And the poet’s comment is a useful check, perhaps, on the ambitions of the sympathetic imagination. Mine is happening to me – a factor of incalculable weight. The identity crisis in question was a humble thing; but it was exclusively and indivisibly mine.
*1 Yes, this all took place a very long time ago. Forty-odd years later, London taxis persist in not costing £5: they now cost £88.80. But back then the sum of £5 was only seen on the meter of a taxi bound for the airport. (And £5, as Phoebe reminded us, was what the agency would have paid Ariadne.)
*2 Genghis Khan is revered today only in Mongolia (whose premier airport bears his name). Elsewhere and always – even in Nazi Germany – he is remembered as a blood-smeared genocidaire. He killed about 40 million: close to 10 per cent of the global population in 1300. We remember him too, now, as a hyperactive satyr and rapist: 16 million people alive today are not being at all deluded when they claim to feel the blood of Genghis coursing through their veins…Hitler’s declaration – part of a morale-stiffening lecture to his military brass – was made on August 22, 1939, when the immediate prospect was the ‘depopulation’ of Poland; and Genghis, said Hitler (getting slightly carried away), ‘hunted millions of women and children to their deaths, consciously and with a joyous heart’. We may incidentally note that the
liberal thinker Alexander Herzen, in one of his extraordinary premonitions, said in the 1860s that a Russian post-revolutionary power might resemble ‘Genghis Khan with the telegraph’. Khan is Turkic for ‘ruler, lord, prince’ (and when Churchill heard the news on March 11, 1953, he said, ‘The great khan is dead’). At that point Stalin was revered as ‘the father of the peoples’ by about a third of humankind (China, et al.). So you could say that Stalin got away with it (i.e., his personal toll of 20-odd million), in the West at least, until the publication of Conquest’s The Great Terror (1968) and more comprehensively Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago in the early 1970s. Today, in 2018, Stalin’s approval rating in Russia is over 50 per cent.
*3 Specifically ‘a real dilly of a VD’, in the words of William Burroughs. One of the books I was reading at the time was The Naked Lunch. ‘The disease in short arm hath a gimmick for going places…And after an initial lesion at the point of infection [it] passes to the lymph glands of the groin, which swell and burst in suppurating fissures, drain for days, months, years…’ Elephantiasis of the genitals is ‘a frequent complication’, as is gangrene, to the point where ‘amputation in medio from the waist down [is] indicated’.
*4 Germaine was unwaveringly kind and gentle, and in every way – but the amatory demeanour of the world’s most glamorous feminist is surely of scant general interest in this day and age…I don’t think she and I ever talked except glancingly about the situation of women. Germaine’s strength was wild brilliance, not sober instruction; she certainly infused her influence, but the job of turning me into a true believer devolved upon the world’s second most glamorous feminist, Gloria Steinem, with whom I spent a not especially relaxing but highly educational day, as an interviewer, in New York State in 1984…It was said of Florence Nightingale that she was ‘very violent’ – tacitly. All the great feminists of my era had moral menace in them. And they were almost invariably childless. They had to harden their hearts: such was the historical demand.
*5 ‘He could feel quite tangibly the difference in weight between the fragile human body and the colossus of the State. He could feel the State’s bright eyes gazing into his face; any moment now the State would crash down on him…’ The extreme asymmetry in mass defines the ‘fear that millions of people find insurmountable…this fear written up in crimson letters over the leaden sky of Moscow – this terrible fear of the State’. Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate.
*6 And one senses that the third way attracted more poets than novelists. Obviously it did. Poetry by definition a) tends to be oblique, b) resists paraphrase, and c) can find refuge in extreme brevity. It is the work of a moment to imagine an opaque haiku about (say) the collectivisation of agriculture (1929–33); it is very hard to imagine an extended socialist-realist narrative on the same subject with not a thought in its head about the annihilation of several million peasant families.
PART II
Chapter 1 France in the Time of Iraq 1: Anti-américain
Invisible ink
There’s no doubt about it: this is the life.
St-Malo, on the north-west coast of France, in March 2003. The name of the seafront hotel was Le Méridien…
Freshly showered, and wearing only a pair of kitten-heeled red shoes and an attractive lower undergarment (arguably her coolest pants), she came out of the bathroom and into the bedroom and stood quite still with her back to the bright bay window. There was a one-page single-spaced typescript in her hand…
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. So wrote the Irish novelist Margaret Hungerford (1855–97; typhoid) in her best-known novel Molly Bawn (which earns a friendly mention in Ulysses). It is a generous thought, and memorably expressed; its spirit is inclusive and egalitarian (there’s hope for us all, it murmurs); and it has the further merit of being broadly true. But ‘beauty’, here, is a misnomer or an example of poetic licence: Mrs Hungerford means physical charm, or appeal, or the power to attract and endear. Her aphorism doesn’t really apply to the beautiful.*1
You see, in the case of the woman with her back to the window – it wasn’t just him. In her case there was more than one beholder; there was in fact something like a beholder
