Intellectuals

Paul Johnson

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061871474
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

"Johnson revels in all the wicked things these great thinkers have done...great fun to read."— New York Times Book Review

A fascinating portrait of the minds that have shaped the modern world. In an intriguing series of case studies, Rousseau, Shelley, Marx, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, Brecht, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, and Noam Chomsky, among others, are revealed as intellectuals both brilliant and contradictory, magnetic and dangerous.

1

Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘An Interesting Madman’

OVER the past two hundred years the influence of intellectuals has grown steadily. Indeed, the rise of the secular intellectual has been a key factor in shaping the modern world. Seen against the long perspective of history it is in many ways a new phenomenon. It is true that in their earlier incarnations as priests, scribes and soothsayers, intellectuals have laid claim to guide society from the very beginning. But as guardians of hieratic cultures, whether primitive or sophisticated, their moral and ideological innovations were limited by the canons of external authority and by the inheritance of tradition. They were not, and could not be, free spirits, adventurers of the mind.

With the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, a new kind of mentor emerged to fill the vacuum and capture the ear of society. The secular intellectual might be deist, sceptic or atheist. But he was just as ready as any pontiff or presbyter to tell mankind how to conduct its affairs. He proclaimed, from the start, a special devotion to the interests of humanity and an evangelical duty to advance them by his teaching. He brought to this self-appointed task a far more radical approach than his clerical predecessors. He felt himself bound by no corpus of revealed religion. The collective wisdom of the past, the legacy of tradition, the prescriptive codes of ancestral experience existed to be selectively followed or wholly rejected entirely as his own good sense might decide. For the first time in human history, and with growing confidence and audacity, men arose to assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and cure them with their own unaided intellects: more, that they could devise formulae whereby not merely the structure of society but the fundamental habits of human beings could be transformed for the better. Unlike their sacerdotal predecessors, they were not servants and interpreters of the gods but substitutes. Their hero was Prometheus, who stole the celestial fire and brought it to earth.

One of the most marked characteristics of the new secular intellectuals was the relish with which they subjected religion and its protagonists to critical scrutiny. How far had they benefited or harmed humanity, these great systems of faith? To what extent had these popes and pastors lived up to their precepts, of purity and truthfulness, of charity and benevolence? The verdicts pronounced on both churches and clergy were harsh. Now, after two centuries during which the influence of religion has continued to decline, and secular intellectuals have played an ever-growing role in shaping our attitudes and institutions, it is time to examine their record, both public and personal. In particular, I want to focus on the moral and judgmental credentials of intellectuals to tell mankind how to conduct itself. How did they run their own lives? With what degree of rectitude did they behave to family, friends and associates? Were they just in their sexual and financial dealings? Did they tell, and write, the truth? And how have their own systems stood up to the test of time and praxis?

The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all. Older men like Voltaire had started the work of demolishing the altars and enthroning reason. But Rousseau was the first to combine all the salient characteristics of the modern Promethean: the assertion of his right to reject the existing order in its entirety; confidence in his capacity to refashion it from the bottom in accordance with principles of his own devising; belief that this could be achieved by the political process; and, not least, recognition of the huge part instinct, intuition and impulse play in human conduct. He believed he had a unique love for humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity. An astonishing number of people, in his own day and since, have taken him at his own valuation.

In both the long and the short term his influence was enormous. In the generation after his death, it attained the status of a myth. He died a decade before the French Revolution of 1789 but many contemporaries held him responsible for it, and so for the demolition of the ancien régime in Europe. This view was shared by both Louis XVI and Napoleon. Edmund Burke said of the revolutionary elites: ‘There is a great dispute among their leaders which of them is the best resemblance of Rousseau…He is their standard figure of perfection.’ As Robespierre himself put it: ‘Rousseau is the one man who, through the loftiness of his soul and the grandeur of his character, showed himself worthy of the role of teacher of mankind.’ During the Revolution the National Convention voted to have his ashes transferred to the Panthéon. At the ceremony its president declared: ‘It is to Rousseau that is due the health-giving improvement that has transformed our morals, customs, laws, feelings and habits.’¹

At a much deeper level, however, and over a far longer span of time, Rousseau altered some of the basic assumptions of civilized man and shifted around the furniture of the human mind. The span of his influence is dramatically wide but it can be grouped under five main headings. First, all our modern ideas of education are affected to some degree by Rousseau’s doctrine, especially by his treatise Émile (1762). He popularized and to some extent invented the cult of nature, the taste for the open air, the quest for freshness, spontaneity, the invigorating and the natural. He introduced the critique of urban sophistication. He identified and branded the artificialities of civilization. He is the father of the cold bath, systematic exercise, sport as character-forming, the weekend cottage.²

Second, and linked to his revaluation of nature, Rousseau taught distrust of the progressive, gradual improvements brought about by the slow march of materialist culture; in this sense he rejected the Enlightenment, of which he was part, and looked for a far more radical solution.³ He insisted that reason itself had severe limitations as the means to cure society. That did not mean, however, that the human mind was inadequate to bring about the necessary changes, because it has hidden, untapped resources of poetic insight and intuition which must be used to overrule the sterilizing dictates of reason.⁴ In pursuit of this line of thought, Rousseau wrote his Confessions, finished in 1770, though not published until after his death. This third process was the beginning both of the Romantic movement and of modern introspective literature, for in it he took the discovery of the individual, the prime achievement of the Renaissance, a giant stage further, delving into the inner self and producing it for public inspection. For the first time readers were shown the inside of a heart, though-and this too was to be a characteristic of modern literature-the vision was deceptive, the heart thus exhibited misleading, outwardly frank, inwardly full of guile.

The fourth concept Rousseau popularized was in some ways the most pervasive of all. When society evolves from its primitive state of nature to urban sophistication, he argued, man is corrupted: his natural selfishness, which he calls amour de soi, is transformed into a far more pernicious instinct, amour-propre, which combines vanity and self-esteem, each man rating himself by what others think of him and thus seeking to impress them by his money, strength, brains and moral superiority. His natural selfishness becomes competitive and acquisitive, and so he becomes alienated not only from other men, whom he sees as competitors and not brothers, but from himself.⁵ Alienation induces a psychological sickness in man, characterized by a tragic divergence between appearance and reality.

The evil of competition, as he saw it, which destroys man’s inborn communal sense and encourages all his most evil traits, including his desire to exploit others, led Rousseau to distrust private property, as the source of social crime. His fifth innovation, then, on the very eve of the Industrial Revolution, was to develop the elements of a critique of capitalism, both in the preface to his play Narcisse and in his Discours sur l’inégalité, by identifying property and the competition to acquire it as the primary cause of alienation.⁶ This was a thought-deposit Marx and others were to mine ruthlessly, together with Rousseau’s related idea of cultural evolution. To him, ‘natural’ meant ‘original’ or pre-cultural. All culture brings problems since it is man’s association with others which brings out his evil propensities: as he puts it in Émile, ‘Man’s breath is fatal to his fellow men.’ Thus the culture in which man lived, itself an evolving, artificial construct, dictated man’s behaviour, and you could improve, indeed totally transform, his behaviour by changing the culture and the competitive forces which produced it–that is, by social engineering.

These ideas are so wide-ranging as to constitute, almost by themselves, an encyclopaedia of modern thought. It is true that not all of them were original to him. His reading was wide: Descartes, Rabelais, Pascal, Leibnitz, Bayle, Fontenelle, Corneille, Petrarch, Tasso, and in particular he drew on Locke and Montaigne. Germaine de Staël, who believed he possessed ‘the most sublime faculties ever bestowed on a man’ declared: ‘He has invented nothing.’ But, she added, ‘he has infused all with fire.’ It was the simple, direct, powerful, indeed passionate, manner in which Rousseau wrote which made his notions seem so vivid and fresh, so that they came to men and women with the shock of a revelation.

Who, then, was this dispenser of such extraordinary moral and intellectual power, and how did he come to acquire it? Rousseau was a Swiss, born in Geneva in 1712 and brought up a Calvinist. His father Isaac was a watchmaker but did not flourish in his trade, being a troublemaker, often involved in violence and riots. His mother, Suzanne Bernard, came from a wealthy family, but died of puerperal fever shortly after Rousseau’s birth. Neither parent came from the tight circle of families which formed the ruling oligarchy of Geneva and composed the Council of Two Hundred and the Inner Council of Twenty-Five. But they had full voting and legal privileges and Rousseau was always very conscious of his superior status. It made him a natural conservative by interest (though not by intellectual conviction) and gave him a lifelong contempt for the voteless mob. There was also a substantial amount of money in the family.

Rousseau had no sisters but a brother, seven years his senior. He himself strongly resembled his mother, and thus became the favourite of his widowed father. Isaac’s treatment of him oscillated between lachrymose affection and frightening violence and even the favoured Jean-Jacques deplored the way his father brought him up, later complaining in Émile: ‘The ambition, greed, tyranny and misguided foresight of fathers, their negligence and brutal insensitivity, are a hundred times more harmful to children than the unthinking tenderness of mothers.’ However, it was the elder brother who became the chief victim of the father’s savagery. In 1718 he was sent to a reformatory, at the father’s request, on the grounds that he was incorrigibly wicked; in 1723 he ran away and was never seen again. Rousseau was thus, in effect, an only child, a situation he shared with many other modern intellectual leaders. But, though indulged in some ways, he emerged from childhood with a strong sense of deprivation and–perhaps his most marked personal characteristic–self-pity.⁷

Death deprived him quickly of both his father and his foster-mother. He disliked the trade of engraving to which he was apprenticed. So in 1728, aged fifteen, he ran away and became a convert to Catholicism, in order to obtain the protection of a certain Madame Françoise-Louise de Warens, who lived in Annecy. The details of Rousseau’s early career, as recorded in his Confessions, cannot be trusted. But his own letters, and the vast resources of the immense Rousseau industry, have been used to establish the salient facts.⁸ Madame de Warens lived on a French royal pension and seems to have been an agent both of the French government and of the Roman Catholic Church. Rousseau lived with her, at her expense, for the best part of fourteen years, 1728–42. For some of this time he was her lover; there were also periods when he wandered off on his own. Until he was well into his thirties, Rousseau led a life of failure and of dependence, especially on women. He tried at least thirteen jobs, as an engraver, lackey, seminary student, musician, civil servant, farmer, tutor, cashier, music-copier, writer and private secretary. In 1743 he was given what seemed the plum post of secretary to the French Ambassador in Venice, the Comte de Montaigu. This lasted eleven months and ended in his dismissal and flight to avoid arrest by the Venetian Senate. Montaigu stated (and his version is to be preferred to Rousseau’s own) that his secretary was doomed to poverty on account of his ‘vile disposition’ and ‘unspeakable insolence’, the product of his ‘insanity’ and ‘high opinion of himself’.⁹

For some years Rousseau had come to see himself as a born writer. He had great skill with words. He was particularly effective at putting the case for himself in letters, without too scrupulous a regard for the facts; indeed, he might have made a brilliant lawyer. (One of the reasons Montaigu, a military man, came to dislike him so much was Rousseau’s habit, when taking dictation, of yawning ostentatiously or even strolling to the window, while the Ambassador struggled for a word.) In 1745 Rousseau met a young laundress, Thérèse Levasseur, ten years his junior, who agreed to become his mistress on a permanent basis. This gave some kind of stability to his drifting life. In the meantime he had met and been befriended by Denis Diderot, the cardinal figure of the Enlightenment and later to be editor-in-chief of the Encyclopédie. Like Rousseau, Diderot was the son of an artisan and became the prototype of the self-made writer. He was a kind man and an assiduous nourisher of talent. Rousseau owed a good deal to him. Through him he met the German literary critic and diplomat Friedrich Melchior Grimm, who was well established in society; and Grimm took him to the famous radical salon of Baron d’Holbach, known as ‘le Maître d’Hôtel de la philosophie’.

The power of the French intellectuals was just beginning and was to increase steadily in the second half of the century. But in the 1740s and 1750s their position as critics of society was still precarious. The State, when it felt itself threatened, was still liable to turn on them with sudden ferocity. Rousseau later loudly complained of the persecution he suffered, but in fact he had less to put up with than most of his contemporaries. Voltaire was publicly caned by the servants of an aristocrat he had offended, and served nearly a year in the Bastille. Those who sold forbidden books might get ten years in the galleys. In July 1749 Diderot was arrested and put in solitary confinement in the Vincennes fortress for publishing a book defending atheism. He was there three months. Rousseau visited him there, and while walking on the road to Vincennes he saw in the paper a notice from the Dijon Academy of Letters inviting entries for an essay competition on the theme ‘Whether the rebirth of the sciences and the arts has contributed to the improvement of morals’.

This episode, which occurred in 1750, was the turning point in Rousseau’s life. He saw in a flash of inspiration what he must do. Other entrants would naturally plead the cause of the arts and sciences. He would argue the superiority of nature. Suddenly, as he says in his Confessions, he conceived an overwhelming enthusiasm for ‘truth, liberty and virtue’. He says he declared to himself: ‘Virtue, truth! I will cry increasingly, truth, virtue!’ He added that his waistcoat was ‘soaked with tears I had shed without noticing it’. The soaking tears may well be true: tears came easily to him. What is certain is that Rousseau decided there and then to write the essay on lines which became the essence of his creed, won the prize by this paradoxical approach, and became famous almost overnight. Here was a case of a man of thirty-nine, hitherto unsuccessful and embittered, longing for notice and fame, at last hitting the right note. The essay is feeble and today almost unreadable. As always, when one looks back on such a literary event, it seems inexplicable that so paltry a work could have produced such an explosion of celebrity; indeed the famous critic Jules Lemaître called this instant apotheosis of Rousseau ‘one of the strongest proofs ever provided of human stupidity’.¹⁰

Publication of the Discours on the arts and sciences did not make Rousseau rich, for though it circulated widely, and evoked nearly three hundred printed replies, the number of copies actually sold was small and it was the booksellers who made money from such works.¹¹ On the other hand it gave him the run of many aristocratic houses and estates, which were open to fashionable intellectuals. Rousseau could, and sometimes did, support himself by music-copying (he had a beautiful writing-hand) but after 1750 he was always in a position to live off the hospitality of the aristocracy, except (as often happened) when he chose to stage ferocious quarrels with those who dispensed it. For occupation, he became a professional writer. He was always fertile in ideas and, when he got down to it, wrote easily and well. But the impact of his books, at any rate in his own lifetime and for long after, varied greatly.¹² His Social Contract, generally supposed to encapsulate his mature political philosophy, which he began in 1752 and finally published ten years later, was scarcely read at all in his lifetime and had only been reprinted once by 1791. Examination of five hundred contemporary libraries showed that only one possessed a copy. The scholar Joan Macdonald, who looked at 1114 political pamphlets published in 1789–91, found only twelve references to it.¹³ As she observed: ‘It is necessary to distinguish between the cult of Rousseau and the influence of his political thought.’ The cult, which began with the prize essay but continued to grow in force, centred around two books. The first was his novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, subtitled Letters of Two Lovers and modelled on Richardson’s Clarissa. The story of the pursuit, seduction, repentance and punishment of a young woman, it is written with extraordinary skill to appeal both to the prurient interest of readers, especially women–and especially the burgeoning market of middle-class women–and to their sense of morality. The material is often very outspoken for the time, but the final message is highly proper. The Archbishop of Paris accused it of ‘insinuating the poison of lust while seeming to proscribe it’, but this merely served to increase it...