Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

by Simon Schama

  After the reading came the listeners’ turn to respond, or else. The claret and fruit circulated (Porter and I usually doing unspeakable things with the grape scissors, an instrument for which London lower-middle-class life had inadequately prepared us). The diplomatic psychology of the discussion was tricky: too fierce in our criticism and we would sacrifice a friendship; too cosy or indulgent, then we risked disbelief and raillery from Plumb. So we generally told the truth. At the end of the circle of comments, Jack would supply his own, and belie his reputation for fierceness by generous helpings of praise for the student’s research and his grip on the subject, even while raising questions about both evidence and analysis which not infrequently turned the whole exercise inside out and upside down. Whatever else happened in those seminars, we all learned the art of vigilantly sympathetic attentiveness, which has stood me, at any rate, in good stead in over thirty years of teaching.

  But aside from pedagogic style, was there a ‘Plumb’ philosophy of history, evident in these bracing hours of instruction, and faithfully represented in The Death of the Past? In the mid-1960s, it seemed to be an obligation for every historian worth his salt to make some sort of utterance on what history was and wasn’t, many of them a response to, and exasperated refutation of, E. H. Carr’s What is History?, a book which its countless critics (all of them in the right) see as the mailed fist of determinism lurking in the velvet glove of a faux-scepticism. Herbert Butterfield, G. R. Elton (Plumb’s particular nemesis) and many others had all put their methodological oars in, but what is striking about so many of these professions de foi is their un-self-examined address to the converted. Their working assumption (fair enough in the 1960s, when the escalator from A-level history to undergraduate history to graduate history to that first Research Fellowship was serenely uninterrupted by anything resembling a power outage from the employment Zeitgeist) was that academic history would continue to be the dominant discipline of both the humanities and the social sciences; its scholarly gravitas weightier than the study of literature, yet somehow more imaginatively creative than sociology or economics. For Elton, the question ‘who cares?’ would have been not so much impertinent as unthinkable. The issue was not to legitimise the discipline so much as to issue a stringent manual for its professional practice.

  For the worldly Plumb, though, with his relish for, and brilliance at, popular history writing and journalism, especially in America where he was the leading literary light of Horizon magazine, there was no question of history resting smugly on its laurels. Dragged inside the professional stockade, he believed, history would atrophy into an arid scholasticism. ‘What do they of history know,’ I remember him borrowing from E. M. Forster (who had in turn creatively pilfered Kipling), ‘who know only other historians?’ For Plumb, history was either a public craft or it was nothing; and in this spirit he was constantly urging on us books he cherished which had been written by historians either rejected by the academy or who had chosen to work outside it. Iris Origo’s Merchant of Prato, Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and Frances Yates’s work on neo-Platonist hermetics (very much an eccentricity in the 1960s) all come to mind. While others cringed at the belletrism they imputed to C. V. Wedgwood, Plumb welcomed her to High Table and introduced us personally to that elegant, surprisingly astringent mind.

  The battle lines were decisively drawn for us at Christ’s: the encyclopaedic and the omnivorous (us) versus the arid and the parochial (them); history seen as an enquiry into the human condition (us) versus history assumed to be the unfolding epic of English (not even British) governing institutions (them); history which embraced the literary and the imaginative without ever forsaking the hard tests of documentary evidence (us) versus history which treated strong writing as a fig-leaf for analytical mushiness (them). And while Plumb was adamant about the indispensability of the archive, neither did he fetishise it. The archive was, he insisted, startlingly anticipating Arlette Farge and Pierre Bourdieu, a social institution, with its own invented practices, hierarchies of significance, both human and documentary, and which was as much the product of a particular culture as its shaper. Caveat lector! The notion that the historian’s task consisted entirely of archaeological self-effacement before the bedrock of archival truth – a mole-like digger of nuggets and gobbets – he found not so much professionally deluded as betraying an almost pathetic want of critical self-consciousness.

  Yet it was precisely Plumb’s abiding and unapologetic sense that history lived for others, not just for itself – that it was, at root, a civic vocation, not a monastic profession – which snared him in all kinds of contradictions, some of which are exposed, others glossed over in The Death of the Past. The central message of the book – that history, practised as a truly critical discipline, was the enemy of a ‘past’ in which liberty of thought and action was forever in thrall to the claimed authority of ancestral prescription – actually pointed its readers in two directions at once. On the one hand, history, construed as the study of human society, needed the input of professionals, saturated in, and invigorated by, the methodologies of the Annales school, especially Bloch and Braudel, if it were to break free, simultaneously from a culture of sentimental deference to heritage and from the airless claustrophobia of Gobbet Land. On the other hand, none of that would make any difference to the survival of history as a public craft, unless that new professionalism could be translated into genuinely popular writing. In principle, there was no reason why this little miracle should not happen, and Plumb’s ambitious multi-volume History of Human Society attempted to do just that. But as an advertisement for a new, yet genuinely popular, history, the series never really took off, not least because the quality of its writing, while seldom exactly pedestrian, never really made for page-turning, either. The project, stalled before its ambitions could be realised, remained obstinately encyclopaedic rather than genuinely innovative. Several volumes only brought home the truism that Braudels, Blochs and Febvres, capable of achieving a synthesis of narrative and social analysis, of ethnography and textual exegesis, were painfully scarce. Narrative drive and the force of events – precisely the history repudiated by Braudel as the artifice of dull practitioners in favour of the slow heave and shift of tectonic-plate forces – were in fact the sine qua non of bringing readers back to history and thus liberating them from ‘the past’.

  And Plumb, a supremely accomplished narrator, knew this. However much he may have asserted the equivalence of the history of the potato with the history of the British (or American) Civil Wars, in his heart of hearts he didn’t believe it. In fact, at the height of the mode for social history in the Annales style, Plumb could be found insisting on the power of speech-acts to shake and shape the destiny of communities and nations. If, in some of his great lecture performances (as in his work on Walpole), he might suggest that parliamentary rhetoric was a veil behind which the grind of monied interest did its business, on other days he would impersonate the histrionics of a Fox or a Chatham with precisely the opposite conclusion in mind. His considering intellect, then, may have pointed him away from the power of argument and ideology, but the vitality of his temperament and his deep engagement with the mystery of language pointed, always, towards it. That, indeed, was the gravamen of his ferocious argument against Lewis Namier, whose obsession with interest over ideology Plumb thought a simple mistake about how humans behave.

  None of which prevented Plumb from accomplishing an important and even lasting little polemic in The Death of the Past. But as so often with him (as with many of the finest historians) what he says is less significant than the way that he says it. Though Plumb clung to the notion that history had to be more than just the exercise of the pleasure principle; more than merely the inspection of the generations of humanity; that it ought, really, to bring about some sort of epistemological and cultural alteration; he was actually hard-pressed to define what such an alteration might be. While all his pupils would agree that a world without critical history would be
dangerously worse off, in the end, Plumb, like many of us, remained stymied by an aesthetic in search of a didactic.

  Rescuing Churchill

  Review of Churchill by Roy Jenkins, New York Review of

  Books, 28 February 2002

  The last thing George Orwell published was a May 1949 review of Volume Two of Winston Churchill’s memoirs of the Second World War, Their Finest Hour. You might expect him to have been allergic to its chest-thumping patriotism, its flights of empurpled rhetoric; but not a bit of it. Churchill’s writings, Orwell observed, bestowing the most meaningful accolade he could manage, were ‘more like those of a human being than of a public figure’. Though in 1939 Orwell had been suspicious of Churchill’s belligerent rhetoric and ominous potential for a personality cult of his own, by the time he came to write 1984, it was not Big Brother who would be baptised Winston, but the doomed renegade, ‘the last man’.

  Churchill may have been born in Blenheim Palace, but Orwell was right to grant him the gift of the common touch. When the Prime Minister toured the scorched and shattered remains of Bristol after a particularly hellish air raid in April 1941, a woman who had lost everything and was awash with raging tears, on seeing the jowly face and cigar, stopped crying and waved her hanky, shouting herself hoarse, ‘Hooray, hooray!’ Along with the millions of his compatriots, Orwell believed that, more than any political, or military, gifts, it had been Winston’s exuberant humanity – egotistical, erratic, histrionic – as well as his long career as a word-warrior, that had taken a people, shaking with trepidation, and made of them comrades in arms.

  Of a piece with that humanity was Churchill’s large capacity for self-mockery. Orwell also recycled the story that Churchill followed up ‘we will fight on the beaches’ with ‘we’ll throw bottles at the b——s, it’s about all we’ve got left’, but that the candid addition was buzzed out by the quick hand of the BBC censor just in time. The story was apocryphal, but the point was that such Churchilliana existed at all. No leader who made jokes against himself was in much danger of turning dictator. In the same vein, Clement Attlee, the Labour party leader who served in his War Cabinet and who could, at times, be a fierce critic, commented not long after Churchill’s death that he was ‘a supremely fortunate mortal’, but that ‘the most warming thing about him was that he never ceased to say so’.

  But the comedian and the tragedian lived within the same surprisingly delicate skin. The challenge facing any biography added to the groaning shelves of Churchill histories is somehow to do full justice to the Promethean character of its subject, the richly lived (not to say gluttonously engorged) career, without ever being a slave to its mystique. Mere character delineation – easy enough in Churchill’s case – won’t suffice. The hard work is to demonstrate exactly how the outsize Churchillian personality, so truculent, so impulsive, so often profoundly wrongheaded, became, in the dark spring of 1940, just what was needed for national survival. There’s no doubt that Roy Jenkins has risen splendidly to this challenge, succeeding, much better than many biographers before him, in bringing to life Churchill the political animal, whose impatient appetite for power, and strenuous exertions to secure it, are often hidden beneath the grand opera of his speechifying. He was smoke, certainly, but he was also mirrors. And Jenkins catches Churchill’s studied self-inspection with the sure-shot sharpness of an expert portraitist, a Karsh who has the cheek to stare back.

  His big book appears at a doubly interesting moment. The popularity of biographies of heroic but unimpeachably democratic leaders on both sides of the Atlantic owes something, obviously, to the present craving for both public reassurance and political education. The temptation is to return Karl Rove’s call and deliver an anatomy of charisma, stripped down to interchangeable parts, available for selective cannibalisation, and rebuilt to cope with the Crisis of the Week, the very stuff (as Churchill might have said) of that most egregious waste of time and money: leadership seminars. Perennially shrewd politician (even, or rather especially, in his eighties) though Lord Jenkins is, he also knows that the cloth from which Churchill was cut is deeply unsuited for modern imitations. (Who, these days, writes his own speeches, much less has the guts to begin one: ‘The news . . . is very bad’?) So he preserves and celebrates Churchill in all his titanic, unreproducible peculiarity; the storms of petulant fury rage along with the cherubic smiles. Jenkins’s angle of vision is that of undeluded, critically intelligent appreciation, wisely informed by his own lifetime of governing experience, neither adulatory nor hyper-sceptical.

  His biography also coincides, though, with a moment when Churchill revisionism shows signs, perhaps welcome, of running out of steam. The genre began with the most cumulatively powerful and perceptive book ever written on the daunting subject, Churchill: Four Faces and the Man, published in 1968, only three years after his death, when the marble at Bladon churchyard was still shining white. Such collections usually suffer from curate’s-egg syndrome, with some good pieces and some bad; not, however, when its authors are A. J. P. Taylor (on the statesman), Robert Rhodes James (on the politician), J. H. Plumb (on the historian), Basil Liddell Hart (on the war leader) and Anthony Storr (on the ‘Black Dog’ bipolar depressive). While the memorable book was in no way a hatchet job, the authors were nonetheless determined to look at their subject without stars, or tears, in their eyes. While they all acknowledged his indispensability, they were equally forthright (as was Churchill himself) about his many failings. For Plumb (notwithstanding the fact that he had worked on the proofs of the last volume of The History of the English-Speaking Peoples), the histories that won Churchill the Nobel Prize for Literature were just so many anachronistic swashbuckling failures, Gibbon’s orotundity married to Macaulay’s complacent insularity. Liddell Hart thought he had been excessively criticised for disasters in the First World War, but not nearly enough for the Second World War, not least because he had rewritten its history so selectively. And A. J. P. Taylor pointed out with typically unsparing sharpness that the man who, during the 1930s, had so obstinately and so noisily resisted the demise of empire, especially in Asia, actually guaranteed its collapse in 1941 by starving its defences of fighter planes, warships and manpower, in favour of the North African theatre and, less forgivably, the catastrophic attempt to take on the Germans in Crete.

  As the tomes of Martin Gilbert’s multi-volume Churchilliad arose in the 1970s and ’80s like some massive biographical Stonehenge, revisionists, as if in resistance, became correspondingly more audacious. Robert Rhodes James’s book Churchill: A Study in Failure, 1900–1939 made the fair point that had, in fact, the taxi that struck Churchill on Fifth Avenue in 1930 hit with lethal force, his career would indeed have been judged on its impulsive blunders (the Dardanelles in 1915) and its quixotic devotion to deservedly doomed causes – the gold standard, the British Raj in India, the constitutional viability of King Edward VIII. Likewise, Paul Addison’s fine scholarly history of Churchill’s career in domestic politics and government pulled no punches about his tendency to favour trigger-happy solutions for difficult problems – calling out the troops in 1911 and 1926 to deal with industrial strikes, for example.

  A step very definitely too far, however, was taken by John Charmley, whose Churchill: The End of Glory (1993) was the most ambitious attempt yet to reach up and pull the giant from his pedestal, but which succeeded only in having his full weight collapse back on the author. Starting with Taylor’s insight that the most intransigent defender of the Raj had ironically ended up being the inadvertent instrument of its downfall, Charmley added to it fresh research about the tentative suggestions mooted in the War Cabinet by Lord Halifax in the gloomy days of late May 1940, when France was on the point of collapse, for an approach through Mussolini, to discover what Hitler’s terms might be.

  The premise of any such negotiations was the proposition, raised as early as 1937 by von Ribbentrop in a private conversation with Churchill when the latter was still just an MP, that Hitler would be prepared to
leave Britain’s insular sovereignty and its empire intact, in return for a free hand in Eastern Europe. By 1940 this hegemony was to be extended through the whole continent, and Churchill’s response – superlatively chronicled in John Lukacs’s moving Five Days in London, May 1940 was the same as it had been three years earlier: indignant categorical rejection.

  Charmley, appealing (as self-appointed revisionists invariably do) to the calculus of national interest rather than to ‘emotive’ morality, argued that if imperial self-preservation, not to mention freedom from post-war economic and military dependence on the United States, was British policy, it might have been better to take the deal. But as Geoffrey Best’s excellent, concise new biography (which has had the bad luck to appear at the same time as Jenkins’s) points out, even supposing that British national independence, courtesy of the Third Reich, would have fared any better than the French, especially when it came to the little matter of saving Jews from the gas chambers, there is an air of quaintly naive parochialism about Charmley’s assumption that the Raj (already exposed by Gandhi as intrinsically ungovernable) would somehow have been granted a stay of execution thanks to the Swastika and the Rising Sun. It is, in fact, to Churchill’s imperishable credit that, faced with the alternatives of hanging on to the scraps of empire, courtesy of Adolf Hitler, or fighting to the end, whatever long-term damage might accrue to British power, he unhesitatingly opted for the latter. Even for its most conspicuous eulogist, better by far an ‘end of glory’ than the end of freedom.