History, Historians and Autobiography

By Jeremy D Popkin, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, 340 pages, hardcover, . Reviewed by Susan Tridgell in the July 2005 issue.

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It's a rare and delightful experience to read a perfect book. This is especially the case with academic books -- even the most impressive normally generates a wish to argue with it. Yet Jeremy Popkin, despite being a newcomer to the field of life writing (he is well-known as a historian) has managed to achieve this miracle. The only 'but' he manages to generate in my mind is to write so fascinatingly about his chosen subject -- the autobiographies of historians -- that I felt immediately impelled to go and read even the autobiographies he warns are dull.This is one of the central and delightful paradoxes of this book: in Popkin's hands, even tales of technical failure become illuminating. Thus, he when draws attention to the ways in which historians' autobiographies fail, become strained and awkward, his analysis of the reasons for this makes this tale of failure riveting reading. Rather than simply drawing attention to the omissions in historians' autobiographies, Popkin draws us into the struggle: how can historians write their lives, he asks, when they must omit all reference to teaching, all suggestions that they have achieved success, any reference to professional frustrations, rivalries or jealousies, and any suggestion of worldly ambition? Posing such questions not only illuminates the way in which historians and other academics craft their autobiographies, it refocuses our attention away from the limitations of the tale and settles it instead on the constraints which make any telling of the tale a minor miracle. The central irony, that most historians must leave out the major aspects of their professional lives in order to write their autobiographies, is never forgotten. At the same time, it is not over-emphasised: one of the delights of this book is Popkin's understated, ironic style. Who would have thought this subject could be so entertaining?

Popkin never compromises on scholarship: he has an encyclopedic grasp of the memoirs of historians. His grasp of the current life writing conversation is also impressive and thorough. His writing, however, is never clogged by scholarly concerns. Instead it is lucid and incisive, inviting and accessible for the general reader as well as for his fellow academics.

Popkin covers a vast range of memoirs, from Gibbon to Holocaust memoirs, through to contemporary experimentation, and manages to find something to interest in all. His discussion of the memoirs of Jewish historians (all of whose lives were in some degree shaped by the Holocaust, but none of whom were survivors of the concentration camps) draws attention to the use of historical time in these memoirs. This use of time forms a contrast to the memoirs of Holocaust survivors, who tend to use a truncated time frame, stressing the utter discontinuity of the experience of the camps and their later lives. He also notes the way in which the use of a historical perspective increases the gap between the protagonist and the narrator in the Jewish historians' memoirs, increasing their reflective quality but blunting their dramatic force. This might seem to indicate that the affiliation of the historians with their profession ultimately trumps their engagement with autobiography, but Popkin is also alert to the ways in which historians' memoirs suggest that no individual's experience maps to the larger narratives of history. His study of other wartime memoirs (by American historians who enlisted during the second world war, for example) brings this to the fore, as he notes the ways in which many historians' memoirs detail a life of dull routine and noncombatant tasks, far removed from the traumatic tales of combat we might expect. He highlights the experience of frustration in these memoirs, which reveal that many historians felt marginalised by their lack of full engagement with these major historical forces, or unsettled by their inability to influence them.

Through such analyses he illuminates both autobiography and history, looking at the light each form of writing casts upon the other, the ways in which historians' own memoirs can call into question the precepts of their profession.

A final paradox inheres in the book's effect on the reader. The first monograph in this field, Popkin's book is so comprehensive that it seems to be not merely groundbreaking but definitive. Yet his accounts of historians' autobiographies are so intriguing that his book has a kind of gravitational pull, enticing his readers to explore more of these volumes for themselves. As such, he has not merely defined a new field: he has made further exploration of it irresistible.

Citation

• Susan Tridgell. 'Review: History, Historians and Autobiography by Jeremy D Popkin' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), July 2005. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 23 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• Though history and autobiography both claim to tell true stories about the past, historians have traditionally rejected first-person accounts as subjective and therefore unreliable. What then, asks Jeremy D Popkin in History, Historians and Autobiography, are we to make of the ever-increasing number of professional historians who are publishing stories of their own lives? And how is this recent development changing the nature of history-writing, the historical profession, and the genre of autobiography?
  
  Drawing on the theoretical work of contemporary critics of autobiography and the philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Popkin reads the autobiographical classics of Edward Gibbon and Henry Adams and the memoirs of contemporary historians such as Emmanual Le Roy Ladurie, Peter Gay, Jill Ker Conway, and many others. He reveals the contribution historians' life stories make to our understanding of the human experience. Historians' autobiographies, he shows, reveal how scholars arrive at their vocations, the difficulties of writing about modern professional life, and the ways in which personal stories can add to our understanding of historical events such as war, political movements, and the traumas of the Holocaust.
  
  An engrossing overview of the way historians view themselves and their profession, History, Historians and Autobiography will be of interest to readers concerned with the ways in which we understand the past, as well as anyone interested in the art of life-writing.

Have You Also Read?

• Civilising Subjects: Colony and Metropole in the English Imagination
  
  Catherine Hall, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 556 Pages, Paperback, $US29.95
  Reviewed by Lorenzo Veracini in the November 2002 issue.
  
  Civilising Subjects is an outstanding achievement, which, as Roy Porter has suggested, 'does for colonial history what E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class did for social history' (cited in Polity site: http://www.polity.co.uk; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, 1963). The point of departure for Hall's study is, on the one hand, the 'imperative of placing colony and metropole in one analytic frame', and on the other, the notion that the complex dialectic relationship associating the two 'went both ways, even if in unequal relations of power' (Hall, p 9). The underlying assumption is that the metropole determined colonial developments as much as -- and this ... read more.