Letters

HBO's John Adams

To the Editors:

I must respectfully disagree with Professor Brendan McConville's conclusion in the January 2009 issue of Historically Speaking that, despite shortcomings that historians have come to expect in history programming on television, the flaws in the HBO John Adams series "are generally minor distractions rather than glaring mistakes."

The series does indeed have many strong points. But it is undermined by a plethora of serious and often entirely gratuitous departures from the historical record, distorting Adams's era, his family relations, and the man himself. I have discussed these problems in some detail on the History News Network:

• • "What's Inaccurate About the New HBO Series on John Adams" (a discussion of the opening installment), March 18, 2008, http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/48493.html.

• • "What's Wrong with HBO's Dramatization of John Adams's Story" (a critique of the remainder of the series), October 27, 2008, http://hnn.us/articles/56155.html.

If the John Adams series is to be recommended to students, they should also be exposed to more critical evaluations of its contents. Students always benefit from exposure to multiple points of view.

Jeremy A. Stern

Princeton University

Historians in Fiction

To the Editors:

A comment on Beverly Southgate's "Why Dryas-dust? Historians in Fiction" in the April 2009 issue. Hedda Gabler is probably the only play about two historians. These are Tesman and Løvborg. Tesman is an amiable third-rater who should not have been given tenure; Løvborg is a phony through to where his backbone ought to be. At the end of the play, Tesman and Løvborg's widow are left to edit Løvburg's notes and see if anything can be made of them. They will probably not succeed, but their collaboration is authentic enough to drive Hedda to suicide. There arises a further question. Could there be a novel about a working and reasonably creative historian? Probably not. His or her activity would be that of writing history: so like and yet unlike writing a novel as to be a very unsuitable subject for the latter. It would have to be concerned with either some other activity on the historian's part, or the faults of circumstance or character that prevent him or her from writing it. Perhaps such a novel will be or has been written; but I don't think I want to read it.

A scene from a New York City performance of Hedda Gabler. Henrik Ibsen, The Works of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. XI (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1912).

J.G.A. Pocock

Johns Hopkins University

To the Editors:

I had hoped that my essay (and book) would provoke some discussion about history's meeting points with fiction, and I thank Professor Pocock for getting us off to such an encouraging start. I am not sure, though, that he is entirely fair to Ibsen's two historians (nor, incidentally, that he correctly assesses Hedda's motivation for suicide; but that need not concern us here). Tesman is portrayed as the archetypal Dryasdust, a conscientious note-taker who lacks the creative imagination—or is it confidence?—to use his material productively. But although he may not deserve tenure, and in the play still awaits his professorial chair, he is surely recognizable, if only as our sometime selves? Løvburg is in certain respects his antithesis, imaginative enough to publish a well-received history of civilization, and even to write a speculative sequel about the future. The latter assuredly makes him unconventional (though here he has a parallel in Wyndham Lewis's Professor Harding), but surely not necessarily "a phony"? His inspiration anyway comes at a price: susceptibility to women (who provide his inspiration) and drink. But while those moral "flaws" prove his undoing, they are also perhaps what make him interesting. Which leads to Professor Pocock's other point: that "perfect" historians, if such exist, would be lacking in any interest either to novelists or readers. For they would be in some sense less than "human"; and it is perhaps...