THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022 63BOOKSGIBBON’S LEFT TESTICLE
What influences the writing of history?BYLOUIS MENANDILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN“
I
t was at Rome, on the 15th of Oc-
tober 1764, as I sat musing amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-
footed friars were singing vespers in the
Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writ-
ing the decline and fall of the city first
started to my mind.” Those are the words
of Edward Gibbon, and the book he
imagined was, of course, “The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire.”
The passage is from Gibbon’s autobi-
ography, and it has been quoted many
times, because it seems to distill the six
volumes of Gibbon’s famous book into
an image: friars singing in the ruins of
the civilization that their religion de-
stroyed. And maybe we can picture, as in
a Piranesi etching, the young English-man (Gibbon was twenty-seven) perched
on the steps of the ancient temple, con-
templating the story of how Christian-
ity plunged a continent into a thousand
years of superstition and fanaticism, and
determining to make that story the basis
for a work that would become one of the
literary monuments of the Enlightenment.
Does it undermine the gravitas of the
moment to know that, as Richard Cohen
tells us in his supremely entertaining
“Making History: The Storytellers Who
Shaped the Past” (Simon & Schuster),
Gibbon was obese, stood about four feet
eight inches tall, and had ginger hair that
he wore curled on the side of his head
and tied at the back—that he was, in
Virginia Woolf ’s words, “enormouslytop-heavy, precariously balanced upon
little feet upon which he spun round
with astonishing alacrity”? Does it mat-
ter that Gibbon’s contemporaries called
him Monsieur Pomme de Terre, that
James Boswell described him as “an ugly,
affected, disgusting fellow,” and that he
suffered from, in addition to gout, a dis-
tended scrotum caused by a painful swell-
ing in his left testicle, which had to be
regularly drained of fluid, sometimes as
much as three or four quarts? And that
when, late in life, he made a formal pro-
posal of marriage, the woman he ad-
dressed burst out laughing, then had to
summon two servants to help him get
off his knees and back on his feet?
Cohen thinks that it should matter,
that we cannot read “The Decline and
Fall of the Roman Empire” properly
unless we know the person who wrote
it, scrotal affliction and all. Gibbon would
not, in theory, at any rate, have disagreed.
“Every man of genius who writes his-
tory,” he maintained, “infuses into it,
perhaps unconsciously, the character of
his own spirit. His characters ... seem
to have only one manner of thinking
and feeling, and that is the manner of
the author.” When we listen to a tale,
we need to take into account the teller.
“Making History” is a survey—a mon-
ster survey—of historians from Herodo-
tus (the father of lies, in Plutarch’s de-
scription) to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,
sketching their backgrounds and person-
alities, summarizing their output, and
identifying their agendas. Cohen’s cov-
erage is epic. He writes about ancient his-
torians, Islamic historians, Black histori-
ans, and women historians, from the
first-century Chinese historian Ban Zhao
to the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard.
He discusses Japanese and Soviet revi-
sionists who erased purged officials and
wartime atrocities from their nations’ au-
thorized histories, and analyzes visual
works like the Bayeux Tapestry, which he
calls “the best record of its time, pictorial
or otherwise,” and Mathew Brady’s pho-
tographs of Civil War battlefields. (“In
effect,” he concludes, “they were frauds.”)
He covers academic historians, includ-
ing Leopold von Ranke, the nineteenth-
century founder of scientific history; the
Annales school, in France; and the British
rivals Hugh Trevor-Roper and A.J. P. Ta y-
lor. He considers authors of historical fic-
tion, including Shakespeare, Walter Scott,Chronicles of the past reflect the perspectives, agendas, and quirks of their authors.