Practicing History: Selected Essays Read online

  Again, when Garibaldi’s bugler blew reveille, “the unexpected music rang through the noonday stillness like a summons to the soul of Italy.” In the verb of sound, “rang,” the reader hears the bugle and in the phrase “like a summons to the soul of Italy” feels the emotion of the listener. Without knowing that he is being told, he has learned the meaning to history of the expedition.

  To visit the scene before writing, even the scene of long-dead adventures, is, as it were, to start business with money in the bank. It was said of Arthur Waley, the great Orientalist who died a few months ago, that he had never visited Asia, explaining that he was content with the ideal image of the East in his imagination. For a historian that would be a risky position. On the terrain motives become clear, reasons and explanations and origins of things emerge that might otherwise have remained obscure. As a source of understanding, not to mention as a corrective for fixed ideas and mistaken notions, nothing is more valuable than knowing the scene in person, and, even more so, living the life that belongs to it. Without that intimacy Francis Parkman would not have been the master he was.

  Parkman’s hero was really the forest. Through experience he learned passion for it, and fear, and understood both its savagery and beauty. In those long days of intermittent blindness when he was not allowed to write, his mind must have worked over remembered visions of the forest so that they come through on the page with extra clarity. As a scout paddles across the lake in autumn, “the mossed rocks double in the watery mirror” and sumachs on the shore glow like rubies against the dark green spruce. Or the frontier settler, returning at evening, sees “a column of blue smoke rising quietly in the still evening air” and runs to find the smoldering logs of his cabin and the scalped bodies of his murdered wife and children.

  Vision, knowledge, experience will not make a great writer without that extra command of language which becomes their voice. This, too, was Parkman’s. When the English are about to descend the rapids of the upper St. Lawrence, they look on the river whose “reckless surges dashed and bounded in the sun, beautiful and terrible as young tigers at play.” In choice of verbs and nouns and images that is a masterpiece. It is only physical description, to be sure, not a great thought, but it takes perfect command of words to express great thoughts in the event one has them.

  Steeped in the documents he spent his life collecting, as he was steeped in the forest, Parkman understood the hardship and endurance, grim energy, and implacable combat that underlay the founding of the American nation. He knew the different groups of combatants as if he had lived with each, and could write with equal sympathy of French or Indians, English or colonials. Consider his seventeenth-century French courtiers, “the butterflies of Versailles … facing death with careless gallantry, in their small three-cornered hats, powdered perukes, embroidered coats, and lace ruffles. Their valets served them with ices in the trenches, under the cannon of besieged towns.” In this case the ices in the trenches is a specimen of the historian’s selective insight at work. He has chosen a vivid item to represent a larger whole. It distills an era and a culture in a detail.

  Distillation is selection, and selection, as I am hardly the first to affirm, is the essence of writing history. It is the cardinal process of composition, the most difficult, the most delicate, the most fraught with error as well as art. Ability to distinguish what is significant from what is insignificant is sine qua non. Failure to do so means that the point of the story, not to mention the reader’s interest, becomes lost in a morass of undifferentiated matter. What it requires is simply the courage and self-confidence to make choices and, above all, to leave things out.

  In history as in painting, wrote the great stylist Macaulay, to put in everything achieves a less, rather than a more, truthful result. The best picture and the best history, he said, are those “which exhibit such parts of the truth as most nearly produce the effect of the whole.” This is such an obvious rule that it is puzzling why so many historians today seem to practice a reverse trend toward total inclusion. Perhaps the reason is timidity: fear of being criticized for having left something out, or, by injudicious selection, of not conforming to the dominant thesis of the moment. Here the independent writer has an advantage over the professional historian: He need not be afraid of the outstuck neck.

  Finally, the historian cannot do without imagination. Parkman, intense as always in his effort to make the reader “feel the situation,” chose to picture the land between the Hudson and Montreal as it would look to a wild goose flying northward in spring. He sees the blue line of the river, the dark mass of forests and shimmer of lakes, the geometric lines and mounds of man-made forts, “with the flag of the Bourbons like a flickering white speck” marking Ticonderoga, and the “mountain wilderness of the Adirondacks like a stormy sea congealed.” On reading that passage I feel the excitement of the Count of Monte Cristo when he opened the treasure chest. It would not be remarkable for one of us who has traveled in airplanes to think of the device of the bird’s-eye view, but Parkman had never been off the ground. It was a pure effort of imagination to put himself behind the eye of the goose, to see the flag as a flickering white speck and the mountains, in that perfect phrase, as “a stormy sea congealed.”

  Great as this is, the more necessary use of imagination is in application to human behavior and to the action of circumstance on motive. It becomes a deliberate effort at empathy, essential if one is to understand and interpret the actions of historical figures. With antipathetic characters it is all the more necessary. The historian must put himself inside them, as Parkman put himself inside the wild goose, or as I tried to do inside Sir John French in an effort to understand the draining away of his will to fight. As soon as the effort was made, the explanation offered itself. I could feel the oppression, the weight of responsibility, the consciousness of the absence of any trained reserves to take the place of the BEF if it were lost. The effort to get inside is, obviously enough, a path to insight. It is the Einfühlung that Herder demanded of historians: the effort to “feel oneself into everything.” The interpreter of the Hebrew scriptures, as he put it, must be “a shepherd with shepherds, a peasant in the midst of an agricultural people, an oriental with the primitive dwellers of the East.”

  To describe the historian’s task today in terms of narrative history and two romantic practitioners, Parkman and Trevelyan, will seem old-fashioned at a time when interdisciplinary techniques, and horizontal subjects such as demography, and the computerized mechanics of quantification are the areas of fresh endeavor. These are methods of research, not of communication, for one reason because the people who use them tend to lose contact with ordinary language; they have caught the jargon disease. Their efforts are directed, I take it, toward uncovering underlying patterns in history and human behavior which presumably might help in understanding the past and managing the future, or even the present. Whether quantification will reveal anything which could not have been discerned by deduction is not yet clear. What seems to be missing in the studies that I have seen is a certain element of common sense.

  The new techniques will, I am sure, turn up suggestive material and open avenues of thought, but they will not, I think, transform history into a science, and they can never make it literature. Events happen; but to become history they must be communicated and understood. For that, history needs writers—preferably great writers—a Trevelyan who can find and understand the cosí poetica in a soldier’s letter and make the right use of it, a Parkman who can see and feel, and report with Shakespeare’s gift of words; both, I need not add, assemblers of their own primary material. To be a really great historian, Macaulay said, “is the rarest of intellectual distinctions.” For all who try, the opportunity is now and the audience awaits.

  * * *

  Address, American Historical Association, December 1966. Saturday Review, February 25, 1967.

  Problems in Writing the Biography of General Stilwell

  I HAVE TO BEGIN with a disclaimer.
My book on Stilwell is not really a military biography even though the protagonist is a soldier. The book is really two-in-one, like an egg with two yolks: Stilwell and the American Experience in China, with the man chosen to represent the experience—to serve, as I stated in the Foreword, as vehicle of the theme, which is not military. The larger theme is the Sino-American experience. For purposes of making it comprehensible to the reader and writing a narrative, it needed a human vehicle. I chose Stilwell for that function, and the more I investigated, the more valid the choice appeared. He was, I think, exactly right, but the fact that he happened to be a soldier was, for my purposes, more or less incidental. It was not of the essence; it was merely the form his career took.

  With regard to sources for the military aspect, I met only two problems: For the period of World War II there is too much, a problem I will return to later. The second was minor: What happened during the maneuvers of 1940–1? This was when Stilwell earned the great reputation as tactician and field commander that led to his being rated number-one corps commander in the U.S. Army and to his being selected after Pearl Harbor for the first overseas command of the war. Maneuvers do not seem to be a very well-documented subject; in fact, for public affairs of the time they have the unique distinction of being under-documented. Yet as Stilwell’s biographer I obviously had to find out what the maneuvers demonstrated. It is not enough to know the result; one wants to show it happening.

  This is a frequent problem in military history: One always knows the result of a battle; the difficulty is in reconstructing the course of events during it. It is only when the time comes to write the narrative that you discover that you really don’t know what went on. I had that problem with the loss of Alsace in August 1914. In that case I never did find out enough to make it clear in my own mind. I faked it, but nobody noticed.

  This time I spent endless hours searching. I read all the critiques in the Infantry Journal. OCMH (Office of the Chief of Military History) came up with a history of the Third Army, in which Stilwell commanded a division during the first maneuvers, but it didn’t tell me anything. The best source, oddly enough, proved to be the press, which can hardly be said of it later on when the war was for real in China and Burma.

  At that stage the American public was reading fairy tales, largely based on Chinese communiqués—which could teach Munchausen a thing or two. For a while, presumably on the theory that you would come nearer to the truth if you got out of Asia altogether, the New York Times covered the Burma campaign from London! The whole fairy tale of the Chinese war effort became in itself a factor of history because the attitudes and myths it created influenced our policy—but that is another story.

  It has led me, however, to the proposition that the press might do well never to publish anything its reporters have not personally witnessed. It would eschew all communiqués, press releases, canned speeches. Just imagine! The news without press releases! We would be reading what happened, not what someone wants us to think happened—it might even be, on some delightful day, nothing at all. I proposed this once to Turner Catledge when the Times published a report about an alleged Israeli air raid which Cairo said killed fifty civilians while Tel Aviv said no planes had left the ground. Why not send a reporter to the spot, I asked Mr. Catledge; why bother to print the communiqué and the denial at all? He said something about being a paper of record, but I don’t see much point in putting into the record something that may never have taken place, just because some propaganda office has put it into a communiqué. That is simply being a sucker. Communiqués have about as much relation to what actually happens as astrology has to the real science of the stars.

  To get back to the maneuvers, the best account of all I found in a press-clipping book kept by the Stilwell family, which was a mine of wonderful things you never would find in a paper of record, but suffered from the disability that neither date nor name of newspaper was supplied for any of the clippings. Needless to say, the scrapbook was, to put it gently, a nightmare to the researcher.

  From the point of view of World War II historians, my research was characterized by two unorthodoxies: no clearance and no tape-recorder. As regards the first, I may say that when I first opened relations with the Pentagon I dutifully applied for clearance as I was told to do, had myself fingerprinted, and filled out a questionnaire as long as a Chinese scroll painting—two, in fact: one for the Department of Defense and one for the State Department, though I can’t say I was happy with the thought that I would have to submit notes on classified material, and the finished manuscript, for official sanction. The more I thought about it, the less the prospect pleased. In the meantime, while the bureaucratic mills were grinding, I was working on the Stilwell papers in the family home at Carmel and in the Hoover Library, where Stilwell’s World War II papers were deposited. At some point after Hoover acquired them, the Army got to thinking about it, and had gone through the deposit and removed the more “sensitive” (if that’s the word) of the classified reports, helpfully leaving a blank sheet of white paper in each place as mute token of its passage. This was not as frustrating as might be supposed, since I discovered that duplicates of the removed material remained in the Carmel files. With access to the Stilwell archive and other private collections, and with the amazingly thorough research and documentation by my predecessors, Riley Sunderland and Charles F. Romanus in the military and Herbert Feis in the diplomatic field, and with the publication of the Foreign Relations volumes on China through 1944, what did I need clearance for?

  A lawyer who had been consulted on another matter relating to the book was emphatically opposed to my using any clearance that would require submission of the manuscript. By this time, six months after application, owing either to the murkiness of my past or to bureaucratic torpor (I am not sure which), the clearance had not yet come through. The question was, how does one stop a process even if it is not producing anything? The lawyer advised that I simply write to the Adjutant General and ask that my request be canceled on the grounds that I no longer needed it, which was accordingly done, taking a load off my mind. Subsequently, whenever I came across reference to a document I wanted to see for myself, I would write to the very obliging people in the Military Division here at the Archives or at OCMH, and ask if such-and-such a document could be declassified. In all except one instance, I think, it could. In some cases, for example the episode of Colonel McHugh’s intervention through Secretary Knox to have Stilwell recalled that so enraged General Marshall, I was able to establish the facts through the simple expedient of going to the private source, in this case the McHugh papers at Cornell, where the top-secret letter to Knox is quietly and innocently—and openly—resting. So much for clearance; it is overrated.

  As to not making a tape-recording of my interviews with participants, I can only say that a machine makes me quail. This may have something to do with being female. A woman is accustomed to entering upon a conversation as a personal thing, even with a stranger—perhaps more so with a stranger—and I can’t imagine myself plunking a machine down in front of someone and saying, “Now, talk.” Besides, I am quite certain I would not know how to make it work. So I took along a notebook instead, one that fitted into my pocketbook and so was always handy for planned or unplanned need. The loose-leaf pages, being the same size as my index cards, could be filed conveniently along with the other research material.

  Interviews, of course, proved some of my most useful sources, but I have told all about that in a speech to the Oral History conference two years ago, and as I have a horror of old speeches, I won’t repeat it here. There is one aspect, however, which I was uneasily aware of all along but more acutely since publication, and that is all the associates of Stilwell whom I did not talk to. I have now had innumerable letters from CBI (China-Burma-India) veterans and old China hands, some with anecdotes or phrases or bits and pieces of information which I could have used, but none, I think, or only one, that would have changed my thinking.

  An incompara
ble and, I think, indispensable source for historians of World War II is film. I don’t mean merely for illustrations but for physical description, for the realities of place and people that one cannot get any other way, and for flashes of insight and understanding through visual means. I think I learned more about Chinese propaganda from a film of the military parade staged for Wendell Willkie in Chungking, and more about Stilwell from a film showing him lying in the dust next to a Chinese soldier at the Ramgarh training ground and demonstrating how to handle a rifle, than I could have any other way. There is a room upstairs in this institution where one can happily spend days among the reels, learning and learning.

  On the same principle, there is nothing like research on the spot, but that of course, in the pre-Ping-Pong days, was denied me. As the next best thing, I went to Hongkong and Taiwan to get a feeling of Chineseness and to interview a group of Chinese veterans of the 38th Division who fought under Stilwell. Though not on the mainland, these visits were productive of insights: for instance, into the problem created by the Chinese considering it impolite to say No. I knew this caused Stilwell all kinds of agony, but I never realized how much until the wife of an American officer in Taiwan told me of her difficulty in giving official dinner parties because the Chinese always accepted whether or not they intended to come. She never knew how much food to order or how many places to set. It is equally difficult to conduct a war if your divisional commanders say Yes, they will be ready for action at a time and place, and fail to show up.

  So much for research. I would rather talk about the problems of writing, not only because they interest me more but because the average layman underrates writing and is overimpressed by research. People are always saying to me in awed tones, “Think of all the research you must have done!” as if this were the hard part. It is not; writing, being a creative process, is much harder and takes twice as long.