The Revolt of the Pendulum by Clive James
I hope I spotted that at the time. For a short while I might have attempted to address my classmates the way Hornblower addressed his first mate, Mr Bush – saying the minimum, asserting his authority, bridling at contradiction – but taciturnity was not my natural style, nor tolerance theirs, so the imposture could not have lasted long, and anyway it was obvious that in at least one vital respect Hornblower was a wish fulfilment. He could steer his ship into the massed broadsides of the whole French fleet and the enemy cannon-balls would hit everyone on board except him. They just curved around him. They had been manufactured in the same ordnance factory as the Hollywood bullets that swerved past John Wayne on Iwo Jima. When Hornblower did get hit, he got hit at the edge, leaving all the bits that mattered still working. The same could have been said of Nelson – it must certainly have been said by Lady Hamilton – but Nelson spent as little of his career as possible facing overwhelming odds, whereas for Hornblower the odds had to be overwhelming or he wouldn’t bother pointing his bowsprit at them. In recent years the indecently gifted Spanish writer Arturo Pe´rez-Reverte, taking a tip from Stendhal, has been turning out a wonderful series of novels and novellas about what war was really like in the Napoleonic period. His key trick is to build a central character you can’t help sympathising with and then kill him off at random. This is a cruel literary strategy – Tolstoy pioneered it in War and Peace when he aced out Nicolai Rostov just after the reader had learned to love him – but in the cruelty lies its truth. War was like that, is like that, and will always be like that, until the day when Full Spectrum Dominance, or whatever the nerds call it, allows a battle with no people in it at all. In reality, flying metal doesn’t care what it hits. Least of all can flying metal be staved off by moral stature. An invulnerable character is inviting you to join him in dreamland, the land of flying sludge.
As a war orphan myself, I don’t think I ever quite lost sight of the truth about the insouciant randomness of the Grim Reaper’s scythe, but there was perhaps an element of compensating for the absent father figure. I think it more likely, however, that I was just fantasising about the possibility of individual initiative and valour having some effect in a world which I already knew to be unjust. Some of my heroes were fascists in all but uniform. My adolescence had taken place after, and not before, the era in which the supermen had done their worst, but I didn’t spot the connection: perhaps because I was unusually obtuse, but more likely because adolescence takes place in its own time, and refuses to be pre-empted by history. Putting the best possible construction on it – something we ought not to do for ourselves, but there are times when it is necessary in the interests of justice – I think I admired my collection of superior beings for how they did their duty, not for how they indulged their eminence. From far off, beyond the walls of my bedroom, history had already reached me as a wave of shock. Clearly one was powerless, and yet here were these marvellous people who had power: not power over others – that never really appealed to me, a blessed blank spot on my crowded list of vices – but power over events. The only drawback was that my paragons were fictional.
In my next phase, I moved up to reality, but read about it as if it were sludge fiction. After World War I, the books that told the story of what the war had been really like did not start coming out until about 1928. After World War II, the flood of realistic accounts started almost immediately. In Australia, my generation of schoolboys grew up reading about British heroes: Guy Gibson in Paul Brickhill’s The Dam Busters and in Gibson’s own Enemy Coast Ahead, Douglas Bader in Reach for the Sky (Brickhill again) and all those resourceful RAF types in The Great Escape (Brickhill yet again). Paul Brickhill was an Australian but he might as well have been working for the British Council. I took in all the factual detail but as far as the characters went I was still dealing with Biggles, Bulldog and Sherlock. In The Big Show and Flames in the Sky, Pierre Clostermann was the French Biggles. When I read Adolf Galland’s book The First and the Last I was almost sorry the Luftwaffe hadn’t won: clearly they would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about the Me 262 jet fighter’s potential. Galland, if not precisely the German Biggles, had a lot in common with Erich von Stahlhein, the caddish but talented gentleman spy and ace pilot who had almost brought Biggles permanently down to earth in Biggles Flies East. When I read Desmond Young’s Rommel, I was overcome with grief that he hadn’t won in the desert: clearly he would have, if only Hitler hadn’t been so stupid about strategy. My three-colour drawing of Rommel, copied from the dust jacket of Young’s book, decorated the wall beside my bed. From my mother’s angle it might as well have been a drawing of General Yamashita, but she knew how to wait.
She had to wait quite a while. My hero worship was slow to fade, partly because the cast of characters in the war books had actually been pretty heroic. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that they had had the opportunity to cut a dash because their circumstances were favourable. But my voracious reading habit eventually led me to the uncomfortable truth. In The Scourge of the Swastika, by Lord Russell of Liverpool, I read my first accounts of another kind of prison camp from which no tunnels led out, and saw the kind of pictures I had no urge to copy. And when I read The Naked Island, by Russell Braddon, I got my first close-up of the war my father had been in, and they had all been in: a war to the death, a war in which men were very lucky indeed if they even got the chance to fight, and in which women and children had died by the million. Children like me. Time to grow up. After that, I continued to read everything that was real, and I still do. But I got the habit by reading everything that was false.
TLS, December 16, 2005
Postscript
Any cultural commentator who lives to my age is bound to be reminded, many times a day, of how his tastes and interests, even at their most highly developed, began in his childhood enthusiasms, and of how those in their turn sprang from instinct. Thus the circle closes, and the mental life that we had thought was linear is revealed as having no end, because it is joined to the beginning. When I laid my first books out beside each other so that I could better love their covers, it was the start of the thrill I feel now, as I decorate my website with the covers of all the books I have come to favour. In my library, I see only their spines, but on the Web, they answer my first desire. Young, naive and knowing nothing, I had no idea, as I sat absorbed in Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s tank-busting adventures as recorded in Stuka Pilot, that Rudel, still alive at the time, was one of the bunch of unrepentant Nazis in Argentina who always knew where Adolf Eichmann was hiding. But my clueless fervour was the beginning of my later capacity to find such things out, and the thrill of reading was the first and most solid instalment of what Bruno Schultz called the iron capital of the adult brain. A critical capacity had already begun, even if it was only on the primitive level of knowing whether what I read excited me or not. Finally, because initially, that critical capacity must be innate. Samuel Johnson, who has been often in my mind during the assembly stage of this book, invented a worthless critic called Dick Minim. Rising to great prestige through no other gift but his sensitivity to the direction of the wind, Dick Minim was devoid of any genuine critical capacity, because he had not been born with it. Johnson, the most effectively learned man of his time, had taken in all that mattered of everything that had been written, but he was sure that his ability to judge it had started in his blood. ‘There is a vigilance of observation and accuracy of description which books and precepts cannot confer,’ he wrote. ‘From this almost all original and native excellence proceeds.’ He was talking primarily, at that point, about the scholars and their learned conjectures, but his wonderful Preface to Shakespeare is full of precepts equally pertinent for all critics, however general their approach. As he says here, however, the precepts will never mean enough unless we have it in our nature to recognize their truth. Yes, we must read. But first of all we must choose our parents wisely.
THE REVOLT OF THE PENDULUM
CLIVE JAMES is the author of more than thir
ALSO BY CLIVE JAMES
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Unreliable Memoirs
Falling Towards England
May Week Was In June
North Face of Soho
The Blaze of Obscurity
FICTION
Brilliant Creatures
The Remake
Brrm! Brrm!
The Silver Castle
VERSE
Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage Through the London Literary World
Other Passports: Poems 1958–1985
The Book of My Enemy: Collected Verse 1958–2003
Angels Over Elsinore: Collected Verse 2003–2008
Opal Sunset: Selected Poems 1958–2008
CRITICISM
The Metropolitan Critic (new edition, 1994)
Visions Before Midnight
The Crystal Bucket
First Reactions (US)
From the Land of Shadows
Glued to the Box
Snakecharmers in Texas
The Dreaming Swimmer
Fame in the Twentieth Century
On Television
Even As We Speak
Reliable Essays
As of This Writing (US)
The Meaning of Recognition
Cultural Amnesia
TRAVEL
Flying Visit
To the memory of
Pat Kavanagh
A Note on the Text
Most of the essays in this book appear just as they were first printed by various publications whether in Britain, Australia or the United States. To all those many generous editors, my thanks, and I mean them no disrespect by having occasionally restored production cuts, undone the rigours of house style, or reversed the effects of supposedly beneficial changes in the prevailing version of the English language. In Australia, for example, the Symphony Orchestra, in any major city that has one, is nowadays called the Symphony: a clear case of needless confusion introduced through the itch for improvement. A symphony is something composed by, say, Beethoven. A symphony orchestra is something that performs it. To restore such distinctions I counted as a simple duty, like clarifying my own prose where it seemed necessary. But on the whole I have tried to leave a piece exactly as it was, following my established practice of adding afterthoughts only in a postscript. An updated essay would be torn loose from its time, and the resulting claim to prescience would falsify everything in it, because my main aim as a cultural commentator is to help define the connections between the past and the present, in the sure conviction that the future is uncertain. The date given at the end of each piece is therefore the first clue to its beginning.
First published 2009 by Picador
First published in paperback 2010 by Picador
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Copyright © Clive James 2009
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Clive James, The Revolt of the Pendulum