Cultural Amnesia (58 page)

B
UT KRAUS NEEDED
a woman
to liberate him. He found her in the person of the Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin, the great love of his life. He had loved the beautiful actress Annie Kalmar and after her pitiably early
death he never forgot her: but he worshipped her as a symbol. She fitted his idea of the sensual woman whose eroticism would provide the fuel for the intellectual man. Another actress, Bertha
Maria Denk, was harder to fit into the same frame because she was very bright, but Kraus managed to talk his way free. From Sidonie there was no escape. Sidonie was the living woman, and
didn’t even need his money. (Kraus had a private income, but Sidonie’s wealth was on a different scale.) The luxury of her company offered him the chance to become fully himself: to
live like a prince, lose himself in a passion, cry on a fine-boned shoulder. Knowing that, we can see why so much of his supposedly scorching satire now strikes us a fire in straw. There were
people at the time who thought the same, and not all of them were his victims. He had admirers who spotted that by giving the society he lived in more scorn than it warranted he might have too
little left over for something worse. His satirical attack was based on the analysis of clichés: in politics, in the arts and above all in journalism. He did for German what Swift had once
done for English, and Flann O’Brien would do again. Nothing got past him. He was a one-man watch committee, the hanging judge of the
sottisier
. Anyone
who
let slip a loose phrase lived to rue it if Kraus caught him. As the self-appointed scourge of self-revealing speech, he was a linguistic philosopher before the fact, a
blogger before the Web.

But the world is made up of more than language, and a truly penetrating view, if it is to have scope as
well as depth, must get through not just to the awkward facts beneath the lies, but to the whole complexity of events that give the facts their coherence, and to the networks of necessary human
weaknesses that even the most developed civilization can’t realistically hope to eradicate. The archimandrite of a linguistic monastery, Kraus found human beings guilty of being human, and
society of allowing them to be so. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a monument to theatricality, and it was certainly true that hyprocrisy was universal, especially in matters of sex. But at least
hypocrisy was human. He was unable to envisage what a society would be like that eliminated the human factor altogether. The Nazi future was not yet available to tell him, but he might have found
instruction in the despotic past, had he been historically minded.

He conspicuously wasn’t. He belittled the forces that held his world together because he was not
sufficiently educated by the incoherence within himself. Had he been, he would have expressed it. His whole stance was to say the unsayable. If he didn’t say it, it was because he
hadn’t thought it: or, having thought it, couldn’t face it. Hence his confident ability to say a thing like this: a rock through a window. There are a thousand other Krausian moments
like it. He is made up of such moments. The complete run of his magazine
Die Fackel
—given to me by a cultivated young Austrian aristocrat in expiation
for what his country has never been able fully to admit, it occupies a whole shelf of my library in Cambridge—is an asteroid belt of pebbles that have passed through glass. They all share
the same unfaltering tone of the self-elected elect: the oracle who can see everywhere except into its own being, and sees through everyone because it has no insight into itself.

Kraus’s self-assurance was a pose that he believed was real. If he could have admitted it as a pose, his work would
have more to astonish us with than its glowing surface. The golden bowl was cracked, and its richest secrets were in the flaw: but he could not go in there. Schnitzler, whom Kraus had the
arrogance to patronize, could interpret the world through knowledge of his own failings. Klimt, another of Kraus’s
targets, was being lastingly self-exploratory in the
very paintings that Kraus found cliché-ridden and sentimental. (The Nazis, with their gift for practical criticism, paid Klimt the tribute of pulverizing his greatest set of murals, in
which they saw what Kraus had missed: an unashamed celebration of desire.) It never occurred to Kraus that his vulnerable contemporaries had something to gain through not being self-protective.
The loophole in his own armour was his love for Sidonie, but he did not, and obviously could not, make it an energizing subject for his main work. He shunted it aside into his lyric poetry, which
is weak precisely because it contradicts his prose without complementing it. Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart: Byron meant that as an emphasis. Kraus meant it as an
axiom.

What finally happened between the two lovers will always be a secret. The long affair ended too gradually to bequeath the
memory of a revealing crisis. (“K.K. so kind, so good,” Sidonie told her diary in English, while Kraus was tearing his hair out waiting for a letter.) But it seems fair to suggest
that he put on too much pressure, and it was all the wrong kind. He wanted to own her. She wanted to be free. (“I want freedom, solitude. . . .”) She told him that his enslavement
enslaved her. All the usual things happened. When he showed signs of taking back his independence, she enslaved him again. She was no stranger to guile. But her heart was good—on the
testimony of her many friends, she was one of those aristocrats with all the bourgeois virtues—and Kraus, given a modicum of acumen, should have been able to drink from the fountain of her
loving kindness for the rest of his difficult life. One would prefer to blame Rilke, who had his eye on Sidonie’s sumptuous estate at Janowitz as a plush staging post in which he might one
day write a cycle of poems. Rilke was always scouting the country seats of the great ladies for a suitable ambience in which to connect himself with eternity. As his nauseating letters to Marie
von Thurn und Taxis Hohenloe reveal, Rilke knew no shame in such pursuits. His bread-and-butter letters are always hard on the reader’s stomach. But to shut Kraus out from his possible
claims on Sidonie’s hospitality, Rilke truly disgraced himself by hinting to her that she courted degradation by keeping company with a Jew. (In his letter of February 21, 1914, Rilke
carefully avoided the word “Jew,” but she knew exactly what he meant when he warned her that Kraus could only ever be a stranger: to help
her figure it out, Rilke
underlined the adjective
fremd
. Admirers of Rilke’s spiritual refinement will find the letter quoted on page 52 of the second volume of Friedrich
Pfafflin’s two-volume edition of Kraus’s letters to Sidonie.) Kraus, all unknowing that he had been betrayed, went on helping Rilke’s literary career, and Rilke went on
accepting the help.

Rilke reminds us of the young man who wanted to be a suspect when he grew up. Alas, Kraus looks like a
better bet as the culprit. He wanted all the social credentials that an official alliance with an aristocrat would have brought him; and the wish seems understandable, if not particularly
edifying. But he didn’t want to modify his exalted stance as the seer who needed no other viewpoint than his own. When he went to her he was on holiday, and by marrying her he wanted only
to make the holiday official. The biographers seem agreed that she grew to want less of him. It might have been equally possible, however, that she wanted more: some evidence of a change of
heart, an expansion of sympathy that she might have ascribed to her own influence. She knew how she inspired him to poetry, but there was nothing of her in his prose, which from first to last was
one long tirade of self-assertion. Clearly he felt free to fall apart when safe on her estates: that was the attraction of her comfortable ambience. But he always put himself back together in the
same form, and returned to work as the universal castigator of
The Last Days of Mankind
. Too much is made of the discrepancy between the
grande dame
and the self-despising Jew, and not enough of a more usual difference, between the housekeeper and the nihilist.

Later on, when the Nazis came to Schloss Janowitz, she met some real nihilists and must have had cause to look back fondly
on a warrior violent only with words. But in view of her intrinsic worth she had been right to freeze him out. He had loved her for her beauty, position, charm, cultivation and
savoir faire
. But her intrinsic worth went deeper than that. She was the product of a social order, which Kraus had admired only for its accoutrements: i.e., he wanted
its benefits without understanding their provenance. Though he was pleased to appropriate the concept of gentility as a talisman against modern opportunism, he had no real capacity for valuing
noblesse oblige
, which is the long-gestated product of a society of obligations, not of rights, and is almost wholly unwritten. Kraus lived in the written
world. He thought that the misuse of language was an incitement to crime. (In his tireless
analysis of the bad journalism that came out of the war, he came very close to
suggesting that the war had been caused by bad journalism: if only it had been that simple.) But there were worse incitements to crime than misused language, and if he had lived a little longer
he might have been caught up in a crime it was beyond his powers of reason to predict. All the politicans and journalists whose bad prose he had laughed at were unexpectedly silenced by a new
range of orators who meant exactly what they said, and who took their satisfaction from mangling a lot more than syntax and vocabulary. He would have found that there are forms of speech to which
satire does not apply. He lived just long enough to entertain the possibility, and we can be sure that the possibility did not entertain him. When he said that he had nothing to say about Hitler,
he was really saying that his life’s work had come to nothing.

Famous while he lived, Kraus is cited now as a byword for hard-headed wit by people who have never read
more than few paragraphs: his name is invoked rather in the way that Cole Porter invoked Dorothy Parker’s, as shorthand for a quality. It’s the same sort of lazy journalistic reflex
that once made him spit tacks. So was his career a waste of time? Not really, although he might have died thinking so. Though to read him for long at a stretch is like trying to make a meal out
of Mexican jumping beans, some of his aperçus are more than enough to make you see why the scholarly commentators should enrol him
honoris causa
among the Vienna school of philosophers. Anyone who reads a few random pages of Kraus will write more carefully next day, with fear of his blue-pencil eyes as the spur to revision. He knew how to
cut the inessential. “Female desire is to male desire as an epic is to an epigram.” Try saying the same thing quicker. It was a production in English of
The Last Days of Mankind
that led Niall Ferguson to learn German, and so helped him towards laying the learned foundations of his fine book
The Pity of War
, in which Kraus’s debunking of patriotic rhetoric is frequently acknowledged. The whiplash speed and snap of Kraus’s reasoning can be heard
even through the language barrier.

But his negative example is the one that lasts. He embodied the unforeseeable tragedy—made actual only by a cruel
trick of history—of those bourgeois Jewish intellectuals who caught out Jewish artists for their bourgeois vulgarity: by helping to undermine the bourgeoisie
as a class,
and by helping to establish Jewish origins as a classification, the intellectuals unwittingly served two future masters whose only dream was to annihilate them. Above all, his supreme mastery of
verbal satire served to prove that satire is not a view of life. It can be a useful and even necessary by-product of one, but it can have no independent existence, because the satirist
hasn’t either. Any writer who finds the height of human absurdity outside himself must find the wellspring of human dignity inside, and so lose the world. The secret of a sane world view is
to see virtue in others, and the roots of chaos within ourselves. Kraus had the secret right in front of him, in the soul and body of Sidonie. She was his best self, come to save him. He had his
arms around her, but he lost her. We will never know quite how, but there is something about this deadly little aphorism to make us think it more plausible to blame him than to blame her.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

GEORG CHRISTOPH LICHTENBERG

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) stands at the beginning of German modernity, and
right in the centre of the country’s post–World War II concern with the recovery of liberal thought from historical catastrophe. If it was felt necessary to pump the mystique out
of the whole idealistic heritage of German philosophy, Lichtenberg was the prototype of a German thinker who could be seen as the level-headed smallholder waiting back at the beginning,
looking once again like an attractive prospect, now that the smoke had cleared. Mainly owing to Hegel and his long influence, German, as a language of thought, had acquired a bad reputation
for the higher nonsense of self-generating transcendentalism. In truth, however, German has as good a right as French to be thought of as essentially terse. (All of its most able prose
writers, from Goethe through Schopenhauer to Freud, Schnitzler, Kafka and Wittgenstein, found the aphorism a natural form.) Just as Pascal, in French, began a tradition of compact concrete
statement even about the spiritual, so did Lichtenberg in German. He came later, but then the whole of Germany came later. Germany is a young country, and Lichtenberg is one of the reasons
that it can still feel that way for anyone who can push
back through the curtains of tosh, much of it woven by patriots who believed that only the solemn could be truly
serious and only the impenetrable profound. One of those valuable faculty members (he was a professor of physics, astronomy and mathematics at Göttingen) who never lose the trick of
talking like a brilliantly amusing graduate student—we can imagine Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, or Richard Feynman at CalTech—Lichtenberg was critically minded about the
language of others, unfailingly scrupulous about his own, and never content to settle into a formula. Barred by physical deformity from any easy participation in the passionate emotional life
he saw as central to existence, he was nevertheless wonderfully sympathetic to the realities of love and sex: with every excuse to turn away from the real world, he kept its every aspect
always in plain sight. Finally it is his detailed and unflinching awareness that astonishes the reader. Scattered through his scores of “Waste-Books” and manuscript notebooks,
Lichtenberg’s innumerable observations add up to a single demonstration of his guiding principle: that there is such a thing as “the right distance,” a sense of proportion.
He is the thinker against hysteria, the mind whose goodhumoured determination to avoid throwing a tantrum provides us with a persuasive argument that the tantrum might be the motive power of
political insanity. In German there are numerous selections and collections, but most of the very best moments are in J. P. Stern’s excellent
Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions
(1959). Nutshells packed as cleverly as an old soldier’s kitbag, Lichtenberg’s sayings are quoted in the
original where that seems helpful, are always sensitively translated into suitably colloquial English, and are thoroughly annotated, from the body of humanist knowledge about shattered
Germany that Stern built up after the war. (Born and raised as a Czech, Stern also wrote one of the best short books about the man who shattered it,
Hitler:
The Führer and the People,
in 1975.) Stern first encountered Lichtenberg’s name in the pages of Karl Kraus’s magazine
Die
Fackel
. It would be a mistake, however, to confine the question of Lichtenberg’s long
delayed but highly welcome influence merely to the sardonic paragraph.
His clarity and concision set a standard for expository prose, at whatever length, in the whole of his language, and, by extension, in all languages.

It was impossible for him not to disturb words in the possession
of their meanings.

—LICHTENBERG,
Aphorismen

L
ICHTENBERG IS
DESCRIBING
a bad writer. There are bad writers who are exact in grammar, vocabulary and syntax, sinning only through their insensitivity to tone. Often they are among the worst writers of
all. But on the whole it can be said that bad writing goes to the roots: it has already gone wrong beneath its own earth. Since much of the language is metaphorical in origin, a bad writer will
scramble metaphors in a single phrase, often in a single word. From a made-for-television film called
The Movie Murders
I noted down this perfectly bad line
of dialogue: “A fire is a Frankenstein when it’s let out of its cage.”

A fire can be a caged animal if you don’t mind a cliché. But a caged
Frankenstein is worse than trite. Frankenstein was not the monster, he was the monster’s creator: so the use of his name is an inaccuracy. By now the inaccuracy has entered the language,
like the juggernaut that serves us for Juggernaut’s car: but one of the things good writing does is to fight a rearguard action against this automatic absorption of error. For example, a
competent writer would look twice at “rearguard action” to make sure that he means to evoke a losing battle, and check “automatic absorption” to make sure that it falls
within the range of phenomena against which a battle might conceivably be fought. He had better also know that “phenomena” should not be used in the singular, although that knowledge,
too, is becoming rare. Competent writers always examine what they have put down. Better than competent writers—good writers—examine their effects
before
they put them down: they think that way all the time. Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel
of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world.

In a television interview, Francis Ford Coppola said “hoi polloi” when he meant
“elite.” There is no reason to think that he would not commit similar solecisms in one of his screenplays if he were to put himself beyond the reach of expert advice, which the more
bankable film directors—the ones whose films are marked as being “by” them— are increasingly apt to do. (This tendency, by the way, arises less from the conceit of
directors than from the paucity of writers: screenplays depend more on construction than on dialogue, and experienced writers with those priorities are hard to find.) Most of us write “the
hoi polloi” when we should leave off the “the” because “the” is what “hoi” means, but that is a point of usage. Using “hoi polloi” to mean
“elite” is an outright error, indicating that the speaker has either misunderstood the term every time he has read it, or, more likely, that he has not read much. Unblushing
semi-literacy is quite common among film directors, especially those who fancy themselves to have so powerful a vision that they grant themselves not just the final word on the structure of a
script but the privilege of creating its language from line to line. We have to forgive them for this: the ability to put a movie script together takes such rare qualities of generalship that the
person who can do it is almost bound to succumb to hubris. James Cameron’s screenplay for his film
Titanic
is no doubt a mighty feat of construction.
It is also linguistically dead from start to finish. If pressed on the point, he would be able to say that his film made more money faster than any other film in history. He could also say that
the visual narrative matters far more than the dialogue, and that his mastery of the screen image would be alone sufficient to refute the charge of inattention to the texture of reality. But
there is a clear connection between the film’s infantile characterization—which for any adult viewer entirely undoes the effect of the meticulously reproduced period detail—and
the dud dialogue the characters are given to speak. None of this would be germane to the issue if the director did not consider himself a writer. But he does, and he is a bad one: a bad writer by
nature.

Macaulay’s review of the hapless poetaster Robert Montgomery is the classic analysis of the naturally bad writer who
gets everything wrong because he is sensitive enough on the question of style to attempt to lift his means of expression above the ordinary. When Montgomery evoked a river that “meanders
level with its fount,”
Macaulay pointed out that a river level with its fount can’t even flow, let alone meander. Macaulay had uncovered the connection between the
inability to notice and the inability to transcribe: the double deficiency that Montgomery’s highfalutin diction was invented to conceal. Mark Twain did the same for, or to, James Fenimore
Cooper, who thought that “more preferable” was a more impressive way of saying “preferable”: the clumsily elevated language, Twain argued, was closely linked to the
deficient power of observation that made the action of Cooper’s Leatherstocking books absurd. When a bad writer borrows locutions from past authorities, he characteristically takes the
patina but leaves the metal. Biblical pastiche is a standard way for a mediocre stylist to attempt distinction. Attempting to define the sensationalism of the press, Malcom Muggeridge came up
with the slogan “Give us this day our daily story.” A doomed effort, because all it did was remind the reader that the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer was better written
than an article by Muggeridge. He would have been better off just saying that the press needs a new story every day. Gombrowicz in his
Journal
(specifically, vol. 2, p. 164) notes that when a writer complicates a truism it is a sure sign that he has nothing much to say.

Julius Caesar wrote with invariable clarity, whether about Gaul being divided into three parts or about building a bridge.
Frederick the Great wrote about falconry from direct observation, with no hearsay, and in a plain style. Queen Victoria’s letters are models of compact accuracy: she wrote better than Queen
Elizabeth I, which is saying a lot. Such practical expository prose by people with non-literary day-jobs should give a measure for would-be professional writers wise enough to build a solid base
in their craft before trying to make an art out of it. They will soon discover that even the most down-to-earth of practical writers can scramble their meaning when they are in a hurry, so it
must be a craft, and not just a gift. In addition to
A Genius for War
, his excellent biography of Gerneral Patton, the eminent American military historian
Carlo D’Este wrote two essential books surveying whole campaign areas in World War II,
Decision in Normandy
, about Operation Overlord, and
Bitter Victory
, about the Allied invasion of Sicily. But a third book,
Fatal Decision
, is much less satisfactory than
the other two because it squanders their chief virtue, which is to record and weigh the facts in a transparent style. D’Este knew all there was to know
about the Anzio
campaign, but while trying to tell the reader either he got so excited he forgot how to write or else—more likely, alas—he received less than his usual quota of editorial help. Thus
we are regaled with his paraphrase of Churchill’s strategic view “that the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Mediterranean is Germany’s Achilles heel” (p. 12). But such
a blatantly mixed metaphor at least enables you to divine what is meant. Metaphorical content is mixed more inextricably when a standard idiom is unintentionally reversed in meaning, thereby
infecting the whole sentence. “For the next eight weeks there was a standoff in the northeastern corner of the beachhead as the 504th were forced into trenches that for sheer misery had
nothing on their World War I counterparts” (p. 176). Here “had nothing on” is used for “yielded nothing to,” but they do not mean the same thing. When an important
book is infested with deeply lurking solecisms, it has to be read twice while you are getting through it once. A less important book, of course, is quickly cast aside.