I am trying to identify writers who give us a sense of life
at a particular place and time… a zeitgeist. And to understand what exact skills
that requires. Marcus Aurelius and Montaigne perhaps abstract too much from
their context to qualify; Pepys and Boswell, as diarists, focus perhaps just a
bit too narrowly on the London quotidian. Marcel Proust is simply too
incestuous.
I am left with names such as George Orwell, Arthur Koestler,
Vasily Grossman and Hans Fallada but also people such as Richard Cobb, Tony
Judt, Timothy Garton Ash and Geert Mak.
What do they have in common (apart
from all being male!)? Orwell, Grossman and Mak were/are journalists; Koestler
and Fallada writers; Cobb, Judt and Garton Ash academics.
The terms, of course,
are arbitrary – indeed my distinctions seem to imply that journalists and
academics do not also write! In using these terms, I was simply referring to
the main source of income.
Half of those on the list wrote novels – some (Orwell and Fallada) famously so but that is
not quite how we remember them. The sort of writing I am talking about seems to
exclude the “suspension of disbelief” required by novelists…..Clearly many good
European novels do give a sense of “zeitgeist” (Voltaire’s Candide; Flaubert's Madame
Bovary; Zola; Thomas Mann) - but, compared with the writers on my list, they seem
to lack a certain “voice”.
Initially I thought I had identified three features of
these writers – range of experience; breadth of insight; and literary capacity.
The first group of names all had the harrowing experiences of war; the last
group the privileges of access to academic sources about 20th
century European savagery and, in Garton Ash’s case, more direct sources about
post-war European change and conflicts. Some writers not on my list (such as
Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dervla Murphy and Jan Morris) of course give a terrific
sense of place and time - Naples; central Europe in the 1930s and 90s. And Diane
Athill is one of several European women I wrote about recently whose diaries give an excellent sense of zeitgeist (Simone de Beauvoir is
perhaps the supreme example). Diaries and travelogues, however, always run the
risk of self-centredness. In that sense I have a preference for the more detailed analysis which Clive James gives in Cultural Amnesia.
At what point do individual memories become part of social –
if not political - history?
The painting is Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II (1940-42)
The painting is Max Ernst's Europe After the Rain II (1940-42)
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