One Day I'll Remember This by Helen Garner

Author:Helen Garner [Garner, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-09-16T00:00:00+00:00

V presses me to read a symposium in Salmagundi magazine called ‘Art and Intellect in America’. He is sombrely impressed by the contribution of George Steiner, who makes a slashing attack on any American pretensions to a culture able to hold a candle to that of Europe. My hackles go up. Where does Steiner get off? Hasn’t he heard of jazz? Contemporary art and literature produced under any but totalitarian regimes, he says, are ‘an embarrassment’. All right—the horror of the Holocaust is unanswerable. But we are still here. What about the losses, griefs and sacrifices, the small heroisms that occur each day, often unnoticed, in people’s relations with each other? What about death, and cruelty, and fear, and children, and love? People suffer. Don’t we still have to find the meaning in our lives that only art offers? I try to put these thoughts to V: ‘Where does this leave us—you? If you agree with him, how come you haven’t given up trying to write novels? That’d be the only action consistent with his argument, wouldn’t it?’ I had a weird feeling that V was seeing the argument only distantly, as a brilliant performance by a man he admires for maintaining excoriating standards—‘taking it right up to the Yanks’.

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