The Writing Life Page 4

  But irony does not diminish in any way either the energy he expended in his fight against Nazism or his courage. It cost him many years of exile and his natural audience, the one that over more than thirty years he had made his own, and the right to publish in his homeland. It is only because he was such an indefatigable worker and had such a strong sense of his own destiny as writer, because he needed so much to hang on to his ‘secrets’, to the ‘dignity of play’, that it did not cost him as well some of the greatest of his works.

  The Goethe book, Lotte in Weimar, and the four Joseph novels, are not only a marvellous expression of culture as he understood it – and all the more since they were made in defiance of the absolute challenge to it – but a tribute as well to his powers of dedication and belief. It is they, with their essential lightness, their freedom from taint, rather than his political activities, that stand as a counterweight to the brutalities of the period and so triumphantly outlast them.

  Mann had always written articles on social and political matters. However much he protested the opposite, he was at home with controversy. He also saw himself, in a very German way, as ‘representative’ – the idea has no equivalent in our literary culture; no writer in English has ever presented himself, I think, as the personification of the language and the living embodiment, for his time, of all that can best be said in it. Mann had always been in the public eye. He orchestrated his reputation, enjoyed his fame, and enjoyed even more when it came – from America of course – his celebrity; and it was his celebrity that had to be exploited when he came to fulfil his role as the good German, since its main target was political opinion in the United States. I say this not to diminish the part he played but to suggest how many-sided it was, and the ways in which the use of it, the usefulness of it, was not always in his control.

  Given the way Mann saw things, he could have done nothing else. But there were others and they acted differently. One of them was the poet Gottfried Benn, the same poet we have just seen Mann referring to in his diary.

  Another unpolitical man, Benn was one of the leading voices of pre-Nazi Germany, an expressionist, a Francophile, insistent always that poetry existed in its own world, free of the sociopolitical. But in a famous broadcast of 1933 he supported the election of the Nazis, and as vice-president of the writers’ wing of the Prussian Academy drafted the declaration that all German writers were asked to make giving their unconditional support, with a simple yes or no, to the new regime – incidentally, the answer Mann gave was deliberately ambiguous, and it was to be another three years before he made his final break with his homeland. Benn meanwhile, within the year in fact, had seen his error, and while Mann was still being published in Germany was expelled from all his official positions and forbidden to work professionally, either in medicine (he was a skin specialist) or literature.

  Early on in the regime he had written a letter of challenge to the émigrés, especially those, like Heinrich Mann, who were not Jewish. Now he did not leave Germany and join them but went into what he called an inner emigration: silence. He joined the army, put himself at the service of German soldiers on the Eastern Front, wrote only for himself, and did not publish again until 1948. He was choosing to share with his fellow Germans an experience he felt he could not walk away from because they could not.

  In the writer’s way of being always in at least two minds, I find it hard to choose between these very different ways of responding to an impossible situation: the one acting up to an international audience, a courageous speaking out, and making himself endlessly available for comment, of a man who wanted nothing more than to be allowed to get on with his own writing, but who recognised a solemn public duty; in Benn’s case an acceptance, out of sight of all witnesses but himself, of a silence he could only hope would be temporary, and a dedication, in the meantime, to the physical suffering of men whose life and fate, inside the historical moment, he felt it was his duty to share.

  Like a good many writers, I suspect, who have spent their whole lives on the light side of history, I am haunted by the lives of those who have found themselves in darker places and in darker times. By that no doubt terrifying phone-call from Stalin, for example, that left Pasternak unable to find the few words in support of a fellow poet that might have saved Mandelstam from deportation to Siberia and an anonymous death. By the situation Camus found himself in at the height of the Algerian war. By the different paths taken in the Nazi period by Mann and Benn.

  At a time when everything, including even what we used to call history, has become spectacle, an extension of the twenty-four hour news cycle, we might have to resist the recruiting of our support – which means our name and whatever may have accrued to it as ‘recognition value’ – in any but the most serious causes. The expression of opinion, which is a slippery enough commodity anyway, is just another form of self-presentation, a temptation to talk – and trivial talk – that is, as I said at the beginning, the real enemy of writers, and all the more tempting in this case because it flatters with the assurance of public importance, and because real or whipped-up energy, in the overheated world of the media, can seem such a reassurance of presence.

  The writer is most present in the writing itself; which is a product of silence. We are luckiest, as writers, if the society we live in allows us the privilege of silence. But one that is chosen, not enforced.

  Annual address to English PEN, London, 1998

  ‘THE MOST BEAUTIFUL AND PUREST MIRROR’

  TOTAL WAR AND GENOCIDE are not modern concepts. Early on in the Iliad, Meneleus, Helen’s deserted husband, captures a rich Trojan, Adrestus, and is tempted to accept a ransom and spare his life. His brother Agamemnon, the Greek leader, is furious: ‘Did the Trojans treat you so handsomely when they were your guests? No, we are not going to leave a single one of them alive, down to the babies in their mother’s wombs – not even they must live. The whole people must be wiped from existence, and none be left to remember them and shed a tear.’

  Only Achilles, in his hatred of the other Greeks after his quarrel with Agamemnon, is more extreme. ‘How happy I should be,’ he tells Patroclus, ‘if not a Trojan got away alive, not one, and not an Argive either, and we two alone survived to pull down Troy’s diadem of towers, single-handed.’

  The Iliad has two great themes.

  One is the splendours and miseries of what it is to be human and mortal; to be one of those ‘who have’, as Achilles tells Priam, ‘sorrow woven in the very pattern of our lives’; ‘for whose feet’, as Sarpedon on the Trojan side puts it, ‘Death has a thousand pitfalls, and no man can save himself or cheat him.’ Violent death in all its forms is examined in the Iliad in a warrior class for whom, because of the spiritual demands it makes, extinction in battle surpasses every other human experience. This is the warrior ethos.

  But not all the characters in the Iliad belong to that class. Thousands of ‘average and inferior troops’ are slaughtered; their deaths go unrecorded, they remain anonymous. There are women too, who are traded like cattle, or worry and grieve, and if they survive are carried off, like Hecuba, Cassandra and Hector’s wife Andromache, as spoils of war. ‘Heroes’ in their dozens are named, and their deaths are described in shocking anatomical detail, but fewer than a score of them emerge as living characters: Agamemnon and Meneleus, old Nestor, Achilles and Patroclus, Odysseus, the two Ajaxes and Diomedes among the Greeks, Hector, Paris, Glaucus, Sarpedon, Aeneas among the Trojans. These are ‘leaders’, and a man who leads, as Odysseus insists, ‘is duty bound to stand unflinchingly and to kill or die’. He has chosen war as the context for what Necessity demands of him: a death.

  ‘There were times at home,’ Achilles tells the ambassadors who come to tempt him back into battle, ‘when I had no higher ambition than to marry some suitable girl of my own class and enjoy the fortune my father Peleus had made … But Destiny has left me two courses on my journey to the grave. If I stay here and play my part in the siege of Troy there is no homecoming for me, tho
ugh I shall win eternal fame. If I go home to my own country, I shall be spared an early death but my name will be lost.’

  He chooses fame, of course: but later, in the After-life, in his bitter understanding at last of what it is to be alive and living, he tells Odysseus, who visits him there: ‘Better to work the soil as a serf, on hire to some impoverished landless peasant, than to be a king among the dead.’ But that is in another poem.

  The other great theme of the work is what Simone Weil calls ‘the greatest calamity the human race can experience’, the destruction of that noblest and most complex of man’s achievements, that embodiment of co-operation and neighbourliness, of order and art and industry and the law, a city.

  Troy, standing at the beginning of all western history – no, before those remote beginnings – is emblematic of every city, in every war, in the twenty-seven centuries since Homer created his epic song of mourning for individual loss and the destruction of many-towered ‘holy Ilium’.

  Two groups make up the opposing forces here: an army of invading heroes, plus foot soldiers and servants – a loose confederation of opportunistic heroes and their allies – and Troy’s beleaguered citizens; highly civilised – perhaps even over-civilised – town-dwellers, luxuriously domesticated, as we see in the description in Book VI of Priam’s palace and its extended household of his sons and their wives, and in every way courteous and stylishly refined. Hector speaks of the Trojan ladies in their trailing gowns. Priam, in a bitter moment after Hector has been killed, accuses his remaining sons of being ‘no more than heroes of the dance, who win your laurels on the ballroom floor when you are not robbing your own people of their sheep and kids’.

  The invaders, rough farmers and family men, are far from home. ‘Home’ is what the Trojans have to defend. As one of them, Dolon, tells Odysseus and Ajax in a chance night encounter, ‘As for our allies, they are asleep. They leave us to keep watch. Their women and children are not lying close at hand.’

  Hector, who has the heavy responsibility of being the protector of Troy, is the most rounded and sympathetic character in the poem. He has no illusions about what is at stake. We see him in an intimate moment, at home with his wife and child. ‘Yet I am not so much distressed,’ he tells Andromache, ‘by what the Trojans will suffer, or Hecuba, or King Priam, or all my gallant brothers whom the enemy will fling down in the dust, as by the thought of you, dragged off weeping by some man-at-arms to slavery. I see you in Argos, toiling for some other woman at the loom, or carrying water from an alien well, a helpless drudge with no will of your own. “There goes the wife of Hector,” they will say when they see you in tears … And every time you hear it you will feel another pang at the loss of the one man who might have kept you free.’

  He holds his arms out to take the child, Astyanax: ‘But the boy shrank back with a cry … alarmed by his father’s appearance. He was frightened by the bronze of the helmet and the horsehair plume he saw nodding grimly down at him. His father and his lady mother had to laugh.’

  The moment, for all its lightness, is charged with pathos. It is also prophetic. Later, just such an armed man will snatch Astyanax from his mother’s arms and cast him down from the walls of Troy.

  Athenian scholars of the fourth century BC, and critics in eighteenth-century Europe who insisted on decorum and the rules, took Homer to task for the inappropriateness to epic dignity of his similes. But for ordinary readers these have always provided some of the Iliad’s best-loved passages.

  Sharply observed and down-to-earth, these small life-studies establish, amid so much striving and so much angry strife, what the norm might be, and offer a critique, typical of Homer’s complex and contradictory view, of the warrior’s cult of death. At the most unlikely moments, the poem shifts perspective to take in a world of farming, herding, hunting, the raising of crops and vines; of seafaring and weather-watching; or, more surprisingly, ‘an honest woman balancing the wool against the weights to make sure of the meagre pittance she is earning for her children’, or ‘a little girl trotting at her mother’s side and begging to be carried, plucking her skirt and looking up with streaming eyes till at last she takes her in her arms’; or again, ‘a boy at the seaside playing childish games with the sand, building a castle to amuse himself, and then, with his hands and feet, destroying the whole work for fun’.

  This is like the shield that Hephaestus makes for Achilles in Book XIII, which shows two cities; one beleaguered like Troy by an army, the other the scene of weddings, banquets, wise men sitting in judgement, fields with hired reapers and herds of sheep and cattle, and at last ‘a dancing-floor, with youths and marriageable maidens hand in hand, dancing’.

  Two visions: of warriors at their business, obsessed with the inevitability of death, and to balance this, the dailyness of life and living.

  Two other aspects of the poem have over the centuries attracted critical complaint. One is Homer’s irreverence towards the gods, the other the sometimes unheroic light in which his ‘heroes’ are seen. Both, to us, seem refreshingly modern.

  The Olympian gods, each with a name and a distinct personality, embody those undefinable forces in us, and in the world around us, that govern human existence: earthquakes, storms, such outbreaks of chaos as rebellion and war, but also the full range of sexual proclivities, and madness and psychotic rage. The pantheon on Olympus is a family – we would call it a dysfunctional one – whose antics, as Homer presents them, are all too human in being for the most part absurd.

  Father Zeus (a serial philanderer) has supreme authority, but his sister/spouse, Hera, his two brothers, Ares and Poseidon, his children – Aphrodite (fathered by Zeus alone), Athene (Hera’s daughter), and Leto’s twins, Apollo and Artemis – constantly undermine his will with special pleading, or through plots, or in open rebellion. Entirely self-willed, they take sides in human affairs, intervene on behalf of their favourites, are childishly vindictive; and since they are immortal, and know nothing of human fear or grief, know nothing either of human kindness or compassion.

  When Homer calls one of his heroes ‘godlike’, the compliment has a double edge. It suggests that in being superhuman like the gods he is less than human as well. Hence those occasions when heroes, like the gods, act in ways that are unworthy of them. A lot of the Iliad is about men and gods behaving badly.

  When a man behaves badly the result is tragic. When gods do so, because it is petty and incongruous, it can also be comic.

  Aphrodite is wounded in the hand and flies weeping home. ‘Father Zeus,’ her sister Athene bitchily observes, ‘I hope you will not take it amiss when I suggest your Cyprian daughter must have been at work again, luring Achaean women into the arms of the Trojans she loves so dearly [a sly reference to Paris]’. ‘One of these ladies evidently wears a golden brooch, and Aphrodite scratched her dainty hand on it …

  ‘This only drew a smile from the Father of men and gods. But he called Aphrodite to his side and said: “Fighting, my child, is not for you. You are in charge of wedlock and the tender passions. We will leave the enterprising War-god and Athene to look after military affairs.”’

  What is so astonishing, always, is the even-handedness with which Homer, unlike the gods, deals with both sides of the conflict. The contrast is with that other great foundation book of our culture, the Hebrew Bible. Its great subject, the redemption of a fallen world, lies beyond the classical mind, but its vision of the damned and the saved allows for nothing of Homer’s impartiality and noble compassion. The enemies of its chosen people – Philistines, Canaanites, Medes and Persians – are all equally beneath contempt.

  Homer’s largeness of spirit shows itself in the great penultimate scene of the poem, when Priam’s eyes dwell on the killer of his son and he sees ‘with admiration how big and beautiful Achilles was … and Achilles noted with equal admiration the noble looks and utterance of Dardanian Priam’. This is the same new-found magnanimity with which the Greeks treat one another at the funeral games for Patroclus.


  We glimpse it again in an image, a moment of suspended stillness, that exists for once to illustrate nothing but itself: ‘There are nights when the upper air is windless and the stars in heaven stand out in their full splendour round the moon; when every mountain-top and headland and ravine starts into view, as the infinite depths of the sky are torn open to the very firmament … There were a thousand fires burning on the plain, and round each one sat fifty men in the light of the blaze, while the horses stood by their chariots, munching white barley and rye.’ The lovely inclusiveness of that looks forward to Shakespeare or Tolstoy.

  The Iliad reminds us that we inhabit a world of unfinished stories, and echoes, the repetition of age-old horrors and miseries. No wonder, in a month when the news is yet again out of Gaza and Ashkelon, that for those, as Simone Weil wrote in 1942, ‘who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the centre of human history, the Iliad is its most beautiful and purest mirror’.

  Australian Literary Review, 2009

  THE ART OF LOVE

  THE ARS AMATORIA PRESENTS itself as a didactic poem in the manner of Vergil’s Georgics, but if we expect it to be solemn and improving we will from the start be confounded. Its subject is neither farming nor military tactics, hunting, horsemanship, seafaring, rhetoric or any other practical and socially useful activity. In the topsy-turvy ‘modern’ world that Ovid introduces us to, the flaneur’s world of cruising the streets of a vast cosmopolitan city – of shopping and partygoing; of theatres, taverns, temples, synagogues, colonnades, racetracks, piazzas – his subject is the entirely unsolemn and to this point unconsidered art, or so the poet would have us believe, of getting and keeping a lover.