History, his way
Simon Schama, surrounded by a BBC film crew, is practising his walking shots on the site of Nendrum monastery in Northern Ireland – a glorious, isolated hill overlooking Strangford Lough – and reciting his script explaining the role of St Patrick and the early Christian missionaries. Down by the lough the tide is coming in so fast that the walking shots quickly turn into wading shots, but Schama takes the damage to his Timberlands in good heart and carries on advancing across what is now a marsh. The vignette calls to mind King Canute, a much-misunderstood figure in need of Schama’s sympathetic attention. Take six is a wrap, saving the soggy presenter and the sinking crew from a watery fate.
Schama, who is 54, is currently engaged in writing and presenting a 16-part history of Britain, which will be the centrepiece of the BBC’s millennium programming. It will be broadcast in two tranches, with the first scheduled for autumn 2000 and the second following in 2001, and promises to lift the already garlanded historian into a league of his own, making him “Mr History” for the English-speaking world. It is also likely to make him an instant target for obloquy – and Schama knows it.
“I kept on saying no, over and over again,” he says. “It’s an impossible task – you can satisfy nobody. It was just too big and unwieldy, but they kept coming back, and I said, why me? I’ve lived in the US for 20 years; it’s a long time since I taught British history; why me? It’s a question a lot of people will be asking. They wanted someone who was out of the industry and had no axe to grind, who wasn’t part of any particular academic debate or dispute, who was coming home in a way. That was the gamble. It was to be offset against my colossal ignorance of the subject and I hope it pays off.”
Schama says this with a characteristic mixture of ebullience and self-deprecation. It is a mad project – in both scale and speed of production – and Schama is one of the few with the chutzpah (that word fits him perfectly) to attempt it. “In our opinion, of all English-speaking, English-writing historians, he’s the one who best suited the project,” says series producer Martin Davidson. “He combines breadth with originality and a bril liant, captivating writing style – an ability to bring characters to life, to tell stories, to coin that telling turn of phrase.”
Schama evidently enjoys filming, swapping technical jargon with the director and cameraman, hearing planes and yapping dogs before the sound man does, changing his clothes in the back of a car in a cold car park. The one thing he does object to is dodgy hotels, and, staying in the Orkneys, a production assistant had to spend half a day scouring Kirkwall for a fluffy pillow after Schama had had a poor night’s sleep.
Out by the lough, he fluffs his lines occasionally, but that is hardly surprising, as he is working from memory, not an autocue. He waits patiently for the weather to improve, chats cheerily to the quietly spoken man who runs the Nendrum visitors’ centre, quizzing him for details of a recent dig, and shows no signs of fatigue, despite having been up late the night before watching his beloved baseball on Channel 5 at his hotel. He is the quintessential modern media academic, the historian of the future, the AJP Taylor of the digital age. He is also a man whose moment has come.
This month, as well as working on the BBC series, he publishes Rembrandt’s Eyes, a far-from-conventional biography of the artist that wants to capture not just the man and his world, but “the way the paint lands on the canvas or the panel and how it resolves itself into a subject”. Schama’s intention is not simply to instruct or inform, but to “intensify people’s pleasure in engaging with the pictures”. Try to read the book as a straightforward biography and you may end up throwing it across the room. It attempts to inhabit Rembrandt’s universe, to portray the emergence of genius, but most of all to catch the texture of his painting.
The epigraph to the book is from Paul Valéry: “We should apologise for daring to speak about painting.” But having apologised, Schama dares: the book runs to 700 pages, contains a lengthy section on Rubens (Schama argues that it is Rembrandt’s escape from the shadow of Rubens that allows him to assert his individuality and revolutionise art), and combines biography with a painstaking treatment of the paintings.
Schama recalls standing in front of a Rembrandt self-portrait as he was embarking on the book and feeling the painter mocking him, saying, “I’ve seen people like you before, sonny.” “I feel like that all the time,” says Schama. “I feel very close to him but there’s barely a day when you are not aware that the best writing I could do about a painting, at the top of my form on a bright Monday when I hadn’t been out to a party the night before, was going to be a woeful effort compared to his most miserable, clumsy, chimpanzee-like daub.” Hence the epigraph.
The book has just been published in Holland, and Schama – who has the confidence to tell stories against himself – says the country’s leading authority on Rembrandt came up to him at the launch party and congratulated him on how “well written” the book was. The implication was clear: a triumph of style over substance, of intellectual dazzle over inherent value. Schama is used to such criticisms and laughs them off: he has been known to quote Gibbon on the “deep and dull potation of the dons”.
In a way, Schama is a Gibbon for the 21st century. Just as Gibbon found Oxbridge uncongenial, so did Schama (though it took him 14 years rather than 14 months to get out). Just as Gibbon embarked on a monumental history of the Roman empire, so Schama essays the epic in door-stopping, wrist-wrenching books with catchy titles and contentious theses. Just as Gibbon was the consummate stylist, so Schama makes fine writing an essential part of his armoury, seeking to entertain and to evoke the wonder of the past through wonderful prose. If Gibbon – waspish, witty, full of good tales – were alive today, he would have a very good agent, his books would sell in large quantities, he would be a regular on Start the Week and high-fee US magazines would fight for his services. In lieu of Gibbon, we have Schama, garrulous, gossipy, game to take on the impossible.
Everyone says that Schama is “brilliant”, but the word is nuanced depending on who is saying it. His friends, of course, mean it. Take the historian Peter Hennessy, who has known him since they were at Cambridge together in the 60s. “He gets arcane matters to walk, in fact to dance, off the page,” says Hennessy. “He was always like that, and to sustain that degree of verve over three decades is amazing. He was very precocious – I always knew he would be a star; he had brilliance and bubble, and nobody does narrative better than him.”
A leading British historian who prefers not to be named also calls Schama “brilliant” and “engaging”, but the meaning he gives those words is rather less flattering. “Academics tend to be quite sniffy about his work,” he says. “He isn’t engaged in quite the same project as the academic historian. He is concerned to present the past in a vivid fashion – which is not what academics are supposed to do. Their approach tends to be more analytical. He is in the tradition of Macaulay and principally concerned to evoke atmospheres. But the danger of that is that the imagination takes over; we just don’t know enough about the past to be able to do it.” Sometimes, perhaps, one can be a little too brilliant.
Schama is an enthusiast, almost drunk on the power of history. His view of the subject, like his writing style, is digressive. He loves lists, adores details, is often inspired by peculiar incidents or facts. The beginnings of his books are majestically quirky. He told me – putting on the requisite cockney accent – about a taxi driver he met who was extolling the joy of history, one of those autodidacts who knew everything about the battle of Hastings, down to the last arrow. You sense he sympathises with such devotion to the past; by adopting elements of the amateur’s approach to history, he has become far more famous than all his academic, analytical peers.
John Carey, in a review of Schama’s award-winning Landscape and Memory in the Sunday Times, summed him up: “At his best, Schama is rather like … an old-style popular educator, enormously interested in commonplace things… He loves the teeming oddities of history’s underbelly.” Keith Thomas, in his review of the same book in the New York Review, added a sting to Carey’s sentiments: “Schama tells us early on that he has ‘always liked that word, meandering, its snaking run of syllables flowing who knows where’. He has chosen to make his book one great meander, flowing in no easily discernible direction. “
“Brilliant, but …” is the academic world’s view of Schama. Thomas, in his review, quotes Max Beerbohm’s remark that “to give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.” Others have talked of the “Schama-isation” of history, a commitment to atmosphere rather than analysis.
Schama is unfazed by the donnish doubters: “It’s an extension of the old ‘he’s too clever by half’ line. People think I wave my hands around and talk too much. I had that in Oxford a bit, perhaps in Cambridge too. It doesn’t get in the way of anything now. I’m completely free of that in America. If you’re caught doing bad work there, you’ll be called for it. But the notion that the way you write is a problem is not a factor in America, and for that I’m really grateful.”
Schama has been based in the US since 1980, and appreciates the freedom that US academic life allows him. There, he says, he is seen as a cultural commentator, writing history, art history, art criticism for the New Yorker, essays for Talk magazine. He is part of the academic star system, a professor in art history and history at Columbia university in New York, but far more than that – a walking, talking, elegantly pontificating advertisement for the university. Here he is seen – “pigeon-holed”, he says – as a historian, and there is almost resentment when he strays from the straight and narrow, attempts to fuse disciplines, cross boundaries, reinvent forms.
He says that other historians treat his adventures in art history as a part-time enterprise, a holiday entertainment; there is a suggestion that the historian of the Dutch golden age, the French revolution and now the history of Britain shouldn’t also be immersing himself in the art of Rembrandt and the cultural significance of wood, water and rock (the theme of Landscape and Memory); that he is somehow not playing the game. He expresses himself in grand narrative rather than well-turned footnotes, pursues his enthusiasms, is not frightened to overreach himself.
“I don’t set out to do it this way,” he says. “I can’t write with Alan Taylor’s clean waspishness, his ironic neatness, and I certainly can’t write with high-table asperity. I just can’t do it that way. I do try and write for the reader’s plea sure. A lot of us were taught by a generation of historians in the 1960s who wanted, out of sheer instinct and pleasure, to communicate outside the academy. Jack Plumb [professor of modern history at Cambridge in the 1960s] certainly taught me that you weren’t doing your job properly if you weren’t equipping yourself with the skills to make history work with the broad reading public. There was this wonderful quote from Forster, who we used to see shuffling round Cambridge; he said, ‘what do they know who only know other historians?’ So we were plugged into this old man of letters, populist tradition going through Trevelyan and back to Macaulay. We didn’t try to emulate them but we did think of them – I did anyway – as the patriarchs of the craft.”
Schama’s rejection of Oxbridge and the way that the US allowed him to expand his horizons are at the heart of his intellectual development, and perhaps pose questions about the petrified nature of academic life in the UK. Whatever the haughty, high-table doubts about Schama-isation, the culture should be strong enough to support the radical, the free-thinking, the stylist, the star. That he felt obliged to leave the UK tells us something about him – but something, too, about our insularity.
Schama was born in 1945 into a Jewish family – both sets of grandparents fled persecution, one from the remnants of the Ottoman empire, the other from Lithuania. Immigration, movement, cultural collision are part of his experience and central themes in his work. His series for the BBC will, in part, be the odyssey of a returning exile, in part a portrait of a society built on layers of immigration, exploring the tensions between sometimes competing cultural groups and the way identity is forged on the anvil of difference.
His father was a textile merchant who did well enough after the war for the family to move out to Essex, where they lived near Leigh-on-Sea. The young Schama enjoyed the non-kosher delights of Southend – he calls it “gloriously lurid” and salivates over the “flaccid, vinegar-saturated chips” and “cylinders of Day-Glo-pink rock candy” – and he eulogised the visual pleasures of the Thames estuary in Landscape and Memory. One of his father’s periodic financial disasters necessitated a move back to London, to a more modest house in Golders Green, but Schama’s intellectual progress was secure. He won a scholarship to Haberdashers’ Aske’s school, was captivated by a series of inspirational teachers, and shone at English and history, opting to study the latter at Christ’s College, Cambridge, but never quite forgetting the former. His writing career and the way he commutes between art history and history reflect his fertile marriage of the two disciplines.
At Cambridge he fell under the spell of Plumb, whose 60s students – Linda Colley, Roy Porter, John Brewer – now dominate British historical thinking. Plumb instilled in his students the importance of style and a commitment to narrative; he “taught us that writing was not just an auxiliary to research, wanted people outside the academy to read history, wanted it to be entertaining,” Schama has said.
Schama, with his starred first, immediately became a fellow at Christ’s, but without tenure. He stayed for 10 years, his contract perpetually renewed, teaching, delivering a famously vivid set of lectures on the French revolution – complete with funny voices, waving arms and impersonations of Marat – and working on the book that became Patriots and Liberators, a fairly conventional treatment of the impact of the French revolution on Holland. But the expected tenured job at Cambridge never came, so in 1976 he took a fellowship at Brasenose, Oxford. He stayed for only four years before, tired of the teaching, the syllabus and the lottery that was the exam system (“I felt like a gerbil on a treadmill”), he headed for a professorship at Harvard, where a year earlier he had delivered a set of lectures exploring themes that would later resurface in The Embarrassment of Riches, the 1987 history of the Dutch golden age that cemented his reputation and, some believe, is his most perfect fusion of historical narrative and cultural critique.
At Oxford Schama had met and married the Californian-born Ginny Papaioannou, a geneticist who gave up her job at Oxford to go back to the US with him. In 1993 he returned the compliment, giving up Harvard and following her to Columbia when she became professor of genetics; he became a history professor there. They have two children, 16-year-old Chloë and 14-year-old Gabriel, on whom Schama clearly dotes.
After The Embarrassment of Riches, Schama wrote Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. Commissioned by Penguin and written at breakneck speed, it was a triumph, admired everywhere except France where, in the revolution’s bicentenary year, they found it hard to stomach his argument that from the beginning it had been the harbinger of terror, a “sacrament of blood”. He was accused of Fukuyama-style revisionism, but denied the charge: he was, he insisted, no conservative, no apologist for the ancien regime; he told one interviewer he was on the right in the old Labour party, on the left in the new.
In 1991, his confidence and the urge to experiment growing, he produced Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), a curious hybrid of fact and fiction linking the death of General Wolfe in 1759 with the trial for murder of a Boston professor in 1849. It was bold, imaginative, daring – and almost universally disliked. Undaunted, in 1996 Schama produced Landscape and Memory – fact, certainly, but fact presented in a uniquely imaginative, coruscating way. Reviewers entered their caveats and readers struggled with its sheer munificence – it posed as many questions as it answered – but the book sold well and won plaudits and prizes. Schama had become a phenomenon.
He is a populariser of history, but never dumbs down. His books are by no means easy reading. As his friend Antonia Fraser says: “If he wanted to achieve great popular success, he has a funny way of going about it.” But his books do strike a chord and appeal to a large general audience; his wonderful titles, the breadth and humanity of his vision, the scale of his enterprise, the willingness to fail set him apart from other historians. He has become part of the cultural conversation in the US and the UK, and the plugged-in classes want to read him, or will at least buy his books with that intention.
That he is a star can be gauged by the company he keeps. He is close to Tina Brown, wrote art criticism for her at the New Yorker and now writes for her at Talk; he has been a friend of Martin Scorsese since the latter wrote him a fan letter; and is on intimate terms with most of Manhattan’s cultural elite. He lives in a glorious glass box of a house in Chappaqua, a suburb about an hour north of New York. The Clintons have just bought a post-presidency house in the neighbourhood, and Schama intends to ensure they contribute to the local baroque music society.
In the US, his book of the BBC series will be published not by his usual publisher, Knopf, but by the publishing arm of Disney-owned Miramax, which in turn owns Talk magazine. The rationale is that marketing buzzword, “synergy”: the series will probably be shown in the US on the History Channel (also owned by Disney); the book will be published by an offshoot of Miramax; and extracts will be published in Talk.
Schama was in two minds about the move from Knopf, but to his credit he doesn’t disguise the commercial advantages of the switch. I ask him whether he feels he is becoming part of a global marketing machine. “I hope so,” he replies disarmingly. “It would be grotesquely disingenuous to say that this is the Tina Brown University Press. I thought in this particular case it was worth trying, to see if the much-vaunted synergy would work. We want the stories to work at the level of educational entertainment, a phrase I’m not ashamed of – strong storytelling that might stand a chance of working with a mass audience.”
Brown has no doubt that Schama’s view of Britain’s past will find a ready market in the US. “Simon combines narrative pacing with scholarship and original insights,” she says. “I felt that having him tell these stories to a huge American public would be a very thrilling transatlantic cultural exchange.”
Talk has also signed up Martin Amis, and one insider sees them as parallel signings: two internationally recognised star writers, one in fiction, the other in fact. “They will promote the hell out of this book and out of the TV series. One of the bargaining chips to get him to leave Knopf is the publicity machine, which is really powerful. British history is hot in America thanks to Elizabeth, Braveheart and Shakespeare in Love.”
Schama prefers to see the impetus as democratic, rather than blatantly commercial – a matter of history rather than Hollywood. “Fifty million people watch the History Channel in America. There is a colossal hunger for popular history out there and it’s being only partially served by monumental PBS documentaries, good though they are.”
Schama’s elevation to even starrier heights may have our more austere academics spluttering, but Peter Hennessy has no time for those who argue that the worlds of scholarship and showbiz should never collide. “There have been carpers ever since AJP Taylor broke through to a general audience,” he says. “It’s all bollocks. It’s ludicrous that people think it detracts from the scholarship. There are two types of dust, the dust in archives and stardust, and there is no reason why they should be mutually exclusive.”
Schama says the suspicion of letting those worlds interreact is peculiarly British, and that in America they have traditionally enjoyed a fruitful relationship. “American universities, while they are not necessarily obedient creatures of the society at large, don’t see themselves in priestly opposition to it,” he says. “It goes all the way back to Franklin: a thinker and philosopher but at the same time deeply part of the political world and part of urban Philadelphia. The natural handshake between men of letters, politicians, journalists, scholars and teachers is unforced in America. It goes very deep into the origins of American cultural life.”
Schama once said that his work aspired to “truths offered by the great novels and the great poems”. There is an almost spiritual dimension to his quest: for him it has never been enough to sift the evidence and attempt to sum up what happened. His vision of history, or rather of what historians do, is romantic. He once described it as “the study of the past in all its splendid messiness; it should revel in the pastness of the past, the strange music of its diction.” He quotes Trevelyan approvingly: “The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, on this familiar spot of ground walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions but now all gone… gone as utterly as we ourselves shall be gone like ghosts at cockcrow.”
In an essay on the practice of history written in 1991, Schama ended with the hope that historians and narratives would emerge “that will recall the time described by Macaulay, when the appearance of a new history was so exciting that ‘the circulating libraries are mobbed; the book societies are in commotion; the new novel lies uncut’.” His wish may be about to be fulfilled.
← Daniel in the lion's den
Under the volcano →
