Musing on Clio
Eric Christiansen
AN INTELLIGENT PERSON'S GUIDE TO HISTORY by John Vincent Duckworth, £11.95, pp. 122 History is about arranging bits of paper,' says Professor Vincent, at the end of a list of other things it is, or has become. Intelligent persons probably know that, but sometimes overlook the consequences of paper-arranging either as a career, or as a substitute for thought. Modern historians, with a few exceptions, are paid by states for pushing paper; as a result, they tend to be dead from the neck up. That is the theme of this book.
There are thousands and thousands of these professional masters of the past, either 'state employees' in Europe, or members in the USA of 'a workforce with- in large organisations like those fostered by private collectivism', i.e. American univer- sities. In both cases, their occupation cuts them off from the power, wealth, fame and action which they study and claim to 'understand'. 'Their disconnection from things, their want of rootedness, their poverty of commitment, are those of the minor official class the world over.' They live among the foothills of society, where they engage anxiously in downward social mobility.'
(Not quite true, that last bit. Seventeen historians have assured me that they were raised in conditions of the utmost squalor, and I know of none who has actually lost caste by the trade, even if it has not been lucrative. More work needs to be done on this.) Little things please little minds, and the stuff these clerkly helots write is tainted by the job. They train for it when young, they still sometimes, or quite often, keep it for life, and 'they call it professionalism', although it actually disqualifies them from knowing how the world works. So they get the past all wrong, and wrong in one partic- ular direction:
Living on a state salary, while looking for- ward to an index-linked pension [that must be a joke] rather than by selling books is unlikely to weaken one's collectivist outlook. The payroll historian is likely to look with tender sympathy on the general system which produces salaries for people like him to live on. Just as in the days of gentry scholarship few raised their voices to condemn rental income from land.
Whatever their political sympathies, his- torians give their blessings to 'the big state, the high tax economy' and 'make social reform the measure of all things'. But even where they reign, blessings do not abound. Their relative poverty and real impotence breed self-pity and bolshiness, 'a failure to sympathise with those in responsibility'. This is because 'the outlook of the minor official leans to grumpiness' and to blaming everything on mistakes made at the top, by the high-ups. So they don't regard 'kings and battles' or big money-men as worthy objects of study; they go for abstractions, like social development, everyday life, mentalities, and mediocrities; the fusty contents of the disgruntled filing-clerk's back pocket which he or she can trifle with on government time. Or else they train slightly smarter helots to service 'heritage history': a castrated past for the benefit of comatose tourists.
So far, so good. But I fear that things are worse than Professor Vincent suggests.
Minor officials may be contemptible, but they are useful. If they were to vanish, there would be dancing in the streets for a few days, but the fun would stop when the benefit cheques ceased to come through. An unpaid police force would terrify even the anti-collectivist element in the popula- tion.
But if a Clioclastic virus were suddenly to eliminate every living academic historian, nobody would be any the worse for it, out- side the immediate family circles of the deceased. Their students would drift into lectures about Performativity in the novels of Robert Bage' and 'Kinship in Coroman- del' without noticing any change in man- agement. Their publishers would whistle up a few hundred more biographers from the pub, and do rather better than before. Their universities would congratulate themselves on a 'significant saving', and move the cash into the Business Manage- ment faculty, or Women's Studies. The his- torians are perfectly useless, even if they wish to serve the collectivist ideal or the big state; and most of them would hotly deny that this is what they do. Even if their feet have been bound from infancy, they fancy their chances as ballerinas.
And that's not the worst of it, either. It is the same in nearly all branches of learning, and in all the once liberal professions which have sold out to public funding if not to overt state control; the reek of minor officialdom permeates everything that was once free and honourable. It makes you sick; and perhaps it encourages the writing of dismal, impoverished history as well. But Vincent overlooks one quite important arithmetical ray of sunlight.
History is not only a pseudo-profession, it is a pseudo-industry. Any occupation that gives employment to thousands is bound to be conducted in a routine and unoriginal manner, with shop-floor and office politics taking up a lot of space. And yet this is mainly eye-wash, to impress the public and distract the seriously unreflective employ- ees. In every thousand, there will be two or three historians who live up to the Vincent standard: he himself, 30 years ago, for one. That's enough. Nobody seriously expected the hiring policy of expanding universities to result in the mass-production of good historians. The whole business is so tricky; history itself is mainly too horrible to con- template, and the evidence depends on freakish accidents of survival: either casual disappearances, or indigestible surfeits. Whatever may be the conditions of employment or liberty, the good 'uns will always be exceptional. The rest will always be forgotten.
Meanwhile, they are probably more harmless because more obscure, inside universities than out. The worst they do there is to persuade impressionable students to spend what could be entrancing or at least faintly peach-flavoured hours in the study not of history, but of ways of writing history: the sluggish tale of how Professor Vincent's salaried dullards learned to arrange their bits of paper, and what exactly they wasted their time on, down in the sixth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, where some of the more pompous banalities of modern historiography were nurtured under the patronage of the French state. And so the Profs write solemn guides to historical study, and become objects of solemn study themselves, and the young are defrauded of the opportunity of ever knowing how the battle of Trafalgar was fought or how Glad- stone and Disraeli debated, because there isn't time.
These 'courses' and guides are a nui- sance, and only those who have encoun- tered them will appreciate the joy of seeing them debagged by J. Vincent; he manages to deflate the French and Americans, ignore the Germans (apart from Marx and Fritz Fischer), and loses interest in the Britons after about 1935. His treatise is full of prejudice, laziness, nonsense, and inter- mittent impersonations of Hilaire Belloc after a long lunch, but when he hits the nail on the head he more than compensates for the mis-hits. This is a good little book to give to anyone thinking of reading history at a university, or fed up with the way it is studied or written.
According to the publishers, it was first accepted by Oxford University Press and then rejecte, as needlessly offensive. This is hard to believe; that this degraded old tart, wallowing in the profits of heritage gift- books, illiterate sociological tracts and brain-dead anthologies should start getting priggish in her flabby senescence would be a contradiction in terms. There must be some mistake. If not, the OUP missed a winner here.
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