Why Does It Matter?

A biographer—or any nonfiction writer—may be drawn to a subject because it has a good story. Dramatic events, colorful characters, exotic settings: these and more make for fun reading (and writing), and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. As E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, the most basic element of writing is the story: "and then, and then, and then. . . ." I believe that keeping your reader interested in discovering what happens next is a fundamental element of a pleasurable narrative.

But storytelling alone is not enough, at least not for a book that is meant to be more than a throw-away diversion. There's a question that the biographer must constantly ask, and continually answer: Why does this matter?

In The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I tried to combine storytelling and a search for significance on the opening page. The events I describe there are depicted in the illustration in this post, which shows Dr. Jared Linsly, Vanderbilt's personal physician, testifying in December 1877 on the opening day of the trial over the Commodore's will. Vanderbilt left the bulk if his estimated $100 million to his oldest son, William Henry, and the other children were not pleased. One sued to break the will. The trial was a media sensation (revealing the Commodore's prominence in American culture), and led to a fascinating but fragmented and not-always-accurate exploration of his life and character.

So, I pat myself on the back. In fact, a set-piece like the will trial makes the story-significance balancing act seem easy, but it's not. For example, when I wrote about Vanderbilt's role in the business and legal battle that led to Gibbons v. Ogden, the Supreme Court's landmark first commerce-clause case, I struggled for a long time. I got bogged down in petty details (which I thought were important—merely because they hadn't been written about before—but they really weren't). I got caught up in the standard story-line about this episode, which can be summed up as "All hail the downfall of a government-sanctioned monopoly."

I only emerged from this mire when I paid attention what what the participants were saying and thinking, and began to connect it to the broad stream of historians' thinking about the period. Instead of recording every injunction and service of papers in this complicated legal mess, I had to turn to the larger social, cultural, and even political implications. The destruction of a monopoly was indeed one important result of this story, but it also represented a profound shift in American society. Once I made that breakthrough, I saw everything that followed in Vanderbilt's life in a different light.

For all I know, my analysis may not be well received by critics and other historians. What I do know, though, is that it was not an easy process getting there. I had to fail with my first draft of those early chapters before I really worked through what I was seeing in the mountain of evidence I had compiled. But if those (revised) chapters do succeed, then it is because I was able to intertwine the discussion of the larger significance with well-paced storytelling. If I did that properly, then the dramatic events are all the more compelling, because we can see what was at stake.

Well, that's the sort of thing that I like in a book. And it's good advice to write what you like to read.

What to Believe?

People who complain about "revisionist historians" have a mistaken idea about history. Getting the facts straight is only part of the picture. Interpretation—figuring out what the facts mean—is just as important. And interpretation is constantly subject to (justifiable) criticism and revision.

But let's go back a step. The truth is, the facts themselves are rarely completely clear. Why? Because so much evidence is contradictory, insufficient, or unreliable. Take, for example, the part of Vanderbilt's career reflected in the picture above-right, which shows a building on the plaza of Granada, Nicaragua, in the 1850s. When I looked into the sources behind the standard accounts of Vanderbilt's Nicaragua enterprises, I found them to be sketchy—and wrong.

That naturally begs a question: How do you know what sources to believe? 

I could go into a long, detailed account of ways to measure the strengths and weaknesses of historical sources—and how one must cross-check and correlate them. Ultimately, though, it's a matter of judgment. Does the source fit with the understanding you're building of the person and context? Does the source strike you as reliable, or, perhaps, driven by some agenda? In short, does it feel right?

That begs another question: how do you develop good judgment? The answer lies in an uncomfortable fact: Much, perhaps most, of your research will never make it into your book. The facts on the page and sources in the notes are the proverbial tip of the iceberg. It can be painful to leave so much hard work out, but it's not wasted, even when it doesn't appear on the page. The more fully you understand your subject and his or her surroundings—the society, institutions, politics, culture, even the weather—the more accurate your judgment, the more precise and appropriate your decisions about what to put into print. 

As the epigraph for my forthcoming book, I selected a quote from Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children: "To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world." Biographers do well to take this to heart. Lest I sound as if I think I've mastered this injunction, let me say that it's damned hard to do, and perhaps impossible to do perfectly. At least for me.

Not the Vanderbilt I Know

There's an opinion piece by popular business historian Charles R. Geisst in Sunday's Washington Post that underscores the point I make in my previous post, below. Geisst dismisses Vanderbilt, and he's very wrong to do so. 

Actually, what Geisst says about Vanderbilt goes beyond merely adopting the cynicism that surrounded him. Even critics alive at the time would have disagreed that Vanderbilt used his railroads as "piggybanks," as Geisst claims. They did criticize him for stock watering, as noted below, which they saw as dishonest, but they did not think that Vanderbilt simply raided the treasuries of his companies, or engaged in self-dealing, as so many of his contemporaries did. Anyone who invested in Vanderbilt's railroads made money, and did so as long as he lived.

Conventional, Yes, Wisdom, No

The cartoon above demonstrates one of the problems facing a biographer writing about the not-so-recent past. It ridicules Commodore Vanderbilt by making an unflattering comparison to Jim Fisk in the "watering" of the stock of their railroad companies. The caption ("The Statue Unveiled") refers to an immense statue of Vanderbilt atop the St. John's Park Freight Depot, unveiled in a grand civic ceremony in 1869. (The statue was later moved, and is now in front of Grand Central Terminal.) The mock solemnity heightens the scorn for Vanderbilt's power and pretensions to dignity.

The cartoon reflects conventional wisdom among the intellectual elite in 1869. It's also wrong.

Without question, the unprecedented wealth and power acquired by Vanderbilt after the Civil War posed serious questions for those who cared about equality and opportunity in America. The emergence of corporate capitalism challenged the assumptions underlying American democracy from the time of the Constitution. But many intellectuals fell back on simple cynicism—a kind of prejudice, one that destroys serious investigation.

I won't bog down this posting with a full explanation of why the comparison to Fisk is wrong. Suffice it to say that the two carried out very different kinds of "stock watering"—to use the slang for increasing the number of shares in a company, without expanding its physical facilities. Fisk and Jay Gould damaged the interests of existing shareholders to ensure their own control of the Erie Railway; Vanderbilt increased the wealth of his shareholders, to reflect what he saw as a more accurate calculation of his companies' worth.

The problem for the biographer lies in the unthinking adoption of the prejudices of his sources—the thinkers, journalists, and critics of the day. It makes us feel pretty damned smart, not to mention politically correct, when we're cynical about a robber baron like Commodore Vanderbilt. And it doesn't hurt that appealing figures such as Mark Twain, Henry Adams, and Henry's brother Charles F. Adams Jr. all fiercely criticized him. 

But they attacked him out of assumptions that economists today have come to reject. Unfortunately, it's very easy for us biographers, as we spend our time immersed in the primary sources, to absorb the contemporary outlook, without stopping to ask if it really makes sense. In economic terms, the contemporary critique of Vanderbilt doesn't make any at all.

On the other hand, it's not enough to simply dismiss the era's views as primitive or undeveloped. We have to ask questions, understand why these people saw things as they did. In unraveling why stock watering was considered such a crime, I found the key to understanding an economic outlook that is lost to us now, but truly explains the politics and culture of the economy in the first couple of decades after the Civil War.

There's always another good question to ask, but when prejudice or cynicism creep in, we've stopped trying to understand—and that's really the whole point. 

Going Under the Surface

"We cannot understand each other, except in a rough and ready way," E.M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel. "But in a novel we can know people perfectly. . . . In this direction fiction is truer than history, because it goes beyond the evidence, and each of us knows from his experience that there is something beyond the evidence."

I recommend Forster's classic to any biographer, despite the title. Substitute "nonfiction" for "history," and it's clear that he's zeroed in on every nonfiction writer's dilemma, particularly that of the biographer. As biographers, we are writing about an individual person. We very much want to go below the surface—to get at the state of mind, the personality, the submerged mental landscape of our subjects. Nothing is less satisfying in a biography than a mere record of comings and goings, with no attempt to flesh out the individuality of the main character.

But, if we are being honest, we can only address such things through what appears on the surface—the evidence that Forster wrote of.  We cannot just concoct thoughts and feelings, to go inside our subjects' brains. If I say, for example, that Cornelius Vanderbilt thought something, I can do so only because he later said that he thought such a thing, or (maybe) made it transcendently clear through his actions.  A novelist, on the other hand, can fully imagine the thoughts of characters. This is one reason why I think fine literary novels usually make for bad movies, while less literary ones can more easily become great movies. The more literary works tend to dwell in the interiors of life, which are not easily translated into on-screen action; less literary works are often more external. Good acting, cinematography, and editing can transform a pot-boiler like The Godfather into high art.

What can we biographers do? Well, we can do something. The best biographers create a vivid sense of what's going on inside a subject's head. In Robert Caro's works, for example, we feel certain that we truly understand the inner life of Lyndon Johnson. Such accomplishments begin with your own judgment. Then you amass the evidence that points to that inner life you see, in a convincing way (for we cannot escape our reliance on external evidence). You explicate, explain, draw inferences from that evidence—in short, persuade your readers that your vision of the submerged is plausible and convincing.

I could go on in detail about the detailed methods that accomplish this feat, but that's the gist of it. Amass, interpret, persuade: follow this path correctly, and you'll convince your readers that you really do understand something that, ultimately, can never be fully understood—not even by the subject, for we never know ourselves fully.

Lincoln Watch Update

I just wrote a short piece for The Atlantic about the story of the secret message inside Lincoln's watch. It has just been published online here.

I hope it comes across as rather more than mere genealogical chest-thumping. But I have to admit, having named my son Dillon, I think the secret-message story is pretty cool.

Lincoln's Watch and my Son Dillon

Please pardon the personal nature of this post. It doesn't have much to do with biography, but it does relate to my interests as a biographer, or at least as an independent American historian.

The watch shown here belonged to Abraham Lincoln. I grew up with a family story that my great-great-grandfather, Jonathan Dillon, was fixing it when Fort Sumter was fired upon, and took it upon himself to inscribe a secret message on the back of the dial. He closed it up, and never mentioned it to the president.

I liked to repeat the story, because my own son is named Dillon (in tribute to my father, whose middle name is Dillon, and my great-grandmother, who was the daughter of Jonathan, and to Jonathan Dillon himself). I never quite believed it, but figured it would never be disproved—who is going to tear open Lincoln's watch to check?

The Smithsonian, that's who. My cousin Douglas Stiles convinced the grand old institution to check. They did. The secret message was there all along.

Take a look at this story from the Washington Post, and this one from NPR. My son isn't old enough to read about his namesake yet, but we'll keep him in the loop.

One more thing: It turns out both Jonathan Dillon and I lived in Harlem—my great-great-grandfather on West 117th Street, and I on West 136th Street. Check out your copy of the New York Times, April 30, 1906.

That's the End of That Chapter

In one episode of The Simpsons, Homer was delighted to learn that an exciting new cop show was coming to TV. It featured a cool character, also named Homer Simpson, who spouted a tag-line whenever he dispatched the bad guys: "And that's the end of that chapter."

Unfortunately for the "real" Homer, the cop show was rewritten after the pilot aired, and the Homer Simpson character became a buffoon. His tag-line remained the same, but became the set-up for a slapstick pratfall. Homer (the regular character, not the TV-show-in-a-TV-show character) was crestfallen.

As a biographer, I can sympathize—specifically, with Homer's distress at how quickly "that's the end of that chapter" can go from heroic closure to  banana-peel foolery. Chapters matter—where they begin and where they end, how they are broken up, how they link together. Some wise editor once corrected a writer who had said that God was in the details, offering the alternate view that God was in the structure. When you get it wrong, it's unholy.

But how to impart structure to that chaotic, unplanned succession of events that we call a life? Fiction is like painting—working on an imaginary space, wide open to invention. Biography is like sculpture, because the biographer is limited by the physics of the materials. An honest biography is confined by the messy reality of a subject's actual experiences. 

Fortunately, art is as much of the process as science. It is not enough to slap down the days of a subject's life, just one damn thing after another. The biographer has to think through those experiences, decide what is important and what isn't, what is meaningful and what isn't. What are the arcs, where is the rise and fall, where are the conflicting forces and developments? How do smaller stories and secondary characters fit into the larger pattern of the life?

I think it was Chekhov who said that the end of every chapter either closes a door or opens one. (Well, someone smarter than me said it.) This very useful admonition works two ways. First, it suggests how to start and end a chapter—with either a satisfying conclusion to a narrative arc, or a set-up that builds the reader's expectations for what comes next. It can do both, of course. Second, it offers guidance on staking out the chapter itself—for deciding what it should cover. We should segment our larger narrative according to where we see opening and shutting doors, these divisions between smaller stories within the larger life.

Of course, in a complicated life a chapter may cover more than one story or narrative thread. Ideally, we should identify some thematic consistency to the chapter as a whole. I find it particularly satisfying when I can start a chapter both with a narrative set-up and by sounding a thematic tone that runs through the various tales that unfold in it. 

The complexity of simply cutting a life into chapters shows why we can read with satisfaction multiple biographies of the same figure. There is no single set of correct answers to the questions I listed. What's important in a life? What stories are worth telling? What is the meaning in a person's existence? There are almost limitless possibilities, and for structuring a life story—and that keeps us biographers in business.

Military Interrogation & Historical Research

As a biographer, I find very familiar a sentiment I've often heard in recent discussions of the efficacy of torture. Experienced military interrogators tell us that those who advocate torture (sorry, "enhanced interrogation") are operating on a false model: They think intelligence is gathered by "breaking" a prisoner—by smashing his piñata resistance, so that he pours out an abundance of information.

In reality, most military intelligence is gathered not through big breakthroughs, but by gleaning little bits of information from several sources—information that is analyzed and amassed into a larger picture. 

In biographical research, I've found much the same thing to be true. Yes, every now and then you find a breakthrough source—a letter that describes a previously unknown relationship, a lawsuit that reveals an unsuspected episode. Believe me, it's a wonderful thing when you find that magic item. I found more than my share in working on my forthcoming biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

But most of the actual labor of research consists of culling little bits of information from multiple sources, piecing them together, and building a larger picture. A newspaper story may report on a stock-market battle, without mentioning names; a letter may off-handedly refer to a chance encounter; a corporate report may refer to someone going onto a board of directors. Put them together, and the tale of a hostile take-over emerges.

There's no substitute for time spent in key archival collections, for reading through letters and records that don't seem pertinent at first. When we do find the papers of someone key in the life of our subject, we have to soak in it, absorb it, and then we start to see important things that weren't apparent initially. It's not enough to just pull out the items that were written by, to, or about our main subject.

Of course, time is money. Publishers are cutting back on advances, and grant money is harder to get than ever. More and more, independent biographers will be squeezed out, and full-length works will be left to academics. There are some outstanding academic writers, of course, but the demands of the scholarly disciplines sometimes lead academics away from literary quality, something we hope for in a good biography. It's pretty tough for those of us out there on our own—and there are going to be fewer of us before this year is over.

Don't Believe It

A biographer plays three roles: researcher, writer, and historian. In my last post, I talked about the relationship between the latter two. This time, I'd like to discuss research.

The first and most important thing to keep in mind when conducting research is to take nothing for granted. If you have a relatively well-known subject, there are bound to be canonical stories that are accepted as fact. Sometimes they are. But it's the biographer's responsibility to look at the evidence, and make a judgment. No matter how well accepted a story may be, it must be rejected (or critiqued) if there's no primary source that backs it up.

Of course, this raises a host of questions about the quality of your evidence. In researching the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, I found that many of the accepted tales about him came from newspaper obituaries. After all, he left no collection of papers behind, and conducted much of his business in secret. But journalists in his time (he died in 1877) did not exactly adhere to modern standards; they reprinted rumors rather freely. And the obituaries were a notch down in accuracy from standard news stories. 

For example, one of the most famous tales about Vanderbilt is that, upon returning from a tour of Europe in 1853, he sent a chilling letter to some colleagues who had betrayed him during his absence: "Gentlemen: You have undertaken to cheat me. I won't sue, for the law is too slow. I'll ruin you. Yours truly, Cornelius Vanderbilt." Unfortunately, the only primary source for this letter was a New York Times obituary, published a quarter of a century later. It distorts some of Vanderbilt's testimony to a New York State Assembly committee in the 1867 about an entirely unrelated matter. Vanderbilt did publish a letter of warning to his enemies in 1853, but it promised that he would sue. The "I'll ruin you letter," so much a part of Vanderbilt mythology, is just that: mythology.

No one would have criticized me if I had simply repeated the received wisdom, and quoted this letter. It's colorful, nicely sets up a conflict, and fits with our image of Vanderbilt. It has been accepted by every writer since the Times first printed it. In fact, I may get some heat from reviewers or historians who are attached to it, for all those reasons. But it's not the truth. In fact, it distorts the truth. Vanderbilt had no interest in ruining his enemies. After they paid him back and admitted defeat, he became friends with them again—even joined in business ventures with them.

Sometimes the truth is harder to pin down. In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, I struggled with a widely accepted tale that Jesse James was incapacitated for three years with a gunshot wound he received through the lung in May 1865. There is evidence that he did receive such an injury, and that it affected him severely. But it's all pretty murky. The main evidence for his being laid up in bed for years comes from the later writings of John Newman Edwards, the newspaper editor who helped create a heroic public image for James. Pretty fishy. But is there evidence to the contrary? Yes, but it's not definitive. There are contemporary accounts from people who were in contact with James no later than 1866, and made no mention of him being injured or ailing in any way.

I concluded that the three-year-recovery story was an alibi concocted by Edwards to spare James prosecution for crimes he probably took part in before his name became famous in 1869. But I felt it was my responsibility to discuss my case in the text of the book, because the story I criticized is canonical, and the evidence against it was not conclusive. It's tough going against a widely accepted version of events when you don't have a real arsenal for fighting the mythology. But you have to be intellectually honest, and offer your best judgment.

Still, it's important to remember that biography should not be an exercise in debunking. It's one of the things you do on the way toward the truth, but ultimately it's rather marginal. Usually you simply leave out the stories you don't accept, offering a new version without bothering to alert the reader. Arguments over evidence usually belong in the endnotes. After all, the biographer is still historian and writer as well, crafting an interpretive, literary work.