Practicing History: Selected Essays Page 10
The frightening thing was how close I had come to missing them altogether. No one among his family or former colleagues of the 15th Infantry had mentioned to me the existence of the articles; the originals had not been among his papers; and the Sentinel was not, of course, indexed in the Periodical Guide. With no clue to their existence, I might never have found them, which would have been a serious omission for Stilwell’s biographer. This is the kind of thing that makes one shiver to think of what else one may be missing.
How came the 15th Infantry’s journal from Tientsin to 42nd Street? It appears that a Library staff member had made a hobby of regimental histories and had acquired a file of the Sentinel, which the NYPL, with an admirable sense of time, place, and history, had preserved. Researchers in every field must owe the staff many debts similar to mine.
Unlike the British Museum (BM) and Bibliothèque Nationale (BN), where you cannot penetrate the mysteries of the catalogue (which is written in books and changes system whimsically, say at letter H from 1792–1920 or suddenly at Q in 1898) without the assistance of the staff, at the NYPL you can plunge ahead independently by virtue of its single over-all card catalogue.*1 The card catalogue, to my mind, is the supreme advantage of being an American; if there are others, they are secondary. One may acknowledge, however, certain drawbacks at 42nd Street: It does not have the marvelously mellow, protected surroundings of the circular Reading Room at the BM or of its replica under the dome of the Congressional, nor the pleasant sense of being one among a community of scholars. Although access is open at the Congressional, the drifters do not come there, no doubt because of its location on the Hill rather than in a midtown commercial area like that of the NYPL. In Europe access to the great libraries is controlled by the requirement of written application with a statement of purpose. This is hardly more than a formality in London, but in Paris you should prepare for a week’s struggle with French bureaucracy, which regards every applicant as a natural object of suspicion. Supply yourself with passport, birth certificate, university diploma, your mother’s marriage license, and a letter from your ambassador. If you can show your return ticket home, that will have a soothing effect.
Apart from the rather heterogeneous types who join you in the NYPL Reading Room—some to come in out of the cold, others to pursue often strange devices (once a lady sat across from me with a large cloth bag from which she extracted a variety of embossed paper napkins, colored pencils with which she decorated the napkins, envelopes into which she stuffed them, an address book which she fiercely leafed for names to write on the envelopes, stamps and a sponge to finish the process)—apart from these distractions, the chief disadvantage of the NYPL is that one cannot enter the stacks, as one can, with authorization, at the Congressional, or at Widener at Harvard (which, suffering from the universal budget squeeze, now sensibly charges outsiders for this privilege). To roam the stacks is of course the most delightful, if not the most disciplined, form of research, and the most productive of discoveries. Collected before you is all the gathered wealth on your subject. You can examine, compare, explore, and choose.
Archives are a resource whose usefulness depends on the knowledge and enthusiasm of their custodians. The searcher is helpless without them. Fortunately, archivists are a genus who seem actually to get their satisfaction from locating for you what you want. At the prototype of them all, the Public Record Office in London, which houses the documents of ten centuries, I once asked for the papers of the English delegation to the Hague Conference of 1899 and received the originals within fifteen minutes. That was another example of serendipity because they were bound in with all the letters from the public to members of the government on the subject of the Peace Conference, and the letters gave an extraordinary glimpse of public opinion at the time; they were something I would never have known to ask for.
The chief disadvantage of the PRO is gastronomical: There is no place to eat a quick lunch in Chancery Lane (or there wasn’t when I was there last), and when absorbed in a pile of original papers one hates to waste time by going far afield for food. In these circumstances my solution is a small package of raisins and nuts which can be carried in one’s purse and eaten surreptitiously while working. Our National Archives in Washington, the American counterpart of the PRO, suffers from the same disadvantage, except for a cafeteria in the basement; and concerning all cafeterias in American government basements the only polite comment is silence. Maybe libraries and gastronomy do not mix, except, naturally, in Paris, where one can buy a sandwich in a superlative French roll and eat it with mirabelles on a stone bench under a tree in the lovely little park of the Place Louvois outside the BN; that is, if one has arranged to do one’s research in summer.
The National Archives and the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress are our major archival collections, both of them places so seductive that, notwithstanding the nutritional handicaps, historians have been known to enter and never emerge, or at least never publish because they cannot bear to bring their research to an end.
* * *
Authors Guild Bulletin, March 1972.
*1 As of the year I wrote, 1972, this was to become a bygone condition. Acquisitions since 1972 are now catalogued in printed books, and in time the entire card catalogue will be photographically reproduced in bound volumes.
Biography as a Prism of History
INSOFAR AS I HAVE USED BIOGRAPHY in my work, it has been less for the sake of the individual subject than as a vehicle for exhibiting an age, as in the case of Coucy in A Distant Mirror; or a country and its state of mind, as in the case of Speaker Reed and Richard Strauss in The Proud Tower; or a historic situation, as in the case of Stilwell and the American Experience in China. You might say that this somewhat roundabout approach does not qualify me for the title of biographer and you would be right. I do not think of myself as a biographer; biography is just a form I have used once or twice to encapsulate history.
I believe it to be a valid method for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it has distinguished precedents. The National Portrait Gallery uses portraiture to exhibit history. Plutarch, the father of biography, used it for moral examples: to display the reward of duty performed, the traps of ambition, the fall of arrogance. His biographical facts and anecdotes, artistically arranged in Parallel Lives, were designed to delight and edify the reader while at the same time inculcating ethical principles. Every creative artist—among whom I include Plutarch and, if it is not too pretentious, myself—has the same two objects: to express his own vision and to communicate it to the reader, viewer, listener, or other consumer. (I should add that as regards the practice of history and biography, “creative” does not mean, as some think, to invent; it means to give the product artistic shape.)
A writer will normally wish to communicate in such a way as to please and interest, if not necessarily edify, the reader. I do not think of edifying because in our epoch we tend to shy away from moral overtones, and yet I suppose I believe, if you were to pin me down, that aesthetic pleasure in good writing or in any of the arts, and increased knowledge of human conduct, that is to say of history, both have the power to edify.
As a prism of history, biography attracts and holds the reader’s interest in the larger subject. People are interested in other people, in the fortunes of the individual. If I seem to stress the reader’s interest rather more than the pure urge of the writer, it is because, for me, the reader is the essential other half of the writer. Between them is an indissoluble connection. If it takes two to make love or war or tennis, it likewise takes two to complete the function of the written word. I never feel my writing is born or has an independent existence until it is read. It is like a cake whose only raison d’être is to be eaten. Ergo, first catch your reader.
Secondly, biography is useful because it encompasses the universal in the particular. It is a focus that allows both the writer to narrow his field to manageable dimensions and the reader to more easily comprehend the subject
. Given too wide a scope, the central theme wanders, becomes diffuse, and loses shape. One does not try for the whole but for what is truthfully representative.
Coucy, as I began to take notice of him in my early research on the fourteenth century, offered more and more facets of the needed prism. From the time his mother died in the Black Death to his own marvelously appropriate death in the culminating fiasco of knighthood that closed the century, his life was as if designed for the historian. He suppressed the peasant revolt called the Jacquerie; he married the King of England’s eldest daughter, acquiring a double allegiance of great historical interest; he freed his serfs in return for due payment (in a charter that survives); he campaigned three times in Italy, conveniently at Milan, Florence, and Genoa; he commanded an army of brigand mercenaries, the worst scourge of the age, in a vain venture in Switzerland, his only failure; he picked the right year to revisit England, 1376, the year of John Wycliffe’s trial, the Good Parliament, and the deathbed of the Black Prince, at which he was present; he was escort for the Emperor at all the stage plays, pageantry, and festivities during the imperial visit to Paris; he was chosen for his eloquence and tact to negotiate with the urban rebels of Paris in 1382, and at a truce parley with the English at which a member of the opposite team just happened to be Geoffrey Chaucer; he was agent or envoy to the Pope, the Duke of Brittany, and other difficult characters in delicate situations; he was a patron and friend of Froissart and owned the oldest surviving copy of the Chronicle; his castle was celebrated in a poem by Deschamps; he assisted at the literary competition for the Cent Ballades, of which his cousin, the Bastard of Coucy, was one of the authors; on the death of his father-in-law, King Edward, he returned his wife and the Order of the Garter to England; his daughter was “divorced at Rome by means of false witnesses” by her dissolute husband; he commanded an overseas expedition to Tunisia; he founded a monastery at Soissons; he testified at the canonization process of Pierre de Luxembourg; at age fifty he was challenged to a joust (in a letter that survives), by the Earl of Nottingham, Earl Marshal of England, twenty-three years old, as the person most fitting to confer “honor, valor, chivalry and great renown” on a young knight (though, from what I can gather, Coucy was too busy to bother with him); he was of course in the King’s company at the sensational mad scene when Charles VI went out of his mind, and at the macabre “dance of the savages” afterward; it was his physician who attended the King and who later ordered his own tomb effigy as a skeleton, the first of its kind in the cult of death; finally, as “the most experienced and skillful of all the knights of France,” he was a leader of the last Crusade, and on the way to death met the only medieval experience so far missing from his record—an attested miracle. In short, he supplies leads to every subject—marriage and divorce, religion, insurrection, literature, Italy, England, war, politics, and a wonderful range of the most interesting people of his time, from Pope to peasant. Among them, I may have rather reached for Catherine of Siena, but almost everyone else in the book actually at some point crossed paths with Coucy.
Once having decided upon him, the more I found out while pursuing his traces through the chronicles and genealogies, the more he offered. The study of his tempestuous dynasty dating back to the tenth century, with the adventures in law, war, and love of his ungovernable, not to say ferocious, forebears, made in itself a perfect prism of the earlier Middle Ages, which I needed for background. When I came upon the strange and marvelous ceremony of the Rissoles performed each year in the courtyard of Coucy-le-château, with its strands reaching back into a tangle of pagan, barbarian, feudal, and Christian sources, I knew that there in front of me was medieval society in microcosm and, as I wrote in the book, the many-layered elements of Western man.
As Coucy was a find, so for America at the turn of the twentieth century was Speaker Reed, or Czar Reed as he was called. As soon as I discovered this independent and uncompromising monument of a man, I knew I had what I wanted for the American chapter in The Proud Tower, a book about the forces at work in society in the last years before 1914. He was so obviously “writable”—if I may invent a word, which is against my principles—that I could not believe that, except for a routine political biography published in 1914 and an uninspired academic study in 1930, nothing had been written about him since his death in 1902. I now felt he was my personal property and became seized by the fear that someone else would surely see his possibilities and publish something in the years before my book—of which he formed only one part in eight—could appear. Novelists, I suppose, are free of this fear, but it haunts the rest of us from the moment we have found an exciting and hitherto untreated subject. Unbelievably, as it seemed to me, Reed remained invisible to others, and as soon as I had written the chapter I took the precaution of arranging with American Heritage to publish it separately a year before the book as a whole was completed.
Reed was an ideal focus, not least because, as an anti-Imperialist, he represented the losers of that era in our history. Usually it is the winners who capture the history books. We all know about Manifest Destiny and McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt and Admiral Mahan, but it is astonishing how much more dramatic an issue becomes if the opponents’—in this case the anti-Imperialists’—views are given equal play and the contest is told as if the outcome were still in the balance.
Though the events of the chapter are confined to less than a decade, I learned more about the ideas that formed our country than I had in all my years since first grade. Reed led, through the anti-Imperialist cause, to Samuel Gompers, E. L. Godkin, Charles Eliot Norton, William James, Charles William Eliot (and what a writable character he was!), Carl Schurz, Andrew Carnegie, Moorfield Storey, and to their attitudes and beliefs about America. All America’s traditions were reflected there. Our development up to that time, and indeed since, was caught in the prism of the struggle over expansion.
In form, the piece on Reed is a biographical sketch, which is a distinct form of its own with a long literary history. As a rule such sketches are grouped in a collective volume, often by the dozen, like eggs: The Twelve Caesars, Twelve Against the Gods, Twelve Bad Men, and others. The advantage of the form is that one can extract the essence—the charm or drama, the historical or philosophical or other meaning—of the subject’s life without having to follow him through all the callow years, the wrong turnings, and the periods in every life of no particular significance. Reed was an excellent choice for many reasons: because of his outsize and memorable appearance—he was a physical giant six foot three inches tall, weighing three hundred pounds, always dressed completely in black, with a huge clean-shaven face like a casaba melon; and, because of his quotable wit, his imposing character, his moral passion, and the tragic irony linking the two great contests of his life—one over the Silent Quorum and the other over the treaty assuming sovereignty over the Philippines. The first in its mad action was a writer’s dream, and the second brought into focus the struggle of ideas at the turn of the century that marked the change from the old America to the new.
The Silent Quorum was a custom by which minority members of the House could defeat any legislation they did not like by refusing to answer “present” when called to establish a quorum for the vote. As Republican Speaker of the House, Reed had made up his mind to end once and for all the device that made a mockery of the congressional process. He succeeded in scenes, as a reporter wrote, “of such wild excitement, burning indignation, scathing denunciation and really dangerous conditions” as had never before been witnessed on the floor. Pandemonium reigned, the Democrats foamed with rage, a hundred of them were on their feet at once howling for recognition. One Representative, a diminutive former Confederate cavalry general, unable to reach the front because of the crowded aisles, came down from the rear, “leaping from desk to desk as an ibex leaps from crag to crag.” The only Democrat not on his feet at this point was a huge Representative from Texas who sat in his seat significantly whetting a bowie knife on his boot.
Recalling that scene here is for me simply self-indulgence: I had such fun writing it. In the end, after five days of furious battle, Reed triumphed and succeeded in imposing a new set of voting rules that ensured that the will of the majority would thereafter govern. It was a long stride, as he said, in the direction of responsible government. Five years later, when it came to a vote on the annexation of Hawaii, and subsequently, on the treaty taking over the Philippines (which Reed as an anti-Imperialist bitterly opposed), the purpose of the Quorum battle came to a test with inescapable moral fate, against himself. Still Speaker, he might—by summoning all his authority and manipulating every parliamentary wile of which he was the master—have stifled the vote, but if he did he would nullify the reform he had earlier won. He had to choose between his hatred of foreign conquest and his own rules. Knowing too well the value of what he had accomplished, he could make only one choice. His victory over the Silent Quorum gave the victory to the expansionist sentiment he despised.
To me it seemed a drama of classic shape and I have always thought it would make a good play if only some perceptive playwright would come forward to write it. None has, I suspect, because the playwrights of our era prefer to find tragedy in the lives of little people, in pale Laura and her glass menagerie, in the death of a salesman, in loneliness crying for little Sheba to come back. Something about our time does not like the great—though doubtless pathos and frustration are as true for humanity as the theme of The Trojan Women.
. . .