Cultural Amnesia (96 page)

We have to go a long way down the world’s scale of enormities before we find a terrorist scenario that looks like
pure farce. When we do, it’s probably because we don’t know enough about it. Already we forget that the fantasy politics of Germany’s glamorous young terrorists in the
Baader-Meinhof era had real victims. In the Basque area of Spain, the terrorists are currently collecting what they call “war tax” from their own civilians: pay up or get shot. It
looks like the reductio ad absurdum. At one time a regular holiday-maker in Biarritz, I was very glad when a Basque bomber from south of the border, taking a rest from his little war while he
constructed a new device, blew himself through the front window of one of my favourite bars and wound up in pieces all over the Rue Gambetta. (Don’t think it didn’t strike me that I
would have been less glad if I had been in the bar at the time.)
On top of my holiday from London, I got a holiday from pity. To the onlooker, the Spanish government would
appear to have done its best to give the Basques everything they want. It seems, however, that they want their own country, coterminous with their own language and culture. When the Slovaks
wanted that, Vaclav Hável gave it to them. (Some of his own colleagues thought he was foolish to do so, and that he permanently impoverished the Czech Republic as a result.) But the
Spanish government, we are told, is not in the same position to be generous. Too much of Spanish industry is in Basque territory. It is the mission of the ETA terrorists to persuade the Spanish
government that their cause is just. It doesn’t seem so to me: it doesn’t even seem sane. But there are some young Basques who are ready to face torture for it. To steel themselves,
they torture each other. Faced with that kind of determination, the first idea we must give up is that terrorists are not serious.

The idea we must never give up is that they are not rational. Not even Israel was necessarily a unique case. The Irgun
could have wrought suitably unacceptable havoc on a target that was not alive. But it would have taken more resources than they had, and anyway the chances were good that the British, exhausted
from the war and with the will to empire fading fast, would pack up and go home. In all other cases, the consequences of killing the innocent are predictable only in the sense that the terrorists
will alienate the best elements among their own political sympathizers. The IRA put its own cause back by years when it blew up a London bandstand that contained nothing military except
musicians. The whole idea of a soft target is a misconception. Insurgents could choose the hardest target, themselves. All the evidence suggests that if dramatization is the aim, there is nothing
more dramatic than a suicide in the right spot. When the Vietnamese monks set themselves alight in central Saigon, the flames were seen in Washington. When Jan Palach set himself alight in Prague
in 1968, the flames were seen in the Kremlin. There was no immediate effect—the sequel was years of oppression in each case—but suppose there had been twice the number of human
torches the next day, and twice as many again the day after that, and so on? In recent years the use of demonstrative suicide has expanded to include innocent victims. So far it hasn’t
worked: probably because it can’t, in the sense that those
groups wedded to it as a weapon have no clear aims that can be granted. (Palestinian suicide bombers, for
example, want the dissolution of the state of Israel, a wish that will be granted only on the understanding that the whole area is dissolved along with it, by the atomic bombs that the Israelis
would presumably use if the state caved in.) It hardly needs saying that if suicidal terrorists returned to leaving the innocent out of the equation they would no longer be terrorists. But by
confining violence to themselves they would be dramatizing one thing for certain: the sympathy for the oppressed that made them ready to give their lives. Young people who see
The Battle of Algiers
—and they should all see it, although not, I think, before they are old enough to vote—will identify that sympathy as a creative force,
and they will not be wrong. In the bar afterwards, however, we might find it hard to resist asking them what they suppose Algeria is like to live in now, almost half a century after the oppressor
was put to flight. It isn’t like Italy, that’s for sure. But there lay Rognoni’s big advantage: he was starting with a country that knew what it wanted to get back to, before it
went anywhere else.

Ernesto Sábato

Edward Said

Sainte-Beuve

José Saramago

Jean-Paul Sartre

Erik Satie

Arthur Schnitzler

Sophie Scholl

Wolf Jobst Siedler

Manès Sperber

ERNESTO SÁBATO

Ernesto Sábato was born in Buenos Aires in 1911 and studied physics and philosophy at the
University of la Plata. For the first part of his long career he combined science with radical politics. In 1930 he joined the Juventud Comunista and by 1933 he had risen to become secretary
of that embattled organization, but his doubts about Stalin had already begun. Reluctant to let the Party go, he eventually sought renewal of his faith by enrolling at the School of Leninism
in Moscow. Luckily he had got only as far as Brussels when news of the Moscow trials led him to break a journey which, he later admitted, would surely have ended in his premature death. At
the Curie Laboratory in Paris he went on with his study of physics, and was present when the French did enough work on the atom to give an idea of the destructive power that was on its way.
Sábato, always prone to thoughts of suicide and large questions about life and death, was suitably impressed by the prospect of doom for all mankind. After 1945 he did no more physics,
giving himself full-time to writing, painting and education. But when he wrote articles in dispraise of the Perón regime, the public education system was no longer a field open to him,
and he had to transmit his ideas by writing. His novels—most
famously
The Tunnel
(1948)—are important, but unwieldy for
the beginning reader. His essays provide the ideal approach to his teeming range of opinion, almost all of it reasonable, even when camped beween the dream world and the world. During the war
over the Malvinas in 1982 he took Argentina’s part but that didn’t stop him burying the last credentials of the junta with his editorship of
Nunca
Mas
(Never Again, often called simply the Sábato Report), which detailed and analysed the atrocities of the military regime. He was even better than Borges at being interviewed,
so when they talked with each other they could cut out the middleman. The transcripts of their dialogues are delightful. Sábato’s non-fictional prose is collected in half a dozen
attractively presented volumes of essays which he himself, as a pedagogue, might have designed as magically unputdownable textbooks for foreigners learning to read Spanish. In his later
years, after he was medically declared to be too blind to read and write, he has concentrated on his painting: a typically category-busting gesture from a writer so good at convincing the
rest of us that we aren’t looking hard enough, and especially not into our own memories. Sábato’s memory of his radical years has served him well. Protected against
snobbery, he never fell for the illusion, rife in the elevated Argentinian literary world, that art was only for the elect. He thought that even humble journalists could share the glory of a
genius, simply by pointing out that he was there, and thus offering him the consolation of understanding. Sábato has a phrase for it:
la infinita
liberación de no saberse solo
. The infinite liberation of knowing that one is not alone. I should add, in fairness, that there are young intellectuals in Argentina who find my
admiration for Sábato incomprehensible. They remember that he, too, like Borges, sat down with the generals. But I rememer that he stood up again; and his prose, which they find
stifling, I find lucid. But that could be the usual effect of reading in a language not one’s own: one is too easily impressed.

Only a thick skin can defend itself, and the characteristic of an
artist is an extreme delicacy of skin.

—ERNESTO
SÁBATO,
Entre la letra y la sangre
, P. 126

I
F I
HAD
my time again, I would never react publicly to criticism, no matter how unjustified. Unless the point in dispute is a point of fact, all you can do by doing so is to cooperate in your
assailant’s aim of getting you onto your back foot and keeping you there. But this is mainly a tactical consideration. The injunction that you should not
feel
criticism is an impertinence. After all, when you criticized other people, it was on the assumption that they would feel it, or anyway ought to have done. Savagery
of critical expression can often be put down to the critic’s belief that his subject, having become renowned, has attained a position of power, and might not be troubled unless well
whipped; with the conscience-saving clause that the hurt will not go deep, because its recipient is too well-armoured with the world’s rewards. Success has given him a thick skin. But as
Sábato was right to point out, for an artist there is no such thing as a thick skin. Sometimes his thin skin has to bear the weight of complete steel, but it will suffer from that too: the
burden of seeming toughness is hard on the nerves, and you can’t wear a suit of armour to bed without losing sleep.

In his diaries, Thomas Mann made what sounded like anti-Semitic remarks about the critic Alfred Kerr.
Mann was no anti-Semite, but he flew off the handle because Kerr had belittled him in print. (Mann, with some justification, thought that he was Goethe, so making him feel belittled was easy: all
you had to do was suggest that he was only Schiller.) Proust’s invariable response to adverse criticism was to write to the critic at great length. When the first volume of
À la recherche du temps perdu
came out, it was panned in
Le Temps
by a blundering hack called Paul Souday. Proust wrote to
him in detailed protest, and over a period of years invited him several times to dinner. Souday later claimed to have discovered Proust. In effect, Proust had disarmed his tormentor by taking him
at his own absurdly exalted estimation. From my experience as a critic, I would have to conclude that no writer of any kind or degree is content to be taken any other way. Anthony Powell and
Patrick White had in common an elephantine capacity to
remember the perpetrators of an unfavourable notice: White sincerely believed that they were all in touch with one
another. He kept a list. When I heard that I was on it, I wondered if he would send his seconds, or some large man carrying a tyre iron. I was also struck by John Le Carré’s private
reaction to a bad notice I gave his long novel
The Honourable Schoolboy
, which I thought, and said, was a put-up job. Le Carré did not react in
public, but in private he spread the opinion that I was conducting a vendetta. Since, in the same article, I had called
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
a
masterpiece, it would have been a strange vendetta.

Le Carré would have been on solid ground if he had confined his annoyance to the industrial fact
that a negative notice in the
New York Review of Books
could be of no help to his new book’s prospects in America, and might well have damaged them. I
would guess, however, that he threw his toys out of the pram because I had suggested that his new book was a dud by his own standards. The compliment involved in that kind of condemnation never
registers. I once saw a famously cool literary friend of mine turn angry enough to commit murder. A collection of his critical pieces had just been dismissively reviewed in the
Times Literary Supplement
, the burden of the review being that somebody of my friend’s high talents should not be wasting his time writing journalism. The
paper’s reviewers were still anonymous in those days but my friend knew who the culprit was: a notorious dullard. The victim pronounced anathema not only against the dullard for writing the
review, but against the editor for printing it. Clearly he would have liked to see the guilty pair lashed back to back with cable and used as landfill in the Thames estuary, but only after being
toasted to the point of death with a flame-thrower. I was so shaken by the spectacle of his white lips and clenched fists—one of the fists had a pint of beer in it, so there was danger from
flying glass—that I had trouble remembering three pertinent facts. The dullard’s sedulous mediocrity was fully revealed in his piece for all to see; almost every piece in the book
that he had reviewed was more intransigent than the review; and it had been scarcely twenty-four hours since the victim, in that same pub, had given me a withering lecture on my absurd
sensitivity to criticism.

But injured pride knows no reason: a fact I know from my other experience, as an author. It took me many years to grow out
of the
assumption that any adverse criticism was a personal attack. It
felt
like a personal attack. Sometimes it was meant to feel like
that, but common sense should have told me at the time that a limiting judgement can be written out of regret as well as spite. After all, I would have been outraged if anyone had dared to
suggest that my own limiting judgements on other authors were written out of anything except an objective care for literature. The fly in the ointment (what W. C. Fields called “the
Ethiopian in the fuel supply” until he was stopped from doing it) is that an author’s work
is
his personality, so he can’t help feeling
that any aspersions cast on it are cast on him. Realizing this to be so is one of the secrets of survival in the literary world: as so often happens in life, the strength that matters is gained
from recognizing your weakness. Without going so far as to forgive yourself for it, you have to get it in perspective. The price of not doing so is a disabling petulance. Confidence must be
preserved somehow, but to assume that everyone who criticizes you is out to get you is a bad way of preserving it.

One once-famous contemporary playwright always operated on the assumption that any hostile critic was motivated by envy of
his fame, money, house and wife, all four of which were on display in the colour supplements from week to week. He missed out on listening properly to advice he should have heeded, because the
day came when his major revenue stream consisted of royalties from Norway. I learned my own lesson when someone I knew and loved told me that I should be counting my syllables along with my
stresses. We were having a huge fight at the time and I thought that everything he said against me was meant to wound. Some of it was, but on that point he was right. I learned another lesson
when I finally realized that the point he had been right about was the hardest one to forgive him for. Even when they are confined to private interchange, these prickly sensitivities amount to
the most uncomfortable thing about the creative life. One of the many advantages conferred by a general knowledge of the arts is the evidence it provides that not even the greatest figures are
immune. What makes them great is that they are not disabled. Verdi longed for Wagner’s praise, but eventually wrote
Falstaff
without it. Renoir was
right to be mortified when Degas found him wanting. (Where Renoir went wrong was in dismantling some of the strengths of his technique in an effort to correct the weaknesses: he should have
trusted his public.) Keeping
an eye on yourself is a hard but necessary task. Much as it hurts, criticism can help you do it. A thick skin, taking nothing in, turns dry and
cracks. The thin skin is the strong one. It wasn’t just generous of Sábato to say so: it was realistic.