CENTRAL AND EASTERN
EUROPEAN REVIEW
Volume 10, 2016
‘WHEN HISTORIANS GOSSIP’
A REVIEW
by
Elizabeth Gowing
ISSN 1752–7503
10.1515/caeer-2017-0004
© 2016 CEER
First publication
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When Historians Gossip—History’s People; Personalities and the Past by
Margaret MacMillan (Profile Books, 2016).
History’s People; personalities and the past (Margaret MacMillan, Profile Books,
2016) has a cast of 18 interesting individuals whose lives are told around some loose
themes such as ‘persuasion and the art of leadership’, ‘hubris’, ‘daring’, ‘curiosity’
and ‘observers’. MacMillan has quite a pedigree—author of bestsellers and
prizewinners like The War that Ended Peace, Nixon in China and Paris 1919; six
months that changed the world, and professor of history at Toronto University as well
as Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford—and it’s clear from the start of her book,
based on a series of lectures, that with such generic themes this volume is going to be
mainly an excuse to tell some good stories about fascinating people she’s come across
in her research. That makes it an invitation to an intriguing fantasy dinner party: who
wouldn’t want to listen in on the conversation and narration of an eclectic group
which includes Joseph Stalin, the Mughal Emperor Babur, a Jewish diarist in 1930s
Germany, Victor Klemperer, and—my personal favourite if I could choose whom
from history to have round to dinner—Edith Durham.
There is indeed plenty of interesting narrative and memorable description—
even if it’s such as might rather put you off your food. We meet, for example,
Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King in the descriptive phrase of the wife of the
contemporary British High Commissioner in Ottawa ‘after a conversation with him
she feels as if the cat had licked her all over and she ought to go and have a bath’, or
extraordinary Nobel prizewinner Dr Barry Marshall whose cure for stomach ulcers
was tested and proved after he had first made himself ill with a nasty concoction
brewed with bacteria from a sick patient.
MacMillan’s closing words are ‘I hope that the individuals I have selected
from the past will help to illuminate for us here in the present the complicated nature
of humanity, its many contradictions’ and such a reminder that, as Emerson said,
‘there is properly no history, only biography’ is a welcome reinforcement of the
significance of every life. Nevertheless, by the end of the book we are left instead
feeling that the treatment given to MacMillan’s subjects largely undermines that
significance. Her telling comment in chapter two is that:
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‘when I was growing up in Canada, there would always come a moment
in a conversation about friends or neighbours when someone would say
reprovingly, “But we mustn’t gossip”. And we have had the
equivalent—perhaps for different reasons—in history, where it was felt
somehow inappropriate or unnecessary to be interested in the
individuals who stood out in their times for what they had said or done.
But I want to gossip.’
Leaving aside the gender connotations of ‘gossip’ (what women do while men
‘discuss’ or ‘debate’?), the connotations are trivializing. Nor does it seem that
MacMillan is being merely coquettish in her professed interest in gossip—she refers
to the word repeatedly through her book; it is, for example, what Fanny Parkes, diarist
of the Raj, is said to have done with the former queen of Gwalior (‘pitching her tent
for weeks on end in the queen’s camp and gossiping with her and her female court’)
even though Parkes’s own account describes their discussions ranging over issues
such as women’s inheritance rights and the practice of suttee. It’s also what Edith
Durham is described as having done with King Nikola of Montenegro—‘gossiping
with him in his little palace’ where—ouch!—the trivialization manages to belittle
both of them, their conversation and even its setting.
As MacMillan remarks, ‘Intrepid women have not always been great
feminists; on the occasion of her seventieth birthday, Freya Stark invited only men for
a celebratory dinner, while Gertrude Bell opposed votes for women and despised most
she knew.’ MacMillan’s own ‘celebratory dinner’ includes only 4 women out of the
18 major characters whose stories are told, and the way they are narrated conveys
further scorn. Fanny Parkes is described as ‘beautiful and energetic—and, by the time
she reached middle age, stout’ while Eleanor Roosevelt, who features as a bit-part in
the section dealing with her husband, is summed up as ‘intelligent, earnest and plain’.
Of Edith Durham we are told, ‘An early photograph shows a very handsome young
woman with a lovely profile, sensuous mouth, and thick dark fair, but as she grew
older she lost her looks’. Even when the comments are less catty—such as the
description of Ursula Graham Bower who recorded the lives of the Naga ‘looking like
a movie actress’—their relevance isn’t clear. When Ada Lovelace, extraordinary
nineteenth century software developer, is mentioned in passing, we are informed ‘she
managed somehow to combine being a wife and mother with using her mind’, rather
giving the lie to MacMillan’s later comment ‘We no longer fear that women don’t
have the heads or the stamina for business or law.’
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If this is a fantasy dinner party the reader gets the impression that the most
important business takes place once the women have retired—presumably to an
anteroom where they sit ‘gossiping’, and passing comment on each other’s
appearance. Surely the real message of these lives is how fascinating the conversation
in that other room might have been: Durham, the feisty author of seven narratives of
travel in the Balkans a century ago, and respected for her anthropology, humanitarian
aid and lobbying for self-determination, in debate with Margaret Thatcher; Fanny
Parkes with her insights into nineteenth century India swapping stories of endurance
with the ‘endlessly curious’ Elizabeth Simcoe, an early diarist of conditions in
eighteenth century Canada (including the unexpected delights of raccoon served with
mint sauce).
The women would each doubtless have their tales to tell of the compromises
and privileges of being female in a male world—Thatcher could easily find her
equivalent of the experience Durham recounts of throwing local mores into confusion;
as a foreigner in the Albanian highlands of the early twentieth century she was usually
treated as an honorary man, and allowed to sit for political discussion in the men’s
meeting room, for example. However, when it came to allocating her a place in the
gender-segregated sleeping arrangements she says it was clear to all that it wouldn’t
be suitable for her to sleep in the male quarters. Nevertheless, in a society where
woman is described in the traditional ‘kanun’ code as a ‘sack to be well-used’ it was
considered just as inappropriate to put her in the room with the women and children.
An ingenious solution was found to this dilemma—she was informed that she would
sleep in a room with the priest.
Like many of the characters in the book, Durham left an account of these
adventures in her own words; perhaps the greatest strength of History’s People is in
inspiring us to read such stories—first-hand accounts are always better than gossip.
The Reviewer
Elizabeth Gowing is the author of Edith and I; on the trail of an Edwardian traveller
in Kosovo and two other travel books about the Balkans, as well as being translator of
two books from Albanian to English.
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