Taki's Mag

Noam Chomsky

(with apologies to James Agee, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941)

In Paris at the Shakespeare and Company bookshop the other night, a ninety-three-year old man delivered a lecture on resistance. Reflecting on his near-death in a German concentration camp, he told us that he wrote down a Shakespeare sonnet that he hid inside his clothes. He hoped that if he were killed, his body might one day be found and the sonnet sent to his wife. He then declaimed the seventy-first sonnet from memory:

No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled
From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not
The hand that writ it; for I love you so
That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot
If thinking on me then should make you woe.
O, if, I say, you look upon this verse
When I perhaps compounded am with clay,
Do not so much as my poor name rehearse.
But let your love even with my life decay,
  Lest the wise world should look into your moan
  And mock you with me after I am gone.

It is impressive to remember all the words of a sonnet committed to memory at school more than seventy years ago—even more so when it’s in your third language. This gentleman, Stéphane Hessel, belongs to an era that has passed. (His most recent book has sold almost two million copies in France, and I have just published it in English as Time for Outrage! under my new imprint. Not bad to become a best-selling author at 93.) A generation of Googlers, podcasters, video gamers, and television viewers will be unlikely to mourn the passing of people like Stéphane Hessel because most of them do not know such erudition and style ever existed.

When I think of the educated, artistic, and fascinating people in my life, they are almost all older than I am. And I am not all that young. Among them was the great Krikor Mazloumian, who owned and ran the Baron’s Hotel in Aleppo, Syria. Mazloumian always dressed impeccably in a tailored suit. Rare was the language he did not speak fluently. Some Austrian friends told me his German was better and more refined than theirs. Armenian, Turkish, Arabic, English, and French flowed from his lips as naturally as lies from a politician. His family founded the Baron’s in 1909, and he was lucky to survive the Turkish genocide of the Armenians a few years later. He used to regale me over bottles of Armenian brandy with long tales of the hotel’s famous guests, among them Lawrence of Arabia, Prince Feisal of the Hejaz, Agatha Christie, Charles de Gaulle, and Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser. Mazloumian had a fondness for poetry, which he could recite at will in whatever language he felt like.

Another savant was the actor and singer Theo Bikel, born in Vienna in 1924 and an old friend of my mother. Although I have not seen him since my mother died when I was sixteen, I remember him singing ancient folksongs in his five languages. He knew about art and politics, although on the latter he and my mother agreed to disagree.

While I am praising, not famous men, but veterans of life, I have to mention Steve Weiss. Weiss was born in Brooklyn in 1925, and he studied at ordinary public schools until he volunteered for the US Army in 1942. The Army and the French state decorated him for his bravery during the war, and he is the only American awarded French citizenship, the Croix de guerre, and the Legion of Honor for services to the French Resistance. He was also a deserter, one of many apparent contradictions in any worthwhile life. (His life is one of those I am recounting in a book I am writing now for Penguin, Deserter, about American soldiers who fled from battle in World War II.) After the war, he became a photographer, a sound engineer, and a psychologist. Nearly eighty-six, he lectures on war studies at King’s College London. As I write, he is touring China. His interests seem more wide-ranging than anyone’s of my generation or younger. He can tell you what goes inside a Patek Philippe watch just as he can sing Neapolitan arias from eighty years ago.

When I was in London a couple of weeks ago, I had breakfast with another ancient titan. Noam Chomsky is two years younger than Steve Weiss and nine years junior to Stéphane Hessel. A man who more or less invented modern linguistics, he refused to confine himself to one discipline. Psychology, philosophy, and politics are his other realms. His work rate is prodigious—teaching, lecturing, and writing at a rate that would kill me (and probably you too, dear reader). His optimism, in spite of his cogent analysis of man’s self-destructiveness, astounds me. A good speaker, he is a patient listener. As with the poet Terence, nothing that is human is alien to him. He has traveled to and taken up the causes of the downtrodden in Central America, Colombia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. He thrives on a punishing schedule. Like me, he is skeptical about American intervention in Libya. And he is outraged at American financial and military support for Israel’s domination and displacement of the Palestinians.

Modern culture does not nurture the intellects and spirits of men like Hessel, Weiss, and Chomsky. Maybe it is bad education or commercial values or an absence of values. Their like are unlikely to return, so we should cherish their presence among us for as long as we are able. When they go, we lose.

Observing Stéphane Hessel’s wandering eye at dinner after his lecture, as well as my recollections of Krikor Mazloumian and Steve Weiss, I conclude that making it into the twilight years with one’s intellect and sense of humor intact coincides with a healthy interest in women. Although his wife Christiane sat opposite him in our little Paris restaurant, Hessel’s head never failed to turn when young women in diaphanous dresses wandered past the table. Flirting mercilessly with Sylvia Whitman, twenty-nine-year-old proprietress of Shakespeare and Company, he said he knew her namesake, Sylvia Beach. Miss Beach, founder of the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919, lived with her female lover, Adrienne Monnier, when Hessel was growing up in Paris. As a youngster, he probably flirted with the original Sylvia as well. I doubt he got far with sapphic Sylvia, but the ones who keep on trying keep on going. And the women love them.