Working by Robert Caro
The best way to improve your writing is to write a lot. Once you’re already doing that, it doesn’t hurt to consult the heavyweights. Today I review “Working” by Robert Caro. For more in my series on writing, check out the links below.
Six tips for getting columns published (from a very new writer)
My war of art (a piece about the resistance to pursuing creative goals)
Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert Caro
Another writer lent me this book, I believe for three reasons. One, he thinks Caro is a great writer. Two, he knows I am interested in researching my own book. And three, he thinks I’m obsessed with power.
Robert Caro is a heavyweight biographical writer. He won Pulitzer Prizes for his books, The Power Broker and Master of the Senate. In excruciating detail, these tomes cover the lives of two American men: Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. They are important men, yet relative to bigger names, neither spring to the average person’s mind as particularly exciting people.
What Caro explores through these biographies is power: how a person gets it, how they wield it, and how they harm those without it. Moses was the power broker of New York, negotiating the deals that built much of its transport infrastructure. Johnson was the king of the senate, passing the first major civil rights legislation since Reconstruction and going on to pass the Civil Rights Act as President.
Though his source material is people, his writing is relentlessly guided by questions of power. This leads him to explore not just the powerful men he profiles in his biographies, but the powerless people they leave in their wake.
What I value most about this book is feeling overwhelmed by the depth, diligence and relentlessness of Caro’s research. He also left me inspired to do the same.
Caro’s mantra, to “turn every page,” comes from a former editor. He encouraged him to check every page of the archives to find the story that everyone else missed. In this, his editor is like a finance MD - “always read the footnotes.”
Researching the Johnson books, he discovered Johnson’s “king-maker” moment by reviewing letter after letter of Johnson writing to other congressmen during his early years. He noted a tone of supplication, normal for juniors addressing their seniors. Yet he read so many of these letters that he started noticing that the roles flipped: “senior congressmen…were doing the beseeching, asking for a few minutes of [Johnson’s] time”. He pinpointed the date (the 1940 election), received a tip from a Roosevelt aide, and eventually found the evidence he needed in letters from Johnson’s financial backers in Texas. He successfully raised unprecedented sums for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and made sure everyone knew that he decided on whose campaigns it would be spent.
Caro applies this informational hunger not only to paper resources but to people. He often starts with them: “papers don’t die. People do.” He interviews hundreds for his books, coming at a story from all angles – family, friends, associates, neighbours, colleagues, enemies, victims. He will revisit the same person multiple times as a matter of course, and ten, twenty, thirty times if needed, to draw out the details he seeks. He doesn’t stop until he is satisfied that he has uncovered the truth.
One of his tricks is to write in his notebook that he is pausing, instead of asking another question, to restrain himself from filling the silence. He describes a revelation with Johnson’s brother when Caro recreated the family home and had him narrate a typical dinner. Johnson eventually recanted all his previous stories and told Caro what their family life was really like.
In another example, after years of being told it would never happen, his diligence was rewarded when he even secured a meeting with Robert Moses. Access was promptly withdrawn after Caro discovered evidence in an archive that Moses thought was buried. Turn every page.
Caro goes so far as to up-end his entire life for the story. He observed that he wasn’t getting quite the full story from the residents of Johnson’s hometown because he was an outsider. He decides to move himself and his wife to the town for years, so he could earn their trust and uncover the truth. This even led him to discovering the missing, damning pages in a high school yearbook that had been meticulously cut from other records.
Because of the research intensity and an overdose of perfectionism, Caro’s books take years to write, sometimes even a full decade. His first book took such a toll on his family life that his wife sold their home to make ends meet. His wife also dedicated most of her life to supporting his research, poring over archives by his side. Although the final books are long to read, the drafting process results in an even longer manuscript.
Caro sifts through roomfuls of research to distil and write the best stories. He wants to place the reader in the moment. Then, he continues cutting, measuring success by the quality of what is left out. Like other writers, he suggests writing every day, gaining momentum on the story.
Caro is still scribbling away (he likes to handwrite his drafts) on the fifth instalment of the Lyndon Johnson biographies, 50 years after he started researching the first book. His writing and research guidance is immensely valuable, though to do justice to a full memoir would take him many years still. He wrote the book now anyway, and the reason why is throat-stopping:
“Why am I publishing this book now? At the age of eighty-three… the answer is, I’m afraid, quite obvious, and if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it, by journalists who … often express their doubts … in a sarcastic phrase: ‘do the math.’ Well, I can do that math. I am quite aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.”