‘Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past’By Richard CohenSimon & Schuster, 784 pagesRichard Cohen’s book begins with an epigraph from Jorge Luis Borges about a man who sets out to draw the world and realizes shortly before he dies that he has drawn the lineaments of his own face.Mr. Cohen contends that those who tell history are telling histories of themselves. His conceit should thrill biographers and novelists and outrage the historians who insist history can be separated from the historian. Indeed, to say otherwise, in their view, jeopardizes the very enterprise of writing history as objectively as possible.Herodotus liked to tell anecdotes and his histories are anecdotal. Thucydides, a failed warrior, put himself back into the action by re-creating speeches in a kind of you are there drama. It is surprising that Mr. Cohen, given his interest in televised historical re-enactments, does not make the connection between the earliest accounts of history and what is common fare in documentaries today.Mr. Cohen does not limit himself to a conventional sense of who is a historian. He thinks Ken Burns is as good as any historian working today. The same is true for novelists like Toni Morrison, who provides a vivid depiction of slavery and its aftermath that is more powerful than any historical account — or so I presume, since he spends so much time on her work. The buoyant Whig interpretation of history, Mr. Cohen argues, cannot really be separated from the ebullient Thomas Babington Macaulay. Similarly, the rotund Edward Gibbon, who needed help getting off his knees during a proposal, writes history with an irony that has much to do with his own sense of being outside of the action. In short, Mr. Cohen is very ecumenical in his notion of who can tell history, and why who tells it matters. He says a sharply observant foreign correspondent, Martha Gellhorn, renders a much better first draft of history than her sometime husband, the preening Ernest Hemingway. Plenty of pages are devoted to women, African Americans, diarists of all sorts, Islamic historians, Chinese historians — the book is a valiant democratic effort.For a historiographer, however, Mr. Cohen presents a problem. He evinces very little interest in how over many generations biography and history form a pattern that subsumes the individuality of historians. For this kind of perspective, he would have needed to write about Herbert Butterfield’s seminal work, “George III and the Historians” (1957).A more glaring omission is the work of Rebecca West, especially her masterpiece, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1951), in which she debates with her husband about how her personality and the personalities of others infect the history they have to tell — in this case, about the Balkans, but also about the advent of World War II and the fate of the West.Of course, it is easy to quarrel with Mr. Cohen, to point out writers and filmmakers he could have included or said more about. But the problem with his book is more fundamental: Too often it reads like a string of anecdotes fascinating in themselves, but without the sort of dialectical search for truth that distinguishes writers like Butterfield and West. Yet for sheer information, delivered in a thoughtful lively way, Mr. Cohen’s book cannot be surpassed. He brings to life both the ancient and modern worlds, and mounts a heroic effort to restore narrative history to primacy, chiding academic historians for confining themselves to specialist analyses of brief periods of history.Mr. Cohen has his heroes, whom we should cheer: the French historian Marc Bloch, who helped the Resistance and was murdered by Nazis, and W.E.B. Dubois, who went searching through the South, at some risk to his personal safety, for primary sources that white historians overlooked or suppressed in telling their version of Reconstruction.Mr. Cohen might well say this review is an example of confirmation bias: the searching for information, or the lack of such, that confirms my choices and beliefs regarding the making of history. As any reviewer, I have judged the book, like history, on my terms. To him, I can only say, you left out a discussion of “Absalom, Absalom!” — perhaps the profoundest exploration of how history is told by examining those who tell it. What else can I say, Mr. Cohen? You got me.Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Beautiful Exile : The Life of Martha Gellhorn,” “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl,” and “Uses of the Past in the Novels of William Faulkner”
