PB's Notebook From The Republic of Letters, No. 9, December 2000

I think my next book will carry the following, or something like:

I would like to thank my wife for being so understanding, my youngest son for inspiring me with his endlessly bouncing ball, and the rest of my children for not bothering me with any major problem; my agent for not existing; my publisher for his foolhardiness; Avanti for doing my hair; the makers of Krups and Lavazza for sustenance; Prada for my shoes which are so heavy I stay glued to my desk…

No kidding. Has anyone noticed how ridiculous acknowledgments have become? Mr. Simon Winchester, in his touching book on Messrs Minor and Murray and the makings of the OED, runs to pages of this drivel. Why not a complete cast list? Or how about a little discretion about the people surrounding the very humdrum task of writing? Wouldn't it be simpler to say that being around a writer is an ungrateful task?

I can only assume that among our readers there is a fair number of people who listen to the radio and care for classical music, and Boston is musically a reasonably civilized place, yet classical radio here sucks. That is, the one "dedicated" classical music station, an excrescence called WCRB, sucks. If a station dedicated to classical music could be said to be causing the art a disservice, this is it. It is all nuggets, bits and pieces of this and that, something called the "Mozart block" which leaves three-quarters of his output unheard, and "I really love this" music tailored to the commuter trade. It's the feel-good station for the musically-challenged.

It is no accident that this shlock outfit should also be in the business of piping music into offices: that's where musical wallpaper—that is, the kind you actually don't have to listen to—triumphs (barely) over silence. The diet, as you can imagine, runs from Telemann to Telemann. On WCRB never will you hear anything that engages your ear. (Not if they can help it, though some does seep in via outside broadcasts.)

If that were all, I would let the matter rest and leave WCRB to drowse among its prodigiously repetitive advertising, its unchanging and unedited five-minute news, and its gushy self-congratulation. But it has two defects on which I cannot forebear commenting: first, that it is totally corrupt (only a station with a juicy payback from record companies would play almost no other Chopin than Ashkenazy's and three quarters of its orchestral output from two or three labels); and second, that in line with a national tendency, it believes that its employees (who can barely pronounce composers' names and whose diction is grossly substandard) are as interesting as the music they play. Sorry, I am not interested in how the announcer's commute went.

None of this will prevent WCRB from being voted, again and again, "best" classical music station. For such accolades, as we all know, are given out—like Pulitzer Prizes, Oscars, Emmies und so immer weiter—by those on the cozy inside of the industry. Vested interests have ways of looking after each other, and self-regard is the name of the game.

There died in Paris recently Jerzy Giedroycz, an elegant little man, a furious smoker well into his nineties. He died in his house in the Parisian suburb of Maisons-Lafitte. It was one of those unexceptional banlieu houses, vaguely turreted and uncomfortable. But to Poles it was paradise, and for the four decades in which Poland lived under the dirty thumb of the puppets imposed on them by their traditional enemies, the Russians, no one who managed to get out of Poland passed through Paris without visiting Giedroycz. Like the late K. A. Jelenski or Czezlaw Milosz, Giedroycz was one of those secular "saints" through whom a national culture survives.

Back in the many years in which Giedroycz's magazine, Kultura, published every Polish writer who mattered, you have to remember that being a Polish dissident writer was not like being a Russian dissident. A Solzhenitsin, a Yuri Daniel, a Brodsky, could count on the political weight of Cold War politics: not to make his life easier, but at least to give him a ready outlet. Poles were different. After all, they were barely a country. The world was full of people who—thanks to the Cold War—had studied "Soviet" affairs, and therefore Russian. Who was interested in Poland, or Polish?

These three Poles made sure of Poland's cultural survival, and I can think of few more saintly acts than the role Milosz played as nurse and amanuensis to Alexander Wat's extraordinary My Century. Not many Nobel laureates will put down their own pens to interpret another writer, much less one completely unknown outside his own country. Giedroycz, Jelenski and Milosz kept the Paris-Warsaw lines open. They encouraged, they supported, and they published—in exile—a magazine which had no equal in Poland. They lodged, fed, encouraged and affectioned generations of Poles, and today the Kultura archives in Maisons-Laffite lodge and preserve all sorts of extraordinary correspondences and manuscripts that could not be kept safely in Warsaw.

Much as Boris Souvarine collected all the evidence possible about Russian (Soviet) affairs, and in Bucharest Sasha Pana built up the world's premier collection of documents on surrealism (which began, after all, in Romania), as Max Hayward and George Gomšri did for Hungarian literature, so Giedroycz did for Polish literature. With little support, but colossal energy and taste. In the dark days between 1947 and 1989.

Another nonagenarian, G. V. Desani, also died after many years of suffering and (literal) truncation of both mind and body—far from the Benares he so sparklingly celebrated, in Dallas. Govind was a captivator in every sense. A mellifluous man, musical in thought, pungent in expression. Both the Mr. B's of this magazine thought him part of a tiny handful of genuinely funny writers: in the not-always-benign Swiftian sense. For Desani used language to puncture, and the language he used—India's odd demotic English—was brilliantly adapted to his comic purposes. I have no doubt at all that H. Hatterr, whom his only novel was all about, will be forever celebrated in the annals of scapegracery. The Indians most of us know are not celebrated for their humor; it is doubtful, then, that they enjoyed Desani as much as we did.

But comedy was not the only thing Desani excelled at. His persona, at once gentle and ferociously arrogant, attracted immediate attention. Unlike Nirad Chaudhuri, that other great Indian writer of our time, Govind was by way of being a professional Indian. That is, he played, dressed, ate, and talked the part. He also spent his American years teaching Indian philosophy, mainly at the University of Texas. "Philosophy," here is an all-embracing term. Govind thought it impinged on everything, down to the smallest detail. Never esoteric, however, he was a genuinely learned man, and one of my fondest memories is a long evening (like one of those dusk-like ragas of which he was so fond) discussing how the Bhagavad Ghita might be rendered into English. "But as a score, of course!" he explained. "It is pure music and inseparable from its sound. So you have a stave for the text, another few for its music, a sort of counterpoint of glosses to support the textÑit is a very deep workÑand at the bottom a bass-line of literal English."

I know that all the talk about the Euro, fascinating as it may be to readers of the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, is as much a turn-off to the wider public as have been the presidential "debates." But the Euro is just money. Unromantic money. Not a florin or a guilder or a zloty or a lira, but the anonymous coin of a non-realm. Gone the weight in a trouser pocket, gone the joys of currency exchanges and wadges of dirty notes.

The Euro is, like all money, merely symbolic.

Consider the "other" realities of the new Europe. If you think we have a bad case of victimitis here—the lady who sues because a pickle burned her chin at a MacDonalds, the proofreader who sues (and of course wins) for discrimination because he wasn't hired, though he was blind—imagine yourself trying to run an enterprise, business or educational, under the new directive on racial discrimination of the European Commission.

This peculiar instance of the bureaucratic need to legislate social "amelioration" has its origins in Article 13 of the Amsterdam Treaty, which authorized the commission to "take action" to "combat discrimination." Any discrimination. Sex-d, race-d, ethnic-d, religious-d, age-d, gender-d, sexual-orientation-d. The commission has indeed taken action, and this, despite the fact that discrimination (as in X having a "discriminating palate" or Y being a "discriminating collector") is often valuable. One should indeed discriminate bad from good (that's what critics are supposed to do), bad legislation from good.

Here's the new catch. The directive requires those accused to prove their innocence "once the complainant has established facts from which a court or tribunal can presume discrimination."

Now as we all know the difficulty in proving that anything did not happen is insuperable. Our laws have, from the beginning, understood that negative proof—proof that one did not do X—places an intolerable burden on the defendant. You have but to think about the nature of zero. It took millennia to come up with zero, and centuries to prove its existence. The difficulty of negative proof is why we are presumed innocent until proven guilty and the burden of proof lies on the prosecution.

No more. Now Miss Victim, who is claiming that her employers failed to promote her (because she is a woman, as well as countless other things better left unsaid) may require the government, her university, her business, to somehow prove that that wasn't why she wasn't promoted. And where in the past you might have been able to show that she was incompetent (e.g., she never showed up at her job, or she couldn't proofread because she was blind), now you're going to have to show that you didn't do something. The presumption is that you're guilty.

The presumption of innocence is fundamental to the individual facing the accumulated (and gross) power of the state; it limits the inherent tyranny of the collective. That presumption is already under attack on many fronts, largely on sexual "offenses" such as harrassment, rape and sexual discrimination. It survives in the courts only because it is a foundation of the common law.

As far as I can see, the only groups genuinely served by this directive are three: the various bureaucratic commissions which will administer it; the victim society which will abuse it; and the lawyers who will profit vastly. All will grow and swell and lord it over us. Frankly, the number of civil "servants" (ha!) engaged in futile tasks is already excessive, the number and the causes of victims are equally gross, and lawyers, methinks, are already well-served by their billion-dollar class-action suits on behalf of any group with a grievance, no matter how contributory these were to the griefs they suffered.

Life's no longer a pleasure, elections no longer a thoughtful choice. Life is one big tort.

Lord knows, we misuse the word "fundamental" (as in "fundamentalist"). As far as I'm concerned, "fundamental" means first things, and if we dislike people who bother us with first things, like God, Death, Why we're here, and the like, it's because the people who talk out loud about such things are often bores and not very bright. Or because we think those are, and should remain, private matters.

The same thing has happened to the word "sect." Recently the two youngest children of a group who believe in God and think doctors are the devil's reps died, one at birth, the other not long after. Massachusetts has since spent well over a million dollars looking for their bodies in the woods of Maine and, not finding them, has since taken nine of the group's children into the tender care of the state's welfare bureaucracy. Further, the mother of the two dead infants being pregnant, she has been taken into custody so that she can deliver under the protective eye of the state, and have her child taken away at birth.

They do not order this sort of thing better in France, where recent legislation now empowers the state to "paralyze the activities of sectarian organizations and make it impossible for them to harm others."

The measure is of course aimed at whackos who set fire to themselves because the space-ships are at hand, or poison their followers because their leader has a bad hair day. But it also creates a new crime, "mental manipulation" (in the words of the law, "grave and repeated pressure . . . that might lead to an act or a failure to act prejudicial" to the victim). And while this is aimed at, say, Scientology (but not Christian Science) and the Rev. Moon, as far as I can see all those someone (the state) considers a "sect" are equally guilty: and should have their newborn child taken away or incur the penalties of the law (dissolution of the sect). No sects. No Judaism, no Christ, and no Prophet.

Not just the august Times Literary Supplement, but all sorts of literary cheat-sheets, like the weighty Sunday newspapers, both British and American, have taken to selling the books they purport to review. Anyone who believes this does not affect what they review and how they review is credulous enough to deserve a stake in Pig-Air.

Not only do we now have a series of blockbuster pirates taking over publishing, distribution and sales, now we have this further attack on the book trade. Let me make my point crassly—since no one seems to have taken this matter up even obliquely. The TLS reviews book X. It gives its readers a whacking ten percent discount if they buy book X from them. Which means that by standard bookselling terms, it pockets between thirty and forty percent of the retail price of the book.

"C'est une nouvaute," M. Homard might say approvingly. Why? Because it's the first ever direct link between "judging" a book and "selling" it. The better the judgment, the better the sale. Squeezed out by this Heimlich manoeuver on an already weak business are: local bookshops with taste (few remain), those publishers who might refuse to play the game, and, of course, all those whose books do not go on general sale anyway—for instance, the new direct-sales publishers such as Toby, which indeed is publishing an anthology of our joint editing over the past half-century. We are curious to see what will happen.

The "Me" Generation has now institutionalized itself. Let's all sing a Song of Myself. That's the way it goes in Boom Times. People want empowerment so they can have fun. In the Depression they wanted to eat.

Well, highs and lows will always be with us, and much is made of inequality. But it's always the low end we look at, and this surprises me. It used to be the rich, who having more money than the rest of us were more grossly unequal. But in the Entertainment Society, no one seems to mind that athletes, Hollywood and TV types, rock singers are rewarded on another scale from the ordinary folk who consume their wares. Our presidents sweat twenty-four hours a day for four solid years for a quarter-mil plus; pitchers get that for exercising their talents for a total of about forty-five minutes total.

But at least pitchers don't drivel in the public press. Unfortunately, ever since newspapers and magazines took up pop and Yoof took over, acres of space (far more than to inequality, foreign affairs or such old stuff as books) gets devoted to the stuff.

Without (much) commentary I offer the following from one k.d. lang. Yes, that's the way she likes it; she's a lowercase kind of gal. And this is the originality of her art. That's all of it, folks.

Here is the supine rock critic speaking of one song in lang's new album: this "sun-kissed disc evokes everything from the Beach Boys to Dusty Springfield to current ambient dance music." Replies lang: "That's what I wanted. I was really influenced by the Air record 'Safari' and how the melodic structure and the approach to the music was super, super retro but the added loops and synthesizers made it progressive."

Chew on that, Ludwig. You never got what lang gets. Me-ness. "I think I have a lot of different kinds of fans. I have 70-year-old women that like me because I sing like Patti Page. I have dykes that like me because I'm a dyke, whatever my music is. There's people like me because I'm a vegetarian . . . I think it would be detrimental to me to base my music on what people expect."

Now you know where Me-Me leads. Like politics, to music by poll.