NICOLA CHIAROMONTE: THE ETHIC OF POLITICS

...In this sense Pasternak is Tolstoyan...

...Scali's face, a bit mulattoish, was indeed common to all of the Western Mediterranean...

...not all the facts fit—in the character of Scali in L'Espoir (Man's Hope...

...The highly placed diplomat at the Quai d'Orsay, Rumelles, explains that the major powers are all similarly in the grip of a force they cannot control...

...He [Tolstoy] was by nature a fox," Berlin writes, "but believed in being a hedgehog," i.e., he was endowed with an almost superhuman gift for apprehending the unique, the individual, the concrete, but yearned for an overall, general, abstract theory...

...I can call to my aid the superb gift for evocation of Andre Malraux, who immortalized the essence of Nicola Chiaromonte—only the essence...

...No one could really be his enemy...

...We'll go to the other office...

...it assumes "a pre-established harmony" between the two "whose operations theoretical reason is supposed to reveal and practical reason not to hinder...

...Tolstoy is really at the center of Nicola's book because his is the most powerful and overwhelming onslaught ever made against modern man's belief that he can control and master History...

...and though they are often inspired by the issues of the moment, they constantly transcend this level of ephemerality because of the probing depth Nicola never failed to bring to bear on whatever he discussed...

...But the same is not true of War and Peace, with its laborious and painfully elaborate appendices detailing Tolstoy's intellectual wrestlings with the dilemma it poses...

...What would the aim NICOLA CHIAROMONTE: THE ETHIC OF POLITICS 87 of such action be...

...the horns of autos and ambulances resound in the night as they rush to the fires: —The hour when the Valkyries choose among the dead, said Scali...

...Defeats and setbacks may occur...

...Let's go down...

...This view causes a great deal of uneasiness, and inspires much talk about "alienation," the "absurd," and modern "anguish...

...Sir Isaiah drives this point home with his accustomed eloquence and authority...

...But in this essay, I want to confine myself to the main line of his argument...

...Ordinarily, critics stress the literary similarities implied in such a comparison...

...Zhivago, and to a concluding summary whose burden is expressed in its title: "An Age of Bad Faith...

...This is of course not all that Nicola has to say about Malraux, in this revised and shortened version of a justly famous essay...

...Instead, his real achievement is to have indicated the limits of all historical understanding, and to have pointed to the fact of the ultimate irrationality and unknowability of human life and human action...

...But another blow of this kind—one which strikes even more directly against the modern, political variety of this dogma—was delivered by Martin du Gard's too-little appreciated Les Thibault...

...He was that rare species, especially in our time of intellectual specialization, a philosophical commentator on con84 JOSEPH FRANK temporary affairs...

...On Scali's first appearance in the book, what Malraux stresses is his ordinariness in the physical sense: one is not sure whether he is Spanish or Italian...

...What disquiets Nicola about Pasternak is that he finds no way of uniting these ideas with the experiential texture of the novel, or even of giving them some sort of unity and consistency in themselves...

...With him we went back over all the stages of political theory, from Trotskyism to Marxism, going even further back to Proudhon and the utopians of the eighteenth century...

...the refusal to surrender the substance of the socialist dream to the play of vast historical forces or the compulsive grip of iron-clad ideologies...

...but Nicola thinks that he does not quite put the issue in the right way...

...Quite simply, he was always thinking of the ultimate implications and the ultimate issues of the life he was living and of the world in which he found himself...

...The book begins at exactly the right place: with Stendhal's famous depiction, in The Charterhouse of Parma, of Fabrice del bongo's confusion and bewilderment at the battle of Waterloo...

...For the politics of the Left in the modern world has been dominated by the view that human history had a meaning, and that, as a result, history could be mastered and controlled and made to serve the purposes of the ethical ideals 1 Andrea Caffi, A Critique of Violence (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970), trans...

...For the book is very good criticism, and a real contribution to the understanding of the modern tradition...

...He finds the authentic truth of Pasternak not in such ideas, but—and this is a brilliant flash of insight—in the magical incantation of a peasant sorceress, converting the terrifying events of History into a folk poetry of the supernatural whose roots lie deep in Russia's pagan past...

...and when, as a result, man's relation to it begins to assume all the ambiguity and paradoxicality that has always plagued his thoughts about the older, religious idea...

...the comparison is one that he made himself in telling Gorky that War and Peace resembled The Iliad...

...I met him first in Paris, in the early 1950s, and I recall feeling how starkly he stood out among the clever, febrile French intellectuals whom I then also began to meet and very often in the same place (the salon of H. J. and Celia Kaplan, which was so important for Franco-American intellectual relations at that time...

...this is why he never gave up hope...

...But Nicola could not have become as involved with them as he was if he had not been concerned with the relation of politics and ethics, and with the question of the ultimate source of values in the modern world...

...but one felt that he came from a different world, and that he was far less impressed with all the brilliant talk than might appear...

...He sometimes assimilates History to nature, and, sometimes, views it in terms derived from what Nicola calls "a rational-mystical interpretation of Christanity" (whose roots can be found in the Russian semiGnostic tradition of religious Messianism represented by Dostoevsky, Vladimir Soloviev, and Berdyaev...

...This is the tradition that Nicola studies and defines in his book for the first time—the tradition which, in opposition to that of Hegel and Marx, constantly juxtaposes individual experience against historical abstraction, and, whether ironically or tragically, stresses the eternal disparity between the two...

...To be more exact, the myth of History has really been replaced by that of material progress, and by a surrender of any view of man other than as "an animal . . . completely absorbed in the satisfaction of his appetites and in unlimited self-aggrandizement, at the same time that he is a slave to the needs of the species as expressed by the claims of the social machine...

...For this is the point in time when History with a capital H enters into the consciousness of modern man...

...Nicola was very much a part of the French scene in those days, the days when French Existentialism was still trying to work out the foundations for a new philosophy of libertarian, democratic socialism...

...the quality we so often associate with those who, like the peasant, have been toughened and tempered by their encounter with everything in life that resists facile solution and easy explanation, and who, if they lack knowledge, exhibit something that has been universally recognized as wisdom...

...but the war soon made this belief "incredible...

...The answer could even be `Socialism,' " Nicola writes, "if one means by it a social order which is not only egalitarian, but also authoritarian, the only conceivable one, given the conditions of modern society...

...With Pasternak (and, one should add, with Solzhenitsyn, whose works Nicola did not live long enough to take into account), the literary tradition initiated by Stendhal has proven itself to be one of the most vital of our time...

...Just a year or two before he died, Nicola collected a number of essays (some unpublished, and some, like the one on Malraux, long-famous), and wove them together into a book called The Paradox of History...

...and when his death came unexpectedly, his wife received letters of condolence from the young Italian terrorists of the Potere Operaio whom he had been arguing against and criticizing in his very last writings...

...and because of the importance that he attributed to personal friendship as the basis for true intellectual community, I have no doubt that he poured much of the best of himself into these epistles...

...It was this that one felt about him as he listened (he was a very good listener), his head cocked to one side, his eyes slightly closed, his lips pursed and faintly smiling—but never with a smile of superiority or condescension...

...2 The subject of the work—which contains chapters on Stendhal, Tolstoy, Roger Martin du Gard, Malraux, and Pasternak—is Nicola's perennial theme, which, as we have seen, obsessed him even in the midst of the most violent action: the relation of politics and ethics...

...And the situation of his defeated "conquerors" exposes what Nicola calls "the great heresy of our time: the attempt to control force by becoming its servant...

...Why History should have suddenly emerged at this moment has been well explained by Georg Lukacs in his book on The Historical Novel—a work that deals with the same problem as Nicola's from a directly opposite point of view...

...but the relation of Hugo to History as the new, up-to-date version of Providence is essentially the same...

...Force is now felt, ac86 JOSEPH FRANK cording to Nicola, as "essentially a physical, quantitative affair, a certain amount of power, the more of which one has at his disposal, the more good one is in a position to do to oneself and society as well...

...This is the quality in Nicola Chiaromonte that made his responses so slow and hesitant, and that contrasted so sharply with the eager, self-assertive, self-confident, and ultimately self-deluding torrent of words by which he was surrounded...

...There are a whole group of people with whom he exchanged ideas by letter over a long period of time...

...but Nicola, with a little help from Simone Weil, goes a good deal deeper...

...Nicola was not a philosopher or a literary critic in the technical sense (though for the latter part of his life he was drama critic for several Italian periodicals, and a volume of his reviews, La Situazione Drammatica, was published several years ago...

...Scali is speaking with a senior officer, Commandant Garcia, formerly a prominent ethnologist...

...Simone Weil called The Iliad "a poem about force," and said that "force" was its real hero...

...Nicola's book, as I think should be clear by now, is far more than just a work of literary criticism...

...There is nothing stronger in us" Nicola writes, "nothing we know with more certainty than this force about which we know nothing...

...For socialism, in its prebolshevik form, was not only a set of ideas about society or an economic doctrine: "confidence in socialism implies * Part of Nicola Chiaromonte's essay on Les Thibault appeared in the November—December 1970 DISSENT...

...The attack on the revolution by an intellectual who was a revolutionary, Scali said, is always a questioning of revolutionary politics by . . . its ethic, if you like...

...What was so unusual and so attractive about Nicola was that he had both knowledge and wisdom, though he valued the second much more than the first...

...But poor Fabrice del Bongo, who wanted to become a part of History in the grand style, and to participate in the battle of Waterloo at the side of his hero Napoleon, is fearfully disillusioned by the attempt...

...This position implied the radical rejection of the nineteenth-century idea that since the truth about human life could no longer be found in religion, in nature or in the individual, it had to be looked for in the historical adventure of man, that is, in political, warlike, or in any case violent, enterprises...

...This is a different version of the Weltgeist from that of Hegel or Marx...

...It has long been a cliche of criticism to call Tolstoy Homeric and to refer to the "epic quality" of his work...

...that the Left was presumably struggling to put into practice...

...but any principled opposition to it is condemned in the name of "modernity," "science," and "reality"—the same old myth of History reduced now simply to being modish and up-to-date...

...Neubourg...

...this Nicola has done, and it is an original and permanent accomplishment...

...and the famous scene in which this disillusion is expressed becomes the source of another tradition...

...Seriously, Commandant, that criticism, would you wish it not to be made...

...They ally themselves with the Communists because "an event to which a certain kind of intellectual dignity cannot be attributed does not interest him [Malraux...

...One has only to turn back to Malraux's pages to understand why Nicola should have looked with some skepticism upon the atmosphere that had already produced, for example, Merleau-Ponty's sophisticated apology for Stalin's Moscow trials, Humanism and Terror...

...NICOLA CHIAROMONTE: THE ETHIC OF POLITICS 89...

...For Stendhal, the Waterloo episode is merely a backdrop to the history of Fabrice...

...no one has ever seen it as a unity, and situated it in terms of the developing social-historical experience of the last 150 years...

...Both the young terrorists who wrote to Miriam Chiaromonte and Nicola himself were part of this tradition...

...or to put it less deprecatingly, like all good criticism it is inspired by an interest in literature that is not merely "literary...

...But they are not really revolutionaries because the deed itself has become more important for them than its supposed rationale, and a will to action has replaced all other values...

...there is no puerile optimism that the right will always triumph...

...How Madrid seems to say to Unamuno, with this blaze: what do I care about your thought, if you can't think my struggle...

...The importance of Tolstoy, and the profound root of his "epic quality," is that he was the first modern writer to feel again the terrible ambiguity of force as the Greeks had done, and "to raise the problem of force as a moral, not a physical, fact...

...For Meneystrel, the "ideal" content of socialism—its ethical aims and its humanism, which the revolution is supposed to actualize—had long since ceased to have any importance, and had been replaced by the will to act in a world where nature and conscience were no longer in any sort of harmony...

...No modern writer has presented the tension between the individual and history, between private life and social experience, on such a vast scale as Tolstoy...

...Nicola gleaned a fascinating series of comments and apercus on society and history from Caffi's letters,' and I am sure that the same could be done with his own correspondence...

...He is, of course, unqualifiedly sympathetic to Pasternak's basic symbolic contrast of the private and the public, the individual and the social, which undercuts all of revolutionary ideology and reaffirms the sacredness of values (art, friendship, spiritual independence) that no political movement can accept as predominant...

...It was this faith that was shattered by the division and helplessness of the socialists in face of the looming catastrophe of the greatest war in history...

...but the important thing is that the road to the future is clear, well-marked, and unmistakably inscribed in the very order both of the development of the world and of human conscience...

...Or at least, having fought Stalinism since the early '30s, and having been through the Spanish Civil War, he could sense where a good deal of this fascinating ratiocination was heading and where, as a matter of fact, it very soon arrived: to the acceptance of Left totalitarianism as the only possibility for the future...

...What is so moving about Nicola's book is what was so impressive about him as a person—the moral passion that one feels in every line...

...and it is in the pages of Malraux's great novel that he will always remain a living presence...

...Ours is an age of nihilism and bad faith, Nicola concluded, because we try to conceal this truth from ourselves...

...It is he who constantly pierces beneath the theories and rationalizations called forth by 83 the need for action in the immediate situation...

...when it becomes a dominating ideology taking the place formerly held by Providence...

...It will now be impossible in the future to overlook this line of writers, or to neglect the position they represent and the problems they raise...

...Rather, one of sympathy and communion, like the smile of an older person watching young lovers and fully sharing in their joy, but from a vantage point that can see further along the road they are going to travel...

...What interests Nicola in this novel, particularly in the final section, Summer, 1914, is the detailed depiction of the events leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.* These events, which led to the breakdown of the First International, marked the end of socialism as the last, surviving form of faith in the rationality of History...

...Nicola did, in truth, have the face of an Italian peasant— as does his great friend, Ignazio Silone—and this means a face possessing all the limpidity, natural gentleness, and simple, instinctive dignity and courtesy that seem to be a quality of the race...

...His manner also showed some of the slowness, gravity, and deep seriousness of peasant comportment, of men who live with and close to the earth...

...In The Paradox of History, Nicola continues his never-ending exploration of "the philosophical basis of politics," and reaffirms his commitment to his own version of the revolutionary tradition—one that clings stubbornly to the original moral component of the utopian vision, and has always refused to surrender to the demands of leftwing Realpolitik...

...In Les Miserables, Hugo explains the defeat at Waterloo by declaring that "Napoleon had been denounced in Infinity, and his fall has been decided...

...Mary McCarthy, describing the impression Nicola made on his American left-wing friends when he arrived as an exile in the early '40s, said that he brought in more radical ideas and gave us the background, or rather the philosophical basis of politics...

...There was nothing quick and voluble about him, nothing excitable, mobile, agitated...

...There is one character in Les Thibault, the professional revolutionary Meneystrel, who welcomes the outbreak of the conflict, and who, indeed, views it as a golden opportunity for his cause...

...The high point of a Malraux novel is invariably the moment at which the hero realizes that he no longer can give intellectual assent to his cause, but precisely for this reason decides to continue to fight for it: all Malraux's protagonists are thus "nihilists with a cause...

...One thinks, too, of the strong ethical, moral and personal-anarchic strain that has always been such a distinctive feature of the Italian liberal and radical tradition since the Risorgimento...

...and his pages on this enigmatic masterpiece are among the most interesting and searching I have seen...

...And just as Tolstoy recaptured this pre-Christian attitude to force, so too he revived a sense of all the dark, mysterious powers that govern and control human life, and which, whether we call them Moira, Ananke, Nemesis, the divine, the sacred—or, more recently, Being—pose an ultimate limit and ultimate challenge to man's self-confidence that he is master of his destiny...

...All of Nicola's writings are fundamentally concerned with politics, whether or not this is his ostensible topic...

...For Lukacs was persuaded, at least at the time he wrote his book (1936), that Marxism in its Stalinist incarnation had really solved the problem of History, and that it did not contain any paradoxes or ambiguities at all...

...For what distinguishes Scali in the book is his absolute refusal, even while risking his life for a cause, to surrender his critical capacity and his moral sense...

...the unwillingness to lose sight of, or betray, the simple, humble, pathetic bedrock realities of human experience...

...This is the world in which the heroes of Malraux act out their tragic destiny and go to their doom...

...The last two chapters are devoted to some reflections on Dr...

...She also spoke about the way in which the Greeks "geometrized" force, meaning by this their sense of how power could be misused, and the inevitable punishment suffered by those who misused it...

...this is why he spoke to them, and, even more crucial, this is why they listened...

...Nicola was deeply moved by Pasternak's book, but also troubled and disturbed by its ambiguities...

...No one before has picked out, defined, and analyzed so discerningly this antihistorical line of novelists on which Nicola focuses...

...it is he who asks the truly hard questions, the questions for which there is never really any answer—but the questions that must be asked if the values in whose name the action is being carried on are to have any true meaning...

...we still continue to believe in History, even though this belief has long since been emptied of any inner content or ethical substance...

...There is one scene in the book, during an air raid on Madrid, which must be quoted if this quality of Nicola Chiaromonte is to be understood...

...These heroes, as Nicola perceptively puts it, "are fascinated by the contingency of history, not by its rationality...

...The bad faith and nihilism of the modern world is nothing other than acceptance of the empty form of what was once authentic belief in the 88 JOSEPH FRANK absence of other beliefs that can be wholeheartedly embraced...

...This principle is simply the conviction that there is no discontinuity between "nature and conscience...

...To illustrate the difference between these two traditions in literary terms, Nicola makes an extremely effective comparison between Stendhal and Hugo...

...And the quick succession of these upheavals gives them a qualitatively distinct character, it makes their historical character far more visible than would be the case in isolated, individual instances: the masses no longer have the impression of a "natural occurrence...

...Among all the men he had to see that day and night, Scali was the only one for whom that conversation had the same resonance as for himself...

...but he does not separate off peace and nature as sharply as Tolstoy did from war and history...

...and this essay provided Nicola with the point of departure for his own reflections...

...2 Nicola Chiaromonte, The Paradox of History (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971...

...confidence in a more general principle...

...For the modern, however, the use of power is no longer seen as a difficult and dangerous task involving grave moral responsibilities...

...some of his other formulations are of classic quality, and will certainly be endlessly repeated in the future...

...NICOLA CHIAROMONTE: THE ETHIC OF POLITICS 85 Hegel, when he saw Napoleon at Jena, knew immediately that he was looking at the Weltgeist on horseback...

...All they can do is to pretend (like Prince Bagration in War and Peace) to dominate a situation that has totally escaped from their grasp...

...And this was the quality, too, that united Nicola's exterior with the special cast of his mind—the quality of getting down to what Malraux too liked to call "the fundamental," to the simple, bedrock truth that no amount of verbiage could conceal...

...By the paradox of history, Nicola actually means the paradox of politics in the sense that he understands it...

...At the same time, the paradox of History— the gap between aims and accomplishment, between ideal and reality—has never been more glaring and self-evident...

...But he was, for all that, a philosopher in the true and original meaning of the word...

...despite his remarkable literary foreshadowing of the problem of the individual's relation to History, Stendhal was not profoundly concerned with this issue...

...However that may be, his explanation of the rise of the new historical self-consciousness is an independent insight: It was the French Revolution, the revolutionary wars and the rise and fall of Napoleon, which for the first time made history a mass experience, and moreover on a European scale...

...and since, for most of his life, he was either an active participant in, or a close observer of, the struggles of the European Left in the era of fascism and bolshevism, his thoughts naturally turned to examining these phenomena...

...Luckily, I do not have to depend on my own limited literary powers to conjure up his presence...

...and this same confidence in his ability instantly to grasp the inner significance and meaning of historical events was also displayed by Hegel's greatest pupil, Karl Marx...

...Even more important, those in the bourgeois world itself— those who controlled the reins of power— were equally helpless and equally broken by the onrushing juggernaut...

...and I cannot resist the temptation to try and make him come alive again, even if only for a moment, for those who may read these words...

...But the paradox of history is that things never turn out as they should...

...and ever since the modern world began with the French Revolution, these ideals have always been betrayed in the effort to convert them into realities...

...nothing produced by the opposing tradition that Lukacs studied can compare with it in creative vitality and achievement...

...One thinks, while reading Nicola, of the poor peasants, the cafoni, in Silone's novels, who always oppose the human lessons they have learned so bitterly in their own lives against the rigidity of doctrinaire party lines...

...A refugee from Fascist Italy, living in Paris in the 1930s, Nicola was a member of Malraux's squadron in the Spanish Loyalist Air Force...

...Garcia had just told Scali about his talk with Dr...

...Also, like his remarkable friend Andrea Caffi—whose book-cluttered hotel room in Paris I remember looking like something out of a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann— Nicola was an indefatigable letter-writer (though not to me, because of my own deficiencies in that regard...

...by Raymond Rosenthal, Introduction by Nicola Chiaromonte...

...It is this paradox, and the lessons that might be drawn from it, that Nicola sets out to examine in a group of works where, in each case, the central subject is that of the relation of the individual to history...

...and a collection of the essays that he published in English alone (not to mention in Italian and French) would make a substantial and indispensable volume...

...Despite their opposition, both the bourgeoisie and the socialists, before 1914, had lived in the same kind of world—a world based on the faith that, in the last analysis, their own private aims and the objective order of things would coincide in some fashion...

...For Nicola, however, it is inaccurate to believe that Tolstoy wanted to discover some sort of independent variation of the philosophy of History in the old sense...

...It is Isaiah Berlin's brilliant essay, The Hedgehog and The Fox, which has made us all newly aware of the importance for Tolstoy of the question of History...