That man was for turning

Paul Johnson, who died yesterday at 94, was one of the few contemporary writers I could cite as an influence. He is also one of the few who’ve taken me in.

Whenever Johnson was asked about the about-face in his views he performed at midlife, he liked to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

True, a man who dedicates his life to a search for truth is bound to find it in different places at different times. Show me a man who holds exactly the same views at 70 as he did at 20, and I’ll show you someone who made a point of stunting his intellectual growth.

However, there’s different and there’s different. Generally speaking, the intellectual pendulum can swing within a wide amplitude, but there are limits. These are imposed by one’s temperament, mentality, innate taste – one’s very personality. One’s views can change; one’s personality can’t.

For Johnson, no such limits existed, which is why he, or rather his works, played an unwitting prank on me. That started some 40 years ago, when I read his book Modern Times (American title).

At that time I had only lived in the West (Houston, Texas, to be exact) for some 10 years, a period mostly spent on trying to come to terms with, and survive in, a new world that didn’t seem to be designed for people like me. As a naturally conservative chap, I subsisted on a steady diet of National Review and Firing Line, both brainchildren of the Catholic writer William F. Buckley.

National Review writers, such as James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Erik Kuehnelt-Leddihn and Buckley himself, showed me how to relate my innate conservative instincts to a system of thought.

Most of those writers were Catholic, either cradle or converted, and they gradually nudged me towards Catholic writers across the ocean: Newman, Chesterton, Belloc, Muggeridge, Waugh and so on, all the way down the list.

And then another English Catholic, Paul Johnson, published Modern Times, which I devoured practically in one sitting. It was a valuable book of history, though not, to me, of historiography. I hardly gleaned from its pages any facts I didn’t already know, and a few of those I knew well sounded inaccurate.

But that didn’t matter. For there was a brilliant writer who put into a coherent narrative many a scattered thought flashing through my mind. Johnson came up with an explanation and criticism of modernity, not just a diary of it. And, unlike some of his facts, his explanation rang true.

His was a conservative exegesis of a period that was veering further and further away from conservatism, a cri de coeur as analysis, analysis as a cri de coeur. There was no vacillation: every page exuded the certainty of a man who knows.

Normally, when a book impresses me as much as that, I’d re-read it after a year or two, sometimes more than once. But there is Modern Times, sitting in my bookcase unopened again since 1983.

For at the time I had to slake my thirst for more writings by that impressive man. So I rummaged through the piles towering at my local second-hand bookshop and was rewarded with A History of Christianity, published just a few years earlier.

The author was identified as Paul Johnson, but as I read it I thought the book-seller had pulled a fast one on me. Far from being a conservative synthesis, the book was clearly written by a rank Leftie, an unapologetic socialist.

Surely it wasn’t the same Paul Johnson? Today this question could have been answered within seconds, but in those pre-Google days it took time. So I did some research – and found to my amazement that sure enough, it was the same man whose Modern Times had impressed me so.

Considering that the two books were separated by merely five years, the turnaround was unfathomable. Yet one thing didn’t change: Johnson’s unwavering, authoritative certainty behind every sentence. There was a man who had the power of his rapidly changing convictions.

I felt cheated, which was silly. After all, Johnson wasn’t the only Catholic writer I knew who had changed horses in mid-gallop.

James Burnham, for example, was a leading Troskyist writer throughout the 1930s. Yet already in 1941 he published his seminal conservative work The Managerial Revolution. In the 1950s he became a regular contributor, and eventually co-editor, of National Review, whose columns I never missed.

Burnham’s turnaround was even more drastic than Johnson’s, but for me there was an important personal difference. I had never read Burnham’s Trotskyist writings and hence couldn’t juxtapose them with his conservative prose – as I could do with Johnson’s work.

That difference was trivial intellectually. But emotionally, that ignorance spared my sensibilities – and never diminished my pleasure in reading Burnham’s books. But the bond between writer (Johnson) and reader (me) was broken.

Since then I’ve read several of Johnson’s books and liked them. But that was akin to playing no-limit poker with strangers: one has to be on guard against the possibility of cheating. I could never again quite trust Johnson, though I could still admire him.

That admiration survives him, as do the reservations. But those apart, on balance I’m still grateful to Paul Johnson, as I am to all writers who influenced me in any way.

Paul Johnson, RIP.