18 Feb Robert Caro on writing in proximity to other writers
Robert Caro is one of my favourite authors. He’s working on the last part of his five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, an exhaustive, spellbinding account of a strange but masterful politician. The project has taken 42 years so far.
Before that, Caro wrote Power Broker, a biography of Robert Moses, the polarizing, all-powerful mid-20th century master builder of the metropolitan New York area, whose influence on urban planning spread design mistakes across the continent. We are only beginning to come to terms with the consequences.
The Gothamist, a New York City blog, has a fascinating interview with Caro in which he describes his tortured transition from newspaper reporter to book writer, and how a little known writers’ room in the New York Public Library proved his salvation. Here’s an excerpt, but if you’re contemplating a book, read the whole thing.
I was doing political reporting, and I came to realize almost by accident that this guy Robert Moses had so much power….
No one knew he was interesting. I only knew one editor, and they gave me the world’s smallest advance. For years I was working up in the Bronx, it was before I came to the library. You work on a book for years, and if you don’t have writers around to tell you that books take years—it was sort of a terrible time, because we were broke, really broke for years. It was terrible because Moses had stopped everyone from talking to me for a long time. But it was also terrible because you felt, what am I doing? No one’s interested in this! You’re keeping your family impoverished, you know? All of a sudden you’re in a room with 10 other people who are all sort of doing the same things.
I was very moved by this [NYPL] kiosk. It reminded me of how much that library meant to me. For the first time you were in a room full of writers. This guy, James Flexner, who was an idol of mine, he came over one day and said, “How long have you been working on this?” Which was the question that I just dreaded, you know? And whatever my answer was at the time, “five years,” or whatever. He said, “Oh that’s not so long, my Washington book took 14 years!”
There was another guy in the room named Ferdinand Lundberg, nobody knows this guy’s name. Ferdinand Lundberg wrote a book in the ‘30s that was one of the greatest examples of political reporting. It’s called America’s 60 Families. This would be our one-tenth of 1 percent—it’s about how 60 families controlled 95 percent of the wealth in the United States. I came across that book as I was researching the robber barons and I thought it was the greatest book.
One day I was doodling titles, and I decided I was going to call it The Power Broker, and my first editor didn’t like that title. But I knew this was going to be the title. And I wrote it, and all of a sudden Lundberg was standing behind me. He said, “Is that the title?” And I said yes. “Don’t let them change that,” he said. So there were things that happened in that room, right at the beginning, that made everything change all of a sudden.
There were other famous writers, like Barbara Tuchman had been there, she had just left when I got there. And then there were a bunch of writers like me, who no one knew. Like, Susan Brownmiller, she wrote a book called Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape, and it was groundbreaking. Susan had the next desk from me, and no one had ever heard of her either, and her editor wasn’t returning her calls. We used to make a bet, whose editor would return our call first! [Laughs]
Sometimes the bet would go on for a long time, but I still remember Susan’s feet. She wore these socks with bright horizontal stripes, and she’d stick them under this partial carrel, so they’d be sticking under my desk, and when I was writing I’d see them. So when you were writing you weren’t lonely.
Here’s a talk Caro gave at 2011 Biographers’ International Organization’s Compleat Biographer Conference. Caro begins speaking about four minutes in.
A Sense of Place from Biographers International Org on Vimeo.