Latest Readings Read online

  Angles on Hitler

  HUGH’S BOOKSTALL can sometimes turn into a sort of club. You meet people there who are in the middle of writing a three-volume treatise on the politics of Byzantium. Recently I bumped into Dr. Michael Tanner, a fellow of Corpus Christi who was already one of the smartest minds in the philosophy faculty when I was an undergraduate. He told me that he was under strict instruction to bring no more books into his house, so he had to smuggle them in and hide them. Since I was under something like the same embargo myself, it was clearly time to sit down at a coffee bar and discuss the protocols and techniques of book-smuggling. Tanner is generally informed about the arts to a daunting level, but he is also very funny, and I soon had to tacitly concede that his imitation of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf teaching a master class was better than mine. (To illustrate her drawbacks as a teacher, you have to be able to evoke what her mouth looked like when she sang an umlaut: she looked as if she were trying to kiss the behind of a hummingbird in midflight.) Mention of the famous soprano’s early career in Nazi Berlin led us naturally to the eternal subject of Hitler’s interest in the arts. Tanner contended, in the nicest possible way, that Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, by Frederic Spotts, was an essential book on this subject. He had correctly guessed that I hadn’t read it. I wrote away for it and soon found this to be true. Spotts gives Hitler all the credit he could possibly have coming for a range of cultural interests that was wider than we tend to think. Certainly his passion for music, or anyway for opera, extended far beyond Wagner and Lehar: he also liked Puccini and Verdi, and could tell you about them as he could tell you about everything.

  But I still feel that there is a danger of underestimating one of Hitler’s most demonic gifts: he had the con-man’s knack of making himself seem profoundly steeped in any subject just by the fluency with which he could learn a list of facts and reel them off to the susceptible ear of a worshiping disciple. There were Wehrmacht officers, some of them high up in the business of commissioning new weapons, who were amazed by how much Hitler knew about tanks. But what he knew about tanks was a pastiche of stuff he had picked up from random study, and to the extent that his policies on armaments were carried out, they ensured the loss of the war. It seems a logical inference that many of the artistic subjects he touched on in conversation he knew more fleetingly than he made it sound. I have always found it hard to believe Hitler’s claim, which Spotts unquestioningly repeats, that he carried the five volumes of Schopenhauer’s collected works in his knapsack throughout his time in the trenches. I have those five volumes on my shelves, and they make quite a weight even in a thin-paper edition. But there can be no doubt about Hitler’s aesthetic passion: Spotts is dead right about that. Hitler was up all night studying Speer’s scale model of a future Berlin while the actual Berlin was being pounded to pieces around his ears. As can so easily happen for a man in trouble, art was an escape route.

  While Martin Amis was preparing the manuscript of his novel The Zone of Interest, he caught me out in correspondence when I had to confess that I had not read Ron Rosenbaum’s Explaining Hitler. I bought it, read it at the table in my kitchen, and was suitably impressed. Rosenbaum does a good job of balancing up the central theses of the two main postwar interpreters of Hitler’s personality: Hugh Trevor-Roper and Alan Bullock. Trevor-Roper, in his worldwide best seller The Last Days of Hitler, thought that Hitler did indeed possess a mysterious, charismatic secret: how else could he have still been obeyed when all his real power was gone? Bullock, in Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, thought that Hitler was a mountebank. Later on, Bullock took a second position, calling Hitler an actor who believed in his own act. The two professors were both on the case early (in the German cities the Trümmerwelt, the world of ruins, was still being cleared away), but between them they caught the Hitler story better than the supposedly major studies did later on: I haven’t read Joachim Fest’s Hitler biography since it came out in 1974, but lately I have slogged my way through Ian Kershaw’s massive two-volume effort (he is a thorough writer without being an attractive one), and I couldn’t find much that Trevor-Roper and Bullock didn’t catch more than half a century back. I must read Trevor-Roper and Bullock again. When I first read them I was still in my teens, and they helped to form my view of life, but old men forget. Sometimes slightly younger men get things wrong, however: Rosenbaum was born in 1946, so perhaps he has not quite had time to pick up the odd item of seemingly incidental, but in fact vital, information. When he says that the prewar newsreels were “speeded up,” and that this “jerkiness” contributed to the robotized atmospherics of Nazi maneuvers, he is making a false point. At the time they were filmed, prewar newsreels didn’t look speeded up, because they were projected at the correct rate. Later on, the rate changed. As a general rule, writers should be wary about making technical points.

  Stephen Edgar, Australian Ace

  MY FRIEND Stephen Edgar is the supreme lyricist among the current wave of Australian poets. Les Murray is the acknowledged master, the Magister Illyrio in our Free City of Pentos—here I attempt to forecast one of the Game of Thrones allusions that might be standard usage among the cultural critics of the generation to come—and I suppose that in the long run all of us will be measured by our distance from him. But others can do strikingly individual things: Peter Goldsworthy, for example, can actually write in the tiny, haiku-like measures that everyone admires but hardly anyone can handle; and Judith Beveridge, with her uncanny powers of observation and evocation, is unbeatable when it comes to portraying nature as only marginally needing humans. And there are more. But nobody, not even Murray, can put an intricate form together like Stephen Edgar. Swiss watches aren’t in the race, especially now that all they contain is a microprocessor and a battery. The typical Edgar poem generates an astonishing first force from its panscopic wealth of imagery, and then that force is multiplied by the way it is put together, with verse paragraphs that flow meticulously from stanza to stanza, and every stanza a new formal discovery in itself. I have all his books, and today his new book arrives: Exhibits of the Sun.

  Just the thing to take with me on this afternoon’s visit to the Infusion Suite at Addenbrooke’s, where, once every three weeks, I sit for a whole afternoon with a tube plugged into my arm. As what seem gallons of immunoglobulin are pumped through the tube, I am going nowhere. It is an ideal time for reading, but the book has to be the right size, so as not to demand too much handling, lest my cannula get joggled loose. (In that idea can be heard an incipient poem, which might be comic; as, indeed, is the whole process. I feel like Iron Man in the repair shop.) Quite soon I plan to make a start on Conrad’s Victory, but for this afternoon I have Stephen Edgar’s new volume.

  As always, perfection is Edgar’s territory. A typical poem by him leaves nothing more to say, nor any other way of saying it. His poem about Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history—the angel that flies backward with its vision full of accumulating ruins—gives us a picture of the ruins: “one vast / Impacted havoc.” But even more remarkably, it also gives us the angel’s feelings, how “he longs to stay” but is forever swept onward: “a storm is blowing out of Paradise.” These phrases do Benjamin even more honor by quoting him directly: but their placing is all Edgar’s. Savoring a hundred moments like that, as President Reagan might have binged on a packet of Jelly Belly Super Sours, I reflect on how far the Australian cultural expansion has come. And so it should have done: Australia has twice the population of Sweden, which gave the world Saab, Volvo, and Abba. (The third conglomerate made more money than the first two put together.) But Australia remains a small country. It just looks big on the map. Any feelings of isolation that its intelligentsia once had, however, no longer fit the facts. Its film directors and actors, its singers and conductors, are everywhere. The theater director Michael Blakemore has several times had hit shows running in London and New York both at once. Even in poetry, a field which has no real commercial existence, there is an Australian presence in the world. Once, as
recently as in the previous generation, this was not so, and there was a justifiable niggling ache from the marginalization. But now the Australian poets don’t have to waste their time thinking on nationalist lines at all, because the world is their oyster. I never expected this to happen in my time. It should be no surprise, however: along with the freedom to prosper, the freedom to create is one of the first freedoms a democracy offers. And even the Americans now know roughly where Australia is. All over the world, any underprivileged or oppressed group of people would like to get into Australia. Though many are invited in—for its intake of immigrants, Australia rates high as a host nation—they can’t all come: a fact which gives the Australian pseudo-left intellectuals, always looking for a new grievance, a chance to call their own country an offense to mankind. Meanwhile the first container ship full of Australian Aboriginals has yet to arrive in the Persian Gulf. As I reflect on these things, I resolve to take down from the shelf, this very night, Stephen Edgar’s nearest thing to a definitive selection—published in the United States, it is called The Red Sea—and further soothe my aching brain. Along with my heart, my brain is practically the last part of me that works, but the news from the Middle East is enough to further scarify the mental lesions one already has. A new group of extremist killers has shown up who regard Al-Qaeda as being too soft on the infidel. A storm is blowing out of Paradise.

  John Howard Extends His Reign

  I GAVE JOHN HOWARD’S hulking autobiography Lazarus Rising to my younger daughter for a birthday present, and now I have borrowed it back. She was impressed, and I am too. Prime minister of Australia for more than eleven and a half years, Howard was never a physically imposing figure. When he went out for a run every morning, he could leave some of the journalists gasping, but showing off was not his style. He writes as he spoke: always clear but never exciting. To be without style was his style: on holidays at Nambucca Heads on the northern coast of New South Wales, he would paddle about in the water in his long shorts with a hat improvised out of a handkerchief to protect him from the sun. At such times he was the very picture of what Australians call the Aussie Battler: the average bloke slogging along to keep his family fed and well. But in Parliament his mind came into play, and it ran rings around the opposition, the Australian Labor Party, or ALP. The ALP regarded him as the devil. So did almost the whole of the Australian intelligentsia, who have been handing down their elementary anti-American, anticapitalist, and indeed anti-Australian views from one generation to the next for many years now. There is a vestigial blue-collar left to which I myself still belong, but the much more vocal white-collar left has always been united in hating Howard, despite, or perhaps because of, his popularity with the electorate. The Labor Party spent a doomed decade looking for a leader who would be so different from Howard that the electorate would change its allegiance. Then Kevin Rudd realized that the only way to win against Howard was to promise to do all the same things Howard did, but do them younger.

  Howard’s book is an educational text for showing how far you can get in Australian politics by balancing the books and saying what you mean. Nevertheless, he could make mistakes, and he made a whopping mistake in his last term, when he somehow concluded that he could not endorse his highly competent treasurer, Peter Costello, as his natural successor. Effectively, Howard was calling himself indispensable. The British have a monarch anyway; and the Americans treat their president as a monarch, sometimes with ludicrously overblown results; but most Australians want no monarchies any closer than, say, London.

  I deduce from Howard’s book, which is luminously self-aware in all other respects, that Howard never quite grasped why he was toppled. But the answer is not beyond analysis: as long as he behaved as if he thought of himself as an ordinary man, intelligent voters were ready to think him extraordinary, but when he behaved as if he thought of himself as an extraordinary man, he was finished.

  Finished but not quite. He has written this book, and soon there will be another one about the Menzies era. The name of Menzies, crucial to modern Australian history, is already forgotten out there in the less fortunate world, and soon the name of Howard will be too, to anyone except a student of Western democracy. But he’s ready for that.

  One of the many admirable things about him was that he genuinely believed that to be prime minster of Australia was quite enough glory to be going on with. His successor, Kevin Rudd, wanted to be secretary general of the United Nations. The debate goes on about which of Howard’s successors was worse: Kevin Rudd or Julia Gillard. To help scramble the question further, each of these two Labor Party giants has published a book vilifying the other. In the meanwhile, Howard is adding to the essential literature which will help explain to the next generation of Australians just how their nation has come to hold its exceptional position.

  Hemingway at the End

  STARTING WITH Carlos Baker’s pioneering biography in 1969, called simply Hemingway, I have spent a good part of my adult life reading books about Ernest Hemingway, and I don’t want to die among a heap of them, but they keep getting into the house. Once, there were people who wrote books about Hemingway who were born after he became famous. By now there are people who write books about Hemingway who were born after he killed himself. Some of these scholars, back in the old days, were professors of American literature in general before they switched full time to Hemingway. Nowadays they tend to spend their entire careers in Hemingway studies. Whether yesterday or today, their common qualification is the ability to produce yet another book about Hemingway, sometimes including a whole new fact.

  In my experience, even if you don’t read these books about Hemingway, you will own half a dozen of them. I suppose I keep reading them for the same reason that people can’t help writing them: he’s too much of a problem to leave unsolved. Beside Hemingway, even d’Annunzio is a mere zany. Hemingway’s personality was so extravagant that his creative work occupied only a small corner of it. In some ways, that fact was a blessing. He was never driven back to mere aestheticism when searching for material. He could measure his manhood by how he shot and fished. Unfortunately, he also measured his manhood by how he wrote. It wasn’t enough for him to prove his bravery by shooting a charging lion or blasting at sharks with a tommy gun to preserve the carcass of the giant marlin he had just finished fighting after a whole day in the chair. He wanted us to admire the bravery with which he rewrote his latest manuscript for the 323rd time. For a figure like that, we only had his word for it, and he could get very angry—fighting angry—if anybody suggested that he was making anything up. Honesty and accuracy were masculine things.

  But in his case, perhaps in everybody’s case, his sexuality was of a dual nature. Thus his pose of masculinity was in opposition to his sensitivity. This gap in his mental makeup as a writer he tried to weld shut with style. To some extent he succeeded, especially early on, and even when he didn’t succeed he wielded a pervasive influence. The style was a virus. Younger would-be writers took it as the sound of truth, of real experience lived and assimilated. The facts say that he was at his most persuasive when making things up. One of the most lastingly famous scenes in A Farewell to Arms is usually called the Retreat from Caporetto. A long and dazzling tour de force, it has the same stamp of authenticity as a short story like “Big Two-Hearted River.” But Hemingway never saw the Retreat from Caporetto. It happened the year before he got to Italy. He simply had the gift of turning a few facts he had read or heard about into a convincing narrative. He could do the same with a few lies. His way of putting things was a transformative illusion.

  As such, it could bind any acolyte with a spell. I have just finished reading Paul Hendrickson’s Hemingway’s Boat, the story of the close relationship, stretching from 1934 to 1961, between the great writer and his fishing launch, the Pilar, which, operating out of Key West and Cuba, carried its owner to his adventures with the big fish and the German submarines. (The fish existed, but about the submarines he could only claim to have provided va
luable information about their location: i.e., there weren’t any.) The book is a solid seven hundred pages and I read them all, but I don’t begrudge the time. Hendrickson has a good, hard head, and tracks down every exaggeration. Nor is he floored by the consideration that Hemingway should never have needed to exaggerate. No doubt there is the occasional maddened dwarf who dreams of being a giant, but Hemingway was a giant who dreamed of being a giant. Years ago, on my first trip to Cuba, in the days when Castro was still making speeches that could be measured in geological time, I was given a tour of the Finca Vigía and saw the Pilar up on its blocks. You weren’t allowed in the house because the floorboards were giving way, but you could look through the window and marvel at his walls of books. There, on the floor, was a pair of his moccasins. They were like two canoes side by side. The man was from Brobdingnag.

  But even though Hendrickson prides himself on getting Hemingway’s number, he can’t help being infected by the style. When Hemingway beats his chest and boasts that he wrote good, Hendrickson forgets to note that for any lesser writer to echo such bombast even faintly is a guarantee that he will write bad. Still, Hendrickson’s brain survived his encounter with Hemingway’s, which was clearly in a dreadful mess long before he ended the agony with a shotgun.