E.H. Carr

Last Monday was, by modern standards, a reasonably eventful day. The House passed the Civil Rights Bill, Nationalist China broke diplomatic relations with France, and white students boycotted a school in Alabama.

In Winthrop's Guest Suite, however, the day's events couldn't have seemed more remote. Visiting E.H. Carr, the noted British historian who is spending six weeks at Harvard, was like stepping onto a very white, very soft cloud and drifting off into a sky of milk. As he lay back on his sofa and slowly fingered his white hair, Carr talked about the past, present, future and himself with a simple, contented smile and an almost unbelievable optimism.

Carr, now 71, stopped teaching about nine years ago, and is currently living at Harvard to study the Trotsky archives in Houghton and Widener. He has already published six large volumes on Soviet history; the seventh will probably come out sometime next month. He claims he isn't trying "to prove anything" by writing about Russia, but merely hopes his study will help "throw some light on what motivates the Russians."

Carr is rather vague, in fact, about his role as a historian. Dissociating himself from the squabbles of scholarly journals, he says that he avoids "writing history for the historians." He likes to assume "I'm writing for intelligent people who want to understand something about their past. You can't understand the present unless you've some sort of experience and know how things are apt to work." When he published What Is History? a few years ago, Carr wrote it only as a "sort of diversion," not as a serious espousal of historical determinism. "I just felt like reflecting on what one does when one writes history."

In the famous last chapter of What Is History?, Carr expressed considerable faith in the progress of mankind. Since then, he has been accused of naivete by a number of British historians who find considerably fewer reasons for hope in the modern world. Carr will have nothing to do with them. "I guess you might say I have a sort of faith in the future which is unlikely to be seriously shaken. I have confidence that the world has a direction. I'm not saying, of course, that every move in the game is a step forward, but I would look to the more promising aspects of modern society."

Carr finds particularly promising the growth of political consciousness in the world. He isn't bothered by the claims of men like Erich Fromm that the rise of modern society has forged an "alienated" man. "People have more education now, and more culture. There is a breaking down of old class barriers. There are more opportunities now, and people are making more of their opportunities. And these are people who once had nothing at all." The historian is daunted in this faith by neither "teenage rowdyism" nor tribal warfare in Africa. "You have to remember that the African countries are just starting on the road we've already traveled. That's no reason to condemn them. I dare say there may be bloody mess on the way, but one has to expect that."

One of Carr's principal arguments in What Is History? is that a historian can be understood only by looking at his environment. He likes to explain his own unyielding optimism by pointing to his pre-World War I education. "We had a great sense of historical progress then. We did worry after World War I, but we soon had the feeling that we were getting things back on the rails again." After World War II, "there was the same sort of disillusionment, but we got a new wind, a new sense of direction. I still have that same feeling."

Carr first entered academic life in 1935, when he became a professor of history at the University of Wales. He had spent most of the Years after 1918 in government service, including several years in the foreign office. By 1939 he had published his first important book, The Twenty Year's Crisis, a study of international politics since 1919. After World War II, he began his work on Soviet Russia, and has interrupted it only to put out What is History? A don at Oxford for ten years after the war, Carr switched to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1955. He liked giving tutorial at Oxford, but was always more interested in writing and secured a non-teaching post at Cambridge.

This is not the historian's first trip to the United States; he has come here several times in the last few years. Carr senses that Americans have lost their feeling of omnipotence over the past ten years, but hasn't paid particular attention to American attitudes on this trip. "I came over only to look at your archives, and I haven't seen very much else. There's no real hurry, is there?" And there was that same unassuming smile.