Between Eternities: And Other Writings Read online

  The phrase in question is often topped off by another similar, still more explicit one: ‘People pass, institutions remain’, as if the latter, from the Church to Athletic Bilbao, were not the work and invention of people, and in fact existed to serve them rather than the other way round. The truth is that for far too many centuries, we have been encouraged to believe that we are all at the service of something intangible whose perpetuity takes precedence over us. It is not, then, so very odd that these categorical, vacuous statements should enjoy such a magnificent reputation, nor that those who cease to subscribe to them should be treated as if they had the plague. Do you mean that you’re not prepared to sacrifice everything for the company? A soldier who is not prepared to die for his country whatever the circumstances? A revolutionary unwilling to betray his neighbours? One of the faithful who has doubts about blowing himself up in order to kill three infidels? A believer who chooses to renounce his faith rather than embrace martyrdom? A footballer who prefers to accept a juicy financial package rather than stay with the club that nurtured him? There you have examples of an egotist, a coward, a turncoat, a traitor, an apostate and a money-grubber. Anyone who doesn’t place something above himself, above other people and above their feelings is greeted with insults and scorn.

  And yet … I feel much safer and more comfortable in the company of those who lack that ‘superior’ loyalty, who never place an abstraction above their concern for those close to them, who will turn against me only because of something I have done, rather than because of some dogma or belief or ideal. More than that, they are the only people I trust, whereas I could never trust a religious leader or a politician or a soldier or a nationalist, or indeed a believer or a militant or an official patriot, because I know that any one of them would be prepared to betray me or sacrifice me. If it came to it, they would be the vassals and unconditional supporters of what they have placed ‘above’ all else even if they disapprove of the behaviour of those who embody that ideal. So widespread is this feeling that I find there is almost no one I can trust. And, viewed through that prism, you, too, will see – if you think about it or look back or remember – how very few people can be trusted.

  (2009)

  In Praise of the Egotist

  There are many types of egotist, and literature abounds in them, from the misanthropic Pío Baroja to the ecumenical Thomas Mann, as well as almost every poet who has ever lived, with Juan Ramón Jiménez and Rainer Maria Rilke at their head, poets who sacrificed everything (mainly their fellow men and women) to compose a few lines of poetry in silence and solitude. There is no shortage of fictional egotists either, from the mean Dickensian Scrooge of A Christmas Carol to the cruel and suffering Adolphe, protagonist of Benjamin Constant’s novel, whose direct heir is Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, the most pitiless observer of humanity in all of twentieth-century literature.

  And that is perhaps the great virtue and advantage of the egotist: his or her capacity to observe without experiencing any obligation to feel pity. It is said of generous, altruistic people that they are capable of putting themselves in someone else’s shoes and of understanding their needs, but this can inevitably give rise to a high degree of confusion: the altruist – who is, deep down, a stickler for the rules – ends up believing that everyone’s desires and needs are the same, and thus performs a kind of levelling process, the effect of which is to make those individuals replace their possible previous desires with others that the altruist considers universal. Now that is precisely what no one wants, since our most authentic desires are unique and untransferable and, often, unconfessable. The egotist, on the other hand, tends to know himself through and through and is never likely to confuse himself with someone else, still less usurp another’s personality. And because he is not equipped to place himself in that other person’s shoes, he will never cease to see other people as individuals with their own interests and desires, which he deems to be as worthy of respect as his own. The egotist will be able to discriminate, discern and see more clearly because he doesn’t compare or involve himself with others. The egotist weighs his words, his actions and his power, and in doing so, even though his objective is always his own best interests, and although one might say that, as a whole, he lacks scruples, the advantage is that he will behave with urbanity, civility and tact, and can at least claim to be free of the two gravest and most widespread sins of our age: proselytism and messianism. The egotist is one of the few people not trying to convert or save anyone, and is, therefore, one of the few capable of seeing the truth.

  (1990)

  All Too Few

  A few of my female friends are reaching an age when their sons or daughters are beginning to leave home; and since, sometimes, I’m so obtuse that I can only think about and fix on what is there before me – a form of obtuseness, let it be said in my defence, that I believe I share with most of my fellow men and women – I cannot help but reflect on the silent, private sadness ‘that dare not speak its name’ with which these mothers confront the emptying of their homes. It’s not surprising they keep quiet about it and conceal it. My friends are intelligent and generous women. They know that it’s good for their offspring to leave home, whether to get married or something similar, out of a desire for adventure or independence or out of mere impatience to incorporate themselves fully into the world. They know, too, that they’re not losing their children, they will simply cease to live with them and, often, cease taking care of them in the more prosaic and everyday ways: they will no longer have to cook for them or take them to the doctor or turn on the washing machine to do their laundry, or put up with their deafening music or their occasional bad manners. They know that their children must now learn things for themselves, take on responsibilities and gain experience; and that if they do linger in the paternal or maternal home (as happens with ever greater frequency, because of the increasingly high cost of housing and the precarious nature of employment), they, the mothers, would be the first to worry and to encourage and help them find their own territory. So they know that they have no objective reasons to complain or feel sad. And, of course, it cannot escape them that they did exactly the same when they were young, and did so without a twinge of bad conscience.

  However, another reason why their discretion doesn’t surprise me is that mothers are often the easy target of affectionate derision. Remarks such as ‘Oh, you know what mothers are like’ or ‘You sound just like my mother’ are commonplace, and while they may be affectionate, they’re also slightly scornful, in particular comments along the lines of ‘Mothers are such a drag’. In films, of course, mothers tend to be shown weeping at the weddings of their ‘little ones’, out of an excess of sentimentality and a lack of self-control, and are deemed more deserving of gentle mockery than compassion and understanding. When I look at my female friends now, I think their reasons for weeping are far more respectable than mere superficial and rather exhibitionist emotion, because, like it or not, a long period of their existence is coming to a close, and their life will never be the same. I have so much respect for the pain caused when something ends that I can even understand those who regret – although they will rarely confess or admit to it – the death of a long-time enemy or the resolution of an unsatisfactory situation. Because one can also miss struggle, effort, resistance, habit. Conrad said that the only thing that saved sailors from despair when they went to sea, not to return for a long time, was ‘soothing routine’, the routine that made them get up each morning during the first few days of the voyage. That’s why it’s so hard to lose routines, however unsatisfactory.

  I can think of only one film that views such abandoned mothers with sympathy and sensitivity, even though the mother in question is actually the maiden aunt who brought Captain Gregg up after he was orphaned as a child. That Captain is the protagonist of one of my all-time favourites, The Ghost and Mrs Muir by Joseph Mankiewicz. He set sail for the first time at sixteen. When Lucy Muir asks what his aunt did when he ran away t
o sea, the ghost replies: ‘Oh, probably thanked heaven there was no one around to fill her house with mongrel puppies and track mud on her carpets.’ Lucy Muir remains thoughtful, and the Captain asks her what she’s thinking. ‘I’m thinking how lonely she must have felt,’ Lucy says, ‘with her clean carpets.’ It’s just a detail, but it’s the only example I can recall of a fictional character putting herself in the modest place of those mothers.

  And of course all this leads me to remember my own mother when I left home at twenty-three to go and live in another city with a married woman separated from her husband. Naturally, I didn’t give a moment’s thought then to the sadness I see now in my female friends whose children are going away. Life is really very badly organized: when we’re young, we’re aware of so little, certainly not of our parents, whom we tend to see as suffocating, intrusive beings, who get in our way and stop us doing what we want to do, almost as a burden. Only much later, once we’re over thirty (if we’re lucky) can we start to see them as people who were, have been and are something more than just our parents. Then comes curiosity, and even the desire to make it up to them, to listen to them properly, to look at them clearly, to pay them more attention, to ponder their feelings and anxieties not just about us, because we were not always the centre of their lives, even though in our youthful vanity it seemed to us that we were. And sometimes this comes too late. I only returned to my mother’s house to watch her die, three years later. And now when I see the private sadness of my friends whose children are leaving aged twenty-five or thirty (although, as mothers, my friends still keep alive the memory of all the other years, from zero on), I realize that my mother only had me near her for twenty-three, and that those twenty-three years must have seemed to her all too few.

  (2006)

  DUSTY SPECTACLE

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  Damned Artists!

  Fortunately, very few children want to be artists or writers when they grow up. That is something which – with the odd repellent exception – one simply ends up becoming or turns out to be. Even though I enjoyed reading as a child, I think the last thing I would have said in response to the classic question was ‘a novelist’. A pirate, a footballer, an archaeologist (yes, long before Indiana Jones), a bandit, a lion-tamer, even perhaps, in an attack of folly, a doctor … I’ve no idea what children nowadays would like to be when they grow up, but I’m sure they don’t aspire to devoting their lives to literature, painting or ‘serious’ music. Just as well, because, as I did fifty years ago, they would find it hard to identify with artists as they’re represented in films and, indeed, books, and they certainly wouldn’t want to emulate them. The most worrying thing for those of us who have turned out to be novelists or poets or sculptors or painters or musicians is that not even as adults have we seen much reason to admire our predecessors as people. We might feel great admiration for their work, but we rarely take to them when their lives are recounted in books or depicted on screen. I don’t know if it’s just that our profession has been particularly unfortunate in that respect or if we really are unbearable.

  The truth is that artists are usually seen as megalomaniacs and, very often, as loudmouths, who suffer greatly and cut off their ear or pretend to be suffering and drag themselves histrionically through the mud; who take themselves very seriously and are, by and large, vain, ambitious and rather on the stingy side; who, with unbelievable frequency, slide into some form of addiction (alcohol, drugs, gambling) which leads them to inflict the most bizarre and harmful behaviour on their loved ones; who find it equally difficult to cope with either success or failure and require unhealthily large doses of attention; who determinedly get themselves into inadvisable situations and set off along gratuitously dangerous, self-destructive paths; who strive at all times to be brilliant and deep, which is tiring for them and tiresome in the extreme for those around them, as well as for the reader or viewer; they also take pride in being enigmatic, which is a dreadful bore; plus they’re obsessed with their work, which is all that really exists for them. So I’ve seen Scott Fitzgerald getting drunk as a lord while wearing Gregory Peck’s face; Michelangelo throwing one almighty tantrum wearing Charlton Heston’s face; Picasso endlessly misbehaving and wearing, I believe, Jeremy Irons’s face; Beethoven being proud and grandiloquent wearing Ed Harris’s face; and Mozart playing the fool wearing the face of the now forgotten Tom Hulce; not to mention the seamier side of Van Gogh, Rimbaud, Bob Dylan, Truman Capote, Frida Kahlo and her husband (well, with a couple like that, what can you expect?), and hundreds more. Speaking from a purely personal point of view, the experience has served to make me try to be as unlike them as possible in my own life, even at the cost of abjuring characteristics that many people – not children, but adolescents and adultescents – associate with talent and genius: there are still those who believe that drinking to excess, pumping themselves full of drugs or driving erratically will make them more like Faulkner, Lowry or the inevitable Kerouac, Burroughs and Bukowski.

  This was why, in part, I was interested to watch the German TV series The Mann Family, made in 2001 and newly issued on DVD. Thomas Mann was not noted for his unusual or anomalous behaviour. He was forced into exile during the Nazi regime, but apart from that, suffered few setbacks or hardships and led a reasonably respectable life. The life of his eldest son, Klaus, a not inconsiderable writer himself, was rather more shocking and ended in suicide. There was, then, nothing in Thomas Mann as a character that might lend itself to the excesses and exhibitionism that beset almost every artist depicted on screen or in literature. ‘Perhaps I will at last find an artist whom I like,’ I thought, ‘someone I wouldn’t have minded knowing.’ No such luck. Thomas Mann appears neither irascible nor hysterical, he doesn’t live in a permanent torment of doubt or poised on the edge of the ‘abyss of creation’. He seems more like a notary or a factory-owner, and his one caprice – for a father of a large family – is a kind of abstract homosexuality that manifests itself only in half-furtive glances at handsome young men. Not a very attractive character, but sober enough. And yet his seems more an example to flee than to follow: a kind of pumice stone, rough and brittle, who doesn’t even get upset over his own son Klaus’s first suicide attempt. A smug, solemn individual, who receives the news that he has won the Nobel Prize with unseemly nonchalance, as if it were only to be expected or were simply his due. He’s someone keenly aware of his own celebrity and appears to share his wife’s estimate of him when she interviews a candidate for the post of secretary to the writer, warning her: ‘We will require absolute confidentiality on your part. After all, he is Thomas Mann!’ To judge by this worthwhile and interesting series, the author of The Magic Mountain must have got up in the mornings, looked at himself in the mirror and exclaimed reverently: ‘Gosh, I’m Thomas Mann!’ I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to see a film about an artist or read a book about his or her life without it making us wonder if our admiration for the work of such a creature hasn’t been a big mistake.

  (2008)

  Dusty Spectacle

  In a world of ever more but ever less enduring books, the survival of the antiquarian bookshops that sell second-hand books – that is, used books, previously owned books, or whatever you choose to call them – is, in itself, a spectacle worthy of note. True, their quality varies from country to country, and although some attractive ones are to be found in Spain, where they warrant a whole block of stalls at the two annual book fairs held in Recoletos in Madrid, their true domain lies in England. Not only do such shops never close down, they occasionally move to better or larger premises. The main reason for this, I believe, is not sociological, it is not because the English read more voraciously than other Europeans, but physical, because in England, books have usually been published first in hardback, which is why the books do not perish, but are passed endlessly from hand to hand without suffering any harm. One should perhaps add another somewhat idiosyncratic reason: England has far more cranks and eccentrics than any other country, and it
s inhabitants are of a naturally investigative bent.

  In one way, this literary underworld represents the world in reverse, or perhaps a brave negation of the present, where the kind of books you see on display everywhere in ordinary bookshops, standing stacked in vertiginous piles alongside gigantic posters displaying the author’s generally ill-tempered face, the books that, week after week, will top the best-seller lists and whose titles will be on everyone’s lips for, at most, a couple of months, are precisely the ones that will never find a place in the literary underworld and will always be rejected by the second-hand bookseller when included in a batch of books for sale. In his world, an initial print run of tens of thousands is a positive blot, because such a book will be of little value. On the other hand, a limited edition, never to be repeated, means that, a few years after its birth, the book in question will have appreciated, not depreciated in value, as will have happened with the best-seller. Obviously, in order to reach that thrilling, belated and all too often posthumous kingdom, it is not enough for a book to be rare or for there to be only a few copies available; its creator also has to become what is known as a ‘cult author’, or (which comes to the same thing) someone with a small but growing band of fanatical admirers who want to own every line he or she ever wrote and are prepared to pay large sums of money for a signed or dedicated copy.