Cultural Amnesia (60 page)

In Lichtenberg’s language, which was the lightly conversational version of German, Schopenhauer extended the same
idea by favouring real observation over erudition, and stated confidently that the second sapped the first. German is a language supposedly given to the airy building of conceptual castles, but
there is a use of German given to the opposite: those who find Hegel wilfully impenetrable would do well to look at his art criticism, where they will find him down-to-earth, fixed on the object
and responding to a work of art as if it were an event in nature. (Kant could never do that: he conjured Spanish castles about aesthetics without ever having seen a painting.) In Italy, the vast
edifice of Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic theory was erected on the basic proposition that true creativity is a primary function, not to be derived from formal knowledge. He thought the same
about formal knowledge: unless acquired through passion, it would count for nothing. Egon Friedell, perhaps the biggest bookworm of all time, deplored bookworms. He could make it stick: he read,
and wrote, from a personal hunger that had nothing to do with emulation. But knowing himself to be vulnerable on the point, in his crowning work
Kulturgeschichte
der Neuzeit
(
The Cultural History of the Modern Age
) he was always careful to identify sclerotic erudition as a sure sign of decadence in any
historical period. In our time, Philip Larkin warned against the consequences of trying to make art out of art. Larkin thought the later Auden had done that, and there is evidence that Larkin was
right. But Auden, both the earlier and the later, always presented his artistic enthusiasms as if they had forced their way into his busy head: he wrote as if learning had pursued him, not he it.
In his critical compendia, even the most abstruse speculations are given as the workshop know-how of a master carpenter. If he wrote a poem about a painting, it was
because
the painting had hit him like a force of nature, as an everyday event. Stefan Zweig, in his book
Begegnungen
(Meetings), squeezed the theme into a single
antithesis when he said that in Goethe’s life and career there was seldom a poem without an experience, and seldom an experience without the golden shadow (
ohne den goldenen Schatten
) of a poem. First the experience, then the golden shadow. It would be easy to contend that the same is so for all of the art, and all of the
thought, that has ever mattered. But is the thought itself quite true?

If it were, this book would be a folly. It might well be the product of more
Belesenheit
(bookishness) than
Talent
: as I remember it across the decades, I wrote more fluently when I knew nothing, and may
have been talentless even then. But a primary impulse and a lifelong disposition are the very things that tell me Lichtenberg is fudging a point for one of the few times in his life: in a naked
proposition there is a hidden assumption. He assumes that an explanation drawn from art can’t be natural. The antithesis is false. Art is a part of nature. Art is one of the most natural
things we do, and to care about art, and to draw our examples from it, is as natural as caring about our personal experience and drawing our examples from that. It can even be more natural,
because it gets more experience in: other people’s as well as ours. If we were to say, “I almost had it figured out but Nola Huthnance from next door interrupted me and by the time
she finished yakking I lost my train of thought,” we would be speaking from personal experience. But if we were to say, “I almost had it figured out but I was interrupted by a person
from Porlock,” we would be speaking not only from our experience, but from Coleridge’s; and being more specific instead of less, because we would have incorporated a recognition that
such an event is universal. We would have also conveyed the suggestion that the thing we were on the verge of figuring out was pretty important, perhaps on the scale of the masterpiece that
Kubla Khan
might have been if Coleridge’s flying pen had not been stopped short by a passing dullard. If we didn’t want to lose Nola Huthnance,
we could just add the poetic reference to her prosaic name (“. . . but Nola Huthnance from next door did a person from Porlock . . .”) and get two benefits for one. Increasing our
range need not cost us our focus: quite the reverse. The person without a range of reference is not more authentically human for being so. He is just more alone.

The root of the matter lies in whether art and learning are loved, or merely used. Among the thirty or forty
missing plays of Aristophanes, it would be surprising if there were not three or four well populated with pretentious halfwits: there were men of learning in those days too, and wherever learning
is valued there are arid scholiasts who seek merit by flaunting its simulacrum. Pointless erudition has always been ripe for parody. Proust’s Norpois puts his audience to sleep by quoting
endlessly from diplomatic history, but what makes him funny is that he knows nothing about life, not that he knows everything about diplomacy. (We conclude that he must have been a bad diplomat,
but that’s by the way, and might not be right.) If Talleyrand had quoted from diplomatic history at the same length as Norpois, Talleyrand could have sold tickets. People who crank out
their knowledge of the arts in a mechanical manner gained it the same way. Some of them came to it late, as a social accomplishment. Others were unfortunate enough to be born as Philistines into
a cultivated household. (At Cambridge I met one of these: he knew everything about all the arts in many languages, but had a way of proving it that made you want to enlist in the Foreign Legion.)
Most of us were luckier, and took in our first enthusiasms as we took in our first meat and drink, with a scarcely to be satisfied hunger and thirst. Choosing one case out of a possible thousand,
I first encountered Toulouse-Lautrec in Sydney, in the year 1957. He had died in Paris in the year 1901, but suddenly, and with overwhelming enchantment, he was alive again for me. There were no
actual paintings by Lautrec on public display in Australia at that time, but the Swiss publishing firm Skira had just produced its first series of little square books bound in coarse white cloth,
with tipped-in colour plates. Eventually I owned them all, but the Lautrec was the first. Not much bigger than postage stamps—big postage stamps from South American countries, but still
postage stamps—those little reproductions occupied my eyesight for a week. I could see nothing else. But when I was finally ready to see the world again, I kept meeting Lautrec’s
characters from the cabarets of Paris—Yvette Guilbert, Jane Avril and la Goulue—in the streets of Sydney. I saw the rubber-legged dancer Valentin le Desosse bonelessly jumping off a
Manly ferry at Circular Quay. It wasn’t art instead of life: it was as art as well as life, and the art in life. Years later, when I got to Europe, I was ready for the real Lautrec
paintings
because I already had some idea of what was coming. And I was immeasurably more ready for Paris itself than I would have been without my scraps of book learning that
had given me the living ghosts of Montmartre and Montparnasse. It had never been book learning, really. It was passion: a sudden, adolescent, everything-at-once passion for shape, colour, the
permanent registration of the evanescent, the singing stillness of a captured movement, the heroism of an injured man who had forged a weapon to fight time. And fighting time, it collapses space:
because of the sumptuous concentration of capital works by Lautrec in the Art Institute, the streets of Chicago are haunted for me by his small, bent but unbroken form. Twenty years ago, filming
there very late one night by the lake, I thought I saw him. A beautiful set of roller-skating blonde twin girls came hurtling out of the dark along the esplanade, streaked carelessly through our
laggard lights, and were gone before we could catch them. He would have caught them.

And that was just Lautrec. Gauguin did the same for me before I could pronounce his name. (I called him Gorgon.) Degas I
gave an acute accent over the “e,” not realizing that the “De” was an honorific prefix: “duh” would have been closer to the right sound, and certainly would
have conformed to my general reaction when faced with his genius. Adding tear sheets from magazines to a small stack of thin books, I built up an archive of reproductions, calling him
Day
-ga until a kind woman from Vienna at last corrected me. (She ran a little coffee house in the Strand Arcade. How young and foolish of me not to quiz her
on the story of her life.) From then on, I never laughed at anyone who mispronounced an artist’s name, because it usually only meant that what he had read had run far ahead of what he had
heard, and I knew too well how that can happen. When you are learning a new language, there is a blissful moment when, from not knowing how to, you pass to not knowing how not to. The second
phase is the dangerous one, because it leads to sophistication, and one of the marks of sophistication is a tendency to forget what it was like to be naïve. But it was when we were still
naïve that we knew most intimately the lust of discovery, a feeling as concentrated and powerful as amorous longing, with the advantage that we never had to fear rejection. Art will always
want us. It finds us infinitely desirable. Beethoven’s late quartets waited for me for more than thirty years after I first went mad for the
Eroica
symphony, and when I finally deigned to notice them they didn’t even look peeved.

For anyone who loves it, art is as personal as that. The works of art have personalities: they are
another population of the Earth. They even behave like people. After Barbirolli prepared the way with his Berlin concerts at the end of World War II, Mahler’s symphonies, which had never
been played while Hitler ruled, entered the conversation of music lovers in Berlin and were gossiped about as if their sumptuous attractions were a delicious scandal. Under Stalin, one of
Shostakovich’s most sublime creations took on a secret identity and hid out until the world got better. It holed up in the soundtrack to a Soviet film called
The Gadfly
, where I finally tracked it down only a few years ago, after hearing it by accident as the theme of a television series entitled
Reilly, Ace of Spies
. A middle-aged man by then, I found it to be the dreamed-of companion of my youth, a melody I would have been pleased to hum and whistle to an
early girlfriend, although whether she would have been pleased is another question. But if the works of art have personalities, their creators are a human race in themselves: one that never ages,
nor, unlike the Struldbruggs, grows tired of immortality. When you are young, and first meeting them, the artists seem more than human. But to hail the superhuman is always to keep bad company.
(Yeats not only should have known better, he did know better: but he couldn’t resist the cadence—the reason that Plato wanted to banish poets from the Republic.) Luckily a more
thorough acquaintance is bound to teach us that the artists are more than human only in the sense of being even more human than us. It is an important lesson to learn because there is a severe
penalty to be paid for the belief than an artist should be beyond personal reproach. We are paying it now, in the cultural press, where too many half-qualified reporters are continuously busy
proving to us that our idols have feet of clay. The fault, a double fault, is in the arrested psychological development and the ruinously abbreviated education of the reporter: a propensity to
vindictiveness drives him to the task of cutting down to size people who were never giants in the first place—not in that sense, anyway.

Few artists were ever fully well, so it is no great trick to prove them ill. There are commentators who can’t get
interested in Caravaggio
until they find out that he killed someone. They are only one step from believing that every killer is Caravaggio. But we must all be alert to the
potentially deleterious effects of letting in too much light on art. It is an essential political study, for example, to examine just what a treacherous piece of work Bertolt Brecht was, to his
friends, to his loved ones and to civil society. But the study will lead to nothing if we fail to keep in mind that he was a great poet. Our innocence can’t be regained: once we start
finding out how our heroes and heroines lived and what they did, we can never go back to our first pure infatuation with what they made. But our innocence should never be forgotten: and if it is
remembered, infatuation matures into admiration, as we blend our knowledge of the creators’ failings and vicissitudes with our gratitude for what they created. Art is for adults, even when
it is made by children. Children, left to themselves, tear up each other’s stuff.

Because Lautrec was one of my first great loves, I often think of the very first artist, painting in the
cave, as a man with withered legs. Unable to go out hunting, he would probably have been killed off if he hadn’t turned out to be so entertainingly good at drawing a bison with a burnt
stick. What were his feelings? They were primitive: almost as primitive as the instinct that sent the first hunters hunting, instead of just lying around to die when the edible roots ran out. But
the painter, like the hunters, was doing something that was not in the natural dispensation. And as soon as he did it, it was. Though Sigmund Freud’s reputation as a scientific thinker is
in constant dispute, there can be no dispute about his stature as a writer. He was a very great poet in prose, and he was on top of his form in his essay “
Die Zukunft einer Illusion
” (The Future of an Illusion) when he said that culture’s characteristic reason for being (
ihr
eigentlicher Daseingrund
) is to protect us against nature (
uns gegen die Natur zu verteidigen
). He might have added, however, that protecting
ourselves against nature is the most natural thing we do: the thing that makes us human. The arts, and learning about the arts, are not additions to life: they are life itself, an expression of
life that feeds back into it and helps to make it what it is—and, above all, to
show
it what it is, to make life conscious. But Lichtenberg knew all
that. Dozens of his other aphorisms prove it. He wrote this one on a bad day. Some bookish twerp must have got up his nose.