The History Boys film gets me all wrong
The villainous teacher in the play, now a movie, is partly based on Andrew Roberts. But, he writes, Alan Bennett fails to grasp that revisionist history is not based on a desire to be contrary I’ve been assaulted by a National Treasure. Alan Bennett, whose awardwinning play The History Boys premiers as a movie this week, has cited my fellow historian Niall Ferguson and me as the inspiration for the loathsome, creepy, shallow, pederastic ‘TV historian’ character called Irwin, who represents all that is wrong about the presentation of the past in Britain. In the play — which has already enjoyed a run of over 400 performances in the National Theatre and on Broadway — Irwin’s character is so repellent that audiences are delighted when he suffers an accident that leaves him wheelchair-bound.
To have been the inspiration for one of the great villains of the international cinema eviscerated by no less a literary paladin than Alan Bennett — was therefore within my grasp. I would be a cultural footnote, enjoying a fame that would last long after my own books were dust. I might even put ‘Villain in Alan Bennett play’ in my Who’s Who entry.
Every writer has to develop a rhinoceros hide against criticism, so the fact that a stranger disliked my work did nothing to prick the pachydermatous layers of self-protection I’ve grown over the years. Imagine my disappointment, therefore, when I watched a preview of the movie and discovered that, far from being the hateful representative of all that is dreadful about modern society, Irwin has been turned into a rather sympathetic character. My hopes of undying fame as a popular hate-figure slipped away. True, Irwin is still a fraud who lies about his educational achievements, belittles the Holocaust and plans to perform fellatio on one of his pupils — he’s still characterised as a ‘reckless, immoral’ teacher — but he is played in the movie by Stephen Campbell Moore as an essentially good chap.
The central argument of both the play and the film is about the difference between Knowledge and Education. ‘Knowledge is not general, it is specific,’ says the hero, the schoolteacher Hector (played by Richard Griffiths), ‘and nothing to do with getting on.’ His General Studies classes are spent creating ‘rounded human beings’ out of eight brilliant Oxbridge candidates who are able to sing fluently in French, quote reams of Stevie Smith, debate the origins of the Great War and recite by heart the closing sequences of Brief Encounter. They are humorous, friendly, sophisticated, intensely respectful of each other’s sexual and racial differences, and together present Civilisation at its best.
Hector’s idyllic, Platonic form of pure education is shattered by the arrival of Irwin, the temporary contract teacher, whom the homophobic, results-obsessed, snobbish headmaster Felix has drafted in to unnerve and subsequently displace Hector. For Irwin, a devotee of revisionist history, ‘Truth is no more at issue in an exam than thirst at a winetasting or fashion at a striptease.’ When Irwin criticises a boy’s essay for being dull, and is told that at least it was all true, he explodes, ‘What’s truth got to do with it? What’s truth got to do with anything?’ In one of his interviews for the movie, Alan Bennett said of Niall Ferguson and me, ‘Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse.’ The possibility that Niall and I might genuinely believe the things we write seems to have simply passed Bennett by. It is all done solely to shock, and to collect dividends. For him, an approach to history that ignores the left-liberal assumptions of so much post-war history teaching — especially at universities — simply has to be actuated by a desire to be perverse, since it cannot possibly have been arrived at objectively.
How staggeringly arrogant it is of the Left in general, and Bennett in particular, to think that there is a Truth, of which they are the natural custodians, and that deviation from this monolithic concept is a priori proof either of a contrarian nature or of avarice. When, as in my latest book, A History of the EnglishSpeaking Peoples Since 1900, I question the received left-liberal interpretations of the Amritsar Massacre, Wall Street Crash or Suez Crisis — let alone the ‘crimes’ of Dresden, Hiroshima and Guantanamo — or when Niall writes about the Great War in Pity of War or American imperialism in Colossus — it is not out of a desire to shock but simply because we fundamentally disagree with the standard, Guardian bien pensant analysis of those events, and we want to get a different view across, backed up by evidence gleaned from our researches.
‘If you want to know about Stalin,’ Irwin tells his Oxbridge class, ‘think of Henry VIII. If you want to know about Thatcher, think of Henry VIII.’ Quite apart from subtly connecting Margaret Thatcher with Joseph Stalin — the play is set in the year of her post-Falklands election victory — the teacher’s line is one of very many in the play that implies that the Roberts-Ferguson figure consistently underrates the evil of 20th-century totalitarianism. By insisting that the Holocaust is seen in the context of other genocides, for example, Irwin lays himself open to criticism from the beloved teacher Hector and the Jewish pupil Posner that he is indifferent to the monstrous evil perpetrated by the dictators. ‘I was so nice about Hitler, a much-misunderstood man,’ says one of Irwin’s pupils as he leaves his Oxbridge exam.
This is where I came to doubt whether Bennett, for all his willingness to attack our work, actually knows of anything Niall or I have ever written. We might make easy targets because of our Toryism, but to attack either of us for harbouring even the slightest David Irving-ite tendencies is utterly absurd, as a reading of any of our books would immediately show. ‘Say something different, say the opposite,’ Irwin tells his class, but while such a puerile spirit of contrariness might cover a three-hour exam answer, it would hardly sustain either Niall or me over the three years or so that it takes to write a history book.
When the adorable Hector — whose essential decency is denoted by his enormous fatness, three-piece suits and bow-tie — dies in a motorcycle accident, it is only moments after he has been unmasked for fondling his pupils’ genitals in broad daylight. Irwin has similar paedophile inclinations. One of the male pupils is gay, another offers his male teacher sex at the weekend. Gomorrah comes to 1980s Yorkshire. Yet nothing in The History Boys is quite so shocking as the idea that in this postpostmodern world the Left is the guardian of something called the Truth. To criticise Attlee, socialism and the welfare state, as I do in my new book, is quite obviously ‘reckless, immoral’ and presented as being on the same slippery slope as Holocaust denial. What is more, I am only doing it, says our National Treasure, out of perversity and greed.
All history is a rewriting of what has been said before, and almost all of it is undertaken for proper motives. In the avalanche of praise that The History Boys movie is already garnering, not least for Nicholas Hytner’s direction, I should like to point out that its central message is nonetheless complete rubbish. And I’m not just saying that because I want to ‘say something different, say the opposite’.
The History Boys goes on general release on 13 October.
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