Introducing Mr. Trevor-Roper

August 24, 2011 Topics: EthicsHistoryPhilosophy

Introducing Mr. Trevor-Roper

Mini Teaser: For the great historian Hugh Trevor-Roper—whose poison pen spared no ego and whose toxic overconfidence relegated him to a perpetual almost-ran—refusing to become the false prophet of a grand new theory of history was his greatest triumph.

by Author(s): Jacob Heilbrunn

These battles might seem antiquarian, but they possessed a contemporary significance during the Cold War. Trevor-Roper was dispensing with the fanciful Marxist myth that economics was the sole motor of history. Instead, he told his friend Bernard Berenson, “I now believe that pure farce covers a far greater field of history, and that Gibbon is a more reliable guide to that subject than Marx.” Indeed, his next rancorous assault—on Arnold J. Toynbee—delivered one more blow to the civilization-over-nation-states school. Trevor-Roper put paid to the bogus sage. Instead of going at him frontally, he mocked Toynbee, accusing him of trying to establish a surrogate religion with himself as the messiah who saw that the West was doomed. Trevor-Roper accused Toynbee of hoping that the Nazis would triumph during World War II to validate his theories about the flaccidity of the West. He viewed Toynbee as fundamentally “antirational and illiberal.” According to Sisman, “everything that Hugh valued—freedom, reason, the human spirit—Toynbee found odious.” Trevor-Roper’s essay resounded around the world. “The generals of the last war have nothing on the dons,” wrote the novelist V. S. Pritchett in the New York Times. Trevor-Roper also decried John le Carré’s benign description of Kim Philby after he defected to the Soviet Union (Trevor-Roper knew Philby well), condemning it as “rich flatulent puff.” Not for Trevor-Roper the faux moral equivalence between Moscow and London that was the dominant banality on the left. Trevor-Roper enjoyed nothing more than to engage in intellectual fisticuffs. He wrote one friend, “There is nothing so exhilarating as a good battle, I find, especially if one wins it!” Sisman acutely notes, “Combat stimulated him, rousing him from lethargy and curing depression.”

Nowhere did he find more combatants than in Cambridge. Evelyn Waugh once declared, “One honourable course is open to Mr. Trevor-Roper. He should change his name and seek a livelihood at Cambridge.” And so it was. Toward the end of Trevor-Roper’s life, he became Master of Peterhouse. Trevor-Roper likened his move from Oxford to Cambridge to becoming a colonial governor. The fellows, led by the reactionary and brilliant historian Maurice Cowling (his clique was known as the “mafia”), blundered in selecting Trevor-Roper because they believed, among other things, that he would oppose the admission of women into the college. (In fact, Trevor-Roper acceded to their admittance.) The shadow of the historian and former Peterhouse head Herbert Butterfield, who was pro-appeasement and famously attacked the “Whig” interpretation of history, loomed large. One Peterhouse fellow apparently displayed a poster of General Franco in his rooms and wore a black armband on the anniversary of the Spanish dictator’s death. According to Sisman, “distinguished Jewish visitors endured anti-Semitic sneers.” Another fellow was seen, Sisman writes, in a “disreputable London club, dressed as an SS officer.” Trevor-Roper’s detractors also established an undergraduate dining society called “The Authenticators.” Trevor-Roper himself endured seven years of such inanities, confessing that when in the House of Lords he was a Tory and at Peterhouse a Whig. In the end, he outmaneuvered his foes by dislodging a number of college officers. “The Fellows of Peterhouse,” he said, “have been brought to order, if not to life.”

TREVOR-ROPER WANTED to author a history of seventeenth-century England that would rival Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. “I know what to do. To write a book that someone, one day, will mention in the same breath as Gibbon—this is my fond ambition,” he wrote in 1943. It never happened. Instead, his adversaries would argue, he experienced his own very personal decline and fall with the faked Hitler diaries. How much was the impulse to match up to Gibbon by being in on the discovery of a work of monumental importance and how much sheer greed?

The wonder of it remains that Trevor-Roper, who had published a marvelous work, The Hermit of Peking, on the British con man Sir Edmund Backhouse, a legendary sinologist who claimed, among other things, that he had enjoyed affairs with Lord Rosebery, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine and Empress Dowager Cixi, was taken in at all. But since he had spent much of his life in the lucrative trade of authenticating Nazi documents, much as Bernard Berenson had become a millionaire by attesting to the provenance of European paintings for American collectors, so the temptation to be involved in the publication of something as momentous as the putative Hitler diaries must have been almost irresistible.

As he surely knew, the great age of works warning of the perils of empire (Gibbon) or hailing it (Lord Macaulay) had probably passed. After the Holocaust, the idea of inevitable progress championed by the Whigs suffered a brutal reversal. And as much as Hugh Trevor-Roper wanted to emblazon his reputation with the mark of a great work, he was not about to enunciate a fresh, bogus grand theory of history or make it the plaything of a conservative political agenda, one that trumpeted Little England against the European continent. Quite the contrary. Trevor-Roper rightly shunned ideology. He was writing at a moment when history could not plausibly claim to hold the key to humanity’s problems, as it had during the Enlightenment when Hume and Gibbon could produce sweeping philosophical works. He recognized, as the Gibbon scholar David Womersley has discerningly put it, that

The moment of history’s intellectual hegemony had passed, perhaps never to return. Truly to emulate Gibbon was now impossible, and those who attempted it, such as Toynbee, succeeded in producing only gassy, shapeless, unhistorical monsters.

Trevor-Roper’s highest aim was to write history as literature rather than to pretend it could be an exact science, commanding a kind of omniscience.

In retrospect, Trevor-Roper was the last exemplar of the humanist historical tradition that ran from Hume to Gibbon, from Macaulay to G. M. Trevelyan. In the end, he was unable to continue it. He assayed the essay, not the great book. The deliquescence of the British Empire meant that the era of the celebrated nationalist historian had reached a terminus. “Honoring [Macaulay],” as his new biographer Robert E. Sullivan observes, “amounted to honoring England.” That was no longer possible. And yet the memory of the empire remains most alluring for those who never experienced its heyday. The generation of historians mocked in The History Boys has tried to resuscitate the grand style. Andrew Roberts invokes Churchill, who also modeled his writing style on Gibbon, in the title of his lengthy work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, while Niall Ferguson chronicles what he sees as the rise and fall of the West in his latest book Civilization, complete with lucubrations about the perils that the East has always posed to the West, as though Christendom were once more menaced by the depredations of the Turk (when what the Turks really want is to become members of the European Union). By now these efforts carry a strained and faintly parodic air with them. It is as though an American president were to wear a top hat or David Cameron carry a nosegay. It requires a distinct sense of self-importance for historians even to adopt such swollen titles and subjects as the decline of the West. As the British historian J. C. Stobart already observed in 1911 about Gibbon, “The mere notion of empire continuing to decline and fall for five centuries is ridiculous” and indicates that “this is one of the cases which prove that History is made not so much by heroes or natural forces as by historians.”

Trevor-Roper knew better. It wasn’t simply that his fecund social life stole time away from his research and writing. Rather, he likely knew his own limits. And had he not lived such a glittering lifestyle, moving from one country house to the next and consorting with the “quality,” he probably would never have merited such an absorbing biography. Trevor-Roper may have committed many sins, but never the deadliest one of being tedious.

Pullquote: What Trevor-Roper admired was style and flair, the bold insight, not the tedious accumulation of detail for its own sake.Image: Essay Types: Book Review