History’s Rewrite Man : When Simon Schama Combines Scholarship and Storytelling, He Makes the Past a Bestseller

WE WEREN’T THERE. WE CAN’T GO BACK. NOT EVEN IN our dreams, not even for a fast peek. Slogging through the archives, tete-a-tete with perfumed ghosts, we can only pick over what remains, puzzle over gleanings, search and wonder, sleuth and imagine: what it must have been like, all that we missed, all that we’ll never know.

Historians do this for a living. Precious few, however, have found an audience for their published findings outside the academy, and fewer still have written anything resembling a blockbuster.

A line of people trails down the street as far as the eye can see from the entrance to the New York Historical Society, a severe American Renaissance block of a building on Central Park West. On this warm evening they are waiting for no-shows to a long-sold-out lecture about the tradition of storytelling in history and the recent rebirth of the historical novel: “History and the Imagination: The Storyteller and the Detective.” Good enough title, but the real draw is the lecturer: Simon Schama, British-born cultural historian, author and Harvard professor who, though he may not fit the usual mediagenic specs, magnetizes crowds and readers in several languages as surely as he attracts controversy. In the hallways of highest education, the restless, demiurgic intellect of Schama grates on his critics. A historian of impeccable credentials at the apex of his profession, he is one of their own, yet he is not.

Schama might have been happier in the 19th Century, when the rules of professional decorum mandated a compelling prose style--rules that are the antithesis of the microscopic dissections of increasingly esoteric material that academic historians favor today. For instance, Schama is famous for delivering riveting lectures without relying on a formal text, seemingly off the top of his head, and using slides to illustrate his material--methods considered highly unconventional in history departments. Perhaps his critics frown because he’s maddeningly difficult to pigeonhole with his uncommon range of subjects and styles--from in-depth studies of the Netherlands, revolutionary France and the early settlement of Israel all the way to an experiment in historical fiction set in 19th-Century Boston. What Schama has called his “shameless eclecticism” and his “thieving magpie” approach in “The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age,” published in 1977, may just as well describe his proclivity toward breaking out of academic prisons and exploring the possibilities of writing and studying history. Most objectionable of all to his critics may be his talent for targeting the general reader and then banking the proceeds, thereby causing paroxysms of sneezing in the dusty realms of scholarship among those who write exclusively for their colleagues. As Anthony Grafton, a Renaissance historian at Princeton, observes, “We’re a grudging little profession. There’s an old saying, ‘Academic politics is so bitter because the prize it strives for is so small.’ ”

Yet there is no richer or bigger subject than history; not even sex caters so much to human self-interest. History encompasses every physiological and psychological activity that touches the lives of human beings. And Schama knows how to hold an audience. In his lectures, he unlocks the hidden past with the use of slides of paintings, photographs, maps and other pictorial and symbolic evidence of how people lived and thought. His description in “Dead Certainties” of how Benjamin West created his celebrated painting “The Apotheosis of General Wolfe” grew out of a lecture about the work and its influence on subsequent interpretations of the general’s demise. “After West,” Schama wrote, “nothing could dispel the odor of sanctity that lay over Wolfe’s memory.”

“Schama’s knowledge of visual images,” Grafton says, “is probably unmatched by any other person in a history department and is actually better than that of people who are in art-history departments of museums. It’s enormously rare for somebody to combine his mastery and incredible range of written sources with his mastery of visual sources.”

Almost as novel is his writing style, Grafton says. “This is not an age in which academics write even plausible English. Our training is much more technical than literary. Very few young historians are writing with great distinction, as in the romantic tradition of (Edward) Gibbon and (Thomas Babington) Macaulay, who are probably Simon’s real models. They wrote with great learning for a wide public.”

Schama’s admirers line up for autographs after his lecture, his latest book, “Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations),” in hand. Several also carry “Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution,” his incendiary, best-selling account of that seminal convulsion. The author is glowing from a vigorous performance in which, with wit and erudition, he countered attacks by the “Himmelwoods,” his name for two critics: Gordon S. Wood, who had written about “Dead Certainties” in the New York Review of Books, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, who, in the New York Times Book Review, had criticized Schama’s abandonment of on-the-page footnotes. Schama dismissed such citations as mere “credit-card receipts from the library” rather than “certificates of irreproachable authenticity.”

Wood warned that in attempting fiction and “denying the possibility of perfect objectivity,” Schama’s “purely invented parts taint the credibility of the whole” and his “violation of the conventions of history writing actually puts the integrity of the discipline at risk.” In the course of his lecture, Schama responded, “Far from the intellectual integrity of history being policed by the protocols of objectivity, distance and scientific dispassion, its best prospects for survival lie in the forthright admission of subjectivity, immediacy and literary imagination.” Hard-core, dry, statistically based analysis versus dramatic, poetic pleasures of the mind. It’s an argument, Schama pointed out, that goes back all the way to Thucydides and Herodotus, or at least to when the Greeks coined the word historia.

The New York engagement, followed by a bountiful reception underwritten by Knopf, was a triumph for Schama, who confesses that he’s lived through his share of sparsely attended book signings. And it was a far cry from an address a confounded Schama gave in 1989 to a packed congress of historians of the French Revolution in Washington, D.C. Several of the group, openly hostile to Schama’s revisionist view in “Citizens”--that the revolution, far from being “the most sublime event in history,” was unnecessary and egregiously bloodthirsty--rose up and sang the “Marseillaise.”

Despite the passage of 200 years, a historian’s contrarian interpretation could incite a call to arms by inflaming powerful and prickly nationalist feelings.

SCHAMA WORKS IN WHAT SOME DESCRIBE AS AN ERSATZ MEDIEVAL monastery at Harvard--the newly renovated Adolphus Busch Hall, a Teutonic-style structure with an imposing clock tower. Here, at the Center for European Studies, professor of history and senior associate Schama teaches courses varying from methodology to the Baroque period and the historical-literary references of landscape. His spacious aerie under a steeply pitched roof features deep vaults at the window, modern leather sofa, laptop computer and pile upon precarious pile of art-history books.

The bearded, 46-year-old historian is tanned and relaxed following a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. He wears a loose, sunflower-yellow linen shirt and yellow-hued eyeglass frames; he’s known for his unusual attention to accessories and wardrobe--Italian linen suits, for example. When he was a child, he says, his family usually had more clothes than money. His father was in fashion textiles, a business notorious for its sudden reversals of fortune.

Traversing a thronged Harvard Yard on the way to lunch, Schama talks about the book he’s working on, “Landscape and Memory.” “The mountain chapter shows how mountains go from places of epiphany and revelation, like Mt. Sinai or Mt. Moriah, to places of ordeal, terror and dread, like Golgotha, or the demonic tradition of dragons in caves, or to the place on which you can carve Theodore Roosevelt’s face,” he says, laughing. “From mountains where you prostrate yourself in the face of the severe Almighty to places where you literally hammer in the face of your reigning executive.”

Plans are already afoot to turn “Landscape and Memory” into a British television series, hosted by Schama. He describes the work as a self-education in sensing and articulating his feelings about landscape. “I wanted to do it in a way that was not just eco-environmentally serious,” he says. “That’s why I switch subjects all the time. Life is too short to go on doing things you know about.”

Next will be his Rembrandt book, and then he hopes to write “Soldiers”; not just a French Napoleonic history, it will take in the Caribbean and the Egyptian campaign. And after that, he has a historical fiction in mind, featuring a maverick Scottish sea captain who adventures mightily in 18th-Century Latin America.

Schama unfolds his own history with disarming humor. His father’s family, Sephardic Jewish spice traders, came from Smyrna (now Izmir, in Turkey). At the fall of the Ottoman Empire they fled pogroms, dispersing across Eastern Europe to Romanian Moldova, settling in London about 1900. His mother is from the Lithuania-Belarus region; Schama compares her family’s experiences in London to “classic Lower East Side (New York)--not poverty, simplicity.” His father was born in London in 1901, two months before the death of Queen Victoria. Says Schama: “He liked to call himself a Victorian. The family joke is that we’ve always lived in collapsing empires: first the Ottoman, then the Hapsburg, then the British. And here I am in America.”

Schama’s and his older sister’s childhoods were more New York mosaic than English traditional. The northwest London section of Golder’s Green is polyglot, heavily populated by Jewish, Indian and old Italian families. His father, he says, “would sometimes gamble brilliantly on textiles, and we would live in incredibly high style in an immense house down by the sea. Then he’d do it again and be left with thousands of yards of unsellable fabric in near or actual bankruptcy, and the house would disappear, and the car would disappear, and we’d find ourselves living in a miserable cottage somewhere.”

Things got so bad that at the age of 53, Schama’s mother had to go out and work. “Textiles,” he explains, “were one of those things that bright Jewish boys did before and after the Second World War, but it was a wrong turn. My father’s true talents were in show business, in speech and drama.” The fate of (Arthur Miller’s) Willy Loman struck home: “That play was the most tragic and terrifying thing I’d ever read in my life. I thought, ‘God, this could easily have been my father.’ He was determined I would never go near commerce.”

The elder Schama was obsessed with Shakespeare, taking his son to the theater, making him learn Henry V’s Harfleur speech at the age of 9 and putting him on a competitive public-speaking circuit for youngsters, which paved the way for the “speechifying” he was to do at Cambridge.

“My father always used to say that a Jew’s only weapon is his mouth,” says Schama, grinning. But he owes his love of spinning yarns, he says, to his mother, who was “a relentless, extraordinary storyteller about the world of her childhood, like a (Isaac) Babel or a (Isaac Bashevis) Singer. We didn’t need television.”

The Bible was his first history book. “I liked the bloody, least saintly passages, and the violent, dramatic parts.” He also relished the “really terrible movies of the time--epics against improbable odds. My favorite was called something like ‘Sword of Florence,’ with Edmund Purdom as Michelangelo, who leaps off his horse in what was supposed to be the Piazza della Signoria and announces, ‘Men of Florence, the Renaissance is here!’ ”

The Tower of London and the block on which Anne Boleyn was beheaded “absolutely made the hairs go up on the back of my neck,” he says. But it wasn’t just the sight of the block, “it was the sense of the whole Tudor world behind it.” He assembled his first “history” at the age of 7 with illustrated cigarette cards (like baseball cards) about the British navy--the precursors, perhaps, of the slides he favors today.

Charismatic, eccentric teachers of literature and history were, as much as his family, the making of Simon Schama. At his secondary school, Haberdasher’s Aske, and at Cambridge, they inspired his teaching career, now in its 25th year. “A lot of them were those types whom Robin Williams so accurately portrayed in ‘Dead Poets Society’--imaginative, headstrong, slightly reckless, faintly dangerous.” Field trips were critical. “You couldn’t just absorb history texts and dates, you had to have the smell and feel of the place. That’s why textbooks in America are so bloody awful. They’re made to resemble the 6 o’clock news--no sense of the texture of the past. The same is now true in England.”

Zionism and politics were theaters of adolescent passion. Schama was brought up Orthodox, attending Hebrew classes four times a week. “We kept absolutely strict kosher. My mother still does. I was bar-mitzvahed grandly. I became a Hebrew teacher and taught little children at the school where I myself had learned, but then I suddenly ceased believing in God. Didn’t see the point.

“Isaac Deutscher, the great Marxist historian, told me when he ceased believing that he was more worried about offending his mother than about offending God.” Today Schama is an agnostic, “ceremonially but not theologically observant. We have a Seder table, I fast at Yom Kippur. We bring the children up in the knowledge of the tradition, but we fudge on the issue of belief, which is wicked of us,” he says.

SCHAMA LIVES OUTSIDE BOSton with his wife, Ginny Papaioannou, a developmental biologist at Tufts University Medical School, his two young children, Chloe and Gabriel, and Morgan, a Welsh springer spaniel. Their flat-roofed, glass-walled house was designed by a student of Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius in 1949 and seems to disappear into the sloping, thickly wooded property.

The reading material in the house includes stacks of contemporary fiction by Louise Erdrich, Jeanette Winterson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Penelope Lively, Patrick Suskind, Martin Amis and John Banville. A few items on Schama’s reading “hit list”: Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” (“the best novel ever written,” he says) and “War and Peace” (which he has read four times), Alessandro Manzoni’s “The Betrothed,” Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Charles Dickens’ “Little Dorrit,” Alexandre Dumas’ “Journey on the Rhine,” Jaroslav Hasek’s “The Good Soldier Svejk,” Mikhail Bulgakov’s “Black Snow,” Anatole France’s “The Gods Are Thirsty,” Mark Twain’s “Roughing It.”

Schama’s mentor at Cambridge was the distinguished British historian Sir John (J.H.) Plumb. “What Plumb and a number of others did,” Schama says, “which was a huge gift, was to persuade me that a lot of the possibilities of historical life lie in its literary power, as much as they did in its analytical exactness, and that made sense. I no longer had to choose either literature or history.”

Plumb’s confidence in his star pupil was confirmed in 1966, when Schama graduated with a starred first--the highest-possible grades--and was instantly made a Cambridge don, a teaching fellow, at the age of 21. According to Plumb, that happens about once every decade. “People who had been my teachers were now my colleagues,” Schama says. “I was both bowled over with delight and excruciatingly embarrassed and clumsy, always worrying about the right way to pass the port. I had to work incredibly hard at teaching, at everything.”

It was also Plumb who lured Schama away from his kosher diet to the serious appreciation of food and feasting that Schama so abundantly displays in “Embarrassment of Riches.” “Jack’s way of doing this was to prepare sumptuous meals and then serve me a miserable-looking cheese omelet, until I finally cracked.” Today he still dines with Plumb, collects wine and reportedly cooks for family and friends with enthusiasm and finesse.

When asked what it was about history that made him want to make it his life’s work, he hesitates. Then his answer is patient, but intense. “In the Britain of the ‘50s and ‘60s, history was no marginal activity. It was absolutely as major a subject at university as math or English language. You spent a lot of time doing it, you were surrounded by it, and you understood your whole political world in historical terms. Spectacularly eloquent, brilliant, piercingly analytical personalities were then writing and teaching history, not just at Cambridge but all over the country.”

Something else gripped his imagination. A voice addressed him from the grave. It happened while he was in the Hague archives researching his first book, “Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780-1813.” He was the first to open a sealed box containing the property of a Dutch politician and soldier who died in battle in 1799. The contents were intended for the Dutchman’s wife, who, unknown to her husband, had predeceased him.

As he tells it: “Out came a series of objects, a picture ID done in silhouette, letters, tickets to a chamber-music series he would never go to, proofs of an article he’d written that would never be published, and most moving of all, a lock of his wife’s blond hair taken from a locket he’d worn, bound in ribbon. The hair had never seen the light of day and still held the musky fragrance of perfume. I suddenly felt an immediate and powerful awareness of that person, his private life, cultural life and political life. This kind of ghostly communion with the past makes you feel that you’re its witness to the future.”

“Patriots and Liberators,” a 745-page traditional narrative, would take him 11 years to write and establish him as a leading authority on the history of the Netherlands. The subject was pristine territory even for the Dutch: 1780 to 1813 was, Schama says, “a sad and largely forgotten period of Dutch history, a time of their collapse,” when the Dutch Republic was destroyed and the Kingdom of the United Netherlands established under William I.

While teaching at Brasenose College, Oxford, Schama met his wife, an American. He was also introduced to his most important mentor after Plumb, the French historian Richard Cobb, whom Schama describes as an “anarchic, poetic writer of phenomenal gifts who refused to obey academic rules. Half his books are autobiographical.” Schama gave a series of lectures on Jewish social and intellectual history and was introduced to the formidable Victor Rothschild, the reigning lord of the powerful British banking dynasty. Rothschild commissioned him to write “Two Rothschilds and the Land of Israel,” making use of an untouched family-owned archive to document the Rothschilds’ role in the Zionist movement.

The charms of Oxford faded under a grinding tutorial load--”I felt like a gerbil on a treadmill”--and a restrictive curriculum that left little room for initiative. “I was getting interested in anthropology and art history, the things that feed into ‘Embarrassment of Riches.’ A colleague and I tried to put on a course in family history, and it was laughed down. It was thought of as unspeakably radical and unorthodox,” he says.

SCHAMA CAME TO HARVARD in 1980, where he says he was “like a kid in a candy store. I could teach whatever I wanted to. It was like going from an extremely controlled version of academic life to an almost narcissistically uncontrolled one. There’s a danger of self-indulgence.”

The illustrated “Riches,” published in 1987, went through eight printings, and continues to sell in paperback. The idea was born when Schama couldn’t find an anthropological account of the uniqueness of the Dutch community in Europe, the dynamics of which he felt he hadn’t satisfactorily understood in writing “Patriots and Liberators.” He calls “Riches” an “improbable book” and says he was far more challenged by it than by “Citizens,” which “tumbled out” in two years, thanks partly to the vast collection of primary sources at Widener Library at Harvard.

But “Embarrassment of Riches,” also hugely controversial, which took six years to write, was a different matter. His use of creative speculation to decode Dutch art clashed with the conventional dictates of historical-research methodology. “I could see my emphasis on symbol, concept and metaphor might be problematic, because the relationship between the lived experience and its representation is a problematic issue. It took a lot of torn-up drafts and a lot of doubt,” he says.

“Citizens” was a hefty (875 pages plus sources) masterstroke of timing. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for 10 weeks, sold in six figures and was one of the most widely read and reviewed books among the prodigious outpouring of publications on the French Revolution’s bicentennial. Forgetting he’d covered contiguous ground in “Patriots and Liberators,” some of the negative reviews took Schama to task for infringing on the territory of established historians of the revolution, negative reactions that still rankle.

“People were cross. People I’d known a long time wouldn’t speak to me. And a French historian did an absolutely appalling thing. He had not read the book, and he wrote an article in Le Monde saying, ‘This is a Reaganite piece of history, written purely to please the ultraconservatives in America.’ I am certainly not a Reaganite, nor even a conservative. For a while I was finished in France.”

“Dead Certainties,” which he calls a “ jeu d’esprit , a little book” is two novellas: a “playful exploration of the suppositions between the actuality of the event and the uncertainties of the reports.” It’s about two deaths--Maj. Gen. James Wolfe’s at the Battle of Quebec in 1759 and a gruesome 1849 murder case involving a Harvard professor. Though based on evidence, they are told in different voices and use fictional techniques. Schama has no doubts about taking the leap into fiction but wonders “whether I could have written a different book that had the feel of fiction but would have been entirely nonfiction.”

As for teaching, Peter Hansen, a graduate student-witness to Schama’s teaching-as-performance-art lecture style, believes Schama likes teaching and the academic world too much to give it up, “in spite of his efforts to push at the boundaries of how it defines itself.”

But perhaps Simon Schama won’t find peace in the academy until convictions about the writing of history change again or until the ranks are thickened by Schama-inspired students. But he will surely continue to mine the language with his customary bravura, following his best expansive sensibilities and aspiring to the “truths offered by the great novels and the great poems.” He may already have achieved greatness as a historian, a feat that Macaulay called “the rarest of intellectual distinctions.”