Cultural Amnesia (7 page)

I listened to most of Beiderbecke’s Jean Goldkette and Paul Whiteman sides before I left Sydney (even the most
fanatical New Orleans purists among my friends seemed to have them on hand), but it wasn’t until I was down and out in London in the early 1960s that I first heard “I’m Coming,
Virginia.” An Australian homosexual ballet buff—a lot of Australian homosexuals were still prudently sending themselves into exile in those days—persuaded me to sit down and
listen to a piece of music he held to be the most beautiful thing in his life: better even than
Swan Lake
. (I wonder if he lived long enough to see
Swan Lake
danced
by boys: I hope so.) For a while “I’m Coming, Virginia”—I used to make rude jokes about the
title, but they conveyed my appreciation—became the most beautiful thing in my life too. The coherence of its long Bix solo still provides me with a measure of what popular art should be
like: a generosity of effects on a simple frame. The melodic line is particularly ravishing at its points of transition: there are moments when even a silent pause is a perfect note, and always
there is a piercing sadness to it, as if the natural tone of the cornet, the instrument of reveille, were the first sob before weeping. Armstrong could probably have done that too, but he
didn’t want to. He wasn’t like that. Beiderbecke was, always: his loveliest-ever outpouring was an example of the artistic freedom that can be attained through being trapped in a
personality. Perhaps for personal reasons, I took it as an encouragement. I wanted to write prose sentences that way, and lines of poetry: as a shining sequence of desolate exuberance, of playful
grief. I loved the spareness of his technique: a wordless song with one note per syllable and no lapses into mere virtuosity. It helped me to conceive the notion that the only permissible
obscurity is an excess of vividness, or the suggestive hiatus that comes from removing the connecting tissue between transparencies. In my last two years before I left Sydney I had moved on to
bebop and modern jazz in general, but although I tried to enjoy some of the headlong
sprezzatura
stuff I always thought that it was only in the slow numbers
that the virtuosi really showed what they could do. I liked it best when Thelonious Monk dragged his hands like tired feet in “Round Midnight,” and my favourite Charlie Parker number
was the last-ditch, half-ruined but drenchingly lyrical “My Old Flame.” At Cambridge I was still listening to that one almost every night.

Mechanisms of influence are hard to trace. Writers tend to think that the way they write was influenced by literature, and
of course scholars make a living by following that same assumption. But a writer’s ideal of a properly built sentence might just as well have been formed when he was still in short pants
and watched someone make an unusually neat sandcastle. He might have got his ideals of composition, colour and clean finish from a bigger boy who made a better model aeroplane. To the extent that
I can examine my own case of such inadvertently assimilated education, I learned a lot about writing from
watching an older friend sanding down the freshly dried paint on his
rebuilt motorbike so that he could give it another coat: he was after the deep, rich, pure glow. But for the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot from jazz. From the moment I learned
to hear them in music, syncopation and rhythm were what I wanted to get into my writing. And to stave off the double threat of brittle chatter and chesty verve, I also wanted the measured,
disconsolate tread of the blue reverie. Jazz was a brimming reservoir of these contending qualities. Eventually I was listening to so much classical music that I left jazz aside, but I never
thought that I had left it behind. Later on, when I took holidays from classical music, it was Tin Pan Alley and Broadway that attracted me, and there were years on end when I listened to
everything happening in pop and rock. The second lustrum of the sixties was a particularly good time for that: you could slide a coin into a jukebox and hear Marvin Gaye singing “I Heard It
Through the Grapevine,” and wonder whether there had ever been, or would ever be again, anything quite so addictive as the triumphal march of a Tamla anthem.

Jazz, however, was always there underneath all that, and begging to be revisited. I couldn’t muster an affection for
John Coltrane or Sonny Rollins—I don’t think I was meant to—but the tradition that led up to them still had many glories to reveal. The great period of Duke Ellington was a
constellation of glories that made Berg and Webern seem very thin gruel. Listening on the same day to the Lester Young quintet and a string quintet by Ravel, I could hear no incongruity: they
seemed comparable events to me, although there was not much evidence at the time to suggest that the same was true for anybody else. Such catholicity of taste has only recently become
respectable. At the time when the divinely gifted and cruelly doomed cellist Jacqueline du Pré was breaking our hearts with Elgar, the boys around her were thought rather daring when they
vamped and jammed a few jazz figures on their strings. But the argument about a supposed hierarchy of genres would have continued much longer if Leonard Bernstein had not put a stop to it. In the
first chapter of his television series about music, after giving brief, instantly enchanting examples from the classical repertoire, Broadway, Tin Pan Alley, jazz, rock and pop, he said the only
thing that mattered: “I love it all.” He had jazz in his blood. His show song
“Lonely Town” is a melody that Bix Beiderbecke would have loved to play,
and it would not have been composed in quite the same way if the broken heroes of jazz had not first lived their dangerous lives. The paradox was that the most persuasive witness to the lyrical
distillation of Bix’s broken life, Louis Armstrong, was a man whose life was never broken, even by the full force of America’s most tenacious social malignancy, white prejudice. If it
is a political nightmare no longer, Armstrong’s shining trumpet certainly contributed to the wake-up call. But there is only so much art can do against injustice, and the blues, from which
jazz took flight, were an embodiment of the sad truth that much beauty begins as a consolation for what can’t be mended.

RAYMOND ARON

Raymond Aron (1905–1983) began as a sociologist but made it clear from the
start that the subject would not restrict him to social facts. Instead, it would release him into political analysis, and from there into general philosophy on the scale of Durkheim, Pareto
and Max Weber. The strength of his voluminous theoretical work, however, would always be that his wider views were backed up by minutely observed concrete detail: his journalism was his
bedrock. One of the few French thinkers who were equally at home in Germany, he saw during the Weimar Republic that the left intelligentsia hated capitalism, and hence social democracy as
well, far too much to think that Nazism could be worse. As George Orwell did later, Aron realized that the professed enemy of Nazi totalitarianism was itself totalitarian. He carried this
insight with him into exile in London during World War II.

After the war, he emerged as the great opponent of the French left wing, and especially of its most illustrious
figurehead, Jean-Paul Sartre. Beyond their respective deaths, the contest between the two great names continued to define the frontiers of argument in French political thought right up to
recent times. “Better to be wrong with Sartre than right with
Aron” is still meant to be a slogan testifying to political seriousness, rather than to
intellectual suicide. For French
gauchiste
thinkers, even after they had given up hope on the Soviet Union, liberal democracy was fundamentally suspect
because it had capitalism for an economic motor. For Aron, liberal democracy was the only way ahead to social justice: it could be, and had to be, criticized in detail, but never dismissed in
its entirety. Since ideologists of every stamp would always attempt to do so, that made ideology itself the perpetual enemy of realism. Liberal democracy, based on an historic consciousness,
could afford to reveal even the most unpalatable truths, whereas ideology was bound to conceal them. Of the comparatively small proportion of Aron’s enormous body of work that has been
translated into English,
The Opium of the Intellectuals
(1955) can still be regarded as the best introduction to his thought, and indeed to modern
intellectual history in its entirety. For readers of French, he can be met more briefly, but almost as effectively, in
Le Spectateur engagé
(1981), a long interview of the type that French publishers do so well.

. . . the liberal believes in the permanence of humanity’s
imperfection, he resigns himself to a regime in which the good will be the result of numberless actions, and never the object of a conscious choice. Finally, he suscribes to the pessimism
that sees, in politics, the art of creating the conditions in which the vices of men will contribute to the good of the state.

—RAYMOND ARON,
L’Opium des intellectuels
, P. 292

S
UCH WAS THE
central
belief that put Aron on a collision course with all the radical thinkers in Paris after World War II. He couldn’t have put it more clearly; and if he couldn’t, nobody could. Essayists
who stake everything on writing the kind of spangled style that glitters in the limelight near the top of the tent must sometimes wish, as they sweat to keep a sentence alive, that the tightrope
could be laid out
along the ground. There are essayists who write plainly and yet are duller still because of it. But the most enviable essayists are those who can write
plainly and generate an extra thrill from doing so, demonstrating a capacity to clarify an intricate line of thought in their heads before laying it out sequentially on the page. Always matching
a decorum of procedure to their weight of argument, they can make the more spectacular practitioner look meretricious. Foremost among these cool masters of expository prose must be ranked Raymond
Aron.

Most of Aron’s vast output remains untranslated in the original French, but enough of his books
have been brought into English to give some idea of his importance, and some of those books are indispensable—most prominently
The Opium of the
Intellectuals
, which remains to this day, after all the years since it first appeared in 1955, the best debunking of Marxism as a theology, and the most piercing analysis of why that
theology, during the twentieth century, should have had so pervasive and baleful an influence in the free nations. Even now, every first-year university student in the world should read that
book, if only because the poised force of Aron’s prose style gives such a precise idea of the strength and passion of the consensus he was trying to rebut.

It should be said straight away that his clarity of view was not attained from a right-wing viewpoint. Though many a
prominent figure of international anti-communism paid tribute to him after his death—Henry Kissinger, McGeorge-Bundy, Norman Podhoretz and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. were among the Americans
who acknowledged his example—Aron himself began on the left and stayed there until the end. But he was always disgusted by the thirst of putatively humanitarian intellectuals for the lethal
certitudes of Marxist dogma. As early as the 1950s he was proclaiming the need for a new party,
de la gauche non conformiste
. A sizeable party of the
nonconformist left never really arrived, but the massed ranks of the conformist left were not fond of the idea that somebody so prominent had called for one. Many of his fellow French
intellectuals never forgave him for his heresy. (Sartre, who respected Aron’s credentials—Aron, unlike Sartre, had always been the kind of star student who actually read the
books—took particular care to discredit his opinions: a potent endorsement.) A few of them were grateful, and they were among the best. Jean-François Revel, François Furet,
Alain Finkielkraut and the small handful of
other French writers on politics who have managed to defend their independence of thought while surrounded by a tenaciously
lingering pseudo-progressive consensus have all had Raymond Aron as a forebear, and have usually been polite enough to acknowledge his pioneering faith in the strength, and not just the virtues,
of liberal democracy.