Stories from the dustbin
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 19: Re-imagining Australia
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Peter Cochrane
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Peter Cochrane's biography and other articles by this writer
‘A writer,' declared the novelist Thomas Mann, ‘is someone for whom writing is harder than it is for other people.' University-based historians working in Australian history are fast learning the truth of Mann's little dictum. In schools and universities and in the community's general knowledge, history has lost a lot of ground. ‘History has contrived somehow to end up in its own dustbin,' writes Don Watson, ‘yet history is nothing less than the whole human drama and it is pretty well anything we want it to be. To make it boring and irrelevant is a phenomenal achievement and one for which the history profession has to take a lot of the credit.'
Watson was aware of the inhospitable climate – a marketplace where a ‘million other stories furiously compete', an education sphere where ‘narrow vocationalism rules the roost', and a ‘postmodern world in which the past seems increasingly irrelevant'. His emphasis on the discipline's own failure seems right to me, but begs the question – how has this happened? Here's one answer – the first sentence of Tom Keneally's Commonwealth of Thieves (Doubleday, 2005), visualising the journey of the First Fleet: ‘If, in the New Year of 1788, the eye of God had strayed from the main games of Europe, the Americas, Asia and Africa, and idled over the huge vacancy of sea to the south-east of Africa, it would have been surprised in this empty zone to see not one, but all of eleven ships being driven east on the screaming band of westerlies.' The narrator on God's own cloud, imperial dramas, a vast emptiness, eleven specks upon the sea, the caprice, thrill and threat of the screaming westerlies, the beginning (we know) of a considerable story with serial invitations to our own imagining – perhaps not the most original trope, but all in one eminently readable sentence. In short, one reason history is in its own dustbin is the lack of narrative skill. But this is not the main problem – that precedes the writing.
The main problem is the choice of topic. Academic historians don't so much look at history as at the debates among their peers – they survey the historiography and buy into arguments (often highly refined points of difference) and mark out territory for investigation and refinement. Scholars of the Renaissance might have called this ‘coterie writing', entertaining or contending with peers, a conversation among fellow specialists; Milton's ‘fit audience, though few'.
The obsession with ‘coterie writing' has pretty much meant the death of the narrative form in that sphere. Narrative is thought to be dumbed down, simple storytelling, the business of amateurs, a trick, sub-history – myth, even. Turning away from narrative has meant, by definition, the abandonment of character and human drama. Without character and drama it is not easy to captivate a wider readership. The preoccupation with historiography has moved academic history, with notable exceptions, too close to the pretension to science, too far from poetry – the poet drowned in what the distinguished biographer Leon Edel called ‘floods of critical explication'. Some professional historians are so deeply concerned with critical ideas (the critical ego run amok) that they are incapable of dealing with the human drama of the past. Watson's choice of words is telling: ‘History is nothing less than the whole human drama and it is pretty well anything we want it to be.' Anything? Are we that free?
One qualification: the great champion of historical narrative, Simon Schama, is scathing about the over-specialised, jargon-ridden work of his colleagues, but Schama would have a lot less of a story to tell without their work. He might have no story – and certainly couldn't tell it the way he does. His original work would be impossible without the vast groundwork of research and writing by others. Most advances in historical knowledge come from the forensic research of university-based historians and the in-house debate this engenders. The big question is – can in-depth scholarship on the Australian past be written in a way that delights the general reader? If so, how?
SOME READERS WILL KNOW Inga Clendinnen's book of essays Agamemnon's Kiss (Text, 2006). It's full of stylish, lucid and explicitly moral writing, much about doing history. It includes one essay on biography I find quite odd. Clendinnen argues that people love literary biographies, but don't much care for political biography. She says fiction writers enthrall us with a capacity to create a fictional universe – they are ‘world makers' whom we long to understand, enter their lives and marvel at their creativity – whereas politicians, mere ‘world shakers', do not have the same appeal.
There are two problems here. Clendinnen's sense of the sales figures is, as one literary agent put it to me, ‘so far off base she's over the horizon'. Political biographies may not sell in Australia but in the United States they crowd bestseller lists: George Washington, FDR, LBJ, Nixon, Reagan, the Clintons, Obama – there is a mass market for political biography. Not just lowbrow, superficial biography either, though that kind sells mightily, but deeply scholarly, majestic works such as Robert Caro's life of LBJ, or Doris Kearns Goodwin's biography of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, No Ordinary Time (Simon and Schuster, 1995). The same goes for military biographies – Patton, Macarthur, ‘Monty' – none of them inhabits a fictional universe.
Any biography fascinates when it's good. I think Clendinnen's terminology has led to confusion: why call great fiction writers ‘world makers' and great politicians ‘world shakers' – that is, mere ‘world shakers'? Surely Mandela or Washington were world makers, creating something more astonishing than any fiction writer.
Readers want to go deep into a life, to know it comprehensively, or at least come away with a vivid sense of it. This entitlement has been set up by great biographers who got behind the public mask, to convey a sense of the deeper self, the core that guides or drives or perhaps explains the public life – that relationship, as Leon Edel puts it in Writing Lives (W.W. Norton, 1987), between the ‘revealed self and the concealed self'. That fascinates us.
Political biography also draws readers who are fascinated by that inner demon called the ‘will to power'. Someone once said that long-serving prime ministers require three qualities: a hide as thick as leather, rat cunning and the endurance of a marathon runner. Just that makes us wonder in astonishment at such people. How do they do it – the eighteen-hour days, the endless lobbying, policy-making on the run, plotting, fighting, pressing the flesh, the marathon pace, year in year out, the undying hunger to hang on, to have more. Stories as different as Mandela and Nixon have this at their core – phenomenal capacity. Political biographies, consequently, are sometimes studies of super-human will applied to making the real world, our world.