Himself Alone

Curzio Malaparte: The Skin

The New Criterion, October 1, 2013

Navigating the first half of Italy’s twentieth century took elasticity. There were few more elastic than Curzio Malaparte (1898–1957), author of The Skin (La Pelle, 1949), a novel of which the first English-language “unexpurgated” version is being released by New York Review Books this autumn. Malaparte was a fascist, and then he was not. He flirted with Communism, and then he did not. A protestant by baptism, an atheist by choice, he converted to Catholicism on his deathbed, but in his will left the house he had built on Capri, the most beautiful in the world some said—his “Casa Come Me”—to the Chinese Communist Party. He was a writer of great, if unreliable, talent. He was a soldier, diplomat, moviemaker, duelist, agitator, provocateur, and dandy. A famously successful Romeo, his only true loves were his dog Febo and, above all, himself.

The Skin is a strange, uneven, and baroque creation, a fabulist memoir, a surrealist fiction based on fact and anything but. It is a terrifying, occasionally hallucinatory and weirdly arch depiction of an Italy devastated by war and moral catastrophe. Added by the Vatican—no mean judge of a good read—to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum, The Skin works well enough on its own merits, but to accept it at face value is to be beguiled by a mask.

To hazard a guess at what lies beneath involves peering into the evasive Malaparte’s bewildering, and frequently rewritten, career, and being prepared to risk being led hopelessly astray. Bear with me, this is going to take a while.

Born Kurt Erich Suckert, to a German father and Italian mother, he changed his name in 1925 to something more in keeping with Mussolini-era Italianizzazione. It was one of the more straightforward maneuvers in a life of transformation and disguise, but it came with a characteristically perverse wrinkle, with Malaparte (“bad side”) a spin on the Bonaparte already taken by another, more illustrious, narcissist.

We catch our first glimpses of him: a precocious schoolboy, some early writings, and what the British once called a “good war,” enlisting with the French in 1914 and then, after Italy signed up for Armageddon, joining his (maternal) home team. Next came stints as a diplomat, at the Versailles Conference and in Warsaw. But it was his first book, La Rivolta dei Santi Maledetti (1921), a sympathetic account of the mutiny that followed the Italian defeat at Caporetto (1917), that, in its rage at the old order, paved the way for what was to come. While Malaparte was—to the extent that any ideological labels apply (“anarcho-fascist” has been one brave shot)—a man of the “right,” it was the drama of revolution that appealed to him more.

And that’s what Mussolini appeared to offer. With the help of some fiery books, energetic journalism, and a spot of more sinister activity, Malaparte worked his way into a leading role among Italy’s fascist intelligentsia. Then the story starts to cloud. Malaparte was drawn to power, but he was too restless, too self-involved to play its games with the discipline that they require. Frustrated by Mussolini’s failure to unleash the social upheaval that had once seemed possible (and making no secret of that frustration), Malaparte drifted away from the regime’s center, but not too far: He was appointed editor-in-chief of La Stampa in 1929, only to lose the job a year or so later, for reasons that remain unclear. But the myth—assiduously promoted by Malaparte in the postwar years—that he was already slipping into outright opposition to fascism is nonsense, brutally debunked by Maurizio Serra, author of the invaluable and sternly forensic Malaparte, Vies et Légendes (2011), the finest biography of the writer to date.

Nor did Malaparte’s 1933 conviction for defaming one of the fascist leadership represent a definitive break with Mussolini. The offending letters were a clumsy power play gone wrong, nothing more. Malaparte’s punishment—five years’ confino on an island just off Sicily—turned out to be rather less than he would subsequently maintain. Thanks to Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, another of his useful friends, the sentence was eased, reduced, and, after some eighteen months, commuted. Throughout it, Malaparte wrote for the Corriere della Sera, albeit under a pseudonym—some proprieties had to be observed. A Yevtushenko (if even that) rather than a Solzhenitsyn, he resumed his career on his release. In addition to journalism, there were a number of books, and in 1937 he founded Prospettive, an initially propagandist publication that evolved into a magazine of the arts offering a modernist, outward-looking reminder that there remained some room in fascist Italy for more than jackboots and bombast. Breton, Eliot, Éluard, Garcia Lorca, Joyce, MacLeish, and Pound were amongst those who made their appearances in pages that, as Serra notes, almost never featured contemporary German writers, one of the many rebellions with which this revealingly incomplete opportunist punctuated his career.

When Europe caught fire, Malaparte was recalled to his old Alpine Division and appointed a war correspondent, in the catbird seat to view the inferno that fueled his best work. Il Sole è Cieco (1947), the first, in terms of the period it covered, of his books on World War II, is an unexpectedly lyrical piece based loosely—of course—on a couple of weeks in the mountains spent with the Alpini as they half-heartedly campaigned against the French in June 1940. Twelve months later, after travels that included a grubby detour in Athens writing articles intended to help prepare the Italian public for the invasion of Greece, Malaparte was tacking along with the Germans, reporting for the Corriere della Sera as the Wehrmacht swept out of Romania and into the Soviet Union.

Presciently—and unfashionably—enough, Malaparte described the Soviets as tough opponents, even in retreat, something that he claimed (later) had led to him being expelled from the war zone in September 1941 “by order of Goebbels” (no less!), a tale that, like so many of his confections, crumbles under closer inspection. After a break in Italy (no, not “house arrest”), he returned to what he thought would be a more congenial sector of the Eastern Front, the stretch controlled by Germany’s Finnish allies. After some rewriting to restore what had (supposedly) been lost to the censor, a selection of his dispatches from the Eastern Front were first published in book form in 1943—after the fall of Mussolini—as The Volga Rises in Europe (Il Volga nasce in Europa), a volume that is, much more so than the far better-known Kaputt (1944), his greatest work.

Vivid, haunting, and elegiac, the book ranges from descriptions of the summer Blitzkrieg pouring into the Ukraine, to the snow and silence of Karelian forests from which isolated Finnish outposts overlook besieged Leningrad, and skirmishes evoke the “primitive ferocity” of ancient war: “wholly physical, wholly instinctive, wholly ruthless.” There are also stirrings here—visiting remnants of the Czarist bourgeoisie clinging onto shreds of the old ways in Moldavia, an excursion to the deserted house in Kuokkala where the Russian painter Ilya Repin had lived—of the lament for a broken European civilization that emerged as a major theme in Kaputt and The Skin, and, difficult as it is to reconcile with his past enthusiasm for an upending of the social order, became another twist in this writer’s labyrinth of contradiction and ambiguity.

Malaparte may—true to form—have spent considerably less time at the front than he implied, but a good part of what makes The Volga Rises in Europe more compelling than Kaputt or The Skin is the debt it owes to the discipline of journalism. The prose is spare, the stories brief, telling snapshots of moments that may once have even been real. By contrast Kaputt and The Skin, bestsellers both, are sprawling, fragmented, astounding epics of hideous accuracy, exaggeration, and deception, “novels” where fact merges with fiction, and where lies tell a truth that Europe was just beginning to grasp. Recounted in the first person by a “Malaparte” who is both fictional and not, they were also designed to distance their author from his fascist past (a pressing necessity by 1944) whilst (in Kaputt) also trumpeting his presence—witty, sardonic, superior—in the center of the Axis’ nightmare world. This was a tricky maneuver, but unavoidable if he was to be able to demonstrate that he—his best, his only hero—mattered: Malaparte had peered into the abyss and found it filled with mirrors.

His “horribly gay and gruesome” Kaputt is—as Malaparte recognized—a far stronger work than The Skin. He spent 1941–43 close enough to the heart of darkness to recognize it for what it was. Based however remotely on his experiences during this time, Kaputt is savage, sensual, and brilliant, decadent, revolting, and beautiful. It is filled with black humor, narcissism, self-conscious erudition, and embarrassing snobbery. There is champagne as well as carnage, Proust as well as Goya, a jarring mix that sometimes reinforces the sense of cataclysm or is sometimes just crass. Horrors are layered upon horrors, but in a way that not infrequently suggests that they are being deployed to showcase his formidable descriptive powers, an aestheticization of barbarity that underlines Malaparte’s icy detachment, a detachment that this most flawed of chameleons does not always bother to conceal.

Asked by a delegation of Jews in the Rumanian city of Jassy (Iasi) if he can intercede with the military to head off the pogrom that they rightly fear is imminent, Malaparte (no anti-Semite in fact or fiction) starts off well into the next afternoon on what he believes to be a hopeless trudge to see the relevant officers, only to pause to inspect a statue, and then head in the direction of the local bigwigs’ club to discuss poetry. He never even manages that, but instead takes a turn towards a cemetery for a nap. He awakes at sunset, woken by the sound of a Soviet bombing raid, and heads off to see a sixteen-year old waitress, Marioara, for whom he feels, well, it’s hard to say. A few hours later the pogrom begins.

In reality, Malaparte arrived in Jassy shortly after the slaughter. That didn’t stop him painting a sickening picture of the pogrom and of an aftermath that pointed to the hecatombs to come. A writer looking to walk away from an Axis-tainted past might have been expected to take the opportunity to present himself in a nobler light. And yet Malaparte does not. It says something too that, while living in France in the, for him, not uncomplicated late 1940s, Malaparte sent a portion of his royalties from Kaputt to Céline, the collaborationist French author, and notorious anti-Semite, then living in uncomfortable exile in Denmark. Whatever one might think of that gesture, it was not the act of the shape-shifter that Malaparte was so often said to be. According to Serra the two had never even met.

Kaputt ends with Malaparte’s arrival in Naples after the fall of Mussolini in July 1943, and his own brief detention by Italy’s new government. The Skin opens some time later, with Malaparte installed (as indeed, in another impressive twist to his resume, eventually he was) as a liaison officer with the U.S. army in that same occupied, liberated, humiliated, degraded, and anarchic city. Most of the book describes “Malaparte’s” stay there before a coda tracking his journey north with the Allies to Rome and beyond.

To its detriment, The Skin is more didactic than Kaputt. Its portrait of Italy’s moral, political, and physical ruin is bloated by a blend of pacifism and high school nihilism that is crude stuff after the detachment and elegant disenchantment of the earlier book. It concludes with the muttered observation that “it is a shameful thing to win a war,” an observation that is as wrong-headed (it rather depends on who is doing the winning) as it is overwrought.

And the latter adjective will do quite well to describe much of The Skin. The bizarre, sometimes surreal, interludes dotted through Kaputt work because they are interludes, whereas in The Skin (in which the freak show includes an outlandish “Uranian” rite, talking fetuses, dead soldiers on parade, and a feast with cannibalistic and mythic elements) they come close to overwhelming the book, and somehow undercut the sense of apocalypse that the British writer Norman Lewis, who was in the same city at the same time, conveyed so calmly and so effectively in Naples ’44. Worse, they fuel the suspicion—this is a book with longueurs unimaginable in Kaputt—that Malaparte was either running out of new things to say or, more cynically, that he had not much interest in doing so. Kaputt’s sales had not been hurt, to put it mildly, by its author’s emphasis on the cruel, the macabre, and the grotesque, so why not repeat the trick, only more so? But too often more turns out to be less, too rococo, too much. That’s not to argue that The Skin is without sequences of remarkable power and extraordinary beauty. It has those, but it is telling that one of its most memorable passages (a characteristic Malaparte set-piece) describes his discovery of a Ukrainian road lined with trees on which Jews have been crucified, an out-of-place digression that, even allowing for the herky-jerky chronology of both books, reads as if it was left over from a draft of Kaputt—an atrocity surplus to requirements.

As with Kaputt, it is what The Skin adds to the understanding of its elusive author that make for some of its most intriguing moments, whether it be the mocking condescension with which he views African-American GIs, or the peculiar obsession with homosexuality, something found elsewhere in his writing, which may suggest that Malaparte wore at least one mask that he was never prepared to recognize, let alone remove.

Above all, there is a delightful scene—as so often in these books revolving around a meal (well, he was Italian)—in which the trickster plays games with his own reputation. He is eating couscous with a group of French officers just before the final advance on Rome, one of whom teasingly comments that “judging by Kaputt, Malaparte eats nothing but nightingales’ hearts . . . at the tables of Royal Highnesses, duchesses, and ambassadors.” If their “humble camp meal” is to make it into Malaparte’s next book, it will have to be reinvented into an infinitely grander occasion. That leads to a more general discussion as to the truth or otherwise of what is found in Kaputt, to which Malaparte’s American colleague, Jack, eventually responds that “It is of no importance whether what Malaparte relates is true or false . . . the question is whether or not his work is art.” Malaparte then discloses that, unwilling to break up “such a pleasant luncheon,” he had “nibbled” his way through the hand of one of the French goumiers, blown off by an earlier grenade, only to end up, he had discovered, in the couscous. The French are appalled. Malaparte subsequently explains to a delighted Jack how he had arranged some ram’s bones on his plate to look like the remnants of a hand. It was left to readers more observant than me to work out that Kaputt did not appear until several months after the liberation of Rome. Malaparte’s story about his lying could never have been other than a lie. How the ghost of Laurence Sterne must have laughed.

Perhaps it was inevitable that Malaparte’s later peacetime years were, with his war books behind him (Mamma Marcia, arguably a fifth, unfinished, was published after his death), creatively something of an anti-climax, distinguished mainly, and tellingly, by an examination of the aftermath of that conflict, Il Cristo Proibito (1951), a well-received movie that he both wrote and directed. He was, for the most part, rehabilitated, but never entirely trusted, and the perception that his charlatanry extended into his art as well as his politics meant that he was never able to regain quite the prominence he had once enjoyed. In 1956, still, despite everything, tempted by the hard men, he traveled to the China of Chairman Mao, and decided that he liked what he saw, but his Chinese doctors did not like what they saw in him: Malaparte was diagnosed with lung cancer. They did what they could (leaving his house to the Chinese Communist Party was partly Malaparte’s thanks for the care he had received), but there was nothing to be done.

He returned to Italy to choreograph the death-bed drama that was, writes Serra, his last masterpiece, wooed by right, left, and the Vatican alike, each eager to claim his scalp for its own. The Communists sent him a party card, but he neither acknowledged nor repudiated it, preferring instead to reaffirm his membership of the centrist Republican Party. And yes, he did indeed, finally, convert to Roman Catholicism, if I had to guess, a Malapartian hedge, gaming God on the basis of a hint from Pascal, but a dramatic switch nevertheless, the last, critics might jeer, in a long turncoat career.

But that’s too simplistic: The only colors he really wore were his own.

Wrong Place, Wrong Time

Prit Buttar: Between Giants -The Battle for the Baltics in World War II

The Wall Street Journal, August 15, 2013

The finest English-language portrayal of the fate that came calling for the Baltic States in 1939 is  William Palmer’s  “The Good Republic,” a short novel written on the eve of the breakup of the U.S.S.R. that evokes both the horror that engulfed these nations and the monstrous dilemmas that the war left in its wake. Early in its pages, an aging émigré, back in his homeland after nearly 50 years, ruefully remembers how his (unnamed) Baltic country had, for a while, led “a charmed life . . . between mad giants.” That characterization is recalled in the title of Prit Buttar’s history of what happened when Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia carved up northeastern Europe between them before turning on each other.

The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 consigned the Baltic trio of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia to Moscow’s sphere of influence. Mr. Buttar, a British physician and independent military historian, recounts how these three small countries were first forced to accept Soviet garrisons and then incorporated into the U.S.S.R. in August 1940 after elections that were as bogus as the choreographed “popular” revolutions that preceded them. The arrests, deportations and executions that followed were the standard Stalinist script.

When the Germans invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941, they quickly rid the Baltic States of their Soviet occupiers and were initially welcomed as liberators. This was an illusion that the countries’ Jews obviously didn’t share. Though Estonia had only a tiny Jewish minority, about 5% of the Latvian population (some 95,000 people) was of Jewish descent, as was around 9% of Lithuania’s (roughly 250,000). Most of these people were dead at the end of 1941, murdered by the Einsatzgruppen, German mobile killing squads.

The perception that the Jews had collaborated with Soviet rule reinforced older prejudice, and all too frequently Hitler’s butchers had local assistants. Mr. Buttar relates the dismal chronicle of the Baltic’s willing executioners with some skill, if, perhaps, with too little consideration of the way in which the Soviet destruction of the established political, economic and social order had eliminated the elements that might have put some brake on the descent into atrocity.

The danse macabre of ethnicity and ideology didn’t stop there. Had the Germans so chosen, they could have restored a measure of self-determination to the Baltic States and bought some strategically useful loyalty. But Hitler had other plans for the region. In his Teutonic take on manifest destiny, the indigenous populations, even purged of the Jews, offered little more than prospective labor for the greater German good.

As the Red Army pushed back and then west, though, the Reich’s leadership began to view the Baltic nations as a source not just of auxiliaries but of front-line troops. Latvian and Estonian formations were established within the Waffen-SS and fought in battles on the Eastern Front. Some of these recruits were true believers in the Third Reich, and some were simply opportunists. But a good number—knowing what the return of Soviet power would mean—signed up in the belief that they were choosing the lesser of two evils, their countries’ last hope, however remote. Others were the conscripts of any war, young men in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mr. Buttar neither judges nor whitewashes these soldiers. But after going through his carefully balanced account of the predicament in which Balts found themselves in those years, readers will find it easier to understand why today’s reunions of Baltic Waffen-SS veterans, which include an annual parade through Riga, the Latvian capital, trigger not only outrage but also a degree of local approval.

The Red Army re-invaded the Baltic States in 1944 and in a sequence of brutal autumn battles evicted the Germans from Estonia and Lithuania. Several hundred thousand troops were cut off in Latvia’s “Courland Pocket” and continued fighting until war’s end in May 1945. Mr. Buttar is himself an army veteran, and it is from the military perspective that he relates the savage unraveling of the Baltic world during World War II’s last year. There’s plenty here on weaponry, on tactics and strategy, on the movement of units—and, as so often in volumes of this type, who won what decorations for what actions. Thus we are told that in January 1945 the soldiers holding out with desperate effectiveness against the Soviets were each “awarded a ‘Kurland’ badge or armband.” But what conditions were truly like in that cutoff redoubt has largely to be guessed from glimpses of exhausted men, references to continuous fighting and laconic details of “increasingly meaningless” battles fought on until the fall of the Reich many months later.

The Soviet “liberation” of the Baltic States, and their postwar reabsorption within the U.S.S.R., restarted the cruel machinery of Stalinist repression on an even more hideous scale than before. Unlike in 1940, however, tens of thousands of Balts took to the forests and staged a lonely epic of defiance often overlooked by historians. To his credit, Mr. Buttar takes his story through the postwar period. Partisan activity peaked in the mid- to late 1940s but was severely hampered by a wave of mass deportations—over 90,000 Balts were sent to Siberia in 1949. Despite this blow to its base, the resistance struggled on, outnumbered and outgunned, well into the next decade. They were hoping for effective Western support. It never turned up.

Our Climate-Change Cathedral

Rupert Darwall: The Age of Global Warming -A History

National Review Online, July 27, 2013

A 19th-century Scottish journalist, songwriter and poet is not an obvious guide to a 21st-century intellectual and political phenomenon, but when it comes to making sense of climate-change zealotry, there are worse choices than Charles Mackay (1812–89), the author of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841), an acerbic, often drily amusing study of the frenzies — from witch mania to the tulip bubble — that regularly possess our supposedly sophisticated species.

“In reading the history of nations,” wrote Mackay, “we find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it.” One recurrent fantasy, he jeered, was that the last trumpet is ready to sound: “An epidemic terror of the end of the world has several times spread.”

This is not — exactly — to categorize alarm over the impact of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) as just another of these prophecies of doom. The notion that a sharp, man-made increase in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could have a significant effect on the climate is infinitely more soundly based than, say, the dodgy math of a Mayan apocalypse, but that — by itself — is not enough to explain why global warming has so evidently turned out to be the right fear at the right time. To learn more about that, The Age of Global Warming: A History,an intriguing new book (released in the U.K. in March) by the British writer Rupert Darwall (full disclosure: an old friend), is a good place to turn, but read some Mackay first.

To Darwall, “the science [of global warming] is weak, but the idea is strong.” He duly discusses some of the scientific controversies that have arisen, but the underlying objection to today’s scientific consensus on AGW set out in his book is more fundamental. Like Karl Popper, perhaps the last century’s most able philosopher of science, Darwall believes that the essence of a properly scientific theory is that it is falsifiable: “It should be capable of being tested against nature and therefore [potentially] refuted by evidence. . . . The more a theory states that certain things cannot happen, the stronger the theory is.” Put another way: What would it take to persuade believers in AGW or, more important, those concerned by what it could lead to, that they are mistaken? The answer is — let’s be polite — unclear.

If it is not possible to construct a Popper-proof proof of a link between the rise in CO2 (and other greenhouse-gas) emissions and the (now, ahem, paused) increase in the planet’s temperature, then those who believe that there is such a connection are forced to rely on what is effectively a continuous poll of scientific opinion over what the data might mean. It is from this process that the much-cited consensus has emerged. That’s not as unreasonable as Darwall might think, but it is second-best science. And when, as Darwall rightly maintains, it has been tainted by the political importance of maintaining a consensus (and the consequent delegitimization of debate) it ends up as something even less than that.

But even those convinced of the reality of AGW — and the danger it could pose — should find Darwall’s book a fascinating, if uncomfortable, history of climate change as a political and intellectual phenomenon. Those who want to focus on detailed scientific debate would do better to look elsewhere, as would those itching for a rant. There are some clever, occasionally lethal, jibes, scattered throughout The Age of Global Warming, but Darwall’s work is no noisy polemic. It is calmly forensic — and deeply disturbing.

Inevitably, Darwall is unable to resist mentioning earlier doomsayers that have got it spectacularly wrong. These include old Thomas Malthus, the Nixon era’s Club of Rome, and William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), a genuinely brilliant English economist whose best-selling The Coal Question (1865) warned that Britain was going to run out of the coal on which its economy depended. He predicted that by 1961 it would need to produce a colossal 2.2 billion metric tons a year. By the time that 1961 actually showed up, Britain’s annual coal consumption was running at less than 10 percent of that figure: Somehow the country continued to function.  To be sure, the failure of these particular forecasts does not prove that all predictions are nonsense, but they are a vivid demonstration of the need for intellectual humility and, more specifically, of the perils of extrapolation. We cannot know how human ingenuity, chance, or simply the passage of time will change what once seemed so certain. We can, of course, do our best to anticipate what is to come, but in the end, it is only a guess.

The British economist Nicholas Stern, author of the 2006 report that did so much to shackle his unfortunate country to a fundamentalist view of AGW — and what to do about it — took a rather more robust approach. He carried out a cost-benefit analysis of the problem of climate change (something that, outside the U.S., few had bothered to do), but his report’s sometimes controversial methodology had room (as Darwall records) for assumptions that ran up to 800 years in the future, a distance across time that might have made even Nostradamus hesitate. No matter; the U.K.’s establishment found Stern’s work compelling, useful, or both.

Others have been won over by a more atavistic dread. There’s no doubt that one element in the mosaic of AGW panic is a continuation of the ancient anxiety that something — food, say, or water or fuel — will run out, an anxiety created by millennia of human survival at the edge of subsistence, an anxiety that, even now, need not always be unjustified.

Another important ingredient finds its origins in thinking that developed in response to 19th-century industrialization. Romantics fretted that accelerating technological progress was taking man ever further from an imagined Arcadian idyll. Harder-headed sorts worried that the fruits of capitalism were a threat to existing social, financial, political, and religious hierarchies. To read Darwall’s deadpan account of the sometimes lunatic proto-environmentalism of the first half of the 20th century is to be reminded that today’s greenery has profoundly reactionary roots.

The old, Marx-pocked Left traditionally took a very different approach. As Darwall explains, its view of man’s relationship with nature was essentially promethean. The planet was there to be mastered by science and the proletariat. The radiant future would be secured not by the bucolic values of an Eden that never was, but by technological progress. It was only when the failure of the Communist experiment became too obvious to be ignored by its Western sympathizers that the opponents of capitalism looked for another banner around which to rally. Red shaded into green, a shift — boosted by the likes of Herbert Marcuse — that Darwall correctly sees as a key moment in the growth of environmentalism as a political force.

That the evolving environmental narrative fit in so well with currents found running through many spiritual traditions — an aspect of this saga on which Darwall could have focused more attention — also did not hurt. A tale of flawed, fallen, wasteful humanity needing to be led by an enlightened elite (step forward, Al Gore!) back to the austere path of righteousness, wisdom, sacrifice, and restraint has a clear religious resonance, as does the often apocalyptic language of environmentalist discourse and the furious reaction of some of the faithful to any dissent or, to use a more appropriate word, heresy.

And then, of course, there is Charles Mackay’s inconvenient truth: The end of the world has long been good box office.

Mix these elements together and then throw in the warming trend seen in the last quarter of the 20th century and it becomes easier to understand why, once the moment came, AGW won so much acceptance so quickly. Borrowing from an observation made by the British philosopher and mathematician A. N. Whitehead (1861–1947), Darwall argues that an idea “works slowly before mankind suddenly finds it embodied in the world. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone. So it [was] with global warming.” Environmentalists were already predisposed to believe the worst about what hydrocarbons could do.

It was not only the intellectual infrastructure that was in place. Darwall shows how a small, curiously influential group of the unelected — including the annoying Canadian Maurice Strong (the “international man of mystery,” of an old National Review cover story) and Barbara Ward, a pushy, devoutly Roman Catholic, devoutly left-wing former foreign editor of The Economist — had been working to drive the environment up the international agenda since the 1960s. These were typically cleverer-than-thou command-and-control sorts, sometimes, tellingly, with a touch of the mystic about them (Fritz “Small Is Beautiful” Schumacher included astrology in his large collection of spiritual enthusiasms). They truly trembled for the environment (by the early 1970s, Ward was predicting that we’d be pretty lucky to make it to 2000), but they also saw environmentalism as a gateway through which technocratic controls could pour. Better still, the fact that environmental problems often seep across national borders could be used as an argument for supranational regulation, something that fit in nicely with their vision of a world increasingly run from Turtle Bay, by — pass the Dom Pérignon — people very much like themselves.

Darwall recounts how, starting with a 1972 shindig in Stockholm, U.N. environmental conferences were convened. (He has kind words for the chlorofluorocarbon-bashing 1987 Montreal Protocol.) Above all, the concept of “sustainable development” was turned into a device that could be used to head off objections from Third World nations that Western environmentalism would stand in the way of their own badly needed industrialization. As Darwall describes this convenient “political fiction,” it was based on the thesis that “economic growth was . . . double-edged. When rich countries got richer, it harmed the environment; when poor countries grew, the environment benefitted.” To be fair, that’s marginally — marginally — less absurd than it sounds, but in any event it did the trick. As the 1980s partied on (environmentalism has tended to flourish in prosperous times), grand reports (Brandt, Brundtland) were written and institutional mechanisms — national, supranational, NGO — were put in place to help greenery along.

When AGW — with its blood-curdling new angle on the dire consequences of man’s excess –arrived on the scene, the natural response by many in the environmentalist community was to see it as a fresh stick with which to whip humanity into line. Official concern over AGW finally crystalized in 1988, thanks primarily to the efforts of NASA’s James Hansen and a supporting cast that included, of all people, Margaret Thatcher, filled with hubris and pride in herself as a scientist. All was set for the climate-change circus to hit the road, and it did so at a speed that showed how well the way had been paved. Other politicians jumped on board, joined in due course by big business playing the usual corporatist game. Less than four years later the 1992 Rio Earth Summit had been held, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change put in place. Darwall notes, albeit with some exaggeration, “After Rio, debating the science of global warming became superfluous. Politics had settled the science.”

The route the circus took from Rio to Kyoto (1997) to Bali (2007) and to Copenhagen (2009) is detailed by Darwall, a meticulous and occasionally caustic chronicler with a sharp eye for the intricate political and diplomatic maneuvering that this journey has involved.

But, as Darwall points out, warnings of climate disaster came with a catch: The helpful idea that economic growth in the Third World was benign could not — for AGW mavens — coexist with the inconvenient reality of surging greenhouse-gas emissions from some emerging economies. The climate-change jamboree held in Copenhagen was designed to resolve this contradiction. The ultimate objective was to extend the Kyoto concept of binding obligations onto the United States and, crucially, growing industrial powers such as China and India. For all practical purposes, it got nowhere.

In what Darwall sees as a reflection of the diminishing clout of the West, New Delhi and Beijing stuck to their chimneys. As a result, the Obama administration declined to agree to a deal. The EU was left humiliated and without the broad, binding treaty its leadership craved. Its only consolation was that there was (just) enough in the mealy-mouthed final Copenhagen Accord to, in Darwall’s words, “keep the whole negotiating process going on indefinitely and provide cover for European governments to continue with their global warming policies.” President Obama has, of course, recently signaled that he still wants to push the U.S. in a similar direction.

And so the jihad against AGW will likely lurch along, regardless of India and China, regardless of the uncertainties that dog the science, and regardless of the obvious stupidity and astonishing expense of some of the policies (we could start with biofuels, but Darwall offers up plenty more to choose from) that it has set in motion. It has become too big to fail.

But even if this effort is one day abandoned, Darwall suspects that the Western mind would fill the gap that it leaves behind by dreaming up yet another environmental crisis that can be avoided only by crippling the modern industrial economy.

The end of the world, it appears, will always be with us.

Landscape After

Marci Shore: The Taste of Ashes - The Afterlife of Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe

National Review, April 3, 2013 (April 22, 2013 Issue)

Warsaw, Poland, May 1998 ©  Andrew Stuttaford

The new dawn that broke over Eastern Europe in 1989 was bright, but the landscape it illuminated was exhausted, a territory of shadows and regret, where hope was jostled by apprehension and old demons stirred. To read some of the accounts of that time and that place is to confront sadness unexpected after the jubilation on the Wall, the Hungarian border, or Wenceslas Square — a melancholy echoed in Marci Shore’s beautifully written, discursive, and by her own admission “deeply subjective” new memoir, a work of well-told history and perceptive reporting that is both less than its title promises and rather more. Either way, it could have done with an index.

Don’t read The Taste of Ashes expecting a survey that covers all of the old Eastern Europe. With the exception of Romania (does that count?), the Balkans do not really feature, nor do Hungary and the former East Germany. There’s a brief excursion to Lithuania, but the other Baltics and the rest of the Soviet far west are notable only by their omission. This is a volume centered on Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia, but quite a bit of what Shore discovered there could easily have been found elsewhere in the region. Thus, in early 1995, she returns to Prague and visits the house of an apolitical elderly couple, all too typical of a generation throughout Eastern Europe whose lives had been impoverished by Communism, but ruined by its fall:

The Velvet Revolution had brought freedoms they had no use for, and in any case had not the money to enjoy. Their whole adult lives they had worked under the Communist regime, and that regime had promised they would be cared for in their old age. Now the social contract had been broken. For their generation the revolution had come too late. For Pan Prokop and Paní Prokopová, it would have been better had it not come at all.

That, of course, assumes that — had it survived — the crumbling economy of Communist Czechoslovakia would have been in a position to deliver on those undertakings, something that is by no means certain.

Shore is an associate professor of history at Yale, a Generation X intellectual of somewhat progressive hue. Thus it may not be surprising that her description of her time in the Eastern Europe of the “post-Communist moment” — doubtless further skewed, in a form of confirmation bias, by the views and experiences of those with whom she chose to associate — comes with a sigh of disappointment. History failed again. The rise of the philosopher king, Vaclav Havel, was not accompanied by the rise of a philosopher people.

There’s prim tut-tutting about the profusion of pornography, and, more justifiably, about the increase in crime and the persistence of the inertia, passivity, and conformity of the “realm of the not possible” that was so much of the Communist state. There is little about the revival in free enterprise, but plenty on the resurgence in national tensions. Shore spent time “working as an intern for an ethnic-conflict project at an American-funded research institute.” Ex-Yugoslavia was in flames, and other long-suppressed conflicts had reemerged into the space that Moscow had once policed. In Romania, Shore investigated tensions between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians. Fair enough, interesting enough, but all this risks giving an unbalanced impression of a region where most just wanted their lives to be “normal,” an adjective that Shore happens to hear used by a Romanian politician, but that was voiced often in Eastern Europe in those days. When the old regimes fell, achieving a “normality” defined in largely Western terms was a widespread objective.

This idea is reflected in a clever phrase deployed by Shore to describe 1989’s upheavals: “Time, seemingly halted for so long, suddenly leaped forward.” And if the results of the leap have been uneven, they have still been impressive: “To tens of millions of East Europeans the end of Communism brought countless good things — above all a freedom the vast majority of people never imagined that they would live long enough to see.”

But in one sense, time did count, and it counted very much. Shore trains her historian’s eye on the impact of the Communist years, with a keen focus on the telling detail and defining atrocity. And she takes a longer view than most. The rise of the red flag over what her husband, Yale professor Timothy Snyder, dubbed the “bloodlands” in his magisterial book of the same name cannot, she correctly stresses, be seen in isolation. The subtitle of Shore’s book refers not just to Communism but to totalitarianism. In her view, the different stages in the evolution of Eastern European Communism must be read as links in a chain that stretches back to World War II, Nazi occupation, and the Holocaust and, before that, to the Depression, the rise of Fascism, and even to “the dizzying possibilities of the 1920s.”

It is widely recognized that war and Nazi misrule were critical in clearing a political, military, and (perversely) moral space for Eastern European Stalinism, and the link between the war and the troubled decade that preceded it is hardly a secret. The connection to the “unhinging” 1920s is more novel. Shore uses the microcosm of a group of 20th-century Polish poets as a window into the revolutionary fervor that enveloped large sections of the European intelligentsia in a decade happier, luckier Americans remember for jazz and Al Jolson.

Those poets — many of them of Jewish descent — dominated her book Caviar and Ashes and crop up again in The Taste of Ashes. From the later 1920s onward, they exchanged the (to them) ultimately unbearable uncertainties of nihilism for the messianic determinism of the far left, a faith that they — and a number of their associates — were eventually, and crucially, to put at the disposal of Stalin’s Poland. That’s a timetable that suggests to me that the original sin from which the nightmares Shore describes were to flow was the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. After all, it was Lenin’s blood-soaked millennial upheaval that frightened many into Fascism as a supposed last bulwark of civilization. And it was Lenin’s revolution that drove its followers worldwide into a Communist cult that became dangerously intertwined with Stalinism years before the alibi that was Auschwitz.

To attribute so much of the blame to Lenin fits awkwardly with the emphasis that Shore’s narrative places on Hitler. The Holocaust is justifiably central to our reading of Eastern Europe’s dark 20th century, but its role as Stalin’s enabler needs more nuance than Shore gives it. Equally, notwithstanding the pantomime anti-Semitism (a gargoyle hounding of phantoms) that still, shamefully, persists in these lands, the horrors of the Shoah are less critical — other than for the hideous absence that it left behind — to our understanding of the region today than Shore appears to suggest. In a book billed as wide-roaming, she devotes perhaps too much space to what is now, tragically, only a tiny, introspective, often conflicted minority of Polish Jews. A minority of a once slightly larger minority (the Communists arranged a final anti-Semitic purge in 1968), they stay put in a country that groups of visiting Jewish teenagers — there to mourn at the death camps — regard (Shore recalls) “as a cemetery.”

Theirs is a disturbing, compelling story, but it crowds out a broader discussion of the encounter with a Communist past in which so many Eastern Europeans were profoundly compromised and then, “in a world where all the rules had changed,” left exposed by the opening of files that were either devastatingly ambiguous or, worse, all too clear.

There could have been more too in this book on the appeal of totalizing ideology to so many intellectuals. It is a topic that obviously interests Shore (it surfaced in Caviar and Ashes), but she gives too little attention to a phenomenon that still endures, if more benignly, even in the attitude of those such as the former dissident and Velvet Revolutionary who opts out of the, yes, normal politics of the new era: “To be engaged” is, in his view, “to forgo clean hands,” an abdication that is itself a declaration of absolutist thinking. Shore notes that “dissidence . . . had often been born of communism”: Once a believer, always a believer — all that changes is in what. That dangerous thrill remains.

Shore concludes the book with a tale of meeting a “bright young” member of the Polish new Left, who thanks her for Caviar and Ashes — a work he regards as rehabilitating those Marxist intellectuals of seven decades ago. Shore contradicts him, explaining that their fate is a “tragedy.” “But I didn’t read it as a tragedy!” says the bright young man. “I read it as a romance.”

We have been warned.

Time Was On His Side

Rupert Loewenstein: A Prince Among Stones - That Business With the Rolling Stones and Other Adventures

The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2013

If Jeeves had ever written a memoir of his time with Bertie Wooster, it would have been discreet, faintly disapproving, quietly affectionate and just a tiny bit dull. Step forward Prince Rupert zu Loewenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg, a Jeeves of sorts to the Rolling Stones for close to four decades, their “bank manager” but also, as he notes in his new memoir, the band’s “nanny, frequently, psychiatrist, on occasion.” Sure enough, his account of his years with Their Satanic Majesties is discreet, gently disapproving, resolutely unshockable, undeniably affectionate and just a tiny bit dull.

Yet, as an archly written comedy of manners, “A Prince Among Stones” has its merits. The prince hails “from a certain sort of distinguished background,” and, by Gotha, he wants you to know it. Fair enough to mention a lineage stretching back to a Duke of Bavaria who died, poor fellow, “repelling the Huns in 907,” but to conclude the book with page after page of Loewenstein genealogy may be a bit much for readers just hoping for insight into who did what to whom in Studio 54. On that, the prince is, for the most part, loyally, infuriatingly silent, preferring to pepper his paragraphs with names boldface only in the most self-referential of worlds, that of a European high society in which the participants are primarily defined by family and connections. When Mr. Loewenstein introduces us to one of his acquaintances, we quickly learn that his father “was married to . . . a niece of Aspasia Manos, the commoner who married King Alexander I of the Hellenes.”

The prince himself was born on Mallorca months after the launch of the Third Reich. His parents were somewhat bohemian Bavarian aristocrats, who were both also of part-Jewish descent, a fact that is only briefly alluded to in the book but which adds a dark resonance to Mr. Loewenstein’s carefully understated story of a privileged yet vagabond upbringing. He spent much of his early childhood in Paris until, at the age of 6, he fled France and the Wehrmacht for England. He eventually became a British subject but never truly left the Continent behind. By his 20s he was enjoying “a very jolly international time.” He shares anecdotes of a strangely antique midcentury, including grand hotels, Rothschilds, an Agnelli, two guano heirs and a Venetian countess—a roll call enlivened by traces of his endearingly bone-dry humor.

Read one way, the social whirl that Mr. Loewenstein records could easily be viewed as the last hurrah of a deracinated aristocracy, cut adrift from history by the fall of the empires their families had ruled and served. But this is no snooty tale of genteel decline. Dynasties that flourish for a thousand years do so for good reason. Mr. Loewenstein relates how, as a successful and well-connected stockbroker, he headed up a consortium to buy a London merchant bank in 1963. Deal done, “the dolce vita days were over,” he laments, but the bank fared well.

And then, in late 1968, “the art dealer Christopher Gibbs” (a description too bland to do justice to a character even  Keith Richards  remembers as “adventurous”), who Mr. Loewenstein had “met, in that wonderful French phrase, dans le monde,” asks if he “would consider taking care of the finances” of the Rolling Stones. Mr. Loewenstein’s wife, in the know thanks to her “reading of the popular newspapers,” helps him sort out who these ruffians are. Until then “the name of the group meant virtually nothing to me.” He had (of course!) already “tripped over”  Mick Jagger at one of “the new style of informal parties,” an encounter that he, the grander grandee, had managed to forget.

This revelation sets the tone of slightly superior distance that the prince maintains from his unruly protégés throughout the book. There’s talk of “tomfoolery,” of “criticisable” behavior, of “sniggering like schoolboys.” And there is what may be the most spectacular washing of hands since Pilate: “The Stones had their own dressing rooms or caravans where, in the privacy of their own space, Keith, Mick and the other artists could do whatever they wanted,” he writes. “What went on behind those closed doors was entirely their business. I understood that it was part of their own particular way of preparing for a show.”

But perhaps detachment both from the rock ‘n’ roll circus and, to a degree, from the England in which he had settled helped Mr. Loewenstein see the potential in Jagger’s errant crew. In matters of business, “calm dispassion is essential.” A mildly artsy upbringing had left him open to dealing with musicians too scruffy and too chaotic for most City financiers of that era. He understood that in swinging London the old hierarchies had swung apart. Besides, he was “rather bored.”

What he discovered was that the Rolling Stones’ finances were a shambles. What he appreciated was that they need not be so. For all their countercultural baggage, the band was a business, one that needed running properly. Mr. Loewenstein spirited them out from under the grasp of the British taxman and, so far as he could, replaced one-sided commercial arrangements on which they were on the wrong side with ones in which they were not.

As much as Mr. Loewenstein did not like their music (“I never played a Stones track by choice”), he recognized their strength as performers, a talent that, he saw, could be profitably exploited—but by the band and not just by promoters and other scavengers. So here, too, Mr. Loewenstein took charge, not only sorting out the contracts, and the merchandising, and the sponsors, but doing his best to bring a little more Ordnung, financial or otherwise, to the touring process. A leading figure in an “ancient” (naturally!) Catholic order, Mr. Loewenstein even modeled the band’s meet-and-greets on papal audiences. The author’s famous ancestor had died in an attempt to repel barbarians. A millennium later, his descendant embraced them, enriched them and, on the way, did pretty well for himself.

Red Dawn

Robert Service: Spies and Commissars - The Early Years of the Russian Revolution

The Weekly Standard, February 4, 2013

Russian Civil War Monument, Archangel, Russia, August 1996 © Andrew Stuttaford

When everything changes, what should be done?

Over 30 years after Ayatollah Khomeini lit the Islamic fire, the West is still fumbling its way to a proper response. Imagine, then, the challenge posed by the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. A key partner in the Allied war against Germany had just been hijacked by a fanatical cult intent on remaking the world, and the world had no clue what to do in reply.

That’s the background to this fine new work by Robert Service, a distinguished historian of Soviet communism perhaps best known for his biographies of Lenin and Trotsky, two monsters brought to unusually vivid life in these pages. Here’s Trotsky, flirting with Clare Sheridan (Winston Churchill’s embarrassing first cousin, as it happens) as she sculpts his bust in the Kremlin, and there’s Lenin, “shortish, pedantic and impatient. With his thumbs tucked into his waistcoat, he seemed at times like an angry Sunday preacher.”

This is a deftly drawn book, illuminated by the author’s eye for detail, ear for a good quote, and nose for a ripping yarn.

And what a yarn it is. The ancien régime is no more. We are given a quick look at the deposed and imprisoned Czar Nicholas, the most prominent, if far from the most important, of all the “former people” (to borrow the chilling Bolshevik phrase), reading “Turgenev .  .  . [and] anti-Semitic tracts.” Meanwhile, the armies of his kinsman, the Kaiser, are tearing chunks off what once was the Russian Empire, before dissolving into confusion after defeat on the Western Front.

All is flux. The territory controlled by the Bolsheviks shrinks and grows in a mirror image of the tides of a vast, bloody, and chaotic civil war, and the Kremlin’s efforts to export its revolution to Warsaw and beyond. National independence movements rise and fall. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania get clean away (for now), Ukraine and Georgia are not so lucky. Hovering uncertainly on the fringes are troops dispatched to Russia by its erstwhile allies in the hope that they might somehow reverse the worst of the revolution. They were never able to do so.

Service gives an excellent overview of this bewildering series of conflicts, and of the dawn of revolution as a whole, but this is just the frame for his picture of a country where nothing was as it had been and everything was up for grabs. Older, more genteel techniques of influencing events no longer worked. Traditional diplomacy was dead.

But both Russia and its revolution were too big to ignore. Although foreign governments may have dithered, some of their citizens did not. It is around their stories that Service shapes his narrative. The Bolsheviks might have thought that they were steering immense, impersonal, and unstoppable historical forces, but the new world that they created was so fluid and so fragile that the individual could, and did, make a difference.

There were the true believers—early fellow travelers not just along for the ride but eager to speed it on its way—such as the American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant, and, more equivocally, the Briton Arthur Ransome. Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World, ended up an honored corpse beneath the Kremlin walls; Bryant, his widow, was subsequently married (for a while) to the man later appointed the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Ransome became a much-loved children’s writer (Swallows and Amazons and similarly wholesome fare) and a less-loved husband of one of Trotsky’s former secretaries.

Not so idealistic, but in some ways no less credulous, were the prospectors among the rubble, the entrepreneurs and con men who saw the collapse of Russian capitalism as a business opportunity. And then there are the real heroes of this book, the remarkable band of (mainly) British or British-sponsored adventurers who did what they could to overturn Bolshevik rule.

While a small British expeditionary force gathered in the far north, His Majesty’s irregulars set to work in Moscow. At least three of them—Sidney Reilly, Paul Dukes, and George Hill—could, notes Service, “have supplied inspiration for James Bond.” No martinis, but in just one paragraph we read about Reilly’s involvement with Yelizaveta. And Dagmara. And Olga. We also read about that clever and unconventional thrill-seeker, Robert Bruce Lockhart, designated “Head of the British Mission” and the ideal agent-diplomat for a place where the rules of diplomacy had broken down. Between romances, Bruce Lockhart plotted coups. And the Britons were not alone: Uncle Sam was represented by the more staid, but not ineffective, “Information” Service, run by the marvelously named Xenophon Dmitrievich de Blumenthal Kalamatiano, a one-man tribute both to American’s melting pot and its enterprise.

If all this sounds like the stuff of John Buchan, only more so, that’s because it is. This is a story with room for Latvian riflemen, Czech Legionnaires, and a Polish Women’s Death Battalion; for failed revolutions across Europe, for conspiracies and spies, and for the daredevil aviator Merian Cooper, one of the American volunteers in an air squadron that helped Poland beat off Bolshevik invasion. (“Coop” was shot down but escaped after 10 months of Soviet captivity. A decade-and-a-half later, he coproduced, cowrote, and codirected King Kong.)

For all the tales of derring-do, however, it’s impossible to read this book without sadness and frustration. This was a tragedy that could have been cut short. Winston Churchill, a minister in the British government during this period, argued for more to be done against the Reds. He understood what his cousin Clare Sheridan did not: that this terrible infant revolution needed to be “strangled in its cradle.” Not for the last time in his career, too few listened until it was too late.

To some Western leaders, Bolshevism was a spasm that would pass. Russia’s counterrevolutionary armies—the Whites—would prevail with just a little support from the West; or maybe Bolshevism, an onslaught on human nature itself, would simply collapse, or be overthrown in its own heartlands. Others, not unreasonably, feared that their own, already war-weary peoples would be driven to revolt by the prospect of participating in what many were bound to see as a bosses’ crusade against a bright, brave experiment. So, denied the outside assistance that might have made a difference, the Whites were overwhelmed, beaten by an enemy that, in the end, proved more cohesive and determined than they were. The undersized and ultimately irrelevant Allied detachments—primarily French, Japanese, American, and British—slunk home from their beachheads, but the Western statesmen told themselves not to worry: Trade would blunt Leninist rigor, and a cordon sanitaire of new East-Central European states would keep Bolshevism confined to its birthplace.

Less than a quarter of a century later, the Red Army was in Berlin. As for His Majesty’s irregulars, most resumed lives of quieter distinction, but the (probably) Ukrainian-born Sidney Reilly (né Rosenblum) continued to fight. Lured back to the Soviet Union in an elaborate sting operation, he fell into the hands of the secret police, and, like millions to come, was killed.

Medium, Not Rare

Mark Edward: Psychic Blues - Confessions of a Conflicted Medium

National Review, January 23, 2013 (February 11, 2013 issue)

The tale of the whistleblower generally follows a predictable arc. There is the dreadful misbehavior, and the whistleblower’s shamefaced confession of his part in it. The whistle blows. The wrongdoing ends. The penitent whistleblower moves on to a better life, book contract in hand. That’s not quite how it seems to have worked out in the case of Mark Edward. But there has been a book contract, and the result is Psychic Blues.

Its author, Mr. Edward, is a mentalist (yes, that’s the word) who has set the traps of junkyard superstition for decades, and the gullible, the lonely, the hopeful, and the dim have fallen right in. Amongst other roles, he’s been a dial-a-psychic (with the old Psychic Friends Network, an entity that does not emerge well from this book), a rent-a-psychic, a TV psychic, a party psychic (“somewhere between the popcorn vendor and the mimes”), a Psychic Revivalist (don’t ask), a palmist, an ESP-tester, a runestone cowboy, a banana-reader (oh yes), a nightclub act, a fortuneteller, a graphologist, and the organizer of a hoax involving the possibility of a three-way interspecies dialogue to be arranged by whales between them, us, and the extraterrestrials that are, as you know, now living in our ocean depths. He has held “quick but dramatic psychic readings for attractive single women” and he has read the paw-print of a dog (“Whitney has a lonely side to her personality”). But there’s a problem. As the subtitle of Psychic Blues signals, Edward is a “conflicted medium.” Those paranormal abilities he’s been touting? He believes that he hasn’t any, and nor, for that matter, has anyone else. As for the supernatural, well, “there’s nothing there in the dark.”

Indeed. But these apparently long-held beliefs did nothing to stop Mr. Edward from pursuing a charlatan career, something that is a touch difficult to square with the way he likes “to look in a mirror and see integrity staring back.” Clearly he is not only in the business of deceiving other people.

But he’s a trickster, not a monster. Many of his clients will have treated his readings as a game. Even those who didn’t won’t have got into much trouble with pronouncements that, as Edward describes them, relied on common sense and his own sharp intuitive gifts, or were of a generality so wide, bland, or broadly benign as to be helpful at best and safely opaque at worst. And sometimes people just like to talk. “A sideshow tent,” writes Edward, “is never far from a psychiatrist’s couch; there’s just more sawdust on the floor”; an exaggeration, to be sure, but not by too much.

Edward goes on to claim that he has “consistently opted to tell people what I feel in my gut is what they need to hear.” This is not the most clinically rigorous of approaches, and Edward’s early background (according to the Wikipedian oracle, it included stints in various absurdly named bands and time as a fire-eater) involves nothing in the way of scientific training. Then again, would the study of old Freud’s woo-woo have added much more? Cleverness and empathy can frequently be enough.

Thus he notes that, “as P. T. Barnum once said, there’s a sucker born every minute. And in the 900 business, every minute counts.” But he then throws in tales of occasions where he was a genuine friend, if not a genuine psychic. As Edward fielded call after call from the “lost souls” out there, he had, he maintains, a “long list of 800 help-line referral numbers” covering everything from alcoholism to alien abductions. He tries to direct the savagely abused Trish to a women’s shelter. His session on the line with Ginger Triggs (“another drunk badly slurring her speech”) turns out to be a life-saver. He discovers later that their conversation has been enough to persuade her to put down the loaded gun that (as, naturally, he had failed to divine at the time) she was aiming at her head while they talked. Ginger leaves her abusive husband, tackles her alcoholism, and starts training to be a nurse: “I had saved someone’s life.” Who could have foreseen that?

Enlightenment sorts, as well as the more conventionally devout, will be dismayed by Edward’s neatly drawn description of the mumbo-jumbo America in which he works, a credulous place where a psychomanteum (look it up if you care; trust me, it’s ludicrous) is technology, tarot is wisdom, and a pendulum is a lie-detector. But Homo sapiens is who he is. Edward wonders whether the New Age abracadabra represents a “terminus of rationality” or a return to our roots, a distinction that implies, rather optimistically, that we have left them. However bizarre, beliefs like those he was pushing — and their antecedents and, inevitably, successors — offer the meaning that many folk feel that they need, but cannot find elsewhere. Such beliefs will forever be with us. What matters is whether they are put to good(ish) use or bad.

The odds of the latter markedly increase when there’s a buck involved. In Edward’s trade there is plenty of room for “callous exploitation” of vulnerable prey. He quotes Ambrose Bierce: “Magic is a way of ‘converting superstition into coin.’” And this coin can travel in unexpected directions. Edward argues that it’s the phone company, not the psychic, that does best out of all those late-night sessions on the 900 line, followed by the network’s owner, not the psychic. Edward depicts a tough world in which most of his cohort, a carny crowd really — all “greasepaint and bulls**t” — eke their way through. In a reflection of the hardscrabble existences of those on whom they so often feed, they too can struggle to survive. He describes the skills, tricks, flimflam, and cheating that they deploy to make a living, something made easier by humanity’s willingness to believe just about anything, or, for that matter, to pay for a spooky thrill: “Sweat it out, miss a few details, and the audience is left with no other explanation than that you are the real deal.”

At times, this makes for a fascinating read — and Psychic Blues would make a useful gift for a friend susceptible to circling light-workers — even if it falls far short of the bleak, brilliant brutality of Nightmare Alley, the Truman-era novel (and movie) with which Edward would dearly like his book to be compared. Perhaps it takes fiction to do true justice to fables of the psychic con. And some literary talent: Despite some good lines and better insights, Edward is not much more of a writer than he is a clairvoyant.

He’s also pretty cagey. Like so many of his peers, he has peddled what he knows to be nonsense. Nevertheless he claims that he would never “outright lie” (note that careful “outright”). He never, he declares, claimed “to see spirits,” which makes one think that the séances he has organized (briefly referred to elsewhere in the book) must have been a little dull. Nor has he, he says, tried to cheat his clients by telling them only what he “sensed they wanted to hear.” Given the shenanigans to which he does admit, not least his confession that “hope” is what he sells, more cynical readers may not be entirely convinced.

They may also puzzle over the question of why he really reached for that whistle. The way Edward puts it, he was tired of his double life as both skeptic and seer, and became “committed to letting the psychic cat out of the bag.” This book, complete with a foreword by the Great Debunker, James “The Amazing” Randi himself, is part of that process, but some of those pesky cynics may still be suspicious. Could this conversion be just another routine for a conjurer still — notwithstanding an appearance at Buddy Hackett’s 70th-birthday party — looking to hit the big time?

That said, Edward has paid his skeptic dues. He has been on TV with Penn and Teller, he’s shown up at Skepticamps, he posts at Skepticblog, and he practices guerrilla skepticism, swilling what ought to be lethal quantities of homeopathic remedies and punking the infamous Sylvia Browne, “world-renowned” spiritual teacher, psychic, and author.

But Edward’s road to Damascus may have space for some U-turns. In a recent interview with the New York Times, he confirmed that he was “still involved” in some of his old psychic games. It’s impossible not to think that this particular whistleblower may be playing a decidedly ambiguous tune.

Meanwhile, just last year the septuagenarian Browne published her new book, Afterlives of the Rich and Famous, an update on how things are going for the glitterati on the Other Side — Princess Diana, Elvis, and Heath Ledger the newbie, to name but a few.

The gypsy caravan trundles on. Always has. Always will.

The Iciest Apparatchik

John Bew: Castlereagh - A Life

The New Criterion, January 1, 2013

There is a statue of Lord Castlereagh (1769–1822) in Westminster Abbey, but the inscription on his grave nearby has, with perfect melancholy symbolism, worn away. With the exception of the Irish, who forget nothing, Castlereagh is usually remembered, if at all, only for fighting a duel with a cabinet colleague and for committing suicide with a penknife, the sole British foreign secretary to have done so, by that or any other method.

Mainstream historians who prefer to run no risks might add that Castlereagh was a wicked reactionary, author of the policies that generated the insults that have kept his name alive in literature, if nowhere else. Byron labeled him an “intellectual eunuch”—a sneer made all the more cutting by his target’s childlessness—and rejoiced at his suicide: “Here lie the bones of Castlereagh/ Stop, traveler, and piss.”

Shelley, not to be out-Michael Moored, had this to say in the aftermath of the bloody suppression of calls for parliamentary reform:

I met Murder on the way – He had a mask like Castlereagh –
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.

Henry Kissinger, however, is something of a fan.

Castlereagh, with Metternich, was the subject of Kissinger’s first book, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812–1822. It is long out of print, but at least it gave him the billing he deserved. That’s unusual: Looking through the extensive bibliography at the end of John Bew’s fine new life of Castlereagh, it’s striking to see how few books published in the last century include his subject’s name in their titles. The title of one of those that do—C. J. Bartlett’s Lord Castlereagh: The Rediscovery of a Statesman (1969)—is itself an indication of fame that has passed into shadow.

Castlereagh was one of the architects of Britain’s victory over Napoleon and, at the Congress of Vienna and thereafter, a creator of the system that helped shape that continent for a century—the Concert of Europe. He was simultaneously the Foreign Secretary and the Leader of the House of Commons for a decade. Dublin-born, he played a prominent role in the suppression of the Irish rebellion of 1798. Two years after that, he was instrumental in forging a formal union between Great Britain and his homeland. Sic transit gloria and all that, but his current obscurity seems overdone. Shelley, the author of “Ozymandias,” might have approved, but Mr. Bew evidently does not.

His book is designed “to challenge [the] image of Castlereagh as an unthinking reactionary,” and also, I suspect, to restore this forgotten giant to the prominence that he deserves—for good or bad—in Britons’ understanding of their own past. Bew succeeds on the first count and, aided by his formidable storytelling skills, deserves to do no less on the second. Intricate descriptions of Castlereagh’s political and diplomatic maneuverings are inevitable, and they come with their longueurs. But these are more than offset by a sensitive, sympathetic and lively depiction of the man as well as the politician, and of a family that included the Bizarro Castlereagh: his half-brother, “Fighting Charlie,” a proto-Flashman in the George MacDonald Fraser style, whose louche exploits act as a jangling, ribald refrain to his older sibling’s infinitely more stately waltz.

Bew has an eye for the entertaining detail, and he depicts a time and a place impossibly remote and startlingly close. Popular resentment over “tales of ostentation and obscene wealth” that emerged from the seemingly endless series of international conclaves reminds us that the distance from Vienna and Aix-La-Chapelle to Turtle Bay, Davos, and Brussels is not so great after all.

And then there are this book’s more profound contemporary resonances. Europe is now again in disarray, a global revolutionary movement—this time Islamic (how the philosophes would have despaired)—is on the march. New powers are asserting themselves with little respect for the rules of the post-1945 game. Castlereagh would have recognized the picture, and, with his Hobbesian view of humanity, would not have been terribly surprised. As he would have understood, the United States, Britain’s successor as top dog in the pound, has to work out a response, a process that must first involve deciding what foreign policy is for.

About that, Castlereagh had few doubts by 1814. After the expense, danger, and disruption of the Napoleonic wars, the national interest defined (as it always should be—coldly, clinically, and with practical amorality) lay in the maintenance of a peaceful Europe that left Britain free from danger and its trade from disruption. Sharper than the treaty makers at Versailles a century later and too coolly rational to be interested in revenge, he blocked plans to impose a harsh, inherently destabilizing settlement on the defeated France. What he wanted—and what he got—was the creation of a continental balance in which no one power predominated. If that meant going along with a despot or two, so be it. Stability was its own reward. Extreme reaction was potentially as unsettling as “political experiment and popular delirium,” and no less to be discouraged. Attempts by Russia’s increasingly bizarre Czar to recruit Britain into a monarchical Holy Alliance intended to impose a cross-and-scepter anticipation of the Brezhnev doctrine on Europe was rejected. “Mysticism and nonsense” said Castlereagh, as, indeed, it was.

Those are not the words of an unreconstructed reactionary. On the contrary, Castlereagh was, Bew proves, a man of the Enlightenment, but without illusion. He had little time for the stupidities of the ancien régime, but he also witnessed revolutionary France (“that pile of ruins”) first hand. Chaos, he saw, was rarely a friend of liberty, progress, or prosperity. He would have cast a cold eye over the Arab Spring. Change, he accepted, could be for the good, but the best chance of it to work out that way would be for it to be incremental, gradual, and cautious—sometimes, as in the case of his careful support for the abolition of slavery, excruciatingly so. With Castlereagh, calculation and principle walked hand-in-hand.

Thus, the formal absorption of Ireland into a greater (comfortably Protestant) United Kingdom would, he thought, smooth the way to the Catholic emancipation that Castlereagh (to use American terminology, a Scotch-Irish Presbyterian) regarded both as a worthy objective and an essential element in the anchoring of John Bull’s other island. George III disagreed. Perhaps losing America was not enough. Catholic emancipation was delayed for another three decades, further poisoning a well that Castlereagh had already done his bit to pollute.

For when Ireland rose in rebellion in early 1798, Castlereagh went along with, and then presided over, a ferocious response which was shocking even then, and for which he bears more responsibility than Bew appears willing to admit. Cornwallis (yes, that Cornwallis) arrived in June that year to take charge, and quickly grasped that the extreme brutality was self-defeating and adopted a more moderate course. Castlereagh again went along, impressing Cornwallis with his loyalty to the new line. As Bew demonstrates, Castlereagh could be the chilliest of apparatchiks, but he was no sadist. The excesses had been distasteful. Worse, they were counterproductive, an unforgivable flaw to this supremely pragmatic man.

He himself was never to be forgiven for them, either in Ireland or by a growing army of liberal critics outraged first by Castlereagh’s behavior in Ireland, and then by his support for a Europe in which Habsburg, Hohenzollern, Bourbon, and Romanov were free to dash both the hopes of the Enlightenment and the dreams of smaller nations. The abuse thrown at him would have been all too recognizable to George H. W. Bush (not to speak of his son), a lesser master of Realpolitik, but a skilled player of the diplomatic game nonetheless, whose resemblances to Castlereagh include an inarticulacy that was a gift to his opponents, mercilessly used. Castlereagh’s heavy-handed opposition to political reform at home (with its echo of earlier Irish horrors) and acid reluctance to lend even verbal assistance to liberal crusades abroad, such as Greece’s struggle against Ottoman rule, only sharpened his critics’ sense that their bogeyman was on the wrong side of history. Similar sentiments put him on the wrong side of historians too. And they wrote him out of the script.

To mention George H. W. Bush is to remember that pragmatism taken too far can be the opposite. Stasis is not always stability, sticking to the rules is not always the best policy, and precedent is not always a good substitute for imagination. It’s easy to imagine that Castlereagh, iciest of statesmen, would have abandoned the Shia of Southern Iran, and, for that matter, turned up in Kiev to advise Ukrainians to stay within their crumbling Soviet home. But to argue, as the caricature would have it, that, had not overwork and stress—there are other, more exotic explanations—driven him to suicide, Castlereagh would undoubtedly have encouraged the Concert of Europe to keep playing an unchanged tune in rapidly changing times is to underestimate the subtlety and cleverness of a man, who for all his failings, has been sold short for too long.

After this book, there’s no excuse for that.

The Silence That Speaks Volumes

François Bizot: Facing the Torturer

The Wall Street Journal, November 20, 2012

In 1971, François Bizot, a French ethnologist living in Cambodia, was seized by Khmer Rouge insurgents. Held in a prison camp for 77 days and then freed, he is the only Westerner to have survived anything but the briefest brush with Khmer Rouge captivity. His interrogation sessions evolved into a twisted facsimile of friendship with the camp’s commander, Comrade Duch. Convinced that his prisoner wasn’t after all working for the CIA, Duch persuaded the Khmer Rouge leadership to let the Frenchman go.

Phnom Penh fell to the Communists in 1975. Not so long after, Duch was appointed director of the new regime’s Tuol Seng prison. There some 17,000 people—men, women and children—would perish over the next four years, frequently after torture designed to “prove” a guilt that no longer had to be anchored in any reality. When Mr. Bizot later discovered what his tormentor-savior had become, he agonized over Duch’s “monstrous transformation.” Partly in response, in 2000, he published “The Gate,” a powerful, if lushly overwritten, memoir of his capture, release and eventual evacuation with other foreigners from Phnom Penh after that city’s surrender to the Khmer Rouge. He reached the perversely empathetic conclusion that Duch had merely managed to “tame” the terror that must have enveloped him in the nightmare world of the Khmer Rouge, just as Mr. Bizot had come to control his fear while chained up in that camp. In the book’s epilogue, Mr. Bizot described a return to Cambodia prompted by Duch’s arrest in 1999.

“Facing the Torturer” (at least notionally) picks up where “The Gate” left off and culminates in the author’s appearance as a prosecution witness at Duch’s 2009 U.N.-supervised trial. But this short book—and for a short book it can be very long-winded—is rooted in Mr. Bizot’s prolonged reinterpretations of his experiences in the Cambodia of four decades ago. It is a reappraisal colored by incidents that stretch even further back, and the book’s first chapter features a meditation on a possibly necessary evil from his youth—the killing of a beloved pet—and on an incident when, as a small boy in occupied France, he was punished by his panicked mother for sticking his tongue out at a German officer. “I understood that fear could push anyone beyond the normal limits of their behavior.” There is also a recollection of the unease he felt walking past a slaughterhouse as a child and memories of his time in the French army fighting in Algeria.

Such moments are assembled as evidence for a broader case, not so much against Duch, whose individual responsibility Mr. Bizot readily accepts, but against humanity as a whole. We are all capable of horror, he wants us to know: a discovery about as startling as the realization that, as a species, we walk on two legs. In 2010, Duch was convicted of torture, murder and “crimes against humanity” and is now serving a life sentence. Mr. Bizot sees the verdict almost as collective alibi: “We never look under the mask of the monster to make out the familiar face of a human being.” Oh, please.

Mr. Bizot corresponded with his former captor and went to see him in prison. But what lies behind that mask remains, in the end, elusive. Duch’s sparse and dutifully contrite written response to “The Gate” is included in “Facing the Torturer” but gives little away: “Life forces us to do things we do not like doing.” Given the grotesque cruelty of Tuol Seng, there must have been something more than mere opportunity, or the chaos of midcentury Indochina, that turned Kaing Guek Eav, a former math teacher, into another of the 20th century’s lethal everymen.

Duch was a merciless jailer, killer and torturer. But he is neither insane, nor, it seems, a sadist. Nor was he just obeying the orders of a leadership too dangerous to defy. The best clues in the pages of either book (and “The Gate” and “Facing the Torturer” should be read together) as to why—and how—Eav became Duch are tantalizingly incomplete. We glimpse a “demanding and moral being” (he has now, make of it what you will, converted to Christianity) who becomes “possessed” by a cult that offers him the austere pleasures of purification and an intoxicating immersion in a quest for a liberation that was anything but.

Mr. Bizot explains how torturing was for Duch “part of a whole. It was nothing more than putting the ardor of his commitment into practice, the action being in proportion to the greatness of the revolutionary ends . . . a task that he could only carry out by making himself literally ‘out of breath.’ ” Doubtless, it became easier over time.

But of the cult that consumed this “man of faith,” there isn’t much analysis in either of Mr. Bizot’s volumes—just sightings of shadows and fragments of a greater malignancy. The “dreadful smothering” of Cambodia lurks, for the most part, either offstage or in echo or reflection. But the evil comes into clear view in Mr. Bizot’s terrible, telling details. In “Facing the Torturer,” he recounts the chaos of the refugee camps set up in Thailand for Cambodians as their country collapsed into darkness. The camp that the Khmer Rouge had—astoundingly—been permitted to run on Thai territory stood out for “its cleanliness, silence, discipline.”

It was there that some of the evacuees from the French embassy—”journalists and humanitarians”—came across a “half-naked boy tied to a post: He had fainted under the scorching sun.” They complained to the authorities, only to be told that the child was a thief. He had been caught stealing from “one of the bags of rice allocated to the collective.” Well, the camp was so much more orderly than anything else the visitors had seen that they found themselves “unable to utter any protest.” They muttered a few words of lukewarm praise and left. “I was,” recalls Mr. Bizot, “familiar with this kind of silence.”

The Book of Enoch

Lord Howard (Ed): Enoch at 100: A Re-Evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell

The New Criterion, October 1, 2012

When The Great Terror, Robert Conquest’s ground-breaking chronicle of Stalinist atrocity, was reissued in the twilight of the Gorbachev era, its author (so the story—cooked up, apparently, by Kingsley Amis—goes) was asked whether he would like to give it a new title. He suggested “I Told You So, You Fucking Fools.”

Whatever Conquest may or may not have said, we can be sure that the British politician Enoch Powell (1912–1998), a rather less exuberant figure, would never have summed things up quite like that. The satisfaction that Powell derived—and, as he was not a modest man, there was certainly some—from so often being proved right (at least as he saw it) was tempered by the sadness that is frequently the lot of a prophet of doom. Amongst the Powell speeches reproduced in Enoch at 100, a new (and, as such works are, largely admiring) Gedenkschrift published to mark his centenary and edited by Lord Howard of Rising, there is one delivered to the (High Tory) Salisbury Group at a dinner held shortly after the 1987 election defeat that ended his parliamentary career.1

The speech was melancholy, even by the standards of Powell, a virtuoso of gloom. It was a dark, scornful lament for the manner in which the Britain he had idealized and, as incarnated in Parliament, idolized, had willed itself out of existence, leaving him behind, still bound by duty to that vanished country: “there [was] no way out.”

Reactionaries are a tough bunch, and pessimism comes with the territory, but the port must have flown round the table as Powell was speaking. He had famously said that all political lives end in failure, but the failure outlined in this speech was of a nation, not of just one man: it is striking that he made not one reference to Mrs. Thatcher’s third consecutive election victory just a month or so before. His Britain was dead, a suicide; it made little odds that its wake would be better run.

But if Powell’s life was a failure, it was a failure of a grandeur that can be glimpsed in a quick recital of just a few of its details (fortunately, Enoch at 100 includes a helpful biographical sketch by Philip Norton). Professor Powell, Brigadier Powell, the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell, MBE, MP, failed only when measured against the reach of his dreams. The only child of provincial teachers, he became a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and, by his mid-to-late twenties, the youngest professor in the British Empire, as well as the author of two books on Herodotus. He began the war a private and emerged a brigadier. He was elected as a Conservative MP in 1950.

Promotion followed, and then the first of three key turning points. In 1958, Powell and two others quit the Treasury team over the (Conservative) government’s refusal to further cut spending. The trio was worried about the money supply, whatever that was. No lasting damage was done to Powell’s ascent. He was to spend a good part of the next ten years on the Conservative front bench.

Then, on April 20, 1968, came the second turning point: the notorious speech in Birmingham on the dangers of mass immigration that has defined his place in British history: “Like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood.’ ” That was too much foaming for a fuming Ted Heath, the Tory leader. He took the opportunity to fire Powell, a potential rival from the right. Powell was now both Britain’s most controversial and most popular politician. His speeches during the 1970 election campaign secured the Conservatives a mildly surprising victory over the governing Labour Party. There was no reward, nor would he have expected one.

Heath was a technocrat, an economic illiterate, and a corporatist. It is no surprise that he took Britain into the European Economic Community, the precursor of today’s EU, the step that triggered Powell’s final great turn. He declined to stand in the first of 1974’s two elections, endorsing a party committed to a renegotiation of the UK’s EEC membership. That was Labour. Heath duly lost. Accused by a heckler of being a “Judas,” Powell retorted that Judas “was paid” while he had made a sacrifice. To hurl biblical, classical, or historical insults at Powell was to tangle with a tiger. Powell’s smile at the end of the exchange said it all.

But sacrifice it was: this “born Tory” was never a member of the Conservative Party again. As a passionate defender of the integrity of the United Kingdom, however, he was (so far as an Englishman ever could be) a natural pick for the embattled Ulster Unionists. He spent the last third of his parliamentary career as their MP for South Down, until that defeat in 1987 and a final decade as sage, historian, polemicist, and distinctly unorthodox biblical scholar. The infamous xenophobe had studied Hebrew in his later years to add to a Babel that reportedly comprised English, French, Greek (classical and modern), Italian, Urdu, and Latin and a “reading knowledge” of Welsh, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese. The old man died in 1998, with Britain entering yet another period of mass immigration, and with Tony Blair eagerly eying the EU’s exciting new single currency.

Was Enoch Powell a failure, then? Those three crucial turnings are a good starting point for a consideration of that question. The issues surrounding the first, the 1958 resignation, and its longer-term political and intellectual consequences, are ably discussed in Enoch at 100 by Simon Heffer, the author of Like the Roman (1998), the definitive, invaluable biography of Powell. As Heffer notes, by the late 1950s Powell had satisfied himself that the key to inflation was the money supply, an idea with fatal ramifications for his career at the Treasury. But this was not the end of his attachment to monetarism. At the time, such beliefs were widely seen to be the province of cranks (and by embracing them Powell seemed to confirm the view that he was just that), but they dovetailed neatly with his broad (and deep) economic liberalism. Within a few years he was to deploy these ideas in relentless and typically forensic mockery of Heath’s disastrous management of the economy. Not much later, Powell’s thinking in this area was, one way or another, appropriated by someone who Heath hated even more—Margaret Thatcher. The sweetest revenge of all? It worked. A failure? Not in this respect.

On Europe, the last of the three turning points, Powell failed. Worse, he was let down. His lodestar was a profound emotional and intellectual reverence for Britain’s nation state (something well addressed in Enoch at 100 by Andrew Roberts) as the living expression of a people shaped by shared history, kinship, and institutions into something that was distinctly, uniquely itself—even if it didn’t always know exactly what. Powell wanted, he said, to tell the British who they were, and their essence, he argued, weaving the myth in which he himself clearly believed, could be found in Parliament, both core and pinnacle of their sovereign self.

As Roger Scruton shows in the sharp analysis of Powell’s language that is his contribution to this book, Powell “gave a visionary character, even to the most plain and prosaic words. Having heard Powell speak a handful of times, I can only agree. Yet he was unable to dissuade this allegedly marvelous parliament, and the great people he thought it incarnated, from surrendering their sovereignty to the EEC. It was not for want of trying. Powell’s trademark close reading of the European treaties led him to a chillingly prescient analysis (neatly summarized in Enoch at 100 by Nicholas True) of the true nature of the European project. He laid it all out, but to no avail.

And so matters still stand: Despite mounting discontent in the UK and the Eurozone’s stagnant chaos, the chances of a British exit remain remote. Nevertheless, it is Powell’s understanding of the EU that lies at the heart of the long rearguard action still being fought by Britain’s euroskeptics, a struggle that has, if nothing else, acted as an occasionally useful brake on Britain’s integration within the Brussels regime and, critically, played a major part in keeping the UK out of the single currency responsible for a catastrophe that Powell, that economic crank, predicted with familiar uncanny accuracy as early as the 1970s.

No such partial consolation would have been available to him in respect of the second, and the most significant, of the three turnings, the April 1968 speech on immigration. In Enoch at 100 this topic is handled by Tom Bower, a canny selection, no member of the fan club. Bower traces Powell’s genuinely growing concern over immigration, but leaves room (reasonably enough) for the notion that the timing and the nature of the Birmingham speech were partly intended to bolster his position within the Conservative Party. I am shocked, shocked. Powell might have been (much) more principled than many politicians, but he shared their ambition and, more than is generally acknowledged in this book, their, uh, elasticity, something that should disappoint only those who were hoping for a saint.

As for that speech, Bower understandably highlights the passages that, whatever the rationalizations for them, hinted at a genuine racial animus, treacherous ground in the course of any discussion of mass immigration into a country that, like many others then, and quite a few still even now, had an idea of ethnicity, real or otherwise, as the base of its identity. The extent and the nature of Powell’s racism, if that’s the right word, can be debated, but, as a master of language, he would (whatever his denials) have had no illusions about the harsher signals he was sending in that speech and, not infrequently, thereafter.

The irony is that those signals were also picked up, and used by those in Britain who, for whatever reason, wished to suppress substantive, democratic discussion on the topic of immigration that was proceeding at a pace and on a scale that could not help but transform (and possibly Balkanize) the country that Powell had always seen as a gradually evolving, organic whole. And not only Powell: Opinion polls showed that some eighty percent of Britons agreed with what he had said that April afternoon. To claim (as do Bower and two other contributors to this book) that Powell’s lapses into extremism long made it impossible to confront the issues raised by mass immigration is a tribute not to logic, but to the cowardice of Britain’s governing class. The consequences have changed Britain forever—with very little in the way of genuine popular consultation, let alone whole-hearted consent. If you think that there are similarities between this and the manner in which that same class has handed the UK over to the EU in recent decades, you’d be correct.

There’s more, much more, to Powell. And there’s quite a bit of it to be found in Enoch at 100, including his legendary speech attacking British mistreatment of insurgents in Kenya, his views (bizarre, brilliant, and sometimes both) on defense, and his perverse hostility to America, if perhaps too little (too embarrassing?) on how that degenerated in later life into outright conspiracism. Frank Field, one of modern Labour’s most interesting MPs, shines a delightful light on Powell’s odd, spiky personality, and the book concludes with a charming interview from earlier this year with Powell’s widow, Pam. But all of this should be no more than a hors d’oeuvre to Like the Roman. Get to it; it’s only a thousand pages.

And when it comes to judging Powell’s success or failure, this comment (reprinted in Enoch at 100) from The Daily Telegraph on the day after his death will do for now:

His speeches and writings will be read so long as there exists a political and parliamentary culture in which speaking and writing matter.

To which Powell would probably have replied that that would not be very long.