I am going to do something unusual in today’s post. I am going to introduce you to a primary source relating to my own past.
Recently, I came across an essay I wrote when I was eleven called ‘My year in third class’. There are many typos (compotitoin, mathmatics, Arnold Hitchcock) and plenty of the usual charm of children’s writing viewed at a distance of two decades.
There are also lots of jokes in ‘My year in third class’ although, mercifully, the essay is devoid of the toilet humour that was my forte in those years. Back then, whenever someone so much as acknowledged the existence of farts I reacted as though they had independently invented comedy itself.
I wrote ‘My year in third class’ in 2003.
Get ready for some tonal whiplash as I describe what else took place that year.
Earlier that year, the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up on re-entry, killing all seven crew members. Just over a month later, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, setting in motion a catastrophe that still reverberates today. Later that summer, the remains of Jean McConville, a Belfast woman who was abducted and murdered by the Provisional IRA, were finally found three decades after her disappearance.
Some of these events registered with ten-year-old me. In a deeply self-serious moment that foreshadowed the precocious teenager I would soon become, I remember looking up at our classroom clock to mark the moment that George W. Bush’s 48-hour ultimatum to Saddam Hussein passed. ‘We are at war’, I remember thinking. The collective pronoun ‘we’ was, of course, misplaced. A classroom of boys in rural Tipperary was not about to be conscripted into Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Amid all this national and international drama, my life was defined by a mixture of mundanity and levity. ‘My year in third class’, as a primary source, supports this argument. It is the account of a young nerd who likes his friends but dislikes maths and Irish.
I often encounter documents like ‘My year in third class’ in archives of twentieth century revolutionary movements: light and humorous material written during times historians could read as momentous or dark.
I am a historian of movements populated by people whose lives were laden with comic potential. A revolutionary life is one lived between a present reality and a future dream. The gap between those two points is often filled with moments of the absurd and surreal. But it was also a life that had its moments of calm and quite contentment.
Take, as an example, this letter from Joyce, the eleven year old daughter of British communists, sent to Ruth, an American communist librarian:
This was written in 1942, several years into a cataclysmic war.
The recipient and everyone mentioned in this letter - excluding, perhaps, the dog - nominally believed in the Dictatorship of the Proletariat as a transitionary stage on the eventual path towards the withering away of the state. But they also enjoyed ping pong and playing with their pets.
Another example: I once ordered up a handwritten letter from Bolshevik theorist of women’s liberation Alexandra Kollontai. It consisted solely of her description of her cat getting neutered. The document was insightful precisely because it was so far removed from the kind of high-level theorising I expected from someone like Kollontai.
I first began weaving sources like this into my own work to amuse both myself and my readers. But now I’ve begun to see them as important keyholes into past ways of perceiving reality and a crucial aspect of rendering people from the past relatable to us in the present.
In doing so, I have started to think that historical writing that overlooks light and funny source material risks being humourless to the point of distortion.
The people of the past understood and appreciated the elements of the ridiculous in their lives. They found time, even amid unrelenting waves of chaos and disaster, to joke around, to mow the lawn and to suffer ping-pong defeat at the hands of their children.
P.S. If you have ever wanted to get yourself photoshopped into a Comintern congress, here is your chance: