Reflections of a Reactionary Impressionist

“A Thread of Years,” John Lukacs writes in the opening pages of this his twentieth book, “does not have a story.” But, he adds, it has a theme. Even more accurately, the book has a tone. This is a dark, backward-looking, and in some ways reactionary historical experiment. Lukacs has crafted a dirge mourning what he sees as the long decline of appropriate manners, of civility, of civilization, and of the gentleman in the “Anglo-American world” over the course of the twentieth century. (Yes, the gentleman, the English gentlemen to be precise: just this term and Lukacs’s insistence on using it conveys a hint of the book’s mood and politics.)

Lukacs is a self-professed reactionary. He has no interest in preserving the status quo of today; instead he wants to resurrect an older status quo. His brand of conservatism—Catholic, old-fashioned conservatism as he calls it (pp. 450, 467)—is steeped in the past and as such, has little in common with the free market, futuristic politics of the ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, and his loyal band of short-haired, starched shirt, suburban followers. Like the aging Hungarian nobleman that he is, Lukacs laments the fading away of what he see as timeless moral traditions, universal values, and social hierarchies. ¹ While Lukacs longs for the elegance, grace, and sophistication of this imagined lost world of refinement and order, he is convinced that these days are gone for good. From near and far, he describes the waves of vulgarity, cheap amusements, and crass ambitions that throughout the century have steadily eroded the splendor of the Western past. Sure, tattered remnants of this glorious yesterday remained throughout the period, in 1914 and 1939 and 1958, but they are sad, lonely monuments barely standing against the storms of the nouveau riche, consumer capitalism, and narrow political expediency. Lukacs rails against celluloid celebrities, excessive individualism, the false hopes of revolution, the perilous seductions of isolationism, the disease of mindless anti-communism, the brutality of rock-n-roll, and the gilded grandeur of everyday life in the modern world. By 1969, the “best people”—a vaguely defined group—were, he wails, no longer the most influential people (p. 296); they had lost out to Hollywood moguls, two-bit disciples of Joseph McCarthy, and intellectually bankrupt associate professors of history.

Mixing together sweet nostalgia and bitter sarcasm, Lukacs creates detailed pictures of the withering worlds of the “best people.” However, at times, his portraits are marred by garish strokes of essentialism. Perhaps this is the point; that is, Lukacs intentionally deploys a vocabulary that is out of step with contemporary academic conventions, but still there is something jarring about his reductive observations. For Lukacs, Germans are Germans; Poles are Poles; and Philadelphians are Philadelphians. It is all that simple. (Lukacs, by the way, lives in Philadelphia and clearly likes to write about the city.) “His ambitions,” he explains of one of his characters, “you see are American” (p. 64). People in this book possess such things as a “deep Anglo-Saxon—all right, Anglo-Celtic—sense of scruples” (p. 253). “The Germans’ bombing of England,” Lukacs concludes, “awaken[ed] latent racial and cultural inclinations” (p. 283). Gender is as natural as nationalities. Women, in Lukacs’s world, possess a keener sense for social and cultural decline than men (p. 237). Both sexes have “racial feelings lodged in aging bones,” Jews have “Jewish hearts,” and the Spanish are “honestly a conservative people” (pp. 236, 238, 369).

While the tone of Lukacs’s A Thread of Time is backward looking, even nostalgic, the book’s style and form are bold and daring. With this study, Lukacs joins a growing list of scholars interested in experimenting with historical narrative. Like historians Natalie Zemon Davis, John Demos, James Goodman, Robert Rosenstone, and Simon Schama, and writers such as Derrick Bell and David Dante Troutt, Lukacs blurs the lines between fact and fiction, truth and imagination, history and story-telling. ^2...