The History Channeler
For Simon Schama, Scholarship Is Best Served With A Touch of Drama

By Bob Thompson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 26, 2006

Simon Schama has a story to tell -- and as with all of this historian's stories, there's big-time drama involved.

This one begins in London, in 1765, when a young Englishman encounters an injured man "whose dreadful condition horrified even someone inured to looking at the unfortunate." The victim, Schama tells his attentive bookstore audience at Politics and Prose, is a black slave named Jonathan Strong, whose face has been "reduced to crimson gore, the result of a pistol whipping so savage that after repeated, relentless blows the mouth of the gun had separated from the handle."

Strong's master, after beating him, has thrown him into the street to die.

The young Englishman, whose name is Granville Sharp, has a brother who is a surgeon. Together they help Strong recover and find him work. But two years later, he gets arrested as a runaway. The plan is to ship him to a West Indian plantation.

Strong sends a note to Granville Sharp, begging for help.

Schama will go on to outline the consequences of that desperate note. He'll show -- as he does in his latest book, "Rough Crossings" -- how it drives Sharp to immerse himself in legal study, determined to convince the courts that English Common Law is inconsistent with slaveholding. He'll explain how the news of Sharp's eventual success helps persuade tens of thousands of African American slaves to side with the British during the American Revolution. He'll hint at the arduous, ill-fated exodus to Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone that results.

First, however, he wants to underline an unlikely plot element. Without it, history might have unfolded in a different way. "The one crucial thing I say, rather overdramatically," he begins, then pauses to mock himself:

"Dramatically? Moi?"

Appreciative titters from the bookstore crowd. The storyteller plunges on.

"I say that the whole fate of the black population in Britain -- and a very large number in the subsequent American Revolutionary War -- turned on the one fact that while he had a job, as he was convalescing, Jonathan Strong learned to read and write."

'Debate by Stealth'

Schama's own story, you might say, is also about learning to write. He's made a life's work of mixing scholarship with dramatic narrative in ways that few of his scholarly peers can match.

Call it "How to Succeed by Doing What Other Historians Don't."

Does your typical academic write best-selling 900-page histories of the French Revolution that deliberately omit footnotes? Produce texts mixing scholarship with fiction, to the point where you cannot tell the two apart? Dash off art criticism for magazines like the New Yorker? Teach seditious graduate seminars on "Writing History Beyond the Academy"?

No, no, no and no. "He's totally unusual," says historian Eric Foner, a colleague of Schama's at Columbia University. "He's sui generis."

But what really sets Schama apart these days is that he's turned himself into -- oh, horror of horrors -- a television star, signing multimillion-dollar contracts for work designed to surface both in print and as TV history shows.

He's completely unrepentant about this.

"I've always loved television as a sort of craft," he says. The goal is not to dumb things down, but to do "what I call 'debate by stealth.' In other words, you tell a story and in that story you actually pose extremely serious questions."

It's the morning after his bookstore appearance. Schama is breakfasting at the Tabard Inn on smoked salmon and a toasted bagel, having rejected the "slightly Calvinist grapefruit" that arrived instead of the lush bowl of fruit he thought he'd ordered. In dress and manner, he could pass for your average fast-talking Ivy intellectual -- except, perhaps, for the bright red shoes.

Schama, 61, was born in 1945 and raised in England, where his Jewish immigrant family -- his father was a textile merchant -- had sought refuge. He read history at Cambridge but found himself tempted by journalism, even wangling a press credential to the Democratic convention in 1964. In the end, though, he decided to make "big historical scholarship" his focus.

His first book, "Patriots and Liberators," was about "what the French did to the Dutch in the name of liberty" during the Napoleonic wars. "It reads like someone trying to be Gibbon -- it's really embarrassing," he says now.

He was 35 when Harvard lured him across the Atlantic. By then he was doing research on 17th-century Holland -- "slightly crackpot stuff," he calls it, "a sort of anthropology of daily life" in the Dutch Golden Age. "Original" would be a better word than "crackpot": In 1987, Schama published "The Embarrassment of Riches" to wide acclaim.

Two years later, his French Revolution book cemented his reputation as a brilliant young historian who could write .

His goal in "Citizens" had been to create compelling narrative history that also made an argument -- in this case, an anti-revolutionary one. He portrayed the descent into terror as "the essence of what revolutions do." A Washington Post reviewer called the book "brilliantly readable." George Will and Charles Krauthammer sang its praises. A liberal colleague lauded "Citizens" as well, Schama recalls, but warned that it would make him "all the wrong friends."

Never mind. This was a writer who didn't want to be bored, and he soon took a risk most academics would never dream of. Swept up in "a dangerously self-indulgent ecstasy in the pleasure of pure writing," he produced a book that deliberately blended fiction with fact.

"Dead Certainties" was really two short books in one. The first centered on the much-mythologized death of Gen. James Wolfe during the French and Indian War, the second on a bizarre 19th-century murder involving a Harvard chemistry professor. Schama's intent, he wrote in an afterword, was to "play with the teasing gap separating a lived event and its subsequent narration."

Historians were not amused.

"I was terribly naive," he says. "I knew it would cause a ruckus, but I didn't actually think I'd have my sword broken across my knee . . . for betraying the profession." Rather overdramatic, that -- what he got was more like a hard swat on the backside -- but in any case, he's not the type to let a little criticism slow him down.

Out came "Landscape and Memory," which the New York Times called "a variegated forest of stories illustrating the culture's primordial attachment to visions of nature." Out came "Rembrandt's Eyes," a sprawling portrait of the artist. Both did surprisingly well commercially.

And out came, among other television ventures, a ridiculously ambitious turn-of-the-millennium series for the BBC called "A History of Britain" that did really well: The 15-part epic netted the BBC a 20 percent audience share. The History Channel showed it, too. Schama's tie-in books were bestsellers in England.

All that earned him a follow-up contract with the BBC and HarperCollins for three more books and two more TV series. The price? A distinctly nonacademic 3 million pounds (more than $5 million). Meanwhile, Schama found another way to distinguish himself from his academic colleagues: He'd become an outspoken critic of their shared profession.

In a 1991 New York Times piece headlined "Clio Has a Problem," he savaged academic practices as stultifying, overspecialized and hopelessly biased against "dramatic immediacy." And he satirized conventional historical argument in a passage that began:

"In 1968, Wendy F. Muggins published her seminal article on manorial social structure in 17th-century Fredonia. A decade later, this orthodoxy was substantially corrected by Cuthbert C. Buggins, based on a reading of Fredonian tax records. Unaccountably, neither Muggins nor Buggins consulted local manorial records . . ."

"Storytellers," the storyteller lamented, had become "aggressively despised."

Green With Envy

"Rough Crossings" is the first fruit of Schama's $5 million deal. It is without question an extraordinary tale, "narrated with an urgency that is always riveting," as novelist Caryl Phillips put it in the Times Literary Supplement.

Kicking off with Granville Sharp's harrowing encounter with the mutilated Jonathan Strong, Schama shows how the single fact that Strong had learned to write -- and thus could send Sharp a note in his time of need -- turned Sharp into an anti-slavery activist who helped win legal emancipation for slaves in Britain.

The focus soon shifts to those African Americans who, having heard the triumphant news from London, were soon invited to leave their rebel masters and aid the British army during the Revolutionary War. Eighty to a hundred thousand left the plantations to do so.

Why wouldn't they? They now knew that the British definition of freedom -- unlike the one in the Declaration of Independence -- at least in theory included them .

Schama goes on to tell how those blacks fought and died, from smallpox as well as in combat; how, at war's end, the defeated British shipped 20,000 or so to Nova Scotia along with other Loyalist evacuees; how they were cruelly treated by the Canadian winters and equally so by white settlers. He shows how remarkable leaders such as former slave and army sergeant Thomas Peters -- "quiet, angry, illiterate but eloquent" -- emerged to help many of those Nova Scotia blacks to the next promised land, Sierra Leone, where they were intent on governing themselves.

"Seeing the Revolutionary War through the eyes of enslaved blacks," as Schama puts it, "turns its meaning upside down."

True enough. But here's where Schama's exaltation of lyric storytellers over pedantic academics gets complicated.

"Rough Crossings," unlike "Citizens," does have footnotes. And what they show is that without those overspecialized colleagues -- some of whom have been working for decades on the story of blacks in the American Revolution -- he'd have had a lot less story to tell.

Gary Nash is one of many whose work Schama cites. An emeritus professor at UCLA, a past president of the Organization of American Historians, he is the author of many books, among them "Race and Revolution" and most recently "The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution." He hasn't yet read "Rough Crossings," but knows its basic thrust, because "it's being reviewed all over the place -- it's gotten a tremendous amount of attention."

Is Nash jealous? You bet -- but not for the reasons you might expect: the fame and glory, the $5 million book and TV deal.

"I'm about six shades of green with envy for his ability to reach the public," he says. "I'm passionate about the need to reach the public with stories about African American history -- which, after all, is American history."

If Nash were younger and could start over, he says, he might try to write the way Schama does.

Ira Berlin is another historian whose work is cited in "Rough Crossings." He, too, is generous when asked about Schama's book. "It's not a new story," the University of Maryland professor says, "but it's really a great story, and it's important that he did it."

Schama is "expanding the terrain for all historians," Berlin adds, at a time when history is being "squeezed out of schools by No Child Left Behind" priorities and shouldered out of review media by dog-training books.

What's more, the man didn't choose to write yet another Founding Father biography -- the surest route to selling history these days. He's telling "a really different kind of story," Berlin says, "one with great drama and significance."

Schama cheerfully acknowledges that there's not a lot of new information in his book.

"It's a matter of synthesizing it," he says. "The history was sort of fractured, in earlier books, between the American war story, the African story, the Canadian story, the British story." Putting it together in a single narrative was "an incredible joy."

Synthesizer though he is, he nonetheless immersed himself in the archives. He doesn't think you can do "really good popular historical literature" without the "freshness and immediacy" you get from original sources.

Schama sounds less cranky now than the man who wrote "Clio Has a Problem," more inclined to see the clash in historical styles as something other than a zero sum game. Yet his style is different -- and it's more easily admired than emulated, Nash says: "He's a model -- but a model for a very, very select few."

Scholarly grunt work is still what gets you jobs, allows you to feed your family. So "if a lot of young people try to be Simon Schamas, they're going to fail."

On the Scent of History

"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more . . ."

Back at breakfast, bagel consumed, Schama squeaks out the famous line from "Henry V" in the voice of an 8-year-old boy. He's channeling himself at that age, when he would recite Shakespeare at the urging of his father -- a would-be thespian who'd been barred by his father from theatrical frivolity and "always regretted it."

Dr. Freud, call your office. On second thought, any pop-psychologizing hack will do.

Schama's father took him to see Richard Burton as Henry V, "and we sat in the fourth row or something and I could smell the greasepaint." What he thought he was smelling was the Globe Theatre of Shakespeare's day.

"I was a goner. I read all the history plays and was just completely thunderstruck by them."

He read Conan Doyle -- not Sherlock Holmes, at first, but a historical novel called "The White Company." He read Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Walter Scott and, when he was around 12, he thinks, Garrett Mattingly's "The Defeat of the Spanish Armada."

You can feel his excitement when he brings up the Mattingly book, which begins, unforgettably, with the wigless head of the executed Mary Queen of Scots rolling across the floor. "All done out of the archives and the public record office," Schama says, "yet it felt like the most thrilling, magnificent piece of prose."

That excitement can be contagious, whether he's talking about a love letter he once uncovered containing a lock of a woman's hair -- "the hair was actually scented with some little musty 18th-century scent . . . it was so ghostly" -- or standing on the western coast of Ireland, in perhaps overly dramatic rain gear, doing a standup for "A History of Britain."

This particular segment is titled "Empire of Good Intentions." Schama being Schama, he gives viewers the history of British imperialism through carefully chosen stories -- among them the bloody Indian "mutiny" of 1857 and the horrific Irish potato famine a decade earlier. Posed against a bleak shoreline, he evokes the Irish disaster:

"At the height of the famine, there were too many babies dying," he says, "for the priests to be able to baptize them all. Denied consecrated ground, their fathers carried them to a little piece of no man's land, like this, on the very rim of the island, on the Atlantic shore . . ."

But "Empire of Good Intentions" is argument as well as story. It asks the question, Schama says, "about whether or not peoples other than yourself are better served by being run by you." For the heartlessness of the ruling British, in the face of the potato famine, came in part from the imperial obsession with free trade.

"There was just one iron law: Let the market do its job," the television Schama says. If the cost was a million dead, so be it.

It's hard not to see lessons for the 21st century here, but the historian isn't sanguine about them being heard. "In the halls of the energetic policymaker," he says, history is viewed as "emasculating." Thinking about the past, with all its unanticipated outcomes, is "such a bringer-down-to-earth exercise." Abstract political theory is more attractive, because it frees you to act with optimism, to create "facts on the ground."

But for Simon Schama, in the end, the lessons of history are not the point. The point is the continuous, interconnected drama of human lives.

The study of history is "a resistance against oblivion, against loss," he says. "It tells you about what it was like to be a human being."