Slow down and shut up, Caro’s Working, pt. 4

In this installment in this short series on lessons learned from reading Robert Caro’s WorkingI am going to combine two phrases that Caro repeats several times: “slow down” and “shut up.”

In the frantic and frenetic whirligig of activity that is the twenty-first century, with its constant demand for instant information and measurable metrics of performance, the concept of slowing down might seem totally anachronistic. But the historian does need to slow down, despite the pressures to consume and produce scholarship at a breakneck pace. Synthesizing such enormous volumes of information, collating it all, analyzing it, and producing meaningful contributions takes time and cannot be rushed. Facts need to be verified, stories corroborated, dates checked, etc. The graduate school pace of at least a book a week, frequent papers, and preparation for classroom presentations and discussions encouraged the sense that speed is what mattered most. Anyway, that is how it felt to me. Slow down and make it count is always simple, sound advice for the historian. 

Caro laments the early days in his work on Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) –back in the 1970s and 1980s – when he could call someone on the phone for instant verification. Since then, however, many of his correspondents and interviewees, the players who knew LBJ during his early career as a staffer, congressman and senator have long since passed. For Caro, that same process in later decades of the work is done by referring to the millions of pages of documentary evidence, including interview transcripts. 

Slow down works in close conjunction with the importance of editing that I focused on in part 3 of this series. Precise language, clarity, and a concise, even if lengthy, text, are all shaped by the patient and often slow work of editing.  

Where does shut up fit in for the historian? Caro relied a great deal on interviews in both his works on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. One of the lessons is learned was to curb his own need to talk, interrupt, and interject questions during an interview. Whether it is because silence is uncomfortable or because it feels better to provide information voluntarily instead of being prompted, Caro learned that one of the most productive things that he could do during an interview was to say as little as possible; let the subject have the stage. He even wrote “SU” on his legal pads as a reminder whenever he felt the urge to open his mouth. 

Caro’s accounts of his interviews, the behind-the-scenes work of being an historian, are quite interesting. Robert Moses refused to speak with him at first and ordered those closest to him to clam up as well. He figured this would have snuffed out the biography in its infancy. But Caro was too creative for that! He drew some circles on a paper, each one a level of proximity away from Moses at the center. Sure, Moses could control his nearest family and associates, but not those further out, the partial acquaintances, the one-time collaborators, let alone all those who were negatively affected by his actions, such as the people of the East Tremont section of the Bronx who were forcefully relocated to make room for the Cross Bronx Expressway. Once Caro cracked those outer rings, Moses realized that his biographer would not be so easily put off and consented to talking on the record. Caro interviewed his formidable subject seven times before broaching a forbidden topic that triggered Moses to end the sessions. You really need to pick up Working to read about these and many other interviews. 

I am sad to say that I interviewed only one person for The Most Defiant Deviland that was early during the dissertation stage. Rosalie Edge was an important conservationist who worked with William T. Hornaday in the 1920s and 1930s to challenge the leadership of the National Association of Audubon Societies. Later Edge would establish Hawk Mountain in Pennsylvania, the nation’s first wildlife refuge dedicated to a predator species. The use of traps on Audubon preserves was one of the issues that united Edge and Hornaday. Rosalie’s son Peter Edge was a young man at the time and he drove his mother to Hornaday’s home in Stamford, Connecticut for their strategy sessions. He met Hornaday several times. He was still alive, if elderly, in the late 1990s when he graciously consented to a telephone interview. I don’t recall how I tracked him down. He was the only living connection that I could establish with Hornaday. There were a few other possibilities, but I could not get in touch with them. And the only direct descendant that I could track down either never received my requests for an interview or simply ignored them. Looking back, I wish I would have read been able to read Workingwhen I was in graduate school.  

Editing and Workflow, Caro's Working, pt. 3

Would any be surprised if the eighty-three-year-old Robert Caro adheres to the familiar and writes his manuscripts out in long hand before typing them out on an electric typewriter? For the typing, he uses legal paper, triple-spaced. This way, Caro has ample room to edit and re-write his text before having to type it again. It is the same method that he has used since he was a rookie reporter fresh out of Princeton. I think there are two things to look at here: First, the importance of editing; and, secondly, the issue of workflow. 

Over the course of my career I have developed a much deeper appreciation of editing as part of the writing process. When I was I younger I labored under the delusion that good writers managed to produce a quality manuscript of any length on almost one draft, and that editing was a monotonous drudgery that the rest of us had to endure. Numerous drafts discouraged me because I treated them as a sign of my weakness as a writer. To me writing seemed to be an art that you got or did not get. Then one day, about ten or so years ago, I saw a panel on C-SPAN or Book TV panel discussion on the editorial process. One of the panelists was Jennifer Egan, author of A Visit from the Goon Squad, one of my favorite books. Egan confessed to producing over eighty drafts of her book. That was liberation!! An award-winning novelist needed eighty drafts. It is at that point that I came to understand that editing is a vital part of the process that requires all the diligence, patience, and practice of writing itself. Caro reinforces this belief in Workingby emphasizing that editing is as an essential part of writing, not a separate task. Writing, in other words, is a demanding craft. And I felt vindicated when he stated that the final version of the printed page bore almost no resemblance to the very first triple-spaced typed draft. There are samples of this in the fly pages at the start and end of the book. 

I have always been very interested in the workflow of authors and historians. There is something fascinating to me about how others arrange their research and writing. Whether it’s a high-tech use of several different computer programs or writing it all out by hand, I always feel I learn something by a discussion of workflow. Let’s be honest, we all think we should be more productive and efficient when it comes to writing, and I am always hunting for tips and tricks.

Richard Nixon used to sketch out ideas on yellow pads of legal paper, and I have always wanted to look at that them to see what that looked like. Shelby Foote, author of the three volume Civil War: A Narrative, professed to write in an old-fashioned feather quill pen. That sounds tedious, assuming it is true. On the scarier side of the spectrum prolific historian Forrest McDonald claims that he wrote in his birthday suit. One of my mentors in graduate school was a student of McDonald and had known him quite well. And, if the stories are to be believed, McDonald was quite a wild character, so that seems plausible. For those of us with a more modern bent to integrate the latest technology, there are many websites by academics describing how to utilize various word processors, bibliographic compilers, search tools, and note-taking programs. My preference is to use Scrivener and Zotero. 

I am not going to dump my MacBook for an electric typewriter, so I cannot say that I got any specific tips from Caro’s workflow. What his example clearly demonstrates is that each writer has a very customized and personalized workflow, and we should each do what works best for us. 

Context, Caro's Working, pt. 2

One of the most important tasks of the historian is to put events, movements, people, places, etc., in historical context. It really gets to the heart of the questions of “why and how” did something happen. Robert Caro takes this to new levels when it came to providing the “context” of Lyndon B. Johnson’s (LBJ) youth in west Texas. What was it like? What relationships did he have with his family? What role did the environment play in his development? 

An urban New Yorker, graduate of an Ivy League university, and Jew could not have been more distant from background of the thirty-sixth president. Caro quickly realized that he had no understanding of where LBJ had come from and decided that the only solution was to immerse himself in west Texas. To wit, his superhumanly supportive wife, Ina Caro, quipped, “Why can't you do a biography of Napoleon?” (p.103) Nonetheless, the couple departed for hill country in 1976, only three years after LBJ’s death. It stood to reason that Caro could meet enough of his subject’s contemporaries that he could get a good flavor of what it must have been like for LBJ. 

The Caros lived in Johnson country for three years, getting to know his former classmates and neighbors and emerged from the experience with a much better understanding of the environment that made LBJ. It was a hot, dusty, isolated country, mostly poor, and without electrification or running water. To some extent this explains LBJ’s notorious crudity, but also what inspired the future congressmen, senator, and president to his New Dealerism.

Family, of course, provided another context, that was rooted in the same place. Caro got to know LBJ’s surviving siblings. One of the most interesting parts of Workingis his description of how he finally tricked Sam Johnson, Lyndon’s youngest brother, to tell him what the family life had really been like. The problem was that Sam was a notorious bullshitter and Caro discounted most of the information that he received from that source. But how could he get some reliable information from Sam? In a most novel approach, Caro convinced the National Park Service to let him into the LBJ childhood home, put Sam Johnson at the kitchen table, stood behind him, and asked him questions, ones designed to probe deeper into the visceral experience of being at the Johnson kitchen table. Sam seemed almost hypnotized by the experience and described the family scene in intimate detail. And it proved that the kitchen table was not to be a warm and fuzzy place where family members came to break bread after a weary day; instead, it was a place of frequent clashes, some even violent, between Lyndon and his father. Poor Sam Johnson, the elder and father of the Lyndon and Sam, was a classic ne’er-do-well, prone to drink, hyperbole, and poor decisions, especially in financial matters. Young Lyndon came to see his father as a loser and source of embarrassment. This upbringing imparted a relentless drive to succeed. One can also see where LBJ got his west Texas populism, hunger for wealth, womanizing, and willingness to skirt legality. 

I am not arguing that every graduate student should immerse themselves in some obscure, out-of-the-way place for three years during their dissertation to understand context. Certainly not! I did not follow that path myself, other than visiting the Bronx Zoo, which I had to do anyway for my research on William Temple Hornaday. Moreover, from what I picked up somewhere, what had once been Hornaday’s father’s farm is mostly paved over and subdivided. As many hardships as farm life possessed in the 1990s when I started my research, it would be hard, I would think, to get the same sense of what life was like 150 years before from an Iowa immersion. That level of understanding for me came through more clearly in his mother’s letters to her family Indiana in the 1850s and to her son Minos Miller during the Civil War. Her letters ooze with regret for having left a more settled and comfortable life for scratching out a new homestead from the earth in what still felt very much like the frontier. Despite Hornaday’s later accounts of an idyllic childhood, it was a hardscrabble, tough life. It was a story that only his mother told.   

But, what I am saying, is that Caro calls to mind that context can have multiple definitions in historical and biographical writing. It was within Caro’s means to come into direct contact with the world of LBJ. He understood that was the case and acted to maximize its fleeting advantages.