Cultural Amnesia (21 page)

My notion of what is proper and honest between Englishmen and
Indians today is clear-cut and decisive. I feel that the only course of conduct permissible to either side in their political and public relations at the present moment is an honourable
taciturnity. The rest must be left to the healing powers of Time.

—NIRAD C. CHAUDHURI,
The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian
, P. 502

I
N EARLY
2002,
British Prime Minister Tony Blair might have profited if his Foreign Office brief had included this quotation. He might have been a bit less ready to lecture his Indian and Pakistani
opposite numbers on the advisability of cooling down. The advice was received with polite disdain: the best that could be hoped for. It was Blair’s lucky day. After the Indian Mutiny,
cheeky Sepoys were tied across a cannon’s mouth preparatory to its being fired. The hankering for a comparable decisiveness must surely linger. Another use for the quotation, and one we can
all put into effect, is to remind us that Chaudhuri, while he valued the connection with Britain, had no rosy view of its effects: he was never a lickspittle for the Raj. In
Thy Hand, Great Anarch!
he recounts how Britain manoeuvred to get India’s cooperation during World War II without having to promise independence. On the other
hand, he came down hard on the counterproductive intransigence of India’s political parties, especially of the Congress party. If Congress had cooperated with Britain during the war, he
says, it might have prevented partition afterwards. Nehru, not Gandhi, is Chaudhuri’s villain. In Chaudhuri’s picture, Gandhi retreats into the background while Nehru, between 1939
and 1947, stands forward as “the wordmonger par excellence.”

The Indian intelligentsia, says Chaudhuri, wanted Britain weakened
but not
defeated. Like the Trinidad-born writer C. L. R. James, whose message to the Third World was that it should learn from the First, Chaudhuri offered no automatic comfort to the old Empire’s
self-renewing supply of angry radicals. Most of Chaudhuri’s political talk means discomfort for someone, usually for India’s intellectuals. Many big subcontinental names have admired
him, but you can’t imagine any of them not dropping the book and whistling at some point, especially when he reaches the conclusion (and his writings
in
toto
reach no other) that Britain made India possible. The best reason to whistle, however, is the quality of his prose. Ten pages into
The Autobiography of
an Unknown Indian
, he’s already snared you. “The rain came down in what looked like already packed formations of enormously long pencils of glass and hit the bare
ground.” If he had lived long enough, W. G. Sebald would probably have got the Nobel Prize for writing like that. Chaudhuri’s prize was to live for a hundred years, retain a rock-pool
clarity of mind, and spend his extreme old age in England, surrounded by the foreign language he loved best, and of which he was a master.

Chaudhuri and Sebald might seem a strange coupling, but more united them than their choice of England as
a place of voluntary exile. Chaudhuri was a character from one of Sebald’s books: like Austerlitz in
Austerlitz
, Chaudhuri could develop a
philosophical theme out of a long study of practical detail. Similarly, Sebald was a character out of Thomas Mann. If you ever find yourself wondering where you have heard Sebald’s
infallibly precise memory speak before, think of the enchanting and omniscient Saul Fitelberg in
Doktor Faustus
. There are tones that connect authors in
exile, and that give them a single country to inhabit: the country of the mind. The difference is in the timing. Chaudhuri and Sebald were looking back on shattered civilizations. So was Thomas
Mann, but with Fitelberg he could make the character prescient. In
Doktor Faustus
the end has not yet come. The character can foresee it because the forces
that will lead to disintegration are the first he feels. Chaudhuri’s prescience was about a future that had not yet happened, and is happening only now. By the mere act of writing such a
richly reflective prose, he suggested that a civilization continues through the humane examination of its history, which was its real secret all along.

G. K. CHESTERTON

G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936) published so many books that his posthumous reputation is
almost impossible to sort out. He would have been famous just for his Father Brown stories. He would have been famous just for his novels
The Napoleon of
Not-ting Hill
and
The Man Who Was Thursday
. He would have been famous just as a literary critic: his monographs on Browning and Dickens are still
required reading for serious students of those authors. Above all, he would have been famous just for his journalism: the thing he is least well-known for now. The essays he contributed to
periodicals were at the heart of his talent for subversive observation. His vice was wilful paradox, but his virtue was for asking the awkward questions about current liberal fashions. The
virtue itself had a drawback: as a Catholic convert, he valued theological tradition to the point of embracing some of its blemishes, one of which was an abiding suspicion of the
cosmopolitan. Anti-Semitism reared its head, although not as blatantly as in the work of his contemporary Hilaire Belloc. But generally Chesterton’s collections of essays and casual
pieces are well worth seeking out in second-hand bookshops. There are a thousand brilliant sentences to prove that he was the natural opponent of state power in any form, so there can be no
real doubt about the stance he would have taken had he lived longer. He defined true democracy as the
sum total of civilized traditions. It was a conservative approach,
but it could never have become a fascist one, since the idea of a civilized tradition was exactly what fascism set out to dismantle.

To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics
against the fashions.

—G. K. CHESTERTON

W
HEN I
COPIED
this sentence into a workbook about twenty years ago, foolishly I neglected to note the provenance. The sentence does not appear in
The Oxford
Dictionary of Quotations
but that, alas, is no surprise: its entry on Chesterton consists almost entirely of scraps torn from his poetry, whereas all his best remarks were in his prose,
which the editors of the Oxford book obviously did not get around to reading. It is hard to blame them for that, because catching up with Chesterton’s prose is the work of a lifetime. He
wrote a lot faster than most of us can read. Chesterton published many, many books, and at one time I was trying to collect them all. (My shelves containing Chesterton still outdistance my
shelves containing Edmund Wilson, but with Wilson I know my way around almost to the inch, whereas there are cubic feet of Chesterton’s output where I can’t find my way back to
something I noticed earlier: a slipshod disorientation, which I could have avoided by taking proper notes.) I saw myself as his champion. Other journalists feared him because he was so
productive. Mainstream writers feared him because he wrote too well. He was my favourite kind of writer, scaring everybody because he had talent to burn, and no sense of calculation to make his
talent decisive.

His critical writings struck me as particularly valuable among his output: rather more valuable, in fact,
than the nominally creative work, in which
The Man Who Was Thursday
was widely proclaimed to be his masterpiece by people who had no intention of finding
out what else he wrote. I thought
The Man Who Was Thursday
dreadfully windy and most of the poetry less thrilling than its own craft. Is “The White
Knight” really that good, even on the level of a
recitativo
party piece? In Sydney in the late fifties I knew at least one Catholic poet who thought
“The White Knight” a deathless text, but he (my friend, not
Chesterton) was very Catholic, and no great reciter himself. In my experience, fuelled by many a
shouted evening among young men educated by Jesuits, the awkward truth became apparent early: Chesterton the Catholic poet was outstripped even by Belloc, and both were left for dead by Hopkins.
But it was just as apparent that some of Chesterton’s criticism was excellent. Dickens and Browning are not the only names he can bring alive in a short monograph. As an enthusiast for
Chaucer he is only just less inspiring than Aldous Huxley, and he had a gift for the critical essay that could survive even his mania for paradox. Somewhere among the paradoxes there was always a
considerable plain statement, and the statement quoted above is a prime example.

On the whole, Chesterton’s paradoxes merely asked for trouble. His seemingly plain statements were
real trouble. I think I knew that at the time, or I would not have written this one down. If I had taken it straight, I would have regarded it as a truism, and left it unremarked. But there was
something unsettling about it. Pretending to just lie there inert, it glowed, fizzed, and shovelled piquant smoke, as a lot of Chesterton does. With a new century crowding in on London’s
journalistic world, I can recommend Chesterton’s teetering example to Grub Street hacks on their last legs, facing oblivion in the current equivalent of the Cheshire Cheese, going home to a
mansard room full of unmarked files, yellowing tear-sheets and—impossibly dated now, fading to nothing in ordinary daylight—the carbon copies that were once called blacks.
Nil desperandum
. We just might live. After all, did Chesterton ever look at an article and think: this is the one? No, he never knew.

The second part of the sentence is the more immediately awkward part. The first part apparently takes care of itself.
Critics who overdo either the praise or the blame are soon rumbled: sooner still if they overdo both. But the apparently unexceptionable exhortation to support the classics against the fashions
conceals a genuine dilemma. All the classics were fashions once; new classics have to come from somewhere, and might be disguised as fashions when they do. The neatest deduction that can be made
from the advice is about the advisability of finding out what makes something classical, whether it is new or old: and of supporting that, presumably by praise, while blaming anything that
pretends to the same condition without the proper qualifications. So the two parts of the motto connect at that point. They connect
more closely when we consider that a
classic might be tainted by fashionable components, or that a fashion might be enriched by classical ones. Such a possibility is not likely to arise with accepted classics from the past: unless,
paradoxically, we find out too much about them. Suppose we knew everything about popular entertainment at the time of Ovid: it might turn out that tall stories about metamorphosis were a craze at
fashionable dinner tables, the hot topic at the saturnalia. Or suppose we knew everything about theology at the time of Dante (some scholars almost do): it might turn out that some of
Dante’s points of doctrine were the merest run-of-the-cloisters debating points. Benedetto Croce, indeed, working like that very basic Australian device the milk separator (it left the
cream on top of the milk, like a golden duvet on a heap of sheets), divided the
The Divine Comedy
rigorously between
poesia
and
letteratura
, and by
letteratura
Croce meant the stuff that belonged to its
time—a concept which sounds more like fashion than like anything else. Still, most of us never get to know that much. Knowing about the background is what we either don’t get to do or
else forget about in short order, and for us, the common readers—who are, in modern times, the uncommon people still interested even though the examinations are no longer
compulsory—every ancient classic remains classical right through, even when impenetrable. Homer’s most vivid translator in recent times, Christopher Logue, knows that the Homeric
poems are classics, even though he can’t read them in the original. That’s why he feels compelled to bring all his talent to the task of finding an English equivalent for them, with
results that might very well prove classic in their turn.