History of the Present Read online

  The shortest and best-marked frontier is that between history and journalism on the one side and literature on the other. Both good journalism and good history have some of the qualities of good fiction: imaginative sympathy with the characters involved, literary powers of selection, description, and evocation. Reportage or historical narrative is always an individual writer’s story, shaped by his or her unique perception and arrangement of words on the page. It requires an effort not just of research but of imagination to get inside the experience of the people you are writing about. To this extent, the historian or journalist does work like a novelist. We acknowledge this implicitly when we talk of “Michelet’s Napoleon” as opposed to “Taine’s Napoleon” or “Carlyle’s Napoleon.”

  Yet there is a sharp and fundamental difference, which concerns the kind of truth being sought. The novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who played fast and loose with all facts, including those about his own life, defended himself aggressively. “I’m interested in truth not facts,” he said, “and I’m old enough to know the difference.” In a sense, every novelist can say that. No journalist or historian should. In this, we also differ from the father of contemporary history. Thucydides felt free to put words into Pericles’ mouth, as a novelist would. We do not. Our “characters” are real people, and the larger truths we seek have to be made from the bricks and mortar of facts. What did the prime minister say exactly? Was it before or after the explosion in the Sarajevo marketplace, and whose mortar actually fired the fatal shell?

  Some postmodernists disagree. They suggest that the work of historians should be judged like that of fiction writers, for its rhetorical power and capacity of imaginative conviction, not for some illusory factual truth. Eric Hobsbawm has given a finely measured response: “It is essential,” he writes, “for historians to defend the foundation of their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of those fictions is verifiable fact.”2

  That applies equally to journalism. We all know about fabrications at the bottom end of journalism, in the gutter press. Unfortunately, the frontier with fiction is also violated at the top end of journalism, especially in reportage that aspires to be literature. Any reportage worth reading involves rearranging material, highlighting, and, to some extent, turning real people into characters in a drama. But the line is crossed when quotations are invented or the order of events is changed. There is one genre of modern journalism, the “drama-documentary” or “faction,” which does this avowedly. Faction is, so to speak, honestly dishonest. But more often this is done behind a mask of spare authenticity.

  The precedents are distinguished. John Reed’s account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, is probably one of the most influential pieces of reportage ever written. Yet he spoke virtually no Russian, regularly made up dialogue, offered secondhand accounts as firsthand, mixed up dates, and added imaginative detail. As Neal Ascherson observes, in a fine essay on his work, Reed “gives a thrilling account of Lenin’s appearance at a closed Bolshevik meeting in Smolny on 3 November, allegedly communicated to him outside the door by Volodarsky as the meeting went on. No such meeting took place.”3

  To save us from Reed’s disease—and to spoil our best stories—great American journals such as The New Yorker employ fact-checkers. As they drag their fine combs through your text, it is horrible to find how many small errors of fact have slipped into your notebook or intruded on the path from notebook to text. But sooner or later you come to the passages, often the most important ones, that they annotate in the margin, “On author.” This means you are the only source for the fact (if fact it be) that, for example, a church door in the Krajina was stained with blood, or a Kosovo rebel leader said what your notebook records that he said. Then you are alone with your notebook and your conscience. Did he really say that?

  Ideally, I suppose, one should be permanently wired for sound, like a superspy Or, even better, have a miniature video camera implanted in one’s skull. And certainly some of the very best contemporary history has been done on television. I think of documentary series such as The Death of Yugoslavia. Although the television camera can also be made to lie by tendentious selection and manipulative editing, at best it brings you closer than any other medium to how things really were.

  For the writer, however, the conventional, handheld, visible tape recorder and television camera have major disadvantages. They are cumbersome, even in their latest, slimmed-down, high-tech versions. Try using one at the same time as taking notes during a fast-moving demonstration. It is, in practice, very difficult to see simultaneously with both the camera’s and the writer’s eye. You’re always liable to miss the telling detail that is vital to good reportage because you’re fiddling with a tape or lens. And then you keep worrying about whether and what they are recording. Tape recorders and cameras put people off. Politicians and so-called ordinary people speak less naturally and freely as soon as the machines come out. Worse still, cameras and microphones also turn people on. Demonstrators or soldiers strike heroic poses and make portentous statements they would not otherwise make. So these apparently neutral, mindless recorders of reality actually change it by their mere presence. Yet even the visible notebook does that.

  I occasionally use a tape recorder for an important conversation, but my inseparable companion is a pocket notebook. The notebook is often open when the person is speaking, but sometimes, when I think they will talk more freely or simply when walking or eating or whatever, it is not. Then I write the conversation down as soon as possible afterward. I am obsessed with accuracy and, after twenty years, rather well practiced in this kind of remembering. But as I look back through my notebooks there is always this nagging concern: Did he really say that?

  Take the opening passage of my reportage from Serbia in March 1997 (see p. 226): the student named Momčilo exclaiming “I just want to live in a normal country,” and so on. Now Momčilo said this, in his imperfect English, as we hurried through the streets of Belgrade toward a students’ meeting. I wrote it down as soon as we got there. If I had a tape recording of what he actually told me, it would probably be slightly different—a bit more awkward and less sharp. But I don’t have a tape recording. The verifiable historical truth of that fragment of the past is gone for good. You just have to trust me. A little later, I relate excited exchanges at the student meeting. These I scribbled down as they happened. But I don’t speak Serbian, so what you read is my interpreter’s version—and we both have to trust her.

  Altogether, the business of language is crucial. Most of what is quoted in this book was said or written in languages I understand. But some, especially from Albanian and the southern Slav languages now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian, was translated for me by an interpreter, with the inevitable loss of accuracy and nuance. The first thing to ask of anyone writing about anywhere is, Does he or she know the language?

  Finally, it seems to me, the key to trust is not the technical apparatus of audiovisual recording and sourcing and fact-checking, invaluable though that is. It is a quality that may best be described as veracity. No one will ever be completely accurate. There is a margin of unavoidable error and, so to speak, necessary license if cacophonous, Babel-like reality is to be turned into readable prose. But the reader must be convinced that an author has a habit of accuracy, that he is genuinely trying to get at all the relevant facts, and that he will not play fast and loose with them for literary effect. The reader should feel that while the author may not actually have a video recording of what he is describing, he would always like to.

  George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is a model of this kind of veracity. The book is a piece of literature. It is inaccurate in many details, not least because Orwell’s notebooks were stolen by the communist goons who came to arrest him as a Trotskyist.4 Yet you don’t doubt for a single moment that he is striving for the greatest possible accuracy, for the fac
t-based truth that must always set apart the plains of history and journalism from the magic mountains of fiction.

  THE FRONTIER BETWEEN journalism and history is the longest in our Three Country Corner. It is also the least well marked and therefore the most tense and disputed. I can testify to this, having lived on both sides and in between. In journalism, to describe a piece as “rather academic”—meaning jargon heavy, boring, unreadable—is the surest path to the spike. In academe, it’s a put-down to say that somebody’s work is “journalistic,” meaning superficial, racy, and generally not serious. “Contemporary history?” sniffed an elderly don when I returned to my Oxford college from a job in journalism at the end of the 1980s. “You mean journalism with footnotes?”5

  I think it’s important to understand that the reasons why so much is made of the differences between journalism and academic or professional history have at least as much to do with the practical exigencies, self-images, and neuroses of the two professions as they have with the real intellectual substance of the two crafts. Granted, the qualities of bad journalism and bad history are very different: sensationalist, intrusive, populist tosh with millions of readers on the one side; overspecialized, badly argued, ill-written doctorates with no readers on the other. But the virtues of good journalism and good history are very similar: exhaustive, scrupulous research; a sophisticated, critical approach to the sources; a strong sense of time and place; imaginative sympathy with all sides; logical argument; clear and vivid prose. Was Macaulay, in his essays for the Edinburgh Review, a historian or a journalist? Both, of course.

  Yet, in modern Western societies, profession is a defining feature of personal identity, and the professions that are closest together take most pains to distinguish themselves. I say modern Western societies, incidentally, because this was not so true in the communist world, where the most important social identification was with a broad class: intelligentsia, workers, or peasants. One of the interesting experiences of the last decade in formerly communist parts of Europe has been to see friends rapidly becoming differentiated by profession, Western style. Where once they were all fellow members of the intelligentsia, now they are academics, lawyers, publishers, journalists, doctors, and bankers, with diverging ways of life, styles of dress, homes, incomes, and attitudes.

  Now, because of the ways in which the professions of journalism and history have developed and because of the edginess between them, the writing of “history of the present” has tended to fall between the two. That no-man’s-land is perhaps wider and more tense than it was when Lewis Namier put aside eighteenth-century English politics to chart the European diplomatic history of his own times and Hugh Trevor-Roper turned from Archbishop Laud to write The Last Days of Hitler.

  Every profession has its characteristic fault. If I had to summarize in a word, I would say that the characteristic fault of journalistic writing is superficiality and that of academic writing is unreality. Journalists have to write so much, and they are so pressed for time. Sometimes they are “parachuted” into countries or situations about which they know nothing and expected to report on them within hours. Hence the famous, horrible line “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” Then their copy is cut and rewritten by editors and subeditors who are working to even tighter deadlines. And, anyway, tomorrow is another day, another piece.

  Academics, by contrast, can take years to finish a single article. They can (and sometimes do) take infinite pains to check facts, names, quotations, texts, and contexts, to consider and reconsider the validity of an interpretation. But they can also spend a life describing war without ever seeing a shot fired in anger. Witnessing real life is not what they are supposed—or funded—to do. Methodology, footnotes, and positioning in some ongoing academic debate can seem as important as working out what really happened and why. Participants in the worlds they describe sometimes throw up their hands in laughter and despair at the unreality of what comes out.

  Of course, I could equally dwell on the characteristic virtue of each side, which is the opposite of the other’s characteristic fault: depth in scholarship, realism in journalism. The interesting question is, Has it gotten worse or better? Well, some things have improved. If you read what passed for contemporary history in Britain in the 1920s, you find a bluff amateurism unthinkable today. In journalism, the growth of world television-news services such as CNN, Reuters, and BBC World Television and that of documentation on the Internet offers wonderfully rich new sources for present history. But, on the whole, I think it has gotten worse.

  There is still a handful of great international newspapers of record. Top of my personal short list would be The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, The Financial Times, Le Monde in France, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the German-speaking world. You can generally believe what you read in these papers. Yet even with this select group, it is astonishing how many discrepancies you find if you buy them all and compare their accounts of the same event. By and large, they do still separate fact and opinion, although there are exceptions. For example, the coverage of the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung was for years distorted by the pro-Croat views of one of that paper’s publishers.

  In my view, the foreign reporting in the leading American newspapers is the best in the world. Senior, highly educated American journalists are proud to describe themselves as “reporters,” whereas in Britain every twenty-three-year-old fresh out of college wants to be a “columnist” or “commentator.” Standards of editorial accuracy and fact-checking are second to none, and corrections are published when errors are made. Moreover, extensive space is given to foreign coverage. You have a definite sense that what happens almost anywhere in the world matters, because the country in which the paper appears is a world power. What was true of the The Times of London a hundred years ago is true of The New York Times today. For an Englishman, the contrast in quality of foreign coverage between the New York and the London Times is now painful to observe.

  Outside this small group, the value as historical record of most other newspapers in most other countries is slight, and diminishing. This is particularly true in Britain, where the fierce commercial competition for readers—above all between the groups headed by the Australian-American owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, and the Canadian proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black—has resulted in a further erosion of the journalism of record. I’m talking not just about the quite astonishing levels of routine inaccuracy and distortion, for reasons of both sensationalism and ideology—although in Britain this is especially apparent in anything to do with the European Union. As important are two other traits: featurism and futurism.

  A large part of most newspapers is now taken up not, as their name would suggest, with news, but with features: lifestyle, beauty, fashion, medicine, food, holidays, etc. This is what readers are said to want. Meanwhile, in what remains of the news pages, there is the more subtle disease of futurism. More and more space is devoted to speculating about what may happen tomorrow rather than describing what happened yesterday—the original mission of journalism. When read any time after today, this stuff is useless, except as an illustration of what people did not know at the time. Reading my own pieces for this book, I am again reminded that nothing ages more quickly than prophecy—even when it was prescient.

  For all these reasons, the history of the present gets written less in its first natural home, the newspapers. But there are also problems on the academic side of the frontier. Some professional historians do tackle subjects in recent history. Even the Oxford history faculty, long accounted conservative (with a small c), now has a history syllabus that is open-ended toward the present. Nonetheless, in my experience, most academic historians are still reluctant to venture much closer to the present than the canonical thirty years after which official papers are released in most democracies. They still incline to leave this territory to colleagues w
ho have made it their own in subjects such as International Relations, Political Science, Security Studies, European Studies, or Refugee Studies.

  Yet these relatively new specialisms often feel the need to establish their academic credentials, their claim to the high name of Science (in the German sense of Wissenschaft), by a heavy dose of theory, jargon, abstraction, or quantification. Otherwise—horror of horrors—their products might be confused with journalism. Even when those involved have been trained to write history, the results often suffer from overspecialization, unreadable prose, and that characteristic fault: unreality. At the same time, the pressures of American-style “publish or perish” mean that a huge amount of academic work in progress is hastily thrown into book form. Here, too, the ratio of quantity to quality has surely changed for the worse.

  SO I MAINTAIN THAT, for all its pitfalls, the literary enterprise of writing “history of the present” has always been worth attempting. It is even more so now because of the way history is made and recorded in our time. Sadly, it has suffered from developments in the professions of journalism and academic history.

  Yet you can soon have enough of such methodological self-examination. Altogether, the habit of compulsive labeling, pigeonholing, and compartmentalizing seems to me a disease of modern intellectual life. Let the work speak for itself. In the end, only one thing matters: Is the result true, important, interesting, or moving? If it is, never mind the label. If it isn’t, then it’s not worth reading anyway.

  T.G.A., Oxford—Stanford, March 2000

  CHRONOLOGY

  1990

  1 JANUARY. Introduction of economic “shock therapy” to make the transition to a free market in Poland. This is called the “Balcerowicz Plan,” after the finance minister Leszek Balcerowicz.