Book Review: Scribble, Scribble, Scribble

Published on Friday 27 August 2010 21:21

Scribble, Scribble, Scribble by Simon Schama Bodley Head, 464pp, £20

"ANOTHER damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr Gibbon?" is what a witless 18th-century toff is said to have exclaimed when presented, by the author, with the latest volume of his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. So it's a good, self-depreciating title for a collection of essays from a historian — and, at 420-odd pages, it is rather a damned, thick, square book. But it really is very good.

As the subtitle – Writing on Ice Cream, Obama, Churchill and My Mother –is at pains to make clear, this isn't just more of the same by that historical bloke off the telly. Schama can write about matters other than the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind, which is how Gibbon described history. He can indeed write about ice cream, not only from the perspective of a post-war Anglo-Jewish childhood — "Joe (Lyon]'s ice creams were then British and Jewish, just like us! … The opposition's — Wall's — could not have been more deeply goyische, since they also made pork sausages … which of course made the temptation to dally with the forbidden food irresistible" — but from the point of view of someone who can give us workable-looking recipes for the stuff.

And from the evidence of the other essays on food here, it would appear that you should not turn down an invitation to dine chez Schama should you get the chance.

And the conversation would be pretty tasty, too. When he is writing on the grander subjects, Schama manages to be, almost all at the same time, witty, learned, informative and clarifying. (And most enjoyably stylistic. He has absorbed, in ways the modern ear is happy with, the cadences of Carlyle and Ruskin.)

At home in both the American and British contemporary political arenas, as well as in the larger European historical one, there would seem to be no subject about which Schama doesn't have something useful or interesting to say.

If, at times, he seems to be a little pleased with himself, that would be because he has much to be pleased about.

When you are writing about Isaiah Berlin, for instance, it is a good idea to be able to match him for eloquence, command and readability — and Schama manages it. If you are going to engage with Churchill's oratory, it helps to have some rhetorical panache yourself (at the risk of the odd incorrect "whom", as on p360). And if you are going to write about 9/11, both two days after the event and on its anniversary, it takes great tact, insight and what might as well be called moral fortitude not to descend into the traps of platitude, blind wrath or glibness. Schama's take on the event is certainly one of the best you will have read.

You will not like Schama, though, if you are a dyed-in-the-wool Republican blowhard. It's easy to mock such people from our side of the pond but Schama doesn't just mock: he skewers them, and although I wouldn't, myself, invent a word such as "bloviator" to describe them, I wouldn't have the deep knowledge of their pedigree to give myself the licence to invent such terms if I felt like it.

Schama is, in his own words, a "card- carrying liberal", in the finest sense of the term, and we should be grateful that he's around, sticking up for enlightenment values — indeed, embodying them himself.

From the evidence gathered here, he could have been an art or theatre critic had he chosen not to be a historian. He's almost exasperatingly multi-faceted. Long may he scribble.