Cultural Amnesia Page 15

  They cheer me because they all understand me, and they cheer you because no-one understands you.

  —CHARLES CHAPLIN TO ALBERT EINSTEIN AT THE 1931 PREMIERE OF City Lights

  ON THE BIG night, both of the great men looked good in their tuxedos, but the film star was undoubtedly the more adroit at social charm. He said exactly the right thing. He wasn’t quite right, however, about the “no-one.” Contrary to the lasting myth—generated by a New York Times reporter keen to sex up the story—every physicist in the world understood the theory of special relativity straight away, even if they thought it might be wrong. By now, almost every literate person can recite the equation E = mc2, and even give a rough account of what it means. They might not be able to do the same for the multiple equations of the theory of general relativity, but they have some idea of what the theory deals with. To give a rough account, however, is not the same as giving a precise one, and having some idea is not the same as understanding. It remains true that only the scientifically competent can fully know what is involved. Everybody else has to take it on trust. Chaplin’s remark nailed down a discrepancy between two kinds of knowledge: the artistic and the scientific.

  The discrepancy had already been there when Goethe rejected Newton’s theory about the composition of light because it didn’t strike him as artistically satisfactory. The discrepancy was there, but it wasn’t obvious. (Certainly it wasn’t obvious to Goethe.) By the time Chaplin and Einstein both went to see City Lights, it was obvious to all but the insane. Most of science, for those of us without mathematics, is a closed book. But some of the book’s contents can be transmitted in a form we can appreciate, and there is consolation in the fact that the humanities unarguably constitute a culture, whereas whether or not science is a culture is a question that science can’t answer. When the British scientist cum novelist C. P. Snow gave his lecture called The Two Cultures in 1959—his main point was that literary people who didn’t know something about science couldn’t know enough about the modern world—he started a quarrel that he was bound to lose, because the dispute could be conducted only within the framework of written argument. There was no way of conducting it by experiment, or stating it in symbols. It could take place only in language—on the territory, that is, that the humanities have occupied throughout history.

  Science lives in a perpetual present, and must always discard its own past as it advances. (If a contemporary thermodynamicist refers to the literature on phlogiston, he will do so as a humanist, not as a scientist. Nor did Edwin Hubble need to know about Ptolemy, although he did.) The humanities do not advance in that sense: they accumulate, and the past is always retained. The two forms of knowledge thus have fundamentally different kinds of history. A scientist can revisit scientific history at his choice. A humanist has no choice: he must revisit the history of the humanities all the time, because it is always alive, and can’t be superseded. Two different kinds of history, and two different kinds of time. Humanist time runs both ways: an arrow with a head at each end. If Homer could be beamed up from the past, taught English, and introduced to Braille editions of the novels of Jane Austen, he would be able to tell that they were stories about men, women and conflict, and more like his own stories than not. Much of the background would be strange to him, but not the foreground. A couple of millennia have done not much more to make the present unrecognizable to the past than they have done to make the past unrecognizable to the present. Science, on the other hand, can make its own future unrecognizable in a couple of decades. If the most brilliant mathematicians and computer engineers of 1945 could be brought here now and shown an ordinary laptop, they might conceivably be able to operate it, but they would have no idea of how it worked. Its microprocessors would be insoluble mysteries. The power of science is to transform the world in ways that not even scientists can predict. The power of the humanities—of the one and only culture—is to interpret the world in ways that anybody can appreciate. Einstein knew that science had given Chaplin the means to be famous. Einstein also knew that Chaplin could live without a knowledge of science. But as Einstein told Chaplin on many occasions, he himself, Einstein, could not live without a knowledge of the humanities. Einstein loved music, for example, and was so wedded to the concept of aesthetic satisfaction that he gained added faith in his general relativity equations from finding them beautiful, and frowned on the propositions of quantum mechanics because he found them shapeless. On the latter point he turned out to be wrong, and physicists in the next generation were generally agreed that his aesthetic sense had led him astray. The two different kinds of inspiration almost certainly connect, but only at a level so deep that nobody inspired in either way can ever know exactly how he does it. Whoever was inspired to invent the tuxedo, however, did the world a service: on the big night, the two different geniuses looked like the equals that they were.

  NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI

  Born in East Bengal in 1897, Nirad C. Chaudhuri lived for a hundred years, which meant that for almost the whole of the twentieth century one of the great masters of English prose was an Indian: and of Indian masters of English prose, Chaudhuri was by a long way the most distinguished. He was granted that title even by other writers of Indian background who might well have claimed something like it for themselves: V. S. Naipaul, Anita Desai, Zulfikar Ghose. They revered him even when they disagreed with him. Chaudhuri himself never set foot outside India until 1955, for a trip to the centre of the old British Empire—rapidly shrinking at the time—that he had always infuriated many of his compatriots by more admiring than not. His short book about that short visit, A Passage to England, gives us the essence of his limpid style and historical range. But readers should not be afraid to tackle at least two of his longer books. Thy Hand, Great Anarch!, his account of the crucial years in Indian history between 1921 and 1952, is one of the indispensable historical works of the century, and The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian is rich in self-examination, unfailingly hard-headed in its liberal sweep, and true in every detail except its title. If ever there was a known Indian, it was Chaudhuri. His decision to live out the last act of his life in Britain had profound impliciations for some of his fellow Indian intellectuals. Many of them resented it. But his belief in India’s importance to the world remained beyond question.

  My notion of what is proper and honest between Englishmen and Indians today is clear-cut and decisive. I feel that the only course of conduct permissible to either side in their political and public relations at the present moment is an honourable taciturnity. The rest must be left to the healing powers of Time.

  —NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, P. 502

  IN EARLY 2002, British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have profited if his Foreign Office brief had included this quotation. He might have been a bit less ready to lecture his Indian and Pakistani opposite numbers on the advisability of cooling down. The advice was received with polite disdain: the best that could be hoped for. It was Blair’s lucky day. After the Indian Mutiny, cheeky Sepoys were tied across a cannon’s mouth preparatory to its being fired. The hankering for a comparable decisiveness must surely linger. Another use for the quotation, and one we can all put into effect, is to remind us that Chaudhuri, while he valued the connection with Britain, had no rosy view of its effects: he was never a lickspittle for the Raj. In Thy Hand, Great Anarch! he recounts how Britain manoeuvred to get India’s cooperation during World War II without having to promise independence. On the other hand, he came down hard on the counterproductive intransigence of India’s political parties, especially of the Congress party. If Congress had cooperated with Britain during the war, he says, it might have prevented partition afterwards. Nehru, not Gandhi, is Chaudhuri’s villain. In Chaudhuri’s picture, Gandhi retreats into the background while Nehru, between 1939 and 1947, stands forward as “the wordmonger par excellence.”

  The Indian intelligentsia, says Chaudhuri, wanted Britain weakened but not defeated. Like the Trinidad-born wr
iter C. L. R. James, whose message to the Third World was that it should learn from the First, Chaudhuri offered no automatic comfort to the old Empire’s self-renewing supply of angry radicals. Most of Chaudhuri’s political talk means discomfort for someone, usually for India’s intellectuals. Many big subcontinental names have admired him, but you can’t imagine any of them not dropping the book and whistling at some point, especially when he reaches the conclusion (and his writings in toto reach no other) that Britain made India possible. The best reason to whistle, however, is the quality of his prose. Ten pages into The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, he’s already snared you. “The rain came down in what looked like already packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare ground.” If he had lived long enough, W. G. Sebald would probably have got the Nobel Prize for writing like that. Chaudhuri’s prize was to live for a hundred years, retain a rock-pool clarity of mind, and spend his extreme old age in England, surrounded by the foreign language he loved best, and of which he was a master.

  Chaudhuri and Sebald might seem a strange coupling, but more united them than their choice of England as a place of voluntary exile. Chaudhuri was a character from one of Sebald’s books: like Austerlitz in Austerlitz, Chaudhuri could develop a philosophical theme out of a long study of practical detail. Similarly, Sebald was a character out of Thomas Mann. If you ever find yourself wondering where you have heard Sebald’s infallibly precise memory speak before, think of the enchanting and omniscient Saul Fitelberg in Doktor Faustus. There are tones that connect authors in exile, and that give them a single country to inhabit: the country of the mind. The difference is in the timing. Chaudhuri and Sebald were looking back on shattered civilizations. So was Thomas Mann, but with Fitelberg he could make the character prescient. In Doktor Faustus the end has not yet come. The character can foresee it because the forces that will lead to disintegration are the first he feels. Chaudhuri’s prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now. By the mere act of writing such a richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.

  G. K. CHESTERTON

  G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) published so many books that his posthumous reputation is almost impossible to sort out. He would have been famous just for his Father Brown stories. He would have been famous just for his novels The Napoleon of Not-ting Hill and The Man Who Was Thursday. He would have been famous just as a literary critic: his monographs on Browning and Dickens are still required reading for serious students of those authors. Above all, he would have been famous just for his journalism: the thing he is least well-known for now. The essays he contributed to periodicals were at the heart of his talent for subversive observation. His vice was wilful paradox, but his virtue was for asking the awkward questions about current liberal fashions. The virtue itself had a drawback: as a Catholic convert, he valued theological tradition to the point of embracing some of its blemishes, one of which was an abiding suspicion of the cosmopolitan. Anti-Semitism reared its head, although not as blatantly as in the work of his contemporary Hilaire Belloc. But generally Chesterton’s collections of essays and casual pieces are well worth seeking out in second-hand bookshops. There are a thousand brilliant sentences to prove that he was the natural opponent of state power in any form, so there can be no real doubt about the stance he would have taken had he lived longer. He defined true democracy as the sum total of civilized traditions. It was a conservative approach, but it could never have become a fascist one, since the idea of a civilized tradition was exactly what fascism set out to dismantle.

  To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  WHEN I COPIED this sentence into a workbook about twenty years ago, foolishly I neglected to note the provenance. The sentence does not appear in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations but that, alas, is no surprise: its entry on Chesterton consists almost entirely of scraps torn from his poetry, whereas all his best remarks were in his prose, which the editors of the Oxford book obviously did not get around to reading. It is hard to blame them for that, because catching up with Chesterton’s prose is the work of a lifetime. He wrote a lot faster than most of us can read. Chesterton published many, many books, and at one time I was trying to collect them all. (My shelves containing Chesterton still outdistance my shelves containing Edmund Wilson, but with Wilson I know my way around almost to the inch, whereas there are cubic feet of Chesterton’s output where I can’t find my way back to something I noticed earlier: a slipshod disorientation, which I could have avoided by taking proper notes.) I saw myself as his champion. Other journalists feared him because he was so productive. Mainstream writers feared him because he wrote too well. He was my favourite kind of writer, scaring everybody because he had talent to burn, and no sense of calculation to make his talent decisive.

  His critical writings struck me as particularly valuable among his output: rather more valuable, in fact, than the nominally creative work, in which The Man Who Was Thursday was widely proclaimed to be his masterpiece by people who had no intention of finding out what else he wrote. I thought The Man Who Was Thursday dreadfully windy and most of the poetry less thrilling than its own craft. Is “The White Knight” really that good, even on the level of a recitativo party piece? In Sydney in the late fifties I knew at least one Catholic poet who thought “The White Knight” a deathless text, but he (my friend, not Chesterton) was very Catholic, and no great reciter himself. In my experience, fuelled by many a shouted evening among young men educated by Jesuits, the awkward truth became apparent early: Chesterton the Catholic poet was outstripped even by Belloc, and both were left for dead by Hopkins. But it was just as apparent that some of Chesterton’s criticism was excellent. Dickens and Browning are not the only names he can bring alive in a short monograph. As an enthusiast for Chaucer he is only just less inspiring than Aldous Huxley, and he had a gift for the critical essay that could survive even his mania for paradox. Somewhere among the paradoxes there was always a considerable plain statement, and the statement quoted above is a prime example.

  On the whole, Chesterton’s paradoxes merely asked for trouble. His seemingly plain statements were real trouble. I think I knew that at the time, or I would not have written this one down. If I had taken it straight, I would have regarded it as a truism, and left it unremarked. But there was something unsettling about it. Pretending to just lie there inert, it glowed, fizzed, and shovelled piquant smoke, as a lot of Chesterton does. With a new century crowding in on London’s journalistic world, I can recommend Chesterton’s teetering example to Grub Street hacks on their last legs, facing oblivion in the current equivalent of the Cheshire Cheese, going home to a mansard room full of unmarked files, yellowing tear-sheets and—impossibly dated now, fading to nothing in ordinary daylight—the carbon copies that were once called blacks. Nil desperandum. We just might live. After all, did Chesterton ever look at an article and think: this is the one? No, he never knew.

  The second part of the sentence is the more immediately awkward part. The first part apparently takes care of itself. Critics who overdo either the praise or the blame are soon rumbled: sooner still if they overdo both. But the apparently unexceptionable exhortation to support the classics against the fashions conceals a genuine dilemma. All the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and might be disguised as fashions when they do. The neatest deduction that can be made from the advice is about the advisability of finding out what makes something classical, whether it is new or old: and of supporting that, presumably by praise, while blaming anything that pretends to the same condition without the proper qualifications. So the two parts of the motto connect at that point. They connect more closely when we consider that a classic might be tainted by fashionable components, or that a fashion might be enriched by classical ones. Such a possibility is n
ot likely to arise with accepted classics from the past: unless, paradoxically, we find out too much about them. Suppose we knew everything about popular entertainment at the time of Ovid: it might turn out that tall stories about metamorphosis were a craze at fashionable dinner tables, the hot topic at the saturnalia. Or suppose we knew everything about theology at the time of Dante (some scholars almost do): it might turn out that some of Dante’s points of doctrine were the merest run-of-the-cloisters debating points. Benedetto Croce, indeed, working like that very basic Australian device the milk separator (it left the cream on top of the milk, like a golden duvet on a heap of sheets), divided the The Divine Comedy rigorously between poesia and letteratura, and by letteratura Croce meant the stuff that belonged to its time—a concept which sounds more like fashion than like anything else. Still, most of us never get to know that much. Knowing about the background is what we either don’t get to do or else forget about in short order, and for us, the common readers—who are, in modern times, the uncommon people still interested even though the examinations are no longer compulsory—every ancient classic remains classical right through, even when impenetrable. Homer’s most vivid translator in recent times, Christopher Logue, knows that the Homeric poems are classics, even though he can’t read them in the original. That’s why he feels compelled to bring all his talent to the task of finding an English equivalent for them, with results that might very well prove classic in their turn.