanded that the imaginary good old days should be restored. To be comfortable with a vision of the future they need it to be not strange but familiar. That is precisely what film is capable of doing, by creating imaginary alternatives to the world as it is, that can be experienced safely in advance so that they cease to be intimidating. Science fiction has encouraged the acceptance of technology, but the cinema has yet to put on its screens visions of other, more intimate kinds of future, or its own prophesies of what humans could be.