Simon Winchester writes the most compelling history. I’ve
just listened to two books he produced out of one research project – The Professor and the Madman; The Meaning of Everything
Both books are about the making of the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) and they are not his latest work. Sounds dull? I devoured the stories. What is compelling about crusty scholarly
hermits, mostly male, all old, beavering away on A-is-for Alphabet? It’s their back
stories, the depth of detail, the curious, eccentric, unbelievable intimacies
of the tale. No character is without complexity.
The archival work
Winchester undertook would have been mammoth because the OED took decades to
evolve and produced millions of scraps of paper from thousands of collaborators
throughout the world. The making of the OED was a long,
laborious project that produced something like 15 discrete volumes of the OED –
most of us have the little blue version that we had to buy for High School
(back in the day…) One of the big problems for the original editors was whether
the dictionary would ever make enough money to justify the £40,000 invested in
it. Today I’m sure the Oxford University Press is doing nicely - it’s available online by subscription, and
there are many specialist dictionaries, some of which I own, and others that I
covet.
The reason I listened to these books is because I have
always liked the way Winchester tells history, and I am confident he has
millions more readers than the average academic who plods through every dense
sentence providing references and attributions and citations ad nauseam.
Certainly fiction writers depend on our research for the historical accuracy of
their stories, but Winchester captures the spirit of fiction in his facts.
Don’t get me wrong – Winchester’s work is scholarly and
rigorous, but you don’t get heavily laced text, you get the story.
The rigor of
academic research and writing is an important skill to master. But once you’re
in charge of your material and can confidently claim integrity around the
content, why burden the text in a way that makes reading laborious? I
personally love a book with 35 pages of end notes and references and TOC, but
the end is the best place for that stuff. The minute a book looks heavy with
end notes, readers walk away. I've seen seasoned academics literally drop a book because it looked heavy.
When I started writing my book, Feathers, I had three volumes of fin de siecle history written by colleagues working in ethnography,
and a couple of them are so brilliant in their archival research. I was most
impressed by Sarah Abrevaya Stein
Here she is:
She has written many books around Yiddish culture and
little-known marginal events in Jewish history. From my perspective her great
contribution is the book, Plumes. Stein
must have brilliant linguistic skills to get into some of the archival nooks
and crannies. She seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Ottoman Empire and Sephardi Jewry. Plumes is the history of the ostrich feather industry
that has a boom-bust pattern something like Dutch iris, and the fact that she
has written this rich history means that there are entire sections of stuff
that I don’t need to research…languages I don’t have to learn, scripts I do
not have to decipher. However, Stein’s
research was global, expansive and not so interested in the characters, and
that still leaves me with a pile of impenetrable Hebrew document that drill
down into my protagonists.
Another great book that I have been using as a sample for
myself is Adam Kuper’s Incest and
Influence, that looks at bourgeois English society when cousin marriages
were the thing. He explores lots of the great clans, such as the Darwins – and some
of my research spills into that arena because the Darwins lived in Cambridge
and their marriages and friendships crossed into dozens of networks. Professor
Kuper is my mentor for my time at the London School of Economics – a
wonderfully generous act on behalf of both this distinguished academic and the two universities that
have made it possible. If you go through his publications you will see that Incest, represents a left turn in his
academic writing. He has written theory and complexity for so much of his
career, that this book seems to be a re thinking of how we communicate as
academics, and what makes our writing relevant, useful and interesting. Here he is: http://aotcpress.com/articles/anthropology-anthropologists-forty-years/
Which brings me back to Winchester. Winchester writes narrative
non-fiction. Above all else, he tells an interesting story. Narratie non-fiction, is, I think, what I have started to write.
This week I made a shift in my own thinking, away from the
magnificent complexity of Stein, slightly more in line with Kuper ,but
absolutely influenced by Simon Winchester, I began to loosen up and tell the back story.
This morning I wrote just 500 words – 500 words that I would
not have considered relevant previously, clinging instead to my topic sentences
and my rigid logical streams of themes. It was 500 words that would not have
found a place in my book if I had not rethought the issues of style. Five
hundreds words that may have seemed like meandering off the track, but when I
read those words now, I see they paint the background. It’s like returning to
my roots somewhere between journalism and feature writing.
By the way, my book Morning
Lane, is with an agent at the moment. I had some good help from an editor
after I had finished writing the book, and it took another eight months to bash
it into shape. This book is where I used up lots of material that would not fit
into academic journal articles – and it was this material that made me think
about how we write. Sometimes academics leave the best bits in the
deletes. Hope the agent likes Morning Lane and finds it a nice home.
Another book that contains a chapter I wrote, arrived in the mail this week – two copies of a
very slim little book, hard cover, but when I looked up the price online, I
guessed no one is going to buy it. Just in case you’re tempted it’s called Disability and Colonialism, edited by
Soldatic and Grech and published by Routledge. It contains the story of Blind
Brewster of Bingham….buried in the midst of a lot of Foucauldian genealogical
theory.
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