Cultural Amnesia (86 page)

Civilization and culture, if they are left in peace long enough
by war and pestilence, generate mould. And over this mould a layer of dust forms. And in this layer of dust microscopic life-forms settle. And these microscopic life-forms generate excrement.
And in the breakdown-products of this excrement even less visible life-forms find their domicile. And these life-forms, as long as they are resident within the periphery of Vienna and
eligible to vote in the central electoral district, generate the world portrayed in the comedies of Raoul Avernheimer.

Let it be said again that Polgar could write that way not because he was cruel, but because he was
comprehensive. The proof is in the subtle judgements he made between the two extremes of praise and blame. He admired Max Reinhardt’s independence and industry, but knew where to find
fault. Some of Reinhardt’s productions Polgar found not only stylized, but sterilized. (The alliteration is there in the original.) Bound in ties of friendship with Egon Friedell, Polgar
greeted the polymath’s
Judastragödie
with only two cheers. He noted his friend’s “peculiar fencing stance: on the tip of the sword
with which he attacks flutters the white flag with which he surrenders.” Friedell could have done without Polgar’s praise for his brains: “High intelligence, from which the
blessing of refreshing words falls in a shower, offers here a rich substitute for art.” In his letters, Schnitzler reveals how wounded he was by Polgar’s criticism. He would have been
wounded less if Polgar had called him a bad writer. But Polgar called him a good writer who was doing the wrong thing, indulging himself in “the opal tint of his half-bitter,
half-sentimental scepticism.” Werfel would not have enjoyed hearing that his diction was “palate-irritatingly over-spiced.” (Werfel forgot the imputation long enough to grant
Polgar one of the best things ever said about his style: he said that Polgar had the gift of catching deep-sea fish on the surface.) If Schiller could have come back from the dead, he might have
wondered why he made the trip when he heard Polgar point out that
William Tell
“isn’t a protest against tyranny,
only
against its misuse.” When we call a critic deadly, it should be because he knows about life, and will not accept its being falsified. Polgar was suspicious of the theatre, which he called
“a charlatan that works real magic.” His love for it was an intelligent love. He tested it against the world, not by its own standards. Hence the permanent validity of his mocking
advice to a bad critic: “Take aim, let loose. And when your arrow sticks in, draw a target around its buried point. That way you will score a bullseye every time.”

Alfred Brendel put me on to Polgar. Brendel knows everything about the Viennese coffee-house wits, and
carries in his pocket an anthology of their best sayings, individually typed out on slips of paper. Away from the piano, Brendel’s fingertips are usually wrapped in strips of Elastoplast.
(So would mine be, if they were worth ten million dollars each.) When you see those bits of paper being hauled from his pockets by his plastered fingers, you realize you are in the presence of a
true enthusiast. Brendel gave me the name of every card in the pack, but told me to be sure of one thing: Alfred Polgar was the ace of diamonds. The advice saved me years. I probably would have
got to Polgar eventually, but by getting to him early I was granted the entrée to a whole vanished world, because Polgar is the gatekeeper. Though a shy man, he knew everyone, because
everyone wanted to know him; and he had their characters summed up. As for his own books, they put me on the spot. The way he wrote about everything at all levels confirmed me in what I had been
trying to do, but the quality with which he did it was a poser. A single dull page would have been a relief, but there wasn’t one. Travelling a lot at the time on filming trips, I found his
titles in second-hand bookshops all over the world: wherever the refugees had gone to die in peace, and their children had sold the books because the old language was the last thing they wanted
to hear again. On Staten Island I found half a dozen, and there was a bunch of three in Tel Aviv. Strangely enough, Munich teemed with them: despite instructions, fewer Jew-infected books were
burned than the Nazis would have liked.

The original Polgar volumes are delectable to look at. Usually they are bound in light cardboard of a primary colour made
pastel by time, and the format is small enough to fit the pocket. But the bindings are fragile, and easily crack. It was encouraging to discover, in the 1980s,
that Rowohlt
was putting out a multi-volume complete edition on thin paper, strongly bound. The editor could not have been better chosen. It was Marcel Reich-Ranicki, a long-time admirer of Polgar who was
unlikely to muff the job. Nor did he, but the edition is unsatisfactory in one crucial respect. Each piece comes to an end without a sign of its provenance: to find out when it was written, you
have to turn to the critical apparatus at the back of the volume. There was some reason to divide his work into its genres, although it would have been better arranged in a pure chronology, to
show how his diversity was operating all the time. But to leave the dates off the pieces was to connive at a trick of wish fulfilment. German literature in the twentieth century was fated to lose
its self-sustaining monumentality. The point came when everything depended on which year a piece was written, and then which month, and even which day. Glossing that over, you miss the story of
how politics invaded art and came close to killing it. The complete edition would be a tomb if Polgar did not have a spirit that can shine through marble. You can see that I am unable to stop
borrowing his tricks. But the real trick is to borrow his tone. Nobody should try who can’t write English as well as Polgar wrote German, and I’m afraid that lets me out. It was hard
enough, for this note, taking him on a sentence at a time. But he could write a whole essay like that: joined-up writing
in excelsis
.

BEATRIX POTTER

Beatrix Potter (1866–1943) is as much belittled as flattered by her reputation of being the
children’s author that adults should read. What child would be impressed by that? She herself was not amused when Graham Greene wrote a semi-serious article about her. She wasn’t
interested in being a semi-serious subject. W. H. Auden was nearer the mark when he praised her outright as an artist of prose. So she was, and her little books would have been treasurable
even without her drawings. Her stories attract tweeness towards them—the Peter Rabbit ballet must be hard to take for anyone except a very tiny child—but are never winsome in
themselves, mainly because of her tactile, yet quite tough, feeling for language. She could luxuriate in the polysyllabic without making froth of the meaning: a rare, and strictly poetic,
discipline. Some of the post–World War II writers for children got their poetry from rhyme and rhythm: James Thurber in
The Thirteen Clocks
, Dr.
Seuss
passim
. Others got it from atmospherics: Maurice Sendak notably, Roald Dahl less tastefully, and J. K. Rowling by ransacking a sorcerers’
warehouse stocked with all the magic gear since Grimm’s first fairy tales. (In Harry Potter’s world, it’s only rarely that the
language
is magic, although Durmstrang would sound like a witty
name for a school to any twelve-year-old reader familiar with the history of
German literature.) Beatrix Potter got her poetry from prose: which is to say, from speech, concentrated. Written in an age when it was still assumed that children would not suffer brain
damage from hearing a phrase they couldn’t immediately understand, the books are plentifully supplied with elevated verbal constructions. The bright child sees unfamiliar phrases going
by just overhead, and reaches up, while the parent is reminded of the historic privilege of being born into a civilization where the morality of children’s books, even at their worthily
meant worst, has evolved through supply and demand, and not been imposed by the state according to a plan. In the old Soviet Union, there were children’s books that preached the virtues
of informing on one’s parents. Beatrix Potter had her own ideas of civic virtue, and most of them are still ours, although we might be more inclined than she was to ask what happens to
those animals who go to market involuntarily.

Pigling Bland listened gravely; Alexander was hopelessly
volatile.

—BEATRIX POTTER,
The Tale of Pigling Bland
, P. 25

P
EOPLE WHO DID
not have
Beatrix Potter read to them as a child soon learn to envy their own children. The luxury of her diction seems an unfair treat for the young to those of us who meet it for the first time in later
life. My daughters didn’t mind being compared to the hopelessly volatile Alexander, as long as I kept saying it. Children like to hear good things said a thousand times, so it helps if the
good things are as good as this.
The Tale of Pigling Bland
is especially rich in pointe-shoe examples of Potter’s gift for exquisitely elevated
linguistic deportment. In the next paragraph to the one in which this sentence occurs, we find that Aunt Pettitoes gives to each piglet a little bundle, “and eight conversation peppermints
with appropriate moral sentiments in screws of paper.” Bright young listeners will savour the “appropriate moral sentiments” as if they were the peppermints. More important,
they will savour the appropriate moral sentiments even when they aren’t quite certain what appropriate moral sentiments are. If you, as an adult, happen to be there when
the meaning teeters on the point of sinking in, it can be quite a moment. Poets, especially, are likely to be humbled: this is the transitional point where the art they practise begins and
ends.

The only flaw in
The Tale of Pigling Bland
is that the piglets are
going to market, yet there is no mention of the probability that they themselves will one day be on sale there in altered form. Bacon is frequently mentioned, but its significance is not alluded
to by the author, which rather leaves it to the reciter: a difficult moral decision. In the story of Timmy Tiptoes, Potter is more straightforward about the fate of mice: cats kill them. With
that much admitted, the
deus ex machina
that saves Timmy Tiptoes is saved from sentimentality. Timmy Tiptoes gets stuck in the trunk of a tree because the
Chipmunk has tempted him to eat too many nuts. Potter finds two ways of being unforgettable about Timmy’s nut-eating. The Chipmunk “ ’ticed him to eat quantities.” The
reciter will find that his audience is suitably curious about “enticed” being reduced to “ ’ticed,” but is fascinated beyond delight by the “quantities.”
(For days afterwards, hopelessly volatile small people will be discovered to have eaten “quantities” of whatever it is they eat at all.) The
deus ex
machina
is “the big wind” that blows the top off the tree. There is no suggestion that a big wind could save Timmy from a cat. There is, however, an implicit suggestion that
something will save Pigling Bland and the hopelessly volatile Alexander from becoming bacon. No doubt there had to be such a let-out. Potter was, after all, writing children’s books. It is
a mark of how good the books are, however, that the merest hint of ordinary uplift is a shock, as if Jane Austen had forgotten to mention money.