The Red Thread Read online

  As they are the products of our common human nature, it is quite normal that all the great civilisations should cultivate values that are basically similar, but they go about it in different ways and without necessarily attaching to them the same importance. What one may consider a basic axiom, regard as fundamental and embrace as a tenet may appear in the other only as a brilliant intuition, grasped by a few exceptional individuals.

  This idea that the aesthetic quality of the work of art reflects the ethical quality of its author is so essential to Chinese thought that it sometimes runs the risk of becoming an oft-repeated cliché whose meaning can end up being distorted through mechanical and simplistic application. In the West, on the other hand, though not entirely unheard of, this same notion rarely undergoes methodical development. Thus Vasari, for example, can quite naturally point to a link between the spiritual beauty of Fra Angelico’s painting and the saintliness that characterised his monastic existence, but, by the same token, it would hardly occur to him to attribute the artistic shortcomings of other works to the moral failings of their authors.

  China’s four major arts—poetry, calligraphy, painting (in ink, by means of a calligraphic brush) and music for qin (seven-stringed zither)—are practised not by professionals but by amateurs belonging to the scholarly class. Traditionally, these various disciplines could not be performed as a profession: an artist who would accept payment for his art would disqualify himself and see himself immediately reduced to the inferior condition of artisan. Although the poet, musician, calligrapher and painter (and quite often the same man is all of these at once) may let connoisseurs or a few chosen friends enjoy gratis the products of their art (sometimes, also, it is this limited but talented public that fires their inspiration), the fact remains that the prime aim of their activity is the cultivation and development of their own inner life. One writes, one paints, one plays the zither in order to perfect one’s character, to attain moral fulfilment by ensuring that one’s individual humanity is in harmony with the rhythms of universal creation.

  The Chinese aesthetic, which, in the field of literary, calligraphic, pictorial and musical theories has produced a wealth of philosophical, critical and technical literature, developed without making any reference to the concept of “beauty” (mei; the term meixue, “study of beauty,” is a modern one, especially coined to translate the Western notion of aesthetics). When this concept crops up it is often in a pejorative sense, since to strive for beauty is, for an artist, a vulgar temptation, a trap, a dishonest attempt at seduction. Aesthetic criteria are functional: does the work do what it does efficiently, does it nourish the vital energy of the artist, does it succeed in capturing the spirit that informs mountains and rivers, does it establish harmony between the metamorphoses of forms and the metamorphoses of the world?

  But even as he is creating his work, it is always and essentially on himself that the artist is working. If one realises this, one can understand the meaning and raison d’être behind the numerous statements and precepts which, through the ages, constantly associate the artistic quality of the painting with the moral quality of the painter. One could give any number of examples: “If the man is of high moral quality, this will inevitably be reflected in the rhythm and spirit of his painting”; “the qualities and flaws of the painting reflect the moral superiority or mediocrity of the man”; “he who is of inferior moral worth would not be able to paint”; “those who learn painting put the development of their moral self above all else”; “the painting of those who have succeeded in building this moral self breathes with a deep and dazzling sense of rectitude, transcending all formal aspects. But if the painter lacks this quality, his paintings, charming as they may superficially appear, will give out a kind of unwholesome breath which will be obvious in the merest brushstroke. The work reflects the man: it is true in literature and it is just as true in painting.”

  But some critics have gone even further and have tried to identify in the works of famous artists either the expression of particular virtues they have shown in their lives or a reflection of their moral failings. For instance, the eighteenth-century scholar-poet Zhang Geng wrote:

  What a man writes presents a reflection of his heart, allowing one to perceive his vices and virtues. Painting, which comes from the same source as writing, also holds up a mirror to the heart. In the beginning, whenever I looked at the paintings of the Ancients, I still doubted the soundness of this opinion, but after studying the lives of the painters, I venture to say that it is correct. Indeed, if we look at the different artists of the Yuan period (that is to say a period of national humiliation, under the Mongol occupation) we see Ni Zan had broken all ties with the ordinary, everyday world, and his painting is also characterised by a severe austerity and a detached elegance stripped of all ornamentation. Zhao Mengfu, on the other hand, could not resist temptation (he collaborated with the invaders) and his calligraphy, like his painting, is tainted with prettiness and a vulgar desire to please . . .

  This last passage, contrasting two emblematic figures—Ni Zan and Zhao Mengfu—opens a dangerous trend in criticism: the deep meaning of an ethical reading of the work of art is lost only to be replaced by a sort of narrow and dogmatic “political correctness.” There is no doubt that the art of Ni Zan is sublime—a limpid and distant vision of pale, empty landscapes, cleansed of all worldly blemishes—but very little is known about the historical person Ni Zan himself, and the anecdotes attesting to his purity and his detachment could well be no more, on the whole, than an imaginary projection of the virtues suggested by his paintings. The case of Zhao Mengfu is even more curious: an aristocrat who agreed to put himself at the service of the Mongol invaders, he was traditionally regarded by posterity as a vile traitor, but the problem is that, in his painting and especially in his calligraphy, he also proves himself a prodigiously talented artist. In order to resolve this embarrassing contradiction, it is conventional for critics generally to choose to condemn, despite the evidence before their eyes, the “vulgarity” of his overly splendid calligraphy (a judgement that tends to bring to mind the famous condemnation pronounced by the Surrealists against Paul Claudel: “One cannot be French ambassador and poet”—as if Claudel hadn’t been both one and the other!).

  But even such naïve and simplistic rantings have failed to affect the deep understanding the great Chinese artists have always retained regarding this ethical dimension of their work. And the calligraphers, in particular, are all the more conscious of it, since the practice of their art constitutes for them a daily asceticism, a genuine hygiene of their whole physical, psychic and moral being, whose efficacy they themselves can measure in an immediate and concrete fashion. Moreover, in this sense calligraphy is not just the product of their character—their character itself becomes a product of their calligraphy. This reversal of the “graphological causality” has been noted by Jean-François Billeter in his Art chinois de l’écriture, and he has supported his observation with aptly chosen quotations. The supreme beauty of a piece of calligraphy indeed does not depend on beauty. It results from its natural appropriateness to the “truth” that the calligrapher nurtures within himself—authenticity, original purity, absolute naturalness (what the Germans call Echtheit): “In calligraphy, it is not pleasing that is difficult; what is difficult is not seeking to please. The desire to please makes the writing trite, its absence renders it ingenuous and true,” wrote the calligrapher Liu Xizai, quoted by Billeter, who further illustrates these words with a statement by Stendhal: “I believe that to be great in anything at all, you must be yourself.”

  In fact to invoke Stendhal in this context strikes me as particularly interesting. The perfection of the work of art depends entirely on the true human worth of the artist; this moral notion at the basis of all Chinese aesthetics is found also in the West, but here it is more the mark of a few exceptional minds, of which Stendhal is a perfect example. His whole aesthetic sense is passionately and furiously moral—remember for example
his condemnation of Chateaubriand: “I have never been able to read twenty pages of Chateaubriand . . . At seventeen I almost had a duel because I made fun of la cime indéterminée des forêts which had many admirers in the 6th Dragoons . . . M. de Chateaubriand’s fine style seems to me to tell a lot of little fibs. My whole belief in style lies in this word.” In this same spiritual family of geniuses both sublime and “eccentric” (in the Chinese sense of the word), we must also include Simone Weil (a whole aesthetic could be constructed from the rich mine of her Cahiers)—or again Wittgenstein, one of whose statements seems to me particularly appropriate as a conclusion to this little article, for indeed it proposes a criterion for literary criticism that is as original as it is effective (speaking of Tolstoy): “There is a real man, who has a right to write.”

  2004

  A TALK WITH GEORGE JACKSON

  Jessica Mitford

  THE IDEA of interviewing George Jackson about his writing occurred to me last autumn when I read Soledad Brother, his remarkable and moving collection of prison letters. Although I had never done an author interview, I have read many and know roughly how they go: “When do you do your best work?” “At dusk, in a Paris bistro, over a glass of Pernod.” “What childhood influences shaped your literary tastes?” “My parents’ home was a gathering place for the foremost writers of the day. . . .”

  But authors are sometimes elusive and this one, through no wish of his own, proved exceptionally so. Prison walls, I soon discovered, are not only to keep convicts in but to keep reporters out. After months of frustrating and fruitless negotiations with prison officials, who refused to permit the interview, Jackson’s lawyer, at his request, secured a court order for my visit.

  George Jackson, now aged twenty-nine, has been in prison almost continuously since he was fifteen. Seven of those years were spent in solitary confinement. In his introduction to Soledad Brother, Jean Genêt calls it “a striking poem of love and combat,” and says the letters “perfectly articulate the road traveled by their author—first the rather clumsy letters to his mother and his brother, then letters to his lawyer which become something extraordinary, half-poem, half-essay, and then the last letters, of an extreme delicacy. . . .” What was that road, and what kind of person is the author?

  As to the latter question, the San Quentin guard in charge of visitors undertook to enlighten me. “We have to set up this interview for you,” he said. “You’ll be seeing Jackson in the attorney’s room. Now we suggest posting a guard in the room for your protection. He’s an extremely dangerous, desperate man, liable to try anything.” I replied, a trifle stiffly, that I preferred a private interview as specified in the court order. “Then we can post a guard by the window—he won’t hear the conversation, but he’ll be able to look through and see everything that goes on.” No thanks. “We can erect a heavy wire screen between you and the prisoner?” No wire screen, thank you. Thus my interlocutor unwittingly acted out for my benefit the most pervasive cliché in all prisondom: “They treat the convicts like caged animals.”

  Jackson’s appearance surprised me in two respects: unlike other prisoners I have met, whose stooped, impoverished physique attests to their long years of confinement, he has the bearing of an athlete. Nor does he affect the stony, ungiving glare of so many of his black revolutionary contemporaries on the outside; on the contrary, he came forward with both hands outstretched, face wreathed in smiles, and exclaimed, “How wonderful to see you!”

  I had been warned by no less an authority than Alex Haley, author of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, that it is extremely difficult to get political, revolutionary people to talk about themselves. This proved true in Jackson’s case. From a long discussion, ranging across the globe and over the centuries, I distilled the following “author interview”:

  Q. What time of day do you do your writing?

  A. I don’t stick to any regimen. I generally get two or three hours of sleep a day, six hours of exercise, and the rest reading and writing.

  [In the letters, Jackson describes the exercises possible in his tiny solitary cell: “One thousand fingertip push-ups a day. I probably have the world’s record on push-ups completed. . . .”]

  Q. Do you get a certain number of hours of writing in each day?

  A. Of course. After my six and three, I write. At present I’m engaged in a study of the working-class movement here in the United States and an in-depth investigation of history of the last fifty years, when Fascism swept the Western world. I split my writing time between that and correspondence with people I love.

  Q. Do you revise much?

  A. I write strictly off the top of my head. I don’t go over it because I haven’t time.

  Q. What about writing equipment? I noticed that the letter you sent me was written with a very stubby pencil.

  A. That’s all they allow you. I have thirty pencils in my cell right now. But keeping them sharp—the complication is I have to ask the pigs to sharpen them.

  Q. Yes, I see. But do they sharpen them?

  A. Sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on whim.

  Q. Typewriters are not allowed?

  A. No, of course not. There’s metal in typewriters.

  Q. Your book has been hailed here and in Europe as a superb piece of writing. How did you become such a good writer?

  A. You’ve got to understand that I’m from the lumpen, that every part came real hard. I spend a lot of time with the dictionary. I spend forty-five minutes a day learning new words. I’ll read, and I’ll come across words that I’m not familiar with. I record them on a piece of paper, in a notebook I have laying beside me. I look them up in a dictionary and familiarize myself with the entire meaning.

  Q. Were there any problems about sending out the original letters to your family that make up the bulk of Soledad Brother?

  A. The letters that went to the family had to go through the censor, of course, and they were all watered down. Three-fourths of the letters were returned. There’s a rule here stipulating one cannot make criticisms of the institution or society in general.*

  Q. What’s the mechanism for censorship of letters? It starts with the guard, right?

  A. They go through about three censorships. The first one is the unit officer who picks the mail up. He reads them. Then they go to the mail room and a couple of people over there read them. And in special cases—when it was a question of whether I was attacking the institution or the social system—they go from the mail room to the Warden or the Assistant Warden, and he reads them. Every one of my letters has been photostated or Xeroxed, and placed in my central file folder.

  Q. If the warden decides he doesn’t want a letter to go out, does it come back to you with notations, or what?

  A. Either that or they’ll just put it in my file and I’ll never hear anything else about it.

  Q. In other words, you eventually find out from the person you wrote it to that it was never received?

  A. That’s all.

  Q. In Soledad Brother you describe your grandfather, the stories and allegories he made up to tell you. Did anyone else stimulate your imagination as a child?

  A. Well, my mother. She had bourgeois ideas, but she did help me. I can’t give all the credit to my grandfather, Papa Davis. My mother had a slightly different motivation than my grandfather. Her idea, you know, was to assimilate me through the general training of a black bourgeois. Consequently, her whole presentation to me was read, read, read. “Don’t be like those niggers.” We had a terrible conflict, she and I. Of course I wanted a life on the street with guys on the block and she wanted me to sit on the couch and read. We lived in a three-story duplex and the only way out was through the kitchen. It was well guarded by Big Mama. I’d throw my coat out the window and volunteer to carry out the garbage and she wouldn’t see me any more for a couple of days. But while I was home, Mom made me read.

  Q. What books did she give you?

  A. Black Boy, by Richard Wright, was one. All of her life sh
e had the contradictions of black people living in this country. She favored W. E. B. Du Bois. She tried to get me interested in black intellectualism with overtones of integration. When I was twelve or thirteen, I’d read maybe two books a week, also newspapers and periodicals.

  Q. Can you think back and remember a favorite book you read as a child?

  A. Strangely enough, The Red and the Black. I read that when I was about thirteen. I got a deep, let’s say, understanding of some of the degenerate, contradictory elements of Western culture from reading The Red and the Black.

  Q. What about reading in prison? In your book you mention reading Sabatini and Jack London.

  A. I was about fifteen in Paso Robles [Youth Authority facility] when I read those light things. I like Sabatini. Sabatini is fabulous. I read Shakespeare, Sabatini, Jack London with my bathrobe on. I played dummy. Went along with what they told me to do; pretended I was hard of hearing, an absent-minded bookworm, an idiot. And I got by with it. I’ve read thousands of books. Of course years ago I read Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, but mainly my interests are economics and political economy.