Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture 9780823292493

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RESPONSES TO MODERNITY

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RESPONSES TO MODERNITY Essays in the Politics of Culture

 Joseph Frank

Fordham University Press New York 2012

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Copyright 䉷 2012 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frank, Joseph, 1918– Responses to modernity : essays in the politics of culture / Joseph Frank.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-3925-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Criticism—20th century. 2. Literature, Modern—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Literature and society—History—20th century. 4. Realism in literature. I. Title. PN94.F67 2012 801⬘.95—dc23 2011046659 Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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To my beloved younger daughter, Isabelle, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day

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Contents

Previous Publication

ix

Introduction

1

Part One. France 1.

Paul Vale´ry: Masters and Friends

5

2.

Jacques Maritain: Medieval Modernism

22

3.

Camus as Journalist

34

4.

Andre´ Malraux: A Hero of His Time

45

5.

Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer

61

6.

Racine and Anti-Semitism

78

7.

Nicola Chiaromonte: The Ethics of Politics

86

8.

French Intellectuals between the Wars

96

9.

Sartre: An Existentialist in the Underworld

105

Part Two. Germany and Romania 10.

Ernst Juenger: An Impenitent Prussian

111

11.

The ‘‘Double Life’’ of Gottfried Benn

116

12.

Erich Kahler and the Quest for a Human Absolute

120

13.

Eliade, Cioran, Ionesco: The Treason of the Intellectuals

136

Part Three. Critics and Criticism 14.

Eliot’s Legacy

157

15.

The Novel in Wonderland

165 vii

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viii Contents

16.

R. P. Blackmur’s Texts: An Introduction

177

17.

Ian Watt: A Tribute

187

18.

Gary Saul Morson’s Narrative and Freedom

204

19.

Lilian Furst and the Art of Literary Realism

215

Index

221

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1. ‘‘Introduction: Paul Vale´ry,’’ The Sewanee Review 75 (1967): 393–414. 2. ‘‘Medieval Modernism,’’ The New Republic 234 (2006): 24–29. 3. ‘‘The Editorialist as Hero,’’ The New Republic 235 (2006): 31–36. 4. ‘‘A Hero of his Time?’’ The New Republic 232 (2005): 26–32. 5. ‘‘Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer,’’ Europe 890–891 (2003). 6. ‘‘Haman in Paris,’’ The New Republic 229 (2003): 25–29. 7. ‘‘The Ethics of Politics,’’ Dissent 21 (1974): 83–89. 8. ‘‘French Intellectuals between the Wars,’’ Dissent 31 (1984): 103–8. 9. ‘‘Sartre, An Existentialist in the Underworld?’’ in The Arts at MidCentury, ed. Robert Richman (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), 109–14. 10. ‘‘Ernst Juenger, An Impenitent Prussian,’’ in The Arts at Mid-Century, ed. Robert Richman (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), 179–84. 11. ‘‘The ‘Double Life’ of Gottfried Benn,’’ in The Arts at Mid-Century, ed. Robert Richman (New York: Horizon Press, 1954), 190–95. 12. ‘‘The Quest for a Human Absolute,’’ The Sewanee Review 77 (1969): 184–92; ‘‘Erich Kahler and ‘the Predicament of Our Age,’ ’’ The New Criterion 7 (1989): 15–19. 13. ‘‘Thinkers and Liars,’’ The New Republic 235 (2006): 31–37. 14. ‘‘To Criticize the Critic.’’ Commentary 42 (1966): 87–91. 15. ‘‘The Novel in Wonderland.’’ The American Scholar 49.4 (1980): 529–40. ix

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x Previous Publication

16. ‘‘R. P. Blackmur’s Texts: An Introduction,’’ in The Legacy of R. P. Blackmur: Essays, Memoir, Texts, ed. Edward T. Cone, Joseph Frank, and Edmund Keeley (New York: Ecco Press, 1987): 179–89. 17. ‘‘Ian Watt: A Tribute.’’ Common Knowledge 13 (Spring 2007): 497–511. 18. ‘‘Gary Saul Morson: Narrative and Freedom,’’ Common Knowledge (Winter, 1997): 150–58. 19. ‘‘Lilian Furst: The Art of Literary Realism,’’ Boston Book Review, May 19, 1996.

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RESPONSES TO MODERNITY

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Introduction

The present volume contains essays and articles written over a period of many years, during which I was largely occupied in writing the five volumes of my books on the life and times of Dostoevsky. But I did not begin my academic career as a professional Slavist, though I acquired a knowledge of Russian, and I taught comparative literature for many years, dealing with works in French, German, Spanish, and Italian, as well as English. The articles republished here, all of which have previously been printed (though some have been significantly revised), were offshoots of this wider literary concern. I attempted, as it were, to keep up with the passing literary scene as well, especially as it touched on what were the major issues of our time, beginning with the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism, and the problems arising in the aftermath of the Second World War. Hence my overall title for this volume: Responses to Modernity. The earliest pieces in the present volume were written about writers like Paul Vale´ry, Ernst Juenger, and Gottfried Benn, who had come to fame after the First World War but survived to respond to the Second as well. The Vale´ry article is the introduction to a volume of his occasional pieces published as part of the Princeton edition of his works in English translation. My article outlines his career as poet and literary and intellectual commentator and his response, just before his death, to the occupation of France. The articles on Juenger and Benn deal with two German writers who came to fame in the interwar period. They were not Nazis themselves but not outright opponents of Hitler either, sharing a good deal of his nationalism and opposition to Communism. Juenger, who had friends in the Stauffenberg conspiracy to assassinate Hitler, published a fascinating diary that he kept while part of the German High Command occupying Paris. He also wrote a utopian novel expressing aristocratic opposition to the plebeian Nazis in a veiled form. Benn was an important German poet, as well as being a doctor. He was sympathetic to certain aspects of Nazism but did not accept the party line. The book I review is his autobiography. Both men considered themselves 1

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part of an ‘‘inner emigration,’’ who kept alive German cultural values during the terrible Nazi period. Along with the Vale´ry article, I also have a number of reviews dealing with important French writers (Jacques Maritain, Albert Camus, Andre´ Malraux, Yves Bonnefoy), and a piece on French intellectuals between the wars. Although the books I review may deal with particular aspects of the writers in question, I always make an effort to give the reader some general ideal of the importance of their work as a whole. The article on Nicola Chiaromonte, who fought with Malraux in the Spanish Civil War, and then was an important influence in the United States, is a personal tribute to an old friend. But it also discusses his penetrating ideas on the novel and modern history since Napoleon. The article on Erich Kahler, rewritten from three pieces that I published on him, attempts to do justice to this sweeping cultural historian. He was a close friend of Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch, and an important voice for the ‘‘outer emigration’’ of Jewish German intellectuals who came to the United States and tried to arouse the United States to the dangers of Fascism and Nazism. The articles on Eliade, Cioran, and Ionesco arose from a French book that dealt with their littleknown Romanian past, and which put the social-political views of Eliade in particular—though no one doubts the importance of his works on the history of religion—in a very negative light. A number of my articles deal with problems of literary criticism (Gary Saul Morson, Ian Watt, T. S. Eliot, R. P. Blackmur, two books on the history of the novel, and one on the question of ‘‘realism’’). Two collections of my essays, The Widening Gyre (1963), with an introduction by Allen Tate, and The Idea of Spatial Form (1991), are devoted exclusively to such questions of literary and art criticism. My early article on ‘‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature’’ is included in several anthologies, has been translated into French and Russian, and is still being taught in classes in criticism.

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part one

France

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1.

Paul Vale´ry: Masters and Friends

A large part of the published work of Paul Vale´ry consists of occasional literary and cultural reflections on the most varied and diverse topics. Essays, prefaces, official speeches, reminiscences of old friends and literary comrades-in-arms—all poured forth from Vale´ry’s pen in a steady stream during the latter part of his life. Collected in the five volumes of his Varie´te´s (which do not by any means exhaust all his published prose of this kind), these casually incisive and elegant articles did much to spread the prestige of Vale´ry’s name among a wide circle of readers. They are much more easily accessible than his dense and hermetic poetry, his subtle and chiseled Socratic dialogues, or his several volumes of gnomic fragments and aphorisms which can really appeal only to the cognoscenti of his work. And if the average cultivated reader has made some firsthand contact with Vale´ry, it is probably in the pages of his famous La Crise de l’esprit, which in 1919 stated with classic brevity the theme of the decline of the West through an excess of the very rationalism whose discovery had been its greatest triumph. Vale´ry’s essays were called out by the most haphazard occasions, and many were speeches delivered as part of his functions as a member of the French Academy. So many and so varied were the chores imposed on Vale´ry by this august body that he once, in a letter to Gide, jokingly called himself ‘‘the Bossuet of the Third Republic.’’ It is a tribute to Vale´ry’s independence and originality that, despite such ceremonial auspices, he always managed to produce something far surpassing the level of conventional eulogy or ritual celebration. As a matter of fact, he never approached any subject except in terms of his own peculiar intellectual concerns and philosophical preoccupations; and these were quite different from the historical and literary interests of the scholar or critic, as well as from the doctrines of the major philosophical currents in France during his lifetime. (Though personally friendly with Bergson and Alain, Vale´ry perhaps comes closest of all, in his philosophical tendencies, to the Neo-Kantianism of Le´on Brunschvicg, 5

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who, as he notes in a letter, ‘‘quotes me in all his books.’’) Not until the appearance of Sartre’s Situations can we find any French essayist who matches Vale´ry’s literary authority and stylistic brilliance, and who combines these qualities with so strongly marked and sharply individual an intellectual personality. Vale´ry’s thought, however, is the product of an extremely idiosyncratic blend of heterogeneous elements, which are much more difficult to pin down than Sartre’s obvious philosophical affiliations. So, perhaps the most useful task one can perform, as an introduction to the essays collected in Masters and Friends, is to use them for the purpose of disengaging the various aspects of the Weltanschauung that forms their common background.

I The first complex of ideas that may be noted in Vale´ry’s essays derives from his early and crucial contact with the spiritual world of French Symbolism. Like all important literary movements, French Symbolism carried with it a freight of values and attitudes that went far beyond the merely literary, and these values became a permanent part of Vale´ry’s sensibility. Certainly the most important of such values was the Symbolist mystique of art and the artist; and in his farewell to Pierre Louy¨s, Vale´ry recalls the fervor of their common participation in this cult of the aesthetic: ‘‘Thirty years ago, the word ‘artist’ meant for us someone who lived apart, a dedicated person, at once victim and priest, a person who was singled out by his gifts and whose virtues and weaknesses were not those of other men.’’ At the age of eighteen ` Vale´ry announced to Louy¨s that his bible had become Huysmans’s A Rebours; and while he soon discarded the musky trappings of this breviary of Symbolist decadence, the climate of ideas it represented can hardly be mistaken as an influence on his outlook. It explains, for one thing, his reverence for the rare and precious personality, the creative source and center of all culture, whose disappearance he was so often to lament later on. Vale´ry’s idea of culture always remained an aristocratic one, centered around discreetly charismatic individuals and a small spiritual elite whose features are strongly suggestive of the Symbolist ce´nacles (and particularly the ce´nacle of Mallarme´) that he had known as a young man. It also helps to explain his contemptuous disdain for politics, and his indifference (at least on a theoretical level) to the ordinary issues of morality. The Symbolists turned their back on the whole realm of the political and social as inimical to the pursuit of the highest refinements of art; and

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Vale´ry notes, with some satisfaction, that Descartes had also assumed the same indifference to the religious politics in his day in order to pursue the highest refinements of thought; similarly, if the virtues and weaknesses of the artist are not those of other men, then morality has no right to impose its prescriptions on the creative spirit. Vale´ry takes a slyly malicious delight in pointing out this highly amoral moral to the eminently respectable audience attending his lecture on ‘‘Villon and Verlaine.’’ Another example of this indelible Symbolist impress on Vale´ry’s thought may be found in his persistent preoccupation with mysticism, and with other irrational currents of speculation such as Illuminism and Theosophy. Vale´ry, as we shall soon see, is perhaps the most intransigent rationalist to have appeared among major European writers since the eighteenth century. But his fascination with such a figure as Swedenborg, to whom he devotes a lengthy essay, can easily be understood if we remember his Symbolist origins. For the metaphysics of Symbolism was very close to that ‘‘spectral learning’’ which Vale´ry mentions in connection with Ge´rard de Nerval—a learning ‘‘tinged with theurgy, gnosis, the cabala, deciphered myths, and every kind of mystery that could be absorbed by a mind longing too avidly for light.’’ Just how imbued Vale´ry himself was with such ‘‘spectral learning’’ may be gleaned from a letter that he wrote to Mallarme´ at the age of twenty, in which he confides to his cher Maıˆtre that the poet ‘‘defines the mysterious echo of things and their secret harmony, as real, as certain as a mathematical relation to all artistic spirits. . . .’’ The only novels of Balzac that Vale´ry mentions, and the ones he clearly knows best, are those in which the theosophic, Swedenborgian tendencies of the great realist are most prominent (Se´raphitus-Se´raphita, Louis Lambert, La Peau de chagrin); the work of Flaubert that he prefers to all others is that compendium of mystagogical heresies La Tentation de Saint Antoine. Vale´ry also admires Huysmans’s trilogy of novels about a religious conversion, and accords special praise to the final volume, La Cathe´drale, for consisting of an ‘‘extraordinary network of modern metaphors in which we catch, as though in its entirety, the tremor of the vast and exact alphabet of symbols willed by the Middle Ages.’’ The poetic impulse in these Huysmans novels is carefully contrasted with the standard products of turn-of-the-century French Naturalism. And Vale´ry’s attacks on the novel as a form, which gained him a great deal of notoriety, are unquestionably the echo of a taste inculcated by Symbolist aesthetics. Nothing was more opposed to the Symbolist ambition to transform the world into art, to find the poetic talisman that would liberate its

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secret harmonies and reveal its magic unity, than the apparent ambition of the Naturalists to reproduce the thousand and one insignificant details of everyday life. Behind Vale´ry’s sallies at the expense of the novel looms the rivalry between Zola and Mallarme´, with the one gaining the plaudits of the vulgar and the other the adoration of a handful of the elect. Whatever their origin, however, some of Vale´ry’s barbs are extremely shrewd criticisms. He aptly remarks that the Realism of the 1850’s confused scientific observation with the crude unselectiveness of the naked eye: as a result, such writers as Flaubert and the Goncourts, who lavished the most sophisticated prose on the most ordinary and commonplace characters, only succeeded in obtaining an effect of extreme artifice rather than of reality. For Vale´ry, the art of the novel always remained identical with the Naturalism he had rejected as a young man, and in ‘‘Homage to Marcel Proust,’’ of all places, he still continues to define the essence of the form exclusively in terms of verisimilitude. ‘‘There must be no essential difference between the novel and the natural description of things that we have seen and heard,’’ he writes. ‘‘Neither rhythm, forms and figures of speech, nor even any definite structure are obligatory.’’ After this assertion, one is hardly surprised at Vale´ry’s admission that he had ‘‘scarcely read a single volume of Marcel Proust’s great work.’’ But as is so often the case with Vale´ry, his direct literary insight and his power of generalization somehow manage to overcome the limits of his taste. Proust’s genius, he remarks brilliantly, consists in being able to convey the ‘‘infinity of possibilities’’ which is the very essence of human consciousness, but which is usually suppressed because the business of living requires selection and choice. Stendhal is the only major novelist to whom Vale´ry devotes an important essay; but, as he intimates rather coyly, there are special reasons for his attachment to this paradoxical figure. He had read Lucien Leuwen at a moment in his life when the love affair in the book became entangled with his own romantic infatuation, and this trapped him into a betrayal of his critical principles, which required a strict avoidance of confusion between his private feelings and those stimulated by the author’s craft. Moreover, Vale´ry sees Stendhal’s novels primarily as ‘‘vaudeville’’ or ‘‘operetta’’; the highest praise he can give is to compare them with Voltaire’s wittily extravagant contes philosophiques. Vale´ry shows an acute sense of literary history in linking Stendhal with this eighteenth-century tradition, whose influence is patent in the fragments of his own contes philosophiques (published as Histoires brise´es). The point, though, is that Vale´ry could tolerate prose fiction only

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when its authors disregarded the canons of Realism, like Voltaire and Montesquieu, or played fast and loose with them, like Stendhal. It was the formlessness of the novel of Realism, the fact that it presumably modeled itself on the fluidity and aimlessness of quotidian experience, that impelled Vale´ry to exclude it from the realm of true art; and no concept was more important for Symbolism than that of form. For Mallarme´, the world existed solely to be transmuted into his grand oeuvre: the function of life, with all its passions and values, could only be to dissolve its identity into the structure of this grandiose creation. Vale´ry, too, never tires of affirming the importance of form, and like Mallarme´, he assigns to it a superiority over all other human concerns. Bossuet, he asserts, is important not as a defender of the Christian tradition but as a great stylist. So, in a comparison that recalls both Gautier and Malraux, Vale´ry praises Bossuet’s prose because its structures can be enjoyed ‘‘just as passionately as . . . the architecture of a temple when its sanctuaries are deserted and the feelings and causes which led to its construction have long lost their force.’’ It would be difficult to find a critic who gave more weight to the purely formal properties of literature than Vale´ry, though for the most part his comments do not go beyond general appreciations of the type just quoted. Strangely enough, however, it was this very devotion to the concept of form that prompted Vale´ry to react against Mallarme´ and the Symbolist worship of art, and to turn away from literature entirely for a period of about fifteen years.

II If the experience of Symbolism accounts for one strand of ideas that come together in Vale´ry’s essays, then another strand may be traced to his remarkable way of reacting against this very same movement. This reaction is the most important event in Vale´ry’s literary biography, and unquestionably has deep personal and emotional roots. It is linked, in the first place, with the sentimental-intellectual crisis that he went through in 1892—a crisis that was resolved during a sleepless night in Genoa punctuated by the lightning flashes of a violent thunderstorm. The upshot of this crisis was Vale´ry’s determination to master his sensibility by turning it into an object for rational scrutiny and investigation. ‘‘This crisis set me against my ‘sensibility’ so far as it threatened the freedom of my mind,’’ Vale´ry wrote in 1944, the year before his death. ‘‘I tried, without any great success at first, to oppose the awareness of my state to that state itself, and the observer to the sufferer.’’ This effort could not help but lead Vale´ry away from the purely emotive

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world of literary expression, and hence, too, away from the idolatry of art that was the cornerstone of Symbolist values. These latter were now all immolated ‘‘to the one that had to be created to rule over the others, the Idol of the Intellect.’’ Another factor to be considered here is Vale´ry’s personal relation to Mallarme´. Vale´ry had the greatest admiration for this master of verbal music and mysteriously evocative imagery; but all the same, there could hardly fail to be a certain rivalry between an elder poet and a gifted young disciple filled with insatiable creative ambition. Vale´ry was acutely conscious of this inevitable competition between the literary generations, and often used it as a critical schema—for example, when he explains the baroque affectations of style in Huysmans by his necessity of distinguishing himself from Gautier, Flaubert, and the Goncourts. The same tension existed between Mallarme´ and his most talented follower. But, rather than seeking a further nuance or complication of style, Vale´ry broke with literature altogether as the first step in discovering his own literary path. To understand Vale´ry’s development at this period (the mid-1890’s), when he gradually abandoned literature to study mathematics and physics, we must remember that he had always been haunted by the dream of uniting science and art. Vale´ry’s interest in the exact sciences had been originally stimulated by a reading of Poe’s Eureka, that extraordinary and isolated effort to imagine a poetic cosmos in scientific terms; and he had always been fascinated by Poe’s suggestion of a scientific poetics, based on an infallible knowledge of the psychological responses of the reader. Even at the very height of his Mallarme´-ism, we have seen him speaking of the ‘‘mysterious echo of things’’ being ‘‘as real, as certain as a mathematical relation.’’ Art and science had thus never been inseparably opposed for Vale´ry, though they always had been for Mallarme´; and this is the point at which Vale´ry asserted his originality vis-a-vis the Master. ‘‘I told him [Mallarme´] one day that he had the makings of a great scientist,’’ Vale´ry writes disingenuously in his ‘‘Letter on Mallarme´’’: I do not know if the compliment was to his taste because he had no idea of science that would make it comparable to poetry. He opposed them, on the contrary [italics added]. But I could not help making a rapprochement, which seemed to me inevitable, between the construction of an exact science and the design—evident in Mallarme´—of reconstituting the entire system of poetry by means of pure and distinct notions. . . .

Vale´ry was certainly aided in making this rapprochement by the influence of the writings of Henri Poincare´, the great mathematician and philosopher

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of science, whose physical silhouette is sketched in ‘‘Verlaine Passes By.’’ Poincare´’s writings, Madame Vale´ry has told us, remained constantly on her husband’s night table; and one can imagine Vale´ry’s excitement when he began to grasp the implications of Poincare´’s stress on the pure formalism of mathematics, which, like Symbolist poetry, strove to ‘‘donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.’’ ‘‘Matter has no importance for them [mathematicians],’’ writes Poincare´ in his La Science et l’hypothe`se; ‘‘they are only interested in form.’’ Symbolism and science became one in this search for forms which, depending only on human creativity, were yet capable of endowing reality with a new and more profound significance. The conception of mathematical form thus provided a bridge by which Vale´ry could move from art to science without really abandoning one for the other. Indeed, what Vale´ry accentuates in the Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (his declaration of intellectual independence) is the unity of the two rather than their diversity. This unity derives from their common ability to create forms and structures from an agglomeration of raw materials, and to impose continuity on the seemingly haphazard and disorderly; and Vale´ry’s intellectual aim henceforth was both to establish this unity and to clarify its operations. What Mallarme´ had done for poetry, Vale´ry could see as only a particular solution of a much larger task; what Mallarme´ had tried to do only intuitively, Vale´ry would try to do for the activity of the mind as a whole—the common source of both science and art—with the rigorous tools of mathematical analysis. The publication of Vale´ry’s Cahiers, which he always considered his most important work, has shown with what tenacity and application he pursued this ambition all his life—the ambition of working out nothing less than a ‘‘mathematics of mental structures,’’ which would illuminate the forms of all types of mental activity. Using his considerable knowledge of modern science as a guide, Vale´ry tried to find ways of describing mental activity in its most general pattern based on analogies with mathematical and physical models. Judith Robinson, who discusses these efforts in detail in her excellent L’Analyse de l’esprit dans les Cahiers de Vale´ry, points out how close he came, quite independently, to many of the ideas of such thinkers as the Vienna school of logical positivists and their English disciples, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, and Norbert Wiener with his theory of cybernetics. Nothing definite came of these efforts during Vale´ry’s lifetime, and the ultimate philosophical value of Cahiers still remains to be decided. But, what is important here is not so much the substance of these speculations as their spirit. For they reveal the scientific cast of Vale´ry’s mind, and his conviction

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that only the axiomatic clarity of mathematics furnishes a standard by which all knowledge should ultimately be judged.

III Vale´ry evolved, then, from the enchanted world of late-Symbolist occultism to what might be called the aesthetic rationalism (or, more exactly, mathematicism) that constitutes the unique position of his maturity. One would have to go back to Taine and Renan to find any French essayist displaying a comparably intransigent belief in science; and it is amusing to recall that Vale´ry’s precursors were also the progenitors of the Naturalism he abhorred. The ‘‘science’’ that Vale´ry admired, however, was not biology nor historical positivism, but mathematics; this made it possible for him to reconcile his passion for lucidity with his aesthetic sensibility. For mathematics, as Vale´ry had learned from Poincare´, was the creation of pure forms which dominated and transformed the empirical instead of conforming to its exigencies. Moreover, it was not too difficult to transfer the emotional attitudes developed in the exquisitely rarefied mandarin-world of Symbolism to the equally select world of a scientific elite. The language of higher mathematics was perhaps even more baffling than the poems of Mallarme´, and the stance cultivated in the ce´nacle of superiority and aloofness to the common herd could easily be assimilated to the objectivity and neutrality that science ideally demands of its initiates. If Vale´ry did not succeed in working out his quixotic project of a ‘‘mathematics of mental structures’’ (or at least of putting such a ‘‘mathematics’’ into communicable form), the traces of his private cogitations are everywhere discernible in his essays, emerging, like the tip of an iceberg, to reveal the hidden mass beneath. Nothing is more central to Vale´ry than the desire to use the methods of ratiocination developed by mathematics to dissolve the mysteries of mental life—among which, of course, is the mystery of artistic creation itself. He abhors such words as ‘‘genius’’ and ‘‘inspiration’’ because they imply an ultimate barrier to rational comprehension, and it is precisely this barrier that he wishes to break through. Hence his unbounded admiration for a figure like Descartes, who was determined to apply mathematical reason to all the problems of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. Leonardo the artist-scientist is the hero of Vale´ry’s youth; Descartes—the mathematician-philosopher determined to master the universe of the spirit—is the idol of his maturity. No more in the one case than in the other do Vale´ry’s essays on his heroes jibe with all the historical facts. But, as he

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said in a marginal note to his first Leonardo essay, appended thirty-five years after publication: ‘‘In reality, I named as a man and Leonardo what appeared to me then as the power of the mind.’’ The same may be said of most of Vale´ry’s major essays, which, whatever their nominal subject, turn out to be one or another variation on the powers, attributes, and functions of the mind; and this point must be understood if we are to do justice to Vale´ry’s essay on Pascal, ‘‘Variations on a Pense´e.’’ For if the heroes of what Vale´ry called his Come´die de l’esprit bear the names, at various times, of Leonardo, Poe, Mallarme´, and Descartes, the villain of this Comedy is never anyone other than Pascal. No one is hounded by Vale´ry so relentlessly as the great mathematician who was also a great prosateur, and who disgracefully preferred the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to Vale´ry’s Idol of the Intellect. Vale´ry’s essay on Pascal is so obviously a hostile philippic that there is little point in assessing the fairness or validity of its arguments. More important is to understand that, in Vale´ry’s eyes, Pascal had committed the great betrayal: he had renounced his superb mathematical gifts for the sake of Christian salvation. Even worse, his baneful distinction between l’esprit de finesse and l’esprit de ge´ome´trie would have outlawed as futile the whole Cartesian attempt to master the realm of the spirit by mathematics. Nor could Vale´ry’s haughty temperament endure the lack of pride and dignity natural to the whole Christian attitude of humility and self-degradation. Pascal’s intellect, he writes scornfully, ‘‘cannot bear to think that it has fallen into the nets of time, number, and dimension, that it is trapped in the terrestrial system.’’ To this we may contrast Vale´ry’s own attitude in Le Cimetie`re marin, where, after contemplating the full extent of man’s nothingness, the poet refuses to renounce life and affirms his ecstatic submission to these very same ‘‘nets of time, number and dimension’’: Non, non! . . . Debout! Dans l’e`re successive! Brisez, mon corps, cette forme pensive! Buvez, mon sein, la naissance du vent! . . . . . . . . . . . . . Courons a` l’onde en rejaillir vivant!

Nietzsche would certainly have sympathized with Vale´ry’s feeling that to dwell too long on man’s weakness and misery is unhealthy and vitally debilitating. And the essay on Pascal is not the only point at which we can detect a convergence between the impeccably mannered (if mordantly ironic) member of the Academy and ‘‘the nervous poet Nietzsche,’’ who took ‘‘to the idea of energy as to a drug,’’ and who philosophized with a hammer rather than with a stiletto. Vale´ry’s ‘‘Four Letters on Nietzsche,’’

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which merely acknowledge the receipt of some volumes from Nietzsche’s French translator, hardly do justice to the extent and complexity of their mutual interrelation. Along with the writings of Henri Poincare´, the works of Nietzsche were constantly at Vale´ry’s bedside, and according to Edouard Gae`de, who has thoroughly investigated the matter in his brilliant Nietzsche et Vale´ry, the poet was among the first readers of Nietzsche in France. Both share, as we have seen, the same attitude to Christianity and indeed to any form of the supernatural or transcendent: Vale´ry’s repugnance for what Nietzsche called the Hinterwelten may be less violently expressed, but it is no less deep and intractable. And there is a good deal of Nietzsche’s manner as an essayist in Vale´ry’s tendency to see his subjects not as private individuals but as ‘‘types of the creative life,’’ as characters in his Come´die de l’esprit. Unlike Nietzsche, however, Vale´ry was not at all interested in unmasking the hidden emotive impulses stirring behind ideological disguises. He wishes, rather, only to understand the immanent psychic mechanisms of the mind by which these structures are produced. Mysticism for Vale´ry is simply a kind of non-Euclidian geometry whose axioms and postulates have not yet been ascertained; and in the essay on Swedenborg, he struggles to find analogies in artistic experience for the mystic’s certainty of the ‘‘truth’’ of his visions. The name of Nietzsche occurs several times in Vale´ry’s essay on Stendhal; and both are united, to be sure, in their admiration for this quirky and capricious figure, whose vivacity and loquacity remind Vale´ry of Balzac’s illustrious Gaudissart—the literary prototype ‘‘of those prehistoric commercial travelers who dazzled and exasperated their corner of the inn table in the days of the last stagecoaches and the first railways.’’ As a piece of sheer literary and historical criticism, Vale´ry’s scintillating pages on Stendhal are the finest in the book. But Vale´ry would not have been true to himself if he had remained simply on this literary level. Stendhal’s e´gotisme—his continual effort, as Vale´ry sees it, to dramatize and enjoy the spectacle of the multiple facets of his own personality—inevitably leads to reflections on the need of the personality both for absolute independence and autonomy and, at the same time, for the approval and admiration of others. Vale´ry, however, is no La Rochefoucauld who delights in exposing the essence of human nature as vanity and self-love; he distinguishes very carefully between the noble pride which spurs to creative achievement and the ignoble vanity that searches merely for tawdry self-advantage. One of Vale´ry’s most profound and most characteristic insights is to attribute the origin

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of pride not to any base motive, but to an instinctive negation of the common fate of death: ‘‘And so the horror of death produces out of its darkness some insane will to be unlike, to be independence itself and the absolutely singular being, that is to say, a god.’’ It is little wonder that Vale´ry himself finds such remarks to be more appropriate ‘‘as a marginal comment on Ecce Homo than on Henri Brulard.’’ The shadow of Nietzsche’s Superman may indeed be discerned lurking behind these reflections on the Absolute Self, whose need for autonomy and singularity deeply appealed to Vale´ry; and Nietzsche’s insistence that man should strive to surpass himself often echoes more restrainedly in Vale´ry’s pages. But rather than involving the creation of a new table of values for mankind, what this means for Vale´ry is the attainment by the mind of the highest degree of reflexive selfconsciousness.1 Despite this indebtedness to Nietzsche, and the intense admiration for Wagner that Vale´ry shared with all the progeny of Baudelaire, his knowledge of German literature did not go very deep. He knew English well enough to translate some of Poe’s Marginalia as well as a poem of Thomas Hardy’s; once he had even intended to translate The Red Badge of Courage; but though he was acquainted with Rilke personally, and much impressed by the necromantic quality that emanated from the latter’s presence, he was unable to read his work. This lack of any intimate contact with German literature (despite Vale´ry’s employment of the Faust theme) no doubt accounts for the weakness of his essay on Goethe, which is the only place where one feels that he is not quite up to a subject imposed by chance. (It might be remarked that the problem of coming to terms with Goethe has been a stumbling-block for more than one non-German man of letters. T. S. Eliot does little better in the Goethe essay included in On Poetry and Poets; only Santayana and Ortega y Gasset come to mind as having acquitted themselves honorably of the formidable task of tackling the German colossus.) The strength of Vale´ry’s literary essays derives from the quality of their personal insight, the refractions of Vale´ry’s ideas projected through the prism 1. It is impossible to leave this essay on Stendhal without quoting, if only in a footnote, a passage about the literary rage for ‘‘sincerity’’ and ‘‘authenticity’’ which has never been more pertinent than at the present time. ‘‘When one can no longer think what to do in order to create a stir and survive, we prostitute ourselves, we expose our private parts in public. After all, it must be rather fun to give oneself and, by the mere fact of unbuttoning our fly, to give other people the impression that they are discovering America. We all know perfectly well what we shall see; but at the first move everybody is excited. Such is the magic of literature.’’

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of other creations or personalities. But when his sensibility has not been truly engaged, as in the Goethe essay, the result is more rhetoric than substance. Vale´ry does his best, to be sure, to find the points at which his own interests might give him some access to Goethe. Like Leonardo, Goethe too aspired to be a universal man and combine art and science; certainly he is the greatest incarnation in modern times of this perennial Vale´ryan aspiration. As a result, Vale´ry dwells a good deal on Goethe’s scientific side, and implicitly turns him into an anti-Pascal whose love of sober, scientific knowledge saves him from a Hamlet-like despair before the terrors of death and dissolution. Goethe’s attitude, however, as Vale´ry rightly remarks, was based on a ‘‘mystique of objectivity,’’ a refusal to believe that ‘‘there was anything in the subject more significant or more important than was to be observed in the least object.’’ Vale´ry could sympathize with this cult of appearance so far as it tended towards the dispassionate study of nature and seemed to coincide with his own emphasis on form; but he knew very well that Goethe’s idea of science was very far from being his own. Goethe, after all, had been the great opponent of Newton and hence also of Descartes—the opponent of all the mathematical, quantifying tendencies of modern science that Vale´ry so much admired. If Goethe also wished to wipe out the Pascalian distinction between finesse and ge´ome´trie, he unquestionably preferred to give the hegemony over knowledge to the former, rather than to assign it, like Vale´ry, to the latter. This is why Goethe attempted to substitute his own science, based on qualitative observation, for one that dissolved appearance into a network of mathematical relations. Vale´ry could hardly fail to pick up this challenge to his own most cherished principles, and it is no surprise to find him saying that Goethe, though a universal genius, ‘‘was perhaps lacking in mathematical sense.’’ Luridly, though, there is a passage in The Metamorphosis of Plants in which Goethe expresses the desire to have botanical concepts so dearly defined that they could be used ‘‘in the same way as algebraic formulae.’’ This harmless phrase is enough for Vale´ry to exclaim that he has caught the antiNewtonian Goethe ‘‘en flagrant de´lit d’intention ge´ome´trique,’’ that is, reaching out despite himself for ‘‘a variety of symbolic calculus, analogous to those so frequently invented and used in modern dynamics and physics.’’ In this manner, Vale´ry gracefully glides over the hiatus separating Goethe’s conception of universality from his own ‘‘universal man,’’ and sacrifices the chance to measure his position against a truly intimidating foe. The essay concludes with a dazzling display of fireworks and capital letters describing

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the meeting of Goethe and Napoleon, which is sufficiently characterized in Vale´ry’s laconic comment on this article in a letter to Gide: ‘‘Napoleon: external stuffing.’’

IV Vale´ry was fond of declaring that his favorite historical period was the late eighteenth century, and that, if given the choice, he would prefer to have lived during the years in which the resplendent civilization of Le Roi Soleil was beginning to set. ‘‘I imagine this period must have been one of the most brilliant and satisfying ever known to men,’’ Vale´ry writes. It was marked by the glittering close of one world and the powerful struggles of another to come to birth, also by a highly refined art, by forms and manners that were still very temperate, by all the strength and all the graces of mind. There were magic and the differential calculus; as many atheists as mystics; the most cynical of cynics and the oddest of dreamers. The excesses of the intellect were not unknown, yet were counter-balanced—sometimes in the same head—by an astonishing credulity.

Passages embodying the same idea turn up so frequently in Vale´ry that one may take them, not only as the expression of an historical predilection, but also as the fulfillment of an emotional need. Nor is it difficult to explain why the contemplation of this personally selected golden age should have given Vale´ry so much satisfaction. It images a world in which French neoclassical taste still reigned supreme, and in which—though precariously—it was still able to contain and master the most extreme tensions of the free play of the intellect and the emotions; and this world appealed so powerfully to Vale´ry that its various aspects reappeared in his own work. Do we not find in his own creations an adherence to neoclassical forms combined with a never-ending thematic struggle between consciousness and being—the struggle that the mind always discovers between ‘‘what it can know and what it is?’’ Vale´ry’s delight in a world where both magic and differential calculus were equally powerful currents of thought reflects his own creative universe, which could both produce a volume of poetry called Charmes and conceive the project of a ‘‘mathematics of mental structures.’’ The same weave of tensions and contrasts defines the spiritual horizon of the admirer of Poe, Mallarme´, and Baudelaire on the one hand, and of Descartes, Riemann, Poincare´, and Einstein on the other.

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The interest and fascination of Vale´ry’s essays derives precisely from the scope and variety of his intellectual ambitions, which aimed at nothing less than to unite what the whole history of modern culture has driven apart. But one can understand why, like his own Monsieur Teste, Vale´ry liked to dwell so loftily in the realm of pure abstraction and possibility, or, to use his own term, of pure form. For the moment he looked at the reality and actuality of the world created by his mathematical predilections, the poet and man of letters could not prevent himself from uttering a cry of protest. This protest is heard very clearly in ‘‘The Return from Holland,’’ a group of reflections devoted to the revered memory of Descartes. Is not the Method, after all, the Charter of a realm of Number whose whole ambition is now apparent to us, even if we cannot yet grasp its full power? . . . Life itself, which is already half enslaved, circumscribed, streamlined, or reduced to a state of subjection, has great difficulty in defending itself against the tyranny of timetables, statistics, quantitative measurements, and precision instruments, a whole development that goes on reducing life’s diversity, diminishing its uncertainty, improving the functioning of the whole, making its course surer, larger, and more mechanical.

Vale´ry’s paeans to the triumphs of mathematical reason are often accompanied by such a menacing bass, warning of the insidious destruction of the quality of life brought about by the transformation of man’s environment. Another type of warning can be found in his speech on Voltaire, delivered at a solemn se´ance in the Sorbonne shortly after the liberation of Paris in 1944. In what sounds as close to being a cri du coeur as we can find in Vale´ry, he declares: ‘‘It might be said that all our intellectual efforts, the whole of the incredible increase in our positive knowledge, have served only to raise to a savage and crushing power the means of bringing the human race to an end, having first destroyed the hopes it had nourished for centuries of taming its own nature.’’ The desperation that one hears in these lines may well explain the unusual nature of this essay, which speaks a different language from the one generally audible in Vale´ry’s pages. Whether this language is only Vale´ry’s response and adaptation to the demands of a particular occasion, or whether it indicates a genuine modification of his point of view, is difficult to say; but the whole emphasis of the essay, in any case, runs counter to positions he had taken in the past. For Vale´ry does not celebrate, as we might have expected, Voltaire the antagonist of the Church and the supernatural, and the enemy of his enemy Pascal; nor does he so much as mention those marvelously lively contes that

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he was inclined to consider the very apogee of French prose fiction. Rather, he invokes the shade of Voltaire the crusader against inhumanity and oppression, the advocate of humanity who, with the pen as his sole weapon, successfully fought against the much more formidable arsenal of the French monarchy. ‘‘The decisive event of [Voltaire’s] career, the guarantee of his immortality, was his metamorphosis into the friend and defender of the human race.’’ Such ‘‘defenders of humanity’’ had received short shrift from Vale´ry in the past, as we can see from a passage in his Cahiers (1907) on the same subject. There we find him excoriating ‘‘the charlatanism discovered by Voltaire who, at a favorable moment, made of the man of letters a universal, political, prostitute-idol, a sort of Augustus Caesar elevated by popular opinion—as if the truly superior man could be recognized by the crowd.’’ This facile and self-complacent contempt for the mob is one of Vale´ry’s least attractive traits; and it is, regrettably, far more typical than his panegyric on Voltaire for devoting himself to the service of mankind, or for dedicating his literary gifts to a moral-political cause. It is possible, however, that the harrowing events of the war years had shaken Vale´ry’s faith in the Idol of the Intellect which he had hitherto revered so ardently and exclusively, and had opened his eyes to the need for other values as well. However that may be, several other passages in the same essay reinforce the impression of novelty and possible metamorphosis. ‘‘After all,’’ Vale´ry says, ‘‘the Gospels and the Rights of Man are in agreement on the one essential point: the infinite value of the human person.’’ This ‘‘infinite value,’’ as we see, is no longer identified solely with the geniuses who embody the Absolute Self and its ruthless will to autonomy and power. Vale´ry also praises Voltaire for appealing to men’s hearts as well as to their reason (though he was far from having accorded the same privilege to Pascal). ‘‘He [Voltaire] invoked reason, but he aimed at men’s hearts. What could prevail against this alliance between truth and pity?’’ This implicit avowal that pity could aid reason and truth is perhaps the most startling about-face in Vale´ry’s last public utterance. It may be supplemented by the following extract from the Cahiers, written a few months before Vale´ry’s death in July, 1945: ‘‘—That is the fact. The most obscure of facts. Stronger than the desire to live and the power to understand is, after all, this blasted H[eart].’’2 Taken along with Vale´ry’s constant laments about the state of the modern world, such passages reveal the gnawing cleavage that he could never 2. It is impossible to translate the nuance, both blasphemous and reverential at the same time, contained in the play on the words sacre´ C[oeur].

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assuage between his humanist sensibility and his conceptual commitments. This cleavage, to be sure, provides the major theme for all his work; but while he can turn it into superb poetry, and dramatize its antinomies effectively in various prose and semi-poetic genres (Monsieur Teste, Eupalinos, L’Ide´e fixe, the fragments of Mon Faust), he could never find any convincing way of bridging this contradiction in his essays. These latter remain, as E´mile Faguet once said of Voltaire, ‘‘a chaos of clear ideas,’’ in which every part is beautifully perspicuous and the whole a blooming, buzzing confusion. It would be unfair to come down too heavily on this lack of consistency, especially since Vale´ry always disclaimed any ambition to construct a philosophical ‘‘system’’; but one can legitimately object, it seems to me, to his refusal ever to acknowledge this contradiction as a problem that he had an obligation to admit or to confront. Even in the Voltaire essay, it is significant that the change of position is not accompanied by any hint of personal retraction or reconsideration. The Vale´ry who laments the degradation of the quality of life conveniently forgets that he is the same Vale´ry who accepted, as his sole and highest value, the intellectual method and outlook that brought this degradation about. The advocate of intellectual exactitude and Leonardo’s ostinato rigore criticizes mercilessly on the one hand what he glorifies extravagantly on the other—and never a word betrays the suspicion that perhaps his views might require some adjustment or modification. More precisely, if we accept Vale´ry’s own criterion of mathematical rigor, by what conceptual standard can he justify the values that lead him to speak of life as being ‘‘enslaved’’ because of its increasing quantification? Neither the idea of ‘‘life’’ nor that of ‘‘enslavement’’ (in this sense) can be unequivocally defined. One can imagine the withering scorn with which Vale´ry would have treated a mere ‘‘philosopher’’ who had attempted to denigrate science by means of such concepts. Their lack of precision would have been tartly thrown in his face, and he would be disposed of in this way without a moment’s hesitation. As a thinker, then, Vale´ry is much too inclined to evade the implications of his own thought, much too eager to maintain an imposing posture of infallibility. He is forever having his intellectual cake and eating it too by assuming the simultaneous stance of both a high priest of science and a humanistic prophet of doom. The major criticism that can be made of him on this score is not so much conceptual or logical as it is personal: Vale´ry is simply too self-indulgent toward his own position, and never measures himself by the standards he applies so sternly to others. This is one respect in

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which the zealot of the highest intellectual self-awareness falls distressingly short of even a modest approximation to his own goal. Instead of dwelling on Vale´ry’s shortcomings, however, it is much more profitable to conclude by stressing his achievements. No modern writer has lived the adventure of the scientific mind with as much depth and intensity as Vale´ry; and it is never superfluous to defend the virtues inculcated by science against the distortions of passion and prejudice (though one wishes that Vale´ry had imbibed a little more of the personal humility that science—as well as religion—is supposed to foster among its devotees). The creations of Vale´ry proved that the highest abstractions of the intellect could be united with the most subtle refinements of the aesthetic sensibility, even if this was a personal feat that could not be generalized into a doctrine or method. Moreover, in a Western world at present divided, so far as philosophy is concerned, between an irrationalism parading as ontology and a rationalism that cannot get beyond skeptical self-destruction and methodological paralysis, the example of Vale´ry’s aspiration toward universality is not to be ignored. Henri Bergson is once reported to have said: ‘‘What Vale´ry has done had to be attempted.’’ One may add that, if Western culture is to remain faithful to its great tradition, it will have to be attempted again and again.

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2.

Jacques Maritain: Medieval Modernism

The name of Jacques Maritain is hardly likely to arouse in present-day American readers what Edmund Wilson once called ‘‘the shock of recognition,’’ the thrill of excitement that marks an important intellectual encounter. In his own country, though, the life and work of Jacques Maritain is still capable of arousing a great deal of interest. This first full-length biography of the Neo-Thomist philosopher and his agonizingly pious wife Raı¨ssa, Jewish by origin but a Catholic convert, ran through three printings in three years and won the Prix de la Biographie of the Acade´mie Franc¸aise. Their lives spanned the period running from the Dreyfus case in 1894 to the death of Jacques Maritain in 1973. And since they had been involved, both personally and intellectually, in all the agitations of this momentous period in both French and world history, this account of their lives offers a fascinating panorama of the clashing ideas and ideals that still echo in our own time. Jacques Maritain was an extremely complex and contradictory personality, but one with a disarming charm, who always seemed to embody a somewhat subversive version of whatever cause he was espousing. A resolute partisan of Thomas Aquinas’s ideas, he refused to confine them to the past and used them to defend the most extreme experiments of modern art. When he taught in the United States, he was considered to be ‘‘a Catholic Marxist.’’ On another level, he was perhaps the only important French intellectual since Tocqueville who ever wrote anything positive about the United States (Reflections on America, 1958) without overlooking its problems and deficiencies. The issue that preoccupied him throughout his life, the relation of religion, culture, and politics, has lost none of its acuity, particularly in the United States, and history itself has thus given a continuous relevance to the flood of writings with which he analyzed this question from every conceivable point of view. The two books under review here, Jacques and Raı¨ssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven by Jean-Luc Barre´ (translated by Bernard Doering) and Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1913–1933 by Stephen 22

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Schloesser, supplement each other very neatly. The prize-winning biography deals largely with the personal lives of the Maritains, and while not neglecting the artistic and cultural background treats it only allusively and sketchily. While this context is sufficient for a French reader, it is likely that an American one may well desire more information on little-known figures such as Charles Pe´guy and Le´on Bloy. The book by Stephen Schloesser— devoted to a lively and impressively erudite evocation of le renouveau catholique (the Catholic renaissance) that occurred in France during the years after the First World War—fills in this gap very neatly. Maritain played a very important part in this renaissance, and the book devotes two chapters to him and Raı¨ssa. It also contains sections on the painter Georges Rouault, the novelist Georges Bernanos, and an organist and composer named Charles Tournemire, whose work was inspired by the plain-chant of the Middle Ages. Many of the figures with whom Maritain was deeply involved are thus vividly evoked in the Schloesser book in more explanatory historical detail, and the same is true of Maritain’s philosophical ideas as well as the general social-political background of the period. Jacques Maritain came from a family deeply involved in French politics, and his grandfather had been a noted opponent of Napoleon III. His mother Genevie`ve Favre, a Protestant convert, was also politically active in progressive causes and became a close friend of Romain Rolland. Of her two children by an unhappy marriage leading to divorce, her son Jacques was raised as a Protestant while his sister Jeanne received a Catholic upbringing. The earliest years of Maritain’s education remain something of a mystery, and Barre´ notes that on this point ‘‘his silence was quite resolute.’’ It is known, however, that he and his sister were confided to a Protestant minister, a specialist in the history of religions, who taught in the E´cole des Hautes E´tudes in Paris and eventually in the Colle`ge de France. This early schooling in Protestantism may well have contributed to the streak of independence and unconventionality that Maritain always exhibited. As an adolescent, Maritain became deeply involved in the agitation over the Dreyfus case, and ‘‘at about thirteen or fourteen I had become a socialist. The articles of Jaure`s . . . set me on fire.’’ Jean Jaure`s, a founder of the Socialist Party in France, was passionately active in defense of the falsely convicted Captain Dreyfus; but he was not an advocate of the violent destruction of capitalism by revolution. The walls of young Jacques’s room now became covered with incendiary slogans, and he would repair to the kitchen to read Jaure`s’s newspaper in the company of the family cook and particularly of her husband, real proletarians whose company allowed him

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to escape his own bourgeois world that he had come to feel was based on injustice. Barre´ remarks quite justly that ‘‘Maritain . . . would never deviate from the commitments of his youth, unrelenting toward the established order and a violent critic of bourgeois values’’—though for many years this criticism was couched in right-wing terms, rather than the left-wing terms of his youth. The life of Jacques Maritain was decisively changed when he met Raı¨ssa Oumansoff one day at the Sorbonne, where they both were students. Her Russian-Jewish family had emigrated to France precisely to escape the limitations imposed on Jewish students in their previous homeland. The first encounter of the two, which she recounts in her memoirs Les Grandes amitie´s, occurred when ‘‘a young man with a gentle countenance’’ approached her after class and asked her to join a protest movement ‘‘against the harsh treatment of which Russian socialist students were victims in their country.’’ They ‘‘soon became inseparable,’’ and took long walks during which their ‘‘conversations together were interminable.’’ During these exchanges of ideas, they ‘‘had to rethink the entire universe, the meaning of life, the fate of man, the justice and injustice of societies.’’ Both were studying science, not philosophy or religion, but the issues raised by the Dreyfus case had now provoked such questions for the members of the younger generation who were not, as Jacques wrote in a letter, part of ‘‘that ocean of dissolute and ignoble ineptitude of capitalist dwarfs and daddy’s boys.’’ Jacques’s closest friend at this period was Ernest Psichari, the grandson of the great historian of religion Ernest Renan, whose extremely influential works were devoted both to the origins of Christianity and to the history of the Hebrew people. Renan had reverentially depicted Christ as one of the sublimest examples of humanity, but could not accept him as a supernatural God. The atmosphere that Maritain encountered in the home of this family, as he wrote later in his book Antimoderne, was one ‘‘for which original sin and even the metaphysical misery of human nature were really non-existent and had never really happened. And in this way it was . . . basically antiChristian.’’ The highly poetic letters that Maritain exchanged with his friend, who later served with the army in North Africa and wrote a well-known novel exalting the military life, reveal their quasi-mystical response to nature, which they saw as ‘‘ineffable and completely laden with mystery and the shadows of the divine.’’ Barre´ remarks that the later Maritain already seems ‘‘fully present’’ in such an intuition; ‘‘but it was outside of God that his religious sentiment still found its foundation.’’

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The meeting with Raı¨ssa provided Jacques Maritain with another interlocutor who shared such feelings, and for whom the sciences they were both studying provided no outlet. The dominant philosophy of the Sorbonne was ‘‘a calm and resolute materialism,’’ and even for a professor they admired ‘‘life was reduced to a combination of chemicals and consciousness as an epiphenomenon.’’ They read Spinoza and Nietzsche, as Raı¨ssa recalls, and admired both. Spinoza for ‘‘exhorting man to love God intellectually, without asking to be loved in return’’; Nietzsche because of his ‘‘desperate passion for that truth whose death he set himself to proclaim.’’ But neither proved satisfactory, and, possessed by this ‘‘metaphysical vertigo,’’ on one of their walks in 1901 they decided that if they found no answer to the question of why life was worth living in a universe of misery, unhappiness, and the wickedness of men, they would commit suicide ‘‘before the force of our young years was worn out.’’ A bulwark against total despair, however, proved to be Charles Pe´guy, a friend of Jacques’s mother whom she aided financially, a poet and essayist and one of the most ardent defenders of Dreyfus. Pe´guy was a Socialist whose poetry was nonetheless filled with nationalistic fervor (one of his most important poems was a celebration of Jeanne D’Arc); and though he had broken with the official Catholic Church, he gradually and privately (since his wife was bitterly anti-clerical) returned to the faith, viewing himself ‘‘as a maverick socialist in the revolutionary message of the Gospels.’’ His bookshop was located on a street across from the Sorbonne, and the Cahiers de la quinzaine (Fortnightly Notebooks) that he published became an important Dreyfusard organ for younger progressive writers such as Romain Rolland. Jacques wrote him a long and angry letter quarreling with a criticism of Jaure`s in the Cahiers, but the young neophyte was a faithful and attentive reader of the journal and never missed the weekly Thursday evening meetings in the bookshop. A weekly ritual was also to walk across the street with Pe´guy to attend the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Colle`ge de France. Bergson used the latest results of scientific thought to argue that science itself was merely instrumental and pragmatic, and that reality could only be grasped by intuitive sympathy with the e´lan vital (the life-force) of the endless flow of time. Bergson’s efforts to reinstate the freedom of the human personality in face of the reigning determinism served as a temporary stopgap for Jacques and Raı¨ssa, as it did for so many others, by helping them to escape from their ‘‘existential anguish.’’ ‘‘This Jewish philosopher,’’ as Schloesser remarks,

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‘‘was perhaps the main intellectual figure for Catholics during the highwater period of conversions after the Dreyfus Affair.’’ Jacques and Raı¨ssa were soon to follow this path and undergo conversion under the influence of Le´on Bloy. He was a Christian novelist and publicist, whose works were filled with furiously vitriolic and apocalyptic indignation against the injustices of bourgeois society. ‘‘For Bloy,’’ as Schloesser explains, ‘‘those who suffer, especially those considered to be polluted figures by self-righteous society—for example, the prostitutes and the Jews— are redeemed insofar as they are participants in the ongoing Passion of Christ.’’ Moreover, they also redeem others since Bloy’s highest value was ‘‘vicarious suffering.’’ He lived in extreme poverty, and Jacques and Raı¨ssa sent him twenty-five francs out of the blue after reading one of his novels. A previous pamphlet, Salvation by the Jews (1896), provided a much more favorable vision of this people than that of the best-selling anti-Semitic tirades of Edouard Drumont. When republished in 1906, with the financial help of the Maritains, it was dedicated to Raı¨ssa. The two were married in November 1904, much to the dismay of Genevie`ve Favre, who resented Raı¨ssa’s influence and ‘‘whom she never ceased to consider the manipulator of her son.’’ During the next two years, under the influence of Bloy, they began to read the lives of the saints and martyrs, and when Raı¨ssa was seriously ill in 1906 Jacques found himself praying on his knees that she recover. Urged on by Bloy, they decided to accept conversion, and were so unfamiliar with Catholic rites that they thought he could baptize them himself. A notebook entry of Jacques for this year asserts that ‘‘Christians have abandoned the poor,’’ and that ordinary Christians ‘‘fill me with horror.’’ But Jacques then goes on: ‘‘With one’s body present in this actual age of the world, one must live really with the first Christians, go back beyond all the Christians of the present time.’’ He also remarks that Bloy is like a Jewish prophet, raging against his own people but still part of them all the same. After their marriage the couple moved to Heidelberg, where Jacques had obtained a scholarship to study with Hans Driesch, a world-famous biologist whose work on embryos had stirred up a great deal of controversy. It is surprising that his name has not been revived recently because he argued that it was difficult to explain embryonic development except as the work of a superior intelligence, though he insisted that his researches were not opposed to Darwinism. The two years they spent in Germany was a period of solitude, during which time, on a visit to a monastery on the Isle of

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Wight, Jacques sought for spiritual guidance and was told to consult a Dominican father who profoundly influenced the couple until his death in 1914. It was he who advised them to read Thomas Aquinas, and Raı¨ssa, ‘‘though she was already of the opinion that he was out of date and tiresome,’’ nonetheless believed it might be of some help to Jacques. ‘‘Everything came to me through her,’’ he wrote in 1908, describing his first acquaintance with the Summa Theologica, which ‘‘was a pure gift to me.’’ ‘‘I received once and for all certitude about the first truths concerning the intelligence and the joy of seeing that it was strong enough to lead the principles of reason into the very heart of the starry night of faith.’’ This conviction—that reason itself, as defined by Aristotle and Aquinas, did not come into irresolvable conflict with Christian faith—became the immutable cornerstone of Maritain’s own philosophy. The same priest who had recommended the reading of Aquinas also advised them to subscribe to the newspaper L’Action franc¸aise, the journal of Charles Maurras, and they did so with that docile subservience to churchly authority that continued for far too many years and casts an ineradicable shadow on their lives. Maurras himself cared nothing for religion, and dedicated his life to, as it were, undoing the French Revolution. The most important and influential right-wing publicist of his time, he advocated the restoration of the monarchy and promulgated an extreme anti-democratic and anti-republican politics that continued to exercise its disastrous influence even as late as the Vichy regime and beyond. Maritain eventually established personal relations with him, and for fifteen years was an active collaborator on one of his satellite publications, the Revue universelle, to which he contributed regular columns. This association with Maurras, who made no attempt (quite the contrary!) to disguise his anti-Semitism, is a distinct blot on the career of the Maritains, and proved a source of great embarrassment to them later. Barre´ treats it perhaps too gently and somewhat ironically, but even he wonders how they could have overlooked ‘‘the musty smell of anti-Semitism’’ that pervaded the writings of Maurras and his disciples. Raı¨ssa feebly attempted to cope with this issue by recalling Jacques’s exclusive preoccupation with philosophy and theology during these years, and her own total absorption in prayer. Maritain himself embarrassedly wrote that he had felt it necessary to follow the directions of his clerical adviser as part of his commitment to the Church. Barre´, however, finds it impossible to doubt that ‘‘his affinity to Maurrasism corresponded to some of his very real convictions at a time when their

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relationship was publicly known.’’ Unfortunately, Barre´ makes no attempt to clarify this surprising transition from the committed Dreyfusard and admirer of Jaure`s to the partisan of L’Action franc¸aise, ‘‘a milieu of thought that was the most openly anti-Semitic that could be found.’’ The lack of any explanation may perhaps be linked to his remark that ‘‘Maritain’s complete correspondence remains inaccessible, according to his specific wish.’’ This same cleric also urged Maritain, who had begun to lecture at the Institut Catholique, to join in the campaign then being carried on against the influence of Bergson in Catholic circles worried about his undermining of dogma. Maritain’s first book in 1913, The Philosophy of Bergson, constituted so harsh an attack that he acquired ‘‘a reputation for fanaticism and intolerance’’ that would cling to him for a very long time. Forty years later, in a preface to the English translation of this work, Maritain expressed regret that he had been so pompously harsh and inflexible toward ‘‘that master who had awakened me to the metaphysical desire.’’ Other works of these years, such as his Three Reformers (on Luther, Descartes, and Rousseau, 1925) continued Maritain’s campaign against all those who had contributed to the catastrophic course in which ‘‘the human spirit never ceased to become drunk with its creative power and the illusion that it could freely dispose of its own history.’’ Yet while Maritain’s rejection of what he considered the spiritual disaster of modernity seemed to ally him with those who simply wished to restore the past, in fact his neo-Thomism attempted to do quite the opposite. He desired to prove that the ideas of Aquinas could also illuminate the present, and that, if properly understood, they could be used to defend some of the seemingly anarchistic experiments of modern art. The immediate post-First World War years saw a huge explosion of talent and artistic experiment especially in Paris, and the Maritains were very far from being closed to its stunningly seductive appeal. Younger artists like Rouault and the composer Georges Auric formed part of the Bloy inner circle, and through them they became acquainted with many of the immensely talented avant-garde personages who swarmed around Jean Cocteau at the cafe´ Le Boeuf sur le Toit in Montmartre. Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism (1920), a work that first brought him to the attention of a wider public, was an effort to prove that the ideas of Aquinas could help to understand not only the past but the present as well. Art and Scholasticism is a small book written in a rebarbative style full of Scholastic distinctions and terminology; but surprisingly enough it contains a defense of modern artistic experimentation. As Barre´ writes, ‘‘retrograde

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to the point of seeming provocative . . . [it] was closer to Jean Cocteau and Erik Satie than to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas.’’ Art is an act of Making, not of Acting or Knowing, and its rules are provided by the task it sets for itself, not by anything external; hence Maritain could see Cubism as the possible infancy of a new Classicism, and declare that ‘‘Aristotle would have loved Erik Satie.’’ Maritain thus became an unexpected spokesman for that ‘‘Jazz Age Catholicism’’ so excellently described by Schloesser, and which brought Catholicism up to date with the modern world. During these years Maritain also became editor of a new series of books called Roseau d’or (The Golden Reed), in which he published Paul Claudel, Jean Cocteau, Julien Green and especially Georges Bernanos. The latter’s novel Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan) created a sensation in 1926, and in the same year the influential critic Albert Thibaudet wrote, in the distinctively non-Catholic Nouvelle revue franc¸aise, that the Catholic novel and Catholic literature had now begun to take ‘‘a privileged place’’ in French intellectual discourse. Maritain’s list also included, incidentally, a book by his friend, the Jewish convert Father Jean de Menasce, formerly an ardent Zionist and a specialist in Iranian civilization. Entitled Quand Israe¨l aime Dieu (When Israel loves God), ‘‘a masterpiece of Hassidic culture,’’ its choice may well represent a certain guilty compensation for Maritain’s antiSemitic affiliations. The involvement of the Maritains in this rebirth of Catholic influence was more than purely philosophical and editorial. They organized weekly meetings in their home to discuss the very latest issues and ideas, and those in attendance included young students who were later to become notable in one field or another, exiles from their homeland like the Russian Orthodox philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev, and French scholars such as the important Islamist Louis Massignon and the great Catholic historian of medieval thought, E´tienne Gilson. Moreover, many turned to Maritain for spiritual consolation, and he and Raı¨ssa became famous (or infamous, depending on the point of view) for having converted Jean Cocteau, the novelist Julien Green, and a number of others to Catholicism, including the unsavory and totally unscrupulous Jewish convert Maurice Sachs, who even studied to become a priest. Raı¨ssa was justly suspicious of Sachs (though serving as his godmother at conversion), who had some literary talent and left a book of steamy memoirs published posthumously, Le sabbat, which disclosed the largely homosexual underside of the drug-filled and alcoholic escapades of so many of the luminaries of this period who turned to the Maritains for comfort and support.

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The memoirs amply cited by Barre´ contain many descriptions of the peculiar sympathetic radiance that emanated from Maritain’s personality, often described as ‘‘saintly,’’ and as seeming ‘‘to have stepped down from the porch of a cathedral.’’ It is this aura that allowed him to exercise so powerful an influence on so many diverse and fiercely independent figures. Maritain himself was soft-spoken, reticent and even hesitantly awkward; there was nothing at all commanding, impressive or even self-assured about him. But as I know from my own experience, having met him several times during the later years of his life, there was an all-embracing quality irresistibly conveyed by his personality that I had never encountered either before or since. I remember casual conversations at Princeton during which, it seemed to me, nothing in the world had become more important for him than listening to my trivial words with rapt attention. It was then that I began to understand his remarkable success in making conversions, not only in France but also in the United States (Allen Tate and Caroline Gordon, for example). It also helped to explain his ability to establish firm friendships with an incredible variety of Americans: Walter Lippmann and John Howard Griffin, the crusading white journalist who traveled through the American South as a black after darkening his skin; Dorothy Day, the exCommunist founder of the Catholic Workers Movement; and Saul Alinsky, the hard-nosed Jewish labor leader. A crisis arose for Maritain, however, when in 1926 Maurras and his journal were condemned by the Pope and placed on the Index. Maritain thus had to choose between his loyalty to Catholicism as a religion and his commitment to Maurras, who had never attempted to hide that he was no longer a believer and whose politics was entirely temporal. Maritain wrote a whole book, The Primacy of the Spiritual, to explain the importance of not allowing the mission of Christian universalism, which was ‘‘to undertake the reconciliation in justice of all human opposites,’’ to be confused with the limited and purely political aims of a particular party. This break with Maurrasism had the beneficial effect of freeing Maritain from a political commitment which, if we are to judge by what ensued, he had begun to find increasingly troublesome. From this time on he sought to unite his Catholicism, not only with the latest developments in modern culture, but also with an increasing opposition to the ominous triumphs of Fascism and Nazism. As for Communism, he had no illusions about its totalitarian nature, but the old admirer of Jaure`s could not be completely impervious to its appeal. Andre´ Malraux’s novel Man’s Fate made a great

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impression on him, and he spoke to Raı¨ssa in 1933 of ‘‘the human force that the Revolution represents . . . the sense of human misery that the revolutionaries have and that we must acquire.’’ He now began to see his task as being ‘‘to awaken ‘powerful centers of spiritual and religious renewal’ in ‘those multitudes of men whom a profound resentment, born of their humiliated and offended human dignity, has turned against Christianity.’ ’’ Taking an active part in the political life of the period, he helped to organize committees to aid the refugees created by Nazism, and joined Franc¸ois Mauriac in inspiring a protest against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia, which had been hailed by his old Maurrasian associates as a triumph for Western civilization. He also published a book, Integral Humanism, which ‘‘threw out the old sacral conception of politics,’’ while instead, ‘‘integral humanism was theocratic . . . it was a humanism . . . a philosophy of the person and of freedom.’’ During the Spanish Civil War, though denouncing the atrocities on both sides, he participated in a meeting organized by Andre´ Malraux, then a colonel in the Loyalist Air Force, and was excoriated by name by Franco’s son-in-law, the Minister of the Interior. Horrified by Hitler, Maritain also began to denounce anti-Semitism much more vehemently as anti-Christian. A public lecture condemning anti-Semitism given in Paris in 1939 led to an uproar in which ‘‘the speaker was booed and insulted by a part of the audience with cries of ‘He’s sold out to the Jews.’ ’’ Maritain had published a major philosophical treatise, Distinguer pour unir (Degrees of Knowledge), in 1932, and a steady stream of other books concerned with more immediate issues (like those already mentioned) kept pouring from his pen. His fame had become world-wide, he was invited to lecture everywhere, and in 1933 he travelled to North America for the first time. He joined E´tienne Gilson at the Pontifical Institute of the University of Toronto, and then was invited to the University of Chicago at the initiative of the new president Robert Hutchins, though the latter was unable to get Maritain appointed to the department of philosophy. Maritain then kept returning to the United States for part of the year to teach at the University of Chicago, also establishing relations with the University of Notre Dame, which now harbors a Center of Jacques Maritain Studies. The Maritains were in the United States when war broke out in Europe in 1939, and first returned for a visit only in the autumn of 1944. During the war years Jacques Maritain immediately aligned himself against the Vichy regime of Mare´chal Pe´tain and with General de Gaulle, whose father in 1910 had suggested that the young man succeed him as professor of philosophy in the school at which he taught. Suspicious as he had

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become of politics as a whole, Maritain kept a certain distance from the Gaullist movement but busied himself with using his considerable influence to obtain visas to the United States for artists, scholars, and writers who would be threatened. He also participated in the establishment of the E´cole Libre des Hautes E´tudes in New York, taking over its direction for a time, which provided a refuge for many notable French and other scholars, such as Claude Le´vi-Strauss and Roman Jakobson. In 1941 Maritain began to broadcast regularly for the Voice of America, and Le´on Blum, then a prisoner in Germany, told him how strengthened he had felt on listening to Maritain’s words, which somehow he had been able to capture. The deportation to Germany of foreign Jews by the Vichy government filled Maritain with rage, and he thundered against the French replacing their own laws with ‘‘the bestial ignominy of Nazi racism.’’ His ` travers le de´sastre (France My Country, book on the French defeat, A Through the Disaster), was criticized by a close friend as not aggressive enough to enlist others for the anti-Pe´tainist cause. But Czelaw Milosz, reading it in occupied Warsaw, found it inspiring and helpful in countering ‘‘all the fables [concerning France] spread about by Nazi propaganda.’’ At the end of the war, de Gaulle asked Maritain to become the French ambassador to the Vatican, and he only agreed with a great deal of reluctance because he wished to return to his philosophical pursuits. During his tenure in this post, he worked to block the promotion to the rank of cardinal of French clergymen who had cooperated closely with Vichy, and to advance the minority who had spoken out against Vichy policies. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to obtain a public statement of the collective responsibility of the German people for the war and the genocide. Nor could he persuade the Church either to offer a public reprobation of the crimes committed against the Jewish people. In the midst of all this, and the exhausting social responsibilities imposed by his position, he nonetheless wrote a Court traite´ de l’existence et de l’existant (Brief Treatise on the Existence and the Existant), using the terms made fashionable by the dominant Existentialism of Sartre. His effort to replace its moral ambiguity with, as he saw it, the true Existentialism of Aquinas met with no success, even though, as he ruefully wrote to an American friend, ‘‘this is a book into which I put my most intimate thoughts.’’ Retiring after three years, he returned to teaching in the United States at Princeton University after being refused a chair at the Colle`ge de France. Offered one later to replace Etie`nne Gilson, he turned it down: ‘‘the wound was too painful and left a scar that would never completely disappear.’’ Every year he returned to France for three months, renewing old contacts

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but always looking forward to immersing himself again in American life. The openness and freedom he enjoyed here, in a country whose politics displayed no hostility to religion, seemed to him an embryonic realization of that union between the two, without the one trespassing on the other, that he felt to be so important for the future. ‘‘Our civilization,’’ he wrote, ‘‘will not take up once again its normal march forward unless the Christian inspiration and the democratic inspiration recognize one another and become reconciled.’’ After the death of Raı¨ssa and her sister Vera, who shared their household, he returned to France to spend his last years in a monastery of the Little Brothers of Jesus, an order that he believed came closer than others to the ideal of St. Francis of Assisi. It is worth noting that the only social function he attended while preparing to leave his Princeton home was the inauguration of John F. Kennedy as the first Catholic President of the United States, to which he had been personally invited. It is impossible here to do more than mention some of the other books that Jacques Maritain wrote during this latter part of his life. In his penetrating Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), he returned to re-evaluate (but by no means to renounce) his old appreciations of avant-garde art. The intended first volume of a history of ethics, La Philosophie morale (1960), begins with Socrates and ends with a reverentially discriminating treatment of Bergson. Others dealt with specifically religious-theological issues, such as De la graˆce et de l’humanite´ de Je´sus (On the Grace and Humanity of Jesus, 1967) and De l’e´glise de Christ (On the Church of Christ, 1970). Another, Le Paysan de la Garonne (The Peasant of the Garonne, 1966), which contained a critical but by no means hostile discussion of the reforms initiated by the Second Vatican Council, even became a best-seller. As he wrote jubilantly in a letter, ‘‘the Peasant has risen to just a few degrees below Simone de Beauvoir.’’ Jacques Maritain returned for a last visit to the United States in 1966 to say farewell to old friends and to visit the grave of his sister-in-law Vera buried in Princeton. At the same time he went to see others, one of whom was the poet and monk Thomas Merton. The latter regaled him with recordings of Bob Dylan ‘‘whom he [Merton] considers a great poet, a modern Villon. What a strange scene it is,’’ writes the friend accompanying Maritain, ‘‘listening in the monastery of Gethsemani to the hard and expressive voice of a young rebel poet. Jacques likes ‘The Gates of Heaven’ especially.’’ It is with such an appealing image, which seems to unite so many of the seemingly clashing facets of Maritain’s remarkable personality, that we can best catch the secret of his astonishing career.

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3.

Camus as Journalist

The name of Albert Camus will probably be more familiar to American readers as that of a novelist and short story writer, or perhaps as a philosophical and social-cultural polemicist, than as a journalist. But in the early years of his career, before The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger made their mark, he was far better known as a journalist than in any other capacity. Alice Kaplan, a specialist in the checkered and tormented history of France’s emergence from German occupation and the Vichy regime, rightly says in her blurb from Camus at ‘‘Combat’’: Writing 1944–47, edited by Jacqueline Le´vi-Valensi, that the ‘‘daily editorials [of Camus] in the resistance newspaper Combat . . . made him famous and he emerged from the war as a moral and intellectual leader in postwar France.’’ The present volume contains the articles that Camus published between 1944–1947 in Combat, an underground journal established before France was liberated, and which continued to appear for a few years after that time. They allow the English reader to obtain a rewarding immersion, not only in a little-known part of Camus’s work as he was blossoming into a writer of world fame, but also in the social-political questions that have lost none of their acuity. Indeed, it is astonishing to see how many of the issues on which Camus comments—which are elicited by the immediate French historical moment in which he writes—anticipate and prefigure problems that continue to exist outside that historical moment. One reason is that Camus never stays on the surface of events, though these invariably provide his starting point, but is always searching for the deeper causes that motivate human behavior, whether moral, social, psychological or ultimately religious (though he was not a believer of any kind). Journalism seems to form a very minor aspect of Camus’s multifarious activity as novelist, playwright, theatre director and cultural-political commentator, but it played a much larger role in his life than is usually recognized. This is particularly true of the early years of his career, while he was still living in Algeria and beginning to develop intellectually. Unlike most 34

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French intellectuals of his generation who were born into bourgeois families, Camus came from a working-class background whose family lacked any but the most rudimentary education and whose widowed mother worked at menial and ill-paid tasks. Luckily, a teacher in his elementary school (to whom he later dedicated his Nobel Prize acceptance speech) recognized his abilities, gave him extra assignments and lessons, and recommended him for scholarships that allowed him to continue his education. He finally obtained a diploma in philosophy, writing an extremely erudite study on the relations between Hellenism and early Christianity that illustrated his intimate familiarity with the classical authors of this period to whom he will often make casual references (his first play, Caligula, is based on material gathered from Suetonius and Seneca). He would have then taken the competitive exams for the agre´gation to obtain a teaching post in the French school system, but he became ill with tuberculosis and was unable to move on to the next level. To support himself, he worked at a number of jobs—in the meteorological service, as an automobile salesman, a shipping agent, and in the city prefecture. He also taught in private schools, and in 1938 became a member of the staff of a newly established newspaper of vaguely left-wing character first called L’Alger re´publicain, then Le Soir re´publicain. Camus’s contributions cover all sorts of material and occupy over a hundred pages in my old copy of the Ple´iade edition, now being extended from two volumes to four. This is enough to indicate that the Camus of Combat was already an old journalistic hand. Camus’s articles in these other journals cannot be discussed in any detail, but two items are worth noting. One is a series entitled Mise`re de la Kabylie, based on first-hand investigation from his travels in that region, and they are sharply critical of a French policy that led to famine. Many articles in Combat return to the defects of the French colonial administration, about which Camus was much better informed, and against which he had taken a stand long before critics who later, during the French-Algerian war, so ferociously attacked him. He also frequently wrote reviews of books, one being devoted to Sartre’s La Nause´e. Working at that time on early drafts of the philosophy of absurdity expounded in The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus instantly recognized the merits and the importance of Sartre’s text. But he remarks that ‘‘he [Sartre] has perhaps not provided the true meaning of his anguish when he insists on what repels him in mankind rather than grounding his reasons for despair in some of its [mankind’s] grandeurs.’’ For Camus, the ‘‘grandeur’’ of mankind was precisely its struggle to overcome the reasons for despair

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within the limits of possibility, while acknowledging that no ultimate solution could be found to this endless task. Thus, from the very first, Camus refuses to accept the repugnance of mankind so prominent in Sartre, and so unforgettably dramatized in the latter’s play, Huis Clos (No Exit). But when The Myth of Sisyphus was published in 1942, it was at first considered part of the philosophy of Existentialism brought into vogue by Sartre’s novel, stories, and his major philosophical work, Being and Nothingness. In 1945, however, Camus told a journalist: ‘‘I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are surprised at always seeing our two names associated. We even think of publishing a small ad declaring that the undersigned affirm they have nothing in common.’’ Indeed, the moral nihilism that emerges in the early Sartre from his doctrine of freedom can be linked to his complete disinterest in politics before the war. Camus, on the other hand, joined the Communist Party in 1934, was particularly active on behalf of the Muslims, and was excluded from the Party in 1937 because he sided with a Muslim group against the Party line at that time. Such treatment may well explain his refusal later to accept any single political position as unassailable dogma. In 1940, refusing to bow to the demands of censorship, Camus quit the Algerian newspaper and went to Paris. A friend, Pascal Pia, found him a job at Paris Soir but not as anything resembling a newspaperman; he was employed only in a technical capacity to help in the material tasks of putting the paper together. Not that he minded such a mechanical employment; indeed, it made his acceptance of the post possible because he despised the intellectual level of this particular journal, which catered, as he remarked in his notebook, to ‘‘the spirit of shopgirls.’’ Camus left this employment in 1940, after the French defeat, the establishment of the Vichy government, and the German Occupation. The next year he joined the French resistance after reading about the execution of Gabriel Pe´ri, a French Communist politician who had been troubled by the Hitler-Stalin pact and expressed a certain amount of independence from the party line. He became a journalist again with Combat, and the underground paper moved to Paris in 1943. By this time The Myth of Sisyphus had been published and attracted attention; he thus became an editorial reader of manuscripts for Gallimard, the most important and influential publishing house in Paris, and took up residence in the apartment of Andre´ Gide, continuing to write for Combat at the same time. Camus’s editorials touch on so many issues that it is difficult to give any simple overall view of their contents. Moreover, since the background of

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events to which he refers are likely to be unfamiliar to non-French readers (one wonders how familiar they are any longer to the French themselves), it may be helpful to summarize the political situation of the time. In 1944, the Allied armies had liberated French territory as far as the foothills of the Vosges Mountains, and between August 20–25 the Germans were retreating from Paris, harassed by street fighters from the French Resistance. Orders had been given to destroy the city, but the officers of the Wehrmacht in command refused to carry them out. There is an ecstatic article in Combat dated August 25 that reveals the restrained but vibrant poetry that Camus was always able to muster, a style that evokes not only the present but also the past even in his physical descriptions. ‘‘Paris is firing all its ammunition into the August night,’’ he writes. ‘‘Against a vast backdrop of water and stone, on both sides of a river awash with history, freedom’s barricades are once again being erected. Once again justice must be redeemed with men’s blood.’’ Camus never forgets the human cost involved even in this celebration of freedom being restored. Another passage is even more poetic: As freedom’s bullets continue to whistle through city streets, the cannons of liberation are passing through the gates of Paris amid shouts and flowers. On this sultriest and most beautiful of August nights, the permanent stars in the skies above the city mingle with tracer rounds, smoke from burning buildings, and variegated rockets proclaiming the people’s joy. This night unlike any other ends four years of a monstrous history and an unspeakable struggle that saw France at grips with shame and fury.

It is little wonder that articles written with such expressive eloquence immediately attracted attention to the editorial of Combat. France at that time had no official government, though a provisional one had been organized by General de Gaulle; but the Allies hesitated to accept it because, under the circumstances, no elections of any kind had been held. Commenting on a speech of Churchill’s expressing his sympathy for France, but leaving the question of recognition unclear, Camus remarks that ‘‘it is no secret that certain quarters of American officialdom are opposed to recognition.’’ One reason is ‘‘opposition to General de Gaulle personally’’; another is the belief that the Party of the Resistance ‘‘is entirely communist.’’ Camus considers this to be an internal French matter, which should not influence the problem of recognition, and remarks ‘‘we are not obliged to approve of General de Gaulle in every instance or to share all his views of

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the Communist Party.’’ (Nor, as the future would show, and as had happened in the past, would he feel obliged to share all the views of the Communist Party, either.) But while no elections had been held, he insisted that ‘‘the people have just spoken . . . they spoke with their rifles and grenades from many barricades,’’ and he believed (or at least wished to believe) that the country had become united by its opposition to the German Occupation. ‘‘We experienced four years of fraternity,’’ he writes, and based his hopes for the future on this presumed fulfillment of one of the French ideals. For all his hatred of the Vichy regime, Camus had no sympathy for the unstable democratic state it had replaced, which he chastised in the severest terms. The Resistance, he declares, will have accomplished ‘‘only an infinitesimal part of our task if the French Republic of tomorrow were to find itself, like the Third Republic, under the strict control of Money.’’ In the first public issue of Combat, he defines what he believes Frenchmen now want, that is, ‘‘a single politics in the noble sense of the word. Having begun with resistance, they want to end with Revolution.’’ What this means is ‘‘to have done with the spirit of mediocrity and the moneyed interests and with a social state whose ruling class failed in all its duties . . . We want without delay to institute a true people’s and worker’s democracy . . . We believe that any politics that cuts itself off from the working class is futile.’’ These are words written in the first glow of liberation, and Camus’s hopeful enthusiasm gradually ebbed once the compromises and concessions of ordinary political life began to exercise their inevitable sway. Camus could not reconcile himself to this return of politics as usual, which he believed had led the Third Republic to its ruin, and he attacks the so-called ‘‘political realism’’ that invariably involves a surrender to existing circumstance. ‘‘Thus in politics realism is always right, even if it is morally wrong,’’ he noted. He was particularly merciless with those run-of-the-mill politicians who had been even minimally guilty of accepting in any way the government of General Pe´tain and Vichy. ‘‘We are resolved,’’ he wrote, ‘‘not to open the doors of French politics to those who left at a time when the resistance was prepared to welcome them.’’ In an article devoted to a speech by the then-Minister of Information, who had been a resister from the earliest days, Camus writes approvingly that he ‘‘has analyzed the mechanism of concession that led so many Frenchmen from weakness to treason. Each concession made to the enemy and each decision to follow the path of least resistance led to another . . . two acts of cowardice added up to dishonor.’’ No politician who had behaved in this manner escaped the pitiless lash of Camus’s censure.

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One of the thorniest problems of the Liberation was how to deal with collaborators, and so the problem of the e´puration (purification), as it was called, is an issue that comes up again and again in Camus’s articles. It is also an issue on which he entered into a famous polemic with the important Catholic novelist Franc¸ois Mauriac, who had distanced himself from rightwing French Catholicism by his attacks on Fascism in the 1930s and his later sympathy for the Resistance. Camus at first adopted a very hard line about collaborators. After describing in ghastly detail an atrocity committed at Vincennes presumably by the Vichy militia (‘‘and the men who did these things were men polite enough to give up their seats on the subway’’), he asks ‘‘who in such circumstances would dare speak of forgiveness? . . . It is not hatred that will speak out to-morrow but justice itself, justice based on memory.’’ He was thus among those who were in favor of capital punishment for ‘‘those who killed and those who permitted murder’’; both were ‘‘equally responsible before their victims.’’ Mauriac, however, protested against any indiscriminate application of the death penalty, and invoked the Christian principle of charity to counterbalance that of justice. Camus replied that ‘‘so singular is the virtue of charity . . . that in calling for justice I seemed to be pleading on behalf of hatred.’’ But Camus insisted that ‘‘in dealing with these mundane matters’’ it is not necessary ‘‘to make an absolute choice between the love of Christ and the hatred of men . . . Between these two extremes we are searching for the just voice that will give us truth without shame.’’ As time went on, it became clearer and clearer that the e´puration had not found ‘‘the just voice’’ to which Camus aspired—not only in this instance, but on every other social-political issue as well. On the contrary, as he writes in January 1945, ‘‘columnists and journalists can thus take their pick of absurd sentences and preposterous instances of leniency. In between, prisoners are snatched from their prisons and shot because they were pardoned.’’ Later in the same year, he protested against the purge trials even more strongly: ‘‘there can no longer be any doubt that the postwar purge has not only failed in France but is now completely discredited. The word ‘purge’ was already rather distressing. The actual thing became odious.’’ Camus continued to support the death penalty throughout 1944, but by the summer of 1945 he was writing that ‘‘they [the tribunals] will go on handing out death sentences to journalists who don’t deserve as much. They will go on half-acquitting recruiters [who served the Vichy government] with silver tongues. And the people, tired of their sick justice, will continue to intervene from time to time in cases that should no longer be their concern.’’

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Robert Brasillach, a brilliant journalist and writer, had used his considerable talents to denounce opponents of Vichy in the most scurrilous and dangerously accusatory terms. But when he was condemned to death, Camus signed the petition being circulated against the sentence (which was nonetheless carried out). He made it clear that he abhorred everything Brasillach represented, but wrote that ‘‘I have always been horrified by the death penalty, and I have judged that as an individual the least I could do is not participate in it, even by abstention.’’ By this time he had become a principled opponent of the death penalty for any reason, and continued to remain so. In a speech given at a Dominican monastery in 1948, he declared that ‘‘I have come to recognize in myself and publicly here . . . that on the exact issue of our controversy, Francois Mauriac was on the right side and I was not.’’ Most of the particular matters on which Camus writes have long since fallen into oblivion and are the concern only of specialist historians. But he had an unerring eye for what the future was to hold so far as France was concerned, and one can only be impressed by his prescience in foreseeing what happened to the French colonial empire as a result of World War II. Another example of such prescience, which today seems astonishingly close to home, stems from his perception that all such empires were doomed, and that ‘‘colonial civilizations from the four corners of the earth are making themselves heard. Ten or fifty years from now, the challenge will be to the preeminence of western civilization.’’ With reference to his own time, he had no illusions about Indochina, where ‘‘as everyone knows,’’ the budget was balanced ‘‘by selling opium, just as [the government] browbeats ‘local elites’ and oppressed the people.’’ Commenting on a statement of General de Gaulle that matters would change for the better, Camus remarks that if improvements are seen as concessions, rather than as ‘‘formal signs of a policy of emancipation,’’ the reforms will have little effect. ‘‘Indochina will be with us if France leads the way by introducing both democracy and freedom there. But if we hesitate at all, Indochina will join forces with anyone at all, provided they are against us.’’ Whether, if a serious effort of reform had been made, the Indochinese would ultimately have consented to French rule may well be doubted; but Camus was right to consider it the only hope. Nothing of the kind happened, and the French Army finally capitulated to the forces of Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Camus was much more familiar with Algeria than Indochina, and his numerous articles on the situation there emerge from his own experience.

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In 1936, he had agitated on behalf of a plan of the government of Le´on Blum to grant political rights to certain categories of the Muslim population; but this was fiercely opposed by the local French population, who as Camus later remarks had also supported Vichy. When the plan re-emerged in 1944, the Arabs who had favored it earlier were quite wary of accepting it. In a piece entitled ‘‘Time Marches On,’’ he writes that ‘‘Arabs seem to have lost their faith in democracy, of which they were offered only a caricature.’’ But he gives careful attention to a plan offered by one Algerian Arab leader which, while not calling for separatism, nonetheless proposed a federal arrangement with a Parliament containing 50 percent representation of the Arabs. All this came to nothing because of an uprising in several Algerian localities that led to many French deaths. ‘‘Unfortunate and innocent French victims have lost their lives,’’ Camus wrote, ‘‘and this crime itself is inexcusable. But I hope that we will respond to murder with nothing other than justice, so as to avoid doing irreparable harm.’’ This plea was the only one of its kind in the furious French reaction, which led to a merciless slaughter in reprisal. ‘‘Do you truly want to be hated by millions of people, as you have hated thousands of others?’’ Camus asked his French readers. ‘‘If so, let things continue on their present course in North Africa.’’ They did, and the result was the French-Algerian war, which led to Algerian independence only after a bloody conflict and with consequences still unresolved fifty years later. Camus was caught in the middle, feeling the Arabs to be justified by their previous mistreatment, and using his influence to free those political figures he knew who had been unfairly imprisoned. Nonetheless, as he said at a press conference in Stockholm after receiving the Nobel prize: ‘‘I have always condemned terrorism. I must also condemn a terrorism blindly carried on [by the insurgents] in the streets of Algiers . . . and that one day could strike my mother and my family. I believe in justice, but I will protect my mother before justice.’’ This statement, wrongly interpreted as an unequivocal defense of the French, merely shows Camus defending human values, as he always did, against the claims of political abstractions that could lead to justifying murder—and had done so on both sides. This impromptu response unleashed a storm of criticism that for years made Camus a pariah of the French left-wing intelligentsia. All this occurred in 1957, long after his articles in Combat had appeared, but Camus’s response is nonetheless foreshadowed by positions that he took at that time. Eleven years earlier, in a series entitled ‘‘Neither Victims or

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Executioners’’ (printed under his own name and given special prominence), he attempted to define the intermediate stance that he was seeking and called ‘‘a relative utopia.’’ By this he meant ‘‘a philosophy free of all messianic elements and devoid of any nostalgia for an earthly paradise.’’ People like himself, he said, are not after ‘‘a world in which people don’t kill one another (we’re not that crazy!) but a world in which murder is not legitimized.’’ These articles are directed primarily against the Socialists, who are caught in a contradiction between their moral values and a Marxism they refuse to abandon even though it makes nonsense of their moral aims. Marxists are ready to accept ‘‘a hundred thousand deaths’’ to provide for ‘‘the happiness of hundreds of millions.’’ But ‘‘the certain death of hundreds of millions of people . . . is too high a price to pay for the supposed happiness of those who remain.’’ Camus implored his readers to join him in doing battle ‘‘within the historical arena in order to save from history that part of man which does not belong to it.’’ Later, he used the same type of reasoning to argue against indiscriminate terror from whatever source it came. ‘‘We live in terror,’’ he writes, ‘‘. . . because man has been delivered entirely into the hands of history and can no longer turn toward that part of himself which is as true as the historic part, and which he discovers when he confronts the beauty of the world and of people’s faces.’’ Along with his articles in Combat, the present volume also includes a welcome interview with Camus about literature that presents, even if only minimally, another and more important aspect of his multi-faceted career. His novel The Stranger had been seen as an example of the influence of recent American novels because of the impassivity of the main character; and he agrees that ‘‘I used it . . . because it suited my purpose, which was to describe a man who was apparently without conscience.’’ But he adds that he hopes this technical influence would not become widespread because it simply bypasses ‘‘the proper subject of literature . . . the inner life. Man is described but never explained or interpreted.’’ Camus makes an exception for Faulkner, whose Sanctuary he adapted for the stage (Requiem for a Nun), and he puts in a good word for Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. ‘‘But his book about Spain [For Whom the Bell Tolls] is a children’s book compared to Malraux’s L’Espoir [Man’s Hope].’’ Camus objected to the ‘‘MGM love story’’ that Hemingway inserted ‘‘into the middle of the prodigious events that took place in Spain. You can’t mix Hollywood and Guernica.’’ (All through his Combat articles Camus keeps insisting that a legitimate Spanish Republican government existed in exile,

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and should be recognized by the Allies against Franco.) While reserved about other recent American novels (he refers to Erskine Caldwell and Steinbeck), he has the greatest admiration for ‘‘the great Melville, who died in squalor . . . surrounded by his neglected masterpieces,’’ and refers to Poe and Hawthorne in the same terms. For many years the reputation of Albert Camus remained under a cloud in France, even though his novels were widely read, because of his attack on Marxism both in his Combat articles and then in his major theoretical work, L’Homme re´volte´ (The Rebel). The latter was greeted with scorn, especially in Sartre’s journal Les Temps modernes, and Camus was ridiculed with condescension for preaching a ‘‘Red Cross mentality’’ as well as being only a ‘‘philosopher for classes terminales’’ (the basic philosophy course taught in the last years of the French lyce´e). But the collapse of the reign of Marxism, Maoism, and other leftist ideologies, which exercised such a strong grip in France for so many years (several of the most prominent of the French Socialist leaders, for example, emerged from Trotskyist backgrounds), has led to a new and much more positive evaluation of Camus’s point of view. An issue of Le Magazine litte´raire (May 2006) devoted to Camus contains a dialogue between two important members of the older generation, Olivier Todd and Alain Finkelkraut, in which both acknowledge having changed their minds about Camus. Todd is particularly important because he was very close to Sartre (he called himself Sartre’s ‘‘rebellious son’’), and also wrote a major biography of Camus that has still not been replaced. Having spent five years of his life writing the biography, he says ‘‘I have altered many of my attitudes regarding Camus. Today, his personality pleases me very much. He was not only a genuinely sincere man but one who was truly virtuous—and courageous.’’ Finkelkraut, who admits not having liked Camus ‘‘for political as well as philosophical reasons,’’ praises his courage in having attacked ‘‘icons of radicality’’ in L’Homme re´volte´ at a time, the early 1950s, when to do so was to risk the venomously indignant repudiation that actually occurred. He also rejects Sartre’s withering denigration of Camus as failing to attain the caliber of ‘‘a thinker’’ in that book. ‘‘He threw a huge brick into the Parisian swamp,’’ writes Finkelkraut. ‘‘I see only George Orwell and Arthur Koestler as having done as much to open people’s eyes.’’ Camus was killed in an auto accident in January 1960, carrying with him in a briefcase the manuscript of an unfinished novel, Le Premier homme (The First Man). This work surprisingly remained buried among his papers, and was only unearthed and published in 1994; but this lapse of time indicates

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the relative disfavor into which he had fallen during the intervening period. Camus had told a friend that this book was to be his first real novel; and so indeed it was. Just a few months before his death, he told another friend: ‘‘I’ve written only one-third of my work. I truly begin it with this book.’’ Largely autobiographical, and intended as the beginning of a much more extensive evocation of his early Algerian years, here he puts aside the ideological motivations that inspired his earlier works and returns to his childhood. The book was a huge success, despite its unfinished state, and Finkelkraut even calls it ‘‘Proustian’’ because of the density of the sensations that Camus evokes. The publication of Le Premier homme did much to call attention to Camus again after thirty-five years, and helped to motivate the re-estimation of his work that has occurred. For an American reader of the Combat articles, written more than half a century ago, no words of his strike home more forcibly than those in which he condemns indiscriminate terrorism on both sides. Caught as we are in a war against terrorism, what we euphemistically call ‘‘collateral damage’’ nonetheless also kills innocent civilians as well. No one has posed such issues with more poignancy and scrupulousness than Camus, who rejected all attempts to justify them in the name of French or Algerian nationalism. Nor would he, it seems to me, view the elusive aim of spreading American democracy to countries and peoples of a totally different history and culture as providing any such justification. The Arabs, as he told his compatriots, ‘‘are a people of impressive traditions, whose virtues are eminently clear to anyone willing to approach them without prejudice.’’ It is impossible to read him now without thinking of such matters, and this gives his old journalistic forays a new and terrible immediacy.

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4.

Andre Malraux: A Hero of His Time

The name of Andre´ Malraux these days is hardly likely to arouse the same turbulent response as it would have more than half a century ago. But to those like myself, who grew up in the period between the two World Wars, Andre´ Malraux was a heroic figure. He was, in the first place, a brilliant and exciting writer, whose novels not only dramatized the crucial socialeconomic conflicts of the time but also endowed them with tragic, Dostoevskian dimensions. In addition, he was an active participant in the wars and revolutions that he so unforgettably evoked. He was one of the leaders of French and worldwide opinion in the fight against Fascism that took place in the 1930s after Hitler’s rise to power. Not only did he write and speak, he also organized a squadron of planes to fight against Franco in the Spanish Civil War, and then volunteered for service in the French Army at the outbreak of the World War II. Taken prisoner, he escaped and openly joined the French Resistance in 1944 as the German occupation of France was coming to a close. Not since Byron went off to fight for Greek independence from the Turkish Empire has any writer of Malraux’s stature possessed a comparably irresistible aura of literary creativity and physical derring-do exerted on behalf of the highest moral and political causes. The excitement created by his presence on a platform was also compelling and irresistible, as I can testify from having heard him speak in New York during a tour in 1937 to raise money for the Spanish Loyalists. Even though, like most of his audience, I could not then understand French, it was impossible not to be swept away by the dynamic intensity of the passion he managed to communicate above and beyond the limitations of language. During this early part of his career Malraux was continually associated with left-wing causes, and although never aligned officially with the French Communist Party, he was most definitely a prominent fellow traveler. At the end of World War II, however, when a struggle was going on between the French Communists and those who had rallied behind General de 45

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Gaulle, he joined the Gaullists. Indeed, in this latter part of his life he became a close associate of the General, who had refused to follow so many others in surrendering to the Germans and accepting the infamously subservient Vichy government. This alliance with the French right-wing, though de Gaulle was hardly a die-hard reactionary, led to furious attacks on Malraux by former admirers and sympathizers; and the present book, written by someone deeply involved in the internecine warfare of French literary politics, attempts to walk a very fine line between admiration and condemnation. In Oliver Todd’s Malraux: A Life, the balance is definitely unsteady and, in my view, topples over far too often into the latter. There is already a considerable literature on Malraux, but no one, so far as my knowledge goes, has explored the now-available documentation with as much assiduity as Todd. There is a page and a half in small print of the names of all the people he interviewed; and he has gone through government archives in France, India, Spain, and Moscow (the latter containing much non-Russian material). ‘‘I am also indebted,’’ he writes, ‘‘to the CIA, which showed me the file on Malraux, in part, but refused to show me mine.’’ One of Todd’s aims is to dissipate ‘‘the myth of Malraux,’’ constructed in part of statements he made about himself and in part of statements made by others that he left uncorrected. Malraux’s tendency to magnify himself in various ways, and not to object when others did so, has long been known and noted; but his genuine achievements and accomplishments are so many that most commentators do not dwell on them with the same insistence and animosity as Todd, who calls him both a mythomaniac and a liar. Indeed, Todd spends so much space documenting these charges, which often have little or nothing to do with anything of importance, that one cannot help suspecting some ulterior motive. In his introduction, he depicts himself as having once thought when young ‘‘that no better life or death could be imagined than with the members of the International Brigade’’ [the volunteer regiments fighting with the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War]. But such ‘‘contagious naı¨vete´,’’ as he writes, is no longer appropriate, and one surmises that perhaps the biographer is carrying on an internal quarrel with his own past as well as with Malraux. He also seems to bear a personal grudge against Malraux, and finds it difficult to conceive of any possible motive except egoistic selfaggrandizement to explain Malraux’s actions and behavior. All this, in my view, considerably decreases the stature of the book, despite its scope and usefulness as the fullest account to date of this extraordinary career.

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I Malraux led a quite incredible life compared to other members of the French literary establishment, but it began ordinarily enough in a small suburban town just outside of Paris in 1901. At an early age Andre´ began to read very widely, exhibit an extraordinary memory, and manifest a taste for drawing that led ultimately to a passionate interest in the visual arts. He graduated from primary school, but although a reasonably good student, who by this time was steeped in writers like Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Jules Michelet, he was refused admission to the prestigious Lyce´e Condorcet. As a result, he decided not to try for any higher accreditation and to strike out on his own. Malraux was thus forced to fend for himself at the age of sixteen, and did so in a manner exhibiting the considerable erudition he had already acquired. Todd remarks on ‘‘the ease with which Andre´ comes and goes from the medieval Froissart to the nineteenth-century Leconte de Lisle, from Balzac and Flaubert to Malherbe and Montaigne.’’ Using such expertise he became a chineur, someone who combed the bookstores and bookstalls for secondhand works whose value has been underestimated, and then selling them to book dealers and collectors. Malraux thus very early acquired an expertise in such matters as binding, printing, the quality of paper, and so on, which later stood him in good stead as artistic director at Gallimard, the leading French publishing house. Even more, he took his first literary steps with some brief articles in various avant-garde journals. In one he dissociates himself from the French Symbolists, then being also attacked by Dadaists and Surrealists, but without aligning himself with these latter movements either. In another, he sharply criticized an author and a work idolized by these two avant-garde movements—Lautre´amont’s Les Chants de Maldoror (the Songs of Maldoror). He also set up as an independent publisher, issuing works that were neglected or difficult to obtain, and in some cases pornographic, garnishing them with carefully chosen illustrations. By the age of eighteen, he was well known in both publishing and literary circles in Paris. An important event in his life was his meeting with Clara Goldschmidt, the daughter of a well-to-do German-Jewish family, branches of which also lived in France. Clara was multilingual, worked for a journal in which Malraux had published, and the two married against the wishes of her family. Presumably the marriage was to be an open one in which they retained their freedom (Clara suggested divorcing after 6 months), and though the

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twenty-year old Andre´ presumably agreed, he could never inwardly reconcile himself to being informed about her infidelities. There is a famous scene in Man’s Fate (between a central Communist figure Kyo Gisors and his German wife May) thought by scholars to depict one such confession and to dramatize the conflicting emotions that it aroused in the author. Nonetheless, they were a close-knit couple for many years and had one daughter, Florence. Clara’s cosmopolitan culture, particularly its German component, did much to increase the range of Malraux’s already formidable erudition. Moreover, Clara’s fortune allowed them to indulge in their shared taste for travel, and they indefatigably explored the architectural and artistic riches of France, Italy, and Germany. Their money evaporated, however, in the post-war economic turmoil, and Andre´ decided to recoup their fortunes by a bold stroke that displays both his connoisseurship and taste for adventure. Already thinking of writing a history of art, he became acquainted with specialists of Asiatic art in both Germany and France, and was particularly struck by an obscure article of a French expert about the beauties of Khmer sculpture in French Indochina. Specimens were worth a tidy sum, and he thus decided to organize a little expedition with Clara and a loyal friend to a temple falling into ruins that would allow him to acquire a few pieces and recoup his fortunes. To do so, he provided the authorities with a dossier containing recommendations from important specialists, speaks of himself as having followed courses at the School of Oriental Languages (there is no evidence of this), and as pursuing researches in Khmer archeology which he asks permission to continue. Much of this documentation is more pretense than fact; but even lacking the qualifications that he claimed, he impressed specialists with his knowledge nonetheless. Once arrived, he and his friend clumsily pried loose some excellent figures from a small, neglected temple and tried to send them out addressed to a chemical firm in Saigon. Instead, all three were arrested and the two men were brought to trial. Clara was allowed to return to France, pretending illness, but the men were submitted to a lengthy judicial process. Not being imprisoned, as natives would have been in their position, they had time to stroll around Phnom Penh and Saigon and ‘‘soak up the reality of colonialism.’’ This was Malraux’s first moral-physical contact with its actualities as he walked from ‘‘the stone and brick villas of the rich and influential’’ to ‘‘the misery of the Cambodian working class in the poor areas, the stench of the alleyways.’’ Clara was extremely active in rallying support among the literati in France, and a petition appeared in the Nouvelles litte´raires with extremely influential

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names. The two ‘‘archeologists’’ were convicted with suspended sentences, and Malraux managed to return to France with some Khmer pieces probably bought from more adroit local pilferers. Ten weeks after leaving, however, Malraux was on the way back to edit a newspaper in Saigon with one of the lawyers who had defended him, Paul Monin, well known for his opposition to the rampant inequalities of colonialism. He and Malraux succeeded in launching a newspaper, L’Indochine, which then, after running into opposition from the reigning local authorities, became L’Indochine enchaıˆne´e (Indochina in Chains). Todd details the government’s various underhanded efforts to suppress the paper by interfering with subscriptions and sales, intimidating the native typographers, and finally driving it into the ground. The paper, however, was not revolutionary but reformist, supporting the extension of rights to the native population, pleading for aid to allow them to acquire a French education, and attempting to expose and remedy some of the rampant corruption and injustices carried out under the hypocritical cover of legality. ‘‘I say to all French people,’’ Malraux wrote prophetically, ‘‘this terror rising from all parts of Hanoi’s soil, this anguish, a repository for resentment and dispersed hate . . . may, if you are not on your guard, become the field of a fearsome harvest.’’ During these two years in Indochina, Malraux was thus plunged heart and soul into the social unrest beginning to transform that part of the world—an unrest that had partisans in Indochina as well. His newspaper received financial support from Chinese expatriates allied with the nationalist Chinese Kuomintang, and these years provided Malraux with the background he would later use for novels like Les Conque´rants (The Conquerors) and La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate).

II On returning to France, Malraux again set up as a publisher of luxury books, but more importantly published his first novel, La Tentation de l’occident (The Temptation of the Occident). This book is quite different from any novel that he would eventually write, and its sumptuous, ornate style is closer to his later works on art than to his fiction. It is an epistolary novel, an exchange of letters between two young men, a European traveling in Asia and a Chinaman visiting various European countries. One of Malraux’s aims was to combat the fashionable thesis of Spengler—whose Decline of the West

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was then being much discussed—that civilizations were self-enclosed entities impenetrable to each other. Other themes are also broached, which anticipate those of the later Existentialism and even of Foucault and Lacan. As Todd writes, ‘‘one idea running through the book, affirmed rather than demonstrated, is that [the] certified demise of God, seasoned with Nietzsche and Spengler, must bring about the spiritual and intellectual death of man.’’ Another significant idea is that ‘‘the importance of the self ’’ cultivated in the West all through the nineteenth century has ceased to exercise its force; one is now searching for a new conception of man. During the next several years Malraux was again active as a publisher and finally became artistic director of Gallimard, also taking his place as the youngest member of the prestigious reading committee. But he was an inherently curious and restless personality, and he and Clara travelled to Turkey, Batum, Baku, Persia, then Iraq and Syria, and once around the whole world, collecting works of art of all kinds and exhibiting them in a newly established Gallimard art gallery. All this faded into insignificance when Malraux’s next novel, The Conquerors, began to appear serially in the Nouvelle revue franc¸aise. Here he draws on his Asiatic experiences in a direct and explicitly political manner, using a struggle that took place in China in 1925 between the Communists and the Kuomintang as background. They were both allied against the English and wished to boycott trade with Hongkong, but the Communists desired to make the boycott much stricter than the nationalist Chinese. Some of the figures are historical, such as the Russian Borodin sent by the Comintern; others, such as the central figure Garine (at first called Stavine, perhaps because of Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin) are entirely fictional. Todd calls it the first ‘‘good roman engage´ of the decade,’’ that is, a work in which the social-political conflicts of the period dominate the action. Written in an abrupt, nervous style, interspersed with accounts coming from the radio as well as police reports and constantly shifting from scene to scene, it was quite original in construction and broke with more conventional types of French narrative. Garine, a Swiss Frenchman working for the Bureau of Propaganda of the Kuomintang, is the figure who attracted the most attention, and he was almost immediately identified with his creator. Trotsky admired the book, writing that ‘‘by small colorful strokes, following the pointillist method, Malraux gives an unforgettable picture of the general strike,’’ though remarking that Garine—as well as his author—would have benefited from a lesson in Marxism.

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The Conquerors aroused a huge amount of interest, and was greeted as an important cultural event. Indeed, a public debate was organized presided over by the philosopher Le´on Brunschvicg, in which others such as Julien Benda and Gabriel Marcel also participated. ‘‘The whole thing,’’ Todd writes, ‘‘amounts to a coronation.’’ Garine was the center of discussion because, though immersed in a social revolution, he is really a metaphysical rebel, closer to Dostoevsky than to Marx. ‘‘I do not take society to be bad nor capable of improvement; I hold it to be absurd,’’ he declares. Todd comments, ‘‘To escape the absurd for the duration of the insurrection, Garine puts his faith in a brotherhood that evades him.’’ This combination of revolutionary politics and a moral-philosophical quest for the meaning of life proved an irresistible attraction to the novel’s first readers. It is quite clear, however, that politics cannot provide the answer to Garine’s internal dilemma. When accused of despising the people for whom he is presumably fighting, Garine replies that he prefers them ‘‘but only because they are the vanquished . . . they have more heart, more humanity than the others; the virtues of the vanquished.’’ He feels ‘‘nothing but loathing and disgust for the bourgeoisie from which I come,’’ but if the vanquished became victorious, ‘‘I know only too well how abject they would become once we had triumphed together.’’ Despite this last sentence, which shows that Malraux has no illusions about the results of the possible future triumph of ‘‘the people,’’ Todd still accuses Malraux of belonging ‘‘to the age of the Good Poor, the proletariat as the vehicle of History,’’ thus following in the footsteps of Victor Hugo. The Russians knew better, since they banned the book (as did Mussolini’s Italy), and Malraux’s publisher made good use of these interdictions in his publicity. The Conquerors placed Malraux in the very first rank of living French novelists, and his second, La Voie royale (The Royal Way), served to reinforce his literary stature by winning the prix Interallie´ (but not the most prestigious literary award, the prix Goncourt). Abandoning politics, but not the exoticism of an Indochinese background, Malraux’s new novel dealt with a personal quest. The narrator Claude Vannec, like the young Malraux himself (though provided with more authentic qualifications), is searching for lost temples, and draws on the author’s earlier escapade. Another character named Perken, whom he meets on a boat, is a legendary adventurer who joins him for reasons of his own—one of which is to seek a companion who had vanished in the jungle. They finally find him as the prisoner of a hostile tribe in the mountains, blinded and chained to a millstone.

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Once again Malraux endows this adventure narrative, quite reminiscent of one of his favorite books—Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—with a metaphysical dimension. For Claude realizes that Perken’s fabulous exploits have all been efforts to endow his life, haunted by the prospect of death, with significance and meaning; and he comprehends that his own voyage of discovery has the same underlying motivation. At the end of the novel, with Perken dying from an infected spear wound, Claude rises to a truly Dostoevskian exhortation that God might exist so that ‘‘he could, at the price of eternal sufferings, howl, like those dogs, that no divine thought, no future recompense, could justify the end of a human existence.’’ Malraux’s jungle descriptions have become classic, and, as Todd points out with his usual jab, ‘‘have been extremely popular choices for university translation exams’’; but they become more than set pieces as part of Malraux’s metaphysical vision. In his most famous novel La Condition humaine (1933), Malraux returns to revolutionary events in China a few years after those depicted in The Conquerors. Here he no longer focuses on one or two central figures but portrays a whole range of brilliantly delineated characters. There is Kyo, ‘‘the young, virtuous Communist leader’’; his father, old Gisors, ‘‘the disillusioned aesthete, ‘conscience’ embodied in an opium addict’’; Kyo’s wife May, a German doctor (Malraux’s only important female character); the terrorist Tchen; the French capitalist Ferral, worried about his investments; and most of all the captivating, irresponsible, mythomaniacal Baron de Clappique, in whom Malraux could give fictional rein to his taste for the magically transforming capacity of the imaginative (what he called le farfelu). (Malraux had published allegorical and fantastic sketches during the 1920s, some of them later collected as Le Royaume farfelu.) The action is once again conveyed tellingly in a succession of short, sharp scenes, much closer to a film than to an average novel. (Malraux spoke of a ‘‘literature of montage’’ to describe his own technique.) The atmosphere of tension-filled Shanghai is unforgettably evoked, and the scene in which the Comintern representative Katow gives his poison to two other captives while all are waiting to be thrown alive into the boiler of a locomotive is one of the few modern celebrations of self-sacrificing heroism that can be read without embarrassment. But Malraux is by no means hewing to any party line: it is Comintern policy, as he makes clear, that has surrendered the Shanghai Communists to the Nationalists. All the same, Katow felt that ‘‘he had fought for that which, in his time, had been filled with the strongest meaning and the strongest hope.’’ These are the feelings of a fictional character, not those of the author; but there is little doubt that Malraux could

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identify with such emotions at this time, whatever reservations he might have had otherwise. The novel finally won the coveted prix Goncourt, and was so powerful that, as Todd remarks, even a rock-hard right-winger like Le´on Daudet could not resist admitting that he was ‘‘enthralled by the beauty of the work.’’

III La Condition humaine was published the year that Hitler came to power in Germany. Malraux participated fervently in all the anti-Fascist agitation that began on a large-scale in France at this time. A spellbinding orator, he frequently spoke at such meetings, and through Clara and others he met many refugees who became personal friends and provided first-hand accounts. This resulted in a short novel, Le Temps du me´pris (1935), translated as Days of Wrath. The central character is an imprisoned German Communist, first arrested and then released, who returns to join the struggle. The book was well received but written in haste and perhaps too overtly propagandistic for Malraux’s own taste (he refused to have it republished until 1951). He was also, at this time, playing a leading political role: he and Andre´ Gide were appointed by a committee to travel to Berlin to demand the release of the Bulgarian Communist Georges Dimitrov, acquitted of having participated in the Reichstag fire. They were to deliver a petition to Hitler, with Goebbels as second-best, but met neither and left after disposing of their document; Dimitrov though was released the next month. Todd’s next several chapters document Malraux’s intricate relations with the Communist Left during this period. He collaborated with them on their anti-Nazism, but joined Andre´ Breton in protesting against Trotsky’s exile, and even talked to others about organizing an expedition to land in Alma Ata and rescue him. Trotsky’s jailers, writes Todd sarcastically, ‘‘would (obviously) be mesmerized and paralyzed at the sight of a Goncourt laureate leading a literary commando unit.’’ Similarly, while commending ‘‘the shrewdness of Malraux’’ in realizing very early that ‘‘Nazism is the danger of Europe,’’ he laments that the left eye of Malraux and others like him ‘‘has a large blind spot that prevents them from seeing the totalitarian Soviets.’’ Very true, but one might also recall that no Soviet army at that time was a threat to any European country. When Trotsky came to France, Malraux went to visit him and protested along with others when the French government wanted him expelled.

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Nonetheless, even if refractory, Malraux was too valuable a fellow traveler to be neglected or repulsed by the Communists, who assigned Ilya Ehrenburg in Paris to cultivate his friendship. He was invited to a Writer’s Congress in Russia in the spring of 1934, and received the full celebrity treatment, carefully designed to conceal from visitors the distressing truths about Soviet life. Malraux makes flattering statements to his hosts for public consumption, perhaps half-believing them himself, but we find this passage in his journal: ‘‘At the zoo. The chimpanzee keeper, when asked, ‘Does the monkey eat bread, replies bitterly, ‘Yes, but only bread that’s made for foreigners, not ours.’ ’’ At the Congress, Malraux becomes incensed at the attacks on Proust and Joyce, and refuses to bow to the proclamation of the dogma of ‘‘socialist realism.’’ Instead, he declares: ‘‘If writers are the engineers of the soul [as Stalin had said] do not forget that the highest function of an engineer is to invent . . . Art is not a submission, it is a conquest.’’ As Todd remarks, any Soviet citizen would have been imprisoned for this crime of ‘‘le`se-Stalin.’’ Two years later Malraux returned to the Soviet Union again, praising the great possibilities of Soviet culture but saying little about its achievements except in the cinema (in which he always had a special interest, and about which he later wrote A Sketch of the Psychology of Cinema). He met both Eisenstein and Meyerhold, hoping to turn La Condition humaine into a film with the former (for whom he wrote a scenario) or a drama with the latter, but neither project was ever realized. Art and culture receded into the background with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, during which Malraux played an important role. With the help of Jean Moulin, later a hero of the French Resistance and then assistant to the Minister of Air, Malraux became involved in circumventing the official French policy of neutrality and non-intervention. He bought aircraft for the legal Spanish government, recruited pilots, organized a squadron (though leaving the command to experienced airmen), and sometimes participated in combat as a gunner, reciting Racine and Corneille to pass the time. He returned to France occasionally to raise money, and also, as already mentioned, toured the United States. Todd refers to him all through this chapter rather snidely as el coronel, as if to stress a desire for rank and status, and recounts the episode in which Malraux is asked whether Andre´ Gide should publish his biting critique of the Soviet Union, Back from the USSR, just at this time. Since Russia was the only country officially aiding the Loyalists, though also carrying on its own relentless vendetta against Spanish anarchists and Socialists, Malraux reluctantly concluded: ‘‘I think it

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would be better to put off this publication until the end of the war.’’ About which Todd comments: ‘‘Sensible forethought to some, opportunism or follow the leader for others’’—as if there were really a choice between a principled and a cravenly self-serving interpretation of Malraux’s decision! Malraux’s participation in the Spanish Civil War led to another novel, L’Espoir (Man’s Hope), written while the war was still taking place and begun during his trip to the United States. Along with Jacques Chirac, whom he interviewed for his book, and Andre´ Gide, whom he cites, Todd considers this the best of Malraux’s novels and writes about it with enthusiasm; evidently the memories and emotions of his own past still linger. It is a wide-ranging book with a larger cast of characters than any other, and deals with the first eight months of the war, ending on a note of hope with the battle of Guadalajara in the spring of 1937 that was a definite victory for the Loyalists. The action alternates between the Loyalist ground troops composed largely of civilians—many belonging to anarchist groups, who gradually learn how to fight the more disciplined regular armies of Franco and Mussolini—and the air force squadron of volunteers and mercenaries modeled on the one formed by Malraux. At the center of the book is the conflict between politics and ethics, between the necessity of discipline and regimentation to fight a war successfully and the ideals of freedom and liberty, both personal and social, for which one was presumably fighting. Malraux depicts this dilemma both in the action of the book and in brilliantly telling, incisive dialogues between various characters. An Italian member of Malraux’s squadron with a philosophical bent named Scali (perhaps the later well-known Nicola Chiaromonte, a friend who reminisced with me about having flown with Malraux) asks another character, an art historian, ‘‘whether an attack on the revolution by an intellectual who was a revolutionary [they are talking about Unamuno] does not always place in doubt the politics of revolution by . . . its ethic, if you will. Seriously . . . would you wish this critique not to be made?’’ The reply: ‘‘How could I wish it?’’ If the search for personal dignity through revolution provided the leitmotif of earlier books, this is now combined in Man’s Hope with an increased awareness of the tragically dialectical antinomy of ends and means. Malraux was then charged with Stalinism, and the accusation continues to linger because of his implicit anti-anarchist theme, as well as his failure to mention the ruthless persecution of such anarchists being carried on by the Communists themselves. But the book is a still-unsurpassed dramatization of Malraux’s torturing awareness of the dangers of the very course he

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thought it necessary to pursue in order to fight the war. During its last days, under almost impossible technical conditions, he made a film called Sierra de Teruel dealing with the rescue by local peasants of the crew of one of the planes of his squadron shot down in the mountains. Todd cites enthusiastic remarks from those who saw it at the time, including Jean Cocteau, and says that the episode of the descent from the mountains ‘‘is probably one of the finest war sequences ever made.’’

IV At the outbreak of World War II, Malraux insisted on joining the French Army as a private and was assigned to a tank regiment for training. Made prisoner when the Germans broke through the French defenses in June 1940, he was taken, along with all the others, to the cathedral of Sens, then to an improvised camp, and finally worked as a farm laborer. When Malraux learned that his name had been broadcast on a list of writers the Germans were seeking, he decided to escape and did so very easily, travelling to the south of France, unoccupied by the Germans for the time being, to join a pregnant mistress who had become a substitute wife. His relations with Clara had become increasingly stormy, and the two had long been leading separate lives. During the next two years Malraux lived quietly and worked on his next novel, Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (1948) (The Walnut Trees of Altenburg), as well as on the book (or books) on art that he had intended to write ever since his early twenties. Always fascinated by T. E. Lawrence, to whom he felt a distinct affinity, he also launched into an erudite biography of him called The Demon of the Absolute, whose weighty manuscript was left unfinished at Malraux’s death. His two half-brothers, Roland and Claude, were active in the French Resistance; but his Spanish War experience had left its mark and he preferred to wait for what he was certain would be decisive action on the part of the Allies in the future. One of the enigmas of this period, which reveals some of the complexity of the French cultural situation, is the continuance of his long-standing and close friendship with Drieu La Rochelle, a gifted writer and one of the most important Vichy collaborators, who had taken over the editorship of the Nouvelle revue franc¸aise (he ultimately committed suicide). Todd notes this anomaly but does nothing to analyze it, except to refer to the admiration of Malraux’s companion, Josette Clotis, for Drieu. Indeed, she gave birth during these years to two sons by Malraux, and Drieu became the godfather of the second. Drieu had made Malraux his literary executor, and as such he performed his duties conscientiously after the war.

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Malraux joined the French Resistance in the spring of 1944, after Roland was killed (Claude was captured later and also died), and Todd stresses Malraux’s desire immediately to take a leading role in a complex, politically disorganized situation. Apparently claiming an authority there is no evidence he received, he impressed enough leaders (one an important Army officer he had known before the war) to be accepted among them. His aim was to unify the competing groups, separated by clashing social-political ideologies, and while traveling from one to another he was caught, imprisoned, interrogated but not tortured, and freed when the Germans retreated. He then became the head of a group called the Alsace-Lorraine Brigade, which was accepted in the French Army and participated honorably in the Battle of the Bulge. Malraux’s own later account of all this in his Antime´moires is filled with factual errors and probably exaggerations (one is never certain) that Todd tracks down relentlessly. But he is also fair enough to note that Malraux’s men ‘‘admire their colonel,’’ and that, ‘‘in his tight, fur-lined jacket, topped off with a beret, he seems to know no fear,’’ constantly walking on the front lines and even sometimes in advance of them. Malraux’s next novel, the too-little-read Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, draws both on his initial captivity in 1940 (it begins with the French prisoners gathered around the Sens cathedral) and also on his fascination with T. E. Lawrence. The father of the narrator is involved in attempting to organize a United Turkish Empire throughout Central Asia as Lawrence had done with the Arabs. But the deeper theme is once again the nature of the human condition, which here becomes separated from any political association. What Malraux is now searching for is ‘‘the fundamental’’ in man, and he finds it among the prisoners desperately scrawling their letters home even though they may never be delivered. He finds it defined in a hotly disputed discussion among the cream of the European intelligentsia (worthy of the best pages of Thomas Mann) in which ‘‘the humanization of the world’’ by art is seen as one of man’s answers to the fatality of destiny. He also finds it in the hallucinatory scene of one of the earliest German attacks of poison gas, in which the horrified German soldiers return bearing the gasping and dying Russian soldiers on their shoulders. And this ‘‘humanization of the world’’ also occurs when the narrator, awaiting death in a tank-trap all night, disengages himself in the morning and stumbles on a helpless old peasant woman ‘‘harmonized with the cosmos like a stone,’’ but who ‘‘smiles a slow, pensive smile’’ and ‘‘seems to be viewing death at a distance and even—oh mysterious blink, sharp shadow at the corner of the eyelids!—even with irony.’’ Few

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modern novels can equal both the intellectual loftiness and the intense humanity of such pages. At the end of the war Malraux rallied to the cause of General de Gaulle, making a famous speech in 1945 that prevented the Communists from taking control of the French Resistance movement. Todd copiously chronicles what appeared to many as an unexpected shift of alliances, but again does little to interpret it. A passage in Les Conque´rants that seems to have gone unnoticed may be helpful in this context. The narrator remarks that while the propaganda of Borodine, couched in Marxist class-terms, had little appeal to the coolies, ‘‘the nationalist propaganda, that of Garine, [gave them] the possibility of believing in their own dignity.’’ Malraux may now have felt much the same, and in any case took his stand against the Communists, thus leading to his furious castigation by many previous left-wing admirers. He became Minister of Information in the first De Gaulle government; but this lasted only one year, and he resumed his post at Gallimard while working on his books on art. Todd devotes a chapter to them (Les Voix du silence, and others that followed, including those that Malraux edited and commissioned), seeming rather surprised that he cannot completely agree with the art historians he mentions (E. H. Gombrich, Georges Duthuit) who have picked them to pieces. Gombrich’s article of 1954 in the Burlington Magazine was particularly damning because of his own reputation; but no mention is made of his compliment to Malraux as a precursor in his later Art and Illusion. Specialists have never had any trouble ripping apart ambitious works of synthesis in their field—as the great classicist Willamowitz, for example, did irrefutably with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; but this did not succeed in overwhelming the power of a new vision of the subject. Malraux sees the whole history of art as part of ‘‘the humanization of the world,’’ as a sublime expression of man’s answer to destiny. And even though, as Todd writes, his ‘‘formulae are not what logicians of the Vienna Circle would call propositions, they do often carry along suggestions of an imaginative and stimulating nature.’’ So stimulating indeed that if we turn to the footnotes at the back of the book, we find the names of two eminent French art historians (one became director of the Louvre) whose youthful reading of Malraux set them on the path of their careers.

V After 1945, Todd deals both with Malraux’s private life, which was shadowed by misfortune (his two sons were killed in an auto accident), and his

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public career after De Gaulle returned to office in 1958 with Malraux as his Minister of Cultural Affairs. For an American reader, unfamiliar with the complicated history of France during these years (the Algerian uprising, the mini-revolution of May 1968) Todd’s chapters are apt to prove more confusing than enlightening. Malraux, who always considered himself a ‘‘leftwing Gaullist,’’ exerted himself to bring French culture to the people by establishing maisons de la culture (houses of culture) in which movies and books were available to everyone, plays were performed and art exhibitions organized. He also, incidentally, presided over the cleaning of the facades of important buildings and set aside parts of historic towns as properties of the state, which protected them from becoming the prey of real estate speculators. Bypassing more conventional artists, he confided the painting of the ceiling of the Paris Ope´ra to Marc Chagall, that of the Ode´on Theater to Andre´ Masson, and he appointed the painter Balthus to be head of the French Academy in Rome. As a sort of roving cultural ambassador Malraux travelled all over the world, dazzling everyone with the elevated eloquence of his speeches, and both astonishing, bewildering, and sometimes enraging the French diplomats routinely assigned to these various countries. He took no account of established protocol, and Todd quotes abundantly from the files of queries and complaints sent back to Paris by these often outraged officials. They never knew what might occur—as for example when, on a trip to the United States sponsored particularly by Jacqueline Kennedy, who had actually read and admired him and could speak French, he was asked whether France would be willing to lend the Mona Lisa. The reply was affirmative, to the horror of the museum authorities in France and to the detriment of the French budget. But Malraux also arranged for prestigious exhibitions of art in Paris, one on Indian art in particular patronized by Nehru, intended to manifest the cosmopolitan receptivity of French culture. Todd interviewed Malraux twice in October 1975 (he died a year later), and among other questions asked him how he would like to be considered in the future: ‘‘writer, publisher, revolutionary politician, [or] art critic?’’ Malraux answered: ‘‘It’d have to be ‘writer.’ One can imagine Gide: ‘Writer, alas!’ But I don’t accept the ‘alas’ or the exclamation point.’’ Of the many lives that Malraux led, it is as a writer that he wished to be remembered by posterity; and we can thus more or less neglect here the fascinating image of the politician (not at all ‘‘revolutionary’’ any longer, but by no means hide-bound either) that Todd offers us so profusely. The nervous and physical tension under which Malraux always lived led to a breakdown in 1965, and this resulted in a quasi-diplomatic voyage,

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embarked on as a means of recovery, to many places he had known in the past. The result was a new burst of literary activity in the 1970s, whose products were the Antime´moires and a series of smaller works, including one on De Gaulle, an account of Malraux’s recovery from a collapse (Lazare), and studies of Picasso, Mao Tse-tung, and lesser-known figures. These were all semi-autobiographical texts, some presumably reports of conversations (as with De Gaulle), but in which verisimilitude was hardly respected. Malraux includes everything he knew, had known, had thought, or later learned, about everyone or every issue he wrote about, and he also included rewritten parts of Les Noyers de l’Altenburg in the Antime´moires. Todd has a field day showing up literal inaccuracies and implausibilities, but for anyone interested in Malraux these later, obliquely revealing works make irresistible reading. Besides the manuscript of the unfinished book on Lawrence, he also left the first draft of a work on literature, written in an extremely allusive and elliptical style, presumably intended to do for literature what he had done for the visual arts Many years ago (1961), in a review-article on Les Noyers de l’Altenburg, I tried to define Malraux’s position in French literature in relation to writers like Sartre and Camus, who had since come to the forefront. Both had recognized him as a precursor (Camus, on receiving the Nobel Prize, graciously said it should have gone to Malraux), but there seemed to me an essential difference between them all the same. All three could be considered Existentialists, but the post-war writers had taken Kierkegaard and Heidegger as their guide, while Malraux, despite Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, could be said to have aspired towards an Existentialism of the Enlightenment—the Kantian ideal of ‘‘the sublime,’’ which consisted in man’s consciousness of the inability of the power of nature ever to force him to surrender his humanity. This still seems to me a good way of defining a writer whose personal defects, whatever they may have been, are far outweighed by the depth of his commitment to social justice and political liberty, the astonishing multiplicity of his attainments, and the undiminished power of his creations.

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5.

Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer

I The invitation to contribute to an issue of Europe devoted to the work of Yves Bonnefoy presented me with both a welcome incentive and a challenge. I welcomed it gladly because it would allow me to express my intense admiration for the work of an old and dear friend, an admiration that has only continued to increase as the years passed and the promise of the early work matured into an impressively imposing corpus both of poetry, criticism, and translations. It presented a challenge, however, because my own interests have taken me farther and farther away from the field of French literature in which Yves Bonnefoy has come to be recognized as a dominating figure; and there was little I could say about him in relation to his own literary tradition that would add anything to what others would be writing out of far greater knowledge. I decided therefore that the best I could do was to set down a series of personal responses to those aspects of his work that had struck me because of my own particular interests and point of view. This would at least allow me to add my modest tribute to others that would be more substantial and illuminating. It has now been many years since a chance and fortunate encounter at a small cafe´ on the Place Saint-Sulpice, if I recall correctly, first brought me into contact with Yves Bonnefoy. We were introduced by a mutual friend; and when I heard the name, I recalled having seen it recently signed to an article in the magazine Preuves. The article had attracted my attention because it was devoted to the Anglo-American New Criticism, and it was the one and only reference I had come across in a French literary periodical devoted to such a subject. No one in France otherwise seemed to be aware that anything such as an Anglo-American New Criticism existed, and I was very grateful to see it acknowledged as worthy of some attention. The primarily American New Critics had been very important for me, I was indeed considered to be one of them, and I was glad to see them brought to the 61

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notice of a French literary world I was just becoming familiar with, and which I found both so fascinating and so self-enclosed. It also seemed to me, though perhaps this is a later recollection, that I had seen the name of Yves Bonnefoy elsewhere; but I believe I associated it immediately with a lengthy footnote in Sartre’s Qu’est-ce que la litte´rature, a work that still seems to me one of that prodigious writer’s most valuable productions. Why this footnote had attracted my attention is hard to say. It dwelt on a topic in which I had little interest—the differences between preand post-war Surrealism, a movement that had never aroused my enthusiasm—and was written in an elaborate philosophical terminology that I was just beginning to master. Perhaps it struck me because, in the midst of his reflections, the usually solemn Sartre could not resist striking off a pun. Citing approvingly some words of the then still relatively unknown Yves Bonnefoy, he remarks that they were written by someone whose very name inspires trust. It may have been this little touch of humor—standing out brightly amidst the otherwise unrelievedly weighty mass of Sartre’s prose—that caused the footnote to remain in my memory. Or perhaps it was Bonnefoy’s words themselves, which refused, as he would continue to do, to separate ‘‘the imaginary’’ from the social, and from the human communion that ‘‘the social’’ implies. ‘‘Le recours a` l’imaginaire,’’ wrote Bonnefoy, ‘‘qui est critique de l’e´tat social, qui est protestation, et pre´cipitation de l’histoire, risque-t-il de couper les ponts qui nous relient en meˆme temps qu’a` la re´alite´, aux autres hommes? Je sais qu’il ne peut eˆtre question de liberte´ pour l’homme seul.’’ Who was this writer, I recall asking myself, who wrote with such exemplary clarity, and whom Sartre had spared from his general condemnation of Surrealism? Indeed, whose sincerity had impelled even the implacable Sartre to call his words ‘‘un aveu touchant.’’ Yves Bonnefoy’s declaration, in any case, expresses a sentiment that was felt everywhere in those years of the mid-1950s, when the horrifying memories of World War II were still exercising their debilitating effects. The need for human communion and human fraternity was a deeply felt longing after the monstrosities of the conflict and the revelations of the Holocaust (not to mention the severely repressed French sense of guilt over Vichy, which continues to play itself out even now). It was easy to understand why Sartre, who affirmed the supreme importance of individual moral commitment to ‘‘l’e´tat social,’’ should have been so favorably impressed by the words of Yves Bonnefoy. But Sartre was already beginning to interpret such commitment in exclusively social-political terms; and the larger—what one

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could call the moral-metaphysical—dimension of his quest for human communion very soon became swallowed up by the dialectics of the class struggle. Yves Bonnefoy too wished to break out of the solitude of ‘‘l’homme seul,’’ and like Sartre he also rejected the deceptive delights of ‘‘l’imaginaire’’ as a permanent haven for the human spirit; but he took quite another path in returning to ‘‘la re´alite´.’’ A novel that had emerged from these war years, and that I continue to profoundly admire, was Andre´ Malraux’s Les Noyers de l’Altenburg (1948). I mention it here because this too-little read work seems to me profoundly related in its thematics to what can be found in Bonnefoy’s poetry. Whether he would accept this comparison himself I cannot say; but I venture to make it all the same so as to characterize the atmosphere of these post-war years. Those who have read the novel will recall the great scene of a truly human communion above or below the level of party, politics or nation—the scene in which, during the horrors of a gas attack on the Eastern Front in World War I, the German soldiers rush to aid the gasping, suffocating, and dying Russians rather than pressing home the advantage afforded them by this new weapon of destruction. Even more, there is the marvelous scene at the end of the book in which—after having barely escaped death in a tank trap, and spending the night in the darkness of the pit—the narrator walks into a neighboring French village just as dawn is beginning to break. This passage is so poignant and moving—at least to me—that it must be quoted at some length. ‘‘Le monde aurait pu eˆtre simple comme le ciel et la mer,’’ writes the narrator. ‘‘Et de regarder ses formes qui ne sont, devant moi, que celles d’un village abandonne´, condamne´ . . . Je me sens devant un don inexplicable—une apparition. Tout cela aurait pu ne pas eˆtre, ne pas eˆtre ainsi.’’ But the greatest gift of all is the smile of an old peasant woman ‘‘accorde´e au cosmos comme une pierre’’ (are such words not the characteristic accent of the author of Pierre e´crite?). ‘‘Elle sourit pourtant, d’un lent sourire retardataire, re´fle´chi: . . . Par-dela` les tourelles des chars brillants de rose´e comme les buissons qui les camouflent, elle semble regarder au loin la mort avec indulgence et meˆme—o clignement myste´rieux, ombre aigue du coin des paupie`res— avec ironie . . . Qu’avec un sourire obscur reparaisse le myste`re de l’homme, et la re´surrection de la terre n’est plus que de´cor fre´missant.’’ There are nuances of feeling here that, for other purposes, it would be necessary to distinguish. Nature is never for Bonnefoy only ‘‘un de´cor fremissant’’ affirming ‘‘le myste`re de l’homme.’’ But here I wish to stress rather the similarity of sensibility—the heightened awareness of temporality and

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death that is also Bonnefoy’s point of departure, especially in Du mouvement et de l’immobilite´ de Douve (1953), with its epigraph from Hegel declaring that the life of the spirit consists in the ability of man to sustain the trial of death. In Bonnefoy too we find the discovery of life in its simplest and most humble forms as miraculous (and hence touched with the gleam of transcendence, what the poet calls ‘‘pre´sence’’), and the dignity and gravity imparted to the most ordinary people and objects by this archetypal experience of finitude and rebirth. Elsewhere, before meeting Bonnefoy or becoming acquainted with his work, I had written that no writer in modern literature could compete with the Malraux who wrote the scenes already cited from Les Noyers in expressing what Wordsworth called ‘‘the still, sad music of humanity.’’ I should amend this now by saying that Yves Bonnefoy not only competes with, but even surpasses, Malraux in sounding this most authentic and moving of Wordsworthian timbres. I make these observations not primarily for literary reasons but to return, by a long way round, to my point of departure. For it was because my own literary sensibility and interests were determined by and attuned to this same music that I immediately found Yves Bonnefoy to be so sympathetic an interlocutor, and that we seemed to understand each other with so little difficulty. And as our acquaintance ripened over the years, I have often been struck by the extent to which my own appreciation of his work, and the exemplary value it took on for me, harmonized so completely with my own interests. These were to lead me in a direction far removed from the contemporary French literary scene; but far from diverging with Yves Bonnefoy, they coincided completely with the deepest impulses of his own writings. More and more as time passed I was led to concern myself with Dostoevsky, partly, it might be mentioned, because his work exercised such a considerable influence on the French Existentialists. But it should be obvious that I had become intensely fascinated with a writer who embodied, for his own time and in his own terms, the same conflict that so many interpreters have rightly seen to be the obsessive and dominating theme of Yves Bonnefoy. By this I mean the conflict between reason and a longing for faith, between hope and despair, life and death, light and darkness, between ‘‘le vrai lieu’’ and ‘‘le de´sert.’’ No poet of our time has expressed this conflict in purer and more moving accents; and it is because Bonnefoy refuses like Dostoevsky to surrender either pole of the terrible antinomy—since he feels both with equal depth and strength—that his work radiates with such poignancy and occasionally as well with moments of beatitude.

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II It is because of my own involvement with Russian literature and Russian culture that I should now like to dwell for a bit on what might be called Bonnefoy’s ‘‘Russian connection.’’ I am well aware that this may be considered a flagrant example of the inability of a commentator to restrain his personal interests from intruding on a context to which they are entirely inappropriate; but I am emboldened to believe that this is not the case. There is, in the first place, the recollection of my many conversations over the years with Yves Bonnefoy about Dostoevsky, whose works he knows perfectly and whom he called, in a lecture of 1979, the greatest of novelists. But there are also good historical grounds for asserting that, besides Dostoevsky, other aspects of early twentieth-century Russian culture provided an essential element in Bonnefoy’s formation. To begin with, let me mention the name of Boris de Schloezer, to whom he devoted a splendid commemorative essay now contained in his Entretiens sur la poe´sie (1990). Boris de Schloezer, as will be recalled, played a significant role in French cultural and particularly musical life as critic en titre for the Nouvelle revue franc¸aise until his death in 1969. He was a Russian e´migre´ of the great generation formed in the turn-of-the-century culture of Russia’s Silver Age—the generation of Andrei Bely, Alexander Blok, Boris Pasternak, Sergei Diaghilev— and, on a more private level, the brother-in-law of the important composer Alexander Scriabin. He was the author as well of a notable book on Bach, a life of Nikolai Gogol, and a translator of many of the classics of Russian literature including Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. Among his translations were several works of the e´migre´ Russian philosopher Lev Chestov, and Yves Bonnefoy, in the article already mentioned, has stressed how important one of these, Le Pouvoir des clefs, was in his own literary and spiritual development. It was in 1945 that he chanced on this work in ‘‘une librarie d’occasions,’’ and came across the verses from Lermontov’s poem The Demon that left their indelible imprint on his own sensibility. ‘‘Le de´mon,’’ he writes, ‘‘parle du haut de ce que Boris de Schloezer eut nomme´ son ‘moi mythique,’ mais il vient aussi d’entrevoir la lueur qui baigne, la, pre`s de lui, la cre´ature mortelle. Et le voici qui de´clare a` celle qu’il croit aimer, dans cette langue admirablement simple de la traduction de Boris’’ De`s l’instant ou je t’ai vue J’ai ressenti soudain une haine secre`te Pour mon immortalite´ et ma puissance.

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66 France J’ai envie´ alors, involontairement, La joie imparfaite de la terre. J’ai souffert de ne pas vivre comme toi Et j’ai eu peur de vivre loin de toi.

The importance of these lines for Bonnefoy at a crucial moment of his own development, this yearning for ‘‘la joie imparfaite de la terre’’ that became so important for his own poetry, is stressed by the poet himself. ‘‘Ce sont la des mots,’’ he writes, ‘‘et une pense´e, dont la beaute´ est frappante . . . et ils me furent d’un grand secours dans la cristallisation de quelques intuitions ou valeurs qui tendait alors a` se faire en moi.’’ These words are contained in Bonnefoy’s deeply pondered obituary essay, which dwells on the antithesis between de Schloezer’s theory of the ‘‘moi mythique’’ of the artist, whose personal emotions and feelings are entirely absorbed by the work, and yet the critic’s acute responsiveness to what these works contain of passion and suffering. He was caught between ‘‘une pense´e de l’incarnation et celle de la re´demption par la forme,’’ which, Bonnefoy speculates, might be resolved if the essence of life itself were to be imaginatively conceived as ‘‘une oeuvre encore inconnue de la musique.’’ This is not the only tribute that Bonnefoy paid to his departed friend, for in Dans le leurre du seuil (1975) there is an austerely beautiful poem, ‘‘Le Fleuve,’’ in which such an a hitherto unknown and unearthly music sounds for him alone: Et Boris de Schloezer, quand il est mort Entendant sur l’appontement une musique Dont ses proches ne savaient rien (e´tait-elle, de´ja`, La fluˆte de la de´livrance re´ve´le´e Ou un ultime bien de la terre perdue, ‘‘Oeuvre’’ transfigure´e?)—derrie`re soi N’a laisse´ que ces eaux bruˆle´es d’e´nigme.

The philosophy of Chestov was important for Bonnefoy in other ways as well, as we shall see in a moment, but it is worth stressing that he was one of the most important commentators on Dostoevsky in the early twentieth century. His book La Philosophie de la trage´die, Dostoevsky et Nietzsche (1903) remains one of the classics of Dostoevsky criticism, no matter what objections may be raised to its frequently idiosyncratic interpretations. Bonnefoy was instrumental in helping to republish the translations of Chestov’s major works in French (indeed, prefacing the volume entitled Athe`nes et Je´rusalem

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with a scintillating introduction in 1992) and cites a passage from his Dostoevsky book in his text. Nor should one forget another Russian friend, the less well-known Wladimir Weidle´, a literary and art critic and cultural historian of great erudition, insight and subtlety. Most of his works are devoted to Russian culture, but one book, his neglected masterpiece Les Abeilles d’Ariste´e (1936), is a brilliant diagnosis of the modern cultural situation ranging over five literatures and all the arts. Any reader of Bonnefoy who leafs through its pages will be struck by a similar insistence that art, when it is genuine and authentic, always springs from and grapples with mankind’s religious and metaphysical longings and aspirations. Students of Bonnefoy would be well advised to explore this ‘‘Russian connection’’ and to weigh its importance in fostering the values that he expresses and espouses. This Russian component of Bonnefoy’s formation played a crucial role, as he has so often acknowledged, in reinforcing and strengthening his reaction against the seductions of aestheticism, so strong in the late-nineteenth-century French tradition—an aestheticism that regards artistic creation as a self-enclosed world containing its own autonomous values, and whose greatest exemplar may be considered Mallarme´. Bonnefoy, however, felt more sympathy with the metaphysical aspirations of Rimbaud and the religious velleities of Baudelaire, whose art served a profound human function and satisfied a deep spiritual longing rather than becoming a refuge from the risks and hazards of human life. In his essay, ‘‘Sur la fonction du poe`me’’ (Le Nuage rouge, 1977), he describes his early reading in romantic and classic poetry as a literary neophyte, and then his discovery of Surrealism. ‘‘Elle s’ouvrait a` la primaute´ du de´sir. Et elle re´ve´lait ainsi quelles semblables fatalite´s de cloˆture avaient aussi subjugue´, bien que moins ouvertement, d’autres oeuvres.’’ Surrealism thus seemed to open the road leading from the impasse of egoistic self-enclosure to the broad highway of human involvement; but Bonnefoy very early also found the Surrealist solution to be unsatisfactory, and here ‘‘the Russian connection’’ played a decisive role. ‘‘En fait,’’ he writes, ‘‘j’e´tais aussi, dans ces anne´es-la, lecteur de Kierkegaard, de Chestov, qui m’enseignaient la valeur, fondatrice, du rapport qui oriente le moi vers les autres eˆtres, dans l’ouvert, le risque´ du temps ve´cu, ou` le destin se de´cide.’’ The same point is made, with the emphasis placed explicitly on Chestov, in the important interview that Bonnefoy gave to John E. Jackson in 1967 (now reprinted in Entretiens sur la poe´sie, 1981). One of the important events of Bonnefoy’s career was his break with Surrealism in 1947, dramatized by his refusal to sign the manifesto of the group, Rupture inaugurale; it was after

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this dereliction that Andre´ Breton refused to give him a departing handshake. When urged by Jackson to explain the influences that impelled him to such a negation, even while recognizing, as he does, the liberating merits of the movement and the fecundating enrichment it imparted to French culture, Bonnefoy has no hesitation in his reply. ‘‘Je puis sans trop me tromper vous apporter cette pre´cision qui fut pour moi de´cisive, dans cette e´poque de formation, la rencontre peu pre´visible sans doute pour un jeune surre´aliste mais que le hasard me valut tre`s toˆt, d’un the´ologien, si le mot a du sens pour lui, le Russe Le´on Chestov.’’ ‘‘Ce qu’enseigne Chestov,’’ Bonnefoy continues, c’est que ce que nous aimons est de droit ce qui a l’eˆtre, aux sens de ce mot le plus fort, le plus ‘‘objectif.’’ Il s’ensuit que Job a raison d’exiger que ses enfants et ses biens, que Dieu lui a pris, lui soient rendus par cette meˆme puissance libre qui est en dec¸a` de toutes les causes, de meˆme que nous aurions raison de vouloir, d’oser penser et vouloir, que Socrate que nous aimions, et qui est mort de fac¸on injuste, ne soit pas mort, recommence vierge a` nouveau du jugement et de la cigue¨.

From which it follows ‘‘que cette repre´sentation que les philosophes nomment l’essence, et que la science dirait la causalite´, la ne´cessite´, ne sont, Chestov le re´pe`te sans fin, que la consolation apre`s coup, et menteuse autant que catastrophique, qu’invente dans le malheur notre e´ternel stoı¨cisme.’’ Science and the laws of nature, supposedly the repository of eternal truth, are thus nothing but a refuge against despair. Bonnefoy, as we have seen, also mentions Kierkegaard in this context; but he always remains closer to Chestov’s religious atheism than to Kierkegaard’s paradoxical and tortured Christianity. In any event, he learned from ‘‘l’obstination de Chestov’’ that ‘‘ce que nous aimons est de droit ce que a l’eˆtre au sens de ce mot le pus fort, le plus ‘objectif.’ ’’ It was not in causality, in necessity and reason that one found ‘‘l’eˆtre,’’ but in the passions and needs of the human heart; and when he discovered, with the aid of Chestov, that ‘‘reason’’ itself was but another expression of those ‘‘needs,’’ Bonnefoy was freed from what he calls the Gnostic temptation—the temptation to see ‘‘the world, the real’’ only as a ‘‘mauvaise pre´sence’’ (as did the Surrealists) from which it was necessary to escape, rather than as ‘‘un vrai lieu’’ in which one could abide. But the search for such ‘‘un vrai lieu’’ is an endless task, as Yves Bonnefoy well knew. For in his enchanting autobiography L’Arrie`re-pays (1972) he describes his own obsession since childhood with the sense that somewhere

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in the back country, away from the beaten paths and off the well-trodden roads, a Great Good Place could be found that is the terrestrial incarnation of such an epiphanic plenitude of being. But each time that he seems to find it, whether in exotic climes or in great works of art and architecture, he is overcome by the feeling of temporality that dooms it to extinction. The influence of Chestov on Yves Bonnefoy has thus been crucial, suffusing his work with a moral dimension, a reaching out toward the other, that is the only hope of overcoming the tragedy of finitude and mortality. And behind Chestov, of course, stands Dostoevsky—the Dostoevsky who created Ivan Karamazov’s passionate protest against the injustices of God’s world, and whose clamor for retribution in the here and now refuses to be stilled by some future apocalyptic triumph of world harmony. (Bonnefoy sees this protest as the source of Chestov’s apparently senseless demand that God, in his illimitable power, reverse the course of history for Job and Socrates.) It is also Dostoevsky who imagined the frenzied refusal of the underground man to submit to the laws of nature, and to bow to the sublimity of the ultimate truth that two and two make four. It is Dostoevsky as well who sends the death-haunted Prince Myshkin off on his search for the true essence of Russia, and in doing so portrayed his own yearning for that eternally elusive arrie`re-pays that has never ceased to glimmer before the imagination of Yves Bonnefoy as well. Bonnefoy’s opposition to Mallarme´’s poetry of Platonic essences—a poetic transposition of the supreme ambition of Reason to transform the world of appearances, by means of language, into the realm of ‘‘l’Intelligible’’—was certainly nourished by this current of Dostoevskian irrationalism. The profoundly moral personalism of the Russian literary tradition, as it came to him from such sources, its sympathy for the suffering individual of flesh and blood, certainly played its part in Bonnefoy’s dislike of the troubling flirtations of his Surrealist friends with the occult and the demonic.

III This is one of the perspectives in which I wish to place Yves Bonnefoy. Another is provided by the fact that, besides his poetry and criticism, he has also devoted a good deal of creative energy to translating from the English, for example, the poetry of Yeats and particularly the plays of Shakespeare. There is no question that his relation to English poetry is many-sided and intricate; and some hint of its importance may be gathered from the essay

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on ‘‘L’Acte et le lieu de la poe´sie’’ (1958), in which he remarks that ‘‘T. S. Eliot dans The Waste Land a formule´ le vrai mythe de la culture moderne.’’ The use of Grail imagery by both poets forms a link that is decidedly worth exploring further, although as John E. Jackson has pointed out, in his excellent comparative study of Eliot, Celan, and Bonnefoy, La Question de Moi (1978), Eliot relies on second-hand sources taken from Jessie Weston and Frazer whereas Bonnefoy has translated the thirteenth-century text himself. Yves Bonnefoy has also thought long and hard about the qualities of the two languages and has written about them perceptively in his ‘‘La Poe´sie franc¸aise et le principe d’identite´’’ (1967). The views expressed there are an important contribution to the comparative history of poetry in an international linguistic perspective; but this is not my present subject. What I wish to do, rather, is to call attention once again to the ‘‘Wordsworthian’’ quality of Bonnefoy’s poetic utterances and to develop some observations along this line. I do not know if anyone else has been struck so forcibly by the resemblance between Bonnefoy and a certain special Wordsworthian tonality. The spare, stark quality of Bonnefoy’s language, the parabolic simplicity of the scenes he evokes, are closer than any I can think of in French poetry to the spirit of the best Wordsworth. The following untitled poem from Du mouvement et de l’immobilite´ de Douve (1953) with its reverent responsiveness to the spectacle of both physical and spiritual destitution, is an excellent example: Qu’une place soit faite a` celui qui approche, Personnage ayant froid et prive´ de maison. Personnage tente´ par le bruit d’une lampe, Par le seuil e´claire´ d’une seule maison. Et s’il reste recru d’angoisse et de fatigue, Qu’on redise pour lui les mots de gue´rison. Que faut-il a` ce coeur qui n’e´tait que silence, Sinon des mots qui soient le signe et l’oraison, Et comme un peu de feu soudain dans la nuit, Et la table entrevue d’une pauvre maison.

This, I would submit, is as close as one can come to Wordsworth in French (it could also be called Rembrandtian from another point of view).

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One cannot help wondering to what extent this is an accidental convergence, or a stylistic and thematic affinity based on a familiarity with the English poet’s work. That Bonnefoy admired Wordsworth is quite clear, and in his essay on Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1983) lists him with Ho¨lderlin among the few poets of the early nineteenth century who were ‘‘plus ouvert a` des aspects simples de la realite´ naturelle.’’ Moreover, Bonnefoy’s own elucidation of the essential creative intuition from which his poetry springs bears an uncanny resemblance to Wordsworth’s description of those ‘‘spots of time’’ that furnished him, Wordsworth, with poetic inspiration. In his classic study of the English and German Romantics, Natural Supernaturalism (a title that might be used to characterize Bonnefoy’s work as well), M. H. Abrams has described such ‘‘spots of time’’ as ‘‘the instances in which, while Wordsworth’s eye is fixed on the object without being mastered by it, the object itself suddenly becomes charged with revelation.’’ Such moments ‘‘typically occur when the poet, solitary, is confronted by a single thing; his imagination is triggered by an assertive Gestalt whose attendant circumstances fall back to serve, as Wordsworth says, ‘as solemn background, or relief/To single forms and objects.’ ’’ Such objects then stand out with the same starkness, the same mysterious and infinitely expansive suggestiveness that we also feel in Bonnefoy’s famous salamander frozen with fear against the garden wall. ‘‘La salamandre surprise s’immobilise/Et feint la mort/Tel est le premier pas de la conscience dans les pierres.’’ For Wordsworth, it is ‘‘The single sheep, and the blasted tree/And the bleak music from the old stone wall.’’ Could this not have been written by Bonnefoy as well? And is there not a remarkable similarity between Wordsworth’s ‘‘spots of time’’ visions, which are the nuclear core of his poetry, and Bonnefoy’s description of the inner metamorphosis that occurs at the moment of his poetic apprehensions? For at such moments, he tells us, he perceives ‘‘everything in the continuity and the plenitude of a place, and in the transparence of unity.’’ And the metamorphosis occurs when, ‘‘by an act always instantaneous, this reality that was dissociating and externalizing itself comes together and this time in a superabundance by which I am captured and rescued. It is as if I had accepted, lived that salamander, and henceforth, far from having to be explicated by other aspects of reality, it is this itself, present here as the softly beating heart of the earth, which had become the origin of that which is’’ (Un reˆve fait a` Mantoue, 1967). Like Wordsworth, Yves Bonnefoy too reaches that blessed condition in which

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72 France we are asleep In body, and become a living soul, While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things.

There is much more that could be said about the relation between Bonnefoy and Wordsworth, who both draw their most affecting imagery from rural life (‘‘because,’’ as Wordsworth said in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, ‘‘in that condition the passions are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’’), and who both wish to strip language of all rhetorical excess so that it may become the proper vehicle of expression for these ‘‘beautiful and permanent forms’’ and the revelations they provide. But this is as far as I care to go at present along these lines.

IV I should like to turn now instead to explaining what the work of Yves Bonnefoy has meant to me as a contemporary, a participant in the culture that we all have shared in the past half-century. His literary and art criticism is usually discussed largely in the context of, and as a commentary on, his poetry; and no doubt this is as it should be. But the criticism has an independent value and validity, particularly in the present intellectual climate that should not be overlooked. At a time when it has become fashionable to speak of the creative act as the ritual murder of the Father by the Son, and when criticism all too often turns into a literal murder of the artist by the critic, what a relief it is to read Bonnefoy’s serene meditations on art and literature as part of man’s eternal metaphysical quest for the ultimate meaning of human life! It is a criticism written out of a fine generosity of spirit, never supercilious or destructive, and always alert for those tiny signs of spiritual disquietude that will save the blackest despair from total nihilism. Always he searches for, and is able to find, that hint of ‘‘pre´sence’’ that he detects so movingly, for example, in the paintings of Giorgio Morandi, even though that artist apparently gives us a nature that is silent or dead. ‘‘There at the horizon, behind some ultimate and hovering form that stands out, [is] a suddenly more intense region of the luminosity of the sky’’ (Le Nuage rouge, 112). And though Yves Bonnefoy is anything but a polemicist, his quiet, steadfast refusal to accept the more recent critical orthodoxies, which would make language entirely non-referential and thus totally isolate literature from any true human significance, serves as a precious support for those

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like myself who feel this to be an inadmissible impoverishment of the genuine function of art. It is not my intention here to discuss his criticism in detail, but it should at least be pointed out that he is creating a corpus worthy to take its place beside Baudelaire’s Curiosite´s esthe´tiques, Mallarme´’s Divagations, and Vale´ry’s Varie´te´s. Such criticism is not primarily that of scholars and teachers but of creators who are actively engaged in the literary process, and who, if they concern themselves with the past at all, do so in their own terms and in relation to their own problems. (Although Bonnefoy’s scholarship has never been faulted, and he taught for years to packed amphitheatres in the Colle`ge de France.) His essays on past writers and artists are always stimulating and insightful, but I should like to limit myself to one that stresses the importance and the value of poetry in expressing and maintaining that sense of human communion, and its relation to an Absolute informing and transforming human life, that he has never ceased to affirm. The position and the importance of poetry in our own day has fallen on difficult times, and one has only to leaf through the Entretiens sur la poe´sie (1972–1990) to find a despairing diagnosis of its loss in importance and prestige. For many centuries, poetry had been created in a world in which ‘‘les mots, les mots de tous les jours s’articulaient a` la Pre´sence divine, dans la grande chaıˆne de l’Eˆtre, par la voie des choses du monde charge´es d’un sens symbolique, relie´es par le re´seau des correspondances.’’ Poetry could thus be written ‘‘dans la langue vernaculaire,’’ and the poet ‘‘e´tait voue´ a` ressentir et penser avec les meˆmes images que ceux qui n’e´crivaient pas.’’ But then came Kepler, ‘‘et il n’est plus de la science que de la matie`re, dont les lois sont des relations nume´riques et non plus de´sormais ces correspondances ou` trouvaient place nague`re toutes les cre´atures du monde.’’ The task of the modern poet, as Yves Bonnefoy conceives it, is thus the infinitely more difficult one of restoring if possible, or at least of keeping alive, a sense of this relation of his words—now individual and personal, no longer supported by a generally accepted network of correspondences—to the meaning of life as a whole. Nor is he averse to having this task described as ‘‘votre pre´occupation du sacre´,’’ (the words of John E. Jackson in the interview already mentioned), and which ‘‘vous ne craigniez pas d’appeler quelquefois le religieux.’’ Bonnefoy agrees, but then explains that his fascination with ‘‘le religieux’’ is rooted in his childhood obsession with the arrie`re-pays, and thus not with any doctrine or dogma that could be given a specific religious content in the usual sense.

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Nonetheless, as we see, Bonnefoy refuses to surrender the function of poetry to continue to illuminate the fundamental issues of human life; and this places him squarely in opposition to some of the doctrines that have come to dominate the contemporary critical scene. Although never exhibiting any taste for polemical controversy (quite the contrary!) he felt it incumbent, on assuming the Chaire d’E´tudes Compare´es de la Fonction Poe´tique at the Colle`ge de France in 1981, to explain precisely where he stood on this question of ‘‘la fonction poe´tique’’ (La Pre´sence et l’image, reprinted in Entretiens sur la poe´sie); and he does so in a manner that throws a good deal of light on the values that lie at the root of his own creations. In this declaration of his own credo, he defines his objections to those philosophical theories that dissolve the work of literature itself, as well as the consciousness of its creator, ‘‘dans les ruines du cogito.’’ What remains are thus only ‘‘les milles niveaux de nue´es rapides de ce langage dont nous ne sommes, pour notre jour fugitif, qu’un froissement le´ger des structures.’’ And he knows perfectly well that his own insistence on asserting the reality, even if elusive and transitory, of those blessed moments of ‘‘pre´sence’’ runs smack against the fierce campaign waged by Jacques Derrida to uncover and expunge all the lingering traces of any such ‘‘me´taphysique de pre´sence’’ anywhere and everywhere it can be detected, whether in literature or philosophy. Despite his disagreement with such ideas, it is typical of the man that Yves Bonnefoy does not defend his own position simply by rejecting what he contests. For who, after all, if not the poets were aware of ce que la critique a souligne´, re´cemment, du roˆle du signifiant dans l’e´criture, et de la place de l’inconscient dans les de´cisions des poe`tes . . . et au seuil de notre modernite´, qui commenc¸a comme de´sagre´gation de l’ide´e absolue du moi qu’il y avait chez les Romantiques, ils en avaient de´ja` fait leur pre´occupation principale. L’autonomie du signifiant, Rimbaud ne l’ignorait pas quand il e´crivait le sonnet Voyelles, ni Mallarme´ quand il agenc¸a le Sonnet en yx.

Indeed, so far as the most powerful thrust of the deconstructive attack on literature is the denunciation of its claims to any sort of truth-value, Bonnefoy even radicalizes its underlying animus. For he argues that recent criticism, remaining on the level of language and the signifier, has not gone far enough and really fails to expose the true source of illusion in literary creation.

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As a poet, he knows that this unquenchable source, ‘‘un de´sir . . . vieux comme l’enfance,’’ is the Gnostic temptation to create a world alternative to our own, and to revel in it according to the longings of the heart. Literature destroys the world though language in order to fashion a self-enclosed universe that claims its own autonomous reality, its personal idiolect, which, by simply excluding what it finds incongruous, creates a deceptive semblance of the Golden Age. Bonnefoy vigorously denounces what he calls the false cult of the Image, which he defines as ‘‘cette impression de re´alite´ enfin pleinement incarne´e qui nous vient, paradoxalement, de mots de´tourne´s de l’incarnation.’’ ‘‘L’Image est certainement le mensonge,’’ he writes, ‘‘aussi since`re soit l’imagier’’; and he agrees that ‘‘il n’e´tait que temps que la critique textuelle vint analyser et meˆme de´faire les perspectives toujours tronque´es qui s’e´chafaudent dans la parole.’’ More deeply, he is hostile to all attempts, whether through the arts or in philosophy, to construct an order presumably immune to the existential fragilities of the human condition. So far as recent thought has worked to destroy all such attempts, Yves Bonnefoy welcomes its salutary labors, which coincide with so many of his own idea-feelings (to use a Dostoevskian expression). But, in the midst of the ruins of all past certainties, life must still continue; and it is out of this realization that he begins to assert his own values, tentatively but firmly, against the moral-social consequences of such uncontrolled sapping of the foundations. While the stability of the Ego may be placed in doubt, ‘‘il n’en reste pas moins que nous disons Je quand nous parlons, dans l’urgence des jours, au sein d’une condition et d’un lieu qui du coup demeurent, quels qu’en soient les faux-semblants ou le manque d’eˆtre, une re´alite´ et un absolu.’’ Moreover, ‘‘si la de´construction de l’antique vise´e ontologique peut apparaıˆtre, a` un certain plan, un impe´ratif de la connaissance, voici en tout cas que son affaiblissement dans des situations concre`tes s’accompagne d’un risque de de´composition de mort pour la socie´te´ toute entie`re.’’ Yves Bonnefoy thus reaffirms the moral and social needs of the human community against such epistemological challenges, and he sees the task of poetry precisely as the continual rememoration of such needs, the refusal to allow them to be forgotten. ‘‘Si l’eˆtre n’est rien d’autre que la volonte´ qu’il y ait de l’eˆtre, la poe´sie n’est rien elle-meˆme, dans notre alie´nation, le langage, que cette volonte´ acce´dant a` soi—ou tout au moins, dans les temps obscurs, gardant de soi la me´moire.’’ The term ‘‘l’eˆtre’’ here is as much moral-social as ontological, as we can see from what follows. It designates the values that knit a community together just as ‘‘pre´sence’’ suddenly unites the accidental dispersal of

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nature; and Bonnefoy illustrates its significance by imagining a handful of people, the survivors of a disaster, painfully struggling to re-establish their lives. In so doing, they make the decision, without even thinking about it, ‘‘qu’il y a de l’eˆtre; ces eˆtres-la ne pouvant douter, sous le rocher qui s’e´croule, que le rapport a` soi, meˆme si rien ne le fonde, est une origine, et qui se suffit.’’ They learn (or relearn): que ce qui est, c’est ce qui re´pond a` nos besoins simples, ce qui se preˆte a` notre projet, ce qui permet des e´changes, et doit d’abord l’avoir fait pour trouver sa place dans le langage . . . les instruments du travail, demain peuteˆtre les e´le´ments d’une feˆte—on dira alors le pain et le vin . . . Mots d’un sacre´, mots qui nous accueillent sur une terre!

It is such words, Yves Bonnefoy believes, that it is the task of poetry to pronounce and continually to revivify. ‘‘Quelles que soient les de´rives du signe, les e´vidences du rien, dire Je demeure pour eux la re´alite´ comme telle et une tache pre´cise, celle que recentre les mots, franchies les bornes du reˆve, sur la relation a` autrui, qui est l’origine de l’eˆtre.’’ So while the poet, as Yves Bonnefoy conceives him, will go hand in hand with the semiologists and the deconstructive philosophers for a good stretch of the road, he parts company with them when it comes to an ultimate vision of what is basic and crucial for human existence. It is not, as we see, on the level of the concept as such that Yves Bonnefoy defends his point of view, and I believe he is profoundly right in having refused to do so. Finally, it is out of one’s deepest sense of the foundations of human life that one chooses for or against any metaphysics. Yves Bonnefoy was a friend and devoted admirer of the great Greek poet George Seferis, and some words he left about him in a gravely reverent portrait have always seemed to me to characterize the portraitist as well. Seferis served as Greek Ambassador to Great Britain, and it was in London that Bonnefoy called on him in a moment of political tension when he was greatly occupied by his official duties. Nonetheless, his visitor found Seferis si gravement tendu, si obstine´ment attache´ a` une pense´e unique en de´pit des soucis du jour qui se marquait encore sur son visage, c’e´tait pour moi en effet—je le dis sans de´sir de magnifier, mais pour de´finir une aˆme, par le jeu des analogies qui nous unissent aux choses—une exigence si pure, un son si juste dans le discord d’aujourd’hui, qu’il fallait bien que l’astre de l’eˆtre, tout enfoui qu’il put eˆtre au-dessous de nos horizons, n’eut pas cesse´ d’exister. Un grand poe`te est un homme suffisant.

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No better description, in my view, can be given of the impression left after reading Bonnefoy himself. I should like to end these notes in homage to Yves Bonnefoy with three quotations that I jotted down while preparing to write, and which, alas, I have been unable to integrate into my text. But since these are only notes, and the texts are so central to my comprehension of Bonnefoy, let me just set them down here pell-mell. One comes from Dostoevsky’s prison memoir, House of the Dead: ‘‘When he has lost all hope, all object in life, man often becomes a monster in his misery.’’ The second is from Yves Bonnefoy, and probably struck me because I instantly recalled the first on coming across it: ‘‘I would reunite, I would almost identify, poetry and hope’’ (from ‘‘L’acte et le lieu de poe´sie,’’ 1958). The third is from the greatest contemporary American philosophical poet, Wallace Stevens, whose stylistic dandyism (influenced by early twentieth-century French poetry) is light-years removed from Bonnefoy’s stark austerity. But there are secret thematic echoes all the same, which come out in a passage like the following: If ever the search for a tranquil belief should end, The future might stop emerging out of the past, Out of what is full of us; yet the search And the future emerging out of us seem to be one.

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6.

Racine and Anti-Semitism

Surfing the net on the morning of June 2, I ran across a remark by an editor of the Israeli newspaper Haar’etz, who had been asked which non-Muslim country at the present time exhibited the most anti-Semitism. He had distinguished very carefully between criticism of the present Israeli government and anti-Semitism, insisting that the former by no means involved the latter. But when asked to make a choice, he mentioned France as the European country in which this age-old plague now seemed to have the strongest roots. He did not, however, refer to any specific incidents and brought in the Dreyfus case of the turn of the century in the course of his comments; he also added that France had a very large Muslim population. I was sitting in the south of France when I read these words, in the picturesque city of Collioure, located at the foot of the Pyrenees in Catalonia quite close to the Spanish border. It had been the haunt of Matisse, Derain, and a whole host of other then avant-garde painters including Picasso in the halcyon days before World War I. Collioure, its tumultuous history going back to Roman times, had once been under Spanish rule, and several years before I had noticed a little metal plaque on the walkway that ran along the side of the towering old wall, now part of the fortifications built by Vauban to guard the port. The plaque was placed underneath a sheet of metal perforated with holes and bent in a circular arc. A metal rod rising from the ground through one of the holes gave it the appearance of a sail and a mast. Written in both Catalan and French, the plaque informed the public that, from this very port, the last of the non-converted Jews in this region had set sail in 1493, giving all their names as well as that of the two ships on which they had embarked. This part of France also served as one of the escape routes used by predominantly Jewish refugees to reach Spain during the early years of the Vichy regime, all too eager to collaborate with the anti-Semitic Nazi conquerors. The refugees of course took back trails or pathways through the mountains, carefully reconnoitered in advance. If you drive along the winding coast road to the border at Port Bou, you come across the monument 78

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to Walter Benjamin, who swallowed poison when his party was initially refused entry into Spain. A day later admission was granted, too late to save the desperate writer who had earlier been imprisoned in France as a foreigner. The French relation to the Jews is thus a checkered one, but there is enough evidence in the memoirs to indicate that the officially anti-Semitic policies of Vichy were often countered by the local people. Thoughts such as these came to my mind, but what I recalled even more vividly was an evening at the Come´die Franc¸aise in Paris that, just the week before, my wife and I had attended with some French friends. We had gone to see a performance of Racine’s play Esther, very rarely given and comparatively much less well-known than several others. Indeed, though I am a great admirer of Racine, and over the years had taken every opportunity to see him performed in Paris (sometimes with disastrous results when he got into the hands of avant-garde directors), I had never seen Esther announced and thus had not taken the trouble to read it in preparation for such a performance. Nonetheless, I of course knew the main outlines of the plot, taken from the Book of Esther in the Old Testament that is the origin of the Jewish holiday of Purim. What it depicts is the rescue of the Jewish people from the threat of genocide; and when I saw the advertisement for the play I could not help wondering whether the staging of Esther at this time was merely coincidental. Who can say? The Come´die Francaise, after all, is an institution of the French government. Esther is one of the two Biblical plays that Racine wrote (the other is Athalie) after he had officially retired from composing for the theatre, despite the success of such earlier masterpieces as Phe`dre and Be´renice. Instead, he had assumed the post of official historiographer of the reign of Louis XIV. Various reasons have been offered for this change of direction, but they do not concern us here. Despite his renunciation of the stage, Racine took up his poetic pen again at the request of Madame de Maintenon, the consort (and secret wife) of the King, who had established a school for the daughters of the nobility at St. Cyr and wished to see them educated according to the highest moral precepts. As Racine explains in the preface to the play, it was felt necessary, in addition to educating these young women in their duties and responsibilities, to offer them some diversion through literature. Reading and reciting aloud, he remarks, would also help them to correct the provincial accents of their native regions. But, alas, the majority of the best works in the French language dealt with profane subjects, capable of leaving dangerous impressions on susceptible young sensibilities; and it was thus suggested that

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he employ his talents to create a new play, in which both verse and music would be blended on a subject free from the unhappy effects of most other literature. The result was Esther, subtitled ‘‘A Tragedy Drawn from Holy Scripture,’’ first performed in 1689 before an audience consisting of the King and members of the court. All the roles were taken by the young pensioners of St. Cyr, even though several characters are male, and this convention continued to be honored in the performance of 2003. The cast was composed entirely of women. Also, the music written especially for the play by Jean-Baptiste Moreau, and which Racine takes the trouble to praise in his preface, was performed by a small orchestra at the side of the stage. The group of young Israelite women that Esther gathers around her is specifically instructed to chant a good deal of the text; and their clear, fresh voices, some of a touching lyrical quality— they were singers in training with Radio France—added considerably to the emotional gravity and seriousness of the performance. My friends, who are ardent theatre-goers, had not been very encouraging about the Come´die in answer to earlier inquiries, but they agreed that the evening was one of the finest they had recently spent in the Parisian theatre. The enthusiastic audience exhibited the same opinion, and the entire cast was called back again and again to accept the ringing plaudits of the public. Indeed, the importance of the music in Esther, the liturgical aspects of the staging complete with candles, as well as the piety expressed so movingly in the performance of the chorus, created the atmosphere produced by a religious service rather than by a play. There was an attitude of hushed reverence in the theatre that could be felt by everyone as the life and death of an entire people hung in the balance. In this respect, Racine placed the stamp of his own time and sensibility on the Old Testament narrative he was using. Scholars have long noted that the text of the Book of Esther does not contain a single reference to God, and as a result there was some question for a time about accepting it as part of holy writ; but this argument has long been settled. Racine, though otherwise closely following the original, constantly places the events he is depicting within a religious framework whose ultimate moving force is the God of Israel. The play begins with a scene between Esther, now Queen of Persia, and a long-lost friend Elise who had thought her dead. But Elise had been told by ‘‘a divine prophet’’ that Esther was now reigning in the capital of Persia, Suse, and she can only exclaim at Esther’s stature: ‘‘The proud Assuerus [the Persian king] crowns his captive/And the glorious Persian is at the feet of a Jewess.’’ Esther then explains how she had been chosen by the King after

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he put aside his former wife Vashti for having refused to obey one of his wishes. Esther had been raised by her uncle, ‘‘the wise Mardochee,’’ a descendant like herself of ‘‘the ill-fated blood-line of our first king.’’ He had urged her to appear before Assuerus with the other candidates competing for his favor; and she had done so, ‘‘concealing my race and my country.’’ When the King, choosing her among all the others, put the queenly diadem on her head and distributed gifts throughout the kingdom in celebration, ‘‘what was in secret my shame and my chagrins.’’ For while half the earth was submitted to her power, Jerusalem is now overgrown with weeds, Zion has become the home of ‘‘impure reptiles,’’ the stones of its holy Temple have been dispersed, and ‘‘for the God of Israel the holidays have ceased.’’ Mardochee, who inconspicuously sits outside the walls of the palace, learns of a plot by ‘‘two ungrateful servants’’ to assassinate the King; and this information is purveyed to her royal master by Esther. Meanwhile, as she tells Elise, she has filled the palace with ‘‘daughters of Zion, young and tender flowers blown about by fate,’’ though like herself their origins are unknown. Here she intends to educate them far from any profaning influence; and thus, ‘‘weary of vain honors and searching within myself/I come to humble myself at the feet of the Eternal.’’ Attention then turns to the troupe of young girls, requested by Esther to sing some of the songs in which ‘‘your voices, so often mingling with my tears, dwell on the sad misfortunes of Zion.’’ Esther’s melancholy then changes into horror when Mardochee enters, garbed in the sackcloth and ashes of mourning, to announce the terrible catastrophe that will soon occur. ‘‘The bloody Aman,’’ the King’s closest adviser, has persuaded him that the Jews are ‘‘held in horror by all of nature’’; and the King has signed the extermination order Aman had prepared, to be executed in ten days. When Esther weepingly asks of God whether ‘‘have you of Jacob abandoned what remains?’’ Mardochee sternly says that tears are for children; it is up to her to save her people. Even though she is the Queen, the etiquette of the Persian court makes it a crime, punishable by immediate death, for anyone to enter the King’s presence without having been summoned. Esther thus fears for her life, and is rebuked by Mardochee when those of her people were at stake. ‘‘And who knows, when he [God] led your footsteps to the throne/If he were not guarding you to save his people.’’ He then goes on to praise the allencompassing might of the God of Israel (‘‘just at the sound of his voice the sea recoils, the sky trembles’’). If he allowed for Aman’s ‘‘criminal audacity/ No doubt it was to test the fervor of your faith.’’

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The next scene consists solely of a long monologue by Esther, in fact a prayer, one of the high points of the play. Invoking ‘‘the holy alliance’’ between the God of Israel and his people, about which she had heard from her father ‘‘a thousand times,’’ she laments that ‘‘the beloved nation has violated its faith . . . giving to other gods an adulterous honor.’’ Now they have become slaves, ‘‘but it’s little to be a slave; one wishes to slaughter us all.’’ The conquerors impute their triumphs to their gods, and thus wish to abolish that of Israel and its people from the face of the earth. In two lines that express the Messianic link between Judaism and Christianity, Esther foresees how this disappearance would ‘‘snatch away from mortals the most precious of your gifts/The saint that you promised and whom we await.’’ And now she asks her God to accompany her steps as she confronts the King: ‘‘The storms, the winds, the heavens obey you/Turn your fury at last against our enemies.’’ The second act takes place in the throne room of Assuerus. Hydaspe, Aman’s confidant, notices that he is troubled. Why? Despite being the most powerful man in the realm after the King, he is offended every day as he walks in and out of the palace because ‘‘a vile slave, with an audacious look disdains and defies me.’’ This ‘‘slave’’ turns out to be Mardochee, who even today, and though covered with ashes and in rags, in ‘‘his glance preserved under the ashes the same pride.’’ It is this implicit defiance of Mardochee that has aroused Aman’s wrath, and impelled him to seek revenge, not only against Mardochee but all the Jews as a demonstration of his power. Racine’s psychological finesse is displayed as he analyzes Aman’s motives more at length. Aman is not a Persian but an ‘‘Amalecite’’ [the Amalecites were a tribe who attacked the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt, were defeated, and according to Racine emigrated to Northern Greece], who was himself sold as a boy and brought to the Persian court. He has managed, as he says, ‘‘to rectify the injustice of my destiny’’; but this makes Mardochee’s refusal to submit to his superiority all the more galling. Hydaspe wonders whether Aman does not wish to take revenge on the Jews because they had decimated the Amalecites in the past; but Aman explains that, having risen so high, ‘‘my soul . . . is only weakly touched by the interests of blood.’’ It is the intransigence of Mardochee that he finds unbearable, and which makes all his own grandeur ‘‘insipid’’; the motivation is not one of race or revenge but of a wounded and insecure pride. As a result, he denounced the Jews to Assuerus in terms that are all too familiar, and that Racine undermines as he conveys Aman’s words. ‘‘I invented colors, I gave arms to calumny/I involved his glory; he trembled

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for his life.’’ Aman depicted the Jews as threatening the peace of the Empire, as rich, powerful, and seditious, opposed to its laws, and who ‘‘detested everywhere, detest all other men.’’ Assuerus thus agreed to Aman’s plan for their extermination. But in the next scene he is not concerned with this horrible event, still only in the offing, but with the actual and not imaginary threat against his life from which he had been saved by Mardochee. There is very little suspense or surprise as the action of Esther unfolds, but there is an effective use of an irony contained in the Biblical version and dramatized in the play. The King is troubled because Mardochee has not yet been rewarded for saving his life. Learning that he is Jewish, the King can only marvel that ‘‘a Jew has preserved me from the sword of the Persians!/ But, since he has saved me, whatever he is has no importance.’’ The King then asks Aman how ‘‘a generous King should heap honors on a subject that he values.’’ Aman believes the King is referring to his own services, which the text makes clear involved trampling on the law and exerting the utmost cruelty on the King’s behalf. He thus outlines an honor which in effect would display him, in purple robes and wearing ‘‘a sacred diadem,’’ as practically equal to the King. Assuerus, pleased by an extravagance that indicates the extent of his gratitude, orders Aman to parade Mardochee in the manner he had suggested. Nonetheless, the King still clings to the decision he had taken about the Jews, ‘‘that odious race,’’ under Aman’s influence. Esther’s terror at her unannounced intrusion in the King’s presence causes her to faint; but he immediately expresses his tenderness and concern, with an elegance of feeling and expression for which Racine has no rival. Asking her what she wishes, he assures her that every desire would be granted. All she requests, however, is that the King and Aman come to dine with her the next day. The climax of the play is the dinner, at which the King expresses curiosity about her origins. She finally confesses that ‘‘Esther, my lord, had a Jew for her father/Of your bloody orders you know the rigor.’’ Shocked and horrified, the King yet allows Esther to speak without being interrupted by Aman; and she outlines the sad fate of the Jews since their conquest and dispersal. ‘‘But their God, absolute master of the earth and the heavens,/Is not such as error has displayed to your eyes;/The Eternal is his name; the world is his creation!/He hears the sighs of the humble that one outrages/ Judges all of mortals by an equal law.’’ The reign of Assuerus had given new hope to the Jews because ‘‘everywhere of the new prince one vaunted the clemency’’; but ‘‘produced from the depths of Thrace/A barbarian came into these quarters to spread cruelty.’’

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Esther then evokes the horror of the future moment when ‘‘everywhere the terrible signal given at the same time/With murders would fill the astonished universe.’’ Far from posing a threat to Assuerus, the Jews were his faithful followers and prayed for him to their God, who had aided his conquests. Was it not a Jew who had saved his life—one who was her uncle? But Aman had already built a gallows at the gates of the palace, where Mardochee would be hung despite all the favors accorded him by the grateful King. Aman, realizing that his power was tottering, pleads for mercy to Esther, kneeling at her feet as he insists ‘‘that the interests of the Jews are already sacred to me,’’ and that he ‘‘will repair the injury of my fatal error.’’ But there is no Shakespearian ‘‘quality of mercy’’ in this world (nor is there any in the original), and Esther only replies: ‘‘The Jews expect nothing from an evildoer like you.’’ Aman is hanged, by the infuriated populace he had abused, on the gallows prepared for Mardochee. The play ends with Assuerus replacing Aman with Mardochee as his adviser, and freeing the Jews from the ‘‘deadly yoke’’ to which they are submitted. He urges them ‘‘to rebuild your temple, people your cities,’’ and let their happy children forever remember his name with gratitude. The Jewish holiday of Purim, which has enshrined the memory of this great event in Jewish ritual, has given a centuries-old historical life to Assuerus’s wish. The chorus then intones a series of verses praising the beauty and the courage of Esther, the greatness and goodness of the God who had saved them from disaster, and the hope of the Jewish people, ‘‘traversing the mountains and the seas,’’ to reassemble in Zion again from the ends of the earth. The playbill handed out to the audience of Esther was not so much an ordinary program as a brief, erudite account of the work in the context of its period. It is noted that King Louis XIV was very pleased with all the courtiers who made the pilgrimage to St. Cyr, and that the interest of the spectators was increased by the possibility of readings that could be referred to topical events. Assuerus’s displeasure with ‘‘the haughty Vashti,’’ who refused to obey his command, and her replacement by Esther, was interpreted as a reference to the shift of Louis’s affections from Madame de Montespan to the pious Madame de Maintenon. ‘‘It was impossible,’’ we also read, ‘‘not to make the connection between the persecution of the Jews and the fate of the Protestants after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or again the situation of the Jansenists to whom Racine was quite close.’’ Not mentioned in the playbill, but suggested in the notes to my text, was that Esther’s desire to devote herself entirely to the education of the Jewish girls she had assembled was taken as an allusion to Mme de Maintenon’s commitment to St. Cyr. The attention of

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the French audience is thus directed to their own history, and the fate of the Jews is seen symbolically as referring to events it might have been inappropriate for Racine to have approached more directly. The critic of Le Monde Michel Cournot, who gave Esther a deservedly glowing review (June 6, 2003), notes this tendency of French scholarship to interpret the play in the context of the period without paying any attention to the Jewish theme itself. Louis XIV had renewed an order of the fourteenth century expelling the Jews from France: ninety-three families were told to leave in 1684, and Cournot cites anti-Semitic utterances from both Malherbe and Bossuet (whom Racine invited to two performances of the play). What could have caused Racine to choose such a subject? Could he have received the approval of Mme de Maintenon, who in childhood had received a Calvinist upbringing? Nobody knows, and perhaps such questions cannot be answered; but in fact they have never been seriously posed and investigated. However that may be, no one today, it seems to me, can read Racine’s play without thinking not so much of the Protestants or the Jansenists as of the Shoah. And there is no other great classical work in any other European literature, so far as my knowledge goes, which so directly attacks, repudiates, and scorns the anti-Semitic accusations which always have been, and continue to be, leveled against the Jews. Nor is there any other work that so glorifies and exalts the God of Israel as a God of justice and of love, or looks forward so poignantly to the restoration of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland. The plea for tolerance in Lessing’s Nathan der Weise two centuries later cannot hold a candle to Racine. One has to wait for Daniel Deronda to find so pro-Jewish a major work; but George Eliot’s novel, great as it is, does not pose the issue as starkly as Racine, nor can the novel-form rise to the sublimely expressive heights achieved by his poetry. Racine’s plays are one of the glories of French literature, and of course presumably still form part of the school curriculum. To what extent Esther was taught and read over the years, and how it might have been expounded, I cannot say. Proust’s Albertine reels off citations from the play that she had learned in her convent school, and my wife recalls memorizing the Prayer of Esther like all the six-graders of her time. But one great play, alas, can hardly serve as an impregnable dike holding back the forces of prejudice and religious-political hatred. Still, those who launch accusations of rampant anti-Semitism against French culture, which God knows has contained enough since the French Revolution tore down the gates of the European ghettos (and that also might be kept in mind!), should be asked if they have read Esther.

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7.

Nicola Chiaromonte: The Ethics of Politics

To write about Nicola Chiaromonte is, for me, to say farewell to an old friend; and I cannot resist the temptation to try and make him come alive again, even if only for a moment, for those who may read these words. Luckily, I do not have to depend on my own limited literary powers to conjure up his presence; I can call to my aid the superb gift for evocation of Andre´ Malraux, who immortalized the essence of Nicola Chiaromonte— only the essence—in the character of Scali in L’Espoir (Man’s Hope). A refugee from Fascist Italy, living in Paris in the 1930s, Nicola was a member of Malraux’s squadron in the Spanish Loyalist Air Force, and it is in the pages of Malraux’s great novel that he will always remain a living presence. On Scali’s first appearance in the book, what Malraux stresses is his ordinariness in the physical sense: one is not sure whether he is Spanish or Italian. ‘‘Scali’s face, a bit mulattoish, was indeed common to all of the Western Mediterranean.’’ Nicola did, in truth, have the face of an Italian peasant—as does his great friend, Ignazio Silone—and this means a face possessing all the limpidity, natural gentleness, and simple, instinctive dignity and courtesy that seem to be a quality of the race. His manner also showed some of the slowness, gravity, and deep seriousness of peasant comportment, of men who live with and close to the earth. There was nothing quick and voluble about him, nothing excitable, mobile, agitated. I met him first in Paris, in the early 1950s, and I recall feeling how starkly he stood out among the clever, febrile French intellectuals whom I then also began to meet and very often in the same place (the salon of H. J. and Celia Kaplan, which was so important for Franco-American intellectual relations at that time). Nicola was very much a part of the French scene in those days, the days when French Existentialism was still trying to work out the foundations for a new philosophy of libertarian, democratic socialism; but one felt that he came from a different world, and that he was far less impressed with all the brilliant talk than might appear. Or at least, having fought Stalinism since the early thirties, and having been through the Spanish Civil War, he could 86

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sense where a good deal of this fascinating ratiocination was heading and where, as a matter of fact, it very soon arrived: to the acceptance of Left totalitarianism as the only possibility for the future. One has only to turn back to Malraux’s pages to understand why Nicola should have looked with some skepticism upon the atmosphere that had already produced, for example, Merleau-Ponty’s sophisticated apology for Stalin’s Moscow trials, Humanism and Terror. For what distinguishes Scali in the book is his absolute refusal, even while risking his life for a cause, to surrender his critical capacity and his moral sense. It is he who constantly pierces beneath the theories and rationalizations called forth by the need for action in the immediate situation; it is he who asks the truly hard questions, the questions for which there is never really any answer—but the questions that must be asked if the values in whose name the action is being carried on are to have any true meaning. There is one scene in the book, during an air raid on Madrid, which must be quoted if this quality of Nicola Chiaromonte is to be understood. Scali is speaking with a senior officer, Commandant Garcia, formerly a prominent ethnologist; the horns of autos and ambulances resound in the night as they rush to the fires: —The hour when the Valkyries choose among the dead, said Scali. —How Madrid seems to say to Unamuno, with this blaze: what do I care about your thought, if you can’t think my struggle . . .! Let’s go down. We’ll go to the other office. Garcia had just told Scali about his talk with Dr. Neubourg. Among all the men he had to see that day and night, Scali was the only one for whom that conversation had the same resonance as for himself. —The attack on the revolution by an intellectual who was a revolutionary, Scali said, is always a questioning of revolutionary politics by . . . its ethic, if you like. Seriously, Commandant, that criticism, would you wish it not to be made?

This is the quality in Nicola Chiaromonte that made his responses so slow and hesitant and that contrasted so sharply with the eager, self-assertive, self-confident, and ultimately self-deluding torrent of words by which he was surrounded. And this was the quality, too, that united Nicola’s exterior with the special cast of his mind—the quality of getting down to what Malraux too liked to call ‘‘the fundamental,’’ to the simple, bedrock truth that no amount of verbiage could conceal; the quality we so often associate with those who, like the peasant, have been toughened and tempered by their

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encounter with everything in life that resists facile solution and easy explanation, and who, if they lack knowledge, exhibit something that has been universally recognized as wisdom. What was so unusual and so attractive about Nicola was that he had both knowledge and wisdom, though he valued the second much more than the first. It was this that one felt about him as he listened (he was a very good listener), his head cocked to one side, his eyes slightly closed, his lips pursed and faintly smiling—but never with a smile of superiority or condescension. Rather, it was a smile of sympathy and communion, like the smile of an older person watching young lovers and fully sharing in their joy, but from a vantage point that can see further along the road they are going to travel. No one could really be his enemy; and when his death came unexpectedly, his wife received letters of condolence from the young Italian terrorists of the Potere Operaio whom he had been arguing against and criticizing in his very last writings. Nicola was not a philosopher or a literary critic in the technical sense (though for the latter part of his life he was drama critic for several Italian periodicals, and a volume of his reviews, La Situazione drammatica, was published in 1960). But he was, for all that, a philosopher in the true and original meaning of the word. Quite simply, he was always thinking of the ultimate implications and the ultimate issues of the life he was living and of the world in which he found himself; and since, for most of his life, he was either an active participant in, or a close observer of, the struggles of the European Left in the era of Fascism and Bolshevism, his thoughts naturally turned to examining these phenomena. All of Nicola’s writings are fundamentally concerned with politics, whether or not this is his ostensible topic; and though they are often inspired by the issues of the moment, they constantly transcend this level of ephemerality because of the probing depth Nicola never failed to bring to bear on whatever he discussed. He was that rare species, especially in our time of intellectual specialization, a philosophical commentator on contemporary affairs; and a collection of the essays that he published in English alone (not to mention in Italian and French) would make a substantial and indispensable volume. Also, like his remarkable friend Andrea Caffi—whose bookcluttered hotel room in Paris I remember looking like something out of a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann—Nicola was an indefatigable letter-writer (though not to me, because of my own deficiencies in that regard). Nicola gleaned a fascinating series of comments and aperc¸us on society and history

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from Caffi’s letters,1 and I am sure that the same could be done with his own correspondence. There are a whole group of people with whom he exchanged ideas by letter over a long period of time; and because of the importance that he attributed to personal friendship as the basis for true intellectual community, I have no doubt that he poured much of the best of himself into these epistles. Just a year or two before he died, Nicola collected a number of essays (some unpublished, and some, like the one on Malraux, long-famous), and wove them together into a book called The Paradox of History.2 The subject of the work—which contains chapters on Stendhal, Tolstoy, Roger Martin du Gard, Malraux, and Pasternak—is Nicola’s perennial theme, which, as we have seen, obsessed him even in the midst of the most violent action: the relation of politics and ethics. By the paradox of history, Nicola actually means the paradox of politics in the sense that he understands it. For the politics of the Left in the modern world has been dominated by the view that human history had a meaning, and that, as a result, history could be mastered and controlled and made to serve the purposes of the ethical ideals that the Left was presumably struggling to put into practice. But the paradox of history is that things never turn out as they should; and ever since the modern world began with the French Revolution, these ideals have always been betrayed in the effort to convert them into realities. It is this paradox, and the lessons that might be drawn from it, that Nicola sets out to examine in a group of works where, in each case, the central subject is that of the relation of the individual to history. The book begins at exactly the right place: with Stendhal’s famous depiction, in The Charterhouse of Parma, of Fabrice del Dongo’s confusion and bewilderment at the battle of Waterloo. For this is the point in time when History with a capital H enters into the consciousness of modern man; when it becomes a dominating ideology taking the place formerly held by Providence; and when, as a result, man’s relation to it begins to assume all the ambiguity and paradox that has always plagued his thoughts about the older, religious idea. Why History should have suddenly emerged at this moment has been well explained by Georg Luka´cs in his book on The Historical Novel—a work that deals with the same problem as Nicola’s from a 1. Andrea Caffi, A Critique of Violence (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), trans. by Raymond Rosenthal, Introduction by Nicola Chiaromonte. 2. Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971).

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directly opposite point of view. For Luka´cs was persuaded, at least at the time he wrote his book (1936), that Marxism in its Stalinist incarnation had really solved the problem of History, and that it did not contain any paradoxes or ambiguities at all. However that may be, his explanation of the rise of the new historical self-consciousness is an independent insight: It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale. . . . And the quick succession of these upheavals gives them a qualitatively distinct character, it makes their historical character far more visible than would be the case in isolated, individual instances: the masses no longer have the impression of a ‘‘natural occurrence.’’

Hegel, when he saw Napoleon at Jena, knew immediately that he was looking at the Weltgeist on horseback; and this same confidence in his ability instantly to grasp the inner significance and meaning of historical events was also displayed by Hegel’s greatest pupil, Karl Marx. But poor Fabrice del Dongo, who wanted to become a part of History in the grand style, and to participate in the battle of Waterloo at the side of his hero Napoleon, is fearfully disillusioned by the attempt; and the famous scene in which this disillusion is expressed becomes the source of another tradition. This is the tradition that Nicola studies and defines in his book for the first time— the tradition which, in opposition to that of Hegel and Marx, constantly juxtaposes individual experience against historical abstraction, and, whether ironically or tragically, stresses the eternal disparity between the two. To illustrate the difference between these two traditions in literary terms, Nicola makes an extremely effective comparison between Stendhal and Hugo. In Les Mise´rables, Hugo explains the defeat at Waterloo by declaring that ‘‘Napoleon had been denounced in Infinity, and his fall has been decided.’’ This is a different version of the Weltgeist from that of Hegel or Marx; but the relation of Hugo to History as the new, up-to-date version of Providence is essentially the same. For Stendhal, the Waterloo episode is merely a backdrop to the history of Fabrice; despite his remarkable literary foreshadowing of the problem of the individual’s relation to History, Stendhal was not profoundly concerned with this issue. But the same is not true of War and Peace, with its laborious and painfully elaborate appendices detailing Tolstoy’s intellectual wrestling with the dilemma it poses. It is Isaiah Berlin’s brilliant essay, The Hedgehog

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and The Fox, which has made us all newly aware of the importance for Tolstoy of the question of History; and this essay provided Nicola with the point of departure for his own reflections. No modern writer has presented the tension between the individual and history, between private life and social experience, on such a vast scale as Tolstoy. Sir Isaiah drives this point home with his accustomed eloquence and authority; but Nicola thinks that he does not quite put the issue in the right way. ‘‘He [Tolstoy] was by nature a fox,’’ Berlin writes, ‘‘but believed in being a hedgehog,’’ i.e., he was endowed with an almost superhuman gift for apprehending the unique, the individual, the concrete, but yearned for an overall, general, abstract theory. For Nicola, however, it is inaccurate to believe that Tolstoy wanted to discover some sort of independent variation of the philosophy of History in the old sense. Instead, his real achievement is to have indicated the limits of all historical understanding, and to have pointed to the fact of the ultimate irrationality and unknowability of human life and human action. This position implied the radical rejection of the nineteenth-century idea that since the truth about human life could no longer be found in religion, in nature or in the individual, it had to be looked for in the historical adventure of man, that is, in political, warlike, or in any case violent, enterprises. It has long been a cliche´ of criticism to call Tolstoy Homeric and to refer to the ‘‘epic quality’’ of his work; the comparison is one that he made himself in telling Gorky that War and Peace resembled The Iliad. Ordinarily, critics stress the literary similarities implied in such a comparison; but Nicola, with a little help from Simone Weil, goes a good deal deeper. Simone Weil called The Iliad ‘‘a poem about force,’’ and said that ‘‘force’’ was its real hero. She also spoke about the way in which the Greeks ‘‘geometrized’’ force, meaning by this their sense of how power could be misused, and the inevitable punishment suffered by those who misused it. For the modern, however, the use of power is no longer seen as a difficult and dangerous task involving grave moral responsibilities. Force is now felt, according to Nicola, as ‘‘essentially a physical, quantitative affair, a certain amount of power, the more of which one has at his disposal, the more good one is in a position to do to oneself and society as well.’’ The importance of Tolstoy, and the profound root of his ‘‘epic quality,’’ is that he was the first modern writer to feel again the terrible ambiguity of force as the Greeks had done, and ‘‘to raise the problem of force as a moral, not a physical, fact.’’ And just as Tolstoy recaptured this pre-Christian attitude to force, so too he revived a sense of all the dark, mysterious powers that govern and control human life, and which, whether we call them

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Moira, Ananke, Nemesis, the divine, the sacred—or, more recently, Being—pose an ultimate limit and ultimate challenge to man’s selfconfidence that he is master of his destiny. ‘‘There is nothing stronger in us’’ Nicola writes, ‘‘nothing we know with more certainty than this force about which we know nothing.’’ Tolstoy is really at the center of Nicola’s book because his is the most powerful and overwhelming onslaught ever made against modern man’s belief that he can control and master History. But another blow of this kind—one which strikes even more directly against the modern, political variety of this dogma—was delivered by Martin du Gard’s too-little appreciated Les Thibault. What interests Nicola in this novel, particularly in the final section, Summer, 1914, is the detailed depiction of the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War. These events, which led to the breakdown of the First International, marked the end of socialism as the last, surviving form of faith in the rationality of History. For socialism, in its pre-Bolshevik form, was not only a set of ideas about society or an economic doctrine, but ‘‘confidence in socialism implies confidence in a more general principle.’’ This principle is simply the conviction that there is no discontinuity between ‘‘nature and conscience’’; it assumes ‘‘a pre-established harmony’’ between the two ‘‘whose operations theoretical reason is supposed to reveal and practical reason not to hinder.’’ Defeats and setbacks may occur; there is no puerile optimism that the right will always triumph; but the important thing is that the road to the future is clear, well-marked, and unmistakably inscribed in the very order both of the development of the world and of human conscience. It was this faith that was shattered by the division and helplessness of the socialists in the face of the looming catastrophe of the greatest war in history. Even more important, those in the bourgeois world itself—those who controlled the reins of power—were equally helpless and equally broken by the onrushing juggernaut. The highly placed diplomat at the Quai d’Orsay, Rumelles, explains that the major powers are all similarly in the grip of a force they cannot control. All they can do is to pretend (like Prince Bagration in War and Peace) to dominate a situation that has totally escaped from their grasp. Despite their opposition, both the bourgeoisie and the socialists, before 1914, had lived in the same kind of world—a world based on the faith that, in the last analysis, their own private aims and the objective order of things would coincide in some fashion; but the war soon made this belief incredible.

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There is one character in Les Thibault, the professional revolutionary Meneystrel, who welcomes the outbreak of the conflict, and who, indeed, views it as a golden opportunity for his cause. For Meneystrel, the ‘‘ideal’’ content of socialism—its ethical aims and its humanism, which the revolution is supposed to actualize—had long since ceased to have any importance, and had been replaced by the will to act in a world where nature and conscience were no longer in any sort of harmony. What would the aim of such action be? ‘‘The answer could even be ‘Socialism,’ ’’ Nicola writes, ‘‘if one means by it a social order which is not only egalitarian, but also authoritarian, the only conceivable one, given the conditions of modern society.’’ This is the world in which the heroes of Malraux act out their tragic destiny and go to their doom. These heroes, as Nicola perceptively puts it, ‘‘are fascinated by the contingency of history, not by its rationality.’’ They ally themselves with the Communists because ‘‘an event to which a certain kind of intellectual dignity cannot be attributed does not interest him [Malraux].’’ But they are not really revolutionaries because the deed itself has become more important for them than its supposed rationale, and a will to action has replaced all other values. The high point of a Malraux novel is invariably the moment at which the hero realizes that he no longer can give intellectual assent to his cause, but precisely for this reason decides to continue to fight for it: all Malraux’s protagonists are thus ‘‘nihilists with a cause.’’ And the situation of his defeated ‘‘conquerors’’ exposes what Nicola calls ‘‘the great heresy of our time: the attempt to control force by becoming its servant.’’ This is of course not all that Nicola has to say about Malraux in this revised and shortened version of a justly famous essay; some of his other formulations are of classic quality, and will certainly be endlessly repeated in the future. But in this essay, I want to confine myself to the main line of his argument. The last two chapters are devoted to some reflections on Dr. Zhivago, and to a concluding summary whose burden is expressed in its title: ‘‘An Age of Bad Faith.’’ Nicola was deeply moved by Pasternak’s book, but also troubled and disturbed by its ambiguities; and his pages on this enigmatic masterpiece are among the most interesting and searching I have seen. He is, of course, unqualifiedly sympathetic to Pasternak’s basic symbolic contrast of the private and the public, the individual and the social, which undercuts all of revolutionary ideology and reaffirms the sacredness of values (art, friendship, spiritual independence) that no political movement can accept as predominant.

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In this sense Pasternak is Tolstoyan, but he does not separate off peace and nature as sharply as Tolstoy did from war and history. He sometimes assimilates History to nature, and, sometimes, views it in terms derived from what Nicola calls ‘‘a rational-mystical interpretation of Christianity’’ (whose roots can be found in the Russian semi-Gnostic tradition of religious Messianism represented by Dostoevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, and Berdyaev). What disquiets Nicola about Pasternak is that he finds no way of uniting these ideas with the experiential texture of the novel, or even of giving them some sort of unity and consistency in themselves. He finds the authentic truth of Pasternak not in such ideas, but—and this is a brilliant flash of insight—in the magical incantation of a peasant sorceress, converting the terrifying events of History into a folk poetry of the supernatural whose roots lie deep in Russia’s pagan past. With Pasternak (and, one should add, with Solzhenitsyn, whose works Nicola did not live long enough to take into account), the literary tradition initiated by Stendhal has proven itself to be one of the most vital of our time; nothing produced by the opposing tradition that Luka´cs studied can compare with it in creative vitality and achievement. At the same time, the paradox of History—the gap between aims and accomplishment, between ideal and reality—has never been more glaring and self-evident. Ours is an age of nihilism and bad faith, Nicola concluded, because we try to conceal this truth from ourselves; we still continue to believe in History, even though this belief has long since been emptied of any inner content or ethical substance. ‘‘The bad faith and nihilism of the modern world is nothing other than acceptance of the empty form of what was once authentic belief in the absence of other beliefs that can be wholeheartedly embraced.’’ To be more exact, the myth of History has really been replaced by that of material progress, and by a surrender of any view of man other than as ‘‘an animal . . . completely absorbed in the satisfaction of his appetites and in unlimited self-aggrandizement, at the same time that he is a slave to the needs of the species as expressed by the claims of the social machine.’’ This view causes a great deal of uneasiness, and inspires much talk about ‘‘alienation,’’ the ‘‘absurd,’’ and modern ‘‘anguish’’; but any principled opposition to it is condemned in the name of ‘‘modernity,’’ ‘‘science,’’ and ‘‘reality’’—the same old myth of History reduced now simply to being modish and up-todate. Nicola’s book, as I think should be clear by now, is far more than just a work of literary criticism; or to put it less deprecatingly, like all good criticism it is inspired by an interest in literature that is not merely ‘‘literary.’’

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For the book certainly is very good criticism, and a real contribution to the understanding of the modern tradition. No one before has picked out, defined, and analyzed so discerningly this anti-Historical line of novelists on which Nicola focuses; no one has ever seen it as a unity, and situated it in terms of the developing social-historical experience of the last 150 years; this Nicola has done, and it is an original and permanent accomplishment. It will now be impossible in the future to overlook this line of writers, or to neglect the position they represent and the problems they raise. But Nicola could not have become as involved with them as he was if he had not been concerned with the relation of politics and ethics, and with the question of the ultimate source of values in the modern world. Mary McCarthy, describing the impression Nicola made on his American left-wing friends when he arrived as an exile in the early forties, said, ‘‘he brought in more radical ideas and gave us the background, or rather the philosophical basis of politics. With him we went back over all the stages of political theory, from Trotskyism to Marxism, going even further back to Proudhon and the utopians of the eighteenth century.’’ In The Paradox of History, Nicola continues his never-ending exploration of ‘‘the philosophical basis of politics,’’ and reaffirms his commitment to his own version of the revolutionary tradition—one that clings stubbornly to the original moral component of the utopian vision, and has always refused to surrender to the demands of left-wing Realpolitik. What is so moving about Nicola’s book is what was so impressive about him as a person—the moral passion that one feels in every line; the unwillingness to lose sight of, or betray, the simple, humble, pathetic bedrock realities of human experience; the refusal to surrender the substance of the socialist dream to the play of vast historical forces or the compulsive grip of iron-clad ideologies. One thinks, while reading Nicola, of the poor peasants, the cafoni, in Silone’s novels, who always oppose the human lessons they have learned so bitterly in their own lives against the rigidity of doctrinaire party lines. One thinks, too, of the strong ethical, moral and personal-anarchic strain that has always been such a distinctive feature of the Italian liberal and radical tradition since the Risorgimento. Both the young terrorists who wrote to Miriam Chiaromonte and Nicola himself were part of this tradition; this is why he spoke to them, and, even more crucial, this is why they listened; this is why he never gave up hope.

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8.

French Intellectuals between the Wars

Herbert Lottman’s book on writers, artists, and politics, from the Popular Front to the Cold War, is a lively and valuable contribution to the socialcultural history of the recent past.1 No one who grew up during this period, like the present writer, can read it without a surge of old memories and a twinge of nostalgia. Not that one wishes the past it evokes—a past that includes the rise of Hitler, the Spanish Civil War, the fall of France, the almost complete conquest of Europe by the Nazis, the revelations of the Holocaust, and then the explosion of the first atomic bomb and the Cold War—to come back to life. But the memories of youth always have something appealing about them, if only because one remembers primarily one’s innocence and illusions; and Lottman’s narrative recounts the history of a period dominated by one such illusion. It was indeed, despite all its grimness and horror, a period of innocence, when the great dream of the Russian Revolution still had not been recognized—except by a handful of people whom nobody wished to listen to, and who were universally vilified—to have become a nightmare. To be sure, the rise of Fascism and Nazism did not incline one to dwell too insistently on the shortcomings of the Soviet Union; and the French intellectuals of the Left Bank, buffeted by a history they were powerless to influence, were drawn to one or another of these opposing political poles with irresistible force. Rare were those who, while still taking an active part in political life, managed to retain any genuine independence. Lottman sees his book as detailing ‘‘the rise and fall of the committed intellectual’’—and so indeed it does. One can also agree with him that the stretch of time he covers—between the 1930s and the 1950s—has an intrinsic unity that marks a new phase in the history of the French intelligentsia. But the terms in which he describes this unity do not, in my opinion, give a sharp enough focus to what actually occurred. He suggests that the political 1. The Left Bank, by Herbert R. Lottman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982.

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commitment of French intellectuals before 1930 lacked any international dimension and was limited to their own internal affairs. After this time, however, they began to look outward and, as Andre´ Gide put it, acquired the conviction that they had ‘‘a right to inspect [their] neighbor’s territory.’’ This is one of Lottman’s controlling ideas; and it seems to me to blur rather than to illuminate the meaning of the events that he recounts. In the first place, it is not true that the political concerns of the French intelligentsia had previously lacked any international range (one thinks of the pro-Polish agitation that continued through most of the nineteenth century, or of Victor Hugo’s protest against the execution of John Brown). Moreover, the French have always regarded their own internal affairs as of international importance because of the universal mission instinctively attributed to French culture in the world. The history of the ‘‘commitment’’ that Lottman narrates is by no means the new phenomenon that he makes it out to be. What is new, however, is that the French intellectuals were now no longer expressing their own national point of view, whether revolutionary or conservative, but choosing sides and committing themselves to ideologies that had been developed elsewhere and were not French at all. Even though Lottman does not quite grasp this crucial point, he begins the book with a ‘‘curtain-raiser’’ that symbolically illustrates exactly what had taken place. In 1935, after Stalin had given the word—through Ilya Ehrenburg in Paris—that an international organization of writers should be organized against Fascism, a conference was arranged in the French capital. The French wished the Surrealist leader Andre´ Breton to be invited even though he had been expelled from the French Communist party. To the French intellectuals, their internal political squabbles were less important than a show of national solidarity; but the Russians threatened to withdraw unless Breton was excluded. Rene´ Crevel, a Surrealist who had continued to write for Communist publications, tried to act as go-between; and he committed suicide the day after it became clear that the Russians would not budge an inch. L’Humanite´ devoted a respectful obituary to Crevel as a ‘‘revolutionary writer’’ and attributed his death to the worsening of a recurring illness. He had, it is true, been ill for a number of years; but none of his friends believed his health to have been that bad. Lottman is perfectly right to use this episode as a sort of epigraph; it demonstrates how the French intelligentsia had become the plaything of political forces beyond its control. The first section of the book stresses both the physical and personal contiguity of French intellectual life, concentrated within a small area of the Left Bank of the Seine and dominated by a group of people many of whom

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had gone to school together in the E´cole Normale. Friendships were struck up there in early years that lasted a lifetime, and created ties that, as Thierry Maulnier wrote, forged ‘‘that solidarity among members which seems stronger than religious or political differences.’’ Much the same sometimes happened with friendships that arose because people frequented a particular cafe´, or chanced to be invited to the same literary salon. Such personal ties were strong, and Lottman expresses some bewilderment as he watches old friends move into opposing political camps without feeling obliged to break off their intimacy. ‘‘The resulting confusion in the order of battle,’’ Lottman remarks wryly, ‘‘is enough to make one’s head spin. It may even suggest that commitments were not always taken seriously, especially when the dilettantes wore the fancy dress of La Nouvelle revue franc¸aise.’’ This all too facile cynicism, on which Lottman falls back far too frequently, reveals the limits of his historical understanding, and his inability to comprehend the often tragic dilemma created by the conflict between personal and political loyalties. Nor does he grasp the fact that, among Frenchmen, a natural solidarity continued to exist even in the midst of conflicting allegiances to what were essentially alien causes. With his second section, which deals with the 1930s, Lottman gets down to his real subject. What he gives is a sort of newsreel coverage, rather like a documentary film, of the interaction between political events and French intellectual life, singling out one or another figure to hold the spotlight for a moment but then moving on rapidly. There is never time to explore anything in depth, and the reader must take Lottman’s selection of material from his extensive documentation more or less on faith. One should not do so too incautiously, however, since Lottman has obvious biases; and what he chooses to offer as fact is often nothing but malicious, unevaluated gossip. The most flagrant example of such bias is his consistent denigration of Andre´ Malraux, against whom he carries on a never ending if covert campaign. As an example, we may select this juicy tidbit offered in Lottman’s pseudoobjective manner: ‘‘A fellow writer and fighter of these years [the 1930s] later confided that Malraux was, quite simply, devoid of political concerns. He was verbal, without any real interest in ideas.’’ Even if we overlook the obvious non sequitur (are ‘‘political concerns’’ the same as ‘‘ideas’’?), anyone who can believe this about the author of Man’s Fate and Man’s Hope, not to mention the Voices of Silence, can believe anything. When Lottman is not indulging his prejudices in this fashion, however, he gives a full and detailed account of the Soviet manipulation of the various writers’ congresses and the organizations of intellectuals set up in France to

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fight Fascism. There is a fascinating depiction of the activities of the enormously influential but little-known Comintern agent Willi Mu¨nzenberg, whom Romain Rolland described as ‘‘this great artist in revolutions,’’ and who, in pre-Hitler days, had operated newspapers, magazines, and book clubs in Germany with great success. After the Nazis came to power he shifted his activities to Paris and, in Lottman’s view, ‘‘a strong case can be made that intellectual involvement in the archetypical form that it assumed in France in the years before World War II was Mu¨nzenberg’s creation.’’ A revelatory sketch is also devoted to the Czechoslovak Communist Eugen Fried, known as ‘‘Cle´ment,’’ who, as the agent assigned by the Comintern to oversee the French Communist party, was its e´minence grise for many years. Both men were killed under mysterious circumstances, and are assumed to have been dispatched by the Soviet secret police. A key Left Bank figure during this period was Andre´ Gide, whose shortlived flirtation with Communism catapulted him into political life, but who then became a Communist beˆte noire. For after a trip to Russia carefully organized to strengthen his allegiance, he ungratefully wrote his courageous Return from the USSR, in which he revealed some of the underside of the workers’ paradise. Gide, in any case, had always tried to remain his own man, and had advocated a ‘‘Communist individualism’’ in the message that he sent to the first Congress of Soviet Writers held in Moscow in August 1934. Malraux too, though later much more conciliatory because of his active role in the Spanish Civil War—and Soviet Russia was the only country supplying the Republicans with arms—tried to maintain a margin of independence. When Malraux spoke in Moscow, as Lottman notes, ‘‘out of design or naı¨vete´ [italics added], he chose this platform to challenge the principles of Socialist Realism even as they were being polished up for global dissemination.’’ Lottman, as we see, continues his tactics of underhanded denigration, which he repeats a bit later after recording that Malraux had encouraged Gide to resist the enormous pressure put upon him by close friends to suppress his book. ‘‘But when Gide met Victor Serge’’ Lottman adds, with his judicious air of balancing the pros and the cons, ‘‘Serge wondered what Malraux’s attitude would be if he were asked to choose for or against Gide.’’ Serge’s hypothetical question is given the same weight as the well-attested fact of Malraux’s loyal support of Gide (and this on a trip back to Paris from the Spanish front). One can only wonder why Lottman carries on such a personal and vindictive vendetta, which, in the eyes of any careful reader, cannot help but undermine his own credibility.

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Not that Malraux’s behavior was always impeccable; his refusal to grant permission for his Jewish wife to emigrate under the occupation hardly redounds to his glory. But such unsavory personal episodes, with rights and wrongs on both sides (she refused to grant him a divorce so that he could legitimize a child by his mistress), should not have been allowed to color the depiction of his entire career. At the end of the 1930s the Nazi-Soviet pact exploded like a bombshell in the midst of the anti-Fascist left, leading to widespread bewilderment and dismay; and this was followed in quick succession by the period of ‘‘the phony war’’ and then the fall of France. It was to take another year for Hitler to attack the Soviet Union, and during this time there was very little to choose between the attitude of the Fascist right and the Communist left in France. L’Humanite´, which had opposed the declaration of war and was published underground, asked permission of the German authorities to resume legal publication; and it was not the Germans but the Vichy government that vetoed the idea. This single fact indicates some of the socialpolitical confusion of the time, and why the situation of so many intellectuals under the occupation was so ambiguous. Since the Communist party and the Soviet Union had found it possible to come to terms with Hitler, many on the formerly anti-Fascist left felt it possible to work out their own limited form of cooperation with the German occupants. And how could one nourish a bitter hatred against people one knew on the pro-Fascist right who supported Hitler when the Communists were in effect urging the same thing?2 Lottman’s chapters on the German years of the Left Bank are the best in the book because they synthesize so much little-known material and succeed in clarifying a stretch of history that has remained relatively obscure. 2. Shortly after writing the above lines, I carne across an analysis of the same unholy symbiosis of right and left from the pen of Marc Bloch, the famous French historian of Jewish origin, who joined the active resistance and was executed by the Nazis in 1944. Between the time of the French collapse and his own death, Bloch worked on a book called L’E´trange De´faite (The Strange Defeat), in which, from his position as a firsthand observer, he tried to diagnose the causes of the French disaster. From passages printed in Le Nouvel observateur (Aug. 26–Sept. 1, 1983), it is clear that Bloch considered the attitude of the left a major factor in the undermining of French morale. ‘‘The strangest thing,’’ he writes, ‘‘was, unquestionably, that these intransigent lovers of the human race were not surprised to meet, on the routes of capitulation, with the born enemies of their class and their ideals. To tell the truth, the alliance, strange as it may appear, sometimes rose in spirit higher than the enmity.’’

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One learns, for example, that the entire French publishing industry collaborated with the Germans in one way or another, and all accepted the restrictions imposed by the occupation authorities—such as the banning of all anti-German works, and of course books by Jewish authors. Collaboration was made easier by the sympathetic Gerhard Heller, the German officer then placed in charge of French publishing, who admired French culture, deplored Nazi excesses, and often helped his French literary friends out of tight spots. It is Heller who records in his diary—published in France several years ago, and which then enjoyed a succe`s d’estime—that he wept when the brilliant, gifted, and viciously anti-Semitic Robert Brasillach, the editor of the clamorously collaborationist Je Suis Partout, advocated sending French Jewish children to concentration camps along with their parents. Just who collaborated and who was in the resistance is often difficult to determine; Lottman states that a case could be made out, with equal plausibility, for the thesis that everybody collaborated as well as for the one that everybody resisted. For most of the Left Bank notables, ‘‘resistance’’ consisted of little more than writing occasional articles for the clandestine press that gradually sprang into being or, what was slightly more dangerous, helping in its production and distribution. (A few writers and intellectuals did join the Maquis to fight, and Lottman in fairness might have mentioned these exceptions.) Some notion of the complexities of the situation may be judged from the astonishing career of Jean Paulhan, who continued to work as editor for Gallimard, helped Drieu la Rochelle turn La Nouvelle revue franc¸aise into a collaborationist journal, protected his anti-Semitic and pro-German friend Marcel Jouhandeau, and was saved from the Germans by the intervention of Drieu himself. But he refused to write for the NRF because it barred Jews and other authors previously published, and his office at Gallimard’s, right down the hall from Drieu’s, ‘‘resembled a resistance cell.’’ Could Drieu really have been unaware, as Lottman believes, that ‘‘Paulhan was at the center of a whole world of underground resistance [publishing] activities’’ being carried on just a few feet away from his own pro-Fascist citadel? It hardly seems likely, especially since the people who came to visit Paulhan would have been well known to Drieu as anti-Fascist. On the other side, even those without a single trace of pro-German or pro-Vichy feeling (such as the young Sartre and his friend Simone de Beauvoir) did not refuse to take advantage of whatever opportunities were offered to continue to advance their careers. Simone de Beauvoir worked

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for the Radio Nationale controlled by the Vichy government, producing her own cultural program in Paris but helping in this way to gain listeners for the voice of the German-supported regime. Sartre’s L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant was published by a Gallimard that complied strictly with the German rules for publication, and Les Mouches was first produced in the old Sarah Bernhardt theater, by this time purified of its association with a Jewish actress. The critic of the Pariser Zeitung, the newspaper of the occupying forces, praised the play; so did the underground Lettres franc¸aises. One could give the work any political meaning one pleased, and this lack of any concrete political significance to early French existentialism made it much easier for its representatives to write and publish. In his later career, to be sure, Sartre devoted most of his intellectual energies to attempting to supply such a content for his metaphysical abstractions. With the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler, the Communist line quickly changed and the Communists resumed the active role they had previously played in organizing the French intellectuals. They joined whatever existed of the underground intellectual resistance, and soon, with their superior discipline and whole-hearted dedication, succeeded in regaining their influence. A whole younger generation of French intellectuals rallied to Communism under the occupation, and continued to exercise a determining part in shaping the French culture that emerged with the liberation and the immediate postwar years. As Lottman remarks of the several literary and political generations that now clustered happily around the cafe´ tables of St. Germain des Pre´s in newly liberated Paris, ‘‘either they had been Communists, were presently Communists, or would become Communists.’’ What marked these postwar years, besides the superficial excitement created by existentialism as a frenetic postliberation life-style, were the tensions arising from Stalin’s determination to rein in the relative cultural liberalism that had existed in Russia during the war. Zhdanov announced the party’s rejection of corrupting Western influences, and the French Communists immediately joined in with an attack on American cultural imperialism. The Communists gained control of the National Committee of Writers formed during the resistance, and Louis Aragon, the unscrupulous but highly talented ex-Surrealist turned Communist functionary, became the uncrowned king of French letters. ‘‘He was as close to being a commissar of culture as one could find outside the Soviet Union and its bloc of East European allies, with more power over writers and artists than any official Minister of Culture could wield in a Western country.’’

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The Communists, and many others besides, called for a purge of collaborationist writers and intellectuals, and Robert Brasillach was tried and executed. But other voices, some with impeccable resistance records, called for clemency, partly for the personal reasons already mentioned, partly because only writers and intellectuals were being singled out for reprisals while publishers, for example, got off scot-free, as did many other groups who had actively collaborated—and not only in words but deeds. The purge idea petered out once the war against Germany was finished (Brasillach had been executed while the fighting was still raging), and a notorious collaborator like Ce´line, presently at the height of his posthumous fame in France, was able to return a free man after five years. Members of the staff of Je Suis Partout stood trial but received mild prison sentences, and nothing came of a plan, suggested by de Gaulle, to elect resistance writers to vacant places in the acade´mie Franc¸aise, which had sheltered a number of distinguished collaborators. The Communist attempt to regiment French cultural life also met with stiff opposition, and soon the left was split between those willing to follow Communist dictates and those demanding the right to be allowed to think and create independently, whatever their devotion to Communist political aims. Existentialism came under fierce attack, and Sartre at first was tempted by the idea of an alternate Socialist Third Way for France and Europe that would navigate between the official left (Stalinism) and the right (now represented by the United States instead of Nazi Germany). But this movement soon foundered, sabotaged by Sartre himself because of his unwillingness to be suspected of anti-Communism in the effort to hold the balance between the two power blocs. By 1951 he had decided that the French Communist party represented the proletariat, and that it was impossible to break completely with the official apparatus and its Russian mentors. For the time being he became the most important (if occasionally rebellious) of the fellow travelers helping to advance the Communist cause on the international scene. These years also saw a dawning awareness of what life really was like in Russia, although the French left fought desperately to discredit such people as Victor Kravchenko and David Rousset who dared to write openly of the totalitarian aspects of Russian Communism. Their disclosures resulted in libel suits, during which the testimony of witnesses for the defense (especially that of Margarete Buber-Neumann, who had been in both Nazi and Soviet camps) deeply troubled the consciences of younger French Communists but did not succeed in shaking their political allegiances. Many also

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found it difficult to swallow the purge trials being carried on in one East European country after another against Communist leaders, accused, as they had been in the prewar Moscow trials, of the most heinous crimes against the beliefs they professed to hold and that they had zealously served before their arrest. But so powerful was the grip of Communism that almost all those who had the courage to express heretical opinions waited to be expelled from the party (perhaps still hoping for grace from on high) rather than taking the initiative and resigning themselves. (More than 20 years later, the appearance of Solzhenitsyn on a nationwide French television program still was capable of causing a sensation—which indicates that the full impact of the truth about the Soviet camps had not even yet been fully assimilated by left-leaning French opinion.) Lottman ends his book rather abruptly after a brief discussion of the Camus–Sartre quarrel over L’Homme re´volte´, which represented the split between those willing to draw some fundamental conclusions from the existence of Soviet totalitarianism and those who regarded it only as a regrettable accidental error. His epilogue then places the whole history of the Left Bank as the relic of a bygone era: France is no longer the world power that it was, and the quarrels of its intellectuals have lost importance. In addition, it has become a technological society in which scientists, engineers, and technocrats are much more important than novelists, poets, or philosophers. The road to power now lies through the E´cole Nationale d’Administration, not the E´cole Normale. Lottman’s last sentence is a quotation from Beckett’s Endgame, intended to illustrate the ultimate futility of the cogitations and agitations he has been chronicling. ‘‘Mean something! You and I, mean something! Ah, that’s a good one!’’ It is all too easy, and even tempting, to accept such a disillusioned conclusion, which contains a certain amount of truth so far as France itself is concerned. But Lottman’s cynicism, once again, is far from being the whole story; and the view that ideas have no power is one of those pseudosophisticated, ‘‘hard-boiled’’ notions that ‘‘practical’’ people like to substitute for genuine thought. How many battalions did that obscure German refugee Karl Marx have as he wore the seat of his pants to a frazzle in the British Museum? Revolutionaries, or at least revolutionary leaders, read books before they seize rifles (if they do) and go out to fight. The Left Bank history that seems so futile to Lottman produced ideas that have had an enormous effect on the modern world, especially in ex-colonial and Third World countries, and to discount them in the way that Lottman does is a grievous error in perspective. But one should read his book for its rich and skillfully presented material, not for his myopic interpretations.

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9.

Sartre: An Existentialist in the Underworld

Jean-Paul Sartre’s monstrous treatise—running close to six hundred pages, and titled Saint Genet, come´dien et martyr (1952)—is certainly one of the strangest books ever to be written by a reputable philosopher. Kant, it is true, once wrote a short book on Swedenborg—but only, as he jokingly remarked, because someone had persuaded him to purchase a complete edition of Swedenborg’s works, and he decided not to let the investment of time and money go to waste. Moreover, Kant’s purpose was to show that Swedenborg’s delineation of the geography of the supernatural was—as the title of his book proclaimed—the dreams of a spirit-seer. Jean-Paul Sartre’s book is about a far more outlandish figure than Swedenborg: Jean Genet, ex-jailbird and selfconfessed thief, pederast, prostitute, and stoolpigeon. Genet’s sumptuously obscene celebrations of Evil, in a prose whose preciosity recalls Proust and Giraudoux, have made him, since the end of the Second World War, the rage of Parisian literary circles. And Sartre’s intensely, sometimes comically serious discussion of Genet is a dazzling display of dialectic, ending with what Sartre calls ‘‘a request that Jean Genet be well treated.’’ How can we explain Sartre’s choice of so strange a subject? It would be a simple matter to allude to his taste for paradox, which, in truth, runs riot in the present book. One might also refer to Sartre’s personal friendship for Genet, and his admiration for a literary talent which developed under impossibly adverse conditions. Nor should it be forgotten that, at least since the advent of Surrealism, it has become a French literary fashion to revere a figure like the Marquis de Sade and to recommend the total liberation of the instincts as the recovery of man’s true liberty. None of these explanations, however, nor all of them together, seem to me entirely adequate. The truth is that Sartre was preoccupied in those years with the problems of an Existentialist ethics; and in the figure of Genet, he found a pretext for developing certain ideas on Good and Evil that had not hitherto found expression in his theoretical writings. 105

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Despite the book’s huge bulk, and Sartre’s jaw-breaking vocabulary, his basic idea about Genet is very simple. Genet’s work is a gigantic glorification of vice and crime, a willful inversion of all normal ethical standards. Sartre believes that Genet, as a child, was caught in an innocent boyhood theft; this was a traumatic experience that determined his life. Choosing to accept the role assigned him by society, Genet assumed this burden of guilt and turned it into a positive mission. ‘‘I was a thief ’’—Sartre imagines Genet saying to himself—‘‘I will be The Thief; it’s my profession of faith, it will be my martyrdom.’’ Once this choice was made, Sartre proceeds to unravel its implications by ‘‘existential psychoanalysis.’’ This specially patented Sartrian method assumes that every aspect of a life, down to the minutest detail, is symbolically linked with the choice an existent makes among his own possibilities; even ‘‘the world’’ of the existent surges into consciousness as a structure of meanings determined by this choice of himself. And this leads Sartre into a veritable delirium of symbol hunting, an orgy of psychic code-deciphering that makes Freud look like a neophyte and Jung like an amateur. It is difficult, in a brief quotation, to give any adequate idea of Sartre’s grotesquely far-fetched interpretations. But some notion may perhaps be derived from his remark that Genet is a passive pederast because ‘‘surprised while stealing from behind, it is his back which blossoms when he steals, it is with his back that he awaits the discovery and catastrophe.’’ Similarly, if Genet uses argot, Sartre breathlessly interpolates: ‘‘To speak argot is to choose Evil, that is, to know being and truth but to refuse them for the sake of non-truth . . . that is, to choose the relative, parasitism, failure.’’ The consequence of these analyses, which unhappily take up most of the book, is to dissolve all the motives for Genet’s actions into a symbolic repetition, in one form or another, of his original crisis. Sartre always concentrates on the meaning of Genet’s acts in this symbolic framework, and, as a rule, carefully avoids considering them from any other perspective. ‘‘In reality’’ Sartre writes, in an incautious moment, ‘‘Genet steals because he is a thief and because he has no other means of existence; in the imaginary, he steals to make himself a thief.’’ By interpreting Genet’s crimes as if they were only performed for purposes of ‘‘the imaginary,’’ Sartre skillfully glosses over their more sordid results. And whatever their effects, their ultimate cause is not located in Genet himself (a subject who, according to Sartre’s ontology, exercises his liberty with every action and at every moment); the trauma of his childhood experience is always to blame.

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‘‘If, in this whole affair, we wish to find the true guilty parties,’’ Sartre argues, ‘‘let us turn toward the decent people and ask by what strange cruelty they made a child a scapegoat.’’ By implication, therefore, Genet is completely absolved of any responsibility for his misdeeds; he is the victim of an inescapable determinism. This is indeed a strange conclusion for a philosopher who, in L’Eˆtre et le ne´ant (1943), argued that liberty is synonymous with the pour-soi (or human consciousness). In the early 1950s, a writer in La Nouvelle revue franc¸aise remarked that ‘‘Sartre has a philosophy where liberty has never played so large a role, and a politics where it has never played such a small one.’’ The same might be said of Sartre’s philosophy and his notion of moral responsibility. For Sartre’s whole conception of Evil, as developed in Saint Genet, shifts moral responsibility from the wrongdoer to Society. The original ethical sin, according to Sartre, is the splitting of Good and Evil; this is caused by the ‘‘disquietude’’ of the spirit, which is in a state of ‘‘permanent revolution.’’ ‘‘But this disquietude terrifies us: we try to suppress it by checking the spirit in its course and expelling its mainspring of negativity.’’ We identify Good with what is already; Evil with change; and we project this Evil, which is part of our liberty (another term for spirit), on those outcast groups and individuals who then symbolize and objectify all our temptations. To recover true liberty we must arrive at a ‘‘synthesis of Good and Evil’’; and on this ground, Sartre passionately pleads with us to ‘‘listen to the voice of Genet, our next-of-kin, our brother.’’ But if ‘‘Evil is projection,’’ as Sartre argues, then clearly it is les Justes (the decent citizens) who are responsible for its existence; not the criminal but the judge is guilty. Since Sartre’s conception of Evil is totally social, it is no surprise to have him tell us that ‘‘the abstract separation of these two concepts [Good and Evil] simply expresses the alienation of man.’’ Sartre always uses the word ‘‘alienation’’ in a Marxist sense, and when this alienation is removed by the classless society, presumably the miraculous synthesis of Good and Evil will also be accomplished. But what is to become of the ‘‘disquietude’’ of the spirit? Will man cease to be afflicted with the angoisse before his own liberty that is at the center of Sartre’s Existentialism? Certainly this would seem to be implied. In the ideal order, Sartre himself admits, ‘‘the prescriptions of ethics would become social reflexes.’’ And so the happy, un-alienated worker can then take his place in the ranks of those whom Sartre, in La Nause´e (1938), politely calls les salauds—the stinkers; those who conceal from themselves the fundamental contingency and absurdity of all moral

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duties and of existence itself. Sartre is thus caught between his Marxist sympathies and his Existentialist convictions, between the vision of a just and stable society and his view of the spirit and human liberty as negation and disquietude. On the plane of theory, these two facets of Sartre’s thought exist as an unresolved antagonism. On the plane of practice, however, Sartre has provided himself with a neat little escape hatch. In a revealing footnote, where Sartre emerges for a moment from behind his Hegelian armor, he states bluntly that ‘‘this synthesis [of Good and Evil], in the present historical situation, is not realizable. Thus every morality which does not explicitly declare itself impossible today contributes to the mystification and the alienation of mankind.’’ And, a few sentences later, he makes these ominous remarks: Action must give itself ethical norms in this climate of insurmountable impossibility. It is in this perspective, for example, that we must envisage the problem of violence or the relation between means and ends. For a consciousness that would live this agony (de´chirement) and finds itself, at the same time, forced to will and decide, all the splendid revolts, all the cries of refusal, all the virtuous indignations, would appear like outmoded rhetoric.

These sentences go a long way to explain Sartre’s collaboration with the Stalinists (or was it Malenkovists?) during this period. He conscientiously suffers his de´chirement over their immoral actions, but indefatigably reassures himself that, at the present time, all morality is impossible anyhow. Naturally, he continues to belabor all opponents of the Communists as despicable violators of human dignity. And when someone like Albert Camus dares to protest against Communist atrocities, he dismisses this as ‘‘out-moded rhetoric.’’ After all, was it not Sartre who argued that one of the primary ontological structures of the human consciousness was mauvaise foi?

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part two

Germany and Romania

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10.

Ernst Juenger: An Impenitent Prussian

The name of Ernst Juenger is likely to be known to American readers, if it is known at all, as that of the author of Die Marmorklippen (On the Marble Cliffs)—a novel published inside Germany in 1939 that was unmistakably directed against the Hitler regime. Before that time, however, Juenger had been perhaps the most influential talent among those who paved the way for an acceptance of Nazism among the German intelligentsia. And, once the war had been won, Juenger emerged as the most authoritative voice among the writers of the ‘‘inner emigration,’’ i.e., those who claimed to have spiritually emigrated from Hitler’s Germany without having done so in fact. Juenger also published two major works which, German critics agreed, are among the most important products of their post-war literature. One is a huge diary of Juenger’s war experiences and reflections entitled Strahlungen (1949). Juenger spent most of the war in Paris, attached to the staff of General Speidel; and his book provides an eerie glimpse into the fantastic, hothouse world of the anti-Nazi Prussian High Command in France— aristocratic, cultured, connoisseurs of French civilization, discussing Rimbaud and La Rochefoucauld in the Hotel Crillon and the Ritz while the Gestapo did its bloody work in the cellars of the Place de la Concorde. Many of Juenger’s friends from this period were later implicated in the unsuccessful bomb plot against Hitler; and Juenger’s own opposition to Nazism, as Die Marmorklippen had already made clear, was rooted in this aristocratic conservatism. Juenger’s other book, Heliopolis (1949)—the title of a fictitious state—is a massive allegorical novel of the future, his most ambitious creative work up to that time. Set in the same imaginary Mediterranean landscape as Die Marmorklippen, it is written with all the kaleidoscopic brilliance of a writer who has nothing further to learn from the incantatory rhythms and fairytale suggestiveness of the German Romantics. The novel is, indeed, composed in the German Romantic tradition—loosely constructed, filled with philosophical disquisition and interpolated fragments, depending for its effects 111

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more on the relationship of certain key poetic symbols than on any dramatic narrative. What there is of a narrative bears a striking resemblance to the secret struggle for power inside Germany after Hitler’s accession. Two figures are engaged in this subterranean warfare: the Prokonsul and the Landvogt. The first, an hereditary aristocrat, controls the professional Army; the second, a demagogic upstart, whips up the mob with a gang of unscrupulous criminals. Caught in the center are the ‘‘Parsees,’’ a highly civilized Oriental minority on whom the mob wreaks its fury with the Landvogt’s instigation and approval. The chief protagonist is a young officer on the Prokonsul’s staff, Lucius de Geer; a scion of the Burgenland, the seat of the old nobility, where ‘‘everything was still in good order’’ and where there ‘‘was still room for honorable, yes, even for princely existence.’’ Like Ernst Juenger, Lucius keeps a diary of philosophical annotations (all of Juenger’s books before Die Marmorklippen were either diaries or highly personal essays); and he is an intimate of the small group of painters, poets, and philosophers whom the Prokonsul, like an Italian prince of the Renaissance, entertains at his court. It is during a Platonic symposium among this group that the theme of Heliopolis first receives a clear enunciation. ‘‘The Wise Men of all times and places’’ says Serner, the philosopher, ‘‘are all agreed that Happiness cannot be obtained through the Door of Desire or in the current of the world.’’ And the writer, Ortner, reads a selfcontained short story—a variation on the Faust theme, and one of the finest things in the book—about a man who, after a mysterious eye operation, sees through the surface of the world to its hidden mechanisms. He obtains unlimited power; but this inhuman knowledge makes joy impossible and life meaningless. And he finally begs Dr. Fancy, the Mephistophelian eye specialist, to restore him to the degree of blindness befitting the human condition. This narrative is clearly intended to symbolize the spiritual dilemma of man in Heliopolis, and to indicate the direction in which it may be resolved. All parties are engaged in a pitiless struggle for power, made even more crucial because science has solved all its problems (and Heliopolis, as a result, occasionally takes on a faint air of science-fiction). ‘‘Mankind had become fully calculable . . . But just as a new light casts new shadows, so had the extremes of organization produced a new consciousness of what was mysterious and inviolable.’’ At the conclusion of the novel, therefore, Lucius de Geer quits the service of the Prokonsul and flies off on a rocket ship to the

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‘‘cosmic residences,’’ convinced that all human concerns can no longer be sacrificed to the struggle for power. Someday, he believes, mankind will realize the nihilism of sheer power, and will then recall as its ruler a quasidivine figure (The Regent), ‘‘who unites Power and Love.’’ This tenderness for what is ‘‘mysterious and inviolable’’ in man, and this antipathy to power, strike a new note in Juenger’s work; or rather, make explicit a note only faintly struck in Die Marmorklippen. For up to this latter book Juenger had glorified power in all its forms, and had ruthlessly insisted on the suppression of the individual to make way for the type—the interchangeable anonymity whose life would be totally defined by his specific function in furthering the will-to-power. The most complete statement of this theme was given in a semi-sociological book, Der Arbeiter (The Worker), published in 1932, a work taken at the time as the most powerful intellectual apologia for Nazism. Juenger still thinks Der Arbeiter contains a valid diagnosis of what is happening to modern man, and he has pictured the completion of the process in Heliopolis; but he is no longer able to regard it with the same approval as in the past. Man can no longer surrender to the will-to-power as an end in itself. But what principle does Juenger offer to replace it? The answer given in Heliopolis is both theological and political, and the implications of the second cast a somewhat dubious light on the first. Pater Foelix, a Christian hermit, teaches Lucius a doctrine of suffering, sacrifice, and love; and he is primarily responsible for Lucius’ realization that power alone is not enough: ‘‘greatness cannot exist without goodness, without sympathy, without love.’’ On the theological level, then, Juenger implies that power itself is evil. But Pater Foelix, who tends an apiary, also likes to dabble in political theory; and he holds up the inalterable caste system of the beehive as an image of the ideal state. ‘‘The power of love’’ he tells Lucius, ‘‘lives in the beehive completely undifferentiated’’; each caste is happy to sacrifice itself for the whole; and this is an exemplar for the human state, ‘‘if we see the ideal of the State as the elevation of order to a pure relationship of love.’’ On the political level, not power per se but power without ‘‘love’’ is the source of trouble. Just what this means in practice may be seen from the description of the political situation in Heliopolis. The Prokonsul incarnates all the ruling-class virtues, and is quite willing to exercise power justly; but the irresponsible ‘‘Demos’’ refuses to recognize his lawful sovereignty and prefers to follow the siren-song of the Landvogt, who skillfully exploits its basest instincts. The catastrophic rise of the Landvogt, we are told, is directly attributable to

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the ‘‘theoreticians and Utopians . . . who busied themselves with the happiness and future of mankind.’’ They are the culprits who presumably destroyed the feudal equilibrium of ‘‘love,’’ and the restoration of ‘‘love’’ can only come from the voluntary acceptance by the ‘‘Demos’’ of its old feudal bonds (metamorphosed, to be sure, into a transcendental principle of justice). Juenger’s ideal, in other words, is a feudal Paradise which, like the style and structure of his novel, is also in the German Romantic tradition. One thinks of Novalis and his very similar glorification of a poetically colored Middle Ages; and one remembers that this day-dream was invented by the German spirit to exorcise the trauma of the French Revolution. In truth, there is as little room for genuine individual freedom in Juenger’s new feudalism as there was in the relentless mechanization of Der Arbeiter. Juenger has substituted a terminology of love for that of force; but in both instances the individual is lost in the function, i.e., his caste-status. Juenger’s aristocratic distaste for the ‘‘Demos’’ manifests itself all through the book, not only by specific animadversions but also by the unpleasantly selfconscious condescension with which he depicts all his lower-class characters. Except when he is rhapsodizing over the mythical feudal stability of the Burgenland, or celebrating the knightly virtues of the Prokonsul, Heliopolis lacks any note of personal passion, any echo of the torments and the sorrow of which we hear so much and feel so little. Juenger writes from a great distance, from the council-chambers of the mighty—from, as it were, the Crillon and the Ritz; not even the Landvogt arouses any indignation, only well-bred contempt. One cannot help contrasting Juenger in this respect with Dostoevsky—a writer whose name he invokes himself, no doubt because the latter was also a political reactionary and a Christian. Dostoevsky’s works, however, are totally penetrated with a humanity that wells up spontaneously from the brotherhood of man in Christ. Whatever his political opinions, it is impossible not to respect the emotional depth of Dostoevsky’s involvement with the insulted and the injured. There is a good deal of talk about Christianity in Heliopolis, and Pater Foelix’s influence on Lucius is once described as the triumph of Christ over Socrates; but Juenger’s Christianity, if such it can be called, has far more in common with the Teutonic Knights than with the New Testament. In the next-to-last chapter of Heliopolis, a character supposedly possessed of supernatural wisdom remarks to Lucius: ‘‘We know your situation—it is that of the conservative spirit which tried to use revolutionary means, and failed.’’ Since no such effort is depicted, the irrelevance of this comment in the context of the book makes it all the more revealing. For Juenger, the

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impenitent admirer of the Prussian aristocracy, has indeed written their elegy—or at least the elegy of their attempt to use the destructive dynamism of Nazism for their own ends. Heliopolis thus springs far more from a feeling of political impotence and failure than from any profound emotional transformation on the part of its author. And the best proof, to my mind, is that the book lacks precisely those emotions which, in all the great religions, have always been considered the pre-requisite for any deep-seated spiritual conversion. I am referring, of course, to the emotions of humility and repentance.

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11.

The ‘‘Double Life’’ of Gottfried Benn

One of the most striking phenomena of German postwar literature is the sudden rise to prominence of Gottfried Benn. By no means a new or undiscovered writer, Benn published his first book—a volume of brutal, Expressionist poems called Morgue—in 1912, and he has been known ever since, to a small circle of readers, as a mordant satirist who can rise on occasion to heights of dissonant lyricism. At present, he is considered the greatest German poet since Rilke; but, curiously enough, it is not his poetry that has catapulted him into notoriety. Since the end of the war, Benn has published a series of prose works of indistinct genre, somewhere between the dialogue, the novel and the personal essay. All are written in a raucous, highly individual style, filled with straight-from-the-shoulder slang and a cynical, hard-bitten eloquence. It is these works which have brought Benn to the attention of a wider audience, and evidently have struck an emotional chord that has a profound resonance in the German reading public. Among these works Benn has included a species of spiritual autobiography, published in 1950 under the title Doppelleben (Double Life). And this book reveals a good deal, not only about Benn himself, but about the state of mind that has found in Benn’s recent publications an echo of its own obsessions. The first part of the book, a series of fragments called Lebensweg eines Intellektualisten (Autobiography of an Intellectual), was written in 1934 under the impact of Hitler’s accession to power. Despite the title, these fragments contain very little trace of any connected narrative structure; but they all focus on the spiritual dilemma of Benn and his literary generation. What was this dilemma? Quite simply, the fate of having come to maturity in a cultural climate created by Nietzsche—an atmosphere totally haunted by the opposition between Nature and Spirit (Leben and Geist). Nietzsche had undermined all principles of value, both religious and metaphysical, and no creation of Spirit remained viable to order the chaos of life. Or rather, only one such principle remained: Art. Art, Nietzsche had written, was ‘‘the final 116

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metaphysical activity within European nihilism’’; and Benn’s generation, the generation of Stefan George and Thomas Mann, had dedicated itself to this activity with selfless devotion. Benn’s fragments are a violent vindication of this metaphysical aestheticism—contemptuously called Intellektualismus by its opponents—as a valid and inevitable expression of the crisis of modern culture. He refers with savage scorn to the German bourgeois taste for the sentimental and the idyllic, for ‘‘forget-me-nots and apple-cookies’’; and these thrusts may be taken as a riposte against the Nazi charge of Kulturbolschevismus. Regretfully, Benn records that ‘‘the new youth, who enter the scene under Hitler’s star,’’ will not understand the ideals of his generation; they are separated from their elders by the width of the abyss between Art and Might. But, in saying farewell to his past, Benn looks to the future with hope rather than despair. For, it seems, another principle has been found to give Form and Order to the chaos of Life: the principle of Race. ‘‘There are two Laws that today, in Europe,’’ Benn wrote in 1934, ‘‘have raised their heads in defiance of Life: Race and Art.’’ Both are in the service of the same cause, ‘‘the maintenance of Order, the conquest of Form against the European degeneration.’’ And though Benn, in a powerful concluding tirade, again identifies himself with ‘‘the formula of Art,’’ it is clear that the Hitler-Jugend, in their own way, are sacrificing at the same exalted altar of the Spirit. In 1950, Benn collected a second group of fragments published under the title that gives the book its name. These contain some extremely vivid descriptions of life in a German Army barracks while the Third Reich was crumbling into ruins. They also include a running torrent of invective against the ‘‘toy-soldier clowns and toilet heroes’’ who led to their doom ‘‘a mystical totality of fools, a pre-logical collectivity of the weak-minded— something very Germanic, no doubt, and only comprehensible from this ethnological point of view.’’ Perhaps only the Nazis themselves have managed to equal the ingenious abuse that Benn heaps on their deluded followers; and he admits that his earlier complaisance for Nazism was a tragic error. Yet he continues to maintain (and this, too, is comprehensible only from an ethnological point of view) that his mistake, and presumably the mistake of the German people, was inevitable and even admirable. In a fragment called ‘‘Shadows of the Past,’’ Benn comments on his famous exchange of letters with Klaus Mann in 1933—an exchange published at the time as Benn’s ‘‘Answer to the Literary Emigre´s.’’ The younger Mann, an ardent admirer of Benn’s work, could not believe that the intransigent, avantgarde Expressionist would rally to the Nazi cause. Benn’s slashing reply, however, filled with venomous insinuations, left no doubt that he upheld the will

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of the Herrenvolk. Certain passages of this reply, Benn admits, he would no longer write today, or at least not in so ‘‘romantic’’ a tone of ‘‘unpleasant exaltation’’; but he reprints a long section whose reasoning he still supports. Stripped of its bedazzling rhetoric, Benn’s argument reduces itself to the contention that History, indeed social action of any kind, ‘‘proceeds not democratically but through Might’’; and this places the intellectual in an insoluble quandary. ‘‘Killing animals is Might. Executing criminals is Might. Every traffic-cop is Might. Every Organization is Might.’’ How is the poor intellectual to choose between conflicting Mights? Certainly not, Benn answers, by any process of ratiocination. ‘‘When things are mulled over too long, they fall into the void. Just so with this matter of Might and Spirit, Order and Chaos, State and Freedom. One must hang on to something, otherwise one also tumbles.’’ And so, presumably, one joins the ‘‘mystical totality of fools,’’ one follows the ‘‘toy-soldier clowns and toilet heroes’’ with a delicious shudder of abandonment only describable by that untranslatable German word Schicksalsrausch (intoxication with destiny). And one preens oneself, as Benn does, with the affirmation that ‘‘naturally, this conception of History is not that of the Enlightenment nor humanistic but metaphysical, and my conception of Man even more so.’’ Klaus Mann and the other literary e´migre´s, Benn now concedes, may have correctly diagnosed the diabolic evil of Nazism; they may have been more far-sighted than those who espoused the re´gime; but there are more important things than such superficial acumen. ‘‘Always to know everything, always to be right, that alone is not greatness. To err, and nonetheless to continue to believe in one’s inner voice:—that is Man. And his glory begins beyond defeat or victory. The glory, namely, of having assumed his lot, whatever moira—one can, naturally, also say chance and occasion—have assigned him.’’ Here, then, we have man’s true glory; and every German who, like Gottfried Benn, gladly accepted the dictates of Hitlerian moira has a rightful claim to his modicum. Today, Gottfried Benn has become the apostle of what he calls Doppelleben—‘‘a conscious splitting up of personality.’’ In another of his recent works, a dialogue called Drei alte Maenner (Three Old Men), he writes: ‘‘We lived somewhat differently than what we were, we wrote differently than we thought, we thought differently than we anticipated, and what remains is different from what we once had.’’ This is the ‘‘situation-1950’’ as Benn sees it, an absolute split between life and spirit, between action and thought; and his only message is to live this disruption to the hilt.

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In the symbolic protagonist of his short novel, Der Ptolemaer, Benn has pictured this schizophrenic salvation. The Ptolemaer works in a beautyparlor, but, while occupied with the most mundane tasks, bemuses his Spirit with intoxicatingly exotic hallucinations. ‘‘I work over the ladies,’’ Benn has his mouthpiece report, ‘‘but inside me is a wine-harvest—and I feel extraordinarily well as a result, in any case much better than in earlier periods of my life when I did not possess this inner technique; when, as ordinarily occurs in Life, I suffered.’’ In the world of Benn’s Ptolemaer, nobody is responsible for what occurs in the realm of praxis because Life is a meaningless chaos. The self-induced hallucinations of the spirit are, quite literally, the only reality; and to cultivate these is the only morality. ‘‘Make no fuss about going along with persuasions, world-viewers and syntheses to all points of the compass’’ Benn advises, ‘‘if jobs and pocket-books require it; but keep your head free, there must always be some empty space for the images . . . this is his [the Ptolemaer’s] morality.’’ It is also the morality of Benn’s earlier metaphysical aestheticism, monstrously adapted for the masses into the theory of Doppelleben. After this, it is of little use for Benn to assure us that personally he has never acted out of opportunism. Benn himself, it is true, received nothing from the Nazis in exchange for his support except harassment both as a writer and as a practicing physician. He never belonged to the Nazi Party, and in 1935, to escape further difficulty, he joined the German Army and placed himself under the protection of powerful friends on the General Staff. It was at this time that he coined his famous phrase, which, as he reports, made the rounds of the High Command until 1945: ‘‘The Army is the aristocratic form of emigration.’’ But it is only the final inconsistency in this incredibly muddled book that a ferociously honest man should crown his life’s work with an apologia for opportunism as a metaphysic. For what is Doppelleben if not a gigantic philosophy of opportunism? And one can well understand its appeal to a people desperately trying to convince themselves that, whatever the horrible consequences of their actions, the secret shrine of their Spirit had remained unsullied. No doubt the ‘‘inner technique’’ of Doppelleben has been of invaluable aid in this respect. Like the Ptolemaer, Benn’s admirers no longer ‘‘suffer’’ from the complete disparity between their actions and their ideals. German critics have praised these late works of Gottfried Benn as the most profound expression in German literature of the spiritual catastrophe of modern man. To a foreign reader, they suggest, far more plausibly, the spiritual catastrophe of the modern German.

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12.

Erich Kahler and the Quest for a Human Absolute

I Few of his contemporaries could match Erich Kahler (1885–1970) in the immense erudition, the penetrating synoptic vision, and the responsive aesthetic sensibility that he brought to bear on the analysis of the modern world. For Kahler belongs to the great German tradition of the polyhistor, the tradition whose origins go back to Herder and Hegel, and which has been continued up through the twentieth century by men like Oswald Spengler, Wilhelm Dilthey, Ernst Troeltsch, Max and Alfred Weber, Karl Jaspers, and Ernst Cassirer. Erich Kahler belongs with these great names of the impressive German tradition destroyed by Hitler; and it is only in relation to this tradition that his work can be properly appreciated. What marks out this line of writers and thinkers is the universality of their ambitions, and their admirable ability to master the intellectual resources necessary to carry these ambitions through. All are inspired by a vision of the unity of human history (history seen primarily in terms of cultural forms, whether of science, art, religion, or philosophy—the history, in other words, of an enlarged and modernized version of Hegel’s Absolute Spirit), and all undertake to portray the grand sweep of this unity on a majestic scale. Erich Kahler came to the United States as an exile from Hitler’s Germany in 1938 and, after a distinguished career as a university professor and freelance intellectual, died in 1970. He belonged to that great wave of German emigration provoked by Nazi barbarism that did so much to enrich American cultural life. Born in Prague, like Kafka and Rilke, Kahler gravitated toward Munich as a young man and in his early days was among the admirers and disciples (many, though not all, of Jewish origin) who gathered around the great poet Stefan George. Little known outside of Germany, George has sometimes been considered a precursor of Nazism because of his insistence on the importance of inner discipline and obedience to a higher spiritual authority; actually he went into exile in Switzerland when Hitler came to power. Paying a moving tribute to his old master in 1964 for 120

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the benefit of new generations (Stefan George, Gro¨sse und Tragik), Erich Kahler is quite critical of some aspects of the movement that George inaugurated and whose Heilslehre (doctrine of salvation) he had never shared; but he expresses his everlasting gratitude to George for having brought home to him one ineradicable truth. ‘‘In the whirlwind of historical happenings, [man] has to have something on which he stands and for which he stands, and that this something must be the form and dignity of mankind.’’ One can say that Erich Kahler dedicated the remainder of his life to wrestling, on the scale of a gigantic inquiry into the cultures of past and present in all their manifestations, with the problem of how this form and dignity of mankind could be preserved and fostered in the midst of the ‘‘whirlwinds’’ of his life and our time. Before leaving Germany, Erich Kahler had been engaged in a major exploration of the German character as shaped by the history of German culture in all its aspects. The one volume he published, which Thomas Mann called ‘‘a standard for the psychology of Germanness,’’ remained unfinished because of Kahler’s emigration. He launched instead into his next major work, Man the Measure (1944), which once again elicited words of admiration from Thomas Mann. Celebrating the book in an essay written on the occasion of Kahler’s sixtieth birthday, Mann spoke of it as being ‘‘no more and no less than the novel of mankind, narrated by a poetic thinker and historical rhapsode, inspired by the deep feeling that in this gravest of human crises nothing is more urgent, nothing more vital than the knowledge of man, of his historical background and the direction of his evolution.’’ Mann has only one gentle reproof to make to his friend: that a study whose origins were so self-evidently in German culture should have been written in English. Thomas Mann is of course absolutely right in implying that no AngloAmerican historian (one should perhaps make an exception for Arnold Toynbee) would have undertaken a work like Man the Measure or even thought of undertaking it. For Erich Kahler is simply following in the footsteps of Hegel’s Philosophy of History by taking the entire sweep of mankind’s historical and particularly cultural evolution as his province. Man the Measure was precisely such an attempt to survey the whole course of human history and, even more, to give some coherent significance to this grandiose spectacle of the unending succession of civilizations. ‘‘History implies a continuity of something more than time’’ Kahler wrote. ‘‘Otherwise it would be nothing but an incoherent mass of rising and falling powers. . . . Eternity has no history and neither has chaos.’’ It is Erich Kahler’s search for this continuity

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that enabled him to give history a narrative structure and justified Thomas Mann’s comparison of the work to a majestic ‘‘novel of mankind.’’ Some notion of this work can be obtained from the following quotation: On the socio-political plane, this evolution—not to be confounded with Progress, which has a moral connotation—proceeds from the theocratic temple-city to the city and city-state, settling down here below as a mundane community (even the Roman Empire is still a city-state); then, through the intermediary of feudal principalities, which were the first to give non-urban territory some political weight, to territorial estates; from the territorial estates to dynastical and nation-states; from nation-states to fully-developed nations representing the whole of the people; from the nations to civilizational and ideological power-blocs, whole continents or even international units; and finally to the technical, technological prefiguration of a ‘one world’ which is psychologically very far from realization, but which looms as the only alternative that science and technology have presented us to their opposite achievement, nuclear or biological annihilation.

The Tower and the Abyss (1957), which emerged from Gauss Lectures that Kahler gave at Princeton University, took its origin from Man the Measure and carried some of the conclusions of the earlier work even further in the light of the horrifying new material that began to emerge at the end of the Second World War. What runs through the book is the fear expressed in the subtitle (‘‘the transformation of man’’) that the historical conjuncture had reached a point which no longer allowed us to imagine that ‘‘the form and dignity of mankind’’ would continue to be taken as a ‘‘measure,’’ and that perhaps human reality had undergone a fearful metamorphosis. Although documentation is lacking on the point, it is certainly plausible to assume that the shock of learning the full truth about the Nazi concentration camps, combined with the explosion of the first atomic bomb, impelled Erich Kahler to project such a somber hypothesis about the human condition. When The Tower and the Abyss was first published, T. S. Eliot made some striking comments about it that are very helpful in explaining why the work continued to retain its exemplary value and was republished in 1989. In response to an inquiry from the Sunday Times about the books that had made the greatest impact on him in 1957, Eliot referred to Kahler’s exploration of the perils to which modern man has now become exposed. ‘‘Whether one agrees with the author or not,’’ Eliot said, ‘‘what he writes

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must provoke fresh thinking on the part of any reader capable of that exertion. There have been many books written on ‘‘the predicament of our age,’’ some of which I have read, but none of which has impressed me more deeply. Few books in its field of thought since Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses have stirred and disturbed my mind so deeply.’’ What is this ‘‘transformation’’ of which Kahler speaks, and which elicited Eliot’s encomium? It is, in the first place, the steady replacement throughout the course of history of the community (the basic natural form of human association, which structures the personality of individuals and inculcates values) by the collective (artificial associations formed to achieve certain limited purposes and particular ends). (Kahler is obviously here applying the famous distinction of the German sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft.) Such collectives have of course existed in all historical epochs; but what has become decisive in our time, according to Kahler, is that, unlike the past, the modern collectives have become dissociated from any of the communities with which they had always retained some connection. The result, as he writes, has been ‘‘a gradual disruption of the human self, the individual’s growing alienation from the world and ultimately from himself.’’ The human personality on a worldwide scale has thus become fractured and schizophrenic: ‘‘collectivization splits [it] into a collective, functional part and a human, actually individual part which grows more and more atrophied.’’ Kahler begins by dealing with all the pressures from without that reshape the personality in this way, beginning with the involuntary effects of science and technology. These have led to the rationalization of human life, what Kahler calls its ‘‘scientification,’’ that is, the growth of ‘‘specialization, functionalization, standardization, anonymization.’’ As Kahler writes, ‘‘in this way, the concrete human particularity of the unique individual is displaced by the abstract particularity of the collectively specialized function.’’ Combined with such unintentional processes, which are the unforeseen consequences of some of the greatest achievements of the human mind, the human personality also becomes imperiled by the ‘‘totalization and terror’’ purposely introduced on ‘‘the part of the supreme collective, the state, to wreck the structure of the individual.’’ Just as the United States seemed predestined to represent the most extreme development of the unintended extroversion of the individual resulting from ‘‘scientification,’’ the whole course of German history (and here of course Kahler is drawing on his earlier studies) appeared to have marked out Germany to accomplish the frightful apotheosis of this willful destruction of the human personality.

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In a brilliant sketch, Kahler examines how the German character first became split because of the political disunity caused by the lack of a German state, and then by Luther’s insistence on faith rather than works as the guarantee of salvation—to which Luther then added the injunction of absolute obedience to earthly, secular authorities. This created a glaring disparity between inner values and behavior, whose results can be seen in some of the hallucinatory documentation that Kahler produces to illustrate the monstrous disjunction between the private comportment and the official acts of German execution squads, Nazi concentration-camp commanders, and the ‘‘doctors of infamy’’ engaged in their ghastly experiments on human guinea pigs. Nor does Kahler accept the view, more widespread now than when he was writing, that such atrocities can be found to have their counterparts in the unending history of human wickedness. Past horrors, he insists, always retained some link with ‘‘a personal focus,’’ no matter how cruel or misbegotten, while ‘‘what we are facing in the modern atrocities is the absence of anything human.’’ Kahler also rejects the semi-apologetic opinion that the Nazi extermination of the Jews only differed in quantity but not in kind from the mass atrocities of the past, for example, the hecatombs that the armies of Genghis Khan left in their wake. But these massacres were carried out by people who had not ‘‘undergone the smoothing and sensibilizing effects of a world religion,’’ who had never been taught ‘‘the special dignity of the human being, the human quality common to all men.’’ Their actions were thus not a slump from a higher to a lower level of human responsiveness. This analysis of what Kahler calls ‘‘the split from without’’ contains some perceptive remarks on how the growth of collectivist experience has been expressed in the arts. In his second major section, ‘‘the split from within,’’ Kahler focuses on the arts more extensively in order to catch the changes in sensibility that have been brought about by the historical panorama he has been unrolling. The book contains what is in effect a small anthology of modern poetry in four languages, including selections from Eliot himself, on which Kahler comments with great sensitivity. What he finds in all of them is the expression of ‘‘an overwhelming, often enrapturing feeling of the simultaneity, the whirling co-existence of the disparate and fragmentary multitude that populates our life and our consciousness: an all-embracement of discontinuity. In some poets such feeling led to a contraction, a spiritual transcendence of time.’’ One can well understand why such pages should not have left Eliot indifferent.

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Kahler also traces modern man’s ‘‘split from within’’ in terms of cultural history, where it appeared self-consciously in a growing malaise with civilization manifest at least since the eighteenth century and found its most eloquent spokesman in Rousseau. Kahler details this process with his usual mastery of the widest variety of philosophical, literary and artistic expressions, and he notes in all of them the gradual disappearance of the organic individual as a center and controlling focus. This led to the exploration of new dimensions of reality in the realm of art, and to the extension of human consciousness. Kahler is properly appreciative of the great artists who, dissatisfied with the usual contours of the world, began to explore its component aspects—thus providing new sensations and new techniques (such as the stream-of-consciousness in literature) to uncover hidden realms of experience. However, the end result of these aesthetic conquests has been the fracturing and dismemberment of the human image until it has vanished entirely in abstract art or, for that matter, in Finnegans Wake. In the area of thought, both the uncertainty about the ultimate nature of reality created by the discoveries of modern physics, as well as the systematic examination of man’s inner life initiated by psychoanalysis, also worked toward the same end. Kahler was writing his book in the years when French Existentialism had just burst upon the world, and he sees ‘‘the existentialist experience’’ as the despairing attempt to cope with the crisis created, at least for Western man, by the disappearance of all objective structures of value. Existentialism, however, had been created by primarily German or northern European (Kierkegaard) thinkers, and Kahler quotes passages from Rilke and Hofmannsthal that anticipate by half a century the same anguish of emptiness and contingency recorded in Sartre’s La Nause´e. This Existentialist experience stems from an unprecedented predicament in the history of mankind, some of whose symptoms may have existed previously in isolated individuals but never on such a massive scale and as an issue of general import and moral-philosophical concern. ‘‘I do not know of any document relating such a consciously sustained and far-reaching existential experience before the beginning of our century,’’ writes the prodigiously well-informed Kahler, ‘‘whereas since 1900 it has been expressed by more authors than could be quoted here, before and independent of explicit existentialism.’’ What has occurred, Kahler concludes, is more than a crisis of particular values. These have always been precarious, and all the great religions have sought to teach and exemplify them. But there is more here than just a ‘‘devaluation of specific values, [or] a mere invalidation of a world of value.’’

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Instead, he says, ‘‘it is a dwindling of the faculty of valuation altogether.’’ Man no longer feels himself capable of exercising the moral responsibility of choice in the name of values and simply surrenders to the determinism of science and the functional responsibilities created by the various types of collectives which now structure and dominate society. Criminality tends to be excused as a consequence of causes beyond the control of any individual; the very conception of human responsibility is on the point of vanishing. But this leads to the defense made by the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials that they were merely obeying orders; ‘‘any bit of human responsibility that was left in them was blocked out by the collective compulsion.’’ Only in a world where individuals no longer feel responsible to a human community could such deeds have been possible. This is the grim picture that Kahler paints of the predicament of the modern age, and it cannot be said that the past fifty years have infirmed the acuity of his diagnosis. Indeed, many aspects of the book can be said to have been prophetic. Kahler saw the dangers in modern technology, imaged most clearly in the awesome power of the atom bomb, as a world-wide problem that transcended the usual political divisions between right and left and required a world-wide response. The rise of the ecological movement, which Kahler himself labeled Utopian in 1957, has amply confirmed this insight, and it justifies his laconic remark that the presumably Utopian is in fact now the only practical hope for the future. Moreover, the astonishing recrudescence of ethnic and linguistic nationalism as a force in the modern world—this was much less evident in the immediate aftermath of the global conflict—constitutes strong evidence for Kahler’s basic thesis that human life requires roots in a community that provides a source of values. To be sure, Kahler was well aware that the values governing communities bring with them their own perils; often they become embodied in ethnic, racial, national or religious absolutes that lead to the conquest and domination of others. ‘‘Such archaic residues,’’ he writes, ‘‘may be used and misused by groups of a different character, by political and economic power interests. . . . They may swamp everything that is actually individual in a person, sweeping away his conscious ego, his clear thinking.’’ This passage reveals a tension between the individual and the community that Kahler passes over all too lightly, and that points to one of the weaknesses of his basic categories. One of the major criticisms of the book (quite justified, in my view) was that Kahler underestimates, even if he did not overlook, the

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hazards of these ‘‘archaic residues’’ in the human personality, whose effects can be equally, if not more, menacing than some of the relatively harmless collectives that he excoriates. However that may be, Kahler argues that, even if misused, the influence of such archaic residues ‘‘do not by themselves alone break up the structure of personality.’’ But here we have an excellent illustration of how little difference it makes whether one agrees or disagrees with Kahler’s specific judgments. Much more important is that he truly foresaw how irrepressible was the human need for such natural and communal value-orientations, and he warned against creating a world in which the dominance of collectives could wipe them out entirely. It is paradoxical that while the revolt against collectives can now be observed taking place everywhere (even, after half a century of ceaseless propaganda, in the multi-national Soviet Union), accompanied by a revival of religion whose first stirrings Kahler noted but refused to accept as authentic, the most fashionable currents of Western thought should be proceeding in the opposite direction. Kahler’s book stops with Existentialism, which felt the loss of values in tragic terms and dramatized it in such works as Sartre’s La Nause´e and Camus’s L’E´tranger, as well as analyzed it in the theoretical writings of the same authors. But succeeding movements such as structuralism (Levi-Strauss) and post-structuralism (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida) reject human subjectivity altogether as a basis for understanding the world, and thus carry further that functionalization of the human in abject imitation of the physical sciences whose consequences Kahler has so penetratingly portrayed. The two latter poststructuralist thinkers are followers of Heidegger (whose whole-hearted commitment to Nazism as a political movement, if not to some of its cruder theoretical formulations, has now been fully documented). They explicitly reject humanism, with its implications of subjectivity and moral responsibility, as a totally outmoded approach to the problems confronting modern thought and the comprehension of the contemporary cultural situation. Other French Heideggerians, in an astonishing perversion of ideas, have even accused humanism itself of being responsible for Nazism. One wishes that Kahler were still alive to confront these champions of a tendency of thought which regards with equanimity, and even with unqualified approval, the disappearance of the human as a special category of value. But his masterly book, where he marshals so much overwhelming, irrefutable, and frightening evidence of what the loss of a sense of the human has already entailed for mankind, may help to remind new generations of some vital truths that have too easily been forgotten.

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II Art has always occupied a major place in Erich Kahler’s thought. For him it is not only an important clue to the evolving history of human consciousness, but also has special significance in the modern cultural situation. Tracing the evolution of art from cultic and religious representation to a purely self-created and symbolic meaning, he remarks, in his essay on ‘‘The Nature of the Symbol,’’ that the modern artist ‘‘is free to create images which, though being unique, singular forms, imply something commonly human.’’ Modern art thus seems to illustrate the unity in multiplicity of mankind in which Erich Kahler fervently believes; and it also helps to keep alive those forces that have always sustained the equilibrium of the personality. All art, he says, preserves something of its original cultic or magic character ‘‘even in its most advanced or perfected works,’’ and thus fulfills its role of reviving the ‘‘communication, indeed communion, of present man with his mythical or perennial sources of life.’’ This comes quite close to Malraux’s view that modern art is the religion of a time that wishes to continue to assert man’s transcendence—that is, the creative power of the human spirit to endow existence with meaning—in a world that no longer has any particular religious incarnation of this spirit to worship. Kahler, like Malraux, is very far from being an opponent of experimentation in the arts, and he has studied the mutations of the modern with an insight that could only have derived from an enthusiastic sympathy. But, at the same time, he sees these tendencies in the light of the crisis of modern consciousness that is his guiding preoccupation. (Incidentally, it is curious that those who are so eager to discard the notion of ‘‘progress’’ in historical evolution should so often be the very ones to advance this notion vehemently when it comes to the evolution of art). In Kahler’s perspective, the evolution of modern art testifies to the invasion of consciousness by the forces that have disrupted the personality in the modern world. On the one side there is the increasing domination of the functional, rational, and technological, empty of human content and significance. As reaction, on the other there is the irruption of the irrational and the unconscious in its most anarchic and destructive forms. Art has oscillated between these two extremes, producing works either of a rare qualitative subtlety and refinement of aesthetic surface, or, alternately, of a hitherto unexampled and almost pathological intensity of expressiveness. The explorations of modern art have unquestionably uncovered new levels and layers of experiential reality; but its forms and aims could not help being shaped by the imbalance and perplexities of the historical moment.

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Up until very recently, however, the main currents of modern art had not abandoned the age-old ambition of the artist to give form—and hence wholeness and coherence, a human significance of one kind or another—to the products of his creativity. And the point of departure for Kahler’s little book on The Disintegration of Form in the Arts (1968) is his conviction that this effort has been finally surrendered to the chaos against which man has always asserted a human effort of comprehension and control. What characterizes the present situation, according to Kahler, is that ‘‘a boundless predominance of the exploratory functions of art has led to a critical point where the survival of art as it was known through the millennia is in jeopardy. We are witnessing ventures which in their search for an expression of new reality have lost the sense of formal coherence altogether. Reality, to them, is so hopelessly disrupted that no consistent whole seems conceivable any longer.’’ (This quotation is from Out of the Labyrinth, a volume of essays published in 1967, that contains a shortened version of the lectures on art.) Kahler’s definition of the conception of ‘‘form’’ does not rely on any particular style or movement nor on the taste of any historical epoch. Rather, it is the striving for some sort of limiting principle of identity and organic wholeness. To stress the inclusiveness of his conception, and to obviate its confusion with any sort of implicitly classicistic norm, Kahler illustrates his point of view by employing the art historian Heinrich Wo¨lfflin’s idea of ‘‘open form.’’ But even this notion, derived from the visual arts, is still perhaps too tied to the suggestion of visual perception to do justice to his thought; and his application of it in specific instances is sometimes questionable (it is difficult to understand, for example, in what sense Balzac’s novels may be seen as an instance of ‘‘open form’’). Much better is the definition of art as ‘‘form created by a human, intellectual act,’’ or the description of artistic quality as ‘‘an at least half-conscious effort of a creative person toward the intense rendering of some existential coherence—which is identical with form.’’ Retracing some of the ground already covered in The Tower and the Abyss, Kahler demonstrates the gradual ascendancy gained in modern times by the unconscious over the conscious. The supremacy of reason, emerging from the breakup of the medieval synthesis, was itself gradually undermined starting with the late eighteenth century and has been definitively overturned in the twentieth. But while art responded to this dethronement in an ever more radical manner, it continued to struggle to maintain some sort of artistic control over the unconscious. Kahler writes, however, that ‘‘in

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the products of tachism, of action painting, of ‘beat’ literature, and of a certain phase of multiform dadaism . . . the unconscious is unleashed as sheer raw material; it is released intentionally, programmatically.’’ For the unconscious is now no longer ‘‘a mere object of conscious acts of exploration;’’ it has become ‘‘the artistic act itself and emerged as the very enactor of artistic creation.’’ This is paralleled, in Kahler’s opinion, by the purely surfaceworld of the novels of Robbe-Grillet, which is divorced from any relation with human feelings or consciousness. But while such an elimination of the psyche and the subjective is certainly a dehumanization, it scarcely indicates the same sort of surrender of artistic control conceived as aesthetic coherence or identity. Such a loss, though, is incontestably present in the attempts to destroy language that Kahler discusses in his third lecture. Various avant-garde theories of poetry that he singles out aim at a poetry devoid of any syntactical meaning and based on certain physical or quantitative properties of language used in information theory, or on a ‘‘gestic’’ theory that attempts to ground poetic composition on the natural laws of physiological articulation. This is similar, Kahler notes, to the musical avant-garde as represented by John Cage, who urges composers to ‘‘give up the desire to control sound . . . to set about discovering means to let sounds be themselves rather than vehicles for manmade theories or expressions of human sentiments.’’ The culmination of this trend is ‘‘the outspoken attempt to produce incoherence, incoherence as such, devoid of any cause or purpose.’’ Kahler finds this intentional cultivation of incoherence, ‘‘purposeful purposelessness,’’ in chance or aleatory composing, in happenings, and in the antics of the various Hippie groups all over the world. All this he sees as a despairing response to the breakdown of consciousness under the strain of the enormous complexity and confusion of the modern technological universe; and as such he regards it with sympathy but hardly with approbation. Such approbation impels Kahler to castigate that ‘‘intellectual demagogue’’ Marshall MacLuhan, who correctly recognizes all the symptoms of the contemporary cultural malady but irresponsibly glorifies what should be resisted, combated, and transformed. Erich Kahler’s indictment seems to me irresistible and irrefutable so far as it is aimed against the total surrender of ultimate creative (and hence human) responsibility to the irrational unconscious, or to the mechanisms of science in one form or another. There is, to be sure, a certain danger in accepting the programmatic statements of artists as literally as he tends to do; very often the works that emerge from the authors of such resounding declarations prove that consciousness is a hardier perennial than they may have

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realized themselves. In any case—like the experiments in automatic writing of the Surrealists, or the whimsical attempts of the French Lettrists to take the letters of the alphabet as independent units—the determined and relentless application of these precepts is likely to affect consciousness only by lulling it to sleep. But there can be no question that such theories are themselves indications of a general malaise, a loss of human balance, that must be taken very seriously; and if they aid the propagation of the gospel that salvation lies in electronic voodoo, or in multimedia pandemonium, they help contribute to the chaos that is their underlying cause. In this respect Kahler is profoundly right when he observes that ‘‘the novel thing about the present avant-garde is that they do not elucidate our reality, they simply belong to it, they are its victims . . . what they produce are symptoms rather than creations.’’ All this should be enough to show the richness of Erich Kahler’s thought, and its controversial relevance to the most burning issues of cultural actuality. Problems with which he was concerned half a century ago are now still the most immediate and inescapable order of the day. Indeed, no one can help better than Kahler to cut through some of the still-reigning confusion, and to place its issues in a more enlightening and intelligible perspective.

III Kahler was an intimate of Thomas Mann’s, about whom he published a small book (The Orbit of Thomas Mann, 1969), and their friendship grew during their years of common residency in Princeton. Also, Hermann Broch’s loneliness and solitude in the United States was eased by the many years that he lived in Kahler’s own Princeton home. (I shall never forget Kahler casually reaching under the couch in his study one day to pull out a dusty typescript copy of Der Tod des Vergil, with a dedicatory poem.) And Kahler was also the cherished correspondent of the most gifted, tragic, and haunted figure of the post-Holocaust generation of German poets, Paul Celan, who wrote to Kahler out of the blue one day after reading one of his articles. As a hobby, Kahler also made superb translations into German of the modern English poetry (Yeats in particular) that he had grown to love. It is little wonder that Kahler’s several volumes of literary criticism devoted to his friends and contemporaries should instantly have been recognized as of permanent importance; and the same is true for the splendid series of essays on the history of narrative that have been rendered into English.

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The outstanding merits of The Inward turn of Narrative (1973) will be immediately clear to any reader; but he should also know that it fills a genuine gap in the critical literature. For despite the importance of the novel as a form in the last two centuries, there are, surprisingly, very few works that attempt to treat the history of the genre as a whole. Special studies abound, to be sure, and some of them, like Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, are of great value. But such works are usually limited to one or another national literature, or, like the noteworthy The Nature of Narrative by Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, are more concerned with general categories than with history. John Dunlop’s History of Fiction (1845) is little more than a compendium of plots. Frederick Warren’s turn-of-the-century A History of the Novel Previous to the Seventeenth Century (a stimulating book that should be rescued from oblivion) is written by an American scholar with a sharp eye for the sociology of literature and who has little to learn from the Marxists; but it is now sadly out of date. There is thus no recent work which surveys the history of narrative up through the end of the eighteenth century in as magisterial a fashion as Kahler’s work, and which handles all the major problems with a comparable grasp. Only Ortega y Gasset’s Meditations on Don Quixote, with its brilliant remarks on the relation of the epic to the novel, may perhaps be mentioned as of similar stature; but Ortega makes no pretensions to Kahler’s historical sweep. To be sure, not all of Kahler’s emphases and ideas will go uncontested, especially in Anglo-American criticism. The importance he accords to Gulliver’s Travels and to Tristram Shandy, for example, are likely to strike English readers as quite out of kilter. One reason for this discrepancy is that Kahler is writing partly within the context of German literature and with reference to the German Romantic novel; here the influence of Sterne is much greater than in the English or French nineteenth-century novel. Gulliver’s Travels appeals to Kahler because he discusses the seventeenth century in terms of the new modes of perception inaugurated by the era of scientific discovery; and Swift not only later produced the greatest narrative work employing these new modes, but also used them to reveal the dehumanizing possibilities of science itself in a prophetic fashion. Swift’s relevance to modernity is what gives his book importance for Kahler. The same is also true for Sterne, the precursor of the stream-of-consciousness and the experiments with time so typical of the modern novel. Indeed, one of the most original features of Kahler’s book is that he draws his line of historical continuity, not from the nineteenth-century novel of realism as the presumptive culmination of the form, but from the fractured

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perspectives and heavily conceptualized creations of the contemporary epic. In this respect, Kahler’s work is truly the first modern attempt to come to grips with the subject, and to carry out, for the history of the novel, T. S. Eliot’s injunction constantly to reorganize the history of the artistic past in terms of the masterworks of the present. This should stimulate, if not a rethinking of the more conventional point of view, then at least a good deal of controversy. Also, at a time when the cry has gone up in Anglo-American criticism to relate literature once again to the wider horizons of life, the example of Kahler should prove a potent and productive stimulus. For Kahler views the internalization of narrative—the movement from external action and epic adventure to the ever-deeper and more intense exploration of character and personality—as part of the general evolution of human consciousness as a whole. The history of civilization in all its aspects is constantly at his fingertips, and brought to bear at each new twist and turn of the road; but this does not mean that artistic values are discounted, ignored, or deprecated. The analyses of La Princesse de Cle`ves, Clarissa Harlowe, and Tristram Shandy contained in this volume illustrate not only his general thesis but also his illuminating responsiveness to the specific artistic manner by which this is accomplished in each case. His depiction of the gradual evolution from courtly comportment to feminine intransigence and then to Sterneian playfulness with Locke’s ideas about human consciousness is filled with penetrating observations. There is no conflict for Kahler between the closest attention to matters of form and the widest ranging awareness of the historical pressures that condition both formal changes and thematic novelty.

 I have now said everything I think necessary on this occasion about Kahler the historian and literary critic; but I cannot resist the opportunity to conclude these remarks with a few words about Erich Kahler the man as I came to know him in his later years. For Erich Kahler was a remarkable human being, a person of great kindliness, human warmth, and an overflowing generosity of spirit. Nothing about him at all, as might perhaps be supposed, suggested a stiff and self-important German Gelehrter. On the contrary, the absolute simplicity and spontaneity of his manner and demeanor contrasted oddly, and very appealingly, with what one knew of his formidable culture and his intellectual achievements. There was something endearingly childlike about him, even in, and perhaps particularly because of, the ripeness of his years—an

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impression which derived from the direct emotional immediacy of his responsiveness, and his unquenchable zest for, and enjoyment of, life. To watch Erich Kahler eat a lobster, as I once did during a memorable lunch at an open-air restaurant on Cape Cod, was both a lesson in the anatomy of crustaceans and a sheer pleasure at participating in a life-giving and lifeenhancing ritual. Both the irresistible joie de vivre and the natural capacity to raise this to the level of a discriminating and civilized connoisseurship were typical of the man and part of his charm. There is a simplicity of youth, of innocence, and of naı¨vete´; and, to use a phrase of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, there is what can be called la seconde simplicite´, the simplicity which comes when the bitter lessons of life have taught one to unlearn all that is merely factitious, superfluous, and socially imposed. Erich Kahler’s simplicity was of this second kind, and what had remained with him was the pure essence of a soul of the very mildest and gentlest temper (in the full, original meaning of the word ‘‘gentle’’ signifying not only sweetness of disposition but also elevation of character). As Thomas Mann wrote in 1945, on the occasion of Erich Kahler’s sixtieth birthday, his heart was ‘‘one of the warmest, wisest and most willing to give aid.’’ People streamed in to see him from all over the world—in such profusion, indeed, that in his later years his friends would often remonstrate with him at the exhausting expense of time and energy involved. But he would always reply, with the shy and guilty smile of a little boy being rebuked for some minor breach of etiquette, and with a helpless shrug of his shoulders, that his friends were of course right, but still, there might be something he could do and some way he could help; one never knew in advance. Just a few days before his death, when I saw him in the hospital for the last time, he spoke not of himself but, with his hands clasped before him as if in prayer, and with a passion that made his voice tremble and tears come to his eyes, of the terrible psychic burden—the burden of being both a great German poet and a young Central European Jew growing up in the shadow of the concentration camps—which had led to the suicide of Paul Celan. Erich Kahler’s ideal, his hope for the future, was a Utopian and communitarian one. He loved to dwell on the accomplishments of groups such as the Israeli kibbuzim and various communal experiments in France in restoring a lost equilibrium and harmony to human life even under the most extreme and adverse conditions. ‘‘We must . . . establish the human community in our own sphere,’’ he wrote in the first essay in Untergang und Uebergang (1970), his last volume. ‘‘Only if we establish a human community

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can humanity as a whole be saved.’’ Whether this ideal is more than Utopian only the future can tell; but one found it very easy to believe in the presence of Erich Kahler himself. For while he never said one word about any of this in private conversation, the infectious radiance of his personality succeeded in creating around him the sort of community of which he dreamed. He had truly established the human community in his own human sphere; one could believe in it because it existed there, and with him. Those who were privileged to belong to this community—the community of the friends of Erich Kahler—will always remember him with love, and will never cease to honor and revere his memory.

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13.

Eliade, Cioran, Ionesco: The Treason of the Intellectuals

In the aftermath of World War II there was a great influx of refugees into the United States. Most came from countries where populations had been uprooted by the course of battle, or were escaping from a past in which they had been lucky to have survived. Some, however, were trying to put behind them a different kind of past—one in which they had collaborated with, or expressed sympathy for, the Axis powers which had been defeated. A notable case of this kind was that of Paul de Man, the distinguished professor of comparative literature at Yale University; another eminent instance is Mircea Eliade, the much-admired historian of religion, who in 1957 became chairman of the department of religion in the University of Chicago until his death in 1986. Eliade had been a strong supporter of the Iron Guard movement, the Romanian equivalent of the Italian Fascists and German Nazis, but attempted throughout his later career to conceal and deny his affiliation with its ideas and his service in the pro-Axis Romanian government of Marshal Antonescu during the war. Although Eliade’s history has attracted little attention in the United States outside of academic circles, he nonetheless appears, under a fictitious name, in Saul Bellow’s novel Ravelstein. This title is the name of Bellow’s chief character, a member of the faculty of the University of Chicago. It is well known that Ravelstein is a fictional portrait of the late Allen Bloom, a member of that faculty and the author of The Closing of the American Mind, a book that unexpectedly became a best-seller on publication. Another professor of the university is a Romanian-born historian of religion, Professosr Radu Grielescu, with an even greater international reputation than that of Ravelstein himself and obviously based on Mircea Eliade. The narrator of the novel, who may be roughly identified with the author, is married to a Romanian wife (one of Bellow’s wives was in fact a Romanian mathematician, in the novel an astronomer, and an earlier novel, The Dean’s December, 136

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is set in Bucharest). The couple are flatteringly cultivated by the highly civilized Grielescu, and a minor motif of the book is the futile protest of Ravelstein against what he correctly divines as the efforts of Grielescu to ingratiate himself with the narrator. Both Ravelstein and the narrator are Jewish, and the former has gotten wind that Grielescu, during the 1930s and 40s, had been a fervent intellectual spokesman for the ferociously anti-Semitic Iron Guard movement in Romania. Indeed, he had ‘‘denounced the Jewish syphilis that had infected the high civilization of the Balkans.’’ During the war he had served the proFascist Romanian government by posts in its embassies both in England and Portugal; and he lived in fear that his previous Iron Guard affiliations and sympathies would become known. Ravelstein tells the narrator: ‘‘Grielescu is using you. In his own country he was a fascist, and he needs you to cover this up here.’’ The narrator admits that he had never posed a direct question about his past to Grielescu, but refuses to believe that he could ever have been a genuine Jew-hater. This episode of Bellow’s novel is cited in a fascinating French study, Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco: L’Oubli du fascisme (2002), written by a historian of East European history and culture, Alexandra Laignel-Lavastine. The book is an extremely erudite exploration of the careers of the three writers named in the title, based largely but far from exclusively on an analysis of the littleknown (and until fairly recently mostly inaccessible) journalistic and periodical literature in Romanian of the 1930s and 40s. All were natives of that relatively obscure and distant land, and all performed the astonishing feat of becoming world-famous figures. Eliade’s books on the history of religion elevated him to a commanding height in the field, and he attained fame as a novelist both in his own country and in France. E. M. Cioran’s brilliantly disillusioned reflections on history and culture, written first in Romanian and then in French, were not only hailed in their own right but he was praised as one of the greatest contemporary stylists in his adopted language. Euge`ne Ionesco pioneered the vogue of the theatre of the absurd, and his comic but also symbolically tragic plays were performed everywhere; eventually he was elected to the Acade´mie Franc¸aise. All three, however, had a Romanian past that they wished to hide (though Ionesco’s concealments did not arise from any sympathy with the Fascist tendency that the two others fervently championed). The aim of this book is to investigate the truth about this past so far as it can be ascertained from the surviving documents and the testimony of contemporaries. It has now been supplemented by the translation of a work exclusively

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devoted to Cioran, An Infamous Past, published by a Romanian scholar and poet Marta Petreu in 1999. (It places him so solidly in his Romanian background, however, that non-specialist readers will find it rather hard going.)

I Laignel-Lavastine’s first chapter contains a sweeping depiction of the political-cultural atmosphere of the late 1920s in Romania, the period during which the three men she deals with came to maturity. The ideological climate of the time was defined in a series of articles, written by the 20-year old Mircea Eliade and called ‘‘A Spiritual Itinerary’’—a work that quickly became the lodestar of the new generation, and promoted the young Eliade to the position of its leader. Sweeping aside all the ideas of the past that had been destroyed in the carnage of the First World War, he wrote: ‘‘The myth of indefinite progress, the faith in the aptitude and power of science and technology to establish widespread peace and social justice, the primacy of rationalism and the prestige of agnosticism, all this has been shattered to pieces in every area in which it has been contested.’’ This criticism of positivism and materialism was accompanied by praise of the ‘‘life-force’’ (e´lan vital), and of the most extreme irrational experiences as providing the source of a new realm of values. Romania had emerged considerably enlarged as a result of World War I, but in the late 1920s and early 1930s the country was in a deep socialeconomic crisis. It was in this atmosphere of trouble and discontent, complicated by the problem of absorbing the new non-Romanian minorities added to the state, that the three men in question came to maturity. All three attended the University of Bucharest, the center of the cultural life of the country, and where they came to know each other and compete for attention in the animated discussions that took place in the cafes of the Calei Victorei, the main artery of the city. Every conversation there was a personal challenge, and Ionesco ironically depicts, in a volume entitled Non, the various strategies employed to make an impression. One might imitate Cioran, and speak ‘‘in response to everything or with complete irrelevance.’’ Or ‘‘in a trembling voice, in which the emotion and acute interior tension were expressed as the phrases interrupted each other, cite a passage from Unamuno or Berdyaev.’’ Such names illustrate the level and the international range of reference, which was both cultural and religious. Matters were not so intellectually effervescent for others in the university, especially if they were of Jewish origin. The author accompanies her depiction of the main figures by citing the memoirs of Serge Moscovici, later a

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prominent sociologist in both the United States and France, and that of the novelist and playwright Mihail Sebastian, who was for a time a member of the Eliade inner circle and considered the latter his closest friend. He also kept a diary, which provides invaluable information about the inner transformations of the group from which he was gradually excluded. Of primary importance in this context is the endemic anti-Semitism of Romanian culture, which has deep historic roots. Encouraged by the rise of Nazism during the 1930s, the indigenous anti-Semitism of the Romanian Iron Guard made life for Jewish students of the University a continual torment. They were assigned special seats, continually insulted verbally, and assaulted physically. Often it was necessary for police to be called in to protect them as they left the lecture halls. There is a moving passage from a novel of Sebastian’s (1934) in which the obviously autobiographical character, who has been slapped in the face, remonstrates with himself: ‘‘tell yourself that you are the son of a nation of martyrs . . . dash your head against the walls, but if you wish to be able to look yourself in the face, if you don’t wish to die of shame, do not weep.’’ The reigning academic figure in the University, or at least the figure who exercised the most influence on the writers we are concerned with, was a philosopher named Nae Ionescu. He possessed a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Munich and was a charismatic orator, who exercised an almost hypnotic influence by his lectures to packed auditoriums. Depicted here as more or less an intellectual charlatan, whose brilliant performances were cribbed and plagiarized from the best German philosophical sources, he nonetheless succeeded in obtaining an indelible grip on the finest minds of the younger generation. His lectures, according to Cioran, were only half prepared, so that ‘‘we were present face to face with the working out of his thought. He communicated this effort to us, the tension working in a reciprocal manner . . . Such professors are rare.’’ What did his students absorb from the teachings of this irresistible professor? He traced the crisis of modern man, which culminated for him in the emergence of the ideology of democracy, to the fusion of the philosophical subjectivism of Descartes with the ‘‘mathematical method and uniformization imposed by the Renaissance. To this individualist perspective he opposed that of the submission of the individual to the national collectivity, not the legal but the organic nation, the community of blood and spirit, according to him the only living and creative reality.’’ Up to 1933, such proto-Fascist ideas, which formed the common coin of a good deal of the German philosophy of the time, was not given any political application by

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Nae Ionescu, who had been favorable to the restoration of King Carol II in 1930. But in 1933 he went to Germany and was much impressed by Hitler’s rise to power. On his return he protested, along with Eliade, the ban issued against the Romanian Iron Guard, three of whose members had recently assassinated the liberal Prime Minister. It was in 1933 that the philosopher also made personal contact for the first time with C. Z. Codreanu, the founder and leader of the Iron Guard, apparently a powerfully impressive personality. The Romanian Iron Guard was as vicious and brutal as other Fascist formations, perhaps even more so when it came to murderous violence against the Jews, but it differed from others by having a strong nationalisticreligious component. It combined, the author writes, ‘‘the Fu¨hrerprinzip [the cult of the Leader] with the Christian prototype of the apostle and the Balkan model of the haidouks, those who meted out justice on the highways, a type of Robin Hood of the Carpathians.’’ Each member of the Iron Guard was supposed to submit himself to a discipline that would transform his character, and, at least in theory, it was closer to some sort of religious sect than to a customary political formation. This made it much simpler in later years for Mircea Eliade, in his extremely untrustworthy Memoirs, to sanitize his close association with the Iron Guard by describing them as ‘‘having the structure and vocation of a mystical sect rather than of a political movement.’’ To which the author responds that they offered candidates for all the elections and participated in all the political campaigns. Nonetheless, as late as 1980, Eliade stressed the religious component of their ideology, which glorified terrorism and assassination as examples of personal self-sacrifice. The Iron Guard, he wrote, was ‘‘the sole Romanian political movement that took seriously Christianity and the Church.’’

II After sketching in this background, the book then moves on to follow the careers of the three main protagonists during this period. Cioran was born of a clerical family in what had been a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and as a lyce´e student was one of the few who took advantage of the wellstocked German library. As his notebooks show, he imbibed the very best of both old and new German philosophy as well as Russians like Dostoevsky and Leon Shestov. In 1933, at the age of 22, he began to publish articles in an anti-Semitic weekly, Vremea, in which Eliade also regularly appeared. Cioran’s contributions were distinguished both by an extreme cultural

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and ethical pessimism derived from Schopenhauer as well as by an antirationalism absorbed from Nietzsche, Georg Simmel and Max Scheler. Petreu stresses the influence of Oswald Spengler, to whose thoughts on the decline of Western European culture, she argues, Cioran remained indebted all his life. His writings were also characterized by an anguished concern over the status and position of Romania on the world-scene. By what means could his country succeed in raising itself above the mediocrity in which it seemed to subsist? How could it ‘‘emerge from a thousand years of subhistorical vegetative life,’’ as he wrote in 1936? Like other students of Nae Ionescu, Cioran had begun to sympathize with the Iron Guard without, however, accepting some of its ideological presuppositions; and he was always too much of an individual ever to affiliate completely with a political movement. But a decisive moment in his life was a Humboldt fellowship to Germany in 1933, where he lived until the summer of 1935. He was tremendously impressed, like so many others, by the new dynamism that Hitler had imparted to German life, and compared it sadly with the stagnation at home. ‘‘To tell the truth,’’ he wrote to a friend shortly after arriving, ‘‘there are things here that please me, and I am convinced that a dictatorial regime would succeed in conquering our native morass.’’ He admired Hitler more and more as time went on, and he expresses such admiration in no uncertain terms in the articles he sent back for his Romanian readers. ‘‘There is no contemporary political figure,’’ he wrote, ‘‘for whom I feel a greater sympathy and admiration than for Hitler,’’ who had succeeded in infusing ‘‘a messianic inspiration to a domain of values that democratic rationalism had rendered banal and trivial.’’ With many others, he went to the popular courses of the anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer, the philosopher Ludwig Klages (he compared him to Nae Ionescu, and placed him on the same level as Heidegger), who wrote a huge threevolume work to demonstrate that reason had always been a dissolving and corrupting force in human life. On returning home, he performed his obligatory military service in the army, and then, in 1936–37, was appointed professor of philosophy for a year in a lyce´e. During these years he published three books, two on religion and a third, The Transfiguration of Romania, the most scandalously provocative work that ever came from his pen. Here he raises the problem of the integration of minorities, and not only defends Romanian xenophobia but also attempts to develop a rigorously systematic and historical anti-Semitic argument to prove that the Jews are inassimilable. ‘‘The feeling of animosity toward strangers,’’ he declares, ‘‘is so characteristic of Romanian national

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sentiment that the two are forever indissoluble . . . We have lived for a thousand years under their domination [that of strangers], and not to hate them, not to get them out of the way, would be proof of a lack of national instinct.’’ As for the Jews, ‘‘every time that a people becomes conscious of itself,’’ he writes, ‘‘it fatally enters into conflict with the Jews.’’ One can learn to live with other minorities such as the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, but this is impossible with the Jews ‘‘by reason of the particular structure of their mentality and of their inherent political orientations.’’ Cioran repeats the usual litany of anti-Semitic charges, but attempts to give them a logic and consistency they would not otherwise possess, linking them to essential characteristics of the Jewish mentality. This was written after Hitler had passed the Nuremberg laws in Germany. Most of Petreu’s book is devoted to a very detailed, conscientious and quite critical analysis of this work, the only purely political tract Cioran ever produced. Regrettably, she pays little attention to the far better known apolitical works he was also publishing at the same time, inspired by his untiring wrestlings with the fundamental enigmas of metaphysical-religious thought. Aside from his anti-Semitism and xenophobia, Petreu views Cioran’s political ideas as quite independent in the Romanian context, then locked in a conflict over ‘‘occidentalism and autochthony’’ (a reliance on native traditions). He rejects both a capitalist transformation along European democratic lines, and a reaffirmation of the national values embodied in rural life. He was, however, in favor of increased industrialization and expressed considerable admiration for Lenin and the Russian Revolution, though of course abhorring its materialist ideology. Moreover, the transformation of Romania could only be nationalist, and it was here that he coincided with the Iron Guard, proclaiming in 1937 his confidence in their ‘‘heroism which begins in brutality and ends in sacrifice.’’ He met Codreanu several times in 1943, but wrote Eliade in 1935 that ‘‘no political doctrine receives my ultimate approval.’’ In any case, Cioran left Romania again in 1937, having applied for a study grant to Spain but, because of the civil war, obtaining one to spend three years in France instead.

III Eliade, as already noted, found no difficulty at all in accepting the ideology of the Iron Guard, which he viewed in the light of his own preoccupation with religion and spirituality. The difference between him and Cioran,

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whose The Transfiguration of Romania Eliade prepared for the press as a service for his friend, is clearly illustrated in a letter. Eliade is full of praise for the section on the Jews and other minorities, but objects to Cioran’s contemptuous remarks about the Romanian village as containing nothing but ‘‘a biological reserve.’’ For Eliade it was the source of national-religious values that had existed for centuries and were again being revived by the Iron Guard. In a series of more than fifty articles between 1934 and 1938 he praised ‘‘The Captain,’’ as Codreanu was called, for inspiring such a movement and urged young intellectuals to join the cause. ‘‘The significance of the revolution advanced by Corneliu Codreanu is so profoundly mystical,’’ he declared, ‘‘that its success would designate the victory of the Christian spirit in Europe.’’ Eliade’s adhesion to the cause, however, was by no means instantaneous, and the author carefully traces the process by which he gradually came to identify the realm of the spiritual with that of politics. In December 1935 he wrote that ‘‘the primacy of the spiritual does not imply the refusal of action,’’ and in 1936 he openly began to support the Iron Guard; but he did so, as it were, from the interior, ‘‘so as to provide its ideology with a more solid philosophical foundation.’’ One is reminded of Heidegger’s similar attempt to provide Hitlerism with what the philosopher considered a worthier intellectual grounding. Eliade carries on a continual battle against the ideas of the Enlightenment, and traces the degeneration of Romania to its attempt to adopt such alien notions. ‘‘Being a foreign importation, the democratic regime concerns itself with matters that are not specifically Romanian—abstractions like the rights of man, the rights of minorities, and the liberty of conscience.’’ Far better a dictatorship like that of Mussolini, which is always preferable to a democracy because, if the latter goes to pieces, it will ‘‘inevitably slide towards the left’’ and thus towards Communism. An important event of these years for Eliade, as well as for the country in general, was the return of the coffins of two of his friends, both prominent Iron Guardists, killed fighting for Franco in the Spanish civil war. A huge semi-official demonstration was organized to honor their remains, and Eliade wrote three articles, one published in the journal of the Iron Guard itself, to consecrate the glory of their sacrifice. As usual, he endows this event with his own pseudo-religious aura ‘‘The voluntary death of Ion Mota, and Vasile Marin,’’ he wrote, ‘‘has a mystic significance: the sacrifice for Christianity.’’ By this time he had become an active partisan of the Iron Guard, and there is some indirect evidence that he might have participated on their behalf in the election campaign of 1937. As a result, when the

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Guard fell out of favor with the government in 1938, and Codreanu and several hundred of his most prominent followers were arrested in July 1938, the important writer and university professor Mircea Eliade was included among them. Conditions of their detention in a camp, once an agricultural school, were far from being onerous, and courses were organized by Nae Ionescu and Eliade, who also managed to write a novel there entitled Marriage in Paradise. The uncle of his wife was a general close to King Carol II, and since Eliade suffered from a tubercular condition he was allowed to move to a mountain village in October and returned home early in December. Later that month Codreanu was killed, presumably while attempting to escape, and the Iron Guard movement was sternly repressed. Eliade had lost his university post, but he wrote to Cioran that ‘‘he regretted nothing,’’ and he wrote a play, Iphigenia, which exalted the ideas of sacrifice and of death for one’s country in words literally reproducing those he had used about the two Iron Guardists who had sacrificed themselves for Franco. Life for Eliade in his native land was thus becoming difficult, and his correspondence reveals that he was seeking to go elsewhere. He made efforts in the direction of the United States and France with no success, and finally had to settle for a post as cultural attache´ in London before Romania entered the war against the Allies. The English were quite well informed about his past, and he was classified as ‘‘the most Nazified member of the legation,’’ possibly a spy for Germany. When transferred to Portugal, there was some discussion as to whether he should be allowed to leave the country; and he was filled with indignation at being stripped and searched before his departure. He spent four years in Lisbon, where the dictatorship of A. O. Salazar, which he called ‘‘a Christian form of totalitarianism,’’ was much closer to his political tastes than anything he could find elsewhere. While performing his tasks in the embassy, he also wrote a hagiographical but scholarly biography of Salazar, who deigned, much to his delight, to grant him an audience, and then entrusted him with a message to deliver to General Antonescu. His trip to Bucharest in July 1942 was the last time he was to see his native land.

IV The third member of this trio was of course Euge`ne Ionesco, and the book jacket contains a photograph taken in 1977 in Paris at the charming and peaceful little Place Furstenberg, just a few steps away from the swarming

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crowd at St. Germain-des-Pre`s. The picture captures them talking together in the friendliest fashion, and has aroused a good deal of criticism because it would appear that all three were guilty in a similar fashion of the ‘‘oubli du fascisme,’’ the forgetfulness about Fascism indicated by the book’s title. The text makes clear, however, that Ionesco’s politics had always been fiercely hostile to the Fascist temptation. Indeed, his famous play Rhinoceros (1959), one of the most frequently performed dramatic works throughout the world, is based on his horrified fascination with what he saw taking place as the members of his generation each yielded to the Fascist spell. The play depicts a small provincial village whose inhabitants gradually become transformed into rhinoceroses that destroy everything in their path. And Ionesco’s journal records the process by which, as he wrote, ‘‘I saw how my brothers, my friends, gradually became strangers. I felt a new spirit germinating within them; how a new personality was substituted for theirs.’’ These new personalities were those of ‘‘the ideologists and semiintellectuals’’ who mutated into ‘‘rhinoceroses,’’ and a character called ‘‘the Logician’’ in the play, presumably based on Nae Ionescu, precipitates this transformation. Nonetheless, Ionesco too possessed a past that he wished to keep hidden, though it was relatively anodine compared to the other two. For one thing, there was the question of his family. Ionesco’s father was a Romanian lawyer with a French doctorate in law and his mother was presumably French. But there appears to be some question about her origins, and there seems little doubt that she was not a French citizen and was probably of Jewish ancestry. None of this is mentioned in Ionesco’s own autobiographical writings; but he spoke of his mother to Mihail Sebastian, whose friendship, unlike all the others, he continued to cultivate, and who comments that ‘‘I had long known that his mother was Jewish from hearsay.’’ This conversation occurred in 1941, just fifteen days after an Iron Guardist pogrom, horrifying in its savagery, had taken place in Bucharest. Ionesco taught French literature in the University of Bucharest, and became well known in the 1930s when a book of his critical articles, Non, was given a prestigious literary award. In it, he scathingly attacked the eminences of Romanian literature for their ‘‘ethno-linguistic nationalism and historicism.’’ Meanwhile, he was keeping a journal that nourished much of his later work, and in which we see him rejecting the collectivisms both of Fascism and Communism. In 1938 he received a grant to study in Paris from the director of the French Cultural Institute who, a few months earlier, had given one to Cioran; but though the two lived in the same section of Paris

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and had common Romanian friends, they carefully avoided each other’s company. At this time Ionesco was much influenced by Emmanuel Mounier, the founder of the journal Esprit, who as a liberal Catholic attempted to steer a middle course between left and right and fathered a doctrine known as ‘‘personalism.’’ This was both anti-capitalist and highly critical of the weaknesses of liberal democracy, but also stressed the importance of preserving the rights of the individual personality. Mounier has been sharply criticized for having contributed to the undermining of that respect for democracy that marked the pre-war years in France; but what Ionesco valued was his emphasis on the importance and value of the individual. Both Cioran and Ionesco sent home articles containing their impressions of Paris: the first depicted the city and France itself as ‘‘a nation fatigued and wornout, at the twilight of its history,’’ while Ionesco spoke of them as ‘‘the ultimate refuge of humanity.’’ After the outbreak of the war in September 1939, Ionesco decided to return to Romania—a decision he later bitterly regretted. He remained there until the summer of 1942, desperately trying to leave again without success. During this period the Romanian government was taken over by General Ion Antonescu, who for five months shared power with the Iron Guard. They instituted a reign of terror ‘‘of an indescribable savagery,’’ particularly against the Jews but also massacring other opponents and kidnapping former members of the government and prominent intellectuals to be executed. Antonescu, disturbed by the chaos, finally suppressed them after a brief struggle with the help of German troops. Meanwhile, new laws against the Jews were added to those already in existence and applied to ‘‘converts’’ of the past and present as well as those clinging to their faith; all were excluded from teaching, not to mention any other professional office or occupation, except with special permission of the head of the state. Ionesco became frantic, as his notebooks reveal; and after several futile efforts to obtain passports and visas, he appealed to friends in several ministries for help. As a last resort, they arranged for him to become press attache´ at the Romanian Embassy in Vichy (France by this time had been defeated); and as he put it himself, ‘‘I am like an escaped prisoner who flees in the uniform of the jailer.’’ This is the second part of his Romanian past that Ionesco kept concealed; these Vichy years are never mentioned in his autobiographical writings. A full account of them is now given, using the documents available from his dossier in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bucharest and references in his letters of the time. It is quite clear, as Lagneil-Lavastine puts it, that this ‘‘was

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a strategy of survival’’; and though he hated every moment of his duties, he performed them conscientiously enough to receive a promotion to cultural secretary in the spring of 1943. Much of his time was given to encouraging the translation and publication of Romanian writers, and to maneuvering among French journals in the complicated maze created by the collaborationist, semi-collaborationist, and purely literary publications. Ionesco carefully avoided the first and preferred those that attempted to preserve a literary autonomy, even if necessarily limited. He also secretly employed as a translator a Romanian Jewish poet using a pseudonym, whose works had been illustrated by Brancusi and Victor Brauner. The author, very far from being lenient toward her subjects, does not omit to list other duties of Ionesco that might be considered ‘‘compromising’’; but she concludes that his record is ‘‘in general quite honorable.’’ These were years, however, that he wished to forget.

V Cioran was also in Paris at the outbreak of the war and decided to return to Bucharest in the autumn of 1940, though like the Vichy years of Ionesco he too later eliminated these months from his biography. The reason is quite simple: he arrived when the Iron Guard had practically taken over the government; and on the very day that it was committing the atrocities already mentioned, he spoke on the radio with ecstatic praise for the Legion (as the Iron Guard was also called). ‘‘Codreanu,’’ he said, ‘‘had instilled honor in a nation of slaves; he has given a sense of pride to a spineless herd.’’ He also published several articles along the same lines, and, preparing his return to France, obtained an appointment as cultural attache´ to the Romanian Embassy in Vichy. Cioran took up his new post in March 1941, but broke all records for the brevity of his service, which lasted only two and a half months. Meanwhile, he managed once again to obtain a study grant with the help of his former benefactor, now in the Colle`ge de France, and returned to live and write in occupied Paris. During these years, he spent a good deal of time with another exRomanian intellectual of Jewish origin, Benjamin Fondane (actually Vecsler), who had become a fairly well-known literary critic and poet through his works in French. In a letter to his parents in 1946, cited by Petreu, Cioran writes that ‘‘he [Fondane] proved to be more gentle and generous than all my ‘Christian’ friends taken together . . . In the long run, all ideas are absurd and false; only the people are there, regardless of their origin or

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religion.’’ Cioran wrote an admiring essay about him later; and when Fondane was finally denounced and arrested, Cioran went along with Jean Paulhan to plead for his liberation. Surprisingly enough they were successful in his case; but he refused to leave without his sister, who had also been taken into custody, and they both ended in Auschwitz. Besides his essay, Cioran also helped Fondane’s wife re-edit his works after the war and to complete an important, unfinished book on Baudelaire; he also wrote asking that Fondane’s name be included among those deported writers whose names were inscribed in the Pantheon. There can be little doubt, as the author writes, that ‘‘the arrest of Fondane shook Cioran profoundly,’’ but she cavils at the fact that his article only calls him ‘‘Moldavian’’ rather than Jewish (as if this were not understood), and that other phrases might be interpreted as traces of his previous antiSemitism. But actions still speak louder than words, and this is not the only instance in which the author hesitates to acknowledge any genuine transformation of sentiment in Cioran. No such problem arises with Eliade because no transformation of any kind took place. Quite the contrary, Eliade kept a notebook throughout the war now deposited in the University of Chicago library, and which, since never intended for publication, he did not undertake to revise so as to blur and distort his opinions and actions. It is an astonishing document, revealing both a self-adulation merging on megalomania and a fervent commitment to the triumph of Hitler, Mussolini, and General Antonescu over the ‘‘Anglo-Bolsheviks.’’ The author does not conceal her sarcasm as she cites his remark about ‘‘my limitless capacity to comprehend and to experience everything that refers to the sphere of culture.’’ Indeed, comparing himself with Goethe, he concludes: ‘‘I do not believe ever having come across a genius of such complexity [as himself] . . . my intellectual horizons are vaster than those of Goethe.’’ Despite the consolation of such reflections, he was terribly depressed by the course of the war. After the defeat of the Germans and Romanians at Stalingrad (which Eliade called ‘‘a tragedy’’), followed by the invasion of North Africa and the British victory over Rommel, he was upset to such an extent that he notes: ‘‘Insomnias, nightmares, depression.’’ He was appalled that other members of the Embassy ‘‘uncorked champagne at every new Anglo-American victory, forgetting that our divisions were on the Volga.’’ (In his falsified Memoirs, he pretends to share the feelings that he deplored.) For him, the possible triumph of the Allies was ‘‘the abandonment of Europe to the Asiatic hordes.’’ Even though Jews were being slaughtered

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right and left in his homeland, not to mention elsewhere—and Eliade’s Embassy position kept him perfectly well informed—not a word about any such events appear in his pages. As the handwriting on the wall became more and more legible, he decided not to return home and to take another tack. ‘‘I have decided to ‘penetrate’ Europe more deeply and with more determination than I have done until now,’’ he writes. Several months later, he sees himself operating as ‘‘a Trojan horse within the scientific arena,’’ whose aim was ‘‘scientifically to validate the metaphysical significance of prehistoric life.’’ This is exactly how he behaved after General Antonescu was overthrown and a new more or less representative government came to power. He was discharged from his Embassy position, but he had influential scholarly connections in Paris, particularly the cultural historian Georges Dume´zil, and he used this influence as well as others to obtain temporary teaching appointments. He had begun to write his Treatise on the History of Religions in 1944 and his influential The Myth of the Eternal Return a year later; both appeared in French in the immediate post-war years, and launched Eliade on his way to international fame and a permanent post in Chicago.

VI The great value of Laignel-Lavastine’s book is her thorough investigation of the Romanian background in a much larger framework than provided by Petreu. The chapters devoted to the post-war years of her three protagonists, though of great interest in themselves and barely touched on by Petreu, deal with more familiar and easily accessible material. Most of the criticism leveled against her, and there has been a good deal, has sprung from two sources. The revelation of Ionesco’s Vichy years has been much resented by his family and friends; and the injury done to the fame of Eliade and Cioran was also very badly received by their admirers in Romania, the United States and France. None of their criticisms, however, so far as my knowledge goes, has really undermined the factual basis of LaignelLavastine’s indictment, even though she may be faulted on matters of detail. A different question arises when she discusses the issue of whether Eliade and Cioran ever underwent any sort of ‘‘true transformation’’ of their earlier views, or only engaged ‘‘in a secret game of projections, calculations and concealments.’’ This involves matters of interpretation where opinions may differ. Such a question, as she concedes, applies only ‘‘very weakly’’ to Ionesco, who was more a victim of circumstances than of any ideological

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commitment he had reason to regret. But she nonetheless finds it anomalous that, in later years, the picture on the book jacket of the three men engaged in friendly conversation approximates at least some of the truth of what became their relation. In the immediate post-war years, many of the Romanian intellectuals in Paris (not all, to be sure), clustered around Eliade, whose hotel room became ‘‘one of the principal rendez-vous’s of the exile.’’ Ionesco showed up at such gatherings, as he told a friend, only in order ‘‘to escape from [his] undermining solitude,’’ while at the same time declaiming against this group as ‘‘an affair of Legionaires [Iron Guardists] who have not repented.’’ Moreover, aside from the need to overcome the ‘‘painful isolation’’ that he felt, the Romanian political situation had changed entirely, and he now found himself more or less partially in agreement with his ancient enemies. A Communist government had taken over Romania in 1947, and Ionesco could join the others in deploring this imposition of the collectivism, whether of the right or the left, that he had always abhorred. All through his later life he actively supported democratic causes, affixing his name to petitions to support the Prague Spring, the Afghan resistance against Russia, the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate, etc., etc. and joining movements like Amnesty International. He was tireless in his support of Israel, thus bucking a strong current of French gauchiste opinion, and joining Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kolakowski, and Czelaw Milosz among others in his anti-Communism. The author speaks of him as thus ‘‘sliding to the right,’’ but doing so in defense of the values in which he had always believed—the liberty of man and humanism. As more or less of a gauchiste herself, however, she cannot resist a dig at ‘‘the rather reactionary side of the old academician, which sometimes brings on a smile or a reaction of annoyance,’’ when ‘‘his anti-communism becomes in the end a little ridiculous.’’ This is a nasty thrust that one could well have done without. Eliade’s remarkable career illustrates his skill and success in playing ‘‘the secret game of projections, concealments and calculations.’’ Reference already has been made to the falsification of the memoirs and journals that is illustrated all through the volume; but his Iron Guard past nonetheless caught up with him from time to time. His application for appointment to the French CNRS (Center for Scientific Research), though he was sponsored by a formidable array of prominent scholars, was turned down because a renowned medieval historian in France of Romanian origin wrote a detailed letter about his early commitments. Similarly, safely installed in Chicago in 1973, Eliade was invited for a lecture in Israel by the renowned

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Gershom Scholem, whom he had met at colloquiums in Ascona, Switzerland, initially sponsored by C. G. Jung (whose political past is also very suspect). However, in 1972 a small Israeli journal of the Romanian emigration published an article revealing part of Eliade’s connection with the Iron Guard, but without citing any written sources. Scholem was troubled, but Eliade wrote a letter piling lie on lie, indignantly denying that he had ever published a line in praise of the Iron Guard and relying on the inaccessibility of the Romanian material at that time. The invitation to the University of Jerusalem was withdrawn, though Scholem, presumably incapable of believing in such duplicity, urged Eliade to visit him personally and offered to arrange an interview with the author of the article to clear up matters of disagreement. Naturally, Eliade cancelled the trip and never visited Israel then or later. Part of Eliade’s strategy was to cultivate friendships with prominent Jewish scholars and intellectuals, as Ravelstein-Bloom had rightly charged, and the author notes that Saul Bellow spoke at his funeral in 1986. The novel indicates that he might have had some regrets at having done so. Nothing blatantly anti-Semitic can evidently be found in Eliade’s postwar writings, but the author finds it transposed in a much more scholarly key in his theory of religion. One of the cornerstones of his doctrine was that archaic man lived in a world of cyclical time, whose recurrences were marked by festivals of one kind or another in which ‘‘sacred time,’’ the time of religious experience, was re-created. The modern world has largely lost this ability to relive ‘‘sacred time’’ because the Hebrews (as he now calls them) broke with the cyclical time of ‘‘the eternal return’’ by linking God with linear time. ‘‘The Hebrews,’’ he writes, ‘‘were the first to discover the significance of history as the epiphany of God,’’ and this discovery of history ultimately led to all the ills of the modern world. The author cites a French analyst of Eliade’s views on mythology, Daniel Dubuisson, who concludes that this summary notion of history ‘‘especially invents a new accusation against the Jews, that of an ontological crime, a capital crime and without doubt unpardonable.’’ Eliade thus remained true to himself in this erudite disguise during his later years, when his world-wide fame reached its apogee and his death was mourned with sanctimonious reverence. The most complicated case of all involves Cioran, whose later writings are shot through with passages that may be read as implicit expressions of regret for his earlier convictions, but who never seemed able to repudiate them publicly. He was much more forthright in his correspondence, or in private conversation, than when writing for publication. In a letter to a

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friend, for example, Cioran declared in 1971 that ‘‘when I contemplate certain of my past infatuations, I am brought up short: I don’t understand. What madness!’’ This would certainly seem to imply their rejection on his part. In conversation with the author of a book about the commandant of Auschwitz, he said: ‘‘What Germany did amounts to a damnation of mankind.’’ There can be no question that, unlike Eliade, the issue of his previous Fascism and anti-Semitism tormented the complicated, involuted, selfquestioning Cioran, whose thought was always directed toward undermining all of mankind’s certainties including his own. The analysis of the postwar Cioran given here is the most complex and controversial in the book. He is depicted as both evading any overt responsibility for his past, but also, ‘‘unlike Eliade,’’ contradictorily being weighed down by feelings ‘‘inseparable from a desire for expiation and a sense of diffuse guilt, an ‘oppressive sensation’ with which he admits sometimes awakening in the morning, ‘as if I bore the weight of a thousand crimes.’ ’’ As in the case of Eliade, Cioran’s past sometimes came back to haunt the present. Paul Celan, the great German poet of Romanian origin whose parents died in a Romanian camp, and who had himself been deported to a labor camp, was also living in Paris and translated one of Cioran’s works, Pre´cis de de´composition (A Short History of Decay), into German in 1953. The relation between the two was far from being as intimate as Cioran’s with Fondane. Celan, Cioran wrote, was a person ‘‘of great charm,’’ but he was ‘‘an impossible man with whom relations were difficult and complicated.’’ Nonetheless, the two saw each other from time to time, and Cioran came to the poet’s aid when Celan was fighting off accusations of plagiarism. However, when a Romanian critic on his way through Paris laid out the particulars of Cioran’s past, Celan refused to have anything more to do with him; but Cioran was deeply disturbed when he heard of the poet’s suicide. The author suggests that this relationship with a Jewish writer may also have been meant as the same sort of ‘‘cover’’ that Eliade exploited so successfully; but there is nothing to support such a suspicion except that, when once asked whether he knew Ce´line, he mentioned Celan instead. One has the feeling here that, despite her own evident intention to be as fair as possible in stressing Cioran’s ‘‘ambivalence,’’ the author is pushing matters too far. The same problem arises when she comes to Cioran’s attitude toward the Jews. When, for example, a new edition in Romanian was published of his most anti-Semitic book, The Transfiguration of Romania, he insisted that the chapter on the Jews be eliminated along with a number of remarks about them scattered through the text. ‘‘I completely renounce,’’ he wrote a

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Eliade, Cioran, Ionesco: The Treason of the Intellectuals 153

friend, ‘‘a very large part [of the book] which stems from the prejudices of the past, and I consider as inadmissible certain remarks about the Jews.’’ Nothing would seem more explicit. Even more, in one of his later French books he included a section on the Jews entitled Un Peuple de solitaires that was hailed as being philosemitic. The author, however, believes this to be an illusion because, on comparing this text with what he had written years ago, she finds that the image now given of the Jewish people and their history is much the same as that provided earlier—except that what had been evaluated negatively in the past is now given a glowingly positive meaning. Moreover, he continually identifies his own situation with that of the Jews, sometimes writing ‘‘their drama [that of the Jews] is mine,’’ and sometimes musing, as in 1970, ‘‘I lacked an essential condition fully to realize myself: to be Jewish.’’ The author considers this obsessive self-identification with the Jews to be ‘‘the reversed expression of the same psychopathological phenomenon’’ that had earlier led to his worst excesses. Perhaps so; but to glorify the Jews instead of vilifying them surely indicates some sort of change. Also, even though the anti-Semitism is absent, she finds that while Cioran often expresses regret about his errors of the past, he never does so except in general terms, without attempting to analyze them or to explain why they are now rejected. What she misses in Cioran’s tantalizingly ambiguous relation to his past is a genuine attempt to come to terms with the practical consequences of the ideas he once espoused and still, on occasion, seemed to toy with in a rhetorically half-amused fashion. She wonders whether, as was the case with Eliade, he is merely ‘‘translating into an acceptable language ideological motifs and attitudes [that are] ideologically disqualified in the West.’’ Petru is much more affirmative on this issue, and cites someone who visited Cioran during his last days, when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. ‘‘From his hospital bed, desperately trying to overcome the symptoms of his disease, Cioran stumblingly told his guest: ‘‘I . . . am not . . . an . . . anti. . . Semite.’’ Let me add my personal testimony at this point to the record. During one of my years in Paris I met Cioran, saw him on a number of occasions, and we had a good many conversations (particularly but not exclusively about Russian literature, in which he took a passionate interest). Whatever the twists and turns of his troubled conscience, the brilliantly sardonic, selfmocking, totally engaging and fascinating personality that I knew could not have been a conscious manipulator who would set out deliberately to

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deceive. Nor does the author offer any convincing evidence to support this conjecture equating him with Eliade. If there is one general criticism to be made of Alexandra LaignelLavastine’s excellent book, it is that she pursues Cioran too relentlessly, perhaps wishing to counteract his devoted admirers in France and elsewhere— Susan Sontag, for example, who introduced him to the United States. The lack of knowledge of the Romanian background allowed him to be seen innocently and exclusively in the light of his impressively soaring philosophical speculations. But if these are shadowed by the political commitments he later found incomprehensible, the reliable evidence of his genuine struggle to cope with his past deserves more sympathy than the author can muster. However, she must be praised for having accomplished a formidable and enlightening task, and for being scrupulous enough to include the material that allows the reader to contest her own interpretation.

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part three

Critics and Criticism

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14.

Eliot’s Legacy

To Criticize the Critic (1965) is a mixed bag of lectures on literary and sociocultural topics given by T. S. Eliot at various times between 1942 and 1961. By way of a bonus, the book also includes Eliot’s early pamphlet on Ezra Pound and some reflections on vers libre, both originally published in 1917. Most of these essays overlap in date with those of Eliot’s previous volume of criticism, On Poetry and Poets (1957), but for one reason or another they did not appear in that book. The non-literary pieces were probably excluded to preserve the unity of that work as literary criticism; and the properly literary essays, one suspects, were felt to be too casual and perfunctory to be definitively enshrined in a volume. With the exception of the essay entitled ‘‘From Poe to Vale´ry,’’ which is probably the best piece of criticism written by Eliot in his last twenty years, these articles are more interesting for their occasional personal glimpses than for anything they have to say. One can feel in them the natural tendency of advancing age to ruminate and reminisce rather than to engage with the challenge of new subjects. The intermittent elegiac note in the book—as when Eliot refers ‘‘to those of us who succeed in dying in advance of our reputations’’—also gives a touch of poignancy to these final reflections of a major twentieth-century mind and sensibility. The personal observations that Eliot scatters through these essays, most notably in the lecture that gives the present work its title, do not really say anything that two generations of zealous commentators have not long since noted and discussed. There is a certain piquancy, however, in Eliot’s confession that his best criticism has always been simply a reflection of his personal taste. After all, it was Eliot who changed the course of English criticism by his attacks on Impressionist critics like Pater, Swinburne, and Arthur Symons, charging that they wrote about their own subjective impressions rather than about works of art. But now Eliot unabashedly declares that his own criticism expressed primarily his intimate poetic interests and preoccupations; 157

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and he even attributes the continued popularity of his early essays on the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists to the warmth of advocacy arising from his personal involvement. It was from these minor dramatists that I, in my own poetic formation, had learned my lessons; it was by them, and not by Shakespeare, that my imagination had been stimulated, my sense of rhythm trained, and my emotions fed.’’ One might add that the same can be said of Eliot’s relation to such writers as Donne and the English Metaphysicals, as well as to French Symbolists like Laforgue, Corbie`re, and Baudelaire. It was Eliot’s intimate sense of identification with these writers that sparked the literary revolution linked with his name, and which proceeded under the influence of his poetry and essays. That revolution reacted against the Romantic tradition of English poetry in favor of the toughness and intellectual complexity of the Metaphysicals, the bitter, disillusioned irony of Laforgue and Corbie`re, and the moral intensity of Baudelaire. Eliot quotes Baudelaire’s marvelous lines: ‘‘Fourmillante cite´, cite´ pleine de reˆves,/Ou` le spectre en plein jour raccroche le passant’’ (‘‘Swarming city, city filled with dreams/Where the ghostly grips the passerby in blaze of day’’) and he remarks: ‘‘I knew what that meant, because I had lived it before I knew that I wanted to turn it into verse on my own account.’’ Eliot’s poetry, in his own opinion, was far more important than his essays in helping to turn the spotlight on such writers and elevating them to the status of major precursors of the modern. ‘‘As the taste for my own poetry spread,’’ he comments, ‘‘so did the taste for the poets to whom I owed the greatest debt and about whom I wrote.’’ Criticism, he believes, cannot itself bring about a change in literary taste; it is the artists who create such a change by their creations. This is unquestionably true, and it explains why critical movements that have no relation to a living literature—such as the American Humanism that influenced Eliot, or Chicago Neo-Aristotelianism—are likely to remain academic backwaters. If the New Criticism exercised considerable influence, it was not because its theoretical principles were superior to those of its opponents (in some cases they were much narrower) but because its perspective and methods sprang from the new style then taking over in literature. But while the enormous impact of Eliot’s criticism is at least partially explicable by the great vogue for his poetry, its authority also derives from other, more indigenously critical attributes. At first sight, it may seem as though Eliot’s stress on the very personal roots of his criticism involves a repudiation of his original position; but his theory of impersonality never meant that he believed the critic could

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become some kind of monster of non-being with no preferences or opinions. The motto that he took from Re´my de Gourmont, and which he used as an epigraph for his famous essay on ‘‘The Perfect Critic,’’ runs as follows: ‘‘E´riger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un homme s’il est since`re.’’ In other words, a man (or critic) honest with himself will not be content to stay on the level of personal impressions; he will try to generalize, to find the laws or objective structures that determine and control the impressions he receives from a work of art. And the value of Eliot’s criticism—so far as one can assign it to anything except the gift of impeccable insight—is clearly founded on his efforts to live up to this injunction. In To Criticize the Critic, he says that ‘‘When I have written about Baudelaire, or Dante, or any other poet who has had a capital importance in my development, I have written because that poet has meant so much to me, but not about myself, but about that poet and his poetry.’’ Thus, in a more informal way, he reiterates and affirms the position originally assumed in quoting de Gourmont almost half a century before. The personal interest of the critic in the poet does not contradict but is presupposed in, and absorbed by, the attempt to analyze the ‘‘laws’’ of the effect of the poetry. If Eliot’s criticism has played such a powerful role in shifting the perspective of English literary history, it is because he never forgot that he was writing ‘‘about that poet and his poetry.’’ In his essays on the minor Elizabethans, for example, he exhibits a complete mastery of the historical context in which they worked both artistically and intellectually. One never finds in Eliot’s criticism any of the antagonism to ‘‘history’’ that turns up in the efforts of some of his more obtuse epigoni. But Eliot responded to this historical context with a new intensity and freshness, and with a new feeling for artistic quality, because he could apprehend an analogy between his own artistic aims and the situation and sensibility of earlier writers. Unlike some critics, who simply translate the past into one or another currently fashionable critical language, Eliot respected the autonomy of the past while seeking in it new sources of inspiration for the present. This was the manner in which his criticism exemplified his conception of tradition: to feel both the pastness of the past and its vital contemporaneity at the same time. Speaking of the main influences on his early criticism, Eliot singles out the names of Irving Babbitt and Ezra Pound, and refers to ‘‘an infusion later of T. E. Hulme and of the more literary essays of Charles Maurras.’’ The coupling of the names of Babbitt and Pound, Eliot remarks, is ‘‘not so incongruous as might at first sight appear’’; but this only indicates to what

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extent Eliot himself felt the incongruity. There is, indeed, something incongruous in linking the staid Harvard professor and defender of a straitlaced Humanism, to whom all of modern literature since Rousseau was anathema, with the irreverent, flamboyant aesthete whom Punch called ‘‘a blend of the imagery of the unfettered West, the vocabulary of Wardour Street, and the sinister abandon of Borgiac Italy.’’ (This little gem is preserved by Eliot himself in the Pound brochure.) Nevertheless, both were united in their opposition to nineteenth-century Romanticism. Babbitt objected to the Romantics on moral grounds, Pound on aesthetic ones; Eliot’s genius consisted in overlooking the superficial differences between the two and seeing the deep, underlying connection. As a result, Babbitt’s scandalized rejection of the emotional laxity of all forms of individualism and sentimentalism was brought into relation with the very latest trend in modern poetry and became more than a dusty, academic neo-Puritanism. In turn, Pound’s random critical excursions into the past, his hit-or-miss obiter dicta about poetry, were given a solid and respectable historical foundation in a comprehensive theory of modern culture. Taken independently, neither Babbitt nor Pound possessed half the persuasive power each attained when Eliot adroitly fused them together. The two most important general ideas that Eliot launched into critical discussion were ‘‘the objective correlative’’ and ‘‘the dissociation of sensibility.’’ That the first of these ideas was a commonplace in Imagist circles around the period of World War I is interestingly revealed in Eliot’s essay on Pound. Quoting a review of Pound’s ‘‘Cathay’’ by Ford Madox Ford, Eliot transcribes the following sentence: ‘‘Poetry consists in so rendering concrete objects that the emotions produced by the objects shall arise in the reader.’’ Two years later, in his classic essay on ‘‘Hamlet and His Problems,’’ Eliot was to write that ‘‘the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion . . .’’ On the basis of this view, Eliot declared Hamlet a failure as a play because Shakespeare had been unable adequately to objectify the motivation of the main character. As for ‘‘the dissociation of sensibility,’’ Eliot distinguished the style of Donne and the Metaphysicals from that of their successors in terms of a separation that had occurred between thought and feeling. He contended that the Metaphysicals fused the two, while Milton, Dryden, the Augustans, and the Romantics used one or the other in comparative and impoverishing isolation.

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The aged Eliot of To Criticize the Critic alludes to these much fought-over ideas with a certain weariness, and writes that ‘‘I am always at a loss what to say, when earnest scholars, or schoolchildren, write to ask me for an explanation.’’ They now seem to him to be only ‘‘conceptual symbols for emotional preferences’’—in the one case, his preference for the later plays of Shakespeare over Hamlet, and in the other his reaction against the Miltonic influence on English poetry. The astonishing career of these concepts, however, can be traced to Eliot’s ability to turn his preferences into instruments of critical inquiry rather than leaving them, like Ford and Pound, to stand simply as statements of provocative opinion. One can differ with the assertions of both Ford and Eliot on the grounds of abstract aesthetic principle, and very few people agree with Eliot’s judgment about Hamlet. But the analysis of Hamlet in terms of ‘‘the objective correlative’’ supplied criticism with a new and valuable way of looking at the relation between a work of art and its audience, and served to orient critical attention toward problems of form and structure. Similarly, ‘‘the dissociation of sensibility’’ is likely to retain its usefulness despite the brilliant attack made on it by Frank Kermode in The Romantic Image. Mr. Kermode argues that the term is not only an emotional symbol for Eliot’s literary preferences, but also a part of the obscurantist myth of a culture of ‘‘unified sensibility’’ in which discursive reason has no place. It might be remarked that Eliot himself never pressed the idea this far, and in this respect there is a certain danger in identifying him too closely with Yeats. But even if he had done so, the literary value of his concept would not have been impaired. Mr. Kermode himself unwittingly illustrates why when he notes that the Romantics shared Eliot’s view of John Donne, and quotes George Eliot to testify that Donne possessed ‘‘a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.’’ Eliot’s aperc¸u, whatever its contemporary historico-political implications, thus expresses a stylistic fact capable of being felt independently of Symbolist dogma; and the notion of a ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ helps us to grasp both the attributes that Eliot perceives in Donne and the disappearance of their unity. The only true piece of literary criticism in the present book is the essay on ‘‘Poe and the French Symbolists,’’ and here we see all of Eliot’s critical gifts operating at the very height of their capacities. The problem that occupies him is that of Poe’s notorious influence on such eminent French poets as Baudelaire, Mallarme´, and Vale´ry, while his influence on poets in his own language has been negligible (with the possible exception of Lear, as Eliot

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slyly suggests). With his usual skill at quotation, Eliot exposes the lack of precision in Poe’s imagery by a comparison with Tennyson, though he has an appreciative word for the incantatory quality of Poe’s language; and he attributes Poe’s influence on the French to his theory of poetry rather than to his poetry itself. In Poe’s ‘‘Philosophy of Composition,’’ Eliot says, Baudelaire, Mallarme´, and Vale´ry found a rationale for their conviction that, as Baudelaire put it, ‘‘a poem should have nothing in view but itself.’’ Vale´ry was struck by the idea that the process of poetic composition should be as self-conscious as possible; and in his work this idea reaches the point of selfnegation. For with Vale´ry, the process of creating becomes more interesting to the poet than the product of the creative act, i.e., the finished poem. Eliot is fascinated with this line of poetic development, which comes so close to his own anti-Romantic aesthetic; and he affirms that ‘‘the tradition itself [of Symbolism] represents the most interesting development of poetic consciousness anywhere in the [last] hundred years.’’ But Eliot refuses to follow the logic of that tradition out to the end, and to advocate a poe´sie pure in which the total significance of a poem would be completely contained in its style and language. Sketching a Hegelian triad of the evolution of the relation between subject and style in poetry, Eliot argues that poetry begins with a complete attention to subject-matter; reaches a point of equilibrium where both subject-matter and style are of equal importance; and threatens to end with the subject becoming merely the means to the creation of the all-important poetic object. In the first and last of these phases, which might be called—after Yvor Winters—the stages of primitivism and decadence, an equal danger exists that either style or subject will vanish from sight completely. ‘‘A complete unconsciousness or indifference to the style at the beginning, or to the subject-matter at the end, would . . . take us outside poetry altogether.’’ ‘‘From Poe to Vale´ry’’ is certain to take its place with such works as Ortega y Gasset’s The Dehumanization of Art as a classic evaluation both of the presuppositions and limitations of Symbolist doctrine. But what is more relevant in this context is the judiciousness of Eliot’s own relation to the doctrine, the combination of sympathy and reserve with which he analyzes its claims and rejects its pretensions. And if we are to look anywhere for the secret of Eliot’s status as a literary culture-hero during his lifetime, it seems to me that we need go no further than to examine the combination of qualities exhibited in this essay. For the instinctive and deepest movement of Eliot’s mind was to mediate between the past and the present, to welcome the new and the experimental but never to the point where it involved a

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total break with, or repudiation of, the lessons of historical experience— such as, in this instance, the necessity for a poem to preserve some ‘‘impurity’’ if it is to be humanly meaningful. Eliot states his position very clearly in a passage where he speaks in his capacity as a man who was called ‘‘a literary Bolshevik’’ after the publication of The Waste Land. ‘‘It is not that we have repudiated the past,’’ he writes, ‘‘as the obstinate enemies—and also the stupidest supporters—of any new movement like to believe; but that we have enlarged our conception of the past; and that in the light of what is new we see the past in a new pattern.’’ Just how instinctive and deep-rooted this attitude was in Eliot can be illuminatingly observed in his early essay on vers libre. Accepting the experiments of the Imagists and others as a welcome effort to impart a new freedom to poetry (there is even a very complimentary reference to Edgar Lee Masters), the neophyte Eliot yet argues that the idea of totally free verse is a delusion. For what gives free verse its charm and effectiveness is the existence of a regular metrical pattern in the background which the best free verse constantly suggests and evades at the same time. This observation on prosody neatly expresses the dialectical relation between past and present, tradition and individual talent, history and innovation that Eliot preserved throughout his career, and which enabled him to avoid the extremes of either facile iconoclasm or ossified conservatism. It was his ability to mediate between the extremes that gave Eliot’s criticism both its audacity and its authority, and which enabled him to affect so profoundly both the avantgarde and the academy. Like Re´my de Gourmont, whom Eliot once called ‘‘the critical consciousness of a generation,’’ he too was able to supply ‘‘the conscious formulas of a sensibility in the process of formation,’’ and to place the present in historical perspective while it was still effervescing with the excitement of novelty. The same cannot be said, however, for the role that Eliot played as a socio-cultural commentator. The essays on these topics reprinted here (they make up the bulk of the book) deal with subjects on which Eliot has touched many times before. There is a series of four lectures on ‘‘The Aims of Education,’’ in which he shows that any attempt to talk intelligently about education ultimately involves fundamental issues of ethics and theology. A paper on ‘‘The Classics and the Man of Letters’’ outlines the ideal education for this vanishing race, and concludes that a strong emphasis on Latin and Greek is desirable. In an after-dinner speech on ‘‘Literature and Politics,’’ Eliot continues to spar with his old antagonists Bernard Shaw and

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H. G. Wells (how antediluvian all this seems nowadays!). And, while regretting that Charles Maurras ever participated in practical politics, Eliot calls him ‘‘a great writer, a genuine lover of his country, and a man who deserved a better fate’’ than that of being condemned to imprisonment for his collaboration with the Nazis during the French Occupation. The value of Eliot’s writing on these subjects derives from the same source as that of Simone Weil’s and Reinhold Niebuhr’s, both of whom he refers to admiringly; all three apply moral and religious standards to issues that are usually treated only in social and economic terms. ‘‘For the question of questions,’’ Eliot says, ‘‘which no political philosophy can escape, and by the right answer to which all political thinking must in the end be judged, is simply this: What is Man? what are his limitations? what is his misery and what his greatness? and what, finally, his destiny?’’ It is because he keeps such questions in mind that Eliot is always worth reading; as Raymond Williams has said, he serves the cathartic function of reminding left-wing liberals that social changes do not automatically solve the basic issues of culture. But it must also be said that the answers Eliot gives to the questions he raises seem less and less relevant, as time goes on, to anything that his readers can recognize as being connected with the world in which they live. What separates Eliot from Simone Weil and Reinhold Niebuhr, who are also concerned about what Eliot calls the ‘‘pre-political’’ realm, is that they have been passionately involved in the crises and perturbations of the present, and have been able to identify themselves emotionally with its hopes and strivings. Eliot could identify himself with the movement of modern literature, but his relation to other aspects of modern culture has always been purely and totally negative; never has he been able to find anything in the present that could be regarded with sympathy or approval. As a result, he was incapable of achieving the same kind of synthesis in this area that he managed in his literary criticism, and of serving the same function as mediator. (His ill-starred flirtation with Italian and British Fascism in the 1930s may perhaps be regarded as an effort to find some dynamic contemporary social manifestation that he could use for this purpose.) To read Eliot on politics or culture now is to have the impression of a Cassandra-voice, whose pronouncements of doom and decay contain a good deal that is pertinent and disturbing. But it is a voice coming from so great a distance that we are hardly convinced any longer that its words are addressed to us at all.

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15.

The Novel in Wonderland

We have come, in our time, to take the novel so much for granted as a dominant literary form that we tend to forget how recent has been its rise to prominence. Only in the eighteenth century did the novel begin to replace older genres, like poetry and the drama, in popularity and importance; and only since the first quarter of the nineteenth century have we had any criticism of the novel worthy of its name. Until that time, novels had been written against a background of centuries of critical neglect. One reason was that in the past the novel was seen primarily as a popular form, read for entertainment and relaxation rather than for instruction and enlightenment. Moreover, no place for it really existed in the system of classical literary categories inherited from the Greeks. Hence the novel was never taken seriously as art, and hardly more than passing attention was paid to it in the criticism of the past. Beginning in the eighteenth century, to be sure—when the novel began notoriously to compete with the more traditional literary modes—a few critics (or novelists like Fielding) did start to speculate about its characteristics. But these scattered remarks were hardly picked up and expanded, and one looks in vain to the history of novel criticism for any general guidance to the nature of the genre and to the attributes, evolution, and interaction of its varieties (such as the picaresque and the romance). This situation has of course changed considerably, and we are unquestionably at a moment when the novel has become the center of critical attention. Works have appeared within the last thirty-five or forty years that mark a new era of self-consciousness in novel criticism and that are long likely to remain as setting a classic standard. Books such as Ian Watt’s Rise of the Novel, Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction, and Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (to mention only a few titles) are major achievements which synthesize much of the scattered work of their predecessors and lay the foundations for the future. What the tasks of this future are likely to be can be inferred, it seems to me, from some of the characteristics of the works 165

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mentioned above. Like most histories of the novel, Watt’s book, for all its outstanding merits, is still limited to one national literature, and in this case also to one short stretch of time: eighteenth-century England; the rest of the world, and of the history of the novel, is excluded. Again, the sharpness of the insights in Booth and Genette is confined to questions of technique and form; the thematic material of the examples they analyze either is not at issue or is handled only tangentially. The merit of the two books under review (Ioan Williams’s The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600–1800 and Patricia Drechsel Tobin’s Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative) is that both, each in its own way, attempt to widen this present horizon of critical inquiry. Ioan Williams’s work is one of the very few in English that try to grapple with the history of the novel as a genre across national boundaries, and to work out categories applicable to the form as a whole. Patricia Tobin is concerned with novelistic structures and their relation to time (the latter conceived, as we shall see, in a highly idiosyncratic fashion). And while, accordingly, she may seem to be studying only the technique of the novel, in fact she tries to correlate stylistic with thematic change, and grounds her theory in a dizzying bird’s-eye view of the history of culture from (presumably) the caveman to the computer. Both critics have thus seen, or at least felt, some of the limits of contemporary criticism of the novel, and have tried to go beyond them. But both suffer from weaknesses that ultimately can be traced to the lack of a generally accepted set of genre concepts and the absence of a commanding critical tradition. We shall return to this point later; now let us give the two books the serious scrutiny they deserve. Critical speculation about the novel, as we have said, only began seriously at a relatively late stage of its development. To be more precise, it began just after the vogue for Walter Scott had passed and the historical novel had evolved into that depiction of contemporary life (what George Steiner has called the urban Gothic) which portrayed the problems of ordinary people with the gravity once accorded only to the aristocratic personages of epic or tragedy. As Balzac said, the sufferings of his provincial Euge´nie Grandet were no less cruel or fateful than those of the House of Atreus. Contemporaries were thus struck by the new ‘‘realism’’ of the nineteenth-century novel (which meant precisely this treatment of ordinary life in terms previously reserved for more exalted milieus). ‘‘Realism’’ thus became the central critical category for all discussions of the novel, and its entire history was organized in such a perspective. This led to the view, still

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prominent in Watt, that the novel was somehow born in eighteenthcentury England and was essentially a product of middle-class culture. (Even Patricia Tobin, who is terribly up to date about everything, still continues to believe that the novel really began ‘‘in eighteenth-century England.’’) As a result, earlier forms of the novel were neglected or critically depreciated, and this accounts for the failure to work out any unified view of its history that can really be considered satisfactory. One of the merits of Williams’s book is precisely that he tries to do justice to this earlier period of the novel’s history over two centuries. It is not clear whether the temporal limits he assigns himself were imposed externally or chosen for reasons of symmetry, but we can only regret that he does not overstep them a bit. Beginning as he does with the first part of Don Quixote, he includes only a few preliminary remarks on Cervantes’s precursors, the Spanish picaresque novelists; and since he constantly uses this latter term, some discussion of them would have been in order. Moreover, his chapter is entitled ‘‘The Novel as Romance,’’ and some consideration of what that term means would also have been quite useful. The romance, after all, is the modern form of the old epic, with its aristocratic heroes who represent the highest values of their society and class; and it is out of this dialectic between the picaresque and romance that the modern novel (Don Quixote) was really born. To be sure, Williams does not put it quite in these terms, but he grasps the essence of the matter, it seems to me, when he observes that ‘‘Cervantes became a novelist not because he shared the reductive realism of the picaresque writers or the medieval moralists, but because he was an idealist.’’ In other words, the major tradition of the novel does not derive, as most writers tend to assume, exclusively from the ‘‘reductive realism’’ of the picaresque, with its essentially debunking and satirical view of life. Rather, it emerges from the fusion of ‘‘this realist impulse’’ with ‘‘the ambitiously humanistic impulse of Renaissance romance and pastoral.’’ It was by playing one off against the other, and by focusing on the ‘‘constant interchange which takes place in experience between conceptual factors and the demands arising from human nature,’’ that Cervantes succeeded in creating a classical paradigm for the new literary form. Williams’s discussion of the second part of Don Quixote, published ten years after the first, is of particular interest because he compares this second part with the false continuation issued under the name of Avellaneda. This mysterious writer, whose identity has never been established, brought out a supposed sequel to the life and exploits of Don Quixote; and Cervantes then

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resurrected his own characters to set the record straight. Avellaneda, as Williams sees him, was both a rationalist and a moralist, who reduced the original tension between the imaginative and the real in Cervantes’s great characters, and thus greatly shrank them in stature. Sancho became gross and stupid; Don Quixote’s madness was much more carefully motivated, but the result was only to make him foolish rather than sublime. Oddly enough, this false Don Quixote, in which the picaresque and romance elements tend to fall apart, actually indicates what will happen to the novel as a genre in the immediate future. During the first part of the seventeenth century, the great synthesis effected by Cervantes was not maintained, and the romance and the picaresque went their separate ways (of course in much altered incarnations). The new romance was no longer some form of the medieval knightly epic but, rather, the baroque heroic novel strongly influenced by Renaissance pastoral. What Williams calls alternatively ‘‘comic Romance’’ or ‘‘antiromance’’ also flourishes, and the second term seems preferable and less open to misunderstanding. The result, however, was either to ‘‘project a heightened version of standard man in the romances or depict a reduced version in the peasant and the madman.’’ Williams has very little patience with heroic romance and does not take the trouble to analyze it at length— which can only be regretted in view of its perennial importance. The artificiality and absurdity of the interminable novels of d’Urfe´ and Mlle de Scude´ry should not be allowed to obscure their social significance in setting standards of behavior and ideals of comportment that have continued to influence the history of the novel right down to the present day. ‘‘Anti-romance’’ is given fuller treatment, and Williams distinguishes between two types. One, Charles Sorel’s Le Berger extravagant, simply imitates Cervantes while criticizing his exaggerations and lack of verisimilitude. But in Sorel’s La Vraie histoire comique de Francion and Scarron’s Le Roman comique Williams finds closer approaches to genuine novels, and in each instance the terms he uses once again point to some sort of fusion of the picaresque and the romance. Sorel mixes ‘‘an inspiration derived from the picaresque with a Rabelaisian vision of life as a whole, and adapt[s] it to a structure borrowed from the classical epic.’’ The distinctive quality of Scarron lies in his linkage of ‘‘the element of reductive comedy’’ to a strong ‘‘romanesque element’’ in a manner suggested by Cervantes, ‘‘though quite different from anything found in Don Quixote.’’ Both writers are ‘‘strongly committed to the idea of the gentleman as combining the best of the old heroic qualities,’’ while these are projected against ‘‘a comic background in

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which human passions [are] unmoderated by refinement and unelevated by nobility of sentiment.’’ Each of these works is thus a transposition of the Cervantic synthesis in a French seventeenth-century context; and though Williams disclaims any intention of establishing a definition of the novel, some such definition, as we have indicated, constantly emerges from his own historical investigations and literary judgments. The last quarter of the seventeenth century saw the abrupt end of the reign of heroic romance, and the rise of a new form called the nouvelle (the origin of the English word ‘‘novel,’’ which in French is still called roman). This would have been the place for Williams to treat the greatest seventeenth-century French novel, La Princesse de Cle`ves, but he disposes of that work abruptly in a disappointing paragraph. Apparently he does not think of it as a novel at all, and calls it a ‘‘romance’’ adjusted to ‘‘a dramatic plot.’’ Perhaps the lack of any obvious picaresque element is what threw him off, but this component of ‘‘realism’’ is provided by the depiction of the underside of court life, whose ruthless sexual intrigue is set in contrast to the surface seen in terms drawn from heroic romance. The Princesse de Cle`ves wishes to live by the romance ideals of loyalty and fidelity in an unscrupulous picaresque world where sexual betrayal is the accepted norm, and she is caught in an insoluble conflict between the two. Most of the other nouvelles, however, even though protesting against the bombast of the heroic romances, do little more than cut down the complications of romance plots; there is nothing elsewhere comparable to Mme de La Fayette’s disillusioned view of the human condition. The most interesting fiction writers of the time (Robert Chasles and Alain Le Sage) were both directly involved with the Cervantic tradition. Chasles published a part of a continuation of Don Quixote begun by another writer; Le Sage put together a translation and adaptation of Avellaneda. Le Sage also translated one of the masterpieces of the Spanish picaresque, Mateo Alema´n’s Guzma´n de Alfarache. His own major Gil Bias de Santillane is of course a continuation of the picaresque mode, but with ‘‘a consistency and logical development’’ of the main figure lacking in the Spanish model. Also, Gil Bias is no longer essentially a comic or satirical character. Even though from a modest social milieu, he is by no means a rogue or a scoundrel and does not stand in opposition to the world in which he lives. By making Gil Bias a Spaniard, Williams remarks acutely, Le Sage distances him from French society (where he would have had to be either a comic valet or a gentleman), and thus can represent ‘‘an individual at once socially insecure and capable of serious emotional experience.’’ Once again the

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picaresque (‘‘social insecurity’’) and the romance (‘‘serious emotional experience’’) combine in a new amalgam to renew the Cervantic synthesis and to pave the way for writers like Fielding, Scott, and Dickens. Up to the end of chapter 3—despite far too much space given to plot summary—Williams manages to keep some control over the wealth of material he has to cover. In chapters 4 and 5, however, which deal with the eighteenth century, the book simply falls apart. The reason is probably that throughout the seventeenth century it was fairly simple to use the categories derived from his point of departure in Cervantes; but he abandons them after this and is unable to find any others that will pull his exposition together. The result is that we get a more or less disconnected series of little essays on a large variety of writers; these contain interesting observations but hardly add up to anything like the history of a genre. Some perspective is supposedly provided by introductory sections sketching in the general background. ‘‘There was an increasing tendency [in the novel],’’ we are informed, ‘‘to reflect certain developing tendencies in modern life: a greater moral seriousness, interest in sexual and personal relationships, a greater sense of society as a whole and as a context for the individual human being,’’ and so on. Such vague generalities are, regrettably, no substitute for a firmly held critical point of view. This relative breakdown of the book, exactly at the point where the novel really comes into its own, is perhaps due to a loss of nerve (with which one can sympathize) caused by the wealth of great works demanding consideration at this time, as well as by the necessity of dealing with three national traditions (French, English, German). But, more fundamentally, it seems to arise from a failure to grasp how the genre concepts hitherto used could apply to the new modalities of the novel then being created. Yet Defoe clearly evolved a new version of the pure picaresque; Richardson tried to create a middle-class heroic romance; Fielding and Sterne were selfconscious followers of Cervantes (Sterne turned everybody into a Don Quixote obsessed by a hobbyhorse); Rousseau renewed the pastoral in a French bourgeois guise and gave it a subversive thrust. Such lines of continuity have to be explored if we are ever to have a genuine history of the novel as a form. Finally, it is impossible for me to understand how Williams can justify omitting any discussion of the Gothic novel—the most important new mode created in the late eighteenth century—which revitalized the old knightly romance and, by its treatment of landscape and plot construction,

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opened up the artistic road to the future. Despite such shortcomings, however, Williams’s book is the only recent work of its kind in English, and is well worth the attention of anyone concerned with the subject. If Williams can justly be charged with a certain conceptual timidity, then Patricia Tobin stands at the very opposite end of the spectrum in this regard. Her book is nothing if not full of ideas (whether one can or should accept them is another matter), and displays such evident pleasure in the sheer play of mind that one cannot help sharing some of her own zest for ratiocination. Also, her book is written in a bright, bouncy, jaunty, style (no dull academicism here!) which communicates some of her own enthusiasm for her subject. She is, incidentally, a very good literary critic when she descends from her theoretical heights to talk specifically about novels; and it is these sections of the book which, in my opinion, are of most value. But literary criticism as such interests her very little, and she affirms that ‘‘like any formal construct, the novel may be fully understood only at a level higher than its own making.’’ It is this ‘‘logical level’’ that galvanizes all her considerable theoretical energies, and that must be examined if we are to grasp her point of view. The book originated, she tells us, as a result of ‘‘an overwhelming hunch that the problem of time might provide a key to modern consciousness’’; and this last phrase is the most important. For though nominally offering a theory of the novel, Patricia Tobin is really hunting for much bigger game—nothing less than to provide a ‘‘key to modern consciousness.’’ What happens in the novel is thus only a symptom of much larger events occurring in the culture as a whole. As a result, it is impossible to disentangle her theory of the novel from all sorts of other ideas about the state of modern culture—ideas which, to say the least, are highly controversial, and which treat most of the norms that have always been more or less accepted as the basis of civilization as instruments of terror and repression. ‘‘Although the empirical evidence has yet to sustain the thesis,’’ Tobin writes blandly, ‘‘it would seem that in the child’s surrender of private autonomy in favor of parental power can be found the seeds of domination and the germs of subordination that will become the action of history.’’ The family is thus nothing but tyrannical power, history nothing but domination and subordination; what empirical evidence has to do with such a thesis escapes my comprehension. The book is based on assertions and assumptions of this kind which are never justified, simply taken as more or less self-evident truths. This is, of course, not the place to argue such issues in their own terms, but mention of them must be made so that the reader will know what to expect.

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So far as literary theory is concerned, Tobin begins by noting that temporal process has no particular structure and that man imposes patterns on time to give his life meaning. The novel reflects this patterning and in doing so does not imitate ‘‘undeliberated, organic life-in-time,’’ but rather our human impositions on its randomness. ‘‘Realism,’’ according to Tobin, means that a novel conforms to these human structures of time: ‘‘a realistic novel convinces us . . . because it structures experience the same way we do.’’ She believes, however, that we are not fully aware of the extent to which we shape and manipulate time, and hence finds it necessary ‘‘to bring Time out of hiding’’ by explaining some of the implications of this confusion between unstructured and ‘‘human time.’’ For this purpose she produces her key term, ‘‘the genealogical imperative,’’ which is the controlling metaphor richly developed throughout her pages. On the basis of one article by the sociologist Robert Nisbet, who is supposed to have ‘‘demonstrated’’ (?) the matter, Tobin argues that at some point in the dark abyss of the past, poor primeval man confused simple temporal succession with genetic descent. Just as a father founds, controls, and dominates the family, so time began to be seen and felt ‘‘within a line of causality similar to the line of generations, with the prior event earning a special prestige as it is seen to originate, control and predict future events.’’ Hence temporal anteriority became endowed with all the power of the father to discipline, control, and castrate if need be. From this fateful confusion—if we take Tobin’s thesis seriously—date all the ills of Western civilization. (Others are presumably exempt, though how they escaped, according to her point of view, is not very clear. Do not fathers and families exist in, say, China?) In any event, ‘‘the genealogical imperative,’’ once launched on its momentous path, now begins to exercise its baneful rule over all the domains of Western civilization. Families become totally patriarchal and oppressive; religion becomes Judeo-Christian, linear rather than circular, hence valuing life in time and, in Protestantism, ‘‘confusing this forward motion in time with secular progress.’’ From Calvinism and the work ethic we get ‘‘quantification, inherent in capitalism,’’ and the genealogical imperative thus begins to take over the entire world of economic and social life. Western languages are dominated by the sentence, and this is especially frightful because ‘‘the sentence is hierarchical: it implies subjection, subordination,’’ hence oppression. Thought goes completely haywire when it becomes linear-causal rather than analogical, and, worst of all, ‘‘science, philosophy, history all become possible, once a beginning or origin can be sanctioned in such a way that all future stages in the process that follows can

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be referred back to that initial authority’’—i.e., various genealogical orders. Happily, though, there is a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel: ‘‘the demise of genealogical thinking is roughly coterminous with the swerve away from linear narrative in twentieth-century novels (and a few novels of the nineteenth) that are the concern of this study.’’ The mind boggles at the chaos that would ensue if such a ‘‘demise’’ actually took place over the vast areas that Tobin has surveyed in her introductory chapter. Such a demise, though, has taken place in the modern novel, and when Tobin gets down to talking about literature she gives us more than warmedover Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida spiced with tidbits from her wide reading in the social sciences. To be sure, she makes only a perfunctory attempt to sketch the past history of the novel, which for her begins in eighteenthcentury England and contains nothing of value except Tristram Shandy (the sacred text of all time twisters) and Robinson Crusoe. The latter is read, a` la Le´vi-Strauss, in terms of the imposition of culture on nature and as a depiction of the origins of imperialism and historical domination. (But it cannot, as Tobin claims, really have ‘‘institut[ed] the master/slave culture of Hegelian analysis.’’ Hegel’s master is a warrior-aristocrat who would never dream of sullying his hands with anything as demeaning as manual labor.) Actually, as Tobin implicitly admits, her true subject begins only in the nineteenth century, when time becomes definitively tamed and linearized by Darwinism and historicism. ‘‘Victorian man discovered that to be living in time was no longer a fallen state, but rather the very field of action on which he could win the twin trophies of earthly success and spiritual salvation.’’ Hence the triumph of the Victorian novel, ‘‘where spacious familial accommodations are always guaranteed by the patrilinear consistencies between beginning and end, past and future.’’ What interests Tobin, to use a favorite image of her own, are the ‘‘wild cards’’ of this tradition, which in some way disrupt both the time line of narrative and conventional moral-familial patterns. Wuthering Heights makes sacred the mythic, illegitimate lovers Cathy and Heathcliff, who put their offspring and progeny, united in the ‘‘domestic ideal of social marriage,’’ completely in the shade. Melville’s Pierre scrambles the family line by incest, and the story line by impenetrable ambiguity. Butler’s The Way of All Flesh rejects both the future and the father. These are the immediate precursors of that heretical tradition of the novel which Tobin wishes to set against the more usual ‘‘great tradition’’ established by F. R. Leavis—that is, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad. Her remaining chapters, with the exception of the conclusion, are devoted to individual analyses of

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novels by Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks), D. H. Lawrence (The Rainbow), Faulkner (Absalom, Absalom!), Nabokov (Ada), Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude). These chapters constitute the heart of Tobin’s book, and, whatever disagreements one may have with specific points of interpretation, they all contain quite lively, ingenious, and stimulating performances. It is impossible here to do justice to them in any detail; but in general Tobin’s aim is to show how, beginning with Mann’s ironic counterpoint between familial disintegration and strict temporal and narrative continuity, there is in each of her selections an increasing breakup of both the patrilinear family and the novelistic structure. ‘‘All the sins against the family—adultery, illegitimacy, bigamy, fratricide, parricide, and especially incest—can be found within a spectrum of value that arches from the recognition of disorder to its joyous celebration.’’ Accompanying such thematic disorder is an appropriate artistic eccentricity: ‘‘The simple line, which served well enough as the spatial configuration of genealogical structures, is replaced by such wild divergencies as the double cycle, the circle, the spiral and the Moebius strip.’’ These quotations, however, give only a faint and schematic notion of the complexity and density of her readings, which can be heartily recommended to anyone interested in her texts and willing to participate in a strenuous but rewarding intellectual exercise. These chapters, all the same, do not comprise anything that can be called a ‘‘theory of the novel,’’ even the modern one. What they show is that, in some modern novels, one can find both familial disorder and technical experiment. But since, as Tobin admits, only a handful of works display this ‘‘homologous continuity between time-line, family-line, and story-line,’’ the probative value of her selections remains highly questionable. Only if one accepts all her other speculations will these novels seem to be more than an arbitrary (though very interesting) choice; and by the time the book is finished, as we shall see in a moment, it becomes doubtful whether Tobin herself still remains fully persuaded by her own conjectures. In addition, one of her procedures as a practical critic also calls for a brief comment. She is fond, as she says, of reading ‘‘against the grain,’’ focusing not on what the author has put in his book but on what is left out. The purpose of such reading is to call attention to the amputation of possibilities imposed by the genealogical imperative—for example, the refusal of Thomas Mann to envisage that the feminine Toni Buddenbrooks could capably have taken over the family business. One shudders to think of the flood of irrelevancies that would overwhelm us if critics all began to

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write about what was not in the works being discussed. Incidentally, how many children had Lady Macbeth? By way of conclusion, Tobin offers some predictions for the future. Naturally enough, she sees the novel continuing to proceed even more radically along the path already marked out. We live in a world where the authority of all the old ‘‘genealogical orders’’ has lost its power, and hence the novelists of the future will, as she puts it, ‘‘wager on the surface.’’ No longer in thrall to the old binary oppositions of the Western mind (her reverse ethnocentrism really becomes very tiresome; has she never heard of yin and yang?), the novel is destined to become more and more aleatory and ludic. ‘‘In an ultimately unfathomable world, one should have the lucidity and good nature to salute all systems, including history, as obsessive mistakes.’’ Hence the novelist will play with them all and ‘‘develop strategies that at once trigger and frustrate the symbolizing process in the reader.’’ Effects of depth and transcendence will be shown to be illusions and returned to the surface, where ‘‘undifferentiated space might accommodate all that had been discreetly outlawed by the time-line of genealogical narrative.’’ As an example of such possibilities, Tobin pertinently invokes Corta´zar’s remarkable Hopscotch, which portrays a character who attempts to live in a world of the type Tobin envisages, and who equally wishes to escape ‘‘the slowness of a world vision limited to the binary.’’ Unfortunately, she neglects to inform the reader that he ends by going mad. Until the very last pages of her book, Tobin’s own attitude toward the developments she charts—the breakdown and demise of the genealogical imperative—seems to be vigorously affirmative, and her tone even becomes snippily supercilious when dealing with other points of view. But then, suddenly, we find her writing: The negative estimate of our current situation also marshals powerful arguments. Perhaps the literary revolt against the paternal authority is but one sign of a generalized drift away from all authority. Perhaps antilinearity in narrative is symptomatic of a prevailing ahistorical attitude that values only the fleeting present. Perhaps the new freedom is another disguise for ideological blindness. . . . If the novel refuses voice and vision, if it refuses connection with our world, then how can the anonymity and selfsufficiency of its writing speak to the human condition?

One would not have known earlier that a concept such as ‘‘the human condition’’ still retained any validity in Tobin’s framework of ideas.

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It would seem as if, just as she was on the point of finishing her book, Tobin had begun to question all the conceptual premises she had hitherto taken for granted. This may explain why she now decides that ‘‘too much of the literal in literature lends itself too readily to being regarded as a unique, self-contained commodity.’’ (The ‘‘literal’’ in her terminology is equivalent to that of ‘‘surface.’’) Hence, ‘‘if postmodern fiction does not speak to and for our culture [but how could it not have done so if her previous analyses are correct?], perhaps postmodern criticism can.’’ And such ‘‘postmodern criticism,’’ curiously enough, will abandon ‘‘the semiotics of the text (structuralism being the critic’s wager on surface)’’ and return ‘‘the text back to the world.’’ The task of the critic would be to restore ‘‘the cultural context’’ and supply ‘‘the missing referential linkages . . . that [marry] human time to its literary space.’’ But ‘‘human time,’’ with its unquenchable urge to create ‘‘genealogical orders,’’ returns us back to where we began. Patricia Tobin has a powerful, wide-ranging, and gifted mind, obviously in the full course of transition and metamorphosis. Now that she has cut her critical teeth and seems to have outgrown the very latest Parisian fashions, it will be most interesting to see where she goes in her next book. What, however, can her book and that of Williams tell us about the larger issue raised at the beginning of this review? Both reveal the difficulties of writing about a literary genre where all the categories are fluid and nothing has been definitively established or can be taken for granted. It is for this reason that Williams ultimately does not know how to link pre-eighteenth-century forms with the first great age of the novel, and does not realize the full systematic implications of his own insights. The new modes and combinations are not seen—as they would be in the drama, for example—as variations on a structure whose components are known and accepted as relatively stable. Another consequence of this fluidity is seen in Tobin, who is so entranced by the latest experiments that she is inclined to regard nothing in the past as worthy of interest except what foreshadows and announces the most recent revelation. In other words, every new variety of the novel is taken as an absolute beginning, which requires a rewriting of the whole history of culture to explain its apocalyptic appearance. In neither case do we get any sense of the history of the novel as a continuous, if continually evolving, tradition (though Williams does manage to give us such a sense for at least one century). There is a crying need in criticism of the novel for efforts such as his to be pursued along similar lines but with more boldness and conceptual daring than he could muster. Only in this way may we be able to overcome the present confusion, and the endemic lack of inherited ideas about the genre on which we can rely.

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16.

R. P. Blackmur’s Texts: An Introduction

R. P. Blackmur chose very carefully, when he came to compose his volumes of essays, among the considerable corpus of writings that he turned out over the years with unremitting regularity. The books now tend to give the impression of a sovereign judge who, from time to time, sat down to write a definitive and magisterial essay; but the presence of Blackmur as a critic as felt in his own time was certainly quite different. As the variety of his early uncollected articles and reviews makes clear, he was an active participant in the literary life, who served with distinction in the journeyman ranks of regular reviewers and whose name kept cropping up in the journals. Beginning in 1927, when he was twenty-three years old, there is not a year in which anyone reading the magazines of the time would not have come across one or two items by Blackmur (in some years, many more). He wrote not only in the Hound and Horn, which he helped to edit in its first years, and which quickly earned a rightful prestige as the American equivalent of T. S. Eliot’s The Criterion, but also in the New Freeman, the New Republic, and particularly in Poetry. Most of this small-scale production remains buried in the pages of these periodicals; and in republishing here some of the more interesting ones, we hope both to fill out the historical record and also to provide a more faithful image of Blackmur’s activity as a practicing critic. The present selection includes longer late essays as well and spans the entire period of Blackmur’s literary career; but it is the abundant early work, of which only a meager sample can unfortunately be included here, that offers the most new insight into the foundations of Blackmur’s achievement as a literary critic. It was, of course, by his longer essays, first collected in The Double Agent (1935), that Blackmur made his major impact—if one can use the word ‘‘major’’ without overstating the case. He was read and appreciated by the small group of people seriously interested in the contemporary poetry then being written; and the book was published by an obscure avant-garde press called Arrow Editions, which expired a few years later after issuing Blackmur’s second volume, The Expense of Greatness (1940). All the same, the 177

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steady stream of reviews were also having their effect and in some cases introduced Blackmur to those who would soon become his fervent admirers. There is a touching testimony to how they inspired the best young talent of the time in ‘‘Olympus,’’ from John Berryman’s Love and Fame: In my serpentine researches I came on the book review in Poetry which began, with sublime assurance, a comprehensive air of majesty, ‘‘The art of poetry is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse by the animating presence in the poetry of fresh idiom: language so twisted & posed in a form that it not only expresses the matter in hand but adds to the stock of available reality.’’ I was never the same after that. I found this new Law-giver all unknown except in the back numbers of a Cambridge quarterly Hound & Horn, just defunct.

These lines illustrate both the easy adaptability of Blackmur’s prose to Berryman’s colloquial verse-style, and also the importance of these shorter reviews as an independent voice in the animated literary give-and-take of the time. I do not know if any zealous student of Berryman has tracked down the source of this quotation; but it will now be readily available. It is the first sentence of a review of a book by Norman Macleod, Horizons of Death, published in Poetry (May 1935), and it continues with the equally impressive and highly significant assertion: ‘‘Since we no longer live at the stage where the creation of idiom is the natural consequence of the use of language, many of our best practitioners have necessarily to manufacture a good deal of mere competent verse in order to produce a few good poems.’’ Whether a time ever existed in which ‘‘the creation of idiom’’ (in the sense meant by Blackmur) was simply ‘‘a natural consequence of the use of language’’ may well be doubted; but it illustrates his literal acceptance of T. S. Eliot’s idea that a Golden Age of poetry had existed before the ‘‘dissociation of sensibility’’ in the mid-seventeenth century. Norman Macleod, though his name was not unknown to those who, like John Berryman, spent their time in ‘‘serpentine researches’’ among the periodicals of the mid-1930s, was hardly an important literary figure. It is all

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the more striking, then, that Blackmur should have prefaced his review by the statement of his credo as a critic that so much struck Berryman; and this fact illustrates one of his characteristics as a reviewer. Each of the writers he attends to receives his undivided, sharply focused attention; there is no slackening or tightening of scrutiny according to rank or importance, as when a host will shade greetings to various levels of invited guests; all are deemed worthy of requiring the same intensity and integrity of critical response. Norman Macleod is read with the same care and scrupulosity as Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, or Hart Crane; this is why Blackmur feels it necessary to establish in advance the high and exemplary critical standard by which the poetry will be judged. There is also another quality of Blackmur’s reviewing that is exemplarily illustrated in the Macleod piece. Precisely because his critical standards were so high, and because he knew how difficult it was to fulfill their requirements (since the ‘‘creation of idiom’’ was no longer ‘‘natural’’), he resisted being merely dismissive. In the midst of his most negative judgments, he would always search for signs of artistic seriousness and of achievement, even if on lower levels than the one he would recognize as culminating in a genuine work of art. So far as Macleod is concerned, Blackmur writes: ‘‘Of the forty-two short poems Mr. Macleod has here collected, six seem to me of fresh idiom and good within their magnitude, nine good but for various reasons incomplete, and the rest of indifferent manufacture.’’ Whatever his reaction to these words, Norman Macleod could hardly claim that he was not being read with great care. There is also the further statement that ‘‘the feelings are profoundly entertained and are full of implication, and the phrasing is often lovely with affection and discrimination; and there is no question but that the poet is genuinely at home with a genuine subject which he has felt as poetry.’’ But, Blackmur maintains, in the bulk of the book Macleod did not realize his subject sufficiently to turn it into poetry, for lack of an ‘‘imposed form.’’ He concludes, however, with the consoling remark that ‘‘the problems of poetry cannot be discussed except in the work of those who, like Mr. Macleod, actually write it.’’ It is worth further illustrating this charitable quality of Blackmur in the case of writers whom he values much less highly than he evidently does Norman Macleod. Take, for example, the review of Sacheverell Sitwell’s Doctor Donne and Gargantua: The First Six Cantos (1931). This is one of his most severe pieces; the second sentence declares that ‘‘hardly a superficial fault of texture, hardly an essential weakness of conception, but appears

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egregiously and flourishes at length in these eighty pages.’’ Then, after calling the poem ‘‘traditional,’’ Blackmur writes that it ‘‘goes a long way toward preserving out of the past and presenting in all baldness the principal maladies of English poetry.’’ One might think that, after all this, Blackmur would continue to show no mercy; but after a few paragraphs containing a brilliant improvisation on the various causes of sentimentality in poetry, he ends on a note of regret. ‘‘The saddest thing,’’ he writes, ‘‘is that the essential weakness and cloudiness of the poem destroys the pleasure that ought to be taken in the fine things there are in it, the occasional rich sonorities of line and sweet delicacies of association. For Mr. Sitwell is actually a poet, as may be seen by this as well as by past performances.’’ Some incidental felicities in the text, and the memory of others in the body of Sitwell’s work, thus help to redeem this otherwise unrelieved failure, and the condemnation is mitigated. Blackmur is merciless, however, when pretentiousness is allied with incompetence and vulgarity. The most cutting review is devoted to a now forgotten poet, Leonard Bacon (did he not write some light verse a` la Ogden Nash?), who made the mistake of devoting a narrative poem to ‘‘the life and death of the legendary Arthur Rimbaud.’’ The snippets that Blackmur quotes from this opus are unbelievable in their coarseness of sensibility, and he calls the work ‘‘an active poem, full of waste-motion, din, conventional cleverness, verbal fireworks, and dullness around the corner, just like Life. It has a Kiplingese virility, tinged with the YMCA, which equals Robert W. Service.’’ Such a sentence gives some of the flavor of Blackmur’s conversation, and of the satirical verve that he usually kept in check when it came to the printed page. But here he was so clearly outraged, and with such good reason, that he allowed his temperament a freer rein. What particularly aroused his indignation were the blurbs the book had received from reviewers in the newspapers and weeklies, and he felt called upon to urge them to defend their own standards (not Blackmur’s) a little more discriminatingly. ‘‘Mr. Bacon is one of those who carry the burden of our academic poetry, which is a serious and honorable burden to bear; and it has been the sole intention of this review to point out that he carries it a little too jauntily, with the ease and itch of a journalist.’’ Besides enriching our image of Blackmur as a critic, these early pieces provide valuable glimpses into his intellectual formation, which he tended, if not to conceal, then at least to take for granted in the later work. There is, for instance, his notable sympathy with the attack on what he calls, in his

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review of Wyndham Lewis’s Time and Western Man, ‘‘the romanticscientific, sensational, and naturalistic habit of soul,’’ and there is his obvious preference for the position of such writers as Lewis himself, Irving Babbitt, and Ramon Fernandez (not to mention Eliot), who were ‘‘concerned to restore the intelligence and the sensibility by adverse criticism of any such misapplications of science.’’ These lead him to agree with Herbert Read that Proust and Joyce lack ‘‘a sense of values,’’ and that, as a result, there is an ‘‘absence of orderly intelligence, of discipline, in the major works of these writers.’’ Such judgments will later be considerably modified; but they show the strong influence of a neoclassical bent on the early Blackmur—who yet, all the same, already has some qualms about basing aesthetic evaluation primarily on such implicitly moral criteria. For while seeming to agree in one passage with Lewis’s negative view of most of modern writing, he remarks later that ‘‘as to Lewis’ judgments on James Joyce, Ezra Pound and company, they are valid only from Mr. Lewis’ attitude.’’ Moreover, Lewis ‘‘is not, in this essay, primarily interested in the works themselves.’’ When it comes to these, Blackmur leaves open the possibility of another standard. As can be seen from the second section of his two-part essay on T. S. Eliot in the Hound and Horn, Blackmur is greatly concerned with this problem of art and morality (or of ‘‘values,’’ to stick to his terms); and this early Eliot essay is of great help in clarifying the road he took towards its resolution. His later statements of doctrine, such as ‘‘A Critic’s Job of Work,’’ rather illustrate than attempt to explain Blackmur’s position; but the Eliot essay shows him grappling with the issue, and finding a solution by extending some of Eliot’s remarks. Incidentally, it also shows that the same dilemmas tend to recur, and that Blackmur’s concerns have lost little in relevance despite all the fuss currently being made about literary criticism and critical theory—which has now, presumably, passed far beyond the primitive standpoints of the recent past. Any observer of the contemporary scene knows that literary theory is at present moving from a phase of Structuralist Formalism to one in which the values expressed in the works have become once again a focus of attention. In other words, critics are again worrying over the perennial question (perennial at least since Plato ejected from his ideal Republic those poets who refused to confine themselves to sacred songs) of whether works of art should be considered exclusively as autonomous aesthetic objects, as assemblages of certain formal properties or structures, or whether their value depends on the manner in which they interact with other areas of human life. It has become commonplace to consider Blackmur an unconditional

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partisan of the first alternative, and in his informative but annoyingly patronizing biography Russell Fraser simply perpetuates the myth that Blackmur thought that the study of what he called ‘‘executive techniques’’ was enough; ‘‘he left the matter of content to shift for itself.’’1 But this is a gross oversimplification of the complex synthesis that Blackmur tried to achieve, and whose theoretical underpinning he lays out at length in the Eliot essay. Way back then, in those dark ages before even the antediluvian New Criticism had been born, Eliot was making the same shift so evident today in the contemporary post-Structuralists. Beginning roughly with Formalism, or Art-for-Art’s sake as it was then called, Eliot had announced a new turn in 1926. Blackmur noted that in a review of then-recent books by Herbert Read and Ramon Fernandez, Eliot had pointed out that ‘‘both, instead of taking for granted the place and function of literature—and therefore taking for granted a whole universe—are occupied with the inquiry into this function, and therefore with the inquiry into the whole moral world, fundamentally, with entities and values.’’ This marked the moment when Eliot’s return to (or public assumption of ) religion began significantly to affect his criticism; and Blackmur, far from rejecting such a development, welcomes it as an enrichment. But he attempts to reinterpret it in a way that will widen the critical horizon while, at the same time, preserving the benefits that have accrued from Eliot’s earlier work with its intense scrutiny of the language of the poetic text. Blackmur uses Eliot’s essay on Massinger as his example, and shows how the criticism of Massinger’s language, which Eliot saw as more rhetorical than suffused with genuine feeling, is also linked to a moral criticism not so much of the playwright as of the period. ‘‘What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of Massinger,’’ Eliot wrote, ‘‘is not an alteration or diminution in morals; it is simply the disappearance of all the personal and real emotions which this morality supported and into which it introduced a kind of order.’’ The quality of personal emotion in language thus becomes the basis, not only for an aesthetic, but also for a moral evaluation of the writer; and Blackmur tries to generalize this remark into a method of criticism ‘‘whose approach shall be technical, in the terms and in the interests of literature as an art’’ but through which we shall ‘‘reach the moral values where our last interest lies.’’ 1. Russell Fraser, A Mingled Yarn (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 272.

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Blackmur’s strenuous attempt to define such a method can be read in the essay itself; there is no reason to expound it any further in these prefatory remarks. But it would seem to imply that a successful work of art is the true locus of morality because only there is individual moral experience grasped in a complexity that transcends the ordinary application of moral rules. Such appears to be the sense of Blackmur’s observation that ‘‘the failure of ordinary systematic moralities could be shown in their inadequacy to judge such works as King Lear; where it is the intensity of the fusion of the emotional elements that makes the play intelligible and valuable.’’ To return to the present for a moment, one is reminded here of Wolfgang Iser’s notion that art invariably points to the ‘‘gaps’’ in the systematic moralities of its time; it is only through the concrete experiences of the work that such deficiencies are revealed. Blackmur is saying much the same thing in his remark that art possesses moral value ‘‘because it represents the most concrete fate and character in an ideal form in itself ultimate.’’ Further, if we are to understand Blackmur’s point of view, it is necessary to pay heed to his idiosyncratic definition of ‘‘technique.’’ ‘‘Byron’s misanthropy,’’ he writes, ‘‘was part of his technique, not of his ‘philosophy’ so far as we are concerned. Similarly with Keats’ view of the Greeks, or Swinburne’s sweets of sin. Swift’s Houyhnhnms and Yahoos increase their savage contrast if they be considered as technical devices for the definition of emotion. In Shakespeare certain of the characters exist as part of the technique, as witness the character of Enobarbus and the astonishing emotion defined with it.’’ What this means is that ‘‘content’’ will be handled, not as something extraneous to ‘‘technique,’’ but as receiving its fullest expression only through its artistic realization. As a result, one never finds ‘‘content’’ discussed by Blackmur in isolation from the technique by which it is given expression; and this means that he never speaks in terms of conventional and easily recognizable ‘‘ideas.’’ But anyone reading his reviews can see how Blackmur invariably communicates the underlying sense of life that he discerns operating through the work and seeking expression, more or less successfully, in its language. This is the case as well with some of his most famous early essays, which are usually considered examples of his exclusively linguistic approach to literature. Take, for instance, the pioneer study of Wallace Stevens, which has lost none of its pertinence and value in the intervening fifty years. After quoting some lines from ‘‘Sunday Morning,’’ Blackmur remarks that ‘‘the full weight of the lines is not felt until the conviction of the poet that the sun is origin and ending for all life is shared by the reader. That is why the god might be

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naked among them.’’ A bit later, after citing the use of various color-words in Stevens’s poems, he comments: ‘‘Mr. Stevens has a notion often intimated that the sky is the only permanent background for thought and knowledge; he would see things against the sky as a Christian would see them against the cross. The blue of the sky is the prevailing substance of the sky, and to Mr. Stevens it seems only necessary to look at the sky to share and be shared in its blueness.’’2 If these remarks do not contain a discussion of ‘‘content,’’ then the English language has lost its meaning; but the poet’s views are suggested rather than stated, and seen in terms of a clarification of the full weight of poetic imagery. This is the balance that Blackmur tried to achieve in his criticism, and which, in combination with his piercing insight, literary flair, and brilliant gift of phrasing, made everything he wrote so unusual and striking. ‘‘Some critics make a new work of art; some are psychologists; some mystics; some politicians and reformers; a few philosophers and a few literary critics altogether. It is possible to write about art from all of these attitudes,’’ Blackmur remarks in his essay on Eliot, ‘‘but only the last two produce anything properly called criticism; criticism, that is, without a vitiating bias away from the subject in hand.’’ All these types of criticism are still with us, and, just as in Blackmur’s day, those who practice the first four kinds are far more prominent and vociferous than the sort of critic Blackmur was himself—‘‘a literary critic altogether.’’ Few of the others from Blackmur’s day, however, now have more than a historical interest, while Blackmur’s work retains its freshness, vivacity, and power to stimulate and enlighten; perhaps there is a moral here whose lesson should be pondered. And in reply to a likely outcry from the postStructuralist young that all this concern with ‘‘literature’’ is terribly out-ofdate, one has only to open the November 7, 1985 issue of the New York Review of Books to find Helen Vendler reminding her readers that ‘‘naturally, all kinds of ethical and civic topics turn up in poetry, as do trees and flowers and ladies’ eyes; but they all are material for the transformation into green’’ (or, as Blackmur said of Stevens, into blue). In other words, they enter ‘‘into the dynamic system of relations in the poem, and their allegiance is reordered in that magnetic field, which extends outward to the entire oeuvre of 2. R. P. Blackmur, Language as Gesture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1952), 240.

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the poet, and thence to the culture itself.’’3 Or to put it somewhat more familiarly—Blackmur rides again! Blackmur’s exclusive focus on ‘‘literature’’ is derived from a deeply rooted system of convictions that he rarely spoke about abstractly, but which is continually present in his work. One sees him constantly fending off the attempts of both philosophy and theology (in their incarnations as American Humanism and the then-current version of Marxism, as well as Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism) to exercise any hegemony over literature. He believed, as we have already said, that these forms of thought (and any theories that professed to define a final and ultimate truth about life) were a grosser type of response to experience than literature. And since he regarded all such statements of truths about life to be nothing but poems of thought, there was no reason why they should arrogate to themselves the right to judge poems that sprang more directly from the specific occasions and conjunctures of human existence. It was this belief, it seems to me, that ultimately inspired Blackmur’s love of literature, and lay behind his refusal to accord ultimate seriousness to any sort of doctrinal declaration, while always remaining willing to acknowledge and value the human emotion that such declarations might embody. The attitude inspiring his criticism is the same with which he approached the larger issues of life itself; and no better statement of this attitude can be found than in the concluding words of his review of Santayana’s Obiter Scripta. It is appropriate that so illuminating a passage should appear in such a context because so much of his own philosophic stance was molded by Santayana’s influence. Our age, full of conflict and aggressive social needs, is, being without it, frantic for faith as a guide and stabilizer of action; and we suffer everywhere from single insights and formal expressions of single aggressive needs—what we call ‘‘ideologies’’—set up with absolute authority. Such heresies, like private passions, are perhaps inevitable for immediate action. If Aristotle himself was a heretic—in that he ignored physics, and ‘‘cast the universe in the molds of grammar and ethics’’—there seems no likelihood any of us can escape, in persuading ourselves to action, a worse if different heresy. Yet, as we are critics of action, valuers of experience, as we are philosophers in the old, wisdom-loving sense—and not mere advocates—we ought 3. Helen Vendler, ‘‘Looking for Poetry in America,’’ The New York Review of Books 32:17 (7 November 1985), 60.

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at least to sample the remedy for heresy which Mr. Santayana proposes, and which his philosophy attempts to enact. That is, to confess the notorious truth that ‘‘a system of philosophy is a personal work of art which gives a specious unity to some chance vista in the cosmic labyrinth.’’ So confessing, our heresies become graphic and legitimate myths. If opinion is chastened and action is less, there is also less tragic waste in either realm and a better chance for the ‘‘plain deliverance of a long and general experience’’ upon which the arts of action and philosophy ought both to be founded. These words are more than just a statement of philosophic preferences; for those who knew Richard Blackmur, they also express an essential quality of the personality they were familiar with. It was this quality which, whatever the disorders and frustrations of his private life, shone through in him and accounts for the influence he exercised and the loyalty he inspired. It also accounts for the reverence he evoked among generations of Princeton students, who may not always have grasped some of his more sibylline pronouncements but who sensed very well the breadth of human understanding they conveyed all the same.

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17.

Ian Watt: A Tribute

I Several years ago, a small California press published a volume of essays, The Literal Imagination, by Ian Watt. Collected posthumously (the author died in 1991), they attracted very little attention. Yet Ian Watt had written a book, The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, that from the moment of its publication (1957) had been recognized as a major contribution to the study of the novel as a literary genre. It has never been out of print, and a new edition appeared in 2001. This work was followed by the first volume of an intended two-volume opus on Joseph Conrad, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1980) also immediately recognized as a distinguished addition to a subject already amply explored. (In addition, Watt wrote a brochure on Nostromo [1988], and a series of essays on Conradian questions, Essays on Conrad, posthumously issued in 2000.) No student of Conrad can compete with the illuminating richness of Ian Watt’s examination of this novelist within the entire context of nineteenth-century thought. Myths of Modern Individualism (1996), Ian Watt’s last volume (alas, lacking final redaction because of illness) is a pioneering attempt to account for the elevation of certain literary figures—Robinson Crusoe, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan—to the status of mythical prototypes. Despite the range of his interests and the importance of the subjects that he treated, Ian Watt’s name is hardly known outside the academy; and even there, as the years went by, he tended to be regarded with some condescension. One reason is that the study of literature during his lifetime passed from a focus on literary works themselves to a preoccupation with critical methodology. As one specialized vocabulary was succeeded by its competing successor, as more attention was paid to how literature was being written about and less and less to the literature itself, Ian Watt’s preoccupation with the historical, moral-social, and philosophical significance of the texts he was probing began to be seen as terribly old-fashioned. Nor did he make 187

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any effort—indeed, he deliberately avoided doing so—to enter the critical fray. He wrote one or two articles countering critics of The Rise of the Novel, the work arousing (and continuing to arouse) the most controversy; but these were invariably responses to editorial requests, and a lecture of the same kind remained unpublished in his files. Some notion of his attitude may be gleaned from his riposte when the book on Conrad was provisionally rejected by a university press. The reason given was that it lacked a ‘‘theoretical preface’’; and he replied that while such an addition might be necessary for a doctoral dissertation, a preface of this kind, with its ‘‘necessary abstractness, oversimplification and implied self-importance . . . would remove the book from the particular literary sphere where I think it belongs.’’1 In response to questions about his critical principles, posed by his French admirer Tzvetan Todorov, Watt responded that ‘‘this reluctance to state one’s premises is partly because of my empiricism, or my skepticism about philosophical methods in general,’’ adding, a few sentences later, that ‘‘critical reticence may just be a reflection of the English notion of polite manners in public discourse.’’2 If nothing else, this last remark indicates why younger generations might consider Ian Watt, born in 1917, to have been ‘‘old-fashioned’’; but he did set down some general principles all the same. For him, as he wrote of the function of the humanities, they should uphold ‘‘a way of responding to experience which involves what I would call ‘the literal imagination’ entering as fully as possible in all the concrete particularities of a literary work or the lives of others or the lessons of history.’’ And Ian Watt insisted that ‘‘unlike the mysteries of metaphysics, or indeed of faith or science, the literary work is really there, and needs only our own experience of life and language for us to be able to decipher its meaning.’’ If we are to judge from the latest volume of Terry Eagleton, always a reliable bellwether, there now seems to be a general exhaustion with the convolutions of literary-critical ‘‘theory’’ against which Ian Watt took his stand more by example than argument.3 And the vogue for ‘‘cultural studies’’ that now holds center stage at least assumes the relation of literature—along with a good deal else, to be 1. As quoted in Tzvetan Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists: A Personal View of Twentieth-Century Criticism, trans. by C. Porter (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p.120. 2. Todorov, Literature and Its Theorists, 119. 3. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003).

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sure (most recently video games)—to the world in which it was created. The present critical climate may thus well provide the propitious moment to rescue Ian Watt from his relative oblivion, and call attention to a critic who never ceased to explore, in original and perceptive ways, the manyfacetted relationship between literature and cultural history.

II The Rise of the Novel began as a thesis, though not with such a title, under the auspices of such Cambridge luminaries as I. A. Richards, and F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, but the outbreak of World War II interrupted its continuation. Ian Watt resumed it again only after serving as a lieutenant in the British infantry and spending almost four years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp on the river Kwai. His experiences during these years, about which he wrote a number of articles harshly criticizing the well-known film The Bridge on the River Kwai, certainly played a decisive role in his own moralspiritual development.4 A two-year post-war scholarship from Cambridge brought him to UCLA, and at this time he met T. W. Adorno, that formidable member of the Frankfurt School then located in Los Angeles. Adorno took the young Englishman under his wing, and ‘‘put me in touch with the whole tradition of German thought in history, literature, sociology, and psychology.’’ In fact, Watt had been prepared for such indoctrination because he had earlier stumbled accidentally on two German works while perusing the card catalogue of the British Museum. One was Georg Luka´cs’ Die Theorie des Romans (1920), the other Erich Auerbach’s 4. One of the essays in The Literal Imagination deals with his experiences there, and his reaction to the French novel of Pierre Boulle and the well-known film starring Alec Guinness and William Holden that took the novel as its starting-point. This essay incorporates a whole series of shorter pieces from 1956–1971, praising the novel but harshly criticizing the film. Watt has only the highest praise for the British commander of the prisoners in the camp, Colonel Philip Toosey, whose cool and careful estimate of what was possible in the situation saved many lives; and Watt insisted that the image given of such an officer in the film was totally distorted. Also, the movie falsely presented the Japanese, who had beaten the Allies, ‘‘as comically inept bridge builders,’’ and thus ‘‘gratified the self-fulfilling myth of white superiority whose results we have seen more recently in Vietnam’’ For Watt, the ideology of the movie represented much of what he had come to see as a grave defect of the values of modern culture itself, ‘‘the rejection of all realities except the demands of the self.’’ See ‘‘The Humanities on the River Kwai,’’ pp. 229–252.

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Mimesis (1946), both of which he eagerly devoured even though ‘‘it meant learning German for the third time.’’ These works are briefly mentioned in The Rise of the Novel, but Watt acknowledges they were far more important for him than ‘‘the few references in the text suggest.’’ Luka´cs’s book sees the novel, in a vast Hegelian perspective, as replacing the epic in modern times because man’s relation to the gods has weakened and faded; the novel is ‘‘the epic of a world forsaken by God.’’ Characters in the novel act out of motives that are predominantly secular, and ‘‘a measure of secularization was an indispensable condition for the rise of the new genre.’’ Auerbach’s magisterial work traces the gradual accession of the lower classes to dignity and status in European literature, and stresses the importance of ‘‘the Christian view of man’’ in engendering this process. This ‘‘Christian view,’’ with its implicit egalitarianism, was opposed for most of literary history by the class-bound classicistic tendencies deriving from Greece and Rome. Lower-class characters, as was still true in Shakespeare, were only a source of comedy. The novel itself, though this is not Auerbach’s concern at all, was an upstart form that enjoyed very little prestige compared to tragedy, for example, and its rise in importance may be seen as a parallel to that of the people it depicted. Such a book could well have given Watt the first impulse for his own historical inquiry into how this came about in the English novel. However that may be, and with this background in mind, it is no surprise to learn that early drafts contained ‘‘a long methodological first chapter . . . theorising about how literary history and criticism ought to be combined through what I then called the hypothetico-deductive method.’’ It was probably after reading a draft containing this ambitious effort that I. A. Richards proffered the following advice: ‘‘If I were you, Ian, I would keep away from the big transportation companies.’’ Watt himself also indicates some disaffection with this high-flying theoretical endeavor. For while grateful for what he had learned from Adorno, he defines his own aim as being ‘‘to transcend . . . the idealist modes of German thought by translating it into empirical categories and commonsense language.’’ The book was thus happily shorn of its ‘‘hypothetico-deductive’’ initial chapter; and also, for less theoretical reasons (length), three additional chapters were also cut—an additional one on Fielding, and two others on Smollett and Sterne.

III No notion has been more important for the study of the novel than the elusive term ‘‘realism,’’ and Watts’ first chapter, ‘‘Realism and the Novel

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Form,’’ attempts to bring some clarity to this extremely slippery concept. Its meaning had been primarily established by the nineteenth-century French novel, with its portrayal of the seamy side of life in unvarnished detail. The prehistory of the modern novel was thus seen as emerging from a similar tendency in the past—the Greek Ephesian tale, for example, in which ‘‘a grieving wife is shown unable to resist sexual desire,’’ or the medieval fabliau or picaresque story in which ‘‘economic or carnal motives are given pride of place in their presentation of human behavior.’’ ‘‘Realism’’ was thus defined primarily in terms of the content of the work; but Watt rejects such a definition as much too restrictive. It simply views the novel as ‘‘an inverted romance,’’ whereas the genre ‘‘surely attempts to portray all the varieties of human experience.’’ The novel is not defined by the subject-matter treated but by the form through which these subjects are depicted; they are conveyed through ‘‘formal realism,’’ which Watt correlates with social-cultural developments that explain why this new literary form differs from the prose fiction of the past. Watts’ methodological assumption, which he castigates himself for not having indicated more prominently after eliminating his theoretical introduction, was that the eighteenth-century English novel is the purest embodiment of this new form. The products of ‘‘formal realism’’—in particular, the novels of Defoe and Richardson—take full advantage of the lack of any traditional conventions for the novel, and free it of those it may have previously assumed. Their plots were no longer taken from ‘‘mythology, history, legend, or previous literature’’ but from current events. In the case of Defoe, Watt writes that ‘‘his total subordination of plot to the pattern of the autobiographical memoir is as defiant an assertion of the primacy of individual experience in the novel as Descartes’s cogito ergo sum in philosophy.’’ Other aspects of the novel also broke with the conventions of the past such as the use of type-names (Mr. Badman, or Fielding’s secondary characters Heartfree and Allworthy), and used ordinary contemporary ones instead. The time-scale of the action was not condensed for symbolic effect, as was customary in drama, but especially in the case of Richardson was extended to include all the ephemeral incidents of daily life hardly noticed before. Watt compares this with the ‘‘close-up’’ effect invented by D. W. Griffith for his films. Finally, much more attention is now paid to a detailed depiction of the world in which people actually live. Watt is perfectly well aware that European literature, beginning with Homer, abounds in narratives containing some of these features; but previously they had been more or less ancillary in works dominated by traditional plots and literary prototypes. Formal realism only emerged in the

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eighteenth century, and particularly in England, for a series of social-cultural reasons that Watt abundantly expounds. A new middle-class reading public sought diversion and entertainment; this led to the creation of circulating libraries, new journals catering to their tastes, and changes in the manner in which books were produced and distributed. Writers began to create for this new audience, which lacked any traditional literary education, and whose standards were no longer those of the past. Protests were soon heard against the lowering of taste, but had little if any effect. This new reading public had arisen as a result of the growth of capitalism, whose emphasis on economic individualism tended to replace more collective social bonds such as the family or the church. ‘‘Robinson Crusoe,’’ Watt notes, ‘‘has been very appropriately used by many economic theorists as their illustration of homo economicus.’’ Another influence was the spread of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist or Puritan forms. Protestantism encouraged its adherents to believe in the dignity of labor on the one hand, and on the other to subject their daily activities to continual moral-religious scrutiny. Defoe’s importance in the history of the novel arises from ‘‘the way his narrative structure embodied the struggle between Puritanism and the tendency to secularization . . . rooted in material progress.’’ Indeed, Defoe expresses this conflict so overtly that it has given rise to a critical controversy over whether he was consciously aware of the full implications of what he was portraying. Watt differs from commentators like Virginia Woolf, who have tended to detect a deliberate and sophisticated irony in the clash between material and moral-religious values in such a character as Moll Flanders. He views this clash rather as a testimony to Defoe’s authenticity in depicting ‘‘the serious discrepancies in his system of values,’’ discrepancies that existed in the entire social-cultural environment of Defoe’s time. Somewhat the same problem arises in relation to Samuel Richardson, the prudish and socially timorous printer and bookseller whose two novels, Pamela and Clarissa (he also wrote a third, Sir Charles Grandison) became the best-sellers of their day. They both deal primarily with the relation between the sexes, and they do so in such vivid detail that they are at once both titillating and censorious. By this time the old patriarchal family, in which women formed part of a large familial framework, had evolved into the conjugal family of modern times composed only of husband and wife. The importance of marriage as the most decisive event in a woman’s life thus became far more accentuated; and middle-class women now enjoyed more leisure and were better educated than in the past. Homes now included ‘‘a

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closet’’ adjoining the bedroom that was really a study, to which women could retire to write their letters—a form of private communication that became much more widespread. Richardson was the great master of the epistolary novel, composed exclusively of letters, which previously had been more concerned with ‘‘producing new models of eloquence’’ than with conveying intimate thoughts and feelings. In Richardson, however, this form communicated ideas and emotions with a hitherto unknown directness and immediacy, presumably as they were just coming to birth, and allowed the reader to enter into the most recondite areas of consciousness (and implicitly to reveal unconscious desires as well). Both of Richardson’s novels deal with the problem of marriage, which held little interest for Defoe, and with the clash between the codes of morality of upper-class masculinity and that of their feminine inferiors. Upper-class men were accustomed to impose their will on a lower-class serving maid like Pamela, or to bend to their desires a middle-class maiden like Clarissa, who for seven volumes first resists her seducer and then, after a rape, refuses to marry him and upholds her violated dignity by unflinchingly going to her grave. Clarissa is now difficult to accept with the requisite seriousness because sexual mores have changed so radically; but it took the literary world of its time by storm. Nothing like its exhaustive (and exhausting) explorations of every twist and turn of feeling, not only of Clarissa but also of the rakishly brilliant libertine Lovelace, had ever been written before; and Richardson was bothered because the villainous (as the author saw him) Lovelace proved far too attractively glamorous to his readers. Henry Fielding represents a special problem for Watt because he cannot really be included in the categories used for Defoe and Richardson. To be sure, he is ‘‘realistic’’ in the ordinary sense of setting his action squarely within the physical and social world of his time; but he does not place his main character at the center of his narrative perspective. The autobiographical memoir of Defoe and the exchange of letters in Richardson dominate whatever elements of plot-intrigue exist in their works; and one of Watt’s hallmarks of ‘‘formal realism’’ is precisely this subordination of plot to the portrayal of character. But plot comes to the fore in Fielding, who began by writing a parody of Pamela called Shamela, depicting her not as a beleaguered maiden but a shrewd vixen, who uses her sexual appeal to ensnare an upperclass husband. Nor is plot subordinate to character in his first novel, Joseph Andrews, which he labelled ‘‘a comic epic in prose’’ so as to establish its place in relation to more traditional narrative forms. His best-known novel, Tom

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Jones, provides a sweeping image of English eighteenth-century society also organized very carefully by an intricate plot, whose peripeties illustrate the vices and virtues of the characters but are not at all subordinated to their inner attributes. Both Defoe and Richardson (especially the latter) had sharply criticized the epic tradition, whose code of honor, like that of heroic tragedy, ‘‘was masculine, bellicose, aristocratic and pagan’’; and while Fielding hardly glorifies such a code, neither does he reject its literary conventions. His characters are not commonplace or even semi-criminal figures who narrate their lives as in Defoe; nor are we plunged into the depths of the moral dilemmas that assail Richardson’s correspondents. Fielding as author stands outside his main personages, who usually enjoy upper-class status; and he comments openly on their behavior as an intrusive narrator, either exhibiting a disabused but generous man-of-the-world perspective, or arranging his dramatic scenes so that they reflect on each other to make whatever satirical or thematic point he wishes to emerge. Watt does his best to be fair to Fielding, but his continual comparison of him with the inventors of ‘‘formal realism’’ constantly puts the more traditionally literary Fielding at a disadvantage. Wayne Booth, in his unsurpassed The Rhetoric of Fiction, criticized Watt’s favoritism on this score as far back as 1961.5 But Watt recognizes that his implied disparagement of Fielding presents him with something of a dilemma. For he acknowledges that ‘‘the tedious asseveration of literal authenticity in Defoe and to some extent in Richardson’’ hardly brings the work of both ‘‘into contact with the whole tradition of civilized values’’ that great literature has normally expressed. But at the conclusion of Tom Jones, ‘‘we feel we have been exposed . . . to a stimulating wealth of suggestion and challenge on almost every topic of human interest.’’ The future of the novel, if it was to aspire to the status of great literature, thus ‘‘could only come from taking a much wider view than Defoe or Richardson of the affairs of mankind.’’ To cope with this issue, Watt introduces a pair of new terms. There is, on the one hand ‘‘realism of presentation’’ (presumably another designation for ‘‘formal realism’’) and on the other ‘‘realism of assessment,’’ this latter providing the reader with ‘‘the responsible wisdom about human affairs’’ that can be found in Fielding despite a technique violating the ‘‘authenticity’’ achieved by his two rivals. In his greatly truncated final chapter, Watt views the future of the novel as a continuing attempt to unite these two ‘‘realisms’’ into a viable artistic 5. Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), 41.

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synthesis. Lawrence Sterne, the most original and eccentric of English eighteenth-century novelists, indicates the way forward. Tristram Shandy dramatizes the social world of its characters with minute precision, but since everything takes place within the consciousness of the autobiographical narrator, he is able to comment on and assess events without, like Fielding, violating the verisimilitude of his presentation. But Sterne’s remarkable experiments with the time-dimension of narrative, later rediscovered as an anticipation of the modern novel’s break with chronological sequence, was too idiosyncratic to establish a pattern for its own time. This was done by Jane Austen, who depicts her world with Richardsonian exactitude (if not amplitude), but also evaluates it at the same time ‘‘from a comic and objective point of view.’’ Her narrator comments on the action like Fielding, but so discreetly ‘‘that it did not substantially affect the authenticity of her narrative.’’ It was she who paved the way for the road that the English novel was to follow, joined a century later by Balzac and Stendhal after the French Revolution. This is the trajectory of the rise of the novel—the fusion of the objective and the subjective, the external and the internal, that one finds in Henry James as well as in Proust and James Joyce—and which Ian Watt traces against a background of social and literary history whose richness can only be faintly suggested in the summary offered here. There is much that can be (and has been) said to criticize and to supplement Watt’s conclusions (my own major objection would be his failure to take any notice of the Spanish picaresque). He himself admitted later that the distinction between his two ‘‘realisms’’ (presentation and assessment) ‘‘is much more problematic than I realized.’’ But Frank Kermode is right in maintaining that the book has been central, whether attacked or accepted, for all efforts to view the genre of the novel as a whole during the last halfcentury.6

IV The book on Conrad, conceived as an ambitious two-volume opus, is of an entirely different character. For one thing, it emerges from a life-long interest in the enigmatic Polish-English author, whose grave in Canterbury was only a dozen miles away from the Dover in which Ian Watt was reared. His 6. Frank Kermode, foreword to Essays on Conrad by Ian Watt, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), viii.

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father’s library contained a copy of Lord Jim, and ‘‘so I had set myself early on the Conradian path.’’ Indeed, Conrad was obviously on his mind during his years as a prisoner on the river Kwai, where he ‘‘vividly’’ recalls wondering why there was no mention of Conrad’s wife Jessie at his graveside. Why should such a memory have cropped up at such a time? One suspects that perhaps because some of the lessons he had learned from reading Conrad seemed so applicable to what had recently occurred in his own life. He had been lying wounded in Singapore when the Japanese arrived, and had been led away by his comrades who feared that immobile prisoners would simply be slaughtered. Can it only be coincidental that Watt was so drawn to a writer whose chief aim was not only to enable his readers ‘‘to see,’’ as he wrote in the preface to his first great novel, The Nigger of the Narcissus, but also ‘‘to awaken in the hearts of [the] beholders the feeling of unavoidable solidarity.’’ Such human solidarity, according to Ian Watt, became Conrad’s chief positive moral-social value in answer to an overwhelming and ingrown skepticism and pessimism. Conrad’s dispiriting attitudes partly arose from the tragic history of his family and native country, as well as from an inner conflict in his personality between ‘‘the Romantic visionary’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘the practical ethic’’ on the other through which, during his years as a seaman and officer in the British Merchant Marine, he had learned to cope with the limitations necessarily placed on all human endeavor. Watt’s book, however, is not a study of Conrad in such personal biographical terms, though he sketches them in sufficiently so that his reader does not feel any lack. What gives his book its outstanding place in the vast literature that has accumulated about Conrad, beside the thoroughness and insight of his literary analyses, is the richness of their location in the entire panorama of nineteenth-century thought. There is a certain paradox in attempting this latter task, as Watt is well aware, because Conrad so carefully avoided speaking of his own work in terms of ideas or abstractions. ‘‘I don’t know what my philosophy of life is,’’ he wrote in a letter; ‘‘I wasn’t even aware I had it.’’ Nonetheless, Ian Watt accepts the challenge of such definition and writes that, ‘‘if we cannot call him [Conrad] a philosopher . . . the intimations of his fictional world steadily invite ethical and even metaphysical response.’’ Watt remains, it is true, suspicious of what he calls ‘‘the history-of-ideas approach’’ to literature, in which ‘‘a few portable ideas’’ are extracted and, if given too much importance, tend to obscure what the work can yield in more concrete human terms. But this does not mean that art has no ‘‘cognitive validity,’’ and that

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a consideration of it in relation to the climates of opinion existing at the time of its creation cannot provide further insight into its significance. In the Nigger of the Narcissus, for example, Watt analyzes the complex relations between the officers and the crew, which almost lead to an outright mutiny, in terms of the social theories of Ferdinand Tonnies and E´mile Durkheim as well as Georg Simmel and the influential analyst of crowd psychology, Gustave Le Bon. Not that Conrad necessarily had any knowledge of such thinkers, but the distinctions of the first two between organic communities and those social groupings formed artificially for specific purposes help to clarify the larger implications of what Conrad was depicting. Nietzsche also comes into play because ‘‘altruism, pity and decadence as the lamentable historical results of Christianity’’ are present in the book as social dissolvents. But there is nothing like ‘‘the proud warrior mentality of the superman’’: the captain also shares the pity of the crew for their dying shipmate, even though this makes it ‘‘much more difficult to maintain the cohesion of the social order.’’ Conrad himself was thus on both sides of the question, and Watt rejects the attempt by other commentators to derive any condemnatory or consoling message from the book as a whole. Watt himself is moved by the semi-illiterate, superstitious aged sailor Singleton, who has no life except that of his devotion to his ship and its duties. Singleton, according to Watt, is portrayed as ‘‘the guardian spirit of the whole tradition of human toil’’; and it is this tradition that Conrad ‘‘compels us, in a humbling moment of awed vision,’’ to honor in his book. No work of Conrad’s has made a greater impact on our own day than his superb Heart of Darkness, whose searing and inwardly tormented depiction of the great Western adventure of imperialism revealed the problematic of our civilization with incomparable force and acuity. Watt considers this prophetic work to be ‘‘Conrad’s nearest approach to an ideological summa,’’ and he views its narrator Marlow as representing its author’s ‘‘lingering wish to endorse the standard values of the Victorian ethic’’ in face of the ruthlessness that he encounters. On the other hand, the trader Kurtz that Marlow goes to seek went to Africa not only to carry the torch of enlightenment and civilization but also to gather and export ivory; and he ends by reverting to the most primitive level of savagery. To a report that he obligingly wrote for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, he adds a scribbled addendum: ‘‘Exterminate all the brutes!’’—but in a moment of terrified vision he also exclaims: ‘‘The horror! The horror!’’ Whether this moment of lacerating self-scrutiny is ‘‘a significant moral victory,’’ as Conrad presumably believed, is placed in doubt by Watt, who

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writes that ‘‘its force largely depends on the intellectual atmosphere of the late nineteenth century.’’ This atmosphere is amply filled in with Watt’s unpretentious erudition, carefully assimilated and rethought and presented in a flowingly precise and expressive prose. Beginning with Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the basis of Marlow’s last-ditch defence of his Victorian ethic, it moves on to the triumph of Darwinian evolution combined with a belief in progress that led to the conviction of White European superiority over other races of the globe. An ‘‘astrophysical pessimism’’ encouraged by scientific theories of the cooling of the universe replaced the hopes of religion, and encouraged instead a Faustian assertion of the individual to satisfy all his desires that can be related to the career of Kurtz. Such excurses greatly widen the horizon within which Conrad’s novella can and should be read. The same is true of the enlightening chapters on Impressionism and Symbolism, artistic movements that certainly affected Conrad but whose tendencies he employed for his own innovative artistic purposes. He is Impressionist, though he had no taste for the painters of this school, in the sense that he stylistically conveys the sensations of events before their explanations or comprehension. To read him, as a result, it is necessary to employ ‘‘delayed decoding,’’ a very useful technical term that Watt introduced. Conrad is a Symbolist, though he dissociated himself from the purely literary ambitions of this movement, because he often spoke of wishing to embody a transcendent meaning in his work larger than its overt details appear to contain; but what this ‘‘larger meaning’’ might be often remains tantalizingly vague. Watt cites E. M. Forster’s down-putting speculation that ‘‘the secret casket of Conrad’s genius . . . may contain a vapour rather than a jewel’’; and perhaps one aim of his own endeavors is to counteract this niggling suspicion. He takes issue, however, with all those many critics who assign a specific set of ideological coordinates to such a work as Heart of Darkness independent of its literal meaning and narrative context. It has furnished a happy hunting ground for such readings, but Watt insists that ‘‘only a primary commitment to the literal imagination’’ will enable us to grasp the larger implications that Conrad was striving to suggest—the interplay between self-delusion, moral collapse, and the necessity of preserving a moral standard in the midst of such frightfulness. Lord Jim was the novel that launched Ian Watt on his Conradian investigations, and the chapters he devotes to this haunting and unforgettable work are among the most valuable and deeply felt in his book. This story of the young Englishman unable to live up to his Romantic dreams of glory, and

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the involvement of Conrad’s already-familiar narrator Marlow with his fate—an involvement which, as always in Conrad, involves a serious selfscrutiny and self-questioning—is one of the most intricately constructed of all his creations. Watt examines it not only in terms of ‘‘delayed decoding’’ but also that of ‘‘thematic apposition’’ (the juxtaposition of events independent of chronology)7 and ‘‘symbolic deciphering’’ (episodes apparently unrelated to the main story but illuminating it obliquely). The use of memory is also linked to Bergson and William James and, from a more literary point of view, with a remark of Ford Madox Ford to whom Conrad was very close at this time. ‘‘Life,’’ Ford wrote, ‘‘did not narrate but made impressions on our brain,’’ and both he and Conrad thought that the English novel should endeavor to reproduce this process. Lord Jim thus became ‘‘a mosaic composed of the fragments of perceptions, memories and anticipations’’ rather than a narrative unrolling a sequential story; and Conrad thus is now seen as a predecessor of the experimental forms of the modern novel. Watt’s analysis of the theme of Lord Jim focuses on the growing identification of the veteran British captain Marlow, upholding the traditions that guarantee the moral solidity of his personality and his profession, with the young officer guilty of abandoning his ship in a moment of crisis. No one, at least to my knowledge, has written anything close to the discriminating intensity with which Watt ranges over all of Western culture—from the Gilgamesh epic, to medieval romance, to Baudelaire and Flaubert—in his effort to illuminate the moral-spiritual imbroglios of Conrad’s characters and their relations. He grapples with the ambiguities, which he decides cannot be resolved, of the passage containing the famous phrase ‘‘in the destructive element immerse,’’ whose elusive imagery exercised a powerful attraction and allowed for the most diverse interpretations. He also rejects the most widespread critical interpretation of the final scenes, in which Jim unwittingly betrays the Malays who look up to him as a leader and demigod. Most critics view this as evidence of Jim’s subconscious identification with the criminal Gentleman Brown who leads the marauders. But Watt refers ironically to ‘‘that strange Freudian mutation of the doctrine of original sin, which has now established . . . that all errors are the result of unconscious guilt.’’ 7. Although I make no reference to Conrad, Watt refers to my own notion of ‘‘spatial form’’ as similar to his ‘‘thematic appositon.’’ The two are certainly related. See Joseph Frank, The Idea of Spatial Form (New Brunswick and London, 1991), pp. 5–132.

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Again in opposition to critical consensus, he finds that Jim’s decision to return and face certain death at the hands of his erstwhile followers is not ‘‘tragic;’’ it does not arise from moral maturity and a sense of duty to the community similar to that of Oedipus. It remains purely individual and comes from a devotion to ‘‘knightly honor,’’ from an ‘‘exalted egoism,’’ as Marlow says, not from an abandonment of Jim’s initially Romantic ideal. However antiquated and stuffy we may now feel such an ideal to be, Watt remarks, ‘‘honor, and its corresponding human and artistic style, nobility, are timeless and indispensable values.’’ Such reflections on the interweaving of Conradian themes with the thorniest problems of culture both old and new are what make Watt’s book much more than literary criticism; and they also tell us something about the critic-scholar himself.

V Ian Watt’s next book, which (alas!) he was only able to partially complete, takes up a theme that goes back a long way in his development. One of his earliest published essays (1951) was devoted to ‘‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth,’’ the shipwrecked English commoner thus taking his place ‘‘with Faust, Don Juan and Don Quixote,’’ among ‘‘the great myths of our civilization.’’ These characters acquired such a mythical status, he wrote at that time, because ‘‘all exhibit a single-minded pursuit . . . of one of the characteristic aspirations of Western man.’’ This passage from the essay also appears as a side-remark in The Rise of the Novel, and indicates Watts’s preoccupation with such a transformation of a literary prototype into a myth. Indeed, it raises a question that has rarely if ever been approached as one to which some historical answer might be given. Why do literary figures become myths? The answer provided by Watt proves to be more complex than his earlier formulation, and now takes into account the particular religiouscultural moment at which this transformation occurred. Most myths in the Western world, Watt points out, derive either from biblical or classical figures; but the ones on which he focuses (Faust, Don Juan, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe) are all modern. Moreover, the first three were produced in a period of some thirty or forty years, and two were Spanish. They were written during the period known as the CounterReformation, ‘‘when the forces of tradition and authority rallied against the new aspirations of Renaissance individualism in religion, in daily life and in literature and art.’’ The first section of the book deals with the three Renaissance figures who eventually became myths, Faust, Don Quixote and Don Juan.

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The initial German Faustbuch was composed of legends about a magician and sorcerer who competed with established religious authorities for mastery over the invisible forces controlling both natural and otherworldly life. This became the source for the soaring tirades of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, which expressed the world-shaking ambitions, even the claim to self-divinization, of its protagonist. Don Quixote is more complicated, and Watt details its subtleties with appreciative finesse. Here we have a dialogue between the past and present, dramatized by Cervantes with incomparable creative amplitude and ingenuity. Don Quixote sets out on his lone mission to restore the halcyon days of knight-errantry, and is considered ‘‘mad’’ by all those who live in the more mundane world of his time. The character of Don Juan, created by the Spanish monk writing as Tirso de Molina, refuses to inhibit his sexual exploits and defies the terrors of hell that he does not question. All three acquired mythical stature because they express so exemplarily the basic clash between aspects of the modern Western assertion of individualism and the reigning Christian moral-social norms of their time. Watt cites with approval Miguel de Unamuno, who wrote that ‘‘Quixotism is simply the most desperate phase in the struggle between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.’’ Much the same terms can be used for Faust and Don Juan if we take Protestantism and the Counter-Reformation as efforts to rejuvenate the moral-religious values of the Middle Ages. Don Quixote was ridiculous because he asserted medieval values in a world transformed by the Renaissance; Faust and Don Juan were tragic because they attempted to live as Renaissance men in a world that had become a modern reincarnation of medieval constraints. The last of the literary myth-figures is of course Robinson Crusoe, with whom Watt has dealt with earlier. He goes over the ground again, and replies to some of the critics of his earlier characterization of Crusoe’s Puritanism as ‘‘a Sunday religion.’’ It is quite clear, in any case, that if the storm and shipwreck that bring Crusoe to his island are seen as God’s punishment for his disobedience to his father, such presumed chastisement turns out to be a blessing. The ‘‘economic individualism’’ of Crusoe is self-evident; and the Puritan ethic, as Max Weber taught us long ago, sees nothing wrong with ‘‘business enterprise as the appropriate field of Christian endeavor.’’ Even more than his three predecessors, Robinson Crusoe thus became a mythical exemplar for the modern world, a prefiguration of the ‘‘Romantic apotheosis’’ by which all three joined him in their transformation into culture-heroes no longer subject to eternal disgrace or, like Don Quixote,

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to defeat. For we now see these figures with the aureole provided them by Romanticism. For Rousseau, ‘‘the supreme human duty was antinomian subjectivism,’’ and Robinson Crusoe, as he proclaimed in his own E´mile, was the work on which all children should be educated to teach them the virtues of selfreliance. Under the influence of Vico and Herder, myth itself was rescued from the sophisticated sneers of the Voltairian Enlightenment, and Goethe took up the Faust-theme again to give it a magnificent poetic embodiment. For all his misdeeds, Faust is saved in the end by the prayers of Gretchen, thus anticipating Hollywood by being ‘‘the first of our myths to give romantic love an important place.’’ As Watt remarks, ‘‘it would have been a more moral tale if, as in Marlowe, Mephistopheles had been allowed to win his wager.’’ But all of the culture-heroes will now be allowed, in their later embodiments, to get off more or less scot-free through their ‘‘Romantic apotheosis’’ (or if not, are endowed, like the Don Giovanni of Mozart’s opera, with personal qualities that give them a positive appeal entirely lacking in the original). The concluding chapters of the book, in which one feels the absence of a final authorial revision, follow the fortunes of the four culture-heroes in incarnations ranging from Byron and Dostoevsky to Thomas Mann and Michel Tournier. There is also a discussion of modern theories of myth as well as of the historical roots of individualism; and Watt warns against confusing this latter simply with ordinary human egoism per se. He finds most convincing the views of the French anthropologist Louis Dumont, who, after studying Indian caste society, saw individualism ‘‘as a phenomenon of the Western world; it began with Christianity, and was developed by the Reformation and Calvin.’’ Watt wonders whether the Romantic radiance of his four culture-heroes, whose symbolic power stemmed initially from the moral-religious constraints they were defying, will continue to excite the imagination as these constraints become weaker and weaker. Indeed, he remarks that the two twentieth-century works he deals with—Thomas Mann’s Dr. Faustus and Michel Tournier’s Vendredi (Friday)—are ‘‘no longer an endorsement of individualism,’’ though he does not elaborate on what this might portend. Nonetheless, he admits to being ‘‘deeply disturbed’’ at the refusal of Tournier’s protagonist to return to the world of modern civilization from his island. It is impossible here to do justice to the wealth of observation and insight in these later chapters, which comment with wry disillusion but not hopelessness on various cultural manifestations of the present. The literary

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criticism of Ian Watt, as should be clear by now, has always been inspired by this deep involvement in such larger issues about the evolution of ideals and values in our modern world; and this is one reason he will continue to be read long after the quarrels of literary methodologists have sunk into oblivion.

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18.

Gary Saul Morson’s Narrative and Freedom

Gary Saul Morson is best known as the co-author, with Caryl Emerson, of Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, which is unquestionably the most complete, well-rounded, and judicious analysis in English of the works of Mikhail Bakhtin, rediscovered in his Russian homeland in the early 1950s. Morson has also been an indefatigable expounder and propagator of Bakhtin’s ideas, and is the editor of a volume of articles, Literature and History, produced by various hands under Bakhtinian inspiration; but he is also as well an original critic in his own right. His first book, devoted to Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, treats much less the contents of that unique work than the dialectic Morson discerns in it between Utopia and irony—a dialectic which, he argues, creates a new literary form, a boundary genre, labeled ‘‘meta-utopia.’’ Morson has since changed his mind about this conclusion, as he explains in a highly instructive introduction to a new translation of the Diary (1993), but his discussion of the genre of literary Utopia (Sir Thomas More, Samuel Johnson, Edward Bellamy) nonetheless retains its considerable value. Morson’s study of War and Peace, provocatively titled Hidden in Plain View (1987), persuasively links the formal peculiarities of that book, which critics have tended to take for granted or else disregard, to Tolstoy’s deeply pondered views on history, time, and memory. Now, in Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994), Morson raises the question—and answers it in strikingly innovative ways—of how a world of human beings exercising freedom and ignorant of the future can be depicted in a work of literature whose structure is necessarily limited and closed by the sovereign will of its author. Morson begins with some reflections on the nature of time, which is always in process and can never be seen as a completed whole—except, of course, in the mind of God, who presumably encompasses past, present, and future simultaneously, much as one grasps all of a work of literature after it has been read. It is only at the end of time, only at the Apocalypse and Last Judgment, only after death, that the final meaning of time as a whole 204

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becomes known, if at all. And as an instance of the ceaseless and impossible human effort to step outside of time, Morson cites the poignantly beautiful speech of Sonya in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, imagining how her life and that of Vanya will appear after their deaths, when they look back from eternity. But human life takes place in time, and Morson follows Bakhtin (as well as Tolstoy) in criticizing all attempts to comprehend it according to so-called laws (whether scientific, social, historical, psychological, or philosophical) that pretend to predetermine events in advance of their occurrence. Events (or ‘‘eventness,’’ to use Bakhtin’s term) always contain a ‘‘surplus’’ that constitutes their singularity and cannot be predicted. They involve a world of multiple possibilities in which choices have to be made from moment to moment, and ‘‘some things that could happen do not.’’ Yet a writer imposes a narrative structure on this total indeterminacy that gives it a specific shape and form, imitating in this way the collective narratives of religion and history that have always given some sort of coherence to human experience. Russian literature of the nineteenth century, especially after the rise of Nihilism as a dominant left-wing ideology in the 1860s, was haunted by the problem of how to accept scientific determinism as the very latest, irrefutable word of modern (European) thought, and yet continue to preserve a sense of human freedom and hence of moral responsibility. No one revolted against scientific determinism more violently than Dostoevsky’s underground man; and so long as we identify with his point of view, he seems to act in a totally unpredictable, irrational fashion. But, as Morson notes, the more closely we look at the structure of Notes from Underground, the more we discover that ‘‘the underground man can be counted on to do the most spiteful, self-destructive thing’’—his behavior falls into patterns that can be discerned in advance. Moreover, in a prefatory footnote supplied by the author (not by the first-person narrator within the work), we are told that ‘‘such persons as the writer of these notes not only may, but positively must, exist in our society, considering the circumstances under which our society was in general formed.’’ Dostoevsky as author thus presumably undercuts the revolt of his character, and ironically indicates that the underground man ‘‘is the creation of someone who has plotted his actions in advance.’’ Morson’s narratological observation is very well taken; but it is questionable whether Dostoevsky was deliberately using the footnote, as Morson asserts, to show up the underground man’s revolt as ‘‘a sign of failed choice and futile selfassertion.’’ He forgets that the underground man himself believes in determinism, precisely as a result of the historical ‘‘circumstances’’ mentioned in

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the footnote, and that the point of the work, at least in my view, is to reveal the insoluble moral-psychological dilemma that such a belief creates. So that one cannot set up a simple opposition between the assertion of freedom within the work and the determinism implicit in the assumption of authorial prerogative. Nonetheless, even if one can quarrel from time to time with remarks about particular works, this in no way lessens the value of Morson’s original exploration of the antinomy between the closure imposed by any type of narrative structure and the sense of open-endedness, the possibility of making choices, that are indigenous parts of human experience. The interest of these explorations is greatly enhanced because Morson continually brings this seemingly narrow and purely formal problem into relation with larger historical and even theological concerns. His second chapter is devoted to ‘‘foreshadowing,’’ a time-honored literary technique that ‘‘directs our attention not to the experience of the character but to the design of the author’’; and since characters in realistic fiction ‘‘experience time as open,’’ there is an inevitable clash between what they feel and the fate assigned them in advance by the exhibition of foreknowledge. But foreshadowing has been a part of human life since time immemorial, and mankind has felt that ‘‘the end may be known not only to God but also to those people who have discovered God’s plan, the eternal archetypes, or history’s laws.’’ Morson thus outlines various types of predetermination: eternal recurrence, as with the Pythagoreans and the Stoics—to whom he could have added Nietzsche; the presumed foreshadowing of the New Testament by the Old, so brilliantly analyzed in Erich Auerbach’s ‘‘Figura’’; and the assumptions of Marxists that history’s laws have been writ plain for them to read in their own sacred texts. Morson amusingly points out that Ivan Karamazov’s devil depresses him no end by expounding eternal recurrence, and that when Tolstoy rewrote the New Testament, he completely disregarded ‘‘the hermeneutics of prefiguration.’’ As for those who believed in ‘‘history’s laws,’’ which became the basis for the theory of Socialist Realism in the ex-Soviet Union, Morson cites Andrey Sinyavsky’s remark that it produced only a ‘‘loathsome literary salad,’’ which combined the incompatible ingredients of ‘‘utopian fantasy and Tolstoyan realism.’’ Sometimes, however, foreshadowing can be used with stunning literary effect, as for example in Oedipus the King. In a brief perceptive analysis, Morson describes how the audience, knowing the myth, also knew the end, while simultaneously identifying with ‘‘Oedipus and his experience, which, like our own, is lived without knowing of the future.’’ It is only Tiresias

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the seer who, within the play, has knowledge of the future, and ‘‘thus the meeting of the two times in Oedipus’s dialogue with Tiresias encapsulates our own experience’’—which is why, as Morson rightly says, the play is so moving. A lengthier discussion is devoted to Anna Karenina, which Morson sees as Tolstoy’s attempt to cope with the problem of foreshadowing and plotting in general because ‘‘they both impose closure and structure on a world that is fundamentally innocent of both.’’ Morson argues that Tolstoy portrays Anna as viewing herself as a tragic heroine (Greta Garbo, in his view, correctly grasped this aspect of the character) whose life was therefore predetermined by omens of inevitable doom (foreshadowing); and it is these that ultimately lead to her suicide. Tolstoy, however, places her within a larger narrative framework from which foreshadowing is noticeably absent—he thus relies on what Morson calls ‘‘negative narration,’’ that is, a temporality of determinism assumed by the character rather than imposed by authorial structure, a structure in fact so open that the book continues even after Anna’s death. But Morson concedes that Tolstoy’s ‘‘negative narration’’ does not seem to work, and that readers identify too closely with Anna to detect what Morson considers to be the falsity of Anna’s posturing. The epigraph to the book, however, assigns the right of moral judgment (‘‘revenge’’) only to God, and this may indicate more impartiality on Tolstoy’s part than Morson assumes. It was from his study of Bakhtin that Morson was led to investigate the tension between narrative structure and human freedom; and in his third chapter, ‘‘Bakhtin’s Indeterminism,’’ he provides a cogent summary of Bakhtin’s ideas as a means of situating his own. Morson begins by calling William James to his aid in discussing determinism from a broadly philosophical perspective, and the coupling of these Russian and American thinkers could not be more apropos. Indeed, it is a linkage that demands much more development than Morson requires for his purposes, and one hopes that someone will follow his lead and carry it further. Even at a superficial glance, one can see that both, in their respective ways and national contexts, formed part of the same anti-Hegelian reaction at the end of the nineteenth century. Both rejected Hegel’s omnivorous monism, which was then assimilated by Marxism, to affirm a pluralistic universe in which individual freedom and indeterminism, hence moral choice and ethical responsibility, once again come to the fore. Bakhtin, however, approached this question in terms of literature rather than of conceptual argument, using ‘‘the relation of the hero of a work to its author as a figure for the relation of a person to the world and of the individual to God.’’ A person can be

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free in relation to the world, God having incomprehensibly endowed mankind with the freedom to disobey his commandments; but how could such freedom be attained in a work whose author inevitably imposed a narrative structure predetermining the behavior of all the characters? Bakhtin found an answer to this dilemma in studying the works of Dostoevsky, and in the now famous Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, he proclaimed that Dostoevsky had created a new type of ‘‘polyphonic novel’’ whose characters have a special relation to their author, one that (in Morson’s words) ‘‘allows the hero to be truly free, capable of surprising not only other characters but also the author. In some crucial aspects, the polyphonic author—not just the narrator—resembles just another character.’’ Even Morson, however, speaks of Bakhtin’s ideas as ‘‘paradoxical formulations,’’ and it is not clear to what extent he accepts them as empirically valid. In my view, they represent a striking but highly exaggerated extrapolation of features of Dostoevsky’s literary technique that were remarkably original in his time—his very sparing use of an omniscient narrator, often replaced by an unreliable one; his preference for self-characterizing monologue in the portrayal of his personages; and the remarkable liberty that he allows his characters to express opinions quite opposed to his own. Such opinions are not refuted in argument with other figures in the book, which would seem to bear out Bakhtin’s point, but they are, all the same, negated by the plot-action of the novels, to which Bakhtin pays no attention whatever. Indeed, it has often been pointed out that he fails to justify his theories by analyzing any Dostoevsky novel as a whole, and that he never explains convincingly how the author can be just another character. To say, as Bakhtin does, that modern poetics offers no concepts competent to express his totally new, ‘‘Einsteinian’’ ideas (a comparison that Morson too finds implausible) merely begs the question rather than responding to it. At one point, objecting to Bakhtin’s dismissal of Dostoevsky’s epilogues as ‘‘conventionally literary, conventionally monologic,’’ Morson writes: ‘‘In my view, Bakhtin’s conclusion derives more from the inner logic of his argument than from the evidence.’’ The same can be said, it seems to me, about his theory of the polyphonic novel as a whole. Bakhtin was eagerly searching for a literary exemplum to illustrate his philosophy of freedom, and he quite brilliantly read it into Dostoevsky, just as other Russian philosophers like Nikolay Berdyaev and Lev Shestov have read their philosophical positions into and out of his work even earlier. The difference was that Bakhtin focused on the moral-philosophical implications of literary structure and

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on Dostoevsky’s use of language (one of the most valuable parts of the book) instead of on themes, characters, and texts. What Bakhtin did was to imagine what Max Weber called an ideal type, a model that could never occur in reality—the model of an author who allowed his characters the same freedom with which God had endowed mankind—and then misleadingly argued, with consummate rhetorical skill and a wealth of perceptive observations about actual features of Dostoevsky’s poetics, that this model had been realized in Dostoevsky’s works. To take Bakhtin as guide, however, is to run into insoluble problems when studying the novels themselves, which are far from being as loose and amorphous as he would wish them to be. But his effort has heuristic merits, well defined by Morson: ‘‘Perhaps the value of Bakhtin’s theories,’’ he writes, ‘‘lies in their deepening of the problems to be solved in any attempt to represent time as open. His very exaggerations, about Dostoevsky and the novel, serve to foreground the central issues.’’ In the remainder of his book, Morson discusses the general problematic of representing time as open, following Bakhtin’s lead but without taking his ‘‘polyphonic’’ model as at all definitive. Morson points to what he calls the use of ‘‘sideshadowing’’ (as opposed to foreshadowing) to suggest alternative possibilities to actions that occur, or sometimes do not occur even though they might have done so. The reader is thereby kept constantly aware of a world of other outcomes that could have happened besides those that did; time is thus felt as open and free despite the seeming inevitability of the events that emerge from the mass of potentialities. ‘‘In general,’’ Morson writes, ‘‘for every important event in a novel (and for many unimportant ones), Dostoevsky first gives us a probable version, then one more or less but still believable alternative, and at last, in some cases, an additional, extremely remote possibility, often described as ‘utter nonsense’ . . . As a result, other novels hover in the wings and wait to seize control of the text.’’ This use of ‘‘sideshadowing’’ is very effectively illustrated by a wide range of citations offering new insights into some famous passages. One of the best is linked to Dostoevsky’s view of human character as infinitely labile and undetermined: Fyodor Karamazov can both shout with joy on hearing of his first wife’s death, and yet quite genuinely weep over her like a child. Dimitri Karamazov ‘‘descries a similar kind of double thinking as he recognizes in himself and others, a longing for Sodom at the same time as he worships the Madonna. Such psychological states have no predetermined outcome; it is entirely possible that Dimitri either will or will not kill his

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father.’’ Another excellent interpretation is given of Ivan Karamazov’s dialogue with his devil, who unexpectedly desires fixity and stability, and dreams of ‘‘becoming incarnate . . . in the form of some merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone.’’ The devil thus ironically sideshadows Ivan’s position in the novel, where he lives ‘‘in a perfectly uncommitted position, as a mere observer who watches from the shadows but takes no role in action. For life consists not only of possibilities.’’ Sideshadowing, as Morson ingeniously makes clear, is not limited to literature; it responds to a human desire that can be found ‘‘in literature, religion, and popular culture as well.’’ The film ‘‘It’s a Wonderful Life,’’ in which we see what life might have been like in a town if the main character had not lived, is an instance of such a hypothetical possibility, a sideshadow of what did happen. Sometimes ‘‘unactualized possibilities are turned into possible actualities,’’ and we get a spate of stories, which might or might not be true, about important public figures who have attracted popular attention (John F. Kennedy, Elvis Presley, the British—or any—royal family, and so forth). Religious apocrypha, non-canonical texts elaborating on the lives of sacred figures or saints, stem from the same impulse to sideshadow existing versions with alternative ones. Moreover, once literary parodies (like Fielding’s Shamela, a takeoff on Richardson’s Pamela) become historically paired and are read together with the originals, they constitute, Morson says, a form of sideshadowing as well. Concluding with a contrast between Dostoevsky’s use of ‘‘vortex time,’’ the time of crises, and Tolstoy’s ‘‘prosaics,’’ the small alteration of commonplace events, Morson writes: ‘‘Tolstoy’s method is not to project more possible outcomes for each critical event but to give countless ordinary events a small range of freedom.’’ Whether this still conveys a sideshadowing effect to a reader, however, may well be debated. The general impression given by a Tolstoyan novel, as even Bakhtin pointed out, is that of a dominating and all determining authorial presence. To represent time as open means to offer a sense of how events actually occur in the present; and Morson suggests that the experience of watching a ball game, in which excitement is generated by the feeling that the unexpected can occur at any moment, provides a paradigm of what he calls ‘‘the special temporality of intense presentness.’’ Nothing of the same kind can be achieved even by the most exciting adventure stories, since ‘‘we know that the outcome has in a sense already happened because the author has already written it down.’’ Nonetheless, authors like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,

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‘‘who believed in the openness of time . . . both undertook radical experiments to convey presentness in all its experiential fullness’’—but they differed about how this should be done in relation to the past. In a famous article, Dostoevsky criticized a painting depicting the Last Supper as if it were a gathering of Russian radicals of the 1860’s, a painting in which Judas storms out after a quarrel with Jesus presumably to denounce him to the police. Dostoevsky objected to what he considered the ‘‘falsity’’ of this transposition because, he insisted, the past could not be envisaged without the intervention of memory, and this could only be imagined ‘‘in its completed aspect.’’ A past event could only be recalled, that is, along with what had resulted from it. The Last Supper was not only an underground meeting, and Judas was not only a police spy and informer. Tolstoy, on the other hand, believed that the task of the artist was to attempt to capture the ‘‘presentness’’ of the past as if the future of that past were unknown; and Morson, drawing on his own earlier work, outlines the various methods that Tolstoy used to undo those effects of memory that Dostoevsky thought ineradicable. For Tolstoy, the selectivity of memory invariably imparted a coherence to the past that had not actually existed, and the operations of memory were thus at the root of distortion. The character of Nikolai Rostov in War and Peace, according to Morson, incarnates the capacity of living entirely in the present that Tolstoy valued so highly. For Nikolai seizes happiness ‘‘in relatively ordinary events without demanding that they fit into some overall story of his life’’—for example, when Tolstoy singles out as Nikolai’s ‘‘greatest happiness’’ the moment when, during a hunt, the wolf being pursued is accidentally caught by Nikolai’s dog, who sinks her teeth into its throat. The unimportance of this event in any larger scheme of things signals Nikolai’s capacity for ‘‘supreme immersion in the present’’; and Morson argues against Dostoevsky that ‘‘if the representation of Christ without subsequent history seems grotesque, so would the portrayal of a Rostov with it.’’ But does Tolstoy in fact give us Rostov without his ‘‘subsequent history,’’ without all the great historical events in which he became involved? Obviously not, and so Dostoevsky’s point seems to hold for Tolstoy as an artist, whatever the latter’s view regarding memory might be These reflections on the importance of ‘‘presentness’’ argue against what Morson calls ‘‘the bipolar fallacy,’’ the tendency to assume that the existing relation between past and present is the only one that could have occurred, and to eliminate whatever conflicts with this assumption. Morson constructs a very useful and quite original typology of such misuses of the present as

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negate the possibility of freedom. There is what he calls ‘‘the desiccated present,’’ in which we ‘‘lose the sense that the present has special importance.’’ In ‘‘epic time,’’ for instance, a category derived from Bakhtin’s essay ‘‘Epic and the Novel,’’ the world exists as fixed and immutable in a past entirely removed from the present; any flux or change is therefore impossible. In ‘‘epilogue time,’’ the present has run its course and nothing of importance can take place any longer. Characters in Chekhov live in ‘‘epilogue time,’’ and there is a suggestive application of this notion to Fathers and Sons, in which the conflict of generations dramatizes the relegation of the older one to ‘‘epilogue time.’’ Another variation demotes the present in relation to an eschatological Utopian future whose dangers are revealed by some prophetic lines in Herzen’s dialogue, From the Other Shore: ‘‘Who is this Moloch,’’ Herzen asked after the revolutions of 1848, ‘‘who, as the toilers approach him, instead of rewarding them, only recedes, and as a consolation to the exhausted, doomed multitudes crying morituri te salutant (they who are to die salute thee) can give back only the mocking answer that after their death all will be beautiful on earth.’’ Morson also warns, however, against ‘‘the isolated present,’’ in which all relation to the past and future is cut off because the present seems so immensely valuable in itself (the example given is Prince Myshkin, experiencing in The Idiot an ‘‘ecstatic merging in the highest synthesis of life’’). In ‘‘hypothetical time,’’ where characters live only in a realm of possibilities, past, present, and future are all drained of meaning (Chekhov’s three sisters exist in this realm, as does Raskolnikov before he commits his murder). Finally there is ‘‘multiple time,’’ invented by thinkers who postulate alternative worlds to our own, and evoked independently as in Borges’s haunting story, ‘‘The Garden of Forking Paths.’’ In such multiple-universe models, what occurs in the present makes no difference because the very opposite could be taking place in some other world at the same time. ‘‘Choice loses much of its significance,’’ Morson writes, ‘‘insofar as the significance of a choice depends on its singularity and what possibilities are left unactualized’’—for ‘‘ethics would seem to require a singular universe as it requires multiple possibilities. There must be sideshadows.’’ Another means of eliminating sideshadows is what Morson calls ‘‘backshadowing,’’ in which ‘‘the past is viewed as having contained signs pointing toward what happened later, toward events known to the backshadowing observer’’ but hardly to those who took part in them. All the same, backshadowing assumes by definition that whatever did occur was the only possibility, and that somehow its inevitability could be discerned in

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advance. Morson draws on Tolstoy and on Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History to demolish this almost instinctive tendency to take ‘‘our own moment as something special and the prejudices of our own time as wisdom.’’ Backshadowing always seems to involve an assumption of superiority to the past, and Morson expressively labels this chronocentrism, a parallel to the widely used term ethnocentrism. It is curious, we might add, that those who so vehemently oppose the second are so insensitive to the incongruities of the first. Nothing is more prevalent amongst present-day academic literati and historians than chronocentrism, the backshadowing notion that our own time has reached an acme of enlightenment from which it is possible to denounce those in the past who failed to meet current standards. To illustrate this point, Morson uses a telling passage from Petrov’s satire of Soviet life, The Golden Calf. One character here remarks of another, who lived in terror because he had once owned a drugstore: ‘‘ ‘People made their way in the world as best they could; some managed to get a drugstore . . . Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with it. Who could have known?’ ‘He should have known,’ Koreiko said coldly.’’ Similarly, as Morson points out, ‘‘Wordsworth and Goethe, Dostoevsky and Melville are summoned before the stern tribunal of associate professors.’’ They should have known. Such backshadowing judgments are uttered from a Utopian perspective that ‘‘implicitly seems to presume the sort of knowledge that could be available only at the end of history, when all earlier views are revealed as partial and when no future experience could outdate the present values.’’ It is as if such critics were situated in ‘‘epilogue time,’’ so that ‘‘the process of change had essentially stopped with them—as if the future would undergo change but only by realizing and extending the insights of the present.’’ Hence a classic dystopian novel such as Zamyatin’s We primarily involves the rediscovery of uncertainty, of time as open, the revolt against a perfect order, ‘‘an escape from posthistory back to history, either for the hero or for all society.’’ Morson’s concluding chapters appeal to biology, as represented in the writings of Stephen Jay Gould, in order to document the contingency even of human evolution; and as a philosophical mentor, Morson invokes Sir Isaiah Berlin—another admirer of both Tolstoy and Herzen—who emphasizes the merit of accepting a pluralism of values rather than assuming that all can be brought under One Great Good. But pluralism does not involve relativism for Berlin, any more than it does for Bakhtin. ‘‘Otherness,’’ as Morson paraphrases Berlin, ‘‘is not absolute; a common humanity insures that we can grasp and appreciate what it would be like to cherish what others have cherished.’’ Or as Bakhtin put it, ‘‘both relativism and dogmatism

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equally exclude . . . all authentic dialogue, by making it either unnecessary (relativism) or impossible (dogmatism).’’ Morson’s book ends with the advocacy of such dialogic pluralism, based on respect for, and comprehension of, the other, not only in the present but also in the past. Beginning with narratology, Narrative and Freedom thus widens out into a remarkable study, not only of the anomalous relation between literary structure and the presentation of characters as free, but also of how attitudes toward time affect the writing of history and ultimately also of socialpolitical choice. It has been impossible here to give more than a sampling of Morson’s thought and the abundance of literary illustration he provides. If it sometimes flattens out a nuance here and there, more often it illuminates long-familiar works from unexpected angles. Moreover, as a Slavist by profession, Morson’s knowledge of the Russian background gives him an acute sense of the practical consequences of some of the doctrines that he opposes, and it is good to have this sobering perspective applied to what may seem only purely theoretical concerns. Not since Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending has there been such a work, one that links narrative theory to some of the most vital issues of the current social-cultural and literary scene; and Morson’s book is worthy to take its place beside that of its illustrious predecessor.

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19.

Lilian Furst and the Art of Literary Realism

The notion of realism as applied to literary and pictorial art is one that everybody uses, and whose meaning seems to be self-evident; but the moment questions are asked, it turns out to be extremely slippery and difficult to pin down. One of the great merits of All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (1995) by Lilian Furst is that it tackles the problem of literary realism head-on, and does so in the light of all the attacks made on this idea in recent years by Formalist and Structuralist critics, who have emphasized the role of literary and linguistic convention as a determinant factor in all literary creation. Stendhal, one of the fathers of nineteenthcentury French realism, defined a novel—the predominant ‘‘realistic’’ literary genre—as ‘‘a mirror with which one strolls along a road,’’ and this image stressed the overriding mimetic function of the novel as a reflection of a pre-existing reality of one kind or another. Innumerable quarrels thus broke out, and continue to do so in non-academic criticism, over whether a particular artistic reflection was really ‘‘true.’’ All this has been swept aside by critics who broke with the notion of mimesis entirely, and insisted that literature, including novels, was governed only by its own linguistic forms and artistic structures, and not by anything external to itself. As so often in the history of criticism, however, the attack on realism set up a straw man to make its polemic more effective. It was assumed that realists such as Balzac, George Eliot and Zola, by stressing the truthfulness of their depictions of the world they portrayed, were actually unaware of the anomalies implicit in such a claim—the claim to represent accurately through language a totally different order of being. In fact, as Lilian Furst amusingly indicates, exactly the opposite was the case. Her own title, ‘‘All is true,’’ is taken from Balzac’s Le Pe`re Goriot, one of the masterpieces of the French realistic novel, and prefaces a description of the pension Vauquer with which the book begins. The phrase, oddly enough, is given in English by Balzac, and as Furst writes ‘‘is an open exhortation to a referential reading.’’ But the English phrase of course calls attention to language itself, and 215

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is in fact a citation from Shakespeare’s Henry VIII that had been staged in Paris under the subtitle, All Is True. The linguistic nature of Balzac’s text, as well as its intertextual relation to other works of literature, is thus surreptitiously suggested in the very words that deny the fictitious nature of its content. Furst gives a number of other citations from important realists that reveal to what extent they were fully aware of the dubious nature of their claim to a transparent referentiality; but the important point is that they continue to grapple with the task of presenting ‘‘real life’’ despite all their doubts. The result was the creation of a new type of documentary novel which, as the novelist and critic David Lodge has written, ‘‘tends to disguise itself as non-literary writing.’’ Furst adds that ‘‘the realist novel has set peculiar problems for criticism because it has denied its own conventionality. Ironically, its success in covering its own tracks and concealing its artifices has led to its being mistaken for an artless form.’’ The aim of Furst’s book, unprecedented both in its scope and accomplishment, is to synthesize the usual oppositions that have so far obscured the acceptance of literary realism as both referential and thoroughly artistic at the same time. ‘‘The tensions inherent in realism cannot—and should not—be minimized, but it is unproductive to reduce them to the contrarieties generally advanced by critics: fact or fiction, romantic or realistic, Marxist referentiality or structural textuality, reading as recognition or construction.’’ To remain stuck in such antinomies is to miss the very nature of literary realism, which consists precisely in the blending of the two into an original equilibrium. Furst tries to do justice to both sides of her dichotomies by accepting, on the one hand, the attack on realism by those who stress ‘‘literariness,’’ but on the other refusing to regard literature as merely the play of language or a web of intertextuality. ‘‘The realist novel must be taken . . . as a record (more or less faithful, as the case may be) of a past situation and as a texture of verbal signs. Far from canceling each other out, the two overlap in an inescapable and reciprocally sustaining tension that forms the core of realism’s precarious enterprise.’’ The first two chapters of Furst’s book are theoretical, one devoted to the literary-critical, the other to the philosophical aspects of her subject. Both are excellent, and the second in particular offers a refreshingly lucid discussion of the deeper issues involved in the difference between ‘‘fictional truth’’ (an oxymoron that condenses Furst’s own position) and actuality. But one of her greatest merits is that she applies her theoretical views to the

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dissection of realistic texts, and devotes the remainder of her work to a concrete and perceptive exemplification of the strategies used by realists to achieve their uniquely deceptive effects. These are illustrated primarily from the works of six exemplars: Balzac’s Euge´nie Grandet, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Zola’s L’Assommoir, Henry James’s The Bostonians, and Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks. Other novels are cited from time to time but these remain primary, and, since they span the nineteenth century, they allow Furst to point out developments within realism as well as to define the devices common to them all. The first problem faced by the realistic novelist is to persuade readers that what is obviously a piece of fiction somehow intersects with a ‘‘real’’ world which, even if not one the reader is familiar with, is ‘‘contiguous to the ordinary world and coextensive with it.’’ This is done by providing the realistic novel with a ‘‘frame’’ within which the action takes place, and which gives aesthetic coherence while allowing for that ‘‘characteristic porosity between real and fictional’’ that is the hallmark of realism. Such frames can be extrinsic, as with Balzac, Zola and the less-known Gottfried Keller, who impose an external sociological, biological or geographical structure on a whole series of works; or they can be intrinsic to each individual text. In Middlemarch, the frame is provided by the comparison between Dorothea Brooke and St. Teresa; in Madame Bovary by the use of the word ‘‘we’’ in the very first sentence, which makes the reader a spectator that ‘‘bonds us as readers with the narrator.’’ Furst penetratingly analyzes a whole series of such ‘‘frames’’ by which porosity as well as bonding is achieved, and in so doing cuts through some of the usual oppositions between implied and obtrusive narrators. The first type has been more or less considered as enhancing a text’s ‘‘realism,’’ but Furst argues that a relation of trust between narrator and reader is more important, and this can be set up by a variety of narratorial techniques. Of great importance is also the temporal location of the narrative action. The difference between a romance and a novel is that the second does not take place in some indistinct atemporal past but is fixed as ‘‘not long ago,’’ a past that receives a very careful historical specification; and Furst gives a lengthy account of the pains taken by her authors to get all their facts right, even, in the case of George Eliot, right down to the exact details of the female wardrobe of the period. This zeal for factuality serves a distinct aesthetic purpose, since ‘‘the credibility evinced by the outer historical setting, whose accuracy is open to substantiation, is extended to the fictitiousness of

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the text, which readers know to be invented, but whose capacity to convince is sustained by the high truth quotient of the frame.’’ A word or two might have been said here about the historical novel, which Furst mentions only in passing as ‘‘period pieces,’’ but which raises questions similar to those posed by realism. Furst also quotes Hayden White to illustrate our new awareness of the close similarity, rather than opposition, between history and fiction; history too is ‘‘an act of reconstructive narration.’’ But while realism legitimately uses history to support its claim to authenticity, one wonders how far Furst would accept blurring the boundaries in the other direction. There is a considerable danger in turning the idea of historical truth into just another fictional narrative. Another essential component of realism is its preference for denotation, the exact naming of place that, oddly enough, acquires a ‘‘magic’’ of its own, a point on which Furst quotes Eudora Welty. Words, however, are no longer believed to signify things but only to suggest or evoke them, and the importance of names for realism is that ‘‘because of their potential dual existence in both actuality and fiction, names can act as a bridge of continuity, along which readers may move from one sphere to another without becoming conscious of the transition.’’ Names, and the places they indicate, also become increasingly important for the novel because of changes in the ideological climate. ‘‘With the growth of the belief in determinism, in the course of the nineteenth century, place . . . comes to be an increasingly intrinsic factor in the plot. In short, it is transformed from decor to formative milieu.’’ The plethora of place-names used as titles for realist works also is linked to the predominance of female protagonists, whose capacity for mobility outside the home was strictly limited. Although realism is ordinarily associated with objective narration and description, Furst follows the German critic Richard Brinkmann in maintaining that realist texts contain ‘‘landscapes of consciousness’’ that increasingly come to dominate the narrative perspective. The realists themselves, by stressing the factuality of their approach, have misled critics into overlooking the function of the narrative voice even in the most supposedly ‘‘objective’’ accounts; objective and subjective actually intermingle in realism to a much greater extent than previously thought. Furst provides extensive and convincing analyses of how seemingly natural descriptions (such as Flaubert’s depiction of Yonville L’Abbaye, which begins like a guidebook) is colored in a fashion anticipating, in this instance, the disillusionment that Emma will soon come to feel; it is in fact ‘‘a metaphoric landscape of consciousness.’’ Furst also notes progression in which ‘‘the static description of

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Lilian Furst and the Art of Literary Realism 219

place, the norm in Balzac, gives way to the dynamic experience of place found in Middlemarch, Buddenbrooks, and Henry James’s novels. The outer scene becomes in effect or in technique an inner scene filtered through the consciousness of the protagonists.’’ A similar evolution can be observed in the conveyance of historical information, which is given directly (and sometimes forbiddingly) by Balzac as a sort of prelude, but then enters more and more obliquely through reactions and remarks of the characters. Throughout her pages, Furst refers both to the stimulus provided to her own thought by the work of Roland Barthes in his Structuralist phase (particularly his provocative S/Z), but also her disagreement with his dismissal of realist texts as simple ‘‘readerly,’’ that is, lacking any literary complexity, and his treatment of them with ‘‘barely concealed contempt.’’ In a chapter on the language of realism, she proves that it is far from being only monotonously denotative, as Barthes believed, but also richly connotative as well, though the realists never ‘‘foregrounded’’ language and preferred ‘‘functionality’’ to linguistic figuration. Furst distinguishes between density and suggestiveness in description, the first denotative and the second connotative, and places Balzac at one end of the scale with Henry James at the other; but she refuses once again to turn this into an opposition. The two poles of language both can be seen operating in realist texts in differing degrees. Similarly, she refuses to accept Jakobson’s famous metonymy/metaphor distinction, which assigns realism to a metonymic discourse governed only by contiguous relationships, and thus necessarily of inferior literary quality to poetry. Mustering J. Hillis Miller to her support, she insists that the denotative and metonymic language of realist novels continuously moves into metaphoric connotation without breaking the realist illusion, and uses ‘‘the subtle insinuation of the dualistic capacities of language . . . to fuse the ideals of truthfulness and pretense.’’ In conclusion, Furst returns to the importance of place already mentioned, and enlarges on her earlier considerations by showing to what extent ‘‘a physical locale is invested with a moral dimension [and] . . . becomes, as it were, almost a dramatic persona in its own right.’’ As should be clear by now, Lilian Furst’s book is a major contribution to the poetics of realism, and no one concerned with the study of the novel can afford to neglect it—any more than they can neglect Ian Watt’s pioneering classic, The Rise of the Novel, to which Furst acknowledges her indebtedness. Her effort to steer a middle course through the conflict of competing critical schools is admirably done and badly needed. It will remain, in my view, a landmark in the examination of the subject and an indispensable

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point of reference. Furst’s emphasis, to be sure, is on the aesthetic component of the realist fusion of the historical and the artistic, and this is quite in accord with her main anti-Barthian thrust. It remains the task of future critics, building on her foundations, to explore further how the historical enters, transformed but still recognizably referential, into the tension that Furst herself aptly labels ‘‘realism’s precarious enterprise.’’

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Index

A Mingled Yarn (Fraser), 182 A Rebours (Huysmans), 6 A Sketch of the Psychology of Cinema (Malraux), 54 Abrams, M. H., Natural Supernaturalism, 71 Adorno, T. W., Ian Watt, and, 189–90 All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction (Furst), 215 Amalecites, 82 An Infamous Past (Petreu), 138 Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Morson on, 207 Antonescu, Ion, 146 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologica, 27 art Benn, Gottfried, 116–17 Blackmur, R. P., and, 181–83 creation as self-enclosed world, 67 Eliot, T. S., expressing emotion in, 160 Iser, Wolfgang, 183 Kahler, Erich, and, 128–31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 116–17 search for meaning of life, 71 Art and Scholasticism (Maritain), 28–29 Art-for-Art’s sake, T. S. Eliot and R. P. Blackmur, 182 artist murder of by critic, 71 Vale´ry, Paul, on, 6 Auerbach, Erich, 189–90, 206 Austen, Jane, effects on novel, 195

Bakhtin, Mikhail, 204–12 Balzac, Honore´ de Euge´nie Grandet, 217 Le Pe`re Goriot, 215 Vale´ry, Paul, and, 7 Barre´, Jean-Luc, Jacques and Raı¨ssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven, 22–23 Barthes, Roland, Lilian Furst and, 219 Bellow, Saul, 136–37 Benjamin, Walter, 79 Benn, Gottfried, 116–19 Berdyaev, Nicholas, 29 Bergson, Henri, 25–26, 28 Berlin, Isaiah, The Hedgehog and the Fox, 90–91 Bernanos, Georges, 23 Berryman, John, Love and Fame, R. P. Blackmur and, 178 Blackmur, R. P. art and, 181–83 balance in criticism, 184 content, 183–184 on criticism, 184 on Doctor Donne and Gargantua: The First Six Cantos (Sitwell), 179–80 The Double Agent, 177 executive techniques, Russell Fraser on, 182 The Expense of Greatness, 177–78 Hound and Horn, 177 idioms, 178 Language as Gesture, 184 on Leonard Bacon, 180 linguistic approach, 183–84

221

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222 Index Macleod, Norman, and, 179 magazine articles, early years, 177 neoclassical influence, 181 Santayana, George and, 185–86 technique, content and, 183–84 timelessness of work, 184–85 on T. S. Eliot, 181–82 on Wallace Stevens, 183–84 Bloch, Marc, 100 Bloom, Allen, 136 Bloy, Le´on, Maritains’ conversion and, 26 Bonnefoy, Yves artistic creation as self-enclosed world, 67 author’s meeting, 61–62 Chestov, Lev, and, 66–69 cult of the Image, 75 defense of his position, 74–75 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, and, 64–65 House of the Dead quote, 77 Du mouvement et de l’immobilite´ de Douve, 63 Gnostic temptation, 68–69, 75 Grail imagery, 70 Great Good Place, 69 imaginary versus social, 62 Jackson, John, interview, 67–68 Kierkegaard, Søren, 68 L’ Arrie´re-pays, 68–69 Lermontov, Mikhail, The Demon, 65–66 Les Noyers de l’ Altenburg (Malraux), 63 metaphysics and, 76 poetry, 69–72, 74, 77 Rupture inaugurale, 68 Russian connection, 65–69 salamander, 71 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Qu’ est-ce que la litte´rature, 62 Schloezer, Boris de, 65–66 Seferis, George, 76–77 Stevens, Wallace, quote, 77

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Surrealism, 67–68, 69 Weidle´, Wladimir, and, 67 Wordsworth and, 70–72 Booth, Wayne, The Rhetoric of Fiction, 165–66 Watt’s favoritism toward Fielding, 194 Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne, Paul Vale´ry and, 9 Brasillach, Robert, Albert Camus and, 40 Broch, Hermann, Erich Kahler and, 131 Brunschvicg, Le´on, 5–6 Caffi, Andrea, Nicola Chiaromonte and, 88–89 Cahiers (Vale´ry), 11–12 Camus, Albert Algeria, 40–41 book reviews, 35 collaborators, 39 Combat, 34, 36–37 Communist Party, 36 death of, 43–44 death penalty, 39–40 early life, 35 existentialism, 36 on Faulkner, 42 Finkelkraut, Alain, on, 43 French colonial administration, 35 French Resistance, 36 French Socialist leaders and, 43 French-Algerian war, 41 on Hemingway, 42–43 Indochina, 40 journalism’s role in life, 34–35 just voice, 39 L’ Alger re´publicain, 35 L’ E´tranger, 127 L’ Homme re´volte´ (The Rebel), 43 Le Magazine litte´raire magazine article Le Premier homme (The First Man), 43–44 Le Soir re´publicain, 35

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Index 223 Malraux, Andre´, and, 60 Mise´re de la Kabylie series, 35 Muslims/Arabs, 36, 41 Neither Victims or Executioners series, 41–42 Paris Soir, 36 political realism, 38 prescience of, 40 purge trials, 39 on Sartre, 35–36 Sartre quarrel, Lottman on, 104 The Stranger, 42 on terrorism, 41 Todd, Olivier, on, 43 working class, 38 Catholic renaissance, Jacques Maritain, 23 Celan, Paul, 131, 152 Cervantes, Miguel de, 167–70 Don Quixote, 201 Charterhouse of Parma, The (Stendhal), 89 Chasles, Robert, 169–70 Chestov, Lev, 66, 69 Chiaromonte, Nicola author’s meeting, 86–87 Caffi, Andrea, and, 88–89 The Charterhouse of Parma (Stendhal), 89 contingency of history versus rationality, 93 on force, 90–91 French Existentialism, 86–87 The Hedgehog and the Fox (Berlin), 91 History, 89–90 myth of, 94 ideals, betrayal, 89 individual versus history, 90 Les Thibault (du Gard), 92–93 listening style, 88 Malraux, Andre´, L’ Espoir and, 86–87 The Paradox of History, 89–95 Pasternak, Boris, 93–94 as philosopher, 88–89 philosophical basis of politics, 95

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rational-mystical interpretation of Christianity, 94 Socialism, 93 Stendhal versus Hugo, 90–91 Tolstoy, and, 90 Cioran, Eliade, Ionesco, L’oubli du fascisme (Laignel-Lavastine), 137–54 Cioran, E. M. An Infamous Past (Petreu), political ideas, 142 anti-Semitism, 142, 152–53 author’s meetings, 153–54 Celan, Paul, and, 152 Cioran, Eliade, Ioneso, L’oubli du fascime (Laignel-Lavastine), 137 early years, 140–41 Fondane, Benjamin, and, 147–48 Hitler, admiration for, 141 influencers, 141 Iron Guard and, 141, 142, 147 on Ludwig Klages, 141 on Nae Ionescu, 139 postwar examination, 152–53 regret for previous convictions, 151–52 Romania concern for in writing, 141 past, 137–38 self-identification with Jews, 153 The Transfiguration of Romania, 141–42, 152–53 Clarissa (Richardson), 192, 193 Closing of the American Mind, The (Bloom), 136 Cocteau, Jean, 28, 29 Codreanu, Corneliu, 143, 147 Communism Camus, Albert, 36 French Communists, Andre´ Malraux and, 45–46 French intellectuals, 102–4 Gide, Andre´, 99 Ionesco, Euge´ne, 145–46, 150 Malraux, Andre´, 53

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224 Index Maritain, Jacques, 30–31 Sartre and, 108 Conrad, Joseph, 52, 196–98 Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Watt), 187 Crevel, Rene´, 97 Cubism, Jacques Maritain and, 29 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 85 Dean’s December, The (Bellow), 136–37 Decline of the West (Spengler), 49–50 Defoe, Daniel, 191, 192 Demon, The (Lermontov), 65–66 Demon of the Absolute, The (Malraux), 56 Der Ptolemaer (Benn), 119 Descartes, Rene´ politics and, 7 Vale´ry, Paul, 12, 18 Die Arbieter (Juenger), 113 Die Marmorklippen (Juenger), 111 Die Theorie des Romans (Luka´cs), 189–90 Disintegration of Form in the Arts, The (Kahler), 129 Distinguer pour unir (Maritain), 31 Doctor Donne and Gargantua: The First Six Cantos (Sitwell), 179–80 Don Juan, 187, 200–201 Don Quixote, Watt on, 187, 200–201 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 201 Doppelleben (Benn), 116 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Chestov, Lev, and, 69 House of the Dead quote, 77 Juenger, Ernst, comparison, 114 La Philosophie de la trage´die, Dostoevsky et Nietzsche (Chestov), 66 Morson, Gary Saul, on, 204 Notes from Underground, 205–6 polyphonic novel (Bakhtin), 208 underground man, scientific determinism and, 205–6 Driesch, Hans, Jacques Maritain and, 26–27

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du Gard, Martin, Les Thibault, Chiaromonte and, 92–93 Du mouvement et de l’immobilite´ de Douve (Bonnefoy), 63 Dylan, Bob, Jacques Maritain and, 33 Eliade, Mircea anti-Semitism in writings, 151 arrest, 144 Cioran, Eliade, Ioneso, L’ oubli du fascime (Laignel-Lavastine), 137 Codreanu, Corneliu, and, 143 cultural attache´ post in London, 144 French CNRS application, 150–51 Iphigenia, 144 Iron Guard, 136, 140, 142–44 Jewish friendships, 151 Marriage in Paradise, 144 materialism, 138 The Myth of the Eternal Return, 149 positivism, 138 postwar examination, 152–53 Ravelstein (Bellow), 136 Romanian intellectuals in Paris, 150 Romanian past, 137–38 Scholem, Gershom, and, 150–51 A Spiritual Itinerary, 138 on The Transfiguration of Romania (Cioran), 142–43 Treatise on the History of Religions, 149 war notes, University of Chicago, 148–49 Eliot, T. S. The Aims of Education, 163 Blackmur, R. P., on, 181–82 The Classics and the Man of Letters, 163 criticism, 159–60, 182 To Criticize the Critic, 157 de Gourmont, Re´my quote, 159 dissociation of sensibility, 160, 161 on free verse, 163 Grail imagery, 70 on Hamlet, 160, 161

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Index 225 on Impressionist critics, 157–58 literary Bolshevik, 163 Literature and Politics, 163 Maurras, Charles, and, 164 Metaphysicals, 160 New Criticism, 158 objective correlative, 160, 161 on the past, 163 on Poe, 161–62 From Poe to Vale´ry, 157, 162–63 poetic development, 162 poetry, opinion of own, 158 On Poetry and Poets, 157 Pound, Ezra, review of ‘‘Cathay,’’ 160 pre-political realm, 164 Punch on, 160 The Romantic Period (Kermode), and, 161 Romanticism, 160 Shaw, Bernard, and, 163–64 as socio-cultural commentator, 163–64 on The Tower and the Abyss (Kahler), 122–23 Wells, H. G., and, 163–64 Emerson, Caryl, Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, 204 epistolary novels, Samuel Richardson, 193 e´puration (purification), Albert Camus and, 39 Essays on Conrad (Watt), 187, 195–96 Esther (Racine), 79–85 Eureka (Poe), Paul Vale´ry and, 10 European literature, Watt on, 191–92 existential psychoanalysis (Sartre), 106–7 existentialism. See also French Existentialism Camus, Albert, 36 Kahler, Erich, 125–26 Faust, 187, 200–202 Faustbuch, 201

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Fielding, Henry, 193–95 Finkelkraut, Alain, on Camus, 43 Flaubert, Gustave, 7, 217 Fondane, Benjamin, E .M. Cioran and, 147–48 form Kahler, Erich, 129 Mallarme´ and, 9 mathematics and, Paul Vale´ry and, 11 Symbolism and, 9 Vale´ry, Paul, pure form, 18 formal realism, 191–94 Formalism, literary realism and, 215 Fraser, Russell, A Mingled Yarn, 182 French colonial administration, Albert Camus and, 35 French Communists Fried, Eugen, 99 Malraux, Andre´, and, 45–46 French Existentialism Chiaromonte, Nicola, and, 86–87 Kahler, Erich, and, 125–26 French intellectuals (Lottman), 96–104 French Naturalism. See Naturalists French Resistance Camus, Albert, 36 Malraux, Andre´, 57 Mauriac, Franc¸ois, and, 39 French Socialist leaders, Camus, and, 43 French Symbolism. See Symbolists French-Algerian war, Albert Camus, 41 Fried, Eugen, 99 Furst, Lilian All is True: The Claims and Strategies of Realist Fiction, 215 Barthes, Roland, and, 219 denotation, 218 density versus suggestiveness, 219 factuality, 217–218 fictional truth, 216–217 historical novels, 218 Jakobson and, 219 realist novel, 216–219 The Rise of the Novel (Watt) and, 219

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226 Index trust between narrator and reader, 217 Gae`de, Edouard, Nietzsche et Vale´ry, 14 Gallimard, Andre´ Malraux and, 50 Gemeinschaft, Kahler and, 123 genealogical imperative, 172–73 Genet, Jean, Sartre’s theories on, 106 Genette, Gerard, Narrative Discourse, 165–66 George, Stefan, 120–21 German literature Romatics, Heliopolis (Juenger), 111–15 Vale´ry, Paul, 15 Gesellschaft, Kahler and, 123 Gide, Andre´ Communism, 99 Malraux, Andre´, and, 54–55 Serge, Victor and, 99 Gilson, E´tienne, 29 Gnostic temptation, 68 Bonnefoy, 75 Goethe, J. W., 15–17, 202 Goldschmidt, Clara, Andre´ Malraux marriage, 47–48 Good Poor, Andre´ Malraux and, 51 Gothic novel, 170–71 Gourmont, Re´my de critical consciousness of a generation, 163 Eliot, T. S. motto, 159 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), Kahler on, 132 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 52, 197–98 Hedgehog and the Fox, The (Berlin), 90–91 Heidegger, Martin, 127 Heliopolis (Juenger), 111–15 Heller, Gerhard, 101 heroic romance, 168–69 Histoires brise´es (Vale´ry), 8 Historical Novel, The (Luka´cs), 89–90

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History Chiaromonte, Nicola, and, 89–90 Marxism and, 90 Pasternak, Boris, and, 94 socialism and, 92 Tolstoy and, 92 House of the Dead (Dostoevsky) quote, 77 human nature, Paul Vale´ry on, 14–15 humanism, Nazism and, 127 humanity rationalization of human life, 123 unity of human spirit, 120 value of human person (Vale´ry), 19 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 6–7 Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600–1800, The (Williams), 166–71 Idol of the Intellect, Paul Vale´ry, 10 Illuminism, Paul Vale´ry and, 7 Indochina Camus, Albert, on, 40 Malraux, Andre´, 48–49 Integral Humanism (Maritain), 31 Intellektualismus, 117 Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci (Vale´ry), 11 Inward Turn of Narrative, The (Kahler), 132 Ionesco, Euge´ne Cioran, Eliade, Ioneso, L’ oubli du fascime (Laignel-Lavastine), 137 book jacket, 144–45 Communism and, 145–46, 150 Fascism and, 145–46 impression-making strategies, 138 Jewish mother, 145 Mounier, Emmanuel, and, 146 postwar examination, 152–53 Rhinoceros, 145 Romania, 137–138, 145–46 Vichy years, 146–47 Ionescu, Nae, 139–40 Iphigenia (Eliade), 144

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Index 227 Iron Guard (Romania), 136–47 Iser, Wolfgang, on art, 183

split from within, 124–25 on Stefan George, 120–21 The Tower and the Abyss, 122–23, 129–30 transformation, 123 unconscious versus the conscious, 129–31 unity of human spirit, 120 Untergang und Ubergang, 134–35 Kaplan, H. J. and Celia, 86 Kermode, Frank, The Romantic Period, 161 Kierkegaard, Søren, 68 Klages, Ludwig, Cioran on, 141 Kravchenko, Victor, on Russian Communism, 103 Kulturbolschevismus, 117

Jacques and Raı¨ssa Maritain: Beggars for Heaven (Barre´), 22–23 James, Henry, The Bostonians, 217 Jazz Age Catholicism, Maritain and, 29 Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1913–1933 (Schloesser), 22–23 Joseph Andrews (Fielding), 193 Juenger, Ernst, 111–15 Kahler, Erich archaic residues in communities, 126–27 art, 128–30 author’s relationship, 133–34 Celan, Paul, and, 131 The Disintegration of Form in the Arts, 129 ecological movement, 126 emigration to United States, 120–21 existentialism, 125–26 Gemeinschaft, 123 Gesellschaft, 123 on Gulliver’s Travels, 132 history of the narrative, 132 hopes for the future, 134–35 internalization of narrative, 133 The Inward turn of Narrative, 132 Man the Measure, 121–22 Mann, Thomas, 121–22, 131, 134 on Marshall MacLuhan, 130 modern age and, 125–26 modern collectives, 123 Nazi concentration camps, 124 The Orbit of Thomas Mann, 131 Out of the Labyrinth, 129 poetry translations, 131 polyhistor, 120 psychology of Germanness, 121 rationalization of human life, 123 scientification, 123

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L’ Arrie´re-pays (Bonnefoy), 68–69 L’ Espoir (Malraux), 55 Chiaromonte, Nicola, and, 86–87 L’ E´tranger (Camus), 127 L’ Homme re´volte´ (Camus), 43 Lottman on Sartre quarrel, 104 L’ Indochine, Malraux, Andre´, 49 La Condition humaine (Malraux), 49, 52–53 La Crise de l’esprit (Vale´ry), 5 La Nause´e (Sartre), 107–8, 127 La Philosophie de la trage´die, Dostoevsky et Nietzsche (Chestov), 66 La Princess de Cle´ves (Madame de Lafayette), 169 La Rochelle, Drieu, Andre´ Malraux and, 56 La Tentation de l’occident (Malraux), 49 La Voie royale (Malraux), 51–52 Laignel-Lavastine, Alexandra, Cioran, Eliade, Ioneso, L’ oubli du fascisme, 137–54 Language as Gesture (Blackmur), 184 Le Magazine litte´raire magazine article devoted to Camus, 73 Le Pe`re Goriot (Balzac), 215

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228 Index Le Premier homme (Camus), 44 Le Roi Soleil, Paul Vale´ry, 17 Le Sage, Alain, 169–70 Le Temps du me´pris (Malraux), 53 Left Bank, The (Lottman), 96–104 Leonardo, essays by Vale´ry, 12–13 Lermontov, Mikhail, The Demon, 65–66 Les Conque´rants (Malraux), 49 as cultural event, 51 Nouvelle revue franc¸aise, 50 Les Mouches, first production, 102 Les Noyers de l’ Altenburg (Malraux), 56, 57 Bonnefoy, Yves, and, 63 Les Thibault (du Gard), Chiaromonte and, 92–93 Literal Imagination, The (Watt), 187 literary realism. See Realism literary theory, values expressed in works and, 181–82 literature critical methodology and, 187 cultural studies and, 188–89 Lord Jim (Conrad), 198–99 Lottman, Herbert Camus–Sartre quarrel, 104 Crevel, Rene´, 97 French intellectuals, 96–104 Fried, Eugen, 99 The Left Bank, 96–104 Left Bank German years, 100–1 on Malraux, 98–99 Mu¨nzenberg, Willi, 99 Soviet manipulation of intellectual organizations, 98–99 Louy¨s, Pierre, Paul Vale´ry and, 6 Luka´cs, Georg Die Theorie des Romans, 189–90 The Historical Novel, 89–90 Macleod, Norman, 178–79 MacLuhan, Marshall, Erich Kahler on, 130

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Madame de Lafayette, La Princess de Cle´ves, 169 Mallarme´, Ste´phane artistic creation, 67 form and, 9 Vale´ry, Paul, 7, 10 Malraux, Andre´ activism, 45, 53 Antime´moires, 57 breakdown, 59–60 Camus and, 60 Clotis, Josette, 56 communication, passion in, 45 Communism, 53 The Demon of the Absolute, 56 early life, 47 French Army, 56 French Communists and, 45–46 French neutrality circumvention, 54–55 French Resistance, 57 Gallimard, 50 Gaullists, 45–46, 58 Gide, Andre´, and, 54–55 Serge, Victor, and, 99 Goldschmidt, Clara, marriage, 47–48 the Good Poor, 51 Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 52 Indochina, 48–49 journal articles, 47 Kant, and, 60 Kennedy, Jaqueline, 59 L’ Espoir (Man’s Hope), 55 Chiaromonte, Nicola, and, 86–87 La Condition humaine (Man’s Fate), 49, 52–53 La Rochelle, Drieu, and, 56 La Tentation de l’occident (The Temptation of the Occdient), 49 La Voie royale (The Royal Way), 51–52 Le Temps du me´pris (Days of Wrath), 53

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Index 229 Les Conque´rants (The Conquerors), 49 as cultural event, 51 Nouvelle revue franc¸aise, 50 Les Noyers de l’ Altenburg (The Walnut trees of Altenburg), 56, 57 loss of fortune, 48 Lottman, Herbert, on, 98–99 maisons de la culture (houses of culture), 59 Man’s Fate, 30–31 Minister of Cultural Affairs, 59 Monin, Paul, L’ Indochine, 49 Nazism, 53 novels later in life, 60 private life, 58–59 publishing, early knowledge, 47 remembrance as a writer, 59 Sartre and, 60 Sierra de Teruel, 56 A Sketch of the Psychology of Cinema, 54 Soviets, 53, 54 Spengler, Oswald, and, 49–50 Stalinism charges, 55–56 Writer’s Congress (Russia), 54 Malraux: A Life (Todd), 46 Man the Measure (Kahler), 121–22 Mann, Klaus, Gottfried Benn and, 117–18 Mann, Thomas Buddenbrooks, 217 on Erich Kahler, 121–22 Kahler, Erich, and, 131 words on 60th birthday, 134 Man’s Fate (Malraux), 30–31 Maritain, Jacques American universities, 31 anti-Semitism and, 31 Art and Scholasticism, 28–29 Bergson, Henri, and, 25–26 The Philosophy of Bergson, 28 Bloy, Le´on, and, 26 Catholic influence, rebirth, 29

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Catholic Marxist, 22 Catholic renaissance, 23 charisma, 30 Christian inspiration and democratic inspiration, 33 committees for refugee aid, 31 Communism and, 30–31 conversion, 26 conversions of others, 29 Cubism and Classicism, 29 Distinguer pour unir (Degrees of Knowledge), 31 Dreyfus case and, 23–24 Driesch, Hans, and, 26–27 Dylan, Bob, 33 E´cole Libre des Hautes E´tudes, 32 French ambassador to the Vatican, 32 Integral Humanism, 31 L’Action franc¸aise subscription, 27 later writings, 33 Man’s Fate (Malraux), 30–31 Maurras, Charles, and, 27–28 break, 30–31 Merton, Thomas, 33 neo-Thomism, 28 Pe´guy, Charles, and, 25–26 The Primacy of the Spiritual, 30 Princeton University, return to, 32–33 Psichari, Ernest, 24 letters exchanged, 24 Raı¨ssa, 24–26 Reflections on America, 22 religious background, 23 Roseau d’or (The Golden Reed) series editor, 29 Satie, Erik, Aristotle and, 29 Scholasticism, 28–29 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 27 Three Reformers, 28 Voice of American broadcasts, 32 Maritain, Raı¨ssa Bergson, Henri, and, 25–26 Bloy, Le´on, and, 26

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230 Index conversion, 26 conversions of others, 29 Pe´guy, Charles, and, 25–26 Sachs, Maurice, 29 Marlowe, Christopher, Dr. Faustus, 201 Marriage in Paradise (Eliade), 144 Marxism, History and, 90 Massignon, Louis, 29 Mauriac, Franc¸ois, French Resistance and, 39 Maurras, Charles Eliot, T. S., on, 164 Maritain, Jacques, and, 27–28 break, 30–31 McCarthy, Mary, on Chiaromonte, 95 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, Humanism and Terror, 87 Merton, Thomas, Jacques Maritain and, 33 Metamorphosis of Plants, The (Goethe), 16–17 Might, Gottfried Benn and, 118 Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics (Emerson and Morson), 204 Mimesis (Auerbach), 189–90 Morgue (Benn), 116 Morson, Gary Saul on Anna Karenina, 207 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 207–9 determinism, 207–8 on Dostoevsky, 204 foreshadowing, 206 meta-utopia, 204 Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics, 204 Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, 204–14 narrative structure and human freedom, 207 negative narration, 207 predetermination, 206 time backshadowing, 212–14 bipolar fallacy, 211–12

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desiccated present, 212 hypothetical time, 212 isolated present, 212 nature of, 204–5 presentness, 210–11 sideshadowing, 209–10 Moscovici, Serge, 138–39 Mu¨nzenberg, Willi, French intellectuals and, 99 mysticism, Paul Vale´ry and, 7, 14 Myth of the Eternal Return, The (Eliade), 149 mythical prototypes of literary figures, 187, 200–201 Myths of Modern Individualism (Watt), 187 Napoleon, 90 narrative history of, 132 internalization, 133 realism and, 218–19 Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (Morson), 204–14 Narrative Discourse (Genette), 165–66 Natural Supernaturalism (Abrams), 71 Naturalists, 7–8 Nazism Benn, Gottfried, and, 118 George, Stefan, 120–21 humanism and, 127 Kulturbolschevismus, 117 Nerval, Ge´rard de, 7 New Criticism (Eliot), 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich Benn, Gottfried, and, 116–17 La Philosophie de la trage´die, Dostoesvsky et Nietzsche (Chestov), 66 Vale´ry, Paul, 13–14 Nietzsche et Vale´ry (Gae`de), 14 Nigger of the Narcissus (Watt), 197 Nisbet, Robert, 172 Nostromo (Watt), 187

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Index 231 and hope (Bonnefoy), 77 Kahler’s translations, 131 modern position, 73 poetic development, Eliot, T. S., 162 Poincare´, Henri, Paul Vale´ry and, 10–11 Pound, Ezra, 160 Primacy of the Spiritual, The (Maritain), 30 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Bakhtin), 208 Proust, Marcel, Vale´ry on, 8 Psichari, Ernest, Jacques Maritain and, 24

Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 205–6 novel art of, Vale´ry and, 8 Austen, Jane, and, 195 birth of, 166–67 criticism, 165–67 epistolary, 193 fluidity of genre, 176 future of, Ian Watt on, 194–95 Gothic, 170–71 literary realism, 215 mimetic function, 215 nouvelle, 169–70 reading public, 192 realism, 166–67 conventionality, 216 Realism and, 9 rise to prominence, 165 Stendhal, 215 type-names, 191 Vale´ry’s attacks on, 7–8 Oedipus the King, foreshadowing in, 206–7 On Poetry and Poets (Eliot), 157 Orbit of Thomas Mann, The (Kahler), 131 Oumansoff, Raı¨ssa. See Maritain, Raı¨ssa Out of the Labyrinth (Kahler), 129 Pamela (Richardson), 192 Paradox of History, The (Chiaromonte), 89 Pascal, Blaise, Paul Vale´ry and, 13 Pasternak, Boris, 93–94 Paulhan, Jean, 101 Pe´guy, Charles, Maritains and, 25–26 Petreu, Marta, An Infamous Past, 138, 142 Philosophy of Bergson, The (Maritain), 28 Poe, Edgar A., T. S. Eliot on, 161–62 poetry Benn, Gottfried, 116 Bonnefoy, 69–72, 74

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Racine, Jean Amalecites, 82 Esther, 79–85 Ravelstein (Bellow), 136, 137 realism Balzac, 215–16 denotation and, 218 dichotomy of referential and artistic qualities, 216 factuality, 217–18 fiction’s intersection with real world, 217 formal realism, 191 Formalists and, 215 narrative and, 218–19 novels, 9, 166–67 Socialist Realism, history’s laws, 206 strategies of realists, 217 Structuralists and, 215 Tobin, Patricia Drechsel, 172 type-names, 191 Watt, Ian, and, 190–91 Reflections on America (Maritain), 22 Renan, Ernest, 24 Rhetoric of Fiction, The (Booth), 165–66 Rhinoceros (Ionesco), 145 Richards, I.A., advice to Watt, 190 Richardson, Samuel, 192–93 Rise of the Novel (Watt), 165–66

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232 Index Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, The (Watt), 187 Robinson Crusoe, 201–2 Romantic Period, The (Kermode), 161 Rouault, Georges, 23 Rousset, David, on Russian Communism, 103 Sachs, Maurice, 29 Saint Genet, come´dien et martyr (Sartre), 105 Sartre, Jean-Paul Camus quarrel, Lottman on, 104 Evil, 107–8 existential psychoanalysis, 106–7 Genet and, 105 La Nause´e, 107–8, 127 liberty, 107 Malraux, Andre´, and, 60 Qu’ est-ce que la litte´rature, Yves Bonnefoy and, 62 Saint Genet, come´dien et martyr, 105 Stalinists and, 108 symbolism of acts, 106 Schicksalsrausch, 118 Schloesser, Stephen, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1913–1933, 22–23 Scholem, Gershom, Mircea Eliade and, 150–51 science Russian literature and, 205–6 Vale´ry, Paul, 10–11 Serge, Victor, Malraux and, 99 Shamela (Fielding), 193 Shaw, Bernard, T. S. Eliot and, 163–64 Sitwell, Sacheverell, Doctor Donne and Gargantua: The First Six Cantos, 179–80 Socialism, 92, 93 Spengler, Oswald, Andre´ Malraux and, 49–50 Stendhal The Charterhouse of Parma, 89

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versus Hugo (Chiaromonte), 90 novel, definition, 215 Vale´ry, Paul, on, 8–9, 14 Strahlungen (Juenger), 111 Stranger, The (Camus), 42 Structuralist Formalism literary realism and, 215 movement away, 181–82 Surrealism, Yves Bonnefoy, 67–68 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 7, 105 Symbolism, 6–12, 198 Theosophy, Paul Vale´ry and, 7 Thomism, 28–29 Three Reformers (Maritain), 28 Time and the Novel: The Genealogical Imperative (Tobin), 166 To Criticize the Critic (Eliot), 157 Tobin, Patricia Drechsel genealogical imperative, 172–75 human condition and, 175 literal in literature, 176 literary theory, 172 Nisbet, Robert, and, 172 patterns on time, 172 predictions, 175 Realism, 172 style, 171 theory of the novel, 171 time, 173–74 Todd, Olivier on Camus, 43 Malraux: A Life, 46–59 Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina, Morson on, 207 force and, 91–92 History and, 92 Homeric description, 91 individual versus history, 90 Pasternak, Boris, and, 94 Tom Jones (Fielding), 193–94 Tournemire, Charles, 23 Tower and the Abyss, The (Kahler), 122–23, 129–30

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Index 233 Transfiguration of Romania, The (Cioran), 141–43, 152–53 Treatise on the History of Religions (Eliade), 149 Unamuno, Miguel de, on Quixotism, 201 underground man (Dostoevsky), scientific determinism and, 205–6 Untergang und Ubergang (Kahler), 134–35 Utopia, Gary Saul Morson and, 204 Vale´ry, Paul achievements, 21 aesthetic rationalism of, 12 artist, 6 attacks on novel as form, 7–8 authenticity, 15 Balzac, Honore´ de, 7 barriers to rational comprehension, 12 Bossuet, Jacques-Be´nigne, 9 break with literature, 10 Brunschvicg, Le´on, 5–6 Cahiers, 11–12 characters as ‘‘types of the creative life,’’ 14 contempt for the mob, 19 contradictions, 20–21 crisis of 1892, 9–10 culture and, 6–7 death, 14–15 Descartes, admiration for, 12 essays, personal insights and, 15–16 Flaubert, Gustave, 7 form and, 9 mathematics, 11 pure form, 18 French Symbolism and, 6 German literature, 15 Goethe essays, 15–17 Histoires brise´es, 8 human nature, 14–15

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humanist sensibility versus conceptual commitments, 20 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, trilogy, 7 Idol of the Intellect, 10 Illuminism, 7 infinite value of the human person, 19 Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci, 11 La Crise de l’esprit, 5 Le Roi Soleil, 17 Leonardo, essays, 12–13 literary history and, 8–10 Louy¨s, Pierre, 6 Mallarme´, Ste´phane, 7, 10 mathematics of mental structures, 12 mysticism and, 7, 14 Nerval, Ge´rard de, 7 Nietzsche and, 13–14 novel, art of, 8 Pascal and, 13 Poincare´, Henri, 10–11 prose fiction, 8–9 Proust, Marcel, 8 quality of life, destruction warnings, 18–19 Realism, prose fiction and, 9 on Realism of 1850s, 8 A Rebours (Huysmans), 6 Stendhal, 8–9, 14 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 7 Symbolism, reaction to, 9–12 ‘‘the Bossuet of the Third Republic,’’ 5 ‘‘The Return from Holland,’’ 18 Theosophy, 7 Varie´te´s, 5 on Voltaire, 18–19 Varie´te´s (Vale´ry), 5 Voice of America, Jacques Maritain and, 32 Voltaire, Paul Vale´ry on, 18–19 Watt, Ian Adorno, T. W., and, 189–90

INDX

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234 Index on The Bridge on the River Kwai, 189 Conrad, Joseph, 195–98 Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 187 critical reticence, 188 on Defoe, 191 Die Theorie des Romans (Luka´cs), 189–90 English novel and, 191 Essays on Conrad, 187–88 European literature, 191–92 Fielding, Henry and, 193–94 future of novel, 194–95 on Henry Fielding, 194–95 humanities, function of, 188 hypothetico-deductive method, 190 The Literal Imagination, 187 literary figures as mythical prototypes, 187, 200–201 literature, experience and, 188–89 Mimesis (Auerbach), 189–90 Myths of Modern Individualism, 187 Nigger of the Narcissus, 197 Nostromo, 187 novel, birth of, 166–67 reading public, 192 Realism and, 190–91

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Richards, I. A. advice, 190 The Rise of the Novel, Studies in Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, 165–66, 187, 189 Robinson Crusoe, 201–2 homo economicus, 192 spatial form, 199 superman warrior mentality, 197 thematic apposition, 199 war experience, 189 Conrad, Joseph and, 196 Western culture, 199 Weidle´, Wladimir, Les Abeilles d’ Ariste´e, 67 Weil, Simone, on force, 91 Wells, H. G., T. S. Eliot and, 163–64 Williams, Ioan on Alain Le Sage, 169 anti-romance, 168–69 Gothic novel and, 170–171 heroic romance, 168 The Idea of the Novel in Europe, 1600– 1800, 166 Cervantes, 167–71 Zola, E´mile, L’ Assommoir, 217

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