Even as We Speak (2 page)

It’s a dreadful thought, and I wouldn’t want to try erecting it into a principle. For one thing, as Raymond Aron suggested in his calling-card booklet
Le Spectateur
engagé
, it is always a mistake to underestimate the role of sheer obtuseness in human affairs. You don’t need to have malice aforethought to make a travesty of the history
happening around you. Benevolence aforethought can work the same trick. The mountainous accumulation of progressive theorizing that we nowadays characterize as
gauchiste
grew out of the
most generous side of the human character. Even Karl Popper, the great deconstructor of Karl Marx’s scientific pretensions, took care to acknowledge his stature as an inspirational visionary.
For a hundred and fifty years, left-wing analysis retained the impetus of Christian revelation. Even after the Soviet Union, its holy land, showed clear signs of coming to pieces, the Marxist
heritage retained its prestige. In the Soviet bloc nobody with any sense believed any of it – direct experience had done its work – but in the West there was still a reputation for
frivolity to be earned by not paying it sufficient respect. By 1979, when I published my second collection of critical pieces,
At the Pillars of Hercules
, the dissident movement in the
USSR had built up an impressive body of achievement, but it is possible to guess, by the tone of what I wrote on the subject, that I thought there were intelligent readers in the West who might
still need persuading that some of their dearest beliefs were in the process of being not just questioned peripherally but discredited utterly. The same was still true in 1982, when I published
From the Land of Shadows
. In retrospect, 1982 was the year when the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union became inevitable. The tanks of the Red Army should have come to Poland: when they
didn’t it was a sign that they would never come again. But in a piece about Osip Mandelstam, I can still be found speaking as if the historical forces that did for him might yet do for
us.

A paranoid reflex? Possibly. A reactionary view, certainly: but the question remains of what I was reacting against. I wish it had been a figment of my imagination, but all the evidence that has
accumulated since suggests that I was right to start asking myself a new question. In cancer research, it was the asking of a new question that revolutionized the field. The old question, which had
had the merit of seeming reasonable but the drawback of being unanswerable, was: why do some people get cancer? The new question was: why doesn’t everyone get it? The answer turned out to be
that everyone does, all the time, but a mechanism called apoptosis ensures that in most people the disease makes no progress. In politics and culture, my old question, prompted by the seemingly
anachronistic savagery of the times I had been born into, had been about totalitarianism: why does it sometimes happen, what starts it? My new question was: what if it always happens, and it takes
something to stop it? The implications of this line of thought were unsettling, but they had the merit of opening up to interpretation a vast array of phenomena that I had previously found
baffling. The most immediately alarming of these was constituted by the successive waves of pseudo-scientific dogma that had taken over humane studies in the universities, most damagingly in the
English faculty. Most of this busy but essentially vacuous theorizing could be traced back to the obscurantism of the French left, an obscurantism whose origins could in turn be traced back to the
period of the Occupation, when there had been shamefully good reasons for intellectuals to hatch an impersonal language by which history would take responsibility for what they said. What was
startling, however, was the way that these Laputan doctrines, all dedicated to the dismantling of humane culture rather than its protection, continued to flourish as belief in the prospect of an
egalitarian utopia declined. Indeed they burgeoned, with constantly self-renewing supplies of virulent energy.

Capped by its masterpiece, political correctness, the irrationality in the universities clearly had its provenance in the classic Left. Other rampaging viruses just as clearly had their
provenance in the classic Right: specialization, atomization, niche-marketing, the transformation of tabloid journalism into a sort of plain-clothes police state – they all worked the sadly
recognizable trick of erecting opportunism to the status of a principle. Whatever their origins, it seemed more realistic to treat these developments as malignant strains bursting with their own
vitality, rather than as mere symptoms of a benign system grown weary. As a corollary, the main discussion from now on would have to be about what values would prevail in bourgeois democracy, and
not about how bourgeois democracy would be replaced. But by now everyone was acting that way, even if they could not yet bring themselves to declare it. The tendency was well established by the
time I published
Snakecharmers in Texas
in 1989. The Soviet Union was on its last legs and the End of History was already being proclaimed. (For the quarter of the world’s population
who were still up to their necks in history, this was one more insult than they needed, but by some trick of the mind the Chinese as individuals have never mattered much more to us than they did to
Mao.) It was at last being generally accepted that the only struggle for power that counted would take place within the society we already had. In the eye of eternity, such an acceptance had only
ever been a matter of time. What Lassalle tried to tell Marx was always going to be true: the free-market economy, as an economic system, had a much greater potential for development than Marx
ascribed to it, whereas the command economy had much less. Despite the perennial suspicion of the totalitarian Left that the totalitarian Right was capitalism’s logical offshoot and natural
ally, the bourgeois democracy so despised by both extremes inexorably proved, by its power to defend itself, that it was capitalism’s natural host; and, by its power to go on developing a
supervening structure of liberal institutions, that it was the only political system with a plausible claim to the future, because it alone could accommodate the unexpected. Bourgeois democracy has
never been susceptible to exhaustive analysis: it has always grown beyond the limitations ascribed to it by its critics because it is capable of listening to them. It doesn’t always listen,
and scarcely ever at the right time: but the possibility of listening is not ruled out, and that’s enough.

It would have gone beyond conceit, and far into megalomania, to suppose that it was my business to speak in a way which would ensure that bourgeois democracy would listen to me. In
The
Dreaming Swimmer
(1992), my last book of collected pieces before this one, the only section of the Establishment I specifically targeted as an audience was the television executives, whom I
took every opportunity to lecture on their duty to sustain public service broadcasting. They greeted my passionate sentiments with deafening applause and altered their conduct not one iota. I would
have been surprised had it been otherwise. Really, in all these books, I have had no other audience in mind except people like myself: generalists repelled by an age of increasing specialization,
misfits caught between the active and the contemplative life, hustlers too hard at work to examine at leisure the way the world is going yet incurably athirst for the totality of knowledge –
the true, the eternal students. If I am right, and all the forces which made life an out-and-out nightmare in the totalitarian societies are likely, albeit in less toxic form, to go on spoiling the
daydream of the democratic ones, then such non-utilitarian concepts as humanity and individuality will always have to be fought for. They will be best fought for by those of us who know something
about what life is like when they are absent, and by those young people to whom we succeed in passing on our historic memories. It is all talk, but this is a job that can be done only by people
talking. Even as we speak, so shall our children live. For someone who gives his time and effort to this kind of writing, a proud view is always handy to give him courage: he can think of himself
as the people’s champion. For the humble view that he needs to stay sane, he can always console himself with the realization that to be ignored by the state is his proper destiny. Were things
otherwise, the state would be in a worse condition than he is. Anton Kuh, from whose writings I took the epigraph at the head of this introduction, was one of the Viennese coffee-house wits whose
mastery of the brief critical essay reached its apotheosis in the last nervous years before the
Anschluss
. He did bits and pieces: a parody here, a
feuilleton
there, a cabaret act
around the next corner. Among his little triumphs was a prosodic analysis of Hitler’s oratorical style that would have earned him the reward of death by torture if the Nazis had ever caught
him.

If I had the audacity and the sparkling talent of Anton Kuh, I would call him my kind of writer. Yet along with his moral and verbal gifts went a gift which among writers is even rarer – a
sure sense of the complex, mutually sustaining relationship between society and the arts, between politics and civilization. Even as disaster loomed, Kuh, like so many of his fellow Jewish men of
letters, found himself desperately conjuring up bright ideas about how it might be staved off. Kuh’s brightest notion was for the government to attract a last-minute majority among the people
by springing one of the most popular Socialist leaders from gaol. Kuh shared this idea with Mahler’s widow, the famous and famously influential Alma. To Kuh’s astonishment and
gratification, Alma arranged a meeting between Kuh and a top-echelon government official. The official listened to Kuh’s proposal in detail, promised to do something about it, and left for
his ministry. Kuh left for the railway station, where he caught the last train for Prague that was not boarded by Stormtroopers at the frontier. With the solid realism that lay at the foundation of
his brilliant facility, he had correctly deduced that any administration with time to consider his ideas was doomed.

Anton Kuh died forgotten in New York in 1940, from one of those heart attacks which among his generation were the polite way of saying heartbreak. But like his acidly lyrical voice, the message
of his precisely calculated getaway is still transparent across time: if we would speak to each other, we must speak first of all for ourselves, with no other end in view save to speak well. My
usual thanks go to the editors who helped me try to do this: they had a lot to put up with, but I like to think it was mainly because I was trying to get a lot said.

London,
2001

Who wrote this? ‘Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies
sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’ But you guessed straight away: George Orwell. The subject stated up front, the sudden acceleration
from the scope-widening parenthesis into the piercing argument that follows, the way the obvious opposition between ‘lies’ and ‘truthful’ leads into the shockingly abrupt
coupling of ‘murder’ and ‘respectable’, the elegant, reverse-written coda clinched with a dirt-common epithet, the whole easy-seeming poise and compact drive of it, a world
view compressed to the size of a motto from a fortune cookie, demanding to be read out and sayable in a single breath – it’s the Orwell style. But you can’t call it Orwellian,
because that means Big Brother, Newspeak, The Ministry of Love, Room 101, the Lubyanka, Vorkuta, the NKVD, the MVD, the KGB, KZ Dachau, KZ Buchenwald, the
Reichsschrifttumskammer
, Gestapo
HQ in the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.
Arbeit macht frei
,
Giovinezza
,
Je suis partout
, the compound at Drancy, the Kempei Tai, Let A Hundred Flowers Bloom,
The Red
Detachment of Women
, the Stasi, the Securitate, cro-magnon Latino death squad goons decked out in Ray-bans after dark, that Khmer Rouge torture factory whose inmates were forbidden to scream,
Idi Amin’s Committee of Instant Happiness or whatever his secret police were called, and any other totalitarian obscenity that has ever reared its head or ever will.

The word ‘Orwellian’ is a daunting example of the fate that a distinguished writer can suffer at the hands of journalists. When, as almost invariably happens, a totalitarian set-up,
whether in fact or in fantasy – in Brazil or in
Brazil
– is called Orwellian, it is as if George Orwell had conceived the nightmare instead of analysed it, helped to create it
instead of helping to dispell its euphemistic thrall. (Similarly Kafka, through the word Kafkaesque, gets the dubious credit for having somehow wished into existence the same sort of bureaucratic
labyrinth that convulsed him to the heart.) Such distortions would be enough to make us give up on journalism altogether if we happened to forget that Orwell himself was a journalist. Here, to help
us remember, are the twenty volumes of the new complete edition, cared for with awe-inspiring industry, dedication and judgement by Peter Davison, a scholar based in Leicester, who has spent the
last two decades chasing down every single piece of paper his subject ever wrote on and then battling with publishers to persuade them that the accumulated result would supply a demand. The All of
Orwell arrives in a cardboard box the size of a piece of check-in luggage: a man in a suitcase. As I write, the books are stacked on my desk, on a chair, on a side table, on the floor. A full, fat
eleven of the twenty volumes consist largely of his collected journalism, reproduced in strict chronology along with his broadcasts, letters, memos, diaries, jottings,
et
exhaustively and
fascinatingly
al
. The nine other volumes, over there near the stereo, were issued previously, in 1986–87, and comprise the individual works he published during his lifetime,
including at least two books that directly and undeniably affected history. But, lest we run away with the idea that
Animal Farm
and
Nineteen Eighty-Four
are the core of his
achievement, here, finally, is all the incidental writing, to remind us that they were only the outer layer, and could not have existed without what lay inside. Those famous, world-changing novels
are just the bark. The journalism is the tree.