Cultural Amnesia (15 page)

The title that screams quotation is rarely right, although few go as wrong as Anthony
Powell’s notorious
O, How the Wheel Becomes It!
, which not only makes you not want to read his book, it makes you not want to hear anything else that
Shakespeare’s Ophelia ever said. (The same man, we should remember, invented a book title to beat the band:
Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
.) All
the best quoted titles sound invented, with just a hint that someone else once coined the phrase:
A Long Day’s Dying
,
The Strings Are False
,
All the Conspirators
. (The word “all” is too cheaply tempting:
All My Sons
turned out well, like
All the Brothers Were Valiant
and
All the Rivers Ran
East
; but
All the Sad Young Cannibals
made all “all” titles suspect.) When writers take their titles from previous literature, the
previous literature doesn’t have to be all that previous: just as long as it is not contemporary. T. S. Eliot was still very much in business when Evelyn Waugh raided
The Waste Land
for one of his best titles:
A Handful of Dust
. But
The Waste Land
had been
just long enough established as a canonical text for Waugh to pick a plum. Eliot’s own idea of a terrific title was
Ara vos prec
: a sure-fire hit with
any bookshop browser who spoke medieval Provençal.

Poetic titles ought to be easy for poets, but few of them make the effort, or notably succeed when they do. Auden made a
point of choosing titles that would radiate art deco glamour even as they lay sideways on the thin spines of his early collections: the flamboyant side of his gift came in handy.
Look, Stranger!
is one of the best book titles in any genre. He took the title from one of his own lines: “Look, stranger, on this island now.” His American
publisher—at Auden’s suggestion, strangely enough—pointlessly dissipated the effect by favouring the excerpt
On This Island
. (Decades
later, the essayist Wayland Young, collecting a set of lectures about the state of contemporary Britain, realized that somewhere in the middle of the contretemps there was another good title
going begging:
This Island Now
.) Another bank-raid title by Auden came straight out of the American colloquial language, in the same way that the Broadway
lyricists picked up temptingly ambiguous phrases from conversations overheard in the street:
Another Time
. It means better luck next time, it means a
different era, and it means regret. It also means that any reader who picks up the book can already feel his skin prickling before he opens it. I feel the same about the title of Galway
Kinnell’s great long poem—his great
short
long
poem, an important consideration—
The
Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World
. Kinnell’s title has the effect of a
trouvaille
: he probably found it attached to a
painting of Spanish troops and priests advancing into a territory they were fated to lay waste. But it was an American find: a big find, the size of a house. Auden’s finds were
micromanaged, appropriate to his way with a phrase. When young he could invent phrases like “The earth turns over, our side feels the cold” and string them together in a headlong
rush, thus producing his trademark early tension, between the locution begging to be pondered and the impetus declining to be stopped. In his later, austere manner, he invented less, but could
hear just as well. What he wanted to hear was the plain statement with a wealth of implication behind it—well behind it, so that you had to dig. The idea that his American exile was
poetically barren would be sufficiently rebutted by attention to one little poem: “The Fall of Rome.” In my own mind, that title is etched as one of his richest, although there is
almost nothing actually in it: everything is to come. The whole poem leads you back to it, and almost everything you read about in the daily news or hear about in your daily life will lead you
back to the poem. The poem’s “unimportant clerk” is you, here, today. Elsewhere in the world, the mutiny of “the musclebound marines” will affect you tomorrow.

As Auden’s poetic corpus takes up its place in literary history, it stands ready to be mined for titles by later
writers. I myself was one of the first in: the title of my autobiographical volume
Falling Towards England
came from an Auden poem that features Sir Isaac
Newton watching his apple exemplify the law of gravity. (In a letter to me which is now in the State Library of New South Wales, Philip Larkin wondered why none of the reviewers had spotted the
theft, and concluded that they were too young to have known the thrill of Auden’s first impact.) Risking solipsism—not for the first time in my life—I can extrapolate from my
own example to suggest that many writers feel the need to find their titles in the literary past, whether as a claim to seriousness, a desire for legitimacy, or just a childish wish to stick
close to mother. There is also the consideration that if you pull off the heist successfully then at least one part of your book will be worth reading. Long ago, in the seedy heyday of
Sydney’s Downtown Push, I was told the story of an unrecognized but determined Push novelist who had
completed a magnum opus bigger than anything by Tolstoy and thought
she would have a better chance of getting it published if she could dig a good title out of an established masterpiece of English literature. On being told that Milton had been the author of
several works that might conceivably be thought of as filling the bill, she searched his collected poems from end to end—as a slow reader, this took her almost a year—and finally
announced that she had found something unbeatable: it encapsulated her theme, had an intriguing rhythm, came from an obscure secondary effort called “Lycidas,” and nobody had ever
thought of using it before. She would call her book
Look Homeward, Angel
. But there had been nothing wrong about her instinct. She just didn’t know
that Thomas Wolfe had got there before her, following the same instinct: to look for resonant phrases in the past, when writers like Sir Thomas Browne were minting new coin with everything they
wrote.

Albert Camus

Dick Cavett

Paul Celan

Chamfort

Coco Chanel

Charles Chaplin

Nirad C. Chaudhuri

G. K. Chesterton

Jean Cocteau

Gianfranco Contini

Benedetto Croce

Tony Curtis

Ernst Robert Curtius

ALBERT CAMUS

Albert Camus (1913–1960) was born in Algeria just before World War I and never forgot his
colonial origins, although he rose to stardom in metropolitan France, the homeland of the colonist. “Stardom” is the right word because from his first day as a published writer he
was surrounded by the kind of glamorous aura that other writers are likely to resent. In Nazi-occupied Paris he took risks in support of the Resistance but was honest enough to admit later
that the risks had not been very great. A fundamental honesty was his hallmark. It led him to question whether the horrors of Nazism in any way legitimized the horrors of communism. His
answer to that question was his book
L’Homme révolté
(
The Rebel
), which appeared in 1951 and
set him at odds with Sartre and the whole of the French left, although Camus, with good reason, went on calling himself a man of the left until the end. Raymond Aron found the book weak when
not obvious, but that could have been partly because Camus had got into print first with ideas that Aron had held while Camus was still a boy. Those for whom Camus’s thesis is still not
obvious would do well to read the book: his novels
The Stranger
and
The Plague
deserve their reputations but give
only part of the picture of a complex
mind. The widespread notion that Camus’s mind was not really very complex at all is the penalty he paid for being blessed with
good looks, the Nobel Prize, too many women and too much fame. He even died famously, in a car crash featuring that most glamorous of all sports saloons, the Facel Vega. The fate of Algeria,
his lost homeland, haunted him until his last day. Even at the height of his success, he was a
pied noir
in exile. To himself, his condition as a
displaced person was a constant source of unease. For generations of admiring readers, it must count as the deep secret of his overwhelming charm. Bright young beginners will always be
attracted to a man who could say that everybody’s life looks to be in pieces when seen from the inside.

Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes.

—ALBERT CAMUS,
The Rebel

W
HEN I FIRST
read
The Rebel
, this splendid line came leaping from the page like a dolphin from a wave. I memorized it instantly, and from then on Camus was my man. I wanted
to write like that, in a prose that sang like poetry. I wanted to look like him. I wanted to wear a Bogart-style trench coat with the collar turned up, have an untipped Gauloise dangling from my
lower lip, and die romantically in a car crash. At the time, the crash had only just happened. The wheels of the wrecked Facel Vega were practically still spinning, and at Sydney University I
knew exiled French students, spiritually scarred by service in Indochina, who had met Camus in Paris: one of them claimed to have shared a girl with him. Later on, in London, I was able to
arrange the trench coat and the Gauloise, although I decided to forgo the car crash until a more propitious moment. Much later, long after having realized that smoking French cigarettes was just
an expensive way of inhaling nationalized industrial waste, I learned from Olivier Todd’s excellent biography of Camus that the trench coat had been a gift from Arthur Koestler’s wife
and that the Bogart connection had been, as the academics say, no accident. Camus had wanted to look like Bogart, and Mrs. Koestler knew where to get the kit.
Camus was a bit
of an actor—he thought, in fact, that he was a lot of an actor, although his histrionic talent was the weakest item of his theatrical equipment—and, being a bit of an actor, he was
preoccupied by questions of authenticity, as truly authentic people seldom are. But under the posturing agonies about authenticity there was something better than authentic: there was something
genuine. He was genuinely poetic. Being that, he could apply two tests simultaneously to his own language: the test of expressiveness, and the test of truth to life. To put it another way, he
couldn’t not apply them.

Though he sometimes fudged the research and often fell victim to the lure of a cadence, Camus was stuck
with a congenital inability to be superficial: he could be glib, but would regret it while correcting the proofs. He is not being glib here. Over the course of more than forty years, this line of
his must have come to my mind at least a thousand times. (I thought of it again in the first minute of realizing that I would one day write this book.) But the first time I ever read it was the
time that really counted, because the idea didn’t just strike me as true, it struck me as unbeatably well put. He didn’t put it in English, of course, and at that stage I could read
scarcely a word of French, so I had no way of checking up. But by a lucky break the line translates easily, and even sounds rather better balanced in English than it does in the original. It
would probably sound solid even in Urdu, just as long as the second and third nouns matched for polysyllabic weight. What brings the idea to incandescent life is that the line itself is so
attractive an example of the very thing the tyrant’s monologue can never do: it’s interesting.

The tyrant’s monologue doesn’t
want
to be interesting, and that’s
its point. Camus was among the first—almost as early as Orwell—to realize that the totalitarian overlord’s power to bore was a cherished and necessary component of his
repressive apparatus. Droning on without contradiction was a proof of omnipotence, Stalin had already proved it with his grinding speeches to the Presidium: speeches which had to be applauded at
the end of each bromide, and for which the applause at the end had to be endless. (During the Great Terror in the late 1930s, the first person to stop applauding went in peril of his life: it was
either bleeding hands or a bullet in the neck.) But Stalin’s speeches were the merest rehearsal for the tedium of his writings. It was particularly brutal of him to call his personally
penned missal on the theory and practice
of communism
The Short Course
. There was nothing short about it except its length. Physically,
his writings were not all that extensive. Spiritually, they extended into the life of his readers and suffocated everything that breathed. Lenin had already set the style, but with Lenin the
occasional sign of an active mental capacity crept in to aerate the slogans. Stalin made sure that didn’t happen even once, and from his earliest years in power until the Soviet Union
finally crumbled, the tone of official prose never varied in its almost inspired dreariness. To take a late example, the official
Short Biography
of
Brezhnev, nominally written as a group effort by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, could have been dictated by Stalin’s ghost.

In other Communist countries, the tyrant’s monologue was equally a standard, all-pervasive,
atmosphere-clogging item. Mao Zedong had a taste for Tang poetry and some qualifications as a poet himself. Western enthusiasts have even seen the virtues of Oriental miniature poetic forms in
the component mottoes of his
Little Red Book
. But his speeches were an amalgam of squeal and scream that managed to extirpate from Mandarin its normally
inalienable melody. His gift for the dogmatic tirade, lavishly decorated with scatological abuse, was faithfully reproduced by every party mouthpiece who ever addressed a meeting, until, in the
Cultural Revolution, the official address was a recognized form of torture throughout the country. In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s writings, such as they are, have usually appeared in the form of
interviews given to the foreign media. They are not without brio, especially if you are learning Spanish, in which case it actually helps to have the same few themes hit from fifty different
directions by the one hammer. The best example of a book-form Fidel interview is
Nada podrá detener la marcha de la historia
. Nothing can hold back
the march of history, and he proved it with his mouth. The Swedish journalists who faithfully recorded his torrential flow also caught some of his charm, however, and you can’t reach a
realistic estimate of Castro unless you take his charm into account. I bought my copy in the book market in Havana, sat reading it in a café while staving off the heat with a
mojito
, and learned quite a lot of ordinary Spanish by reading from context: the context being, of course, the standard international revolutionary boilerplate,
recognizable at a glance in any language with a Roman alphabet.

But Castro’s more typical form of communication is the speech, and
his speeches have to be
experienced to be believed. Most of the jokes made about them are made by people who have never really listened to him: they have just seen footage of him tossing his beard about while jabbing
his finger at the air. In real life, if it can be called that, Castro carries the leader’s monologue to lengths that should be physically impossible: a dedicated scuba-diver, he can
probably do without the oxygen tanks, because he must have the lungs of a sperm whale. Camus, who played soccer, would have admired Castro’s sporting proclivities but might have found his
oratory suspect. Offshore admirers of Castro’s putative intellectual vitality are fond of explaining how the people of Cuba—happy, salsa-dancing folk whose simple minds can be read
from long range—find his oratorical powers endlessly entertaining, but the emphasis should be on the endlessly, not the entertaining. A sceptic might note that Castro’s supposedly
spellbinding effect presupposes the absence of other forms of verbal entertainment, and indeed the absence of a substantial part of the Cuban population. Cubans who head for Miami with nothing
but an inflatable inner tube between them and the sharks are unanimous on the point: Castro’s speeches would have been enough to drive them out even if the regime’s other promises of
abundance had been kept.