Books: Unprogressive Pilgrim

IN MY TIME by Robert Strausz-Hupé. 284 pages. Norton. $5.

Good autobiographers should have happy childhoods, when the nightingales were singing in the orchards of their mothers. Robert Strausz-Hupé is such a one. His childhood was a hazy idyl of life in old Vienna, of goose-liver breakfasts on the paternal estate in Hungary. This Eden soon closed its gates, but at 62 he still has a vivid memory of what life was like on the sunny side of the great watershed of World War I.

Strausz-Hupé is now director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Foreign Policy Research Institute. More scholar than ideologue, he utters no manifestos but offers in comment and anecdote a system of conservative attitudes to shore against the century’s ruins.

These attitudes can be disconcerting. For example, he sees the success of the Western parliamentary system as dependent upon the existence of a responsible elite rather like a composite English gentleman—to whom he addresses a prose poem of admiration. He deplores oral contraceptives as “stealthy pills which encroach on human dignity and destroy the few good and beautiful things that have not yet vanished in the rummage sale of ancient cultures.” He classifies the “passion for ugliness and disfigurement” in modern art as a “danger far greater than depopulation by war.” Liberals would call him a reactionary. Yet his views might more accurately be called the politics of nostalgia.

Undarned Suits. His memoir suggests that he came by his views the hard way—by a tough and unsentimental study of himself. Here is his account of himself at 20: “I moved from one fitful job to another, improvisations without issue; dreamed my sumptuous dreams of canopied barges on the Nile and throbbing Bentleys in Biarritz; woke with strangers in dank attics; nursed the one undarned, too tightly fitting suit—and plotted my escape. Try as I may, I cannot bring into focus the young man of 20. If we were to meet today, we would have little to say to each other. [There would be] his ruthless naiveté, his clammy embarrassments, his lyrical sensitivity in the throes of his own emotions, his stoic indifference toward the feelings of others.”

Strausz-Hupé came to the U.S. as a tutor-guardian to a no-good Salzburg aristocrat who was older than himself, worked in the art department of Marshall Field’s in Chicago (landscapes and jolly monks), as a runner in Wall Street (with social weekends on Long Island), finally as a customer’s man and—after a return to Europe—as an investment banker. This could have been a simple immigrant’s success story. But Strausz-Hupé, however frivolous his youth, had retained the gravitas of a European education. He met Historian Oswald Spengler only once, while dressed as Marc Antony at a Munich carnival, but he had read that master pessimist well.

Weighty Man. He thus became, in the ’30s, a war hawk against the rising threat of Hitlerism, as later he was to be unpopular as a premature anti-Communist—he is still firmly opposed to negotiation with Russia except from a position of towering U.S. strength, and suspicious even of quiescent coexistence. But Strausz-Hupé has been considered wise and knowledgeable enough to have been consulted on many weighty affairs, including the writing of West Germany’s constitution. He urged Navy Secretary Forrestal to make a show of American power in China in 1946, and argues that such a move might have averted the staggering U.S. defeat that the emergence of Red China represented. More recently, he gave advice to Barry Goldwater.

As for his own story, he says enigmatically: “I have learned a great deal from living, yet virtually nothing from my life.” The secret, no doubt, lies somewhere in the ruins of old Austria-Hungary—but that was in a foreign country, and besides, the youth is dead. A sad émigré survives, whose melancholy wisdom it is to say: “It is safer to dream of the past than of the future.”