26 Books

Now that the United States has a president who has a respect for and understanding of the republic’s “founding documents”, my interest in the early years of the country is at an all time high. Here, Joseph J. Ellis gives us six vignettes from the the lives of seven of the US’s most prominent early politicians.

Founding Brothers

Joseph J. Ellis
Vintage Books USA 2002, Paperback, 304 pages, £9.95

Having passed my fortieth birthday, I’m fully entitled to get my grouchy on, and nothing is likely to make that happen than the facile notion that history needs to be narrated as though it were a drama sketched out in advance. Ellis takes this approach for his opening chapter, which concerns the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr that resulted in the former’s death and the latter’s disgrace.

I’m not naive – at least not about this – I know that this is what publishers think readers want, but it’s painful to have to be told a familiar story as though it were a thriller, and this approach does a disservice to Ellis’s frequently telling insights. The same plague affects his telling of the Jefferson/Adams friendship, feud and reconciliation, with its improbable and all-American ending. It’s the written equivalent of TV documentaries that dramatise events in case our imaginations are too sluggish to be able to grasp the nature of the events.

The rest of the book is much better, in particular the chapter in which Ellis considers the long term impact of Washington’s Farewell Address. Similarly interesting is his discussion of the political manoeuvring around the selection of the location for the nation’s capital. As with so many issues of the time, the result was a compromise that smoothed over differences on the slavery issue that would lead directly to the Civil War. Despite his other great accomplishments, Jefferson comes out of this episode badly, as he does whenever his role vis-a-vis slavery, and even more especially when his double-dealing as John Adams’s vice-president come up.

It’s a short book, and it can’t, doesn’t seek to, match the depth of investigation that a longer book could achieve. Despite its sometimes clumsy dramatisation of events, it contains many fascinating details and much useful analysis.

Somewhere in the recesses of my brain there is a memory of reading that only Jesus Christ and Richard Wagner can compete with Napoleon for the amount written about them. Both Wagner and Napoleon shared a relentless myth-making about their own lives with a good portion of an eye on the judgement of history, to the extent that there’s a question as to whether either was able to act without considering posterity first. As a result, both are repugnantly egotistical. But, whereas Wagner’s reputation is saved from his own personality by the transcendent quality of the art he left behind, Napoleon has a much more questionable set of accomplishments to defend.

Napoleon

F.J. McLynn
Pimlico 1998, Paperback, 749 pages, £16.99

McLynn is a rather leaden writer, and it is hard to stay with him through 700 odd pages without lapsing into boredom. His style is extremely repetitive, especially when writing about people in Napoleon’s circle for whom he has an obvious enmity. Chief among these are Talleyrand, Murat and the Emperor’s sister, Pauline. McLynn has a habit of using the same pejorative adjective every time he mentions one of these personalities (for Talleyrand, for example, it is invariable ‘venal’, for Pauline, ‘nymphomaniac’).

Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera bookends his memoir on life growing up in Wolverhampton with a letter he’s battling to write to his protective, ultra-traditional Punjabi mother. We don’t know what this letter contains, beyond the fact that it’s going to break her heart and it’s got Sanghera swigging neat vodka while he tries to write it. Good start.

The Boy with the Topknot

Sathnam Sanghera
Penguin 2009, Paperback, 336 pages, £9.99

What starts out as a memoir of growing up as a beloved younger son in a Punjabi family and then building a media life with white London friends as an adult soon zig-zags into family investigation. This isn’t a neatly arced story: we stumble across new developments with no real notice. Far from being an all-knowing observer dropped hints by Sanghera’s narration in some kind of Christmas Carol guided travel through his life, we come across things at the same time as he does, making it a far more accurate depiction of how surprises happen in real life. Bang! Surprise one. Bang! Surprise two. We flit from time to time (all held together easily, you don’t lose track) but you feel engaged rather than distanced. No Joanna Trolloping here.

This is a horrifying book. It gets painfully close to the innermost machinations of the handful of politicians close to Stalin from his accession to undisputed power following Lenin’s death to his urine-soaked death more than a quarter of a century later. It is based on extensive research in the recently opened archives, and contains voluminous quotes from correspondence between Stalin and members of his entourage.

Stalin

Simon Sebag Montefiore
Phoenix 2004, Paperback, 852 pages, £9.99

For all those reasons, it’s a very welcome book. But, regrettably, it suffers from being massively overwritten. Far from being the sober, scholarly narrative that one has come to expect from modern British historians such as Richard J. Evans, Ian Kershaw, Richard Overy, Orlando Figes and Robert Service, it is written in a ghoulish prose that sets out to judge the protagonists at every turn. Make no mistake, these are historical figures who need to be judged, but such judgement should be considered not sound like it has come from the pen of an airport thriller writer.

Julian Barnes is a wonderfully elegant writer, and one never finds a sentence of his with even the slightest flaw in it. In Nothing to be Frightened of, he brings his precision of prose and of thought to bear on his own life, on art, on family, and, most especially, on death.

Nothing to be Frightened of

Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape Ltd 2008, Hardcover, 250 pages, £16.99

Barnes’s brother is a philosopher, while Barnes himself is a novelist. These are related but wholly different genres of thought and writing. Their exchanges on death and other matters that litter this book are a wonderful way to appreciate the difference. Where Barnes wants to find the poetry in everything, to shape the narrative of his life into a novelistic whole, his brother looks for patterns of logic, and for ways of classifying phenomena in terms of the philosophical canon.

What’s also a great pleasure is that the book itself has been beautifully made and bound, with actual sown binding and everything. This was also true of Barnes’s Arthur and George, but of so few other books published today. If Barnes can persuade his publishers (Jonathan Cape) to produce such lovely objects, why can’t other authors of similar stature?

This is a fascinating, discursive book full of reminiscences, aphorisms and asides. It feels like a random ramble through a writer’s brain, but in fact is a carefully controlled piece of work. It’s one of the most beautifully poised memoirs I’ve ever read.

Trotsky has always intrigued me. He was an intellectual, a superb writer, but also a brutal proponent of terror, an ideologue and propagandist. Robert Service has written a trilogy of biographies of the major figures of the Russian revolution, of which this is the final part. His biographies of Lenin and Stalin were good and included a wealth of new information from the now opened Soviet archives.

Trotsky

Robert Service
Macmillan 2009, Hardcover, 624 pages, £25.00

Trotsky’s reputation in the West relies in large part on his own highly partial accounts of the revolution and his colleagues and antagonists. Various lefties have kept his flame if not burning, then at least smouldering these last 60 years or so, but no Troskyist government has ever attained power. This distortion in our understanding of such a key figure needed correction, so Service’s book is very welcome indeed.

It’s well known that Trotsky was expelled from the USSR as an enemy of the people and eventually murdered on Stalin’s orders, and this famous death has clouded his biography in a haze of pro- and anti-Stalin internecine strife.

Service shows how Trotsky constantly amended his own legend to suit the political situation. Prior to the October revolution, Trotsky had been in almost complete disagreement with Lenin on several occasions and for at least some of the time between 1905 and 1917 considered himself closer to the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks. This would, under Stalin, become a death sentence.

Trotsky was a man unto himself even after decisively joining the Bolsheviks and taking his place in Sovnarkom (i.e. a senior member of the Soviet government). His most famous role was as head of the Red Army during the Civil War that immediately followed Russia’s separate peace with the Central Powers. The brutality of the Civil War is notorious, but Trotsky seems to have won the respect of his troops. One oddity is that Service almost completely omits discussion of the famine that swept the USSR during and after the Civil War.

After Lenin’s illness and death, Trotsky was repeatedly outmanoeuvred by his rivals, now unleashed from their personal loyalty to Lenin. Service speculates that the core reason for Trotsky’s defeat was that he did not ultimately want the supreme leadership badly enough, and was not prepared to make the compromises – both physical and political – that an effective campaign would have required.

He belabours the point that Trotsky underestimated Stalin, who he thought of as an intellectual nullity. Stalin was many things, but he was not stupid, and was a far more effective politician than Trotsky. It’s a myth that Stalin was immediately vindictive towards his enemies; in fact it took almost ten years from Lenin’s death before the terror started, by which time Trotsky had been exiled for several years. Before his power was cemented, Stalin was constantly compromising and playing adversaries off against each other; playing politics, in other words.

Service finds a memorable phrase to sum up Trotsky’s inability to compromise or use the language that would have made his line more palatable to his colleagues: “He lacked the talent to manage his talent”, which could easily stand as his epitaph.

Somewhat against my expectations, the story becomes less interesting once it turns to Trotsky’s exile. His support in the Soviet Union was gradually snuffed out by a combination of executions and politicking, and his influence became almost non existent. Indeed he became the original un-person. Having lived for a time in Turkey, he passed through France and ended up, famously, in Mexico.

Here there’s a more exciting tale to tell – an affair with Frieda Kahlo, assassination attempts, and so forth – but by this time Trotsky’s involvement with the Russian revolution had completely ceased and not even his acolytes believed in some kind of glorious comeback.

It’s difficult to see an alternative history of the Soviet Union under Trotsky’s leadership, but especially to see how it would not have been brutal. Of course it’s unlikely that its brutality would have matched the almost unbelievable proportions of the Stalinist terror, but Trotsky was, above all else, utterly ruthless, and was in full agreement with Lenin’s ideas on the use of state terror. But what use are speculations on alternative histories?

This is a decent biography of a fascinating subject, but it never quite fires into life. Service’s prose is solid if uninspired, and this is constantly brought to the reader’s attention when the author praises Trotsky’s own exuberant prose style. Service’s writing is plagued with tics, which become wearing very quickly. One of these is to refer to Trotsky’s opponents following Lenin’s death as the ‘ascendant party leadership’, which is a technical term used by historians in this field, but it quickly becomes annoying as it is repeated time after time.

Nevertheless, this is an important addition to the literature on the endlessly fascinating subject of the Russian revolution, and one of its most important proponents.

The File is Timothy Garton Ash’s attempt to understand how the Stasi worked, through examining the file that they kept on him. He goes back to the now unified Berlin to talk with the people who informed on him, as well as those who were exposed to Stasi interference in their lives thanks to their contact with him.

The File

Timothy Garton Ash
Atlantic Books 2009, Paperback, 256 pages, £9.99

While The File is a good read, it never reaches the level of insight of Anna Funder’s superb Stasiland. It’s a bit too self-regarding, and far too easy on our own security services, who Garton Ash always gives the benefit of the doubt.

I think it misses the mark because the Stasi’s offense against Garton Ash was comparatively piffling. They followed him – and he was a foreign journalist, after all – and got people to tell them what he was doing, which was not much. In the end he was banned from East Germany, and so the narrative is curiously incomplete: it ceases to be a personal account of East Germany well before the Wall fell. And, while there is personal betrayal here, it’s not on the scale that Funder uncovers.

Given that it’s now 20 years since the Wall came down, there’s an increased interest in matters East German, hence the retread for The File. But if you’re going to read up about what life under the Stasi was really like, choose Stasiland rather than this.

Captain Robert FitzRoy is one of those interesting, but marginal, figures in history that you might well have heard of but can’t put your finger on. Harry Thompson clearly hopes that he can change that by writing this, a fictionalised account of FitzRoy’s voyage on the Beagle (he was captain, Charles Darwin the ship’s naturalist) but I’m not sure he really does him any favours.

This Thing of Darkness

Harry Thompson
Headline Review 2005, Hardcover, 640 pages, £12.99

FitzRoy was clearly mentally ill and unprepared for the stress of being years away from home having been given impossible tasks and inadequate equipment. He was depressed, delusional and unstable. His enormous achievements in mapping, navigation and weather prediction are testament to his ability and itelligence, but not necessarily to his suitability to command.

Darwin is an important but somewhat marginal figure in this book. It’s FitzRoy’s story, and rather a tragic one. His multiple careers all end in failure, his circumstances diminishing with every new disappointment. Thompson puts the blame in lots of hands, rarely FitzRoy’s, and turns him into a victim as he does it.

His maps are scorned by the Admiralty, he is passed over for appointments, his political career is ruined by spite, his governorship of New Zealand wrecked by vested interests. Throughout, he is a liberal, conscientious, reforming good man, set upon by a wicked world. No doubt that was the case, but it’s laboured until I lost patience and started resenting him.

It might be the fault of the length of the book. At 750 pages it’s far too long and in desperate need of a good editor. The writing is fine, there’s just so much of it and it’s so clearly biased it becomes wearing. Of course a historical novel has no obligation to be objective, but surely he must have had a few faults beyond disagreeing with Darwin?

I’ll come out and say it straight away: Barack Obama’s election was the most exciting political event event I’ve ever witnessed. Here is a very intelligent black man who genuinely wants to do what’s best for the American people being made president after the eight years of corruption and idiocy from the Bush White House that has driven the world economy into disaster and sent thousands of people off to die in indefensible wars. Thank God.

Dreams from My Father

Obama Barack
Three Rivers Press (CA) 2004, Paperback, 480 pages, £14.95

There was little word of actual policy during his campaign so I read this book, some time ago no, to try to get an idea of what he’d done before. This is not the book to read if that’s what you’re looking for.

Written when Obama was still at Harvard, this is a memoir of a boy, confused about his background because he’s a different colour to his grandparents and his mother, who he lives with, trying to decide what to do with his life. He lives in Hawaii, Indonesia, Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, going from a young boy to a young man in the process. He’s influenced more by his grandparents and stepfather than his mother, who seems to be a fairly distant figure. He contrasts the culture in America and Indonesia, then again in Kenya when he goes to meet his birth father’s family, and tries to find his own place within each one.

For the most part it’s very well written. There’s a density to the text and a constant flow of exposition and explanation that carries you along as you read and feels as though there’s a great flow of information pouring into you. Imagine Jane Austen as a modern American man talking about race and you’ll get some idea of the style.

As I read, quite slowly in short bursts, Obama was spending his first months in power. He’d promised to close down Guantanamo Bay, we cheered, then there was the banking collapse and the car industry troubles, the focus on Afghanistan rather than Iraq. Things went a litle quiet for a while, there was a new dog, I began to wonder if he was going to get anything done. The news came that Guantanamo wasn’t going to close after all and Obama started to look like a bit of puffed-up optimism rather than an effective left-wing (for America, anyway) politician.

I felt naive for projecting my own hopes onto the text. A man who’d worked as a community organiser and decided to become a lawyer so he could make a contribution, rather than earn a lot of money, would surely be an entirely different kind of president, I’d thought, but here he is, backing down over one of the United States’ most glaring human rights abuses that he’d made one of his first-day priorities on gaining office.

Bugger it. Spin and rubbish. Tony Blair all over again.

I limped along through the final sections looking for something to be optimistic about, but this book is a mirror. It’ll tell you whatever you like about the man. Either he’s a socially-minded reformer or a cynical opportunist telling the Democrats what they want to know. I put it down feeling just that bit worse about the world.

Now, though, I’m cocking an ear again. Weak though the plan might be, there’s a universal health care plan slowly battling its way towards the statute books in Washington. He might not be as exciting as he first appeared, but if he can turn himself into Nye Bevan then he’s OK by me. I’m sure he’ll be very relieved to hear that.

John Adams is a fascinating figure, a genuine radical democrat, lawyer and polemicist who played a crucial role in the independence and early years of the United States. He was one of the delegates to the Continental Congress that produced the Declaration of Independence, and wrote the world’s oldest functioning constitution for Massachusetts. He eventually became the nation’s second President.

What emerges from David McCullough’s excellent biography is how sharply the original thirteen states were divided on a variety of issues, and none more than slavery. It’s amazing that it took more than fifty years for the civil war to erupt given the extent of disagreement on that issue.

“John Adams”

David McCullough
Simon & Schuster 2008, Paperback, 768 pages, £12.99

Adams and others believed that slavery was an absolute moral wrong and could not be defended on any grounds whatsoever. They believed that failing to address the issue in the constitution was a fatal error that would return to haunt the union. Adams’ more famous colleague Thomas Jefferson, often seen as a great and enlightened man, was himself the owner of many slaves, as did General George Washington. As President Obama reminded the world in his inauguration address, the President’s house and the Capitol itself were built by slaves. It’s impossible to think of Adams being other than delighted at Obama’s victory, although surely he would have been depressed at the amount of time it took to reach the stage where an African American could be considered worthy of the Presidency.

Adams began life as a provincial lawyer and made his name defending British soldiers who had opened fire on an angry mob in Boston in 1770. Adams was the only lawyer prepared to take their case and successfully defended six out of eight of them. His independence of mind, on display for the rest of his life, was perhaps never challenged more than on this occasion.

His career was one of astonishing breadth. He was sent to Europe as Congress’s representative and spent a significant amount of time in France, Holland and, eventually, England. He was responsible for negotiating a peace treaty with the former colonial power.

Adams was a controversial and radical figure even after the revolution and was somewhat surprisingly selected as Washington’s Vice President. Typically, Adams took his role as President of the Senate extremely seriously and was unable to prevent himself addressing frequent lengthy lectures to the chamber.

This was an era of a totally invasive and scurrilous press, and one of government feeling its way towards some idea of how the constitution would work in practice. It’s fascinating to read about how, even with a written constitution, and an enlightened one at that, the government was still subject to convention and the public’s expectation.

Despite being an unpopular Vice President (especially with the Congress), Adams succeeded Washington to become the second President of the United States. Somewhat controversially, he only served one term, and his Presidency was plagued by divisions and betrayals. Presidential elections were very different at this point from the three year nation-wide tour they have since become. It was all rather cosy and campaigning was in effect outlawed, although his opponents certainly did not respect this convention.

The most controversial element of his Presidency was the series of laws known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. From today’s vantage point these laws have a distinct resemblance to George W. Bush’s odious Patriot Act. McCullough is perhaps too lenient on Adams here and ascribes his acquiescence to his reluctance to contradict the Congress and his hostile cabinet.

The events surrounding his defeat in his re-election campaign caused him to sever all contact with Jefferson, who succeeded him, even though they had been on intimate terms for many years. He didn’t even attend Jefferson’s inauguration.

The last years of Adams’ life saw an eventual reconciliation with Jefferson – a relationship so well healed that Adams’ last words were ‘Thomas Jefferson survives’. In an astonishing, and one is tempted to say, all-American coincidence, Jefferson had in fact died only some hours earlier. To add further piquancy, they both died on the 4th July 1826, the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence that they had both played such a major role in creating.

Throughout the book, McCullough draws on the massive number of letters that Adams wrote during his long life. Every so often, the narrative becomes a bit bogged down in the letters and hefty quote follows hefty quote. However, the benefits of this approach far outweigh the negatives, as we are given a wonderful and intimate picture of Adams’ long marriage to his wife Abigail.

If the book has a fault it is that Adams is given the benefit of the doubt at every opportunity, even though as a politician he was fairly inept. It’s a nice irony that such a fierce defender of the people and their rights was unable to conduct policy in a way that was consistent with those rights; in that sense his defeat is reminiscent of Churchill’s post-war loss to Atlee. He was the right man to fight for independence, but not the right one to help preserve it.

His legacy is impressive, even if his Presidency is less so. His son, John Quincy Adams, an even more gifted intellectual than Adams, became the 6th President of the United States. His wisdom and learning reached many subsequent generations through his writings and the part he played in the creation of America’s founding documents, and his humanity and intellectual honesty are an inspiration to many today.

David McCollough’s biography is a well-written and fascinating read, and provides a detailed look at an uncommonly gifted, frustrating, likeable politician from another age.