Cultural Amnesia (43 page)

Is it worth the struggle? Yes, certainly. I still don’t think Gibbon is the Virgil with whom to take your first
journey into ancient history. If it takes multiple volumes to make the effort feel valuable, about Greece you can do well with Grote, and about Rome you can do very well with Mommsen. And there
are single-volume histories that have
served schools well for decades, through telling the story first, before getting down to the implications. In Gibbon the narrative would
be hard to retain even if he wrote as fluently as Macaulay, and nowhere, not even in his autobiography, does Gibbon even look like doing that. (When you hear Macaulay’s style belittled,
guard your head: there is an owl in the room, and it is not Minerva’s.) What Gibbon does give you is not ages past in summary, but his own age in one of its several cordials. He gives you
contrivance. In him we can study the arrangement of prose pushed to its limit—not to the limit of prose, but to the limit of arrangement, where a trellis weighs like a bronze door. Though
the intention might be the opposite, there is a risk of turning the permanent into the evanescent.

Gibbon had a knack for the permanent. It showed up when he was simple. The epithet “vain youths” is a token of
what he could do: it was understatement, precisely calculated to sound that way, as a sign that the facts were too extreme to be evoked. After Probus imposed peace on the vanquished nations of
Germany he used German troops to reinforce the legions throughout the empire, “judiciously observing that the aid which the republic derived from the barbarians should be felt but not
seen” (vol. 1, p. 288). That is good, plain narrative, and this is better: “The feeble elegance of Italy and the internal provinces could no longer support the weight of arms.”
The two-word coupling “feeble elegance” is excellent: a thought compacted but not crippled, it encapsulates the theme for the chapter and indeed for the whole work, which is the story
of an empire dying from the poisonous fermentation of the fruits of its initial success. That there is something feeble about Gibbon’s own elegance is an idea his admirers would resist. I
think there is: but I am in no doubt about the elegance, or at any rate about the initial fruits that lay behind it, before the mania of his stylistic ambitions began to waste them. A proof of
the gift he began with is that he could often revert to it, so long as the occasion was sufficiently unimportant. His footnotes, for example, are almost always better than the main text.
“With regard to the times when these Roman games were celebrated, Scaliger, Salmasius, and Cuper have given themselves a great deal of trouble to perplex a very clear subject” (vol.
1, p. 300). What a pity that the same was true of Gibbon. Not that he always had
to take trouble: sometimes he could create confusion through ordinary carelessness. His
otherwise exemplary tirade about the decline of Roman jurisprudence and the rising tide of lawyers (vol. 1, p. 536) is ruined by a sentence in which there is no sorting out the personal pronouns
except by guesswork. “Careless of fame and of justice, they are described for the most part as ignorant and rapacious guides, who conducted their clients through a maze of expense, of
delay, and of disappointment; from whence, after a tedious series of years, they were at length dismissed, when their patience and fortune were almost exhausted.” Who, after the semicolon,
is dismissed, and whose patience and fortune are exhausted? We will have to read it again.

We will always have to read it again, but sometimes the requirement is a blessing. “The same timid policy, of
dividing whatever is united, of reducing whatever is eminent, of dreading every active power, and of expecting that the most feeble will prove the most obedient, seems to pervade the institutions
of several princes, and particularly those of Constantine” (vol. 1, p. 540). If only he had written like that all the time. He scarcely ever did: a fact made more galling when we find out
that he could. We want more than enjoyment from our historians; but it is hard to make do with less, and to find them tedious is no sure sign that they are thorough. There are eminent readers who
say they wallow in Gibbon. They are hard to believe. When that old showman Harold Macmillan retired into his valetudinarian role as Lord Stockton he noised it quietly abroad that he was occupying
his slippered hours with reading Gibbon “again.” He got away with saying that. When Lady Thatcher let slip that her idea of cloistered intellectual satisfaction was a second reading
of
The Day of the Jackal
she attracted scornful laughter. John Major knew just how high to pitch his claims: in retirement he allowed it to be known that he
was closeted with Trollope, whom he had always always loved, but could now read properly. Stockton sounds to me like the odd man out: i.e., the one who was dressing the set. It is fitting that a
retired Tory prime minister should punish himself with hard reading, as a belated participation in the sufferings of the poor. But if we ever hear that the old man was propelled into slumber by
every second Gibbonian period, I will be no more surprised than Gibbon was in that famous moment when a blind man felt
his face and thought it was a baby’s bottom.
Gibbon was resigned to the absurdity of his appearance. His true absurdity, however, is that he tried to make up for it with the dignity of his style, and his style was never enough at its ease
to be truly dignified. It could have been: but in the great work on which he staked his reputation it died from the strain of hauling on its own bootstraps.

TERRY GILLIAM

Born in Minnesota in 1940, Terry Gilliam, after pioneering his personal graphic style as a
resident artist for Harvey Kurtzman’s
Help
magazine, reached international fame by way of Britain, where his visual inventiveness, based mainly on
the silent wit of animated collage, was an important part of the
Monty Python
television series. In his subsequent career as a film director he earned
an unjustified reputation for extravagance when his
Adventures of Baron Munchausen
left its budget behind and sailed off into the unknown. On the level
of cold fact—always hard to regain once a myth has taken hold—he has proved, with several Hollywood projects including the extraordinary
Twelve
Monkeys
, that he knows exactly how to bring in a movie on time and on budget. These undeniable achievements availed him little, however, when his film of
Don Quixote
had to be abandoned. A measure of his idiosyncratic creative energy is that even a documentary about that film’s abandonment—
Lost in La Mancha
—is required viewing. Really he doesn’t fit the Hollywood frame at all, and needs his own country of which to be a representative
writer-director, like Pedro Almodóvar or Lars von Trier. If he had been born in Montenegro instead of Minneapolis, today there would be
an annual Gilliam Festival
on the shore of Lake Scutari, although his tendency to giggle at a solemn moment might still queer his pitch. Gilliam came nearest to inventing his own country with
Brazil
(1985), one of the key political films of the late twentieth century. There is an excellent interview book,
Gilliam on
Gilliam
. It takes some effort to see past his laughing façade to the troubled man within. His best work depends on an audience that can do so, which will always be in short
supply.

No no no no no no no no. . . .

—TERRY GILLIAM,
Brazil

T
HE TEXT
MEANS
exactly what it says, but it needs a lot of decoding. A meek, distinctly non-glamorous secretary is taking dictation through earphones. She types up everything she hears in the next
room. In the course of time, the viewer of the film deduces that she is compiling an endless transcript of what the victim is saying in the torture chamber. Even if he screams it, she types it up
as if he has merely said it. She herself says nothing, and her face betrays no emotion as the words quietly take form. Her boss, the torturer, is played by Michael Palin in the full, sweet spate
of his bland niceness. This is the
ne plus ultra
of torture as an everyday activity. Still revealing its subtleties after a third viewing or a fourth,
Brazil
is one of the great political films, an extraordinary mixture of Fellini and Kafka, with a complex force of synthesized image which belongs to
Gilliam alone. The torture surgery contributes one of the most brain-curdling of the film’s many disturbing themes. The suggestion seems to be that a torturer, except for what he does, need
be no more sinister than your doctor. That’s the picture we take away. But how true is the picture?

In modern history, which is most of the history that has ever been properly written down at the time,
there is plenty of evidence that the torturers are people who actually enjoy hurting people. What was true in medieval Munich was true again in the cellars of the Gestapo HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht
Strasse, and what was true under Ivan the Terrible was true again in the Lubyanka and the Lefortovo. The frightening
thing is that any regime dedicated to ruling by terror so
easily finds a sufficient supply of lethal myrmidons, and even Americans, on those occasions when they bizarrely conclude that the third degree might expedite their policies instead of hindering
them, never suffer from a shortage of volunteers: at Abu Ghraib, the dingbats were lining up to display their previously neglected talents. On the whole, the man in charge is not a sadist
himself, presumably because it would be a diversion of his organizational effectiveness if he were. Beria obviously enjoyed conducting the occasional interrogation personally, but Himmler would
have fainted dead away, as he did on his sole visit to a massacre. Ceauşescu gave his dreadful son a torture chamber for his birthday. No doubt daddy knew what went on in it: but again,
regular attendance at the frightfulness he encouraged is not known to have been among his pleasures. The same was true for General Pinochet. His critics, still trying to convince us that he was a
homicidal mediocrity despite all the evidence that he was nothing else, write about him as if the dogs that were trained to rape women were trained by him. He probably never saw it happen. He
didn’t need to. All he had to know was that the state commanded unspeakable powers of savagery.

In his huge and definitive political biography of Juan Perón, the esteemed Argentinian historian Felix Luna gives
us a once-and-for-all illustration of how the author of a state that rules by terror can detach himself from the brute facts. First, Luna chillingly describes the actuality that festered at the
base of the Perónist dictatorship. (The description starts on page 253, but a preliminary stiff drink is recommended.) Luna takes the view, which to us might seem quixotic, that the
torturers were just doing their job. He calls them
tecnicos
, and certainly they were technicians of the
picana
, the
electric torture which was invented in Argentina, and was therefore one of Perón’s gifts to the world, along with a good role for a soprano in
Evita.
Luna describes the subtleties of the technique, which on the torturers’ part did indeed require a certain lack of passion if the victim was to survive for
long. If Luna gets you wondering how he knew so much about it, your questions are answered a few pages later, where he records a conversation he had with Perón in 1969. “But in your
time,” said Luna, “people were tortured.” Perón said: “Who was tortured?” Luna said: “Plenty of people. Me, for example.” Perón said:
“When?” We are at liberty, I
think, to marvel at the detachment of an historian who could confine to a few pages out of a thousand a personal experience that might
have left him incapable of being detached about anything ever again.