Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [40]
Because of all the quotable reports it spawned, this affair was a good example of the bewitching effect of diplomatic documents. An episode like the Wallace mission exercises the same effect as Everest on Mallory. You write it because it is there. Then it turns out not to mean anything. It would have been false to history to leave out the Wallace mission altogether, so I condensed it as much as I could, even at the cost of cutting a wonderful characterization of Wallace by a man who said, “Henry would cut off his right hand for the sake of an idea—and yours too for that matter.” I hated to let that go, but since Wallace no longer appeared as a personality, it no longer belonged.
The larger scale cannot be achieved by blithely skipping over whole episodes or chunks of time; it requires condensing, which is the hardest work I know, and selection, which is the most delicate. Selection is everything; it is the test of the historian. The end product, after all, consists of what the historian has chosen to put in, as well as chosen to leave out. Simply to put in everything is easy—and safe—and results in one of those 900-page jobs in which the writer has abdicated and left all the work to the reader.
Selection is the task of distinguishing the significant from the insignificant. It must be honest, that is, true to the circumstances, and fair, that is, truly representative of the whole, never loaded. It can be used to reveal large meaning in a small sample. As Robert Frost said, “The artist needs only a sample.” At Chiang Kai-shek’s residence the glimpse of secret-service boots peeking below red curtains, which I took from someone who was present, was a tiny selection that bespoke a whole atmosphere. Likewise the letters of Colonel Carlson to President Roosevelt (which, incidentally, have not before been printed) crystallized, I think, the American idealized view of China at the time.
One must resist the selection that does too much. By that I mean an item or incident which, by the fact of being made part of the narrative, appears representative and leaves the reader with an impression that may not be entirely justified. The author wields tremendous influence in this way which no one superintends but his own conscience.
I remember facing one such choice at the climax of the debacle in Burma when Stilwell was trying desperately to organize transport and food for the retreat before it collapsed into chaos. The Chinese general who was Chiang Kai-shek’s personal liaison officer could not be found because, as it happened, he was elsewhere engaged in organizing the retreat to China of a Rolls-Royce which he had delightedly acquired from the British Governor-General in trade for two jeeps. I intended to cap this incident with an aphorism I had picked up from the warlord years in the 1920s: “In Chinese warfare commanding officers have never been known to retire poor.” While that may have been reasonably true, it would have left American readers with the impression that all Chinese generals were venal—which is true only in American terms. I am not an authority on China, but I know enough to know that it would be quite false to write about China in the framework of Western values. So I took out the aphorism and the Rolls-Royce too. This illustrates the reasoning behind a negative selection.
I seem to be giving you chiefly examples of what I left out, and this reflects what was a constant struggle. I made a vow when I started that I would keep the finished book under 500 pages, and in the course of that effort I discarded or radically pruned everything I thought could be spared or that was not germane to my main theme. I missed my goal by 51 pages, but it was not for lack of trying.
Which brings me to another working