Cultural Amnesia (111 page)

It wasn’t beneath his art; it was beyond his art; and Tacitus is there to prove it. We know now, in retrospect, that
even worse things happened in the time of Tacitus than he could realize. But he did face up to the worst thing he knew. Though it took the whole of his art to write it down, his art was not the
first thing on his mind: the first thing on his mind was to register the intractable fact of an innocent, unjust death. He could not make the girl immortal. When we say that she has
never ceased to speak, we speak metaphorically. She died. In fact, as he tells us, it was even worse. Because virgins were safe from the executioner, she was raped first, so that no
laws would be broken. The Nazi execution squads in the east were obeying the law too. The paradox had already been identified by Tacitus, and traced to its origin, in the mind of a tyrant. Great
writing collapses time by freeing us from illusions, one of which is that the aesthetic impulse can be a law unto itself. An advantage of being able to write criticism in the wonderfully copious
English language is that we are not stuck with an inappropriate word to register the impact of art at its height. Hearing the voice of Sejanus’s daughter, we are not obliged to say,
“That’s beautiful.” In Italian, even the mighty Croce could only have used the word
bello
. Croce painted himself into a corner with an
aesthetic vocabulary that he inherited but fatally neglected to expand. The warning is clear. An aesthetic vocabulary is only part of what we need. Criticism needs a complete vocabulary, or else
the rare art that responds to the whole of reality will leave us helpless; and far from being able to appreciate Tacitus, we won’t even be able to appreciate Hermann Graebe.

MARGARET THATCHER

Margaret Hilda Thatcher (b. 1925) read chemistry at Oxford but went into politics, a field in
which she succeeded to the point of becoming prime minister of Great Britain. Her ascent to this post was a crisis for Britain’s ideological feminists, who could no longer maintain that
there was a glass ceiling to rank attainable by women. (Some of them said she was not really a woman at all, but a view which had had little plausibility when applied to Elizabeth I had none
whatsoever when applied to someone with a husband and children.) Though very few of those males in attendance upon her ever managed to complete a sentence without being interrupted, it was
not true that nobody could get her ear. Some of those who did were intellectuals. This fact could be disturbing if you were an intellectual of another persuasion. “There is no such
thing as society,” a statement of hers which was held up by her enemies as an example of her callousness, was in fact a summary of a recognized philosophy of individual responsibility.
It could well have been planted in her ear by one of her closest advisers, Sir Keith Joseph. But it was undoubtedly her fault not to realize how it would sound if released as a sound bite.
She let such gaffes happen only because she almost entirely lacked tact. Her rule
was unchallenged for just so long as, and no longer than, that lack was thought to be a
virtue. But her lack of verbal guile made her praise, when she gave it, doubly flattering. Once, in her presence at a soirée in No. 10 Downing Street, I managed to complete the thought
that the great advantage of the British constitution, vis-à-vis the American constitution, was that it had never been written down. She was so emphatic in endorsing what I said that
for a while I thought the idea was mine. In 1990 she was forced out of the leadership of her party by Sir Geoffrey Howe. Having grown far too confident of her own infallibility, she had been
ruling without a cabinet, and with typical lack of diplomacy had assumed that those cabinet members whose opinions she had brushed aside would not mind. But they did, and that was the end of
her reign: although she stuck around close enough and long enough to make life miserable for several luckless males who later got the job of leading the Conservative party, usually to
defeat.

Solzhenitskin.

—MARGARET THATCHER, IN A
CONSERVATIVE PARTY POLITICAL BROADCAST, APRIL 1978

S
HE MUST HAVE
got
Solzhenitsyn mixed up with Rumpelstiltskin, and the result was a composite character of a kind unseen since that unjustly forgotten 1950s Hollywood musical
The
Five Thousand Fingers of Dr T
., whose fans will remember two roller-skating old men joined by the one beard. Most things that Prime Minster Thatcher is remembered for saying were not said
very memorably. They are remembered because she said them. One of the Conservative party’s tame writers, probably Robin Douglas-Home, later handed her the catchphrase “The
lady’s not for turning,” which she delivered to the waiting television cameras with typical over-emphasis. She might or might not have realized that the line was a variation of
Christopher Fry’s ringing title
The Lady’s Not for Burning
. Probably not: on her own proud insistence, her literary tastes ran mainly to the
novels of Frederick
Forsyth, read more than once so that she could savour their vigorous prose. A quasi-biblical phrase “Let us rejoice at this news”—she
delivered it to the surrounding press at a key moment in the Falklands war—probably came to her from memories of the Book of Common Prayer. But this single word,
“Solzhenitskin,” was a truly original coinage, so startling and resonant that I have employed it ever since, and think of it every time I see her picture. As she charges forward into
her bustling, interfering dotage, an old party still haunting her old party, she has even become, in her appearance, a fitting companion for Solzhenitskin—whose Russian component,
Solzhenitsyn, also lived to see the day when his intransigence began to erode his legend. In my mind’s eye I can see the helpless Solzhenitskin with this untiring crone yammering in his
ear, telling him what he already knows, interrupting him in mid-sentence even as he struggles to agree. When I was in the press party that trailed her through China in 1982, I never heard a man
in her company get six words out in succession, except perhaps for Zhao Ziyang, and even with him it was only because she had to wait for the translation. So she had to interrupt the
translator.

It would be a mistake to think that Thatcher got her basic ideas from her entourage. The same assumption is made about
Tony Blair today, and it is equally untrue. What Thatcher got from her attendant spirits, when she was wise, was mainly her vocabulary. Somebody must have told her that the works of the Russian
dissident Solzhenitsyn provided powerful backing for her dislike of collectivism, so Solzhenitsyn would be a good name to bring in. She tried, and invented Solzhenitskin. (The fact that whoever
was in charge of the Tory party political broadcast could not bring himself to correct her pronunciation is a sign of either his ignorance or the blue funk she induced in her support group even
at that early stage.) Admittedly, the Russian sage’s real name is hard to handle without practice. Solzhenitsyn probably had the same sort of trouble when he tried to say
“Thatcher.” It was remarkable, however, that when the prime minister mentioned Solzhenitskin on television, it did not get a laugh. Normally all too ready to pounce on any slip she
might make, the liberal press held back on that one: perhaps they didn’t realize she had made a mistake. The liberal press at the time was already showing signs of a contracting frame of
reference. When the Duke of Edinburgh mentioned that he had been reading
Leszek Kolakowski, his mere citation of the Polish philosopher’s name was regarded by the
Private Eye
school of political commentators as conclusive evidence of pretentiousness. Obviously they found Kolakowski’s name funny in itself,
because it sounded so foreign. Equally obviously, they had no idea who Kolakowski was; that the critique of Marxism in his monumental three-volume
Main Currents of
Marxism
was a standard item for anyone working in the field: and that its pertinence had long before spread his name to most readers who read seriously about politics at all. Viewed from
Pseuds Corner, anyone who refers to a big book by a foreign author must be a fake. (One of the signs of the marvellous self-confidence that has always reigned in the
Private Eye
prefects’ room is the unquestioned assumption that someone like the Duke of Edinburgh might be trying to impress
them
.) The view is limited, but has the large advantage of being easily expressed. All it takes is the written equivalent of an impatient snort and a wrinkled nose.
Strangely enough, however, “Solzhenitskin” was greeted with a respectful silence. In my television column for the
Observer
, I was the only
journalist of any kind who welcomed his advent, and I have to confess that I myself got Rumplestiltskin mixed up with Rip van Winkle, and ran around making cheap cracks about Thatcher’s
having suggested that Solzhenitsyn had been asleep for a hundred years.

In the long run, Thatcher’s mistake, whose consequences we have all inherited, was to listen to her intellectuals
not only on the level of slogans and smart remarks but on the level of their convictions. Her own fundamental notions would have seen her through. Her electoral base, for example, expanded into
the working class as a natural result of her inbred conviction that people would look after council houses better if they were given the chance to buy them. With her widely admired passion for
good housekeeping, she could have opened Britain to the free market without dismantling its civilized institutions, and so won kudos all round. The institutions had their representatives in her
cabinet, but it turned out that they might as well have been speaking from the Moon. Her free market ideologists, on the other hand, could approach her in private, where they had access to her
ear as her cabinet colleagues never did. The free marketeers convinced her that some of the institutions were a hobble for commerce. By herself, she would never
have thought
of removing the quality requirements for the Independent Television franchise bids. When she did, the predictable result was a stampede of the big money to secure the franchises through
pre-emptive cost cutting, and a plunge down market once the franchises had been secured. The BBC, eager to placate the government, and afraid that it could not justify the television licence fee
unless it kept its audience share, duly followed ITV in its swallow dive off the cliff. The long-term result was a ruined broadcasting system. By the time Mrs. Thatcher was remaking the state,
Solzhenitsyn was preaching spiritual renewal: to the disappointment of his liberal admirers, he no longer seemed to believe that the West’s free institutions were very much preferable to
the Eastern authoritarianism he had helped to dismantle. But if the young Solzhenitsyn had been present, and could have got a word in edgeways, he might have told Mrs. Thatcher that the opinions
of intellectuals might be an adjunct to sound government but are no substitute for it. The Russian Revolution was prepared by theorists who were able to persuade themselves, in a period of chaos,
that their theories would be put into action. But the only political theories worthy of the name are descriptive, not prescriptive. If prescriptive theories have plausible hopes of filling a gap
left by a decayed or undeveloped institution, the game is already lost.