The Poetry of It (Writing History)

If they asked me, I could write a book ... .

`I Could Write A Book’ (lyrics Lorenz Hart,music Richard Rodgers, Pal Joey [1940] 1957.)

If you asked me, I could write a book about the way in which political and

governmental factors have shaped the writing I have produced since the

end of the 1980s. This is a British story, and I do not for a moment claim

that it is mine alone. In 1992, four years into a then-new university

funding regime, I suggested that each and every British academic was,

like Colette, `locked in a room and forced to write, the University Funding

Council playing the part for each of us, of his or her own Willy’.1 I enjoyed

the joke—very much—which in an excess of self-regard I thought neatly

deflated all the theories of phallocentrism and phallocentric writing we

spent so much of the 1980s trying to get our head around, by bringing

them up against political and institutional history.2

The first UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) took place in

1986. It introduced what government websites still call an explicit and

formalised assessment of the quality of research at UK universities with

1 1Carolyn Steedman, Past Tenses. Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History, Rivers-Oram, London, 1992, p. xi.

2 2It is one of the myths of European writing that Colette’s lover and manager was, in this way, the progenitor of her books. For one of many accounts of Colette’s being forced to write, Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh. A Life of Colette, Bloomsbury, London, 1999. In UK-English, `willy’ is the child’s and the slang word for `penis’. I have acknowledged that I find my own jokes far too amusing for them to be at all funny. Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of the Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009, p. xv.

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state funding dependent on that assessed quality. Two years later, this

new public management model of governance was confirmed by the

Education Reform Act (Eliz. II 1988 c. 40) which abolished the University

Grants Committee and inaugurated the University Funding Council.3

Further RAEs were conducted in 1989, 1992, 1996, 2001 and 2008. Then

in January 2009 the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills

announced that RAE was to transmogrify into REF (assessment conducted

under a Research Excellence Framework) in order to better judge the

quality of individual academics’ `contribution to public policy-making and

to public engagement’.4 For a quarter of a century now, the funding of UK

universities has been informed by these principles, which are enacted by

academic peer review of selected research outputs carried out by subject-

specific assessment panels.

And we’ve been moaning about it for twenty-five years. The

deleterious effects of yoking university funding to the research

productivity of individuals working within departments and disciplines has

been described many times. The unintended consequences of the system

have been outlined, and `the competitive, adversarial and punitive spirit

3 3Ourania Flippakou, Brian Salter and Ted Tapper, `Compliance, Resistance and Seduction: Reflections on 20 Years of the Funding Council Model of Goverance’, Higher Education, published online 10 February 2010, http://www.springerlink.com/content/ej32872k889g0396 Also Michael Shattock, `The Change from Private to Public Governance of British Higher Education: Its Consequences for Higher Education Policy Making 1980–2006', Higher Education Quarterly, 62: 3 (2008), pp. 181-203. The 1988 Act was a most significant piece of Thatcher-era legislation: it also inaugurated the National Curriculum in UK schools.

4 4Ross McKibbin, `Good for Business’, London Review of Books, 32:4 (2010), pp. 9-10, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n04/ross-mckibbin

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evoked by the RAE’ has frequently been condemned.5 Academics in many

disciplines have formed professional defence groups to assess the effects

of research assessment and to make representation to government about

it. Legal scholars, economists and medical researchers have been

particularly incisive in their judgements; the response of scholars in the

arts and humanities has been more muted.6 Indeed, some historians have

claimed that the History at the Universities Defence Group (HUDG) is part

of a long tradition of history’s engagement with government and public

policy (`contrary to general belief, UK academic history has never

successfully isolated itself in ivory towers’). But HUDG has also

emphasised that `the terms of the RAE create[d] a competitive climate

between institutions as well as an artificial job market in the period

immediately before each exercise’.7

5 5Lewis Elton, `The UK Research Assessment Exercise: Unintended Consequences’, Higher Education Quarterly, 54: 3 (2000), pp. 74-283.

6 6Frederic S. Lee and Sandra Harley, `Peer Review, the Research Assessment Exercise and the Demise of Non-Mainstream Economics’, Capital and Class, 22: 3 (1998), pp. 23-51; Gareth Williams, `Misleading, Unscientific, and Unjust: the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise’, British Medical Journal, 316 (7137), (4 Apr 1998), pp. 1079–1082; Douglas W. Vick et al `The Perceptions of Academic Lawyers concerning the Effects of the United Kingdom's Research Assessment Exercise’, Journal of Law and Society, 25: 4 (1998) p. 536-561; Michael Norris and Charles Oppenheim, `Citation Counts and the Research Assessment Exercise V: Archaeology and the 2001 RAE’, Journal of Documentation, 59:6 (2003), pp. 709-730.

7 7Alex Cowan, `History UK (HE)’, Making History Website (Institute of Historical Research), http://www.history.ac.uk/makinghistory/resources/articles/HE. HUDG was founded in 1982 to `defend and maintain the scope and quality of the teaching and scholarly study of history in British universities’, and to `monitor the effects of the financial cuts on the viability of history in all its aspects in the various universities and to bring these effects to the notice of the public and of all relevant responsible bodies’. HUDG is now called

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There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with such a system of funding

research, and many on the European side of the Atlantic agree that any

publicly funded university system should submit itself to rigorous financial

scrutiny. Many extra-

UK societies operate something similar to the British RAE/REF. What is

difficult to explain to those outside the UK is the factor of collectivity that

is—inadvertently—built into the British system. Under this regime, one

does not write and publish for one’s own gain, career advancement,

ambition or fame (though these may well be achieved) but rather for the

future benefit of a group of colleagues located in a department, school, or

faculty. If the next REF works in the way RAE has worked in the past,

individual academics in departments (`units of assessment’) will be asked

to put forward—or nominate—four items (books or articles) that best

represent their `excellence’ in research. But in practice it is the institution

that decides which those four items will be. Individual scholars are not

rated; it is their departments that are rated, high or low. The ease and

pleasure of working life will be enhanced for all of us if our department is

rated highly; high ratings depend on the estimated worth of research and

classiness of publisher and publication. The cash nexus is very naked. (I

know I am not using the term correctly, in the strictly Marxist sense—or

indeed, in the semantic sense.) More and `better’ publications bring a

university (and perhaps a successful department) more money.

For some of us, born at the end of the Second World War, reared by

the principles of the democratic settlement and as beneficiaries of its

`History UK (HE)’, as described in article above.

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educational and national health legislation, this kind of collectivity is

second nature—and the sense of responsibility enormous (sometimes

debilitating). But then: I’ve never been able to think of my writing as my

very own, as a personal possession, or a piece of moveable property or

real estate. Everything I’ve ever written has been supported, or at least

allowed, by some institution, frequently an institution of the central or

local state. My first attempts at writing at the age of five were undertaken

with a pencil and exercise book provided by the London County Council

(LCC) which was thus in law, the owner of the product. There is case law

on this: objects and entities produced in British schools with materials and

tools provided by the school, belong to the local education authority.

Now, in this moment, sitting at my own computer in my own house, in the

research-designated summer vacation, I fulfil my contractual obligations

to the University of Warwick, to contribute to the University through the

processes of research and teaching (contractually-speaking I must also

undertake any administrative tasks my head of department may

reasonably require of me). I will own the copyright of this piece of writing,

but it may also be a research output considered for submission by the

University at REF in December 2013 - which is the new deadline we are all

currently working to.8 (But no matter how respectable the publisher of

this book will be, it cannot possibly have the same clout as a single-

authored monograph issuing from Cambridge University Press; so it

8 8We were working to a deadline of December 2012 (see above, Note 4) until the biggest regime change possible in the society took place in May 2010: a general election that produced a hung parliament and the coalition government of Cameron and Clegg. This brought about a revised REF deadline of December 2013.

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probably won’t be submitted as one of the four items under my name in

December 2013.)

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It is noteworthy that the virulent—or measured—accounts of

the historical effects of the RAE mentioned above all deal in terms of

`research’, not `writing’. It is research activity that is measured and

judged; the writing of it (or `writing-up’) is its mere vehicle of

expression. In these discussions, `writing’ is an unmarked term.

Nor is interdisciplinarity much discussed, though it has been

suggested that in the field of medicine `both highly specialised and

interdisciplinary research [have been] disadvantaged’ under the

RAE regime.9 I believe that this is also true of disciplines in the arts

and humanities. The system operates through university

departments, which are discipline based; departments are assessed

and funds are allocated to them by their university, according to a

department’s `excellence’ in research. Moving out of departmental

and disciplinary confines has been inhibited: before the last RAE it

was whispered to me that it might not be wise to put forward a

piece of mine that had been published in Critical Inquiry; it was not

a history journal. Yet being published by Critical Inquiry was the

proudest moment of my publishing career ... .

I have always `been a historian’, in that my degrees are in

history, and my education and training in thinking was as a

historian. But when I moved into a history department proper in

1993, I seem to have made the conscious decision—by the principle

of collective responsibility—to write `real’ history.10 This is to say

9 9Williams, `Misleading, Unscientific, and Unjust’, p. 1079.

0 10Between 1984 and 1993 I worked in an education department.

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that I started to write using the literary form and within the

protocols established towards the end of the nineteenth-century,

when the discipline established and professionalised itself in the

Western university system. Indeed, this had been the form of

writing I used for my PhD, so I was only returning to something I

knew very well indeed.11 (My concerns and questions—`the content

of the form’—have always been those of a historian.12) My most read

and reissued book (what is Landscape for a Good Woman? Not

conventional `history’ for sure) was published in the watershed year

of 1986, when the first RAE was conducted.

1 11Philippe Carrard, `History as a Kind of Writing: On the Poetics of Historiography’, Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques, 15:3 (1988), pp. 443-53; idem., Poetics of the New History. French Historical Discourse from Braudel to Chartier, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1992, pp. 1-28; Michael S. Roth, `Review of Refiguring History: New Thoughts on an Old Discipline, by Keith Jenkins’, History and Theory, 43:3 (2004), pp. 372 - 378; Devoney Looser, British Women Writers and the Writing of History: 1670-1820, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 2001; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000; Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and the Historical Practice, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1998; William Egginton, ` A Wrinkle in Historical Time’, SubStance, 25:3 (1996), pp. 30-55; Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History, Columbia University Press, New York, 1988; Philippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional: Antiquarians, Historians and Archaeologists in Victorian England, 1838-1886, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986; Hayden White, Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1973. See also John Brewer’s argument that modern social history-writing is closely aligned to the neo-realist movement of the post-Second World War era in Europe.`Microhistory and the Histories of Everyday Life’, Cultural and Social History, 7:1 (2010), pp. 87-109.2 12Hayden White, The Content of the Form, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1987.

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I think that writing conventional `history’ improved my prose

style. I have had several moments of chagrin in preparing this

chapter, looking back at what I’ve already said about the writing

process. I produced an awful lot of dross in the 1980s. I responded

far too readily to invitations to write ... something or other; I regret

the clumsy imagery, the pretentious sentence structure, the

unthought-through transitions. I did things too fast; I wrote too

much. The discipline of history-writing seems to have provided me

with a much-needed discipline. Moreover, within its confines, I

discovered that I could attempt to write in the comedic mode.

Working on my last major project—on domestic service in the long

English eighteenth century—with the intention of adding the largest

occupational category in the society to the conventional nineteenth-

century accounts of class and state formation that still shape

modern social history, I found a lot of truly bad servant jokes, told

defensively by employers about their domestics.13 The two books

that came out of the project allowed me to repeat these jokes, and

tell quite a few of my own.14 They helped me—I believe—to disinter

the contours of a mentalité. Dust (which is not about servants) is

one long joke, about what Derrida’s `archive fever’ really is. It

lampoons the stolid, artisanal historian I really must be, in my

3 13`Servants and their Relationship to the Unconscious’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 316-350.

4 14Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2007; Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2009.

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dogged search for what `really’ happened, and how things really are

(and were).15 It would be better to say that I learned the uses of the

joke, rather than of comedy. My jokes are febrile attempts to make

people laugh, from the safe position of not being able to see that

they are not laughing at all. This is not writing in one of the four

archetypal genres of nineteenth-century history writing (romance,

satire, tragedy, comedy) as outlined by Hayden White in

Metahistory.16 They are just jokes (probably as bad as any

eighteenth-century servant-joke). The upshot of all of this, is that I

have lightened up a lot since the early 1990s.

And I would be wrong to see 1986, or 1988 (or 1993, when I

joined a university history department) as a diminution in the

possibilities of writing. An imagined diminution may be experienced

at the time as containment and restriction; but there’s nothing

wrong with confines and constraints, as far as writers are

concerned. And let’s talk about writers from now on, in this case a

writer who writes history. I write `history’ because I enjoy its fine

and delightful constraints. I enjoy the pleasures of a plot shaped

according to what the documents forbid, or authorise, but which

they never contain in themselves. I enjoy the massive authority

that this appeal to the evidence gives me as a storyteller. I find the

5 15Dust, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001.

6 16White, Metahistory. Comedy is structured towards a happy - or at least a harmonious - ending in which everything works itself out. By these means, even the `father’ of empirical history, Leopold von Ranke, can be understood as a comedian, in strictly generic terms. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays (1957), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2000.

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printed page of the history I publish aesthetically and rhetorically so

very pleasing: the deep seabed of the footnotes and references on

which my argument sails, a happy ship on a bright sea. As in a

child’s crayoning, the printed page shows a clear cross-section

through process and product (ocean floor, deep sea, calm surface;

little ship sailing on) showing where I’ve been and what I’ve done in

the making of the story you read. The footnotes say: Look, Reader!

I have done this: I have taken the train to the distant county town

where the record office is, I have called up DD/CH Bx 16, sat reading

and note taking in the search room. You can do the same; you can

check my sources, confirm my honesty, acknowledge that I have

told a true story, or at least a likely story, out of those documents.

(I get quite upset when asked to use a social-science citation

method: no footnotes and a messy, jumbled appearance to the

page, which surely must discombobulate readers. And I don’t like

endnotes at all.)

And there’s another deeply satisfying democratic collectivity

at work here, in the entire process of producing any kind of

publication. Historian Roger Chartier has surely persuaded us that

whatever it is they do, authors don’t produce books; they produce

piles of manuscript pages (or heaps of notes). Typesetters, editors,

copy-editors, proofreaders, translators, make books.17 Any printed

and published work has to be the work of many hands. I enjoy my

7 17Roger Chartier, The Order of Books. Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the 14th and 18th Centuries, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1992.

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editors, who have allowed me to make some discrete innovations in

form, over the past few years.18 I would be mortified if any editor

ever said I wasn’t easy to work with. (I am cheerfully compliant in

the hope that I might be able to ignore fifty percent of their

suggestions for changing my prose.)

Above all, I enjoy the shaping purpose that philosophers have

provided for anyone writing academic history. I have written about

this so many times that there is no more to say about it, and I must

plagiarise myself: historians make the stuff (or Everything) of the

past into a structure or event, a happening or a thing. They do this

through the activities of thought and writing. What they write

(create; force into being) was never actually there, once, in the first

place. There is a double nothingness in the writing of history and in

the analysis of it: it is about something that never did happen in the

way it comes to be represented (the happening exists in the telling

or the text); and it is made out of a past that isn’t there, in an

archive or anywhere else. We should be entirely unsurprised that

literary deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing.

What Derrida suggested was the historian's nostalgia for origins and

original referents cannot be satisfied, because there is actually

8 18See Labours Lost and its `interludes’ between chapters. This is a form of organisation I stole from Kathryn Hughes’ brilliant biography—though `biography’ doesn’t describe the half of it—of Mrs Beeton: The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs Beeton, Fourth Estate, London, 2005.

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nothing there: she is not looking for anything: only silence, the

space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.19

I have always wanted to write my own historiography, as I go

along. I think the assumption that we should leave the

determination of meaning in our writing to the philosophers and

social theorists, just a little demeaning. But my attempts to do this

have made no difference to anyone reading the history I’ve written,

for you can always extract the story (the historical information and

argument) from the way it is told and ignore questions about what

this particular text is up to.20 So doing historiography (analysing the

principles, theories, methodology and philosophy of scholarly

historical research and its presentation) appears to be an activity

that falls within the realm of poetics, not the realm of writing.

I think that I am only truly happy when I’m writing. There’s

the awful first stage when what you want to say will not be said

(which writer said that it is like trying to drag something out of your

9 19Jacques Derrida, Mal d'archive. Une impression freudienne, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1995, trans. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996. But! Listen, Reader! As a riposte to Derrida: `There is history', says Jacques Rancire `because there is the past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because there is an absence ... The status of history depends on the treatment of this twofold absence of the “thing itself” that is no longer there—that is in the past; and that never was—because it never was such as it was told’. The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge (1992), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 1994, p. 63. Steedman, Dust, pp. 153-4.

0 20However, one reviewer has been kind enough to say that I’m up to something (or other). Anna Clark, `Review of Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age’ Journal of Social History, 43: 1 (2009), pp. 224-226.

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own guts? I cannot find the source ... .) Not even the expediency of

going off to vacuum the stairs or hang the washing out—which

usually gets something going—works at this stage, for you cannot

leave it alone. But that passes; something is said, some pathetic

simulacrum of a vague idea is on the page, and you can get on with

chipping away at it, patiently making some material object in the

material world. Then you can leave it, for a while, knowing that it is

there, a rough-hewn thing that waits for you to continue working on

it.

From my recent work on the English eighteenth century, I

have learned a very great deal about labour—labour-process and

labour value—the wresting of something from the earth and the

creation of some new thing out of it. And the English eighteenth-

century was the last time when legal philosophers were interested

in writing as a form of labour, in the calm certainty that

transforming the goods of the earth, so plentifully supplied by God,

into some other object or entity, conferred property rights on the

worker. In 1781 its most eminent jurist Judge William Blackstone,

observed that property `may with equal Reason be acquired by

mental, as bodily Labour ... [by] the Exertion of the animal

Faculties ... common both to Us and the Brute Creation, in their

Nests, Caves &c ... and the Exertion of the rational Powers, by which

we are denominated Men’.21 Or Women. Or a woman, who does

1 21William Blackstone, Reports of Cases determined in the several Courts of Westminster-Hall, from 1746 to 1779. Taken and compiled by the Honourable Sir William Blackstone, 2 vols, His Majesty’s Law Printers for W. Strahan, T. Cadell, London, 1781, Vol.

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ponder these things, given the twentieth-century legal relationship

her writing is caught in, the post-1986 academic world described

above.

Above all I enjoy the highest and finest limitation that history-

writing imposes. Cognitively and rhetorically history-writing is

constructed by an understanding that things are not over; that the

story isn’t finished; that there is no end. Closures have to be made,

of course, in order to finish arguments and books. But an Ending is

not the same thing as an End.22 The historical story you’re writing

can’t be finished, because there is the ever-present possibility that

some new piece of evidence will be found, to alter both the

argument and the account. Historians have exhaustiveness as one

of their objectives (finding out again and again, more and more,

about some thing, event or person); they proceed upon the path of

refutation by pointing to exceptions and contingency. Historical

inquiry and historical writing are recognition of temporariness and

impermanence. The narrative explanation you write will soon be

superseded by some other historian’s new account. Old history

(history written ten years ago, a hundred years ago) is colder than

cold porridge. Readers may admire Thomas Macaulay’s style, or

want to go on reading E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English

Working Class (1963) for the exhilarating force of the prose and the

1, pp. 321-22.

2 22Carolyn Steedman, `About Ends. On How the End is Different from an Ending', History of the Human Sciences, 9:4 (1996), pp. 99-114.

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very idea that a class `was present at its own making’; but they are

not then reading for the constructed history within the pages of the

book. Some other, newer, historical account has replaced both The

History of England from the Accession of James II (1848) and

Thompson’s counter-epic of class formation. We can only ever write

a history that will last a while. This is as close to danger—to the

philosophical edge of things—that any writer can get. I think it both

exhilarating and beautiful.

In 1981 Louis Mink told us that stories are only truly

narratavised when they take on the same meaning for the listener

as the teller; and they come to an end when there is no more to be

said, when teller and audience both understand that the point that

has been reached, this end-place, this conclusion, was implicit in the

beginning: was there all along.23 In this sense, all stories, including

historical stories, take part in the art of fiction. The novelist Maureen

Duffy contemplated these questions in the 1983 Preface to her

autobiographical novel That’s How It Was.24 This fictionalised

account of her childhood was, she said, `a novel rather than

autobiography because of its structuring towards [an] end’. If you

structure the story towards an end there is `consequent selection

among characters and events, and the heightened language used to

invoke them’. This is what makes the result a fiction rather than

3 23Louis O. Mink, `Everyman His or Her Own Annalist’, Critical Inquiry, 7 (1981), pp. 5-27.

4 24Maureen Duffy, That’s How It Was (1962), Virago, London, 1983.

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history. She wanted to tell a truth that history-writing does not

permit: `If I couldn’t invent facts, which I couldn’t because I wanted

to tell a particular truth, the art must be in the style, in a language

that was colloquial, with ... the energy of the demotic, and charged

with imagery’. Her novel ends: `As with many of my books, it was

constructed towards its very last line’.25

But history-writing does not end. At the end of a novel, no

matter how arbitrary and strange that ending might be, you know

that there has been someone there all along, who knew the story,

all of it, from beginning to end, and was able to bring you to this

place, this ending, now. This extraordinary turn of thought and

temporality which is not much more than three hundred years old,

and conventionally hidden by the labels `the development of print

culture', or `the rise of the novel' has been explored, most notably

and productively by Benedict Anderson and Franco Moretti.26 But

history-writing is not like this; its narrative moves forward through

the implicit understanding that things are not over, that the story

isn't finished, can't ever be completed: first of all because the end of

the world has not yet actually come and more prosaically, for the

formal reasons adduced above. I believe that all historians, even the

most purblind empiricists among us, recognise this in their acts of

writing: that they are telling the only story that has no end; they are

5 25Duffy, That’s How It Was, pp. vi, xi.

6 26Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991, pp. 37-46; Franco Moretti, The Way of the World. The Bildungsroman in European Culture, Verso, London, 1987, pp. 3-73.

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writing something that it is epistemologically impossible to write. So

there is yet another item to the list of pleasurable dangers of writing

history.

And there is also the poetry of it.

I do not mean by `poetry’, `poetics’. After Hayden White’s

reverberative intervention in the question of `history as a kind of

writing’ in 1973, philosophers and literary scholars spent the best

part of twenty years exploring the rules, codes and procedures that

operate in history texts—exploring what in other contexts might be

called its poetics.27 For the jobbing academic historian the

knowledge produced may have been highly interesting and

pleasurable to read, but had very little purchase on the writing they

produced—on style, or use of figurative language, or rhetorical

organisation of information and argument. Poetics is an activity that

someone else performs on your text, after you have produced it—

although you may, of course, perform it yourself on what you have

just written. But then, in that case, you stand outside your text and

7 27White, Metahistory; also Michel de Certeau, L’écricture de l’histoire, Gallimard, Paris, 1975; Roland Barthes, `Le Discours de l’histoire’, Information sur les sciences sociales, 4 (1976), pp. 65-75; Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (eds), The Writing of History. Literary Form and Historical Understanding, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, 1978; Paul Ricouer, Temps et récit, Seuil, Paris, 1983; Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio. A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-century Britain and France, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984; John S. Nelson, Allan Megill and Donald McClosky, The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences. Language and Argument in Scholarship and Public Affairs, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison WI, 1987.

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as a reader use poetic analysis as a means to saying it better,

discarding unsatisfactory imagery, making better transitions,

reorganising and refining the argument. If you’re the writer whose

own text is under your own scrutiny, poetics is no more than an

editing tool. What I mean here and now, is poetry, or at least, the

possibility of poetry.

One modernist poet was kind to historians. W. H. Auden’s

poetry is so historiographically acute and beautiful that I can see no

way forward for my writing but to imitate him, to the end of my

days. I do not think he ever set foot in a local record office, or

entered the portals of the National Archives (then the Public Record

Office; not then banished to the suburbs of Kew, but at the legal

heart of English history, in Chancery Lane); but he knew what

history was, and what history meant. His fabulous and frequent

musings of the post-War years (`Homage to Clio’, `Objects’, `Makers

of History’) were about the meaning and theory of History as a

made and fashioned thing, not about historians’ quotidian activities

among files and registers. Indeed, they are about Clio—History—

herself.

Auden concludes his `Homage to Clio’ by remarking that

`Approachable as you seem,/I dare not ask you if you bless the

poets,/For you do not look as if you ever read them,/Nor can I see a

reason why you should.’ Nor is there any reason why the poet

should have read history in order to discuss its meaning as a

cultural form. Many of us may have read and taught students the

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poetic and philosophical musings of the Archival Turn and the

Linguistic Turn (and all the other turns of the last thirty years) but it

is not clear that they have mattered to us, or prompted us to join in

the conversation. As Auden says to Clio, `You had nothing to say

and did not, one could see,/Observe where you were ...’. The poet

reveals the Muse of History as a blank-faced girl, always, forever,

present when anything happens—anything at all, at any time—but

with absolutely nothing to say. At any moment

... we, at haphazard

And unseasonably, are brought face to face

By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that

Nothing is easy.28

He figures Clio as the most mysterious of the Muses, but mysterious

only, in the end, because of her silence. Auden’s Clio is event, or

events, but is not their meaning:

Lives that obey you move like music,

Becoming now what they only can be once,

Making of silence decisive sounds ...

`What icon/ Have the arts for you?' he asks, `who look like

any/Girl one has not noticed and show no special /Affinity with a

beast?’ He continues:

8 28W. H. Auden, `Homage to Clio’ [1948-57], Homage to Clio, Faber & Faber, London, 1960, pp. 15-17. For the Ischian poems, written between 1948 and 1957, see Edward Callen, Auden: A Carnival of Intellect, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1983, pp. 218-237. `Homage to Clio' was first published in Encounter, Nov 1955, and provided the title for the eponymous collection of 1960. John Fuller, W. H. Auden. A Commentary, Faber & Faber, London, 1998, pp. 464-5.

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I have seen

Your photo, I think, in the papers, nursing

A baby or mourning a corpse; each time

You had nothing to say and did not, one could see,

Observe where you were, Muse of the unique

Historical fact, defending with silence

Some world of your beholding ... .

In a striking reversal of what we take for granted is the

chronological relationship between Memory and History, the poet

entreats the Muse of History to `teach us our recollections’.

Western historiography teaches that History (professional,

university-based history emerging during the long nineteenth

century) usurped the functions of Memory. At the beginning of

things, Mnemosyne was the mother of all the Muses (including Clio,

History's own), at least according to some authorities of the Ancient

World. Modern historians have believed the ancient authorities for

the main part, in giving various accounts of how History (as a way of

thinking, and as an academic discipline) came into the world, and

what its relationship to Memory has been, over the last three

hundred years or so. Jacques Le Goff used the myth in order to

begin his account of how History usurped the functions of Memory,

over a very long period of time indeed, but accelerating at the end

of the eighteenth century, with the development of history as a

subject of inquiry in the academy, and later, as information to be

imparted to whole populations in European systems of mass

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education.29 Le Goff’s 1977 account suggested that History in its

modern mode is just one more technology of remembering (rather

like the device and use of writing systems as techniques of memory

as well as social practices). Recently, the chronological relationship

of memory to history has been less insisted on; but Auden’s

suggestion that History—or Clio—or his blank-faced girl—might

teach us how to perform the everyday cognitive activity of

remembering, is still a striking one.30

Then, earlier in the 1948-1957 cycle of poems, there is

`Makers of History’, which told of the kind of history I do—of social

history—before its conventionally-described emergence with the

publication of E. P. Thompson’s Making of the English Working

Class.31 Here the poet moves briskly through several stanzas-worth

of great-man history (and myth and legend), and then asserts that

Clio loves those who bred them better horses,

Found answers to their questions, made their things,

Even those fulsome

9 29Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory (1977) Columbia University Press, New York, 1992, pp. 81-90; Krzysztof Pomian, `Les archives’, in Les Lieux de mémoire. Sous la direction de Pierre Nora. III Les France. 3. De l'archive a l'emblme, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, pp. 163-233.

0 30Geoffrey Cubitt, History and Memory, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007.

1 31Or perhaps Auden read Jules Michelet (1798-18974). Or Giambattista Vico (1668-1744). Though I see no reason why he should (have). See Steedman, Dust, pp. 26-9, 38-40, 69-72, 103-4, 150-2, 161-4 for the many possible origins of the social history Auden evokes.

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Bards they boarded: but these mere commanders,

Like boys in pimple-time, like girls at awkward ages,

What did they do but wish?32

Clio’s allegiance, like that of the modern social historian, is to the

workers; to the people.

But it’s mainly the silence that I must contemplate; forever:

... but we, at haphazard

And unseasonably, are brought face to face

By ones, Clio, with your silence. After that

Nothing is easy.

In `The Aesthetics of Silence’, Susan Sontag said that `there are

ways of thinking that we don’t yet know about. Nothing could be

more important or precious than that knowledge, however

unborn’.33 Auden tells me why historians are—perforce must be—

silent. And Sontag of the potential—the unborn—that lies within

that silence.

I must find a new form that I don’t yet know about; I must try

to write poetry. I must work hard and patiently with the restrictions

of metre. It will take a very long time, and will probably come to

nothing in the end, for quite apart from the question of talent, it is

very late in life to set out on such an arduous course. `It sounds

easy’, observed Auden of the lives lived that Clio observed; `but one

must find the time’. This can only be done by leaving one prison

2 32Auden, `Makers of History’, Homage to Clio, pp. 30-1.

3 33Susan Sontag, `The Aesthetics of Silence’, Styles of Radical Will (1969), Picador, New York, 2002, pp. 3-34.

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house, and entering another. I must leave work (I shall have to do

so soon anyway) and the fetters of contractual obligation. But who

will publish whatever it is I come to write? Publishing history-writing

(in book form) is a commercial activity. No matter how venerable

and dignified the university press, the individual writer makes a

commercial proposal to an enterprise that is in the business of

making a profit; the proposal is accepted or rejected after

calculation of likely sales. University presses keenly survey the

current state of university teaching—the new courses mounted,

their reading lists—across the society. The individual writer may

earn some small amount of money from those sales, if she is lucky.

In a legal relationship that runs in parallel to the system described

at the beginning of this chapter, the writer owns the product of her

own labour, even though it is submitted by a university in a research

assessment system that may benefit the institution financially. But

who will want it, or want to publish it, when I have departed the

institution? But ... though it is quite clear that I shall not write in a

condition of freedom when I retire, I may, with some good fortune,

find the means to write history in a form that I do not yet know

about. History itself (doing `history’ over forty years) has taught me

that the highest virtue is to at least know where you stand, to see

the political and social history that shapes your life and writing.

That capacity was not very highly developed in Clio, as we have

seen; so it must be the poet himself who tells me how to read the

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political landscape of my times; who suggests that there might just

be some way of writing myself out of here.

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