(For those of you who want to skip the bad bits and go on to the bit about why I like the book, go to the last few paragraphs.)
I have just been reading a book called COMRADES: Portraits from the Spanish Civil War, by Paul Preston. The author is the Professor and Director of the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish Studies at the LSE — I take him, therefore, to be an exemplary historian and his work to exemplify historical research.
In the first place, there is an obvious British bias — he represents the politics of Spain as having more in common with the politics of the Holy Land as portrayed in Life of Brian — which, actually, I have no problem with. The idea that British politics was/is any different is what I have a problem with. The British and French and Americans and a few other favoured nations are represented as wise, sophisticated and insightful while the unfavoured nations are represented as quite the opposite. In fact, he goes even further, and represents the major players in Spain as members of one or other avatar of the raving, monster, loony party.
Apart from that obvious bias, the other main problem I have with the book is that I get the feeling the author has the history of Spain ‘boxed away’; i.e. he has long lists of names of everyone who could possibly be considered involved, and has records of everything everyone ever said or wrote to everyone else, plus records of what prominent British/American politicians of the time commented on the Spaniards they met, and he has all this information classified and cross-referenced and fitted into a logical structure. He then has names, a time-line and a logical structure and he thinks that he has made some sense of the Spanish Civil War…………
………what is missing is any context and the acknowledgement that these were people who had lives……… no, that is not quite it. It is more that he fails to understand what it is to be human, and therefore the importance of the rest of the peoples’ lives, the realisation that their lives function as a story, that everything they do and have done, inside and outside of politics, is integral to who and what they were, and that you will never understand the person by just looking at their political lives. Conversely, you will never understand their political lives if you do not understand the person outside of politics. Also, because he has no notion of human psychology he completely misunderstands what motivates people and makes them sound ‘reasonable’ when they are nothing of the sort.
I look at all the pictures of those politicians and military personnel in their grey suits or uniforms and I see a bunch of lads relishing their own ‘importance’, loving all the attention, loving posing to have their photos taken for posterity, all pomp and display and ‘serious’ frowns ---- they are just a load of little boys who have got their hands on the biggest machines out — the machinery of state, and have Big Budgets to play with ---- it’s all ‘cor!’, ‘wow!’, ‘zowee!’.
Of course the historian is misunderstanding because he is really one of them, wearing a serious frown and pontificating on serious issues and loving feeling that he is an ‘intellectual’ a VIP = very important/intelligent person.
The truth is that they are all a lot of little boys who are joy-riding and having a whale of a time ---- they need to be taken in hand by their mothers, need to have the nonsense knocked out of them so that they stop buggering up everyone else’s lives.
And the trouble is that is not going to happen so long as people go on being conned by them, go on taking them at their own valuation, keep listening to words like ‘serious issues’, Big Questions, ‘important decisions’ etc etc.
Now, what did l LIKE about the book?
For me, reading it is like travelling to a foreign country where they do things differently, have a different culture, and, just as I love travelling to strange, foreign countries in the physical sense, I also like travelling to strange, foreign countries in the intellectual sense. The object is to get my head round the culture and to learn to see what the world looks like from that new perspective. Also, just as I like developing a taste for new, foreign foods, I like to develop a taste for new, foreign cultures in all their expressions.
Then there is the opportunity to develop new abilities. The book is a dense forest of names and facts and dates in which, if you are not already well acquainted with the subject, you can quickly become lost. The trick is to learn to be able to read (And I do not mean study, I mean read, just as you would a novel.) such a book without getting lost, without one’s mind going to sleep. And, actually, the mental abilities you need are much the same as you need to navigate the wilderness: an ability to pick out landmarks and use them to orient oneself. Also, you want to be able to get ‘above’ the text, rise out of all the detail, so that you can get an overview, just as you might climb a hill to get an overview of the wilderness landscape.
If I develop the ability to do these things I will like these kinds of books and I will be able to read them easily because I have become so adept at navigating the texts. Also, I will have the satisfaction of being able to abstract an overview of the subject and the writer and the culture he is embedded in.
So, although my first reaction is not one of liking the book, if I put the effort into reading it, and a few others like it, I will come to like it and I will have expanded my world, will have opened up another culture.