Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  There are plenty of times when it is perfectly legitimate to write not for the public but for your fellow scholars, and such work can advance the field. But outside the circle of professional practitioners of history, there are clearly millions of men and women with an appetite for reading it. Academic historians ignore the audience beyond their institutions’ walls at their peril. Because if they cannot, at least some of the time, write and speak about history in a way that reaches out to the nonspecialist, they risk being poor teachers of undergraduates. And this, in turn, risks making the proportion of U.S. college students who major in history drop even farther than it already has—from some 5 to 2 percent in the past thirty years.

  I am convinced that deep in the heart of many a historian in the academy is someone who would like to write for a wider audience—and who is more capable of doing so than he or she thinks. Here’s a curious little example from my own experience. When I finished a draft of my Bury the Chains, about the antislavery movement in the British Empire, I wrote to half a dozen scholars in this field, whose work I had learned much from, to ask if they would be willing to read my manuscript. Despite my fears that they would resent an unlicensed interloper in territory they had been working in all their lives, all of them generously said yes.

  But the interesting thing was that they did far more than what I had hoped for, which was to save me from dozens of factual errors. Even though these were people who hold university posts, write for academic journals, and for the most part do not think of themselves as addressing the general public, they knew that this was what I was doing—and they responded in that spirit. Beyond the factual and interpretive corrections, several of them offered thoughtful literary critiques of my manuscript. “You make a lot of this particular character later on; don’t you think you should introduce him earlier?” Or: “It would be more suspenseful if you switched the order of Chapters Four and Five.” To get valuable feedback in this realm, as well as about accuracy and interpretation, greatly touched me. It made me feel that university history departments are rich in people who are eager and able to address the wider audience that Clio, with her trumpet, had in mind for us.

  • • •

  What, then, is required for a synthesis of these two types of writing? To write in a way that reaches beyond the academy’s walls but at the same time has intellectual depth? How can it avoid intimidating the general reader but also add to the body of human knowledge?

  To reach that wider audience, I think, historians who know their subjects deeply must also learn to wield the tools of those inspired by two of Clio’s fellow muses, Melpomene and Thalia: the dramatists. The historian’s job is to use the classic narrative devices of plot, character, and scene-setting to tell a story—but without getting so seduced by the tools themselves that the story gets distorted. Like those who write for the stage, historians have to keep a close eye on the audience. “I am very conscious,” wrote Tuchman, “of the reader as a listener whose attention must be held if he is not to wander away. In my mind is a picture of Kipling’s itinerant storyteller of India, with his rice bowl, who tells tales . . . to a circle of villagers by firelight. If he sees figures drifting away from the edge of the circle in the darkness . . . he knows his rice bowl will be meagerly filled.”

  Beyond using the storyteller’s traditional tools skillfully, there’s one other thing we need to do to keep readers in that circle of firelight. We need to pay more attention to Melville’s advice about writing about whales and not fleas.

  Some of the most interesting moments in history, for instance, are when there seems to be a sudden leap of empathy. Unexpectedly, mysteriously, whole new groups of people who had not been seen that way before are looked at as human beings. The late 1780s saw the birth of an amazingly vigorous antislavery movement in Britain. In fact, you can even pinpoint the very month this idea caught fire: February 1788, when, after decades in which the subject had seldom come up, suddenly half the debates staged by London debating societies had to do with slavery or the slave trade. Four years later, several hundred thousand Britons had signed petitions against the trade and were boycotting slave-grown sugar from the Caribbean. Where did this upsurge of feeling come from, when there had been so few signs of it before? Why did it become a huge, lasting popular movement in Britain and not in any of the other half-dozen European countries with slave colonies? I’m far from the first writer to ask those questions, and I don’t think any of us have figured out all the answers. The general reader has an appetite for books on subjects like this, which writers and publishers too often ignore. When I began doing research on this topic, I found a wealth of brilliant specialized scholarship, often with marvelous quotations or human details buried in the footnotes, but very little written for the wider public.

  I am also attracted to those times when, with equal mystery, human empathy seems to shrink, something that has taken me to Franco’s Spain and Stalin’s Russia. How could Russia, which in the nineteenth century gave the world Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, and Turgenev, in the twentieth give us the Gulag? Why were tens of millions of Russians, people who devoured the best poetry and fiction the way the rest of us breathe air, so quick to denounce friends, teachers, or co-workers as spies and saboteurs? I’m not sure any of us has fully figured out that one either, but I’ve had no more riveting research experience than traveling across Siberia, walking through the snowy, desolate ruins of Gulag camps, looking at secret police interrogation transcripts, and interviewing survivors of the Stalin era, both victims and perpetrators.

  There are plenty of other paths toward harpooning Melville’s whale, taken by first-rate writers both inside and outside the academy. We still read Tuchman’s The Guns of August today, not only because it is a beautifully written account of the moment the world went mad in 1914 but also because it has echoes for our own time: it shows how countries can blithely slip into a devastating war. We read Taylor Branch and David J. Garrow on Martin Luther King Jr., not just because he was a major figure in American history but for clues about how social movements awaken a national conscience. We read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel because (even though I don’t agree with all his conclusions) he boldly goes after one of the biggest whales of all: the question of why some societies develop economically far more than others. Most unusually, by the way, he reached a huge audience with a book that is not a chronological or biographical narrative.

  There is no reason why most history can’t be written in a way that offers thought-provoking analysis and at the same time reaches well beyond an audience of fellow scholars. Plenty of people span both worlds. Tuchman and Branch both came from my first trade, the world of journalism; historians from the academy who write with exceptional grace, like Schama of Columbia and Jill Lepore of Harvard, can be regularly found in the pages of the New Yorker. Lepore, incidentally, has taught one of the all-too-few university courses in the art of writing history.

  These two types of history writing already nourish each other more than we might imagine. A group of historians from southern California universities gathers at the Huntington Library each month to talk about writing history as a craft, sometimes hearing from writers outside the academic world. And when I see some scholar tackling a subject I have written about, but with analytic insights that escaped me (something that happens dismayingly often), I vow to dig deeper next time.

  The British historian Peter Burke, describing his wish to see these two ways of writing combined, compares a lively account of the Indian Mutiny by Christopher Hibbert, perhaps the most widely read popular historian in England, with Eric Stokes’s trenchant collection of scholarly essays, The Peasant and the Raj: Studies in Agrarian Society and Peasant Rebellion in Colonial India (1978). “If one reads the two books one immediately after each other,” he writes, “one may be haunted, as I was, by the ghost of a potential third book, which might integrate narrative and analysis.” He suggests that historians turn to novels and film for examples of vivid storytelling,
pointing out that the models to be found there don’t necessarily require oversimplification: narrative in art can have multiple viewpoints, as in Rashomon.

  How many other such ghosts of potential books are there? Where we can imagine combining two writers: one who writes with a novelist’s flair, one who is an expert scholar? There are several pairs of books on my shelves, each set of which I wish I could shred, mix well, and bake into one. In making such matches, I’d take Burke at his word in his reference to fiction and combine a thoughtful academic historian with a novelist. Let Chinua Achebe and John Thornton write the history of Africa. Toni Morrison and David Brion Davis could do slavery and abolition. Pat Barker and Niall Ferguson could handle the First World War. We could use the superb British novelist Barry Unsworth, whose historical fiction is set in a wide variety of times and places, as a utility infielder, dispatching him to be coauthor as required to anywhere from ancient Greece to the Spanish Inquisition. The books I’m imagining are not hybrids of fact and fiction but pure history, pathbreaking, opening up new vistas, where everything is well documented. They are written, however, in such a way that the reader is absolutely forced to turn the page. We can all imagine such books, and it is the job of all of us—plumbers and heart surgeons alike—to write them. It can be done. The tools are there for the using, and there are plenty of whales at sea.

  2008

  TWENTY-FIVE

  On the Road Again

  SOME DOOMSAYERS THESE DAYS CLAIM that the printed book will soon be eclipsed by the magic of virtual reality and still newer technologies we cannot yet even imagine. They’re wrong—but only about the kind of doom involved. What will replace the book is something else: the book tour. It’s already happening.

  Even as the number of independent bookstores has fallen over the decades and as the amount of time Americans spend reading serious books continues its long, slow decline, 367 authors have “events” scheduled this fall, according to Publishers Weekly, and publishers are still making bookings. Just in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, a recent Sunday newspaper listed 143 author events for the following week, from a group reading of new European poetry, with translations, to a chance to meet the author of Reaching for Reality: Seven Incredible True Stories of Alien Abduction. More preachers of the written word than ever are filling the pulpits, it seems, while the believers ebb away. Our planet’s Last Reader, fossilized in the act of turning the page by a sudden spike in global warming, will not be someone in a cozy armchair at home. It will be an author on tour, declaiming his or her own words in an empty bookstore.

  Many of us still writing books today feel somewhat the way a blacksmith must have felt around 1920. It’s a wonderful trade, but. . . . I have to admit, however, that for me one consolation of the extended twilight of the book has been the book tour. I’ve never completely believed writers who say they find book tours totally wearisome. Can anything be wearisome when you’re the center of attention all day long?

  Also, traveling around talking about what you’ve written, you meet people who are connected to the story. In the course of touring for my book on the conquest of the Congo, I met a Congolese whose grandfather was worked to death as a porter; Belgians who grew up on tales of heroic missionaries; and the Paris real estate agent for Mobutu Sese Seko, the country’s late kleptocrat dictator. He described how Mobutu and his entourage would inspect properties very early in the morning, so as not to attract attention. I wish I could have put these stories into my book—an argument, incidentally, for having the book tour precede the writing of the book, an idea I will return to in a moment.

  In addition, while on the road you get to discuss your book with the country’s best talkers. Intelligent American radio talk shows really came into their own around the same time that the book tour did, in the 1980s, and it’s been a happy marriage. It would be hard to find better conversationalists than Terry Gross of National Public Radio’s Fresh Air or local talk show hosts like Milt Rosenberg in Chicago and Michael Krasny in San Francisco—both college professors who moonlight on the radio.

  The less highbrow interviewers have their own appeal. A well-known nighttime right-wing host in New York once interviewed me while drunk. His swaying from side to side in his chair would have caused problems on television, but did not do so on radio. And the most colorful was Ed Schwartz, a popular liberal in Chicago whose show at WGN-AM went on the air at midnight and who billed himself at the time as “The World’s Largest Talk Show Host.” He weighed, he said, 550 pounds, “slimmed down from 650,” and he wheezed painfully with every breath: “We have with us—eeeeeeesss!—tonight a man who has written a book about—eeeeeeeesss! . . .” Already groggy from the hour, I sat across a table from him, watching him push his vast bulk on a wheeled desk chair past tiers of dials and switches, rolling into unlighted corners of the room during commercial breaks and then reappearing phantasmagorically, like a shadowy mountain emerging out of the darkness.

  Schwartz claimed a million listeners, and the phone lines lit up with their calls: truck drivers on the Interstate near Omaha, insomniacs in Indianapolis, night shift workers in Duluth. Did any of them read books? I don’t know. But a million of them heard my voice, from midnight until I staggered away at 2 a.m., and perhaps that counts for something.

  Book tours are far more civilized in Europe. There are even certain hotels where publishers traditionally put visiting writers. I discovered this inadvertently when, coming downstairs one morning in Amsterdam, I found several television crews, not on my schedule, waiting in the lobby. Ha!—clearly an unexpected surge of Dutch media interest in me. But it turned out they were waiting for a Japanese novelist. When I checked out, the desk clerk asked for a copy of my book to add to their shelves. In London you can find similar shelves at Hazlitt’s Hotel, which incorporates the one-time home of the essayist William Hazlitt, and in Paris at the Hôtel Sainte-Beuve, named after the famous critic, situated on the Rue Sainte-Beuve. Can you even imagine an Edmund Wilson Street in the United States?

  The French, in fact, were the most civilized of all. This I realized at the Paris studio of an all-news radio network. In the United States, the interviewer would glance at the press release, talk to you for five minutes, then later quickly edit the recording down to two minutes for broadcast. In Paris, a well-spoken man in a three-piece suit introduced himself and began asking me questions. I soon noticed that he was taking very careful notes, in an almost diagram-like format—and that he hadn’t turned the recording equipment on. He stopped and explained: “We only have two minutes. However, I don’t like to edit. Ce n’est pas élégant. I prefer a conversation. But we will plan our conversation very carefully, so you can get all your major points across.” We spent half an hour planning. Then he turned the tape recorder on for two minutes. When he turned it off, we spent more time discussing his belief that one could say a lot in a short time. I inscribed my book, “à l’homme des deux minutes.”

  The other nice thing about the French is that they have no literary incest taboo. The New York Times Book Review, for example, will not assign you to review a book if the writer has ever reviewed a book of yours, if you share a publisher, or if you are friends. In Paris, by contrast, the publisher takes you to lunch with the reviewer. Who says, “What an interesting book, Monsieur!” while the publisher orders another bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Incestuous? Yes—but how many times, in reviewing a book myself, have I wanted to ask the author something: why did you include X and ignore Y? What did you mean by that passage on page 174? It might have made for a better review.

  As an art form, the book tour is evolving faster than the book itself. When Knopf sent the Gothic novelist Anne Rice on the road for her Vampire Armand, she combined bookstore appearances with a blood drive. Stores were paired with hospitals and people who had given blood got to the head of the book-signing line. When Ann Mariah Cook took to the road to promote her book Running North, about dog sledding in Alaska, she traveled between two New Hampshire bookstores
by dog sled and brought the huskies to the book signings. Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, once went on book tour to promote a novel—and simultaneously to test the waters for a Senate run. Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota was on the road at the same time promoting his own book, with three bodyguards in tow. And why shouldn’t we have political campaigns by book tour? A Terry Gross interview is far more revealing than a sound bite.

  Finally, back to the question of sequence. Once you’ve been on tour awhile and have described your book a few dozen times, you realize what makes people sit up and what makes their eyelids droop, and you find better ways of telling your story. And then you regret that you didn’t use these fine images and turns of phrase in the book itself. Why not, then, have the book tour precede the writing of the book? Publishers might object—but of course when the book tour comes to replace the book itself, that won’t matter.

  Anyone who doubts that writers will still tour even when no one reads our books any more should consider this story from the novelist and historian JoAnn Levy, writing in the Internet magazine Spotlight: “In San Antonio . . . a Barnes & Noble store asked 23 authors from a Women Writing the West conference to sign books at their store. Employees picked us up at our hotel, had a huge horseshoe of tables, backed with 23 chairs, and 23 stacks of books next to place cards with our names in calligraphy. Plus a big spread of cookies and coffee. Not one person came! Not one. . . . After an hour we started buying each other’s books and then we ate all the cookies.”

  1999

  TWENTY-SIX

  Books and Our Souls