Cultural Cohesion (45 page)

But that doesn't offset the menace of price without value. The abundance isn't intelligently distributed, and never could be by a free market, whose famous invisible hand is incurably short of a brain. Unless public-service institutions are made robust, the art will go to the elite that knows what it wants, while those who might have wanted it but never found out about it are stuck with the junk. Twain was an elitist: when he punished Cooper for supposing that “more preferable” was a more impressive way to say “preferable” he was saying that literary expression isn't just self-expression. But he would have been appalled to be told in advance that the enlightenment of the American people was going to be a matter of niche marketing. He would have regarded that, surely correctly, as a boondoggle.

Though beset by remorse for his own failings, Twain had a sure sense of his rank, but he didn't imagine that he had attained it by his own unaided efforts. He had an institution to help him—the world literary heritage, which he regarded as belonging to America by right, because America was the world's country. Twain's own contribution, daring in every way, was most daring in its dedication to the principle that the institution belonged to the people, and not to its adepts. He was a man so superior he needed no support from self-esteem. One wonders whether the Kaiser, for once in his life face to face with a real aristocrat, realized the implications.

They weren't revolutionary—not politically, anyway. Though a devout republican at home, Twain abroad had a soft spot for monarchs. But culturally he was a bigger revolutionary than Karl Marx, and, in the long run, more successful, because what Marx started went backward in the end, while the popular culture to which Twain gave such a boost has gone on expanding. Doing that, it has necessarily left him behind. The precocious modernity that makes him seem so close to us can only obscure, not obviate, the dependence of his inspiration on a more immediate world than any we know—or anyone will ever know again, unless the industrialized world dismantles itself. The young Twain rode on stagecoaches and talked to strangers. He saw people murdered. Death and disease struck his family at a time when such things didn't happen just to other people; they happened to everybody. Life has improved, but in improving it has grown less real, and there is no going back except through a disaster.

Huckleberry Finn
may survive the misguided clean-up of the library shelves. Unless I lost count, there are forty-two instances of the word “nigger” in the first fifteen chapters of the book, but its heart is so obviously in the right place that it may weather the intentions of the politically correct, whose salient folly is to arouse false expectations of the past. Even if Huck makes it, however, he won't ever again be read by everybody. Professional admiration for the book will remain intense. (In
Green Hills of Africa
, when Hemingway names
Huckleberry Finn
as the book that made American literature, for a moment the campfire fabulist is speaking the truth.) Amateur enjoyment must remain restricted to those who actually read books instead of just hearing about them or watching the video of the movie. Twain was marginalized by the popular culture he helped to create. It had to happen.

Where these four beautiful books will have their effect, along with the Library of America as a whole, is in the academy. With a few exceptions (which have been punished ferociously by qualified reviewers who realize that this project, above all others, is too important to permit lapses from its own standards) every volume in the collection is a model of scholarship in service to literature. By now the damage reports are in and we know that a whole generation of students have had literature killed for them by the way they have been obliged to study it. Instead of the books, they have had to study theories about the books, always on the assumption that the theorists are wiser than the authors. And finally scholasticism, as always, has reduced itself to absurdity, with the discovery by the theorists that there were no authors. There weren't even any books, only texts, and there wasn't any history for the texts to emerge from, because history was just a set of signs, too.

Well, here are the books, with not a text in sight except as a reasoned agreement on what the author actually wrote. Every volume in the Library has a chronology to help you follow the life of the author (who actually existed), with pertinent notes to place him in the context of history (which exists, too). Armed with this subsidiary information, the student will be able to give a book the only “reading” that counts—the one by which the book brings something to him, without his bringing a load of hastily acquired pseudoscience to it. The authors will emerge as the living human beings who made the larger Constitution, the one behind the document. And one author will emerge as even more alive than the rest, stricken by tragedy but unquenchable in his delight, shaking his head as if he had seen everything—even the future that is our frightening present—and not given up.

The New Yorker
, June 14, 1993; later included

in
Even As We Speak
, 2001

POSTSCRIPT

My reference to the temptation
Huckleberry Finn
might offer to the politically correct text-cleansers was made at a time when it still looked possible that gentle ridicule would stave off the menace. Alas, the New York State Board of Regents went on to prove itself in deadly earnest, applying their principles of selection to the school library bookshelves with the same intractable enthusiasm as the thought police of an ideological power. How this totalitarian residue should have come to flourish in a nominally liberal democratic state is a nice question. Part of the answer, I suspect, is that the democratic component of liberal democracy contains an ideological breeding ground, commonly known as egalitarianism. An indeterminate abstract concept masquerading as an ideal, it encourages any amount of censorship to be imposed in its name. There could be no more important specific task for the humanities than to oppose it by protecting the integrity of the classic books, as part of the broad, general and increasingly urgent task of liberalizing liberal democracy before it democratizes itself out of existence. For encouragement, we can daydream with delight of how a New York Regents examination paper might be answered by Mark Twain come back to life.

Considering his disapproval of prominent men who allowed their lust to interfere with the accepted forms, Twain might also have been pretty scathing about my warm invocations of Bill Clinton. But at the beginning of Clinton's presidency the picture looked bright for any observer who thought that the Difference Principle of John Rawls was the truest guide to what an American government should do: benefit the poor. In the long run, that was roughly what Clinton's administration did, although he finally blotted even that part of his record by benefiting some of the rich with absurd pardons cynically bestowed as he made his exit. But it was the record of his private behaviour that determined the general opinion of him, and would probably, alas, have determined Twain's opinion of him too. Twain's implacable conventionality on the subject of sexual conduct was an example of the way America was not like Europe.

A century later, the media uproar over the Monica Lewinsky affair proved that the difference had scarcely changed. As the consequences of Clinton's private folly drove him all the way to a public impeachment, mighty decathletes of the boudoir like François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac must have been astonished. Each had been able to spend decades exercising the
droit de seigneur
with no thought of recrimination from the press, the surrounding culture or even, apparently, from their wives. No doubt that was what was wrong with both of them. There is unquestionably something self-serving about the European reluctance to identify the private and the public life, just as there is unquestionably something admirable about the American assumption that they should form a unity. Unfortunately there is also something dogmatic about the “should.” Compelled by such a concretized ideal, the real unity is between conventionality and legalism. If only love can lead to marriage, any new love must lead to divorce. Innocent people start to disappear, and at the level of intellect and sensitivity as well as at the level of kitsch and glitz. Saul Bellow's wives join Elizabeth Taylor's husbands among the legions of the discarded, to the long-term profit of nobody except lawyers. Despite the almost universal opinion that they should join in this grotesque process, the Clintons have so far failed to do so—a reluctance on their part that is surely worth consideration, if not endorsement.

Very few American journalists have been reckless enough to suggest that the fated couple might be held together by passion; or that his attractiveness to women might be one of the things she finds exciting about him; or that a part of the attractiveness might reside in a gallantry as irrepressible as his libido. On that last point, it is still considered naive, in American company, to even hint at the possibility that the President, when he told his first lies about Monica Lewinsky, might have been just as concerned to protect her future as to protect his job. It was said at the time, and is still said, that she meant nothing to him except as an available intern. There is certainly a sense in which charm is the capacity to lavish intimacy on strangers. But Clinton's charm might well be of the order in which a casually met woman is led to deduce very quickly that she is not a stranger at all: that he cares for her fate. (The deduction might not even be erroneous, at the time.) To say that Clinton had no concern for his young admirer was to demonize him, and to demonize him was to call her an idiot: something which many of those who claimed to be repelled by his contempt for women were quick to do, thus ruling out the possibility that the same charm which seduced her might have seduced them. But they should have ruled it in. Anybody can see through a man like that from a distance. The trick is to see through him from close up.

Clinton was a guest speaker at the Hay-on-Wye Literary Festival in 2001. The media stampede from London towards Wales was not to be believed. British female journalists who had been under the impression that they despised him learned otherwise when they came within range of his aftershave. A high proportion of them, by American standards, subsequently went into print with the opinion that the way he was alleged to behave around women might have been at least partly determined by the way women behaved around him. High office was no doubt a factor, but a similarly seismic effect was never recorded in the case of Jimmy Carter, who was confined to committing adultery in his heart, and got into quite enough trouble just for that. Mark Twain the great liberator also contributed to the building of a prison, whose inmates are under the continual obligation to prove that they have clean hands, in accordance with the principle that if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear—except from the principle itself, which has a way of expanding to include thought in the realm of action.

2003

25

CASANOVA COMES AGAIN

Casanova, outed long ago as a flagrant heterosexual, is out again. This time he's out in paperback—the whole of his memoirs, in six hefty double volumes. What a pity he couldn't be here for a launch party at, say, the Algonquin. He always said that his literary career was the one that really mattered. In his small talk for the assembled
prominenti
he would have said it again, even as he put the moves on the younger and more personable females at the thrash: the editors, the journalists, the PR flacks, the bimboid wannabes toting the canapés. Feeling his age but galvanized by the attention, he would have taken on the biggest challenge in the room: the drenchingly beautiful, impeccably refined junior editor on the point of marrying the tortoise-necked publishing tycoon jealously quavering in the background. As the lights dim for a screened montage of his big moments on film, Casanova talks his target out the double doors, down the stairs and into a cab. Most weekends, like the modest, well-brought-up girl she is, she takes the jitney home to East Hampton, but when Cas explains that he gambled away the last of his
per diem
stash the previous night she immediately offers to cover the cab fare with her spare change. Step on it! The publisher's heavies are already on the sidewalk and scoping the street through their dark glasses. Back upstairs, the indignant publisher has personally lifted the phone to consign the entire print run of Casanova's great book to a garbage scow, but our hero's authorial ambitions never did stand a chance against his primal urge.

Lesser writings aside,
History of My Life
is Casanova's main claim to the literary importance that he always dreamed of in the intervals—sometimes lasting for days on end—between chasing skirt. The claim has to be called successful, if with some reluctance. When the first instalment of the hardback edition came out, in 1966, bigwigs of the literary world united to rain hosannas on its editor and translator, Willard R. Trask, for restoring a masterpiece to just pre-eminence after its long history of being bowdlerized, rewritten by interfering hacks, truncated, mistranslated and attacked from the air. (A Second World War bomb through the roof of the Brockhaus office, in Leipzig, almost did to the manuscript what the bomb through the roof of the Eremitani church in Padua did to Mantegna's frescoes.) Since then, there has been time to think, and wonder whether many of the mandarins who heaped Casanova's
capolavoro
with praise ever read it again, or even read in it. For one thing, it isn't a book for a literal-minded age in which the authenticity of a quotation has to be guaranteed by marking supplied words with square brackets. What about all that dialogue, remembered in detail over the stretch of decades? Did he carry a tape recorder? A limiting judgement would have plenty to go on.

But that's just it: plenty is what the book has—plenty of everything, even without the sex. There are swindles and scandals, pretensions and inventions, clerics, lyrics and bubbling alembics, sword fights at midnight and complots at the palace, bugs in the bed and bedlam in the tavern, masked balls, balls-ups and shinnying up drainpipes, flummery, mummery and summary executions. All that, as the journalists say, plus a pullulating plankton field of biddable, beddable broads, through which Casanova moves with the single-minded hunger of a straining whale, yet somehow brings the whole populated ocean of eighteenth-century society to phosphorescent life. The book teems. It flows. It does everything but end. Written in his old age, the memoirs, recounting his picaresque manoeuvres almost day by day, could get only so far before he croaked, leaving uncovered his most fascinating and possibly most edifying years—the declining years, when the old magic had finally and forever ceased to work. But the memoirs got far enough to establish a pattern that becomes as predictable to the reader as a flimflam man's tent show on tour. Casanova checks into the inn, checks out the upmarket talent, screws the pick of the bunch, screws up a business deal and moves on. Roaming the whole of Europe, he penetrates the local high society in each new place, penetrates all the attractive females up to and including the nobility, works some scam to raise funds, blows it and blows town. (The two previous sentences say the same thing with the words changed. Casanova's prose works the same effect for thousands of pages, the miracle being that it isn't worked to death.)

To call Casanova's
chef d'oeuvre
repetitive is like calling Saint-Simon snobbish or de Sade sadistic. Repetition is what he lived for, especially with beautiful women. Variety had to be serial, or it wasn't variety. After he had done all the different things with the same woman, he wanted to do all the same things with different women. He could never get enough of them, and there were more of them than even he could envision. Think of it: there was one born every minute! Every second! But the eternal problem with which he faces us is that he didn't feel like that at the time. He dealt wholesale but he thought retail. Each love affair was the only one that counted for as long as it lasted. Sometimes it lasted only a matter of minutes, but the liaison got the whole of his attention, even if the Inquisition was waiting for him down on the street. He never had one eye on the clock. He had both eyes on his beloved's face, utterly caught up in the moment when her crisis of ecstasy made her soul his. Anxiety that such a revelation might never come again, as it were, conferred the precious gift of delay. He writes, “I have all my life been dominated by the fear that my steed would flinch from beginning another race; and I never found this restraint painful, for the visible pleasure which I gave always made up four fifths of mine.” Four-fifths is 80 per cent whichever way you slice it: a lot to give away. But then it was by giving that he took. Even in—especially in—bed, he could convince them that it wasn't about him, it was about them. This was, and remains, a winning formula.

.    .    .

There were serving maids whom he routinely leaped on just because he bumped into them on the stairs, and there was the occasional faded
grande dame
he more or less had to satisfy because it was easier than talking his way out of it, but on the whole he never got it on with a woman who he didn't think, while she lay in his arms, was the woman of his dreams, the one designed to appeal to his imagination by the qualities of her mind and soul as well as the beauty of her body. Women knew that about him just by the way he looked at them. He was a great lover because they knew in advance that he would love them greatly—that he cherished each one's unique individuality even though he adored them holus-bolus, as a sex, as a race, as an angelic species. The question remains whether Casanova's infinitely replicated experience of once-in-a-lifetime love has anything to do with love at all. If you believe it hasn't, he and his book are easily dismissed: they have the same significance as JFK jumping a secretary in the White House elevator and telling a crony a few minutes afterwards that he got into the blonde. If you believe it has, then Casanova is still here, now more than ever haunting the civilized world's collective consciousness, and the book of his life, for all its mephitic undertow, has the reverberating ring of an awkward truth: this man is the man you would be if you were free to act.

One of the things you would have to be free from, of course, is sexual morality. But to call Casanova free from sexual morality invites a rejoinder: sexual morality was the only kind of morality he had. About sex, he had at least a few principles, which are best examined after one notes the thoroughness with which he lacked them in all other departments. Living always beyond his means and forever running to escape the consequences, in his life as an adventurer, even more than in his loves, he was ready for anything. He made it up as he went along, and it all came true. Even his name was a fabrication: he really was Giacomo Girolamo Casanova, but his title, Chevalier de Seingalt, was one he gave himself. He was born in 1725, into a theatrical family in Venice, and on the social scale of the time show folk ranked not far above grave-diggers. Casanova's self-election to noble status was in itself a theatrical coup, and his career is best regarded as a succession of vaudeville numbers with nothing to link them except a rapidly falling and rising curtain.

As a boy, he bled easily and was thought mentally backward, but his father was astute enough to secure the patronage of the Grimani family, who staked Casanova to a course at the University of Padua, the idea being that he would have a career in the Church. Casanova graduated—one of the few examples of his properly finishing anything he began—but his entry into Holy Orders was occluded by his entry into the sister of the priest who was giving him instruction. Back in Venice and into bed with two sisters, he started attracting patrons on his own account—a talent that remained with him until the end, although the even more useful talent of keeping his patrons sweet was one he sadly lacked. Offered an ecclesiastical post in the Calabrian province of Martorano, Casanova took one look at the place and called off the deal. He knew he was meant for higher things. In Rome, he met the Pope—big game. Unfortunately, there was some fuss over a woman, and he had to skip town. After a spell in Constantinople brought him nothing but more women, he moved on to Corfu and there added to his handicaps by acquiring a taste for gambling unmatched by any concomitant ability: as a general rule, applicable to his entire lifetime, he could quit gambling only when he was in debt, and dealt with the debt by blowing the scene.

In Venice once more, he scraped a living with a violin, mastered at high speed so that he could join a theatre orchestra. A new patron was so impressed by Casanova's knowledge of the occult sciences that he considered legally adopting the prodigy into his noble family. Since Casanova's knowledge of the occult sciences was largely imaginary, there was no reason he could not have gone on expanding it until the deal was clinched, but once again scandal intervened. The tribunal in charge of religion and morals wanted to question him about possible offences in both fields. Even worse, Casanova had reason to believe that the Inquisition wanted to hear about those occult sciences. Time to take a ­powder.

It was 1749, Casanova was twenty-four, and he was on his way, which is to say on the run, seemingly forever. In Lyons, he was a Freemason; in Paris, he wrote plays; in Vienna, he met intolerance of his amatory success. Back to Venice yet again, where he was charged with sorcery and imprisoned in the notorious Leads. His daring escape was the basis of a subsequent book, which earned him some measure of the authorial prestige he always craved. Returning to Paris, he founded a lottery, the proceeds of which he neglected to abscond with—a rare lapse. He later established a silk manufactory there with hopes of success, which his success at getting a titled mistress pregnant soon translated into failure. In Geneva, he met Voltaire. In London, he was presented at court, presented a false bill of exchange, got busted and left with little to show for his stay except a fourth dose of the clap. In Berlin, Frederick the Great thought highly of him, and offered him a post as tutor to the Pomeranian Cadet Corps, but, typically, he aimed higher still, and headed for St. Petersburg and fortune. Catherine the Great offered him nothing.

In Warsaw, he fought a duel. An accusation—it was false, but it jibed with his billing—that he had embezzled the Paris lottery funds caught up with him there. Banished from Poland, he moved on to be expelled from Vienna, mainly because Maria Theresa had heard that he had been expelled from Poland. So on to Paris, in order to be expelled from France. It was as if his mug shot had been put out by Interpol. During a stretch in a Spanish slammer, he wrote a three-volume opus about Venice, probably designed as a sop to the Venetian State Inquisition. If that was his idea, it worked: in 1774, at the age of forty-nine, he got a pardon. The Inquisition got him all the same—not as a victim but as a fink. In this role, as a paid informer, he had regular employment at last. How could he screw it up? He wrote a satire that satirized the wrong patrician, and was banished all over again.

In Vienna, he finally got lucky by ingratiating himself with Count Waldstein, who, in 1785, appointed him librarian of his castle in Bohemia. There, growing old and bored, Casanova began writing his memoirs in 1789, the year of the French Revolution—an event whose significance almost entirely escaped him. He had never been that kind of revolutionary, and by now he wasn't even a rebel: he had gone legit at long last. But even while he lived out his days in provincial isolation he always dreamed of Venice, where, had he ever returned, he would undoubtedly have accomplished his own ruin all over again. In his last summer alive, two years before the century ended, the Inquisition pardoned him, but it was too late.

It was always too late, or too early, or too something. In a life of opportunism, he took every opportunity to make a shambles of anything he had managed to achieve. Confusion was a compulsion, as if everything had to be tested to the point of destruction, to prove that it wasn't real. And, in fact, nothing
was
real, except women. Women were something he could grasp, however briefly, and if you seek the rhythm of Casanova's mind working—instead of just his feet running away from trouble—it is to what he says about women that you must turn. And one of the first things he says, in the preface to his
magnum opus
, is proved by the rest of it to be true: “Feeling that I was born for the sex opposite to mine, I have always loved it and done all that I could to make myself loved by it.” Feminists should not seize too quickly on the generalized term “the sex opposite to mine.” The operative words are “to make myself loved.” That's what he really wanted to do, and that's what he really did. Women really existed for him. Everything else was a fantasy, even his literary ambitions—except in the case of this one great book, whose greatness, for all the sordid detail of unwashed linen and down-at-heel shoes, depends on making reality fantastic, a dream world like
The Thousand and One Nights
.