John Lukacs: Confessions of an Original Sinner. New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1990. 328 pp.
Considering what a good writer John Lukacs is, this should have been a much better book. The first thing wrong with it is the title. A less misleading one than Confessions of an Original Sinner, with its nod to St. Augustine, might have been: “Manifesto of a Humble-Proud Reactionary,” or perhaps “Confessions of an Aging Curmudgeon.” The Lukacs that appears between these covers may surprise readers who have not followed his career closely and know him primarily from Five Days in London as an admirer of Churchill. That best-seller appeared a decade after this, and is free of the bilious tone that occasionally creeps in here.
Lukacs is of the opinion that he knows himself well enough to write his confessions, but the careful reader may question this. To describe him in a nutshell, he is a Hungarian intellectual (born in Budapest, 1924) who denies that he is an elitist because – due to the vagaries of history – he was for a time a dislocated person. After a stop in England, he eventually ended up at a small Catholic college in post-war America. Finding no one of his acquaintance with a comparable background, he came to feel most at home among conservative upper-middle class Eastern Pennsylvanians. But being “most at home” is not quite the same as being at home. He became consumed by a search for some place, whether geographical or ideological, where he could feel he belonged. From 1947 on he settled rather uneasily into the life of a professor at Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. “Had I remained in England it is at least possible that I might have remained a Socialist, befitting the role of a Central European refugee intellectual. It was my life in the midst of wartime Europe that led to my reactionary convictions.” (pg. 18)
With the overtly dramatic aspects of his life at an end before the midpoint of the book, he abandons chronological narration. This is reflected in his chapter titles, which now become topical: Teaching, Writing, Dwelling, etc. Though trained as a historian, he taught at least one class in German literature, but we hear nothing further about this. Instead, the focus is on the Big Picture. When at the start he urges upon us the claim that he is “a patriot but not a nationalist” (pg. 3), we get an inkling that this is the memoir of someone who – even late in life – is still trying to figure out where he belongs, asking whether he is primarily European or American, and to the extent he is American, what his precise niche in that society is. He acknowledges that the class of intellectual non-professionals he diligently seeks does exist in the US, but to a lesser extent than in Eastern Europe. This accounts for the difficulty he has in creating and inhabiting an equivalent space for himself in the New World. He concludes with the aphorism that while Europe is his mother, America is his wife. While this formulation may be satisfying, it does not change the circumstance that, to a large extent, he remained a lonely man. He sums up his life by saying: “I am a writer and scholar and something of a philosopher; and essentially a surviving bourgeois.” (pg. 299)
His neighbors and colleagues – including the Catholic sisters at Chestnut Hill – must have looked at this survivor, at least at first, as rather a strange bird. They were not wrong. By declaring himself a reactionary, he placed himself outside the traditional dichotomies of left/right, liberal/conservative/, and Republican/Democrat into which most Americans are pigeonholed. Identifying himself as archaic is his way of proclaiming himself unique.
And unique he certainly is. Lukacs is the type of snob who is proud of not being a snob in his own mind, though evidently he is in everyone else’s – something that mystifies him. He cannot associate with leftists, whom he finds disdainful and intolerant of conservatives. While he is more comfortable among the latter, as they are somewhat aligned with his political views, he is not really at home among them either. “The fact – or, rather, the reputation – that one was associated with a wrong kind of opinion meant instant hostility on the part of liberals; somewhat less so with my isolationist or populist or conservative acquaintances, even though in many instances I found that their views were utterly wrong, even dangerous, and said so.” (pg. 167) “The intellectuals’ fear and loathing of non-liberal – or, indeed, any academically unacceptable – opinion was the intolerance of the tolerationists.” (pg. 216)
Lukacs exudes contempt for various examples of popular culture such as “Casablanca,” though his summary of the film will leave many dissatisfied. In his view, it celebrates “the supremacy of the American male because of his wonderfully American know-how. In this imbecile wartime picture Humphrey Bogart is the virile owner of the Bar Américain who knows everything about Frenchmen, Germans, Arabs, black markets, false papers, tricks with roulette wheels, vintages, champagnes and guns.” (pg. 146) Perhaps our critic would have preferred a different, non-virile, non-American leading man – say Peter Lorre, Bogart’s buddy? The circumstance that the movie urges participation in a war that, until Pearl Harbor, many Americans had wanted to stay out of – this is not considered worthy of mention. One suspects the source of Lukacs’ dislike of this film is less aesthetic then political. After all, while he knew that Hitler had to be defeated and that this required American participation, as a self-declared reactionary it would be understandable if he had felt somewhat drawn to the “America First” position that this movie so movingly repudiates.
He says nothing about his controversy with David Irving, which – though it would reach its apogee only some seven years after the publication of this book – began more than a dozen years earlier with his damning review of Hitler’s War in 1977. This is not the only topic our memoirist is reticent about. He refrains from identifying Nazi collaborators in war-time Hungary, using only initials instead. He is more forthcoming when it come to expressing his disdain for President Eisenhower, whom he calls a “supreme opportunist” who merely claimed to be conservative. (pg. 188) He distances himself from William F. Buckley and National Review only after the election of Reagan, when they began to be too full of themselves and also printed “a respectful R.I.P. column in honor of Oswald Mosley, the onetime leader of the British Fascist Party” in 1980. Seven years later, National Review “published a eulogy at the death of the unsavory gangster Roy Cohn.” (pg. 193) One sees why he made his allies on the right uncomfortable.
Confessions is more a record of what Lukacs thought than what he did. I would venture the guess that if this book had an index, the list of authors he read would be longer than that of people he met. Alas, the further I read, the more I checked (and re-checked) how many pages were left, particularly as they became increasingly filled with increasingly cranky opinions. Even James W. Tuttleton, the reviewer for a conservative quarterly, bemoaned the author’s “joyless frame of mind” (Modern Age, Spring 1993, pg. 230). The book grows exasperating in its later chapters – unless one is curious about the housing and family arrangements of John Lukacs; or his proclamations of religious faith and disappointment with the direction of Catholicism since Vatican II (where conservatives may lament the loss of the old Latin Mass, as a true reactionary he would welcome the return of theocracy); or his general despair at the state of our fallen world. One finds oneself tempted to skim pages as yet another pearl of somewhat bitter wisdom is dispensed.
And yet to judge by the reactions to these confessions, Lukacs has found readers who are grateful for a writer who sets a high intellectual standard, is articulate about his beliefs, and is refreshingly unafraid of sweeping generalizations and idiosyncratic opinions. Nor can there be any doubt that he writes well. I close with a selection of quotations.
Characteristic of the architecture and of the furniture before the 1830s was a kind of patrician, rather than aristocratic, elegance, something that evokes in us a real nostalgia: for we could live in those rooms ourselves, unlike in the glittering, coldly magnificent rooms of the eighteenth century. (pg. 38; this quotation is taken from Lukacs’ earlier work: The Passing of the Modern Age)
I could draw certain conclusions about the importance (and the possible consequences) of an event from the way it was announced on the radio, including the diction and the voice of the announcer. (pg. 57)
At their best, the English understand Europeans, but they do not really wish to know them. At their best, certain Europeans know the English, but they cannot really comprehend them. (pg. 90)
[Regarding post-war Hungarian communists:] No matter how cowardly and conformist, they were after all, international Communists, not dumb Muscovite minions; they were not particularly good at being both brutal and vulgar, unlike their Russian masters. (pg. 98)
There was cosmopolitan life in New York [in 1946], but the idea of cosmopolitan New York had come from the movies. Midwesterners visited it as they would visit Hollywood. (pg. 130)
The very history of the American working class amounts to the most blatant refutation of Marx. For many years they have been more conservative and less liberal than the American upper classes. They may have disliked the rich, but they felt no envy for them; social respectability among their fellow workers both circumscribed and constituted their ambitions. They believed, or at least they preferred to believe, that the United States was the greatest thing that ever happened in the history of mankind, that America was omnipotent and the only free country in the world, in the rest of which they were just about entirely uninterested…. (pg. 136)
Errata
Leaving aside Lukacs’ questionable taste in movies, the precise name of the establishment in “Casablanca” is, of course, Rick’s Café (not “Bar”) Américain. (pg. 146)
According to Lukacs:
Kierkegaard wrote: “If God held all truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand the persistent striving for truth, and while warning me against eternal error, should say: Choose! I should humbly bow before his left hand, and say: ‘Father, forgive! The pure truth is for Thee alone!’ “ (pg. 187)
As usual, Lukacs gives no precise source, merely attributing this to Kierkegaard; in fact, it originates with Lessing, who uttered it in the previous century. Even if he only taught a single course, a teacher of German literature should know this.
The following index omits some historical figures and books mentioned only in passing.
Acheson, Dean 142
Alternative 191
Anglomania 14ff, 88
(Annenberg, Walter) 179
Anti-Communism 157
Apor, Bishop 82
Arendt, Hannah 181
Artukovic, Andrija 178
Auer, Paul de 103
Augustine 199, 301
BBC 72
Belloc Path to Rome 149
Bernanos, Georges 195, 273
Bonhoeffer 31f
Bozell, Brent 191
Buckley, William F. 146, 191, 195
Buissaret, David 220
Byrne, Eugene 166
Carr, W.H. 228
Casablanca 145
Canfield, Cass Jr. 243
Chesterton 102
Churchill 20, 25, 221, 226f, 230
Cohn, Roy 192
collaborators 81
Comintern 98
Commonweal 131, 169
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness 230
Under Western Eyes 215
Council of Foreign Relations 163
Curley, Archbishop 314f
Dante 64
Davies, Robertson 279, 305
Dawson, Chris 305, 314, 320
De Gaulle 25f
Dietrich, Admiral William F. 84, 103
Dougherty, Cardinal 120
Drake, Larry 242, 290, 296
Droysen, Johann Gustav 187
Dutourd, Jean 208, 254, 262
Eisenhower 187
Ellis, John Tracy 314
Emerson 215
Epstein, Jason 235, 242
Erasmus 268
Esquire publisher 85
Fitzgerald, F. Scott 153
Fletcher School 213
France, longing for 147
French, Prof. (Robert Dudley?) at Yale 199
Freidel, Frank and Alan Brinkley (Harvard) 249
Gibbons, Cardinal 315
Giroux, Robert 247
Goethe 149
Greene, The Quiet American 146
Hart, Jeffrey 195
Heisenberg 238ff
Hemingway 145f, 177
Herman, John 248
Hitler 12f, 54, 227
Hoffman, Ross 166
Hofstadter, Richard 130
Holtsmark, Torger 217
Horst Wessel Song 21
Intellectuals, American 215
Isherwood 327
Isolationism 164
Italians 18
Jackson, Shirley “The Lottery“ 215
Johnston, Caryl 325
Joseph, Sister Clare 168
Karolyi, Michael 101
Kennan, George 170, 183, 242
Kennedy, John F. 321
Kipling 230
Kissinger 192
Kossmann, E. H. 40
Kostka, Sister Maria 168
Kristol, Irving 26
Kuehnelt-Lehddin, Erik von 166
Lamb, Charles 276
Luce, Clare Booth 191
Lukacs, Georg 97
Lukacs, John, books by
Annus Mirabilis 242
Decline and Rise of Europe 242f
The Great Powers and Eastern Europe 233
Historical Consciousness 40, 235, 237, 271, 302
History of the Cold War 241
Last European War 243-245, 269
1945: Year Zero 245
Outgrowing Democracy 247, 305
Philadelphia 1900-1950 246
Tocqueville 236
MacDonald, Dwight 235, 294, 319
Margenau, Henry 240
Maria, Sister Loyola 168
Maugham 222
McCarthy 175, 179
McCullough, David 249
Megaro, Gaudens 233
Montale, Eugenio 195
Mosley, Oswald 192
Moskva Hotel 72
Mussolini 54
Naipaul 19
National Review 187, 191, 192
New York Times 164
New Yorker 258
Nicolson, Harold 248, 270
Novak, Michael 304
Oklahoma, Gov. of 81
Ormandy 111f
Ortega y Gasset 40
(Palmer, Robie Marcus Hooker, US ambassador to Hungary) 152
Philadelphia Inquirer 179
Polanyi 216
Powers, Eileen Medieval People 149
Quennell, Peter 229
Queiroz, Eca de 149
radio 57
Rahv, Philip Discovery of Europe 146f
Rakosi 101
Reagan 191, 297
Remington, William 177
Rizopoulos, Nick (Lehrman Institute) 247
Russians 92, 96, 215
Rybczynski, Witold 248
Saturday Evening Post 164
Schlachta, Margit 105
Schlafly 304, 306
Shapley, Harlow 100
Shaun, William 248
Smith, Sidney 323
Sokolsky, George 178
Spengler 301
Squires (Leslie A.) 83
Steffens, Lincoln 157
Stendhal 45, 52, 149, 238
Stern, Karl The Pillar of Fire 108
Sulzberger NY Times 242
Taft, Robert 187
(Teller, Edward?) 90
Tocqueville 235
Tolstoy 222
Transylvania 242
Trifa, Archbishop 178
Triumph 191
Trotsky 226f
Usborne, Vivian 230
Vico 149
Viereck, Peter 168, 313
Vives, Vicens History of Spain 149
Voto, Bernard De 188
Waugh, Evelyn 217
Weil, Simone 13
West, Nathaniel A Cool Million 230
Wills, Garry 318
World Affairs Council 160f
© Hamilton Beck
hamiltonbeck 