Frederic Raphael | The Spectator columnists & writers

The evil of banality

Aimez-vous Heidegger? According to his admirers, he was the most significant and influential philosopher of the 20th century. For Hannah Arendt, despite her claims eventually to have found the perfect husband in Heinrich Blucher, Heidegger was the love of her life. She was his precocious teenage pupil when he lectured on Plato’s Sophist at Marburg in 1924, and the Herr Doktor’s dark-eyed Jewish mistress not long afterwards. He was 35, married with two sons, only one of whom (it emerged much later) he had fathered. His wife Elfride was an eager anti-Semite; Heidegger’s eagerness was for his own advancement and fame. Hannah never got over the thrill of being his cookie.When Hitler came to power, the proponent of ‘the truth of Being’ embraced the Führer-prinzip.

‘We’ll always have Paris’

The long war between France and the US has its liveliest consequence in the world of film: Hollywood does movies, the French do cinema. In terms of equipment, the Yanks were the pioneers, but France’s Charles Pathé was the first tycoon and — more importantly — George Méliès was the inventor, by accident, of the method of cutting from scene to scene which has become the signal contribution of cinema to narrative. After the invention of talkies, Hollywood pulled out of sight and sound of its panting pursuers, but the French have remained obstinately inventive and creatively resentful: they harbour an abiding sense of having been robbed of an art form which has been degraded by Californian philistines. Only a few American directors (and Alfred Hitchcock) were dubbed auteurs by François Truffaut and his chums at Cahiers du Cinéma when, in the 1950s and onwards, they attempted the coup which would make them self-appointed arbiters of cinematic merit (poor Vincente Minnelli fell off their train, because he was such a poor subject for interview).

The woman behind the god

The emperor Augustus was the original god/father. Julius Caesar was often referred to as ‘the divine Julius’, but his nephew (and adopted son) was the first Roman to have temples dedicated to him in his lifetime. If uncle Julius had died a natural death, or in some brave battle, the Roman upper class would never have suffered the decimation (and then some) which Caesar’s ‘son’ and heir visited upon it under the rubric of vengeful piety. His last and greatest enemies had had nothing to do with Caesar’s death. Mark Antony had been Julius’s number two and was actually Octavian’s brother-in-law; Cleopatra had been his uncle’s most passionate love. After their deaths, following the battle of Actium in 31 BC, the 28-year-old last man standing had the Roman ruling class at his mercy.

Thoughts on the Great Depression

The Great Depression of the 1930s has passed into myth as essentially American, not global. The Wall Street crash ended the Good Times and led, apparently inevitably, to the crisis of Capitalism. Europe suffered from the effects, but had the glum fun of watching the dollar lose its almightiness. America’s internal response was dramatic and, literally, moving: the migration of John Steinbeck’s Joad family of ‘Okies’, from the dust bowl towards the golden mirage of California, exemplified a general restlessness. At much the same time, Richard Wright’s Native Son spoke up, for the first time, for the mute, oppressed southern Blacks who would find no promised land in their northward drift to Chicago; Michael Gold’s 1930 novel, Jews Without Money, gave an angry voice to the tenement dwellers of New York’s Lower East Side.

Rome on the skids

The Fall of the West: The Death of the Roman Superpower, by Adrian Goldsworthy The Ruin of the Roman Empire, by James O’DonnellThese two fat, well-sourced books about the decline of ancient Rome run, until they limp, in relay. Adrian Goldsworthy begins his leg from the end of the second century AD, the term of the Antonines (under whom Edward Gibbon could imagine himself happy, so long as he was a patrician), through the nervous three centuries which ended with the incursions — here seen more as forceful immigrations — of the Huns and the Goths. After Alaric’s irruption in 410 into Italy, the rulers of the once-master Latin race absconded from Rome to marsh-girt Ravenna where they dawdled until the arrival, in 489, of the Goths led by the Arian Theodoric, self-appointed legate of the eastern emperor.

Mudslinging in the groves of academe

Mary Lefkowitz is a distinguished (i.e. no longer young) classicist who taught for over 30 years at Wellesley College. She has been particularly bold and articulate in promoting the role of women in antiquity. Married to Hugh Lloyd-Jones, a famously rigorous ex-Regius Professor of Greek, she can be presumed not to advance lazy arguments or to abuse her sources. Classicists do, of course, get involved in sometimes furious controversy but, in most cases, odium academicum is expressed with barbed courtesy. Civility is part of scholarship. So too, it is nice to imagine, is what one scholar calls ‘decency in proof’. Education is a common pursuit: even great scientists confess to standing on giants’ shoulders. There are also the contrarians, such as Martin Bernal, author of Black Athena, who gain height, or renown, by stepping on giants’ toes.

And the Oscar goes to . . .

The subtitle of this account of the genesis and fate of the five movies in competition for the title Best Film at the 1967 Academy Awards is ‘the birth of the New Hollywood’. Hyperbole being the most reliable trope known to publicity, we are promised that 1967 was ‘the year that changed film’ and that ‘… a fight that began as a contest for a few small patches of Hollywood turf ended as the first shot in a revolution’. The loud implication is that the time taken to make the announcement ‘And the Oscar goes to …’ were ten seconds that shook the world. Mark Harris believes that at least three of the movies were radical departures, in conception and style, from all that had gone before. His long, and often very interestingly detailed, history tells how, and under whose aegis, the contenders came to line up at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, where the Oscars were presented in the days before they were a prime-time attraction.

The conquering hero as show-off

How should ancient Roman history be written? Gibbon larded his account with ironic elegance. Echoing Tacitus’ epigrammatic sarcasm, he made ponderously light of the vanities and savagery of imperial rule. Yet the Latinate charm of his prose implied wry nostalgia, not only for the age of the Antonines, but also for the whole myth of Roman grandeur. In my undergraduate day, Professor F. E. Adcock continued to lisp in Tacitean epigrams, but the great modern iconoclast was Ronald Syme. A New Zealander whose The Roman Revolution cut the classy crap, Syme denounced Augustus and his family as proto-mafiosi who had taken over Rome in what François Mitterrand later called (when speaking of de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic) ‘le coup d’état permanent’.

The poetry of panic

Tenn — as friends and sycophants called him — Williams was one more of those American writers whose lives have spectacular first acts, but dwindle away, more or less slowly, into repetition, sterility and self-pity eased (and exacerbated) by sex, alcohol and drugs (‘Way to go’, some might say). Williams was born in 1911, in Mississippi; if he had died 45 years later, admirers would be wondering what masterpieces he might have written, had he survived into maturity. In fact he did survive, but he did not mature: he lasted till 1982, his small body and fragile genius having endured as much punishment as its owner could inflict. He choked finally on a pill-bottle top, in a hurry for nirvana: a melodramatic final curtain worthy of his better days.

Mr Facing- both- ways

The classical scholar T. P. Wiseman decided that, once he had passed his 42nd birthday, his middle-aged hands were no longer apt for writing about the erotic Catullus. In his 90th year, Leo Abse manifests no such squeamishness in this psychoanalytic study of Daniel Defoe. Neither embarrassed nor embarrassing, he sees no reason to abate his hot pursuit of the more or less hidden impulses that, he argues, enabled Defoe to impersonate both Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders with such instant insolence.Defoe has been condemned as a hack, an opportunist and a turncoat. He was, by turns, an outspoken dissenter (put in the pillory for his Swiftian, pseudo-High Tory spoof The Shortest Way with Dissenters) and an eager secret agent for the High Tory Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, after the latter got him out of gaol and sent him to Scotland to spy out the prospects for uniting the kingdom.

Her own worst admirer

Audrey Ruston was born in Brussels in May 1929, of a Dutch baroness, Ella van Heemstra, and an English father, Joseph Ruston, some kind of toff, among whose distant ancestors was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Ruston soon abandoned his wife and daughter for a long lifetime of alcohol and irresponsibility. Before he did so, he became an enthusiastic fascist. In 1935, he took the literally fellow-travelling Ella to Munich to have lunch with Hitler. After the war, Ruston hyphenated his name to embrace the Hepburn, from which his deprived daughter took her stage and film name.Audrey and her mother were trapped in Arnhem when the Germans invaded the Low Countries in 1940.

Making the best of defeat

Listing page content hereVae victis, the Roman warning to the defeated, was probably more threatening than sympathetic. Ever after they themselves had been subjugated — forced, literally, to bow their heads under the Samnite yoke — they made a habit of ruthless winning. The defeated could expect slavery and pillage. After June 1940, both were endured by the French for four years which had traumatic consequences. They include the cussedness of France’s foreign policy and her resentment of les Anglo-Saxons. Helping hands too get bitten.As soon as he entered Paris, General de Gaulle set about fabricating the myth that Paris had ‘liberated herself by her own efforts’, which was much truer of Naples. As Richard Vinen says, the myth of the Resistance derived its strength from everyone’s knowledge that it was false.

The Timon of Lyme Regis

Dr Johnson talks somewhere of a Reverend Dr Campbell whom he calls the ‘richest man ever to graze the pasture of literature’. If his riches derived from his books, he was surely outgrossed by John Fowles, whose novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman topped all the bestseller lists, and remained on the New York Times list for a full year. Fowles’s advances reached $250,000. Even The Ebony Tower, a soft-porn novella, and a clutch of short stories made him a small fortune. Hollywood films were made of FLW (as he refers to it) and of his earlier novels The Collector and The Magus, though none was worth seeing. The movies are always said not to do justice to literary sources, but they often reveal fustian, bluff and heartlessness.

Floundering in the shallows

This is a slim two-in-one offer of a pair of previously undisclosed ‘novellas’ (actually film treatments) by Graham Greene. In 1949, when they were written, The Third Man had just been a prodigious hit for the author, Carol Reed and Orson Welles. No Man’s Land — the sole complete piece on parade here — was an attempt to take another bite from much the same cherry (or a squeeze from the same Lime). This time, Richard Brown, a British agent with a ‘neutral name’, crosses into the Soviet zone, in the Harz mountains, in order to find what Hitchcock called ‘the McGuffin’, that vital doesn’t-matter-much-what which serves to prime a thriller’s plot. Here it’s a coded message hidden, in extremis, by a colleague of Brown’s who didn’t survive, detailing secret Soviet uranium mines in the region.

When the Greeks stood together

‘Everyone with a bellyful of the classics,’ Henry Miller said, ‘is an enemy of mankind.’ Was the Brooklyn bronco serious in claiming that indoctrination with ancient literature generated monsters? As readers of The Colossus of Maroussi well know, Miller himself fell under the Greek spell. So, earlier, had the Romantics (with unromantic Periclean Athens), Victorian schoolmasters (with the flog-meister, sodomitic Spartans) and Harold Macmillan, who wanted to be Jack Kennedy’s paidagogos. It all depends which Greece you are looking at, with which preconceptions and through how many veils of a posteriori varnish. The smug division of the world into Civilised and Barbarian certainly supplied moral sanction for aggressive imperialism.

Golden lads and girls

In the first century bc, the wrestler Nicophon of Miletus was said to have a physique which would have made Zeus himself tremble. He literally outstripped his rivals at the Olympic Games. Nicophon’s mere name, Victory Voice, announced a champion, just as that of Schwarzenegger did in the Mr Universe — and, more recently, in the Mr Governor of California — contests. He had only to flex himself for the rest of the field to wilt. Fantastic is the lid-off Arnie of Thal, an Austrian village in which his father, once of the Nazi party, was postwar police chief. Laurence Leamer’s low-down becomes a pedestal on which Arnie’s occasionally lovable hunkishness is jacked up even higher. How high can he go? Although the Constitution of the United States expressly requires a presidential candidate to be born on US soil, what’s an iron rule when the Terminator gets his hands on it? In the present climate of American justice (in which, as Gary Indiana says, the Supreme Court can decree George W.

Sorry symptoms trendily diagnosed

It’s no surprise that one of Alain de Botton’s favoured sources, in a text well-sprigged with neat citations, should be Matthew Arnold: sweetness and enlightenment are their common contributions to a culture in which anarchy is the liveliest art form. What can Arnold have been complaining about in Victorian England, as compared with what we applaud in multicultural, populist Tony Blairville? Public loutishness is echoed in the decline of grammar and of civility, the collapse of common reference points, and hence of wit and allusion. Literature is bestsellers and sport is watching Becks bend it. De Botton is a cut, and occasional thrust, above the usual social diagnostics. David Dimbleby introduces him on Question Time as a ‘philosopher’.

What will the oracle answer?

THE WEST AND THE RESTby Roger ScrutonContinuum, £12.99, pp. 196, ISBN 0826464963 Two reincarnations of the Old Oligarch - alike in deploring The Way We Live Now, different in emphasis and style - jostle for the moral high ground. Gore Vidal's diagnosis of global schism centres on the US and its (mal)administration. Like a liberal, Enlightened mutation of bin Laden, Vidal doubles for Coriolanus and tribune of the put-upon plebs. Exiled from what he takes to be his patrimony - the good, old US, based on the Bill of Rights - he points out that bin Laden was first a CIA protZgZ (but never the first) in Afghanistan, the recent devastation of which was 'like destroying Palermo in order to eliminate the Mafia'. Vidal's blind grandfather, Senator Gore, is once again the paragon; the upstart G.

Unblinking, even for a second

Some novels are something; others are about something. If fiction is an art, then the former class is more likely to qualify. When, for instance, Lolita is said to be 'about' paedophilia, or at least nymphetolepsy, it becomes aesthetically dubious. Hence admirers insist that Nabokov is using H. Humbert's passion as a metaphor for the Master's onomastic infatuation with America (does anyone accuse Yeats of having validated copulation with swans because he made Leda the subject of a poem?). Platform has been admired, as was the same author's Atomised, by worthy sponsors. Clearly they detect merits that go beyond the blow-by-blow sexual activity calculated - others might say - to service those who, as Rousseau said, 'read with one hand'.