Why Blame History?
O'Neill, William L
Why Blame History? The Uncompleted Past, by Martin Duberman. Random House. 374 pp. $7.95. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Martin Duberman is a good man who has worried about the right things all...
...He seems never to have liked studying history for its own sake...
...That not everything one writes bears reprinting, surely...
...And his confessions say less than they appear to...
...Topical essays and book reviews, even when well done, tend to go stale quickly...
...As he became preoccupied with current social problems he found history less "relevant" than ever...
...What remains are a few historical essays and some second thoughts about the profession of history...
...Duberman is no Norman Mailer, however...
...The practice of history may be, as my wife says, an obsolete art, yet some of us love it all the same...
...Now he believes art is a better guide to understanding than scholarship...
...Duberman has combined scholarship and self-revelation to the disadvantage of both...
...Even so, I hope everyone planning to study history in hopes of learning more about himself or his times will read this book...
...He gingerly exposes enough of his own past to show it is important, but not enough to tell us why, which is what makes his book so frustrating to read...
...That confession may be good for the soul without benefiting the craft...
...Still, I must add that many historians enjoy their work and think it well worth doing...
...Having done so, he wrote several biographies, apparently out of sheer momentum...
...He complains that the historian cannot truly know the minds of his subjects...
...Yet it is hard not to feel that he is less candid than we are meant to believe...
...Alas, this volume does not...
...But we only know that because he tells us so editorially...
...What do we learn from such a book...
...He says that most written history really aims at uncovering the sociology of the past, but without the controls that make sociology valid in the present...
...Duberman has organized his book to show his progress from liberalism to radicalism, from history to art...
...A competent historian, a warm teacher, and a generous reviewer, he once made Charles Francis Adams, dullest of all the famous Adamses and the subject of his first book, seem almost interesting...
...This is, of course, to vulgarize, but not to falsify a complex professional autobiography...
...These last essays are the book's most instructive feature, though it is difficult to know how to take them...
...Who cares what someone thought of James Meredith's march against fear four years ago...
...Such a man commands respect...
...Perhaps, also, that a man in the process of becoming someone else ought to wait until he is comfortable with his new self before explaining what the change means...
...Duberman says that he became a historian "out of the need to find some balance for a life tipped heavily toward the present...
...If he wants to solve problems, why doesn't he go into the social sciences where, perhaps, the answers are...
...This revelation did not lead him into sociology...
...But so many alienated young people are entering graduate school now that it is a good thing to have this record of how one man, with feelings much like their own, was disillusioned by his "life in history...
...If one's experience is to be the lens that focuses reality, then one has to tell it all...
...Finally he decided that history could never shed enough light on the human heart, and he started writing plays...
...The more impersonal pieces do not speak for themselves...
...He is the only historian I know to write a successful play...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Martin Duberman is a good man who has worried about the right things all through the 1960s...
...He ignores the scientific historians who are making the most ambitious effort yet to transform history into a policy-making discipline...
...Yet he did not become a psychoanalyst...
...Not that Duberman makes the best possible case against it as a "relevant" profession...
...That is his right...
...If he doesn't, why blame history f6r letting him down...
...Instead he turned to play-writing, a perfectly legitimate enterprise, but one that seems even less related to solving social problems than history...
...Why should we want to know what "the prospects for SDS" seemed like in 1967 (unless Duberman had anticipated Weatherman, which he didn't) ? Yet this sort of thing takes up most of The Uncompleted Past...
...Perhaps this is the crucial point...
...I put these questions so personally because that, especially at the end, is what the book invites...
Vol. 34 • May 1970 • No. 5
