But even Rilke was self-denying in the only area that counts: he served his art and nothing but. He created the conditions for himself in which he would not be distracted. Absurd though it may sound, Wagner was doing the same. The Ring, after all, did get written. The test is not whether the surroundings seem crassly extravagant, but whether what gets created within them seems worth the expenditure. Did Stravinsky keep a needlessly grand household? Not if he needed it: and the precisely discriminating, colour-coded penmanship of his manuscripts was a sure sign that his well-chosen furniture enabled him to concentrate like a monk. (Diaghilev paid him late: behaviour which Stravinsky interpreted, correctly, as bohemian, in the sense that a bohemian’s ability not to worry about money always starts with your money rather than his.) The requirement of stately circumstances applied also to Thomas Mann: always grand in his way of life, he followed Keats’s principle in every respect, right down to his fingertips. Without a proper manicure, Thomas Mann couldn’t write. But he wrote: the second part of Joseph und seine Brüder and the whole of Doktor Faustus cost a small fortune in buffed nails at Brentwood prices, but we got the books. An artist crosses the line only when the way he lives gets in the way of his work. When Scott Fitzgerald spent his way into debt, he sinned against himself and us, because to write beneath himself was the only way out of the trap, so the escape route led to the worst trap of all. Tender Is the Night would have been an even better book if he had known how to give himself time, and admirers who think that The Last Tycoon is much more than a pitiful sketch must have a strange idea of what makes The Great Gatsby a masterpiece. But the self-destructive artists who scare us by the profligacy of their capital outlay can do so only because we know what they are really worth. Orson Welles only appeared to destroy himself: he was still Orson Welles. Plenty of men have been big eaters on borrowed money but we never heard of them. A better comfort, though, is that Diaghilev, when he borrowed money, was rarely thinking about how he could spend it on himself, and almost always about how it would help finance his next miracle of imagination.
PIERRE DRIEU LA ROCHELLE
Pierre Drieu la Rochelle (1893–1945) was the tall blond darling of the French right between the wars. Brought up in a bourgeois family with royalist beliefs, he emerged from World War I with with the kind of loathing for capitalism that found the right more congenial than the left. Later on he said that he had been a fascist all along, Although he didn’t officially declare his allegiance until 1934, he had decided quite early that there were only two sides, fascism and communism. A much-admired poet when young and an effective prose stylist always, he would have been regarded as an adornment of French culture if not for his politics. As things turned out, only his politics lend him lasting interest. (A direct route to the centre of his agitated political consciousness is Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: Secret Journal and Other Writings, translated and introduced by Alastair Hamilton, a valuable student of the fascist intellectuals right up until the day of their total disappearance at the end of World War II.) Drieu was convinced that French culture had been toppled from its rightful pre-eminence by the corrosive influence of liberals and Jews. Giving a warm welcome to the idea that France might be restored to strength by an alliance with Germany, he saw France as the woman and Germany as the man in a partnership that for him always had sexual overtones. His personal beauty was important to him. He was the kind of man who takes it to heart when he loses his hair. Since he looked more like a blond barbarian Nazi god than most of the Nazis did, his alliance with the invader had the stamp of destiny. More than ready to collaborate with the Nazi Occupation, he accepted the editorship of the Nouvelle Revue Française after the parent publishing house, Gallimard, made a deal with the Germans by which it would censor itself in order to stay in business. To do him what little credit he had coming, Drieu became disillusioned with the occupiers, but his annoyance was mainly because they proved themselves less keen about the strength of French culture than he was. The measures against the Jews didn’t bother him.
Nevertheless he must have been aware that he had not only chosen the losing side, but behaved badly enough to attract vengeance, because when the Liberation came he attempted suicide instead of standing up to argue for his views. The failure of his quest to eliminate himself raised the question of what to do with so embarrassingly gifted a leftover, but finally he managed to do the right thing, although scarcely for the right reason. “We played and I lost,” he said in the farewell address he called Final Reckoning. “Therefore I demand the death penalty.” But we don’t demand the death penalty because we lose. We demand it because we have done the wrong thing.
And above all, I am not interested enough in politics to let them encumber my last days.
—DRIEU LA ROCHELLE, QUOTED IN PIERRE ASSOULINE’S L’Épuration des intellectuels
ON THE FACE of it, Drieu’s valedictory testament was absurd. It was 1944, after the liberation of Paris; he had never made any secret of collaborating with the Nazis; his deeds were done and his time had run out. And his whole personal disaster had been because of his interest in polics. Already resolved to suicide, he was attributing a deficiency to himself in the very area where he had been most obsessed. It is an instructive demonstration of the lengths to which self-deception can go. In the thirties he had been the golden boy and even looked like one. His hulking personal beauty was certainly enough to make some extremely civilized women forget his politics. (Visiting from Argentina, the bluestocking heiress Victoria Ocampo, future editor of the literary magazine Sur, welcomed him into her bed, and decades later she was still forgetting his politics, writing fond articles of reminiscence in which his intellectual proclivities featured as charming quirks at worst.) But his political passions, which included a visionary anti-Semitism, had led him all the way to treason, by a series of steps that had begun with his disgust at the inability of France to unite Europe in a crusade against the liberal democratic heresy. Since he thought Nazi Germany could do a better job, he welcomed the German invasion. It is important to remember, on this point, that he was not coming from the direction of Action Française. Maurras hated the Germans. What united the two different strains of collaboration was that they both hated the Jews.
As editor of the Nouvelle Revue Française under the tutelage of a compromised regime, Drieu was effectively a collaborator for as long as he held the chair. But here the difficulties begin. The picture becomes less clear than we might like. Drieu found out, on closer acquaintance, that he didn’t think much of the Nazis either: they weren’t really serious about the transformation of culture. Feeling that, he was able to nurse within himself the belief that he still had the interests of a greater France at heart. (The fate of the Jews, it need hardly be said, he was able to ignore: i.e., tacitly approve.) Had he chosen to live, he might eventually have been able to put up a case for his past behaviour. As a collaborator on the practical level, he had not done much more to favour the oppressive power than many of the late-flowering literary résistants had done against it. It had been Rebatet and Brasillach, after all, who had helped to direct the hunt against the Jews. Punish those two, by all means. But Drieu had been a cut above all that vulgarity, had he not?
He might even have been able to carry the point about politics: the thoroughness with which he had got them wrong was, after all, a kind of proof that they had never held his interest, which had been expended on his purely intellectual vision of a properly authoritarian Europe. In other words, he might have proved himself incompetent. Some of his contemporaries later ventured the cynical but all too plausible opinion that if he had stayed hidden for a couple of years he might have resurfaced as a minister in the provisional government, where he had friends and admirers. It wasn’t just his old Nazi pals who tried to get him to safety. When he revived in hospital after his first suicide attempt through an overdose of Luminal, he found a passport good for Switzerland under his pillow. The documents were almost certainly put there by Lt. Gerhard Heller of the Propaganda Abte
ilung. Heller was still busy in the corridors of Paris even as the German troops were pulling out and the high-echelon collaborators were settling into their supposedly safe new billets in Sigmaringen. But Heller’s efforts were duplicated by Emmanuel d’Astre de la Vigerie, minister of the interior in the provisional government, who also thought that Drieu and Switzerland were a good match. There were plenty of eminent literary figures who considered Drieu as one of them, and thus too important to be sacrificed on the altar of l’Épuration. They had a point, about it if not about him. All too quickly it had emerged that the purgative courts would be used as a means of settling old scores. The unspeakable Louis Aragon (a long-time apologist for state terror as long as Stalin was in control of it and not Hitler) shamelessly tried to nail doddery old André Gide. Gide’s collaboration had amounted to not much more than a judicious reticence, eked out with the occasional soirée for Ernst Jünger where both men could deplore the barbarism that made it so hard to concentrate on one’s art. But Aragon, as a Communist bonze, had never forgiven Gide for his pioneering pamphlet Retour de l’URSS, which had revealed Stalin’s regime for what it was.
Luckily Aragon’s vindictive spite did not prevail. Nor, thank God, did Picasso’s stupidity: to his everlasting shame, the greatest of all modern painters allowed his studio to be used as a meeting point for vigilantes preaching havoc against those who had compromised themselves with the foe—a strictness that came oddly from Picasso, who had eaten in black market restaurants throughout the Occupation and never run a single risk. It was a time for fake virtue: a time in which there was no sure sign of real virtue except diffidence. The fair-minded François Mauriac (some said he had to be fair because his brother had been a collabo) put in a good word for the unsavoury Henri Béraud, who throughout the Occupation had kept up an unrelenting barrage of vituperation against Communists, the Popular Front, England and, always and above all, Jews. Mauriac was brave enough to defend even the choleric Jew-baiter Robert Brasillach as “ce brillant esprit,” large praise for someone who had asked for his fate in open print by telling the Gestapo which doors to knock on. Brasillach’s execution by firing squad was generally regarded at the time as the least he had coming, but Mauriac was prescient in guessing that a saturnalia of rough justice would produce a lasting hangover. Mauriac simply disliked l’Épuration, and in retrospect he seems right. A good moral test for the business is that while Camus saw that there had to be a reckoning but thought it should be done regretfully, Sartre was an untroubled enthusiast. If Drieu had faced trial straight away, a death sentence might well have been on the cards. But it could be that he had already sentenced himself. In March 1945 he finally succeeded in committing suicide. He used gas. Since he almost certainly knew the truth about what had happened to the Jews deported from Drancy, perhaps he thought the means of his own exit appropriate.
E
Alfred Einstein
Duke Ellington
ALFRED EINSTEIN
Not to be confused with his physicist cousin Albert Einstein, the musicologist Alfred Einstein (1880–1952) was born in Munich and went into exile after 1933, first in Italy and then in London. He devoted much of his life to scholarship, of which the principal results were his three-volume history The Italian Madrigal and his reworking of Köchel’s Mozart catalogue. He also produced the standard monograph on Mozart—still the best single book to read on the subject—and an authoritative survey of the golden period in Vienna, Music in the Romantic Era. Abetting these major works were some superbly compressed essays, the best of which are collected in Essays on Music (1958), the book through which he is most easily approached. At a time when biographies of great composers so often run to many volumes (the trend began well with Ernest Newman’s Wagner, but by now it is out of hand) it can be a revelation to discover how much Einstein could say in a single paragraph. He had both wit and a sense of proportion. The second thing is not always accompanied by the first, but the first is impossible without the second.
If we let our imagination roam, it is difficult to conceive what might not have happened in the realm of music if Mozart had lived beyond the age of thirty-five, or Schubert beyond thirty-one.
—ALFRED EINSTEIN, “Opus Ultimum,” IN Essays on Music
LATER IN THE same essay, the musicologist gives a brief list of what Mozart did with the few years of extra life he had that Schubert hadn’t: “Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, the three great Symphonies and the last four quartets.” The musicologist thus refocuses an eternally nagging question. The question isn’t about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart. Einstein doesn’t actually ask the question in that form, but he makes sure that we do. Einstein says that the word frühvollendet (too early completed) is often “strangely and mistakenly” applied to composers who were never completed, because they were interrupted.
For the twentieth–century Jewish scholars of the arts, the idea of a truncated creative life was an ever imminent reality. First in a disintegrating Europe and then later in American exile, Alfred Einstein wrote his books about musicology in the shadow of a looming threat to culture. With persecution always a danger, his view of the past was inevitably tinged with pessimism. One of the elements that make his monograph about Mozart a great book is this projected sense of cultural fragility. He makes Mozart’s prodigious outpouring a race against fate. He treats Mozart the gentile as a Luftmensch with a tenuous claim to a place on Earth. He did the same for Schubert, and was surely right. Schubert’s career—what in German would be called his Laufbahn, the road he ran—was one of busy contentment. Though the occasional romantic radical of today sometimes paints him as an embattled rebel, Schubert was in fact very much at home in bourgeois Vienna, surrounded by friends, a byword for merriment. But he was also an avatar. If he had climbed out of a flying saucer, he could not have been less of this world.
How do we account for such genius? The first question to deal with is how its prodigality did not interfere in any way with its quality. In a conversation I had with the Australian poet Peter Porter, who has a vast knowledge of classical music, he argued that this is nearly always so with the great composers. Modern literature since Flaubert might lead us to cherish the paradigm of a few perfect products slowly refined over a lifetime, but the main tradition of music from Bach through to Mahler allows of no such ideal. The composers churned the stuff out, and it was all good. There would have been no better Bach cantatas if he had written a hundred fewer of them.
But even among his prolific ancestors and heirs, Schubert was something else. My own way into his sonic universe was through the piano sonatas, played by Artur Schnabel. Theoretically my main interest was in the Lieder, but I found that the words got in the way. The better I got at understanding German the less I liked most of the texts. (With the French chanson tradition at its height there is no such restriction, because Fauré, Hahn, Duparc and the rest took care to set first-rate texts; but with Schubert that was less often so.) Schubert’s wordless works presented no such barrier: there was no verbosity to interfere with the eloquence. After a while I could place any phrase from any of the sonatas to the correct sonata, and the time arrived when I could do the same for the symphonies. At Cambridge I knew the future musicologist Robert Orledge. We were in Footlights together—he was musical director for several of the revues I produced on the Edinburgh Fringe—and it would not have surprised me at the time to be told that he would one day be one of our leading musical scholars. (It was a pity he did not compose more: the future student of Duparc could write melodies fully as beautiful as those of his hero.) One evening we had a long discussion about music in which we brandished at each other the names and opus numbers of all our favourite works by the great composers. Orledge admired them all, but Schubert, he said, was beyond admiration. He was surprised that I had not yet heard the Quintet in C Major, and predicted that when I did hear it for the first time it wo
uld be one of the great days of my life.
He was right. I heard it played by the Amadeus quartet plus one, in a performance that I later judged to be too lush with the rubato; but a certain amount of over-interpretation probably helped the initial impact. (Over-interpretation does some of your reacting for you: you hate it later, but it can help you on the way in.) I had thought that nothing could be more wonderful than Beethoven’s late quartets, but the adagio of the Schubert Quintet in C Major contained them all with room to spare. Thirty years later, I listen to the Quintet only rarely: it takes me back too far and too deep, and anyway I already know it note by note. But I can already see that I might listen to it many times in my last years, and might even die to it—during the adagio for preference. I was not surprised, merely satisfied, to find Wittgenstein referring to the Quintet in C Major in one of his letters to the British linguist C. K. Ogden. In language unusually fervent for so cool a hand, Wittgenstein hailed its “fantastic kind of greatness.” The italics were his, and well judged. No more measured words will do. But here, at the moment of rapture, is the exact time to return to Einstein’s formulation. If Schubert had lived even four more years—the difference between his lifetime and Mozart’s—he would have written not just a few more works of the same complexity, but dozens, perhaps hundreds. It is like thinking of the Bellini operas we lost because of a simple sickness. (The same sickness took Bizet, but he was three years older: if he had been the same age, it would have cost us Carmen.) It is not like thinking of the Aristophanes plays we lost because someone mislaid them, or of the missing books of the Annals of Tacitus that took with them the story of how Sejanus came to ruin: those works were composed, they existed. But Bellini’s lost operas, like Masaccio’s lost frescoes and Seurat’s lost paintings, were lost because they never happened. Their creators were not early completed: they were interrupted.