“I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad"

Randall Stephens

What's not to like a about collections of private letters? (Well lots, if you think they are boring, tedious, self-serving, etc.) I almost always enjoy reading the letters of novelists, historians, critics. Collections of letters, like memoirs, make for good reading. You can tell a great deal about an author’s opinions by reading his/her intimate thoughts on all manner of subjects. Often, the more unrestrained the letter writer is, the more interesting the letter.

I recently came across passages on history in the collected letters of two of the most famous authors of the 20th century. Flannery O’Connor makes a passing reference to C. Vann Woodward, while disparaging much of southern historical writing. High praise, indeed, to have O’Connor’s stamp of approval.

Flannery O’Connor to "A," May 25, 1963, Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, pp. 521-22.

I have taken up with reading C. Vann Woodward. Have you ever read this gentleman—Burden of Southern History is what I have but I intend to order off after more. Southern history usually gives me pain, but this man knows how to write English.

C. S. Lewis is far more pessimistic about the history trade. A young fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, Lewis, at least in this 1927 letter to his brother, has little patience for historians. Historians, he laments, typically fail to capture the truth of experience. Lewis’s meditation on “fact” sounds a little like E. H. Carr on the same. Though Lewis is here writing more than three decades before Carr.

Letters like this, though, often reflect the thoughts of a writer in the moment. They are like a snapshot, not a meticulously painted landscape.

C. S. Lewis to his brother, December 12, 1927, in Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters, 1905-1931, 741.

I am almost coming to the conclusion that all histories are bad. Whenever one turns from the historian to the writings of the people he deals with there is always such a difference. What is in my mind at present is (on the one hand) Beowulf and Alfred and the Sagas, and (on the other) Gibbon and Oman about 'the barbarians'. What common measure is there between 'Odoacer had alienated the sympathies of his Italian subjects by seizing a third of the land to reward his veterans' and 'Oft Scyld Scefing overthrew the mead benches of many a kindred. The dwellers round had to obey him across the whale's way. That was a good king . . . So shall a young hero do good and give lordly gifts, that his retainers may repay him when war comes.’ The implication (always present) in the first version that Odoacer oughtn't to have given the land to his men, or that any choice in the matter could have occurred to him, as against the perfectly untroubled sincerity with which the other describes the hero as 'doing good' in scattering the 'lordly gifts' (acquired no doubt at the cost of 'alienating the sympathy' of someone) makes one despair. Then 'his veterans’—memories of Chelsea Hospital! Of course one can see in some sense that the two passages refer to the same sort of fact. But what is left of the 'fact' if you take away both its two 'appearances'? And if you plump for one of them, is that historical truth?

See also these collections in full at Google Books:

The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters (1921)

Letters of Thomas Carlyle to His Youngest Sister (1899)

The Life and Letters of George Bancroft, Volume 2 (1908)

The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll (1898)

Letters of Jane Austin (1905)

The Autobiography and Correspondence of Edward Gibbon, the Historian (1869)

Mark Twain's Letters (1917)

Oscar Wilde: The Story of an Unhappy Friendship, with Portraits and Facsimile Letters (1902)

A Cycle of Adams Letters, 1861-1865, vol. 1 (1920)