IN APRIL 1999 A PARIS WEEKLY (ONE OF THE MORE SERIOUS ones) published a special section on Geniuses of the Century. There were eighteen on the list of honorees: Coco Chanel, Maria Callas, Sigmund Freud, Marie Curie, Yves Saint Laurent, Le Corbusier, Alexander Fleming, Robert Oppenheimer, Rockefeller, Stanley Kubrick, Bill Gates, Pablo Picasso, Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Robert Noyes, Edward Teller, Thomas Edison, J. P. Morgan. So, then: no novelist, no poet, no dramatist; no philosopher; a single architect; a single painter, but two couturiers; no composer, one singer; a single moviemaker (over Eisenstein, Chaplin, Bergman, Fellini, the Paris journalists chose Kubrick). This honor roll was not something put together by ignorant people. With great lucidity it declared a real change: the new relationship of Europe to literature, to philosophy, to art.
Have the great cultural figures been forgotten? “Forgotten” is not the right word. I remember that at that same period, toward the end of the century, we were inundated by a tidal wave of monographs: on Graham Greene, on Ernest Hemingway, on T. S. Eliot, on Philip Larkin, on Bertolt Brecht, on Martin Heidegger, on Pablo Picasso, on Eugène Ionesco, on Cioran, and endless others.
These venomous works (my gratitude to Craig Raine for defending Eliot, to Martin Amis who took up for Larkin) made clear the meaning of that honors list: the geniuses of culture have been set aside without regret; it is comforting to prefer Coco Chanel and the innocence of her dresses over those great cultural figures, all of them tainted with the century’s ills, its perversity, its crimes. Europe was moving into the age of the prosecutors: Europe was no longer loved, Europe no longer loved itself.
Does that mean that all those monographs were especially harsh toward the works of the writers portrayed? Oh no; at that time art had already lost its appeal, and the professors and connoisseurs were no longer interested in either paintings or books, only in the people who had made them; in their lives.
In the age of the prosecutors what does a life mean?
A long succession of events whose deceptive surface is meant to hide Sin.
To ferret out Sin beneath its disguise, the monographer must have a detective’s talent and a network of informers. And so as not to sacrifice his lofty stature as expert, he must cite the names of his informers in footnotes, for in the eyes of scholarship this turns gossip into truth.
I open a huge eight-hundred-page book on Bertolt Brecht. The author, a professor of comparative literature, after demonstrating in detail the vileness of Brecht’s soul (secret homosexuality, erotomania, exploitation of girlfriends who were the true authors of his plays, pro-Stalin sympathies, tendency to lies, greed, a cold heart), finally in chapter 45 comes to his body, in particular to its terrible odor, which the professor takes a whole paragraph to describe. As guarantee of the scholarly nature of this olfactory revelation, in a note to the chapter the writer says he collected “this detailed description from the woman who was at the time the head of the photo lab of the Berliner Ensemble, Vera Tenschert,” whom he interviewed “on June 5, 1985” (that is, thirty years after the smelly fellow was laid in his coffin).
Ah, Bertolt, what will be left of you?
Your body odor, preserved for thirty years by your faithful colleague and then revived by a scholar who, after intensifying it by the modern methods of university laboratories, has now sent it forth into the future of our millennium.