THE AUTHOR
A peculiar occurrence unfolded on January 30, 1912, for it was on that date that an equally peculiar woman was born into a wealthy Jewish banking family. Barbara Tuchman is the unlikely author of The Guns of August (1962), a history of the outbreak of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1970). More peculiarly still, she won a Pulitzer Prize in history for each.
Although Tuchman, who never set out to be an author, won acclaim for her books, her starring role on Publisher's Row might not be so surprising when you consider that her father, Maurice Wertheim, was a banker, philanthropist, founder of the Theatre Guild, and owner and publisher of The Nation. Her maternal grandfather was ambassador to Turkey under president Woodrow Wilson. Her uncle was Secretary of the Treasury under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Obviously, Tuchman was no stranger to the power of achievement. "The unrecorded past," she wrote, "is none other than our old friend, the tree in the primeval forest which fell without being heard."
Tuchman was graduated from the Walden School. In 1933, she received her B.A. from Radcliffe College. Always intrigued by history, she wrote her honors thesis on The Moral Justification for the British Empire. Although she never took a writing course, she followed school with a job at The Nation (1935 - 1939), during which time she traveled to Madrid to report on the Spanish Civil War. She also wrote freelance articles for other magazines. In 1939, she married Dr. Lester Reginald Tuchman, a New York Internist with whom she had three daughters.
In deciding to write, she said, "The single most formative experience, I think, was the stacks at Widener Library where I was allowed to have as my own one of those little cubicles with a table under a window, queerly called, as I have since learned, 'carrels,' a word I never knew when I sat in one. Mine was deep in among the 940's (British History, that is) and I could roam at liberty through the rich stacks, taking whatever I wanted.
"The experience was marvelous, a word I use in its exact sense meaning full of marvels. It gave me a lifelong affinity for libraries, where I find happiness, refuge, not to mention the material for making books of my own ... Nothing sickens me more than the closed door of a library."
In all, Tuchman wrote eleven books. Throughout, she maintained a simple philosophy. "The writer's object should be to hold the reader's attention. I want the reader to turn the page and keep on turning until the end. This is accomplished only when the narrative moves steadily ahead, not when it comes to a weary standstill, overloaded with every item uncovered in the research."
Barbara W. Tuchman—a wise writer despite her unlikely ascent from the ashes of her fallen comrades—died of complications of a stroke on February 6, 1989, at her home in Cos Cob, Connecticut.
THE ETHICIST
While Tuchman failed to mention the fact in her book, The Guns of August, she was present for the pivotal event of the pursuit of the German battle cruiser, Goeben, and light cruiser, Breslau. She wrote about the pursuit:
"That morning [August 10, 1914] there arrived in Constantinople the small Italian passenger steamer which had witnessed the Gloucester's action against Goeben and Breslau. Among its passengers were the daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Henry Morgenthau." As a grandchild of Henry Morgenthau, she was referring to herself, a fact she later confirmed in her book, Practicing History, in which she tells the story of her father, Maurice Wertheim, en route to deliver funds to support the Jewish community. Forty-eight years later, Tuchman finally documented the event, which she must have assumed would be deemed unimportant coming from the eyes of a two-year-old. The knowledge of her presence, although likely not recalled in later years, proved an awakening to the horrors of war and the devastation of antisemitism yet to rear its ugly head. They undoubtedly forged a path for her on the road to equity and human rights.
Another part of Tuchman’s ethics came from her life as a nonacademic historian, as she liked to characterize herself. Forced to deal with truth on a daily basis, she was consumed by the creative writer’s need to fuel readability. A writer without a reader, she reasoned, is like a musician without a listener: Neither one exists.
Even so, she recognized that, of all books published, “There are some … that require the reader to reach,” she wrote in her tome, The Book, “to stand on tiptoe, as it were, to read them. There are others that do not necessarily have to make one think, to be worth reading and enjoyable. Sir Walter Scott’s were unquestionably both, for their story, their vivid scenes, and their reconstruction of history as a living past. They pleased all ranks and classes of men, acknowledged Thomas Love Peacock. When each new Waverley novel appeared, Peacock wrote, ‘the scholar lays aside his Plato, the statesman suspends his calculation, the young lady deserts her embroidery hoop, the critic smiles as he trims his lamp, and the weary artisan resigns his sleep for the refreshment of the magic page.’ What writer could ask for more? ‘The refreshment of the magic page’ condenses in six words all that I am talking about; it should be the motto carved over some appropriate doorway ....”
She went on to emphasize that quality always bubbles to the surface. Thus, “true” writers will always be born to create, even if their contemporary readers discourage them.
Tuchman, while believing in the difference in as well as the justification for both academic and nonacademic historians, had her own list of favorite authors that reflected her belief system. Some of her most admired and, no doubt, emulated characters included Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver, Madame Bovary, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, Alice in Wonderland, and the tomes of Arthur Conan Doyle with Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Dr. Watson. Interestingly enough, all presented admirable protagonists fighting against a deeper, darker system set to destroy them but for their personal inner strengths.
“Each of us,” she wrote in The Book, “can fill the remaining shelves with his or her own nominees. I with Jane Austen, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Treasure Island, The Three Musketeers, The Just So Stories, and for perfection of language, The Importance of Being Ernest.”
Tuchman, who saw herself as an “elitist,” elaborated on her definition of the word versus the understanding of the general population. “They … think you mean class privilege, wealth, comfort, upper-classness, unearned or inherited. When I use the word, it’s necessary to explain that that isn’t what is meant. But beyond that, there’s a very serious and deplorable attitude nowadays that being equal is better than being excellent. The very fact of someone excelling someone else is unacceptable to the egalitarians. There are even movements now to eliminate grades in school because that puts some above others.”
Ahead of her time through her study of mankind’s history from earliest times forward, Tuchman elaborated in a 1980 interview with William Meredith at the Library of Congress: “I suppose this [misinterpretation] is all a movement coming up from below, representing the whole surge of what I might call the Third World idea. I’m not now referring to the nations who are Third World, but the whole movement that represents—what shall I call it—the underprivileged and the masses and holds that in order to for them to have their rights, they mustn't be seen as less capable than anyone else. So therefore, you mustn't distinguish, and any distinction is pejorative.”
As devoted to her writing as she was to her historical integrity, Tuchman once wrote, “Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change, windows on the world, and (as a poet has said) ‘lighthouses erected in the sea of time.’ They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind.”
And certainly, Barbara Tuchman’s works, through their author’s unwavering ethics and devotion to her calling, exemplified just that.
If you’d like a complimentary review copy of one of my latest books, check out my Website at www.djherda.org, as well as my current publisher at Elektra Press. I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts! Meanwhile, happy reading!
“People can lose their lives in libraries. They ought to be warned.” Saul Bellow