Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [23]
The Historian as Artist
I would like to share some good news with you. I recently came back from skiing at Aspen, where on one occasion I shared the double-chair ski-lift with an advertising man from Chicago. He told me he was in charge of all copy for his firm in all media: TV, radio, and the printed word. On the strength of this he assured me—and I quote—that “Writing is coming back. Books are coming back.” I cannot tell you how pleased I was, and I knew you would be too.
Now that we know that the future is safe for writing, I want to talk about a particular kind of writer—the Historian—not just as historian but as artist; that is, as a creative writer on the same level as the poet or novelist. What follows will sound less immodest if you will take the word “artist” in the way I think of it, not as a form of praise but as a category, like clerk or laborer or actor.
Why is it generally assumed that in writing, the creative process is the exclusive property of poets and novelists? I would like to suggest that the thought applied by the historian to his subject matter can be no less creative than the imagination applied by the novelist to his. And when it comes to writing as an art, is Gibbon necessarily less of an artist in words than, let us say, Dickens? Or Winston Churchill less so than William Faulkner or Sinclair Lewis?
George Macaulay Trevelyan, the late professor of modern history at Cambridge and the great champion of literary as opposed to scientific history, said in a famous essay on his muse that ideally history should be the exposition of facts about the past, “in their full emotional and intellectual value to a wide public by the difficult art of literature.” Notice “wide public.” Trevelyan always stressed writing for the general reader as opposed to writing just for fellow scholars because he knew that when you write for the public you have to be clear and you have to be interesting and these are the two criteria which make for good writing. He had no patience with the idea that only imaginative writing is literature. Novels, he pointed out, if they are bad enough, are not literature, while even pamphlets, if they are good enough, and he cites those of Milton, Swift, and Burke, are.
The “difficult art of literature” is well said. Trevelyan was a dirt farmer in that field and he knew. I may as well admit now that I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book but I did not think I ought to say so until someone else said it first (it’s like waiting to be proposed to). Now that an occasional reviewer here and there has made the observation, I feel I can talk about it. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry while the rest of us are lumped together under that despicable term “Nonfiction”—as if we were some sort of remainder. I do not feel like a Non-something; I feel quite specific. I wish I could think of a name in place of “Nonfiction.” In the hope of finding an antonym I looked up “Fiction” in Webster and found it defined as opposed to “Fact, Truth and Reality.” I thought for a while of adopting FTR, standing for Fact, Truth, and Reality, as my new term, but it is awkward to use. “Writers of Reality” is the nearest I can come to what I want, but I cannot very well call us “Realtors” because that has been pre-empted—although as a matter of fact I would like to. “Real Estate,” when you come to think of it, is a very fine phrase and it is exactly the sphere that writers of nonfiction deal in: the real estate of man, of human conduct. I wish we could get it back from the dealers in land. Then the categories could be poets, novelists, and realtors.
I should add that I do not entirely go along with Webster’s statement that fiction is what is distinct from fact, truth, and reality because good fiction (as opposed to junk), even if it has nothing to do with fact, is usually founded on reality and perceives truth—often more truly than some historians. It is exactly this quality of perceiving truth, extracting it from irrelevant