Leave History to the Old Guys
The publishing world is always looking for “bright young things” in literature, philosophy and history. But there is often no substitute for a lifetime of scholarship.
I have been reading two books published at the turn of the century by men who lived through most of it. One by Jacques Barzun called from From Dawn to Decadence and one by Robert Conquest called Reflections on a Ravaged Century.
Barzun was born in Paris in 1907 and still lives. Conquest was born a decade later and is also still above ground. These two books published a decade ago are of a type that comes along too rarely but dazzles when it does. They are both the products of a long lifetime of experience, engagement and learning with subjects that, in their size and scope see nearly ungraspable. Only decades of living engagement and similar decades of reading and rereading could possibly have created these books.
Barzun was born into a culturally aware Paris family. As he notes in his book when it gets to World War I, the kids found the “Big Bertha” shelling of Paris exciting when it first occurred. All sorts of famous painters and writers trouped through his father’s house and Barzun seems to have met a good slice of the cultural shapers of the 20th century. The reason this book is incredible is its sweep over 500 years, touching primarily on culture but also political movements and art. The book is so huge that the only way I could find time to finish it was by listening to it on tape as I commuted. Barzun, apparently reads at minimum four languages (French, English, Italian and Spanish), and I would bet Latin and Greek as well as a few others. He has spent time reading literature, as well as philosophy, history and poetry and had a deep understanding and knowledge of them all. I was reminded of the old Laugh In blurb where they had William F. Buckley look wearily at the camera and say “I’m weighed down by all that I know.” Barzun has written forty books. I have not read them but will start to look for them. This is a summa of a life’s works explaining how the culture of the West arose, and where it is now. Barzun presses forward artists and thinkers he believes dismissed or lessened by history, such as Ben Franklin and George Bernard Shaw, and undermines other he feels have been given too great a due. I do not admire Shaw, or even German thinkers and writers, as much as Barzun does but each chapter and digression caused me to rethink and reassess.
Robert Conquest has written more significant books than Reflections. He is one of a handful who destroyed forever (for those with eyes to see) the Soviet Union’s pretensions to human progress with the publication in the 1960’s of The Great Terror. Conquest, however, uses this book to distill a lifetime of not only learning but intellectual combat. He has served as an intelligence officer in the struggle both against Nazism and Communism. But his true calling has been describing, explaining and clarifying what totalitarianism is, why it is so horrible to those under its spell, and why its so-called benefits are illusory. He made all the right enemies in this quest. This book details not only the horror of totalitarianism but the propensity of a good body of Western thinkers to either agree with it, or belittle the damage it caused and the horror it represented. Conquest is a significant figure in both science fiction and the world of limerick aficionados. Perhaps these diversions relieved the otherwise unrelieved grimness of immersing himself in the totalitarianisms of the 20th century. Unlike Barzun’s Dawn, Conquest’s Reflections is an easy read. It is however a primer on the pitfalls of freedom against tyranny.
The publishing world is always looking for “bright young things” in literature, philosophy and history. These books demonstrate that there is no substitute for a lifetime of scholarship coupled with a lifetime of engagement with the movements of one’s times. No one under fifty could have written either one with such power and grasp and I’m glad these two did not put down their pens in old age.