Author's response
Writing history, like any artistic activity, involves a continuous interaction between creator and client. At one level, authors write purely for themselves in an ongoing attempt to make sense of the world and discover what, on reflection, they themselves really think. Before beginning to write on any major topic in my Seeking a Role: The United Kingdom 1951–1970 I did not at first know what I intended to say. I would discover my thoughts only in the course of writing about them; at the outset, I could not have predicted the end result. In the process of writing, ‘the dull brain’ does of course ‘perplex and retard’, and when starting to write on any particular topic I usually found myself somewhat daunted by a mere jumble of facts and ideas. Yet I was quite often surprised at how the pieces gradually and almost spontaneously fitted into place, given that the pattern had not initially been present in my mind. This gradual and almost spontaneous emergence of a pattern took place at every level: within the treatment of particular topics, but also in the arrangement within sections, between sections, or in the book as a whole. Its initial plan differed almost totally from the plan as published many years later.
No doubt John Baxendale is right to say, however, that sometimes in the book the pattern did NOT fit neatly into place, even as published, and that some of its transitions are awkward. This leads me to my first point: a welcome to the practice of Reviews in History, unique to my knowledge among historical journals, of encouraging a dialogue between author and critic. The writing of history is of course collaborative to the extent that in their publications historians commune with one another – publicly or privately reading, assimilating, disagreeing, reconciling. Like a play or a poem, a piece of historical writing does not spring fully armed from the creator’s mind. It is continuously shaped, especially in contemporary history, by the author’s experiences, observations, anxieties, and relationships. The playwright, however, can test the play when in draft through a series of rehearsals that involve interaction with the audience, and this can often generate changes in the script. Likewise the poet tests reactions to what has been written; in a more oral and communal culture than ours, poets and musicians often conducted public readings or performances, and re-shaped their work as a result.
Academic writing in the humanities differs from creative artistic activity, however, in at least two respects. First, the preliminary dialogue with the public is relatively limited in scope. Indeed, the process of research and writing is necessarily solitary, even selfish and anti-social, and anything that moderates that isolation is salutary if it broadens the perspective and interpretation without dulling its individuality and sharpness of perception. At this point, however, it is worth mentioning one recent development that makes the dialogue with oneself more effective. The author is the sole expert on the content of what is published, and no ‘professional indexer’ can do the job so well; indeed, if all authors took a pride in their books the ‘professional indexer’ would not exist. Yet many authors apparently see indexing as a chore which can be delegated to supposed experts less knowledgeable than themselves. Yet there is now a remedy to hand: the indexing package that implants the index codes in the text itself while it is being drafted. The codes move whenever the associated text moves, so that the index continuously accumulates in rough draft while writing is taking place. Because there is continuous interaction between the text and the index, a host of anomalies, errors, inconsistencies and infelicities are exposed for removal by the author. This certainly happened with Seeking a Role, and from others among my more recent books. The indexing package also brings a second (though, in my view, subordinate) benefit: indexes compiled in this way do not have to be rushed out during the brief interval between receiving the page-proofs and complying with the publisher’s production schedule: they exist in embryo long before the page-proofs arrive. After their arrival, the page-divides can be punched into the text, and the draft index can be put into its final shape. Its components can then be re-arranged, re-worded, winnowed out, and supplemented or shrunk as then seems necessary, often with help from the ordinary search mechanisms within the text that word-processing makes so very much easier.
History differs from creative artistic activity in a second respect: unlike many of the arts, it is almost infinitely malleable, despite being so firmly tied down with facts and footnotes. Once sculpture is shaped, it cannot easily be changed even when the material is malleable, let alone when set in stone, nor can an architect pull down the building and start again. A historian, however, like any writer, painter or composer can in principle start afresh, perhaps by re-writing the same book, or perhaps by writing a different book. Access to a broader range of critics may well therefore turn out to be one of the blessings the internet has brought us: its ample space, its convenience, and its informality all enable author and audience to interact more fully. The author has always at a late stage been able to respond to comments from an agent, a publisher, a publisher’s reader, or a few sympathetic friends, at least in producing the first edition, but in such situations the range of the dialogue is relatively limited: it involves only a small number of people, and usually occurs only between consenting adults in private. Authors once in print and thus launched upon the world must take what comes. Books may go through more than one edition, in which case there can be a somewhat discontinuous dialogue of sorts with the wider world, but by then there is a danger that authors will have become embattled, or feel defensive, especially if they think they have been unfairly criticized. Furthermore, their critics will have been pre-selected by review editors, who may well be drawn from a clique, or be specially subject to fashion, and their work will not be fully exposed to the full diversity of the actual or potential readership. Reviews in History is most welcome for broadening this dialogue: for ensuring that the author receives, publicly or privately, a much wider range of comment. Authors will not necessarily want to respond by changing their text, but they will at least retain it in the light of fuller information about readers’ reactions.
In commenting on John Baxendale’s review, I would like to begin by welcoming the time and care he has put into reading my book, but also the tone of his review. It achieves three objectives that the reviewer should in my view always seek: to explain the author’s intentions, to outline the contents of the book, and to suggest improvements. One drawback of the 20th century’s retreat from anonymity in reviewing is that these three priorities are all too often neglected. Because the review is signed, it is always at risk of becoming an ego trip: an excuse for the ‘reviewer’ to write about himself, to do a party piece, to play to a rather particular gallery, and to evade tackling the prime question that the reader wants answered: should the reader buy, or at least read, the book? Reviews have not necessarily gained from a second late 20th-century trait: from the greater length that reviewers are now often allocated. The resulting problem is partly a matter of opportunity cost: in typeset media, longer reviews of books that are pronounced (by whom?) to be significant entail less space for books that are deemed less significant. It is also partly a matter of content: given abundant space, the ‘reviewer’ may well simply aim to compile an essay which will be re-published in one of those shapeless compendia of ‘review articles’ that publishers, literary agents and authors conspire nowadays to cobble together into yet another book. I welcome the fact that Baxendale’s review does not fall into any of these traps.
His first criticism of Seeking a Role is that the eight cross-cutting ‘motifs’ which I highlight at the end of each chapter make each chapter conclusion ‘seem a bit mechanical, ticking off the motifs as if the whole thing was being plotted on some vast wall-chart’. I should perhaps explain that the ‘motifs’ were introduced at a late stage in the drafting, and were part of an overall ‘signposting’ exercise that would enable readers to find their way more easily through the book. This inevitably lent it a more didactic tone, and I may have overdone it. Baxendale is well aware, though, that it is difficult, once the historian of a society has abandoned the integrating political narrative, to find a satisfactory substitute. The introduction of the ‘motifs’, together with the short agendas and summaries that begin and end the chapters in Seeking a Role, reflect my desire to hold together a multi-dimensional narrative that was always at risk of flying apart. My non-political framework for the book does not, however, signify any abandonment of ‘narrative’ as such: only a recognition that a nation’s history consists of NUMEROUS narratives that are continuously and simultaneously in progress, and that among those narratives the political is not necessarily always the most important.
I do not deny that the political structure which largely shaped volumes in the Oxford History of England (published between 1934 and 1965) possessed virtues absent from the more comprehensive and analytic structure that has been widely adopted by authors within the New Oxford History of England (of which ten volumes have so far been published since 1989). The political narrative can, at its best, fully capture the uncertainty of events at any one time. Demographic, educational and welfare trends may be relatively predictable, but who could have anticipated de Gaulle’s ‘non’ of 1963, the oil crisis of 1973, the full implications of the ‘winter of discontent’ in 1979, or the fall of the USSR in 1989–91? It is when coping with great crises like this that politicians come into their own, and far from deploring a crisis, they often rather enjoy it. Like policemen or soldiers thrilled by the excitements of combat after long periods of boredom, politicians relish the sudden and widespread recognition that they too have a significant role. Observing Harold Wilson during the Torrey Canyon oil-spillage disaster of March 1967, R. H. S. Crossman wrote: ‘I think he adores being in action – acting as the great commander organizing his forces’. This past sense of the unexpected and the unpredictable is often complicated still further by the simultaneity of governmental problems: crises often occur in several areas at the same time, as especially with the Heath and Major governments. Unless this uncertainty in the lives of politicians and administrators is borne in mind, the sheer difficulty of their task may be forgotten. Unlike the writers and readers of history books, politicians do not operate with the full knowledge and ample time that can be enjoyed in a library: the essence of their activity consists in being required to make quick decisions in the midst of imponderables. There is also a danger that the lack of a political framework will lose the biographical excitement of watching ambitious politicians jockeying for power.
It must be said, though, that historians who specialize in political narrative do not always convey these insights into the politician’s trade, though the work of Maurice Cowling and the publication of Crossman’s diaries ensured after the 1960s that few modern British historians could ignore ambition as an influence at the top. Furthermore, there is a heavy price attached to a national history that is dominated by political narrative: the serious neglect of aspects in the nation’s experience that do not impinge on the politicians, or that require only occasional intervention from them. To my mind, the dominance of politics in the Oxford History of England ignored too much and could not be allowed to persist in the New Oxford History of England, whatever the loss entailed. I was pleasantly surprised to see how feasible it was for Robert Bartlett, in his England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225 (2000), the volume so far published that covers the earliest period, to tackle so many of the issues which I myself wanted to tackle when discussing the United Kingdom nine centuries later. Still, the difficulties of integrating a national history remain, and I welcome suggestions on how they can be tackled more skilfully than I found possible in Seeking a Role.
Baxendale’s second criticism is shrewd: he highlights the transition to crime in the section on ‘Working-Class Eclipse?’ in my fourth chapter (on ‘The Social Structure’) as ‘one of several awkward transitions that need more rationalisation’. He hits the bullseye here: he has intuitively realized that for a long time I wondered where crime could be fitted into my overall structure. Part of it I assigned to the discussion of liberty in my eighth chapter (on ‘Politics and Government’), but I could see no other place for the rest than in the discussion in chapter four of the people at the bottom of the heap, for there could be no denying that Britain’s 20th-century prison story is among the shabbiest of the stories I had to tell. Anyone who has visited a prison immediately becomes aware that this is not a place whose tone is set by the better-off in society.
Another of Baxendale’s bullseye hits is to say that the voice of the ordinary man is all too rarely heard in my book. The point comes up when he is discussing my treatment of high-rise building: ‘the one thing missing here’, he writes, ‘... is the voice of those who actually lived in these flats, new towns and suburbs’. This is less a historiographical problem than a problem arising from the authorities’ failure to consult the occupants at the time. One of the reasons why high-rise building went so badly wrong was that its architects did not feel obliged to consult the present or future residents: architects and planners in the high-rise period knew best, if only because the residents were not purchasers investing their own money but tenant-beneficiaries of the local authority. I entirely share Baxendale’s view that people’s lives should not be seen ‘solely through the eyes of outsiders such as sociologists and politicians’, and I regretted when writing my Seeking a Role that apart from what the Institute of Community Studies was able to unearth, there seemed to be no equivalents for the 1950s and 1960s of the Orwells, the Zweigs, the Rowntree/Lavers, and the Nella Lasts for me to cite. Maybe more of these will eventually come to light, in which case their experience should certainly be mined, given that (to quote G. M. Young) ‘the real, central theme of history is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening’. Such comment should certainly become available from the 1970s onwards, for it was then that the ‘oral history’ movement really got going.
I would be sorry, though, if historians using diaries showed an interest only in the views of the less fortunate: I found Benn, Castle, Coward, Crossman, Lees-Milne, Nicolson, and Kenneth Williams so quotable because they lent vividness to experience higher up. To me, the middle- and upper-class experience is interesting too, for its own sake. There is, however, another problem with such quotations: the problem of space. Too often an eagerness to quote from the author’s hard-won interviews or from direct testimony discovered in obscure places prompts in the historian a shapelessness of inquiry, and even an abandonment of analysis in favour of assembling a mere collage. For me, in a book like Seeking a Role, space was at a premium, quotation from any quarter had to be pungent if it was to deserve inclusion, and when included it had to be incorporated into an overriding argument.
Baxendale has some difficulties with my treatment of ‘the sixties’. Some of these may be removed by my essay on ‘Historiographical Hazards of Sixties Britain’ now published in the collection edited by W. R. Louis, Ultimate Adventures with Britannia.(1) With popular music, as with so many other areas in recent British history (the history of sport, artistic endeavour, the armed forces, schools, the legal profession, and – dare I say it? – Wales, Scotland, and the monarchy), the field is dominated by the antiquarianism and connoisseurship that is of interest only to enthusiasts and insiders. Historians seek analysis and explanation, and cannot content themselves solely with description or story-telling. When writing at the generalized level that the New Oxford History of England requires, it is difficult – if the volume is ever to be completed – for authors to rise above the quality of the secondary sources that are available at the time of writing. Where the secondary sources are good, the synthesis has some chance of being good, but not otherwise. Indeed, one purpose lying behind Seeking a Role, as behind all the volumes in the New Oxford History of England, is the hope that more powerfully analytic research will be conducted in areas whose secondary literature is at present exposed as weak. A further purpose is to broaden the scope of research conducted. I am often surprised, when surveying lists of theses recently accepted by examiners, at how conventional and unexciting their topics are. No doubt the theses are worthy, but the New Oxford History of England will, I hope, help to ensure that theses will in future be devoted to topics less hackneyed, more imaginative, and more inviting.
Notes
- W. R. Louis, Ultimate Adventures with Britannia: Personalities, Politics and Culture in Britain (London, 2009).Back to (1)
