Books and Arts

Robert Kaplan’s new book, The Good American, takes as its epigraph V.S. Naipaul’s observation that ‘Pessimism... can drive men on to do wonders.’ It’s tempting to remark that this dry aphorism is as true about Kaplan’s life and work as it is of his subject, the humanitarian Robert Gersony. But in both cases this would be, if not exactly wrong, then incomplete. Robert Gersony is a man who indeed did wonders. The son of Holocaust survivors, he dropped out of high school, earned a Bronze Star in Vietnam and then, Kaplan writes, ‘spent 40 years interviewing... over 8,000 refugees, displaced persons, and humanitarian workers in virtually every war and disaster zone on earth’.

Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the Eliots ‘ate off solid silver plate, even shepherd’s pie’. In 1968, Freud was having an affair with Perry’s wife Jacquetta. According to her, it was an addiction: ‘Completely hooked, a dreadful drug.’ After two turbulent years, Jacquetta decided to have a baby by Lucian, ideally to be born on his birthday. Her husband agreed to bring up the child as his own, provided the matter was not mentioned again. The laissez aller attitude is partly accounted for (though not by William Feaver) by the 1960s, and the way the young aristocracy embraced the hippy-trippy counterculture. Jacquetta mentions smoking an opium spliff in Paris with Freud.

Kids who read Kurt Vonnegut in high school are often the kind of people who have trouble being earnest about anything. These arch-ironist teens sneer at the narrow-mindedness of their families and hometowns and place basketball pep rallies on the same continuum of fascist conformity as the Iraq War. They aren’t what you’d call ‘joiners.’ I should know. My own teenage reading habits tended toward edgy counterculture (including plenty of Vonnegut), and I half admired the kids at my white-bread Presbyterian high school who smoked cigarettes and experimented with Buddhism. Only my ingrained sense of Lutheran guilt and my distaste for excessive cynicism prevented me from truly becoming one of them.

‘Well, that’s you shafted,’ said one friend kindly at the start of the worldwide lockdown. ‘Not a good time to be a travel writer.’ Yes and no. Obviously there’s not much actual travel possible at the moment. But the ratio in ‘travel writing’ between ‘travel’ and ‘writing’ has always been grossly disproportionate — too little time spent traveling and far too much time having to write about it when you get back. In my case, I only did just get back. I was writing a piece about the sunny beaches and boho resorts of northern Uruguay — one of those gigs which leads to envy and resentment, particularly in March — when they introduced the sudden guillotine on air travel.

The death of Joseph Conrad made Graham Greene feel, at 19, sitting on a beach in Yorkshire, ‘as if there was a kind of blank in the whole of contemporary literature’. Greene’s own death in 1991, aged 87, had a similar effect on many younger writers, myself included. For John Le Carré, his most obvious successor, Greene had ‘carried the torch of English literature, almost alone’. His cool fugitive presence, in Martin Amis’s phrase, had been there all our reading lives. In an age of diminishing faith, he had used Catholic parables in a way that lent them a power beyond their Biblical origins, mining the Gospels rather as Le Carré has mined the Cold War.

In a plea for vocational education, Sen. Marco Rubio famously remarked that we could use ‘more welders and less philosophers’. Doesn’t everyone know that ‘skills pay the bills’? If things weren’t bad enough, the rise of deconstruction and critical theory has created a generation of humanities scholars who themselves see little value in the works they study, insisting that famous art and literature emerged from racist and sexist power structures. What sensible young person would borrow $100,000 to be educated in these pointless disciplines? Eric Adler, a classicist at the University of Maryland, has the answer: anyone who wants to understand his own humanity. Adler’s invaluable survey not only defends the humanities: it even lays out how their allies have fallen short.

Our turkeys were stuffed and now we are too. Reclining helplessly in the recovery position, our thoughts turn to feasts future. What better way to show your friends and family that you love them, and also that you have impeccable taste, than sending them a book? In The Spectator’s stocking-stuffing December issue our staff, writers and friends make their seasonal suggestions for Books of the Year: stack upon stack of the most riotous reads, bibliographical beauties and pandemical page-turners. P.J. O’Rourke The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Volume I, by Gibbon, because in this year of scourge and collapsing polity it seemed apposite. And only Volume I, due to reader fatigue after 582 pages and the shift in Volume II to the history of Byzantium.

In 2015, after a 10-year hiatus that followed his debut, the novelist Ryan Gattis published a masterpiece. All Involved is a compulsive, symphonic novel set during the Los Angeles riots of 1992, telling the stories of gang members, a firefighter, a nurse and a graffiti artist, among others, as they try to navigate six notorious, brutal days in LA. This month, Gattis returns to this milieu with The System. Much of the novel is set in troubled, entrepreneurial Lynwood, South Central Los Angeles, where Gattis has spent many hundreds of hours on painstaking research.

In 1919, an obscure political agitator called Benito Mussolini assembled a ragbag of Blackshirt diehards in the Lombard capital of Milan and launched the movement that was to become, two years later, the National Fascist party. The party took its name from the classical Roman symbol of authority — an ax bound in rods, or fasces. Once in power, Mussolini introduced the stiff armed Roman salute after the handshake was deemed fey and unhygienic. At times he wore a richly tasseled fez and thrust out his chin pugnaciously for the cameras. For all his posturing and demagoguery, Mussolini was widely admired in pre-war Britain, where Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail routinely carried flattering portraits of him.