In Our Time - History's relevance in the 20th century

Episode Date: December 3, 1998

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the study of history this century. One of the debates raging in the practice of history is between the history of facts versus the imagination - a debate raised again by so-called ‘faction’ - fiction based on documentary facts which is so much in our minds today from films and television. But in fact it is a debate which has been going on throughout the century within history. The 19th century historian Thomas Macaulay wrote that History is under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers; and like other districts similarly situated it is ill-defined, ill-cultivated and ill-regulated. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the Reason and the Imagination, it falls alternately under the sole and absolute dominion of each. It is sometimes fiction and sometimes theory.Why is the study of history important? Is history relevant to us today? Are the truths likely to be yielded from history closer to those disclosed in great novels than the abstract general laws sought by social scientists? And what is the role of imagination in the writing of history? With Simon Schama, Old Dominion Professor of Humanities, Columbia University in New York and currently filming a 16-part series for BBC Television on the history of Britain; Lady Antonia Fraser historian, writer and author of biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. The great 19th century historian Thomas McCauley wrote that history was caught between two hostile powers, the reason and the imagination. I'm joined by two renowned historians of today to discuss

whether the practitioners of history in the 20th century have resolved this dilemma, or is history still caught between reason and the imagination. Simon Sharma, University Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, is currently filming a 16-part series of BBC television telling the story of the history of Britain. He's been compared to AJP Taylor and McCauley himself. He's the author of best-selling books, including citizens, memory and landscape, and more controversially, a fictional account of two historical deaths called Dead Certainties. Antonio Fraser is one of Britain's best-known historians.

She's written nearly a dozen history books, including her acclaimingly. main biographies of Mary Queen of Scots, Cromwell and Charles II, two books of women's history, The Weaker Vessel and the Warrior Queen, and her most recent book, The Gunpowder Plot. That quotation from Thomas McCauley, Samicham, was written almost exactly 170 years ago. History he wrote under the jurisdiction of two hostile powers. Instead of being equally shared between its two rulers, the reason and the imagination, it falls alternately under the soul and absolute dominion of each. It's sometimes fiction and sometimes theory.

Do you think that that's still upturns today? I think it does, actually. And another point he talked about history being necessarily a compound of poetry and philosophy. You need both, I think, actually, to do the job. And McCauley was often in despair that he sometimes, as befitted, a member of parliament, was extremely good at debate.

And at other times, he would just let his imagination go for a walk. He couldn't somehow get it together. And in a way, one's constantly trying to do. trying to do this. One's aware that argument without storytelling is just sort of an arid seminar, but storytelling without argument becomes just anecdotes. Has it been called his description of history not only obtained, he did that 170 years ago, that's exactly, not only obtained during that 170 years, but in a particular way intensified for the last part of our century. I refer to your very recent lecture in New York and a

phrase in that lecture where you spoke of this crisis of collective historical. amnesia. Oh God, well, I was talking not to bore people with the blight of history in the United States, but history has been swallowed into some hideous black hole called social studies, and that talk was, among other things, meant to be a cry for the abolition of social studies. But what that condition has reflected is simply the reduction of history in school to commentaries on newspaper editorials. It's really the old tradition of, history as an instructional solution for the quandary of the week. So what I was saying about that was the corrective for that,

the way to actually make children interested in history again is to crank out the storytelling elements. Well, let's go back to this dichotomy posed by McCauley. Do you think there's been any fusion in the last 170 years now between reason and imagination or did he spot something? Did he put his finger on something, which still obtains and will continue to obtain? Well, he spotted it all right because he certainly had been reading Walter Scott with admiration and envy. And he repeated Walter Scott's dismissal of most historians as Dr. Dreyer's dust.

McCauley entered the scene at the point where history was a series of tomes about lofty discourses on republicanism and constitutionalism. And McCauley reviewed some of those books. So he said the answer now is to kindle the imagination. History must be burned into the imagination as well as received by the reason. Now, subsequently, the effect of McCauley's appeal was to set light to a generation of historians like Carla, for example, who precisely embodied this amazing trick of being both gifted narrators and brilliant arguers. And there are moments, I think actually we're talking in a very good moment. I think there is an awful lot of history being written now,

which aspires to bring these two difficult parts. together in a happy marriage. But for a long time, I'd say, until the last 20, 30 years or so, the history one did at university was all about debate, dispute. History was thought it was a school for people who won't go into the foreign office. It was a place where you solved the world's problems. So the debating issue was extremely heavy part of what it was supposed to be, to be an historian.

Despite being party of pre-Antonia Fraser, do you think this is a happy time for historians and history? Do you agree with Simon Sharma? I think it is a happy time. I mean, since I have been practicing the noble art to the best of my ability, I've noticed I've gone in and out of fashion. Recently I've been told at universities that I'm coming back into fashion, which is happy news.

But, of course, what I've realized from my readers is that if you do write narrative history, you never really go out of fashion with people who want to know about it. There's an enormous world of people who long to read real history, shall we say. And that, I think, is because there is a definite need which is unaltered. And of course, I think, to fulfil that need, of course you've got to use reason and imagination. And of course you mustn't wander too far away into the dreadful social studies. But I think that it is a good moment.

So I agree with Simon Sharma, but I also think it's been a better moment in the last 40 years and perhaps people who are quite elevated realize. And how would you explain that? I would explain it in a human need. I would explain it in the rise of education after the war, more universities, more readers, more people interested in pursuing history, almost as a hobby in very different jobs.

And I think this is a separate strand from the debates going on in universities, a welcome one, I think. You mentioned Walter Scott Sarmichama, who's again a good starting point, although we needn't stay with Sir Walter Scott. And you say that truths are likely to be yielded from history. They will always be closer, I'm quoting you now,

always be closer to those disclosed in great novels or poems and the abstract general law sought by social scientists. Can you develop that a little? You're talking about the imagination. Yes, absolutely. I think at bottom, history is actually just an investigation of the nature of being human, really. In that sense, it's not different from the revelations that we like to expect from philosophy or poetry or great imaginative fiction.

We study what man has done to discover what man is. That's R.G. Collingwood, isn't it? Right, exactly. It's just that history's element of discovery is time. Collingwood himself also at one point described history as a kind of negotiation between familiarity and strangeness. and part of the need that Antonio Fraser just described, I think stems from this perfectly correct instinct that in some way we remain very close to those who preceded us

over centuries and generations. And in some ways we're also quite different, and history dwells within this wonderfully delicate, problematic area between kinship and remoteness. We need it because we need to, rebel against the shortness of our own span of years, I think. We need a kind of purchase on a length of time that will tell us about our humanity that is longer

than our own allotted three score and ten. I think that's very, very deep in human instinct. Do you go along with this, don't you, Frasier? The truth that you're being sought, as a historian, are going to be closer to those disclosed in great novels or poems? No, I'm not sure I do go along with that, though I go along with what you were saying about the mixture

of the familiar and the unfamiliar, I mean, when I'm writing a biography, every morning I say to myself, this person was exactly like me, felt pride, jealousy, ambition, hatred, fear. On the other hand, this person was totally unlike me. And between these two, I must somehow forge a book. You do so many writing historical novels. I mean, I think that's the same thing there. Sorry, interrupt you. Yes, no, I believe you.

I accept that. I've never written a historical novel because I've personally never actually wanted. to finding real history more interesting, which doesn't mean that I don't think historical novels have a valid place because I do. But this idea of the truth of history being nearer to the truth in a novel worries me rather. I speak as one who was educated on Walter Scott. My mother used to read it aloud in North Oxford, and she obviously skipped a great deal. So I always thought of Scott as a snappy writing, quite the John La Carrier of his generation. But I'm very grateful for that

because it did fill me with a snappy writer with a sort of desire to understand more about the past. I loved all the descriptions. But I don't think there are greater truths in Walter Scott about the past than there are in McCauley or Carlisle. And I say deliberately Carlisle because Carlisle is sort of edging towards something which is pretty imaginative in certain respects.

And yet it's very exciting. I feel I've learnt more history from Carlisle for all his inaccuracies and occasional herring off in the wrong direction than I have from Water Scott. Your position has been taken on by many people. It's been an entertaining argument. John Bintcliffe says that

you don't appreciate that there needs to be a self-conscious separation in our study of the past between the steady, unspectacular, accumulation of converging facts and the theories on narratives erected in them by the great synthesizers. Now, is that a fair criticism? No. Of course it's not. No, the accumulation and the interpretation of the selection of facts are absolutely the building blocks, really, on which all good history is made. The essential dividing line is simply that history is constrained by its obligations to truth.

And the novel clearly has an immensely more imaginative liberty, really. But if you're letting imagination take over history, if you're going for your instinct for particular thing. You can't invent. You can't invent. You cannot invent. As soon as you... I'm sorry, as soon as you really consciously invent an inner monologue or you simply decide you want the sun to be shining over the Battle of Nesby or whatever it is, you've actually botched both the exercise of the novelist and the historian. I agree with that.

And don't you? Excuse me. Didn't you invent in dead certainties? That was a novel. That was a novel about the writing of history. Oh, I see. I say so. At the end, Antonia. You're one of those readers didn't get to the end, for which you have my sympathies. But I specifically say exactly, it failed to get me out of this scrape I got myself into it, that the minute I invented something, these became two novellas, and that's what they were.

Oh, well, I did get to the beginning, and I did get to the cover, and it didn't say to novellas. And I did read it, and I did enjoy it, of course, because you write brilliantly, and it's very interesting. But I was shocked by it, actually. I thought, what is this nice young man doing? You know, he's written these brilliant books. Won't he go away and write some more brilliant books? And, of course, you did and do. But I was shocked.

I mean, I think it's good to be shocked by things, personally. I think because if you are shocked by something, you find yourself wondering where you are, thinking it all out. So I think you did a useful exercise, apart from giving one a good read. But you're not shocked by yourself and you're going away of write a crime novel, are you?

I mean, having done history. Believe me, you don't have to finish my crime novels. They are fiction. I have, I have, but interesting. But I don't see why, in fact, I was wrapped on the knuckles very severely for having presenting myself to the world as one kind of writer and then actually run off and done something else. But all of us sitting around it, both of you actually spend time doing that kind of thing. I would defend your right to do it, but I would also defend my right to say that I think that

it, dare I say, didn't quite work. I mean, just as many people write to me saying, why do you write crime fiction, you're no good at it. I much prefer your history and they're generally people who, in print, said they hate my history anyway. Can I just go back to this? Can you tell us why, at this particular time, at the very end of the 20th century, there is such a, as we've seen demonstrated between the two of you and the last minute or two, such a fierce argument about the essential property of history? What is it we're arguing about, Simon, then I'll come to you, Antonio?

Well, there is an important stake in this, actually. And that is really deception and were, I think, extremely conscious, not because of written history, so much actually as history constructed in films by the likes of Oliver Stone, broadcast history in which, as you've said, I become involved, the enormous power of deceits, actually, to masquerade in the clothes of authority, as in the conspiracy theory of who actually killed JFK. And I suppose actually, you know, writers, we look back somehow on written, printed history, and you think, well, yes, a book has a life and it can be kind of counter-argued against

if it's thought to be meretricious. But the actual authority actually up there on the screen is so scarily alarming, really, when inventions and fictions are made that were, I think, quite right to be upset and defensive and planting our flag really on the field of truth. Antonio, what's your... My first historical biography was Mary Queen of Scots, and I thought that I'd... What a delusion, that I'd forever put an end

to the story that Mary and Queen Elizabeth met because I'd showed the preparations for the meeting, the special kind of pageants that were all planned, and then it didn't happen. And I really thought in those days that was that. And then, of course, the first film, Mary Queen of Scots with Vanessa Redgrave and Clender Jackson came out, and everyone turned around and said, you were wrong, you know.

They did meet. The film says so. How important then, Simon Sharma, is entertainment in writing history? Where are we here? You talk in your lecture, New York, because I didn't hear it, but I read it, about seeing history, and again you refer to one of your great heroes, McCauley, and I know that when I was younger, Robin Graves, in inverted commas, taught me a lot of history, reading the Roman books.

But how important when you're sitting down to write your narratives and to picture the past? And you talk about picturing the past. You use that very specific. That is obviously very important. Now, where does that take you in terms of this, in a sense, in terms of what Antonia said, about the grittiness, the drones in the library who want to get their particular small passage of fact as accurate as is humanly possible? Unless you actually persuade your reader or your viewer in the case of our programs were laboring to make, that they are in some sense sort of living in the world you're describing,

you're going to leave them feeling that they've walked into some incomprehensible university seminar. Forster had this wonderful phrase. What do they of history who only other historians know? You don't want to leave. in that Antonia and, you know, family, mother, knew very well that you really, the idea is to make people suspend the daily life they're leading at the end of this century and live in that particular world for a while, so you must do that. Now, how you do it, you know, in order to entertain, you don't simply come on, you know, with a song and dance routine. It does indeed require an incredible number of hours in the archives, but sometimes it requires a kind of instinct for, what, again, McCauley called the furniture of the past.

If you really want to have your reader there in Fotheringay Castle and the Battle of Hastings, you may want to go to, oh, I don't know, history of armour, or you may want to find out what they've been eating, or you may want to find out what kind of wound would be more likely to polish them off, actually, in hours rather than days. So you don't go at the audience with a series of kind of lofty, abstract generalisations, or heraldic announcements in the way in which, you know, those old Alexander Corder costume, they would say in 1653, you'd go up them with a little minute details,

which built together into a sense of that one. I don't know if it is helpful or not. Everything you've said applies to people when they're writing historical novels. I've written two, and I've done exactly that. And I know other people write historical novels do precisely that. So I suppose I'm looking for a distinction there, Antonia. Something that you don't do. Well, it's rather interesting if we can't come up with one, and I want to falsify it, because I too, like Simon, like you, believe very, very strongly in details.

The thing that people often remember my book about 17th century women, the week of Versal, is that I remark at the beginning of a chapter that if you were a time traveller and you went back to the 17th century, the thing that would strike you as most extraordinary would not be the filthy teeth, which are often or the gap teeth, which are often written about it. but the fact that almost every female between the age of 15 and 45 would in fact be pregnant or just having had a baby feeding one. And this made a great impression on people. And the way I got at that was sitting back, time travelling myself, really thinking about what it would be like in that time. And I think that that was very useful, but I think it was equally useful that I read every diary written by a woman in the 17th century,

not a terribly difficult task, but it's good that I did it as well. Can I ask you something that I think will be of great interest to our listeners, and it's certainly of great interest to me. I mean, after the sort of 20th century wreckage in this country, two hugely debilitating wars, a massive recession and industrial upheaval, followed by a lot of industrial destruction, the end of empire, do you think that we see in this country, or we are, just clinging onto the planks from the wreckage of our history,

what connections do you see that you as historians can bring to not necessarily just children, adolescent as the rest of the world, in maintaining the links between Hastings and Agincourt and Naisby and so on and so forth? Well, I tell you, actually, again, I speak from a slightly transatlantic perspective, but one of the things that's been really upsetting me

has been a kind of hideous noises of Cool Britannia kind of drifting over the sarcaso, actually. I think actually we're setting ourselves up to put a kind of false opposition, really, between antique furniture, polish, smelling history, the burden of the past, the great kind of lumber. It does come as a burden, doesn't it? Well, I didn't think it should be.

No, I don't think it should be. No, it's presented as something from which we have to escape. So if actually were asked to muse on the past or dwell in it for a while, we're simply going to be dooming ourselves to the delusions of the empire never actually, the sun on the empire never actually said. I don't think that's necessary at all. I don't think we need to go in for a kind of collective rebranding, actually, myself. I actually think history from generation to generation is a kind of living,

that is something you give your children. It's something which is intrinsically done. dynamic and every generation puts its own kind of breath and blood back into it. So I think we should be running away from history as though it's kind of Granny's attic, you know, at all. I agree with you, but we seem to be, in a way, not running away from it, but rather sort of, at the least embarrassed by it and very often ashamed of it. Or is that just me? I'm not just my interpretation, that's what I feel, but is it my interpretation? I find real history as opposed to heritage history, you know, the smell of

polish and people dressed in saucy dresses which is sort of terrible I don't expect it does much harm but it's terribly boring compared to the interest of real history. I find it very comforting and I think a lot of people find it comforting. A lot of people wrote to me about the gumpowder pot, the persecution

of the Catholics saying we knew none of that because of course so much of history is winner's history and the Catholic history before the gumpowder plot has been sort of vanished away and I wanted to bring it back but they wrote saying it's comforting to think that other people suffered, you know, these things passed, and so will this of mine, which I think is Anglo-Saxon, isn't it?

And so I think there is a kind of stoic comfort to be got from history, which I think is precisely relevant to the end of the 20th century, and not at all kind of chinty Jane Austen comfort. I think there is a kind of stoic comfort to be got, and I think that's very, very important. And that's why I think history will survive fashion in antique furniture, I think history will go on because it shows the cyclical nature of our lives. But what about the argument which is prevalent and very strong

that all historical interpretations are valid, that your point of view is what gives your history validity, that if you're writing a history of women, it's much better if you're a woman, that if you're writing a history of the working class, is much better your working class. If you're writing history of Africa, it's really valid if you're African and so on and so forth.

Now, this is very strongly held and very strongly argued, isn't it? I'm a trauma. And that is prevalent now. come about in the last 20, 30 years. What's your view on that? History is self-esteem therapy, you know, constituency-based history. I hate that, really. I'm not going to have passed laws to prevent it happening. And in some ways, actually, again, if you teach in New York, I had a young student who actually discovered that there was a kind of earlier Puerto Rican immigration under the city in the 1920s, and her great-grandparents had been

involved in it, and she went and sort of explored that history. So, in her sense, a kind of roots-oriented history, actually produced a rather fine piece of writings. I'm not against it, but there is sort of sense in which history is a kind of elastoplastoplast, which you bind up your gaping wounds, really, weird. I hate that. In my more dictatorial moments, which, of course, incredibly seldom,

I would love history of ruins to get assigned by definition the histories of cultures other than their own, actually. History is, in any case, about exploring other. people in time, people remote from us, the element of stretch presupposes a kind of toleration, a kind of compassion for things that are different from

oneself. But it's interesting that very serious historians are deeply worried about this. Lawrence Stone, done whom more serious you could not get, has said that as a result of this post-modernist view, history is becoming an endangered species. And Tony Fraser, what's your view of that? Yes, I've

read that, but of course it's not so endangered in this country as it is in the state, I mean, I think in this country I could write a biography of Marcel Proust, for example, without someone saying that I was not homosexual and not French and not Jewish and a number of other things that I manifestly not. But a friend of mine at a university in the States gave that as an example of something people used to joke about 10 years ago and had now become a sort of threat. When I wrote about Cromwell, not a woman, I drew on my non-conformist heritage,

grandfather was a non-conformist lay preacher, and I remember him very, very well and terrifying he was, and my grandmother, Unitarian, Chamberl. All of that was very important to me in thinking about what Cromwell was like and the roots of his religious experience. So a more obvious thing, the fact that I was, a woman, didn't seem to come into it. And that's, I think everyone draws on things, but the idea that you're ruled out, that's what I can't bear. No, I think that men should be able to write about women, and Africans should be able to write about Asians, and Asians should be able write about New Zealand. I don't like the history as the history of me.

I really like history as history of them, really. It's just actually... I find it more of a challenge. But your narrative history is actually, in your narrative drive, in constructing an exciting narrative, whether it's historical or any other, obviously sticking to history,

there's a great deal of you there because a strong narrative implies that the present is the climax, and that implies your view of history, which is your selective view. So there's a lot of me in narrative history, inevitably. That's quite true. Can I return to R.G. Collingwood,

whose writing must be a particular favour of anybody who's read history or writes history. And to that simple sentence, we study what man has done to discover what man is. Now, I think it's a valid question, especially at the end of this century,

to say, what can we learn from history that's any real value and use? I'm not talking in a simply utilitarian sense. I know what can we carry forward from it. If you were challenged to say, from this century's history, what can you really learn? Time and Charma, and then I tell you.

It's very hard to improve on Collingwood's epigram, actually. I resist slightly the notion that really, at one level, we kind of pull out of history, very specific little pieces of instruction about how to write constitutions, how to elect governments. It's much more kind of indirect instruction, really. I have to say I'm probably not going to be very eloquent on this because I'm at my most uncomfortable really

when trying to float the company history in the stock exchange and find out actually how valuable in that sense how much the punters are going to pay for it really. It's a good image to kill. It's a good image. That's a very good image. Antonio. I think that history, if read in the right way

and sufficient quantity, it does teach one tolerance. I don't think it makes one join an authoritarian religion, and if one belongs to one, I'm a Catholic, I think you become rather worried by its history, and no doubt that's true if you belong to other religions. It can just as soon teach you intolerance, though, can it unfortunately. You can fall in love with Alexander the Great,

just as much as with any, as it would, as it would. Well, I'm not sure one should fall in love with anyone in history. It's rather unrewarding. I speak rather vernacular in this. No, but I will. maintain my position, I think that if you do study history, I mean, you can't just study one book, but if you study history over a number of years, I think you begin to see, in the words of Puck, you know, Lord what fools these mortals be, and you begin to realize that the

tolerant position, the understanding of other people's position, is something in past history, which would have helped things a great deal, and you begin to admire the people who allowed minorities to exist. Well, I think it's no good wagging your head, I don't mean. That's I know what you are. I'm not denying what you think. I just think, sadly, the dictators have their own historians every bit as much as liberal rulers. And there's unfortunately been more dictators. And when you look in this century, I'm sure every dictator we've had has been backed up by historians have told him that he is following the steady beat of history towards the summit of his wicked and ignoble ambitions. I just think we're a service industry against collective amnesia, really. I wouldn't put it higher than that. I'm going to stop there. Thank you very much to Simon. whose history of Britain will be on our screens in 2000, not very long to wait now,

and to Antonio Fraser. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.com. com.com.