There’s a particularly warm, vivid essay here on Montaigne. It’s an attraction of opposites — not in tone (Swift’s relaxed, sometimes even slack-seeming conversational manner and how it modulates into eloquence has something in common with Montaigne’s style as translated by Florio) but in terms of self-disclosure. Swift, unlike Montaigne, seems genuinely embarrassed by writing about himself and perhaps this is why he doesn’t do it well: why he drops names, shows off, tells us too many times that they closed Canterbury Cathedral to the public so that the relevant scene in Last Orders could be filmed there, and that ‘If someone had said to me long ago when I went to see David Hemmings … in Antonioni’s Blow-Up that one day he’d star … in a film of a novel of mine, I’d have said that pigs might fly.’
It’s appropriate, then, that the book’s most memorable item is about a quest for a man hardly anyone has heard of and who, when Swift found him, told him nothing that he didn’t already know. The Czechoslovak writer Jirí Wolf was repeatedly and brutally imprisoned in the 1970s and 80s for dissident activities. Various individuals and organisations, International PEN among them, took an interest in his case but Wolf exasperated his oppressors still further by refusing to take advantage of the help he was offered. He wouldn’t appeal for remission of his sentence, on the ground that an appeal would amount to an admission of guilt, and rejected an opportunity of political asylum in France because others, similarly eligible, weren’t being offered it. During the events of 1989, Swift was commissioned by Granta magazine to write about Wolf and learned all this from a PEN briefing. Now, having tracked the man down and set up an interview with an interpreter, he was told it again, and nothing more. In describing his reaction, he seems to be defending his own privacy, too:
Why, beneath it all, did I have a perverse feeling of disappointment? I had met him; he had spoken, on his own terms, which were the only proper terms; I had listened. Why should I feel sorry that I felt I was nowhere nearer to knowing him? What right did I have to know him?
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