Timothy Garton AshFacts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name
Atlantic Books; $34.95; 441pp
C. P. Scott’s celebrated remark ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ lives on in the newspaper of which he was the editor. Or rather, one half of the remark lives on, in the form of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. The journalist Timothy Garton Ash, himself a contributor to Comment is Free, is worried about the other half, especially in the light of the enormous challenges currently facing the newspaper industry. ‘In the news business today,’ he writes sardonically in his outstanding collection Facts are Subversive, ‘comment is free, but facts are expensive.’
His title thus has a double function. First, it serves to remind the reader of the forgotten half of Scott’s dictum. Second, it seeks to persuade that reader of why the forgotten half is important. Facts are sacred because they are subversive – subversive, as Garton Ash writes in his preface, ‘of the claims made by democratically elected leaders as well as dictators, by biographers and autobiographers, spies and heroes, torturers and post-modernists’. They are also, one hopes, subversive of indifference, though that firewall can be hard to breach. When, early in 2006, Garton Ash implored the readers of Comment is Free to consider Belarus, then in the middle of a sham election in which President Lukashenko held all the cards, one reader, ‘thedacs’, responded thus: ‘Nah, still don’t give a toss …’ When comments are free, they are very often cheap.
Containing pieces originally published in Prospect, the New York Review of Books and various other publications, Facts are Subversive is the substantial opus of someone who most certainly does give a toss. Garton Ash is a journalistic gumshoe of seemingly inexhaustible energies, touching down in Serbia (there to witness the fall of Milosevic), Ukraine (to witness the Orange Revolution), Burma (to witness totalitarianism’s survival into the twenty-first century) and many other political hotspots. Determined to put events into context, his journalism is almost always augmented with wide-ranging and apparently impeccable scholarship (his is, he writes, a ‘mongrel craft’). He is also a political man of letters of a kind not much in evidence these days. The book contains a number of pieces on writers who exist at what the literary critic Lionel Trilling called ‘the bloody crossroads’ – the point at which literature and politics meet.
It so happens that Trilling used that phrase in an essay on George Orwell and ‘the politics of truth’ and Garton Ash is a devotee of ‘the Saint George of English political writing’. Orwell is everywhere in Facts are Subversive. More precisely, ‘Orwellian’ is everywhere, not just as an adjective to describe the ways in which the powerful tend to manipulate the truth but also as an adjective denoting the kind of journalist that Garton Ash aspires to be. For Orwell it was who, in his own words, had ‘a power of facing unpleasant facts’ and the facts that Garton Ash must face, or ends up facing, are often unpleasant. He also has Orwell’s ear for language. Here he is at his brilliant best, in a review of Stefan Collini’s book about intellectuals, Absent Minds:
Intellectuals begin at Calais. ‘British intellectual’ is an oxymoron, like ‘military intelligence’. The river of colloquial English carries a heavy silt of mildly pejorative or satirical epithets: egghead, boffin, highbrow, bluestocking, know-all, telly don, media don, chattering classes, too clever by half. The qualifier ‘so-called’ travels with the word ‘intellectual’ like a bodyguard. The inverted commas of irony are never far away.
Is Garton Ash an intellectual? He certainly is, but he’s also a journalist – one for whom the second appellation is never in danger of being overshadowed by the first. As ‘dead tree’ journalism continues to suffer and C. P. Scott slowly turns in his grave, one writer at least holds firm to the view that reporter journalism is the first draft of history.
