From: George Mason’s University’s History News Network http://www.hnn.us
Simon Schama Interview
Schama (#12430) by Editor on May 23, 2003 at 4:40 PM
The Times (London) May 20, 2003, Tuesday SECTION: Features; Times2; 14 HEADLINE: The man who made history sexy explains why it is also our freedom BYLINE: ANDREW BILLEN HE LIVES IN NEW YORK, WEARS LEATHER JACKETS AND THOUGHT THE IRAQ WAR A GOOD THING. HOW DID SIMON SCHAMA BECOME THE KEEPER OF BRITISH HISTORY - AND WHAT DOES HE THINK OF CHARLES CLARKE'S ASSAULT ON MEDIEVAL HISTORY? LET'S TRY ON for size this paradox: the only thing protecting us from the future is the past. I do believe it fits.
Our knowledge of history, our own and our civilisation's, is what stops us blundering forth in the belief, for instance, that "things can only get better". This must be why politicians fear history; like soap opera writers, they require us to have short memories of previous plotlines. Consequently, as Winston Smith realised in Nineteen Eighty-Four, recovering the past is the oppressed citizen's first act of liberation. For a while, however, Britain seemed to accept Henry Ford's view that history was bunk. Schools simply stopped teaching kings and queens, and, although Henry and Elizabeth are back on the syllabus, there remain unreconstructed Fordians out there. One of them, worryingly, appears to be our Education Secretary, who was reported this month to have said that, while he was not against having some medievalists around "for ornamental purposes", there was no reason for the State to pay for them. Rightly foreseeing a market in this yawning knowledge gap, television a few years ago began running its own remedial history courses. They won such audiences that Channel Five declared that history was the new sex. Michael Wood in denims, Richard Holmes in Barbours and David Starkey in cravats lectured us from spectacularly windy locations, heirs to the tweedy A.J.P. Taylor, who once conjured the deeds of the dead from empty studios. But before them all, with
the biggest budgets of all, strode Simon Schama in his leather jacket, the author-presenter of the BBC's A History of Britain. Schama thinks of himself as a modern day Herodotus, rescuing the "oral, performative tradition" of history from "the monk-written memorials and muniments". The Radio Times puts it more plainly: if there were a position of historian laureate, Schama would be odds-on to get it. The odds have just shortened. The publication of this article coincides with an announcement by the BBC that Schama has just signed a four-year exclusive deal for two BBC Two series, one on art masterpieces (the author of The Embarrassment of Riches and Rembrandt's Eyes is also an art historian) and another appropriately, since the Golders Green schoolboy has been teaching in America for 22 years - on the links between British and US history. We meet in the Covent Garden office of his agent, PFD, which, unbeknown to me, is hammering the new contract into lucrative shape. No wonder Schama is in garrulous good humour, although, let's be honest, isn't he always? I interviewed him a dozen years ago, when he won the NCR Book Award for Citizens, his coruscating account of the French Revolution. This afternoon the celebrations are for the publication in paperback of the books that accompany A History of Britain. He is 57 now, but does not seem to have aged during the past decade. Physically, the main difference is that he is not wearing glasses, whereas in 1990 he sported jokey, black-framed Harold Lloyds that matched his tuxedo. He confesses that at the height of his optical fetish he was buying three pairs of specs a year, and has kept them all. "It is the only habit I share with Sir Elton John," he says. If he has less need to wear funny glasses to gain attention, his appetite for praise is undiminished. He recalls by byline Michael Ratcliffe's "fantastic" review in The Times in 1977 of his first book, Patriots and Liberators. He now thinks that it was over-written, "cod-Gibbon really", but it was an important event, since at Cambridge at the time he and his friend Roy Porter had been ridiculed as the two historians who were never going to write anything. "The reason we hadn't was we were teaching our balls off. Subsequently, Roy, of course, made me look lazy, unproductive and costive by comparison." Porter, a brilliant medical historian, died last year. Curiously, his potential as a TV performer was never properly explored; conversely, Schama's huge success on the box is also a little curious. He is a beautiful writer, if a bit ornamental for ministerial tastes, and frighteningly articulate, having taken his late father's advice that "a Jew's only weapon is his mouth". On screen, however, his talking head bobs and jerks and surfaces for air alarmingly. He recalls, after an early TV outing, the sound man saying: "Yeah, you're good, but you're no Dr Bronowski."
In a lecture on television and history that he gave last year he said that "television comes at us in gulps and manic ejaculations, frantically discontinuous, anxious". It certainly described his style at the start of the British history series back in 2000. He admits that he finds his early performances hard to watch, but thinks that they improved after his wife Ginny, an American geneticist professor, bought him Patsy Rodenburg's manual The Actor Speaks, and he mastered its breathing exercises. "If only," he laments, "I'd had this book earlier, the first series would have been so much better." But his unusual style hardly mattered because what he had to say satisfied a huge appetite. This was the real surprise. "Many people in, as they say, 'the broadcasting community' expected us to bomb, and how! History was the single least popular subject in schools. The presenter-led genre of documentary was considered passe. And here I was, a white male, not dead, but quite unfashionable enough. "But we got off to such a headwind that we were allowed to get a bit more essay-like and demanding of the audience as it went on. The viewing did fall off, actually, partly because the last series went out in the summer and the World Cup was on, but there's no doubt that some of the last programmes were among the best, in my view." I say I was surprised by the demotic voice he chose in the early episodes. Actually I winced at its cliches: Anglo-Saxon Britain lived in "the long shadow of Rome"; "a truckload of trouble" accompanied the Norman invasion; propaganda worked "like a dream"; the Normans owned Britain "lock, stock and barrel". I tell him I thought the programmes grew more fluent as they went on; he thanks me, ignoring my implied criticism of his earlier style. "Yeah, no one was telling me to do that. I wanted to have a slightly more street-ish voice without being pretentiously blokeish. I loved what Kenneth Clark did, but I thought some sort of alternative voice would do for history." Once he got to the tough, yet elegiac, final episodes, the death of Empire, women under Victoria, Churchill and Orwell, his voice grew to match its subject. "I think the coda was lyrical because I felt that way," he says. "It just came straight out." Whether you preferred the series' Ripping Yarns start or its essayistic finish, by the end Schama had emerged as the nation's head teacher. Like all heads, he had also become a figure of the Establishment. Although some of the morals he had drawn - comparing, for example, the rotting of the Empire to the failure of the Irish potato crop - were scathing of the British ruling class, British history had a happy ending: "The party of liberty won." In the books of the series he says he "doesn't mind if history proves itself a patriot" or if, as a historian, he turns out to be a "born-again Whig". He says he was genuinely moved by the clips
he showed of Churchill walking over the rubble of the London Blitz and by the Old Etonian Orwell becoming empowered by heritage left by the Levellers and Lollards: "From that endless argument going on in our culture comes the special splendour of the British." It was presumably his rarefied appreciation of this special splendour that got him invited into the BBC commentary box for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. He says, being no republican, that he saw no reason to be a party pooper. Yet Private Eye recently unearthed an essay he wrote for The Sunday Times in 1969 in which he said that the Queen came "flavourless, harmless, beautifully packaged but a bit expensive" and that the monarchy survived "to celebrate the rite of fantasy". "That was never meant to be a republican piece, but that's a fair cop, I have to say," he says, amused. While the BBC pays him to endorse the monarchy, the rest of us demand from the oracle a running commentary on history even as it is being forged. On Tina Brown's show on American television, he was asked for historical parallels with the Iraqi war and, uncharacteristically, he fumbled, failing to pull anything out of the "historical grab bag". When I ask for similar guidance, he delivers a long, unusable comparison with the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 BC). "The widening of the Atlantic rift in terms of the historical memory in Europe began as an exercise in cautionary pessimism. I mean Thucydides, the trajectory of it, leads you towards Syracuse, you know, and the debates over Syracuse because Alcibiades and Nicias which are just ..." I am afraid, I say, that he is losing me. "Well," he summarises, "the history of the Peloponnesian War is the history of a cock-up." Julian Barnes, I say, trying to pin him down, wrote recently that the liberation of Iraq wasn't worth the loss of a single child's finger. "Well, he's incredibly wrong about that, in my view, preposterously. Ask three million exiles. Ask any family who have been tortured and mutilated. Hideous." So we had to do it, morally? "I do believe there were horrible things lurking in Iraq even if we haven't found them, and I do think the pond needed to be drained. It was entirely likely that they would get into the hands of people like al-Qaeda - and even if they hadn't, it was absolutely clear that Saddam, over a period of time, wanted to be the extortionate lever in that part of the region."
Although he regards the God-botherers Bush and Blair as "not very good people to defend the Voltaire XI", he does see the "war on terror" in their terms: as a fight between theocratic fanaticism and the values of the Enlightenment. I have to tell him that the British Left sees it differently. It asks how else you expect the dispossessed of the world to react against a great big bullying US super-power. "That's really defeatism. Almost insulting defeatism. I think it's hideous. It's like democracy can never, ever take root in places where people's skins are brown. Why the f*** not?" What he does find "unconscionable" about the Bush Administration is its aversion to spelling out the cost. He means this financially, rather than the "human cost" (although he notes that Ali Ismail Abbas, the child who lost his arms during the coalition bombing, is scarcely known in the America media). "No, not in terms of the war, but of what we are up for now: that it may be a little difficult to have however many tens of thousands, maybe a hundred thousand, people policing and stabilising this part of the world over the next five years while you cut every single tax you can think of and fund social security and prevent Medicare from completely collapsing. There's an amazing Wizard of Oz craziness about basic sums. "Almost every single state in the US is close to bankruptcy; not only that, but the level of subsidy they receive from central government revenues is going down and down. Whether you can finance that and be an empire is deeply moot. "It's traditionally what breaks all empires. We really couldn't run the First and Second World Wars and stay as an imperial power. The Dutch could not fight Louis XIV and the Spanish and Portuguese out there in the East Indies, even though they'd been overwhelmingly the richest country in the world. It broke them." In any case, Americans have little inclination for empire. "America is deeply about tourism, going there and coming back to air-conditioning. Britain wasn't. The Victorians were willing to build Tunbridge Wells in Simla." So where does that leave Britain? "Oh, we absolutely have our moment! It's not just Blair. My view is that we are Europe-plus which is my autobiography, too." Even though Hugo Young of The Guardian, for example, says that far from being the bridge between Europe and the US, the UK has sunk itself somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. We didn't get the war through the Security Council and we alienated old Europe.
"In the end that was really a failure. But we did help to get the inspections process taken seriously. I thought that Powell-Blair alliance was enormously worth pursuing. It created something for the future. We have enormous influence in the US. Our star is grotesquely and unrealistically high in public opinion in the States," he says, his enthusiasm now turned up from simmer to boil. I hope he is right. Whether Britain's moment lasts even as long as Schama's will be a matter for the historians of the future to ponder - if, of course, Britain is allowed to produce any. I wonder, when I ring him over the weekend at his home in New York, if he caught Charles Clarke's comments on medievalists. He hadn't. "Appalling," he splutters when I tell him. "Absolutely appalling. Spitting in the eye of our ancestry! Impeachment, basically, is what I would have in mind." The historian laureate has just become the Education Secretary's special prosecutor. A History of Britain is published by the BBC in three paperbacks, 12.99 each.