4b2
PETER GAY
A free-lance scholar who rarely, ever more rarely, ventured from
his lair in Hampstead, Lichtheim lived by his pen and published a great
deal, probably more than he liked. There are passages, especially in his
Europe in the Twentieth Century)
in which his taut line of prose slack–
ens, and indigestible lists take the place of his normally well-shaped
sentences : "Major innovators such as Thomas Mann
(1875-1955),
Hermann Hesse
(1877-1962),
Andre Gide
(1869-1951),
Paul
Valery
(1871-1945),
Marcel Proust
(1871-1922)
and Joseph Conrad
(1857-
1924)
made their debut before
1914,
and indeed transmitted to the
post-war generation something of the nineteenth-century culture which
at its peak had produced Ibsen
(1826-1906),
Strindberg
(1849-1912)
and Chekhov
(1860-1904)."
That the chosen format, the textbook,
compelled Lichtheim to compression is only a partial explanation of
such a passage. The point Lichtheim is making is true and even im–
portant, but there are less infelicitous ways of conveying masses of in–
formation in a small space than simply to pile up names and dates.
The sentence speaks of haste and of fatigue. In the same book Lichtheim
could write of Freud that he had nailed "his colours to the mast of what
came to be known as the Oedipus complex," a surrealist metaphor that
in his better moments Lichtheim would have excised. For he was a
trenchant, sometimes a brilliant stylist. Had he had more time, he would
have committed fewer lapses; though, I must add, the good moments
remained plentiful to the end.
Lichtheim, these lapses apart, had the felicity of a professional
writer blessed with a good ear. He was one of those exceptional Ger–
mans who discover, and exploit, the expressive possibilities of the Eng–
lish language. But his style was by no means all manner; he knew what
he was talking about. Lichtheim has been called a journalist, but the
epithet applies to him in the sense that he wrote extensively for jour–
nals; few modern journalists know Hegel and Benjamin, Nietzsche and
Freud, as intimately as he did. And his erudition was coupled with a
vigorous pleasure in penetrating cant. He had nothing but contempt
for the culture heroes of the right, and no patience with the cult figures
of the left. He took great delight in announcing publicly that the em–
peror has no clothes. Unfortunately his age gave his mordant wit much
exercise: the thrones of twentieth-century culture have been crowded
with naked emperors. Some of the most memorable paraglaphs in
Lichtheim's writings are denunciations of poets and philosophers whom
intellectual elites have been inclined to worship. Lukacs, he writes in
hi~
little book on that much-admired Marxist aesthetician, "has worn many
masks during his life, and he has performed acts of calculated decep–
tion, accommodation and self-abasement remarkable even by the stand-
