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Though a journalist himself, Paul Johnson is famously hostile to
members of the press. Reporters, he recently wrote, ''tend to be
ugly, stunted -- or, if tall, uncouth -- poor, because they spend their
money on drink or in the betting shop, with bedraggled wives and
unwelcoming homes.'' It is with some trepidation, then, that one puts
one's finger to the bell of the Georgian town house, in the London
neighborhood of Bayswater, where Johnson lives and works.
But on a sunny January afternoon when I am invited for tea, Johnson,
who is 69 and whose once-fiery red hair has faded to the color of ginger
ale, receives me warmly. Dressed in a double-breasted blue blazer, dark
shirt and red tie, he makes apologies for the absence of Marigold, his
wife of 40 years, and proposes a tour of his library and art collection. His
home, he mentions, is one of a row that went up in the 1840's and is
worth $1.6 million. In the backyard is a high-ceilinged studio he had built
for himself. An assiduous watercolorist, Johnson allows no one to disturb
him while he is making pictures there. As a collector, his interest runs only
up to the pre-Raphaelites, of whose work he has several fine examples.
When he was an impoverished left-winger in the 1950's, he recalls, it was
possible to pick up sketches by Burne-Jones and Rossetti for the
equivalent of a few dollars. Now that he is the best-selling author of vast
historical surveys written from a conservative perspective, works that
include ''Modern Times,'' ''A History of the Jews,'' ''A History of
Christianity'' and ''The Birth of the Modern,'' he can't touch them.
Johnson eventually leads the way into a small study, a closet really, where
he produced these books, along with his new epic, the 1,100-page ''A
History of the American People,'' which was released in the United
States two weeks ago and is also expected to become a best seller. A
lifelong admirer of America, Johnson worried that the country's past was
no longer being told as a heroic story. Recasting it in triumphal terms, he
modestly proposed to his publisher, would be ''a small contribution to a
better and more secure future for our planet.''
The Columbus-to-Newt narrative is a remarkable act of virtuosity, if
nothing else. As with Johnson's other surveys, one can only marvel at his
synthesizing powers in taking so many strands of information and weaving
them into a coherent, engaging story line -- and one that cannot be called
familiar. Even more than his previous works, Johnson's new book is a
thumb in the eye of received opinion. A great-man saga, which dismisses
alternative schools of history as worthless, it chooses as its unlikely
20th-century Presidential heroes Calvin Coolidge, Richard Nixon and
Ronald Reagan while casting Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F.
Kennedy as scoundrels. Filled with eccentric cultural judgments, it scoffs
at Frank Lloyd Wright while describing Andrew Wyeth as the greatest
postwar painter and William Randolph Hearst's castle in San Simeon,
Calif., as ''arguably the finest building in North America.'' Further,
Johnson contends that there were no robber barons during the Gilded
Age and that Watergate and the Iran-contra investigations were little
more than re-enactments of the Salem witch trials.
Published in England in November, ''A History of the American People''
drew mostly hostile reviews. In The London Sunday Telegraph,
Raymond Seitz, the United States Ambassador to Britain appointed by
George Bush, described it as ''history. . .very nearly dissolved into a
diatribe.'' In The Guardian, the American journalist Robert Sam Anson
called it ''the most malignly error-ridden study of the American people to
appear since the Politburo went out of business.''
Johnson's book can be expected to draw equally caustic comments from
academics and liberals in America. ''What bothers me is that he feels he
can blithely ignore the work of a whole generation of people who have
helped to rethink critical aspects of American history,'' says Eric Foner,
the distinguished scholar of 19th-century American history who
skewered ''American People'' in The London Review of Books.
One expects the fomenter of all this controversy to be spoiling for a fight.
But chatting over tea in his sitting room, Johnson proves difficult to
provoke. Asked about the scores of errors in the English edition of his
book -- Johnson wrote, among other things, that Thomas Edison
invented the telephone and that California was governed for years by
''Pete'' Brown -- Johnson professes no concern. ''The trouble with my
kind of history is that it's very dense, it's full of facts,'' he says. ''You get a
few of those wrong, but then you clear them up gradually. After a few
impressions, it gets completely clean.'' In other words, a first edition is
merely what in the software business is called a beta version: a test
product to be debugged with the unpaid assistance of reviewers and
readers.
Challenged elsewhere, Johnson enters similar pleas of no contest. On his
view of F.D.R. as a malicious incompetent, he concedes that ''you can
make a case for Roosevelt.'' Johnson notes that he recently debated the
point with his friend Newt Gingrich. ''We had a tete-a-tete dinner last
month,'' Johnson says. ''He said, 'I have to put you right about
Roosevelt.''' Questioned about the view expressed in his book that
America is going to hell in a handbasket of political correctness and
''deconstruction,'' he takes it all back with a sweep of his hand. ''In my
opinion, the whole political-correctness thing has been exaggerated,
probably by the right, and I think it's on the retreat now.''
It struck me as somewhat unfair of Johnson to have written so many
contentious and even careless things and not stand by them. But after a
few hours with him, it is hard to avoid the impression that he is a
misunderstood man, at least in America. Johnson is much less a bitter
ultraconservative than a professional provocateur, a controversialist.
Creating outrages, he has learned, can be a good business.
Pausing over one of his father's landscapes hanging in the drawing room,
Johnson speaks of his regrets at not having become a painter. His father,
the headmaster of an art school in the north of England, dissuaded him.
''He said to me round about 1935: 'Paul, you're quite talented, but when
you grow up don't become a painter. Because I can tell you this: Frauds
like Picasso are going to rule the roost for the next 50 years.''' Paul was
only 13 when his father died suddenly, and he honored the request,
painting only as an amateur and later becoming a scourge of modern art.
(His most recent collection of columns from The London Spectator is
titled ''To Hell With Picasso.'')
Reared a strict Catholic, Johnson received a Jesuit education and then
won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where his tutor was the
great British historian A.J.P. Taylor. ''He used to say to me, 'There's
absolutely no point in writing history if those books get stuck on the
shelves in university libraries,''' Johnson recalls. In fact, Johnson did not
intend to become a historian. Following military service in Gibraltar, he
went to Paris in the early 50's and began working for a French
newsmagazine. Writing about politics, he got to know Pierre
Mendes-France, the Socialist Prime Minister. Johnson now thought of
himself as a Socialist, but never a Marxist.
Though he considered it a privilege to sip wine in the same cafe as Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir, Johnson nonetheless admired the nationalist
DeGaulle, whom he says ''would become quite cross with me'' during
interviews. From Paris, Johnson began writing for the left-wing magazine
The New Statesman. Returning to England to write its editorials in 1955,
he befriended a number of Labor leaders, including Aneurin Bevan and
Harold Wilson. In 1965, he became The New Statesman's editor.
Some detected a subcutaneous conservatism even then. A Roman
Catholic by birth and a moralist by inclination, Johnson has long been
notorious for prodding his friends to convert. Some, like his New
Statesman colleague Alan Watkins, also detected a strain of snobbery. In
one column, Johnson criticized a politician as not truly a gentleman. In
another, he pointed out a family background in ''trade.'' When his break
with the left came, it was decisive. In 1977, he published his most famous
article, ''Farewell to the Labor Party,'' which argued that Labor's lack of
respect for individualism had put it on a path toward the horrors of the
gulag and Auschwitz. ''Dear old Paul,'' the English poet and journalist
James Fenton wrote in a response the following week, ''at last he has
come to terms with his real nature.''
Johnson's break was occasioned mainly by his fears about the rising
power of Britain's unions. Soon after, he helped draft legislation to
diminish union power. ''I attached myself to Margaret Thatcher, who had
just become leader of the Conservative Party, and she was determined to
carry through trade union reform,'' he recalls. ''I advised her with that,
and we solved the trade union problem in this country pretty well.''
In a blurring of roles that has characterized his career, Johnson became
Thatcher's friend, adviser and chief cheerleader in the press. ''That old
girl,'' as he affectionately calls her now, was ''very ignorant in many ways''
when she was first elected. He took it as his job to teach her something
about history. ''I used to say to her, 'Margaret, that's just not so -- it
didn't happen like that.' She'd get things wrong. But she had courage, and
tremendous willpower.
''By the time she left office, she knew everything.''
It was thanks to the Thatcher connection that Johnson began to develop
an American following. He spent 1980 in Washington at the American
Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank; there he made many
friends on the American right, including Jeane J. Kirkpatrick and Michael
Novak. ''I met Reagan and I thought, He's not only going to win the
Republican nomination, but he's going to win handsomely the election,''
Johnson remembers. ''So I wrote to Margaret Thatcher and I said, 'You
make your number with this chap Reagan, because he's going to be very
important.'''
The book that made him popular in America and a hero to conservatives
was ''Modern Times,'' a political history of the 20th century published in
1983. ''American conservatives revere him largely because of 'Modern
Times,''' says Johnson's friend Norman Podhoretz, one of the founders of
neoconservatism. ''Relativism is the great disease of modernity to most
conservatives. This is the book that makes the profoundest and most
wide-ranging case for that idea. It vindicates by evidence what most
conservatives feel by instinct.'' It remains in print, having sold more than
200,000 copies.
Similarly popular is ''Intellectuals,'' published in 1988. In a series of
chapter-length biographical sketches, Johnson culls the most salacious
bits in an attempt to show that believers in social change are invariably
nasty people. Rousseau, Johnson writes, ''liked to be spanked on his
bare bottom.'' Marx seldom bathed and ''took very little exercise, ate
highly spiced food, often in large quantities, smoked heavily, drank a lot.''
Johnson's intellectuals, then, are men on the left who behaved badly. The
definition ties the author up in knots. Edmund Wilson, according to
Johnson, was an intellectual when he sympathized with the Soviet Union,
''a man of letters'' when he became an anti-Communist, but an intellectual
again when he struck his wife and failed to pay his taxes.
''Intellectuals'' also raises the question of why Johnson is not an
intellectual himself. He was a Socialist for many years and has been
known to behave badly. Johnson also shares another trait of the
intelligentsia: a tendency to be dazzled by fame and power. His political
views evanesce when he begins to drop the names of the many statesmen
and celebrities he has known and, as he invariably describes it,
''advised.'' Johnson boasts of smoking cigars with Fidel Castro as easily
as he does about the tea party Chile's General Pinochet gave him.
Johnson saw himself as a close confidant of the Princess of Wales. ''I
was very fond of Princess Diana,'' he says. ''She used to have me over to
lunch to ask my advice. I'd give her good advice, and she'd say: 'I
entirely agree. Paul, you're so right.' Then she'd go and do the opposite.''
What was his advice? ''Don't commit adultery,'' Johnson says. ''That was
my chief advice.''
Over the desk in his study is a Washington-style ''me wall.'' Johnson
points out Johnson with Thatcher, Johnson with Reagan, Johnson with
the Pope. There are also framed letters. Johnson begins reading one from
the philosopher Karl Popper: ''I read your book 'Modern Times.' I
cannot understand how a limited human person could write it.'' Then he
reads a very recent one from Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. ''I help him
with his speeches, you see,'' Johnson says. '''Dear Paul, You're quite
simply one of the most remarkable people in our country.'''
In English terms, Johnson is less a snob, looking down his nose at his
social inferiors, than a ''nob,'' eager to insinuate himself with his social
betters. This is the only way to make sense of his affection for politicians
like Blair -- politicians who do not share his politics.
Conversely, Johnson can be scathing about those who fail to pay
attention to him, even if they're conservatives. John Major is one Prime
Minister who made this mistake. Of another leading Tory politician who
hasn't sought him out, Johnson passes on the view that he is ''queer.'' His
American opinions seem likewise to have been molded by the perception
of his own influence or propinquity. He has a surprising soft spot for
L.B.J. (''I remember going to see him. He was almost a great President.'')
He has no sympathy for J.F.K., Jimmy Carter, Bob Dole or Bill Clinton
-- men he has never known. Nixon, on the other hand, was among
America's greatest Presidents. ''He'd ask my advice,'' Johnson says. ''He
told me once: 'When I read your book ''Modern Times,'' for the first time
since the catastrophe occurred''' -- Watergate -- '''I've begun to recover
my self-confidence. You put it in perspective. I felt, Oh, well, maybe I
won't go down in history as a scoundrel.'''
In Britain, Johnson's guileless name-dropping, his rages about the
''Church of Sodomy,'' as he calls the Church of England, and a penchant
for self-contradiction have made him a running joke in the press. In the
satirical magazine Private Eye, he is referred to as ''Loonybins.''
Everyone in London seems to have a Johnson horror story, many of them
relating to what one of the English papers refers to as his ''long and barely
secret struggle not to succumb to the bottle.'' On one occasion, a
memorial service for his friend Kingsley Amis, Johnson became so
apoplectic at a eulogy given by the leftish journalist Christopher Hitchens
that he had to be escorted out. Johnson is said by some to have his
temper and his drinking under control these days. His wife, Marigold,
recently referred to him as ''far less barmy than he used to be.''
Part of the reason Johnson's writing is not taken seriously in Britain is that
there is so much of it. In the country that invented the term ''hack,''
Johnson's prolificacy is simply astounding. While turning out 1,000-page
books every couple of years, he produces a weekly column for The
Spectator and regular commentaries for The Daily Mail. On a good day
he writes 6,000 words. ''I don't know how many books I've published,''
he says. ''I think it's 34. It may be 35.''
In the United States, and particularly in Washington, where he will
appear later this month at the Smithsonian with Gingrich, Johnson has a
far statelier reputation. American conservatives know him only as a
high-toned historian and intimate of Thatcher's, not as a gassy columnist
horrified by the Spice Girls.
So seriously are his pronouncements taken over here by the right that
two scholars at the Manhattan Institute even assembled a book of
Johnson aphorisms, ''The Quotable Paul Johnson.'' Among Republicans,
his name confers instantaneous gravity and class. Whenever Vice
President Dan Quayle needed to name a book he had read, he cited
''Modern Times.'' (Pressed once about its contents, Quayle described it
as ''a very good historical book about history.'')
Johnson is a writer with a genuine gift. The ability to transform vast tracts
of history into engrossing narrative insures that he will have an audience
for some years. What comes as a surprise is how lightly Johnson holds
most of the views he expresses so fiercely in his writing. Pressed about
the circularity at the heart of ''Intellectuals,'' that any writer becomes an
intellectual when he is up to something Johnson finds nasty, he admits that
it was a ''rather negative book,'' for which he is sorry. He plans to
apologize with two more positive sequels, one to be called ''Creators,''
another to be called ''Leaders.'' ''We can sell it as a boxed set!'' he nearly
shouts.
The suspicion lingers that in the many arguments in which he embroils
himself, Johnson could as easily be taking the opposite side. ''I enjoy a
good row,'' he says. ''Marigold's always saying to me: 'Please, Paul, have
you not got enough enemies already? Will you take a vow not to get into
any more rows?' And to write nice pieces and respect data.''
Johnson chortles. Then, after a pause, he repositions his chair and adds:
''Of course, it would be wrong to say I enjoy having rows, because that
would be un-Christian. If people attack me, then I respond, or if they do
very wicked things. Then they must be brought to book.''
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