In Search of History, Barbara W. Tuchman - week 1
I'm in a Honors Institute history seminar (History 34) this quarter and this week (due Monday) we're supposed to read three essays written by the famous historian and writer, Barbara W. Tuchman. These essays are all from Practicing History, a group of selected essays that Tuchman wrote. The first one, In Search of History, is about how Tuchman writes about history and mainly just her ideas about history and how writers should engage readers... I've come up with some points and quotes that I want to talk about this coming Monday in the second meeting of the seminar.She thinks history is better and more interesting when it's told as the truth instead of making it up.
To write history or any kind of topic you, the writer, have to be excited and passionate about the subject. You have to be in love with it. When you show this through your writing (which is sometimes very hard to do) is when you know you will engage and entice your readers.
page 14 (I've put a star near the part)--
"Like any person in love, [Professor C. H. McIlwain, one of her college professors] wanted to let everyone know how beautiful was the object of his affections. He had white hair and pink cheeks and the brightest blue eyes I ever saw, and though I cannot remember a word of Article 39, I do remember how his blue eyes blazed as he discussed it and how I sat on the edge of my seat then too..."
page 14 (near the bottom)--
"Although I did not know it or formulate it consciously at the time, it is this quality of being in love with your subject that is indispensable for writing good history -- or good anything, for that matter."
She talks about how her vivid ideas and images for her thesis were all in her head but she had an extremely hard time getting them onto paper so other people could read them! page 16 (middle area) -- "The experience was terrible because I could not make the piece sound, or rather read, the way I wanted it to." bottom of this paragraph -- "Enthusiasm had not been enough; one must also know how to use the language."
page 16 (middle bottom) --
"...I discovered that an essential element for good writing is a good ear."
page 16 (near the bottom) --
"Too many writers do not listen to the sound of their own words."
page 17 (second to last paragraph) --
"To write history so as to enthrall the reader and make the subject as captivating and exciting to him as it is to me has been my goal since that initial failure with my thesis. A prerequisite, as I have said, is to be enthralled one's self and to feel a compulsion to communicate the magic. Communicate to whom? We arrive now at the reader, a person whom I keep constantly in mid. Catherine Drinker Bowen has said that she writes her books with a sign pinned up over her desk asking, 'Will the reader turn the page?' "
On the bottom of page 17, Tuchman writes about the duties a writer of history has. "The first is to distill [or condense]. [The writer] must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant -- above all, discard the irrelevant -- and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative... To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry [a person who makes a show of knowledge; a formal uninspired teacher] to show how much he has read."
Tuchman says, and I agree with her, that it takes longer to figure out what to cut out and discard than to just include and what about everything you find and think about. As you can tell, in this blog post, I want to make sure I have the "best" information in here because if I just put in everything I'd be rewriting Tuchman's article -- which I don't think is very productive! I also don't really need everything here because I only want to show you, the reader, what I thought was the most important and relevant to what I'm thinking about. But this takes a whole lot more time than just typing up everything! Tuchman states on page 18 (at the top), "To discard the unnecessary requires courage and also extra work, as exemplified by Pascal's effort to explain an idea to a friend in a letter which rambled on for pages and ended, 'I am sorry to have wearied you with so long a letter but I did not have time to write you a short one.' "
Tuchman thinks of herself... "I think of myself as a storyteller, a narrator, who deals with true stories, not fiction." (page 18, second paragraph) I believe that whenever I write anything that's not fiction I should be thinking of myself as a storyteller and narrator who is working with true stories as well. This is probably one of the key ways Tuchman keeps all of her books, essays, and articles with her very conversational tone (like a story). I feel like one of the most important duties of a writer of any subject is to engage the reader (you'll find a couple quotes above about that) and I am totally hooked when it feels like the writer is sitting right next to me and having a conversation with me. I know I learned the best by talking and conversing with others and I know that reading these essays isn't truly like talking back and forth with someone, but it sure feels like it because of Tuchman's tone that she keeps throughout the essay.
What's also very cool in what Tuchman says is that she not only has a conversational tone but she never invents anything ("I do not invent anything, even the weather." (page 18, 4th paragraph)). Obviously, if it's nonfiction, it's real. But somehow Tuchman makes this real (and maybe not very interesting??) stuff extremely readable and engaging. How?? "The art, if any, consisted only in selecting it and ultimately using it in the right place. Selection is what determines the ultimate product..." She goes on to discuss why she only finds her information from primary sources which is an important point as well; but what I'm trying to get at is that she said that "selection [and placing] is what determines the ultimate product."
At the bottom of page 19 I made a note with an arrow pointing to the last paragraph saying 'more history in the history!' Tuchman says on page 19 (bottom), "Nothing can compare with the fascination of examining material in the very paper and ink of its original issue." She goes on to say that she has found unexpected bits of history in these letters, maps, diaries, and messages.
This essay is half a guide for writing history (what you need, like notecards (page 20), what you need to do (go to actual historical places (page 20)), what you need to use (primary sources, multiple ones because it's obvious that there will be bias (middle of 19), how you do it (ordering, selection, and placing of all the history found, page 18)). The other half is for telling her personal story of how she writes history and why she enjoys it so much. She also discusses the difficulties she's had with writing and why it's so important to follow the guidelines she discusses (which is above here).
You can really tell what she likes about history. "Research is endlessly seductive; writing is hard work. One has to sit down on that chair and think and transform thought into readable, conservative, interesting sentences that both make sense and make the reader turn the page. It is laborious, slow, often painful, sometimes agony. It means rearrangement, revision, adding, cutting, rewriting. But it brings a sense of excitement, almost of rapture; a moment on Olympus. In short, it is an act of creation." (middle of page 21). I find this paragraph sort of odd. This is where she is extremely conversational. The reader, me, has to read through this whole paragraph to get her point about writing. Tuchman couldn't just say "I really enjoy writing about history" she needed to take us through her thought process because you then can understand that she thinks writing is extremely hard to do but still "...it brings a sense of excitement... In short, it is an act of creation." So her feelings about writing are very mixed and by having this very conversational tone, we can see that her emotions are mixed.
Tuchman also discusses the difficulties in writing history. "One of the difficulties in writing history is the problem of how to keep up suspense in a narrative whose outcome is known." (bottom of page 21) Her solution... "I found that if one writes as of the time, without using the benefit of hindsight, resisting always the temptation to refer to events still ahead, the suspense will build itself up naturally." (top of page 22) "I wrote as if I did not know who would win, and I can only tell you that the method worked. I used to become tense with anxiety myself, as the moments of crisis approached." (middle of page 22)
"Prefabricated systems make me suspicious and science applied to history makes me wince" (bottom of 22). I can only guess that Tuchman would not like the saying "history repeats itself."
Tuchman describes the "why??" here: "To find out what happened in history is enough at the outset without trying too soon to make sure of the "why." I believe it is safer to leave the "why" alone until after one has not only gathered the facts but arranged them in sequence; to be exact, in sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. The very process of transforming a collection of personalities, dates, gun calibers, letters, and speeches into a narrative eventually forces the "why" to the surface. It will emerge of itself one fine day from the story of what happened. It will suddenly appear and tap one on the shoulder, but not if one chases after it first, before one knows what happened. Then it will elude one forever. It the historian will submit himself to his material instead of trying to impose himself on his material, then the material will ultimately speak to him and supply the answers." (top of page 23) So don't go running after your work trying to find the "why." That's great advice but it's awfully hard. I also want to know why I'm writing what I'm writing; why am I including this sentence? I think that's so important to know while writing anything that you want to hold together. However, I'm trying to get away from this habit of mine by blogging and writing more loose and story-like pieces. I agree with Tuchman when she says that the "why" will get out when it wants to and has the ability to. I wrote many blog posts for my English 34 seminar last quarter that didn't really come together until BAM! a great idea that totally connected everything I had just previously discussed. It's so hard to just let go and write and put the pieces together without knowing why to include something over something else. It's hard, but it's definitely worth it.
I figure I should include the last paragraph of Tuchman's essay because it really helps connect everything she discusses throughout her essay (and makes it BAM!).
"As, in this way, the explanation conveys itself to the writer, so will the implications or meaning for our time arise in the mind of the reader. But such lessons, if present and valid, must emerge from the material, not the writer. I did not write to instruct but to tell a story. The implications are what the thoughtful reader himself takes out of the book. This is as it should be, I think, because the best book is a collaboration between author and reader."
Hmmm.. I guess this mainly goes with writing about history or something else with facts because then there is actually material. I don't really know what to think of this last paragraph. It's odd and funny how she says "I did not write to instruct but to tell a story" since I feel as if many parts of this essay feel kind of like a guidebook to writing about history--which I totally don't mind, I like instruction manuals-- but she's saying she doesn't write to instruct! Well, I guess she means she doesn't write in her books to instruct since this isn't a part of her books, it's a Phi Beta Kappa Address at Radcliffe College in April 1963... so yeah, I shouldn't base this on what she says she does. I checked out Guns of August and the Zimmerman Telegraph from the library and I'm planning on reading them and I'll make sure to see if all she says she does in this essay she actually does in her writing!
I made many marks on this essay (which I photocopied, ugh I HATE it when people write in library books or any book that's not theirs!!!) about what I enjoyed and what I didn't know or understand. Many of the parts I didn't understand where names that she dropped that I just don't know (yet) or books that I haven't heard of (yet). Here are some of the words or names of people or books:
G. A. Henty - page 13
"Then came a prolonged Dumas period, during which I became so intimate with the Valois kinds, queens, royal mistresses..." - page 13
Conan Doyle's The White Company - page 13
Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs - page 13
"What Radcliffe did give me, however, was an impetus..." - page 14
Anglo-Saxon - page 14 (I thought this was English...)
"But his contempt for zeal was so zealous, so vigorous and learned, pouring out in a great organ fugue of erudition, that it amounted to enthusiasm in the end and held not only me, but all his listeners, rapt." - page 14
Sir Charles Webster - page 15
" 'His presentation is not vitiated historically by efforts at expository simplicity.' "- page 16
One of Emerson's poems, second line - "Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face," - page 17
Catherine Drinker Bowen - page 17
vis-a-vis (accent on 'a') - page 17
"The first is to distill." - page 17
"Narrative, it has been said, is the lifeblood of history." - page 17
"To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read." - page 18
Pascal - page 18
"The historian is continually being beguiled down fascinating byways and sidetracks." - page 18
Macaulay - page 18
"Leopold von Ranke, the great nineteenth-century German historian" - page 18
"wie es eigentlich gewesen ist, what really happened, or, literally, how it really was." - something von Ranke said- page 18
"... they are helpful but pernicious." - page 19
"I plunge as soon as I can into the primary sources: the memoirs and the letters, the generals' own accounts of their campaigns, however tendentious, not to say mendacious, they may be." - page 19
Sir John French - page 19
Aesop - page 19
Secretary of State Robert Lansing - page 19
the National Archives - page 19
"...[I] measured the great width of the Meuse at Liege [accent on 'e'], and saw how the lost territory of Alsace looked to the French soldiers who gazed down upon it from the heights of the Vosges." - page 20
"I was looking for documents in the case of Perdicaris, an American--or supposed American--who was captured by Moroccan brigands in 1904" - page 20
"Something in that awful gulf between perfect plans and fallible men..." - page 21
Joffre - page 22
Gallieni - page 22
"This brings me to a matter currently rather moot--the nature of history." - page 22
"Today the battle rages, as you know, between the big thinkers or Toynbees or systematizers on the one hand and the humanists, if I may so designate them--using the word to mean concerned with human nature, not with the humanites--on the other. The genus Toynbee is obsessed..." - page 22
"When history, wickedly disobliging, pops up in the wrong places, the systematizers hurriedly explain any such aberrant behavior by the climate."
"As Sir Chales Oman, the great historian of the art of war, said some time ago, 'The human record is illogical... and history is a series of happenings with no inevitability about it.' " - page 22
Leon Trotsky - page 22
"More recently an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literacy Supplement disposed of the systematizers beyond refute. 'The historian,' he said, 'who puts his system first can hardly escape the heresy of preferring the facts which suit his system best.' " - page 22
"That sounded to me like one of those bits of malice one has to watch out for in contemporary observes; it did not ring true." - page 23
"Messimy, the French War Minister" - page 23
"The same thing happened with Joffre's battle order on the eve of the Marne." - page 23
Tuchman wrote in one of her books this about what Joffre said, "After the first thirty days of war in 1914, there was a premonition that little glory lay ahead." - page 24
posted by Cassie @ 1:28 PM
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