An entangled cow preferred to heroism
Patrick Marnham
PEOPLE AND PLACES by Richard Cobb
Oxford University Press, f12.50
In the army of historians he is a scruffy lieutenant permanently on retreat from Moscow. He agrees with Zazie when she says: 'Napoleon, mon cul. Il m'interesse pas du tout, cet enfle, avec son chapeau a la con.' This is hardly the order of the scholarly battle favoured, for example, by Maj-Gen Sir Arthur Bryant. Richard Cobb is, by contrast, the historian of the normal, the everyday, and he has become adept at exposing how very abnormal the normal frequently is. He circles the great event, he is bored by the dramatic moment, the heroic usually excites his contempt.
Cobb's history is not so much unheroic as anti-heroic. It is entirely typical of him that his selected memory of Normandy five weeks after D-Day should be the cow that entangled itself in his tent, so causing the structure to collapse on top of him. Not for Cobb the skirl of pipes and the flak-torn beach; instead there is the wind from the south-west, 'bringing a steady low rumble and the same cloying smell'. He seems to have spent much of 'Bastille Day 1944', the title of one of the essays included in this collection, in Bayeaux under close arrest. We already know from another book, French and Germans, Germans and
French, that when the British Army and Lieut. Cobb achieved the liberation of Brussels, the latter was more impressed by the speed with which British military equipment and uniforms were on sale in the flea markets off the Porte de Hal than he was by the more widely remarked speed of the armoured division's advance. The fact that the goods included boots clinched, for Cobb, the likelihood that Brussels was full of British deserters three days after its liberation, clear evidence of an impending return to civilian sanity.
In his anxiety to debunk the heroic, Cobb sometimes stretches the point. Con- vinced, for example, of the unsatisfactory nature of the French Communist Resist- ance, Cobb suggests, in French and Ger- mans . ., that the dead heroes of the Resistance whose names have so often been given to Paris streets were indistinguish- able in ruthlessness and cruelty from the SS men they died opposing. When he writes, War is an unnatural state from which any soldier will endeavour to escape, given the slightest opportunity', he is persuasive. But in remarking with delight the frequently unmilitary spirit of conscripted armies he seems to forget that there could have been no return to ordinary civilian life in Europe in the 1940s without countless acts of military heroism. They can't all have been in bad taste.
There is no need to apologise, in the case of this author, for spending some time on books other than the one under review, since only a fortnight ago he himself in this paper, charged with the grave task of judging the merits of no fewer than four books on the subject of Klaus Barbie, dismissed the lot in two paragraphs, while permitting himself two and a half columns for a delightfully learned topographical essay on the city of Lyon. Having just spent six weeks in that city I was able to follow this tour with enjoyment although there must have been other readers who felt, just for a sentence or two, slightly lost. I was even able to note a topographical error. The five young men shot by Barbie in the Place Bellecour died on the corner of rue Gasparin, not rue de la Republique. This was clearly a deliberate professorial slip, a hang over from the lecture halls, intended to test the alertness of his readers,
Nor is there any need to apologise for reviewing a previous book review, since one of the best essays in People and Places, `Brassai's Paris', first appeared as a review in this paper in July 1983. The piece should be included by the publishers in all future editions of Brassai's The Secret Paris of the 30's. Anyone who can read Cobb's essay and not wish to catch the first train to Paris should never have been taught to read, even though that city, the city evoked by Brassai and Cobb, the Ville-Lumiere, is now dead, and its citizens, 'more joyful, more uninhibited, more eccentric, less conformist . . . somehow more French than the chlorophylic inhabitants of the Hexagone of the 1980s', are now ghosts. Readers of Cobb can never be entirely sure what to expect next. His last book A Classical Education, though not so de- scribed, seemed to be the macabre after- math of a schoolboy touche taken, on one side, beyond the point of reason. There is nothing quite so bizarre in the present collection; we visit Aberystwyth in 1955, meet Simenon at 80, and then Simenon's mother, make two calls on the Parisian demi-monde and undertake a lengthy tour of the Bon Marche department store with its essential distinction, for the people who worked there, between those who stood and those who were seated. Various French historians are introduced and extol- led but there is nothing which quite match- es Cobb's introduction to his own book, A Sense of Place where he defines the histo- rian's art: History has always remained for me very much the depiction of place, of ambience, as well as of narrative . . . it has always appeared to me as inseparable from litera- ture; this awareness . . may be one of my principal faults as an historian, for I believe that history is a creative art, and not a mere exercise in research, scholarship and mea- sured judgment.
. . One just went to the records, read them, thought about them, read some more, and the records would do the rest, they would dictate the exact limits of the subject, and provide both inspiration and material. All the historian had to do was to be able to read and, above all, to write clearly and agree- ably.
This is a wonderfully simple definition, the key words being 'thought about them', and although it omits the essential quality of judgment — the ability to distinguish the illuminating detail from the red herring which Cobb possesses in abundance, it serves very well to put the technicians and methodologists in their place.
For examples of the literary felicity which Cobb values so highly the reader may note a sentence, on page 15 of People and Places which is, I think, 219 words long. After the 154th word there is a colon, followed by the words 'in short . .' That is confident. On page 121 this confidence grows to audacity when the word 'but' is introduced. Jacques Mesrine, we are told, was a 'a monster, a boaster, a show-off with his silly card tricks, a cold-blooded killer, and a torturer. . . . but'. One moves on to the rest of this sentence with some anticipation. He turns out to have been `something of a Parisian poet'; a man, in short, with a sense of place.
The introduction offers one intriguing glimpse of the historian in his favourite place, his place of work, not the library.
'I have been listening to elderly people most of my life, certainly from the age of ten or twelve; and I think I can always give a convincing impression of attentiveness, even when the record has quite clearly got stuck.'
In their repetitions, Cobb suggests, old people, like police records, reveal a scale of values 'that may be of great use to the historian who has acquired an ear attuned to such litanies.' Such asides and insights punctuate this collection of essays, the work of a• man who understands the im- portance of unimportant lives, a grave- robber who enriches our knowledge of the past by confining himself to paupers' graves.
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