The Revolt of the Pendulum Read online

  Kraus somehow overdid it. He got all the love she had to give but wanted more. The dynamics of the breakdown are hard to specify because his half of their correspondence is missing. But we should be careful not to underrate the significance of the part played by Rilke, who warned Sidonie, at a time when she might have been considering marriage to Kraus, that Kraus was essentially a stranger. Possibly Rilke, a schmoozer de grand luxe, had his eye on a solo guest spot at Janowitz: his talent for scoring free board and lodging from titled women was up there with his talent for poetry. But there can be no doubt what Rilke meant by his warning word ‘fremd’. He meant that Kraus was a Jew. Timms is well aware of this, but doesn’t make much of it. And possibly it doesn’t tell you much about Kraus and Sidonie, who, after all, went on being loving friends. But it does tell you an awful lot about Rilke.

  And Sidonie’s tolerance for what Rilke said tells you an awful lot about the insidious prevalence of anti-Semitism even among the enlightened international beau monde. There is no reason to think that mass murder would ever have got started anywhere in Europe if the Nazis hadn’t come to power in Germany. But the Nazis, on their way up, had a lot of prejudice to draw upon, and it doesn’t need a very big minority to look like a majority when it comes parading down the street. Military force transferred to civilian life was the revolutionary new element that would eventually paralyse conventional political expression and Kraus’s critique along with it. After the war, Kraus realised almost as soon as Hitler did that if the war’s unfettered violence were to be unleashed in peacetime politics, private armies could enforce a new and criminal legality. Unlike Hitler, however, he had little idea of what to do about it. He can scarcely be blamed for that. Apart from the psychopaths, hardly anybody had. Sticking with the old legality looked like the only civilized option. The realisation that the civilised option, even with a professional army at its command, had little hope of prevailing against the uncivilised one was slow to dawn. By the time it did, the sun had set. Comprehension came after the fact.

  Kraus saw the menace, however, and should be respected for his insight. From 1923 onwards he had no doubts that the Nazis were out to wreck everything. He just had trouble believing that they could. On the eve of the First World War, Kraus had said ‘violence is no subject for polemic, madness no subject for satire.’ Here was a new and madder violence, a reign of terror. When it came to power in Germany, in 1933, Kraus was faced more acutely than ever with the question of what form of government in Austria might stave it off. His Social Democrat admirers were horrified when he failed to condemn the authoritarianism of Dollfuss, but Kraus was choosing the lesser of two evils: a choice that evil always demands we make, revealing itself in the demand.

  In his long paper ‘Third Walpurgis Night’, Kraus pilloried the Social Democrats for not realising that only Dollfuss’s illiberal measures could keep the Nazis out. Timms gives a long and valuable analysis of ‘Third Walpurgis Night’ – it was the speech about the Nazis that Kraus gave after saying they had left him speechless – but doesn’t make enough out of the fact that Kraus never published it. It was meant to appear as a special issue of Die Fackel, but it didn’t. In effect, Kraus was already retreating from his public role. After the assassination of Dollfuss, he gave up altogether.

  He was through with politics. The sophisticated reasoning of a lifetime had come down to the elementary proposition that anything was better than the Nazis. After Kraus’s death, the plebiscite that Schuschnigg called for would probably have shown that the majority of Austria’s population thought the same. Aware of this, Hitler terrorised Schuschnigg into calling off the plebiscite, and the Nazis duly marched in. A lot of them were already there. Austrian citizens put on swastika arm-bands and set about their vengeful business. Kraus was lucky enough to breathe his last before they took power but he already knew that his long vigilance over the use of language hadn’t changed a thing.

  The dying Kraus could congratulate himself that he had at least, at last, seen things clearly. He had discovered the limited effectiveness of telling people they are fanatics when they think fanaticism to be a virtue. The full force of totalitarian irrationality had become plain to him: the real reason why ‘Third Walpurgis Night’, pace Timms, was not only unpublished, but incoherent. It was a piece of writing that knew that it was useless. Kraus might have reached the same conclusion about all his previous satirical writings had he lived long enough. His German equivalent, Kurt Tucholsky, had the same trouble sinking to the occasion. Asked why he had not said more about the Nazis, he said, ‘You can’t shoot that low.’

  In exile, before he committed suicide, Tucholsky was heard to wonder whether being satirical about the Weimar Republic had ever been a particularly good idea, in view of what was coming next. But even the brightest people – in fact especially them, and especially those who were Jews – had been slow to form a view of what was coming next until it actually came. Even then, some of them still couldn’t believe it. Rational people expect rational outcomes. In exile in London, Freud said in a letter that there was still a chance the Catholic Church would straighten the Nazis out. Not long ago I heard that letter read aloud, at a literary soire´e in his Hampstead house. If one of the great analysts of the human mind was capable of that degree of wishful thinking, we can only imagine what drove him to it. But imagining that, of course, is still the hardest thing.

  The First World War had confirmed Kraus in his pacifism, but by the time he died he knew that peace, in the face of Hitler, had ceased to be credible as a principle, and could be espoused merely as a desirable state of affairs. He had been blind-sided by events, but at least he changed his mind. Many of his admirers were to prove less flexible. Kraus preceded Orwell in the notion that the lying language of capitalist imperialism was the cause of all the world’s evils. Orwell also was obliged to change his mind in the light of events, but once again there were epigones who never gave up on the idea: it was too attractive as a catch-all explanation. And there is something to it, after all. But the idea has an imperialism of its own, which we can now see most clearly expressed in the patronising assumption that nobody would behave irrationally unless driven to it by the dominant West, with America to the forefront. In its extreme form, this mass delusion of the intellect comes up with brain-waves like the one about President Bush having arranged the attack on the World Trade Centre. Since it was always clear that President Bush was barely capable of arranging to recite his own name with the words in the right order, it seems a bizarre notion.

  It is quite possible to imagine Kraus having a fun time with Bush’s use of language, although first it would have to be translated into German, and before that it would have to be translated into English. Commentators who amuse themselves today with the verbal output of Bush are following Kraus. If Kraus were here, he might point out that their target is a sitting duck. Kraus, before Orwell and even before H. L. Mencken, was the ancestor of many of our best sceptics, and almost all of our best bloggers. (The blogger technique of glossing some absurdity highlighted in a mainstream publication was what Kraus did in every issue of Die Fackel and even in his enormous play The Last Days of Mankind, which consisted almost entirely of citations from newspapers and periodicals.) But his biographer, who has gained a dangerous authority by the sheer magnitude of his labours, takes a lot on himself when he assumes that Kraus would have been against armed intervention in the Middle East as an example of our being led into folly by ‘propaganda for war’.

  The phrase is of Timms’s coinage, and rings like pewter. By the time Kraus died, he knew that there could be an even bigger danger in propaganda for peace. Some of the brightest people in Europe, up to and including Bertrand Russell, preached non-violence up to and beyond the day Hitler invaded Poland. The British Labour Party, sitting in opposition to the Conservatives, denounced fascism but also denounced any proposed armed opposition to it as warmongering. In service to the great analyst of cliche´, Timms is hampered not only by his Cultural Studies
jargon (the leaden word ‘discourse’ riddles the text) but by an untoward propensity for not spotting what a current cliche´ is. The two drawbacks are connected, by his tin ear. Kraus, whom Timms tacitly invites to join in the widespread practice of putting jokey quotation marks around the phrase ‘war on terror’, might have pointed out that the quotation marks are a cliche´ in themselves, helping as they do to disguise a brute reality: terrorists are at war with us, and don’t care who they kill. The reason terrorists don’t use those risible cosmetic terms of ours such as ‘collateral damage’ is that they not only have no intention of sparing the innocent, they have no more desirable target in mind.

  The terrorist can talk a pure language: it’s purely violent, but still pure. His opponent is bound to equivocate, and sound silly doing so. That was the point Kraus missed because it had not yet become apparent by contrast with something worse. A liberal democracy, of any kind or degree, is bound to deal in hypocrisy and lies, simply because it has a measure of real politics, and is not unified and simplified by an ideology. Totalitarian irrationalism can say exactly what’s on its mind. Hitler had genocide on his mind, and said so. But only his nuttiest colleagues believed he would actually do it. Samantha Power, in her excellent book Genocide: A Problem from Hell, reached a conclusion she didn’t want to reach, as the best analytical books so often do. After showing that no genocidal government in the twentieth century had ever been stopped except by armed intervention, she reluctantly concluded that the armed intervention usually had to be supplied by the United States.

  Those among us who sincerely believe that the Iraqis are killing each other in fulfilment of an American genocidal plan might think that her conclusion is no longer true. We would have to ignore the implicit opinion of the eleven million Iraqi adults who voted in the last election, but most of us would rather do that than be taken for suckers. The Vietnam War dulled the Stars and Stripes in our eyes. But Power’s idea was certainly still true when Kraus was alive. And there can be no question that he would have eventually spelled out the same conclusion himself. In effect, he had already reached it. In 1930 he published a piece called ‘SOS USA’ predicting that America would have to step in if Europe were to be saved. And in 1933 he renewed the provision in his passport to include travel to the USA. Timms, who makes little of that development, could safely have made more. He could have said, for example, that in making of itself a refuge so difficult to reach, America had abetted the efforts of the maniacs. It would have been true, or at any rate half true.

  Kraus had no particular love for America – it wasn’t China – and he definitely overestimated what America would have been able to do in the short term, when its armed forces were still considerably inferior even to those of Czechoslovakia. But he guessed how the balance of forces was shaping up. Can there be bad violence and good violence? But of course there can. It’s a tragic perception, though, and the day is always sad when a comic perception must give way to it. Kraus had a comprehensive sensitivity to all the abuses of society. Injustice angered him. He was way ahead of the game on questions of race. Nobody ever wrote more powerfully against capital punishment. Despite his famous pronouncement about the fish that fought its way ashore, he understood what women were facing, and why they had to fight. He was their champion. He was a serious man, and a piercing satire was his weapon. But it worked only because he was funny. And then, first gradually and then suddenly, being funny wasn’t enough.

  Australian Literary Review, March 2007

  Postscript

  When Kraus was alive there was no need for a word like ‘media’ because the press was the main thing, with radio only just on its way up. Had he been reborn into the television age, he would have had a vastly increased range of mendacity to debunk. In the 1970s, when I began reviewing television, I was well aware that I was following in his footsteps, and since that time his attitude has become universal. The main reason that his name now means so little outside the German-speaking countries is that an implacable scepticism towards the media onslaught seems a self-evident requirement: nobody intelligent thinks any other way. It would be an unwarranted assumption, however, to suppose that if Kraus were here now he would agree with what the majority of professional sceptics think, or even find them sceptical enough. He was a pioneer in his suspicion of power, but he lived long enough to realize that the only answer to the force of the irrational is a democratic state with a realistic determination to defend its liberties. Edward Timms is symptomatic in his confident retroactive prediction of what Kraus might have said today. Kraus might well have said, for example, that few official statements coming out of Washington in the last ten years, even those that stumbled from the lips of the second President Bush, have ever attained quite the lethal fatuity of Osama bin Laden’s fatwa of 1998. He wouldn’t have been able to read it in Arabic, but his analysis of the German translation could have been scathing. The consensus that the Western democracies are responsible for any threat aimed at them might not have convinced him.

  JOHN BAYLEY’S DAILY BREAD

  Collected under the fitting title The Power of Delight, forty years of John Bayley’s book reviews have given us a book almost too rich to review. Where to start? Bayley himself at one point conjures the threat of ‘reviewer’s terror, a well-known complaint like athlete’s foot.’ Tell me about it, mutters the reviewer’s reviewer. There are more than six hundred pages in the book, and after reading it this reviewer finds that he has made almost four hundred notes. Every reviewer knows that, for a thousand-word review, a mere ten notes are enough to induce paralysis. So either this is going to be a forty-thousand-word review, or there will have to be a winnowing. It could start with a mass crossing-out of all the phrases and sentences transcribed merely because they are excellent. Since we don’t seem to need William Gerhardie’s novels any more, do we really need what Bayley says about Gerhardie’s life? ‘Like most butterflies, he was far too tough to be broken on a wheel.’ But no, it’s too good: we do need it. And maybe we need Gerhardie’s novels as well, if they could inspire a critic to a sentence as neat as that.

  In this respect, if in no other, Bayley resembles the more slavish of the old-time bookmen memorialised by John Gross in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Hacking away week after week, they either enjoyed most of what they were force-fed or else they choked on its abundance. George Gissing was only the most famous victim of piecework literary journalism. Others did worse than fail: they succeeded, earning the tiny immortality of termites. For them, delight was compulsory. Bayley’s delight is compulsive: a different thing. He revels in everything that has been written well, and he himself writes so well that he adds to the total. Reviewing a writer’s biography, he reads, or re-reads, the other books by the biographer, every book by the biographee, and brings in all the other relevant writers he can think of. Talking about a novel, he has not only read all the other novels by the same novelist, he has read all the novels by other novelists that are remotely like this novel. (Sometimes very remotely: the resemblance of The Unbearable Lightness of Being to Northanger Abbey hadn’t occurred to me before, and I wonder if it will again.) He sees no end of connections, but the best thing about them is that they are not theoretical.

  Apart from his intellectual objections, the main reason Bayley has no time for literary theory is that he is absorbed in literary practice. Praising Fred Kaplan’s biography of Dickens, Bayley endorses Kaplan’s ‘all-around attention,’ adding that the understanding of Dickens is ‘probably best served . . . not by theories about him but by the facts – all the swarming lot of them.’ Among the swarming lot are the facts about how the good Jew Riah got into Our Mutual Friend. It was because a deputation of London’s Jewish citizens had pointed out that the bad Jew Fagin in Oliver Twist had worked mischief in their lives. Kaplan supplied that fact. But Bayley, with a typically resonant epithet, supplies the further relevance. ‘Dickens promised like royalty to put the matter right.’ The word ‘royalty’ conveys an insight, based
on real events in Dickens’s life. Risen to great rank, Dickens had dispensation to bestow. The author’s achieved position in the real world, and the other world he created while occupying that position, were in complex interplay. Social duty and artistic impulse didn’t always coincide – Riah, a better role model than Fagin, is a far less interesting character – but there is no understanding Dickens without acknowledging the connection. Concern with such a thing puts Bayley back not just beyond Cultural Studies (in which there are no authors, only texts) but beyond the New Criticism (in which the text tells all). The latest and perhaps among the last in a native line of artist-critics that stretches back through V. S. Pritchett, Cyril Connolly and Desmond McCarthy by way of Matthew Arnold to Hazlitt and even further, he exemplifies the old tradition of socio-literary commentary, with all its benefits and dangers. The chief danger is to lapse into the sweet distraction of gossip. But the chief benefit is so valuable that we would be foolish not to welcome such a lavish demonstration of what it is. The literary past comes alive, sheds all the schemata that have been imposed on it, and teems with contingency, like now. The effect is of a glass-bottomed bucket dipped into the water beside the boat, so that the tourists can suddenly see the living colours and incessant traffic of the reef beneath.

  Dickens is a good place to start with Bayley, who is fully familiar with everything Dickens wrote, takes his supreme importance for granted, and can draw on the perceptions of every scholar who has done the same. Humphry House is commended, as is John Carey. (The professor’s son, Leo Carey, is the able curator of this book, which must have taken some curating: Bayley, by all reports, was never a man to keep orderly files of anything, least of all his own articles.) Dr Leavis is duly twitted for ever having held the ‘unreal’ opinion that Dickens, except for Hard Times, was a mere entertainer. Leavis revised that opinion later, but it was amazing that he should ever have advanced it. Elsewhere, Bayley is generously ready to concede that the irascible Leavis could say pertinent things, but generosity exceeds itself when Bayley says that ‘attitudes have changed a good deal since then.’ They have only changed back to what they were before Leavis made his bizarre strictures. Not only was Chesterton, whom Bayley mentions, fully aware of Dickens’s true stature, so was Shaw. Bayley doesn’t mention Shaw at all in that context, but Shaw mentioned Dickens habitually. Shaw assumed that the readers of his Prefaces would recognize his profuse allusions to the Dickens characters. It could be daunting if you didn’t, as I well remember; but there was no mistaking Shaw’s love of Dickens, which exceeded even his love of Wagner. Many years later, when I finally got round to reading the capital works of Dickens instead of merely pontificating about them, it was because Shaw’s enthusiasm had niggled in my conscience too long. If I had not done so then, Bayley’s enthusiasm would make me do it now. The personal theme is worth touching on because one of the things reviewing does, or should do, is to transmit an appreciation, sometimes to the point of sending an ignoramus to the bookshop.