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April
19, 1998
To Hell in a Handbasket
By Fareed Zakaria
A Thread of Years, By John Lukacs (481 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press. $30)
Of the many differences between the movie "Titanic" and history, one in particular is telling. In the movie, as the ship is sinking the first-class passengers (all third-class human beings) scramble to climb into the small number of life-boats. Only the determination of the hardy seamen -- who use guns to keep the grasping men at bay -- gets the women and children into the boats.
In fact, according to survivors' accounts, the "women and children first" convention was observed with almost no dissension, particularly among the upper classes. The statistics make this plain. In first class, every child was saved, as were all but five (of 144) women, three of whom chose to die with their husbands. By contrast, 70 percent of the men perished. In second class, 80 percent of the women were saved but 90 percent of the men drowned.
The men on the first-class list of the Titanic virtually made up the Forbes 400 of the time. John Jacob Astor, reputedly the richest man of his day, is said to have fought his way to a boat, put his wife in it and then stepped back and waved her goodbye. Benjamin Guggenheim similarly refused to take a seat, saying: "Tell my wife . . . I played the game out straight and to the end. No woman shall be left aboard this ship because Ben Guggenheim was a coward." In other words, some of the most powerful men in the world adhered to an unwritten code of honor -- even though it meant certain death for them. The movie makers altered the story for good reason: no one would believe it today.
It is the decline of codes of behavior like "the ideal of the gentleman" that John Lukacs mourns in "A Thread of Years," an impressionistic social history of the 20th century. An erudite and wide-ranging scholar who has written books on Hitler, Budapest, the cold war and Philadelphia aristocrats, Lukacs sees this ideal as inseparably tied up with Anglo-American civilization. Hence its decline is a symptom of the fall of that civilization. Britain and the United States may flourish as nations, economically, politically, even culturally. But culture and civilization are not the same. The Anglo-American self-conception as a distinct, superior civilization, with codes of behavior and honor, manners and morals, has faded. "That this belongs within the history of this century," Lukacs explains, "may be the theme of this book." It is a bold venture, since even to speak of the ideal of the gentleman today is to be considered slightly balmy, as if you wanted to reinstate the divine right of kings, outlaw electricity and put women in corsets.
Writing about something so intangible is difficult, and Lukacs has constructed an unusual form of history to do it, mixing fiction with analysis. The book is made up of 69 chapters, one for every year from 1901 to 1969. Each chapter begins with a brief fictional vignette depicting, for example, two men at a Philadelphia club in 1901, an American woman in Paris in 1920, a Roman Catholic college in America in 1961. Each vignette is followed by a few pages of dialogue between Lukacs and an imagined interlocutor, who together debate the choice and the meaning of the sketch. Why Philadelphia in 1901? Why American Catholics in 1961?
Now if this sounds odd, it is, but Lukacs disarmingly admits as much: "This book may be an attempt at a new genre. Do not take this too seriously." Alas, it doesn't really work. "A Thread of Years" has moments of beauty, insight and whimsy. But they do not add up to a coherent portrait or a sustained theme. In experimenting with fiction and history, the book falls between the two genres, having neither the texture of fiction nor the logic of history.
Lukacs handles many of the fictional vignettes skillfully, particularly those about Europe before World War II. He conjures up the smells inside a Swiss mountain lodge ("the faint trace of steam heat . . . the thin scent of varnished wood"), the sounds of arrival at a grand lake hotel ("the soft crunch of the gravel as the automobile rolls up the great curved driveway") and the look of a summer resort in 1915 ("People are sitting in white wicker armchairs on their porches or the front lawn, like a spread of black and white cauliflowers"). Few historians ever do this, leaving it to novelists like Dos Passos and Doctorow. Lukacs does it well, achieving what the great Dutch historian Johan Huizinga called "historical sensation. . . . A sense of streets, houses, fields, as well as sounds, colors."
But these achievements are fragmentary because Lukacs seems to want to tell two stories, maybe more, simultaneously. The first is quite simply that of the entire 20th century, or rather whichever of its highlights, moods and memories strike Lukacs's fancy. (There is a good bit about Hungary in this book.) The second, about the decline of the gentleman, pops up here and there but gets lost in the broader story. Lukacs has one character, a Philadelphia gent named K, who reappears now and then but never becomes the protagonist. Though there are three explanatory chapters, called "ribbons," placed at 20-year intervals, to let the reader feel the spine of the book, they don't really help, being mostly a potted history of the American century.
The dialogues often wander as freely as the vignettes, and we are treated to the author's pet enthusiasms and peeves on a variety of utterly unrelated subjects. (He hates the movie "Casablanca," Henry James and rock music, among other things, and likes Gershwin, Huizinga and Spain -- but dislikes Hemingway's use of Spanish.) Some of these diversions are individually a delight, but after a while you begin to resent the lack of discipline.
In his own impressionistic way, however, Lukacs does outline the fall of Anglo-American civilization and its ideals. He alludes to its causes -- the decline of Britain, the rise of immigrant and Catholic influences in American culture, the erosion of religion, the triumph of relativism, but perhaps most of all the loss of confidence. At its peak, the Anglo-American elite had a striking air of high-minded paternalism, born of a cultural sense of superiority and a Protestant sense of mission. The ideal of the gentleman was not simply a matter of manners but of morals. It was a way of embodying the values of that civilization -- fair play, decency, chivalry. These codes have been increasingly criticized over the course of this century as being artificial, ethnocentric and hypocritical -- all of which they were. But "hypocrisy," Lukacs explains, "is the cement that held civilization together." Standards should surely represent a society's highest aspirations, not its tawdry realities. And the artifice of good manners, vital to civil discourse, has now been replaced by "a moral and intellectual sleaziness pretending to be 'sincere.' " From the saccharine confessions of daytime television to the verbal abuse of talk shows, we have created our own brand of fakery.
Most important, we have freed our upper classes of any sense of responsibility. The rich will always be with us. Every society has an elite, those more wealthy or powerful or famous than the rest. We can only ask that it recognize that with this privilege come responsibilities. Social conventions, moral strictures, the gentleman's code, were all attempts to civilize the strong. (The first citation of "civilize" in the Oxford English Dictionary, Lukacs tells us, dates from 1601, when the word meant "to bring out of a state of barbarism, to instruct in the arts of life.")
Society expected the rich to behave themselves and conform to certain ways of living, spending and participating in the public life of the land. When they did, they were honored. Near East Potomac Park in Washington there stands a haunting monument, a statue of a man with arms outstretched, Christlike, with an inscription on its pedestal: "To the brave men of the Titanic, who gave their lives that women and children might be saved." It was erected by voluntary donations from 25,000 women. When the elite did not behave appropriately -- and they often broke their norms -- it was a matter of dishonor and disappointment. Today, by contrast, we expect very little of those in positions of power -- whether they are Presidents or tycoons or movie stars -- and they rarely disappoint us.