I once read a review by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., at the end of which he described himself, or was described by the editors, as “an historian and a writer.” The dual characterization struck me. Aren’t all historians writers? Although neither Schlesinger nor the editors intended it, they had identified a meaningful difference.
An understanding of how academic historians differ from writers of history begins in the graduate reading seminar, where doctoral students are bombarded with professional narratives. Week after week, they are assigned lengthy books of historical argument and analysis. These are not intended to enlighten and move readers, but are aimed mainly at other scholars and focused largely on engaging what other professionals have already said.
Invariably, research is far more important than writing to academic historians. Their books are not so much designed to be read as to be skimmed. The guiding question is, “What does the author argue?” Books have to appear to say something new, to contribute to “the literature.” Successful works become part of the historiography of a field and continue to be cited by other historians. The longer the better, since historians equate length with significance. The historiography game generates mountains of monographic work and rich academic rewards for those who play it well. But it rarely gives rise to works in which the art and craft of story-telling matter.
I came to graduate school in 1979 with a double major in history and English, and I never embraced the idea that contributing to historiography was the point of historical writing. To be sure, I learned the rules of the game, and I eventually passed my general examinations, where I had to recite the begats of various historiographic traditions. But those dense books never appealed to me. I wanted to be enveloped by primary sources -- by the enduring voices and recorded actions of the past. Instead, my professors inundated me with secondary sources -- the shout of academics making abstract arguments divorced from past experience and meaning. Graduate training may not always have been this way; but, with the deepening professionalization of academic life and the proliferation of books in the 1960’s and 1970’s, scholars turned historiography into a fetish. As if fearful of being contaminated by literature and creative-writing programs, they identified themselves as social scientists and migrated away from the humanities.
The effects of professionalization on any sense of history as a literary art have been catastrophic. Most academic historians publish books that are bloated with names, theses, and notes. They concentrate on explaining rather than showing, theorizing rather than describing. They think of themselves as historians working on problems, never as writers struggling every day to find the right words, voice, and structure.
Compared to academic historians, writers care about telling stories that illuminate the human experience. They use form to convey meaning, and seek to discover the truths of history through literary means. They write for themselves and hope, in so doing, to say something of value to others. In a letter to Walker Percy, Shelby Foote summarized the endeavor this way: “Most people think mistakenly that writers are people who have something to tell them. Nothing I think could be wronger. If I knew what I wanted to say I wouldn’t write at all. What for? Why do it, if you already know the answers? Writing is the search for the answers, and the answer is in the form, the method of telling, the exploration of self, which is our only clew to reality.”
Readers, like writers, need to search for answers. Part of the joy of literature is being surprised, but academic historians leave little to the imagination. The perniciousness of the historiographic turn became fully evident to me when I started teaching. Historians require undergraduates to read scholarly monographs that sap the vitality of history; they visit on students what was visited on them in graduate school. They assign books with formulaic arguments that transform history into an abstract debate that would have been unfathomable to those who lived in the past. Aimed so squarely at the head, such books cannot stimulate students who yearn to connect to history emotionally as well as intellectually.
I prefer that my students read histories that are crafted by writers -- journalists, essayists, and those who work in a genre known as creative nonfiction. I’m thinking of people like John Barrie, Melissa Fay Greene, John McPhee, Caryl Phillips, Luc Sante, Rebecca Solnit, and Lawrence Weschler. I also encourage my students to read novelists who use fiction as a means of contemplating historical truth: Julian Barnes, E. L. Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Tim O’Brien, or Philip Roth, for example. Such works complement the primary sources I assign, because they have the power to move readers with a turn of phrase, a dramatic scene, an angle of vision.
In the past decade, some academic historians have begun to rediscover stories. It has even become something of a fad within the profession. This year, the American Historical Association chose as the theme for its annual conference some putative connection to writing: “Practices of Historical Narrative.” Predictably, historians responded by adding the word “narrative” to their titles and presenting papers at sessions on “Transnational Narratives of Race and Color,” “Oral History and the Narrative of Class Identity,” and “Meaning and Time: The Problem of Historical Narrative.” But it was still historiography, intended only for other academics. At meetings of historians, we encounter very few writers talking about how they write, or reading from their work, or moving audiences to smiles, chills, or tears.
That is not to say that there are not dozens of academic historians who write well, offer valuable insights, and reach a general audience interested in nonfiction. Compared with scholarly writing in other disciplines, historians sometimes seem almost lyrical. Over the years, the New York Times best-seller list has included books by such scholars as Stephen E. Ambrose and James M. McPherson, writers adept at storytelling.
Far fewer in number, however, are those historians who write not only for an audience outside the academy, but also in self-consciously literary and artistic ways. Simon Schama’s Dead Certainties: Unwarranted Speculations provides an example. It begins, “Twas the darkness that did the trick, black as tar, that and the silence, though how the men contriv’d to clamber their way up the cliff with their musket and seventy round on their backs, I’m sure I don’t know even though I saw it with my own eyes and did it myself before very long.” Jonathan D. Spence’s The Death of Woman Wang starts, “The earthquake struck T’an-ch’eng on July 25, 1668. It was evening, the moon just rising. There was no warning, save for a frightening roar that seemed to come from somewhere to the northwest. The buildings in the city began to shake and the trees took up a rhythmical swaying, tossing ever more wildly back and forth until their tips almost touched the ground.”
There are signs as well that a younger generation of historians is willing to experiment with nonfiction that aspires to literary art. But, until the profession encourages and rewards those efforts, until more scholars start taking chances, academic historians will not become writers.
It is too soon to tell whether contemporary literary experiments, scattered as they are, will galvanize others. In 1990, I received a letter from Wallace Stegner, whose nonfiction works are as evocative as his fiction. He found the attitude of historians toward literary art puzzling. The interest in writing good history, he declared, “represents a tendency among historians that is always threatening to burst into bloom and produce some really splendid historical literature, but that habitually gets squashed down by the historical establishment. ... It does so delight me when history as an art comes bulging through the covering tarpaulins that I wish it happened more often.”
At various points throughout the 20th century, academics have denounced “dry-as-dust” writing (a favorite phrase of Columbia’s Allan Nevins in the 1930’s), and just as quickly the profession has staked off its academic ground more firmly. Without question, there is wide interest in history among a general audience: Best-seller lists and history programming on television suggest that this is a propitious moment for scholars to incorporate their skills in researching and reading texts with writing creative works of nonfiction.
To do so, they will have to stop thinking in terms of thesis and analysis. Instead, they will have to link themselves in a common endeavor with other writers. That will mean learning new ways to evaluate whether a story succeeds. That will mean trying to express the poetry that is the past. That will mean acknowledging the truth of Annie Dillard’s dictum, dispensed in The Writing Life, “It is no less difficult to write sentences in a recipe than sentences in Moby-Dick. So you might as well write Moby-Dick.”
In his recent autobiography, A Life in the Twentieth Century, Schlesinger talks about his career as a writer. It is not just that he has written some 15 books, countless essays and reviews, and numerous speeches as a ghostwriter for several presidents (in itself an act of ventriloquism that requires considerable skill). Schlesinger has also, throughout his life, done what most writers do -- he has maintained a journal and forced himself to write every day. His father, a distinguished historian, once told him, “There is always a little thrill one gets from saying things well.” For more than 70 years, Schlesinger informs us, that line “has lingered in my mind.” Historians who strive to say things well -- those are the ones on their way to becoming writers.
Louis P. Masur is a professor of history at City College of the City University of New York. His most recent book is 1831: Year of Eclipse (Hill & Wang, 2001).
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