A Thread of Years.

A Thread of Years, by John Lukacs (Yale, 481 pp., $30)

Mr. Bowman is the American Editor of the Times Literary Supplement.

IN the years before the "theory" craze overwhelmed university English departments, there was a period when the dominant mode of instruction was by what at my university was called "practical criticism." This consisted in taking a short poem or a passage from a longer work of poetry or prose and showing how each detail of style -- imagery, diction, rhythm, or rhyme -- contributed to the work's overall meaning and effect. Implicit in this exercise was the assumption that words in a work of literary art were like strands of DNA in a living organism, and that the whole was somehow present in each of its parts. John Lukacs, our most literary historian by far and the author or editor of 18 previous volumes, mainly on the twentieth century, understands that history too is made of words, and in A Thread of Years he has undertaken to give us a sort of historical version of practical criticism.

Beginning with 1901 and proceeding through the century a year at a time until he arrives at 1969, he sketches a two- or three-page, usually fictional, vignette, meant to be in some way representative of the year, and then offers a two- or three-page dissection of it in the form of a dialogue between himself and an imaginary interlocutor, pointing out the vignette's various significances. The only common element linking the chapters is the character of Kensington, or K., "a Philadelphian gentleman" born with the century, episodes from whose remarkably uneventful life account for about one in four of the vignettes. K. is a cultivated man and a minor painter who was present at none of the great scenes of our century's drama. Yet Lukacs makes him embody the century as much as Hitler, Stalin, or Roosevelt.

Anyone with an interest in our century -- which means an interest in how at each branch in the road that led to today we took one turning rather than another -- will find this book completely addictive. As Lukacs himself says, the Socratic injunction "Know thyself" is also a way of saying, "Know your own history and the history of your times, which are not the same things, but they are inseparable." He is always a rewarding guide and companion on the journey, although his dour and wintry analyses, nuance (as he himself puts it) with ethnic, religious, political, and class distinctions that a less finely tuned sensibility would not have picked up, may grow wearisome if consumed all in one sitting. This is a book for dipping into over time -- and for arguing with. Lukacs is right about so much that every disagreement must be carefully weighed, and in matters of taste -- not usually thought of these days as a requirement for a historian -- he almost never puts a foot wrong.

At times his analysis suffers from the fact that he knows so much. There is something glib and unsatisfactory, for example, in his saying that the 1960s were merely a re-run of the 1920s. And he himself finds in his chapter on 1966 a genuinely new phenomenon, which is the academic who "is convinced that his job is to represent ideas . . . rather than explain them or even believe in them." Like his modest hero, K., Lukacs is perhaps worn out by the time he hits the Sixties, and anxious to be done with things. More seriously, his careful adumbrations of the ethnic and religious identities of his characters sometimes seem to get in the way of our understanding, instead of enhancing it. His own self-description as "a reactionary impressionist" is accurate, yet like all his most interesting characters and the century itself he suffers from "split-mindedness" to an extent he is not always ready to acknowledge. Part European (specifically, Hungarian), part American, part liberal, part conservative, he nevertheless manages to synthesize large historical judgments with a sense of enormous and rather repellent self-confidence.

His great theme is the decline, from its zenith at the turn of the century, of the "Anglo-American-Celtic" world dominance and of its cognate social expression, the ideal of the gentleman. As we might expect, Lukacs has the outsider's passionate admiration of the latter, combined with a very Hungarian pessimism about its progressive enfeeblement and the tide of vulgarity by which it has been swamped in the latter part of the century. At the same time, it is not too fanciful to suggest that there is a trace of Central European Schadenfreude in Lukacs's witty (though nearly humorless) and erudite account of the eclipse of the Atlanticist hegemony. Anglo-American withers will remain unwrung, since so much of this account depends on a positively Habsburgian belief in the importance of blood -- thinning blood in the case of what he hates to call but cannot avoid calling the WASP ruling classes.

I suspect that what Lukacs hates about the expression is its Anglo-Saxon flippancy and self-mockery. To him the racial and ethnic and religious make-up of the dominant class, whether in Philadelphia or in the world, is a matter of immense and abiding importance and therefore, of course, hugely serious. The fact that German, Italian, Asiatic, and even Hungarian people can and do make a painless transition to effective Anglo-Saxondom inside two generations is one that he simply cannot bear to contemplate. To him it must seem like an annihilation of the very taste and texture of history, an Americanized, fast-food version of the historical cuisine he has spent a lifetime learning how to prepare.

Yet perhaps the choices are not quite so stark as they seem. Perhaps full-bodied history and even gentlemanliness are not to be quite extinguished by the vulgar ideological reductionism of late-century intellectual life. Perhaps the pessimistic Hungarian is wrong in thinking, when it comes to "the erosion of beliefs and of institutions and of manners and morals," that "the pendulum never swings back." Perhaps it is not mere intellectual dishonesty ("the dominant affliction of this century") which makes us believe that a more American optimism about the regenerative powers of the social order is possible. But certainly there is much to interest and entertain us in Lukacs's historical tour de force, and much wisdom about the human nature which transcends history as well.