Cultural Amnesia Read online

  But with contemporary classics we are involved with the same dichotomy from the jump. It is hard to think of a creative mind so pure that it would not be affected by popular notions to some extent. Also it is hard to think of any modern classic in any field that has not been affected by the popular arts. Some modern classics began as popular arts, and in very recent times an assumption has grown up—not easily to be laughed off—that there is no better way for a modern classic to begin. Certainly, in the English-speaking countries, a modern classic song is more likely to come out of a centre for a popular genre—Tin Pan Alley, say, or Broadway, or the Brill Building, or Nashville—than out of the “art song” tradition. In France, the “art song” tradition has some important classical composers at the foundation of it (Fauré, Reynaldo Hahn, Duparc, etc.) and carries prestige as a consequence; but one of the reasons the chanson heritage is relatively strong is that the popular genres have always been relatively weak; and anyway, Prevert, Brel, Brassens and a dozen other names are scarcely thought of as members of an academy. In literature, a writer as good as W. G. Sebald is safe from selling millions of books, but he would not be disqualified from seriousness if he sold hundreds of thousands, which he is nowadays quite likely to do, given time. No theorist about literature could any longer get away with the proposition that best-sellerdom is an automatic disqualification from quality. Louis de Bernières’s Captain Corelli’s Mandolin might not be quite the masterpiece it was thought to be by many of those who chose it for their one hard read of the year, but it is not inconsiderable either: millions of man-hours on the holiday beaches were well enough spent in reading it, although the heart quails at the thought that those same readers later fell for the unalleviated stupidity of The Da Vinci Code. In Germany, the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s uncompromisingly taxing autobiography Mein Leben was at the top of the best-seller list for most of the millennium year. No doubt there was a fashionable element in its reception—some of the people who bought it to decorate the hall table might have been establishing their tolerance, refurbishing credentials vis-à-vis the cloudy past, etc.—but there was no fashionable element to the book itself, a literary work of the first order. Chesterton was actually alive when his principle was used against Puccini, and if Chesterton had been active as a music critic he might well have used it himself. Apart from Shaw, most of the writers on opera at the turn of the century loftily regarded the Italian operatic heritage as a branch of popular music. (“The music’s only Verdi but the melody is sweet.”) Puccini’s overwhelming popular success was interpreted as a fashion by his detractors. Until very recently it still was. When I was an undergraduate at Cambridge, a prominent Wagnerian among the dons tried to tell me several times that Wagner’s stature as a classic confirmed Puccini’s as a fashion.

  The same don has since turned into one of our best, most receptive and conscientious opera critics, but he didn’t do it by following up on Chesterton’s principle, which turns out, for its second half, not to be a principle at all. Either in life or in the mind, there can be no such rigid division of the classical and the fashionable. A work of art has to be judged by its interior vitality, not by its agreed prestige. Prestige alone was never enough to keep an acknowledged classic alive: if it had been, Petrarch’s long poems in Latin, which he thought were his real claims to fame, would still be read today. The response to vitality brings us back to the first part, and reveals it, at last, to be an even bigger conundrum than the second. Without a capacity for blaming the sterile, there can be no capacity for praising the vital. Those without a gift for criticism can’t be appreciative beyond a certain point, and the point is set quite low, in the basement of enjoyment. (Being mad about Mantovani is not a good qualification for the appreciator of Beethoven: Albert Einstein, who in his role as a dinner-party guru enjoyed introducing ignoramuses to classical music, would use Mantovani as bait, but he never thought the bait was a living fish.) On the other hand, those who are too critical are apt to run out of appreciation at the crucial time. Stravinsky, who was never comfortable about attention paid to other composers even if they were long dead, took most of his adult life to get around to the appreciation of Beethoven’s late quartets, and gave the impression that his own life had to be almost over before he could hear what Beethoven was trying to do at the end of his. (It was also Stravinsky, however, who finally and incontrovertibly gave Tchaikovsky the praise that was due to him, and thus rescued him from a hundred years of being denigrated as Easy Listening.) All we can be certain of is that such oscillations between praise and blame, whatever their amplitude, show no discontinuity. Praise and blame are aspects of the same thing. The capacity for criticism is the capacity for enjoyment. They don’t have to be kept in touch with each other. They are a single propensity that has to keep in touch with itself. Chesterton’s plain statement is like one of his paradoxes without the simplicity: but that’s a paradox in itself. It’s an area that the dear, bibulous, chortling old boy gets you into. He invited being patronized, but it was a stratagem. He was serious, always. He just didn’t seem to be.

  JEAN COCTEAU

  The role of Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) in French twentieth-century culture was to be the wonder boy in perpetuity. He should be commended for it: some of his untiring precocity continues to amaze. Diaghilev’s famous instruction to him (“Astonish me”) was one he fulfilled by astonishing everybody. For Diaghilev, during World War I, Cocteau put together the ballet Parade, with music by Satie, décor by Picasso and choreography by Massine. No single production did more to advance all the arts at once. That they needed advancing was a principle Cocteau never questioned. In that sense, he was dedicated not to the private experience of art, but to its public impact. Unlike other troublemakers such as the Dadaists, however, he was not making up for shortage of talent. Cocteau went on astonishing everybody in a dozen different fields. He was poet, dramatist, graphic artist, novelist and film-maker, practising every art form at a high level. His love for the doomed young novelist Raymond Radiguet resulted in a cycle of tragic poems fit to dispel any illusion that he might have been a dilettante. But he had a dangerous taste for showing off to the exalted, and during the Nazi Occupation of Paris it led him astray. Receptions thrown by the Propaganda Staffel of the occupying power at the Tour d’Argent were too often graced with his exquisite profile. Compounded with an addiction to opium, his compromised reputation led to a spiritual decline after the war. Even then, though, he managed to produce the work by which he is most easily approached now: the film Orphée, which after sixty years still looks original despite all the originality it inspired from everybody else. (“Cinema is the form of modern writing whose ink is light” was a typical epigram.) There were other Cocteau films, most notably Beauty and the Beast, but Orphée gives the best sense of tout Paris making a home movie. If not the first, it was certainly the most sensational updating of a classic myth into modern dress. Orpheus, with immaculately cut pleated trousers instead of a toga, was played by Jean Marais, Cocteau’s young lover. The leading actress, Maria Casares, was Albert Camus’s mistress. French intellectual life was the world’s biggest small world, and everyone in it thought of Cocteau as the arbiter of elegance, even when they despised him. Sympathetic biographies by Francis Steegmuller and Frederick Brown have the facts, and the right judgement. Cocteau’s all-embracing multiplicity was a kind of unity, even if moral weakness was one of the things that it embraced. The best writer of all on “the banquet years,” Roger Shattuck, often brings Cocteau on as light relief, but doesn’t underestimate his importance. By and large, the well-funded and often highly qualified American students of French culture after the Belle Époque were ready to forgive all in their aim to understand everything. A humane attitude, as long as it doesn’t lead us into the illusion that a man as intelligent as Cocteau didn’t know what collaboration meant. He did: he just thought he could find a style for it. After the war, Cocteau’s old friend Misia Sert (the tasteful patroness who serves as the nominal subject for one o
f the best of the many books about tout Paris, Arthur Gold and Robert Fizdale’s Misia) threw a string of soirées for which she invited both those who had collaborated and those who hadn’t. She invited the two groups on different nights. So Cocteau never had to meet the people who wouldn’t stay in the same room with him, because they weren’t there.

  Too many milieux injure an adaptable sensibility. There was once a chameleon whose owner, to keep it warm, put it on a gaudy Scottish plaid. The chameleon died of fatigue.

  —JEAN COCTEAU, Le Potomak

  I UNCONSCIOUSLY PLAGIARIZED this idea on two separate occasions before discovering, when searching through my journals, that it belonged to Cocteau. If I had remembered, I would have flagged the borrowing: it is bad manners to do otherwise, and bad tactics too, because usually you will be found out. My excuse would be that Cocteau, though no end of a dandy and in many respects a posturing water-fly, had the knack of hitting on expressions that were so neat they seemed without a personal stamp, like particularly smooth pebbles on a pebble beach. He once said to an interviewer that you couldn’t teach a young artist anything: all you could do was open the door and show him the tightrope. I loved that idea and kept it in my memory. In his film Orphée there are ideas that I loved and kept in a different way: the cryptic phrases used by the angels—the phrases were based on coded BBC radio calls to the French Resistance—became recognition signals for my group of writers at Sydney University in the late fifties. “The bird sings with its wings,” we would intone to each other, in smug ecstasies of knowingness. No doubt we were being very precious, but so was Cocteau: Orphée is the apex of preciosity, and therefore, appropriately, the distilled projection of Cocteau himself. In life, far from being Orpheus, Cocteau was an Osric with an infinite range of hats, too many of them by Schiaparelli. In World War I, when he visited the front in a party led by Misia Sert—muse and patroness to all the artists—Cocteau wore a nurse’s uniform of his own devising. In World War II he was a cocktail-party collaborator, mainly because he couldn’t bear to be out of the swim. At the Propaganda Staffel receptions, with cocktails and finger food, Cocteau was a fixture, if a chameleon crossing a swastika can be called that.

  While not exactly despicable—nobody died because of him—his behaviour was not admirable. He can be classed with Sacha Guitry, Arletty and Maurice Chevalier among the top-flight artists who gave themselves a free pass because of their art. Only Chevalier was subsequently crass enough to hint that he had really been an Allied spy risking his life to gather information, but Cocteau came close to the same kind of vulgarity when he evoked the call signs of the Resistance in Orphée. All he had the right to evoke was a simpering air-kiss aimed at the Gestapo. There was, however, another, deeper Cocteau: this one, the Cocteau who invented the exhausted chameleon. This was the quickly whittling and fletching phrase-maker who could say and write things that would travel through time like untiring arrows. “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.” A crack like that doesn’t end the discussion, but it certainly starts one.

  This, I think, was the Cocteau whom Proust loved: not the stylish poseur but the true stylist, a living concentration of art and intellect, of taste and daring. The moment in À la recherche du temps perdu when St. Loup runs along the top of the banquette in the restaurant is probably based on one of Cocteau’s carefully calculated displays of his showstopping knack for creating memorable scenes by stealing them. And in the long run, St. Loup’s unlikely conversion to homosexuality was probably justified in Proust’s mind by Cocteau’s nature. Probably there were several real-life models for St. Loup, but at the end the model for one of the character’s dramatic moments took over the character’s inner being, if only because Proust’s inner being had the same bent. It would scarcely have happened, however, if Proust had not genuinely admired Cocteau, who was impossible to admire if one did not envy his talent. This remark about the chameleon comes from the aspect of Cocteau’s gift that will always remain enviable: the combinative power that underlay his protean knack for special effects. (The book Le Potomak, from which the quotation comes, was named not after the American river but after a creature he made up: a deep-sea fish that rises to the surface and dazzles everyone with its polychromatic, scintillating brilliance. Clearly he was talking about himself.) Endlessly pirouetting to get himself into profile, Cocteau was tiresome in the extreme, but mainly because the froth and fizz of his superficial behaviour made you nostalgic for the underlying man, whom you guessed correctly to be classical in his perceptions despite his self-denigrating mania for originality. It could be said that anyone who admired the looks of Jean Marais, the rebarbative star of both Orphée and La Belle et le bête, had the same classical perceptions as a Las Vegas hotel designer, but the late 1940s were a long time ago, and Marais’s bouffant hairstyle was the first ever seen in a serious context. Elvis Presley was not yet there to be copied. Cocteau thought of his own images. He really was as innovative as his admirers said. Their only mistake was to imagine that novelty was an ethos.

  GIANFRANCO CONTINI

  Gianfranco Contini (1912–1990) was the most formidable Italian philologist of his time. As a scholar of Dante and Petrarch he was crucial to the modern Italian tradition of studying the literary heritage on a rigorous textual basis. But he was also intimately involved with contemporary creativity, as a friend and sounding board to such poets as Eugenio Montale and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (His little collection of articles on Montale, Una lunga fedeltà, A Long Faithfulness, is a classic of the genre.) Vast in his learning and uniquely compressed in his prose style, Contini, even for the Italians, has a reputation as a scrittore difficile (difficult writer), and to translate his major critical articles into English would be a task for heroes. But beginners with Italian will gratefully discover that when giving an interview he could talk with clarity and point on cultural topics, some of them with wide resonance outside his own country. Regarded as a collaborative venture, the literary interview has a long and distinguished tradition in Italy. Contini collaborated with one of his pupils, Ludovica Ripa di Meana, to produce an outstanding example of the form, with a disquisition on education that has general relevance for all countries now suffering from the effects of having reduced the demands on memory.

  Unfortunately, the custom of learning by heart has disappeared in the schools, and as a consequence the very use of memory has gone with it. Nobody knows how to read verse. My best students, notably gifted philologists, can’t recognize by ear whether a line is hendecasyllabic or not: they have to count on their fingers.

  —GIANFRANCO CONTINI, QUOTED IN Diligenza e voluttà [DILIGENCE AND ENJOYMENT]: Ludovica Ripa di Meana interroga Gianfranco Contini, P. 190

  CONTINI WAS NEAR the end of his long, fruitful life when he did this book-length interview, which can be recommended for beginners with Italian as a fast track into the national discussion of the humanities. Just as, in the case of Argentina, interviews with Borges and Sábato—and sometimes they had interviews with each other—bring you straight to the top level of the subject, so, in the case of Italy, the dialogue with a protagonist is apt to save you from the perils of over-compression that come with his written prose. This latter advantage is especially important in the case of Contini, whose prose could be so compact that even his best students had trouble picking it apart. In Florence in the mid-sixties, a standard spectacle at the university was a football huddle of his students over their lecture notes after a silently frantic hour of listening to him whisper. Most of the students were female. A few of his best pupils were male but it took an especially daunting breed of woman—we used to call them the continiane—to summon the required pertinacity.

  Ludovica Ripa di Meana is a classic continiana. When she interviewed her erstwhile teacher in 1989, Contini was in his frail seniority, but his mind was still working at full speed. Her registration of the old man’s delivery is a scrupulous job, made easier, perhaps, by the fact that he wasn’t speaking formally in the lecture hall, b
ut conducting a seemingly ordinary conversation. There aren’t very many ordinary conversations, however, that have so much to say about the humanities as this one; and on this particular point, about memory, he goes right to the heart of the topic. If you think of the humanities as an activity in which the mode of appreciation and the means of transmission are versions of one another, there could hardly be a more pertinent complaint than this: he was looking the death of his beloved subject right in the face.

  There is an untranslatable Italian word for the mental bank account you acquire by memorizing poetry: it is a gazofilacio. Contini believed that an accumulation of such treasure would eventually prove its worth even if it had to begin with sweated labour. He confessed that not all of the teachers who had made him memorize a regular ration of Tasso’s epic poetry had been inspired. Some of them had held him to the allotted task because they lacked imagination, not because they possessed it. But in the long run he was grateful. Most readers of this book will spot the sensitive point about modern pedagogy. Readers my age were made to memorize and recite: their yawns of boredom were discounted. Younger readers have been spared such indignities. Who was lucky? Isn’t a form of teaching that avoids all prescription really a form of therapy? In a course called Classical Studies taught by teachers who possess scarcely a word of Latin or Greek, suffering is avoided, but isn’t it true that nothing is gained except the absence of suffering? In his best novel, White Noise, Don DeLillo made a running joke out of a professor of German history who could not read German. But the time has already arrived when such a joke does not register as funny. What have we gained, except a classroom in which no one need feel excluded?