Had they been fully rational, both leaders would have felt constrained by the possible reaction of the Eisenhower administration. Wm. Roger Louis, in his incomparable set of essays on Suez, quotes directly from the letters and messages that the president sent to Churchill and then to Eden, making it unmistakably plain that any unilateral British action would immediately forfeit all American support. Meanwhile, CIA-sponsored radio stations were beaming incendiary broadcasts into Hungary, promising aid in the event of an armed resistance to Soviet rule. Yet both the Russian and British governments went ahead as if these and other considerations were irrelevant. In view of the so-called special relationship between the United States and Britain, it is remarkable in retrospect that it was the British who were more severely punished by Washington: Dwight Eisenhower coldly withdrew American support for the pound, while the American promises to Hungary proved to be chiefly rhetorical. The discrepancy is explained by Eisenhower’s strong feeling that Eden had lied to him about his intentions. “Anthony,” he demanded in an acrid transatlantic telephone call, “have you gone out of your mind?”
The answer to this, much disputed by modern historians, was probably yes: Eden had undergone a botched operation which had nicked his bile duct and was suffering from what might politely have been called “stress.” Such are the truly unpredictable factors for which Montesquieu was attempting to allow. But the French and Israeli governments, which colluded with Britain in the attack, were not led by men in personal crisis, and they were also told by Washington to get out of Egypt at once or face the consequences. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in particular had made the decision that no matter how much America’s junior allies stressed the Russian threat to the Middle East, America was more endangered by the association with “colonialism.”
The biggest losers in all this were the people of Hungary. In spite of all the brave talk about the “rollback” of Stalin’s gains in Eastern Europe, the Eisenhower administration seems to have quite cynically decided to exploit the Russian intervention for propaganda purposes, while quite consciously doing nothing that could hamper the Soviet design. Victor Sebestyen and Charles Gati both cite Vice President Richard Nixon actually putting the policy into words at a National Security Council meeting: “It wouldn’t be an unmixed evil, from the point of view of the US interest, if the Soviet armed fist were to come down hard again on the Soviet bloc.” Malign neglect might have been excusable as realpolitik—the two superpowers had only recently entered the H-bomb era—but the parallel CIA program of hypocritically encouraging rebellion via Radio Free Europe was unconscionable and has never been forgiven. One especially deplorable element in CIA propaganda was the repeated lie that Hungarian prime minister Imre Nagy had requested the return of the Red Army. That falsification greatly increased the difficulties faced by this courageous if hesitant man, and ultimately made it easier for the hard-liners to have him hanged.
The British Cabinet, ostensibly America’s chief Cold War ally, never even discussed Hungary. It was this self-centered indifference, perhaps more than anything else, that animated the great campaign against the Suez adventure launched by Aneurin Bevan, the Labour Party’s spokesman on foreign affairs. Not only had Eden acted outside international law, said this most eloquent of the advocates for democratic socialism, and lied about his collusion with France and Israel; he had increased the isolation and misery of the Hungarians at just the time when they most needed their friends. This was in some ways the finest hour of the left in the Cold War, and it meant that the tens of thousands of people who deserted the Communist parties that October felt they had somewhere to go. Meanwhile, the abject failure of the United Nations even to comment on events in Budapest until it was too late cannot be blamed solely on Henry Cabot Lodge’s decision, taken in concert with Eisenhower and Dulles, to downplay the issue. “There is only one motto worse than ‘my country right or wrong,’ ” as Bevan once phrased it, “and that is ‘the United Nations right or wrong.’ ” This is not the only lesson that the intervening half century has taught us.
(The Atlantic, December 2006)
Clive James: The Omnivore
Review of Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories From History and the Arts by Clive James
I OPENED THIS BOOK, which despite its subtitle is a series of mini-profiles promising a rich and varied salad of brief lives and long reputations, only to nearly slam it shut again when I read Clive James thanking an editor for rescuing him from a confusion between Louis Malle and Miloš Forman—“a conspicuous instance of the embarrassing phenomenon known to clinical psychologists as the Malle-Forman malformation.” How could anyone, embarking on such a project, be so arch and so ingratiating?
Yet perhaps the joke, such as it is, was on me. Clive James knows very well that there is huge confusion and insecurity as to which Mann was which, and as to the differences between, say, the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle, and part of his objective is to show—disarmingly, in the result—how long he himself took to acquire any confidence in these matters. A certain amount of evolution is required to produce the omnivore. I once heard Susan Sontag, in conversation with Umberto Eco, define the polymath as one “who is interested in everything, and in nothing else.” A trifle annoying and complacent as that was, it nonetheless raised the question of how a polymath—or omnivore—should learn to discriminate.
Although in choice of subjects James oscillates as far in one direction as Coco Chanel and as far in the other as Czesław Miłosz, he doesn’t waste very much time in giving us his principle of selection. It is of the sort that might have been employed by Isaiah Berlin, or the editors of the old Partisan Review. To qualify for his admiration, you must have witnessed for liberal principles in a time of trial. To earn his disapprobation, you need to have said something so wickedly stupid that (to paraphrase Orwell) only an intellectual would be daft enough to fall for it. Most of the candidates are therefore drawn from the gaunt gallery of the twentieth century, with a strong emphasis on its hellish midpoint: the locust years in which the “European tidal waves,” as James phrases it in writing about Manès Sperber, “collided.” Even those few who evade this verdict by the grace of early birth, like Hegel and Proust, are renewed in its retrospective light. If a single motto could distill the whole, it might be the one furnished by the Italian prosecutor Virginio Rognoni, who took on the Red Brigades in the 1980s without resorting overmuch to police-state tactics and said: “In whichever way a democratic system might be sick, terrorism does not heal it; it kills it. Democracy is healed with democracy.”
Such a platitude excites few intellectuals. In fact it bores and disgusts so many of them that they prefer to deal in high-sounding justifications for violence. Thus another way of summarizing James’s ambition might be to say that he tries to glamorize the uninspiring—tries to show how tough and shapely were the commonsense formulations of Raymond Aron, for example, when set against the seductive, panoptic bloviations of Jean-Paul Sartre. This might appear to be too easy a task—how much nerve does it really take to defend the vital center?—but James succeeds in it by trying to comb out all centrist clichés, and by caring almost as much about language as it is possible to do.
Alasdair MacIntyre once wrote an essay called “How to Write about Lenin—and How Not To,” in which he said that the one unpardonable historical sin was that of being patronizing. If you could not or would not care to imagine what conditions were like in 1905 or 1917, then it might be best if you kept your virginal judgments to yourself.
On the whole, James passes this test. He can see why, as a German nationalist, Ernst Jünger might have been soft on Hitler, which means that he can see where Jünger went wrong. He grants that Fidel Castro possessed charisma and then wasted it. Instead of simply saying that Leszek Kołakowski got most things right about Poland and about Communism, he says the following about his Main Currents of Marxism:
[The hook extends] from Marx’s own lifetime to those crucial years after Stalin’s deat
h when the dream, somehow deprived of energy by the subtraction of its nightmare element, was already showing signs of coming to an end, in Europe at least.
This sentence does a lot of work, especially in its second clause, while that coda about Europe (somewhat inelegantly tacked on, perhaps) shows that James revisited the aperçu and thought about it in the light of Chile and South Africa.
He has a gift for noticing and highlighting the telling phrase. Albert Camus’s observation, in The Rebel, that “tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes” allows James a useful meditation on the role of sheer tedium in the apparatus of totalitarianism. Indeed, several of the miniature portraits here are occasions for tangential reflections. Heinrich Heine provides an excuse for discussing the terrifying rise of celebrity culture. William Hazlitt spurs an excellent piece on the importance (and rarity) of generosity among literary rivals—where a paragraph on Auden and Yeats wouldn’t have come amiss. Reflections on Georg Christoph Lichtenberg detour into some notes on the disappointments of modern pornography. A treatment of Evelyn Waugh becomes a learned disquisition on the use of the dangling modifier by, among others, Anthony Powell.
There are also occasional repetitions: James (whose Australian father was a casualty of the Pacific War) thrice attacks Gore Vidal for his belief that Franklin Roosevelt deliberately provoked Pearl Harbor, but in the process makes a useful point by describing Japan’s modern right wing as “recidivist”—a far better term than the more common “revisionist.” There are some oddities: Beatrix Potter is upbraided for concealing the awful truth about bacon in The Tale of Pigling Bland, whereas any schoolboy knows that she could be positively ghoulish about human and other carnivorousness—see especially The Tale of Mr. Tod, but also Peter Rabbit. Of H. L. Mencken it is said, very acutely, that “a guardian angel riding in his forehead made sure that the stuff from his brain’s bilges didn’t get through from his secret diaries to the public page.” (The word “usually” might have been forgivable here.)
In attempting to do this anthology justice, I am running the risk of making it sound more eclectic than it really is. If James could have been born in another time and place, he would have chosen Mitteleuropa in the first third of the twentieth century—that drowned world and lost bohemia of Jewish savants and painters and café-philosophers. It is men like Peter Altenberg and Karl Kraus whom he envies, while of course never ceasing to wonder (as we all must) how he himself would have shaped up when the Nazis came. Another of his gold standards is the Russian and French literary opposition, leavened with a good sprinkling of those—like Robert Brasillach—whose talents led them to identify with the overdogs.
A unifying principle of the collection is its feminism. James believes that this is a good cause in its own right, and also a useful negation of the ideological mind-set, since “feminism is a claim for impartial justice, and all ideologies deny that such a term has meaning.” He celebrates and mourns Anna Akhmatova and Nadezhda Mandelstam—I wish he had included Rosa Luxemburg—and highlights less well known heroines such as Heda Kovály, Ricarda Huch, and Sophie Scholl, flawless ornament of the White Rose resistance circle in Hitler’s Germany. The book is dedicated to Scholl’s memory, and to the living examples of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Aung San Suu Kyi, and Ingrid Betancourt. Men who maltreated or exploited women, or who took them for granted, are invariably awarded a chivalrous drubbing—Rainer Maria Rilke being given a deservedly hard time in this respect. And James clearly wants us to understand that his historical examples are meant to be contemporary and relevant, in that today’s Islamist totalitarianism has given us all the warning—precisely by its contempt for women—that we could possibly need.
One of James’s charms as a critic is that he genuinely seems to enjoy praising people. (An early collection of his poems was actually titled Fan-Mail.) But in order to appear ungrudging, he is sometimes hyperbolic, and therefore unconvincing: Is it really apt to write of Camus that “the Gods poured success on him but it could only darken his trench coat: it never soaked him to the skin”? Or of Flaubert that “he searched the far past, and lo! He found a new dawn”?
Yet much may be forgiven a man who can begin a paragraph by saying, “It will be argued that Heinrich Heine was not Greta Garbo,” or who can admit that for years he has been authoritatively mispronouncing the name “Degas” and the word “empyrean.” If you open Cultural Amnesia in the hope of getting a bluffer’s guide to the intellectuals, you will be disappointed; but if you read it as an account of how an educator has himself been self-educated, you will be rewarded well enough.
(The Atlantic, April 2007)
Gertrude Bell: The Woman Who Made Iraq
Review of Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell
ON THE COVER of this book is an arresting photograph taken in front of the Sphinx in March 1921, on the last day of the Cairo conference on the Middle East. It shows Gertrude Bell astride a camel, flanked by Winston Churchill and T. E. Lawrence. She wears a look of some assurance and satisfaction, perhaps because—apart from having spent far more time on camelback than either man—she has just assisted at the birth of a new country, which is to be called Iraq.
The picture is especially apt because Bell spent a good part of her life sandwiched between Churchill and Lawrence. If Churchill had not committed the Allies to the hideous expedition to Gallipoli, she would probably have married a young man—imperishably named Dick Doughty-Wylie—who lost his life on that arid and thorny peninsula. And if the Turks had not triumphed at Gallipoli, the British would not have had to resort to raising an Arab revolt against them and staffing it with idealistic Arabists of uncertain temperament. Finally, if Churchill as a postwar colonial secretary had not been forced to make economies and to find Arab leaders to whom Britain could surrender responsibility, there would have been no Iraq.
As Georgina Howell puts it in this excitingly informative book, those idealistic Arabists of Britain’s hastily formed “Arab Bureau” were objectively committed to living a lie. They knew that the promises given to the Arab tribes—self-determination at war’s end if you join us against the Turks—were made in order to be broken. The dishonesty was famously too much for Lawrence, who became morose and inward and changed his name to Shaw. But it was not too much for Gertrude Bell, who was determined that some part of the promise be kept, and who helped change Mesopotamia’s name to Iraq.
Once more we are confronted with the old question: What is it that turns certain specimens of the most insular people into natural internationalists? Bell was born into a family of ironmasters in the north of England, liberal and free-trade in their politics, and though the family firm had its vicissitudes, she never had to be concerned about money. Her life pre-1914 (the war is the only watershed that matters in considering her generation) was spent partly in doing things young girls don’t normally do, such as Alpine mountaineering and desert archaeology, and partly in adopting causes one might not expect, such as that of the Anti-Suffrage League. As it happened, the First World War involved so many women on the “home front” that it made the post-1918 extension of the franchise almost automatic. The war also forced Bell to realize that she would probably never lose her virginity, which she simultaneously wanted, and dreaded, to be rid of. Her beau ideal lay in a shallow grave on the Dardanelles: she had missed her opportunity and wouldn’t settle for a lesser lover. It’s usually men who volunteer to go off on a desert mission at this point, but by late 1915 Gertrude was in Cairo as the first woman officer (known as “Major Miss Bell”) ever to be employed by British military intelligence.
She was given this distinction because her extraordinary prewar travels and researches in Arabia Deserta had suddenly acquired strategic importance. In the film version of The English Patient, some British soldiers are scrutinizing a map when one asks, “But can we get through those mountains?” Another replies, “The Bell maps show a way,” to which the response comes, “Let’s hope he was right.” This is a pardonable
mistake, perhaps, because even now it is extraordinary to read of the solitary woman who explored and charted a great swath of Arabia, from remotest Syria to the waters of the Persian Gulf, just when Wilhelmine Germany was planning a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. John Buchan and Erskine Childers both wrote important fiction about the impending clash of civilizations, but if anyone’s work should have been titled The Riddle of the Sands, it is Gertrude Bell’s.
Reading about Bell, one is struck not just by her ability to master the Arabic language and to revere and appreciate the history and culture of the Arabs, but by her political acuity. Where others saw only squabbles between nomads, she was able to discern the emergence of two great rival forces—the Wahhabis of Ibn Saud and the Hashemites of Faisal—and she stored away the knowledge for future reference. Georgina Howell occasionally overdoes the speculative and the fanciful, writing “she must have” when she lacks precise information, but she also considers questions other narratives tend to skip, such as, What does an Englishwoman in the desert, surrounded by inquisitive and hostile Turks, do when it is imperative that she relieve herself? (The answer: Take care to have a stout Arab servant who will interpose his body, then reward and nurture him for the rest of his life.) The title of the book may seem exorbitant in its flattery—and depressing in its echo of poor, mad Lady Hester Stanhope—but Bell’s bearing was such that many of the desert dwellers truly believed a queen had come to visit them.
Bell’s own more pragmatic search was for a credible king. Mesopotamia—-or the former Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul—had rid itself of the Turks by 1918, more as a consequence of the arrival of British and Indian troops than as a result of local efforts. The new colonial authorities borrowed a term—“Al Iraq,” or “the Iraq,” from the verb meaning “to be deeply rooted”—that Arabs had formerly used to describe the southern portion of the territory. Much else about their rule was provisional and improvised. Bell saw the truth of a Baghdad newspaper’s observation that London had promised an Arab government with British advisers, but had imposed a British government with Arab advisers. Her immediate superior, A. T. Wilson, believed in strict British imperial control. The colonial leadership in India, which tended to think of Delhi as the capital through which relations with the Gulf states were maintained, was also staunchly opposed to any sentimental talk of Arab independence. As if to further fragment the jigsaw of difficulties, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration into this milieu, awarding a national home in Palestine to the Zionist movement, and the new Bolshevik regime in Russia had the brilliant idea of publishing the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had fallen into its hands. The disclosure of this covert wartime pact between czarist Russia and the British and French empires to carve up the region had the effect of hugely increasing Arab suspicion of British intentions. It also had the effect of spurring President Wilson to issue his Fourteen Points, which proposed a grant of self-determination to all colonial subjects. But at the subsequent Paris peace talks, the Arabs and the Kurds, along with the Armenians, were to be the orphans of this process. Even the imperialist A. T. Wilson found himself sympathizing with Bell at that dismal conclave: