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ELSEWHERE I:
ELSEWHERE II
ELSEWHERE III
COMEDY
RIRE
ON THE EUROPEAN UNION
ROMAIN GARY, from ‘It’s going to be a quiet Night’
APOTHEGMATICA
ON TRANSLATING D’ARZO
JOURNALISM AND THE UNIVERSITY: SOME BRIEF PROPOSITIONS
THE ARTIST AS FOX, NOT HEDGEHOG
ON WRITING
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ELSEWHERE I: Keith Botsford
White Fungus from New Zealand, Henryk Skwarczyński from La Grange, Illinois, Denise Harvey from Limni, Evia, Greece (in re: Alexandros Papadiamandis, via Father Lambros Kamperides in Montreal), Marek Bienczyk in Warsaw, James Meek in Siberia with Czechs, like Piers Vitebsky with his tundra and reindeer, not to speak of R.C. Hutchinson and William Gerhardie: that I am sitting in Cahuita, Costa Rica and have just returned from Turkey, via Ljuljana, Paris, London and Boston: these elsewheres have to join up somewhere in what we once handily called ‘culture’. And they do, they do.
The late Luis Mercier Vega, who killed himself in Paris in the 1970s, had a word for these intricate networks: filiations. It was his belief that one could re-create a fragment of political history (politics was his bag – he is the only man I know who learned Finnish in order to read Finnish trade-union newspapers) if one took a sufficient bag of players and so ordered them in place and time that where and when they crossed paths was surely a way of establishing the roles they chose to play: all their elsewhere and all their elsewhens to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
So why and when did we lose those splendidly useful words? Is, ‘Man! That’s something else!’ really better than elsewhat? More significant?
The aforementioned litany of names and places is the work of a single day. These are the filiations by which my mind works, sans frontières as we put such matters today.
A fortnight ago, my e-mail got a message from the Hanson brothers: they had a magazine and they wanted to expand it. I love magazines. I wrote back: send a copy. Today it arrived. In it were: a fine pastel on paper by Frits Klein, a Dutch painter I did not know; an article on the composer Hans Otte of whom, though I am much concerned with contemporary music, I had not heard and, best of all, an account, with splendid decades-old photographs, of the destruction of a Maori religious sect and its warrior-prophet, Rua Kenana by settler police – a subject which immediately brought to mind one of the truly great books on the last century, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (very finely translated seventy years ago by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands), which details the Brazilian government’s expeditions against Antonio Conselheiro. The filiation here is that in our own time, Mario Vargas Llosa took up that story in La Guerra del fin del Mondo, his best novel, satisfactorily translated (1981) by Helen Lane, but greatly neglected by our provincial critics.
Henryk Skwarczyński, besides sending me another section of his new novel, A Feast of Fools (from which a chapter will appear in The Republic of Letters #18) was also conducting an interview with me for a Polish magazine. One of his questions – as to why I was so interested in Polish literature (who wouldn’t be, since it includes so many astonishing writers?) – related to Gustaw Herling-Grudzinski whose story, The Tower, I had translated. He wrote that he owned an inscribed copy, the book having been ‘given to my father, Zdzislaw, in 1964 during his only trip from communist Poland to western Europe. He was denied a passport for the rest of his life. Before the war, when my father as an assistant professor at Warsaw University, Herling-Grudzinski was his student.’ Coincidence? Or is this one of Mercier’s filiations? For I recall that my co-editor and pal, Saul Bellow, refused to countenance Herling’s name being mentioned. How so, for a man otherwise so generous? One of those specifically ‘Jewish’ quarrels to which Saul was prone? Herling’s indirection – a chance meeting bringing up, à la Stefan Zweig, the story – always delighted me, but then Zweig too was forgotten until the Pushkin Press began to re-issue his work. Must everything good be forgotten?
Perhaps that is why Denise Harvey, in remoter Greece, sent to me by the good Father Lambros, a singer of some quality, would wish my magazine to review the first volume, beautifully produced (€22 from Katounia, 340 05 Limni, Evia GR) of the stories of Alexandros Papadiamandis, which I will certainly do, for not all Greeks bearing gifts bring Trojan horses, this one being a delight. She has an English hand with Greek overtones – her d’s, like mine, are deltas – but would not the admirable Harvill have done Papadiamandis: that is, before it was shuffled into the Random House maw?
The details of Daily Life. Meeks’ novel covers the Siberian railroad and our forgotten intrusion into Russia’s civil war, surely a topic for the day, but what were the citizens of Masaryk’s new-minted republic doing in Siberia? Or, for that matter, the Poles doing, alongside some of the German Freikorps (see von Salomon’s Fragebogen for the answer) when, elsewhen, they made their incursion into Soviet territory, which like the Czechs’, had so urgently to be avenged at Yalta?
Turkey – a new and secular state, as freshly minted as Czechoslovakia and at about the same time – has a military and institutional problem; Costa Rica has no army; and one of my sons is second-in-command of the Queen’s Royal Dragoons. Many of these bits and pieces of a single day are connected to one another by violence and conflict: unavoidable, and intimately known in daily life by all of us. Fragments of these many elsewheres, these filiations, are part of the everyday of a writer’s life. They are what feed the fictions by which, and often in which, we live. They should be as real for the Reader, and one of the many pleasures of teaching a class in Turkey – where things not Turkish are much frowned upon – was how my students at Boǧaziçi University reacted to texts such as Chwin’s Death in Danzig, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, D.H. Lawrence on Maurice Magnus, to books and writers whose existence they ignored before the connexions were offered them. Is that not what literature does? Connect, locate, suggest, face, consider?
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ELSEWHERE II: Keith Botsford
It is possible for writers to be aliens in their own country. When Godot hit the Royal Court in London, the tenor of that play – perfectly pitched to the mood of post-occupation France – was deeply alien in London. It had to be explained as ‘absurd’. Beckett, an Irishman living in Frabce, was elsewhere in every sense of the word. Henry James, the would-be English gentleman dispensing coins from his waistcoat pocket to Sussex urchins, chose England as his elsewhere: as did Conrad, Joyce, Julien Green and many others. An irritated agent in New York who didn’t want me on his books, said ‘Your best bet is to publish your novels in Europe’: and then, in his eyes, get them accepted stateside as ‘translations’? Welcome to Elsewhere.
Many writers have been ‘displaced’ in language or culture. Reputation being a fickle thing and commerce being ever intrusive with its demands, there is always somewhere else where a writer can peddle his wares.
Writers with borrowed or adopted alien sensibilities, however, are another story. Common enough is the relationship between motherland and comedy, a two-way street: Kipling, Forster and Maugham used India as a backdrop; in return, Indians write in English for non-Indian readers, Nirad Chaudhuri repaying the compliment elegantly with A Passage to England. If Borges loved Chesterton and Machado de Assis thought Maupassant, that is really a form of translation. The deliberately exotic is a passport to the Metropolis. It is not just a matter of of abandoning the more settled structures of the motherland literature for the wilder shores of New World imagination. An alien sensibiity is part of creating a new identity. A new language follows. After all, the American language is, and rightly so, what counts for American writers; it makes its own kind of statements, and these are very different from such statements made in English English.
Can we then say that the truest form of an alien sensibililty, an Elsewhere, is when a writer is of a place and seems to write in another?
A curious case is that of Ray Coryton Hutchinson (1907-1975), Midlands born, Oxford educated, an officer in the Second World War (and historian of Britain’s campaign in Iraq during that war) and yet totally alien to the English novel. Most will not even have heard of him, but I do not write in the hope of reviving his reputation. I know full well that the kind of readership that once was no longer exists: ditto for literate publishers, editors, agents, critics and the rest of the rubble of our once-vital culture.
But Hutchinson’s is particularly unhappy fate. Some headway has been made with Gerhardie, and Ford Madox Ford is just English enough to survive with his war novels. Is the publication of Baring’s letters another straw in the hostile wind of Oblivia? I fear nothing like will blow Hutchinson’s way. He doesn’t fit.
He began writing at about the same time as Henry Green, that artful manipulator of the English demotic and its class structure, and was far better known than the three writers I have mentioned. He sold better than decently. He had backers, too – Walpole, Wells – and a generally good press and the kinds of publishers who, between the wars, when literature was still taken seriously, were sedulous in their backing. But unlike Green, but like the Gerhardie, Ford and Baring, he took what one might call the ‘continental’ route. Though he had no alien blood, what fascinated Hutchinson was the Big Subjects. It is not that he neglected close observation of English life or was unaware of the complex class structure of English life – he had a special sympathy for the poor and deprived – but that the ‘subjects’ of his novels insistently reflect continental problems – revolution, captivity, occupation, war.
His characters, even when English, are isolated from English manners and English concerns. It remains a very curious choice. If you take a novel like A Child Possessed (1965), the story of imbecile girl and her father’s discovery of his desperate love for her, you have to wonder why Hutchinson set his story in France, made her father (a Russian upper class intellectual) a French lorry driver and her mother a famed Romanian actress? And why is the underground story of Image of My Father (1961), the story of a son’s quest for his father, set in a wartime German labor camp in Poland?
Clues are strewn throughout his novels – especially in Elephant & Castle (1949) and Johanna at Daybreak (1969), and largely have to do with scale: England is a tiny island and English emotions are constrained, artificial, habitual; it has not been hurt or shaken by great passion and catastrophe as Belgians, the French, or Russians have. But here again there is a ‘puzzle. By all accounts, Hutchinson himself was a relatively happy, genial man; he adored his wife and his three children. He himself, therefore, was not alienated. He was not elsewhere, but an accepted writer of reputation. Yet everything about Hutchinson the writer suggests a striving for something far greater than contentment. Indeed – with the exception of his penultimate novel, Origins of Cathleen (1971), which is a miracle of good humour and stylish comedy – he makes an uncomfortable companion.
If he chose Big Subjects, I would suggest, it is because he aspired to be a Great Writer, and this too, has consequences of scale. In his eyes, Great Subjects required exhaustive treatment. His characters, outsiders, extremists, solitary men imprisoned within their own problems and quite possibly mad, have to be examined in far greater detail than those gentler creatures that populate Trollope or Austen. His true home is the three volume Russian saga. Complexly plotted, densely written, often discursive to the point of distraction, his novels – in an age that, all about him, was impatient, brief and fragmented – simply could not accommodate all he wanted to say. The well-made novel was, to him, simply lacking in dimension. For the modern reader, then, far less accepting than those of the pre-war, his novels lack space to breathe and directness; they are prolix and over-intense; they ask too much of the Reader. His Elsewhere is so vast a territory that we are made to feel guilty for concerns that have never been a part of our lives, that we have indeed ignored or don’t wish to face.
If this sounds a negative judgment, it must be said that his novels, nineteen in all and a dozen first-rate, have their rewards. They are all compelling narratives; they are powerfully structured and realized; they are not to be read lightly. One doesn’t just read Hutchinson; one experiences the stories he tells. The very wildness of his imagination, this terrible intensity, these dire situations, do have something to tell us: something unique and quite marvelously human. Strange as it may seem, what Hutchinson is after is love and compassion, authentic feeling, truth to oneself.
Elsewhere is a state of mind, a private geography. Surely such a world – no matter how alien – is worth exploring and ought to command our respectful attention?
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ELSEWHERE III:
Isn’t Time also an Elsewhere? This winter – just a somewhat rainy summer in Costa Rica – I re-read all the so-called Leatherstocking novels of James Fennimore Cooper and came to two distressful conclusions: first and most important, that of the frontier spirit of independence and mutual tolerance that marked America’s early colonial period, only pale vestiges (chiefly in the post-Little Big Man period in Hollywood westerns) survive; and second, that it was highly unlikely that few Americans would, nay could, read them today.
The solid volumes of the Library of America classics – that bastardized American version of the meaty Pléiade, a make-work for the politically correct academy – have been zapped by the one-liner, sound-bite culture. Where else would the wonders and horrors of our time be summed up by Fox’s ‘Around the World in Eighty Seconds’? No, America’s nineteenth century masterpieces, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, are – outside courses which require them to be read by students – so many dead-ends, lost property, unreadable to the majority and unread by nearly all. A cultural wrecking-ball has been at work. Time erodes the very meaning of words.
Now it is election time in America and the concept of an informed electorate has paid the price for this protracted loss of memory. If you ask even educated Americans a simple question, such as, ‘Will George W. Bush go down in history as America’s worst president?’ few of them can recall other candidates for this dubious distinction. Polk? Andy Jackson? Coolidge? Who were they? (George W. gets my vote, and I voted for him. You seriously think I could vote for Al Gore?)
America owes this to the relentless pursuit of the new. What is not Now just isn’t. Ask how has America fared under military men? Jackson? Grant? Eisenhower? Oldsters remember Ike (he played a lot of golf) and Grant’s name remains alive as a street-and-park name. They were not ineffective presidents; both men had commanded whole armies. They weren’t prisoners-of-war, however heroic. Might that be relevant to the candidacy of John McCain? Is all experience. . .er, experience?
Take some of the ‘problems’ the next American president faces. Afghanistan? Has any foreign power ever managed to sort out, much less rule, its local autarks? Not the Persians. Not the British, not the Soviet Union that was. If they could not, what reasonable prospect is there that the United States, which until a decade ago barely knew where it was, will be able to do so?
What about the growing leftish powers in Latin America, Lula’s Brazil, Chavez’s Venezuala, Ortega’s Nicaragua, not to speak of Ecuador and an on-the-edge Peru? Aspart from Mexico (which provides California’s gardeners and the Southwest’s peons, America’s southern neighbors hardly exist in the American mind. Have any American secretaries of state read Domingo Sarmiento, the memoirs of General Paz, or that great masterpiece Euclides da Cunhas Os Sertões (translated by Samuel Putnam as Rebellion in the Backlands)? Much past Borges even the literati don’t go.
Iran (Persia) is a target run by guys in turbans, the Kurds are ‘terrorists’, the Serbs – who gave so much and from whom so much was taken – are ‘ultra-nationalists’, or were until the European Union, which conspired to rid itself of Yugoslavia, dangled before them the carrot of membership, with jobs and pensions for eurocrats. This sort of shorthand put-down is routine fare in America, a country deeply divided between know-somethings and know-nothings. It makes it easy to think of bombing them out of existence. Memory is short, the past goes unheeded.
What has been the outcome for ‘intellectual’ candidates (that is, people who can read and write their own speeches)? On the few occasions on which such rare birds have entered the lists, they have been reviled. The last candidate to think for himself, to steer relatively clear of speech-writers, pollsters and spin-doctors, was Adlai Stevenson. An egg-head. Is Barak Obama an egg-head? Perhaps yes, but he’d better not let it show. Now he can be dissed as a ‘celebrity’. In all other respects he is a machine politician, and one who learned his trade under the Daleys in Chicago, Illinois being one of the most disgracefully corrupt states in the union.
Harry Truman played the piano and his daughter wrote a novel; Theodore Roosevelt wrote tall travel tales. The only recognizable intellectual in the Enlightenment sense was Thomas Jefferson. He got the votes because the electorate back then was limited to the literate and TV wasn’t around to poke into his sex-life. History was as tangible for him as it was for James Fennimore Cooper, a way of defining the nation and its issues: for Cooper the Big Issue was mistreatment of the noble savage, as for Lincoln, ever so reluctantly, it was the exclusion of the blacks.
So who is responsible for this mess? I have two candidates, one on the right, Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp, and one on the putative left, the several million strong American teachers. Murdoch, his Sky, his Fox, his Random House, his Times (UK), can be dismissed: News Corp feeds on the vulgar and base instincts that flourish in the contemporary world. American teachers bear the greater responsibility: for nigh on forty years now they have been in loco parentis to the learning process of the American young.
On which, I have two brief anecdotes.
When John Silber, a genuinely intelligent man, was canvassed by the senior Bush for the post of Secretary of Education, he was asked what he would do if he got the job. ‘Abolish the Department of Education,’ was Silber’s answer. What else could an intelligent man answer?
Then, one day when I walked the halls of Boston University, I accosted a young man walking down the hall towards me, carrying a fat textbook which I recognized. It was Carl Becker’s European history. He taught juniors and seniors. That was my textbook in the ninth grade in a perfectly ordinary high school in California. Seven years of education has been lost in the interim, thanks to the Education industry.
If the Leatherstocking novels are lost because no one has the patience to read a style that runs longer than a single line, that failure undermines the country Cooper loved and admired. Natty Bumppo was no intellectual, but he observed, thought and understood. He curated an America that is now very much elsewhere. Civility, as much lost in Britain as in America, rests on a real sense of what was, which is something we know (or ought to). It’s not like the future, which we can not know.
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COMEDY: Keith Botsford
I often wonder why Greece, with its limpid light by day and its non-stop life at night, should be so obsessed by tragedy. The associations are always of moaning choruses of women reflecting on fate. The eumenides are always in the wings. Perhaps it is because Greek comedy would embarrass most modern actors. Why wear a giant priapus when you can do the real thing, and naked, on stage? But there we were talking about the comic, and not all of the talk was funny. Our Tiresias had wanted us to talk about the comic in fiction, and few did. So I will.
The deliberately funny writer who is not primarily a playwright is a rarity and a specialist, the joker in the literary pack. An all-comic novel is the rarest form I can think of, because comedy does not wear well over too many pages. Mark Twain is intermittently funny, but has too fine an ear to be spendthrift with his japes. The one exception is that great stylist, P. G. Wodehouse, who can be funny page after page: sobriety of style, an aversion for the obvious, complex and absurd plotting and potty characters will do it. Otherwise keep it short. Comedy is not the same as wit, or esprit, and if the comic works better on stage than in the pages of a book, that is because true comedy relies on situation and becomes farce: the husband with rival mistresses in a cupboard, under the bed and behind the curtains, and desperate to get his wife out of their bedroom. The same principle is enshrined in the eponymous situation comedy on the box. The rest is humor, and humor is a matter of manipulating the language: Ring Lardner’s hicks in the big city, S.J. Perelman’s recherché use of an arcane language to describe the mundane (such as his delicious piece about dentists ‘Nothing but the tooth’. Nothing but the truth compels me to say that at heart such writers are punsters.
Though it is hard to think of Russians being anything but soulful and sin-struck, there remain Goncharov’s wonderful Oblomov, whose oblomovschina, or paralysis of the will, is hilarious (at least as long as you’re not Oblomov), and Gogol’s Dead Souls, whose conceit is that no one will understand why Chichikov would want to buy up dead souls, though we know why. The Russians, too, have their specialists, Ilf and Petrov, and very funny they are too, a few pages at a time. And I know people in France, Germany, Italy and so on, who will tell you that so-and-so is wildly funny, but a wan smile is the best they get out of me.
Poetry, too, is seldom comic: at least without being witty and elegant (as in Pope) or vicious (such as Martial). But poetry is suited to satire: by exaggeration. In prose, that is where Rabelais and Swift enter the scene, not to mention Sterne or Evelyn Waugh. But when Sterne says, ‘They order this sort of thing better in France,’ the laugh belongs to his readers. When Pope writes, of courtiers, ‘I am His Majesty’s dog at Kew / Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you’, the courtier, wounded to the quick, is not prone to laugh. Satire is meant to hurt. I don’t think it’s truly comic: comedy, after all, requires a happy conclusion, as in Benoît Duteurtre’s admirable ‘La jeune fille et la cigarette’, where the joke is on society, its health fascists, fussy bureaucrats and incompetent lawyers.
I have to say that I think genuine comedy (as worthwhile satire) is an imperial gift. If your language is not that to which the educated aspire, the comic is hard to come by, it hasn’t exceeded that dreadful literary period in which readers and writers alike aspire to being correct, overcoming a clumsy language to achieve an elegant (but perhaps superfluous) result. At best such languages reach the ho-ho stage of comedy. That is because the comic very much depends on its audience’s capacity to grasp it, for comedy is very much an in-joke, something that is not funny to all. Humorists cater to those who don’t grasp all the overtones the comic brings with it: that strange displacement, that feeling one has, as in Alice, of having strayed into an elegant but unfeeling world – as Waugh’s harmless nature-writer, sent by mistake to be a correspondent from a futile African war, reflects adversely on almost everything he sees, his targets being the people back home and their absurd wars. That is an imperial prerogative: superior looks down on inferior. An imperial language can dispense with niceties. Who but an imperial people can afford political correctness?
Empires suffer from no lack of subjects. By which standards the Austro-Hungarian Empire should have been a glorious battle-ground of wit (which it wasn’t – even a Karl Kraus struggled there, while Walter Benjamin and Sigmund Freud got lost in the shuffle.) Austro-Hungary was an empire all right, but it was a polyglot empire and German never became an imperial language. With the verb coming at the end? The cart before the horse?
I would be tempted to say that the novelist’s sense of comedy is relative to the flexibility and grammatical and syntactical simplicity of his language, where it not for the utter humorlessness of Chinese, the world’s simplest language. And is Don Quixote’s archaizing use of language funny? Only if you set it against the world’s incomprehension (very like Chichikov’s) of his true aim.
What the empire does have is the greatest possibly choice of subjects and a leisured audience to appreciate – without guilt, it goes without saying – the absurdity of its own pretensions, to enjoy the violation of its rules, including the rules of language. In novels, it is character which bears the weight of being comical – as Dickens so admirably demonstrates. The empire can be tolerant of its comedians and satirists; an insecure culture finds its difficult, and the reader says, My God! That bastard is writing about me! Yet that secure (and desperate) world of Dickens’ nineteenth century cannot really aspire to true comedy. Dickens is the master of the comic type; Uriah Heap always wrongs his hands and is always ‘ever so ‘umble’. And types are the forcemeat of comedy, the stuffing, not the bird an sich. As Dickens’ characters are exaggerations of individual aspects of their speech, clothing, pretensions and so on.
Let us say that all good writers of fiction admit comedy – of situation, of character, of laguage – into their work. I strongly suspect that such comedy is both incidental and fortuitous. And lucky is the man who has the gift for that felix culpa, which is not sought but somehow introduces itself into the text. The novelist, who is concerned with another matter altogether, the creation of a viable imaginary world, cannot spare the time or the space to work at comedy, to force it into his work. (I am not going to push this point too far, for those who read Saul Bellow in French will, I fear, find him not funny at all, but Bellow in conversation was prodigiously gifted for the comic; in his novels, bits and pieces apart, he had other fish to fry. But I will point out how much he valued comedy, so that when two black men sat down, one on each side of him, with the clear intent of mugging him, the comedy of his plight so struck him that he burst out laughing – and they fled.)
This is an example, of course, of that famous deep subversiveness of the comic: the hat with a brick inside it left on the sidewalk so that the café clientele can see a man kick it and hurt himself, Bergson’s banana skin, the drollery of Ubu, the spectacle of a man suffering from satiriasis. All these examples rely on the spectator or reader being imperially superior to the man who does his comic turn and then disappears from the scene. A certain largesse is needed. The 2,062 women who were not Donna Elvira, Donna Anna or Zerlina probably resented Don Giovanni’s attentions (and his disappearance) as much as those three did, but Mozart didn’t deal with them. Lolita, one of the great comic turns of fiction is too self-absorbed to realize what a comic spectacle her pubescence is and, married, she forsakes all that made her laughable.
Yet comedy is as necessary as food. The humorless man., and we all know some, especially those of us who work in the Academy, represents death. Which fits what I said at the start about the grossness of Greek comedy: it is a representation of life, which is intrinsically gross, as gross as the sexual act which it unleashes on an audience wishing for little more than a flushing of the system. At half-time in certain Asian countries, instead of marching bands and chicks with pom-poms, two blindfolded players start from their respective goals, one disguised as a doughnut, the other as a, well, you know. . .they run at each other, guided by the public until, to tumultuous roars, he gets his ahem into her doughnut.
Laughter, like a sneeze, is an explosion. The humorless man never lets go, he can’t allow himself to explode lest he disintegrate. Like the professorate he has his dignity to think of.
Comedy, therefore, is the territory of the man who knows enough not to take himself too seriously. That’s why, as empires diminish and begin to be fearful of losing their standing, comedy gets lost. It requires self-irony: as the Chinese ideogram puts it, the bone with the meat stripped off it. Or a sense of the true absurdity of life. El sentimiento comico de la vida. That was not possible for Unamuno, not with what was happening all about him.
In Nauplie I thought much about Shakespeare, who set his own ‘comedies’ in such unlikely (and unreal) places as the woods of Bohemia, deserted islands or a Greece that never was. No ho-ho’s in the Tempest or A Winter’s Tale, but a deep appreciation and love of the imaginative world of comedy, that world in which anything can happen because the real world does not hamper its freedom. Comedy is Shakespear’s brave new world, bringing sometimes laughter but more often tears of recognition.
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RIRE: Keith Botsford
Ionescu refusa d’aller a une rencontre car il y aurait eu present cet expert en frais de voyages et repas opulents, M. Jacques Lang, qui etait, de surcroit, trop a gauche pour lui faire plaisir. C’est la preuve do cote fou de I., car combien refusent les bourses, les invitations, les subventions, les prix que decernent a notre pauvre profession le gouvernement?
Pour faire ca, il fallair du cu-cu-culot.
On en convient: le rire apartient aux anciens. Prenez sur scene les personnages de M. Feydeau. Si je ne me trompe, ils ne sont pas tout jeunes, plutot – ayant une femme (et meme des enfants) ils s’etalent sur la quarantaine, voir le fatal cinquante. Il n’est pas du tout drole de tomber amoureux.C’est pour cette raison la que tout compte-rendu du sexe (anime!) Dans un livre, grande specialite americaine, fait pleurer. Du savoir-faire, ca prend du temps.
D’ailleurs, le lutte de deux corps dans un lit ne se prete pas au rire.
Sartre, dit Maugarlonne, dixit, a propos de la resistance, ‘Je m’en fous d’etre pris, mais je ne voudrais pas etre ridicule.’ Je cite Sartre car quiconque enseigne, soit ses enfants, ses copains and ses etudiants, sait tres bien le role joue par la honte dans l’education d’autrui. ‘Mais, jeune homme, vous m’ecoutez mais vous ne savez pas ce que je dis; vous laissez passer un mot dont vous ne savez was ce qu’il signifie! Et vous n’aviez qu’a me demander!’ C’est la qu’on trouve le ridicule. Sartre craignait qu’il ne puisse bien placer ses explosifs. Se moquer de quelqu’un, rire avec un autre. Il y a de quoi reflechir!
Peut on dire que le rire est pur et simple? Je ris donc je suis? Y a-t’il des gens qui ne savent pas rire? (Ce qui est different de ne pas trouver de quoi rire.) Je crois que c’est RW Emerson qui disait, ‘Life is serious, life is earnest.’ (Le mot ‘earnest’ n’exist pas en francais, ca veut dire ‘prendre au serieux, plus ou moins.) L’ideologue ne sait pas rire, car il a un but; il veut nous amenez au paradis terrestre. Une fois arrive, on a plus besoin de rire. In monde parfait manque de comedie.
Mon copain Bellow faisait beaucoup rire, mais c’etait toujours lui qui riait en premier de ses propres blagues. Le rire pour lui etait un cadeau qu’il donnait aux autres. C’etait aussi son arme, sa defense. [the two muggers on a park bench]. De par sa tradition juive, il fallait qu’il soit victime. Mais, etait-ce vrai? C’a c’est vraiment passe ainsi? On ne savait jamais. Si on veut faire rire, il faut inventer.
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ON THE EUROPEAN UNION: Keith Botsford
Whatever my nationality, the only kind of European (or any other) Union I would care to join would be one limited to ‘uniting’ different nations, cultures and societies only in those areas which are, and long have been, the basic prerogatives of ‘democratic’ states.
The first and most important of these prerogatives (and obligations) is the preservation of those matters without which the citizens of any state are unable to adhere to that nation. Amongst These are:
¶ The territorial integrity of the nation, as negotiated with its neighbors
¶ The defense of that territory against external aggression
¶ The maintenance of a sufficient level of internal order, so that its institutions can function free of indue pressure or violence, and
¶ The maintenance of its laws, as legitimately agreed to by its citizens.
Beyond this, there is a secondary level which concerns the relations between the member states of any such union. Amongst these would be:
¶ The regulation of currency and the maintenance of solvency
¶ All those licenses and agreements which govern international transactions, particularly with regard to economic actions whose scope cannot be guaranteed by national boundaries, such as transportation, aerial rights, matters such as copyright, the flow of information, etc.
Of those matters already established by the European Union, is am powerfully in favor of:
¶ The free movement of labor
¶ The abolition of all protective tariffs and duties and the economic and personal boundaries these imply
For these to work successfully and to benefit the populations of the Union, it is not necessary – indeed it is damaging – to
¶ Create supra-national organizations, or a cumbersome additional level of bureaucracy
¶ Enforce standardization of anything except standards of measurement, such as the metric system
¶ To do more than consult on policies which affect more than one member-state.
There is nothing wrong with having a very limited charter which would set out the desiderata of such an Union. The Union may, by agreement of its member state:
¶ encourage educational levels
¶ license professional qualifications
¶ guarantee individual freedoms as established by the societies of each
¶ provide financial aid to development
¶ with the consent of its citizens, seek a common policy on such matters as defense, currency, pensions, labor, imprisonment, capital punishment, etc., all of which are part of the agenda of the individual states.
The chief enemy of human development, as the rise of totalitarian movements in the twentieth century has shown, is the State itself. For the Union to become another State, federal or not, is noxious to what is most important to the citizens of the union, namely their individual freedom and their capacity as citizens of an orderly polis.
Rules are needed, especially, since all the societies within the current union are capitalist societies, in economic matters. But the societies of the Union have all, separately and severally, rejected the dirigisme of state economies (socialism). Some form of insight of national economies is, therefore, a necessity; the conflicts engendered by globalization are beyond the capacity of national laws to settle. The Union has already proved its capacity to temper the wilder shores of speculation and fraud; it should continue to do so, and it is useful that there are, in place, courts of adjudication to make the necessary adjustments. But one law for all has already proven a failure. Too many laws without the consultation of the citizens breed contempt for natural equity.
I take it as a given that:
¶ politics is not an useful profession
¶ the least government is the best
¶ there are matters which are not the business of the state (religion, freedom of expression, the family, local tradition are amongst them.)
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ROMAIN GARY, from ‘It’s going to be a quiet Night’: trans. Keith Botsford
Among the many generous gifts – reviews, comments, advice – which Bondy gave literature, was this eliciting from his childhood friend, Romain Gary, of a kind of spoken autobiography. The masterpiece of this genre of good deed is Czeslaw Miłosz’s re-invention of Alexander Wat in My Century. Writers, being beleaguered and very self-concerned, are not known for their generosity. All of us know of colleagues who will praise your work to your face but find themselves unable to do so publicly – lest they be wrong. But here it’s clear that Bondy, the more reticent of the two, was fascinated by the enigmatic Gary, who fittingly led a multiplicity of public and private lives: aviator, resistant, diplomat and novelist under two names, neither of them his own, each winners of the Prix Goncourt, lover, star and fleeting connoisseur of the great. The book appeared in 1974 and seems to have been promptly forgotten. We have chosen a passage which leads, appropriately, from De Gaulle to America, and as the tone is throughout colloquial, begins in medias res. [insert note at bottom of page citing real name and brief biography of Gary]
R.G.
Total amnesia. Ah, wait a moment, yes. . .A phone call from de Gaulle, at the time of a big steel strike. The TV shows a journalist interviewing a striking worker. De Gaulle rings up: ‘What kind of business is this? By what right does a journalist use the familiar tu to a working man? They went to school together?’ And then he hung up.
F. B.
But your relations with de Gaulle himself? Did you ever put him to the test with irony? I don’t suppose you’re going to deny you revered the man?
R.G.
Yes. No. I don’t revere, I respect. Allow me to quote myself. I don’t need to remind you how important his place in history was to de Gaulle. In Tulip, which was reissued in 1970 – you’ll recall it’ s a story set in the distant future – I wrote: Resistance: the German movement which opposed the invader between 1940 and 1945 when the French occupied Germany under the commander of a tribal leader called Charles de Gaulle. The latter had finally been defeated by the Chinese at Stalingrad and committed suicide with his mistress Eva Braun in the ruins of Paris. At which I got a fiery letter from de Gaulle [. . .] asking me if I intended to spend the rest of my life oscillating between idealism and cynicism. The old boy handled satire very well. I remember a dinner at the Elysée palace where a minister’s wife protested so that the King was sure to hear her the way a well-known singer of the day imitated him. ‘But Madame,’ de Gaulle said, ‘He’s very good at it; and besides, on a poor day, I sometimes imitate him myself.’ The way the great Charles has been sanctified, mummified, scrutinized and corrected calls for pity. And I can’t think of anything more afflicting than the way in which his ideas and his thought are subject to endless exegesis. I hate relics. In my view all relics, whether those of Marx, Lenin, Freud or Charles de Gaulle, are nefarious. [. . .]
Besides, as far as de Gaulle is concerned, the surest way to betray a purely ethical heritage, is to seek to make it an object of current political consumption. When I once said on TV that my relations with de Gaulle derived more from metaphysics than ideology, the media sneered and smiled: the vertical smile of jerks, as first defined by the American novelist Richard Condon. What I’d meant was that what drew me to de Gaulle and bound me to him, was his sense of those things which are immortal and those that aren’t, for the old man believed in the everlasting nature of some humanistic value which today are dead, and which sooner or later the world will rediscover: as the French Revolution had rediscovered the old Polis and the Renaissance has rediscovered Antiquity.
F. B.
Why do you think so fee writers and artists supported de Gaulle when he came back to power in 1958?
R. G.
Because instinct in writers and artists requires them to have neither respect nor sympathy for leaders, for chiefs and bosses and great statesmen, for providential men, for those who save their country and so on. If writers are artists all aligned themselves with established power we would despair of the world. Anyway, in the world of ideologies, no sooner do you pronounce the word ‘great man’ than you think of power, of Hitler and Stalin. These days, due to abundance, shit is in a state of confusion. The world seems to have no choice: the brain gets either stuffed or washed. Add to the above the individualism of the French when speaking of ‘great men’ in politics, and the average Frenchman feels personally diminished, as though he’d been robbed of something. I know a very distinguished gentleman who hasn’t voted once in his whole life because to vote for someone other than himself enrages him. That’s a lot more frequent than people realize. Look at the history of the twentieth century. You’ll see that for all the votes de Gaulle got, he still paid for the Kaiser, for Hitler, for Mussolini and for Petain. [. . .]
F. B.
So what is Gaullism to you?
R. G.
A memory. There was a moment in history, an encounter, a spirit that passed over the French people. Now it’s all gone well, and that is also good. There will be other moments, other men, other encounters, further spirits. It wasn’t the last. It was a living thing and what is living cannot be preserved, embalmed; it wasn’t once and for all. It arrived well and left well. I am happy to have been alive at the time. Today, eighty percent of the young in France do not know what a ‘Companion of the Liberation’ is, and that’s all right too. If there is one thing that de Gaulle demands, it is originality; that means an end to the reliquary. There is a lesson to be learned from the way he refused to organize his succession, don’t you think? He didn’t want to be continued. He always spoke of renewal, and that does not mean marching toward the future backwards with our eyes fixed on a holy image. In the Soviet Union they embalmed Lenin under glass and exhibit him, look what that offered: an embalmed, straw-stuffed Lenin, a wax figure, a thing once and forever, forbidden to change anything. . .
F. B.
I seem to remember that at some point de Gaulle had suggested you might take up a political career?
R. G.
Twice. Both times with irony and scorn, as if to say I didn’t deserve anything better. Well, he didn’t exactly tell me to go to hell – That wasn’t his way – but there was a lofty disdain in his suggestion. The first time was at the start of his ‘crossing the desert’, before I left for Bern; the second [. . .] was at the apogee of the R.P.F. when he was surrounded by eager young future marshals. Each time with an ironical smile that said, ‘You too!’ [. . .] I was thinking of leaving the Foreign Office altogether, to start up a projected literary-satirical weekly. Luckily, the project came to nothing, and I went to see de Gaulle, rue la Pérouse, less to ask his advice but just informally, to keep in touch. He offered no advice at all, but he did question me for a quarter-hour. . .about Malraux! Malraux gave him huge fun – Madame de Gaulle called him, ‘That devil!’
F. B.
You finally took up your post at the French Embassy in Bern, and you stayed there eighteen months. Careful what you say, I am Helvetian. . .
R. G.
Don’t worry: I have no memory of the place at all. . .An eightene-month hole in my memory. I vaguely remember a clock with little men striking the hours or something like that. It seems I did some stupid things there. I’m told I went down into the bear-pit, the Bärengraben, perhaps hoping that something would finally happen. Nothing happened at all. The bears didn’t budge. They were Bernese bears. The fire-brigade came and pulled me out two hours later. [. . .] The effect Bern can have on people is bizarre. It’s certainly one of the most mysterious places on earth, a sort of Atlantis that hasn’t been found yet. The sort of place, you know, where everything takes place elsewhere. I finally sent Bidault a personal telegram: in code, Top Priority: ‘I have the honor to inform you that at one in the afternoon it snowed for twenty minutes in Bern. It must be noted that this snowfall was not forecast by the Swiss meteorological service and I leave it to Your Excellency to draw the appropriate conclusion.’ Bidault’s conclusion was sharpish. He told his personnel directgor, Bousquet, ‘Send him off among the madmen.’ That was how I was appointed spokesman to the French delegation to the United Nations in New York Before leaving I was allowed a few weeks’ leave for reasons of stress – stress in Bern!
I spent them at the Hôtel des Théâtres on the Avenue Montaigne, then much frequented by the most beautiful models in the world: Dorian Leigh, Assia, Maxine de la Falaise, Bettina of course, Nina de Voght and Suzy Parker among others. The hotel had a tiny elevator and when you had the good fortune to go up with one of those goddesses you were taken straight up to heaven. Unfortunately, also there was also the celebrated Marquis de Portago, who killed himsele later at the Twenty-Four Hour race at Le Mans. He had a stable of fantastic cars; I had just the elevator. [. . .] Also resident there were Capa, the famous Life photographer, who had covered the Normandy landings and would later be blown up by a land-mine in Indochina, Irwin Shaw, Peter Viertel, Ali Khan. What went on in those rooms must have been marvelous, things such as I can only imagine, for reasons of morality and inexperience. I was entitled to no more than a rapid glance, and only when one of those extraordinary creatures opened the wrong door. The door would open, one had to work fast, with just one’s nose, to catch a few whiffs of paradise; then the door would shut. They were visions; I was visited, in the mythical sense of the word.
F. B.
Okay. Pure poetry, huh?
R. G.
I sometimes go back to the bar at the Hôtel des Théâtres, and I think what my life might have been if I had any initiative.
F. B.
All right. So after this crisis of humility, if you’ve recovered, lets leave for New York and your first contact with America.
R. G.
It’s just about impossible to have a first contact with America. It’s probably the only country that is really like what you thought it was like before you went there. The first thing you note on arrival is that American film is the truest in the world. Even the worst American film is truthful. That makes discovering America very difficult. All you get is a long series of confirmations. Every frame of an American film, whatever its inanity and the inverisimilitude of the whole, is freighted withauthenticity. America is a film. It’s a country which is cinema. That has a deeper meaning than the usual relationship between film and reality. It means that American reality is so overwhelming that it wipes everything else out, so that all means of artistic impression in America, theater, painting, music, etc., are specifically American. For thirty years, like the whole western world, France lives in an American civilization. And the authenticity of that way of life is fashioned in America. So that in part we face the threat of playing a purely imitative role. The French part always looked to the eighteenth and nineteenth century, whereas French life today requires American vitality. [. . .] I think Europe can only rediscover its reality and its vitality by returning to its real origins, the Italian cities, the French provinces, the German principalities, by a form of super-nationalism that can only be created through its roots. Otherwise, Europe will be no better than a failed America.
Never in the history of the world has there been a form of popular expression more representative of and symbiotic with a civilization than the American cinema. Every little psychological, political, ethical or ethnic frisson in the nation is imediately reflected on film.
[. . .] When I arrived in New York all I felt was a sense of déjà vu. Every silhouette, every street corner, every slice of daily life was like those out-takes of film that spill onto the floor.
[. . .] The strongest and most ingrained American myth is the division of mankind into ‘winners’ and ‘losers. [. . .] That is the basis of machismo, of the American dream of ‘success’ which causes such ravages in the American psyche, which destroyed Jack London and Fitzgerald, which pushed Hemingway to suicide. It’s the one thing that never changes. [. . . When I was in a gambling room in a New Orleans motel] the feel was of a family, no whores around, just men, real men. That’s what I hate most: pure balls, nothing but balls, a comic-strip mentality.
[. . .] For some seventy-five years America has swung – on the ‘Who am I?’ level – between Captain Ahab and his white whale and Jack London’s hoboes. He was, at his beginnings, the first hippy. [. . .] San Francisco holds the American record for alcoholism and suicide. Why? I think it’s because life is much slower there. People have time to think. And to come to a conclusion.
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APOTHEGMATICA: Keith Botsford
(A continuing series of occasional comments on Public Inanity)
Maybe that Spanish Jack-of-all-Laws, Balthazar Garzón – which translates as Kid Balthazar – who has been so busy trying to sort out history, latterly that of the remains of the Civil War in his own country, could be induced to consider the crimes of the Soviet era? Solemn justice has been meted out to the Nazis for their atrocities; much noise is made about Serbia and Rwanda; no court has been convened to plead for the twenty to thirty millions who perished under Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.
My French dictionary of Quotations has Ms Julie Kristeva writing that the three great crimes of the twentieth century were misogyny, anti-semitism, and anti-intellectualism. As a Jewish female intellectual, one suspects special pleading here.
Ms Tina Faye, the impersonator of Sarah Palin, is reported to have been offered six million dollars by Little Brown for a book. In which she will presumably impersonate a writer, as Little Brown is obviously impersonating a Publisher.
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ON TRANSLATING D’ARZO: Keith Botsford
The difficulty with translating D’Arzo lies in the simplicity and transparency of his writing. English has no such understated style so readily available because – faced with the problem of the deliberately underplayed – English resorts to the purely colloquial, to talk. D’Arzo does not ‘talk’. That means that English (and even more, American) resorts to he vernacular, and D’Arzo is a classicist.
Of all the Romance languages, Italian is unsurpassed in the simple, the limpid, the ultra-pure. Where a heat comes off Spanish, an emotion that defeats distance, Italian – in this form, because it has other forms which are arch-rhetorical (and also sound absurd in English) – can be both domestic and classical. Where the simple, in French, sounds banal (the French are used to being taken for more intelligent than they are by dressing up their language), in Italian it comes close to song. The sounds of Portuguese are so powerful, especially the vowels, that the translator gets caught up in sound; D’Arzo’s Italian is the least obtrusive of any Italian writer of the twentieth century. That is, the reader notices a rhythm, he takes in what is being said, he is moved by the mood set down, but not necessarily the particular words.
Not that this was in any sense a creed for him. One feels that stripping away the finery was natural to him: or, rather, that the particular nudity of his language was embedded in his characters and the subjects of his oeuvre, many of whom are unsyntactial, inarticulate. Pavese may be as limpid, and Saba, and Calvino, but all of these are ‘intelligent’ writers, even intellectuals. If it didn’t sound like a limitation in so fine a writer, one could say that D’Arzo’s style is expressly innocent, like the best passages in Silone.
This is enormously difficult to convey in English, not only because there are no writer ‘models’ (the closest to D’Arzo in America are Willa Cather and Wright Morris, both writers – like D’Arzo – of the empty spaces) but because American English militates against this kind of understatement. From Melville to Bellow, the American language has been formed on the energy of the spoken language, on its inventiveness, on its coinages and particularities. Irish English has different rhythms, English English (David Garnett sometimes strikes a D’Arzian note) is too complete and polished an instrument to accommodate exfoliation.
Then there is the matter of D’Arzo’s natural rhythm, the seven-stress sentence, which reappears constantly (it is also a characteristic of Lampedusa’s wonderful story, la Sirena). This too, in a language whose beat is the iambic pentameter of the King James version of the Bible as it is of Shakespeare, comes out – if the translator is not wary – as faintly languid, and certainly foreign.
In short, everything militates against D’Arzo being successfully translated; and broadly speaking, that is true of translating Italian in general. Our language is not inflected; it has almost no grammar at all. The wonderful subjunctives which are one of the glories of Italian simply cannot be reproduced without making the language sound stilted, and that removes what in D’Arzo is richest: the underlying doubt, the conditionality of human existence, all the verbs which, involving uncertainty of one kind of another, require the subjunctive and thus render the surface of a racconto like Casa d’altri unsettling and even mysterious.
There are no lexical problems in D’Arzo, but huge problems with what is left unsaid. Without very close reading, much of the way in which D’Arzo says things remains elliptical. English handles this ectoplasmic sort of confrontation between two characters by ‘perhaps’ and ‘maybe’, indicating that matters are not settled. But in D’Arzo matters may not be settled within a single sentence, or the briefest of exchanges between his characters, as though they were not speaking to each other but away from each other. The English ‘he said’, a firm marker indeed! is defeated by the miraculous Italian punctuation (or non-punctuation) for dialogue.
Is it not curious that this most operatic of peoples should have produced so many writers who sought to distance themselves from the rhetoric of Verdi, the Risorgimento, that of lawyers, politician and magistrates, the empty phrases of scholars with little to say? Or was it all purposeful? A reminder that real human life is domestic, simple, humble? And that least is best?
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JOURNALISM AND THE UNIVERSITY: SOME BRIEF PROPOSITIONS: Keith Botsford
1. Is journalism a profession?
If so, it is a profession without an outlet – That is, given a bright young man of an independent mind, one who can write well, who is well-trained in observation and in conveying matters of relative importance to a wide public, there is currently no one likely to hire him to do what he has been trained to do. He will spend his first years watching TV (for ‘breaking’ news) in a newspaper office, fetching coffee and fixing up the grosser errors of his colleagues. It is a profession without peer-review, subject to no licensing or supervision (beyond the captious judgment of his editors), and embodying no high ideals (such as healing the sick or administering justice). For all but a handful it is a trade, providing a commodity to purchasers.
2. What do journalists (in any medium) do?
One of two things: they report in words (sometimes with images) and they offer opinion. The former offers little influence and, given that all professions thrive on influence or power, the better sort graduate via reporting to opinion (sometimes in the guise of reporting, but more commonly bare-facedly – e.g. in sports, reviewing and politics).
3. What do they need to learn to be able to exercise their trade?
Command of language in a highly limited (by its potential audience) and controlled (by its medium) fashion. The United States – with its mania for training everyone to become something (TV repairman, philosopher, manicurist, professor) – is the only nation that takes seriously the ‘education’ of journalists, even though only some thirty percent of all journalists have been so trained. (Of the 500 or so I have sought to train, a handful are full-time professionals.) In the rest of the world (though licensing, by the government or by trade-unions, is frequent) it is a branch of the arts, a ‘lesser’ form of literature or image-making, an incidental activity for a writer.
As such, it is of a very great usefulness for those who practice it. It teaches writers to observe deadlines, to finish work, to consider their audience, to be economical with words, and to think outside of their own imaginations in a real world. This ‘usefulness’ is one of the ways in which it can be said to be annexed to the liberal arts
4. What do schools of journalism (the written press, TV, radio and film) profess to do?
A mish-mash of high-level platitudes about ‘communication’, ‘objectivity’, ‘balance’ and a grueling (wastefully repetitive) practice in and study of ‘techniques’. The former are the feel-good part of the trade (question anything at a high enough level of abstraction and it becomes important – viz, sociology); the latter are clichés of a low order imposed by teachers who are not currently practicing the trade, the obligatory opening par, the suppression of the ‘I’ (Why?), where the funeral is being held.
As a sort of accommodation to more recent shifts (downward) in reporting and coverage, a third field has been introduced: specialization. Writing is no longer writing but is ‘science’ or ‘business’ writing; magazine writing can be both elementary and advanced (from Parade and People to the New York Times?); writing about foreign places (there are about a hundred such jobs among the several hundred thousand in the trade) is different from writing about back home; there is even ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ (or Gonzo) writing, or the journalist-as-his-own-hero. In this morass, the idea that a properly-educated writer (for a properly-educated editor) can write about almost anything is lost.
5. What should the University do?
Since a large number of incoming students desire to exercise this trade, the University must cater to them. Its job is to educate minds: on the correct presumption that better minds will make for better journalists. Given the real condition of the media world they are supposedly entering, it is hard to conceive of any training (beyond the core tasks of the University) that is equally suitable to those who aspire to go on to make movies, who wish to lobby, advertise and affect public opinion, who (if lucky) get to stand on a corner in a tornado-torn street and give their name and station, and those who really ‘cover’ news as it happens (a province first of radio and then of images, on television or film, and only finally of print journalism). As the techniques of all of these varied activities are best learned in practice, on the spot, via apprenticeship and experience, the only thing the University can do is educate such people in the broadest possible way.
As I see them, therefore – and focusing entirely on our own College – here are some of the problems:
1. Intellectual Leadership
The meeting proposed for May 8 is, to my knowledge, a first. In fifteen years, I have never been engaged in semi-public concerted thought about what the College should be doing. To consider Journalism as an intellectual problem is vital. It is what a dean should be doing all the time. The problem has been the low esteem in which the College is held, and that in turn is due to the relatively equivocal place that journalism, as practiced, has in American intellectual life. It is no joke that next to lawyers, journalists are the most-despised.
2. Nomenclature
Only the good Lord knows why (How? When? And with what pretensions?) our college is a college of ‘communications’. Who is communicating, and to whom? The various branches of this sapling do not even communicate with each other.
Film:
If there is a difference between film as ‘art’ and film as ‘document’, then we should acknowledge this. A film department meant to serve both genres make sense, and film requires considerable technical expertise. But is has – except as reportage/documentary – nothing whatever to do with Journalism.
Radio:
This is a mature field of universal usefulness. The only field that journalists themselves use on a regular basis. It is the most immediate, the most deployable and the medium with by far the most comprehensive coverage, both at home and abroad. It is true journalism.
Mass Communication:
This is pure, invented, PhD-and-jargon ridden sociology. It has no relationship whatever with journalism.
Advertising and PR:
These are vocational subjects. They offer jobs.
Television:
Like film, this has two distinct functions. What ‘creative’ TV does is what film does, only the medium is different. What TV journalism does is, or could be, what journalism does.
Photography:
Again, both an ‘art’ and a vital portion of journalism.
Journalism:
Ultimately, this is the heart of the matter. It purports to deal with ‘news’, with reporting and opinion; it is a branch of ‘writing’, a minor art.
Recommendations:
(1) Separate out from each other all those sections of film, TV, radio, etc. that focus on journalism, group them all together academically so that they can interact and have a common intellectual content.
(2) Nomenclature doesn’t matter if the purpose is clear. But as Robert Flaherty is not Darryl Zanuck, so there would have been little point in putting them (beyond how-to courses) in the same classroom. In an ideal world, or a good university, art film, photography and even television, belong among the arts, at SFA or the equivalent; news film, news photography, etc. belong under journalism.
(3) This separation holds good for PR and advertising, which have only the most tenuous connection to journalism.
(4) I have long advocated (and sent memos) that Mass Communication be either abolished or sent to its proper home, somewhere between sociology and psychology, which is where a sensible person would place even such borderline phenomena as the study of journalism, television, etc.
(5) If these various functions should be, for practical reasons, under a single umbrella, then we are properly a ‘College of Journalism & the Media Arts’. The two branches can each be ‘Institutes’ and can, indeed, aspire to grant higher degrees.
3. An Institute of Journalism
Grouped in this fashion, all those aspects of the media which pertain to journalism can have a common agenda and a common curriculum, leading to specialization in the last two years.
4. Curriculum
The present problems of the College would seem to be intractable. They are: too many repetitive ‘required’ courses, too many specialized courses that are really the same course (writing) dressed up in different gear, too little content, and neither a clear beginning nor a clear end.
A major part of the problem is the semester system.
To train a journalist to ‘do’ science or business, or diplomacy, does not requite training in writing; it requires training in the content of those fields. Journalists are presumably the least competent to do the training. Someone who wants to be a diplomatic correspondent would presumably start in international relations, etc.
That some small adaptation to journalistic practice in these specializations is needed is obvious, as is practice. Does that require a whole semester? Or could journalists (who are by nature ‘generalists’ be put through a whole cycle of specializations of four-to-six weeks each?
Another serious problem, constantly referred to by students, is the abysmal state of advising. The answer to the question, ‘How is a student helped through his studies?’ is, he isn’t. By isolating the college from the rest of the university a gulf has been created; faculty members in the College have very little idea of what goes on elsewhere, nor which teachers are to be preferred – the latter surely being at the very heart of education.
Recommendations:
(1) Start again from scratch. Consider what journalists as a collectivity (not a bunch of specializations) need.
(2) First and foremost is the ability to read, write, think, listen and speak with economy, clarity and organization. Would anyone take a JO course for this purpose?
(3) A Liberal Arts ‘content’, as broad as possible, is vital: that is how the rest of the world’s journalists are formed. Some of this can be covered in a common ‘core’ course designed for journalists, but might not a secondary stage be provided by the humanities ‘core’?
(4) A journalist confined to ‘sources’ in English alone is no journalist. We should consider two years of a language in high school for admittance and a further two years at the university level.
(5) Small and brief seminars are essential to learn how to listen, think and speak. These can be add-on and engage faculty from outside the College, with classicists, historians, economists, etc.
The rest, and how to do it in the first year, I leave for tomorrow.
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THE ARTIST AS FOX, NOT HEDGEHOG:
1. Expectation of the audience being bored. Artists are supposed to entertain, and perhaps move, but never to lose their audience.
First, the title. The Artist as Fox. The distinction was made by Isaiah Berlin about Dostoevski and Tolstoi. Artists, he said, come in two sorts: the foxes, like Dostoievski, hunt where and what they please; they follow their scent wherever it leads; the hedgehogs, like Tolstoi, have one great idea and go to ground with it, burrowing all their lives.
2 You see before you one who was here, in short pants, over sixty years now. You also see someone who has worked all his life with what are broadly considered ‘the arts’. There are a lot of them. Traditionally: literature, music, painting & sculpture (e.g., fine arts) and dance. I am an artist and one hundred percent a fox, and I have worked in all those areas. Plus the law. Plus teaching. And even plus sports. What’s more, I’ve even made a living at it. Sort of.
When and how did this sorry propensity of mine first show itself?
Well, as with many an artist, it showed itself first in sorting out those things which I found boring and avoiding them. Every artist is, in that sense, a wastrel. He doesn’t want to do the things he’s supposed to do, he does what he wants to do.
That may be the case with a whole lot of you. You find algebra tedious or Latin useless and rules confining. This does not make you an artist, though it may make you a wastrel.
It showed itself, second, in the things I did because I enjoyed them. It took me a fair time to understand that in order to enjoy them properly, I also had to learn about them. But let’s say that at Portsmouth I submitted to the rules and to being educated as long as I had some free space in my mind in which I could enjoy doing what I wanted to do. But this would be as true for those of you who want to be goal-tenders, rock musicians or financiers, for all of you will have dreams of glory. Being famous, of course, is not the same thing as glory.
A third factor may have been my family, which on its Italian side had solidly achieved nothing for a great many centuries but which, on the American, had a thrusting, ambitious side, producing a historian of ancient Rome (a great-uncle), a collector of folk-songs (a grandmother) and (an aunt) who never sold fewer than a million copies of her books, alongside climbing the Matterhorn (she said) and the first woman (she said) to do so, and marrying seven times, the last obligingly choking on a grapefruit during their honeymoon.
What did this genetic inheritance do for me? Well, the Italians gave me a subject (decline and fall), my grandmother gave me a lasting dislike for Christian Science, and Aunt Rosamond the perfect occasion to despise someone who wrote for profit, not for Art. [Ros’s story. Satenstein] My father also contributed to my artistic bent by refusing to allow me the piano lessons I craved, saying that music only made a man sad; he capped this with killing himself in his late forties – an event so enigmatically surprising to a seventeen-year-old that sixty years later his story is told in my latest novel. But as you all know, there is nothing like a parental prohibition to increase one’s desire.
But. . .
But they also gave me opportunities. It was my grandmother who first brought me, in New York, and in my first weekend in America, to Radio City Music Hall where, in those days, a live symphony orchestra rose from the pits. I was eleven and the experience marked me for life. Erno Rapee and Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody #2, a rousing chestnut that nonetheless convinced me that I should write music, something that had not occurred to me before. My mother was tone-deaf, but apparently I wasn’t. And it was my family’s friends who paid for me to take lessons with Bela Bartok and invited me, every Sunday night, to listen to the Budapest String Quartet in their home. It is also thanks to my parents’ mis-match (Italian v. English, French being their common language) that I acquired my love of language and languages.
3. I don’t think many young people say – at least before adolescence – that what they want to do when they ‘grow up’ (a daunting prospect) is to be ‘an artist’. The result is usually a fit from one or both parents, though usually mothers are more sympathetic. They have reason on their side. They’re laying out a lot of money to educate you and you are supposed to repay them by making them proud of you; or at least no longer clinging to their financial skirts by the time you’ve finished college. We don’t know much about Mr. And Mrs. Picasso, but I think it unlikely that they celebrated when he said ‘I’m going to be a painter’. We know even less about Signora Buonarotti, Michelangelo’s Mum. All parents are interested in your survival first. Being proud of you comes a distant second. And making them proud of you, if you are an artist, doesn’t depend on you alone; I depends on the judgment of your contemporaries and a beastly thing known as ‘the market’. Should you manage to make money with your art and be successful in terms of reputation, not even that will necessarily make your parents happy.
*Of course there are artistic families and there are families who support the arts. But to one and all, the arts are a luxury. I mean that few families, in search of something to put salt in, think of asking Bernini to make a salt cellar: out of solid gold. The kings of France may do that, because it is a part of their job description that they be (a) luxurious and (b) patrons of an art which only kings and princes can afford. (Perhaps if they knew that it would be worth over 10m dollars today, the average parent might consider it an investment, but he wouldn’t expect a son of his to make it.)
The fourth and final factor in making me what I am was a piece of ill-fortune that turned out, as it did for my oldest pal, Saul Bellow, an amazing gift. [Burn, etc.]
Saul was hospitalized in Montreal and nursed by the good sisters. The only book they allowed this quirky bright seven-year-old was the New Testament. He fell in love with its language while I, largely confined to bed for over five years, could do nothing better than read. Read and imagine. That sense of the primacy of those things which I have created (scenes, characters, ideas) over those that other people think about (jobs, money, getting ahead) is the real seed-bed of the Artist as Young Fox. What was imagined was simply so much more interesting, so much more free, than anything else.
4. I did make such a declaration. I never wanted to be anything else, though I have – out of necessity, or because I fancied variety – done many other things.
That is because I am a Fox, and he mark of a Fox is his curiosity. And whether your bent is the sciences or philosophy, the arts or gastronomy, the mysteries of hedge-funds or the habits of the Aborigine, it is curiosity that will drive you to explore them.
Now, none of these things I have mentioned about my youth as Fox can be taught you, but everything that you are taught, or I was taught right here, feeds the mind. The Fox is avid for such food. This school fostered that and, I’m sure, still does. Was it an aptness for Euclidian geometry, for the just proportion of things, for the certainties of Euclid’s triumphant proofs that led me to (a) start an art collection by attending, because I had nothing better to do, an auction in New York, and as though seized, to buy five drawings of horses (an animal I have never got on with), to take them home, rip them from their oval frame, and realize they were by Degas? They cost me fifteen bucks, but where did the Eye come from? Or (b) to be so deeply interested in philosophy (a subject I can no longer understand) that I chose to major in it at Yale? The answer is probably yes.
Was it in Dr. Kelly’s history classes that I learned of the close relationship between history and the telling of stories? The realization that events are seen differently by different people? That in the best-ordered families people lie about the past? Probably yes. And in teaching history (the Mediterranean and Italian) am I not really examining how my family came to be what it was, and hence how I became what I am?
Did the beautiful melodies of Gregorian chant listened to over years, have some effect on my fox’s ear? Certainly yes.
My first opportunity in the theatre came to me very young and quit disastrously. [angel story] You will, I hope, do better in this year’s production. But later the theatre was something I had to try and understand. For the Fox tries his hand at every trick in the book. The theater led to film, because film feeds all of the Fox’s desires: eye and ear and memory. During my summers, having left home to be an artist (Yes, no artist can live as others do, or by the rules of his parents), I lived by day in the cinema. As later I was to work in it.
As to the dance, the last of the arts to come my way, that I got from two sources: my father’s insistence that to be good at sports (he was one of the great tennis players of his day) one’s movements, one’s strokes, had to be beautiful, and from sex, because all the girls I was attracted to were both untouchable (because devoted to their art) and inviting, because they moved so beautifully.
5. All these things came to me at your general age: my first writings when I would have been a first-former, my desire to roam through all the arts throughout my adolescence. I cannot possibly ascribe them to anything more than two characteristics of the Fox: his curiosity and his latency, that is, his waiting until the desired object comes into view and must be pursued.
No one will ever ask any one of you to be an artist. Some of you may become artists. But both of those propositions are deeply relevant to only a few. Does this mean the arts are not for you? I cannot speak for the Hedghogs among you. You are few, and unlikely yet to have your great idea, but the Foxes are numerous.and should be of interest
(Oh, here at Portsmouth it was mightily encouraged. After all, Fr Gregory of blessed memory, was a monk who read the New Yorker! And Fr Wilfred, an artist himself, and Fr Alban, who had a few choice first editions, were eager to see creativity.)
* To take literature (or writing) first, because that was something I already did here (God forbid you should look at early issues of the Raven and find me listing ‘great’ negro writers, half of whom I – early showing imagination – invented; or read my proofs for the existence of God. Anyway, I am a writer of prose, though as a very young person I was a poet – and God forbid you should be curious enough to look that up, too! I was a poet until a good friend (good friends tell you the truth) told me a poem, given to him to read in the balcony of Carnegie Hall, was ‘no good’. I agreed, and switched to prose, where I was just as pretentious as I had been a poet.
Point taken: the besetting evil of the artist as a very young man is his need to impress. Whether it’s teacher, boy- or girl-friend, or friends. I’d say that holds good for five to ten years. Impressing someone else is a form of lying to them and lying to oneself.
These few notes from a scattered life may tell you something about how artists begin, but (a) how they begin has not very much to do with how they develop, and (b) not all of you (I desperately hope) wish to become artists.
But this is precisely where the two sides of the arts – the practice and performance of art, and the consumption of art, as a reader, a listener, or a looker – come together: like the second stage of a rocket.
Development for an artist – to write, compose, paint and so on in his or her own style – is very hard and very frustrating work indeed. You go to a museum and copy a Vermeer, say; they you discover that you can’t get a Vermeer blue out of your palette, or that patch of red in the top corner of a Rubens. Oh, they didn’t buy from the paints store? They made their own? You hear the notes, the sound, of a violin sonata in your head, but actually you don’t know how to make on a fiddle those sounds that emerged in your head? You’ve buried yourself in the novels of Charles Dickens? How on earth did he manage to make all those scenes in murky nineteenth century London come to life?
In short, the arts takes practice; they embody specific forms of language. Everyday practice: of your muscles won’t give you the leap you need in dance, your hand will have lost the habit of drawing from life, your ear isn’t quite sure whether it’s hearing an A or a B♭or something between such as a string player hears. Therefore writers read, musicians listen, painters look. The artist is perhaps better trained to understand those arts he does not practice, but that training is available to all, and from a very young age. What if, instead of asking for an i-pod or a better (bigger) plasma screen, you asked your parents and indulgent uncles to give you something permanent – say a Tiepolo drawing – to hang on your wall? Do you think you’d stop there? It’s the habit and the permanence of having the arts to hand – books on one’s shelves, and records, a drawing on the wall – that creates the audience for the arts. What you read or hear or look at for the first time may represent someone else’s taste, but how else are you going to develop your own? No one asks that you start reading with War & Peace, you have to find the books that you like yourself. The same is true of music: canned music is not live music, whatever the fidelity of the sound. The question, for audience and artist, is, does it turn you on? Are you curious? Do you want to increase the richness of your life by discovery or are you going to slouch on your sofa and consume what the merchants of culture pour into you eyes and ears?
Such decisions are taken early. Yes, it is harder to hear the 11/16 beat of a Bulgarian dance than the thump-thump of rap, but if you know only the latter you are actually impoverished. The same is true of reading only what you are told to read or buying a poster, any poster, to put on your wall. Foxes do not follow a straight path; they keep their noses to the ground and follow the scent that appeals to them. This is their freedom and their independence. But even the Fox needs patience and perseverance.
At the heart of the whole enterprise is the imagination. Imagination underlies our lives. It happens when you day-dream or night-dream, when you remember the past and when you think of the future. Mining that imagination – as when I wrote for the pulps while here at Portsmouth, imagining my heroes stealing home in the bottom of the ninth, on what I’d say on receiving the Nobel Prize, or how my parents would grieve if I died right now – developing that faculty into making paintings the like of which no one has ever seen, writing music that will move many, writing books that testify to what my world has been like, that makes creation so exciting and so personal, so unique to oneself. In the same way no two people see a Vermeer, hear a Beethoven, read Homer exactly the same way. There is your Vermeer, your Beethoven and your Homer. It belongs to you. As do your desires, your feelings or your fears.
A final word of caution, however, don’t become an artist unless you absolutely have to, and don’t imagine art won’t consume you if you do.
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ON WRITING:
Awl, rut, jot; bag, beg, big ,bog, bug; sap, sep, sip, sop, sup. Three-letter words. If you know what the first three mean, do you know how they came to be? Are there other sets of five using all the vowels and the same sets of consonants? (There are.) I didn’t think there was such a word as ‘sep’, but there is. It’s an old word for a sheep. Writers have a curiosity about language, about languages. Not just the languages we speak or write in, but the languages of music or mathematics.
From the age of three to eight I was largely confined to bed. I had been badly burned with a linseed oil poultice, because when linseed oil is stale it turns into an acid. But few of you have ever seen a poultice (a warm mass of cloth. . .for medicinal purposes). I nearly died from one. As a result, for those five or six years there was little I could do but read. Words were the building blocks of my world. When a book said, ‘not one jot or tittle’, I tried to see a jot and a tittle. I jotted down words, but that’s not the same ‘jot’, as in ‘to jot down’, and I have yet to encounter a tittle (a dot in printing), though I hear a lot of tittle-tattle.
You get the idea. When one begins to find words seductive, one is already a writer.
Everyone has to write, which is speaking through words that are written down. Writing is often easier than speaking. To your beloved you can write what you do not say: ‘Darling, much as I love you, I. . .’ Contrariwise, there is nothing you cannot write that you, or others, have said. My journals, intermittently kept, begin before I ever went to school. Alas! They deal, as most young peoples’ journals do, with how I felt: the state of my soul. Would that in all those years, from seven to thirty, I had written down what others – teachers, writers, painters, musicians – had said, things that were so much more interesting than what I had to say!
Starting in England, I was brought up in Benedictine schools, where the discipline of writing is well-taught and scholarship respected. Scripture means what is written down. Beware of getting God’s word wrong. Monks have a deep respect for words; they chant them so that the words stick in their heads. Edent pauperes et saturabuntur. Sixty years later I still mutter those words before eating.
*
Writing is not just about words. Looking back – as someone who has made his living from writing and languages – I would have changed a number of things in my apprenticeship. What follows is an elementary guide to my own development which may (or may not) be useful for others.
I – As a young, published writer in my twenties, I thought of myself as a literary figure. That was presumptuous. Writing is craft and an art. Craft calls for art, and art for craft. Others are better judges of what you write than you are. It is unwise to accord yourself a status you have not earned.
II – It takes a long time to develop a voice of one’s own. Meanwhile you are moved by other writers. There is nothing wrong in imitation (indeed, it is good practice), so long as you can find your way home.
III – There is no right way to write, though there are many wrong ways and, worse, ignorance and incorrection. No teacher has taught me writing, but many have corrected my mistakes. Usually by just pointing them out.
IV – I found editing myself difficult and being edited by others humiliating. I got around this by editing others with generosity and re-writing with humility.
V – Literature is but one form of writing. With a raft of children to feed, I had to consider how I could earn a living at the ‘trade’ end of it. From that I learned that anything can be interesting if it interests you – even a business report or a legal opinion. Your interest will make you interesting. To learn this lesson and earn your pay, you need practice. You get that by writing constantly. Just as, if you want to play the piano well, you do five-finger exercises every day. Writing, too, has its five-finger exercises: notes, journals, common-place books (what you read and want to remember, and especially translation, the supreme exercise of mastering someone else’s style.
VI – I was lucky enough to stumble into journalism: in sport, gastronomy, profiles, obituaries, columns, etc. I learned from this craft: the importance of deadlines, how to relinquish a text when it was needed, and therefore how to write faster, think faster and respond immediately and to length and requirements.
VII – I also learned that for every text there is an audience (a great joy for a literary writer, who has no such assurance) and that I had to address that audience, not myself. Brevity is a hard master. My best editor told the story of the writer who said to him, ‘If only I had more time I could make this shorter.’ The writing of good, clear English (or any language) is a matter of considering that audience. As my dear friend Saul Bellow put it to me, ‘Take the Reader by the hand, Keith, and he will follow you anywhere.’ Or as I tell my students, ‘You are not writing for me, but for the world. Or at least for your Aunt Nelly in Boise, Idaho.’
VIII – The secret of writing for an audience is simplicity. I have not entirely mastered this, so I have on my desk a reminder, which reads, starkly, ‘SIMPLIFY’.
None of this deals with the riches of literature, and life. I don’t think there is such a thing as a good, immature (young) writer. A young writer shows talent, he shows promise, he displays his skills. Really good writers have to know everything, and for that they need the time to grow up, to stop thinking about themselves. Mature writers know how to connect the most disparate ideas. They are interested in everything: the speech and habits of barbers as much as the compactness of poets.
IX – For this kind of richness, wide reading is necessary, and so are languages. Unless you want just one voice in your ear. What and how Catullus writes is important to a writer. ‘I hated and I love’ is not the same thing as odi et amo. Curiosity about others voices is what gives you something to say. Learning how to listen. Asking questions. Asking your grandfather how life was, as you will one day ask your grandchildren how life is.
X – All writers require tenacity. They have to understand that writing is not always inspired, that one may have bad days and good, and that it may take (up to) twenty or thirty attempts to get what you want to say right. As a writer, I am often asked, ‘How does one become a writer?’ To which my unvarying answer is, ‘by writing.’ To which I should add – but seldom do, as it is dispiriting to those who think writing is a trade you can learn at a Writing School – that writing of the best kind is for those who would feel bereft if they weren’t doing so. In other words, for the poor sod who can’t help himself.
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