COMMENTARY: Biographer's book on writing is delightful read

By Ashish Joshi

Robert Caro disheartens his fans. In “Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing,” we learn that he’s still working on the last volume of the projected 5-volume Lyndon B. Johnson biography and is — at the age of 83 — “several years” from finishing it. Aside from this one bit of disappointing information, “Writing” is a delightful read. While not a full-scale memoir, the book offers “some scattered, almost random glimpses” into Caro’ encounters with both documents and witnesses in researching, interviewing people, and writing his books.

Fans of Caro’s doorstopper biographies that take years in making will be surprised to discover that he’s actually a very fast writer. But early on in his career Caro was fortunate to get a piece of advice that he took to heart, which was to stop thinking with his fingers. Because writing with your fingers is easy — “No real thought, just writing” — and Caro resolved to not write until he had thought things through. He still does his first few drafts in longhand and sticks to his Smith-Corona Electra 210 typewriter instead of a computer. A disciplined writer, Caro sets a goal of a minimum 1,000 words a day and on most days meets it.

The book reveals the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner, masterful biographer’s craft in researching and writing superb biographies — not just of towering personalities but also of the times gone by. The characters, scenes, dialogues, inner monologues — the detail — which is the hallmark of a Caro biography is a result of another sage advice that the writer received during his days as a young Newsday reporter: “Turn every page. Never assume anything. Turn every goddamned page.”

“Writing” reveals Caro’s determined pursuit of power and its inner workings. Power has always fascinated Caro. He set out to learn and write about political power, “the raw naked realities of power, about how power works in cities, how it really works.” And he found it in unlikely places. In writing “Power Broker,” his magisterial biography of Robert Moses, Caro’s research —“turn every page” — focused his attention on New York’s public authorities, entities with dreary, arcane names such as the Henry Hudson Parkway Authority. These authorities, which were outside politics, were ignored by journalists and historians. No journalist or historian apparently saw these authorities as sources of political power in and of themselves. Caro did. And he made us, the readers, see it as well. Caro’s indefatigable research revealed how a public work, say a bridge, is not just a “transportation device,” but rather a source of power. “Every aspect of it was a source of power.” “Power Broker” showed us how this source of power was masterfully leveraged by Moses and how it changed the face of New York City forever. But Caro doesn’t write just about the men who wielded power, he also writes about the people, politics, and the times that were shaped by that power.

And writing about people requires talking to them. Talking to and interviewing people is a skill that Caro appears to have elevated to an art form. Between the records that needed to be reviewed and people that needed to be interviewed, Caro always gave priority to people. Because “papers don’t die; people do.” The lawyer, litigator in me reveled in learning about Caro’s “tricks of the trade” — his art of conducting interviews. What not to say or ask is as important, if not more, than what questions to ask and how to. As Caro explains, “silence is the weapon, silence and people’s need to fill it—as long as the person isn’t you, the interviewer.” While he is waiting for an interviewee to “break a silence” by giving him a piece of information that he wants, Caro writes “SU (for Shut Up!)” in his notebooks. I commiserate with the plight for future Caro biographers: “If anyone were ever to look through my notebooks, he would find a lot of ‘SUs’ there.”

Writing also exposes the hard truth that the flawless I-could-have-been-in-the-room-witnessing-this-scene story-telling in Caro’s books is by no means an accident or even an innate gift. Rather it’s the skill that Caro has cultivated through difficult, deliberate, and dogged attempts in interviewing people. What makes an interview a good story? According to Caro, it’s the reader’s ability to “see the scene.” “Are you making the reader see the scene?” Caro doesn’t just write words; he makes a reader see.  When writing about the difficulties and humiliations that black Americans experienced when they tried to vote for instance, Caro makes a reader feel and see the injustice and humiliation faced by a dignified, soft-spoken black woman — “you could see in their eyes they were laughing at us.” “I wanted the reader to feel the indignation I felt at the way this ...woman had been treated.” Caro teaches us that if you talk to people long enough and enough times, “you find out things from them that maybe they didn’t even realize they knew.” But it’s not enough to ask a person being interviewed, “What did you see?” As Caro shows, often enough, you have to make them see.

No doubt, it takes time to write all this. And no wonder Caro’s books take time. “Truth takes time.”

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Ashish Joshi is with Joshi: Attorneys & Counselors in Ann Arbor.