The History Men

The conversation on the shelves between Carlyle, Caro and Carr.

In an exchange on the nature of leadership on Easter Monday, someone suggested to me that I read Robert Caro’s monumental biographies of Lyndon B. Johnson. As Caro’s books are a series I have gone to some pains not to read - I think they are vastly over-rated (sorry) - I thought I would republish this essay I did long ago on the nature of history writing and its relationship to biography. Fans of Caro will be gratified to see that I do in fact come round to him by the end, That said, I do think the point about his manifesto, smuggled into the preface of the second volume, is a good one. It does matter, I think, that Caro is just wrong about Johnson’s importance and wrong in the way that biographers usually are. He just makes too much of the individual. The very reason I love the form is also its flaw and, far from being a judicious writer, Caro falls for it.

They have been sitting there, tucked in neatly between Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes And Hero Worship and EH Carr’s What Is History?, admonishing me for years now. The first three of five planned volumes of Robert Caro’s epic biography of the 36th President of the United States, Lyndon B Johnson. Those 2,280 pages demanding my attention, mocking me for never having opened them, trying to excite a hunger in me to be more serious. There is another volume, not yet purchased and another, not yet written but expected. At my usual rate, the three volumes I have will consume three months, even if I read absolutely nothing else—no newspapers, magazines, novels, old Wisden almanacs, nothing but Johnson. If the conversation doesn’t get round to the electrification of rural Texas, I will have nothing to say.

It took Caro’s recent visit to London, in which he was given the royal treatment by the British political class, including slots on Newsnight and the Today programme and an audience with the press gallery of the House of Commons, to force me to get them down from the shelves. However, having done so, and having been alerted, for the first time in years, to the Carlyle and the Carr, the contents of which I retained in broad but vague outline, I found myself constantly diverted from the Caro. The three books—Carlyle, Caro and Carr, to put them in their alphabetically-shelved order—started a conversation which is, essentially, about what counts in history. Historians exist along a spectrum which has the individual agent at one end and grand impersonal forces at the other. The claim of the biographer is that history is better illustrated and understood through the prism of the single important life. Given Carr’s point that only some facts are historical, this inevitably means that most biographical writing is the account of the lives of great men and women. In that debate, the Caro and the Carlyle kept ganging up on the Carr with the proposition that the individual life changes the world. Carr devoted his famous 1961 Trevelyan lectures on the definition of history to the idea that there was a lot more involved than the grand works of the great and the good.

My shelves groan with biographies. I have the poets (some of them read), lots of novelists (hardly any read), plenty of politicians (read too many) and more cricketers, musicians and footballers than one life ought to include. I am intrigued, for reasons I cannot quite fathom, about where people grew up and went to school. I am interested in where they lived and, if they had children, what happened to the offspring. I like biographies in the way the most loving reader does, which is to say rather uncritically. Yet I had always felt a nagging irritation with Caro’s implicit claim to importance, which was part of the reason I had never got round to reading his books. There are all sorts of books I have not read for no particular reason. I just haven’t read them. My failure to get around to reading Edward Mendelson’s Later Auden, for example, does not imply the verdict, wrong even if common, that Auden went missing as a poet when he went to the US. It is meant as no slight on Mendelson either. I just haven’t read it. Well, I say that. In between noticing it and this piece appearing, I’ve started.

I was not reading Caro in a much more active way, though. I was not reading him in the sense that I do not watch The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin’s television series about a liberal US president. Never having seen it, I now take care not to ruin the anecdote. There were also a set of less frivolous reasons. Reading Caro strikes me as the equivalent for the current generation of politicians of reading Trollope for the last. It’s a way of pretending to have a hinterland when in fact the British political class seems to me to be unreasonably, and misleadingly, obsessed with the US. The stage there is larger and the theatre more gaudy. British politicians and journalists cannot resist the whole lapel-badged, big-toothed glamour of it all. The fact that the Americans inherited from the British a constitutional arrangement that bears no comparison with the one we have at home does not deter them from drawing lessons from the US.

Caro redoubles that problem, although, given the amount to get through, that verb perhaps includes too low a multiple. The detail he lavishes on Johnson raises the question of whether an individual president can be so influential as to warrant such attention. This is not just about the effect that US politics has on its British counterpart, but also about the role of the individual in biography.

Historical memory is a pantheon in which only certain people are commemorated. Philip Larkin’s great poem “An Arundel Tomb” gains its potency from the fact that two lovers are immortalised holding hands, “the stone fidelity they hardly meant.” Their gesture, Larkin is saying, does not warrant being captured in the poem. It was a passing moment that is petrified and made significant. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper tried to pull off the biographical equivalent with Hermit of Peking, the story of Edmund Backhouse, an obscure Sinologist and scholar of the Qing Dynasty who was accused, and convicted, by Trevor-Roper of forging his sources. One of the trends in history writing attributable to the influence of Carr was the rescue of lives that an earlier generation, including the likes of George Trevelyan and Thomas Macaulay, would have regarded as unimportant. Erecting a grand thesis on a scabrous, and partly fictitious memoir left behind by Backhouse, Trevor-Roper proved one of Carr’s famous maxims about history: everything that has happened is historical, but not everything warrants being elevated to the status of historical fact.

Nobody is suggesting that Johnson is a hermit of Texas. He was President, after all. Not that you would grasp that fact from most of Caro—a couple of thousand pages in, and the coming man hasn’t arrived yet. There is an awful lot about Texas senatorial races just after the Second World War to wade through first, and the apparently philistine question has to be faced as to whether there isn’t too much. Caro makes the arithmetic hard to avoid. If Johnson is worth five volumes, how many should we devote to Harry S Truman, Dwight D Eisenhower or Franklin D Roosevelt? With time shortening on me all the time, I am looking for books to get shorter, not longer, so I am not keen to encourage biographical inflation. Five volumes cannot be the baseline when Ian Kershaw managed to do Hitler in two. It may simply be that Caro is more interested in Johnson than any well-adjusted person ought to be, but it does seem that he is ranking his subject by paying him such attention.

Having skipped some of the longueurs in the first volume, passages which, when joined together, made up most of the book, I found Caro’s manifesto in the introduction to the second. Here is the claim, rather hidden away, that he makes for the whole series. “Many of the ends of Lyndon Johnson’s life,” writes Caro, “were noble; heroic advances in the cause of social justice… many liberal dreams might not be reality even today were it not for Lyndon Johnson. These noble ends, however, would not have been possible were it not for the means, far from noble, which brought Lyndon Johnson to power. Their attainment would not have been possible without that 1948 campaign. And what are the implications of that fact?”

What indeed? Here is the biographer’s credo. It is also the justification for the length of the treatment. The reason Johnson’s ignoble chicanery in pursuit of a seat in the Senate really matters is that the civil rights movement would not have reached its zenith without the legislation that Johnson piloted through Congress, for which we will have to wait for Caro’s final volume. A major social movement, a historic change to the relations between black and white people in the US, the great scar since slavery, the vexed issue of the Civil War—it all rested on this Texan Machiavelli. If Johnson had not started on “the path to power” (the title of Caro’s first volume) in the 1940s, then the whole history of modern America would have been different. Caro’s claim is really very stark and it is odd that so few of his admirers have engaged with it. Perhaps, reading Caro as literature and needing a justification for three months they have spent doing nothing else, they don’t want to hear that it’s not really true.

Unfortunately, the claim isn’t as true as Caro needs it to be. There is no need to go as far as Leo Tolstoy and attribute historical causation to abstract, impersonal forces to doubt that the fate of US civil rights rested on Johnson alone. Before Johnson, there was the accumulated moral weight of all the indignities and stupidities of racial prejudice. There were the activists, protestors and ordinary black Americans who refused to sit quietly while they were denied the elementary right to be treated equally. Most legislation comes with an invisible wind at its back, in this case a righteous wind, and the civil rights legislation is an exemplar rather than an exception. It is also important to remember that legislation, by itself, changes no attitudes. Racial prejudice was not, alas, abolished in the US by the passage of civil rights acts. Caro inflates not just Johnson’s claim to posterity, but also the claim of conventional politics. It is not surprising that the class of people who practice and follow politics for a living find this account so convincing. But one look at the US prison population will tell you why it isn’t.

Historians know that change takes a long while. They also understand that power is an elusive and many-splendoured thing. This led the professionals towards structural explanations. This was also one of the effects of the debate that Carr initiated. Most of his acolytes in the growing higher education sector of the 1960s took issue with Carlyle’s “great man” thesis. This was the era in which social, economic and cultural history all flourished, as historical writing diverted from literary narrative into an array of narrow specialisms. Historians’ field of vision expanded from a narrow focus on the doings of the powerful elite to a preoccupation with how the mass of people lived.

This was a development that Carr prefigured, more by accident than design. There was no more obvious representative of the powers-that-be than Carr himself. He never held a chair in history as international relations was his subject. He was for 20 years a civil servant in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and then Assistant Editor of the Times. He was also a child of his time in that he thought a planned society preferable to a market economy. He believed in grand teleology, that history has a purpose and direction. Above all, Carr believed, rather like those Caro-cultists who think they are studying “power” rather than just the arcane details of the life of Johnson, that the point of studying history was to draw lessons for the present, the better to create the future. Young historians rallied to his cause, convinced that they were working on the side of the angels. By burying themselves in the archives, they were bringing out the secret of the future.

Those of us who lived to see the Berlin Wall come down (which Carr did not; he died in 1982) can hardly swallow any of this stuff now. The writing of history has moved on again. Influenced more these days by anthropology than by the once-fashionable discipline of sociology, historical writing has shifted focus from Carr’s impersonal causes to the elucidation of meaning. The argument between the individual and the deeper forces propelling change has entered a new phase.

This is best seen by looking at Kershaw’s biography of Hitler. Coming to Nazi Germany via the unusual detour of medieval history (perhaps a useful starting point, on reflection), Kershaw developed an approach somewhere between the two extremes. The writing of modern German history, as toxic and political an enterprise as there has ever been, had divided, broadly speaking, into two schools. Taking its cue from Karl Dietrich Bracher’s stunningly good The German Dictatorship, one school of historians stressed the deep intellectual roots of National Socialism and the long-range historical factors such as the Versailles settlement and the impact of a nasty depression on Germany. While no reputable historian would ever leave those events out of the account, that structural approach came to be countered by a school known as the “intentionalists” who placed a greater emphasis on human agency, in particular the role that Hitler played in willing Germany to destruction.

Kershaw put these two approaches together with the notion, which he took from a speech delivered by Werner Willikens, a Nazi politician, of “working towards the Führer.” What this suggestive phrase means is that Hitler did not need effective personal command of every aspect of civil society. Once his power had been established, people were happy to do their bit to move things along. Nobody quite felt personal responsibility. If the chain led somewhere dark, that was a collective, rather than an individual, concern. It was structural, yet impossible without the daily consent of millions of individuals. At the apex was the Führer, whose demonic command was the invisible incentive for every indecisive step towards him.

It would be flattering Kershaw somewhat to say that he has settled the argument between Carlyle, Caro and Carr. It is more that, in trying to write a structuralist biography, the flaw at the centre of the enterprise becomes apparent. It isn’t easy to write a biography and take the subject out. The choice of biography as genre implies that the individual voice needs to be heard. Not many lives are written in which the central subject is an unwitting victim, unable to act. It makes for a dull story, for a start, because it empties the life of moral choice.

The core of the appeal of biography is that it brings history alive by presenting the drama of the individual life. This has been evident in recent literary biographies predicated, whether openly or not, on TS Eliot’s insistence that the work of art, whatever other precursors it may have had, is an expression of the individual talent or its opposite. Jonathan Bate’s biography of Ted Hughes is powerful not because of the salacious titbits about Ted in bed that made their way into the papers. It worked because the story of Hughes and Sylvia Plath is as sad as they come and the question to be resolved is how far the sorry outcome was Hughes’s fault. No story has been more pored over than that of the two star poets, so much so that Hughes once complained in a letter that he had thought he should be the owner of the facts of his own life. He discovered, as various disputes went to court, that he wasn’t. But the attraction of Bate’s book derives from Hughes’s actions within it.

Chief among them, in Hughes’s case, is the poetry, of course, which points to another limitation of biography as a form. In every life of a literary, sporting or musical genius there comes a point, usually once the immediate family is out of the way and the prodigal is at school, when you think, “Yes, but how did he ever learn how to do that?” The source of the talent is what attracts us to the biography, but it is also its undisclosed mystery. Why was Robert Zimmerman Bob Dylan rather than the hermit of Hibbing? We don’t know and the biography by Howard Sounes, much as I enjoyed it, cannot say.

Yet, like so many others, I cannot help but feel that the search is worthwhile. The biographies that line my shelves do tell me something, I realise, about an individual. That individual is me. A long while, stretching to half a lifetime now, of academic training, political participation and journalistic observation has taught me about the constraining context in which every artist, every politician, everybody works. I can give you chapter and verse on Tolstoy’s grand, impersonal forces which impel man towards this and away from that. Yet, despite all that, and despite the nagging doubt that it is a disreputable conclusion, I still believe these life stories; I still believe that the men and women between these covers changed the world. I don’t believe that quite to the extent that Robert Caro believes it, and I might wait for the abridged version of his life of Johnson, but, in the end, I am on his side.