The following piece is one in a series of letters to my newborn granddaughter.
Dear Leila,
One early morning last weekend, I was lying in bed trying to think about something I wanted to tell you. And then a book I read a dozen years ago popped into my head: Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Later that day, I went looking for it. Your grandmother and I keep European history downstairs—she’s got our fiction in her office at work; I’ve got our U.S. history in my office at home, both of which are better organized than other stuff we’ve got down there (ancient history; religion; sports; books your father and uncles accumulated over the course of their childhoods spent down there, each one in turn occupying the bedroom on that floor). I couldn’t find The Sleepwalkers, though there’s a good chance it will turn up 17 or so months from now when I’m looking for something else and come across it. I checked on Amazon, where I learned it cost about thirteen bucks. Knowing this urge of mine might be a dead end, I decided to take the relatively small risk and buy another copy. I’m now about a quarter of the way through this 550-page tome.
Christopher Clark, who teaches history at Cambridge, does history in the grand style. The Sleepwalkers has 100 pages of footnotes, many of them drawn on primary sources from a variety of countries (he’s clearly multilingual). You sense his utter mastery in the familiar tone he strikes when talking about the Austrian foreign minister, or the way he shades his assessment of Serbian politics by summarizing plausible alternative assessments only that make his own seem more authoritative. I just checked the card page (that’s where you find the copyright date and other publishing information) and see that the book is in its eighteenth printing. My guess is that people will be reading this definitive study long after you grow up. Like the work of A.J.P. Taylor of Oxford. Another hall-of-famer you will probably have no reason to know, but from whom I first encountered much of this story while reading his 1954 study The Struggle for Mastery in Europe while working late-night shifts at the Tufts University library when I was a student there. One of my more vivid memories of college, in fact.
Anyway, re-reading The Sleepwalkers has brought back another vivid memory, from when I originally read it in 2013. I was at a pretty fancy country club somewhere in northern Westchester because your uncle Grayson had a swim meet. He had only recently gotten serious about a scholastic swimming career that would intensify in high school and college, refuting my original assessment that the coaches at our local pool who had been encouraging him as a middle schooler were merely recruiting him as a revenue source for their travel team. Your grandmother put her foot down about this, and I deferred because she’s usually right, as indeed she was this time. Anyway, as you may know, swim meet competitions are very much hurry-up-and-wait affairs. So I had a lot of downtime. I found a pleasing perch overlooking the pool (with a picturesque view of Long Island Sound behind it) and had a grand old time learning about Franco-Russian diplomacy circa 1900.
Thinking about what to say to you prompted me to return to this book because I had the thoroughly unoriginal idea that the complicated and highly unpredictable origins of World War I furnish an object lesson in how the world can change in utterly unforeseeable ways in rapid and dramatic fashion. In the introduction of The Sleepwalkers, Clark emphasizes that his study is less about why the war happened (a question of deterministic forces) than how it happened (a highly contingent series of circumstances that very well might have turned out differently). I don’t know how much reading is likely to prove useful beyond furnishing a basis for this missive to you, but I plan to stick with it. Though I’m usually a pretty directive fellow, sometimes you just have to go where your half-formed instincts tell you.
But my main point here, dear child, is not really to recommend casual reading or to instruct you in the finer points of twentieth-century historiography. Instead, it’s to note that the act of reading itself can have a history. The decision to re-read this book has led me to time-travel back to the 2010s (when I read a hard-cover copy of The Sleepwalkers I purchased in my capacity as Chair of the History Department at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School) and to the 1980s (when I read the work of Christopher Clark’s illustrious predecessor A.J.P. Taylor), whereupon I was transported to another continent a century earlier from the perspective of a few years before I was born. You will have lots of waking memories. I hope many of them will take the company of good books.
I must read this book. Thank you.