Cultural Amnesia (2 page)

GRADUALLY I REALIZED
that I had been looking in
the wrong place. As a journalist and critic, a premature post-modernist, I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car in the
same breath, or of treating gymnasts and high divers (in my daydreams, I astonish the Olympic medalist Greg Louganis) as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and
often the sore point reveals where the real point is. Humanism wasn’t in the separate activities: humanism was the connection between them. Humanism was a particularized but unconfined
concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather
than reduce it. Builders of concentration camps might be creators of a kind—it is possible to imagine an architect happily working to perfect the design of the concrete stanchions
supporting an electrified barbed-wire fence—but they were in business to subtract variety from the created world, not to add to it. In the connection between all the outlets of the
creative impulse in mankind, humanism made itself manifest, and to be concerned with understanding and maintaining that intricate linkage necessarily entailed an opposition to any political
order that worked to weaken it.

SUCH WAS THE
conclusion I had already reached after thirty-seven
years of preparation. I was doing other things to earn a crust, but the book was never out of my mind, somewhere at the back of the building between the storeroom and the laundry. In the three
years it took to compose the actual text, I was faced more and more, as it moved for-
ward, with the consequences of not having isolated my themes. If I was determined on
avoiding those broad divisions that I thought not only artificial but actively inimical to my view, the question was bound to keep on arising of where the book’s unity was to come from.
Answering that question over and over in the course of long days and longer nights, I had to intensify a faith that I had always kept throughout my writing life: the faith that the unity would
come from the style. From the beginning of my career, whenever I had written an essay, it was most likely to come alive when its planned progression of points was interrupted by a notion which
surprised me, and which could be brought to order only by making the manner of writing more inclusive instead of less. In other words, I took the same approach to prose as to a poem. When young
and cocky, I had defined a poem as any piece of writing that could not be quoted from
except
out of context. Older but even more ambitious, I had the
temerity to define prose in the same way: a prose work of whatever length should be dependent, in each part, on every other part of what was included, and so respect the importance even of what
had been left out. From the force of cohesion would come the power of suggestion, and one of the things suggested should be the existence of other voices.

THERE ARE HUNDREDS
of voices in this book, and hundreds more
which, although not cited directly, are nevertheless present in the way its author speaks. In that sense, the best sense, there is no such thing as an individual voice: there is only an
individual responsibility. The writer represents all the expressive people to whom he has ever paid attention, even if he disapproved of what they expressed. If anything in this book seems not
to fit, it isn’t, I hope, because it is irrelevant, but because I have written about it in the wrong tone, or the wrong measure. The polemicist has the privilege of unifying his tone by
leaving out the complications. I have tried to unify it while encompassing the whole range of a contemporary mind. The mind in question happens to be mine, and any psychologist could argue
persuasively that mine is the mind I am least likely to know much about. This much, however, I do know: it would not be a mind at all if its owner had allowed his multiplicity of interests to
be restricted by a formula. He might have been more comfortable had he done so. But we have to do better than just
seek comfort, or the Exterminating Angel will overwhelm us
when he returns. He is unlikely to return at the head of a totalitarian state: even after the final and irreversible discrediting of their ideological pretensions, there are still a few
totalitarian states left, but their days are surely numbered.

Totalitarianism, however, is not over. It survives as residues, some of them all the more virulent
because they are no longer hemmed in by borders; and some of them are within our own borders. Liberal democracy deserved, and still deserves, to prevail—one of the aims of this book is to
help stave off any insidious doubts on that point—but in both components of liberal democracy’s name there are opportunities for the ideologist: in the first component lies
inspiration for the blind devotee of economic determinism, and in the second for the dogmatic egalitarian. From within as well as without, the Procrustean enemies of our provokingly
multifarious free society are bound to come, sometimes merely to preach obscurantist doctrine in our universities, at other times to fly our own airliners into towers of commerce. What they
hate is the bewildering complexity of civilized life, which we will find hard to defend if we share the same aversion. We shouldn’t. There is too much to appreciate. If it can’t be
sorted into satisfactory categories, that should make us take heart: it wouldn’t be the work of human beings if it could.

There was never a time like now to be a lover of the arts. Mozart never heard most of Bach. We can hear everything by
both of them. Brahms was so bowled over by
Carmen
that he saw twenty performances, but he had to buy twenty opera tickets to do so. Manet never saw all
his paintings in one place: we can. While Darcey Bussell dances at Covent Garden, the next Darcey Bussell can watch her from Alice Springs. Technology not only has given us a permanent present,
but has given it the furniture of eternity. We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires. English is this new world’s lingua
franca, not because it was once spoken in the British Empire but because it is spoken now in the American international cultural hegemony. Born to speak it, we can view the whole world as a
dubbed movie, and not even have to bother with subtitles. Should we wish, we can even savour the tang of alien tongues: a translation will be provided on a separate page, to be dialled
up at a touch. We can be world citizens without leaving home. If that seems too static, we can travel without leaving home. The world is prepared to receive us, with all its
fruits laid out for our consumption, and wrapped in cling film to meet our sanitary standards. Gresham’s law, that the bad drives out the good, has acquired a counter-law, that the bad
draws in the good: there are British football hooligans who can sing Puccini’s “
Nessun dorma
.” It would be a desirable and enviable
existence just to earn a decent wage at a worthwhile job and spend all one’s leisure hours improving one’s aesthetic appreciation. There is so much to appreciate, and it is all
available for peanuts. One can plausibly aspire to seeing, hearing and reading everything that matters. The times are not long gone when nobody could aspire to that—not even Egon
Friedell, a man once famous for being better informed than anybody in Vienna. In a city stiff with polymaths, he was the polymath’s polymath.

Egon Friedell looms large in this book. Active from the early years of the twentieth century until the Nazis turned off
the lights in Austria, the Viennese prodigy knew everything, or talked as if he did. There was nothing he could not talk about brilliantly. Some thought him a charlatan, but no charlatan is
ever remembered for making clever remarks: only for trying to make them. One of the most famous cabaret artists of his day, Friedell in the 1920s combined his career in show business with a
monkish dedication to his library, in which he produced a book of his own that must count as one of the strangest and most wonderful of the twentieth century:
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit
(
The Cultural History of the Modern Age
). A fabulous effort of style and concentration, a
prestidigitator’s trick box packed with epigrammatic summaries of all the creativity in every field of art and science since the Renaissance, a prose epic raised to the level of poetry,
Friedell’s magic show of a book remains a fantastic demonstration of the mind at serious play. At the time, he left people wondering if there was nothing he might not do next. That kind
of expectation can easily breed envy. Though he did his best to be humble, there were many in his audience who thought him not humble enough. Friedell believed that an artist of his type needed
“a magnetic field” in which to operate. He was well aware that he was surrounded by the kind of people whose only ambition was to cut off the electricity. They were Nazis, and he
was a Jew.
On the day of the
Anschluß
in 1938, Friedell saw the storm troopers marching down the street, on their way to the
building in which he had his apartment full of books. He was only a few floors up but it was high enough to do the job. On his way out of the window he called a warning, in case his falling
body hit an innocent passer-by.

I CAN’T IMAGINE
being brave enough to copy the way Egon
Friedell made an exit, but there was something about the way he made an entrance that could be a model for us all. He came on as a combination of actor and thinker. We are all doomed to be
actors, in the sense that our abilities and deficiencies will guide us, in certain ways if not in oth- ers, to becoming active participants in a productive society, whether we like that society
or not. Alas, we will be participants even if we hate it: terrorism, which will not tolerate a passive audience, is already part of the show. But to palliate that condition, we are nowadays
much more free to be thinkers than is commonly supposed. The usual division is to treat our daily job as the adventure and our cultural diversions as a mere mechanism of renewal and repose. But
the adventurous jobs are becoming more predictable all the time, even at the level of celebrity and conspicuous material success. Could there be anything less astonishing than to work day and
night on Wall Street to make the millions that will buy the Picasso that will hang on the wall of our Upper East Side apartment to help convince us and our guests that we are lucky to know each
other? I have been in that apartment, and admired the Picasso, and envied its owner: I especially envied him his third wife, who had the same eyes as Picasso’s second mistress, although
they were on different sides of her nose. But I didn’t envy the man his job. In the same week, I was filming in Greenwich Village, and spent an hour of down-time sitting in a café
making my first acquaintance with the poetry of Anthony Hecht. I couldn’t imagine living better. The real adventure is no longer in the job. In the job we can have a profile written about
us, and be summed up: all the profiles will be the same, and all the summaries add up to the same thing. The real adventure is in what we do to entertain ourselves, a truth which the profile
writers concede by trying to draw us out on our supposed addictions to shark fishing, fast cars, extreme skiing and expensive young women. But even the entertainment can no longer be
adventurous if it serves a purpose.
It will be adventurous only if it serves itself. In other words, it will not be utilitarian. It has always been part of the definition
of humanism that true learning has no end in view except its own furtherance.

What this book then proposes—what it embodies, I hope—is something difficult enough to be
satisfactory for an age in which to be presented with nothing except reassurance is ceasing to be tolerable. As the late Edward W. Said wrote after the attack on the World Trade Center, Western
humanism is not enough: we need a universal humanism. I agree with that. The question is how to get it, and my own view is that it can’t be had unless we raise our demands on ourselves a
long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized. When the doomed Russian poet Osip Mandelstam said that he was nostalgic for a world
culture, he didn’t mean that it would be a world culture if everyone could live in Switzerland.

THE IDEOLOGISTS THOUGHT
they understood history. They thought
history had a shape, a predictable outcome, a direction that could be joined. They were wrong. Some of them were intellectuals who shamed themselves and their calling by bringing superior
mental powers to the defence of misbegotten political systems that were already known to be dispensing agony to the helpless. Young readers will find some of that story here, and try to
convince themselves that they would have behaved differently. But the way to avoid the same error now is not through understanding less. It can only be through understanding more. And the
beginning of understanding more is to realize that there is more than can be understood. As an aid to that end, this book is not a testament to my capabilities, but to the lack of them. Proust
talked about “that long flight from our own lives that we call erudition.” There is nothing inherently wrong with erudition: it’s not as if we’re drowning in it, and
anyway Proust himself wrote the most erudite book in the whole of French literature. But this book is the reverse of erudite. It does not just record what I have learned. It also suggests what
I have failed to learn, and now will probably never learn, because it is getting late. The student who flicks through these pages in the bookshop will see many strange names, and perhaps be
impressed. But what impresses me is all the names that are missing. I
would never have taken a note in the first place except out of the fear that what I was reading would
soon slip away: a fear all too well founded. The Russian symbolist writer Andrei Bely once said that what we keep in our heads is the
sum
of a writer: a
“composite quotation.” But the only reason I still know that Bely once said that is that I wrote it down.

There was a time when I could fairly fluently read Russian, and get through a simple article in
Japanese about my special subject, the war in the Pacific. I hope to get Russian back, but the written version of Japanese is the kind of language that you can study hard for five years and yet
can’t neglect for a week without its leaving you like a flock of birds. I hope they return as easily as they went, but I remember how long they took to arrive in the first place. I have
always loved the title of Milan Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
. I hope this is a book of laughter, at least in places. But it is
everywhere a book of forgetting. I am not urging young people to follow me on the path to a success. I am showing them the way to a necessary failure: the grim but edifying realization that a
complete picture of reality is not to be had. If we realize that, we can begin to be realistic. Thinking otherwise, we doom ourselves to spinning fantasies, which might well be fluent, but
could equally be lethal. Stalin and Hitler both thought that they could see the whole picture, and look what happened.