Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [38]
In organization, however, if not always in the finished product, chronology remains the spine. When I started writing The Guns of August I planned to begin with the guns going off so people should not think this was yet another book about diplomatic origins—Sarajevo and All That. I had worked out an intricate arrangement of four chapters in which war opened in each country and was followed by an internal flashback in each to explain the background. It was as beautifully designed as a Bach fugue, but when I had finished these chapters my editor didn’t know what to make of them. On rereading them, neither did I. He suggested trying it chronologically. This was so simple that I had thought it inartistic, but when the flashbacks were lifted out and put first where they belonged, behold, the result read as simply and naturally as if it had been ordained. I have avoided razzle-dazzle arrangements ever since.
With each book, one encounters new problems of organization and presentation. Obviously the dual theme of Stilwell—the biography of a man and the relationship of two countries—was a major difficulty throughout, but it was my choice, and peculiar to this book, so I can’t generalize from it—except to say “never again.” Every time I started a new chapter I felt like Jacob wrestling with the angel all through the night. Although it was hard work, the dual theme was justified, I think, because the figure of Stilwell as a continuing focus supplies human interest and drama, while the over-all Sino-American relationship gives the subject importance.
The Chinese scene of the book was another problem. It meant, as I was aware all the way through, that the reader had no familiar frame of reference. If you write a book laid in Europe or America, you can count on the reader having a mental picture of the relative location of France and Germany, or of Texas and Alaska, or where the Rockies are, or the Great Lakes. Equally with people. Once introduced let us say to Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh or Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, he will have no great difficulty in keeping them distinct, but what is he going to make of Sun Li-jen and Li Tsung-jen, two prominent persons in my book, or of Yen Hsi-shan and Wang Ching-wei and Wei Li-huang and Chang Tso-lin and Chang Tsung-chang and all those other triple monosyllables—not to mention the provinces: Kwangtung and Kwangsi, which adjoin each other, Kiangsu and Kiangsi, which do not, Honan and Hunan, Shensi and Shansi, and all the rest. I tried at first to avoid using these names, and to locate places in relation to the more familiar rivers and cities, but this soon proved impossible. China’s provinces can no more be avoided than America’s states.
Especially in an alien setting like China—but the rule should hold true for all historical writing—I try never to introduce a place name without locating it in relation to some place already mentioned, nor introduce a person without describing some attribute that will fix him in the reader’s mind. People and places must be given recognizable identities, otherwise the reader flounders in a sea of unknowns; he will miss the point of this or that and sooner or later, bored by incomprehension, will drift away.
The mere parading of names without taking the trouble to locate or personify them is either simple laziness on the part of the writer or else showing-off, in which case it is no trick; anyone can do it just as anyone can double the length of his bibliography if he has a mind to. I never can understand why historians who go in for this name-dropping make themselves great reputations. In D. W. Brogan’s France Under the Republic,