Though American
born and raised, Lee Congdon is a stranger in a strange land. As he
himself puts it, he is a “cultural and intellectual European.”
Indeed, there is a touch of Old World sensibility about this 30-year
JMU history professor, especially when perceived against the end-of-the-week
revelries at a Harrisonburg brew pub and restaurant, where he has agreed
to meet for an interview.
It is there in
his poise and the contemplative pause he takes before responding to
a question, as well as the barbed humor he evinces as he derides the
vox populi of American culture and politics. It’s evoked, too,
in his crisp appearance — his neatly clipped gray beard and combed-back
hair, his buttoned cuffs, the suit jacket he wears, and — though
it’s not a cravat — his tightly knotted necktie, even though
it is nearly 7 on a Friday evening and most people are just getting
loose.
Congdon is an
internationally recognized scholar for his lifelong research and publications
dealing with the generations of Hungarian intellectuals, who, as exiles
throughout the cafés, cabarets, art houses and salons of Europe,
particularly in pre-Nazi Berlin, were prominent in shaping 20th-century
culture and politics in the West. And while the notion of exile lies
at the heart of his scholarship (one of his three books is titled Exile
and Social Thought), Congdon, a Chicago native, admits to a degree of
alienation when it comes to living in America. “I do feel myself
to be something of an exile in this country,” he says. “I
feel closest to those Americans who preferred Europe — Henry James,
T.S. Eliot, George F. Kennan — there are others I could name.”
Politically, for
instance, Congdon veers right of the American right, meaning, within
a European context, he is a monarchist. He sees little difference between
the competing ideologies of America’s political parties and he
professes an abiding admiration and preference over the common-denominator
chaos of American democracy for some of Europe’s royalist governments
of the latter 19th century, wherein “liberty — not equality
— was the highest political value. For European conservatives,”
Congdon says, “order is first and liberty only within a context
of order.”
When he asks his
students whether they would “prefer to live under a good government
or a participatory government that is bad,” he is bemused that
they always choose the latter. It’s a choice the professor finds
somewhat incomprehensible as a proponent of “right-wing liberalism”
a là Alexis de Tocqueville and Edmund Burke, in his view “two
of the greatest political thinkers produced by the Western tradition.”
Although he is
not dogmatic about his politics in his conversation, writing or teaching,
Congdon is quick to challenge his students’ assumptions about
the “verities” of American democracy, beliefs inculcated
throughout their lives. His monarchist leanings, moreover, are certainly
provocative amid JMU’s recognition of James Madison and his political
genius as author of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
In matters of
faith, Congdon also parts company with most of his compatriots. In the
early 1980s, prompted by a personally and deeply affecting reading of
Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, he reconverted to Christianity,
“from which I had strayed.” In 1996, furthermore, he and
his wife, Carol, converted to the Russian Orthodox Church, attracted
to its Divine Liturgy. Today they are members of the National Cathedral
in Washington, D.C.
Candidly speaking,
Congdon, upon whom the Hungarian government bestowed the prestigious
Order of Merit, Small Cross, takes a rather detached view of his American
citizenship. “God placed me in this country, and I am bound to
it by certain loyalties — to my family and my friends —
and by memories of a time when America was a more innocent, but more
decent — I do not say perfect — land.” Finally, he
adds, “I’m afraid my loyalty to the U.S. is now a matter
of principle, not of the heart.”
So is there nothing
quintessentially American that can thaw this Europhile’s cool
demeanor? Has Congdon, who learned Hungarian in the U.S. Army intelligence
corps in the early 1960s, expunged from his heart all fond traces of
his American roots — other than family and friends? Well, for
starters, he is a big fan of Duke Ellington — but so were most
Europeans. Is there not just one purely American institution that he
holds in high regard that Europeans have steadfastly and largely spurned?
Yes, there is.
Baseball! (Ah. Waiter. Another round of beer, please!)
At home in Congdon’s
study, among the things he values most — the Orthodox icons on
the wall facing his desk, his shelves of books, the smattering of family
photographs and a postcard of Dostoevsky sent by his wife — a
pride of place atop a bookcase is given to two baseballs, one of which
is autographed by Jackie Robinson, Mel Ott and Stan “The Man”
Musial. The other is “one that Andy Pafko autographed in 1949
or 1950,” writes Congdon in a favorable review earlier this year
of Don DeLillo’s novella, Pafko at the Wall. “It was given
to me by Jocko Conlan, the Hall of Fame umpire and Chicago florist,
whom my father knew as a business friend. The fiery Irishman hoped to
lift my spirits during one of the Cubs’ off years.”
When Congdon begins
talking baseball, there’s no mistaking his locus classicus: It’s
the diamond in Wrigley Field, a painting of which adorns a plate hanging
in his study. For Congdon, allegiance begins with the Chicago Cubs,
then it’s baseball, then America. In particular, Congdon’s
fealty is for the era before free agency, when players were less mercenary
and more loyal to the cities that supported them. His own “baseball
awakening” occurred in 1948, and he is especially fond of the
game as played during the late 1940s through the mid-1960s. He recalls
going often to Cubs’ games with his father or “taking the
bus to Wrigley Field with a friend [and] seeing my favorite players.”
“Baseball
is a far more interesting game than, say, football and basketball, which
are merely mass spectacles — games for the unthinking masses who
simply look for circuses,” he says. “So many things happen
on the diamond, and it takes time to learn to look for them. Moreover,
baseball is the most historical of games. Part of the pleasure it gives
derives from knowing its history,” he adds.
Sportswriter Thomas
Boswell says that baseball is a game of conversation. It is through
conversation that the games’ history is daily revisited, passed
down or debated, as fans recount the individuals — great and small
— who turned a game, saved a series, or lost everything in a bad
bounce or ill-timed decision. Then, too, there are the records and numbers
— RBIs, errors, home runs and batting averages — to examine,
challenge and reconfigure in discussing the “what ifs” of
the game. This historical and mathematical dimension is what attracts
so many American intellectuals to the game, says Congdon, passing on
an idea attested to by a venerable line of American intellectuals of
all persuasions — from the late, left-leaning evolutionist Stephen
J. Gould to conservative columnist and talking-head George F. Will,
among a legion of others.
Congdon, a Spenglerian
even at his American core, sees the game today in its demise, like so
much else in the West. “It is yet another sign of national decline
that baseball is no longer the national pastime. Young people —
including my own children — in my experience are bored by baseball.
They require more frenetic action.” Of course, he’s right.
How long before some TV syndicate proposes “X-treme” baseball?
“But the
game itself,” Congdon adds, “has declined. Money —
too much — and drugs and the end of the reserve clause —
I shall not speak of the designated hitter — have taken a heavy
toll. I continue to love the game, but I find that I love the game as
it was before, say, 1965.”
The emphasis on
spectacle and entertainment for its own sake, as well as the greed so
prevalent in the game today are the consequences of a larger culture-wide
slide into the dugout that — to risk oversimplifying Congdon’s
academic work — can be traced back to the pronounced nihilism
expressed by so many European writers, artists and philosophers in the
latter 19th century. That nihilism, which undercut the moral authority
of Judeo-Christian beliefs, was countered by an urgent search for meaning
among many of the European intelligentsia, who were drawn increasingly
to the utopian appeals of communism and nationalism, the two competing
sociopolitical movements that prophesied a terra firma world of social
justice and equality. Of course, those utopias rapidly spawned the terror-forming
policies of Hitler and Stalin.
One of the major
themes of Congdon’s work is that the “intellectuals, who
contributed so much to the secularization of the modern mind, are particularly
reluctant to accept a world from which God has fled, and therefore look
for meaning and direction in secular — substitute — religions,
especially of a political kind,” he says.
Such was the zeitgeist
during which several extraordinary generations of Hungarians came of
age in the first few decades of the 20th century. Among them were physicists,
mathematicians, sociologists, poets, playwrights, artists, political
theorists, musicians, architects, filmmakers and engineers — intellectuals
of all stripes, men and women, who achieved international distinction
in each of these fields. Sure, many countries produce great individuals
within a spectrum of disciplines during specific eras or generations.
But consider that Hungary is a country roughly 5,000 square miles smaller
than the state of Virginia. Moreover, nearly all of these people were
from Hungary’s urban center, Budapest, with a population circa
1900 of approximately 733,000.
“I do not
think it possible to explain how it happened that so many talented people
were born in one time and place,” says Congdon. “But I do
think I can identify some factors that account for the Great Generation’s
record of achievement. One such factor was the quality of Budapest’s
schools — especially its Gymnasia. These schools were reserved
for the country’s intellectual elite. No one pretended to believe
that every child was gifted or capable of serious academic study. Such
a system has its drawbacks, of course. Little or no provision was made
for ‘late bloomers.’ But in my judgment, no American university
(of the present day) can match the education those schools offered to
those who qualified themselves.”
Congdon also notes
that “many of the best students came from assimilated Jewish homes
that placed a high value on education and culture.” In addition,
this generation “drew upon the kinetic energy of Europe’s
fastest-growing metropolis. They could share in the excitement generated
by the modern culture taking shape in [Budapest’s] democratizing
coffeehouses and bustling editorial offices,” adds Congdon. Nobel
Prize-winning physicist Eugene Wigner, who emigrated to America, once
said of his days growing up in Hungary, “You heard a great deal
more erudite conversation than you hear in the United States. ... People
talked more about culture, about art, about literature.”
Perhaps the most
significant reason for this flowering of talent is that this “Great
Generation possessed a sense of mission. For them, life was public,
not merely private,” says Congdon. “Hence they were never
content to withdraw into their own worlds or to view the outer world
in a detached manner. They looked for ways to fulfill what they understood
to be their civic responsibilities.”
Unfortunately,
as Congdon chronicles in his three books, particularly his recent Seeing
Red: Hungarian Intellectuals and the Challenge of Communism, that sense
of mission ended in personal tragedy for many Hungarians who chose to
immigrate to the Soviet Union, instead of England or America, the two
main alternative routes. Attracted by Russia’s “colossal
human experiment” under Communism, which Congdon terms a “substitute
religion,” those who went to the USSR met with penury, fear and
even death.
“The intellectual
history of 20th-century Europe must be understood within the broad context
of secularization and the consequent crisis of belief,” Congdon
says, reiterating one of his main themes.
And so, then,
what of baseball? What about the crisis of belief there — and
what it means? Congdon, in his review of David Halberstam’s Summer
of 49, answers, “Despite some salutary changes, especially the
breaking of the color line, the game, like our public life, has lost
its civilizing function, its ability to elevate our sense of human possibility.”
But Congdon also believes the game still points to a larger redeeming
truth.
“It is hardly
surprising that we long for something that will not be lost to time,
something that won’t be forgotten, something eternal,” Congdon
writes in his review of DeLillo’s book in the June 2002 issue
of The World and I. “Everyone can, and almost everyone does, participate
in some ritual; think of the Catholic Mass or Orthodox Liturgy, which
in their continual repetition lift us out of time and give us a foretaste
of those things eternal. There are, of course, secular rituals as well,”
Congdon adds.
Baseball, he proposes,
is one of those rituals, one in which history and tradition are central.
And its most memorable, dramatic moments are “analogous to icons
in Eastern Orthodox churches” that “point us to a transcendent
reality.” Accordingly, a spectacular home run in the bottom of
the ninth, upon which a series hangs, or one snatched away by a daring
fielder’s catch at the wall are images “of the eternal.”
Through them, Congdon concludes in his book review, “we catch
a glimpse, however small, of permanent things.”
These words reveal
an exile-in-residence who makes his way around to home with uncommon
grace. Furthermore, at his inner core, there remains a uniquely American
touch of optimism. Congdon “still believes” the Chicago
Cubs will one day achieve utopia on that field of dreams.
