The challenge
when writing to order is always to integrate the job on hand with the overall project you have. The more you can draw on the energy that’s going into your more personal writing, the better you feel doing the work and the better the job you do for whoever’s commissioned you. The writing has more purpose and conviction. And there’s the further advantage that, however disparate the subject matter, when you bring your occasional work together, it does ‘fit’, it makes sense.
So in this collection the title piece ‘The Fighter’ on D H Lawrence, introduces a theme that recurs through all the essays: in a world where all the old categories and hierarchies have are despised if not forgotten, almost the only way for us to relate with each other is through struggle and competition. Curiously, things I’d written about violence in football, about Mussolini, about Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek, about Garibaldi and Zola and Beckett, all call to each other and complement each other.
The Fighter (D.H.Lawrence)
Gardens and Graveyards (Giorgio Bassani)
After the Struggle (Dostoevsky)
The Illusionist (Mussolini)
Fear is the Key (Thomas Hardy)
The Disenchantment of Translation
Still Stirring (Beckett)
Genius of Bad News (Thomas Bernhard)
Let sleeping Beauties Lie (Elfriede Jelinek)
A Polished Pessimism (Emil Cioran)
True Scandal) (Machiavelli)
A Model Anomaly (Italy and Berlusconi)
Mad at the Medici (Lorenzo de’ Medici)
Love Letter (Fleur Jaeggy)
Tales Told by a Computer (Hypertext)
Real Dreams (Zola)
A Matter of Love and Hate (World Cup Football
Hero Betrayed (Garibaldi)
Siege of the Serenissima (1848)
The superman’s Virgins (D’Annunzio)
A Pagan in Italy (Lawrence and Italy)
‘An impressively cogent book… For a writer so fascinated by conflict, Parks is a model of critical reason and clarity’
Jonathan Gharraie in the New Statesman
A Euro-centric compendium that loses no resonances in translation
By Amanda Hopkinson in The Independent, 22 October 2007
Tim Parks is a master of the essay, however much broken down into its component parts. Try him on first lines, his own or others'; I particularly enjoyed: "Wake up! This is the experience. At any moment, Lawrence may say something startling." And he ends as stylishly as he opens, this time with the poet Leopardi: "Every Italian is more or less equally honoured and dishonoured."
What could have been a hotchpotch of reviews, introductions and the odd conference paper amounts in The Fighter to something altogether more revelatory. Parks's polymath pursuits here focus primarily – and bravely – on heavyweight novelists (Dostoevsky, Zola, Hardy, Thomas Bernhard) and on almost every historical, political and cultural aspect of his adoptive homeland, Italy. He has essays on Bassani and Berlusconi, Mussolini and Machiavelli, Garibaldi and Gabriele d'Annunzio.
There are diversions to consider the plays of Beckett, the experimental writings of the Austrian Nobel prize-winner Elfriede Jelinek, and the Swiss author Fleur Jaeggy (whom Parks translates), as well as on the art of literary translation and the science of the hypertext. Even here, his antecedents tend to be European – no mention of the beat poets.
That his reference-points should remain across the Channel rather than the Atlantic is a refreshing indication of how far Parks has travelled in moving from England to Italy 25 years ago. Yet he is candid on the otherness of being an emigrant. As a professional translator, he is honour-bound not to believe in "untranslatability". But, the scion of evangelical Protestants, he acknowledges the lack of resonance that the English obsession with The Word, as laid down in the Authorised Version, has in the Italian version of an autobiographical novel.
Parks's essays are bookmarked by two on Lawrence, his literary hero. Like Parks, Lawrence fell in love with Italy and made a mission of scrutinising it in sometimes "startling" prose written within a "strenuous" discipline. (Parks uses the latter adjective three times in as many paragraphs.)
At times, Parks' own language becomes almost indecipherably entwined in homage to Lawrence's. His own writing reaches a crescendo of expression that hauntingly marks Lawrence's original. This makes for exciting reading as Parks has Lawrence merge, during his last months of painful life, into an identification with the early Etruscans: "becoming truly pagan".
Michael Hulse in The Irish Times January 26, 2008
'Any serious quarrel with our culture of origin," writes novelist Tim Parks here, "is also and inevitably a quarrel about language, the values it enshrines and thought patterns it tends to impose."
He makes the remark in the course of an underwhelmed critique of Austrian Nobel Prizewinner Elfriede Jelinek, whose wit he finds "more coercive than illuminating or amusing". Jelinek's quarrel with Austrian values and thought patterns is notorious, as was Thomas Bernhard's before her. Parks's observation stems from his own tussles, though, as writer and émigré, and it offers a good point of entry to this brimful book of essays.
Having defended Garibaldi's memoirs against the charge of being badly written, Parks approvingly quotes the hero himself: "In times like those in 1860 in southern Italy men are truly alive [ . . .] This is the real life of the soul!"- then mischievously pictures a scene in which Garibaldi's academic biographer is imposing her thought patterns while the summons of life calls to the students in her care. "One imagines the young men and women who sit in Professor Riall's classes at the University of London. Outside the window, perhaps, in the busy city, there is a call to arms, there are people urging us to take up a struggle. Perhaps a young man's head lifts. He wants to be involved in the world. Should he answer the call? Should he submit to the enchantment of the embattled community? Is the struggle ugly? Is it beautiful? Is it worth a life?"
Tim Parks is always on the side of those who answer the call. Though his own fiction knows full well that some struggles with life end terribly, as Europa so powerfully reminded us, he is also one of the few living novelists worth reading who can persuade us without a trace of saccharine (as he recently did in Rapids and Cleaver ) that to engage, to fight, to struggle, is what counts above all. "Look!" (we may say, with his admired Lawrence, once the crisis has been survived), "we have come through". Not for nothing does Parks value Dostoevsky for his "moments of relief, of internal conflict resolved in extreme well-being".
The writers Tim Parks most wholeheartedly embraces in this book are Lawrence, Beckett and Dostoevsky, writers whose lives were conducted in a spirit of struggle. Whether that spirit issued in the unstoppable outpourings of a Lawrence, or the steady retreat towards silence of a Beckett, isn't really the point. The thing is to be "in the thick of the scrimmage", as Lawrence put it. And never to cease examining and re-examining the fabric of living and the words we put it into: "my own language," declared Beckett, "appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it". What was once thought solid ground beneath our feet is likely to be excavated: "To take on board the implications of Notes from Underground," writes Parks of Dostoevsky, "is to undermine any political debate predicated on the existence of people with stable selves who can make responsible decisions."
TWO BOOKS ARE interleaved in this volume. One tracks the writers who have lodged in Parks's thinking: the two thorny Thomases, Hardy and Bernhard, are here as well, as are Emil Cioran and Émile Zola, D'Annunzio and Fleur Jaeggy. Quarrels with culture, language and thought are also quarrels with ourselves, and Tim Parks conducts his with arresting vigour. It's a vigour that has an air of the European coffee-house to it, a whiff of conversation impassioned and concerned, one moment witheringly scornful of "Austria's mendaciously sanitised image of itself" and the next tracing with exemplary sensitivity the difference between the traditional reading experience, "hardly aware of turning the pages, or of the sounds in distant rooms", and the experience of "reading" hypertext. Like Lawrence and Beckett before him, Parks has benefited profoundly from living out of the country of his birth - not least in his alertness to the cultural context within which any language must resonate.
The other book within this book is a continuation of Parks's tussle with his adopted Italy. There are essays on Italian history, politics and football, on Machiavelli, the Medicis and Mussolini. And it's here, even more than in the literary essays, that the full bracing freshness of Tim Parks's responses strikes home. "Since the modern English reader of Machiavelli has largely been brought up on a rationalist, utilitarian philosophy which ties itself in knots to demonstrate that, given the right kind of government, self-interest, collective interest and Christian values can all be reconciled, it is something of a relief to come across a writer who wastes no time with such utopian nonsense." Amen to that.
Machiavelli The Prince
He is still a scandal. Yet to read Machiavelli is also and always to take a very deep breath of fresh air, and that despite the almost five hundred years that have elapsed since he wrote The Prince. How can these conflicting reactions coincide? The fresh and bracing air blows, no doubt, from our immediate sense that this man is telling the truth about realities normally sugared over with rhetoric. The scandal lies in the fact that Machiavelli himself is not scandalised by the bitter truth he tells.
The very idea behind The Prince overturns any official hierarchy of values, whether ancient or modern. Machiavelli decides to give us a manual not of how a prince, or political leader, should behave, but how he must behave if he wishes to hold on to power. Every action will be judged with reference to that one goal. Power thus becomes, at least for the Prince, an absolute value. There is no talk of man’s soul. There is no question of power’s being sought in order to carry out some benevolent programme of reform. The good of the people is not an issue, or even a side issue. The Prince must hold on to power… e basta.
Societies and military strategies, individual and collective psychologies are rapidly and efficiently analysed. A wide variety of possible circumstances are established and enquired into. Examples are given from classical literature and recent history. The aim is never to savour the achievements of a given culture, to assess the attractions or otherwise of this or that political system, the balance of weal and woe under this or that regime: what we need to know is how, in each specific situation, a prince can best consolidate his authority and security. The underlying assumption is that, whatever may have been written in the past, political leaders have always put power first and foremost, and indeed that any other form of behaviour would be folly.
The scandal of the book is not felt in its famous general statements: that the end justifies the means; that nothing is so self-defeating as generosity; that men must be pampered or crushed; that there is no surer way of keeping possession of a territory than by devastation. It is easy to imagine these formulations arising from the transgressive glee of the talented writer who simply enjoys turning the world upside down.
No, it is when Machiavelli gives concrete examples and then moves on rapidly without comment that we begin to gasp: the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not really fighting hard any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with some of the territory he previously captured for them: “So for safety’s sake, they were forced to kill him.”
Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, “realized that the mercenaries they had were useless… It seemed to him impossible either to keep them or to disband them, so he had them all cut to pieces.”
Cesare Borgia, having tamed and unified the Romagna with the help of the cruel minister Remirro De Orco, decides to deflect the people’s hatred by putting the blame on the minister and then doing away with him: “one morning, Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it. The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna for a time appeased and stupefied.”
Borgia then consolidates his position by “destroying all the families of the rulers he had despoiled.” “I cannot possibly censure him,” Machiavelli concludes, because “he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did.”
This sense of coercion, of there being simply no alternative to brutal and murderous behaviour, is central to Machiavelli’s at once pessimistic yet strangely gung-ho vision. It involves the admission that there is a profound mismatch between the qualities that we actually appreciate in a person – generosity, loyalty, compassion, modesty – and the qualities that bring political success – calculation and ruthlessness. As Machiavelli sees it, this mismatch occurs because people in general are greedy, short-sighted and impressionable and must be treated accordingly if a leader is to survive. “I know everyone will agree,” he concedes, “that it would be most laudable if a prince possessed all the qualities deemed to be good among those I have enumerated, but, because of conditions in the world, princes cannot possess those qualities…”
Since the modern English reader of Machiavelli has largely been brought up on a rationalist, utilitarian philosophy which ties itself in knots to demonstrate that, given the right kind of government, self-interest, collective interest and Christian values can all be reconciled, it is something of a relief to come across a writer who wastes no time with such utopian nonsense. Yet though Machiavelli never actually welcomes the world’s awfulness and certainly never rejoices in cruelty, our own upbringing prompts us to feel that he should at least have seemed to be a little shocked by it all.
Seeming is an important issue in The Prince. Given that moral qualities are no longer to be taken as guides for correct behaviour, what then is their importance? They become no more than attractions. It is attractive when a man is compassionate, generous, and modest. It is attractive when a man keeps his word and shows loyalty to friends. We are in the realm of aesthetics, not moral imperatives. And what is attractive, of course, can be manipulated as a tool of persuasion. So even if a Prince is actually better off without certain moral qualities, he should appear to have them, because people will be impressed. In particular, he should appear to be devout in his religious beliefs. “The common people are always impressed by appearances and results,” Machiavelli tells us. But he leaves us in no doubt that if you have to choose between the two, what matters is the result.
One of the great pleasures of reading and re-reading The Prince is the way it prompts us to assess contemporary politicians and the wars of our own time in the light of Machiavelli’s precepts and examples. To read The Prince in the 1980s was to have Thatcher and Reagan very much on one’s mind, to think about American interference in Nicaragua, about the British adventure in the Falklands, as Machiavelli might have thought of them. Returning to the book in 2006, the reader is struck by how many of his observations could be applied directly to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, or indeed to many other such enterprises. This for example would seem applicable to any post-invasion situation:
a prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler, subjecting them to the troops and imposing the endless other hardships which his new conquest entails. As a result you are opposed by all those you have injured… and you cannot keep the friendship of those who have put you there. You cannot satisfy them in the way they had taken for granted, ye you cannot use strong medicine on them as you are in their debt. For always, no matter how powerful one’s armies, to enter a conquered territory one needs the good will of the inhabitants.
Future readers, no doubt, will have other wars to think of as they turn the pages of The Prince. That fact alone is a sad confirmation of Machiavelli’s understanding of international politics. Yet after the obvious parallels have been made and we have marvelled at how applicable this Renaissance writer’s precepts still are, the further surprise is our growing awareness that, like it or not, the way we judge the wars of our times is indeed “Machiavellian”. Would we be so critical of Suez, of Vietnam, of Iraq, if those adventures had succeeded? Wouldn’t we rather begin to think of them as we think about Korea, or the Falklands. We do not, that is, judge the action in and for itself on a moral basis, but for the consequences it produces. Which is the same as saying that for us, as for Machiavelli, the end justifies the means.
“The wish to acquire more,” The Prince laconically reminds us, “is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.”
If there is a difference between ourselves and Machiavelli in this regard, it is that he remembers to condemn the adventurers for their mistakes, while most of us prefer the comfort of a moral high ground, imagining that we would have condemned the adventure even had it been successful.
Are we then simply to accept Machiavelli lock stock and barrel? In many ways he presents us with the same problem as the lesser known but even more disturbing Max Stirner who in The Ego and His Own (1845) extended the amoral Machiavellian power struggle into the life of every individual, rejecting the notion that there could be any moral limitation on anyone’s behaviour. For Stirner the only question a person must ask before doing what he wants or taking what he desires is: Do I have the power to get away with this or not?
Certainly it would be foolish not to be warned by what Machiavelli has to tell us about politicians and politics in general. We must thank him for his clear-sightedness. Yet a charming ingenuity in The Prince allows us at least to imagine a response to what appears to be a closed and largely depressing system of thought. Why did Machiavelli publish the book?
Ostensibly written in the attempt to have Lorenzo de’ Medici give him a position in the Florentine government, The Prince is obviously self-defeating. Who would ever employ as his minister a man who has gone on record as presenting politics as a matter of pure power? If Machiavelli himself remarked that leaders gain from appearing to have a refined moral sense and strong religious belief, why did he not at least hint at these qualities in himself, or find some moral camouflage for his work, or put the book in Lorenzo’s hands for private consultation only?
The answer has to be that as he was writing Machiavelli allowed himself to be seduced by the desire to tell the truth come what may, a principle which thus, at least for him, in this text, takes on a higher value than the quest for power. And in exposing the amoral nature of politics he actually and rather ironically threatens the way the political game is played. If it has not been possible, for example, for our contemporary armed forces in the west simply to lay waste to the various countries they have recently invaded, that may, in some tiny measure, be due to the kind of awareness that Machiavelli stimulated with this book, not in princes, perhaps, but in their subjects.
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...the index
...a couple of reviews
Answering the call of life
George Szirtes in The Guardian
“Obedience to the force of gravity,” said Simone Weil, “the greatest sin”. Framed by D. H. Lawrence front and back, the title of Tim Parks’s new collection of essays is concerned with fighting spirit and literary contrarianism in the spirit of Lawrence. If there is an accepted point of view, a too-easy consensus dominating a topic, Tim Parks is there to question it and resist the force of gravity.
Critical and historical gravity has exercised a certain drag on Benito Mussolini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Nicolo Machiavelli, Silvio Berlusconi and indeed Lawrence himself. It is even trying to topple Giuseppe Garibaldi in the way of other historical Great Men. There are no great men, only spin, gravity claims. A different gravity has drawn Elfriede Jelinek to the Nobel Prize for literature. Parks has time and praise for The Piano Teacher but finds Greed “unreadable”. When Jelinek complains that she cannot go out, saying “My language and I watch TV together of an evening since we can’t go anywhere else”, Parks adds: “Readers of Greed may wish it had stayed that way.”
It is muscular writing, marked by phrases such as “Well, I deny it”, “rings hollow”, and “By no means”, but this is not street brawling for the sake of it, nor is the short jab any key to Parks’s own voice and style. He is much subtler, more perceptive than that. Most of the essays, the most substantial ones, first appeared in The New York Review of Books and are comprehensive responses to groups of books around an author such as Dostoevsky, Hardy, Beckett, Bernhard, Fleur Jaeggy and so forth, or a historical theme. On purely literary subjects Parks is an enthusiastic wormer out of truths. His greatest enthusiasm is reserved for Beckett, Jaeggy, Emil Cioran and D H Lawrence, who is, after all, the genius loci of the whole. Between Beckett and Lawrence there is a fair distance of course: it is Beckett for language and Lawrence for moral restlessness.
The essays on the political subjects are not admirations but attempts to see clearly rather than through the dark glasses of ideology. He points out contradictions in Mussolini, the gap between message and action. He tries to place Berlusconi in the context of Italian corruption, family loyalty and general scepticism about the state. The attitude of Machiavelli, he says, should be regarded partly as a matter of aesthetics:
Since the modern English reader of Machiavelli has largely been brought up on a rationalist, utilitarian philosophy which ties itself in knots to demonstrate that, given the right kind of government, self-interest, collective interest and Christian values can all be reconciled, it is something of a relief to come across a writer who wastes no time with such utopian nonsense…our own upbringing prompts us to feel that he should at least have seemed to be a little shocked by it all.
“Seeming,” he says, “is an important issue in The Prince.” Nay, madam, I know not seems, says Hamlet. If something seems easy it cannot be quite right, can it?
There are two fascinating essays in the book that look not so much to set right a contentious balance as to explore what makes things tick. The first, delivered originally as a speech in India, is on translation, an activity Parks has now abandoned. In ‘The Disenchantment of Translation’ Parks tells how, in childhood he “entered into song” through choral singing. But then the reasoning mind took over. He recalls Wittgenstein’s contention that philosophy was a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. Translation, he says, is a form of disenchantment. “Better,” he ends, “the Babel that defends us from a possibly totalitarian nightmare” that allows us to be aware of “the different ways we can enchant ourselves.”
The other essay, ‘A Matter of Love and Hate’ is about football, in particular the World Cup of 2002. Parks quotes Cioran: “The civilising passage from blows to insults… was no doubt necessary, but the price was high. Words will never be enough.” Having followed his local Italian team for a whole season, Parks pits tribal loyalty against high-minded internationalist rhetoric, the former as corrective to the latter. Here, as elsewhere, he insists that life consists of illusory structures and real interests; that life, in short, is what goes on under the façade.
Lawrence though is the man he most loves, valuing Lawrence’s constant pitting of himself against comfort and the sumptuous writing that springs out of distrust. There is considerable lyricism in the undertow of Parks’s prose but it is given short brief runs rather than allowed a long leash.
In the European Championships last year Manchester United faced AC Milan.
Milan won thanks chiefly to the sheer spirit and dogged poetry of a defender, Gennaro Gattuso. Being a lover of football Parks would see the value of Gattuso. Muscular, very sharp in the tackle. All but indomitable.
Tim Parks's collection of essays The Fighter examines the public and private roles of art, says Stephanie Merritt
Sunday September 23, 2007
The Observer
Tim Parks's third collection of essays ranges, like its predecessors, across literature, European politics and popular culture and is loosely linked by the theme of conflict, particularly in the sense of the artist's struggles, both internal and in relation to the wider conflicts of his or her time. Though there is little explicit reference to present international conflicts, through the work of Beckett, Hardy, Dostoevsky, Zola and a number of Italian and European writers whose names might be less familiar to English-speaking readers, he locates the constant tension between the desire for retreat to the private sphere and the duty to active engagement with the world, particularly in times of national crisis.
The majority of these essays were first published in the New York Review, and Parks approaches his subjects for the literate lay reader, with a novelist's rather than an academic's eye. His style is always erudite but never forbidding, bringing an unashamedly humanist consciousness to the lives and works under consideration. Where the subjects have been thoroughly picked over by biographers and critics, such as in the case of Lawrence (the subject of the title essay) or Hardy (which takes Claire Tomalin's recent biography as its starting point), Parks offers a succinct overview with this idea of conflict to the fore, rather than introducing new readings or research. But he is at his most engaging when he turns his attention to less canonical subjects, such as the World Cup or the growth of hypertextual internet novels.
At times, he wears his literary passions on his sleeve; in 'Gardens and Graveyard', he considers three classic Italian novels of the Thirties and Forties, by Giorgio Bassani, Cesare Pavese and Dino Buzzati, that illustrate the tension between withdrawal and the consequences of political involvement. It hardly matters if the reader is not familiar with these novels; Parks's enthusiasm, especially for Bassani, is infectious and leaves you feeling that you understand the characters (and, more important, with a desire to rush out and find the source material).
Not that he is always so warm towards his subjects; 'Let Sleeping Beauties Lie', a piece on Austrian Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek is one long cry of disbelief that she should ever have been considered for the award. He reminds us that 'one member of the Nobel committee resigned over the award, describing Jelinek's work as "whining, unenjoyable public pornography" and "a mass of text shovelled together without artistic structure"'.
Parks leaves us in no doubt as to where he stands on this debate (quoting copiously from her most recent work to prove the accuracy of the renegade judge's views), but proceeds to explain why Jelinek's best-known novel, The Piano Teacher, is her one artistic triumph. Jelinek is a model example of the writer who has deliberately withdrawn from the friction of living in the world.
Parks, a resident of Verona for many years, approaches his Italian subjects with the outsider's advantageous combination of familiarity and critical objectivity. Tackling the complexity of Silvio Berlusconi and his place within Italy's anomalous political model may leave some English readers struggling to catch up with the mass of names referenced, not to mention the necessary explanations of certain Italian legal and political terminology, but elsewhere, on the Medicis. D'Annunzio or Mussolini, he is a smart and lively guide. 'A Matter of Love and Hate', his essay on World Cup football as a legitimised form of nationalist fervour and tribalism, analyses why the Italian national team can never generate such passion as local matches, where the sport really is a sublimation of ancient enmities between former city states.
This collection is a thought-provoking and often funny contribution to the endless debate about the uses of art and its place in political life.
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