Simon Schama: In for a Rough Crossing?
THE CLEVEREST BRIT IN New York is bracing himself for a choppy 2006; a rough crossing, even.
We’re talking about Simon Schama — überhistorian, “better than average cook”, Bob Dylan fanatic and wearer, for this interview, of startling red shoes. He’s also sporting a late summer tan which he insists is not of the Blair variety but acquired while tapping away at his computer outside his office at Columbia University on the Upper West Side.
But enough of that. We are talking about his latest book, which seems likely to bring down on him a serious storm of abuse when published in the US next year. This is because now is not a good time for a 400-page skewering of the most cherished notion that America has about herself unless you want to set off an almighty media slugfest — and Schama has written that skewering. He has dared to mock America’s claim to have been founded on the idea of freedom.
It all started over lunch, shortly after 9/11, when the price and history of freedom was even more of a preoccupation than now.
Schama sat down with the British Consul-General in New York, and the Duke of York. “Bright, actually,” he says of the Duke. “I mean, very interested in history, and knowledgeable.” And who would satisfy the royal thirst for history? Not Schama, oddly, but Sir Thomas Harris, then the Consul-General, who volunteered some New York titbits to please the guest of honour. These included the fact that former slaves in the city were first allowed to marry under the British, not the Americans, and that hundreds fled their masters to fight for the King in the Revolutionary War.
Prince Andrew was fascinated. So was the professor. Sensing a breakthrough in a project that he’d been mulling over for some time and for which he had signed one of the biggest publishing deals in the history of history, he scurried to the library and started digging.
The bibliographic trail meandered back to the journal of a singularly earnest and idealistic lieutenant of the Royal Navy, John Clarkson who, in 1791, was seconded to the command of extraordinary mission to provide free passage from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone for every black, freeborn or otherwise, who wanted it. Clarkson traipsed across much of the freezing Canadian province advertising the offer, and in the process encountered an ex-slave who had changed his name to British Freedom.
“I though, OK,” says Schama, who will return to the story in The Times Lecture at Cheltenham next week. “That gives me a wonderful opener: Who owns freedom? Nobody owns British Freedom.”
The book that grew from that opener, Rough Crossings, was intended as one of four stories of “post-divorce custodial battles” between Britain and America, comprising the first volume delivered under Schama’s reported £3 million deal with the BBC. But as Schama dug, the story of the slaves’ mass defection away from the colonies that were supposedly fighting for liberty and towards the supposedly tyrannical British Crown became “so rich and so moving and so complicated, and the nuances were so interesting, that I thought ‘Oh Christ . . . This is going to be a monstrous, elephantine book even by Schama standards, three quarters of a million words.”...
Read entire article at Times--UK
We’re talking about Simon Schama — überhistorian, “better than average cook”, Bob Dylan fanatic and wearer, for this interview, of startling red shoes. He’s also sporting a late summer tan which he insists is not of the Blair variety but acquired while tapping away at his computer outside his office at Columbia University on the Upper West Side.
But enough of that. We are talking about his latest book, which seems likely to bring down on him a serious storm of abuse when published in the US next year. This is because now is not a good time for a 400-page skewering of the most cherished notion that America has about herself unless you want to set off an almighty media slugfest — and Schama has written that skewering. He has dared to mock America’s claim to have been founded on the idea of freedom.
It all started over lunch, shortly after 9/11, when the price and history of freedom was even more of a preoccupation than now.
Schama sat down with the British Consul-General in New York, and the Duke of York. “Bright, actually,” he says of the Duke. “I mean, very interested in history, and knowledgeable.” And who would satisfy the royal thirst for history? Not Schama, oddly, but Sir Thomas Harris, then the Consul-General, who volunteered some New York titbits to please the guest of honour. These included the fact that former slaves in the city were first allowed to marry under the British, not the Americans, and that hundreds fled their masters to fight for the King in the Revolutionary War.
Prince Andrew was fascinated. So was the professor. Sensing a breakthrough in a project that he’d been mulling over for some time and for which he had signed one of the biggest publishing deals in the history of history, he scurried to the library and started digging.
The bibliographic trail meandered back to the journal of a singularly earnest and idealistic lieutenant of the Royal Navy, John Clarkson who, in 1791, was seconded to the command of extraordinary mission to provide free passage from Nova Scotia to Sierra Leone for every black, freeborn or otherwise, who wanted it. Clarkson traipsed across much of the freezing Canadian province advertising the offer, and in the process encountered an ex-slave who had changed his name to British Freedom.
“I though, OK,” says Schama, who will return to the story in The Times Lecture at Cheltenham next week. “That gives me a wonderful opener: Who owns freedom? Nobody owns British Freedom.”
The book that grew from that opener, Rough Crossings, was intended as one of four stories of “post-divorce custodial battles” between Britain and America, comprising the first volume delivered under Schama’s reported £3 million deal with the BBC. But as Schama dug, the story of the slaves’ mass defection away from the colonies that were supposedly fighting for liberty and towards the supposedly tyrannical British Crown became “so rich and so moving and so complicated, and the nuances were so interesting, that I thought ‘Oh Christ . . . This is going to be a monstrous, elephantine book even by Schama standards, three quarters of a million words.”...