Today’s Dabbler Hero had all the characteristics of a dabbler in his subject with the notable exception that he was as dedicated as any scholar could be. He had an amateur’s approach but a professional’s commitment. Here’s Julian Barnes’ description of our historian:
Cobb’s history is archival, anecdotal, discursive, button-holing, undogmatic, imaginatively sympathetic, incomplete, droll; sometimes chaotic, often manic, always pungently detailed.
Richard Cobb seems more or less forgotten nowadays (though I’m not sure what form remembering him would take). In the Oxford of the ’90s his memory was revered – he’d been the previous Professor of Modern History – or at least it was in some quarters. He was particularly appreciated by those dons who could point to their own sometime ebullient behaviour and claim with conviction that it wasn’t a patch on what Cobb used to get up to (including his successor, the great and not unebullient Professor Stone).
He was an unusual academic in many ways. The French, whom he devoted a lifetime to studying, described him as l’étonnant Cobb. He lavished his very considerable enthusiasm on the disregarded, the ordinary and the everyday thereby revealing intrinsic interest where none had been noticed before. In his more extensive works the accumulation of so many intriguing smaller facts becomes illustrative of larger, entirely satisfying pictures; a sort of historical pointillisme with each point retaining its individuality and importance.
The darker side of life – or should that be the more interesting side? – attracted him in particular. Affairs, drinking, prostitution, murder, bars, thrillers: he was fascinated by all of them, and not just in his studies. This from his astonishing obituary, which hails him as ‘the poet of the vespasienne and the fille montante, of bourgeois ladies of Roubaix and the museum of crime at Lyon’:
He was exuberant and unconventional. At one of the night-clubs he frequented, he met ex-King Farouk, with whom he shared the same birth-date. They occasionally drank together, and 40 years later Cobb was one of the few people to remember that, in the Fourth Republic, un farouk was a name for a 10,000-franc note. He once greeted the dawn nude, in the company of a dozen similarly unattired men and women, in the fountains of the Place de la Concorde.
Later on, these enthusiasms sat rather incongruously alongside his perch in academia:
Richard Cobb’s A Classical Education is a short and macabre book mainly concerned with an Irish schoolfriend who murdered his mother, partly (the Irish police then suspected) at Cobb’s urging… This matricide was of especial fascination to Cobb, the future historian of many criminal acts. Cobb kept up with the murderer during and after his long detention and delighted in inviting him to the Balliol high table, on one occasion carefully placing him next to an Emeritus Professor of Law: ”My guest is keenly interested in the Irish penal system.”
Why do I describe him as having the best attributes of an amateur? One of his autobiographical works relates how he was once asked by a Serbian exile, keen to write history,
…what methodological equipment he should acquire… [Cobb] shocked him very much by saying that no such method existed, that the methodology of history was the invention of solemn Germans and was the ruination…of unfortunate pupils… One just went to the records, read them, thought about them, read some more, and the records would do the rest, they would dictate the exact limits of the subject, and provide both inspiration and material. All the historian had to do was to be able to read, and, above all, to write clearly and agreeably. I could see that he was very shocked.
His interlocutor accuses him of being an ‘incurable amateur and pragmatist’, a label I would guess he was proud to bear.
To read such civilised but down-to-earth and commonsensical opinions is even more inspiring today than when I first read them about twenty years ago: learning as a good in itself; a humane intelligence and the ability to read and write well being sufficient for scholarship; a humbly enquiring approach to the people of the past.
Working as an independent scholar outside the academy in his early days must have helped this unusual intellectual formation (at least for an academic). Having been introduced to this, I now think of him as something of a Man of Letters, certainly in his early years, someone who
[…i]n a world which favours experts and specialists… is increasingly liable to be dismissed as a dilletante or resented as a trespasser. But if his uncertain status often puts him at a disadvantage, it also makes possible, ideally, the breadth and independence which are his ultimate justification. In this sense, at least, however archaic it may seem in other respects, the idea of the man of letters has a place in any healthy literary tradition.
Such a character is increasingly rare in the academic world. However, one powerful recommendation of the web is that in its vast and various ecology such people are still sometimes to be found…
What a coincidence. After years of putting off reading Richard Cobb (I was first told to read him when I was an undergraduate, but what time did I have for French history when the whole of English literature was waiting?), just a week ago I picked up a copy of People and Places in (how these things come together) the Slightly Foxed bookshop in Gloucester Road. His shining prose is utterly fascinating, whether he is writing about French historians, Simenon’s mother, or the importance of a trilby hat to a schoolboy at Shrewsbury.
Wonderful stuff, Gaw.
Philip – did you mention that you were a Dabbler in Slightly Foxed? You ought have been able to wangle a discount – especially if Tony was on the desk…
Lovely post. I really must head to Paris, enjoy the company of many, many whores and greet the dawn naked at the Place de la Concorde.
Because that’s what being a historian is all about…
Cooking with gas today Gaw, Cobb must have been the template for many a Morse episode.
Having never been privy to this sort of fustian academia I find this sort of stuff fascinating! I trust he had exceedingly luxuriant leather elbow patches on his tweed jackets. Thanks for sharing Gaw
Starting to read David Gilmour’s ‘The Pursuit of Italy’ recently, I was pleased to encounter a reference to Cobb very early on in the introduction – there was a distinct sense of colours being nailed to masts, if not actually a sense of nude dons greeting the dawn in Parisian fountains, although who knows what Mr Gilmour gets up to in his spare time, which I for one, having long ago been converted by Gaw’s Cobb-related prosthelytising, found immensely heartening.
Thanks all.
I’ve really enjoyed Gilmour’s biographies, Barendina, and I’m looking forward to reading what sounds like one of Italy! I believe he was a student of Cobb’s, writing an illuminating introduction to the first edition of Paris and Elsewhere (I think).
On the basis of ‘The Last Leopard’ – the only one of Gilmour’s books that I’ve read – Gilmour is certainly one to file under ‘incurable amateur and pragmatist’ – which I mean as as high praise, obviously. He also writes something as close to the sort of prose that was the everyday stuff of ‘Horizon’ as anything one is likely to find in these diminished times. I suspect we ought to treasure these people while we can, as their numbers are hardly increasing.
I really enjoyed his biographies of Kipling and Curzon. I read them a few years apart but imagine reading them back-to-back would be very satisfying as they cover such a fascinating transitional period in British history. I keep meaning to read The Leopard and then Gilmour’s book – perhaps this summer hols.
BTW is he the son of Ian Gilmour (I do know he’s not the one from Pink Floyd)?
Have you really not read ‘The Leopard’? It’s one of my very favourite books. Do by all means read it during summer hols, especially if you’re planning to go somewhere warm, dry and mildly baroque. And then review it for the Dabbler as I for one would very much like to hear what you think of it.
As for David Gilmour’s parentage – this encourages the idea that he’s Ian Gilmour’s son, with the reference to the house in Tuscany as revealing in its way as Gilmour’s evident if generally elegantly circumspect Tory sympathies. Whatever else one might say about factional wets, they are often good with houses, prose and history.
Will do!
I would guess that Scottish Tories on the lines of Gilmour père are about as rare nowadays as Scottish wildcats.
http://tinyurl.com/4luuvw8
Thanks Dave. The previous edition didn’t have Julian Barnes’s involvement. BTW here’s a nice recent piece by him on one of the hidden pleasures of Paris:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/mar/26/julian-barnes-icons-of-paris?INTCMP=SRCH
“Paris in 2,000 Images”
http://blogs.nationalgeographic.com/blogs/intelligenttravel/2011/03/paris-in-2000-images.html