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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 27, 2005
Jonas
Our sister publication, the National Post, has been running pieces recently in which writers try to name Canada’s leading “public intellectual”. Let me forego a long discussion of what that phrase might mean, and simply add my nomination. Without hesitation, I will tell you that Canada’s leading public intellectual is George Jonas.He is a writer of reliably elegant and attractive English prose -- which is in itself remarkable, for a man whose first languages were German and Hungarian, and who spoke more Latin than English when he landed here in the 1950s. He is, almost secretly, one of Canada’s finest poets. But a “public intellectual” must do more than cut a figure: he must, over time, have something to say, shocking in clarity, of real significance to our historical era. I began reading Jonas in an Ontario high school, nearly four decades ago. Curiously, the first thing of his I ever saw was a poem he contributed to an anthology entitled The New Romans, giving Canadian views of the United States. This poem, evoking an affair with a girl in Buffalo, arrested me because it was impudent. It broke with the smug, anti-American condescension in all the surrounding poems and essays, and was utterly free of that quality to which the learned Prof. Harry G. Frankfurt of Princeton has formally applied the term, “bullshit”. Less technically: it smashed through the posturing, self-serving, and fraudulent conventions of “sincerity”. It is among the failures of our country, in the last generation or two, that we have been unable to provide adequate platforms for public intellectuals. Our universities jealously guard their narrowness, there are no intelligent general-interest magazines, and hypocrisy has ruled our courts and Parliament. Party interest has largely controlled our mass media. A man like Jonas could not have survived, had he not found remunerative niches in broadcasting and journalism. His books, though excellent, had to pay, and so his newspaper columns, over four decades, have served as his pulpit. He has nevertheless enunciated a consistent, bold, “old-fashioned liberal” view of the world, founded in a deep appreciation of the West’s legal heritage. Now, at the age of three-score-and-ten, his memoir, Beethoven’s Mask: Notes on My Life and Times, has been published by Key Porter. It is a book uttered in defiance of commercial calculation, and I think the most important book published in Canada for some time. For here is an irreproducible Canadian who, from out of his origins in a Central Europe convulsed by Hitler and Stalin, can use fragments from his own remembered life to explain his times. The book is always entertaining, often quite hysterically funny, and the chapter offering his father’s droll apophthegms on various subjects is alone worth its price. But I would recommend the book instead as a means to understand what happened in the 20th century -- for that is what it is really about. Passages of pure and very sober reflection are intermixed with the memoir. It is the combination of his sobriety and his impudence that has made Jonas so great an observer. He will dare anything, without ever losing his head. To give the most difficult example, towards the end of his memoir, he writes about the passage of generations, touching on the risen “Generation X”, in the most painful personal way, by bringing his own son into it. And what he says I have not seen attempted elsewhere. “My father’s generation tried to explore reality. Mine tried to exploit it. My son’s generation preferred to simulate it.” He finds no ambition in the risen generation: they take no risks, and therefore no serious responsibilities. They derive their excitement from video games, and fear the direct encounter. In the end, they have no regard for truth, no stake in it. Looking farther, over his grandchildren, Jonas says, “I spawned a tribe of virtual people.” He is not speaking only for himself. Being Jonas, he weaves this theme brilliantly into “the end of history”, and that in turn into a larger discussion of what history is, and how it will not go away. He is not merely taking a “sonny dearest” kick at his own flesh and blood, let alone trying to vindicate either himself or his own generation. “All philosophy is personal,” and necessarily transformative. The memoir form can be the cistern for truths that evaporate, spread over too broad a field. Jonas has written a true classic, and turned himself into a book. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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