Photo: André Malraux
Some objected and received the first blows of their careers from the Kapos… others became despondent; others yet (I among them)… perceived that there wasn’t a way out… Nevertheless, unlike Améry and others, my feeling of humiliation due to manual work was moderate: evidently I was still not ‘intellectual’ enough… I had a degree, true enough, but mine was an undeserved piece of luck. My family had been rich enough to send me to school: many contemporaries of mine had shovelled dirt since adolescence.
– Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
Of all the definitions of an intellectual, though, it is the one by André Malraux that seems the most sensible. This is the same Malraux who told Bruce Chatwin that most of his intellectual compatriots were incapable of opening an umbrella. At any rate he defined the category as anyone who tries to live by the use of reason but, then again, experience relentlessly demonstrates the surrealism of life i.e. how so often it resembles a bad or weird dream.
Most of the writers I admire have an underlying, unwritten thread in common. I cannot believe this is really happening. It is a mix of horror and amusement that enables some detachment in the face of the fact that everything, as Mario Puzo pointed out, is personal.
Long ago, an uncle of mine took part in an amateur play, after which a celebration dinner was held in a farmer’s house, where, before they all sat down for the grub, the seating arrangement began to look a bit tight. It was then that he noticed that a subtle, yet, to any reasonable man, unbelievable attempt was being made to shunt one cast member, a woman from a mere cottage, down to the kitchen, to eat on her own.
He discreetly protested, indicating that he’d leave if that happened, and give the lady his seat. It did not happen. A place at the table was found after all, with just a minor bit of shoving up this way or down that way, but these pathetic provincial snobberies, these notions, at all levels, and the insolent slights they inspire, will never stop providing fodder for writing and storytelling that try to make sense of a world “full of the most outrageous nonsense” (Gogol, The Nose).
Dr. John Flynn 