Nirad Chaudhuri is the author of two of the greatest books to have come out of the Anglo-Indian encounter, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian and Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Together these memoirs tell three interlocking stories. First, how a brilliant, book-loving boy from rural Bengal, born in 1897, the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, was classically educated in English and Bengali among the Westernized Hindu elite of Calcutta. Second, how the world of this elite, the vigorous Bengali bhadralok, was destroyed by Ghandi’s xenophobic nationalism and by the British withdrawal from India, a catastrophe to which Chaudhuri, as a journalist and intimate of Indian politicians, was a pained and privileged eyewitness. (Chaudhuri dedicated the Autobiography “to the memory of the British Empire in India,” because—and the words have made him anathema to anti-colonialists everywhere—“all that was good and living within us was made, shaped, and quickened by . . . British rule.”) Third, how all of Western civilization, at high noon at the moment his birth, has in the course of his lifetime set like the sun, and how the personal experience of this sudden descent, and his lifelong literary protest against it, have made him “feel like a heretic being burnt at the stake, but without release from the torture by death.”

The Autobiography was published in 1951, when Chaudhuri was fifty-four; Thy Hand, Great Anarch! in 1987, when he was ninety. Now, at the phenomenal age of 101, Chaudhuri has published a kind of coda to these books, a prophetic and mordantly aphoristic essay on contemporary decadence. He has found no solace in old age: for him the flames have only grown higher, and the present become a ghastly pyre-lit foreground, “empty with nothingness in it.” The Night of Time has spread out against the sky, its chariot drawn by Three Horsemen of the New Apocalypse, individualism (i.e., unrestrained self-indulgence), nationalism (militant race-pride), and democracy (leveling egalitarianism and contempt for human greatness). Circe, in the form of an American pop diva, presides over all, subjugating the world mind with the wine of a degraded culture. The West, a used-up old man, his creative powers exhausted, approaches the end not “in his bed, full of years and honors,” but “in a brothel, suffering from delirium tremens,” begging for deliverance by the Fourth Horseman, death.

Chaudhuri’s examples of contemporary decadence—in India, England, and the United States; in government, religion, education, and manners—are vivid and apt.

Chaudhuri’s examples of contemporary decadence—in India, England, and the United States; in government, religion, education, and manners—are vivid and apt. His language and imagery are an improbably beautiful fusion of the Elizabethan Bible, the Gilbert Murray classics, and the evening news. His diction is precise, and when he speaks of “decadence” and “civilization” and other abstract nouns, he takes great pains to define his terms. The clarity, force, and poetry of Chaudhuri’s pessimism is powerful, more powerful even than that of Henry Adams. As with Adams’s Letter to American Teachers of History, the only literary work to which it can be compared, Chaudhuri’s polemic could easily be laughed off as mere pathetic fallacy—as an angry man’s projection of his own imminent demise, and the death of the world that made him, upon the universe. It could … but only by those who have accepted decadence as the normal condition of human life. Those who have not will find nothing to laugh at here. Neither will they find any comfort.

In 1939 Philip Hamburger, then twenty-five and fresh from the Columbia School of Journalism, joined the staff of The New Yorker. Harold Ross put him on The Talk of the Town, where, Hamburger writes, “he made it clear that, above all, he was looking for content laced with humor.” This Hamburger gave him—not only for Talk but also for Profiles, Notes & Comment, and a dozen other departments—and he gives it to the magazine still. Friends Talking in the Night is Hamburger’s own choice from his life’s work, ninety-four pieces spanning sixty years, from his very first months on the job (a sketch of Dr. Otto Bettmann, founder of the eponymous archive, “whose fastest- moving item [in ’39] is Umbrellas; he thinks Chamberlain is responsible for that”) all the way down to last summer (a visit with Al Hirschfeld, who’s still drawing at age ninety-five, and who “uses the word ‘retire’ the way some people pronounce ‘Richard Nixon’”).

Hamburger, who has always made his own assignments, has proven himself to be one of the magazine’s most versatile, inquisitive, and far-reaching reporters. When at home in Manhattan—which is not all that often—he writes about old mayors and delicatessen waiters, about dog shows and carrier pigeons and the labyrinthine package-delivery system inside the walls of Macy’s. When writing his series “Notes for a Gazetteer,” he looks hard at small-town America, from the copper mines of Butte, Montana, to the spas of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and, unlike those social critics who argue that the country is now an undifferentiated whole, he finds each place he visits more foreign than the last, “never the same realities or the same dreams or the same yesterdays or the same todays.” He seeks out the company of judges, and presidents, and writers. He loves art, music, and the theater, and he possesses what he calls “a deeply felt amateur appreciation” of these things, which is a modest way of saying that, though he isn’t a scholar and cannot read a score, he can write extremely well about his own experience of beauty.

He seeks out the company of judges, and presidents, and writers.

But lest anyone think that Hamburger concerns himself only with the smiling aspects of life, special mention must be made of perhaps his best work—his chilling reports from Europe and South America just after World War Two. He was in Rome on April 29, 1945, and saw Mussolini and some of the other Fascists “dangling by their heels from a rusty beam in front of a gas station” on the Piazza Loreto. He walked through the ruins of Hitler’s house at Berchtesgaden, “a grotesque and instructive heap of rubbish,” and made an unforgettable catalogue of the kitsch he found there. And in Buenos Aires, in 1948, he interviewed Juan Perón, who wore “a brown Palm Beach suit” and sucked on hard candy and spoke of how education in Argentina must be reformed. “This is not a matter of putting my own people into the universities,” Perón explained. “It is a matter of getting politics out of the universities.”

In a profile of Vartan Gregorian, Hamburger wrote that, “in a library, one thing leads to another, and each point of reference becomes an act of discovery, an extension of one’s own horizons.” This is true, and not only in a library but in life—that is, if one is as open to the joys of discovery as is Philip Hamburger. To read this big book of his, and to follow his mind as one thing leads to another, is to extend one’s own horizons. It is also, in these times dominated by exposé, muckraking, and sour, unconsidered opinion, to extend one’s ideas about what a fundamentally humane journalism—content laced with humor, the facts reported with compassion—can achieve in the hands of a master.

To the writer Cyril Connolly, his own flawed character was a limitless literary goldmine, a dark gift beyond measure. In Enemies of Promise (1938) and The Unquiet Grave (1945), his sui generis confessions-cum-self-lacerations, he wrote with wit and candor about his famous failings: snobbery, gluttony, nostalgia, cowardice, paralyzing perfectionism, and, above all, sloth. To Connolly the man, however, the selfsame character was an unmixed curse, and his clear-eyed knowledge of it the crux of his life. He loathed what he was, knew what he wanted to become, but lacked the will to change. He ached to deliver great books and perfect lyrics—the masterpieces that, since his boyhood days at Eton, he “knew” he had inside him—but he could not find “the obstruction which [was] blocking the flow from the well.” He published a bad novel, the stagnant Rock Pool (1936), and talked away countless others. The rest, as his present biographer notes, was ephemeral literary journalism, but journalism “so permeated by his personality and his own experience that its glittering shards, when pieced together, form an ever-evolving autobiography.” Connolly’s writing was, in the words of his friend V. S. Pritchett, the compulsive “exposure of a temperament.”

Since Connolly’s death in 1974, many have tried to trace the contours of this temperament, and to explain to a younger generation how a writer who wrote so little, and complained so loudly about his inability to do more, could still be called (by Gerald Brenan) “the most brilliant mind in contemporary English literature.” Many have also tried, with varying degrees of success, to evoke the living personality of this paradoxical man and the effect that his laughter and his melancholy, his generosity and his selfishness, his dazzling torrent of monologue and his frustrating trickle of prose, had on his contemporaries. Michael Shelden, in his brief and admirable Friends of Promise (1989), came closer than others in his vivid re-creation of the world of Horizon, the literary monthly which Connolly edited in the Forties and which many consider his most significant achievement. Now Jeremy Lewis has published the authorized life, a sort of standing figure to Shelden’s bust. It’s a splendid job, and a double rarity: a biography of a wit that is it- self witty, and a long book that one wishes were still longer.

A biography of a wit that is it- self witty, and a long book that one wishes were still longer.

Lewis, a former director of Chatto & Windus and a onetime editor of London Magazine, brings many happy talents to the writing of this life, among them a flair for literary portraiture: his quick, nuanced sketches, such as those of Connolly’s mentors Logan Pearsall Smith and Desmond MacCarthy, are remarkably deft. He also has a historian’s feel for the climate of ideas through which Connolly moved—the intellectual air he breathed at Eton and Oxford, in Spain and London, in editors’ dens and rich friends’ country houses—and the ability to show how it sometimes invigorated, sometimes blighted his prose. He is a sensible, sensitive critic of Connolly’s work, and he never lets his affection for the man get in the way of his judgment of the artist. Best of all, he is incapable of condescension, and instead shows his subject perfect empathy—a tough and loving humor and acceptance that never shades into strident censure or winking approval. Here at last is Connolly plain, in all his contradictions. He continues to hold our interest, and not only as one of the key figures of his literary generation, the wit who knew and helped and outraged almost everybody. Connolly, Lewis’s good book reminds us, was a unique writer, one whose merciless understanding of his all-too-human shortcomings illuminates certain dark corners of our own selves, places we dare not approach except in his engaging company.

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This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 17 Number 6, on page 77
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