There is nothing particularly documentary or authentic-seeming or intimate about these conversations. The little acolyte, known for nothing else, just for talking to the big man, bringing him out, leading him on. The big man, himself by now somewhat fallen on hard times, recorded by the little acolyte.

I don’t know what we should be more ashamed of: our stupid credulity or our oh-so-clever suspicion.Ī strange time to publish-strange time to publish anything-a translation of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe (or should that be Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann?), in six hundred static, major-key pages that can easily feel like twice as many. We can no longer count to three, but by golly you should see our numerology. What a poor, gaslighted, meme-riddled, spook-spooked species we are. Ahem ahem.) Now that we’ve had it with uncomplicated greatness, just give us our supernatural machinery. (Meanwhile, in what’s derisorily known as the real world, we have politicians’ and diplomats’ memoirs, written supposedly-legendarily-between dinner and bath time with an FBI-approved, legally satisfying memory of once-seen documents with the benefit of shorthand or without. We do have books, important books that would actually bring us close to important people, but now these hem-of-the-garment books have come upon hard times they are discredited, almost exploded: John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, so mysteriously stuffed with the speech of men long dead, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (which lives by its “Sir” and dies by its “Sir”), Coleridge’s Table Talk, Gustav Janouch’s spurious Conversations with Kafka, Hitler’s (God save us) Tischgespräche. Nothing is real and- pace John Lennon-everything to get hung about. Maria Callas? Elvis Presley? Freddie Mercury? Vera Lynn? Vera Imago? Straight up? With a twist? Genetically enhanced? Coming right up. What can we not do? Tell Sophocles (“What a wonder is man”) the news. Why, it’s almost as if we were alive to see them do it.

We can change a face, change a gender, change a race, change a voice produce the true illusion of someone speaking words they never spoke sell tickets for events at which dead people will sing and dance for our delectation.

Beyond Power by Marilyn French