Read to Write

Given that my posts have become more infrequent, I'm going to pick up the pace through a classic method:  reading recommendations.

The old axiom is quite true: If you're going to write, you have to read. Since I've often commented that serious biography straddles literature and scholarship, that means I have to read both fiction and nonfiction, works of art and works of deep research. Beyond the sheer pleasure of the reading experience, of being transported to another life or time, there are specific strategies and lessons that can be learned from each book.

My first recommendation: Colum McCann's National Book Award-winning Let the Great World Spin. The thread that holds the multi-voiced narrative together is the tightrope that Philippe Petit walked between the two towers of the World Trade Center on August 7, 1974. Yet the high-wire act merely supplies the frame for the tale, the skeleton; the flesh and blood is in the myriad characters whose lives criss-cross and finally come together in a heartbreakingly beautiful conclusion.

Why do I recommend this book? First, it's a stunning work of art. That's enough. More specifically, the prose is gorgeously lyrical. Not that I urge nonfiction writers to try to write this way; few writers of any stripe can. In fact, I'd warn against it. But it's a reminder to pay attention to the sound and impact of each word, to the power of the sentence.

Second, McCann's novel demonstrates that the heart of a historical moment is not in the broad structure of society or politics, important as that can be, but in the texture of life, the personal experience. He makes 1974 more real than any academic study ever could. No, the biographer should not fictionalize, but he or she should be alive to these matters in conducting research, to serve up the subtle flavors of the time.

Finally, McCann's portrait is panoramic in a social sense, from a hooker's walk under an overpass in the Bronx to an Upper East Side penthouse. I love this kind of sweeping view, taking in the range of human experience. Few can do it as well as McCann does, whether we write fiction or nonfiction, but it's a virtue worth striving for.

A Passion for Dispassion

My blogging is getting more and more infrequent. I blame society. Specifically, the holidays. So let me make up for lost posts with an end-of-year tribute to the virtues of dispassion.

It might seem a little odd to those who know me that I would praise the coolness of a writer's eye. I think it's safe to say I have a passionate temperament. I have strong opinions about a lot of things, from politics to food. Indeed, my passions drive my work—that is, they lead me to ask certain questions. The answers are another matter; they must be arrived at impartially, with a sense of skepticism for one's own preconceptions.

I've written before about how the biographer plays a double role, looking inward at the subject and outward at the context, the history. Dispassionate inquiry is essential in both. With Cornelius Vanderbilt, for example, I began with certain notions of his personality and family life, as well as of his business operations and public impact.  But I tried to be honest, fair, and even-handed, to revolve the evidence in my mind until I had a three-dimensional understanding of the person and his times. What I found surprised me.

I count it as a mark of success that I've been criticized by Amazon customer reviewers for being both too critical and too admiring, for being too liberal and also too conservative. The truth is that I see irreducible complexity, both in the man and the changes he embodied. In any individual, there are going to be contradictions that the writer should not stamp flat, as I've mentioned before. And to allow the contradictions to stand on the page as they stood in life, we must not be caught up in our own emotions. We must give life, but we should be wary of turning into prosecutors or defenders.

Oh Wise One

It's been a while since I posted, thanks largely to illness over Thanksgiving and the couple of weeks that followed. So I thought I would catch up, with a brief comment in keeping with the season.

There is something about literature that lifts it from mere entertainment to the more profound level of art. It is difficult to achieve. It's simply impossible to teach. And it's nearly impossible to define. I speak of wisdom.

I mean more, of course, than intelligence, even shrewd perception, and certainly more than self-help advice. I'm referring to deep insight into the human condition. When I read truly great writers (I'd list Tolstoy, Wharton, Melville, and Conrad as a few), I discover not only rich, fully fleshed-out characters, but a special vision that takes me deeper into the essence of it all. Of course, the names I've just listed are all novelists, but I'd add many nonfiction writers as well, such as George Orwell, Gary Wills, Joan Didion, even Robert Caro, a fellow (but far more accomplished) biographer.

I don't know if it's possible to deliberately instill wisdom in writing, but I do believe that I—that all of us writers—can try to think about the universal human experience in the course of our work. When I wrote of Cornelius Vanderbilt as a father, I tried to connect it to the Fatherhood with a capital F. When I wrote of Jesse James becoming a violent criminal, I reflected as best I could on the fraught relationship between circumstances and individual choice in the warping of his nature.

I must caution myself as well as my fellow writers: It takes ambition to reach for wisdom, but the attempt must be made with modesty. There is a difference between self-important pronouncements and reflective consideration, between declaring judgments and pondering the depths. At its best, perhaps, wise writing does not offer answers, but points to where readers might pursue and discover their own insight into the human condition. Unfortunately, the pursuit rarely ends with "Ho ho ho." But, at its best, literature can bring us all a little closer to being Wise Men.