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A Closer Mirror Barbara Tuchman

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A Closer Mirror Barbara Tuchman NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES • VOLUME 1 NUMBER 2 • MARCH/APRIL 1980 Humanities Barbara Tuchman . A Closer Mirror by CATHARINE R. STIMPSON In October, I read A Distant Mirror because I had once sat up to finish The Guns of August, published seventeen years before. My copy of A Distant Mirror was a loan from a friend , a musicologist, who had been given it by another friend, a heart surgeon. I even read passages aloud with a nine-year-old boy who was having trouble with sentence structure in his English class. He responded enthusiastically to the nar­ rative, to the tales of youthful kings and squabbling uncles, but he also liked the writ­ ing's moving vivacity and pictorial skill. In November, I interviewed Barbara Tuchman because she is to be a lefferson Lec­ turer, the first woman to be so.1 Many people write books that become a part of public con­ sciousness and that a jumbled variety of readers buy, pass around, and recall. Few give formal speeches on prestigious occasions that seek to define elements of consciousness as well. In­ deed, a commonplace of modern cultural criti­ cism is the difficulty, even the arid impossibil­ ity, of speaking both to large audiences and about complex questions scrupulously. A belief in that commonplace haunts the humanities, forcing a false dichotomy between a “democratic” or an "elite" enterprise. Discourse is inflamed and the justification for the funding of specific projects becomes anxious and over- zealous. Tuchman's career embodies and defies both half-truths "I am," Tuchman says, "interested in what Illustration by Allan Carroll happens in reality." Her acts of attention are cultivated—she prefers that the teaching of his­ tory include literature and art. They are also demanding. She once wrote about China, "As are important, and innovative. and place. Responding to the concrete, she en­ always, the foreigner feels inadequate to pene­ Tuchman's self-assigned concern is "com­ livens single human beings as well. In a judi­ trate the reality."2 A Distant Mirror exacted municating history." She calls herself a "writer cious summary of her achievements, after The seven years of toil. Neatly, firmly, Tuchman dis­ whose subject is history." Eloquent about the Proud Tower, Martin Duberman once said: tinguishes two ways in which we can articulate necessity of eloquence, she cheerfully admits to . .in our age of collectivization and the substance of the past: the "academic" histo­ being "very fond of the beauties and rhythms of system-building . Mrs. Tuchman is able rian, whose responsibility is "to discover, to the English language," which she unknowingly to suggest some of (the) . complexity and analyze, to make known" the patterns of the helped to teach that nine-year-old schoolboy. chaos of historical procedure largely lacking worlds behind us; and the "writers of history," She mourns a lack of self-consciousness about in the work of . pseudo-scientists. What whose responsibility is to communicate it. language in modern scholarship, a "dissertation they exclude, she evokes: those ir­ Others also divide up historians and see a style" that has corroded elegance and that re­ regularities of personality and incident gap between the groups. In 1978, Lawrence flects a search for a narrow originality that has which are in historical events an echo of our Stone reviewed A Distant Mirror. He criticized "stifled a passion for the subject" even as it has own untidy lives.4 Tuchman's judgment and analytic grasp, and sought to detail it. Tuchman grieves for the violation of the respected her descriptive talents, an assessment Like nature, real style abhors a vacuum. dignity, decency, and security of the individual. Tuchman labels "schizophrenic." Sardonically, Perhaps like nature, style in itself animates a Some of her most compelling passages tell of he separated the historians who win Pulitzer sense of the significant. Tuchman's literary the abuses the powerful impose upon the less Prizes, as Tuchman has done, from those who prowess, her novelist's command of "suspense powerful—marauding mercenaries upon help­ gain “the final accolade of the profession, and story," is inseparable from explicit ideas less villages. Tuchman is neither radical nor nomination as president of the American His­ about history and implicit commitments to cer­ blandly idealistic. In a sharp essay on Henry torical Association."3 For Stone, the first group tain humanistic values. She is a witness to Kissinger's memoirs, she declared that morality might be solid and interesting, but the second quirks and accidents, to the bite and pull of time could not guide international relations.5 Still, she prizes the vulnerable, valuable, imperfect, struction. Her title The Proud Tower comes from active human presence. Edgar Allen Poe's lushly apocalyptic poem "The In this issue... Tuchman's organization of the particular City in the Sea": into narrative signifies her conviction that nar­ While from a proud tower in the town 1 Barbara Tuchman . A Closer Mir­ rative is "the spine of history." She states Death looks gigantically down. ror by Catharine R. Stimpson baldly, "History in sequence is the way life is She believes that our contemporary institutions lived." She places us in a world of cause and are "disintegrating." "Uncomfortable," we ex­ 3 The Jefferson Lecture effect, of action and consequence. Her sense of press ourselves with a vocabulary dependent form shapes her use of sources and of evidence. upon the prefix "dis." We are discontented, dis­ Revising America: Symposium at 4 Outlining her research for A Distant Mirror, she turbed. NEH cites a debt to historians whom Marc Bloch has Tuchman offers some defenses against our Frances FitzGerald— with John Blas- influenced, but she then praises the chronicles general messiness and our particular malaise. singame, Joseph Featherstone, Dan that professional medievalists now find "un­ Stubbornly capable of visions of order, we can Lacy and Kathryn Kish Sklar fashionable." She writes: also enter into social contracts. Her review of 8 Deadlines for Grant Applications . .for a sense of period and its attitudes I Kissinger endorses obedience to "the rules we found them indispensable. Furthermore, have worked out for the social order," without 9 NEH PLANS AND PROJECTS their form is narrative, and so is mine. which "society slides back into anarchy . as Good Writing = Good Thinking in As humanists catalogue the ways in which dangerous for the right wing as for the left." We the Bay Area Writing Project we have tried to find sequence and order in our have the humanities. She defines them, con­ Documenting Black Women's History lives, they often juxtapose two patterns. One is cisely if conventionally, as "education in the A Rural Heritage evolutionary, progressive, a sense that events disciplines that deal with civilizing art." They Belgium Today develop in time towards an admirable and hap­ can help us become better-informed, even pily necessary end. In the second, history is a "wiser" citizens. This is particularly true of his­ 14 The Humanities and Television: The process in which elements mingle and remingle, tory, the discipline that gives us our pro­ Message and the Medium in which events both change and repeat them­ genitors, a knowledge of human behavior, an Scholars and Filmmakers by Jay Ruby selves in time. awareness of causal and social relations. Odyssey and The American Short Story Tuchman believes in the possibility of prog­ Finally, Tuchman seems to advocate a by Arthur Unger ress. She notes the reduction in the number of dialectical response to despair. "We may A Guide to the NEH Media Program the underprivileged in the Western democra­ really," she says with some disapproval, "de­ by Steve Rabin cies. However, she also asserts that "human spise our own species too much at this point." behavior" has not, and does not, change. The She dislikes the kind of thing represented by Dustjackets— Philosophy by David 18 last passage of A Distant Mirror pictures a fallen Naked Lunch, William Burroughs' autobiog­ Coder castle. It has seen "cycles of human endeavor raphy, drug hallucination, hyperbolic fantasy, 2 0 The State of the States and failure, order and disorder, greatness and and report from his domain of reality. She Socrates at Bellevue by Barbara Del- decline. Its ruins remain on the hilltop in wants to remind us now of some of the "fine man Wolfson Picardy, silent observers as history's wheel wonderful, brave, beneficial aspects of the An Introduction to State Programs by turns." Tuchman interprets her allusion to the human record," like our journey to the moon. B.J. Stiles metaphor of fortune's wheel as "an unspoken The same spirit of resolve marks Tuchman's denial of history as a straight line progressing attempts to mediate between the two ap­ 26 Recent NEH Grant Awards towards greater liberty and wisdom.” She proaches to history that she describes. She be­ doubts certain nineteenth-century ideas. She lieves that one person, a Francis Parkman, can 26 Letters to the Editor finds history an enormous drama, but neither a integrate art and scholarship, but even if most divine nor a human comedy about salvation. historians are not omnicompetent, there need About the Authors 28 Tuchman denies that wars and violence, not be "hostility and jealousy" between diver­ generals and armies, catastrophes and bands of gent schools. Their members can show good FOR INFORMATION ABOUT scorched earth have enthralled her imagination. will and good faith towards one another. She SUBSCRIPTIONS SEE PAGE 27 "It's not so," she says decisively. Her 1971 book stresses that academic historians have treated about Stilwell was about a military man, and her well, particularly in person. the American experience in China.
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