Cultural Amnesia (82 page)

In one of his more charming fits of silliness, William Saroyan once said of George Bernard
Shaw, “I am that man by another name.” I am not sure if I am Paul Muratov by another name: he knew much more than I do, and to the extent that I can construe his Russian fast enough
to catch its rhythm, I have a dreadful suspicion that he wrote better as well. But I am very sure that I am that man with another fate. When I leaf through the tiny volumes of his magisterial
book, I see the love of art rewarded by the distortion of a life, and the quietly desperate affirmation of creativity in the face of unrestrained destruction. I would like to think that I had the
same passion, but except from hearsay I know little about the same destiny: not even enough, perhaps, to be sufficiently glad that I know no more. To die guessing that you will be forgotten is
one thing. But what would it be like to know that you have been forgotten before you die?

Lewis Namier

LEWIS NAMIER

During what he called the Nazi era, and in its thoughtful aftermath, Lewis Namier
(1888–1960) was a figure of immense prestige in British academic and intellectual life, to the point that many of his fellow historians were able to call their country civilized simply
because it had given him refuge: they didn’t have to like him. Of Russian heritage, born Lewis Bernstein in Poland, he was a Jewish refugee in search of a homeland. To his adopted
country, Britain, he devoted microscopic attention. The mark of his historical method was to study the written records of Britain’s representative institutions right down to the level
of the names on the electoral lists, an approach which yielded a body of meticulous factual material that tended to overwhelm the conclusions he drew from it, thus making his major books hard
to enjoy now. His journalism, on the other hand, was, and remains, a model for acerbic style and pointed argument. Namier’s knighthood makes him sound like an establishment figure, but
his professorship at Manchester between 1931 and 1953 tells the truth about how the Oxbridge mandarinate preferred to keep him at a distance. In their own defence, they could say that his
frustrations stimulated his productivity: a classic argument of the genteel anti-Semite.
A better defence was that another Jewish academic, Isaiah Berlin, scaled the
heights of both the intellectual world and polite society. The truth of the matter probably lies there. Namier simply lacked charm. But he could write Engish prose with an austere beauty that
leaves Berlin’s sounding verbose. The influx of talented Jewish refugees was one of Europe’s most precious gifts to Britain in the twentieth century, but Namier’s career,
which dramatized the story in almost all its aspects, reminds us not to be sentimental about it. A gain for the liberal democracies was a dead loss for the countries left behind.
Poland’s twentieth-century tragedy was already there in Namier’s rise to success in his new homeland, and if he had possessed a light touch to ease his course, the disaster would
only have been more evident.

Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the
historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

—LEWIS NAMIER,
Crossroads of Power

C
OMING TO
ENGLISH
as a second language, there were twentieth-century political refugees who wrote it with mastery: Joseph Conrad could do almost anything with his adopted tongue that any native
writer of discursive prose had ever done before. There were even those who wrote it with primal, poetic genius, as if they had been born and grown up bathed in the richness of its etymology and
idiomatic nuance. Vladimir Nabokov is the first example that springs to mind, and the last to be eliminated from discussion, because there will always be equivocal admirers who think that the
beauty of what he could achieve with English was the real reason he could never tear himself way from the mirror.

But the exiled European writer who really got the measure of English, with the least show and the most
impact, was Lewis Namier. Early to the field, he arrived in England in 1906 as a refugee from the
pogroms in Poland. His stylistic achievement has never been much remarked
because he was not thought of as a writer. He was thought of as an historian—which, of course, he was, and a renowned one. He would have been a less renowned historian, however, if he had
not written so well: as with all truly accomplished prose styles, his was a vehicle for emotion and experience as well as for a sense of rhythm and proportion—the griefs and hard-won
knowledge of a lifetime are dissolved into his acerbic cadences, and his neatness of metaphor epitomizes the gaze long grown weary but which misses nothing. His prose had hooded eyelids, but they
were never quite closed. You can see his alertness in the single sentence quoted above. For primitive, improvised instruments, “wooden plough” is already good. For an isolated, not
very well rewarded endeavour, “lonely furrows” is a pretty development; and “most successfully when we strike sand” is a poetic climax that drives a prose argument deep
into the memory. The line of thought is a trek into pessimism: he is really saying that the historian’s research tools work only when the work they do is not worth doing. But by the
distinction of his style he exempts himself from the stricture, and by implication he exempts anyone else who can see the problem—and if it is put as clearly as this, who can’t? So
there is a game being played here, for high stakes. Hence the drama.

Namier was always dramatic, although in some of his central work he tried his best not to be. With his capital piece of
original research
The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III
he piled up impeccable credentials. The book was a hard grind to write and proved
it by being a hard grind to read: like the tireless counting of heads that Ronald Syme brought to the study of ancient Rome, Namier’s archival burrowings left no doubt that he was serious.
But even here, with the air full of dry dust, he was establishing a dramatic principle: he was talking about the individual people who made up a class. He was doing the exact opposite of what the
Marxists did, which was to talk about a class as if it formed its individual people. Though a convinced determinist, Namier had no time for big ideas. He hardly had time for the arts and
sciences, about which he was unusually dispassionate for one of his background. Namier studied the parish registers and the electoral rolls in the urge to know about the individual lives which,
he was convinced, were in the end unknowable. In a lifelong flight from the
murderously abstract, Namier was making the other European contribution, which was pre-eminently
the contribution of the émigré Jewish intellectuals—the contribution which could see developments in history but refused to accept that they tended towards a culmination. He
had already seen how they could tend towards tragedy.

In his incidental writings that dealt with the diplomatic and political prelude to World War II, and the issues raised by
the war itself, Namier brought his gift for drama to its fullest flower. It is meant neither as an insult nor as a paradox to say that he did journalism the favour of writing it like a
journalist. Fifty years later, his buttonholing immediacy remains a shining example of what journalism can do. Contributed to the whole range of British upmarket publications—the
Times Literary Supplement
, the
New Statesman
, the
Listener
, etc.—his
pieces were collected into a row of books which any serious student of modern English prose, let alone of history, should seek out and treasure, because more than any other books by anybody they
give you the full weight of the event even when describing only a fragment. I have a row of them before me now; substantial demi octavo volumes bound in black or dark blue linen and stamped with
silver titles:
In the Nazi Era
,
Europe in Decay 1936–1940
,
In the Margin of
History
,
Conflicts
. One of them, although written as a set of instalments for the magazine
Political
Quarterly
, was conceived as a complete book: the marvellous
Diplomatic Prelude 1938–1939
. Much of it was written before the relevant official
papers were released, but his guesswork was dauntingly good, and remains penetrating to this day. Namier’s academic contemporaries often punished him in print for his tendency to wander off
the point into a forest of footnotes, but on the strength of his journalism you would say he had cogency in the blood. Put together, the books constitute a short but weighty shelf of some of the
most vivid higher journalism in English since Hazlitt, although behind them is a far greater depth of learning—an extravagance of mental impulse for an arresting economy of effect. Writing
at the time instead of later, he couldn’t always be right, but he was never less than pertinent, even when, the circumstances being what they were, he faced the task of matching with his
style a sadness that shrieked to heaven. In 1942 he was saying—saying without crying, and God alone knows how—that the Jews would have to be withdrawn from Europe after the war and
go to their new home. He couldn’t yet be certain, or didn’t want to be certain, that Hitler and Himmler had concocted a radical new way of withdrawing them from
Europe, but his fine essay is certainly written in the context of that terrible possibility. As Walter Laqueur has convincingly argued, the code-breaking unit at Bletchley Park was getting the
news about the massacres in the east almost from their inception; and though circulation of the news was restricted to the very highest levels in order to protect the Ultra secret, it was
definitely talked about. Namier, a born stalker of corridors, was not the sort of man to miss a significant word—or, for that matter, a significant silence. Though Namier never wrote a
single book about the Holocaust, its significance permeated all his work from the moment he got wind of it.

With the war over, Namier showed his unusual powers of character analysis when it came to assessing the
suave special pleading of the surviving German bigwigs who directed their appeals towards a higher tribunal than the one at Nuremberg. (“The factual material in these books,” he wrote
in
In the Nazi Era
, “is mostly of very small value.” He meant that they were lying.) He wasn’t fooled for a moment by Halder’s
claims that Hitler had buffaloed the Wehrmacht into an unwanted war. Fifty years later, Carl Dirks and Karl-Heinz Janssen in
Der Krieg der Generale
were
able to quote chapter and verse from the military archives to prove that the German armed forces were always a long way ahead of Hitler in their expansive ambitions. Namier guessed the truth just
from listening to the denials. He respected the decency of Beck but correctly spotted that the other surviving generals were looking for an alibi by blaming Hitler for the army’s build-up
to aggression in both west and east. Namier blew a melodious but piercing whistle over Halder’s niftily calculated pamphlet
Hitler als Feldherr
.
Namier had been warning the world since the 1930s that the Nazis were backed up by a German political culture whose authoritarianism would always amount to savagery if given the green light. He
could be thought of as a sort of reverse anti-Semite on the subject, if it were not such a bad joke.