Cultural Amnesia (49 page)

As far as I know, Dr. Linhardt’s activities during the war made little mark on world history. One hopes they were
benign. We know what happened to Hitler: in Hegelian terms, he died cursing the German
Volk
for their shortage of development-stage. But the name to notice
is that of Friedrich Bülow. His name was still there on the title page of Kroner’s 1955 reissue of Hegel’s
Volk. Staat. Geschichte.
Though
the
reissue was in the same reliable Kroner format, there was a notable change to the exterior. The word
Volk
had disappeared from the
spine, which now read
Recht. Staat. Geschichte.
The people had been quietly replaced by the law. But on the inside of the book, the ecstatic passages about
the people chosen by history to carry the development-stuff of the world-spirit remained intact. There was no footnote to warn of the presence of toxic waste, and perhaps there should not have
been. Though I think the West German government was right to ban
Mein Kampf
even at the certain cost of its becoming a bootleg hit with neo-Nazis, on the
whole the revived democracy’s educational authorities were wise not to attempt a new tampering with established texts. The Nazis had done that, usually by banning them if not burning them:
and it hadn’t worked. Some of Hegel’s thinking had lethal tendencies, but the times had to become lethal before the tendencies became obvious; until then, those bits looked merely
silly. In 1940 Dr. Linhardt made marginal notes against any of the editor’s comments that he found too liberal (
grund falsch!
) but that was because
the Nazis had so distorted
Staat
and
Recht
that they had convinced a nonentity like Dr. Linhardt he was enrolled with
Hegel as a member of the world-historical
Volk
. Hegel’s celebration of unopposed and inexorable power had become temporarily relevant, but it was
never right. On that subject he had set Minerva’s owl flying too early. In the long run, had he lived, his poetic perceptiveness would have shown him what had gone wrong with his political
theories. Great writers supply us with the strengths to measure their weaknesses; but the latter are always there, to generate the air through which the dove flies, dreaming of freedom.

HEINRICH HEINE

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), one of the greatest writers in German, spent only the first
third of his mature creative life being a great writer in Germany. Already famous for both his poetry and his prose, he went into exile in Paris in 1831, never to return. In 1825 he had
volunteered for the Christian baptism that a Jew then needed if he were to gain German citizenship; and he had incurred the derision of some of his fellow Jews as a consequence; but it was
his revolutionary political opinions that made emigration advisable. In Paris he continued with the travel journalism that he had already pioneered as a serious form, and added a body of
miscellaneous writings recommending a closer identification of French and German intellectual achievement. On whatever subject, he wrote a clear prose whose wide-ranging play of thought has
never gone flat: on every page will be found something relevant now. As a cosmopolitan democrat he eventually incurred the disapproval of the more incendiary revolutionaries, and might easily
have died in a duel. Instead, he was condemned to the long agony of spinal paralysis, which kept him in bed for the last seven years of his life, during which he wrote and published books and
collections that can be seen in retrospect to express
the romantic age at its height. His status as a displaced person, and a prophetic statement—that those who burn
books will one day burn people—combined to place him, politically, a hundred years before his time. Nietzsche thought him second only to Goethe among the German poets. Beginners who
start with his poem about the slave ship (“
Das Sklavenschiff
”) will get the immediate and correct impression of a brave liberal intelligence
combined with a vaulting lyric gift. Both characteristics transferred readily to his prose, making it one of the first and finest models for what we now see as desirable in literary
journalism.

I take pride in never being rude to anyone on this earth, which
contains a great number of unbearable villains who set upon you to recount their sufferings and even recite their poems.

—HEINRICH HEINE,
Reise von München nach Genua
, CHAPTER 1, P. 193

T
HE JOKE STILL
rings
true. Hearing a man recite his poems unbidden remains even worse than hearing him recount his sufferings. So Heine’s sarcastic crescendo is as funny as ever after more than 150 years. But
the statement as a whole has been overtaken by time. The possibility of choosing not to be rude has long vanished. It was already vanishing when Yeats said, “Always I encourage,
always.” A few years later, and Yeats’s prominence on the radio would have ensured that the heaps of unsolicited manuscripts he was already receiving would have increased to teetering
hills that he could no longer consider being polite about. The mass media, even when a literary figure did his best to avoid their embrace, eventually made it certain that there could be no
natural, human connection between the illuminated exemplar and the solicitous disciple. There is no real relationship, for example, between ordinary letters and fan letters. In the
pre-celebrity-culture world, an important writer received a lot of letters, but they all, in some way, had to do with his work, even when the correspondent’s own work was the subject under
discussion. Later on, in the celebrity
age we now all inhabit, the fan letter is connected only with the addressee’s fame: it has nothing to do with his achievement. If
it has, it is not really a fan letter: it is an ordinary letter buried in the pile of fan letters. Circumstances dictate that it will be buried deep.

A woman much more original than she is often given credit for, Greta Garbo was one of the first
international celebrities to spot what was going on. Joan Crawford answered every fan letter she was ever sent: she was under the illusion that they were ordinary letters, and that there were
just a lot of them. Garbo never answered a single fan letter in her whole Hollywood career. She ordered them destroyed before they reached her. The few that did reach her she threw into the fire.
She was acting on the defensible assumption that they had already done their work simply through having been sent. She also showed acute insight in divining that there was no appropriate
response. The sort of person who might send a fan letter would take any form of personal reply as the beginning of a relationship. It was not given to one person to maintain even a small
proportion of those possible relationships in a single lifetime. Dismissing the prospect was thus the only way of dealing with it. As the most famous woman in the world, only Garbo could know
that the sole means of behaving politely was to subtract herself from the whole monstrously amplified anomaly.

It will be argued that Heinrich Heine was not Greta Garbo. But he practically was. Heine was famous on the scale of Byron
and Victor Hugo. If there could be a twentieth-century equivalent to his kind of literary prominence—you have to imagine a Philip Larkin as famous as Jeffrey Archer—he would be snowed
under with correspondence that had no clear instigation except his fame. As things were, the flow of attention was on a scale that, though great, allowed him to think he still had a choice. Even
in retrospect, however, it is remarkable that he chose not to be rude. His nature must have been uncommonly sweet. It might also have been perilously gullible. The sheer volume of correspondence
with which any literary figure, no matter how obscure, is nowadays inundated has the dubious advantage of uncovering a full taxonomy of the literary aspirant. The correspondence from the obvious
maniacs bears a disturbing resemblance to the correspondence from the apparently sane. The disturbing element springs from the dreadful suspicion that the normal-sounding ones might not be quite
all there either. Leaving aside the typical appurtenances of the nut letter—the many closely written or typed pages, the numerous cut-out inserts, the documentary
evidence to illustrate some rankling item of litigation—the things that the psycho supplicants want are wanted also by the sane. They want you to read a manuscript. Often the manuscript is
huge, but they want you to read it. Some of them, verging on the nutty, want you to help write the next draft. A few, nutty but perhaps not irreversibly so, will generously suggest that after you
have arranged for its publication, the title page might carry your name. A very few, nutty on a career basis, will insist that it carry both your names, and there will be the occasional
one—the supreme nut, the dingbat
in excel sis
—who thinks
your
next book should carry
his
name. Backing up all these suggestions, in all their varieties, will be the general argument that the publishing industry, as at present constituted, is not
favourable to the individual talent. The publishers have formed a conspiracy against any fresh voice.

To the occasional sane-sounding letter informed by the same assumption, it is possible, if one has the
time, to reply with the truth. The truth ought to be so obvious that it needs no pointing out to anyone not mentally unbalanced, but there is always the chance that your correspondent has lost
his judgement temporarily just from the fact of knowing you, and knowing you to be a writer—as you yourself might temporarily lose your judgement just from knowing somebody and knowing him
to be a doctor. If you have ever found yourself describing your symptoms to a new acquaintance who had until then been under the impression that he was meeting you in social circumstances for a
few drinks, you will see how it happens that people who have been in your life for years—good, solid friends, sometimes—can be struck simultaneously with the unfortunate urge to write
(the sudden disease that Dr. Johnson, following Juvenal, called
scribendi cacoethes
) and the capacity to forget common manners. Anyway, whatever the
reasons, and without warning, someone you thought you knew well is telling you that he requires your assistance in getting his manuscript past the usual barriers thrown up by publishers to ward
off original talent. It is made clear that a recommendation, to your agent if not to your publisher, is the very least favour expected. What do you say?

You say the truth: there are no such barriers. Publishers are in business
to publish a marketable
manuscript, and go to some expense employing professional readers in order to ensure that such manuscripts may be found, among the mountain ranges of unmarketable ones. (A single glance at the
clogged throughput of this traffic in any publisher’s office would be enough to convince the independent onlooker that the old saw about the average novel is nothing but the truth: the
average novel does not get published.) Recommendations never work: publishers are too well aware that whoever does the recommending might be under pressure, and anyway an author’s personal
marketability is no proof of his capacity to detect it in others. You might be sincerely passionate on behalf of a friend, but sincerity will not do: a good publisher will sometimes be prepared
to lose money on a writer he believes in, but not on one that
you
believe in. Just making these simple points will take you at least a page of prose, which
will make you impatient of lost time, so try to remember that it’s your friend, and not you, who has tested the friendship. Blame him, not yourself. Getting harder not to be rude,
isn’t it? Things will be easier all round if he has included his manuscript, because the awesome bulk of its presence will help you reclassify him in the screwball category where he
belongs.