RIP Paul Johnson

 From the Wall Street Journal: Paul Johnson, British Historian and Polemicist Against the Left, Dies at 94

During his long career, the ginger-haired Catholic from Manchester with a combative streak became one of the most prominent leftist intellectuals who drifted to the right during the 1960s, moving from editor of the leftist New Statesman magazine to a regular columnist for the Spectator and eventually the right-wing Daily Mail tabloid. 

Along the way, he wrote more than 50 books on topics ranging from Socrates to Queen Elizabeth I, as well as dozens of tomes on religious history, art and architecture, novels, memoirs and travel. His histories of the modern world, Jews, and Christianity were among the most prominent.

I usually avoid items on who died, who was fired and who got what orchestra job, but Paul Johnson was a particularly important thinker and he wrote a quite good book on Mozart that I have mentioned here. He also wrote an excellent history of art that I have also mentioned. But his wider influence came in the form of books on the history of the 20th century, history of the Jews, history of Christianity and of the United States.

Many decades ago I read a seminal book on historiography by R. G. Collingwood in which he made the comment that there are two fundamental ways of looking at history: one of them emphasizes the dislocations of wars, revolutions and cultural innovations while the other emphasizes the continuity of history, how events are shaped by customs and traditions and how innovation is always in relation to tradition. Taruskin wrestled with this idea in all five volumes of his Oxford History of Western Music.

The crucial value of Paul Johnson was that he was also very aware of it and did not let the doctrines of modernism affect how he viewed history. This is particularly evident in his Art: A New History in which he does not overvalue, for example, 20th century painters like Pablo Picasso, but instead sees how much their innovations were a kind of artistic fashion. In music this is sometimes called "patent office" innovation.

I just watched a clip on YouTube about the Rite of Spring in which the commentator shows just how much the structure of the work relates to certain traditional styles like folksong and hymn. Of course, the title of Taruskin's masterful work on Stravinsky is Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions. All art is in a tension between tradition and innovation.

So you might have a look at some of Paul Johnson's books. For a fresh look at recent history I recommend Modern Times.