A THREAD OF YEARS.<i> By John Lukacs</i> .<i> Yale University Press: 482 pp., $30</i>

John Lukacs has broken the rules of his profession. He won’t lose his job (he’s retired from his university), but his former colleagues will warn their students that his latest book is not real history. Of all the arts, history is the most conservative. Experimental painting, experimental theater, experimental music abound, but academic historians have on the whole refused to learn anything from the ingenuity and discoveries of the other arts, and it is rare indeed for them to write in anything but orthodox academic style, starting at the beginning and going on to the end, where their footnotes are amassed like Scud missiles, ready to shoot down those who disagree. Lukacs has had the courage to do otherwise, and he deserves a medal for it. Each of the 68 chapters of his book, one for each year between 1901 and 1969, begins with a piece of fiction, an imagined incident as a symbol of the year’s significance. These are fun, suggestive, controversial. There hasn’t been a history book quite like this before.

The reader is constantly surprised by Lukacs’ inventions. In 1907, for example, he tells the story of an English bachelor headmaster visiting New York, meditating on Anglophilia and cosmopolitanism, on the comfort of railways and the colors of shop windows. He sums up 1957 in a portrait of mechanics working on the first space satellite and of the Catholic chaplain praying for the gremlins in it to disappear.

We shall always need the traditional history book, which provides essential building materials for our thinking and which can sometimes be a masterpiece as exciting as any statue or symphony. But historians, dazzled by the success of scientists and social scientists, have been more tempted to imitate them, rather than artists, in the way they present their findings. Which is incongruous, because historians who have anything new to say are intellectual rebels; they like rescuing heretics and eccentrics from oblivion. Why should they be so wary of revealing their own private eccentricities?

Lukacs does just that by following his fiction with a debate about it between the two sides of his own personality. He calls them his Hungarian and his American sides, but then he says, No, that’s not what they are. His debate is full of such disagreements with himself. One side of him says that such a year was a turning point in history, but his other side then produces arguments to disprove what he has just said. The result is a conversation that is at once modern and ancient.

On the one hand, his book resembles the architecture of Richard Rogers’ Pompidou Centre in Paris, in which the sanitation pipes that are normally hidden from view are placed on the outside for all to see. Lukacs lays bare the hesitations of historians, showing how they vacillate between contradictory epigrammatic conclusions and what uncertainties are concealed behind their apparently authoritative pronouncements.

But his conversations are also ancient, in that they recall the learned disputations of scholars in the past, which one can sometimes still hear in universities today, hair-splitting discussions of what a word means, abundant quotations from forgotten literary sources and, above all, an unconcealed pleasure in discussion for its own sake. Lukacs enriches his monologue into a madrigal of voices, incorporating both the urbanity of 19th century provincial academies and the polemical energy of the old-style cafe.

His experiment is all the more intriguing because he uses it to put forward a very nonexperimental thesis. He admits that he is “reactionary” and “an old-fashioned conservative” whose ideal is the 19th century Hungarian gentleman. He “dislikes most movies.” He does not much like the modern cult of sincerity either, nor--for good measure--lawyers, Henry James or Russians. The argument of his book is that “Anglo-American civilization” is in terminal decline; indeed, he cannot bring himself to go beyond 1969 because he finds the years since then completely uninspiring. In particular, he deplores the disappearance of the ideal of the gentleman.

Having given Lukacs a medal for the inventiveness and panache of his presentation and having said that, I find much that is charming in his cultivated, gifted, almost Proustian writing, and I must add that I would draw completely different conclusions from his material. His admiration for Old England is a brilliant exercise in nostalgia, like Proust’s evocation of his childhood. England may be the mother of parliaments and may worship liberty, but for most of history, it reserved liberty for itself: the Magna Carta is for Englishmen, not a declaration of human rights. England was slower than the United States in extending liberty to women. The prosperity of its gentlemen rested on the impoverishment of its colonies.

There is no need to regret the disappearance of the gentleman as an ideal. He was useful while he lasted, enabling us to escape from thinking that warriors slaying enemies with swords were humanity’s most admirable invention. In his most refined incarnation, he may have represented honesty and politeness, but in real life, he lived off other people’s labor, and his generosity was often mixed with cruelty. He is an unsatisfactory ideal because we could not all become gentlemen, any more than we could all become Athenian citizens discussing philosophy: Most of us would have to be slaves serving food and drink to keep Plato talking.

And do not imagine these elegant Old World gentlemen were necessarily happy. Their courtesy to each other concealed a neurotic pride. When I was young, I taught many young English aristocrats (and nonaristocrats) at Oxford; my unhappiest pupil was heir to a dukedom, the awesome obligations of which drove him to a nervous breakdown. The Europeans and Philadelphians who envied the English aristocracy have been victims of a myth.

We should rethink what kind of people we want to be, rather than lament that we no longer resemble our ancestors’ idea of what they would have liked to be (and seldom were). It is significant that Lukacs gives up in 1969, precisely when a new generation began to uncover the hypocrisies of their gentlemen fathers and tried to become different.

The gentleman cannot be our hero today because we have increasing difficulty with believing in heroes: We have seen them debunked too often; and besides, imitating our betters no longer appeals to us. Nor can we be satisfied with the antihero, who represents our own frailties. Self-pity and self-analysis cannot give a sense of direction to our lives. But there is a solution for this dilemma. The gentleman is in the process of being replaced not by a new kind of model individual--we cannot all be champion athletes or wizard surgeons--but by a pair of individuals. Individualism is giving way to the notion that two people, intimately linked, can, by giving each other encouragement, become more than they would be as individuals. Couples, by changing one another, change the world, however minutely.

Nostalgia appeals to those who believe there are no solutions for the conflicts that surround them. The struggle for survival, for success, for freedom, the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious--all seems to be conflict. Nostalgia is a well-tried palliative--almost a narcotic--that eliminates the memory of conflict and replaces it with an imaginary world of gentle harmony. But it is not an efficient remedy for those conflicts.

Without denying conflict, I prefer to concentrate on discovering what people have in common. I believe the thread that runs through history, which holds it together, is not conflict but the constant search by individuals for partners, lovers, gurus or God. The most significant events in history have been the meetings of people who believed they found their soul mates or others who have given meaning to their lives. If you accept that, there is no need to construct myths about the past. Life has a direction: It is a search, even if you never know whom you will meet or what effect the meeting will have.

In many cases, these meetings are disappointing or disastrous. But instead of coping with that by dreaming about success, it is more useful to realize that life is full of failures. If life is lived as a series of experiments, that prospect should not be discouraging. Scientists are not disheartened by the failure of their experiments; they learn from them, and it is the prospect of understanding or reordering the world that sustains them. And recently, humans have been getting a little better at dealing with failure. Technology is the science of failure, organizing matter to limit failure, knowing you cannot eliminate it altogether. It is impossible to conceive of an airplane that will under no circumstances crash. Technology used to inspire arrogance, the belief that we could do what we liked with nature. Today, it increasingly inspires modesty, which is a virtue we are just beginning to practice without self-abasement.

Lukacs’ highly enjoyable and thought-provoking book makes one understand better what happens to people when they have no satisfying new vision of the future. They imagine they would have been more comfortable in another age. The United States, and even California, have far more nostalgics than openly declare themselves. You could be working in a cutting-edge industry and be dedicated to innovation in your firm and yet be a nostalgic. Making obedient robots contains an element of nostalgia, a dream of being a gentleman who does not have to work. You could be inventing new forms of art--as this book does--and still be nostalgic.

My own view is that we have to create new kinds of professions for our imaginations to become more inventive. But that is another big subject.