Rich as Fiction?

I was stung by something I read recently on the dust-jacket of a work of popular history. The reviewer declared as a form of high praise that the book was “as richly detailed as a work of fiction”. This took me very much by surprise. What does it tell us about how history-writing is perceived? First, that it is not richly detailed compared to fiction, and second, that it is less interesting or less readable than fiction. For a work of history to be interesting, stimulating and readable is unusual; it brings it closer to the field of entertainment, and thus fiction.

Yet axiomatically, truth is stranger than fiction. Truth is certainly more interesting than fiction. Unfortunately I have a kind face and attract real-life confidences from strangers in public places. Recently in a fast-food restaurant a woman told me about her daughter’s trip to the hairdresser, during which the stylist cut his hand and proceeded quite casually to bleed all over her specially-created 1920s hairdo, without so much as the application of a sticking plaster. She had to go to a costume party with her hair absolutely soaked in blood.

Authentic history—which is just real life in the past tense—is full of equally startling events, although perhaps on a slightly larger scale. So why is so much of it so desperately hard to read?

My PhD supervisor once said to me, by way of criticism early on in my efforts to produce my thesis, “You don’t write the way you speak.” I thought about it, and decided that he was quite correct. Then I wondered why I was unable to write the way I spoke. After dismissing the more obvious considerations of obscenity and libel, I came to the conclusion that I didn’t write the way I spoke because when it came to writing history, I had decided that it was best to eliminate any content which might quicken the pulse. Failure to do so would result in one not being taken seriously as a historian.

Where did I learn this? From reading very, very dull and theory-laden books and journal articles by eminent historians. I will name no names; it is bad enough feeling driven to write an article of this sort in the first place without turning completely into G.K. Chesterton (complete with fat and pince-nez). But as an undergraduate, the connection was made as easily as with Pavlov’s dog. Serious history = as boring as possible.

Then comes the inevitable self-reproach, or reproach from tutors: “If you would just make the effort, you would find it interesting.” But I was making the effort. I loved history and wanted to be an historian. But nothing on earth could make me enjoy much of what I had to read; these were the days when Foucault was highly fashionable, and as a historian of medicine, I had no legitimate means of escape.

But I hung on to a tiny spark of encouragement which I had received as a teenager from Warren Carroll, the author of the enormous Christendom series published by the eponymous US college. Carroll wrote in his preface to The Founding of Christendom that there was no rule anywhere that said history should be as dull as possible. This was the first time I had seen my own sneaking suspicion articulated in print, and inwardly I cheered. 

Why are we afraid to turn history-writing into good reading? Here I find myself surprisingly in sympathy with the late Manning Clark, who possibly spent too much of his time making good yarns out of otherwise unpromising events (and sometimes out of things that didn’t happen at all). This is an Irish failing par excellence, and I can easily forgive him. But no one reads Clark, and plenty of people do read Geoffrey Blainey. Why? Because Blainey knows a good story when he sees one, and he tells it mostly by letting it tell itself.

Art is, fundamentally, communication: you have something to say, and you say it, and try to find out who gets the message. When history-writing becomes incomprehensible, or comprehensible only to a select few, it has lost the plot. It has ceased being an art and has become a social science, with all its dated and awkward posturings. (Nothing delights me more than to go to second-hand bookshops and see rows upon rows of blue-spined Pelican social science paperbacks, all gathering dust in glorious irrelevance.) Conversely, when you meet a historian who can no longer speak from the heart, but who rather has begun to speak as he or she writes, then you are in the presence of a dying soul.

This is why history-writing is an art, and always has been, and should not apologise for being so. Its essential quality is artistic, not scientific. The art lies in selecting one’s material from the vast range available, and turning it into something accurate and readable within its own limitations. No historian can include “everything”; if they could, there would be nothing for book reviewers to reproach them with while showcasing their own encyclopaedic knowledge of the subject.

St Benedict claimed that there were four kinds of monks; perhaps there are four kinds of history-writing. The best histories are those which are both truthful and entertaining. Next are those which are truthful, but not entertaining—the equivalent of the difficult relative at the family gathering. Next, those histories which are untruthful but entertaining, which can be forgiven much for their blood-on-the-wattle qualities. Finally, that poisonous breed of histories which are neither truthful nor entertaining: commissioned histories of upwardly mobile institutions undertaken by desperate freelance historians, who are prevented from revealing scandals and yet must write in a “scholarly” style which is impenetrable to the very people to whom they hoped to sell the book.

So what can we do about this? Ad fontes: historians need to remember why they got into this business in the first place. History as art is a highly personal quest: anyone who knows historians at all knows that they have bees in their bonnets as individual as they are. I have a friend whose mania is sixteenth- and seventeenth-century forts; introduce this topic into conversation at your own risk. I also cannot think of a single academic or professional historian who, when they have had sufficient to drink sufficiently late at night, will not divulge awful confessions of what drew them to history-writing: “I just really, really loved historical adventure stories when I was a kid.” “My nanna had hundreds of ancient copies of women’s magazines.” “I was totally obsessed with Germans; always have been.” And, even more shaming than admitting to viewing child pornography, “I wanted to find out what really happened.”

Come daylight and sobriety, these admissions vanish like smoke (except that I have a mind like a steel trap for such confessions). We trot back to our dutifully theory-laden books and journal articles, write monographs which only sell because we set them as compulsory texts for our courses, and obediently disparage any best-selling popular history titles. Inside, however, lurks the fermenting, distorted passion to write exciting history; that unbalanced and highly artistic urge that seeks an outlet and is denied. So we channel our frustration into departmental politics, and take up triathlons.

I know exactly why I am an historian. I am a long-range gossip. I am in it for the thrill of the chase; the research trail that, once sensed, can uplift me like the fangs of a bull-ant. One prominent historian (male) once described me as a “bower-bird”: I have seen their nests and I couldn’t be happier. Another prominent historian (female) described me to my face as “a lightweight”; again gratefully accepted, given some of the purportedly heavyweight bilge I see remaindered in second-hand bookshops.

Historians adore snooping. We have to. It’s our job. We follow the dead at a discreet distance, taking compromising photos and examining hotel registers. We thrive on inconsistencies, scandals, paradoxes and mysteries. There is nothing quite so much fun as catching some historical personage out in, for example, the telling of a really big lie, and being able to prove it. History conferences are an especial joy in this regard: presenters do their best to remain po-faced, but there is no disguising their glee when they get to the good bits. This warms the cockles of my heart, because you cannot fake that intense love of good subject material. This is the inner truth which kept the budding historian awake at night with Nanna’s old magazines, or obsessing about Germans in the university coffee shop to anyone who would listen.

Historians should learn to write the way they speak, the way they really speak, with the confidence that this authentic voice is the one everyone wants to hear. If this enthusiasm and warmth can be communicated, historians will win more students to the discipline of history than all the hand-wringing in the world. Best of all, they will attract students who have the same fire in their belly as they do. These are infinitely preferable to the artful little runts on the make who are determined to carve their way to fame, fortune and academic permanency by dutifully parroting the golden ideologies from His/Her Master’s/Mistress’s Voice.

I love writing history, and I love trying to communicate that love by art rather than science. Do I always practise what I preach? Sadly, no. I have been an historian on and off for twenty years now, and I still wish I could write more lively journal articles, but even I feel constrained by the weight of “scholarly merit” to tone it down. Not to worry. In twenty more years, those who rebuked me will have gone to that great Archive in the Sky. I, on the other hand, will no longer be a mere feather on the breath of Clio, but a grande dame, and will thus be allowed to say and do whatever I like.

If I live that long.

Philippa Martyr is the author of Paradise of Quacks: An Alternative History of Medicine in Australia (Macleay Press, 2002) and other works of history.