Cultural Amnesia (90 page)

MR-R has never been just a stylist judging style, although there are
worse things to be than someone
who can do that. He can get to the heart of a writer and stay there, sometimes for decades. In the heart of Thomas Mann he set up shop. His book on the Mann family is the first thing to read on
the subject (although first you should read the subject, which takes a good chunk of a lifetime) but if he had never talked about any of them except Thomas Mann he would still have done a lot to
get the titan in context—and from the inside, which is the hard part. “
Er hat fast nichts erlebt und fast alles beschrieben
.” He
experienced almost nothing and described almost everything: it was too true to be cruel. MR-R takes that truth as an invitation to extend his enquiries, not to shut them down. He has never
stopped being interested in, or being interesting about, Thomas Mann; but always on the understanding that Thomas Mann devoted his life and art to needing no such assistance. So why is a critic
necessary? Well, there are all those other critics who aren’t, and they will hardly shut up unless contested: someone has to speak plain sense. There was a lot Thomas Mann could do, but he
couldn’t always do that. In the style of a great creative writer, too many clarities collide and make rainbows: sorting out the spectral maelstrom is a long job.

There have been other great names that MR-R has felt no compulsion to cling on to. He has always been a great one for
echoing Tallulah Bankhead’s vocal judgement during a self-consciously advanced production of a play by Maeterlinck: “There’s less in this than meets the eye.” Admirers of
Walter Benjamin were disconcerted to find that MR-R thought him short of the very thing he was supposed to have in abundant stock: profundity. MR-R thought Benjamin the critic made a mistake in
trying to think like a writer. MR-R skewered Benjamin’s character on the basis of Benjamin’s snobbish remarks about Walter Mehring’s social background. (Mehring was a catchpenny
writer of lyrics and sketches under the Weimar Republic, and in exile he was a bit of a liability, but he was also a genuine lover of books, as his lament for his lost library,
Die verlorene Bibliothek
, subsequently revealed.) When you consider that Benjamin’s prestige as a pundit continues to be almost as high within Germany as outside
it, you begin to grasp just how brave MR-R can be, or at any rate how cocky he can sound. On his ZDF television talk show
Das literarische Quartett
he
regularly
advances the outrageous opinion that no contemporary novel longer than 500 pages can possibly be worth reading. (A book of transcripts from the show, collected under
the snappy title
“. . . und alle Fragen offen
,
”
comes in at 768 pages, but is very much worth reading.)
Though his fellow panellists and most of the television audience secretly agree with him, they all delight in ascribing such opinions to his choleric impatience, and indeed he always looks as if
he is about to bite the book he is holding in half, even if he says he likes it. But the short shrift he customarily extends to the profundities of
Kunstwissenschaft
ought not to be ascribed to the supposed brevity of his attention span. He has taken the time to understand what the higher criticism is on about. He
just doesn’t agree with it.

MR-R wants the critic’s job kept down to earth. Really he wants the writer’s job kept down there too. In a
culture where the sublime has always seductively beckoned, his has been a useful corrective emphasis: a shift of direction towards talking turkey and away from
Mumpitz
, that useful German word for exalted twaddle. There is a danger of know-nothing savagery, but he offsets that by knowing everything. Politically clued up, he
has always been able to approach contemporary German writers through what tends to be their blind spot, which is their attitude to liberal democracy. In a cockfight whose flying feathers have not
yet settled, MR-R leapt on Günter Grass for flirting with the notion that at least the old DDR had had a system of belief. (Graham Greene used to peddle the same line about the West’s
deficiency in faith, but apart from Dwight Macdonald there was no Reich-Ranicki to tear into him.) Contrary to the received opinion among MR-R’s more embittered opponents in Germany, he has
always been hospitable enough to any writer who has found the capitalist West deficient in human values. He just punishes any lingering suggestion that the totalitarian East might have had a
surplus of them. His credentials were impeccable: the East was where he came from. The credentials looked less impeccable when it turned out that part of the price he paid for staying in the East
at the end of the war was that he had to turn stoolie, but his personal history—though he made a mistake in not admitting it before it was revealed—couldn’t invalidate the
attacks he launched on writers in the East after he himself had made it to the West. Regretfully but firmly,
he dismantled the claims to seriousness of those East German
writers who did not, as he did, take it on the lam, but who stayed on, compromised with the State, and flourished. He argued, surely correctly, that the compromise not only turned their opinions
to apologetics, it turned their literature to propaganda. But the unyielding strictness with which he said so has understandably been held against him, and raises the question of whether a critic
should ever throw a stone without remembering his house is made of glass.

When we look at the quoted statement carefully, however, we see that MR-R is claiming no such right. The death certificate
is signed by a doctor. It is the death
sentence
that is signed by a judge. The judgement MR-R is talking about is the diagnostic one about whether the work
presented to him is alive or dead, not about whether it should live or die. As long as this is borne in mind, it seems to me that the irascible arch-critic is on strong ground. He is often called
Henker
, hangman, but it’s a nickname. At most he is a grave-digger, and what would we do without those? We have a right, though, to ask grave-diggers
for a modicum of tact. Hamlet met one with the saving grace of humour. MR-R’s humour is real and often hilarious, but he would do better to make his fellow-feeling more obvious more often.
In old age, heaped with honours and uncontested in his position, he continues to write as if he had not yet made it. One of the most piquant complaints in his autobiography is how he was not made
to feel at home in the German literary world: it is a complaint that goes all the way back to Jakob Wassermann, whose case is cited in MR-R’s indispensable pocket book
Der doppelte Boden
(The False Bottom). Under the Weimar Republic, Wassermann was nationally famous but felt he did not belong. MR-R, nationally famous in a democractic
Germany half a century after the Holocaust, still feels the same. If it is the condition of the Jew in Germany, then the condition is historically incurable. (There is a lot to prove that the
German intellectual world has done everything in its power to make amends.) But it might be just personal. Not many artists feel secure in their posts, and Marcel Reich-Ranicki is an artist if
anybody is: an artist of criticism if you like, but for anyone who can write a sentence the way he can, the option to rule himself out is not open. As MR-R has always been the first to insist, a
critic is not a scientist, because there is no Golden Yardstick: no
Metermass
. That leaves the
critic as either artist or factotum. MR-R
claims the lower status, but the way he writes condemns him to the higher. I came to German late, and it has sometimes been a hard tussle with my thick wits: but knowing what I know now, if I had
never learned it to read anyone else, I would have learned it just to read him.

JEAN-FRANÇOIS REVEL

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) was the man who defined the
Communist world as the first society in history condemned to live behind walls in order to stop people getting out. The best way of defining his style as a writer is to say that there is
something as good as that in every paragraph. No political commentator anywhere is so consistently entertaining on such a high level. Revel’s youthful beginnings were as a courier in
the Resistance. After trading in his thorough academic preparation as a philosopher for a career as a working journalist, he set out on a long attempt to bring French political journalism
back towards philosophy, by developing, over the course of twenty-five or more books, a dense consistency of liberal views always underpinned by both a deep background in historical reading
and a close observation of daily events. The close observation fed a good memory, which made him the bugbear of his
gauchiste
opposite numbers, because
he remembered things they preferred to forget: to the end, he retained an impressive knack for tracing the latest progressive fad back to its roots in the orthodoxy before last.

In succession to Raymond Aron, and on a par with the eloquent ex-Communist François Furet, Revel was part of
France’s comeback from the depths of glamorous but perilously self-deceiving radical chic. Several of his books, most notably
How
Democracies Perish
, earned international fame. It could be said that in the United States at least one of his opinions made him too famous: his notion that democracy might have to give
up some of its liberties in order to protect itself was, when translated into English, far too popular on the American neo-conservative right, as Hendrick Herzberg pointed out at the time.
But Revel is at his most rewarding when read in his own language, which he writes in a style that the beginner will find gratifyingly clear in its structure, memorable for its vivid imagery,
and consistently funny. Revel is brilliant in attack, but always remembers to dismantle the man’s position and not the man. He has a lively appreciation of how people can get stuck with
a view because it has become their identity. In 1970 his book
Without Marx or Jesus
was an early guess that America would not be universally admired for
making a totalitarian hegemony impossible. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Revel was prescient about how nostalgia for a collectivist social solution would continue to infect the
left. By extension, he foresaw the crisis that would be brought to liberal democracy by an ideology of multiculturalism, because it would automatically undermine liberal values at home
without even needing to pay allegiance abroad. Perhaps Revel’s single best book about the world picture is
L’Obsession
anti-américaine
(2002, translated as
Anti-Americanism
), which ranges far more widely than its title suggests, persuasively tracing the
development of globalized terror from its origins in the threat, not that the Palestinians might be denied their own state, but that they might gain it in a way that accepted the existence of
the state of Israel. The best book about him is by him: his 1997 autobiography
Le Voleur dans la maison vide
(The Thief in the Empty House). It is
impossible to imagine any of his dogmatist opposite numbers writing anything so human, self-deprecating and charmingly troubled. No wonder they loathe him. Outwritten, outpointed and
outraged, French
gauchiste
commentators have always consigned Revel to the far
right, but they find it hard to make the
classification stick. When it comes to the welfare of the common people, he was all too clearly more to the left than they are, never having succumbed to the intellectual opportunism that
cherishes a non-existent class struggle as the motor of social progress.

During the preparation of this book for the press, Jean-François Revel, full of years and
honours, died at the age of eighty-two. Though the pseudo-left throughout the world went on calling him a right-winger to the very end, it was always apparent, to anyone with an ear for his
sardonic music, that he was a popular champion in the very best sense of the term. He began on the left, and, in the only sense that really matters, on the left was where he finished:
vigilant against all powers that hold the common people in contempt, including the power that claims they can be coerced into being free.