The Revolt of the Pendulum Read online

  My own views begin with the welfare of the common people, to which I prefer to make subsidiary any total scheme of historical necessity. Born and raised in the industrial proletariat, I have a long memory for the forces which once exploited it, and one of them was left-wing ideology, which never ceased to believe that manifest destiny was an ally fit to command any sacrifice, including the sufferings of the very people who were meant to benefit from the march of progress. But historical necessity, if such a thing exists, can be analysed by intellectuals only to the extent that they are ready to deal with reality, and their best way of doing that is to begin by staying alert to the language in which they speak. If eleven million Iraqis turn up at the voting booths despite their being threatened with death for doing so, the commentator may call them dupes if he likes, but he should know that his terms of expression prove that he is more concerned with his own wish than with their hopes. If he calls the brave women of the Iraqi provisional government Quislings, he should at least know who Vidkun Quisling was. He should know where his own words come from, and what they were once meant to mean. That should be his first alertness, because the area of language is the only area where he is ever likely to effect any change, and it will be a change for the worse if all he can say compounds an illusion. So constant an attention to the use of mere words is a finicky business with small apparent reward, and the world’s vast supply of expert onlookers get understandably impatient when they are reminded of their true and only role. But I would rather offend them than further insult the vast numbers of comparatively voiceless people they ignore while proclaiming their concern for humanity.

  ‘All I have is a voice,’ said Auden, ‘to undo the folded lie.’ Coming after a decade of flirtation with romantic politics, it was one of the best things he ever said, a permanently valuable demonstration of how a true confidence connects with a sense of duty. The operative word is ‘folded’. The writer, if he wishes to write about current affairs – and ideally he should wish it only because he is forced to – must have the confidence to regard the unpicking of language as a proper job, and he must have the patience to do it. It is hard work for low returns, but the same condition is true for almost everyone in the world. The workers building the luxury hotels in Dubai get fifteen minutes for lunch. They look like the lucky ones to untold millions of people elsewhere who are doing even worse. It’s all too easy to think of poor people in the mass, and it takes only a modicum of compassion to start blaming it all on us. But the feeling is as foolish as the thought. They are us: a multitude of individuals. They are just leading less fortunate lives, and anyone who writes about justice from his privileged position as a citizen of a Western democracy will be able to do very little for them if he fails to realize that his own fortune begins with his freedom.

  London, 2009

  Contents

  LITERATURE

  The Question of Karl Kraus

  John Bayley’s Daily Bread

  Kingsley and the Women

  Canetti, Man of Mystery

  Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry

  The Guidebook Detectives

  Denis Healey’s Classic Memoir

  Zuckerman Uncorked

  CULTURE

  The Flight from the Destroyer

  Saying Famous Things

  Insult to the Language

  The Perfectly Bad Sentence

  Happiness Writes White

  All Stalkers Kill

  In Praise of Tommy Cooper

  A Microphone for the Audience

  Best Eaten Cold

  The Velvet Shackles of a Reputation

  Don’t Hold Your Breath, Argentina

  White Shorts of Leni Riefenstahl

  Made in Britain, More or Less

  Movie Criticism in America

  Show Me the Horror

  HOMELAND

  The Measure of A. D. Hope

  Robert Hughes Remembers

  Modern Australian Painting

  A Question for Diamond Jim

  Exit John Howard

  ABR 300

  The Voice of John Anderson

  Bea Miles, Vagrant

  RACING DRIVERS

  Nikki Lauda Wins Going Slowly

  Damon Hill’s Bravest Day

  HANDBILLS

  Going On in Edinburgh

  Gateway to Infinity

  Back on the Road

  Lure of the Lyrics

  Five Favourites

  ABSENT FRIENDS

  Jonathan James-Moore

  Ian Adam

  Richard Drewett

  Alan Coren

  Pat Kavanagh

  BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  Music in the Dark

  Starting with Sludge

  LITERATURE

  THE QUESTION OF KARL KRAUS

  ‘A liberated woman,’ said Karl Kraus, ‘is a fish that has fought its way ashore.’ Even at the time, there were women, some of them among his cheer-squad of beautiful mistresses, who thought he was talking through his hat. Agree with him or not, however, you wouldn’t mind being able to say something that sharp. Kraus was famous for being able to do so whenever he wanted, but eventually, as with his hero Oscar Wilde, his fame as a wit was there instead of the full, complex, tormented and deeply contemplative man. As a writer and practitioner of the higher journalism, he is still up there with all the other great names of literary Vienna – Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth – but up there for what, precisely?

  The risk run by the aphorist is that people will grow restless between aphorisms, because they aren’t getting enough of what it says on the label. Even while he was alive, most people didn’t want any more of Kraus’s world view than would fit into a fortune cookie. Though he had no computer on his desk, Kraus was essentially a blogger before the fact: his basic technique was to write a couple of hundred words about something silly in the newspaper. He sometimes wrote at length, but his admirers preferred him to keep it short. The kind of thing they liked best from him might have been designed to pop up on a BlackBerry today. ‘An aphorism can never be the whole truth,’ he once wrote: ‘It is either a half-truth or a truth and half.’ Yes, but that’s an aphorism. So is it true?

  Outside the German-speaking lands, Kraus is now known mainly for having been the Viennese cafe´ pundit who brilliantly fulfilled a self-created role as the scourge of loose language. Serious readers, even if their serious reading does not often include him, know that Kraus, from before the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of years before the Anschluss in 1938, was the linguistic health inspector who searched through what was said for what was meant, and was particularly scathing about the jingoistic propaganda that helped drive a generation of young men irretrievably into the mincing machine of the Great War. Kept out of it by his distorted spine, he was the pacifist on the warpath, the libertarian grammarian. Whether in the pages of his magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) or by means of his celebrated readings on stage, he constantly pointed out the connection between official bombast and the suffering of the people, between journalistic mendacity and political duplicity, between fine writing and foul behaviour. Some of those serious readers also know, or think they know, that Kraus finally fell silent because, on his own admission, Hitler had left him speechless.

  Not true. The facts say that Kraus, immediately after confessing that the Nazis left him with nothing to say, went on to say quite a lot. There are thousands of facts like that in Edward Timms’s biography Karl Kraus, a two-tome desk-breaker which can be taken as the instigation of the piece I am writing now, because such a big, factually precise yet historically approximate biography brings to a focus some of the problems that Kraus’s brilliant career exemplified. Such a biography can also be a problem in itself, if its interpretations come to define its subject. Something like that, I believe, has happened in this instance, and it might be worth attempting a short historical account of Kraus’s career without wasting space by decorating the narrative with the usual sprinkle of aphorisms
. There are a dozen different anthologies of those, quite apart from the compendia of his writings that Kraus put together himself. What we need, however, is a picture of the mind behind the fragments. Was that fragmentary too?

  Timms’s first volume, with its Margaret Mead-sounding subtitle ‘Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna’, covered the years 1874–1918 and was published to acclaim in 1986. The second volume, ‘The Post-War Crisis and the Rise of the Swastika’, covering the years 1918–1936, came out late in 2005. I had meant to write about it before this, but first I had to read it. As with its predecessor, ploughing through it took time. Timms has done a lot of reading, and takes a lot of reading in his turn: far more than most non-academic students will ever give him. It should be said that he makes that demand with good credentials. Though his hulking double whammy of a book is further burdened by an ultra-post-modern vocabulary and by his apparent conviction that having become an expert on the European politics of the early twentieth century has somehow given him automatic insight into the world politics of the early twenty-first century as well, he has done a good job of bringing subtlety to the accepted picture of Kraus, the picture we thought was adequate.

  It wasn’t. But it wasn’t all that untrue either. Kraus, in the end, might not really have run out of things to say, but he did run out of hope that they might be relevant. His business had been to criticise high-flown speech that concealed base motives. Now, with the Nazis mouthing off in all media, he was faced with gutter talk that concealed nothing, or else with lies so blatant that they were clearly weapons in verbal form. There was nothing to uncover. Like Othello’s, his occupation was gone. Although Timms has the smaller facts to say otherwise, the larger fact remains: Kraus spent a lifetime thinking that euphemistic talk led necessarily to evil, as exemplified by the Great War, which he had thought the most evil thing imaginable. But the Nazis, who largely said exactly what they meant - and even their euphemisms were meant to be decoded as the threat of murder - brought an evil even worse than that. Though it’s a conclusion Timms doesn’t reach, his facts reach it for him: Kraus had been wrong from the start.

  This, however, is a conclusion we should not reach too early. Today, there is no excuse for failing to see that the avowedly irrational doesn’t yield to reason. Kraus had every excuse, because total irrationality was not yet in charge of a modern European state. Even before the Great War broke out, Kraus had ample cause to think that he was already dealing with enough madness to keep him busy. Kraus was a Jew, but if he had not sought baptism in 1911 he would have faced a lot of closed doors. He wanted those doors to be open. He wasn’t against the Austro-Hungarian social order, he merely wanted it to be less stupid, and indeed it wasn’t until quite late in the war that he began blaming the Empire for having driven its various constituent populations into a slaughterhouse. Kraus preferred to blame the newspapers. He blamed them no less if they were owned and/or edited by Jews. Indeed he seemed to blame them more, a fact which left us obliged to deal with the question of Kraus’s anti-Semitism.

  Timms deals with it in torrential detail, but seems to be in two minds when dismissing the usual accusation against Kraus of judische Selbst-Hass, Jewish self-hatred. Timms can only partly dismiss it, because Kraus really did seem to reserve a special virulence for Jewish artists he didn’t admire – the list went back to Heine, on whose grave Kraus regularly danced – and really did seem to go out of his way to accuse the Jewish bourgeoisie of money-grubbing, especially if they had taken baptism in order to increase their opportunities. (Kraus found it convenient to forget that he himself was living on an unearned income: it flowed copiously from the family firm in Czechoslovakia, a source that made it inflation-proof.) The question was already omnipresent in Timms’s first volume, and in the second volume, which takes up the Kraus story from the end of the First World War, through the disintegration of the old Empire and on into the various phases of the new Austrian republic, the question attains something worse than mere omnipresence: a focused virulence that takes it out of culture and society and puts it into the heart of politics.

  Timms might have reached an answer on the subject more easily if he had realised, going in, that it was Hitler who gave the question new life – or, rather, new potential for death. Before being Jewish became unequivocally an issue of race rather than of religion, any Jew who vilified another might indeed have been aiding and abetting an institutionalised prejudice. But he wasn’t complicit in mass murder. Very few Jews, no matter how clever, even dreamed that such a day could ever come. At the turn of the century, Theodor Herzl had guessed it, but most Jews thought he was just a nut. The playwright Arthur Schnitzler had half guessed it, but most Jews thought he was just a playwright. Freud, the master of dreams, never dreamed of it. Kraus, whom Freud admired for his insight, never dreamed of it either. The multi-zero deaths of the First World War were racially unspecific. That there might ever be, in modern Europe, such a thing as a racially specific extermination was unthinkable.

  It should be said, however, that Kraus sometimes sounded as if he might be trying to think of it. In 1916 Kraus wrote a poem naming ‘Israel’ as the ‘cosmic enemy’. You can strain to believe that he was using ‘Israel’ as a symbolic analogy for ‘Germany’, but it seems more plausible to take it that by ‘Israel’ he meant the Jews. And in 1918 Schnitzler was surely right to complain that Kraus, when denouncing the war-profiteers, seemed only to notice them when they were of Jewish origin. The fact awkwardly remains, though, that a Jew could as yet flirt with anti-Semitism and still convince himself that he was being merely rhetorical.

  For a man nominally at war with rhetoric, this was a strange flirtation to indulge, but no doubt the causes went deep. It could have been that like so many Jewish rentier intellectuals living on incomes they had never had to work for, Kraus just despised the bourgeoisie for their materialism, and that the bourgeois people he knew most about were Jews. In Germany during the thirties, the same lofty distaste for his personal provenance drove Walter Benjamin to become a Marxist, even as the Nazis were busy proving all around him that their own views on the Jewish question were free of class bias, in no way theoretical, and immediately effective.

  In post-war Austria there were all kinds of contending views among the Jewish population about who they actually were, how they fitted into the state, and what kind of state they should favour. There were even Jews who backed the idea of Austria’s joining itself to Germany (Anschluss) as soon as possible. Kraus never really made his mind up on the subject of what the state should be. Even as he lost faith in the ability of the old social order to revive, and began to favour socialism, he still wasn’t sure, under his crisp air of certitude, that democracy could bring about a reasonable society. Like young radicals almost fifty years later, he began to nurse a fantasy about China. In his case there was no sweet smoke involved, but it was the same pipe-dream. In a letter to his great love, Sidonie Nadherny, he said ‘but really there remains only China.’ It scarcely needs saying that he had no idea of what China had been like, was like then, and might be like in the future. He just wanted a cloud-cuckoo land to console him from the stress of living in his actual surroundings. Sidonie had already gone a long way towards providing him with that.

  The Baroness Sidonie Nadherny von Borutin was elegant, sexy, clever, and loaded. Her country seat, Schloss Janowitz in Bohemia, was the full arcadian dream. Kraus was no hick – several great ladies had been among his mistresses – but he was still pleased by such lavish access to gracious living at top level, whereas Sidonie, with the delightful charm of a Euro-aristo bluestocking whose malapropisms came in three languages, enjoyed having her grammar corrected by the man who could make her laugh. In private, Kraus had a sweet nature to ameliorate the biting sarcasm he deployed in public, and he had the key element of a way with women: he found them interesting. Under the style and gloss, the baroness had a wanton nature and Kraus knew how to set it loose on the overnight train from Vienna to Trieste. Well aware that he
was a great man, Sidonie was as flattered by his attentions as he by hers. Timms began to tell the story of their long, on-and-off romance in the first volume, but in the second he could have told us more about how it petered out. In a work whose chief characteristic is to tell us more than the doctor ordered on almost every topic, this is an annoying deficiency, because the romance between Kraus and Sidonie was something much bigger than a love affair: it was a meeting of history running at two different speeds.

  Sidonie stood for inheritance, for noblesse oblige, for a longstanding social tradition that contained all its contending forces in a recognised balance, if not a universal harmony. Kraus stood for intellectual merit, which, in a rapidly developing political explosion, was only one of the contending forces, and possibly among the weakest. Even if the crisis had never come, the two lovers would have been star-crossed enough. Sidonie was one of the rulers of a Bohemia with a capital B. Kraus was a different kind of bohemian: no capital letter. However brilliantly, he lived outside the walls she owned. There have always been liaisons between the two realms but it works best if the participants respect each other’s individuality even when their physical union is intense. Sidonie quite liked his possessiveness, but the day came when she found herself gasping for air.