Dirty, Dirty Politics

On Sunday, October 30, 2010, the San Francisco Chronicle will publish a review I wrote of H.W. Brands's history of the United States in the late nineteenth century. You can find it here. This follows a review I wrote of Ron Chernow's big new bio of George Washington, published the week before by the Washington Post. You can read it here.

On reading the comments posted on the Post's website, I'm struck by how the readers' reactions reflect our modern politics, rather than the eighteenth century. I'm betting that many readers will react similarly to my review of Brands's book. There's an irony to this: My most important point, in both reviews, is to say that we must understand historical figures in the context of their times, not ours.

And yet, when political passions run high, as they do now, it is inevitable that many readers will not follow this advice. Politics tends to dirty up the historical waters—not because politics itself is bad or dirty, but because it is so filled with emotion, with passion. It's difficult to step outside of the urgency of now to coolly understand the very different world of yesterday. I guess that's why I get paid the, er, small bucks.

But my job, as a biographer, is to try to bring readers along with me when I try to move inside the contemporary mindset of the past. Not everyone will be willing to follow; many will insist on seeing the past in terms of the arguments of the present. But we can't really understand the present unless we see how it emerged from the past. Things do change, and we'll never really see where we are unless we know where we came from to get here.

Getting all Zeitgeisty

On Sunday, October 24, the Washington Post published my review of Ron Chernow's Washington: A Life. You may read that review here.

I'd like to add three things to my otherwise self-evident commentary. First, I should have clarified something in the review. I quote historian Joyce Appleby's reference to "the Republicans," without specifying that this refers to the Jeffersonian Republicans—also known as the Democratic-Republicans—rather than the modern GOP. I think this may have confused some readers.

Second, I liked this book. (I'm even getting my father a copy as a gift.) I think that's pretty obvious, but unfortunately that's not what everyone will take away from the review. In many significant ways, Chernow produced an exemplary biography. But my job as a reviewer is not simply to convey my sense of the book's quality, of the degree of pleasure in reading it (though that's essential). I also must say something interesting about it. In doing that, I pointed to the limits on the book's excellence, an act that tends to draw the eye away from the excellence itself. I don't know of any way of countering that effect, except to say, as I did in this review, that a reader might agree with my criticisms, yet still thoroughly enjoy the book.

Third, the main thrust of my criticism is that a biographer must be a historian as well as a life-writer. To understand a person fully—to be able to judge the accuracy of conflicting evidence—a biographer needs to be fully immersed in the times, and the historiography (that is, what historians have written in their arguments with each other). This necessarily involves reading a lot of tedious monographs, the scholarly studies that comprise the academic field of history. It's not fun. It's possible to write a decent historical book without a background in the historiography—but it's harder. And it's nearly impossible to write a great book without it.

I've written about this before, so I needn't go on, but there is an unfortunate hostility between "popular" historians and biographers on one side, and academic historians on the other. Writers of narrative and biography often denounce scholarly writing as boring and irrelevant to the public. Academic historians sometimes deride widely read books as shallow and uninformed. These charges carry some truth, but we shouldn't get carried away in either direction. History needs in-depth studies, with their analyses and arguments. It also needs synthetic narratives, which restore the human, individual element, the life, to history. A biographer needs a literary sensibility and a deep understanding of the historical context, which means an understanding of the ways the context has been debated.

Is there such a thing as zeitgeist? Kinda, I guess. But, real or not, a good biographer must pursue it, to try to grasp what it meant to live in a time and place.

Verily Verity

The art of narrative nonfiction has occupied my thoughts even more than usual lately. I was recently on a panel with three distinguished writers, as a part of San Francisco's literary festival, Litquake. The other writers included Frances Dinkelspiel, Tamim Ansary, and Richard Rhodes. I'm a big admirer of Rhodes in particular, who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for his epic The Making of the Atomic Bomb. (He deserved to win both again for his heartrending memoir, A Hole in the World.)

One of the issues that came up, as I knew it would, is Rhodes's contention that we shouldn't call nonfiction nonfiction. We don't call sculpture "nonpainting," he notes. His solution is elegant: we should call it "verity," the anglicization of the latin word for truth.

I agree, though I doubt it will catch on. It's interesting to note, though, that our fascinating discussion strayed dangerously close at times to claiming that there is no difference between fiction and nonfi- ... er, verity. There is an electrified wire between them, in fact. I've argued this question with Colum McCann, who often writes novels about actual people, and doesn't see much of a distinction. My point is that you can cross the boundary quite easily, but only in one direction. (I'm hardly the first or only person to say this.) A fiction writer can make use of fact without hesitation, but a writer of verity cannot invent anything. Indeed, getting at truth—at verity—is what we do, the reason in many ways for our entire field of writing.

But in our panel discussion, Rhodes quite correctly pointed out that we make countless choices that reflect the same artistic sensibility as that of the novelist. What we include and what we leave out; what questions we ask and how we answer; our insights and the connections we draw. We  give life to characters, sound the emotional depths, identify motivations and consequences. It all must be solidly founded on evidence, but evidence can be looked at, and judged, in so many different ways.

It's not fiction, but it is art. If the writer wants it to be, that is.

Breath Sentence

Six years ago, when I still lived in New York, I got into an argument with a friend of mine over nonfiction. He was a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers Workshop, a fiction writer also published by Knopf (at the risk of sounding self-serving, this spoke to his literary chops). He insisted that nonfiction is not literature, because nonfiction writers don't care about "the beauty of the sentence."

I disagreed then, and I disagree now. And yet, I must admit, there are plenty of nonfiction writers who seem determined to prove him right. It frustrates me to read biographies, historical narratives, discussions of current events, and other nonfiction works, and stumble over clichés, dead phrases, lifeless metaphors, and ugly sentences.

George Orwell famously wrote, in "Politics and the English Language," that you must think about each word you use; if you simply write in stock phrases, then your phrases will do your thinking for you. I think this is the single most useful piece of advice he ever gave to writers. You might write in a style that would never have occurred to Orwell, yet excel in beauty and clarity by following this axiom.

There are nonfiction writers who write sentences as complex as a seven-course meal, and that are just as satisfying. There are writers who craft sentences as stark and simple as drops of distilled water, yet readers dry out their eyeballs from staring at their beauty. Whatever a writer's style, the important thing is that the sentences breathe life. Let the dead bury the dead—just keep them out of your paragraphs.