Talking Writing, Tonight

Find yourself in Marin tonight? I'll be discussing The First Tycoon, biography, and writing narrative nonfiction with writer Jane Ganahl, at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley at 7:30 PM.

Here's the link:

http://www.throckmortontheater.com/event.php?eventid=1243

Can You Teach Writing?

In my previous post, I discussed Eric Arnesen's essay from a few years ago, "Historians and the Public: Premature Obituaries, Abiding Laments." There's one thing it brings up that I wanted to tackle, but forgot to dive after until this moment.

I was recently given Michael Chabon's Manhood for Amateurs as a gift. It was a good gift, because Chabon is a good essayist. One of the things he discusses is the creative writing program. (Chabon himself received an MFA.) Often, he notes, he is asked, "Can you really teach writing?"

As it so happens, this is just the question asked by many historians, when faced with criticism of their prose. As Arnesen notes in his essay, many express doubts that writing can really be taught. Chabon's essay tells us that this is a common assumption. But yes, Chabon counters, you can teach writing.

It astounds me that there is a seemingly universal belief that writing is an innate talent that cannot be developed through devoted study and practice. With Chabon, I must say: What crap.

Obviously some have more of a knack for it than others. Some could study writing forever, and still be so-so; some can study not at all, and be pretty good at it. But this is true of absolutely everything. No matter what the inherent ability of the student, it is a universal truth that there is no skill, art, discipline, or endeavor of any kind engaged in by human beings that does not improve with diligent effort, guided by knowledgeable instructors.

Chabon graduated from a creative writing program. I never matriculated in one. Yet I believe that even my experience bears out the truth that writing can be taught. I have studied writing very hard over the years. I've read intently, with the goal of learning to be a better writer. I have been corrected, taught, guided, and I bear those lessons in mind at all times. I think every day about what good writing is, and how I can make my writing better.

As I mentioned in my previous post, not all writing has to be literary. The discipline of history needs the scholarly monograph. No, I do not criticize the graduate students and assistant professors out there, writing dense tomes that only scholars will read. We need your investigations, analyses, and arguments, people. But for you historians and other scholars who wish to write narrative (good for you, by the way, because history and other fields need narrative works, too): Don't make excuses for bad writing. The claim that "writing can't be taught" serves as a lazy excuse for not trying to write well—for not believing that literary values are universal values.

They are. So pay attention, learn something, and write gooder. Er, and I'll keep trying to do better, too.

Is History Mired in the Past?

On June 13, CSpan's BookTV televised my on-stage conversation at the Chicago Printer's Row Lit Fest. You can view it here. My interlocutor was historian Eric Arnesen, of George Washington University in Washington, D.C.

Though Professor Arnesen left most of the air time to me, he's a very interesting fellow. In 2007, he wrote a fascinating article titled, "Historians and the Public: Premature Obituaries, Abiding Laments." The topic of the piece was an essay by Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, lamenting the passing of Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.—America's "last great public historian," Tanenhaus wrote.

Tanenhaus bemoaned the absence of historians who write history with the intention of speaking to present problems. "We live in what is often called a golden age of history and biography," he wrote; but even such great and widely read works as James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom and Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution lack "reach," Tanenhaus complained. "These are books that, for all their merits, seem not only about the past but also, to some extent, mired in it. They are archival."

For historians, this was like—well, insert your favorite uproar-igniting metaphor here. (Red flag to a bull? Match in a gas tank? Moderate incumbent Republican at a Tea Party rally?) As Arnesen aptly shows, academic historians of all stripes responded to Tanenhaus's complaints with anger. A lot of anger. Really angry anger, of the hopping-mad variety. Plus they were angry.

There are two aspects to the resulting frenzy that I'd like to discuss. First, as Arnesen's discussion shows, much of the response revolved around academic historians' recurring complaint that they are not reaching a wide audience. Though it's true, I think much of the grumbling is misplaced. History is an academic discipline. It has become professionalized, with a high degree of specialization, and a set of professional concerns that practitioners discuss among themselves in pursuit of more exacting standards. The almost-unreadable scholarly monograph is, in fact, the basic building block of historical knowledge. Narrow but deep studies of various topics have advanced history tremendously in the last century. No assumption goes unchallenged in today's historical world, which is a good thing even if you really don't care to read the discussions.

But don't take my word for it: Gordon Wood makes an eloquent defense of academic historical writing here.

In fact, what's remarkable about history is that it's one field that continues to produce excellent writers who turn out truly literary works, even as they meet the highest scholarly standards. I think one reason is that history, as the study of humanity over time, is ultimately tethered to narrative, no matter who far it may wander. As E. M. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, the story ultimately comes down to a chronological progression of events; even experimental fiction cannot escape it completely. Not all historical writing is narrative, but narrative writing will always be a part of history.

The worst thing that academic historians do is to try too hard to be popular. I loathe the frequent resort to cutesy, punning titles in academic works. Often academics think that reaching a wide audience means they must dumb down their books, to write in a cloying way. The age-old rule is true: write what you yourself would like to read. I can't believe that's happening with books that scream, "Look at me write for a popular audience!"

My solution: History should teach narrative writing—not as the be-all and end-all of the profession, but because there are many historians who also wish to be good and widely read writers. Meanwhile, scholarly and not very readable monographs will continue to be published, because we need them.

On the other hand, I would like more non-academic writers of popular history to study history from an academic perspective. I enjoyed Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand, for example; it's a crisply written book filled with beautiful details. But when Philbrick writes that Custer's rank as general was a mere brevet rank, I feel deflated, knowing that the writer does not fully grasp the institution he's writing about—the army. (Custer actually was a general, but in the volunteer force that existed only for the duration of the Civil War and was organizationally separate from the standing Regular Army. His brevet, or honorary, rank as general was specifically in the Regular Army. The distinction sounds picayune, but it speaks to the way Americans thought about the role and size of the permanent military establishment. A mass army was thought valid only as a temporary organization for a limited national emergency.) This doesn't ruin the book for me, but it marks its limitations.

I aspire to meet scholarly standards and create historical knowledge. I also aspire to write works with literary qualities, that both entertain and enrich. Not all popular writers of history attempt to engage the world of historical scholarship, and not all academic historians wish to engage a popular audience; but I bet there are plenty who want to do both, as I do. Generally speaking, each class of historian could use more education in, and more respect for, the approach of the other.

I mentioned a second issue that I wanted to discuss, with regard to Tanenhaus's now three-year-old essay. That's the notion that history is "mired" in history, and that being "archival" is a fault. I'm sorry—that's just weird. It elevates the notion of writing very specifically about present-day problems to the foremost purpose of history, which does violence to the study of the past. It's OK to write about subjects that speak to present-day concerns, or to write about the making of the problems we have today, but to present history as some kind of template for or easy analogy with the present is bad scholarship and bad writing.

Let me use my most recent book as an example. Many of the issues that dominated Cornelius Vanderbilt's life are ones that we struggle with today. He was a creator of the modern stock market, the modern corporation, the giant corporation. He was the focal point for a new debate over the need for government regulation of the economy. I believe that understanding his life richly informs the present. But I think that if I had written up a set of lessons to be taken from his life, it would have diminished the book. It would have taken a complex, multi-faceted life, one rich with contradiction and ambiguity, and boiled it down to take-away nuggets. I can think of nothing that would have more effectively shrunk the impact of my writing. Similarly, if I had kept the present too much in my mind when analyzing his life, I would have missed the truth. Before the Civil War, the ways Americans thought about corporations, government, freedom, equality—even the meanings of common words—were radically different. If I had made a deliberate attempt to make that period speak to today, I would have warped the reality of that time. Because I did my best to avoid present-mindedness, I actually discovered more about the present—such as the historical roots of popular suspicion of government, among people who materially benefit most from government action.

Don't get me wrong—Sam Tanenhaus is a smart guy, and the essay is provocative and thoughtful. But I do think that attacking history for being "mired in the past" is dumb. It asks history to cease being history, which would eliminate its very utility for understanding the present.

Chicago's Printer's Row Lit Fest

I'm on my way home after appearing at Chicago's wonderful Printer's Row Lit Fest. My event was a conversation with Eric Arnesen, a historian very interested in the discipline in general, and the writing of history.

The video is already available on BookTV's website:

Here.

In preparing for this event, I read an interesting article by Arnesen on academic history and general audiences. It had provoked some thinking, which I'll share in my next post. But first: I have to get home, and finish writing a review.

Classic Repost: Why Does It Matter?

I'm having an insane week, having just returned from two weeks on the East Coast, and a few days before I go to Chicago for the Printers Row Book Fest (which I'm really looking forward to attending). Oh, and did I mention that I have three events this week?

So here's a classic repost—the blogger's equivalent of a clip show on TV:

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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 [not shown in this repost], 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.

Art, Scholarship, and Prizes

I haven't been posting regularly, because I've been on the road for a mixture of business and pleasure. It feels mostly like business, because I've got deadlines hanging over my head. But my travels have had me thinking about the art of writing biography, the purported point of this blog.

My family and I headed back to New York (what I think of as my adult home town, where I spent twenty formative years) specifically for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony at Columbia University. Here you can see me with President Lee Bollinger, holding my Pulitzer certificate (and, apparently, attempting my best imitation of President Bollinger's smile).

Winning the Pulitzer is a remarkably disorienting thing. So is winning the National Book Award. Winning both makes me feel like a character in Being John Malkovich, as if I've suddenly found myself inside a famous person's head. I have actually been referred to as a celebrity, though I frankly don't believe it.

Part of the problem is that it places me in this peculiar position of explaining why it really is humbling, without diminishing the prizes themselves, or the seriousness and effort of the judges.

As I've written before, we have to admit that there's something inherently arbitrary about picking just one book in biography (in the case of the Pulitzer), let alone all nonfiction (in the case of the National Book Award). A different set of qualified judges might well have chosen another book. The Los Angeles Times Book Prize and National Book Critics Circle Prize went to different books—in fact, mine didn't even make their shortlists of finalists—and there were no riots in the streets by outraged readers and critics. As I've written, this is no surprise: the books that were selected as finalists and winners in those cases were all highly deserving of recognition.

So I'm very fortunate. And yet, I'm not the beneficiary of mere random chance. I know that might make me sound like a jerk, so allow me to explain.

Both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award exist to recognize writing that is both literary and meets exacting scholarly standards. They celebrate the idea that truly great writing can not only co-exist with accuracy, precision, and deep research, but that they can enhance one another. Knowledge and argument have the greatest impact when couched in fine writing; compelling narrative, smart pacing, richly drawn characters, and fully realized settings have the greatest power when they emerge from deep study.

This is my ideal. In the years that I devoted to The First Tycoon, I worked as hard as I could to write at the level that might make it a candidate for such prizes. Why? I didn't write in order to win a prize. That's frankly ridiculous, because (as I've said) there are always so many deserving candidates that the odds are tiny; it would be like devoting your life to a profession in order to earn money to buy one lottery ticket every four to seven years. Rather, I wrote in pursuit of the prizes' values: writing that informs, entertains, and enriches. It's deeply gratifying to win, not simply because it helps my career or garners me attention, but because distinguished juries have identified my work with that tradition. And that—well, that is a dream come true.

As I mentioned in my National Book Award acceptance remarks, one of the virtues of singling out just one book as a winner is that it starts arguments; there will always be dissenters who champion other books. That's exactly why these prizes are so great: they remind us of our values, when it comes to writing, and remind us that there are a lot of excellent books being published every year, in the face of interminable claims that publishing is dead and no one reads anymore. I really do thank the finalists, and the deserving books that didn't make these particular shortlists, because they share those values, because they write in the same tradition.

I've been talking a lot recently about these virtues, about the marriage of literary and scholarly qualities in the best biographies. As I've ruminated on the topic, it has dawned on me just how daunting it is to win major prizes. Expectations have been raised; meanwhile, good writing continues to be hard, hard work. Each book is a unique effort, and it shows when you take shortcuts. But the old chestnut is true: If it's worth doing, it's worth doing well.

Or, as my editor says, books are life. And here's to life.