Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (25 page)

A decisive no to all neo-Nazi revisionism, but no as well to letting the Holocaust set as incontestable as stone. How will we adequately understand what it was, how it came about, what it goes on being in men's minds, unless we are forever asking questions of it? Irving cannot by any perversion of meaning be turned into a champion of the enquiring intelligence because his historical methodology, vis-à-vis the Holocaust at least, terminates enquiry, because his interpretation of what constitutes proof is ignorant and slanted, because he is insensitive to testimony, and because his mind has closed. Good riddance to him in the particular, but in the general we are the poorer for every disagreement not voiced, every dispute not pursued. It is not only history that will seal over if we let it; all around us, every day, we see the triumph of like-mindedness, and like-mindedness is scarcely to be distinguished from closed-mindedness, even among those who would be astonished to hear themselves called bigots.

Take, for example, if you don't mind stepping down from ill will to bad taste, the capitulation of British film judges to that pleasant but unexceptional film,
American Beauty
. Nowhere can you have a better illustration of the truism – and if it wasn't a truism before, it should be now – that just because a lot of people agree about something, it doesn't mean they're right.

Of course
American Beauty
carried everything before it in America. The self-flattering title alone was worth half an Oscar. And the other half was in the bag by virtue of the film's cunning cantilevered uplift. All for the best, give or take, in the best of all possible Americas. But English judges are meant to be less susceptible to the sprinkling of stardust. Where was
Happiness
, the movie that truly took the lid off happy families? Or
Topsy-Turvy
, which did
Beauty
all ends up both as tragedy and comedy, laying hold of life and therefore loving it more as a consequence?

In the end, what's important is not that the British Academy got it wrong – right will never be watertight, anyway – but that it was unable to think for itself. The moral infection of seasonal like-mindedness had laid it low.

Uniformity kills. And uniformity is the price we pay whenever an argument is comprehensively lost. I almost wish Irving had acquitted himself better, though he could have done that only by being a better historian, in which event he would not have denied the Holocaust. As it is, I'm left wondering how it helps to have the field of conflict silent, and heaven hushed beneath its blanket, when we know that God Himself has always needed the devil to contend with.

Mind Your Own Business

 

Watching the last episode of Peter Ackroyd's television series on Charles Dickens last week, I came over all queer suddenly with a thought. Not the thought that in the course of his researches into Dickens Mr Ackroyd had grown (I speak merely of appearance) to resemble someone only Dickens could have created – I had that thought the week before – but the thought that maybe we have no business being quite so curious about Dickens's or any other artist's personal life, and that historians of illustrious persons' privacy ought not to indulge or even excite that curiosity to the degree they do.

That the work's the thing, and the life a mere accidental irrelevance, is one of those truisms old-fashioned academics of my sort were wont to iterate in the days before intertextuality came along, refusing to see the work for the trees, and eventually finding the trees more interesting. There was a time we would have called such a position philistinism, but we chose instead to call it theory.

Taking the critic Sainte-Beuve to task for his attachment to the methodologies of history and biography – knowing everything about the writer as necessary preparation for knowing what he wrote – the novelist Milan Kundera observes that Sainte-Beuve ‘thereby managed not to recognise any of the great writers of his time – not Balzac, nor Stendhal, nor Baudelaire'.

‘By studying their lives,' Kundera goes on, ‘he inevitably missed their work.' Since Kundera throws into the pot what Proust had to say on the subject as well, I will help myself likewise. ‘A book is a product of a
self other
than the self we manifest in our habits, in our social life, in our vices . . . the writer's true self is manifested in his books
alone
.'

Thus, while perfectly understandable at the level of gossip and idle curiosity, the impulse to unravel a work in an attempt to discover the circumstances that occasioned it – to find the truth behind the fiction – is necessarily inimical to art.

I have no such complaint against Peter Ackroyd's telly series. Telly must do what telly does. And while the base metal out of which Dickens's great novels were made was of necessity Ackroyd's subject, he never failed to marvel over the transformation. Indeed, what made me go over all queer in that last episode was more humanitarian than aesthetical, not so much the Sainte-Beuve in Peter Ackroyd as the Miss Marple – in particular the sight of him excitedly going through old ledgers proving not only that Dickens was living secretly with the actress Ellen Ternan, but that he was doing so, because he was desperate not to be discovered, under a sequence of assumed names. What the writer has gone to great lengths to hide, let the biographer go to even greater lengths to uncover! Not on account of any sin against Dickens the novelist did that suddenly strike me as callous, but on account of the trespass against him as a man.

We do, of course, take it for granted now that the wishes of the living, let alone the dead, confer no obligation on us when we scent a scandal. This being the case, what some dead writer wanted is bound to cut no ice. Did not Max Brod, faced with Kafka's dying instructions that ‘all this, without exception, is to be burned', refuse to commit ‘the incendiary act' his friend demanded of him, and is not the world a richer place as a consequence? They know not what they ask, that is our justification. We know better what will serve their memory.

A person's squeamishness dies with him – that's our assumption. Dickens did not want to be found out, for reasons of local delicacy which no longer apply. Those he did not want to hurt are dead. The morality he wished to be seen to live by has changed. Therefore there remains no reason why the facts he chose to conceal should stay concealed. More than that, applying the model of political chicanery, we believe it is in the public good that everything should come to light. We have a right to know.

But do we? Dickens has not been shown, despite the zealousness of historians and biographers, to have whispered state secrets into the ear of a Prussian spy. So what end is served by our right to know? Not any understanding of the art, we have established that. And why should our right to know enjoy paramountcy over Dickens's right to insist we don't? Who are we to deny his wishes or to quarrel with the ideal of dignity by which he tried to live? Who are we to assert that shame does not live on beyond the grave? The heart must have its secrets, D. H. Lawrence said.

And now it's the turn of the other – not D. H. but T. E. Lawrence. Nice, for his shade, to be reminded whenever his name crops up (forgive the ‘crop') of the scars across his buttocks, maybe administered, maybe not, by a Turk hell-bent on rape. Having experienced and even courted notoriety, Lawrence chose to live the second part of his life in obscurity. When a ‘film merchant called Korda' proposed a biopic, he did what few of us would do today, and said no.

So what to make of the sensational news that during the time he was serving in the RAF under the name first of Aircraftman J. H. Ross, then as T. E. Shaw, he paid a Mrs Bryant of Newark two of the three shillings he earned a week? A closet heterosexual after all, was he? Or just an indiscriminate masochist, not fussy who did the flogging – a glistening Ottoman on a kilim in a tent in Wadi Safra, or a powdered married lady strapped for cash (sorry about the ‘strapped') on the doormat of a two-up two-down semi in Newark?

Secrets of the human heart? Let the dead fret about the dead, the living don't give a damn.

The Egotism of the Terrorist

 

There's a moment in one's attempt to understand the mind of a terrorist, or, if you prefer, freedom fighter, secessionist, let's just say any active member of any armed resistance movement, when one's imagination falters. More than falters, fails. No matter how hard you try, no matter how conscientiously you clear your mind of the clutter of prejudice and partisanship, you cannot make the next step to comprehension. Intellectually, the experience is like walking into a door you hadn't seen was there. One moment you're proceeding, however gingerly and distastefully, the next you're on your back and everything is darkness.

The moment I'm talking about, of course, is when the terrorist or freedom fighter straps on his or her belt of exploding nails and boards the bus crowded with strangers, or kneels to hack off the head of a hostage – in the latest instance a Nepalese cook, but it could have been anybody – or promises, for even a promise can be an act of violence beyond our understanding, that ‘For every one of us you kill, we will wipe out fifty children'.

Yes, yes, I know that when you have a cause to further there are no innocents. The stranger is your enemy if he happens to be sojourning in the wrong place; and if your enemy's child is his vulnerability then you must strike him there. This is no time for softness. The other party drops its bombs on children and you must fight fire with fire.

Such reasoning I can grasp. And you may say that if I can grasp the reasoning I must be able to grasp the deed wherein reason is converted into action. But I cannot. God withholds the hand of Abraham in the moment of his sacrificing Isaac. Of the many meanings of that story, one is that a line can be drawn between intention and fulfilment. There is a chance, even in the final instant, for anger to relent, for a different decision to be made, for consciousness of the sacredness of another life to strike you, no matter how sacred the cause in which you meant to take it.

That's the door I keep walking into – the otherness of the other person. How are you able to convince yourself, in the moment of the deed, that whatever grievance has been visited upon you, you are justified in visiting upon someone else? Must there not be a flash of illumination in that arc of the knife which God prevented Abraham from completing, not only of the mysterious inviolability of a life that isn't yours to take, but of the supreme egotism of your reasoning? Hold your weapon and think about it. Something terrible has been done to you. Let's not argue the toss about how terrible, whether you had it coming, whether you've misread history, etc. Let's grant you your outrage and even your despair. Something terrible has been done to you. Agreed, agreed, agreed. What must follow from that? That something terrible must be meted out in return? Why? Who are you to measure outrage against outrage? Who are you to say that your suffering is to have a higher value placed on it than someone else's? In that split second when you are eyeball to eyeball with the divine equivalence of human souls, might it not be logical of you to conclude – never mind compassionate, forget compassion – might it not dawn on you with the light of reason that there is no righting your sense of wrong, not by you, not ever by you, because you above all people cannot be the judge of it, because resistance, retaliation, revenge – give it what name you like – cannot ever be anything but a privileging, that is to say a sentimentalisation, of yourself?

That's a lot of reasoning, and perhaps reasoning never stilled any hand raised in murderous intent. But there is a distillation of reason that is meant to come to our aid at such a moment, a sudden impulse if not of beneficence then at least of self-disgust, whose very purpose is to turn us back from action. And before the idea of a person in whom such a distillation of reason is absent, my imagination fails.

To explain a blood-thirst we cannot otherwise get our heads round we point to religion. Indeed, the bloodthirsty often point to religion for us. Acknowledging responsibility for the beheading of the Nepalese cooks and cleaners, the Army of Ansar al-Sunna invoked their deity. ‘We have carried out the sentence of God against twelve Nepalis who came from their country to fight the Muslims and to serve the Jews and the Christians . . . Believing in Buddha as their God.' Where one person's God restrains Abraham, another's spurs him on. And it's a giddy roundabout we jump on when we try to sort peaceful Gods from bloody ones.

Myself, I'm not sure I blame religion for busying itself with political resistance as much as I blame political resistance for enlisting God. Look for a universally fetishised figure and it is the freedom fighter not the priest. Cradle a child in the ideology of resistance and you will make him go where our imaginations cannot. Resistance is what closes the mind to reason. The assumption of a wrong, and the assumption that it is divine to fight it. Divine, today, to the tune of fifty children's lives for that of every fighter. And divine, tomorrow, by virtue of calculations we cannot yet begin to make.

Of course, if we see capitulation as the only alternative to resistance, there's no argument. We shoot traitors as a matter of course, and our heroes, whatever else we believe, are those who fight, hang on, resist with the last drop of their blood and that of whoever else happens to be to hand.

Don't ask me where between craven capitulation and blind resistance we should pitch our tent. But after the events of last week, with warriors in their own cause making the earth fit for no one, my hero is the man who says shit happens, and walks away.