Twentieth Century Journey: a Native's Return, 1945-1988.

Twentieth Century Journeys: A Native's Return, 1945-1988

WILLIAM L. SHIRER, here consciously bidding us farewell at age 85, is a phenomenon to give one pause. He is a great reporter, a man who was situated at the epicenter of the twentieth-century convulsion. He has lived intensely in his time. He has had marvelous energy and animal spirits. He has been an indefatigable diarist, mining successful books from his daily log--Berlin Diary, of course, and also his three-volume autobiography, of which this is the final volume. His Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) is an important book, weaving his personal impressions of the period into solid research. It represents a serious achievement in the great tradition of narrative history. But now we come to the but Mr. Shirer is a famous and successful writer who can't write. He claims to admire the great writers, Stendhal, Chekhov, Dickens, Sophocles, Shakespeare, and many others; and one must believe that he really does admire them, but just why he does so we cannot infer from his own prose. In fact, his literary judgments are often simple-minded or worse. For example, he thinks Carl Sandburg's biography of Lincoln a very fine work indeed; but Edmund Wilson was on the mark when he observed that Sandburg's book was the worst thing that had happened to Lincoln since John Wilkes Booth.

The verbal banality is pervasive. Each Shirer sentence creates a small lesion of energy in the reader, a sort of installment on death itself. "What good three thousand years of so-called civilization, of religion, philosophy, and education, when right up to the 1980s, as this was being written, men go on torturing, killing, and repressing their fellow men? In fact, was there not a retrogression here?"

This prose is not exactly illiterate. Indeed, downright illiteracy would be a relief in comparison. Shirer's prose is sicklied over by the pale cast of junk thought and bogus profundity. His metier is the secondary cliche; not the outright howler, but the deadly cliche nevertheless. "But after nearly half a century of existence have you come any closer to solving the riddle of life? Its meaning? Purpose? I doubted it." During the Blitz, England was "fighting for its life." We live in can ever changing world." Zounds! As Wilde said, you would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.

This third volume covers Shirer's life after World War II, and there is much here of interest. For example, he was sacked by Bill Paley and Ed Murrow at CBS because his radio commentaries were too far left. But how far left was he in fact? We do not learn in this book what they objected to. It would be interesting to know. Throughout this book, Shirer's opinions seem conventionally New Deal liberal. He detests Soviet Communism. He supported the Korean War. But wait. He can write that Paul Robeson was "under suspicion of being a 'Red.'" Hmm. Suspicion? Robeson made no bones about it. He was a conspicuous defender of Josef Stalin.

Shirer's friends and neighbors in rural Connecticut during the period covered by this volume were virtually all left-liberal, which he seems to think is mainstream. His close friend Joseph Barnes, for example, then a senior editor at Simon and Schuster, was almost certainly a Communist. Another neighbor, Mark Van Doren, in 1948 supported Henry Wallace, and liked to remark to his Columbia students that Stalin's Russia was "just like" Elizabethan England. Shirer has no perceptions about all of this. It is symptomatic of his smugness that he can offhandedly refer to the "reactionary NATIONAL REVIEW," as if we all routinely shared his definitions. (NR's economics could arguably be called "progressive.") It comes as no surprise that almost all Shirer's British friends are Labor-left; he seems nonplussed by Margaret Thatcher.

Shirer's energy and appetite for anecdote, however, often provide resuscitation. He does not have a first-rate mind, very far from it, but he is a first-rate gossip--and gossip, by the way, is generically conservative and comedic. Thus, as Shirer recounts, Rebecca West and H. G. Wells had been lovers, but Wells decided he wanted to marry a Russian named Moura Budberg, who was a lover of Maxim Gorky. Shirer remembers "sitting up all night with Moura to hear her recount the night in 1936 that Maxim Gorky died in his dacha outside of Moscow. She was with him. And she believed that he was poisoned by Stalin, who could no longer stomach Gorky's refusal to support fully his bloody dictatorship. Again, as after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, which had caught her in Petrograd, she was forced to flee in the dead of night. Stalin would surely kill her, to silence her, if he could find her. She somehow made her way safely out of Russia."

There are energies here that survive even a clunker like "in the dead of night."