Book Review : A Look at Some Ordinary Lives in Grandiose Settings

Cities and Civilizations by Christopher Hibbert (Weidenfeld & Nicolson: $24.95)

Christopher Hibbert pursues an enviable goal in “Cities and Civilizations.” From ancient Thebes to modern Sydney, he considers the ways cities represent the interplay of their social and political histories through architecture, city plans and various records of daily life. Mysterious forms in the Egyptian desert, walled fortresses in the Andes and an improbable imperial city rising from the Russian marshes are all images drawn from Hibbert’s book. The history of cities as presented in this brief illustrated survey of 4,000 years attempts to show how man has always been dedicated to subduing the land in order to build a permanent memorial to himself.

Hibbert’s work is hardly original. Furthermore, it lacks the comprehensiveness and telling details of Lewis Mumford’s “The City in History” or the single focus of a book like Carl Schorske’s “Fin-De-Siecle Vienna.” To get around these structural limitations, “Cities and Civilizations” is introduced as a popular history. Hibbert is neither attempting an objective rendering of the culture of cities nor a strongly interpretive one. Rather, he is caught oddly in the middle. He has written the kind of book done better recently by British television hosts Lord Kenneth Clark (“Civilisation”) and Jacob Bronowski (“The Ascent of Man”), who successfully popularized history through the power of their own personalities and comfortable knowledge of their subjects.

In contrast to them, Hibbert is at his best when he appears to be confronting a subject for the first time. His chapter on Moscow is a good example of how well the author can do when freed of the compulsion to make remote experience unnaturally familiar.

Dramatic Descriptions

Descriptions of the city are dramatic because he allows the material to reveal itself. Less daunted by modern societies with which he does not identify than by ancient ones with which he does, Hibbert’s method of combining known histories with personal accounts begins to work.

He captures the tragic comedy of revolutionary politics when he recalls how Leon Trotsky was deliberately given the wrong information by General Secretary Joseph Stalin and wound up missing Lenin’s funeral. Trotsky’s absence from Red Square on that frozen January day vividly prefigures his subsequent exile and assassination.

Soviet intrigue and duplicity are only matched in Moscow by the meanness of everyday life. Even favored artists like Dimitri Shostakovich could only express horror at the lack of adequate housing. The author quotes the Russian composer: “An apartment could hold 10 or 15 families. There was a housing shortage, what else could you do? . . . And it’s easier to make a statement or, to put it bluntly, a denunciation about your neighbor, since your neighbor’s life is on display.” The connection between the physical environment and the psychology of living in the city come together in the book’s examples of Moscow’s contracting personal spaces and its ever-expanding public areas. Ambitious building projects created more park land and wide axial roads or Prospekts. Sometimes even distinguished architecture like Velikovsky’s Constructivist glass and reinforced concrete Gostorg Building provided examples of a visionary new city. But more often than not, the dreary lives of individuals belied the city’s grander cultural pretensions.

Although in a strange inversion, the city’s drabness above ground was confounded deep in the ground by its elegant subway system. Great marble floors and vaulted ceilings with long rows of chandeliers like those at the Arbatskay underground station were conceived as proper palaces for the Russian people. Along with its grand theaters and concert halls, Moscow’s subway reminded the new Soviet man and woman on their way home to their suffocating apartments how out of balance their city still was.

The Moscow subway, The Theben pyramids, the Parthenon of Athens and the walls of Jerusalem all suggest the ways cities memorialize their people. But these monuments reveal more than a desire for immortality. Through their survival, these places also reflect the conflicts and passions that created and many times ended their cultural dominance. Desire for vast material perfection appeared always in contrast with the reality of the people whose labor and sacrifice were more often than not the very basis for urban prosperity.

Unfortunately, Hibbert’s organization of his material tends to discourage these kinds of connections between cities. Each is presented discreetly with little more than an introductory paragraph to warn the reader of his next huge cultural leap. For example, the author moves from Cuzco to Florence with little preparation. He simply declares, “While the Incas held sway over 400,000 square miles in America, the 131,000 square miles of what is now Italy was a collection of states, usually in rivalry and often at war with each other.”

If a point is to be made, it is for Hibbert to argue the connections between two cities not usually linked together. This is one of many missed opportunities where the author leaves his material to explain itself. Without a strong organizing intelligence and shaping narrative voice, Hibbert’s interesting subject always remains out of reach. Presented with ample if not inspired illustrations, “Cities and Civilizations” remains a collection of fragments that compels the reader to be his own historian and offer the interpretation that the author declines to provides.