Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/01/25/the_surrender_of_the_spirit.php

The Surrender of the Spirit

Friday, January 25, 2008

By Emily Ghods

Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.
—Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte Der Neuzeit

They make a desert and call it peace.
—Tacitus

The American critic Lionel Trilling once called the intersection of culture and politics the bloody crossroads, which turns out to be a deservedly macabre description of modernity. When Trilling coined that promiscuous phrase, Stalin’s purges and the Nazi horrors were lingering memories that plagued a world quickened by the ideology of evil and what was now clearly the emergent evil of ideology. Utopian political ideologies, which no doubt sounded good at the time, begat the massacre of millions, and, of course, some of the best and brightest of the culture were the first to go. To put the secular in religious terms, the modern word—ideology—was made flesh; it was the utopian ideologies of man that brought about the mass extermination and genocide of those it was supposed to have served and civilized. In our secular era, this abiding catastrophe of the 20th century has played itself out so many times that by the time the purges and cruelty of Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur were revealed, they were ‘already a cliché.’
When ideology, fully formed, recreated itself in the world it did not long suffer the inquisitive demurral of the free spirit to doubt its legitimacy. Ideology, with its monochrome impressions, does not enjoy the tincture of art, culture, the spirit. Culture, on the other hand, is by nature malleable and tolerant, and sometimes even too malleable and too tolerant: in his new book, the critic Clive James examines the sleight of hand that moved many of the intellectuals and artist, in their naïve duplicity, to go so far in rejecting one noxious ideology, Nazi totalitarianism, that they were fooled into replacing it with another, Soviet Communism.
Dazzled by the evil that men do, amidst the cultural heroes that opposed it and the malefactors that complied, James has spent the past forty years of his life thinking hard about the way men deal with art and freedom: what is it about the imagination that can produce both elevation of man through art and the perversion of the spirit through political theory? With a steady hand and a sharp pen James etches his way into the rotted core of theory and practice, of politics and the arts in the 20th century; here he lands an anecdote that leaves the modern liberal sensibilities gasping for air: “Even in Auschwitz, some of the enslaved musicians must have thought that Schubert’s writing for strings would melt Dr. Mengele’s heart, as it melted theirs. And it did melt his heart. It just didn’t change his mind.” And there we are.
And he goes on. How could such sympathetic and enlightened figures as Brecht and Neruda and Heidegger and Sartre remain complicit in or indifferent to the brutalities of the reigning ideologies that bent either their knee or their art? James, the chastened humanist asks, “If there was not a field of creativity that was incorruptibly pure, where did that leave humanism?” There is a tragedy here.
Still, James struggles and lives to fight another day in his latest book, Cultural Amnesia. Examining over a hundred major personalities, mostly from the 20th century, James is not afraid to separate the saint from the miscreant, the opportunistic brute from the genteel sinner.
This extraordinary book is the result of not only years of learning and reading, but also of the suffering and disillusionment that must accompany any honest appraisal of the last century. In its lush pages, James testifies to the traces and remnants of truth in art and the optimism and hope it leaves behind, scattered through the debris as souvenirs and keepsakes. In the form of essays, James takes us on his own adventure, living the rather bohemian life of what he calls a ‘café-nomad’ with his piles of books written by names both well known and barely remembered (remember Egon Friedell? few do). Originally the book was titled Alone in the Café to express his solitary theme and Sisyphean task.
In his mind, he opens the door of a café in Vienna. It’s 1938. The cafés of Vienna are silent. The emptiness is overwhelming; but just the year before, a forty year tradition of café banter was the soul of Viennese life. What’s more, as James puts it, the garrulous habit of speaking one’s thoughts and mind to the world spun out into the society at large: “It can’t be confined to the cafes: in the whole culture right through until the Nazis turned out the lights, talk was a way of being, it was universally understood that the best talkers had the right to talk it all away.”
In 1938, that talk and that life ended with the Anschluss.
As James lovingly—and with some wit—pieces it all back together, he is guilty of only one romantic transfixion, a ruminating nostalgia for a bohemia that is all but lost, that was heeled into dust and sand. And he keeps coming back to it. A lot was lost, and James lives to regret the passing.
Back in the day, Vienna and Berlin could have contended with Paris’ intellectual café scene, but its bon vivants and cultural impresarios were rounded up and lost in time. Gone missing. James is trying to conjure what-could-have-been in those end-time ghost towns; he is a pilgrim, stopping at the stations of the intellect, cafes, across the continent and animating the voice, the sorrow, and the wit of forgotten men and women that deserve to be remembered, that demand to be remembered. Reading through the novels and essays, which he often struggled to read in the original language, James, the scribe, was quick to record the brief words that moved him in the margins, a cache of voices past. Then, armed with these fragments, these quips and neglected asides, James rouses the spirit of the essays that enliven Cultural Amnesia. And they are full of life.
Each essay begins with a poignant or pregnant remark by characters as disparate as Coco Chanel, Sartre, Hitler, Jean-François Revel, Edward Said, Terry Gilliam, or Tony Curtis (he is particularly delightful), among others. The ensuing essays unfold as exegeses, emerging as personal rumination on a line or passage, the historical circumstances surrounding it, and a final judgment on the figure at hand. You can almost feel James kneading his brow, often in anguish, as he taps out the words one by one on the keys. The propositions and judgments span the spectrum, led along by the disparate characters that James binds together to keep each other company if not in life, then in death.
There are heroes and heroines in James’ book: Sophie Scholl and Egon Friedell are portrayed majestically, while the “evil-eyed genius” in the corner, the fallen Sartre or Jünger—found wanting—are ridiculed as the liars and cowards they were.
The remembrance can be quite poignant: when the Nazi’s stormed Vienna, Friedell (the Jewish cabaret star and polymath whom James imagines to be “a combination of George Saintsbury, Aldous Huxley, Peter Ustinov, Kenneth Clark, and Isaiah Berlin”), seeing the storm troopers making there way up his Vienna street, made the transcendent decision to throw himself from the window; before he jumped, he made the humane decision to call out a warning to the people below “a cry whose echo contains an era with all the despair of a just world, and the despair of that world cruelly lost.”
The story of Sophie Scholl, the heroine to whom Cultural Amnesia is dedicated, is an equally heart-wrenching souvenir of the past century. It too involves a choice shrouded in death. From Munich, the “Aryan” Sophie joined a resistance group headed by her brother, a group called The White Rose. They protested the fate of the Jews by writing pamphlets and dispersing them; such a slight act was a capital crime. In 1943, she stood before a judge who condemned her to die unless she renounced the compassion contained in her pamphlets and her mission as a member of The White Rose. Still, she had a choice, a privilege not given to her co-conspirators–and she chose death, and did not whimper or cry when she placed her head below the guillotine blade. The essay on Sophie, one of the best in the book, is moving for reasons beyond the tragedy of an innocent and wonderful woman; behind Sophie’s courage and humanity is the startling molecule of humanity yet possessed by the Nazis, her murderers. They pitied her enough to give her a choice, through which she might have saved her life, and when she rejected their offer, they possessed something—compassion? —that lead them to put Sophie to death before all the others so that she would not have to languish in terror as her friends were marched off to die.
Here, something James wrote about Anna Akhmatova, but applicable to Sophie, is instructive: “What we have to grasp is that it needn’t have happened to her. History needn’t have been like that. That’s what history is: the story of everything that needn’t have been like that. We also have to grasp that art proves its value by still mattering to people who have been deprived of every other freedom: indeed instead of mattering less, it matters more.” The tragedy of Sophie and Anna is not what they did, but what they could not do.
The insipid tragedy of Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, is not what he could not do, but what he did do—which was all the more a tragedy for doing. Sophie stood before a Nazi judge and humbly said, “Finally, someone has to make a start. We only said and wrote what many people think. They just don’t dare to express it.” Conversely, Sartre joined a defunct Nazi resistance group whose only occupation, as it turned out, was to meet as a group, all the while groveling on bended knee before the fascist authorities, greedily pleading for his plays to be shown in the fascist-controlled theatres. Aware of his own tendency to hypocrisy and cowardice, Sartre had an instinct to shirk away from a clear assessment of not only his own actions in life but in life as such, an instinct which regrettably and necessarily informed much of his philosophy; the nothingness of such a being. Just as his resistance-bravery was a pose, so was his shifty philosophy. But of course a philosophical pose as influential as Sartre’s is far more damaging than his own self-deception. A legion of his acolytes used him and his work to proselytize in the public square with no shortage of dimwits willing to buy his shoddy goods. James writes, “Sartre, the philosopher, the man of truth, lied in his teeth about the most elemental fact of his adult life all the way to the end, so it is no wonder that his philosophy is nonsense…Sartre, as an essayist and critic, was almost exclusively concerned in concealing the truth instead of revealing it.” Sartre, as it turns out, did not write philosophy, he wrote a cheap apology, in many editions.
The seeker of truth is seldom wise enough to separate his autobiography from his worldly speculations, and it is always helpful to know the back story of anyone trying to sell you something. The experience of living shapes opinions, and a variety of experiences will tend to clarify and refocus any view. Chesterton was famous for saying, “My democracy includes the dead.” A broad view indeed. The value of such a cultural icon is in the distilling of reality from the dross of the cultural imagination on the way to the truth, and this occurs by talking, debating and engaging the truth…and the lie. As always, the enemy at the gates in this game is self-deception. In its presence, truth won’t have a chance.
In order to illustrate the nexus between culture and politics—which should generally not exist, James argues—James enjoins voices in conversation and in conflict. Only the ideologue has his world schematized, the unbridled individual—and the epitome of the individual, the artist—does not. The artist, instead of trying to reduce thought and reality into a system, will engage the contradictions and questions, and in a fit of desperation realize that even these answers may contradict each other. This is the beginning of philosophy and art, the pursuit of wisdom and truth and the conversation of history that echoes in the chambers of our minds—or at least, according to James, should echo there with each toll of the bell—to create transcendent overtones. The echoes are memories, collaborating with each other, modifying each other, and never allowing one voice to rise too high above the others for too long. For those of us who cannot hear them, James offers up one of his own:

Whatever we say, it is bound to be dependent on what has been said before. In this book can be heard the merest outside edge of an enormous conversation. As they never were in life, we can imagine the speakers all gathered in some vast room. Or perhaps they are on a terrace, under the stars. They are wearing name tags in case they don’t recognize each other. Some of them recognize each other all too well, but they avoid contact. Thomas Mann, with the family poodle snuffling petulantly at his knee, would rather not talk to Brecht, and Sartre is keen to avoid Solzhenitsyn. Kafka tells Puccini that he would have approached him at the Brescia flying display in 1909, but he was too shy. Nabokov tells Pavlova that he never forgot the time he danced the waltz with her. Yeats has failed to convince Wittgenstein about the importance of the Mystic Rose. All over the place there are little dramas. Standing beside the piano, Stravinsky refuses to believe that Duke Ellington is improvising. Robert Lowell has cornered Freud and is telling him that when he, Lowell, has a depressive phase, he imagines he is Adolf Hitler. With barely concealed impatience, Freud mutters that Hitler spends very little time imagining he is Robert Lowell. Anna Akhmatova at her most beautiful, a catwalk model with nose of an unsuccessful pugilist, has moved in on Tony Curtis at his most handsome, dressed for his role as Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. Curtis looks frightened. Akhmatova’s friend and rival Nadezhda Mandelstam, on the other hand, seems delighted to have met Albert Camus: she distrusts the way he turns on the automatic charm even for an old lady, but she approves of his opinion.

It is amazing to see how James brings these characters to life out of a simple line, a sentence encapsulating a life. Whether conjured from history or his own mind it is a strange biography and intellectual history that wanders away from and back to its subject, and it is all the more refreshing for it.
From the well remembered quip of Miles Davis ridiculing his uppity critics, “If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and drive away,” James steers Miles’s Ferrari into a pragmatic consideration of the effects of money and the lack of it on the artist, art, creation and taste; onto William Hazlitt’s gilded praise of Burke’s prose—“Burke’s style was forked and playful as the lightning, crested like the serpent”—working James into a lather on a baroque tour of writers appraising, praising and envying the beauty of their peers’ creations; to a rumination on the significance of religion and the sacred text in an agnostic age, unwound from the banality of a single line of Czeslaw Milosz, “The scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics and atheists.” James, though sympathetic to the believer, falls into the latter category. From dusting off such rhetorical gems as, “He’s such a liar that not even the opposite is true”; to a transcendent throwaway from 17th century prose writer Sir Thomas Brown’s eschatology: “Dreams out of the ivory gate and visions before midnight.” He offers a delightful reflection on the salvaging and reissue of the literature of the past by the light-fingered writers of the future. He encapsulates the French Revolution’s excesses in a line by Edgar Quintet: “But this success, where is it?”
If the 18th century was the age of reason, the 19th century the age of science, and the 20th century the age of crisis, where does that leave us today? Perhaps it’s the age of indifference and boredom. As mentioned earlier, in James’ sepia reflections, the cafés represented a paradise of free thought, expression, and ultimately, knowledge. The academy, on the other hand, is still performing intellectual acrobatics suited to the seventh level of Dante’s hell where the fraudulent and deceptive, or in the nomenclature of the place, cultural studies, are the order of the day. This leaves most readers—all of us in a few short years—in an upper-middle-class purgatory that demands that we either self-educate or in the words of Proust, engage in “that long flight from ourselves that we call erudition” or otherwise surrender our spirit to the age of cultural indifference, the amnesia of our age. According to James the elevation of humanism “cannot be had unless we raise the demands on ourselves a long way beyond decorating our lives with enough cultivation to make the pursuit of ambition look civilized.” But then, you cannot forget what you have never known. Here’s to all that is worth remembering and to the person that wishes to remember it all. n