Occasional Prose (33 page)

The relativeness of all this, too, can be frightening, like a seesaw, as a true-life anecdote will demonstrate. Many years ago my great friend Hannah Arendt and Chiaromonte had agreed to meet in Florence during a trip of hers to Europe, for they had much to talk about (he had greatly admired
The Human Condition
and written her a long letter about it, which she answered, also at length, I believe). In Florence, they spent a couple of days together looking at the city, but when afterward I asked one of them (I forget which) how it had gone, he or she shrugged: “All right, I suppose. She/he is intelligent. But so abstract!” The other reported the same.

In any case, Chiaromonte’s mind, even more than Arendt’s, was questioning, skeptical to the point of doubting the solidity of any proposition outside geometry. All abstractions but two—justice and freedom—were anathema to it. And if I ask myself now why he made an exception of justice and freedom, I can only think that it was because—unlike Progress, unlike History—they make no claim to be incarnate in the material world, but exist in it, so to speak, negatively, in bits and pieces, never “adding up.” In short, they really are Ideas, of the true Platonic stamp. Thus I can conceive a just act without ever having beheld one; I construct it in my mind as the
reverse
of the whole sum of unjust acts I am familiar with. Hegel’s famous utterance “I have seen an Idea on horseback”—Napoleon at Jena—would have made Chiaromonte laugh.

But to sum up: though he loved reason and reasoning, theory was repellent to Chiaromonte except in the realm of pure speculation, which is its natural home. And I suspect that the awful misunderstandings in the minds of those English reviewers, the yearning, evinced by all, to attribute a theory or a prescription to him, were caused, at least in part, by the absence of any such thing in the work they were trying to evaluate.

The message contained in
The Paradox of History
is mysteriously simple: the faith in History, which was shattered by an historical event—the impact of the First World War—cannot in good faith be restored, since the confidence in Progress underpinning it, tacitly or explicitly, is no longer there. The collapse of that man-made structure can be dated—summer 1914—when a credo in a forward-directed History fell instant victim to history with a small
h
, history in a raw state, a “senseless” accumulation of happenings. That is the paradox, the irony, the joke if you wish; it suddenly emerged with a painful shock that history unprocessed, history in the raw, is what the ancients knew as Fate.

Yet this discovery, like all discoveries (which are only
un
coverings), had been anticipated some time ago. Stendhal had glimpsed it in
The Charterhouse of Parma
; Tolstoy saw it full face in
War and Peace
. And between the two World Wars, Roger Martin du Gard in
Summer 1914
, the concluding volume of
The Thibaults
(today forgotten except possibly as an example of the
roman-fleuve
), showed the trusting faith in History, which for the educated had replaced religion, in the act of collapsing as French and German Socialists voted war credits in their respective parliaments. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and of Jaurès in a Parisian café triggered—for once the awful word seems suitable—a kind of rapid, out-of-control automation in world events. Yet these assassinations could hardly be viewed as “causing” a chain reaction of trench warfare lasting four years, nor as historically inevitable—the result of deeper causes themselves: Prinzip could be said to have acted for “historic” reasons, but Jaurès was the victim of a crazed fanatic, i.e., of a psychiatric accident.

In
Dr. Zhivago
, Pasternak saw the Bolshevik revolution in somewhat similar terms: as an upheaval, an uprooting, a shaking and tossing that nobody was prepared for (though it could be viewed as predictable through hindsight) any more than a violent windstorm or a raging flood. But the analogy with nature could not have been applied to World War I and, in any case, for Chiaromonte it is misleading. To equate revolution with a natural event is to declare it to be somehow affirmative, belonging by its very might to the sempiternal order of things and hence not to be resisted by a mere individual in its path. In Pasternak’s vision you “bend to” a revolution as to a hurricane. Yet, as Chiaromonte points out with his invariable acuteness, we do
not
bow to an historical occurrence as we do to a natural force (though of course there are always those who try to swim with the current). There is a difference; even in daily affairs, “... it is not possible to resign oneself to the evils of society in the same way as one submits to the adversity of nature.”

The underlying theme of
The Paradox of History
is, simply, fate. What happened, like a roll of thunder on August 2, 1914, was the rediscovery of fate. It was not the intellectuals that the War forced to open their eyes. They had been discovering necessity in the awful freedom of nihilism for the past thirty years. “Clinging to the ‘notion of Man’ would mean ... fearing to draw the logical consequences of atheism, which demands that
nothing
be an obstacle to the realization of a human project. What is possible must be.” For them, there was no failure of belief in Progress on that “fatal” date, because they believed in nothing anyway. It was ordinary people who bore the brunt of looking into the face of fate suddenly exposed like the featureless egg in the Chinese tale of the traveler.

Fate is the unknown, the uncalculated and incalculable, what the Greeks called the sacred, meaning merely (to start with) that which is hidden. For Tolstoy, as Chiaromonte understood him, the perception of power as a relation of maximum dependence meant that “destiny has, for man, the face of his own neighbor.” Or, as he stated it on his own behalf, speaking of
The Thibaults
: “What is violently revealed in the transition [from peace and freedom to war and coercion] is the extreme dependence ... in which each individual finds himself with respect to others.” And, again, referring to the characters in
The Thibaults
at the outbreak of the war: “Individuals are no longer alone. History invades their lives and, with history, the nation, the State, and all mankind.”

Chiaromonte’s book is descriptive, not prescriptive. The encounter with fate is shown almost novelistically, in episodes, which amount to a single prolonged encounter. As in a work of fiction, one of the figures tries to escape: Malraux, who in the person of his hero seeks to make himself the invincible lord of his destiny by invoking the demon of action. Or, as Chiaromonte puts it: “What matters to Malraux’s ‘conquerors’ is not history but force, and the problem of force in history. ... They represent, pushed to the extreme, the great heresy of our time: the attempt to control force by becoming its servants.”

Chiaromonte is not really a difficult writer, but a dense writer, a compact writer; insights,
aperçus
, brief analyses, pungent observations are packed together in a continuous flow or stream of narrative, carrying the entire baggage, miscellaneous yet related, along with it as in the
roman-fleuve
. I will mention a few examples: the “arias” of Fabrizio’s soul (is Chiaromonte the first to notice the operatic element in
The Charterhouse
?); Anna Karenina’s passion is condemned not by the sixth commandment but by “universal entropy”; “Was it God who brought about Napoleon? It is hardly conceivable”; the “Stoic morality” of Martin du Gard, a phrase evoking not only a distinctive quality of the novelist but the decline and fall of Rome; in Malraux, action is analyzed with “such vehemence” that it becomes “immaterial and transparent”; Malraux’s heroes as inheritors of Pascal’s wager; Malraux as the poet of defeat. Finally, and in my view most wonderfully characteristic, apropos of war and politics: “Why is war an extreme situation? Is it because of death? This is what a certain kind of pacifism (that of Barbusse, of Céline and Giono, for example) has maintained. Yet the most terrible thing about war is not death.”

The pithiness of such a remark (which hits a reader with the double force of surprise and recognition) points to an essential trait of Chiaromonte’s that is summed up like an ideogram in his very name: “clear mountain,” “bright mountain.” I mean his absolute realism and clear-sightedness, which were illustrated in nicely abridged form in an incident related to me by an American who had been sent in 1940 by the Quakers or Unitarians (maybe both) to help anti-Nazi and anti-Fascist refugees in unoccupied France. One of the American’s first concerns was to supply all these people around Toulouse with false papers. Shortly afterwards, one of them—Chiaromonte—was halted on the street by a Vichy policeman who, naturally, demanded his papers. The reply came smilingly. “Which do you want? The real ones or the others?” Chiaromonte denied that it had happened that way, adding mildly, almost by way of confirmation, that those ridiculous forgeries would have deceived nobody.

That realism, which shines through this book, is Italian, I think, and by no means, if Joseph Frank will forgive my disagreement with an observation he makes in his preface, uniquely a peasant’s trait, even though it seems to be connected with some basic simplicity. It has in it a strong element of naming things by their names, as though returning to our forefather, Adam, who gave a name, clearly the right one, to everything on the earth. There is also wit—an effect of compression, that compactness I spoke of. Chiaromonte had a humorous mind; that it was dark-complected prevented many people from observing the fact. There was a saturnine cast on occasion, I admit, and sometimes a rasp of sarcasm. But anyone who takes the pains to look will find a striking kind of humor in
The Paradox of History
, not only at intervals (as in some of the remarks quoted above), but in the fundamental conception, which is a wry joke, after all, an irony at the expense not only of “evolutionists,” progressives, and historical Salvationists but also of our poor race as a whole, which had become over-hopeful and so was bound to meet Nemesis, another joker, on the high road to Utopia.

Yet if there were not a Utopian, a thirster for justice and freedom, in Chiaromonte, this book of his, summing up in brief form a lifetime of meditation, could have been cruelly reductive rather than inspiring in something like Tolstoy’s way. To firmly conceive a notion of limit, of a boundary beyond which there stretch expanses of the unknown and unknowable, is no more gloomy or “confining” than the sight of the huge sky to Prince Andrei lying wounded on his back at Austerlitz. Moreover, as Chiaromonte puts it, paraphrasing Tolstoy on freedom, “If we could get to know the consequences of our actions, history would be nothing but an idyllic and constant harmony of free wills, or the infallible unfolding of a rational design. ... But then we would not be free. We are free, however, and this means literally that we do not know what we are doing.”

So, if man had the choice between knowledge and freedom, which should he choose? Knowledge, of course, we chorus, which to the “man” we have come to be means mastery, supreme control. Today’s genetic engineering—surely more significant for the future if there is one than the manufacture of nukes—leaves no doubt how the vote has been cast.

January 1985

*
To serve as postface to a University of Pennsylvania Press publication (Fall 1985) of a book by Nicola Chiaromonte.

INTERLUDE

La Traviata
Retold

T
HE METROPOLITAN OPERA, WORKING
with the publisher Little, Brown, had the idea of inviting writers to tell in their own words the stories of some “beloved” operas. The rules laid down were simply that the narratives should be about seventy typed pages long and should contain no allusion to the music.

The result was an expanded program in hard covers, to be sold in the opera-house lobby as well as in bookstores and containing the libretto, analyses of the score, photos and drawings of former performances, in addition to the writer’s narratives.

The first to appear was Anthony Burgess’s
Der Rosenkavalier
; then came V. S. Pritchett’s
La Bohème
; then me. I was always glad not to have picked one with a plot like
La Forza del Destino.

PART ONE

The “woman gone astray” of our story is a classic product of her century and of a single country, France—you would not find her in Madrid or London. She is as much a Parisian distillate as perfume is of Grasse. But she is also a universal, an archetype of the misunderstood woman of easy virtue—the Magdalen, Moll Flanders, Dostoyevsky’s Sonia, Tolstoy’s Maslova, Sartre’s “Respectful Prostitute.” The type perhaps goes back to the temple prostitutes of ancient religions—opposites and counterparts of vestal virgins tending the sacred flame. Is it in the temple of love that Violetta Valéry, a highly successful cocotte and our special fallen woman, is serving as a votary or somewhere else? The story will show.

In our own century, this Violetta, so alluring to aristocrats, might have been a Coco Chanel, kept by the Duke of Westminster, or the Mlle. Modiste of an opera by Victor Herbert (whence the song “Kiss Me Again”). Or a famous model—there is a continuing relation to fashion. But actually she belongs, historically and in spirit, to the reign (1830–1848) of Louis Philippe, the so-called citizen king. The kept woman, of course, was not invented during those years; the mistresses of French kings over several centuries had been acting as “role models” for young women of luxurious tastes and accommodating habits, and they did not even have to be beautiful to catch the royal eye—look at the portraits. Nor was it necessary to be vicious—think of Madame de Maintenon.

The kept woman, or high-class courtesan (the same as “court lady,” originally), was well known to readers of romances long before Violetta’s time. Indeed a key book that may well have guided her footsteps was
Manon Lescaut
(1731) by the Abbé Prévost, about a well-born youth, the Chevalier des Grieux, ruined by the bewitching girl of fatally acquisitive propensities he undertakes to keep. Much later, this story became an opera, in fact, two, but Violetta can have known only the novel. She identified herself, very likely, with Manon (higher up than she, to start with, on the social scale), though this would have been a guilty identification; her sympathies, since she is a young woman of heart, must have gone to the Chevalier des Grieux.