Cultural Amnesia (75 page)

Looking for something to count on, he found the Bible in the ruins. For us, blessed with a more comfortable set of
ruins—even if the streets are more dangerous, most of us live better now than we did in the houses we grew up in—there seems less to be afraid of: we can persuade ourselves that
history is a linear development, in which even the
eternal can become outdated, and be safely forgotten. Perhaps our own catastrophe will never come in any readily
intelligible form, so it will never matter if there is nothing to go back to, no past to legitimize the permanent present, which will legitimize itself by doing us no evil except by its puffball
bombardment of triviality. There is always the chance that our confident iconoclasts are right. Milosz is telling us not to bet on it, but perhaps he was unlucky. Like the Polish intelligentsia
that was wiped out half by one set of madmen and half by another, he was just caught in the squeeze, and had his heart broken even though his body walked away.

You can be a non-believer, however, and still be amazed at how even the believers are ready to let the Bible go. In
England, the most lethal attack on the scriptures has been mounted by the established Church itself. The King James Bible is a prose masterpiece compiled at a time when even a committee could
write English. The modern versions, done in the name of comprehension, add up to an assault on readability. Eliot said that the Revised Standard Vesion was the work of men who did not realize
they were atheists. The New English Bible was worse than that: Dwight Macdonald (his hilarious review is collected in his fine book
Against the American
Grain
) had to give up looking for traces of majesty and start looking for traces of literacy. Those responsible for the NEB probably did realize they were atheists: otherwise they could
scarcely have been so determined to leave not one stone standing upon another. For those of us unable to accept that the Bible is God’s living word, but who believe that the living word is
God, the successful reduction of once-vital language to a compendium of banalities was bound to look like blasphemy, and the perpetrators like vandals. When I joined in a public protest against
the rejigging of the Book of Common Prayer, a practising Christian among the London editors—it was Richard Ingrams, editor of
Private
Eye
—accused me of being in bad faith. He hated the new prayer book even more than I did, but thought I could have no reason for sharing his contempt. But it was my book too. I had
been brought up on the scriptures, the prayers and the hymns. I had better reasons than inertia for deploring their destruction. Milosz had the same reasons. The scriptures had been his first
food. For me, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity
against the pervasive falsehoods of advertising, social engineering, moral uplift, demagogic
politics—all the verbal corruptions of democracy, the language of illusion. But for Milosz, the scriptures provided a standard of authenticity against a much more dangerous language, the
language of legalized murder. We have to imagine a situation in which the state was so oppressive and mendacious that the Church looked like a free institution, and its language sounded like the
truth. Milosz was well aware that the record of the Church in Polish politics had not been brilliant. One of his many braveries, post-war, was to give an unflinching account of Poland’s
institutionalized anti-Semitism, a strain of opinion in which the Church had always been implicated. We should also strive to remember that any German lover of his Bible must cope with the
knowledge that its classic translation was the work of Martin Luther, whose loathing for the Jews was well up to Nazi standards. But we are not talking about our love for a Church, whether
Catholic or Protestant. We are talking about our love for a book, and what we love is the way it is written. Rewriting it is not in the realm of the possible, and any attempt to do so should be
seen for what it is: the threat of destruction.

Sooner than become the enemy of its own classical texts, the Anglican Church would have done better to
seize the first opportunity of disestablishing itself. However tenuous, its offical connection to the state has been enough to saddle it with the doomed ambition of maximizing its popular
audience, like a television channel in desperate search of more viewers who eat crisps. Separated from a fully secularized state, it might have fully enjoyed the only civilized condition for a
religion, which is to provide a spiritual structure for private life. Only a secular state can be democratic; although the democracy will soon be in trouble if the private citizen is deprived of
a spiritual code, to be acknowleged for its moral example even if he does not believe in its divine provenance.

With the possible exception of Buddhism, no religion we know about is capable of allying itself to the state without
working to the destruction of liberty. Less commonly noted is that it will also work to the destruction of itself, by trivializing its own teachings, or rendering them obnoxious in the attempt to
impose them legally, instead of by
exhortation, example and witness. In its proper sphere, private life, a religion can keep its teachings as pure and strict as it likes, as
long as they do not break the law. It is also free to protect its own sources of spiritual nourishment against the fatal obligation to make them universally intelligible. We can be sure that one
of the consolations the Pope brought to Poland in 1979 was a few words of Latin. That he spoke Polish helped him to be understood, but that he also spoke Latin was the reminder, thirsted for by
the faithful, that there was an eternal language which the years of the captive mind had not managed to corrupt. There were many among the faithless who were glad to be reminded too.

Evelyn Waugh’s correspondence teems with bitter complaints at the time when the Church adopted a vernacular liturgy.
He hadn’t, he said, become a Catholic in order to applaud the Church’s clumsy adaptation to the modern world. He wanted it not to adapt. He wanted, that is, a refuge. Those of us
brought up as Protestants, but who later lapsed, found out, when the doors closed behind us, that we hadn’t lapsed quite as far as we thought. We had lapsed into unbelief, but not into
stupidity, and the spectacle of our one-time cradle rocking to the clappy-happy rhythms of half-witted populism was a betrayal of something that had once impressed us at least enough to invite
rebellion. I don’t want the teachings of Jesus taken from me. He might no longer be my redeemer, but he is still my master. If I no longer know that my redeemer liveth, I know that he
speaketh not like Tony Blair. It is true that Jesus never spoke the language of the King James Version of the New Testament. But the language of the King James Version is of a poetic intensity
congruent with the impact Jesus must once have made on simple souls, of whom I am still one: simple enough, anyway, to need my sins forgiven. Now that there is nobody to do that for me, I must
try to do it myself. Like most men with a conscience, I find that very hard, and spend much time feeling absurd. But without the scriptures we poor wretches would be lost indeed, because without
them, conscience itself would become just another disturbance of the personality, to be cured by counselling. We are surrounded by voices telling us that everything will come right if we learn to
love ourselves. Imagine the torments of Jesus in his passion, if, on top of the sponge of vinegar
and the spear, they had offered him counselling as well. Exiled in
California, Milosz saw enough of America’s culture of personal fulfilment to wonder what he had got himself into. But he never forgot what he had got himself out of—a repression so
arid that it left him thirsty for a language he could respect, even though it came from a book he couldn’t believe.

EUGENIO MONTALE

Eugenio Montale (1896–1981) was Italy’s most famous poet after World War II, and
eventually established himself beyond challenge as the living embodiment of his country’s humanist culture in modern times. Immediately memorable even when he was obscure, he was the
nearest thing to a national lyrical voice since D’Annunzio, and a distinctly more enticing prospect. Whereas the posturing D’Annunzio had been one of the harbingers of Fascist
hysteria, Montale, growing up in the Fascist era, was a portent of the more level tones of the liberal democracy to come. Educated in the fine shades of love, loyalty and emotional truth
during histrionic times, he gave everyday sanity a lyrical voice for which his recovering country was grateful. His Nobel Prize in 1975 was welcomed as a sign of restored national prestige.
Every educated Italian knows at least a few lines of Montale. People familiar with the standard episodes of Dante and lyrics of Leopardi can usually quote from Montale’s famous poem
about the sunflower (“Bring me the sunflower mad with light”). Beginning readers of Italian can be confident that a few hard hours spent between a dictionary and Montale’s
first, reputation-making collection,
Ossi di seppia
(
Cuttlefish Bones
), will promote them directly to
the hub of Italian literature in the twentieth century, and give them a phrase or two that everyone will be delighted to recognize. One of the young Montale’s principal
objects was to tame rhetoric, the verbal inflation to which an over-musical language is prone. (The hardest trick in an Italian poet’s book is to avoid rhyme: Montale could dodge it
forever.) There have been many attempts to translate the masterpieces in Montale’s main body of lyrical poetry. All have failed, but at least they have provided a wealth of parallel
texts. For a long while the task of translating his exemplary critical prose looked equally doomed, but Jonathan Galassi finally did an acceptable job with
The
Second Life of Art
(1982). Galassi sometimes misses the easy rhythm of a Montale sentence, but he always catches the dry neatness of its argument. Widely read in several languages but
devoted to the value of common experience, the urbane and affable Montale was an enchantingly down-to-earth writer in every form he touched: even his most difficult poetry is full of concrete
detail. He was also a singer (his early training provided the bedrock for his superb music criticism) and a painter. Alas, it was revealed after his death that a certain knack for sleight of
hand had been among his talents: some of his reviews of English books had been written by a student, with whom he split the take.

Art destined to live has the aspect of a truth of nature, not of
some coldly worked out experimental discovery.

—EUGENIO MONTALE,
Auto da fé
, P. 81

I
N HIS CRITICAL PROSE,
Montale often reminds you of Flaubert’s insistence that we don’t love literature. Montale didn’t love literature either: not in the sense of drawing his principles from it. He
practised literature. As a practitioner, Montale was ready to countenance experiment. He had time for Ezra Pound. When he said, in reference to Pound, that talent presupposes dignity for anyone
on whom it is conferred, he was being forgiving about Pound’s politics. He knew he was being generous: Pound flagrantly represented the sort of capitulation
to Fascist
rhetoric that Montale had not made. But Montale felt no need to be generous about Pound’s technical experiments in fragmentation and panscopic allusiveness. Montale simply thought they were
legitimate: as he said much later of Auden, it didn’t matter how lyricism happened as long as it happened. In his own era there were hermeticists in whom he was determined to detect the
lyricist even when they themselves had given up. What Montale loved was music, and that was where this cry from the heart came from. He was born and raised as a musician—he could sing at
professional level—and was there as a critic at most of the first nights that counted in the long last gasp of the classic Italian opera. Budding critics of television or the movies, if
they really want to know how the response to a cultural event can be turned into a critique of the whole society behind it, should get a reader of Italian to take them through a few paragraphs of
Prime alla Scala
, Montale’s splendid compendium of the best pieces he wrote about the
teatro lirico
on its way
to exhaustion. What destroyed it—or anyway, what marked its destruction, since cause and effect were hard to distinguish—was intellectualism. Late in his life, Montale was in the
audience when the avant-garde composer Luigi Nono tried to persuade the Italian musical public that he had been sent to make their lives more significant with a Marxist arrangement of notes.
Early in his life, Montale had also been in the audience when the great last operas of
verismo
had made the audience’s lives more significant without
Marx getting a mention: all it had taken was melody, orchestration and thrilling theatrical effect. Montale was thus ideally placed to point out that Nono was a brain in a bottle.