Thoughts from the Trenches: How to Make the Longue Durée Manageable
In
1967, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office refused to license German playwright Rolf
Hochhuth’s new play, Soldiers: An Obituary
for Geneva, for London’s National
Theatre. The play, which decried strategic bombing during WWII, also held Winston
Churchill responsible for the death of Polish General Sikorski. Sikorski had led
the Polish government in exile and died in a plane accident off of British
Gibraltar in 1943. Citing concerns for the Churchill family (Churchill died in
1965), the LCO first hedged on offering the license, then refused it. It would
be one of the LCO’s last decisions before the end of theatre censorship in
Britain the following year.
The play became the subject of intense external
scrutiny for the better part of two years; libel suits stemming from the play
extended the debate into the 1970s. The controversy pitted a self-professed new
generation of Britons against older board members, a number of whom had not
only fought in the war but were personal friends of the Churchill family. Was
the play a libel on Churchill’s memory? On the nation and those involved in the
war effort? Was personal reputation sacrosanct enough to justify censorship?
Whose account of history was even right in the first place? And whose story was
this to tell?
Then Director of the National Theatre, Sir
Lawrence Olivier, eventually backed away from the play, though the National
Theatre’s Literary Director, Kenneth Tynan, continued as Hochhuth’s champion.
Tynan eventually staged the play at another theatre in December 1968. The play ended
up being performed in London for only a few months. The Churchill family never
sued for libel, but others involved in the account of the crash did. As Tynan’s
biographer notes: focused on the end of theatre censorship, Tynan had not taken
into account a simultaneous strengthening of the laws of defamation [1].
When heading to London earlier this
summer, there was but one single mention of Soldiers
in my list of archives to see at the British Library. I knew there was some
issue of libel involving Churchill, but nothing more. The case does not feature
in accounts of defamation law. Indeed, the Churchill family never sued and, as
I have learned since, the suits that were filed did little to influence case
law. Yet, the play has quickly become a central example for my project. Beyond
its intrinsic narrative interest, the Soldiers
controversy enables me to tackle the interrelated threads of a very big project
whose scope requires taming. Finding the case was thus something of a relief; but
it was a studied find, not just a lucky one. I’ll try to explain what I mean so
as to offer some suggestions about managing what can seem like ever-proliferating
narrative threads when undertaking a new topic.
* * *
For
my dissertation and first book, I read every item with “refugee” in the title I
could find in the British Library catalogue and in the National Archives at Kew.
From there, I worked to establish whom Britons identified as refugees over time
as well as key turning points in the use of the category. Zeroing in on these
moments, I extended my research on these cases in other archival and periodical
sources. The research for Beyond Sticks
and Stones has tested this method to the extreme. I could not hope to read everything in the
British Library on reputation. How would I even find those pieces? The topic is
simply too large and nebulous. What nineteenth-century novel does not hinge on
matters of reputation or attempts to know character? All court cases involve
“libels” – or charges. “Defamation” itself regularly refers to attacks
on personal character, and seditious, blasphemous, and obscene libel. So, what
to do…? For me, the answer lies in
sampling primary material early and, through those early samples, establishing initial
patterns and breaking the project into more manageable pieces.
Once
I had my initial research question -- What shaped the quasi-right to personal
reputation? -- I began to build my bibliography and to read the secondary
literature on defamation and reputation. While this is critical, to be sure, secondary
reading cannot be done in isolation from primary material when defining a topic
of one’s own. I start with a patch of evidence that I hope will help to
establish the parameters of my subject, seeing how contemporary actors wrote
about it, not just scholars in the years since.
1.
Sampling. Unable to read
everything on reputation, I began with a sample from the Times of London. Over
several months, I read all editorials and correspondence with the keywords
“defamation,” “slander,” “libel,” “calumny,” and “reputation” between 1785,
when the newspaper began, and the present. This task familiarized me with the
major controversies over reputation over the past two hundred and fifty years, when
the defense of reputation became a topic worthy not just of law reports, but of
mainstream public commentary. I could derive from this a working timeline as
well as basic patterns of debate.
2.
The Fields of
Scholarship. There
are histories of the defense of reputation, but they are piecemeal. In British
history, one finds key elements in accounts of privacy, celebrity, scandal, and
of the media more generally. Even in the few legal histories of defamation,
authors have tended to separate out different elements. We have books on
obscene libel and on blasphemy, as well as a large literature that examines
seditious libel and radical reform. Within the few texts on personal
defamation, chapters tend to take aspects like fair comment, slander, and damages
to write about their evolution separately. Sampling primary material helps, I
find, to see better which seemingly separate swatches of scholarship are actually
part of the same broader public conversation. This work itself ramifies, of
course. I did not know when I first read that subset of Times commentary in 2016 that by 2019 I would need to track down
literature on the Lord Chamberlain’s Office.
3.
Making Selections,
Establishing Core Points. The task of the historian is not that of the
chronicler and it shouldn’t be, even if the list of patterns and key moments
were well-behaved enough that they could be included in a single volume. We
seek explanations of change over time. I only half tease my students that they need
to ban the words “also,” “additionally,” “furthermore” and so on – the connectors
that so often stand in for stepping back to make a coherent argument. To change
history by narrative accretion into history as explanation, the task is to organize
chapters around the core episodes that move the argument along thematically and
chronologically. This takes time and, for me, usually involves writing through
several cases at a time, brainstorming comparisons along the way to help forge
a compelling argument from a list of cases, points, or threads. I still
remember vividly the day I first read about the Fugitive Slave Circulars for my
dissertation in the summer of 2005. The contest over these Circulars crystallized
issues of right, intervention, humanitarian need, and the very nature of life
in British asylum and helped furnish a key turning point in my account of
modern refuge. I had a hunch that I could use the material as a tool for
thinking through the project as a whole. Indeed, I used it as one of my
earliest conference papers and, later, for fellowships and the job market. It is
still early, but the 1967-1968 question of whether to stage Soldiers feels like it has similar
promise.
Notes:
[1]
Dominic Shellard, Kenneth Tynan: A Life
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
p. 314.
--Caroline Shaw
