Cultural Amnesia (35 page)

When the talent-mind of the artist exists and has the conditions to express itself, it
seems to develop with great speed and daunting ease. On this subject, scholarship can be misleading, and the formal history of the plastic arts can be especially misleading. For long periods and
over wide areas, primitivism reigns, but that might only mean that the wrong people are painting the pictures, carving the logs and throwing the pots. The idea is hard to kill that the natural
condition of graphic art is to be not very impressive: after all, the idea fits what we ourselves can do, who can barely draw a man standing sideways. But those cave paintings in France, if they
didn’t come out of nowhere, certainly came out of a very short tradition. In the eye of history, perfection was reached in a trice. The animals on the walls make ruins of all developmental
theories. No higher development is possible: there is nowhere to go except abstraction. There are good reasons for thinking this to be the natural condition not just of graphic art but of all the
arts, even music: that something which needs to be expressed will quite rapidly gather towards it all the technical means it requires. It might be said that it takes a while to marshal a
symphonic tradition to the point where Beethoven can write the
Eroica
. And so it does, because there are practical considerations: for one thing, all the
instruments have to be invented, and very few instruments were invented just to be in an orchestra—most of them were invented for separate purposes. But Bach needed few predecessors in
order to write
The Well-Tempered Clavichord
, and he didn’t even need a very highly developed clavichord: it just had to be well tempered.

None of this line of thought is meant to simplify the question of the individual talent and its composition. On the
contrary: one is trying to complicate it, by rendering it even less explicable than it was. Explicability is inimical to it. Talent can be dissected, but not alive. The elegant yet conversational
cadence of Fitzgerald’s prose is unmistakable precisely
because
it can’t be analysed.The creative talent is probably the most complex phenomenon
a non-scientist will ever have to deal with, and to deal with it the non-scientist needs first of all to realize that there is only one thing he can borrow from the scientist, but borrow it he
must—the scientist’s unsleeping attention to the question of what constitutes evidence. Just because someone says that he has been influenced by someone else, for example,
doesn’t mean that he has, and just
because someone doesn’t say that he has doesn’t mean that he hasn’t. In philosophy, an area where gifted people try
hard to tell the truth, few practitioners have ever been able to provide plausible reports of their own interior workings. In the creative arts, where fantasy is at a premium, introspection is
even less likely to be reliable. Advice, rules of thumb and cautionary tales from established artists are always worth hearing—Goethe certainly thought that such talmudic material was worth
providing—but there is no guarantee that those artists ever followed the same path themselves. What they are giving you might be the sum of their experience, but could just as well be a
schematized form of what they had by nature. They might be trying to teach you what they had no need to learn.

There is no small print, unfortunately, to warn us it might be impossible to teach. We guess, and
probably guess correctly, that if an artist acquires technical ability beyond the requirements of what lies within him to be expressed, the result can only be mannerism. The same guess should
lead us to the possibility that the technical expertise artists really do need they will be driven to acquire by the demands of talent. If there is a class, whether for music or for painting, the
best students in it know what they want; and it is doubtful whether a class for creative writing can teach anything at all except remedial reading. We shout “yes” to
Fitzgerald’s advice because what he recommends is what we were doing anyway: reading dozens of the best writers we could find, including him. As things turned out, Fitzgerald’s
daughter did become a writer: but never one like him, because what he had could not be transmitted.

The same was true for Rilke and his letters to a young poet.
Briefe an einen jungen
Dichter
is a toy-town book for the magic doll’s house of the mind, but before we choke up with twee gratitude for its impeccably balanced cracker-mottoes we should remember that the
young poet to whom they were addressed turned into a boring old businessman whose only masterpiece was his impeccably balanced account book. Rilke and Fitzgerald were two different versions of
the same neurotic wreck, and both would have given a lot, in their darker hours, to be blessed with the ordinary ambitions of the youngsters they advised. But the avuncular advice, as always, ran
exclusively in the wrong direction, from those in need of consolation to those who could not benefit. An
effective letter from Fitzgerald’s daughter to her desperate
father would have had too much to cover: it would have had to tell him to get out of Hollywood, to go back in time, to stop imagining that he could hold his drink, to visit the fashionable world
for material but never think that he could live in it, and above all to marry someone else—someone he could not damage, and who would therefore not damage him.

He wouldn’t have listened anyway. When a man on a cross is told to save himself, he can do so only
at the price of seeming to admit that it was all for nothing—he knows better than that. Concerning Fitzgerald, there is a principle that can’t be taught in a creative writing class
and is hard enough to teach in the regular English faculty, but it’s worth a try: his disaster robbed us of more books as wonderful as
The Great
Gatsby
and
Tender Is the Night
, but we wouldn’t have those if he hadn’t been like that. Fitzgerald’s prose style can be called
ravishing because it brings anguish with its enchantment. He always wrote that way, even when, by his own later standards, he could as yet hardly write at all. He could still write that way when
death was at his shoulder. He wrote that way because he was that way: the style was the man.

GUSTAVE FLAUBERT

Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880) was adopted by twentieth-century modernists as a precursor,
especially if the modernists wrote in English. Among his fellow French writers, Flaubert’s first fame was for his bad grammar. But his untiring quest for factual accuracy and the right
word (the untranslated French expression
le mot juste
got into English mainly because of his influence) eventually, and justifiably, formed the basis of
an international reputation, mainly because
Madame Bovary
can be seen to be charged with meaning in every sentence even when translated into Japanese.
The reputation was buttressed by the lengths he would go to in order to keep his art uncorrupted by the allegedly sentimental expectations of the bourgeoisie. Flaubert himself looked on the
bourgeoisie as the sworn foe of art, even though he and most of his readers were of bourgeois origin. In the following century his hatred of cliché was eagerly taken up by right-wing
critics—principally Ezra Pound—disdainful of democracy’s supposedly weakening influence on language, and his view of the bourgeoisie as the class enemy of art was equally
eagerly taken up by left-wing critics with an anti-capitalist programme. The most conspicuous among the latter was Jean-Paul Sartre, who devoted much
of the later part of
his career to a mountainous critical biography of Flaubert which should certainly be sampled by any student of ideology on the rampage, but not before that same student has read
Madame Bovary
and at least one of Sartre’s own novels, which prove, although not quite as thoroughly as Flaubert’s do, that a living work of fiction is
a vision of what the world is, and not just of what the author thinks society should be.

No cries, no convulsions, nothing more than a face fixed in
thought. The gods no longer existed, Christ didn’t exist yet, and there was, from Cicero to Marcus Aurelius, a unique moment in which man was alone.

—GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, IN AN
1861 LETTER TO MME. ROGER DU GENETTES (TRANSLATED INTO SPANISH BY MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO IN
Ensayos
, VOL. 2, P.
1022)

T
HIS PASSAGE
IN
one of Flaubert’s letters has fascinated two great essayists, Miguel de Unamuno and Gore Vidal. For Unamuno, the apostate Catholic in a permanent spiritual crisis about his
repudiated faith, it was one of the great texts of his life. In interviews, Vidal has said several times that Flaubert’s godless hiatus was the historical period in which a sane man would
have been glad to live. Obviously the idea appealed to Unamuno in the same way. It never appealed much to me, which is probably why I didn’t underline it in Francis Steegmuller’s
magnificently edited translation of Flaubert’s letters. (A well-edited translation of such an archive is often more useful than the original, because the editor is more likely to supply
copious annotation: witness our privileged access, in English, to Mozart’s letters and Cosima Wagner’s diaries.) But because it appealed to Unamuno, suddenly it appeared striking, so
I underlined it there. Unamuno preceded Vidal in his distrust of the religious impulse, and Flaubert preceded both of them. Those of us who came easily to our paganism will find it hard not to
think all three of them correct.

But really the idea that mankind would do better if atheism were
universal is only an
idea. Some of us would now like to think that Islam will destroy itself, and possibly us along with it, unless it develops a secular culture strong enough to offset the comforting strictness of
fundamentalism: but we had better be right. There is also the question of whether Flaubert was factually correct. The two questions are linked. In his preferred interregnum between polytheism and
monotheism, it is more likely that people believed everything than that they believed nothing. Flaubert has pinpointed a brief age in which superstition, far from being absent, was almost
certainly paramount. In those circumstances, the last thing you could say, whether in French, English or Spanish, is that man was alone. Even theoretically, man had no refuge from the judgement
of his fellow men. You can’t be less alone than that. A society in which all the pressures are social is the one dreamed of by totalitarians. In
Julius
Caesar
, one of them pricked Cicero’s name on a list. Shakespeare, with typical sensitivity to an historic turning point, recorded the sub-zero temperature of the unique moment,
although he did not show us how Marc Antony made the proscription: he only showed us how Cassius heard about it, rather put out that Brutus already knew. If Shakespeare took such a roundabout
course to make the point, it could have been because of his irrepressible awareness that he was living at a totalitiarian period in history, all the more insidious for being apparently exuberant.
In the time of Good Queen Bess, it meant death to be Catholic.