The Last Empire (17 page)

I was both moved and alarmed that one of his own last reviews in
The Observer
was of my collected essays in which appeared a long piece on his first volume of memoirs: I recalled him personally, with fondness; reported on his life and work; remarked, of the memoir, that he had no sense of humor.

In his review of me he quotes this, remarking that, once, he did have a sense of humor. I almost wrote him to say that I was referring only to the autobiography. Now I know that he had known for some time that he was dying of cancer, no rollicking business.

I cannot think what English book reviewing will do without him. He actually read what he wrote about, and he was always interesting on what he read. He did not suffer from the English disease of envy that tends to make so much English reviewing injurious to the health of literature.

When I first met him in 1964, he was about to be famous for
A Clockwork Orange
. He was, however, truly notorious because he had reviewed, pseudonymously, several of his own books in a provincial newspaper. “At least,” I said at the time, “he is the first novelist in England to know that a reviewer has actually read the book under review.”

Shakespeare, Joyce, Roman Empire (of the imagination), Malaysia; the constipated Enderby, whose fine poems were often included in the prose text. He ranged throughout language, a devoted philologist, and throughout music as a composer.

Once his first wife snarled—when it became clear that I was eight years younger than he—that I ought not to have got some Book Club selection when he had written so much more than I. Neither of us quite sober, we began to compare units of production. When it became clear that I was ahead, he said with quiet pomp, “I am really a composer.” I was left without a single choral work, much less a fanfare, to put in the scales.

At one point when we were both living in Rome, whenever I would be offered a twelve-part television miniseries on the Medici or the Huns, I’d say, “Get poor Burgess,” and so they did. When I made the mistake of using the phrase “poor Burgess” in an interview, he wrote, “I can’t say that I liked that ‘poor Burgess’ bit. Happily, I left Gore out of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the contemporary novel.” In due course, he transcended Italian television and did, for the RSC, the finest version I have ever seen of
Cyrano de Bergerac
. Many parts, not so poor Burgess.

I ended my review of Anthony’s autobiography—much of it about how he lost faith in God—by making a play on the title
Little Wilson
(Burgess’s real name)
and Big God
. I suggested that the book might better have been called
Little Wilson and Big Burgess
, “who did it his, if not His, way.”

I saw him a year or two ago. We were being jointly interviewed by BBC Radio. “Odd,” he said, “I keep looking at my watch. It’s like a tic. I wonder why?” For once, I made no answer.

The Observer

28 November 1993

* 
P
RIDE

Is pride a sin at all? The
Oxford English Dictionary
strikes a primly English note: “A high or overweening opinion of one’s own qualities, attainments or estate,” or too clever by half, the ultimate put-down in those bright arid islands where ignorance must be lightly worn.

Apparently, the Romans and the Greeks had other, by no means pejorative, words for it. The quintessential Greek, Odysseus, reveled in being too clever by any number of halves. Of course, neither Greeks nor Romans had a word for sin, a Judeo-Christian concept that the Germans did have a word for,
Sünde,
which Old English took aboard. Obviously, in any time and place an overweening person is tiresome, but surely laughter is the best tonic for restoring him to our common weeniness. He hardly needs to be prayed for or punished as a sinner. Yet pride is listed as the first of the seven deadly sins, and only recently—by accident, not design—did I figure out why.

Over the years I have taken some . . . well, pride in never reading my own work, or appearing with other writers on public occasions, or joining any organizations other than labor unions. In 1976, when I was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, I promptly declined this high estate on the ground that I was already a member of the Diners’ Club. John Cheever was furious with me: “Couldn’t you at least have said Carte Blanche? Diners’ Club is so tacky.” A couple of months ago I declined election to the Society of American Historians—politely, I hope.

James Joyce’s “silence, exile, and cunning” is the ultimate in artist’s pride. But for someone politically inclined, that was not possible; even so, one could still play a lone hand, as a writer if not as an engaged citizen. Recently, Norman Mailer asked me if I would join him and two other writers in a reading of George Bernard Shaw’s
Don Juan in Hell
. The proceeds would go to the Actors Studio. I would play the Devil, who has most of the good lines.

So, out of Charity—Vanity?—I set to one side my proud rule and shared a stage with three writers and the fading ghost of a very great one; fading because Shaw can appeal only to those who think that human society can be made better by human intelligence and will. I am of Shaw’s party; the Devil’s, too, I found, as I began to immerse myself in the part.

In a very long speech, the Devil makes an attractive case for himself; he also explains the bad press that he has got from the celestial hordes and their earthly admirers. The Devil believes that the false view of him in England is the result of an Italian and an Englishman. The Italian, of course, is Dante, and the Englishman is John Milton. Somewhat gratuitously, Shaw’s Devil remarks that like everyone else he has never managed to get all the way through
Paradise Lost
and
Paradise Regained
. Although I had my problems with the second, the first is
the
masterpiece of our language, and Lucifer, the Son of Morning, blazes most attractively while God seems more arbitrary and self-regarding than ever, eager in His solipsistic pride to hear only praise from the angelic choirs, as well as from Adam and Eve, two mud pies He liked to play with.

It is Milton’s conceit that proud Lucifer, a bored angel, tempts Adam and Eve with the only thing a totalitarian ruler must always keep from his slaves, knowledge. Rather surprisingly, the First Couple choose knowledge—well, she chooses it; they lose Eden; go forth to breed and die while Lucifer and his party, expelled from heaven, fall and fall and fall through Chaos and Old Night until they reach rock bottom, hell:

Here we may reign secure, and in my choice

To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.

I first heard those words in 1941, spoken by Edward G. Robinson in the film of Jack London’s
Sea Wolf
. It was like an electric shock. The great alternative. I can do no other. Bright world elsewhere. To reign and not to serve. To say, No. This was my introduction to Milton and to Lucifer’s pride.

I was brought up in a freethinking Southern family where pride of clan could lead to all sorts of folly as well as to exemplary self-sacrifice.

My great-grandfather sat for a whole day on the steps of the courthouse at Walthall, Miss., debating whether to go fight with the rest of the clan in a civil war that he knew could not be won, and for a cause that he despised. Pride required him to fight with his clan; he fell at Shiloh.

Fifty years later in the Senate, his son defied the leader of his party, President Woodrow Wilson, on the issue of whether or not the United States should fight in World War I. The Chamber of Commerce of Oklahoma City sent him a telegram saying that if he did not support the war, he would be an ex-senator. He sent them a telegram: “How many of your membership are of draft age?” He fell from office, as they had promised.

There is a whiff of sulfur here, perhaps; but there is also the sense that one is the final judge of what must be done despite the seductive temptations and stern edicts of the gods. In the absence of a totalitarian sky-god or earthly ruler, there is the always troubling dictatorship of the American majority, which Tocqueville saw as the dark side to our “democracy.”

Very much in the family tradition, in 1948, I ran counter to the majority’s loony superstitions about sex and fell quite far indeed. (This newspaper’s regular daily critic not only did not review the offending novel,
The City and the Pillar,
but told my publisher that he would never again read, much less review, a book of mine: six subsequent books were not reviewed in the daily paper.) But pride required that I bear witness, like it or not, and if the superstitious masses—or great Zeus himself—disapproved, I would go even deeper into rebellion, and fall farther. Understandably, for the cowed majority, pride is the most unnerving “sin” because pride scorns them quite as much as Lucifer did God.

Significantly, a story that keeps cropping up from culture to culture is that of the man who steals fire from heaven to benefit the human race. After Prometheus stole the fire for us, he ended up chained to a rock, an eagle gnawing eternally at his liver. Zeus’ revenge was terrible, but the Prometheus of Aeschylus does not bend; in fact, he curses Zeus and predicts: “Let him act, let him reign his little while as he will; for he shall not long rule over the gods.”

So let us celebrate pride when it defies those dominations and powers that enslave us. In my own case, for a quarter-century I have refused to read, much less write for, this newspaper, but, as Prometheus also somewhat cryptically observes, “Time, growing ever older, teaches all things.” Or, as Dr. Johnson notes, reflecting Matthew’s Gospel, “Pride must have a fall”; thus proving it was the real thing and not merely the mock.

The New York Times

4 July 1993

* 
L
INDBERGH:
T
HE
E
AGLE
I
S
G
ROUNDED

On May 20–21, 1927, in thirty-three and a half hours, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., flew nonstop from New York City to Paris’s Le Bourget airport. At the age of twenty-five, Slim, as he was known to associates, became the most famous person in the world, and so he remained for much of a life that ended in 1974. As is usual with heroes, his popularity waxed and waned; also, as is not usual with ordinary heroes, he was much more than just the one adventure. He was also an engineering genius with a mystical bent that, by the time of his death, had made him regret the world he had helped create—
Modern Times
(starring the world’s second most recognized man, Charlie Chaplin). Slim was drawn more and more to Thoreau and to primal nature as well as to Lao Tzu, who saw essential change in those waters and tides that are able to wear down rock surfaces, no matter how adamantine, in order to make a new world. Finally, he turned himself into a good writer; school of Julius Caesar, yes, but Caesar crossed
with Lucretius’ sense of the beauty of “things” and their arrangement, precisely described. Lindbergh was a very strange sort of American for the first part of the century now ending. He is practically incomprehensible today.

A. Scott Berg has produced a characteristically workmanlike survey of the many things that Lindbergh did, and of some of the things that he was. Aside from the creation of airlines in the 1930s, he invented a “perfusion pump,” variations of which now keep alive bodily organs until they are ready to be transplanted. Also, as early as 1929, the prescient Lindbergh befriended Robert Goddard, whose rocket research could have given the United States the unmanned missile long before Hitler’s V-2, which nearly won the war for the Nazis.

In 1932, when the Lindberghs’ two-year-old son was kidnapped and killed, fearful for their growing family and hounded by a press every bit as dreadful then as now, Lindbergh and his wife, Anne Morrow, moved to Europe, where they stayed for three years.

At the request of the American military, Lindbergh checked out the German Luftwaffe, which he found alarmingly advanced in both design and production, while the French and British air forces combined were not in the same league. In 1939 Lindbergh came home to call for “an impregnable system of defense.” Also, between 1939 and 1941, he was the chief voice raised against U.S. intervention in the Second World War. In a notorious speech at Des Moines in 1941, he identified America’s three interventionist groups: the Roosevelt administration, the Jews, and the British. Although the country was deeply isolationist, the interventionists were very resourceful, and Lindbergh was promptly attacked as a pro-Nazi anti-Semite when he was no more than a classic Midwestern isolationist, reflective of a majority of the country. But along with such noble isolationists as Norman Thomas and Burton K. Wheeler, not to mention Lindbergh’s friend Harry Guggenheim’s foundation, the “America First”
movement, as it was called, did attract some genuine home-grown fascists who would have been amazed to learn that there was never a “Jewish plot” to get the United States into the Second World War. Quite the contrary. Before Pearl Harbor, as Berg notes, “though most of the American motion-picture studios were owned by Jews, most were virtually paranoid about keeping pro-Jewish sentiment off the screen.” Also, Arthur Hayes Sulzberger, publisher of
The New York Times
, confided as late as September 1941 to the British Special Operations Executive agent Valentine Williams “that for the first time in his life he regretted being a Jew because, with the tide of anti-Semitism rising, he was unable to champion the anti-Hitler policy of the administration as vigorously and as universally as he would like, as his sponsorship would be attributed to Jewish influence by isolationists and thus lose something of its force.”

It was not until November 25, 1996, that an American academic, Thomas E. Mahl, researching Britain’s various secret service archives, came across the Williams file. He has now published
Desperate Deception
, as full a story as we are ever apt to get of “British Covert Operations in the United States 1939–44.” Although media and schools condition Americans to start giggling at the mention of the word “conspiracy,” there are, at any moment, all sorts of conspiracies crisscrossing our spacious skies and amber fields of grain, and of them all in this century, the largest, most intricate and finally most successful was that of the British to get us into the Second World War. Mahl shows us just how busy their operatives were, from Ronald Colman, starring in pro-British films and the Korda brothers making them, to Walter Winchell reading on his Sunday broadcast pro-British messages written for him by Ernest Cuneo, who also ghosted pro-British newspaper columns for Drew Pearson. There
was indeed a vast conspiracy to maneuver an essentially isolationist country into war. There was also a dedicated conspiracy to destroy Lindbergh’s reputation as hero.