Reading History and Biography
THE WORLD OF NONFICTION divides human experience into two time frames: Now and Everything Before Now. How much before? How far back would you like to go? The Trojan War (circa 1300 BCE) exists in EBN but so also do the Clinton and Bush administrations, with Obama’s following quickly. Events discussed in historical works do not need to be back in the mists of time, only earlier enough that we are now looking back at them from a suitable distance (by which we mean, not last week). Now is always moving forward, leaving more and more Everything Before in its wake.
The difference between, say, Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers (2012) and David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2017) is time. Boo reveals the hidden world of a Mumbai slum that exists, however much we might wish it weren’t true, in the twenty-first century, while Grann exposes the murderous conspiracy against wealthy Osage tribal members during the 1920s. And that difference matters in a number of ways, among them the nature of the available information. Boo has the advantage of being able to interview her subjects. Grann’s subjects are unavailable, since almost a century had passed between the events and the writing. On the other hand, he has a deeper written record on which to draw, which includes interviews, court records, journals, and letters as primary documents and articles, novels, nonfiction books, court reviews among the secondary documents. By “primary,” we mean any firsthand source, or source by someone who was actually present. A “secondary” source is one that relies on received information. So a journal entry by a crime victim is primary; if a writer draws upon that journal to analyze the events, the resulting article or book would be a secondary source for some future researcher. For Boo, the secondary record is fairly thin, although she can draw on many sources that discuss the world’s poorest neighborhoods generally.
What books and articles on contemporaneous events offer is immediacy: we are looking at events or situations that are happening right now. What the passage of time affords, by contrast, and what historical works provide is perspective. Both types of writing are valuable. Behind the Beautiful Forevers is news in the broadest sense, information readers need to understand their world as it currently exists. How is it possible that such poverty exists in the world? How is it that most of us have no idea how desperate lives are in places we never see because we don’t look? Katherine Boo is reporting from the front, looking on our behalf and sending us this detailed, unsettling dispatch from a war that poverty is clearly winning. Killers of the Flower Moon, on the other hand, is taking the long view, allowing us to see one of the ugliest chapters in a long and ugly history of treatment of Native peoples. David Grann is not so much a reporter as a compiler, amassing and then sifting through a mountain of information on a story from ninety years earlier to fill in a major gap in our understanding of race relations. Our need for this knowledge is no less acute for the passage of decades.
Histories come in various denominations. We are accustomed to the great-man-great-event sort of history, whether of George Washington and the beginnings of the American presidency or George Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. These can lean more toward the biography of the protagonist or the events he or she brings about. But histories can also be about ordinary men and women caught up in something far larger than themselves. Stephen Ambrose’s Undaunted Courage or Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals stand as examples of the former, David McCullough’s 1776 or Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation of the latter.
Ambrose’s book follows the exploits of Lewis and Clark’s expedition to open up the West, but it does so, as we have said before, through Lewis’s perspective. The strategy here is that Lewis is the more compelling figure, in part because of his short, tragic life, but also because of his meteoric rise. That he was also the ranking officer (he had been a captain to Clark’s second lieutenant, although both are treated as “Captain” on the expedition) may also have played a role in Ambrose’s decision. Clark is also covered extensively, but Lewis receives the star treatment, along with his president, Thomas Jefferson, who completed the Louisiana Purchase and commissioned the grueling quest to “discover” the new real estate he had bought. Ambrose is exhaustive in his treatment of the journey, drawing heavily on the journals the two leaders kept as well as correspondence with Jefferson and contemporaneous sources of many types. And while he is generally favorable to the project and the people involved, he doesn’t fail to mention their shortcomings, as when Lewis neglects to inform his president that their survival over the winter was made possible by the generosity of the Mandans in sharing their corn; the resulting report suggests that the land itself supplied adequately for their nutritional needs, which was not the case. He reports the challenges and sometimes surprising assistance the Corps of Discovery encountered from Native American tribes, at times displaying a wry humor. He is also sympathetic toward the native peoples encountered, the friendly tribes and individuals certainly, but also the Sioux, who were frequently obstreperous. Rather than merely seeing them as blocking characters in a narrative, he examines the reasons they might have had for being hostile to strangers, since the Corps was not the first incursion by outsiders in the history of the Plains.
This work is in a sense the easiest sort of history to follow, tracing a large event—in this case a massive series of events—through the experience of a single person. When in doubt, the author always doubles back to Meriwether Lewis. Are there downsides to this approach? Of course. Every writing decision is a choice based on what is gained and what is lost. In exchange for greater coherence, Ambrose sacrifices the variety of views. This is likely a necessary element since the two captains are very nearly the only literate persons on the journey, so their views are captured in a way that Sacagawea’s or the enlisted men’s are not. Nevertheless, an argument can be made that the story is as much Clark’s as Lewis’s, and that in fact each person on this journey had his or her own epic adventure. The Odyssey, however, admits of no hero but Odysseus.
An alternative to the single-focus history is what we might think of as the mosaic approach, a narrative without a central figure but with a thematic or temporal lodestar. Both McCullough and Brokaw follow this pattern. We can best understand McCullough’s book as a biography of the single most consequential year in American history. His approach is a discontinuous narrative, moving from place to place as the date and events dictate. In order to do the story justice, he must present not only tales from up and down the colonies—the newly declared States by midyear—but also from the chambers of power in England. Travel and communication being what they were in the late eighteenth century, there is an inevitable lag between, say, the signing of the Declaration on July 4 and the British response some weeks later. King George and Parliament may have anticipated that the action would come, but expectation and certain knowledge are two different things. The other notable aspect of the narrative is that McCullough focuses on persons great and small, not forgetting that this incipient war was more than a contest between two men named George. He recounts the experience of an ordinary soldier in the army when his unit was called forward during the disastrous rout of the Battle of Brooklyn:
Private Joseph Martin, one of those in the units ordered to march to the Brooklyn ferry, remembered the cheers of the soldiers as they embarked, and the answering cheers of the spectators who thronged the wharfs to watch the excitement. “They all wished us good luck apparently.” For his own part, Private Martin could only think of the horrors of war “in all their hideousness.”
When they arrived at the battle, his worst fears were confirmed. Discovering an officer who made a spectacle of his fear and alarm, thereby making the scene even worse for his men, “A fine soldier you are, I thought, a fine officer, an exemplary man for young soldiers! I would have suffered anything short of death than have made such an exhibition of myself.” In passages such as this, McCullough shows us the character of the common enlisted men and the not-always-sunny relationship with their leaders.
There are numerous nonfiction works with a four-digit (usually) numerical title. You can find multiple titles for 1066, the year of the Norman Conquest of England. Books about major disruptions or, at least as common, the year just prior to calamity are popular. Thus we have 1913 in various guises. Would you like that by Florian Illies (2013), Charles Emmerson (also 2013, centenaries being what they are), Oliver DeMille (2012, jumping the gun a little), or Paul Ham (back to 2013)? You have only to ask. Want to know about Columbus’s impact on the new world? Charles C. Mann gives us 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus (2005) and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011). Wait, you cry, what about the year he landed? No sweat. Felipe Fernández-Armesto covers that in 1492: The Year the World Began (2009). The thing is, these titles and many, many more like them arise from the same impulse as McCullough’s book: the desire to carve out a space small enough that a deep dive into it avoids resembling a ship’s anchor.
Brokaw’s book, in contrast, which stands as a tribute to a generation that was shaped by the privations of the Great Depression and that made its mark in the cataclysm that was World War II, is much more fragmentary and pointillist. In a series of chapters drawn from oral or written testimony, Brokaw presents forty-seven profiles—thirty of “Normal People” and another seventeen of those who went on to achievements in the public realm—of men and women whose contributions helped win the war. The chapters average under ten book pages in hardcover; none runs more than a dozen. The book makes no pretensions at being an exhaustive treatment of the war, no claims as to strategy or policy. Rather, this is a book of lives, reminding us of all the lives that were risked to turn back tyranny and oppression, of young people called away from quiet or noisy private lives by an enterprise vastly larger than anything they could have imagined. To that end, he allows his subjects as much voice as space can accommodate, moving between narrative overview and direct quotation from either the participants or their family members in each profile. Take, for instance, his handling of the story of Lloyd Kilmer, the son of a Minnesota farmer who went bankrupt during the Depression. Kilmer, despite having never been in an airplane, was determined to become an airman, which he did, piloting a bomber during the early months of the US involvement until, on June 29, 1944, just three weeks after D-Day, his plane was shot down, crash-landing near Beemster, Holland. It was his sixteenth mission. He and his crew were taken prisoner, and he remained a prisoner of war for the duration, until his camp’s liberation on April 26, 1945. After the war, he would earn a degree from Creighton University and have a successful career in business and local government in Omaha while raising a family with Marie, the girlfriend whose memory kept him going during the ten months in Stalag 7A. When he retired to Sun City West near Phoenix, he began a campaign to affix American flags (something he noticed lacking on his first Fourth of July there) “to each of the hundred power poles along the [main] boulevard,” which goal he achieved in short order. Here is Lloyd’s account of his plane being hit: “One shell went through the wing, rupturing the gas tanks, and starting a fire. Another burst knocked the propeller off an engine. Other planes were exploding all around us. We could see parachutes coming out of some—and others with no parachutes. We were in big trouble.” Count on the man who was there to give you the story straight, with no extra drama. The facts supply plenty.
Brokaw’s goal is not to present a comprehensive overview, which would be massive and unwieldy in the extreme, but a broad canvas filled with miniatures. In so doing, he can move from people who became businessmen or farmers or presidents (George H. W. Bush, who flew for the navy) or famous television chefs (Julia Child, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the CIA). The point of the book is that the heroes of the Second Great War came from every place and every background to fight and then dispersed equally widely to help build postwar America. The structure—a large accumulation of brief biographical vignettes—served to underscore that purpose. As we learned from the example of John McPhee earlier, every successful nonfiction work must find the structure adequate to its task; the best ones find the perfect structure to accomplish their ends.
This will surprise almost none of you, but publishing is a fashion industry. Turn one Harry Potter–style success loose in the world and suddenly all of publishing is madly chasing the next boy wizard, the next school of magic series. Let one Gone Girl take flight, and within a couple of months we will be swamped with books bearing the word girl on their spines. This is no less true of histories and biographies. At one time, both concerned themselves chiefly with the star attractions of our past. That means big wars and the generals who (mostly) won them. Famous statesmen, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Famous writers and artists and composers, chiefly male. See any pattern? Oh, there were occasional books about famous helpmeets, if those wives or lovers kicked up enough of a ruckus or drowned in difficulty. Occasionally, a book on Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, or Mary Todd Lincoln might appear either because of the atmosphere of mythmaking (Madison, especially) or incredible suffering (Lincoln) that surrounded the First Ladies. Mostly, however, history and biography were the province of Great-Men-and-the-Acts-that-Made-Them-Great. A biography of Mrs. Charles Dickens? Get serious. His mistress, maybe, since Ellen Ternan was an actress, famous in her own right, but not poor, long-suffering, misused Catherine Hogarth Dickens. Even her beautiful younger sister Mary, known to be the model for every “young, beautiful, and good” doomed heroine in his novels, had a better chance of being profiled.
Then in the late twentieth century, something changed. In large measure because of second-wave feminism, great men’s wives also seemed like material for serious study. There had always been interest in those who, like Zelda Fitzgerald, were intimately tied to their husbands’ public personae, especially if, also like Zelda, their stories carried elements of scandal or madness in their own right. The biography that really set this trend rolling was Nora, Brenda Maddox’s life of James Joyce’s wife (1988). Much of the early writing on Joyce characterized Nora as a hapless figure, at best an uneducated, non-literary, incompetent housekeeper from the West of Ireland, at worst a sharp-tongued harridan who made her celebrated husband’s life hell. These accounts were written by or based on the view of Joyce’s male friends and fellow literary stars, who could see nothing to account for Joyce’s utter devotion to his other half. Their prejudice was abetted by leaning heavily on her family surname, Barnacle. Worse fortune in the matter of naming has rarely occurred. True, in his brilliant James Joyce (1959), a work that forever changed literary biography, and not inevitably for the better (bigger is truly not always better), Richard Ellmann does much better by Nora, even ending with the story of her funeral, at which the presiding priest referred to her as “a great sinner” (eine grosse Sünderin), leading to the book’s most touching line. “No epithet,” Ellmann writes, “could have been less apt.” Still, even for him Nora remains a peripheral figure. Maddox, happily, became the first to bring this supposedly peripheral life to center stage, depicting a much more complex woman than any previous writer on the Joyce ménage. Sometimes in publishing, virtue is rewarded; Nora appeared to critical acclaim and excellent sales.
From there, the race was on. The last thirty years have seen biographies of Georgie Hyde-Lees Yeats (wife of W. B.), Frieda Lawrence (wife of D. H.), Véra Nabokov (wife of Vladimir), pretty much every Hemingway wife, some repeatedly, Zelda again, Sophia Tolstoy (wife of Leo), Constance Lloyd Wilde (wife of Oscar), Lee Krasner (wife of Jackson Pollock), and so many more. There is a special case in the trend in women’s biographies about not a wife but a work colleague: Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (2002). There is even a new-ish class of novel, the artist’s wife/partner/lover book, of which the most successful is probably Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife (2011). The day I wrote this list I heard of The Age of Light, a new bio-novel by Whitney Scharer of Lee Miller, the assistant to as well as fellow photographer and lover of experimental visual artist Man Ray. And why should this not be so? The wives, lovers, and friends of famous male artists constituted a largely untouched field of information. To continue ignoring them would simply be extending the insult. Maddox was clearly on to something.
It is always tempting when discussing history to drag out George Santayana’s bromide about ignorance dooming us to repeat it, but I don’t think that gets at the real need for historical understanding. First of all, evidence from every quarter suggests that we humans inevitably repeat every sort of folly, however knowledgeable we are about past performance. The greater argument for knowing history is that we cannot possibly comprehend our present without understanding our past. To think, for instance, that a single event, whether the Emancipation Proclamation or Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus or Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, somehow rectified relations between black and white citizens of the republic is sheer lunacy. Those moments and movements are justly celebrated, but they are not the entire story. A book like Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures, which shows us the NASA triumphs that were made possible by black female mathematicians and physicists, while at the same time pointing out the difficulties they faced because of their race and gender, adds depth and complexity to the saga of the struggle for racial equality. Similarly, David McCullough’s 1776 fleshes out our understanding of that founding year by including not merely famous leaders but also ordinary men and women who helped to shape events. Ron Chernow’s biography helps restore to prominence Alexander Hamilton, who for many of us was little more than a footnote, dying in a duel over obscure reasons in our high school history textbooks.
Perhaps the most troubling book from a Santayanian perspective is Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon. The Osage murders of the 1920s were, as he details, not incidental misfortunes but a horrific campaign of murder driven by greed, racism, innate viciousness, and official indifference. A particularly disturbing element is the patient violence required for white men to become the lovers or husbands of Osage women in order to murder them with poisoned whiskey (although they were not opposed to guns and nitroglycerin when dealing with women or men). Grann’s book is like a terrible wreck from which we can’t avert our gaze. At least, readers will feel, this is ninety years and more in the past, the last major outrage in a long, bloody history of murderous impulses carried out against the original inhabitants of the land.
Or so we thought. Something closer to the truth became general knowledge in 2018–2019 with reports of a series of disappearances of women across Indian Country dating back more than a decade. A great many of the cases have not been solved. It turns out that Native women are, depending on location, up to ten times more likely than the overall population to be victims of murder. As with the Osage murders, the current situation is a stain on the character of America; that this should happen in such numbers is appalling. Yet happen it does. Was David Grann prescient when he chose his subject? Did he understand the extent to which the problem of violence against Native people, women especially, has never really left? Probably not, but his work shines a light on one of the darkest aspects of life in America, one that has been with us since colonialization and shows too few signs of abating. What he did discover was that the killings went on long after the supposed perpetrators had been identified. Many Osage died while under government-ordered guardianship; some “guardians” had client deaths of 100 percent. The resulting windfalls made some of those men quite wealthy, and most went unpunished.
For those of us who would embrace the ideal of social progress, such stories are repulsive. This is not why we read nonfiction, to find out that things have not improved, that crises continue or reemerge periodically, that the two founding crimes of America—slavery and genocide—continue to stain the national soul. But it may be why we need to.
Ultimately, biography and history are merely tools available to writers and the reading public, and like most tools, they have no innate morality. Writers have to supply that, if it is to exist, just as readers must approve or disapprove of the result. A great many lives of great leaders and major historical events, especially those works closest in time to their subjects, have been written in something like bad faith, glorifying and lionizing war criminals as heroes, painting unjust incursions as acts directed by Divine Providence. Nowhere has this been more true than in dealing with our twin Original Sins, slavery and the treatment of Native Americans. We may wish to believe, with Martin Luther King Jr. (and before him, the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker) that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,” but it will not bend thusly without some work from those who seek justice. Among that number are invariably writers. I said earlier in the chapter that the key element in these works is time. In this case, time allows later writers to look at the falsehoods often present in first-generation biographies and histories and to offer correctives, as with Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970), a history of westward expansionism from a Native American viewpoint, and Vine Deloria Jr.’s Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969). Yet what can be gained can also be lost, and recent times have proved that a society is capable of backsliding along that moral arc. There will always be writers and readers eager to return to some earlier, personally advantageous status quo. Readers interested in a more perfect union, then, must recognize those retrograde efforts for what they are, a drag against the movement of history. As former Attorney General Eric Holder said of Dr. King’s maxim, that arc only bends toward justice with a little pulling from us.