Many of those featuring in this series wrote top class journalism, including Albert Camus, Noam Chomsky, Voltaire and George Orwell. None of them, however, are pre-eminently or exclusively associated with their journalism. There is one intellectual who is however. That of course is Christopher Hitchens – the non pareil journalist of our recent age, and perhaps the last of the just.
The purpose of this essay is not to deal with types of journalism or codes of ethics, or to deal with the complex relationship between editors and proprietors, and indeed now social media exerts control over journalism. Instead, I seek to identify which hacks, from Fleet Street or otherwise, have singularly, through the restrictions and obsession with news and sensation, stood out to become true Public Intellectuals.
There has never been a greater need for a mass circulation public intellectual. I open this debate by suggesting five choices, at least two of whom displayed superiority in this arena to Hitchens.
The Criteria
A Journalist-Public Intellectual must seek the truth, understand the nature of fact-gathering and vocationally support speech rights even at the outer limits. He or she must also form a bulwark against the degradation of language. In this respect the Promethean storm of social media opens the door to ever more unregulated and unfiltered opinions, often deliberately orchestrated by far right-wing or absurd woke viewpoints to enforce wrecking ball compliance and control.
It begs the question: compromised by corporate control how can a journalist in the mainstream press now become a Public Intellectual?
Recently I visited my friend Patrick Healy éminence grise of Irish Public Intellectualism in Amsterdam. He is a retired professor of architecture, painter, writer and a global authority on Karl Kraus. So let us get to the first of my five choices. The first greater than Hitchens and Swift greater than all.
- Karl Kraus
In my piece The Austrian Mind I omitted Kraus given the challenge of writing on him, as Jonathan Frantzen in effect suggested in his interpretation of certain of his texts in The Kraus Project (2013). How do you grapple with so protean or unclassifiable an intellect? He seems almost incomprehensible in the present age.
Kraus acted as editor from 1899-1936 of the leading Viennese magazine Die Fackel (The Torch) which he used as his own personal soapbox. He was the exclusive writer from 1911 onwards. People feared his intemperate pen. A satirist, polemicist, aphorist and playwright, writing in the Golden Age of literary Vienna, which ended very abruptly. All shortly emigrated and dead. The fate of Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth.
His targets, not unlike the later Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, was the mediocrity of the Austrian Bourgeoisie and above all their distortion and abuse of language, particularly his fellow journalists. He could often be seen for half an hour trying to work out the insertion of a comma in Café Mozart!
In his book on Kraus Frantzen primarily deals with an essay on the German national poet Heine, where with very effective pastiche Kraus crucifies Heine and by implication those like him, saying: ‘Heinrich Heine so loosened the corsets of the German language that today every little salesman can fondle her breasts.’
He was a scathing aphorist and two of my favourites are applicable to our own age. First, is the idea that ‘corruption is worse than prostitution. The latter might endanger the morals of an individual, the former invariably endangers the morals of the entire country.’ The second is also quite relevant: ‘Language is the mother of thought, not its handmaiden.’
Reading the entirety of Die Fackel is an experience not unlike an extended viewing of Peter Cooke’s four great impersonations of English archetypes, judge, football manager, naturalist and rock star for the Clive Anderson show shortly before his death. Peter Cook was also Lord Gnome, the proprietor of Private Eye. He employed Ian Hislop and was by indirection a journalist and public intellectual. In fact, his impersonations, his support of and informal and sometimes formal contributions to Private Eye make him an intrinsic if not central choice.
Krauss epic play The Last Days of Mankind (2015), which Patrick Healy has translated, is an attack on press barons, hacks facilitating, through mass orchestration, Populist bellicose hysteria, and the First World War. Its uneven tone demonstrates his evolution from aristocratic condescension to social democrat. The play is a mammoth fifteen hours long for voices or rather a voice best read by Kraus, or as a substitute Patrick, attacking stupidity in all directions.
Die Fackel also attacks psychoanalysis as a quack science; antisemitism, though his own antisemitism as a self-loathing Jew is also evident; corruption, not least the police chief of Vienna who he forced out of office; the pan-German Populist movement; laissez-faire economic policies; and numerous other subjects.
He dies at the very precipice of collapse, of natural causes, after a self-enforced interregnum when he suspended publication with the rise of Hitler, only for one last push of part of an extended essay The Third Walspurgers Night (1936). Its essential argument is that through their devotion to the pastime of palaver and tactics, the social democrats had facilitated Hitler’s rise and had lost all material gains. He despaired at their belief ‘they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.’ Consequently, the essay supports the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor Dollfuss, as anything other than Hitler was needed. Historic desperation.
The opening paragraph of the essay is devastating in its implications for today I interpose.
As to Hitler, [read Trump or any other contemporary ‘strongman’ leader] I have nothing to say. I am aware that as the upshot of extended reflection, of repeated efforts to grasp the phenomenon and the forces driving it, this falls far short of expectations. They were, after all, pitched higher than ever before at a polemicist who is popularly – but mistakenly – expected to take a stand; and who, when confronted by any evil that appeals to his temperament, has indeed been prepared to “stick his neck out”. But there are evils which not only make the neck cease to be a metaphor but may also prevent the associated, ….?
The rest of the essay deals with the propogandists and the facilitators primarily Goebbels [read Musk, The Daily Mail, and indeed other legacy media].
The best reading of Walpurgis Nacht as Patrick Healy suggests is that satire is as the Roman genre par excellence satura tota nostra est – and should point not only in the direction of rhetorical agility, but also use mockery, insult, indignation etc, fusing the voice of the moralist and the skill of a standup comic. Indeed, the word also a meaning of stew bringing all ingredients together.
- Jonathan Swift
The only equal of Kraus as a Journalist-Public Intellectual, and thus also greater than Hitchens in the pantheon is, in my view, Swift. Incontestably, the greatest satirical essay in the English language is A Modest Proposal ((1729). Kraus was in fact pleased to be compared to Swift on the basis that false modesty was the most arch kind of hypocrisy.
Swift’s essay argues, in light of a policy of Malthusian liquidation, that rather than allowing children starve to death a profit could be made that would contribute to the common weal. Apparently informed by an American friend, the author says that children make a very fine dish. A passage towards the end of the essay perfectly encapsulates much of the awfulness of that time, and our own:
I desire those politicians who dislike my overture, and may perhaps be so bold as to attempt an answer, that they will first ask the parents of these mortals, whether they would not at this day think it a great happiness to have been sold for food, at a year old in the manner I prescribe, and thereby have avoided such a perpetual scene of misfortunes as they have since gone through by the oppression of landlords, the impossibility of paying rent without money or trade, the want of common sustenance, with neither house nor clothes to cover them from the inclemencies of the weather, and the most inevitable prospect of entailing the like or greater miseries upon their breed for ever.
Swift wrote other great journalistic tracts such as The Tale of The Tub (1704) and in a golden age of satire his skills were venerated. His exact contemporary Alexander Pope, particularly in his epic poem The Rape of the Lock (1717) stirring up the upper classes, was more lyrical than trenchant. In fairness Pope’s wonderful Dunciad (1728-43) castigates stupidity in all its manifest forms and is dedicated to Swift. Indeed it was possibly partly written by him. It is also apposite to our time. Two quotes suffice.
How with less reading than makes felons scape, less human genius than God gives an ape
And out of context but an elaboration of the above.
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.
Consider also the final book of Gulliver’s Travels, where ‘Yahoos’ – a term that has entered the lexicon as a pejorative description of humans – describes lawyers and judges in the following unflattering terms:
Judges… are picked out from the most dextrous lawyers, who are grown old or lazy, and having been biased all their lives against truth or equity, are under such a fatal necessity of favoring fraud, perjury and oppression, that I have known several of them to refuse a large bribe from the side where justice lay, rather than injure the faculty by doing any thing unbecoming their nature in office.
Or
It is a maxim among these lawyers, that whatever hath been done before may legally be done again: and therefore they take special care to record all the decisions formerly made against common justice and the general reason of mankind. These, under the name of precedents, they produce as authorities, to justify the most iniquitous opinions; and the judges never fail of decreeing accordingly.
- H.L. Mencken
In Kraus’ own time only the legendary muckraking American journalist H.L. Mencken is comparable. He wrote a fantastic treatise on The American Language (1919 and revised) and was the bugbear of the American bourgeoisie of his time. In colourful terms Mencken referred to the religious right in his day as ‘gaping primates, anthropoid rabble’, and the ‘boobiesie’. Famously through the Baltimore Sun he briefed Clarence Darrow to defend the teacher accused of the criminal offence of teaching Darwinism in the Scopes Trial (1925).
Darrow’s opponent as prosecutor was three-time Presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Bryan won, but Darrow won the moral victory not least in his devastating cross examination of Bryan on expert lessons from the Bible. The verdict was reversed on appeal. One week later Bryan died and Mencken penned his infamous obituary of William Jennings Bryan to a chorus of disapproval. Here is a flavour of it:
Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. … He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”
The thread that unites Kraus, Swift, and Mencken is fearless satire and rhetoric and opinion of the most audacious type, built on the defence of rationality against institutional, governmental and fundamentalist abuse.
- Christopher Hitchens
Hitchens could not write a bad sentence, a line Edmund Wilson used about Scott Fitzgerald. The towering achievement of his gifted polemics is in my view The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), which he argues that he ought to be arrested for war crimes. There was an equally famous and blasphemous text about the ostensibly good Mother Therese of Calcutta The Missionary Position (1995). Irreverent journalism of this type is now sorely lacking!
- Ryszard Kapuscinski
The book on the Islamic Revolution in Iran Shah of Shahs (1982) or his equally famous book on the fraud that was Haille Selassie The Emperor (1978) are eye-witness accounts, and rightly lauded. He had no fear, like Hitchens, of wading into dangerous territories, but his wisdom is contained in other more reflective books.
Whereas learning about the world is labour, and a great all consuming one at that. Most people develop quite antithetical talents, in fact-to look without seeing, to preserve oneself within oneself.
Travels with Herodotus (2004)
Or best of all in Imperium (1993), his best book and a summation, he writes:
Three plagues, three contagions threaten the world. The first is the plague of nationalism. The second is the plague of racism. The third is the plague of religious fundamentalism.
All three share one trait a common denominator an aggressive all powerful total irrationality. Anyone stricken with one of these plagues is beyond reason. In his head burns a sacred pyre that waits its sacrificial victims.
The final word is left to Karl Kraus, who I regard as the second greatest journalist of all time, after Swift:
Those who now have nothing to say because actions are speaking continue to talk. Let him who has something to say come forward and be silent.
Feature Image: Suzy Hazelwood
