NON– F I CTI ON

The Good European Essays and Arguments

Iain Bamforth Carcanet / 244pp. / £16.95

Review by Hugh Lawson-Tancred

THISbook is enjoyably unsatisfactory, but not unsatisfactorily enjoyable. Let’s start with the dissatisfaction. The collection is a from-my-studio miscellany of occasional pieces, from which, if we are to trust the title, a kind of take will emerge on the Europe we have inherited. The strength of this genre is the constantly shifting camera angle and zoom, the absence of anything too closely resembling a message; the flaw is the sense of a personal and unrepresentative – albeit highly observant – trip through a maze of trans-Borgesian complexity. The limitations are geographic, generic and thematic. The good European is really for Bamforth, Strasburger arrivé é, the good Francogerman. Italicized mots from Geneva, Vienna, Hamburg or indeed Colmar pepper the pages, and there are many oblique – and often highly revealing – asides from Russia, America and Israel, but Italy exists only as a refuge for wandering Teutonic savants, Iberia is represented only by Quixote and Compostella, and Scandinavia need not have bothered. As for our own outpost, the Englishman, or even the Scot, still feels very much abroad. The generic constraint is more paradoxical. In a way

the canvass is broad, since we find ourselves now gripped by a political thriller, now at an exhibition of erotic cartoons, now watching late night French TV. Yet there is still a problem of level, or at least balance: lots of Cééline but almost no Proust, plenty of Grass but no Bööll and only Alpine snatches of Mann. Of course, the most interesting thing in any league is promotion from the Second Division, but it would be nice to be reminded of what the promotion is to. The biggest gripe, however, is thematic or tonal. The lodestars of this Europe are firmly Nietzsche and Rousseau, though the former is tempered by a reading heavily affected, if not influenced, by Kafka, and the latter is not implausibly fingered as responsible for that uneasy co-existence of the Englightment and Romanticism that is the United States. These strictures, however, may seem adventitious for a sophisticated Liberal reader, who will not turn to Bamforth for a handy summa Europea, and it would certainly be a mistake to let such shortcomings spoil the fun of this collection, which is clearly motivated by the dictum cited approvingly from John Gross that “even the most intensely serious literature needs to be approached with a certain lightness of heart, if it is to yield its full intensity”. Almost every one of these pieces brims with the sheer relish of paradox and aphorism. Indeed, perhaps the best set essay is devoted to the aphorism, for which Bamforth has a connoisseur’s eye: “Everything in the world has already been said but not everyone has said it”, remarks Stanislaw Lec; “doctrines pass, anecdotes remain”, remarks Emil Cioran. Bamforth is happiest with the

momentary, the transient and the miniature. His larger scale pieces, such as his recollections of the Berlin wall in mid-fall or his own barrage of aphorisms on the French, lack momentum and coherence. He is most at home with those not at home, displaced nostalgics such as Joseph Roth or Marina Tsvetaeva. The owl of Minerva always flies at dusk and, to borrow an image of the curiously absent Wittgenstein, ghosts haunt the ruins. Not surprisingly, he has considerable time for Karl Krauss and Robert Musil, and indeed his vision is really that of a kind of Musil of the Rhineland. For Bamforth, one suspects, it is Europe itself that is the ultimate paradox, emancipating itself in its mind from a past to which it still clings in its heart. How, after all, can a workable mode of living for a person, let alone a continent, be procured by a fusion of Rousseau and Nietzsche? Europe is irredeemably contrary, elusive, problematic, a hydra standing guard over an oubliette. A good European is something that you can be but cannot be taught to be. “The only freedom we demand is freedom from the dead”, pleaded the Expressionists, but that, of course, is the one freedom that we cannot have. Not having it, we must live with our heritage for good and ill. Bamforth does not perhaps provide the arguments advertised in his sub-title, but he does offer glimpses, vignettes and sightings of the half-buried landmarks of a culture which, without our fulling knowing it, is our own. One of his subjects is the great cityscape photographer Eugèène Atget, whose work preserves the spirit of pre-Haussman Paris. He would not, I think, be displeased to be called the Eugèène Atget of Old Europe.

Hugh Lawson-Tancred is a Departmental Fellow in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London A range of non-fiction titles are now available for purchase directly from The Liberal’s website, at www.theliberal.co.uk.

Autumn 2007 | The Liberal | 41