Precisely the Point

Things have quieted down slightly, so I am free to post again.

In this blog, I often use examples from my books to explain my approach to writing biography, but I hope to keep the focus on the general question of, well, writing biography. And nothing is more important, in any kind of writing, than to choose words precisely.

This has been so well covered by so many writers—some far, far better than I am—that I hardly need add anything. I can only point to the obvious examples, such as George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language." In it, Orwell made the profound observation that, if we write in stock phrases, our phrases will do our thinking for us. Each individual word must be selected for meaning and effect.

But there is one aspect of this matter of word-selection that I wish to stress. It's the importance of not misusing words, even when the misuse is common. Many writers have favorite examples of words that are routinely used incorrectly, but mine is "disinterested." It is commonly used where "uninterested," a very different word, would be correct.

It's a tragedy that the meaning of "disinterested" is being destroyed, too, because there is no word in the English language, to my imperfect knowledge, that means the same thing. It might be supposed that the true meaning is the same as "impartial," but there are important shades of meaning that distinguish "impartial" from "disinterested." Impartial means fair and unbiased, but disinterested means "lacking an interest, or stake, in the issue at hand." It is not the same as being impartial, though the meaning is close. One could have a stake in the outcome of a court case, yet, through nobility of character, rise above it and be impartial. But one can only be disinterested by having no stake at all, by having no interests that will be affected by the outcome.

My point is not that I am an unusually precise writer. Rather, we writers must choose our words precisely not merely for meaning and effect, but to preserve shades of meaning that are lost when words are commandeered to serve alien definitions. The slow, grinding death of so many misused words destroys the English language's capacity for precise meaning. That's not good.

A Little Q and A

Life right now is a bit too busy to devote much time to my blog. So here's a rip-off of a blog entry: An excerpt from the Q&A I did with the Gilder Lehrman Institute's blog, History Now. You can find the whole thing here.

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Your last two books have focused on an outlaw and a robber baron–Jesse James and Commodore Vanderbilt. Are you generally more interested in writing about the “villains” of history?

A fair question, though I don’t think I would put it that way. I am drawn to iconic figures, to physically adventurous lives, and to those who cut their own paths through life. Certainly both Jesse James and Commodore Vanderbilt are iconic, and they set the terms of their own existence. And their lives were full of conflict, which makes for great drama. But I’m not so much interested in villains as in complicated and controversial individuals. Jesse James could be charming and funny yet ruthlessly murder an unarmed victim. Vanderbilt was honest and invariably true to his word, yet he pursued his own interests regardless of the consequences for the public—consequences that grew to be vast as the Commodore essentially invented big business in the United States. And both men were loved and hated by the public during their lifetimes.

Most important, I am drawn to figures who illuminate the larger themes of American history. Jesse James’s life was shaped by slavery, the Civil War, and the fight over racial equality during Reconstruction. Vanderbilt helped to create the modern economy—and, along with it, such problems as the polarization of wealth and the conundrum of corporate power in a democratic society.

How do you go about researching a biography? Do you begin with secondary sources or primary sources?

Biographical research begins with the last biography to be published. I always start with secondary sources, reading for a broad background, and combing through the endnotes to compile an initial list of sources. Then comes the brainstorming—trying to think of seemingly tangential paths of research, often shaped by the particular interpretation I am providing of my subject. For example, with Jesse James, I looked into the political debates that provided the context for how he was seen by the public during his lifetime. I read the other editorials by John Newman Edwards, the newspaper editor who worked to elevate Jesse James to heroic status, to understand the role that the outlaw played—that Edwards wanted him to play. I read the industry journals of the railroads and express companies to understand his role (or lack of one) as an economic avenger.

With Cornelius Vanderbilt, the task was much more complicated, because the last serious attempt at a biography was published in 1942. There was vastly more archival material available, but much of it was not indexed or linked to Vanderbilt in any manuscript catalogs. Nor did he leave any collection of papers behind. So I had to dig into collections connected to the people or businesses that Vanderbilt was connected to. By looking up papers connected to the Stonington Railroad, for example (the first line that Vanderbilt ever controlled), I found a treasure trove of letters about him for a period of his life that previously was largely unknown. By trolling through the papers of Erastus Corning, I found dozens of insider reports on Vanderbilt’s doings as he constructed his railroad empire. And I stumbled into two absolutely critical archives of civil lawsuit papers. Even when working in papers used by previous biographers, I found numerous letters that had not been cited before.

In other words, I find it essential to think broadly, follow up tangents, and give yourself time to get lucky. Finally, the digitization of material, especially newspapers, has changed the face of research. It is problematic—it takes time, leads to lots of false hits, and requires access to a research library—but research in digital archives can lead quickly to important discoveries.

How do you know when you’ve done enough research and are ready to begin writing?

After I’ve gone through my initial list of collections, then conducted fresh research down those tangents I’ve talked about, the decision to stop comes from a sense that I really get what this life is all about. This relates to interpretation and analysis. What does this activity or period really mean? What is important about it? How does it reflect or shed light on larger themes? When I wrote my first draft of the first chapters of The First Tycoon, my editor told me to go back to work: something was missing. He didn’t know what it was, but I soon figured it out. Vanderbilt’s early life was wrapped up in the downfall of the eighteenth-century culture of deference, and the rise of a more individualistic and commercial, competitive society. More secondary-source research helped me identify the central theme, and fresh research in the archives led me to the point where I thought I could write the story, as I came to see it. And that’s what draws a boundary around research: knowing what the story really is, and sensing that you’ve got it.

Do you have any writing habits or techniques, and was the process of writing The First Tycoon the same as that of Jesse James?

Since I’m not an academic, I can’t afford to work on a manuscript without an advance from a publisher. That means I have to write a book proposal first. But this is a very useful process. I have to identify what’s interesting about the subject, and what my fresh interpretation or approach will be. I have to outline the book, chapter by chapter, and get a grip on what else has been written about the subject. Of course, the chapter organization usually changes in the process of writing, and new books may be published in the interim, but it helps to have a structure at the outset.

Then I begin at the beginning. Since the historical context is so important to me, I sometimes begin before the beginning. For example, Jesse James doesn’t really show up for the first 100 pages of Jesse James. This is because I think it is essential to understand the disintegration of Missouri society in the run-up to the Civil War in order to understand Jesse James’s actions and popularity. I can’t imagine writing the end without fully digesting the beginning and middle. And I have to write about something to really fully digest it.

I proceeded the same way with The First Tycoon, but it was a much more complicated and difficult process, because Vanderbilt lived a far longer life. More than that, he was at the center of American history for nearly seventy years. This was a man who drove Lafayette in a carriage, hired Daniel Webster, sat in Chief Justice John Marshall’s courtroom, was in a train wreck along with John Quincy Adams, gave a ferry ride to Andrew Jackson, advised Abraham Lincoln on fighting the Merrimack, and negotiated with John D. Rockefeller.

As both a historian and a writer, this presented a different set of challenges. I couldn’t honestly strike a single interpretive note, as I did with the short-lived Jesse James. So, too, was there a great deal of change over the decades in Vanderbilt’s personality and private life. But I had to provide an organic unity to both my historical interpretations and my portrait of him as an individual. Though I took years to write it, I had to make sure it didn’t feel disjointed or pasted together. That meant I had to rewrite extensively. One reviewer mentioned that the book is full of surprising turns. That’s terrific, as long as I managed to present them so that they make sense, emerging organically out of what came before, and not as jarring departures. The Vanderbilt of later years, the diplomatic empire-builder, should seem like the same (if changed) person as the combative monopoly-destroyer of his youth; and both should seem to logically reflect the deeper changes in the American economy and society.

But that’s the pleasure of writing biography for me—trying to merge history and literature.

Take Nothing for Granted

One of the biographer's roles is that of historian. What does that mean? Clearly it refers to the importance of historical context. When I write the story of someone's life, it's incumbent upon me to grasp, to the best of my ability, the world around my subject.

But I think the biographer, in the role of historian, often must go one step farther, and take nothing for granted. Just because other historians have said something about the context doesn't necessarily make it so. The historical profession is constantly revising its understanding of the past, and the biographer should actively take part in this process.

Of course, that doesn't mean I throw out all secondary sources, and construct a completely fresh portrait of the past in every detail. Rather, I try to pay close attention to places where the received wisdom just doesn't sound right. Then I dig in and rethink.

Example: With The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I came across many places where I had to reexamine the underlying context. To take one instance, Vanderbilt was a player in the landmark Supreme Court case, Gibbons v. Ogden. This has been hailed simply as a victory for free commerce (the high court ruled that New York could not bar steamboats from entering its waters from other states, in order to protect a monopoly on that had been granted to the Livingston family). Looking deeper, I saw that the case reflected a broader social revulsion against the culture of deference, the hierarchical world-view that the American republic had inherited from colonial days.

The historical context needed a fresh look in terms of stock prices as well. There were bitter public debates over Vanderbilt's creation of new stock in his corporations. But the historical literature I read couldn't explain why. (I may have missed something, of course.) So I dug through the discussion and pieced together for myself a picture of how nineteenth-century Americans conceptualized shares, how they tied the stock price to the cost of the physical capital of a corporation. As this portrait came together, it offered fascinating insight into a mental landscape that is lost to us now, but once was shared by everyone.

In Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, I early on concluded that the source of Jesse James's popularity was his status as a folk hero to former Confederates in Missouri. But I faced a conundrum, put best by a prosecutor who went after the James gang in its later days: Jesse James robbed mostly other Missourians. So I dug deeply into the Civil War experience in Missouri, conducting new research into how society broke apart at the grass roots. It turns out that Missourians were so divided in the Civil War that Jesse James himself never shot at a soldier from another state (until after the formal end of the war). Rather, all his wartime gunfights were with other Missourians who were fighting for the Union. After the war, James appealed to one segment of Missourians—former Confederates—to rally them against another segment—former Unionists.

I've taken other biographers to task for failing to do this kind of work, but perhaps unfairly. There are many kinds of biographies; the model I'm laying out is hardly universal, and biographies that do not demonstrate such deep contextual rethinking need not be failures, or even flawed, because of it. Not only that, it's always possible that I've gotten my reassessments wrong, or that they will be eventually made obsolete by future historians. But I think this method's useful, because it is one of the surest paths to those eye-opening, aha! moments, when an individual's life seems not only interesting, but enlightening and important.

Repost: Who Are Those Other Guys?

From time to time, I'm reposting earlier discussions of the elements of biography-writing. This is one of them.

This photograph shows Cornelius Vanderbilt, seated on the right with crossed legs and top hat, on the veranda of the Congress Hall hotel in Saratoga Springs in the 1870s. I like this image. It nicely illustrates life in Saratoga, the most famous resort town of the nineteenth century. It also shows what a celebrity Vanderbilt was.

In broader terms, it raises an essential question for the biographer: Who are all those other guys?

Secondary characters are as important to a biography as they are to a novel, but they are often overlooked and underused. Over the course of years of research and writing, the biographer can begin to grow a bit Ahab-like, ignoring all the other whales in the ocean. And, of course, when we pick up a biography, we expect it to tell a specific individual's story, and we can grow frustrated when a book wanders off topic for too long.

Secondary characters, though, serve valuable purposes in both research and narrative. By digging into the lives of those who surround the main character, a biographer often discovers new dimensions of the primary subject, uncovering fresh sources and facts. To take just one example from my study of Vanderbilt, I dug into the life of his second son, Corneil (as Cornelius Jeremiah was called). Epileptic and addicted to gambling, Corneil might not seem like a worthwhile target for research; in fact, he was a prolific letter-writer whose correspondence dwelled on his family troubles. His very weaknesses made him the perfect light for illuminating the long-overlooked emotional life of his father, who struggled with contradictory feelings for Corneil.

Secondary characters are invaluable in crafting a narrative as well. For one thing, subplots and diversions from the main narrative line enrich a biography, just as they do in a novel, offering relief from a monotonous focus on just one character. Zeroing in on secondary characters also illuminates how events take place through the intersection of the intentions of multiple individuals, the collision of sometimes conflicting agendas. By following the purposes and actions of those who surround the main character, a biographer offers a fuller understanding of how that life unfolded—and can provide some dramatic tension.

Lest I sound like I believe I am a great craftsman in the use of secondary characters, I should note that I had little choice. Vanderbilt left no collection of papers. The letters by and about him are scattered in multiple archives, and do not amount to the kind of treasure trove that draws biographers back to a well-documented subject again and again. In pursuit of more information, I was forced to delve into the lives of those who surrounded him. Fortunately for me, necessity was truly a virtue in this case. In fact, it's a virtue in every case. Keep asking who those other guys are; the answers are bound to be illuminating.

When the Record Will Not Straighten

One of the things we inevitably do as biographers is to set the record straight, as the old cliché goes. In my most recent biography, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt, I had to do quite a lot of straightening up, for he had not had a serious biography in almost seventy years, and the last one used a few apocryphal sources. Vanderbilt's story has been garnished with quite a few flat-out concoctions over the decades.

But sometimes, despite your best efforts, the record simply stays crooked. One case is my slam-dunk debunking of the notion that Vanderbilt helped invent the potato chip. This story is not even unlikely—it's demonstrably false. Yet it lives on.

Another, perhaps more serious, misconception relates to his involvement with the woman pictured here, Victoria Woodhull. Vanderbilt clearly had a relationship with her and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, from around late 1868 through maybe 1870. They were spiritualist mediums, and Tennessee was a "magnetic healer," and the Commodore patronized such types. He may have had an affair with Claflin, though the evidence for that is inconclusive.

But Woodhull and Claflin made many claims about their relationship with Vanderbilt that simply do not stand the test of evidence. The sisters claimed to have set up a brokerage on Wall Street with his backing, and suggested that they gave him stock tips from the spirits.

In fact, Vanderbilt denied that he gave any support for their "brokerage." I found contemporary evidence that they did not carry on any stock trading at all; in fact, they were sued for losing all the money that old ladies invested with them. Rather, it seems to have been a publicity stunt, used to propel their radical weekly (which Vanderbilt did not support) and their bid to lead the women's rights movement. Woodhull and Claflin, the daughters of grifters, were in part con artists themselves.

Perhaps not everyone will believe my case, for I freely admit that the evidence is often murky. But surely my book should raise serious questions in everyone's mind about Woodhull and Clafin's claims. Nope. The stories of their "brokerage," supposedly backed by Vanderbilt, continue to proliferate. Most recently, the Museum of American Finance opened an exhibit on women in Wall Street that touts the sisters' purported accomplishments.

The moral: Set the record straight. It's your job. But don't expect anyone to pay attention.