Hell and Back Read online

  To the extent, then, that we perceive different patterns of behaviour in different countries this would appear to have to do with a certain dynamic in the way people behave together. After all, what is usually most perplexing in our experience of a foreign country is not the pleasant conversation with any one individual -in that scenario we tend to be struck by how like us they are, how easy it is going to be to understand each other - but the way they behave in relation to each other. Drawing on the culture’s available role models, they become themselves in a play offerees that may be very different from that pertaining in our own country. Rather than one immediately recognisable type, what we’re up against is a constellation of possible types whose mutually tensing and defining energies may be even more difficult for us to grasp than those in the night sky.

  Ex-prime minister Giulio Andreotti, to hazard an example, is often referred to as quintessentially Italian for his particular mixture of piety and mystery, of astuteness and ambiguity. Yet the man could only function as he did and become what he was within the special environment of Italian politics, and most particularly post-war politics, something dependant on a huge number of external circumstances. Brought up in Liverpool or Lisbon it is reasonable to suspect that Andreotti would have developed very differently.

  If we accept this premise, it isn’t difficult to see how we can have a ‘national character’ - or a series of behaviour patterns -that perpetuates itself through education (the word used here in the broadest possible sense), without assuming that this is an inevitable product of the race or the soil and without imagining that it is necessarily impervious to outside influence. By the same token, it is clear that any institution exported to another country will necessarily be absorbed into the local dynamic, perhaps be transformed by it. The end results are not easy to predict. This is what makes the experiment so exciting. And perhaps dangerous. In any event, there is no need for us to be either strictly nativist or strictly universalist.

  When the Italians introduced something approaching the British electoral system, they did so after the traumatic years of mpmi pulite had led to the disintegration of the broad-church Christian Democratic Party that had dominated since the war. The decision of the old Communist Party to distance itself from the past and become the Partito Democratico della Sinistra also led to splits on the left. On the right the fascist-inspired Movimento Sociale Italiano had likewise made a move towards the democratic fold, changing its name to Alleanza Nazionale. Again this led to splits. The new system was thus introduced at a moment of maximum flux when the formation of two clearly dominant parties of the kind that would thrive in a first-past-the-post system was particularly difficult.

  Immediately campaigning began, it became evident that an electoral tradition is far more than the legal machinery of its voting system. The Italians have a long history of complex electoral alliances of the variety that tend to nullify the clarifying effect of the first-past-the-post system. While in England one might indeed find, say, the Liberals and Labour agreeing not to stand against each other in certain seats, it is unlikely that one would see scores of parties allying with all kinds of different partners in a huge and complex mosaic designed to give each of them more or less the proportion of representation they hold across the country. Far from shunning such complications, the Italian electorate is at home with them, or at least inured. Fatta la legge, trovato l'inganno goes the proverb (‘no sooner is a law made than the way round it discovered’). It’s an old observation that a history of despotic foreign rulers has led, in Italy, to the exaltation of the anarchical model. A certain pleasure is taken in demonstrating that a system imposed by the centre doesn’t work. There is nothing racial or genetic about this, nor any reason why it shouldn’t change. But, as Voltaire himself accepted, it takes time.

  The existence of proverbs which seem to sum up aspects of national character naturally leads to a reflection on the relationship of that character to the language its people speaks. Here Buruma is dismissive. ‘The Geist of language,’ he announces, ‘is one of those foggy concepts that swirl around like dry ice on Wagnerian stage sets.’ Later he takes Pevsner to task for suggesting that the difference between the English word ‘chop’ (as in pork chop) and the Italian word ‘costoletta’ shows an English love of understatement and the Italian predilection for the florid. Here one can only agree and smile. But without any further consideration, Buruma then sums up his position thus: ‘The notion that some essence of Englishness, running from the middle ages to the present time, can be identified in the national language is to put it mildly dubious.’

  If we imagine any group of people as organising their behaviour around available role models and a consequent hierarchy of values, it is reasonable to suppose that those values will be reflected in the language they speak and the way they speak it. This must have been even more evident when societies were smaller and more homogeneous. So while one would hardly wish to make much of the sound or length of a single word, it would equally be hard to deny that, say, the more elaborate nature of Italian sentence structures might reflect different habits of thought. And clearly there are some words ‘Geist’ is one - that Buruma himself will not translate because he knows that they are the product of a pattern of thinking which would be lost in translation. This is why Europeans do not translate such words as ‘gentleman and ‘hooligan’, or why a notion like ‘omertà’ needs more than a little explanation in English. What have our nonconformist writers always done, after all, if not sought to expose the pattern of thinking implicit in the language itself? When Lawrence wrote a sentence like ‘she was destroyed into perfect consciousness’, he was eager to subvert the normally positive loadings afforded to the concepts of both perfection and consciousness. The translation of the sentence into Italian - ‘era dilianiata, perfettamente consapevole’ - rejecting as it does the oddly transformative ‘into’ of the English, is suggestive of the Italian resistance to provocative subversion of the language within the field of belles lettres something everywhere evident in Italian translations of British modernists.

  Clearly the phenomenon of translation offers an intriguing instance of the extent to which any culture may or may not be open to influence from another. Again, the question is complex and ultimately impossible to resolve. Again Buruma’s thinking is cloudy. At the beginning of a chapter dedicated to Goethe and the German appropriation of Shakespeare, he remarks of his own early bilingualism: ‘Such a background effectively cuts off all routes to linguistic nativism.’

  Buruma, then, a universalist, believes in translatability. Apparently, languages are interchangeable. But a few pages later, discussing Schlegel’s translation of Shakespeare, he is offering the following typically nativist and entirely reasonable qualification: ‘His brilliant translation may have been the most accurate version of Shakespeare in German to date, but it also contained echoes of Goethe’s classicism and Herder’s poetry. It was, in short, a German text.’

  Having made this observation, Buruma would now appear to be in a strong position to make a truly pertinent statement about the way cultures may indeed be open to each other, yet transform, without necessarily nullifying, what they absorb according to their own dynamic: yes, this is Shakespeare, but Shakespeare in German. Instead, his closing remark merely betrays how little he has been enjoying his reading in this particular field: ‘A famous German Shakespeare (and Goethe) scholar tried to explain this [Schlegel’s translation] in the following rather tortured formulation: the universal genius of Shakespeare could be reborn in Germany only after the universal genius of Goethe had infused the German language with a German Geist equal to the English spirit of Shakespeare.’

  Though the lofty diction of the scholar’s observation may not be to everybody’s taste, it is hard to see what is ‘tortured’ about this. That the way in which certain writers have enriched their languages then makes it possible for translators to find solutions to hitherto insoluble problems seems self-evident. How could translations into Itali
an of English novels be the same after Manzoni had written I promessi spossi How could one not draw on Eliot for a translation of the French symbolists?

  Freshly arrived in England, Voltaire thoroughly enjoyed an afternoon by the Thames and at the races; but introduced the same evening to court society his enthusiastic report was met with disdain: ‘the young women he had admired so foolishly were maidservants, and the jolly young men mere apprentices on hired horses.’ A century later, Tocqueville is bewildered to find that his English friends are ‘still convinced that extreme inequality of wealth is in the natural order of things’. When will these people have their revolution? the Frenchman wonders. Why are they obsessed by class? Visiting the Poet Laureate Alfred Austin, Theodor Herzl was unimpressed by the man’s grasp of international politics but terribly taken by his respectful manners. In general, Buruma comments, Herzl made a point, ‘of mentioning that the Grand Duke of this or the Marquess of that had helped him into his coat or showed him to his coach’. How could the Jewish immigrant fail to love a country where a Jew had not only been made prime minister, but an earl too …

  The most exciting aspect of Voltaire’s Coconuts and its very real contribution is the way - with all the attractive diversity of the anglophiles and anglophobes it presents - nevertheless and across three centuries, a very clear consensus begins to build up as to what the conundrum of British national character amounts to, for a European. We are allowed, that is, a growing insight into how the dynamic of our own national life puzzles our neighbours.

  Inevitably the difficulty is not with any single element but with the way in which they stand in relation to each other. On the one hand there is the high value put on reason and on political and religious freedoms: the Britain of the last two centuries was indeed freer than its European counterparts. On the other, and however much it may now be under attack, there is the strong sense of class belonging that continues to enshrine social and economic inequalities. There is a great and progressive drive in the areas of trade and industry, coupled with ancient, ludicrous, even Gothic traditions, usually in those areas where privilege is sacred. There is a notable lack of support for, or even interest in, extremist ideological positions, together with the most vociferous and tasteless gutter press anywhere imaginable. Above all - and on this point it seems all the bickering revolutionaries, from Ledru-Rollin to Herzen, Marx and Mazzini agreed - England was dull) was mediocre. Buruma never quotes Nietzsche but that philosopher’s denunciation of the ‘English-mechanistic stultification of the world’ never seems far from the visiting European’s lips.

  Naturally, the more astute thinkers were eager to guess at the secret that kept these apparent opposites in equilibrium. Tocqueville noted that for all the starkness of class distinctions, nevertheless there was a possibility of upward mobility in England, something that was not true in France. “A man could become a gentleman,’ Buruma glosses, ‘but you had to be born a gentil homme” The English avidity for trade and money is thus peculiarly different from the American, in that the Englishman aspires to use his cash to buy into a world of mystique and privilege, to change class. As a result he isn’t eager to have his aristocracy abolished, while the aristocracy in turn is, yes, snobbish - how could it be otherwise? - but does not entirely turn up its nose to new money and new celebrity. In this regard Buruma offers some convincing remarks on the alliance between Thatcher and the Tory party.

  There appears, then, to be a curious alchemy by which, in certain circumstances, the English mind turns the water of money into the wine of nobility. Intriguingly, Buruma draws on his own experiences to remark that most anglophiles are snobs. They see the English social world as offering a recognition that elsewhere neither money nor celebrity can buy. Convincingly, he points to the great many foreigners who have become English lords and gentlemen. England offers this odd opportunity. After twenty years in Italy, I have yet to see the phenomenon in reverse.

  Herzen’s observations on English mediocrity may at first sight seem some distance from Tocqueville’s musings on the permeability of the British class system. Taken together, however, and with the help of an observation or two from Giacomo Leopardi, who was neither anglophile nor anglophobe, perhaps we can hazard a guess as to the deeper nature of the quarrel, or love affair, between England and mainland Europe, both a century ago and still today.

  Herzen reflected that ‘the only countries in Europe that are tranquil are those in which personal liberty and freedom of speech are least restricted’. However, not being oppressed by their governments, the British and Swiss were not obliged to develop a spirit of private disobedience and thus tended to become duller. What was more, freedom of speech actually opened the way to a different kind of tyranny, that of public opinion as expressed in a scandal-mongering press. Herzen wrote: “The freer a country is from government interference, the more fully recognised its right to speak, to independence of conscience, the more intolerant grows the mob: public opinion becomes a torture chamber; your neighbour, your butcher, your tailor, family, club, parish, keep you under supervision and perform the duties of a policeman.’ In short, Tocqueville’s upwardly mobile industrialist, eager to buy into a world of British privilege, will not only have to accumulate a great deal of money, he must also avoid scandal so as to keep the public respect.

  So far so good. But what was this dullness, this supposed mediocrity that Europeans, particularly the revolutionaries and above all Marx, despised? What did it amount to? Did Mazzini, for example, honestly imagine that in the Utopia he proposed -ultimately a free, democratic, one-world state - people would be more interesting Surely when no longer obliged to disobey in private they too would become ‘dull’.

  Herzen’s reaction to a representation of the battle of Waterloo is telling here. Wellington and Blücher, he complains, ‘had turned history off the high road and up to the hubs in mud’. For these European revolutionaries excitement and romance had to do with a particular and basically Hegelian vision of history in which they saw themselves as high-road prophets of a future transformation at once inevitable and positive. From this they derived importance and self-esteem. It is a curiosity of the British mindframe that it has remained largely indifferent to this particular delirium, and it was this indifference that so irritated nineteenth-century revolutionaries, as today it irritates those in Europe who are eager to construct, with a similar vision of history in mind, the single European Community. Rather than appreciating, with Tocqueville, that the British, and so many of those who have been attracted to Britain, were perhaps locked into a different project, the acquisition of prestige through style and money - what we often refer to in the pejorative as snobbery -they chose, and choose, to dismiss them as mediocre.

  Leopardi was among the first to suggest that in the great wreck of noble illusions brought about by rationalism and the retreat of religion, national mores would play an important part in helping the individual develop a strategy for dealing with the now evident, as he saw it, meaninglessness of life. Written in 1824, his Discourse on the Present State of Italian Customs presents ‘Italianness’ as almost a special condition of the spirit. In other countries public morality had survived the collapse of metaphysics thanks to a more highly developed sense of society. In England or France a gentleman ‘would be ashamed of doing wrong in the same way as he would be ashamed of appearing in conversation with a stain on his suit’. As in Schopenhauer’s aphorisms on honour, it is the search for the respect of one’s peers, coupled crucially with the knowledge of how that respect is to be obtained, that holds society together. Leopardi thus envies the British the ridiculously high opinion they afford to each other, seeing in it a guarantee of moral behaviour.

  In Italy, however, the poet claims, no such society had replaced the illusions of the Middle Ages; Italians conceded no respect to each other, indeed took pleasure above all in exchanging insults, with the result that it was clear to everyone that “there was no reason for not behaving exactly as one wished’. Leopardi conclud
es by prospecting the need for collective illusions on a large scale to combat a sense of meaninglessness and the resultant cynicism. He speaks of the idea of nationhood, prophesies, long before Coubertin, that sport and its associated pageantry will become an important spiritual resource. He can hardly be blamed if Italy’s great collective illusion, when it did finally come, was to take such unfortunate turns.

  Ever since the Enlightenment, continental Europe has been busy producing grander and grander projects to compensate for the collapse of feudal authority and shared religion, to cover up underlying doubt and existential anxiety. Infinitely preferable to communism or fascism, the European Community is the most recent of these projects. Unlike empires seized or rigid systems merely imposed, it possesses a novel and perhaps decisive asset: a scope for seemingly endless complication, endless accommodation of minorities, interminable negotiation with new members. Not for nothing have all the national languages been maintained. Not for nothing are various tiers of membership envisaged. Quite simply, this project, which can easily be believed in as inherently good and historically inevitable, will take up all the time there is. Not a moment will be left for feelings of futility. At present one sure way to gain prestige in Europe is to work tirelessly to keep this ideal on the high road of history, out of the mud.

  Meanwhile, and at the deepest level, the British are not so much opposed as disinterested. They have other ways of keeping meaninglessness at bay. Wasn’t the fate of Diana, Princess of Wales, the possibility of her introducing a wealthy Middle Eastern playboy into an extended royal family, a much more interesting story than anything the bureaucrats of Brussels have dreamed up? And the British agony is that while they would be content to stay out of the European project, this might lead to a loss of wealth and, ever associated with wealth, the prestige they chase. But it’s only a might. For, alas, the further agony is that participation and the corresponding surrender of sovereignty could equally well lead to a loss of wealth: those hellish complications the continentals keep generating are not conducive to the accumulation of capital. We’ll wait and see, the British say about the Euro, blissfully unaware that this approach is as contemptible to the contemporary European with the Grand Idea as British diffidence to liberal revolution was for Mazzini and Herzen 150 years ago. Yet in or out, like it or not, Britain is part of the larger dynamic that makes up European character. It is, as Buruma’s book very convincingly shows, the place where people can go when, whether as leader or victim, the Continent’s grand ideas let them down.