Fame & Folly (24 page)

I
GNAZIO
S
ILONE
, the renowned Italian novelist who was early attracted to revolutionary politics, once testified that it was an act of greed during an earthquake in the Abruzzi village of his boyhood that turned him to Communism. While Silone’s mother lay buried under rubble, with only one arm exposed, his uncle—until that moment in every way a good man—looted her housekeeping cache. “I think that night my attitude to money became tinged with a profound horror.”

Communism’s centrally defining seductiveness has never been politics in the Roman sense of
civitas
, the mundane social mechanisms of civil order, so much as it has been a metaphysical denial of greed. In “Proofs,” George Steiner’s arresting novella of Communism’s 1989 collapse—the opening fiction of his
Proofs and Three Parables
—the Marxist purists are all messianic spiritualists swept away by seizures of justice and radical love. Like Silone, they are Italians who remember Il Duce with revulsion, and they are similarly in search of the transcendent insight that catapulted them into a belief as indissoluble and sacramental as any other species
of immovable faith. Silone famously left the Party and disavowed it: “the forgetting of the end in the means, the acceptance of a new servitude masked by the theory of historical necessity, seemed to me to be disastrous. My ‘way out’ had led me into a concentration camp.”

The few quixotic members of Steiner’s last-ditch Circle for Marxist Revolutionary Theory and Praxis have not recanted, though they too are no longer of the Party: they were expelled for protesting the brutalities of Soviet tanks in Hungary. Yet they cannot expel the primordial ideal from their own bosoms—they watch with shocked bemusement as the Berlin Wall crumbles, as the tyrannies of Prague, Warsaw, Budapest, Sofia all dissolve. The visionaries of the CMRTP do not obscure Stalin’s atrocities—“The perversion is monstrous”—but they cannot snuff the redemptive dream that has animated their meager lives. All the same, in the annus mirabilis of 1989, it is not the state that is withering away, as Marx predicted, but the dream itself. The CMRTP, with no recruits and a lost agenda, is compelled to disband. The rhapsody jangles, the maggots have eaten Utopia.

In the Circle’s chief visionary, whom the others call
“Professore”
because of his erudite intensity, Steiner has contrived a seamless and apposite metaphor: the
Professore
is a proofreader of such flawless purity that he “had not rival in the arts of scruple.” His perfectionism is such that even paper litter in the streets cannot escape his fastidious eye: “if the winds blew a piece toward his feet, he would pick it up, smooth it, read closely, and make any correction needed. Then he would deposit it in the garbage receptacle.” And finally, after debating the genesis of Marxist hope until dawn, the proofreader cries out: “Utopia simply means
getting it right
! Communism means taking the errata out of history. Out of man. Reading proofs.”

The errata of history and of humankind comprise the obsessive counterminings of Steiner’s narrative. His models are Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, the dialectical segments of
The Magic Mountain
, Chekhov’s more argumentative and theorizing characters—in short, the fiction of ideas, wherein ideas are indistinguishable from passions, and culture is defined by its loftiest
urgencies. Steiner’s Marxists, contending on behalf of the ordinary human article, are nevertheless consummate elitists. They look to Olympus or Sinai, or to the holy men of the West: Plato, Schubert, Shakespeare, Einstein, Mozart, Cézanne, Marx above all. They are the gravest of theologians, with a weak sense of irony and hardly a glimmer of the comedy struck off by human unpredictability. They will find origins, they believe, in outcome.

So Father Carlo, the renegade priest, has learned to see that “at the heart of Communism is the lie.… The systematic bribing and betrayal of human hope.… Your earthly messiahs turned out to be nothing but hypocritical hoodlums. Lords of lice.” But he dismisses Christianity as “aspirin” and ends by praising American consumerism. “A country,” the
Professore
retorts, “which no poem can shake. Where no philosophic argument matters.” And of Bolshevism even in the hour of its rot he declares, “Yes, we got it wrong. Hideously wrong.… But the big error, the overestimate of man from which the mistake came, is the single most noble motion of the human spirit in our awful history.”

Yet here Steiner’s tragic satire springs its terrible trap. The perfectionist erratum-catcher, having proclaimed that the “hopes of a Communist are a way of seeing with absolute clarity,” is gradually losing his eyesight to glaucoma; his vision is compromised. If Utopia is “reading proofs,” then Communism’s landscape has been turned into an uncorrectable jungle of typos and ignoramus blunders.

George Steiner may be a philosophical essayist who writes fiction—his last, “The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.,” notorious for giving Hitler the last word, was also a narrative of history’s outcome—but it is contentious fiction with the blood of life in it. The blood of life, that is, if it is understood that our lives hang on what we think and believe (or what others lead us to think and believe) as much as on what we feel and do. Even the sexual occasions in “Proofs” are stimulated by a union of belief: idea is as elemental as pulse.

The three “parables” that follow are, it seems to me, unnecessarily drawn under this portentous head, which can suggest Khalil Gibran as readily as Kafka. What is meant to have, in “A Conversation
Piece,” the resonance of rabbinic disputation (notable for its succinctness), is rather more redolent of a grandiloquent translation from the Persian: “blessed be the hem of His unsayable Name and the fire-garment of His glory.” The subject is what Hebrew scripture calls the
akedah
, Abraham’s “binding” of his son Isaac, who is saved from sacrifice by divine intent. Though the dialogue is mazy with speculations concerning the purport of God’s way with Abraham, the speakers are finally gathered under the spigot of gas. “There is no ram now and the bush is burning.” Having pierced us with this twentieth-century denouement, does Steiner mean us to infer that the Holocaust was God’s will?

“Noël, Noël” is a short story told from the viewpoint of a family pet, for whom the pleasures of Christmas are violated by what appears to be an act of incest. “Desert Island Discs” proposes a sound-archive that includes Fortinbras’s belch, the “sibilant swerve (in G minor) of the steel nib on Rudolf Julius Emmanuel Clausius’s pen in the instant in which this pen wrote the
n
in the exponential
n
minus
x
to the
n
th power in the equation of entropy,” and other captured acuities. A witty piece, its format moving between poetry and a conceit.

But in this little book of fables for the intellect, it is the canny agility and breadth of “Proofs” that leave the most enduring traces. With all their weary pathos, Steiner’s incurable visionaries will likely find their way into the accumulating archive of Communism’s spiritual doom.

MARK TWAIN’S VIENNA
 

I
N CONTEMPLATING
the difference between a Victorian museum and one of our own era, what is the instantly recognizable contemporary element? Never mind that display cases have evolved from what used to be called “vitrines” (glass boxes on wooden legs); or that pictures are no longer strung from rococo cornices; or that museum visitors, too, have evolved—from isolated passionate starers to dogged mobs in motion, with headsets plugged into their ears. The absolute difference is in the growth of the lobby shop: here nearly every treasure of the galleries overhead appears in facsimile. The past is exactly duplicated in the present: for a few dollars you can own a Canaanite clay oil lamp or a carved Egyptian cat.

Jorge Borges in one of his ingenious
ficciones
imagines the paradox of a man who has written a “modern”
Don Quixote
, identical in every syllable to Cervantes’
Don Quixote
. Yet the difference is extreme: whereas the original work manifested a robust contemporary
style of speech appropriate to the seventeenth century, the modern duplicate turns out to be hopelessly archaic. Or consider the plaster casts of those pitifully fleeing figures of Pompeii, whose shapes have already been preserved, two thousand years ago, in cooled volcanic ash: sculpted twice, they are twice removed from the ancient catastrophe they copy.

The idea of the facsimile is, in our time, itself a kind of volcanic eruption: this or that newfangled device can spew out an instantaneous copy of practically anything. All the same, there is a divide between the original and its imitator. The divide is history. When you purchase one of those clay oil lamps from a museum shop, and take it home and put it on a shelf, you may dream over it all you like, summoning up the past with your marveling caress—but the past of what? Its history is a molding machine in Newark, New Jersey. The original of anything carries the force of its own contemporaneity. Polishing my grandmother’s brass candlesticks, I feel how
her
hand once did the same, and her spirit accompanies the act. Rare-book collectors know all this: the living touch of an aging binding is instinct with its period, and with the breath of its first owner.

A facsimile edition is something else altogether. Though it suggests a Zeitgeist long evaporated, still it can only
suggest
; so it places on its readers a burden of history-imagining that a genuine first edition will not. A first edition of an old book is an heirloom, a relic, an authentic survival of the past; in its own presence and essence, it
is
the past, a palpable instance of time-travel. But a facsimile edition, because it is the product of machined reproduction, stirs up a quandary: even if we are seduced into pretending so, ancestral eyes and hands did
not
encounter this very volume.

The quandary is this. Mark Twain in any available edition—and there are scores of these—augurs a reader’s private exchange with an American classic. But Mark Twain in a facsimile edition is designed to be a wholly dissimilar experience; and yet it is not, and cannot be. Touch a facsimile volume, and what you touch is the refined technology of photocopying—no time-travel in
that
. I am looking now at a facsimile of a Harper & Brothers publication of
The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays
,
dated 1900. The print is large and clear, the margins generous. There is a frontispiece photograph of Mark Twain, captioned “S. L. Clemens.” The copyright, curiously, is not in the name of S. L. Clemens (or of his pseudonym), but in that of Olivia L. Clemens, his wife. (She died in 1904, predeceasing him by six years). The fifteen items in the Table of Contents disclose their sources; of periodicals once renowned (
Harper’s Magazine, The Century, The Cosmopolitan, The New York World, The Youth’s Companion, The Forum, McClure’s
, and
The North American Review
), only
Harper’s
recognizably survives. The several illustrations (artist unidentified), with their captions excerpted from the text, are redolent of nineteenth-century charm—the charm of skilled and evocative drawings—and may make us nostalgic for a practice long in disuse: every tale equipped with its visual interpretation. (But it was a practice serious authors grew tired of and finally could no longer endure. Henry James, for instance, banished internal illustrations from his New York Edition and turned to photography for the frontispiece.)

A facsimile volume, then, can offer only this much of “history”: a list of forgotten magazines, a handful of old-fashioned drawings, an imitative binding. The rest of it is the job of reading; and a facsimile volume, despite its hope of differentiating itself from an ordinary sort of book, reads, after all, like any other reprint. With this caution. A run-of-the-mill reprint will supply you with a text—fiction or essay—and leave you on your own, so to speak. A facsimile edition, on the other hand, because it deals in reproductive illusion—like that clay oil lamp bought in a museum gift shop—demands what illusion always demands: confirmation (or completion) in solid data. In brief: context or setting.