Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [85]
Certain aspects seem slighted: for one, the fact of Wilson’s late reading, whose repercussions for a mentally gifted child in an intellectual family could not fail to have been devastating, and for another, oddly enough, Wilson’s relations with women. The easy references to mother identification and to his wives as “mother substitutes” are coupled with the flat statement that until the first Mrs. Wilson’s death Wilson “had not the slightest sexual interest in any other woman.” I am perfectly prepared to believe it, but, to quote my own marginal notes at this point, “how on earth do they know?” What is the evidence for or proof of this negative? (The book, incidentally, is without notes or references of any kind, and quotations are given without attribution.) As regards the second Mrs. Wilson: “Let us content ourselves,” the authors say airily, that Wilson “again found a mother’s breast on which to rest.” In view of rather more genial aspects of this relationship not mentioned in this book, including the fact that Wilson habitually referred to his second wife as “Little Girl,” the authors’ reliance on mother seems a bit glib.
Sex in lay terms in fact receives surprisingly little explicit emphasis in a work co-authored by the progenitor of the sexual revolution. (I note this less in complaint than in wonder.) Even the male friendships are treated as facets of the father-son problem, not as latent homosexuality, a relief to anyone whose cup of ennui has been filled by that particular strain in our current literary supply.
Up to this point the authors’ exploration of Wilson’s unconscious is enlightening and valuable, despite an irritating style. Among other faults is a habit of maddening repetition, not only of phrases but of whole episodes, recounted two or three times in identical language as if the reader were some sort of nitwit who could not be trusted to retain what he is told from one chapter to the next. More fundamental is the basically irresponsible approach. The authors have allowed emotional bias to direct their inquiry, which has led to undisciplined reasoning, wild overstatement (the Treaty of Versailles was “the death sentence for European civilization”), and false conclusions.
A writer dealing with the world of actuality as distinct from fiction has, it seems to me, an obligation to the reader to deal as honestly with the facts as he knows how. It is easy enough with even a minimum skill in words to leave a loaded impression on the reader while evading the responsibility of being explicit, but the temptation is one that most writers who respect their profession will try to resist. Freud and Bullitt indulge it. They repeatedly, for instance, use the suggestive but loose terms “mental degeneracy” and “degeneration” (“the mental degeneration which led him to sign the Treaty of Versailles”), and sidle up to psychosis while avoiding a precise statement which could be challenged (“he nearly plunged into psychosis” or “he was rapidly nearing that psychic land … in which an asylum chair may be the throne of God”). This is pretty, but is it historical? The fact may be historical; indeed, the evidence adduced by the authors, especially the truly frightening quotations from Wilson’s last frenetic speeches on the League, suggests that he was psychotic in the final period from Versailles to his collapse. But the historian’s duty, especially in a matter of such moment as the psychosis of a President, is to state plainly, not to evade responsibility by the blurring of metaphor.
Freud says in his preface that as he studied Wilson’s life “a measure of sympathy developed … mixed with pity” which grew until it “was so overwhelming that it conquered every other emotion,” and he vouches the same for Bullitt. If so, the pity does not penetrate into print. Dislike and contempt dominate these pages. So highly charged is the authors’ bias that it is a constant astonishment to realize that they seem unaware of