Clio's Lives Read online

  Reading his papers, as well as the published work, I realised very vividly

  the constraints on him from lack of access to reliable information about

  the outside world and his attempts to remedy and compensate. I saw that

  only some parts of the outside world were real or relevant to him, like

  a globe with only some regions lighted up, constituting a kind of personal

  epistemological geography, and, moreover, that these lighted-up regions

  were known to him primarily through a finite list of favoured interpreters

  or authorities. This interested me initially as an insight into my father,

  but I also thought it an interesting way to think about Australians in

  the whole period before the ‘tyranny of distance’ was mitigated by plane

  40 Something similar is done by Mark Roseman in The Past in Hiding (London: Allen Lane, 2000), although he was not related to his subject, a Holocaust survivor.

  41 ‘Brian Fitzpatrick and the World Outside Australia’, in Stuart Macintyre and Sheila Fitzpatrick,

  eds, Against the Grain: Brian Fitzpatrick and Manning Clark in Australian History and Politics (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2007), 37–69.

  34

  2 . WRITING HISToRY/WRITING ABouT YouRSELF

  travel and the internet.42 You could see my essay as a kind of tentative

  intervention in scholarly debate on Australian intellectual history, with

  my father as case study; although if this had been its primary purpose

  I would no doubt have published it elsewhere.

  A few years later, in a similar vein, I wrote an article on Misha for a

  transnational memory volume emphasising his dislike of being classified

  by ethnicity or nationality, or indeed in terms of any broader category other

  than theoretical physicist.43 This involved both an assertion of individuality

  and a reaction against the categories imposed on DPs by occupation

  authorities and international organisations, which could determine their

  fate but were also simplifications of a complex situation (as in the case of

  Misha’s nationality/ethnicity) or straight-out misrepresentations. This set

  me thinking about the ambiguities of national/ethnic identity in Eastern/

  Central Europe in the mid-twentieth century, and could have been the

  basis of a scholarly intervention in debate on the topic. But again, I would

  have published it elsewhere and written it up somewhat differently if this

  had been the primary purpose. I did not feel any real uneasiness about

  either of these two publications.

  But, recently, I did something dodgier. I had to write an article for

  a special issue of a scholarly journal on DPs, and the due date was too

  early for me to finish the Paris and Moscow components of my archival

  work on that topic. So I thought, what source base can I use that I have

  basically mastered? The answer was the Danos papers,44 supplemented

  by archival resources of the International Refugee Organization and the

  United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, as well as the

  National Archives of Australia. But in this essay I did not use the Danos

  materials primarily to illuminate the lives and individual personalities of

  Misha and his mother, whose correspondence in the DP period was my

  backbone source. While acknowledging my personal connection to the

  subject, I used these materials to make an intervention in the historians’

  debates about DPs. My argument was that, contrary to much of the

  42 Geoffrey Blainey’s phrase in The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australia’s History (Melbourne: Sun Books, 1966).

  43 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘A World War II Odyssey: Michael Danos, en route from Riga to New

  York’, in Desley Deacon, Penny Russell and Angela Woollacott, eds, Transnational Lives: Biographies of Global Modernity, 1700–Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 252–62.

  44 These include the personal papers still in my possession, plus the Musings from the 1990s, which I have already deposited along with his physics papers with the Michael Danos Papers in the archives of the University of Chicago.

  35

  CLIo'S LIvES

  literature and memoirs that present DPs purely as pawns of fate, DPs

  actually exercised agency in many ways, a range of which I illustrated

  on the basis of case studies of Misha, his mother, and a Latvian friend of

  his who ended up in Australia.45 In short, this was an instrumental use

  of Misha, and I am not sure whether I should have done it. These are

  not doubts about the essay’s professional legitimacy but about something

  more like moral appropriateness. There was nothing substantive in the

  article that would have disturbed Misha, and he would almost certainly

  have agreed with the argument and thought it worth making. I am fairly

  sure that he would not have objected to my writing the book about his

  DP experiences, would even have welcomed it. But, given his resistance to

  categorisation, he might have felt differently about a case study in which

  he was firmly put in the category of DP. Did I cross a line? Does it make

  it any better that the peer reviewer for the journal not only liked the

  argument but also took a great fancy to Misha as an individual personality,

  and sent a message wanting to know more about him? That reaction came

  as a relief to me, and almost felt like a justification. But an uneasiness

  remains.

  I have outlined the various twists and turns of my parallel but sometimes

  intersecting lives as a historian and a memoirist. Along the way, my sense

  of the distance between these two endeavours has narrowed. I see them

  in some ways as contradictory, but that does not particularly bother me:

  life is full of contradictions. The process has made me more self-aware

  than I was earlier about what I am doing when I write, which is probably

  a good thing, and certainly intellectually interesting, at least to me. Above

  all, it has made me see myself as first and foremost a writer whose writing

  happens to be based on historical research, rather than as a researcher

  for whom writing is just the medium for presenting historical findings.

  But a historian-writer is probably what I always wanted to be; I did not

  particularly enjoy the effort in my early years in America to remake myself

  as a social scientist. I do not really believe in history as a science, even

  allowing for the fact that, in the light of chaos theory, real-life natural

  science is a lot less law-bound and predictive than social scientists and

  humanists tend to think.46 In my judgement, historical knowledge is not

  in any important sense cumulative. Historians can make no predictions,

  45 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘“Determined to Get On”: Some Displaced Persons on the Way to a Future’, History Australia, 12:2 (2015), 102–23.

  46 See Michael Danos, ‘Chaostheorie und Geschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 30:2 (2004), 325–38 (posthumous publication prepared by SF).

  36

  2 . WRITING HISToRY/WRITING ABouT YouRSELF

  except about probabilities, and history has no laws. It makes sense to

  me to see historians as practising a craft, using a particular kind of raw

  material, and governed, like all crafts, by various conventions about their

  preparation and use. The writing of history can also be seen as an art, in

  which
our storytelling is shaped (within the conventions of our craft)

  by aesthetic considerations. It is in that capacity, I think, that it comes

  closest to the writing of autobiography, which can scarcely be regarded as

  a distinct craft and is certainly not a science. Clio, the historian’s patron

  saint, was a muse in Greek mythology, and seven of the other eight muses

  personified various arts. Her emblem was an open scroll of parchment.

  Back in the days before objectivity and subjectivity became concepts, she

  probably would have been as happy writing her own history on the scroll

  as that of the Greeks.

  37

  3

  Walvin, Fitzpatrick and Rickard:

  Three Autobiographies of

  Childhood and Coming of Age

  Doug Munro and Geoffrey Gray

  Once a comparatively rare beast, historians’ autobiographies are becoming

  prevalent to the point of being commonplace. Since the 1980s, such works

  have crystallised into a genre and have become a historiographic growth

  area. Limiting the head count to monograph-length works, a dozen

  historians’ memoirs were published in the 1970s, rising to three dozen

  in the 1980s, five dozen in the 1990s, and the contributions continue

  apace.1 Once on the fringes of the historical enterprise, historians’

  memoirs are now edging closer to centre stage. Increasing frequency has

  lent respectability. There remain significant pockets of resistance, the usual

  canards being that autobiography is inescapably egotistical, self-indulgent

  and narcissistic. Nonetheless, the genre is rapidly gaining acceptance

  and being treated seriously – and not simply historians’ autobiographies

  but autobiography by academics generally. Almost without exception,

  historians’ autobiographies contain a chapter or chapters on childhood

  and coming of age. In parallel with the increasing prevalence of historians’

  autobiographies, a subgenre devoted to the childhoods through to the

  1 The figures, which are conservative, are taken from Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians,

  & Autobiography (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 307–22, whose bibliography lists 381 historians’ autobiographies in the English, French and to a lesser extent German languages, of which over 160 are book-length autobiographies, depending on how they are counted.

  39

  CLIo'S LIvES

  young adulthoods of historians has also become a growth area. We are

  concerned in this chapter with three such works: Sheila Fitzpatrick’s

  My Father’s Daughter (2010); John Rickard’s An Imperial Affair (2013);

  and James Walvin’s Different Times (2014).2

  The authors are of the same generation, born within eight years of

  each other, and spent their careers in the academy. All have safely

  passed their three score and 10 years and are still actively publishing,

  especially Fitzpatrick and Walvin. Rickard and Fitzpatrick were born in

  Melbourne, in 1935 and 1941 respectively; the fact that two of the texts

  are by Australians reflects the Australian over-representation of historians’

  memoirs, including those of childhood. After an earlier career in the theatre,

  Rickard became a historian of Australia at Monash University. Fitzpatrick,

  by contrast, carved out a formidable reputation as a historian of modern

  Russia, mostly at the University of Chicago. Walvin, by contrast again,

  was born in 1942 in Failsworth, in the Greater Manchester industrial

  belt. Based at the University of York (UK), Walvin’s research interests are

  many, and the overlap between life and work is evident in Different Times.

  The historian of childhood now writes about his own childhood; the

  historian of Victorian values discusses mid-twentieth-century working-

  class values; the historian of transatlantic slavery (Walvin’s speciality) talks

  about working conditions in the Lancashire cotton mills and hat factories;

  and the historian of soccer includes a chapter on his beloved Manchester

  United and the Munich air disaster of 1958.

  2 Sheila Fitzpatrick, My Father’s Daughter: Memories of an Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2010); John Rickard, An Imperial Affair: Portrait of an Australian Marriage (Melbourne: Monash University Publishing, 2013); James Walvin, Different Times: Growing up in Post-War England (York: Algie Books, 2014). Other historians’ autobiographies of childhood include A.L. Rowse, A Cornish Childhood (London: Jonathan Cape, 1942); Donald Horne,

  The Education of Young Donald (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1967); Richard Cobb, Still Life: Sketches from a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (London: Chatto & Windus, 1983); Amirah Inglis, Amirah: An Un-Australian Childhood (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1983); Bernard Smith, The Boy Adeodatus: The Portrait of a Lucky Young Bastard (Ringwood: Allen Lane, 1984); Ronald Fraser, In Search of a Past: The Manor House, Amnersfield, 1933–1945 (London: Verso, 1984); Manning Clark, The Puzzles of Childhood (Ringwood: Viking, 1989); Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundation and Other Memories of a Melbourne Childhood, 1908–1928 (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1989); Jill Ker Conway, The Road from Coorain (London: Heinemann, 1989); Sydney Checkland, Voices Across the Water: An Anglo-Canadian Boyhood (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press, 1989); Robert Allen Rutland, A Boyhood in the Dustbowl, 1926–1934 (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1996); Peter Gay, My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin (New Haven/London: Yale University Press, 1998); John Molony, Luther’s Pine: An Autobiography (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2004); Helga Griffin, Sing Me that Lovely Song Again … (Canberra: Pandanus Books, 2006); Joachim Fest, Not Me: Memoirs of a German Childhood (London: Atlantic Books, 2012); Arnold J. Bauer, Time’s Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2012).

  40

  3 . WALvIN, FITzPATRICK AND RICKARD

  Contextualising

  It is in the nature of autobiography to be about ‘other things’ and

  ‘other people’ as well as being a depiction of the autobiographer’s

  life, with the result that several types of content will coexist within

  a given autobiography. The back cover blurb describes An Imperial Affair as

  ‘[p]art biography, part autobiography, part social history’. It is also partly

  an autobiography of childhood, partly a family history and, as the subtitle

  goes, a ‘portrait of an Australian marriage’. My Father’s Daughter could

  be characterised as part autobiography, part family history (and also the

  portrait of her parents’ marriage), part biography of her father, and in part

  an exploration of memory.3 The essential point is that childhood memoirs

  can be positioned at various points along a conceptual continuum, with

  autobiography at the one end and family history at the other. An Imperial

  Affair is located at the far end of the spectrum, focusing on Rickard’s

  parents, Philip and Pearl.4 It contains relatively little direct autobiography,

  and thus presents a useful contrast for the purposes of discussion.

  The three books are family histories as well as being childhood

  autobiographies. Individuals are almost always brought up in families,

  which is another ways of saying that there are no exact boundaries between

  a memoir of childhood and a family history. All families have secrets, or

  at least things they wish concealed from the outside world; these hidden

  dimensions can be used as a vehicle for introducing each book. Rickard’s

/>   father Philip started work in 1926 at the Stores and Accounting Branch of

  the recently formed RAAF, rising to the rank of Group Captain. His duties

  involved numerous postings at home and abroad, which meant relocating

  his family or else being separated for extended periods. Handsome and

  personable, Philip needed female companionship, resulting in two affairs.

  Pearl was understandably devastated, especially on the second occasion,

  but to avoid scandal and disgrace, not to mention the effect on the

  children, they patched up their marriage. He ends by quoting the lines in

  a James McAuley poem: ‘they were good people, / They cared for us and

  loved us’ (p. 146).

  3 Equally difficult to categorise are Biff Ward, In My Mother’s Hands: A Disturbing Memoir of Family Life (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2014); Jim Davidson, A Führer for a Father: The Domestic Face of Colonialism (Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2017).

  4 Pearl initially called herself Mildred. For the sake of simplicity, we refer to her as Pearl, irrespective of what time in her life.

  41

  CLIo'S LIvES

  There is also an affair in Different Times, one that was staged inside the

  family home. Shortly after Walvin’s birth in 1942, his father (aged 32) was

  diagnosed with tuberculosis and spent his remaining dozen years coughing

  up his lungs and painfully wasting away. Across the road lived Joe Eyre,

  his best friend from childhood days. Joe had his own cross to bear, from

  the physical and psychological effects of mistreatment in Japanese POW

  camps. Joe visited his old friend on a daily basis and at some point he and

  Emma Walvin began a furtive relationship – resulting in Ian (b. 1952),

  who was the spitting image of his father. On this occasion, there was

  no recrimination, although tittering went on among neighbours and

  relatives. More than 20 years later, Walvin asked Jack (his father’s elder

  brother) ‘about the whole saga of Joe, Mum and the baby. Without a hint

  of disapproval, Jack simply said that our father knew, and didn’t mind’

  (pp. 68–9). In a further twist to the tale, Emma Walvin and Joe Eyre

  never married, although they had plenty of opportunity. Joe was clearly

  in love with Emma, but he never proposed and she married someone else.