Are you the author of an African Writers Series title published by Heinemann between 1962 and 2002? If so, Heinemann Educational Publishers would like to speak to you about an exciting new initiative in partnership with ProQuest Information and Learning. Please contact us with your current contact details, so that we can send you further information.

I like of course, the whole idea of a ‘new’ initiative, since I am pretty sick of the old ones. But what really attracted me to the ad was the ‘Quest’ theme. Heinemann did in fact publish a series devoted to African writers, and some of them were well worth publishing. Only somehow, in the forty years intervening, they have misplaced them. A pity, since African writers are now good for business. Otherwise ProQuest (listed on the New York Stock Exchange as PQE) would not be promoting this exciting initiative. Quest, and its subsidiary, the infamous Chadwick-Healey, are eager outright purchasers of texts which they then sell at a mark-up of several thousand percent. Caveat vendor! And Heinemann, send out one of those fearless explorers of old!

*

The presidential election has come and gone. Here is my two cents on the subject.

I hear that a lady walking her dog on New York’s West Side felt fortunate, in the wake of the election, that she lived ‘in an Island off Europe’ and not among the unwashed to the west of Manhattan, those people ‘out there’ who were so simple-minded as to vote for George Bush. Alas for her, ‘out there’ was still, at last reckoning anyway, part of the United States, though it is terra incognita to The New York Times and much of the American intelligentsia, not to speak of those Europeans who thought it fitting to tell me how to vote. These illiberal ‘liberals’ simply cannot understand that anyone would disagree with them. Hence the much weeping and gnashing of teeth at yet another loss to the ‘morons’, to people who don’t eat soufflés, don’t value the departed Jacques Derrida, and are baffled by the common agricultural policy! To the propagandists of the Enlightenment project, why would anyone vote for a man who, in James Bowman’s utterly ‘straight’ words, is ‘just an ordinary guy trying to do what is best for his country’? Maybe what we need is cheap package tours to Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Tennessee and the like.

The Counter-Revolution, however, is not the reason why John Kerry lost the election or why George W. Bush won it. Nor was it entirely won by the Republicans. It was lost by the Democrats. In our national elections, it is perceptions that count, ‘gut feelings’, intuitions, a sense of one’s place in the world, what psephologists and the pitch-men of the monstrous advertising industry call one’s ‘comfort level’. These inner convictions and (often) unstated feelings are rich, complex and almost impossible to fathom, and artists are far more likely to get them right (intuitively) than scientists armed with measuring sticks, surveys and charts.

Let me offer a single, hypothetical example. If you, dear Reader, are the political ‘analyst’, your guesswork appears in brackets.

Harold B. is black (therefore a Democrat) and lives and works in Tennessee (Republican). He works as a gang foreman for the electricity company, a lower-management job he’s held for twelve years (Republican?). He is now thirty-eight (swing-voter). Had he been college-educated, he now knows, he would be on the management side; instead, he is unionized and on an hourly wage (Democrat). His take-home wage is roughly $35,000 a year (Democrat), but his company has recently been merged with another and he is insecure about his job (Democrat). He has been married twice, the first time to a black woman who works for the city government (Democrat) and has two children he sees only intermittently (Republican, because he is bitter about the treatment he received in the courts from an elected Democratic judge). Nor does he think much of the way his children are being educated by unionized teachers (Republican). He knows several co-workers who have been to Iraq and have told him that the war, which he considered unavoidable (Republican) is going badly (Democrat). His second wife is feisty, young, Hispanic and hard-working (Democrat), but has liberal attitudes (likely to make him vote Republican) and generally despises politics and politicians (Democrat). He is indifferent to religion (Democrat) but believes himself to be a responsible working-class citizen (Republican). He did not vote in the last election (swing vote) but if he had, he would not have voted for Al Gore (Republican) because he thinks Gore would have taken him for granted (Republican). In his eyes, the same applies to Kerry (Republican). He knows no homosexuals (Republican), and certainly can’t quite understand why they should want to marry one another (Republican). His co-workers and buddies, many of whom do not vote, wouldn’t dream of voting Republican, because that’s the big money party (Democrat), but he himself thinks of himself as an ‘independent’ (Republican).

I could go on about the intimate details that might influence his choice, but that is enough to show that there is no way a journalist, a social scientist, or a political activist can be sure which way Harold B., or anyone else, is going to vote. Indeed, poor Harold has no sure conviction himself. Those who seek his vote, therefore, must somehow wrest it from him. Huge amounts of money were spent to that end, great forces were mobilized.

But if there is one thing I am sure about in the recent election, it is that this largesse, this insistent scream, this electoral Blitzkrieg, is something the millions of Harold B.’s, even in New York, do not like. Because he (and those other millions) thinks ‘independently’, he doesn’t like to be sold a bill of goods. In fact, over his whole adult life, he has become increasingly resistant to anyone who seeks to seduce him or sell him anything. For him (and them) journalists, ad-men, the CEO’s of big companies (including his own), lawyers and politicians are all cut of the same cloth. They are not only useless and idle and too big for their boots, they represent a sort of insidious evil which he cannot identify rationally but understands is destructive of the often painful but idealistic America his mother and grandmother have told him about.

If it costs a billion dollars to win an election and those running for president have to be millionaires, or take money from millionaires, who gets those millions? Advertisers, TV, newspaper, lawyers, that’s who. Why should an election cost billions when voting is such a simple matter?

In other words, it is the very excess of politics and of the money it involves, the superfoetation of opinion and pundits and talking heads who think they know how he is going to vote, that actually revolts him. Neither money nor stridency, neither bullying nor patronizing, make it any easier for the average American to choose whom to vote for. In fact, it makes it a lot more difficult.

What do most of us do when the messages we receive are hugely contradictory, divisive, murky, confused? I suggest that we move into some quiet, internal space in which we know, regardless of what others tell us, what the worth or non-worth of persons X, Y and Z really is. We say to ourselves, ‘Do I want him sitting next to me at the bar? How would I react if I ran across him in the street? Would I tell him anything about how my life really is?’

Do I know any better than anyone else what happened on November 2? Probably not. The movement of opinion in any mass is fickle. Am I saying this is an irrational process? Yes. Democracy is. Money and morals simply make it more irrational.

Of one thing I am fairly sure, and that is that the whole Enlightenment project has been hi-jacked by the intolerant. I know that, whatever their personal merits, neither Al Gore, in 2000 nor John Kerry in 2004, are representative of anything particularly American. And if a president does not represent the whole people, how can he lead his people? Bill Clinton, whatever his faults, and they were many, was a representative American—perhaps more in his faults than his virtues. So were all the electable Democratic candidates in my lifetime. And I voted for them, though I did not for Clinton. The historical compromises involved in the Electoral College guarantee that.

The forefathers saw to it that the differences between Americans would be mitigated by the several states, that the will of the Majority would not necessarily triumph over the individual rights and traditions of the Minority. That is, that a president could only be elected when a sufficient number of that minority felt comfortable with majority opinion.

Since the Second World War (I first voted for Harry Truman of Blessed Memory) and with the single exception of John Kennedy (by the narrowest of margins), the Democratic presidents in my time have been from what was once a broad party of Consensus. I grew up believing, like most Americans, that the Republicans represented Money, Business and the Booboisie. It was the party of the vast Middle West, of the Volk, of Progress and Optimism and the Rotary Club, of Boosters and Chambers of Commerce. In a profoundly and fortunately centrist nation, the Democratic party was our ‘left’ and the Republicans were our ‘right’. This, of course, was a misunderstanding on our part. We were right about the Republicans of the day (Eisenhower and Reagan were its icons) but wrong about the Democrats.

The Democratic party of Truman (from a conservative border state), of Lyndon Johnson (from the South) and Jimmy Carter (likewise), was a party with two constituencies: the solid, conservative South and the heteroclite industrial belt, sustained ideologically by an immigrant intelligentsia. To put it at its simplest, the Democrats ceased to be the ‘natural’ majority party when they threw away (or alienated) their southern, states’ rights, base. The gurus of the cities, inflamed by issues of civil liberties, captured the party. Thus they lost the long-range war. The South, and a startling proportion of the newer immigrant vote, is now Republican. In terms of the Electoral College, that leaves the Democrats with population, but not votes.

Yet this is a total contradiction of the natural order of things. The great leap forward of the United States—of involvement with the world, of civil liberties, of economic prosperity, of educational equality—is a product of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson who, to add to his luster, also extricated the nation from Kennedy’s war in Viet Nam. They won because of their party’s natural base in the southern states. Yet can anyone imagine the present Democratic party nominating either man? Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson all believed that the government should act for all the people; it was they who enfranchised the poor; yet they were part of and dependent on retaining that minority of states (and electoral votes) that wished for none of the reforms that took place. Nonetheless, they in their wisdom finally accepted that the changes were inevitable, and perhaps even desirable.

That the most recent Democratic candidates were not for all the people is, I think, self-evident. They were anthropophagously virulent about Bush and his kind of people. Like Hollywood darlings, Bruce Springsteen, or the Guardian of England they weren’t simply against Bush; they wanted him for lunch. They perfectly reflected the lady walking her dog on Central Park West: those who voted for Bush were ‘morons’. Necessarily so, because they don’t agree with Us.

Since all political analysis is essentially personal, I will tell you why and when this life-long Democratic voter did not vote for Kerry. Quite apart from the issues of war or the environment my epiphany came with the arrival in my mail-box of The New Yorker, the East Coast middlebrow weekly to which a million people subscribe because if you don’t, six or seven times a year (and ever more rarely) you may miss something really good. And half way through the magazine was a full page photographic portrait of Act Up, a homosexual activist group. Ten bodies are portrayed with stencils saying ‘STOP AIDS’ across their pectorals and dugs, with trousers (yes, the women too) around their feet, and four of them in the front row with everything else, including pubes and genitals, showing, dead center being a quiescent black penis. This, the magazine was saying, is what you should be voting for.

I chose not to and I think many Americans felt as I do. The portrait, the magazine, the harassment, liberal money, the Smart set, the failure to understand the nature of offensiveness, did not sit well in the America I prefer, the America of my inner space. If more of that was what Kerry had to offer America, I wanted no part of it. The tastes of the few have become the agenda of a party adrift in a sea of solipsism, hedonism and seething hatred. Thus does a self-styled intelligentsia commit public suicide. Unless it recovers its base, I see nothing to indicate that it will not repeat its own disembowelment in 2008.

*

A recent review by Michael Gorra deals with Orhan Pamuk and a subject I think bears a close look, the development of an ‘international’ style, one that ‘travels well from one country to another.’ Gorra lists its avatars: Grass’s Tin Drum, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Easy enough to think of others: Peter Esterhazy in Hungary, Kundera, displaced in France, Julian Marias in Spain, Paul Auster, somewhere. Its characteristics Gorra defines as (1) having ‘a political edge’, grappling with ‘terror, atrocity and tyranny’; (2) ‘grimly comic’; (3) ‘not above trading on the charms of the exotic’; (4) in style, ‘flamboyant’ and ‘prolix’; (5) sometimes ‘fantastic’ and often referring to the ‘folk tale’ and the ‘oral tradition’; (6) in characterization ‘broad’ and ‘at times over-determined’ or ‘verging on caricature and therefore coming ‘to stand . . . as the embodiment of an entire national literature, as though one story could indeed do the job of many.’ Wryly, Gorra goes on to argue, that for writers in these un-English literatures, the international style has become ‘the choice of those who expect to be read in translation.’

This is meaty stuff—a search for universals, for events and processes that are particular to a single culture but must be perceptible to another. I don’t think this works. Literature is firmly based in language, and thereby horribly dependent on translation. There is no such thing as an ‘universal’ literature, any more than there is a world-wide language, or can ever be ‘universal’ jurisdictions or law. We are products of a particular place and particular customs. Those who seek to transcend their own cultures for the sake of ‘general’ ideas sacrifice the only readers likely to see their messages as relevant to themselves.

*

I have been playing and listening to a lot of Janácek piano music lately. He didn’t write much. It is quiet, reflective music: ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’ describes it perfectly. He had a troubled life; women agitated him, as they do most artists. He wrote much of it in the country, an idealized place which artists often seek out (see Martial) but where in most cases they spend their days chopping logs. The result is serene, sometimes foggy, seldom bright, mainly autumnal. It is where he explored what might be called ‘private’ harmonies, the ones he would use later in noisier, more open compositions.

I happen to like that quietist approach to music, which is why I went down to Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia just as summer was about to break on us. Hampden-Sydney is a small private college founded in 1776, and it annually offers a very attractive chamber music festival. The countryside is lovely, the campus clean, the auditorium modest but pleasant, the audience (largely but not exclusively drawn from Washington) is cultivated, the musicians friendly and available. As does Gidon Kremer at Lockenhaus, its directors, the clarinetist Ethan Sloane and the pianist James C. Kidd, keep its proportions reasonable. Though there are young and talented artists around, the festival is neither a show-case, nor just an assembly of seasoned musicians seeking extra summer honoraria by offering the public lollipops. It is not as earnest as Marlboro (nor indeed as faintly pretentious) nor as dumbed-down as the modern Tanglewood can sometimes be. Its programs are neither over-long nor skimpy, and seek neither to shock nor to bore. In short, it’s rather close to what I truly want from a festival, and it is devoted to chamber music of the sort with which we are all familiar, but know insufficiently, largely drawn from the nineteenth century.

This sort of chamber music repertory is far more taxing than it seems, though every instrumentalist of caliber has probably ‘been through’ it. Its special quality, of course, is that it brings out the best in those whose instrumental careers have not led them to the purely grandiose. Chamber music is ever intimate and requires that the players interrelate and blend, that they submerge their big moments into the whole, and that they pay every attention to detail while retaining the over-all flow of the music. This does not exclude virtuosity, as was amply proven in the two concerts I attended.

The first program included Mozart’s E-flat major trio for piano, cello and violin, played in sprightly, melodic and clean-as-a-whistle style by Ethan Sloane, Gilbert Kalish and Arturo Delmoni on the violin (not the most ingratiating part) and the quite wonderful Nathaniel Rosen on the cello. If I say that this was followed by two works, Fauré’s Elégie and Saint-Saëns’ Allegro appassionato, both for cello and piano, both played with mastery and great lyricism by Messrs. Rosen and Kidd, you will have an idea that the Hampden-Sydney Festival does explore even the remoter parts of the repertory. Both were revealing as music and nicely romantic in performance. The center-piece was Dvorák’s Dumky trio, which I have never heard played with more verve, a greater drive in the parts where drive is required, and a lyrical subtlety and expressiveness in the haunting lentos and adagios that are the heartland of this piece. Here Delmoni showed his prowess with the bow, Gilbert Kalish his fine understanding of how this great melodist’s rhythms need to be observed but not thumped, and Rosen on the cello just had himself one of those utterly memorable performances that congenial group-playing sometimes produces.

The same could be said of the second concert. A Glinka trio pathétique was nothing great as music, but sympathetically played proved to have plenty of musical ideas, especially for the clarinet, where Sloane had a seamless sense of melody and showed no signs of strain, sustaining even the longest lines. There followed a medley of quite spectacular show-pieces (by Kreisler, Chopin, Sibelius and Fauré) that showed to advantage Delmoni’s Paganini side (which is considerable both as to musicianship and technique) and Kidd’s delicacy of touch. Here again we ended with a formidable, brooding, many-colored trio, Schubert’s in B-flat major. And once again, a trio (itself a formidable challenge to a composer) that is, in so many celebrated hands, a war-horse to be played for effect, came completely alive. Would that Delmoni-Rosen-Kalisch were a permanent trio! And recorded!