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  forward the substantive findings of the contributing authors but defining

  their combined significance and identifying productive directions for

  future research. Barbara Caine’s reflective concluding chapter addresses

  these wider questions, and underlines the inseparability of biography

  and autobiography from historical understanding in the context of the

  evolving historiographies of the early to mid-twenty-first century. Indeed,

  Caine identifies the emerging focus on the lives of historians as nothing

  less than ‘a new way of writing the history of history, both as a discipline

  and as a profession’. Purely institutional or methodological approaches

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  1 . INTRoDuCTIoN

  thus give way to studies informed by ‘the impact of particular forms

  of family life and education, of personal outlook, and especially of social

  networks on the work of historians’. While challenges inevitably arise from

  acknowledging the role in historical writing of imagination and indeed of

  personal myth-making by the historian, nevertheless Caine is confident

  – as expressed in a phrase that we are happy to make the conclusion

  of this Introduction, as well as ultimately of the book as a whole – that

  the currently ‘wide and ever-growing interest in historians’ autobiography

  and biography will fundamentally change the ways in which we see, think

  about and write history’.

  13

  Autobiographies

  of Historians

  2

  Writing History/Writing about

  Yourself: What’s the Difference?1

  Sheila Fitzpatrick

  According to Philippe Lejeune, writers of autobiography implicitly sign

  a pact with the reader to tell the truth, or at least the truth as they know

  it, about themselves.2 That is, primarily a subjective truth. As for facts,

  the expectation is presumably that autobiographers will convey the facts

  as they know or remember them, but without a necessary obligation

  to check their memory through documentary or other research. There

  is no autobiographer’s commitment to objectivity, rather the contrary.

  The autobiographical truth is, by definition, a subjective one.

  Historians do not have an explicit pact, and the theoretical assault of the

  past 20–30 years on objectivity as a historians’ goal, as well as the rise of oral

  history and memory studies, have muddied the waters. However, I think

  most historians (at least outside the cultural field) would assume that their

  task is to ‘get the story right’, implying an obligation of factual accuracy

  based on careful research in archives and other primary sources, which

  are referenced in such a way as to allow others to check their accuracy.

  Cultural historians are partial exceptions, since they may be after somewhat

  1 Part of this chapter draws on a short essay, ‘Demoyte’s Grey Suit: Writing Memoirs, Writing History’, published in Australian Book Review, 362 (June–July 2014), 26–30, which was itself an abridged version of my Ward Lecture, ‘Writing Memoirs, Writing History’, delivered at the University of Sydney on 27 March 2014.

  2 Philippe Lejeune, Le pacte autobiographique (Paris: Seuil, 1975).

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  different goals, such as recovering forgotten ‘voices’, or analysing how

  historical events have been remembered and mythologised, represented

  in different contexts and by different groups. The obligation of accuracy

  here must be accuracy of reproduction and representation. Historians who

  focus on memory are perhaps the least committed to the positivist goal

  of ‘getting it right’, since a certain relativism about the actual past is built

  in to the exploration of ways people remember it. This same relativism,

  however, tends to incline them towards a stance of detachment rather

  than advocacy.

  This essay will offer an account of the problems and issues that arose

  when I, being a historian by trade, started writing autobiography but

  continued to write history. Whether I am writing as an autobiographer

  or as a historian is a moot point; I hope historians will not find it too

  self-indulgent. The main question to be pursued is how the experience

  changed my stance on and understanding of the objectivity/subjectivity

  discussion. I will conclude with an examination of territory that I find still

  trickier than writing about my own life, namely: writing, as a historian,

  about the life of someone close to me, to whom I feel a strong commitment

  of loyalty.

  As I was taught in the history department of the University of Melbourne

  in the 1950s, the historian’s task was to strive for objectivity. We were

  like scientific experimenters, not letting anything contaminate our

  experimental data. Full objectivity was, of course, not realisable, but it was

  a goal to which one needed to get as close as possible. The personal and

  the partisan were biases and distortions that would prevent you getting

  at ‘truth’. If you wanted to offer a subjective view (so the conventional

  wisdom went), write literature or propaganda, not history. Nevertheless,

  the Melbourne approach to history, at least in my time, was not inimical

  to the idea of the writing of history as an art or craft rather than a science.

  I encountered social science imperatives for the first time on arriving in

  the United States in the 1970s, and for a while attempted to satisfy them

  and suppress the literary impulses that came more naturally to me.

  For a long time, I was a true believer in the objective approach to writing

  history, primarily because I found myself working in America during

  the Cold War as a historian of the Soviet Union. With Soviet historians

  writing blatantly biased accounts of their own history (their work going

  through censorship to make sure they got the bias right), and American

  scholars writing pretty blatantly biased accounts of ‘the empire of evil’

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  2 . WRITING HISToRY/WRITING ABouT YouRSELF

  from their side, the only possible stance seemed defiant objectivity, or the

  refusal to take sides. Of course, it was a stance that got me into trouble

  with both sides. The attitude in US Sovietology in the 1970s was that if

  you were not unmistakably ‘anti-Soviet’, you must be pro. The Soviets

  were even more insistent on this dichotomy, and moreover added their

  own Marxist rider that the claim to be objective was in itself a political

  stance of non-sympathy with the Soviet Union. They called people like

  me ‘so-called objective bourgeois historians’. At least that was a better

  category than the other one available to non-communist foreigner

  historians of the Soviet Union: ‘bourgeois falsifiers’.

  By the 1990s, the Cold War was over, more or less, and within the

  historical profession, objectivity was getting a bad name and subjectivity

  was getting interesting. The moment I remember becoming aware of

  this trend was when I moved to the University of Chicago in 1990 and

  gave a talk to the department on my work, giving my usual critique of

  politicised history in the Soviet context, and our black and feminist

  historians glared at me and said: What’s wrong with politicis
ed history?

  I saw that the issue of advocacy history was a bit more complicated than

  I had thought, but I still did not want to write it myself. Objectivity and

  detachment might, I conceded, be considered an emotional (subjective)

  choice like any other for historians, but, if so, it was my choice.3 Feeling

  detached came naturally to me (and not just as a historian), so I was going

  to stick with it.

  There were lots of problems of bias and selectivity surrounding the

  published and even the archival materials I worked with as a Soviet

  historian. Thus, I added a highly developed scepticism about the reliability

  of sources and alleged facts to my temperamental stance of detachment.

  My historical subjects, I found, often did their best to mislead and hide

  their real selves and purposes from me. That is particularly true of political

  history, which I tackled obliquely in my first book,4 and have recently

  returned to with On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet

  3 See the interesting discussion in Paul White, ‘The Emotional Economy of Science: Introduction’, Isis, 100:4 (2009), 792–7, doi.org/10.1086/652019, and the articles that follow.

  4 Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970). One of the subthemes of this book was the post-revolutionary discovery by the new Bolshevik leaders of the importance of institutional interest in politics, once you are running the state and not just planning revolution.

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  Politics.5 Stalin was a great self-mystifier with a talent not only of fashioning

  himself for history but also of fashioning his archive for historians. But it’s

  true of any kind of history about people who left records. They give you

  an account of what they did and why they did it, but that account is spun

  for the audience and the record; the trick is to find out what they actually

  did and why (to the extent this is knowable) they really did it. Perhaps

  I go too far in my suspicious approach to all statements of motive (one of

  my books is called Tear off the Masks);6 while I am not a Marxist historian,

  I think it is one of the things I picked up early on from Marx, the great

  unmasker. Stalin picked it up too, and he certainly took suspicion to an

  extreme. The objects of his suspicion included historians who insisted on

  scrabbling in archives without a fixed conviction about what they were

  going to find there. He called them ‘archive rats’.7

  Stalin was proud of not letting people pull the wool over his eyes.

  He particularly prided himself on knowing that whenever a bureaucracy

  asks for money, its people are lying about their actual resources and

  exaggerating their needs. This is something historians should remember,

  too. Institutional archives – that is, the records of government bureaucracies

  – are basically telling the story from the institution’s point of view. Their aim

  is self-justification, often in complex turf wars with other institutions, not

  the gathering of objective and reliable data for the use of future historians.

  The same applies, a fortiori, to personal archives, even if not everyone is so

  upfront about it as Manning Clark, who (as Mark McKenna has told us)8

  left explanatory notes and cross-references for the biographers’ guidance

  in his papers. As a historian, you should never have a happy relationship

  of trust with your sources and the data they offer you. Your sources and

  your data are all, in the nature of things, biased.

  Given my favoured stance of detachment and my well-honed scepticism

  about source bias, I seemed the last person who ought to be writing memoir

  or autobiography. In fact, it did not occur to me to do so until in 2006

  Louise Adler of Melbourne University Press heard me give a short talk on

  5 Sheila Fitzpatrick, On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously in Soviet Politics (Princeton and Melbourne: Princeton University Press and Melbourne University Press, 2015), doi.org/10.1515/

  9781400874217.

  6 Sheila Fitzpatrick, Tear off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth-Century Russia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

  7 I.V. Stalin, ‘O nekotorykh voprosakh istorii bol’shevizma’ (1931), in J.V. Stalin, Sochineniia, vol. 13 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1951), 96.

  8 Mark McKenna, An Eye for Eternity: The Life of Manning Clark (Melbourne: Miegunyah Press, 2011), 28–34.

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  2 . WRITING HISToRY/WRITING ABouT YouRSELF

  my father (the radical historian Brian Fitzpatrick), and suggested I write

  a memoir about him. I thought that might be not only an interesting but

  also a useful thing to do, given that I had not really managed to come to

  terms with him in the four decades since his death, just stopped thinking

  about him. So I did a trial run in a ‘Diary’ essay for the London Review

  of Books,9 and when people wrote in to say they recognised him, that he

  had become a living person to them, I was hooked. I thought of it initially

  purely as a memoir of my father.

  When writing his autobiography, A.J.P. Taylor said nothing about his

  second marriage, in deference to the objections of his second wife, who

  had made it clear that any mention of her in the book would almost

  certainly result in legal proceedings. It did, as Taylor acknowledged, result

  in ‘some odd gaps’, which he might not have countenanced had he been

  writing a biography of, say, Lord Beaverbrook.10 In fact, it is tempting to

  do things like omitting a marriage you do not like to remember. But as

  I got deeper into the business of writing autobiography, I decided that

  would be cheating. I also decided that in some special circumstances,

  you are allowed to cheat, though preferably with some warning to the

  reader (which Taylor gives) that a personal censor has been at work.

  My methodology in writing My Father’s Daughter 11 was more or less that

  of a historian, despite the fact that I was basically interested in conveying

  personality and relationships, which had not been a primary endeavour

  (or at least not recognised as such) in any of my historical works.

  I started by writing down everything I could remember about my

  childhood under chapter headings, not looking anything up, treating my

  memory as a primary source that I was transcribing. Then I expanded

  my source base as in any other historical research project: reading the

  documents, doing oral history to check my memory against others’,

  trying to square and check the various accounts. My approach was so

  much that of a historian that I even included a bibliography and list of

  archival sources at the end. Still, I was startled by the discrepancies of

  the various oral accounts and documents, and even more by the fact that

  things that I subjectively believed – knew – to be really important in my

  life had somehow not made it into the historical record. I saw that if I had

  9 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘Diary’, London Review of Books, 8 February 2007.

  10 A.J.P. Taylor, A Personal History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983), x.

  11 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbour
ne: Melbourne University Press, 2010).

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  CLIo'S LIvES

  been another historian working just with that record – that is, without

  my own memory and sense of the ‘truth’ about my life – that historian

  would have (from my point of view) got it wrong.12 At that point, I had

  a sudden fear that perhaps I would never be able to write history again. If

  a historian who was not me could not get my life right without my help,

  how was I going to get Stalin right, even leaving aside the fact that he, the

  great mystifier, was consciously out to hinder me?

  Then there was the awkward question of my memory, used by me as

  a primary source. If it is part of historians’ Hippocratic Oath not to trust

  their sources, why am I trusting this one? But then, as a memoirist, what

  choice do I have? What you remember and what you believe to be the

  truth about your life are impossible to separate. One can, of course, argue

  that the genre of memoir allows for more detachment than autobiography;

  perhaps here the implicit pact (à la Lejeune) is to tell a story about

  yourself and your times that is based on personal memories, but only

  those memories that are deemed relevant to the times experienced – in

  other words, something less than full disclosure as far as personal life

  is concerned. In any case, memory is the basic source in both genres.

  So how do we accommodate that basic scepticism about sources that,

  as a historian, I have been preaching?

  There is only so much scepticism that memoirists can deploy about

  their own memory. To be sure, you can play around at the margins,

  as I did in My Father’s Daughter, telling readers where my memory of

  events was contested by other people’s memories (for example, the ‘hate

  Sheila’ campaign at school, vividly remembered by me, but denied

  by my schoolfriends),13 or had been found to be inaccurate (the song

  I remembered my friend Camilla Maxwell singing in 1958, which

  turned out not to have been written until two years later).14 But basically

  you have made a pact to tell the truth about yourself and your life,

  and your memory is the only access you have to that. So my memory

  misdated Camilla’s song, and on top of that I passed the false memory