Read The Revolt of the Pendulum Online
Authors: Clive James
The Revolt of the Pendulum (2 page)
Armed with such experience – which, appropriately nuanced, can be made to sound edifying if not dramatic – it becomes difficult to avoid writing essays. The obituaries alone would
keep me busy, and there is also the necessity to bark for the various activities by which I supplement my pension now that I am no longer a wage-earner on main-channel television. Whether I go on
stage alone or tour with my song-writing partner Pete Atkin, I have to send out my handbills if I am to do my share of filling the house in the next town. Writing such material could be treated as
a formulaic chore but I prefer to give it the works. Some of the results are here, and to any readers who find the intensity of self-promotion embarrassing, I can only say that it seemed to me like
a matter of sink or swim. As for my website, www.clivejames.com, it makes no money at all but I have to publicize it if it is not to make even less, and besides, I value my twilight folly too much
to sell it short: I have never been more sure of being on to something, even if I still don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s what Prospero called a midnight mushroom. Anyway, my
web-spinning needs promotion in the MSM (mainstream media: yet another set of initials to cope with) along with anything else I get up to in these crowded days of retirement. The wares of Autolycus
rattled on his cart, but he still had to cry out that he was there. So writing the next essay is something that one is always doing, like writing the next poem. I just hope I’m getting better
at it. Encouraged by the worldwide reception for
Cultural Amnesia
, I have a second volume of the same proportions in mind, and perhaps even a third, if there is time: but the difference
between those projected books and the essays that appear in this book will mainly be a difference of scale. If I hadn’t thought that the pieces here assembled could contain the utmost of what
I have to say on their subjects, I wouldn’t have written them. That, in fact, was the attraction: the chance to prove that one’s freedom to reflect on life has not been wasted.
Being so occupied has helped to make for a quick few years. Some of the world events during this period might have seemed slow to unfold. Barack Obama was a full two years on the campaign trail
before he won a victory which will seem to history like the work of a moment. The events in Iraq, between 2003 and 2008, gave critics of allied intervention plenty of opportunity to say that an
unending nightmare had been unleashed. And indeed, for the parents and relatives of the dead soldiers and innocent civilians, there could be no quick end to the agony. But the events themselves,
despite every possible blunder having been made by the forces of salvation, turned out to be finite. The decisive moment was in early 2007, and almost all the international commentators missed it.
They had made such an investment in the idea of an irreversibly catastrophic intervention that they were disappointed, rather than chastened, by any evidence that Iraqi democracy might be
establishing itself even though the word-blind President Bush said it was. When the zealous leaders of the Sunni and the Shia finally started showing less interest in killing each other and more
interest in fighting off the attentions of al-Qa’eda, pundits accustomed to placing all blame on America were stuck with a conundrum: reluctant to admit that the Pentagon’s famous
‘surge’ might actually have made a positive difference, they were obliged to entertain the possibility that the Iraqis had their own opinions about the inevitability of a civil war. The
blogs coming out of Iraq sent a clear message that for any citizen free to act, the aim was to rebuild. But for most commentators outside the country, the conundrum was too much, and they lapsed
into echolalia. To put it bluntly, they had a theory, which was proof against any facts.
The pervasive effect of just such a blind obduracy was one of my themes for
Cultural Amnesia
. It was also a theme, steadily growing more dominant, in my previous collections of essays,
and once again it is a theme here. It’s a perennial theme. I wish it wasn’t, and by that wish I state my difference from all those negligent vigilantes who profess a grand vision of how
the world must go. (I wish I had thought of the term ‘negligent vigilantes’, but it was Alain Finkielkraut: fine phrases should never be borrowed without acknowledgement.) In the
twentieth century, many among even the best-qualified intellectuals thought that liberal democracy either had a natural outcome in Nazi-style fascism or was helpless to oppose it, and that
Communism might therefore have credentials as an historical force to shape a just future. Only slowly was the conclusion drawn that fascism and Communism were merely two different forms of
totalitarianism, and that they were far less the enemies of each other than they were the common enemy of democracy. In the twenty-first century, a further form of totalitarianism, which does not
depend on nation states, was quickly enough identified – by its own proclamations, its intentions were hard to miss – but it was thought to be an inevitable consequence of how the
liberal democracies behaved. From any sensible viewpoint, it should be clear that this latest form of the murderously irrational would be determined to expand its power even if the liberal
democracies did nothing except exist.
But a sensible viewpoint is not glamorous enough for those who are commanded by a vision, and the vision of the culpable West is now the dominant vision among the intellectuals of the world, and
all the more dominant if the West is where they come from. Those of us without that vision must content ourselves with having a viewpoint, which even at its most coherent is nothing more ambitious
than a set of views. Any set of views should logically begin with the view that there is something desirable about a political system that leaves us free to have them, even if that system finds it
difficult, as it should, to deal with views that are inimical to its existence. In any free nation, for example, there will be eloquent voices to proclaim the virtues of isolationism. And indeed
that view is considerable: it can always be plausibly said that the United States would be better off if it had never gone near Iraq. But to say that Iraq would be better off, you need to be pretty
detached about what Saddam Hussein and his ineffable sons might have done next, let alone about what they had done already. And to say the same about Darfur, if and when the cavalry rides to the
rescue, will take something beyond detachment: it will take a wilful forgetting, a rewriting of the past which will involve yet further reconstruction of the language, so that nothing can be called
evil if it is not caused by the only forces that have the power to correct it. Interference will always have a moral cost, and to accept that cost without question will always be callous. The moral
cost can even be too high: in retrospect, it might have been better if the people of South Vietnam had been left to their fate, which they would have voted for anyway, just as the people of
Czechoslovakia once voted for it, postponing their freedom into the generation after next. But the idea that there need never be a moral cost in leaving things as they are is one that only a
visionary could hold. Charles Lindbergh had a vision of isolationism that would have kept America out of World War II. But he could express his vision only as one view among others: the surest sign
that his country, when it was drawn into a war against evil, was not entirely evil in itself. It could have been said at the time that America’s only aim was to secure its oil supplies, but
it could equally have been said that the GIs were on their way to save the life of Harold Pinter, and that second thing would have been true.
My own views begin with the welfare of the common people, to which I prefer to make subsidiary any total scheme of historical necessity. Born and raised in the industrial proletariat, I have a
long memory for the forces which once exploited it, and one of them was left-wing ideology, which never ceased to believe that manifest destiny was an ally fit to command any sacrifice, including
the sufferings of the very people who were meant to benefit from the march of progress. But historical necessity, if such a thing exists, can be analysed by intellectuals only to the extent that
they are ready to deal with reality, and their best way of doing that is to begin by staying alert to the language in which they speak. If eleven million Iraqis turn up at the voting booths despite
their being threatened with death for doing so, the commentator may call them dupes if he likes, but he should know that his terms of expression prove that he is more concerned with his own wish
than with their hopes. If he calls the brave women of the Iraqi provisional government Quislings, he should at least know who Vidkun Quisling was. He should know where his own words come from, and
what they were once meant to mean. That should be his first alertness, because the area of language is the only area where he is ever likely to effect any change, and it will be a change for the
worse if all he can say compounds an illusion. So constant an attention to the use of mere words is a finicky business with small apparent reward, and the world’s vast supply of expert
onlookers get understandably impatient when they are reminded of their true and only role. But I would rather offend them than further insult the vast numbers of comparatively voiceless people they
ignore while proclaiming their concern for humanity.
‘All I have is a voice,’ said Auden, ‘to undo the folded lie.’ Coming after a decade of flirtation with romantic politics, it was one of the best things he ever said, a
permanently valuable demonstration of how a true confidence connects with a sense of duty. The operative word is ‘folded’. The writer, if he wishes to write about current affairs
– and ideally he should wish it only because he is forced to – must have the confidence to regard the unpicking of language as a proper job, and he must have the patience to do it. It
is hard work for low returns, but the same condition is true for almost everyone in the world. The workers building the luxury hotels in Dubai get fifteen minutes for lunch. They look like the
lucky ones to untold millions of people elsewhere who are doing even worse. It’s all too easy to think of poor people in the mass, and it takes only a modicum of compassion to start blaming
it all on us. But the feeling is as foolish as the thought. They
are
us: a multitude of individuals. They are just leading less fortunate lives, and anyone who writes about justice from his
privileged position as a citizen of a Western democracy will be able to do very little for them if he fails to realize that his own fortune begins with his freedom.
London, 2009
Contents
Camille Paglia Burns for Poetry
The Velvet Shackles of a Reputation
Don’t Hold Your Breath, Argentina
White Shorts of Leni Riefenstahl
THE QUESTION OF KARL KRAUS
‘A liberated woman,’ said Karl Kraus, ‘is a fish that has fought its way ashore.’ Even at the time, there were women, some of them among his cheer-squad
of beautiful mistresses, who thought he was talking through his hat. Agree with him or not, however, you wouldn’t mind being able to say something that sharp. Kraus was famous for being able
to do so whenever he wanted, but eventually, as with his hero Oscar Wilde, his fame as a wit was there instead of the full, complex, tormented and deeply contemplative man. As a writer and
practitioner of the higher journalism, he is still up there with all the other great names of literary Vienna – Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth – but up there for what,
precisely?
The risk run by the aphorist is that people will grow restless between aphorisms, because they aren’t getting enough of what it says on the label. Even while he was alive, most people
didn’t want any more of Kraus’s world view than would fit into a fortune cookie. Though he had no computer on his desk, Kraus was essentially a blogger before the fact: his basic
technique was to write a couple of hundred words about something silly in the newspaper. He sometimes wrote at length, but his admirers preferred him to keep it short. The kind of thing they liked
best from him might have been designed to pop up on a BlackBerry today. ‘An aphorism can never be the whole truth,’ he once wrote: ‘It is either a half-truth or a truth and
half.’ Yes, but that’s an aphorism. So is it true?