Cultural Cohesion (84 page)

Since the Meiji restoration the Japanese have been photographing one another and the inhabitants of every country they have invaded. They seem rarely to have decapitated anyone without getting some carefully framed before-and-after shots. The level of violence in the book is made even more terrifying by the degree of delicacy. You feel that you are at a tea ceremony with Mishima and that he might behead you and disembowel himself at any moment and in either order.

The photographs of war put McCullin's work in its proper perspective. McCullin might be trying to awaken our dormant psyches but for the Japanese the gap between everyday tranquillity and stark horror seems always to have been only a step wide. And just as readily as they photographed the violence they inflicted, they photographed the violence inflicted on them. Elegantly judged, Pompeii-like photographs of the charred bodies after the Tokyo fire raids may be edifyingly compared with similar studies obtained in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Proudly saluting from the cockpit, a kamikaze pilot taxis past a class of schoolgirls waving cherry branches in farewell. Words are needed to tell us where he is flying to, but once we know that, the picture tells us that he was there. Probably some of the schoolgirls are still alive and can pick themselves out in the picture. They were there too. Reality is the
donnée
of photography and sets the limit for how much the photographer can transform what he sees into a personal creation. For the artist photographer the limit is high but it still exists. To think it can be transcended is to be like Kant's dove, which, upon being told about air resistance, thought it could fly faster by abolishing the air.

New York Review of Books
, December
17, 1981;

later included in
Snakecharmers in Texas
, 1988

POSTSCRIPT

Like writing about television, writing about photography was a chance to talk about everything. If someone had taken a photograph in China, I could talk about China. Doing a round-up of all the world's books about photography in the past and present, I could go on for pages about time, space and the history of the world. But I couldn't go on for long about photography itself, because apart from the technicalities there isn't much to discuss, and criticism based solely on technicalities is doomed to famine. It can sound impressive, but so can an actor pretending to be a doctor. The specialist photography magazines are full of articles specifying shutter speed, focal length and what have you. No doubt it all means a lot to the adept, but it leaves the layman facing the same void as he always does when an aesthetic event is discussed in mechanical terms. A solo by Darcey Bussell, for example, can be registered on the page as a set of steps and poses with French names. Unfortunately every member of the
corps de ballet
can do them too. So the writer has evoked precisely nothing. In the case of photography the problem is exacerbated by the remorseless industrial effort to get all the relevant expertise into the camera itself, and out of the fallible hands of the goof holding it. There is indeed a miracle of creativity involved, but it is all inside the mechanism: more than a hundred and fifty years of intense technical development, none of which, if it were all forgotten tomorrow, even the most gifted photographer could begin to recapitulate.

Making a television programme about a safari in Kenya, I was supplied by my producers with the very latest Nikon. All I had to do was point it and twist the bit that stuck out until something I could see through the little window was in focus—anything. I can't even remember if I had to press a button. Perhaps it pressed its own button and told me afterwards. Anyway, I got a close-up of an angry lion's face. The lion was angry because the car I was in woke it up, and some idiot human sticking out of the top of the car was pointing a sinister-looking box of tricks at it. When the photograph came back from the chemist's, I was as open-mouthed as the lion. Cartier-Bresson would have swallowed his hyphen with envy. The photograph was as sharp as a tack, impressive as the crack of doom, frightening to chill the mind. It could have gone straight into a glossy magazine, full page, bled to the edges. There is a lot I could say concerning that photograph. I could talk about my fear and the lion's nobility, Africa's tragedy and the pathos of civilization. But there is almost nothing illuminating to say about the technique with which I secured it. With a camera like that, the lion could have taken a photograph of me.

Art is safe from such developments. We aren't, but it is. At once primitive and infinitely protean, art wasn't born of consciousness: consciousness was born of it. As long as human life lasts, art will go on being the one activity for which no amount of calculation can provide a substitute, and the job of the critic will be to explain why this is so. The ability to realize that he can never attain to an exhaustive analysis of the thing he loves best is the indispensable qualification for signing on. What he has to offer is his life, of which his learning can only be a part: the more he knows the better, but if he thinks that nothing else counts then he will count for nothing.
Primum vivere, deinde philosophari
is a rap that nobody can beat.

Reliable Essays
, 2001

INDEX

Abbott, Berenice, 589

Abbott, Jack, 408

About the House
(Auden), 15

Abrams, M. H., 445, 447, 450

Accattone,
533

Acheson, Dean, 300

Across the Rhine,
580–81

Across the River and into the Trees
(Hemingway), 208

Across the Street and into the Grill
(White), 390

Adams, Ansel, 571, 572, 582, 592–93

Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The
(Doyle), 191

Against Oblivion
(Hamilton), 88–89

Against the American Grain
(Macdonald), 182

Agee, James, 179–89, 573

Age of Anxiety, The
(Auden), 18

Aimée, Anouk, 533, 540, 546, 550–51, 552

Alberti, Guido, 545–46

Alex in Wonderland,
555

Allen, Woody, 541, 562

Allende, Salvador, 415

All What Jazz
(Larkin), 48–51, 71, 79

Altered Landscapes
(Pfahl), 599

Alvarez, A., 440–41

Amarcord,
554–55

Ambler, Eric, 191, 193

American Dream, An
(Mailer), 405

American Earthquake, The
(Wilson), 371–72, 374, 382

American in Paris, An,
523

American Photographers and the National Parks
(Cahn and Ketchum, eds.), 592–93

Amis, Kingsley, 23, 45, 68, 69, 122, 191, 193, 453

Amis, Martin, xiii, xiv, 122, 466–69

Ammons, A. R., 573

Amory, Mark, 432

Anchors Aweigh,
523

Andropov, Yuri, 299

And the Ship Sails On,
556

Angier, Carole, 276, 279, 281–82

Animal Farm
(Orwell), 285, 289, 296, 297

Anna Karenina
(Tolstoy), 215

Annotated Sherlock Holmes, The
(Baring-Gould), 196

Another Time
(Auden), 13

Antonioni, Michelangelo, 533–34, 543

Apologies to the Iroquois
(Wilson), 373

Arbus, Diane, 570

Arendt, Hannah, 479, 489–90

Arnold, Eve, 580

Arnold, Matthew, 316, 317

Aron, Raymond, 300

Art of Australia, The
(Hughes), 250

Art of the Great Hollywood Portrait Photographers, The
(Kobal), 577, 601

Ascension
(Coltrane), 50

Ashes of Gramsci, The
(Pasolini), 531

Astaire, Fred, 278, 521–22, 523

Atget, Eugene, 589–90, 593

Atherton, Gertrude, 241

At Long Last Love,
562

Attachment and Loss
(Bowlby), 505

Auden, W. H., 3–18, 58, 80, 95–96, 97, 108, 113, 201, 447, 448–49

Auerbach, Erich, 452–53

August 1914
(Solzhenitsyn), 214, 215–19

Au Pays du Grande Mensonge
(Ciliga), 288

Auroras of Autumn, The
(Stevens), 86

Autobiography
(Russell), 507

Autochromes of J. H. Lartigue, The
(Lartigue), 590

Auto da Fé
(Montale), 53–54, 457

Autumn Journal,
108

Avedon, Richard, 569

Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World, The
(Kinnell), 129–35

Axel's Castle
(Wilson), 379–80

Baby Face Nelson,
564

Backless Betty from Bondi
(Slessor), 142

Bailey, David, 578

Baker, Nicholson, xv, 188

Baker Street Studies
(Bell), 196

Balchin, Nigel, 233

Balzac, Honoré de, 120

Bancroft, Anne, 400–401

Band Wagon, The,
521, 522

Barbera, Jack, 123–28

Baring-Gould, W. S., 196, 198

Barkleys of Broadway, The,
523

“Baron de Meyer/
The New Hat Called Violette Worn by the Honorable Mrs. Reginald Fellowes—Alex, (1924)”
(Beaton), 576

Baronio, Joyce, 579

Barthes, Roland, 532, 585–604, 595

Battle of Algiers, The,
534, 544

Baudelaire, Charles, 30–31

Bausch, Pina, 556

Bay City Blues
(Chandler), 210–11

Bayley, John, 37, 112

Beaton
(Danziger, ed.), 575

Beaton, Cecil, 575–76, 583

Beatty, Warren, 564

Beautiful Changes, The
(Wilbur), 437, 441

Beautiful Stars of the Bear,
548

Bechet, Sidney, 39, 52, 82

Beiderbecke, Bix, 52, 72

Bell, H. W., 196

Beloved
(Morrison), 310, 311

Benjamin, Walter, 572, 584, 585, 586

Beresford, Bruce, 535

Bergman, Ingmar, 555, 557

Berkeley, Busby, 523–24

Berlin, Isaiah, 446–47

Berryman, John, 26, 36, 84, 114, 437

Bertrand Russell: The Spirit of Solitude (1872–1921)
(Monk), 502

Best Man, The
(Vidal), 422

Best of Photojournalism 5, The,
580

Betjeman, John, 81, 286, 432

Big Sleep, The
(Chandler), 186, 201, 203, 209

Bill Brandt: Nudes, 1945–1980,
600

Bishop, Elizabeth, 132

Bit Between My Teeth, The
(Wilson), 373, 379

Black, Dora, 511

Black Orpheus,
530

Blainey, Geoffrey, 255–56

Blow-Up,
543

Blue Dahlia, The
(Chandler), 209

Bogan, Louise, 97

Bogdanovich, Peter, 553, 557–58, 561–67

Booth, Wayne C., 443–55

Boratto, Caterina, 549

Bourke-White, Margaret, 581

Bowlby, John, 505

Boyer, Deena, 541–42, 545, 550

Brady, Veronica, 154

Brandt, Bill, 582, 600

Brecht, Bertolt, 6, 14, 500

Brennan, Christopher, 149–50, 156, 157–58

Brett Weston: Photographs from Five Decades
(Weston), 573

Brezhnev, Leonid, 410

Brideshead Revisited
(Waugh), 431, 497–98

Brief History of Time, A
(Hawking), 38

Broad Stream, The
(Stewart), 157

Brodsky, Joseph, 56–57

Bronze Horseman, The
(Pushkin), 113

Brooks, Van Wyck, 374, 376

Brown, Tina, 491

Buckland, Gail, 583

Bull, Clarence Sinclair, 577

Buñuel, Luis, 11

Burgess, Anthony, xvii, 298, 442, 581–82

Burke, Kenneth, 15, 445, 447, 450, 451

Burmese Days
(Orwell), 287

Byron, Lord, 105, 449

Cahn, Robert, 592

Callahan, Harry, 572–73

Callas, Maria, 463, 534

Call for the Dead
(le Carré), 227, 231–32

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
(Barthes), 585–604

Campbell, David, 144, 149

Camus, Albert, 220

Camus, Marcel, 530

Cancer Ward
(Solzhenitsyn), 215, 223

Canetti, Elias, 457

Cantos
(Pound), 129, 130, 134, 139

Capote, Truman, 424

Captain Quiros
(Fitzgerald), 150

Captains Courageous
(Kipling), 311

Cardinale, Claudia, 548

Carné, Marcel, 559

Carroll, Lewis, 586

Carteggio Svevo/Montale
(Montale), 457

Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 582, 590, 595

Carver, Raymond, 188

Casanova, Giacomo Girolamo, 328–39

Casanova's Homecoming
(Schnitzler), 335–37

Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, The
(Snow), 191

Castro, Fidel, 416

Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches, The
(Twain), 307, 313

Century of Japanese Photography, A
(Dower, ed.), 601

Ceremony
(Wilbur), 437

Chamberlain, Neville, 290

Chandler, Raymond, 186, 201–13

Charisse, Cyd, 522

Chaudhuri, Nirad, xiii

Christina, Queen, 368

Churchill, Winston, 220, 290, 292, 315, 483

Ciliga, Anton, 288

City Hall,
565

City of Women, The,
555

City Without Walls
(Auden), 15

Classics and Commercials
(Wilson), 373, 379

Clinton, William Jefferson (Bill), 325–27

Coburn, Bob, 601

Cocktail Party, The
(Eliot), 354

Cocteau, Jean, 256, 549

Cold War and the Income Tax, The
(Wilson), 371, 373

Coleman, Ornette, 53

Coleridge, Samuel, 220

Cole Weston: Eighteen Photographs
(Weston), 592

Collected Essays
(Orwell), 300

Collected Essays 1952–72
(Vidal), 421

Collected Poems
(Larkin), 38–48

Collected Poems
(Roethke), 95

Collected Poems
(Smith), 126

Collected Poems of James Agee, The
(Agee), 179

Collected Shorter Poems 1927–1957
(Auden), 12

Collected Shorter Poems 1930–1944
(Auden), 10, 12

Collected Short Prose of James Agee
(Agee), 179, 182, 184

Coltrane, John, 49–51

Comden, Betty, 522, 523

Common Pursuit, The
(F. R. Leavis), 349–50

Complete Poems
(Jarrell), 84

Complete Professor Challenger Stories, The,
200

Connolly, Cyril, xiv, 286

Conquest, Robert, 219, 221, 224, 225, 298–99

Conrad, Peter, 255

Contemporaries
(Kazin), 374

Contini, Gianfranco, 4, 531

Cooper, James Fenimore, 21, 316–17, 322

Cooper, Thomas, 582

Cooper-Willis, Irene, 509

Crane, Hart, 133

Crane, Ronald S., 445, 447, 450, 451

Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism
(Booth), 443–55

Croce, Benedetto, 450, 462

Cukor, George, 577

Curtains
(Tynan), 500

Curtis, Tony, 398, 399–400

Curtius, Ernst Robert, 453

Dalí, Salvador, 11

Dante Alighieri, 4, 13–14, 33, 40, 266, 308, 354–55, 380, 456

Danziger, James, 575

Da Ponte, Lorenzo, 334

Dario, Ruben, 136

Darkness at Noon
(Agee), 181

Darkness at Noon
(Koestler), 222

Darkness Falls from the Air
(Balchin), 233

Darlinghurst Nights
(Slessor), 142

Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit
(Benjamin), 585

Davie, Donald, 71

Davis, Franklin M., Jr., 580–81

Davis, Miles, 51–52, 53

Davison, Peter, 285, 291, 300

Dawe, Bruce, 159

Death in the Family, A
(Agee), 181–82, 186

Decline and Fall
(Waugh), 433, 434

Deer Park, The
(Mailer), 395, 396, 405, 406–7

Dehumanisation of Art, The
(Ortega), 588–89

Deighton, Len, 191, 192

de Laurentiis, Dino, 553

Delon, Alain, 548

Demon, The
(Lermontov), 113

Der Doppelte Boden
(Reich-Ranicki), 492

Der Weg ins Freie
(Schnitzler), 492–93

Der Widerstand Gegen den Nationalsozialismus,
482

de Santis, Pasquale, 545

de Stael, Madame, 120

Destruction of the European Jews, The,
475

Devil and James McAuley, The
(Pybus), 152–53

Devil's Eye, The,
555

Dialogue with Photography
(Hill and Cooper, eds.), 582

Diana and Nikon
(Malcolm), 569

Diaries
(Waugh), 427

Diary of a Century
(Lartigue), 590–91

Dickens, Charles, 308–9, 454

Dickinson, Emily, 439

Die Blendung,
457

Die Grenzen der Macht
(Stürmer), 489

Die Moritat von Mackie Messer
(Brecht), 14

Dienes, André de, 396

Die Seeräuber-Jenny
(Brecht), 14

Die 200 Tage von 8?,
541

Dirty Dancing,
524

Di Venanzo, Gianni, 542, 544, 545, 553

Divine Comedy, The
(Dante), 14

Dobson, Rosemary, 159

Dodge, Mabel, 173, 174–75

Dolphin, The
(Lowell), 25, 28, 36

Donen, Stanley, 522

Donovan, Terence, 578

Door into the Dark
(Heaney), 19

Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition
(Ohrn), 582

Dos Passos, John, 217

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 120

Double Bond, The
(Angier), 276, 279, 281–82

Double Fold,
xv

Double Indemnity
(Chandler), 209

Dower, John W., 601

Down and Out in Paris and London
(Orwell), 287

Doyle, Arthur Conan, 190–200, 231–32

Dream Songs
(Berryman), 26, 36, 114

Drouet, Minou, 256

Drowned and the Saved, The
(Levi), 259–73, 280, 282, 283

Dr. Zhivago
(Pasternak), 218, 220

Dubus, Andre, 188

Dudley, Helen, 508–9

Duffey, Brian, 578

Dutton, Geoffrey, 140

Dwan, Allan, 563

Eclipse, The,
543

Edgar, Stephen, 441–42

Eichmann in Jerusalem
(Arendt), 489–90