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Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson:
One book, half a lifetime
t's rare in the modern publishing world to
come across a tale of such epic dedication and
achievement, but then Robert Caro, the multi
award-winning biographer of Lyndon B. Johnson, is
no ordinary writer. He's spent almost 40 years on
his subject, and when the fourth volume in the
series is released in May, he still won't be done.
Does the word "obsession" apply? By KEVIN BLOOM.
Why would a man give over a good portion
of his life to recording the life of another man?
It's always an intriguing question, and it always
gets asked when the publishing industry deposits a
thick, new biography on the shelves of nationwide
booksellers. In South
Africa, the question got
asked with most urgency in 2007, when acclaimed
historian Charles van Onselen released The Fox and
the Flies, a 672-page tome that was close to 25
years in the making.
A biography of the
nineteenth century gangster Joseph Lis, Van
Onselen's painstaking labour was evident on every
page - from the detail on the subject's early
years in Poland to his time as a pimp in New York,
a white slaver in Johannesburg, and a thug in
South America. In the last chapter, the author
posited the theory that Lis, who stalked the
streets of London's Whitechapel in the 1880s, was
in fact Jack the Ripper. And here, unfortunately,
lay the undoing of a quarter-century of research:
none of the major reviews of the work treated the
theory seriously.
Mark Gevisser, who took
eight years to write Thabo Mbeki: The Dream
Deferred, also released in 2007, achieved what can
only be seen as a more equitable return on his
investment. Not only did he beat Van Onselen to
take South Africa's Alan Paton Award the following
year, but most of the international critics deemed
the work authoritative. If we can say that a
biographer intends for his or her work to have
lasting value, that the obsession (for a
biographer is nothing if not obsessed) is in
service of some transcendental vision, then
Gevisser's years were well spent where Van
Onselen's were not. It's a cruel calculus, but it
is what it is.
Still, the gamble - the
possibility of having your words read by scholars
and researchers a century from now - doesn't
completely explain why a man would spend more than
forty years in single-minded pursuit of somebody
else's life trajectory. And more than forty years
is what Robert Caro, now 76, will have spent, when
he is finally finished, on Lyndon B. Johnson.
Unlike Van Onselen, who published the lauded New
Babylon, New Nineveh and The Seed is Mine (winner
of the 1997 Alan Paton), as well as countless
academic articles while gathering material for The
Fox and the Flies, Caro has done nothing else for
close on four decades.
It all started when
he was a relatively young man of 39, after his
first book - a biography of the New York urban
planner and developer Robert Moses - had won the
Pulitzer Prize. Back then, Caro figured he could
finish a three-volume series on the 36th president
of the United States within six years. But only
the first volume, covering Johnson's life up to
the failed 1941 campaign for the US Senate, was
finished in the projected timeframe. Eight years
later, the second volume was released, taking the
life of Johnson up to 1948. A further twelve years
later, the third volume was released. Next month,
after another decade of work, Random House will
publish the fourth volume. Caro has only now
started to touch on the LBJ that the world outside
of America recognises from the Vietnam War -
volume four ends in 1964.
"In other
words," wrote Charles McGrath, in the latest cover
story for the New York Times Magazine, "Caro's
pace has slowed so that he is now spending more
time writing the years of Lyndon Johnson than
Johnson spent living them, and he isn't close to
being done yet. We have still to read about the
election of 1964, the Bobby Baker and Walter
Jenkins scandals, Vietnam and the decision not to
run for a second term."
The process that
Caro puts himself through before he hands in a
final manuscript is, in a word, incredible. The 45
million pages that make up the Johnson Library in
Austin, Texas, are where he gets a major portion
of his material, and many of these pages have been
retrieved and read by nobody else but him. Then
there are the thousands of interviews he has
conducted over the years, interviews that he
prefers to handle face-to-face because, as he sees
it, it's harder to refuse someone who is standing
on your doorstep.
As for the ordering of
all this material, Caro's filing system contains
an elaborately coded cross-referencing method to
the notes - each page carefully transcribed - that
are held in a bulging cabinet in his Manhattan
office, and the outlines he writes and rewrites in
longhand point to the exact page where the
relevant information is waiting.
"Only
after he has filled and annotated those notebooks
does Caro begin to write," observed Chris Jones in
Esquire magazine, "three or four drafts in
longhand, on pads of legal paper. With each pass,
muscle is added to the frame. Finally, Caro feels
prepared to give his fingers wings. 'There just
comes a point you feel it's time to go to the
typewriter,' he says. He does write quickly; the
math dictates that he must. When he finished The
Power Broker, it was thirty-three hundred
typewritten pages, more than one million words.
(Gottlieb cut three hundred thousand: three
normal-size books.)"
The Gottlieb of which
Jones writes is, of course, Robert Gottlieb - the
celebrated former editor-in-chief of the Random
House imprint Knopf, as well as the former editor
of the New Yorker magazine. It was Gottlieb who
signed Caro to write the "Years of Lyndon Johnson"
series in 1974, and it is Gottlieb who's worked
closest with Caro on every volume since. Recently,
according to the New York Times, Gottlieb told his
writer: "Let's look at this situation actuarially.
I'm now 80, and you are 75. The actuarial odds are
that if you take however many more years you're
going to take, I'm not going to be here." But the
octogenarian has been there every step of the way
for the latest book; he still keeps an office in
Random House's Manhattan headquarters (he resigned
as editor in chief in 1987), and he's still going
to war with Caro over the construction of
paragraphs and the placement of semi-colons.
It's one of the most remarkable
partnerships in modern publishing, and it speaks
of a time when the industry was far more visionary
and courageous. Not only has Caro's agent lost
track of the number of times she's had to
renegotiate his contract, but Knopf long ago
stopped worrying about deadlines for the final
manuscripts. While this focus on depth and quality
has brought the author and publishing house a slew
of awards - including, but not limited to, the
Pulitzer, two National Book Critics Circle Awards,
the National Book Award, and a gold medal from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters - it has not
yet brought a profit.
Which may be about
to change. The new volume, entitled The Passage of
Power, has a print run of 300,000 and will almost
certainly be a bestseller. Outside of America,
magazines like the Spectator are calling the 1 May
launch the "publishing event of the year". The
fact that there have been times in the last forty
years that Caro has gone bankrupt, and has had to
rely on his wife's income as a teacher, means that
there's probably no author in the world right now
who deserves a royalty windfall more than him.
That said, the size of the advance he'll need to
earn out is no doubt prodigious (the exact amount
hasn't been forthcoming), and at 76, with only one
heir, these things stop to matter so much.
What does matter, though, is whether Caro
will live long enough to complete the project. The
fifth volume will cover the years 1964 until
Johnson's death, and according to Caro most of the
research is already done. He estimates that the
final book will take him two to three years to
bring to an end, and he already has the outline
and a few sections written.
But Caro has
been wrong every time about his projections, and
now he is closing on 80 years of age. If he dies
before putting the final full-stop on the final
page of the final volume, it will be a
Shakespearean tragedy to match the fall of Lyndon
B. Johnson himself. Still, Caro remains obsessed,
even while he has little patience for people who
fail to understand what drives him.
"He
bristles at the word obsessive," Jones comments in
the Esquire article, "his eyes flashing through
his thick, dark glasses. 'That implies it's
something strange,' he says. 'This is reporting.
This is what you're supposed to do. You're
supposed to turn every page.'" DM
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