Response to Stephen Pyne

My first reaction on reading Stephen Pyne’s essay was “hooray!” And so was my second. And my third.

Without much recognizing it, historians have—for several generations now—downgraded the writing part of their task. Time was when writers of history held a solid stake within the larger domain of serious literature: Gibbon, Macauley, Parkman, Prescott are the first, most obvious, names to come to mind. No doubt the change, the downgrading, has had much to do with professionalization; as the discipline became, in fact, a discipline, priorities shifted. Perhaps there was something of a seesaw effect: when concern with research and interpretive technique went up, prose composition went correspondingly down. What “good writing” has come to mean, in the minds of most historians, is clear and effective communication: getting your point across.

It ought to mean so much more. Pyne is absolutely right to spotlight the importance of evocation alongside exposition, and voice as much as thesis. Put differently: historians must speak to the hearts as well as the heads of readers; they should write both from and toward the realm of emotion. And realizing that goal to the fullest involves the use of (gasp!) literary artifice. Plotting; variations of pace, pitch, and tone; the resort to visual imagery and auditory sound—these and similar devices belong in our repertoire no less than that of novelists, poets, and writers of creative nonfiction. Only thus can we draw out a full range of responses from those we aspire to reach with our substantive “findings.”

Such elements need not be confined to work of an explicitly narrative cast; they can strengthen argument-based prose as well. Pyne’s essay itself makes a good case in point—filled, as it is, with sharp images, lively turns of phrase, and as many metaphors per page as one ever sees in writings of (or about) history. (“Riding the Melt” is just the first.)

I believe, however, that Pyne is mistaken in one respect: his insistence that history be sharply distinguished from fiction. No boundary line divides the two; at most there is a wide and nebulous borderland. Open any work of history, even the most conventional sort, and you will find statements that involve a degree of “making it up.” We are always filling little holes in our evidence with bits of inference or outright invention—whether we acknowledge this or not. (And better, for sure, if we do.)

Such acknowledgment is important because it opens a door to cross-fertilization. Some works of fiction have achieved remarkable feats of historical understanding; we need to learn from them. A couple of quick examples: Wallace Stegner’s novel Angle of Repose is as fine a work of family history as any I can think of. And I’d say the same about William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner for the history of slavery. If fiction were fundamentally different from history, the transposing of “style” from the one to the other simply wouldn’t work.

From Rowland Edmund Prothero, ed., Private Letters of Edward Gibbon (1753–1794), vol. I (London, 1896).

On the teaching of historical writing, my own experience mirrors that of Pyne: reading and reflecting on exemplary works; painstaking efforts of dissection, line by line, even word by word; and regular written exercises by the participants, to be shared and critiqued jointly: my seminar-program too. What can come of this is extraordinary: for one thing, a uniquely bonded group; for another, an atmosphere of deep collegiality and support; for yet another, a level of writing far above the expectations of either the students or their instructor. Some takers of my seminar have been known to me from previous coursework, where their writing gave no sign of special gifts. Yet when allowed the “chance to experiment” in “a literary detox program,” they do indeed “soar.” (The phrasings are Pyne’s, not mine.) Might we actually be squashing certain buds of literary talent with our regular graduate curriculum? I only know that time after time, given the opportunity, these students outdo themselves. I have sometimes imagined gathering the...