Cultural Amnesia (23 page)

While not exactly despicable—nobody died because of him—his behaviour was not admirable. He
can be classed with Sacha Guitry, Arletty and Maurice Chevalier among the top-flight artists who gave themselves a free pass because of their art. Only Chevalier was subsequently crass enough to
hint that he had really been an Allied spy risking his life to gather information, but Cocteau came close to the same kind of vulgarity when he evoked the call signs of the Resistance in
Orphée
. All he had the right to evoke was a simpering air-kiss aimed at the Gestapo. There was, however, another, deeper Cocteau: this one, the
Cocteau who invented the exhausted chameleon. This was the quickly whittling and fletching phrase-maker who could say and write things that would travel through time like untiring arrows.
“Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” A crack like that doesn’t end the discussion, but it certainly starts one.

This, I think, was the Cocteau whom Proust loved: not the stylish poseur but the true stylist, a living concentration of
art and intellect, of taste and daring. The moment in
À la recherche du temps perdu
when St. Loup runs along the top of the banquette in the
restaurant is probably based on one of Cocteau’s carefully calculated displays of his showstopping knack for creating memorable scenes by stealing them. And in the long run, St.
Loup’s unlikely conversion to homosexuality was probably justified in Proust’s mind by Cocteau’s nature. Probably there were several real-life models for St. Loup, but at the
end the model for one of the character’s dramatic moments took over the character’s inner being, if only because Proust’s inner being had the same bent. It would scarcely have
happened, however, if Proust had not genuinely admired Cocteau, who was impossible to admire if one did not envy his talent. This remark about the chameleon comes from the aspect of
Cocteau’s gift that will always remain enviable: the combinative power that underlay his protean knack for special effects. (The book
Le Potomak
, from
which the quotation comes, was named not after the American river but after a creature he made up: a deep-sea fish that rises to the surface and dazzles everyone with its polychromatic,
scintillating brilliance. Clearly he was talking about himself.) Endlessly
pirouetting to get himself into profile, Cocteau was tiresome in the extreme, but mainly because the
froth and fizz of his superficial behaviour made you nostalgic for the underlying man, whom you guessed correctly to be classical in his perceptions despite his self-denigrating mania for
originality. It could be said that anyone who admired the looks of Jean Marais, the rebarbative star of both
Orphée
and
La Belle et le bête
, had the same classical perceptions as a Las Vegas hotel designer, but the late 1940s were a long time ago, and Marais’s bouffant
hairstyle was the first ever seen in a serious context. Elvis Presley was not yet there to be copied. Cocteau thought of his own images. He really was as innovative as his admirers said. Their
only mistake was to imagine that novelty was an ethos.

GIANFRANCO CONTINI

Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990) was the most formidable Italian philologist of his time. As a
scholar of Dante and Petrarch he was crucial to the modern Italian tradition of studying the literary heritage on a rigorous textual basis. But he was also intimately involved with
contemporary creativity, as a friend and sounding board to such poets as Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (His little collection of articles on Montale,
Una lunga fedeltà
, A Long Faithfulness, is a classic of the genre.) Vast in his learning and uniquely compressed in his prose style, Contini, even for the
Italians, has a reputation as a
scrittore difficile
(difficult writer), and to translate his major critical articles into English would be a task for
heroes. But beginners with Italian will gratefully discover that when giving an interview he could talk with clarity and point on cultural topics, some of them with wide resonance outside his
own country. Regarded as a collaborative venture, the literary interview has a long and distinguished tradition in Italy. Contini collaborated with one of his pupils, Ludovica Ripa di Meana,
to produce an outstanding example of the form, with a disquisition on education that has general relevance for all
countries now suffering from the effects of having
reduced the demands on memory.

Unfortunately, the custom of learning by heart has disappeared in
the schools, and as a consequence the very use of memory has gone with it. Nobody knows how to read verse. My best students, notably gifted philologists, can’t recognize by ear whether
a line is hendecasyllabic or not: they have to count on their fingers.

—GIANFRANCO CONTINI, QUOTED
IN
Diligenza e voluttà
[DILIGENCE AND ENJOYMENT]:
Ludovica Ripa di
Meana interroga Gianfranco Contini
, P. 190

C
ONTINI WAS
NEAR
the end of his long, fruitful life when he did this book-length interview, which can be recommended for beginners with Italian as a fast track into the national discussion of the
humanities. Just as, in the case of Argentina, interviews with Borges and Sábato—and sometimes they had interviews with each other—bring you straight to the top level of the
subject, so, in the case of Italy, the dialogue with a protagonist is apt to save you from the perils of over-compression that come with his written prose. This latter advantage is especially
important in the case of Contini, whose prose could be so compact that even his best students had trouble picking it apart. In Florence in the mid-sixties, a standard spectacle at the university
was a football huddle of his students over their lecture notes after a silently frantic hour of listening to him whisper. Most of the students were female. A few of his best pupils were male but
it took an especially daunting breed of woman—we used to call them the
continiane
—to summon the required pertinacity.

Ludovica Ripa di Meana is a classic
continiana
. When she
interviewed her erstwhile teacher in 1989, Contini was in his frail seniority, but his mind was still working at full speed. Her registration of the old man’s delivery is a scrupulous job,
made easier, perhaps, by the fact that he wasn’t speaking formally in the lecture hall, but conducting a seemingly ordinary conversation. There aren’t very many ordinary
conversations, however, that have so much to say about the humanities as this
one; and on this particular point, about memory, he goes right to the heart of the topic. If you
think of the humanities as an activity in which the mode of appreciation and the means of transmission are versions of one another, there could hardly be a more pertinent complaint than this: he
was looking the death of his beloved subject right in the face.

There is an untranslatable Italian word for the mental bank account you acquire by memorizing poetry: it
is a
gazofilacio
. Contini believed that an accumulation of such treasure would eventually prove its worth even if it had to begin with sweated labour. He
confessed that not all of the teachers who had made him memorize a regular ration of Tasso’s epic poetry had been inspired. Some of them had held him to the allotted task because they
lacked imagination, not because they possessed it. But in the long run he was grateful. Most readers of this book will spot the sensitive point about modern pedagogy. Readers my age were made to
memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn’t a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a
form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn’t it true that nothing is gained except
the absence of suffering? In his best novel,
White Noise
, Don DeLillo made a running joke out of a professor of German history who could not read German.
But the time has already arrived when such a joke does not register as funny. What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?

The questions are loaded. Few of us enjoy the thought that the younger generation has escaped our miseries, and I suppose
it was a misery when one of my first teachers, a stalwart of the then pitiless Australian school system, made me stand up to recite “I come from haunts of coot and hern.” Thus I paid
the penalty for having memorized the first stanza more quickly than the rest of the class. More than half a century later I still know the line that comes next (“I make a sudden
sally”) and the one that clinches the stanza (“I bicker down a valley”). The third line has turned into a bit of an um-um canter, like Nigel Molesworth’s approximate
rendition of “The Charge of the Light Brigade” in Geoffrey Willans’s
Down with Skool!
, a classic spoof that depends for its effectiveness
on at least an indirect memory, if not
a direct one, of the old teaching methods of the British private school. Though Molesworth never got anything right, he knew he was
supposed to try. (“Harfleag, harfleag, harfleag onward. All in the Valley of Death rode the er.”) But there are still poems, drilled into me in the classroom, that I can recite in
chunks. If I get myself started on “I love a sunburnt country,” sooner or later I will get to the rugged mountain ranges, the droughts and flooding rains. I will not always get to the
name of the poet. In my uncaring recollection, Henry Kendall, Dorothea McKellar and many other Australian poets all shared the one elasticized identity until they were superseded by Shakespeare.
But hundreds of their lines got into my head, and with them came the measures of English verse, the most common rhythmic structure being the iambic pentameter. (In Italian, the equivalent is the
eleven-syllable line, which is why Contini picks it out.) Even before my first celebrated classroom appearance as a Lady Macbeth shrilly demanding that her milk be taken for gall, I had the
shape, weight and length of the iambic pentameter in my mind, as a sort of sonic template. A long time later, in Cambridge, I abruptly realized what a blessing this early inculcation had been. In
the practical criticism classes, the American-affiliated students were incomparably better informed than the locals—incomparably more intelligent all round, to put it bluntly—but the
one thing the Americans could not do to save their lives was recite the verse in front of them. Whether it was by Donne, Herbert, Fulke Greville, Lovelace, Marvell or Dryden, it came out like a
newsflash being read sight unseen by Dan Rather. They had no feeling for a line of iambic pentameter whatever. On their being quizzed about this, it transpired that they had never been required
to remember one.

In Italy at any one time there is always someone who can recite the whole of
The Divine
Comedy
by heart. Usually he is of humble clerical occupation: if the man at the post office who goes off to get your parcel fails to come back, that might be what he is doing. Contini
wasn’t impressed by that kind of feat, the mental equivalent of lifting a grand piano with the teeth. Contini said that where memorizing Dante was concerned, the important thing
wasn’t to release a torrent at the touch of a button, but to have the poem in your head as an infinite source of ready reference for the events of every day. It was true for him and he
valued the same capacity in others. He was a quiet man and it was hard
to make him laugh aloud, but his delighted smile was a rich reward for a Dante reference appositely
supplied.