Paul Newman

Before the 18th century, the spokesmen of our moral conscience were drawn mainly from the clergy. But later periods saw the emergence of intellectuals, men who claimed, or whose followers claimed for them, superior faculties of reason, enabling them to formulate radical critiques or alternative ideologies in an attempt to solve the problems created by a world largely composed of blundering non-intellectual masses.

Paul Johnson has profiled a motley crew of writers, philosophers, playwrights and poseurs, examining the divide between the ideas they propagated and the manner in which they conducted their private lives. Certain instances have more force than others. Jean Jacques Rousseau proclaimed a boundless love for humanity, yet he emerges as a heartless and self-obsessed liar. Despite his alleged empathy with children, he dumped his own directly after they were born in orphanages, where they promptly died. Shelley, blithe-spirited apostle of liberty, left a string of unpaid debts behind him and treated his servants with summary contempt. Karl Marx never visited the factories whose working methods he exhaustively analysed, relying on the writings of Comrade Engels who used out-of-date or misleading sources. Jean Paul Sartre espoused every tremor of radicalism, especially if it were young, brash and anti-establishment. Bertrand Russell is a case of "logical fiddlesticks"; he achieved fame as an anti-nuclear campaigner only after wasting a great number of words urging the West to drop atomic bombs on Russia in order to finally annihilate the Red Threat. Brecht was a cynical careerist with "a heart of ice" who espoused communism in a selfish, self-serving way. Ibsen stood for the liberation of women but was as convivial as an iceberg. His weakness was a bizarre lust to acquire medals and honours from the eminently respectable bodies whom he theoretically despised. Hemingway was a brutal drunkard and political nincompoop whose redeeming feature was his artistic integrity. Tolstoy was a messianic ogre. Victor Gollancz was a champagne socialist who connived to conceal the truth about Stalin's pogroms and founded the Left Book Club as a P.R. exercise.

Worse still, many of these intellectuals were also philanderers, kept harems of mistresses and behaved in an egoistic and arrogant manner. They drank, lied, failed to pay debts and used people for their own ends. In fact, they shared the failings of the rest of mankind, which might be a shock to anyone naive enought to believe that the gift of insight and self-expression denotes a higher order of moral being.

The weakness of this book, aside from its right-wing bias, lies in its selection of material. It dwells obsessively on the sexual mores of its chief protagonists. The reader is served up with an edgy combination of quality journalism and page-three salaciousness. Like someone unsure of his audience, Johnson leavens his high-minded discourse by including much intriguing penile data, varying from Rousseau's regular recourse to a catheter to Edmund Wilson's frankly appreciative self-appraisals. When he attempts a justification for the Vietnam war, criticizing the political opinions of Noam Chomsky by blending them with the polemics of Norman Mailer (who presented black violence as an honest mode of self-expression), his moral pedestal crumbles. We are left with as tawdry a piece of sophistry as was ever produced by the intellectuals he singles out for condemnation. "How came it that," he writes, "at a time when intellectuals were increasingly willing to accept the use of violence in the pursuit of racial equality, or colonial liberation, or even by millenarian terrorist groups, they found it so repugnant when practised by a Western democratic government to protect three small territories from occupation by a totalitarian regime?" The answer is obvious enough. Violence writ small is easier to comprehend than violence writ large. It is easier to forgive and forget the crime of a solitary mugger than that of a huge institutionalised regime like the United States, compounded of thousands of privileged and educated people. Providing a rationale for localised outbreaks of violence by oppressed minorities, however abhorrent, is not the same as napalming of thousands of innocent peasants on the other side of the world.

But despite such misgivings, Johnson's central thesis holds weight. The integrity of professional thinkers should be examined in the light of their personal lives because it is important that words should be anchored to daily practice rather than belong to a realm of pure abstraction. On the other hand, the fact that Victor Gollancz regularly took out his member to check that it had not de-materialised, should not cited in order to diminish his status as a publisher. What does Johnson expect? That great minds should reach beyond ordinary sexuality and reproduce by photo-synthesis?

How the brain works