Jonathan Steinberg

There are not many historians who matter. Not many whose works have changed the way people see themselves. Of that little list, there is an even smaller number whose works have mattered to those in another society. The obscure American naval captain Alfred Thayer Mahan was one. His Strategy of Sea Power, published in 1890, had earned him honorary degrees in Oxford and Cambridge by 1893: Mahan told an anxious British public what it most wanted to hear about its navy. Denis Mack Smith is another. His Cavour and Garibaldi, published in 1954, told many Italians what they did not want to hear, but told them at a special point in their history when they had no choice but to listen. Denis Mack Smith became and has remained one of the most important historians of Italy. His confrontations with Renzo De Felice over their respective interpretations of Mussolini have taken place before huge audiences of Italian television watchers and his books are widely available everywhere in Italy. Readers of history in this country now have an unusual chance to get to know Mack Smith’s work at its very best. Weidenfeld and Nicolson published his new biography of Cavour a few weeks before the Cambridge University Press reissued Cavour and Garibaldi. The English-speaking reader has the first full-scale biography of Cavour for more than fifty years to compare with the book that made Mack Smith famous in Italy.

I was sitting on the uptown express on what used to be called the Lexington Avenue Line, and now has some alien number assigned to it by the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority, when a great truth (you get a lot for your 90 cents on the subway) was revealed to me. The truth came in a remark made by Heinrich von Kleist: ‘One could divide people into two classes, those who understand themselves by metaphor, and those who understand themselves by formula. Those who understand themselves by both are too few to make up a class.’ Suddenly I understood not only what I was doing there and why, but also what I had been doing for years. I belonged, of course, to the metaphor people and Kleist had made me see that mine was Henry James’s ‘The Jolly Corner’. This is the story of Spencer Brydon, in his mid-fifties, who has spent 33 years abroad enjoying ‘the freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity’, running away from ‘the ugly things of his faraway youth’. The death of his two brothers had left him heir of two New York properties and he has come ‘home’ to attend to them, ‘or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually and, quite fondly, described it, the one in which he had first seen the light.’

Seymour Hersh belongs to that small group of American newspaper reporters who made national reputations during the Vietnam War and Watergate. He won a Pultizer Prize in 1970 for his exposure of the My Lai massacre. He exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia and the role of the CIA in toppling the Allende regime in Chile. He tracked down evidence of CIA spying within the United States and exposed it. Investigation and exposure are his trade, and he does it thoroughly. For years he worked for the New York Times, whose motto is ‘All the news that’s fit to print’, and when the Times says ‘all’, it means all.

‘1983 is the most important election since the war,’ said my Italian friend, a sociologist, exultantly. ‘After nearly forty years everything is in flux.’ I had rung him the day after the election. He could hardly speak for excitement. The country was stunned. The results had completely flattened the opinion polls, which has been caught with their predictions down. They had not foreseen the landslide of voters leaving the ‘party of relative majority’, as the Christian Democrats tend to be called.

A Calabrian who now lives in Rome told me a revealing story about the Mafia. An uncle, aged 90, rang up from the ancestral village absolutely furious. ‘Do you know, Vincenzo,’ he spluttered, ‘they actually threatened me?’ There is more than a casual connection between the insulted old gentleman and the murdered General Dalla Chiesa. Both are signs that the old Mafia is gone, a Mafia which, no matter how brutal and violent, knew its betters. The traditional mafioso treated the galantuomo, the signore, the man in the white suit who sipped his coffee in the piazza at night, with the guarded deference of a peasant before his lord and he never murdered policemen unless it was absolutely necessary.