Latest Readings (5 page)

Phantom Flying Saucer

IF A BOOK CONTAINS
hard facts about World War II, I find it hard to toss it aside even when the author inadvertently makes clear that he has fallen for a journalistic myth. I’m too scared of missing something vital. In
Last Days of the Reich
, James Lucas tells the awful story, not often enough told, of the atrocities that went on after the war was over. In some of the countries which had come under the control of the Soviet Union, or else of the Communist partisans, the locals strove to show any German civilians they could catch that the behavior of the Wehrmacht and the SS in Russia could have its counterpart in central Europe now that the tables had been turned. Hounded to death by the thousands, the victims were innocent civilians; but the victors were working on the principle that nobody was an innocent civilian. James Lucas, who died in 2002, was the author of a whole row of secondary books
about various aspects of the war: the kind of book that is useful but not really essential. His
Last Days of the Reich
, however, would come close to being essential if it did not demonstrate at one point that the author can’t tell a fact from a myth. He reports that the German aircraft industry, in its last phase before it ran out of petrol, developed a flying saucer that flew at eighteen hundred miles an hour. Connoisseurs of sensationalist rubbish will have met this German flying saucer before. In
Brighter than a Thousand Suns
, Robert Jungk’s international best seller of 1970, the German flying saucer put in an appearance as if Jungk knew all about it. Excited journalists had to be told by aviation experts that if the Germans had developed a high-speed saucer, then it would have been copied straight after the war by either the United States or the Soviet Union, or perhaps by both. Already in contention for military supremacy, the two victorious superpowers had taken all the German aircraft industry’s experts and documents home. Besides, there could have been no such leap forward by an aircraft unless there was an engine to propel it. There was no such engine, nor any prospect of one. And so on: for once, the facts were so overwhelming that they even managed to kill a media myth, which is usually hard to do.
World War II was, and remains, a potent inspiration to fantasy. There were people who were actually in the war who came away believing things that they should have known to be impossible. Gore Vidal would have been among the U.S. service personnel who invaded Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped. Yet he believed until the day he died that President Roosevelt tricked Japan into the war. There were plenty of ultra-right-wing Japanese madmen who were glad to have his support for their views; but really there was less than nothing in the idea. As the scientists say, the theory was so bad that it wasn’t even wrong.

Under Western Eyes

SUDDENLY I AM
reading
Under Western Eyes
again. I had vowed not to reread the whole of Conrad, but after a lifetime spent in the world that he presaged, I realize that I am at last ready for him. Much of the presaging is encapsulated in
Under Western Eyes
.

In Switzerland before World War I, before the tragedy in Europe, and before the chaos of the Russian Revolution, the Russians who gather in Geneva to enjoy democratic freedom—their part of the city is nicknamed Le Petit Russie—are already carrying within them all the varieties of doom that will soon engulf their land of origin. The book gives us a preview of the terrors to come. Some of the characters, indeed, are outright terrorists; but the majority of the radicals on view have as yet seen little of the life of action, although they talk a lot of theory. And some of the characters will be victims one day, if they do
not have the sense to stay away: they are members of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and they tend to think that tsarist despotism is the worst thing that their homeland has to offer.

They are in fact, idealists: and idealism is a cast of mind that Conrad questions even more than he questions radicalism. The logical end of radicalism, in his view, is terrorism; but idealism is the mental aberration that allows terror to be brought about. Conrad’s originality was to see that a new tyranny could be generated by people who thought that their rebellion against the old tyranny was rational. Thus his writings seem prescient about what was to happen in the Soviet Union. He didn’t predict the Nazi tyranny because he had underestimated the power of the irrational to organize itself into a state. But then, nobody predicted that except its perpetrators; and anyway, mere prediction was not his business. His business was the psychological analysis made possible by an acute historical awareness.
Under Western Eyes
is valuable not because it came true but because it rang true even at the time, only now we can better hear the deep, sad note.

The book’s antihero, Razumov, is Lord Jim all over again; although this time Jim has started off, in Petersburg,
by getting someone killed, and now, in Switzerland, must face the dilemma of having fallen in love with the victim’s sister, and being unable to tell her. She is a wonderful character, Natalia Hardin: operatically attractive yet sensitive to the point of being saintly. But she is an idealist. In the end she will go home to Russia, in order to do good. Conrad published the book in 1911, when the Revolution was still six years in the future: but he got all the contending forces into the story, and the future along with them: the perfect girl, a living synthesis of everything praiseworthy and desirable, is heading for an appointment in which her superior qualities will not be forgiven. Or so we think; so history makes us think, after Conrad and the very few writers of comparable greatness have shown us what history is. The book takes a little too long to end, but a reader today should not miss the author’s note at the start. Describing the unplumbably evil torturer Necator, Conrad calls him “the perfect flower of the terroristic wilderness. What troubled me most in dealing with him was not his monstrosity but his banality.” Later in the century, Hannah Arendt was to say almost the same thing about Adolf Eichmann. She made the mistake, however, of finding his banality more remarkable than his monstrosity. Conrad,
had he lived that long, could have told her that the two things, though one of them might be the more difficult to describe, are both as fundamental to evil as hydrogen and oxygen are to water.

Anthony Powell, Time Lord

HAVING REREAD SOME
of the twentieth-century English novel sequences, and having read Olivia Manning’s two trilogies for the first, belated time and realized she was great, I was determined not to go back to Anthony Powell. I thought my opinion of
A Dance to the Music of Time
was fully formed and would need no alteration: the sequence, as I recalled, was absorbing almost throughout, but at the end it went off precipitately. And even early on, there was evidence that its signature technique of teasing out the subtleties of any social incident, however minor, was too often strained beyond the limit. For half the time, the incident would be worth the trouble he took to reflect upon it; but for the other half, the effect of prosing away for pages about the repercussions of some minor accident suffered by an even more minor character would be, if not perhaps a fuss about nothing, certainly an endless palaver about not
enough. And the clear prose could get into a tangle over the course of a long sentence.

All this I thought I remembered well. Also I had lost somewhere, in a move from a previous house, my precious set of the twelve Penguin volumes with the cover drawings by Osbert Lancaster. In yet another house there sat an American four-volume hardback edition, but the Americans had, in their usual way, overdone the reverence, so that any of the four compilations was too bulky to take on a train, thus defeating one of the chief pleasures that Powell offers: to read, while traveling in a second-class carriage, about the kind of people who used to travel in first.

No, let Powell rest in the memory. But what happened next you can guess. For once I got to Hugh’s bookstall early enough in the day to catch the first wave of books, and there among them, spine upward, were all twelve volumes of the Mandarin paperback edition of
The Music of Time
with the cover illustrations by Mark Boxer. Like all Boxer’s friends I had missed him fiercely since his premature death. He had once illustrated several books of mine, with results I had better not praise, although I was very proud to have his collaboration; and for Powell he was ideal, since Powell was minutely versed in social notation,
and Boxer had the same fine focus. In fact Boxer was fully as good as Osbert Lancaster, who had been Powell’s close friend. (It was because the Penguin editors stupidly wanted to ditch Lancaster’s cover illustrations for the next reprint that Powell had left Penguin, his sardonic upper lip curled in contempt.) Mark Boxer, having been born much later than Powell and Lancaster, did not share their store of prewar experience, but he knew how to imagine himself into the past, and I think anyone who loves the books can see that those Mandarin volumes look as good as they read well.

And they do read well, as I soon found out all over again; because when I got them home I started reading them one after the other. In the last years of his life I knew Powell well enough to be sure he would have approved of how I relished the actual physical experience of consuming his little books like plates of sweets and grapes as I sat on my garden terrace while the heat gradually went out of a long summer. As an Australian I never love England more than at such times: they remind me of home, but are so much less fierce that they also remind me I was right to come away. Powell inspires you to reflections like that. He’s good on the significance of the passing moment, his key
message being that it doesn’t really pass, but is incorporated into the texture of your reflections just as thoroughly as the ecstasies and disasters, and perhaps even more so.

This latest rereading of Powell soon put my admiration for the newfound Olivia Manning in its right context. She is great, but Powell’s scope is even greater. The way the characters go on meeting one another through time, and the way that those who endure are always exchanging information about those who will not, is just like life. He is sometimes accused of overdoing the device of coincidence, but life does too; and in that regard he has given us, in what might be called the Powell Moment, a measure of consolation for those unsettling occasions when coincidence seems to threaten us with a visitation from the supernatural. Once, many years ago in Florence, I found myself, after dinner with friends, composing in my head a speech in denigration of the prose style of Bernard Levin, at that time Britain’s most famous newspaper columnist. I had never met him, but I had seen him on television; and I suppose I might have been a little jealous of the fortune he got paid. The next morning I was crossing the Santa Trinita bridge when I realized that the diminutive figure striding briskly toward me on the same pavement was
Bernard Levin. Such moments, in my experience, can be quite frightening, because they so sharply evoke chance and chaos. Powell’s triumph of intuition was to realize, and illustrate, that there are patterns in the chaos; and he thought of all this long before Lorenz and others did the scientific work that established chaos theory. So from that aspect,
A Dance to the Music of Time
is an intellectual feat.

But it’s more than that: it’s consistently absorbing. Nothing so extended has ever generated such a thirst in the reader for wanting to know what happens next. Will Charles Stringham give way to his alcoholic propensities? Is the beautiful but bitchy Pamela Flitton insane? What will happen to Widmerpool after he marries her? On the level of everyday life among the upper classes the sequence is unbeatable; and always on the understanding that those classes have now been joined by the new people of the literary world and the media in general, so that the old edifice is inevitably crumbling, merely in order that it might become more accommodating.

The great solvent, of course, is World War II, and I now see that nobody ever wrote about it better. Powell spent most of the war as an intelligence officer in London, dealing with representatives of the European countries occupied
by the Nazis. He was, therefore, plugged into the future, but he doesn’t make a thing of his own role; whereas his friend and rival Evelyn Waugh made much more of his own role than had any relation to fact. Powell was a modest man, although he could be very jealous of his reputation. He would turn on his famous sneer if you raised even the slightest point about a possible fault in any sentence he had ever written. I quickly learned to keep my reservations to myself. Michael Frayn was only one of the fans who thought the last volume of the sequence,
Hearing Secret Harmonies
, was a muffed picture of the so-called Youth Culture, about which Powell knew very little, because he was by then too old to get out amongst it and sample the flavor. But I noticed that Frayn used the soft pedal when he put the opinion in print. The man who wasn’t afraid to mock Powell’s occasional deficiencies was the late Auberon Waugh, Evelyn Waugh’s son: but “Bron” (as everyone called him) overdid it absurdly. He forgot to mention that the whole sequence is an almost unbroken stretch of genius.

New readers should be warned, however, that there is the occasional dull stretch. At the opening of volume 6 (
The Kindly Ones
) there is far too much about servants,
ghosts, and the occult. Defending himself against charges that he was too interested in
Burke’s Peerage
, Powell once said that he would have been equally interested in a book called
Burke’s Workers
. But the truth was that the toffs, or would-be toffs, were what he was best at. And no writer dedicated to showing life as it is should give even fleeting acknowledgment to the occult. The real reason why Scorpio Murtlock, the sinister, hippie-ish cult leader in the last volume, is such an unlikely figure is that Powell gives him a measure of the telepathic power that he claims, whereas in fact the typical counterculture hero was a fake. Evelyn Waugh would not have been fooled for a minute. Nor, probably, would Olivia Manning.