The sliding axis on which the world rests or goes adrift
PAUL JOHNSON
Writers oscillate between the poles of criticism and creation. A divine few — such as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Victor Hugo and Mark Twain — are at home equally as critics of society or as producers of pure fancy. But the vast majority slide towards one end of the axis. Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, Cyril Connolly, for example, all attempted fiction, but it is their critical essays which strike home and are reread. That is really true of George Orwell, too, for his essays form the laurels of the crown on his troubled brow: Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four are fictionalised analyses of social perils, and neither has any true, living characters. The fiction serves merely to pull in the plebs.
Some writers change their polarity as they age. Tolstoy largely transformed himself from a wonderful creator into a dubious critic. Dickens was subject to the same temptation but held it at bay — just. Evelyn Waugh felt it too as he grew older and his views became bitter and angry; but he kept his critical moods for his friends and for the odd public gesture. By campaigning against Tito's visit to England and getting his bowler hat lined with steel to prevent assassination by the Reds, he purged his spirit of critical bile and demons, and so enabled his greatest creative work — his wartime trilogy — to reach inventive fulfilment. You could say the same about Dostoevsky, whose demons were safely imprisoned in fictional cages. Not about Sartre, alas, whose critical acid slopped over into all his creative work and corroded it.
Over the years I watched Kingsley Amis succumb to the Critical Temptation. Criticism was always a distinctive element in his work, of course, because he had a fiercely critical mind and would interrupt a fascinating conversation to point out that you had just been guilty of a syntactical error or a verbal solecism. But in his young days criticism was firmly harnessed to the chariot of humour which danced along gloriously in consequence, with creation as its team-mate. In age, however, criticism took over. He explored, with growing malevolence, the incurable failings (as he saw them) of half the human race — the female sex — until the picture became unrecognisable. It was not that the creative side of him dried up, because till the end he was always trying to do new things in fiction and never repeated himself. But too much criticism kills humour, and Amis's laughing chariot was shunted into a siding to rust.
I write as one who ruefully admits to having
too much of the critical spirit. How often, and how vainly, have I prayed for the gift of pure creation. How wonderful it must be, as a teenager like Kipling or Emily Bronte, or a young voluptuary like Flaubert, to see entire universes peopled by living creatures of your imagination, obeying you or — yet more precious — taking on a life of their own. Instead, as a 14-year-old, I saw the real world and studied its limitations and crimes. A wise old Jesuit at my boarding school used to say, 'You are too critical, Paul. Learn to be less censorious.' But it is not so easy to change your inherent propensities when young. Besides, criticism is such a delight! It is an exhilarating thing to bring to bear all the resources of your mind to take apart a work of literature, or even a whole society or ideology, and identify its weaknesses. 'What about putting them right?' 'Oh, that's not my job.' I recall, as a young man, demolishing a James Bond novel in a ferocious essay, then finding myself sitting, at a dinner party, next to the wife of the author, the redoubtable Annie Fleming. She literally rapped my knuckles with the handle of her heavy silver table-knife, and demanded, 'Try writing a good adventure story yourself, you horrible young man!' But I had tried writing novels — had actually published two — and had decided it was not my métier. By contrast, I enjoyed criticism and was good at it. Only after many years, and the cumulative results of studying the histories of many societies, did I grasp the limitations and dangers of a life devoted to criticism. I am now trying to slide along the axis to the other pole, to write creatively and to cultivate the virtues of tolerance, broadmindedness, humility and sheer love of the universe and all that is in it. I aim for a softer tone in words, fewer blackand-white distinctions, pastel colours, a certain mistiness so common in Nature when she cannot make up her mind about the weather. Above all, fewer judgments, more acceptance of things and a determination to enjoy them as they are. That. I think, is the true approach of the essayist. who, after all, is a creative writer in a minor way.
For the danger of the critical mode is that it is liable to degenerate into dislike, which becomes habitual and eventually coarsens into hatred. The life and writings of Dean Swift, who once possessed formidable creative powers, are salutary warnings of what can happen. I would also cite the case of Karl Marx, who began as a poet, and whose poems are the least displeasing element in his vast oeuvre. Marx had no Judaic training but he was descended from learned rabbis on both sides. His genes reflected the deformation professionelle of rabbinical scholarship: the habit of basing a book on critical examination of your predecessors rather than setting out an entirely new thesis. Criticism was not only dominant in Marx, but also self-breeding to the exclusion of anything else, and accompanied by a growing disposition to hate and engage in violent abuse. The creative element, if it ever existed, never makes its appearance. So what kind of society will emerge, when the existing order has been physically pounded to bits, is sketched only in the vaguest terms? Marx taught destruction and hatred, rather than the building of a good society. Is it any wonder, then, that the state which embodied Marxism. the Soviet Union, was a conspicuous failure over three quarters of a century, was held together only by terror, and collapsed in ignominious ruin; or that communist China survives, as a pointless tyranny, only by embracing the system that Marx spent his life repudiating? In the process, the hatred which his critical approach generated cost 100 million lives.
The new Archbishop of Canterbury, at his inauguration, exhorted us all. 'Speak out with passion.' That is dangerous doctrine, for passion is so close to hatred. In my friend Harold Pinter, for example, passionate criticism of America has degenerated into hatred of the American people, which is the ultimate form of racism — hatred of humanity — for the American nation is the nearest we have to an emblematic microcosm of the human race. One lesson we have not yet learnt from the case of Hitler, who spoke out passionately many times, is that extreme criticism is not only counter-creative but also monstrously destructive. Hitler's criticism of the Jews became passionate hatred and so destroyed all the creative aspects of his character. Arabs, it seems to me, have fallen into the same trap. The discovery of oil gave them a priceless opportunity to create a fair, just and wealthy society in their part of the world. Instead they allowed their criticism of the Jews and of the Israeli state to occupy their entire intellectual and moral horizon to the exclusion of any creative activity. Like Hitler, they have allowed their poisonous Jew-hatred to corrupt the whole. The great merit of the Americans, which they have inherited from their English forebears, is that they balance their critical idealism with a practical skill in creating a new world which is better than the old.
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