Thus begins an interesting interview by the Paris Review of American biographer David McCollough, entitled David McCollough, The Art of Biography no. 2. Known for writing excellent "narrative history" (winning the Pulitzer Prize for Truman [1992] and John Adams [2001]), Mr. McCollough uses the interview to discuss a range topics dealing with history, writing, and curious ways the two come together.
Of history, McCollough talks about the "difficulty of recreating the past." Central to his point I think is "recreating," which is to say making a past world as real to a present reader as their own world is to them. It isn't easy, particularly in conveying the sense of a future full of unknowns. We can look back on a past era and trace events one to the next, following a chain of dates and important names until some new age comes to pass, itself a logical outgrowth of the era before. For McCollough, however, a historian's job is to make the past real and present for someone today; to capture the "feeling of events happening in freedom," not a "pre-ordained" track of instances. That:
"In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened...There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next. The Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that, it’s standing there today, but they didn’t know that at the start. No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed."
This is important for two reasons. First, it captures the goal--one might say credo--of the narrative historian: make the reader feel the past as they feel their present, with all its tension, risk, aspirations, and uncertainty. Second, it suggests history has no inevitabilities, only possibilities. Even when we know the course of events, as historical thinkers we must always bear in mind that for those involved, the future was always in some measure in doubt.
On writing McCollough makes similarly interesting remarks. He talks about how for him the act of writing (not just "thinking") is what reveals what he ultimately wants to say.
"There’s no question that the sheer effort of writing, of getting it down on paper, makes the brain perform as it rarely does otherwise. I don’t understand people who sit and think what they’re going to write and then just write it out. My head doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to mess around with it on paper. I’ve got to make sketches, think it out on paper."
"In truth, nothing ever had to happen the way it happened...There was always a degree of tension, of risk, and the question of what was going to happen next. The Brooklyn Bridge was built. You know that, it’s standing there today, but they didn’t know that at the start. No one knew Truman would become president or that the Panama Canal would be completed."
This is important for two reasons. First, it captures the goal--one might say credo--of the narrative historian: make the reader feel the past as they feel their present, with all its tension, risk, aspirations, and uncertainty. Second, it suggests history has no inevitabilities, only possibilities. Even when we know the course of events, as historical thinkers we must always bear in mind that for those involved, the future was always in some measure in doubt.
On writing McCollough makes similarly interesting remarks. He talks about how for him the act of writing (not just "thinking") is what reveals what he ultimately wants to say.
"There’s no question that the sheer effort of writing, of getting it down on paper, makes the brain perform as it rarely does otherwise. I don’t understand people who sit and think what they’re going to write and then just write it out. My head doesn’t work that way. I’ve got to mess around with it on paper. I’ve got to make sketches, think it out on paper."
Writing also informs McCollough what needs more work. "It’s only when you begin to write," he says "that you begin to see what you don’t know and need to find out."
Another aspect of writing involves keeping with it long enough to produce something. In the interview McCollough tells a story about meeting the author Harry Sinclair Drago at a gathering. When informed that Mr. Drago had written "over a hundred books," McCollough introduced himself and asked the following:
"Mr. Drago, I said, Alvin Josephy says that you’ve written over a hundred books. Yes, he said, that’s right. How do you do that? I asked. And he said, Four pages a day. Every day? Every day. It was the best advice an aspiring writer could be given."
I like this story because it tells very bluntly how an author becomes prolific: he or she writes every single day. Mr. Drago didn't say "well I research a lot and think very deeply on a subject;" no, he said "four pages...every day." Hard to beat that message for simplicity.
Yet perhaps my favorite parts of the interview dealt with the way history and writing come together through the experiences of life. What we see, how we see it, and how we conceptualize, interpret, and imaginatively create a piece of writing is influenced by so many things in life. For McCollough, an extensive background in artistic creation informed the way he went about writing history in later life. For instance, "The training I had in drawing and painting [at Yale] has been of great benefit. Drawing is learning to see and so is writing. It’s also an exercise in composition, as writing is, though in writing it’s called form."
In the beginning of the interview, McCollough tells the story of Louis Agassiz, who trained naturalists at Harvard in the nineteenth century by asking them to "Look at your fish," literally a fish specimen on the table in front of them. To every question Mr. Agassiz would answer with the same response: "Look at your fish." After several days of this, students usually began to see the fish in a completely different way than they did at the start. This is why McCollough tells the story so often in writing classes:
"Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of an historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’s great admonition to all writers, 'Make me see.'"
As a whole I found the interview fascinating on many levels. In his answers Mr. McCollough conveys a deep sense of the art, industry, and perspective involved in writing narrative history. He helps us to see the telling of history as both an exercise in research as well as one of imagination; to not only "make us see" another age, but also "feel" it like our own. The task is not easy of course; McCollough mentions that "sometimes I think I’m not a writer, I’m a rewriter." As with historical events, a piece of work comes together through the interaction and combination of many single instances. Yet as with history in general, the outcome is never exactly certain; we can plan a work all we like, but no one knows if it will actually make the pres. It would seem we have little recourse than to write, rewrite, and keep looking at our fish.
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