By Gary Topping–
Sometimes I think I’ve learned almost as much about the historian’s craft from simply imitating historians I admire as from formal academic coursework. This “monkey see, monkey do” approach might seem primitive, but it does work, after a fashion. It has its perils, to be sure: the great Don D. Walker, who supervised my doctoral dissertation, was such an influential thinker and stylist in his own quiet way, that we all wrote like him and became little Walker clones. It took me a considerable amount of time after leaving graduate school, not to shake Walker’s influence exactly, but rather to assimilate it along with other influences into development of my own voice.
Another influence has been Robert A. Caro, whose ninety-plus years have been devoted to two massive biographies: The Power Broker, about the New York real estate developer Robert Moses, and The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the fifth and final volume of which is still unfinished. He recently took time out to pen a brief autobiography, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, which I enthusiastically commend to any historian looking to refine his craft.
Caro is quite a character, and few of us would care to emulate his daily work habits. Each morning he dons a coat and tie, just as he did when he was a young reporter, and sets off across Central Park on foot to his Manhattan office, where he spends his long days shut up alone with his books and research notes. It is there and there alone that he works, and he absolutely refuses to discuss his work at cocktail parties or other gatherings. He creates and revises the early drafts of his huge books in longhand, then types them up on his ancient Smith-Corona electric typewriter. (The endpapers of Working show examples of his nearly illegible script and its cramped revisions.) I have long been an advocate of letting people write in whatever way is most comfortable, but even to my laissez faire philosophy, this seems unnecessarily cumbersome, and it does mean that his books are a long time in appearing.
What I admire most in Caro, I think, is the strong moral quotient in his writing. Rather than simply chronicling Robert Moses’ creation of bridges and freeways, for example, Caro took the trouble to seek out, in often unspeakably squalid and dangerous tenements, the people whose homes and lives had been ruined by Moses’ uncaring ambition and drive for power. Their story was part of Moses’ story, and Caro felt compelled to detail both sides of the equation.
Similarly, Caro, a New Yorker born and bred, moved out into the barren hill country west of Austin, Texas, to try to understand the people and their way of life among whom Lyndon Johnson had grown up. His efforts paid handsome dividends. In a chapter called “The Sad Iron,” in The Path to Power, the first volume of his Johnson biography, Caro describes, in almost unbearably moving detail, the hard lives of those hill country ranchers, especially the women, before the advent of electricity. Those women became “bent,” in their terms, stooped over in their posture, from carrying heavy pails of water from the well to the house, and they almost passed out from the summer heat when they had to do their ironing with a “sad iron” manually heated over a wood stove.
“The women who lived that life, a life before electricity—millions and millions of them—of course they are almost all dead, and they can’t tell their story to their descendants. So the story might easily have been lost. If in even small measure I told it for them, these women of the American frontier, and in order to accomplish that, The Path to Power took a couple of years longer to write, well—so what?” (p. xx)
