This is the first of historian Paul Johnson’s trilogy of books on Intellectuals, Creators, and Heroes. Looking at the names in the contents, it seems obvious that Johnson’s idea of “Intellectuals” in his book is different from the commonly accepted definition, which Cambridge Dictionary defines as “a very educated person who is interested in complicated ideas and enjoys studying and careful thinking”. I looked in vain for his definition in “Intellectuals”. Then, on p.1 of the second of his trilogy, “Creators”, there appears the sentence “I defined an intellectual as someone who thinks ideas are more important than people.”
According to the author, with the decline of clerical power in the eighteenth century, there arose in the last two hundred years a class of secular intellectual who assert that they could diagnose the ills of society and fundamental habits of human beings and cure them with their own unaided intellects and transform them for the better. They were not servants and interpreters of gods but substitutes. The purpose of the book is “an examination of the moral and judgmental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give such advice to humanity”. As one can guess, all those examined by Johnson were deficient in such credentials.
The first to be examined was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, born in Geneva and lived in Switzerland, France, and Britain. His writings on political philosophy, economic theory and education had a great influence on the Age of Enlightenment throughout Europe. Writers who claimed to be greatly influenced by Rousseau form an impressive list of Who’s Who. They included Goethe and Schiller in Germany, Tolstoy and Pushkin in Russia, Byron, Shelley and Keats in England, and John Dewey in America. Unfortunately, the personal behavior presented by Johnson showed Rousseau to be a despicable human being. He was mean and cruel to women, friends, and to folks who helped him. He even abandoned his own children. He was not trueful in his biography “Confessions”. Johnson was led to ask: “Rousseau’s reputation during his lifetime, and his influence after his death, raise disturbing questions about human gullibility, and indeed about the human propensity to reject evidence it does not wish to admit.”
Rousseau was the hero of the English poet Shelley. It turned out that as a person, Shelley was as despicable as Rousseau. Another English poet, Byron, though not selected on the list of Intellectuals, was mentioned in the chapter on Shelley. The reference to Byron was also far from flattery.
Two famous names Ernest Hemingway and Bertrand Russell filled two chapters of the book. Much of these pages dealt with their sordid relations with women. Hemingway hated his mother. He had several wives, all treated badly by him. Like Rosseau, he invented stories about himself. He failed on all three of the codes he created: honor, truth, loyalty. In his later years, he became aware of his inability to recapture his genius at writing. This led to accelerated circles of depression and drink. He ended his life by suicide, blowing his skull with a pistol. He was, in Johnson’s opinion, a man killed by his art.
There is not much to learn about Bertrand Russell’s philosophy in the book. Instead, there are page after page of how he mistreated his wives and his mistresses. It is not easy to keep track of how many mistresses he had. One gets tired of reading about them after a while.
Tales of romance continue in the chapter on Jean-Paul Sartre, French Playwright and a key figure in the philosophy of existentialism. Sartre’s main mistress was Simone de Beauvoir, author of “The Second Sex” and one of the early feminist activists. Sartre and Simone agreed that their relationship should follow the policy of transparency. Each was free to have other partners, called peripherals, and to let the other know about them. On at least one instance, such a policy led to tragedy. Her great peripheral, the American novelist Nelson Algren, in an interview he gave when he was seventy-two years old, revealed his fury at her disclosures, which included his name and letters appearing in her autobiography. He was so upset that he had a massive heart attack after the interviewer had left and died that night.
Other negative comments are prevalent in the Chapter on Sartre. He was described as “tried to make history from his armchair” and “a man whose mother has to pay his income tax” by Albert Camus. The film director John Huston portrayed Sartre in his autobiography as “a little barrel of a man and as ugly as a human being can be. There was no such thing as a conversation with him. He talked incessantly.” Among the comments by Paul Johnson are: “Sartre always preferred to write nonsense rather than write nothing”; “He sometimes talked when no one was listening”. “Sartre failed to achieve any kind of coherence and consistency in his views of public policy. No body of doctrine survived him.”
Tolstoy was introduced as a person who felt that he had “immeasurable grandeur” in his own soul and “retained the belief he was born to rule, in one way or another, expecting his wishes to be obeyed instantly”. A detailed account was given of the tragic relationship between Tolstoy and his wife Sonya. It is a very negative portrait of Tolstoy. According to the author, a main source is the biography by Ernest J. Simmon. I happen to have read Simmon’s book a long time ago, and the impression I got was much less negative. Indeed, my most vivid memory was the story of the green stick. Legend has it that the secret of universal happiness had been recorded in the green stick which was buried at the edge of a ravine in Yasnaya Polyana, the native estate of the Tolstoy family. Tolstoy began searching for it when he was young. He was still in search of it when he left home at the age of 82, dying alone at a train station. This moving story of the green stick was not mentioned in Johnson’s account.
Other “Intellectuals” chosen by Johnson included Henrik Ibsen, Karl Marx, and several others whom I have not heard of before: Bertolt Brecht (German playwright and poet), Edmund Wilson (American writer), Victor Gollancz (British publisher and humanitarian) and Lillian Hellman (American writer). Their “moral and judgmental credentials”, or lack of them, together with a chapter entitled “The Flight of Reason”, in which many more are briefly introduced, including George Orwell, Norman Mailer, Noam Chomsky, constitute the remainder of this 342 page book.
There is no one from Asia. Lu Zun, a Chinese writer who had a significant influence on Chinese youths who led the May 4 movement in 1919, certainly fit the type of intellectual Johnson was writing about. Perhaps Johnson had not heard of him. This is not surprising. For someone schooled in the West, it is only to be expected that he/she is not as knowledgeable with Asian history as with European and American history.
In conclusion, if you hope to learn a lot about the thoughts/writings/doctrines of the individuals profiled in this book, you will be disappointed. The aim of the book is to examine the moral and judgmental credentials of certain secular intellectuals who claimed they are the best qualified to teach humanity how to behave. From this perspective, shedding light on their personal behavior is more relevant than explaining their intellectual accomplishments. The reader has to decide whether the author has accomplished this mission fairly.
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Top reviews from other countries
Gerard
Intellectuals have feet of heavy clay
Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on November 3, 2020J. Wayne Eyre
Excellent anti-commentaries on overly-vaunted intellectuals
Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 12, 2014
