Dislocated history
J. Enoch Powell
Suez: Splitting of a Nation Russell Braddon, (Collins 0.00) "My task has simply been to hold a microphone, ask the questions and link the answers." Just so. The sensation produced in the reader of this book resembles that of the viewer of those television programmes — are they now mercifully fewer? — in which a whole series of persons who either knew nothing about an event or would not tell if they did are invited, just in one sentence, to ventilate a profound and mature judgment of it.
The book is a painstaking but conclusive demonstration that history, history of any kind, cannot be written like this. Thousands of passages, comprising one or two sentences or fragments of sentences from some five hundred people — people who knew as much as Anthony Eden and people who knew as little as I did — are strung dizzily together, agreeing, disagreeing, confirmi4, contradicting. It is a phantasmagoria divided into chapters.
There would be great value in assembling for study and comparison a sort of source book, in which could be read what witnesses of all kinds had written or were prepared to say about the Suez operation and its consequences. But these lose their value when they are atomised into sentences and sprayed across hundreds of others. A source must be heard or read as a whole in his own context before he yields any useful meaning. The cover design shows four portraits framed in the four letters of S-U-E-Z: Eden, myself (why?), Gaitskell and Nasser; but a sentence published by Eden in Full Circle, another spoken by me to the author in 1970, another of Gaitskell's in the House of CommOns in 1956, and a fourth from a speech of Nasser simply cannot be arranged together like a child's alphabet bricks.
Interviewing, even if the interviews are not chopped up and muffled, is not history. History demands a historian. The man who writes must himself, on his own responsibility, be constructing from the source materials his picture, his truth, which will stand as an artistically consistent whole, within the limits he has set himself. No history is' true' or ' objective' or' impartial,' except in the sort of sense that an Old Master or an epic poem is so. Russell Braddon has demonstrated experimentally the effect of a book from which everything except a statement of opinion by others has been removed: even the conjunctions are intended to be anonymous. Also, the more chronological linkage itself is a form, and a particularly invidious form, of purported explanation; for all sequence in time is apt to be interpreted as sequence in cause — even where the chronicler himself remains silent.
Thus, in less than a year, as Eden had prophesied when Nasser nationalised the canal, stability in the Middle East had vanished, which is perhaps why. when Macmillan held a General Election on Octo 'bar 8, it was the Conservatives, rather than Gaitskell, who received the electorate's mandate to form a new government.
He [Eisenhower] had visited 27 nations and travelled 320,000 miles: what more could his fellow Americans demand of their President and the RePublican Party? But the American voter was insufficiently impressed. Instead of Richard M.. Nixon, John F. Kennedy was elected Eisenhower's Successor, whereupon, on that side of the Atlantic, Suez along with summitry and the special relationship was forgotten.
The words I have italicised are not even Rood journalism, let alone good history. They are falsifications, thoughtless or deliberate, Just for the sake of joining one paragraph and one chapter to another.
It is no consolation that the passages so joined are full of the same fault:
"The same thing happened after Munich — which, for the time, was popular," says Mark Bonham Carter, Hogg, in spite of Heath's support for his opponent, won Oxford on a pro-Munich ticket."
Alastair Burnett reverts to Bonham Carter's point and develops it. "1 think Suez helped the emergence of the likes of Enoch Powell — of little Englanders on all sides,' he muses.
At least in a straight narrative the seediest historian would avoid anything so crass as this. But that is what happens when you hold the microphone and just pour out what pours into it. I am sure I would prefer Russell Braddon's novels.
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