Cultural Amnesia (38 page)

So argues Torberg, and there is reason in what he says: but there is also an unintended pathos, like a
nervous whistle in the dark. In Vienna, the Jewish café habitués had no other real home. They were assimilated, but mainly in a technical sense: except for the café, where
they could pay for a place by the hour, there was nowhere they belonged that was not overseen by a watchful landlord—the
Blokleiter
of the future.
They could feel comfortable only in public. They could feel
private
only in public. Torberg tells a poignant story of seeing, in the Café Herrenhof
in 1960, Leo Perutz and Otto Soyka still pursuing their no-speak policy from the years before the
Anschluß
. Soyka had returned to live in Vienna but
Perutz was merely visiting, from his new home in Haifa. The only reason the Herrenhof was still open was that its proprietor, Albert Kainz, thought there should be a meeting point for anyone who
came back from the past. These two had, but they refused to meet. Their time-honoured vendetta—some ancient business of an unexpiated insult—continued long after its context had
disappeared. In the café thronged with the voices of contentious ghosts, no literary Jews remained alive except them. Their quarrel was all they had left, and no doubt they preserved it as
a way of pretending that this much, at least, had not altered.

Horrific evidence suggests that the Austrian Nazis, when their armbands were still in their pockets, put the café
talk high on their long list of Jewish intellectual pursuits to be trampled out of existence when the great day came. The future firebrands and executioners had been listening in for years,
probably inflamed as much by sincere disapproval as by thick-witted jealousy. After a single orgiastic day of violence in March 1938 there was no-one left who had anything to say worth hearing.
Hugo Sperber, already worn out from too many years of living on
thin pickings, was thrown to the ground and kicked until he fell silent for good. Fritz Grunbaum, one of the
stars of the
Simplicissimus
cabaret, was arrested within hours of the takeover, shipped to Dachau, and beaten to death. Whether in Austria or Germany, it
had never been the fault of the Jews that they were so slow to realize the catch in the assimilationist ideal: the more indispensable to culture they became, the more they were resented. Hitler
needed no telling that there were a lot of brilliant Jews from whom German-speaking culture had gained lustre. That was what he was afraid of: of a bacillus being called clever, and of the
phosphorescence of decay being hailed as an illumination. For him, as for every racial hygienist, the whole thing was a medical problem, and the last thing he was likely to contemplate was that
the medical problem might lie within himself. He didn’t know he was sick. He thought he was well. Convinced racists think they are healthy: their conscience can’t be appealed to, they
have no better self that might repudiate the lesser one, and they bend all the powers of human reason to the unreasonable, without reservation. For the Jewish intelligentsia, cultivated to the
fingertips, it was very hard to grasp the intensity of the irrationality they were dealing with—the irrationality that was counting the hours until it could deal with them. Even in
Auschwitz, some of the enslaved musicians must have thought that Schubert’s writing for strings would melt Dr. Mengele’s heart, as it had always melted theirs. And it did melt his
heart. It just didn’t change his mind. Similarly, there were probably crypto-Nazi kibitzers who laughed at the running commentary of Hugo Sperber as he played cards. But that was exactly
why they wanted him dead. They wanted
their
jokes to be the funny ones, and they got their wish.

It should be said that Friedell’s great book, for much of its enormous length, does not use wit for its texture. But
it always has wit for a basis. The Viennese tradition of the enlightening wisecrack is there underneath, supporting a prose narrative that never loses its geniality even when talking about the
Black Death. Friedell didn’t always feel compelled to be funny. But he was never unfunny, in the sense of straining to amuse, and missing the mark. For him the whole target was a bullseye,
and he could let fly at his leisure. He saw the same quality in Shaw, whom he admired, perhaps to excess. When Friedell dedicated the English translation of
The
Cultural History of the Modern Age
to Shaw,
the dedicatee was already a known admirer of the dictators. Friedell would never have been capable of such a misplaced
enthusiasm. He would have been a valuable voice in the English-speaking world if he had ever been taken up, but his name was never well-known in Britain or the United States except to the
German-speaking refugees. Today it is so thoroughly forgotten that he is not even listed in the excellent
Chambers Biographical Dictionary
, which finds room
for Finnish playwrights of the second order, and is usually good about those who once were prominent but are so no longer. Friedell, however, was never there to be forgotten. But if we know
nothing about him, he, true to form, knew a lot about us. He was a student of British cultural history and wrote one of the best appreciations of Lord Macaulay. Typically playing himself in with
a witticism—Friedell the cabaret artist always knew how to buttonhole the audience—he said that Macaulay was so highly regarded in Britain that his book of collected essays was
included in any list of classics. In the English-speaking countries, Friedell pointed out, a list of classics was regarded as a guide to books that should be read, and not, as in the
German-speaking countries, to books that should be avoided. It’s easy to imagine that idea starting its life at a café table. Harder to imagine is how the giant could walk away from
his laughing friends, climb the stairs to his apartment, and settle down for another day’s lonely work on his strange and wonderful attempt to get the whole of creation into a nutshell.

Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which
people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.

—EGON FRIEDELL,
Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit
, VOL. 3, P. 225

In his great book, Egon Friedell regales us with thousands of lines like this. If they were fully
separable from their context, they would be aphorisms: we could pick them out like jewels from a crown. But they are more like threads and knots in a tapestry, and can’t be pulled loose
without violating the texture. Suitably aware, however, that we are doing his masterwork an injury, we can memorize some of his best moments and reproduce them in conversation, although morality
demands that we should acknowledge the borrowing. After all, he did. This line is one of the many he lifted from someone else. Friedell gives the provenance: one Gustav von
Bunge said it in his
Lehrbuch
(Textbook)
der Physiologie
, and it wasn’t his line either. He was quoting a
professor of physics who said it in a lecture. Thus, all the way back to anonymity, we can follow the trajectory of a shining notion. The tapestry analogy breaks down. Friedell’s mighty
gathering place of a text is a game park, a menagerie, an aviary and an aquarium. Sentences live in it as our dreams are populated with fragments of experience, often including experience we have
not yet had, and may never have. It follows that the importance of always identifying a source lies not only in common justice, but in truth to life. Whether we like it or not, individuality is
the product of a collective existence. Few writers have ever had a more identifiable tone of voice than Egon Friedell. But the tone was a synthesis of all the voices he had ever heard, and so is
ours. If we had never heard anyone else, we would not sound more like ourselves; we would sound like Kaspar Hauser the savage infant, on the day he was rescued from solitude. In the matter of
style, freedom lies in all the ways we have been a prisoner of someone else’s example. He might only have been a school bus conductor with a gift for sardonic verbal abuse. She might only
have been the woman who stamped your card at the lending library. But they gave you the gift that comes next after the gift of speech: the gift to give it shape.

Obviously, in wit, there are degrees of humour, from intense to non-existent. What is funny is a matter
of dispute, but I have always found the anonymous humour of Hollywood immensely funny. Nobody knows who first said: “She’d be a nymphomaniac if only they could slow her down.”
But whoever thought of that line knew a lot about humour: probably he worked in it professionally, in some branch of the film business, although I doubt if he was a writer. (If he had been, he
would have a found a way of letting us know who he was.) One day, perhaps on the spur of the moment, he—or, come to think of it, more likely she—came out with a witty line that was
also creasingly funny. Slightly lower down the scale of tickled ribs, there are witty lines that make you smile with appreciation—the smile that acknowledges how you almost laughed.

On that level one can place many of Oscar Wilde’s best epigrams:
the ones that are condensed
without being leaden, and fashioned without being laboured. “Meredith is a sort of prose Browning, and so is Browning.” But much of the most valuable wit forms at a level where
laughter is neither induced nor sought, and even a smile is not required: the level where a sense of rightness combines with a sense of neatness, and a nod of the head is enough to acknowledge
the blend. It’s possible to say that on this level all wits sound the same. They are not monotonous—quite the reverse—but they do share a tone: the enviable tone of something
put with sufficient cogency to make the listener feel that if he can’t remember exactly how the thing was said, he won’t remember exactly what the thing was. It is as if there were
one precisely codified set of manners operating, which all its adepts know equally.

As a result, it’s easy to mistake them for one another. As an illustration, I once quoted several
aphorisms by Hugh Kingsmill, capped them with a single aphorism by Santayana, and defied the reader to spot the difference. In my memory, the one by Santayana is “A fanatic redoubles his
effort when he has forgotten his aim.” But I would not be surprised to be told that it is by Kingsmill. It is not so much that the memory plays tricks: rather that, in this area of
distilled truth, there is not all that much difference between personalities. “We are asleep,” says Baptiste to Garance in
Les Enfants du
Paradis
, “but sometimes we wake up just long enough to realize we are dreaming.” “If all the people who lived together were in love,” says Wittgenstein, “the
earth would shine like the sun.” It is easy to imagine the attributions reversed; and indeed, without your permission, I just reversed them; it was in Jacques Prevert’s screenplay
that the shining earth appeared, and the moonlit line about the dreaming sleepers came from the thin-lipped mouth of the sad philosopher.

Vauvenargues the unlucky aristocrat is a larger spirit than La Bruyère the rising bourgeois, and both would have
been more fun to meet for a drink than La Rochefoucauld, whose contempt for mankind would have been unlikely not to have included us. They were three very different minds, but you would need to
know an awful lot about the treasury of the French aphorism never to misattribute a coup by one of them to either of the others. The same applies even on the dizzy level where wit becomes funny:
in the brief span that the Italians usefully
call a
battuta
there is not much room for an individual personality to show up, so all the
wits sound like the one sparkling soul, and on our deathbeds—if we do much laughing there—it will probably be a matter of hearing the jokes that go past our ears rather than of seeing
the people who cracked them go past our eyes. When forgetfulness confers anonymity, it could well be that justice will be restored. I doubt if Liberace was the first to say “I cried all the
way to the bank.” It sounds like Old Hollywood, and could very well be Old Vienna. Dorothy Parker might not have been the actual inventor of the joke about the woman who injured herself
sliding down a barrister. Except for Flann O’Brien, there was never a new pun, although always an alert plagiarist. Dorothy Parker could think the stuff up, but you can tell that it took
effort: in her theatre reviews, she could barely manage one real zinger each time, even when it was expected of her. A wit under pressure to produce is very apt to borrow on the sly.

Friedell could go on and on being wise because he didn’t feel compelled to be funny. He thought it
sufficient to be interesting: a desirable condition for a writer to be in. Comedians do not enjoy the same luxury, although they always aspire to it: given the chance, they will construct a
framework in which character makes the points, so that they can relax. The necessity to go on throwing a double six is nerve-racking and eventually not even amusing. A commentator probably does
better to accept that too many wisecracks are a mistake. Even Mark Twain soured some of his early travel writing in Europe by dragging in a vaudeville routine when he should have been focusing
his observations, which were always the most interesting features of his pieces, and often the funniest.

Friedell was one of those enchanted spirits who are observant over the whole range of human experience from everyday
behaviour up to the most exalted level of creativity: indeed he scarcely recognized the hierarchy, and took it all as an isotropic universe of delicious excitement. Finding everything
significant, he was in a good position to appreciate the perennial charm of the charlatan, whose expertise is to convince the hayseeds that they share the same propensity for universal insight.
It is not enough for the mountebank to unleash a theory that explains everything: to be successful, he must convince his gormless onlookers that the same theory has always been in their
possession,
but now stands suddenly revealed. They reward him for what he has discovered in them, and buy his snake oil as a vote of thanks.