Cultural Amnesia (102 page)

As a philosopher, to escape history was Sartre’s chief concern. There was almost no salient truth
about the Occupation period that he was able to analyse directly at the moment when it might have mattered. When it was safe to do so, he nerved himself to say that anti-Semitism was a bad thing.
Réflexions sur la question juive
even contains a good epigram: armed with anti-Semitism, he said, even an idiot can be a member of an elite. Though
the trains had already left from Drancy—by the time he wrote the pamphlet, the Nazis were gone as well—at least his opinion was published. He slammed the stable door. But he never
made a beginning on the question of how the writers and intellectuals who continued with their careers during the Occupation could do so only at the cost—precisely calculated by the
Propaganda Abteilung— of tacitly conniving at Nazi policies, all of which radiated from one central policy, which was the extermination of the Jews. No moral issue was ever more inescapably
real; even the cost of ignoring it was directly measurable in lost lives; there could be no philosophical discussion of any subject on which
that
subject
did not intrude. If Sartre wanted to avoid examining his own behaviour—and clearly he did—he would need to develop a manner of writing philosophy in which he could sound as if he was
talking about everything while saying nothing. To the lasting bamboozlement of the civilized world, he succeeded, at least on the level of professional prestige. Working by a sure instinct for
bogus language, a non-philosopher like George Orwell could call Sartre’s political writings a heap of beans, but there were few professional thinkers anywhere who found it advisable to
dismiss Sartre’s air of intelligence: there was too great a risk of being called unintelligent themselves.
Effectivement—
to reemploy a French
word that was worked to death at the time—Sartre was called profound because he sounded as if he was either that or nothing, and few cared to say that they thought him nothing.

How did he work the trick? There was a hidden door. From the writer committed to transparency it might go against the
grain to say so, but there is such a thing as an obscure language that contains meaning, and there is also such a thing as a meaning too subtle to be clearly
expressed. Karl
Popper made a heavy commitment to what he called “ordinary language philosophy.” But in
Unended Quest
(subtitled “an intellectual
biography”) he registered his telling, last-ditch concessions that ordinary language is conservative; that “in matters of the
intellect
(as
opposed, perhaps, to art, or to politics) nothing is less creative and more commonplace than conservatism”; and that although “common sense” is often right, “things get
really interesting just when it is wrong” (p. 125: the italics are his). Because Popper is the doorman, we can believe that there really must be a door, and that it is a very large one to
be left open. The legitimate inference seems to be that an expository language pushing deep into originality might not necessarily sound readily intelligible; with the niggling corollary that a
language which does not sound readily intelligible might conceivably be exploratory.

Revel, heartening in his impatience with Sartre’s ponderous folderol, usefully records Kierkegaard’s threat to
Hegel: that he would send to him a young man who was in search of advice. Kierkegaard’s menacing insinuation was that Hegel would have to either get down to brass tacks or be responsible
for the young man’s bewilderment. Revel also, and even more usefully, suggests that we should make the same threat to Heidegger. One says “even more usefully” because although
there is something to be said against the belief that Hegel’s obscurity is never meaningful, there is nothing to be said against the belief that Heideggers’s obscurity is always
meaningless. Hegel was trying to get something awkward out into the open. Heidegger was straining every nerve of the German language to do exactly the opposite. More than half a century later,
the paradox has still not finished unravelling: it was Heidegger’s high-flown philosophical flapdoodle that lent credibility to Sartre’s. It was a paradox because Heidegger was an
even more blatant case than Sartre of a speculative mind that could not grant itself freedom to speculate in the one area where it was fully qualified to deal with the concrete facts—its
own compromises with reality. But merely to call Heidegger a “more blatant case” shows what we are up against. The case is still not clear, and in the years when Sartre and Heidegger
were in a supposedly fruitful intellectual symbiosis, it was still not even a case: Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis was thought of as a flirtation. The means scarcely existed for
anyone—philosopher, philologist,
literary critic, journalist or clinical psychologist—to point out the truth which has since become steadily more obvious, even if
it does not appear axiomatic yet: that these two men, Heidegger and Sartre, were only pretending to deal with existence, because each of them was in outright denial of his own experience, and
therefore had a vested interest in separating existence from the facts. Will it ever be realized that they were a vaudeville act? Probably not. Even George Steiner, who can scarcely be accused of
insensitivity to the historical background, persists in talking about the pair of them as if they were Goethe and Schiller. Those of us who think they were Abbott and Costello had better
reconcile ourselves to making no converts.

There are plenty of philosophical works that writers should read, starting with the Platonic dialogues if
not before. Life being short, however, and full of things that an artist should know, there is only so much time to read books
about
philosophy. Bertrand
Russell wrote a great one—his
History of Western Philosophy
—and there are many more, some of them very seductive: Bryan Magee’s handbook
about Popper is an introduction much more entertaining than the subject it introduces. But
caveat lector
: life is waiting, and to read about someone who
writes about life is getting far from it. Reading Schopenhauer when he tells you to watch out for reading too many books is already getting far from it, and at this moment you are reading someone
who is telling you about how Schopenhauer said that you should not let reading come between you and life. In philosophy, the infinite regress is a sign that someone has made a mistake in logic.
In ordinary life, it is a sign that someone is hiding from reality.

Sartre hid. Of course he did; and if
he
did, anybody can, including us; although I
think that if we hide in lies, the lies should not be blasphemous. Sartre blasphemed when he took upon himself, and kept for the rest of his life, battle honours that properly belonged to people
who ran risks he never ran, and who died in his stead. All his other weaknesses can be comprehended, and easily pardoned if not dismissed: most of us would have shown the same frail spirit. Many
of the traumatized French soldiers who were allowed to go home from German POW camps pretended they escaped: it sounded less feeble. To get a play put on, Sartre bent his knee to the Occupation
authorities. In one of Beauvoir’s novels, a character otherwise obviously based on Camus
is portrayed as doing the same, whereas the character based on Sartre is braver
than a lion. Sartre was genuine (conveniently genuine) in granting Beauvoir her individuality, so he can perhaps be excused for not feeling responsible for her: but on that point an apology to
Camus might not have come amiss. To question himself, however, was not in Sartre’s nature. For a man whose Resistance group had done nothing but meet, he was a haughty inquisitor during
l’Épuration
. Memories of the French Revolution were not enough to tell him that there might be something wrong with the spectacle of a
philosopher sitting on a tribunal instead of standing in front of it.

But many a mouse came out roaring during
l’Épuration
:
it was what that performance was for, a fact de Gaulle recognized by closing it down as soon as possible. Sartre should have called it a day after that. Camus did: decently aware that his
resistance had not amounted to much (though he took many more risks than Sartre), he was out of the hero business long before his death. But Sartre could never let it go. He pretended that he had
been brave: the single most shameful thing a man can do when other men have been brave and have paid the price. Sartre, the philosopher, the man of truth, lied in his teeth about the most
elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense. Revel valuably noticed how modern philosophy denies from the start that “the
level of the essayist and the critic” should be its departure point. He must also have noticed that in Sartre’s case it couldn’t be, because Sartre, as an essayist and critic,
was almost exclusively concerned in concealing the truth instead of revealing it. As Solzhenitsyn pointed out in
The Gulag Archipelago
, Sartre on his trip
to Moscow was at one point standing only a few feet away from the living refutation of all his mendacity on the subject of the Soviet Union: a black Maria full of innocent prisoners. If the back
door had accidentally swung open, he would probably have said the people inside were criminals, or actors—anything except what everyone in Russia knew they were. Nobody serious in the
ex–Iron Curtain countries ever thought Sartre the Philosopher much better than a solemn buffoon. But in his homeland Sartre’s national prestige was too enormous for anyone to think of
undermining it completely. Mockery was permitted, but only within the limits of throwing eggs at the Arc de Triomphe.

Not even Revel, by far the most penetrating critic of Sartre’s bombastic
philosophical style, could quite bring himself to say that it was a mechanism devised not only to ape meaning while avoiding it, but by avoiding it to conceal it. As Egon Friedell noted, the true
philosopher is close to the artist, except he has only himself for a character; so that any deeply felt philosophy is an autobiographical novel. The converse holds: Sartre’s autobiography
was the last thing he wanted us to know, and so his philosophy was never felt, but all a pose.

ERIK SATIE

Erik-Alfred-Leslie Satie (1866–1925) was the eternal figure of the brilliant young French
composer in rebellion against everything at once: the social order, bourgeois gentility, even music itself. Wagner had opened the way for Debussy, but for Satie Wagner was an oppressor,
simply because he had become accepted. Satie successfully made it his mission to save Debussy from Wagner’s influence. With his goatee, pince-nez worn askew, and pumiced
fingers—he had a Howard Hughes–like obsession about clean hands—Satie was the kind of eccentric who unites normal men by making them feel protective. Debussy and Ravel,
never generous to each other, were both generous to him. Whatever was orthodox, Satie hated: his ballets were not like ballets, his lyric dramas were not dramatic, his chamber pieces were
designed to make the chamber uncomfortable. Dropping out from the Paris Conservatoire after a single term, he started his career as a piano player in the cabarets of Montmartre, but as a
composer he soon lost any wish to appeal to a wider audience. On the contrary, his aim was to trim the audience down to a select few, and perhaps to zero, by making his programme notes and
general presentation as off-putting as possible. When he published his first set
of piano pieces he called it opus 62. After living in poverty he went back to school at
the Schola Cantorum, but took care to hide the seriousness of his subsequent compositions with suitably demented titles:
Three Pieces in the Form of a
Pear
was typical. Some of his fellow composers were not fooled: Darius Milhaud and the rest of Les Six all kept tabs on what he was up to, the impressionism of his
Sarabandes
and
Gymnopédies
anticipated Debussy and Ravel, and his determination to get the emphasis away from harmonic
lushness and back on to a spare melodic line went on influencing music in France after his death. Today’s admirers of advanced music who find even John Cage an historical figure, and
think that there must be unexplored paths of development beyond his pieces for “prepared” pianos, deliberate passages of silence, etc., might care to study Satie’s brief but
frenziedly original career, in which they will find everything they could desire except electronic effects. Satie was too early for those, although he was in time for the telephone, which he
incorporated into the orchestra for
Parade
, the 1917 Diaghilev ballet that unleashed Satie, Cocteau and Picasso on the public all at once, setting
standards of innovation that have been hankered after in vain ever since: to get an effect like that, you don’t just need all those people, you need the war they were ignoring. In the
score of
Parade
, Satie’s instrumentation was competing with the western front. Finally, however, Satie’s lyrical talent was victorious over
every nonsensical idea that he could throw at it. A quarter of a century after his death, his piano pieces were rediscovered, joined the standard repertory, and became so popular—really
popular, Chopin popular, Rachmaninoff popular—that they might have been mistaken, by him, for the kind of sonic wallpaper he so despised. Satie would have had something to say about
that: his killing wit never failed him, especially at inappropriate moments. Students of Dada from Tristan Tzara through to Yoko Ono sometimes yearn for jokes with genuine laughs.
Satie’s jokes were really funny, probably because he was really gifted. The grand gesture of throwing it all away depends for its effect on having something to throw.