April 16th, 2012
Esquire has an amazing piece on Robert Caro by Chris Jones. Do not miss it.
I’m endlessly fascinated by the process of great writers, and Jones delivers the goods with Caro. Sample awesome:
After Caro composes his one or two anchor paragraphs, he writes his outline, the first of his outlines. This is the one that he pins onto his bulletin boards: maybe two dozen pages, typewritten on his Smith-Corona Electra 210. (“It’s like giving your fingers wings,” the advertisements in Life magazine read in 1967. “They just kiss the keys. Never punch them.” Caro has nine spares that he can cannibalize for parts, and he collects ribbon like a hoarder.) Here, he writes only the briefest sketches of scenes, entire chapters reduced to single lines: His Depression or The Cuban Missile Crisis. “Once that’s done,” Caro says, “I don’t change it.” He has his frame.
Then he writes a fuller outline that usually fills three or four notebooks, throwing himself into the filing cabinets that surround him, the yields from nearly four decades of research. Caro has spent vast stretches of his life poring over documents, mostly at the Johnson Library in Austin — it alone contains forty-five million pages, held in red and gray boxes, many of which he is the only visitor ever to have opened, rows and rows of boxes stretched across four floors — and interviewing hundreds of subjects. Some have stopped talking to him; he lost Lady Bird Johnson’s ear after the first book. . . .
Caro flew to Florida unannounced — “it’s harder to say no to a man’s face,” he says — and knocked on the door. Soon Caro found himself inside, filling notepads with scribbled secrets about Johnson’s cruel collegiate rise, then returned to his hotel to type up another transcript to slip into another file to slip into another drawer.
Each of the files is labeled in blood-red ink — Busby, Horace; Jenkins, Walter; The Gulf of Tonkin — and given a code. (A particular file on the assassination of John F. Kennedy is labeled ASS. 107X, for instance.) Caro’s outline contains hundreds of these codes, leading him directly to the file he will need when he is writing that particular section. “I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter,” he says, “and I don’t want to interrupt it, searching through my files.” . . .
Only after he has filled and annotated those notebooks does Caro begin to write, three or four drafts in longhand, on pads of legal paper. With each pass, muscle is added to the frame. Finally, Caro feels prepared to give his fingers wings. “There just comes a point you feel it’s time to go to the typewriter,” he says. He does write quickly; the math dictates that he must. When he finished The Power Broker, it was thirty-three hundred typewritten pages, more than one million words. (Gottlieb cut three hundred thousand: three normal-size books.) Caro’s sentences are long, fluid, intricate. (A single sentence inThe Passage of Power contains a parenthetical, an em dash, a colon, a comma, another two commas, a semicolon, two more commas, and a period.) There are stretches in each of his books that feel as though they rolled out of him in flurries, and they feel that way because they did. Three or four more drafts will appear out of that battered Smith-Corona Electra 210, each one hundreds of thousands of words, until he has his final draft.
There’s much, much more. Print it out and treat yourself.
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I’m exhausted just reading that.
The hardest thing about writing is believing that what you’re writing matters even a little. Caro evinces an awful lot of belief.
Is this like Manchester spending his life with Churchill as a subject? I mean, this is LBJ. I think frequently of Churchill; I think never of LBJ.
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Prediction: As e-reading becomes more dominant, meaning that no one who visits your home or sits near you on the subway can see what you’re reading, prestige books like Caro’s will mostly disappear. Without the “Look at me, I’m smart” factor, 90 percent of that market is eliminated. Talk about vanity press.
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I’m amused by writers who focus so much on a subject that they can tell me everything about it but very little on how it fits into the larger scheme of things. Such focus is wonderful for say an engineer designing an aircraft engine but not for someone trying to explain a piece of the puzzle of life.
One day while in traffic I was listening to Tony Kornheiser do a radio spot with John Feinstein. The two were discussing how e-books generated less revenue for Feinstein than a traditional publishing contract and then moved onto the key point which was…. if physical books were replaced by e-books what would people display in their homes to show visitors how smart they were?
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That’s a bit different from my writing process, which is as follows:
*get a great idea
*tell everybody about your great idea
*screw around on the internet
*write some code
*screw around on the internet
*write some more code
*screw around on the internet
*tell a few more people about your idea
*screw around on the internet
*get invited to give a talk on it
*write some more code
*realize the new idea won’t be ready in time for the talk, change the talk to be about your old (completed) paper
*screw around on the internet
*give the talk on the old paper
*get the results, but keep writing more code because it’s more fun than writing the paper
*screw around on the internet
*write half a draft
*screw around on the internet
*shit, summer’s over, time to teach
[3 months later, it’s winter break]
*screw around on the internet
*write the other half of the draft
*screw around on the internet
*send it to a few friends for comments
*screw around on the internet
*make some revisions
*screw around on the internet
*convert it from LaTeX to Word and send it out for peer review
*screw around on the internet
*get back the peer reviews, procrastinate having to deal with them for several months
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[…] I enjoyed this excerpt (read the comments too) by Jonathan V. Last from this article on the process of Robert Caro, who […]
Galley Friend L.B. April 17, 2012 at 9:53 am
Had the same thought myself, J.E. LBJ is no doubt a grand figure in 20th-century American politics, at the nexus of several huge events: JFK’s assassination, the Civil Rights era, Vietnam, and the Great Society apotheosis of American welfare-state liberalism. And he’s the only American politician I can recall who was both a giant figure as a legislator (House and Senate) and then VP and President. He’s certainly worthy of a great biography.
Howevah… By the time he’s finished his planned opus, Caro will have spent nearly 50 years and *FIVE* volumes on LBJ. LBJ!!! It’s not like his subject is a truly world-historical level figure, like Churchill or (two take a trio of Americans) Washington, Jefferson, or Lincoln — each of which whom were not only key players in epochal events but also had some greatness of soul to recommend them to a biographer looking for a life-long subject. Heck, it only took Shelby Foote 20 years to write his Amerian Iliad, his Civil War trilogy.
A nice, fat, 1,000-page one-volume bio on LBJ (a la McCullough’s Truman) would’ve been plenty. Alas, editors don’t seem to draw lines anymore…