And yet the meaning of a life like Sakharov’s is that individual weakness can be turned to strength, if one has the will and moral courage to do so. Now that the power of Soviet communism is crumbling, while the ideas and principles to which Sakharov dedicated his days are changing the face of Europe, the great physicist’s endurance and refusal to be broken give his autobiography the status of an exemplary life.
This first volume of Sakharov’s memoirs takes the story up to his release from internal exile by President Gorbachev in 1986; a second book, detailing his last years, including his frequent clashes with Gorbachev in the Congress of People’s Deputies, is promised. Sections of the typescript were confiscated on four occasions (one time he lost 1,400 pages of work). That it exists at all is proof of the determination with which its author kept at it.
It isn’t easy to live a symbolic, even iconic, life; it isn’t easy to write about one either. Andrei Sakharov’s rather flat style can be heavy going. His desire to write as a witness, to detail just about every dissident cause in which he participated, every battle he fought, results in many turgid (if unfailingly noble) passages. It was clearly difficult for him to write about personal matters, and that reticence, too, can be frustrating, as can its opposite, the understandably idealizing gushiness which sometimes overcomes him when he writes about his beloved second wife, ‘Lusia’, the formidable Elena Bonner. He speaks at one point in these memoirs of his dislike of books thick enough to be used as doorstops. This extremely thick doorstop would have been a more vivid self-portrait, though a less complete testament, at half the length. As it is, what we’re given is an account ‘for the record’, a thorough, often plodding version of a great life.
The Sakharov who emerges from these pages is a boy who loved science-fiction novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Mark Twain, who was something of an awkward character and made few friends. The boy grew up to be, like many scientists, better at his work than at his private life. In one of the relatively rare intimate passages in his book, he faces up to this: ‘In my private life, in my relations with Klava [his first wife] and with the children after she died, I always tended to avoid confrontations, feeling myself psychologically unable to cope with them … in all honesty, I never spared my time or my physical strength. Afterwards I suffered. I felt guilty, and then made new mistakes, since guilt hardly improves one’s judgement.’ After Klava’s death, his growing involvement with human rights and his new love for ‘Lusia’ were the things that turned him outwards toward the world, and made him whole. His description of falling in love is, however, characteristically laconic. ‘For months, Lusia and I had been drawing closer and it was becoming more and more dificult for us to hide our feelings. Finally … we confessed our love.’ That’s it.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, among others, has suggested that Sakharov was an innocent, unworldly figure who was manipulated by the ferociously articulate and highly motivated Elena Bonner, and Sakharov repeatedly defends her against these charges. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in the middle. It is impossible to read these memoirs without believing that Sakharov knew exactly what he was doing when he espoused human rights causes in the USSR; but one also gains a strong impression of a reserved, inward personality who needed, or felt he needed, his wife to help him with his public utterances.
It was Elena Bonner who insisted, ‘My husband is a physicist, not a dissident,’ but of course he was both. His memoirs fall roughly into two halves, the physicist’s book and the dissident’s book, and each half really needs a different reviewer. As a scientist, Sakharov was in the same league as Stephen Hawking, but as a writer he makes far fewer concessions to the lay reader. As a result, his long and important descriptions of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme, and also of his theoretical work, can be bewildering, even for those non-scientists with a keen interest in such matters. Nevertheless, these chapters are in many ways the most informative in the book, in the sense of opening up to us a world we knew almost nothing about—for example, the secret city, ‘The Installation’, where the Soviet hydrogen bomb was built. It’s also clear that the theories Sakharov developed around the notion of ‘baryon asymmetry’—crudely, the relationship between matter and antimatter—prefigured the Grand Unified Theories of the 1970s. (Sakharov plainly regretted not having become involved in the GUTs.)
Sakharov was, in a sense, a Russian version of J. Robert Oppenheimer. The ‘father of the Russian hydrogen bomb’, he came passionately to oppose the testing and proliferation of these weapons. What makes him fascinating is that there was also a part of him that was a Russian version of Edward Teller, Oppenheimer’s more hawkish colleague and opponent, who believed that in the late 1940s and 1950s ‘only American military strength could restrain the socialist camp from an expansion that … might trigger a third world war.’ Sakharov is almost lyrical about the theoretical beauty of thermonuclear explosions. For him, to participate in such work was to be able to witness, in microcosm, the unleashing of the same forces that created the universe. The cruel paradox that these might also be the forces by which life could be destroyed was not lost on him; but the ambiguity of his position allows us a richer understanding of nuclear issues than any simple hawk/dove antithesis. Sakharov was both hawk and dove.
There is much more information of great value, both scientific and political, in these pages: Sakharov’s attack on the absurd Stalin-endorsed theories of Trofim Lysenko, who believed that ‘modified’ plants and animals could pass on their new characteristics to succeeding generations, thus offering a ‘quick fix’ for Soviet agriculture; his campaign to save Lake Baikal from pollution; portraits of Beria, Khrushchev and other Soviet bosses; and a notably unsentimental account of the dissident movement, especially of the emergence of a breed of ‘professional dissidents’ with whom Sakharov plainly felt he had little in common. His dispute with Solzhenitsyn in which he rejects the writer’s ultraist religious ideas and dissents from Solzhenitsyn’s contempt for Western values, is one in which this reviewer’s sympathies, at least, are firmly on the Sakharov side.
Ultimately, however, this book is a monument to the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. But Sakharov’s victory was not complete (perhaps no individual victories ever are). There are many Russians today who blame President Gorbachev for the scientist’s death in December of last year. They say that Gorbachev may have ended Sakharov’s long exile in Gorky, but that he then hastened the great man’s demise by his harsh and humiliating public criticisms of Sakharov in the Congress of People’s Deputies. We’ll have to wait for volume two of these memoirs to find out how Sakharov felt about Gorbachev’s behaviour. But whether the story is true or not, the fact that people believe it emphasizes the widespread Russian distrust of Gorbachev, and also the extent of public sympathy for the élite academician who became the Soviet system’s most distinguished dissident, the boy who made friends with difficulty but who grew up to be, as the Estonian deputy Marju Lauristin said at his funeral service, ‘the incarnation of intellectual courage and conscience, of the true Russian spirit’.
1990
UMBERTO ECO
About twenty years ago the bookshops seemed to be full of volumes with titles like Illuminatus, in which it was suggested that the world was run by this or that occult conspiracy. In the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, the notion that ‘visible’ history was a fiction created by the powerful, and that these ‘invisible’ or subterranean histories contained the ‘real’ truths of the age, had become fairly generally plausible. The only writer who ever managed to transmute the base metal of the illuminatus-novel into art was Thomas Pynchon, who succeeded in making the necessary connections between the occult and political worlds, and who constructed a rich metaphorical framework in which two opposed groups of ideas struggled for textual and global supremacy: on the one hand, Entropy (the idea that things fall apart, which we can call ‘pessimism’, but which is also connected, in Pynchon, to the profane, democratic spirit); and in the opposite corner, Parano
ia (the idea that everything has a meaning, a Plan, it’s just that we don’t know what it is … which we can call ‘optimism’ because of its opposition to meaninglessness; but which is also linked to the religious, even totalitarian spirit, because meaning, in Pynchon, is in the hands of the hidden adepts).
What gave Pynchon the edge over all the other cabalistic babblers was that he was funny, he could create vivid, belching, hilariously unstrung characters (Benny Profane, Tyrone Slothrop), and that his awareness of genuinely suppressed histories—of the genocide of the Herero people in southern Africa, for example, or of the collaboration between US and Nazi industrialists during World War II—always informed his treatment of even his most lunatic fictional conspiracies.
Pynchon once wrote a short story called ‘Under the Rose’, its title an Englishing of the Latin sub rosa. Foucault’s Pendulum, the obese new volume from Umberto Eco, is an illuminatus-novel for the end of the eighties, a post-modernist conspiracy fiction about, I suppose, the world under the name of the rose. It is, I regret to report, a very faint Eco indeed of those old Pynchonian high jinks. It is humourless, devoid of characterization, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. Reader: I hated it.
The plot of Foucault’s Pendulum (which begins on page 367 of this 629-page book) is surprisingly uncomplicated. Three weird publishers, Belbo (named after a typeface), Diotallevi and Casaubon (‘wasn’t he a character in Middlemarch?’), are employees of a two-faced publishing house, Garamond/Manutius, whose visible Garamond face is that of a straight, up-market company, but whose true Manutius nature is that of a vanity press for self-financing authors (‘SFAs’). Tired of receiving an endless stream of cranky manuscripts about Templars and Rosicrucians and suchlike twaddle, our three heroes decide to make up the ultimate conspiracy theory, their own private totalization of occult knowledge. ‘If the Plan exists, it must involve everything,’ they decide. Their invention, the bad fiction within this fiction, is fed into a computer named Abulafia after a medieval Jewish cabalist. Then, in a ridiculously melodramatic finale involving the eponymous pendulum (no relation, incidentally, to the philosopher) and massed hordes of crazed mystics, the fictional Plan starts to come true … Edgar Allan Poe is among the myriad references in this book, but it doesn’t help. This Pendulum is the pits.
It’s just possible that, inside this whale, there’s an enjoyable smaller fish trying to get out. The unscrupulous world of the vanity press and the fleecing of its feeble authors is depicted with some verve, and there are moments when the ponderous narrative sparks into life. But the spark is instantly snuffed out by page after page of Higher Bullshit. Here is a typical paragraph:
‘So those are the Massalians, also known as Stratiotics and Phibionites, or Barbelites, who are made up of Nasseans and Phemionites. But for other fathers of the church, the Barbelites were latterday Gnostics … and their initiates in turn called the Borborites Hylics, or Children of Matter, as distinct from the Psychics, who were already a step up, and the Pneumatics, who were the truly elect … But maybe the Stratiotics were only the Hylics of the Mithraists.’ ‘Sounds a bit confused,’ Belbo said.
And this is what passes for dialogue: “‘Are you saying I’m superficial?” “No … what others call profundity is only a tesseract, a four-dimensional cube.”’ And this, I assure you, is a love scene:
‘Amparo, the sun’s coming up.’
‘We must be crazy.’
‘Rosy-fingered dawn gently caresses the waves …’
‘Yes, go on. It’s Yemanjà. Listen. She’s coming.’
‘Oh, Tintinnabulum!’
‘You are my Atalanta Fugiens …’
‘Oh, Turris Babel …’
I rest my case.
Eco, the consummate post-modernist, is perfectly aware of all possible criticisms of his text, and lets us know that he knows. ‘We’re talking in stereotypes here,’ one of his characters astutely observes. And, ‘Maybe only cheap fiction gives us the measure of reality,’ Belbo muses; that’s Eco hinting that he intends to play deliberately with the form of the penny dreadful. And, because he’s enough of an intellectual to know that hokum is hokum, he has not written an ‘innocent’ late-sixties illuminatus-novel, but a ‘knowing’ version, a fiction about the creation of a piece of junk fiction that then turns knowingly into that piece of junk fiction. Foucault’s Pendulum is not a novel. It is a computer game.
One way of playing it is to spot the references. Apart from Pynchon, Middlemarch and Poe, there are touches of The Maltese Falcon, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, The Lord of the Rings (Belbo/Bilbo), Gone with the Wind, The Magus, 007 and a classic SF story entitled ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. And at the very end, in Casaubon’s conclusion (‘I have understood. And the certainty that there is nothing to understand should be my peace, my triumph’), there’s more than a touch of the ancient Japanese poet Basho who travelled to the seat of wisdom, the Deep North, to learn that there was nothing to learn in the Deep North.
Unfortunately, the journey to this truth is so turgid that it’s impossible to care about reaching the goal. This is Spielbergery without the action or bullwhips, and if, as Anthony Burgess threatens on the jacket, ‘this is the way the European novel is going,’ we should all catch a bus in the opposite direction as soon as possible.
1989
GÜNTER GRASS
The Meeting at Telgte
When the Thirty Years War ended, one word was sufficient to describe Germany: rubble. And in our own century, after a war which did its work at approximately six times the speed: once again, nothing to be seen but rubble. ‘The thing that hath been tomorrow,’ reads the opening sentence of Günter Grass’s new novel, ‘is that which shall be yesterday.’
Grass’s subject is how German writers responded to ruination; how, after Hitler, German pens re-wrote Genesis to read: After the end was the word. How they tore their language down and rebuilt it anew; how they used words to assault, excoriate, accept, encompass and regenerate; how the phoenix poked its beak out of the fire. Rubble, after World War Two, gave birth to what was at first disparagingly termed ‘rubble literature’. Heinrich Böll, defending these books of war and homecoming, wrote: ‘We have no reason to be ashamed of this label … we see things the way they are, with a human eye that normally is not quite dry and not quite wet, but damp, for let us not forget that the Latin for dampness is humor.’ And now Günter Grass has taken the story of a group of writers who set about the task of seeing sharply, but with a sense of humor, and projected it three hundred years backwards in time; which of course, Grass being Grass, enables him to tell the tale more humorously.
On the cover of his book, drawn by himself, is the image of a hand holding a goose quill rising triumphant from a heap of stones … taking arms, so to speak, against that sea of rubble.
In 1947, such a meeting of writers did in fact take place: that was when H. W. Richter first convened the famous Group 47. Its mirror-meeting, the one Grass describes, never happened, at Telgte or anywhere else except in his own Croesus-rich imagination; but it seems none the less actual for that.
There assemble, in the Bridge Tavern at Telgte, a town located in the midst of the 1647 peace negotiations, divers writers, publishers and even musicians, ‘for the purpose of giving new force to the last remaining bond between all Germans, namely the German language … Everything had been laid waste, words alone kept their lustre.’ As a matter of fact, even the words themselves are somewhat tarnished: the great composer Schütz tells the Meeting, ‘When the fatherland was laid low, poetry could hardly be expected to flower.’ And in a comic-opera parallel to the twentieth-century pollution of Germany by the terrible dead language of Nazism, we find the tongue of the seventeenth century polluted, too: all manner of armies, tramping and Babeling across the land, have left their bootmarks on the common speech, so thoroughly that the landlady, Libuschka, in The Meeting at Telgte is moved, at one point, to
ask the assembled bards ‘whether the signores would care for a boccolino of rouge.’
The Bridge Tavern is, of course, symbolically named; Grass the snail, the Social Democrat, the ‘irenicist’, has always been a man for bridges. And when the inn burns down, its destruction seems to signify the failure of the writers’ hopes. But before the fire, we have been given a marvellously credible portrait of a bunch of bitching, pedantic, devout, bawdy, gloomy and innocent men struggling to build a new world from the flawed fabric of their minds.
At the centre of the book stands Christoffel Gelnhausen, a version of the writer Grimmelshausen, whose novel Simplicissimus is the rumbustious, iconoclastic ancestor of The Tin Drum; riotous, self-taught, amoral, Stoffel is also Grass himself in green doublet and feathered hat. In The Flounder, Grass gave himself the starring role and popped up, disguised as all sorts of folk, throughout German history; in The Meeting, which is a sort of chip off that mighty fish, he is once again his own best character. Stoffel lies, cheats, steals, punches women in the eye; he empties the Bridge Tavern to make room for the poets by telling its residents that the scribblers have the plague, which is ‘no respecter of wealth’. But after the book’s great set-piece, a feast provided by Gelnhausen which turns out to be the product of a looting trip, he defends himself against the rage of the rhymers by pointing out that they are, in fact, also corrupt, and precisely because they do respect wealth too much: ‘He and his horsemen had acted in the spirit of the times, just as the gentlemen here assembled … when they wrote poems in praise of princes to whom murder and arson came as naturally as their daily prayers.’ What enrages the poets most of all about Stoffel, of course, is neither his lying nor his looting but his decision to compete with them at writing.