History & Herstory

I have been on the road for a couple of weeks, hence the long hiatus between blog posts. Being on the road happens to you when you write a book. You have to leave home for one reason or another having to do with the baby you have just birthed. And out on the road I was thinking a good deal about history, the thing I allegedly write about.

Some time ago I figured out that there are basically two kinds of history—studies and stories. Studies are what serious historians with academic credentials tend to write—deep-thought stuff dripping with perspective and interpretation. Stories are what some of them also--and the rest of us--write, and they are called narratives. Narrative history also has perspective and interpretation folded in, but its main function is to tell a story. And believe me, history is, above everything else, a great story, a dramatic story. Put yourself down anywhere, anytime, in the past and something worth writiing about is going on. Somebody is doing something fascinating and probably doing it to somebody else.

Many great minds over the centuries have taken a turn at defining history. Henry Ford, the Model-T man, called history “bunk.” (He later said he didn’t say it quite that way, or that he had been misquoted – a distinct possibility.)

Voltaire, the great French philosopher and author, evidently thought seriously about history, for he called it “a pack of tricks we played upon the dead,” and “just fables that have been agreed upon.” He also called us historians “gossips who tease the dead.” A number of other thinkers have also called history gossip. “Merely gossip,” growled Oscar Wilde, the British iconoclastic playwright; “Broad-guage gossip,” grumped Ambrose Bierce, the equally iconoclastic and eccdentric American journalist-short story writer.

Guy de Maupassant, another Frenchman, called history “that excitable and unreliable old lady.” Henry Steele Commager, the fine American historian, called it “a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises, and absurdities.”

An anonymous source has tried to set us all straight on the subject by reminding us that “history is herstory, too.”

But of all the definitions of history that I have heard, I like best what Winston Churchill, a great everything, said about it: “History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days.”

Churchill’s words constitute my marching orders. What I try to do is what he said: stumble along the trail of the past with my flickering lamp, striving to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and to rekindle its passion--with my regrettably too pale gleams.

I also try to do what Frank Buck said: “Bring ‘em back alive.” Bring ‘em (all those great characters of the past) back to life--so I can meet ‘em again and introduce ‘em to you.

Have Pen, Will Sign

When you write a book you lay yourself open to its handmaiden, book signings. In a dozen years of writing books I have suffered through, enjoyed, loved, hated, bounded through, stumbled through, signed and missigned books at any number and variety of bookstores in all parts of the country. I have signed anywhere from zero books to scores of them in one signing. I have signed them in Barnes and Nobles and Borders, and in the most unknown, struggling, and dusty bookstores in America. They are a trial and they are a joy. The joy is in the fact you meet a lot of nice bookstore people and on a good afternoon or evening actually sign a lot of books. The trial is when bookstore patrons stream past your desk, stare absently at you and your book, and nobody ever buys one.

In a big bookstore in Louisville one afternoon I signed upward of 45 books--a great day. The community relations person--what they call the always helpful bookstore employees who coordinate signings--thought so too.

"This has been a great signing," he said.

And I said, "What would you consider a really, really great signing," I asked.

"Well, he said, somewhat sheepishly, "recently we had Winona Judd in here with her book and 1,100 people showed up."

Jimmy Carter showed up In Dallas recently with his book of poetry and about 2,000 got in line. It makes me think that to get a really, really good turnout you need to be an ex-president, be famous or notorious, serve a term in prison before writing your book, be on TV regularly, or have Oprah endorse what you have written. It might also help if you wrote a bodice-ripper instead of a work of history.

At any rate, I have started doing signings for ONE MAN GREAT ENOUGH. The most successful one so far was at my high school reunion in Tucson, Arizona, two weekends ago. Since they knew me there somewhat and wondered how I ever managed to write a book, I sold out. I have had two other signings since, an evening in the Barnes & Noble on University Avenue in Fort Worth, Texas, where I didn't sell out but had a good time. They still have a pile of the books there, all pre-signed, if anybody is interested. And just this past weekend, November 3, I signed in the corner of a tent at the big Texas Book Festival. A few people managed to find us--I was signing with another Lincoln author, Orville Vernon Burton, who was there with his excellent book, THE AGE OF LINCOLN.

So it goes. In case anybody wants to know how I feel about it all, I say, "Have pen, will sign."