It’s not often that a writer begins a book with a half-apology for its brevity. But when it comes to Robert Caro, the explanation for why his latest offering, Working , ships in at just over 200 pages is an act of necessity to evoke the backdrop against which it comes.
Caro, the celebrated biographer of former U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson who has set a gold standard for the genre, is currently at work on the fifth (and likely the final volume) of that project, The Years of Lyndon Johnson . He began the biography in 1976, has been at it since, and published the fourth volume in 2012. With these books, he has deepened the scope of what a biography can do. As he writes in the pages of Working , “From the very start I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times — particularly the force that is political power.”
Powerful and the powerless
Political power, Caro emphasises, “shapes all our lives”. And his use of the biography form is to inquire into the life of his subject as well as to make tangible to the reader how numerous lives have been affected, for good or bad, by the exercise of power. In Working , a collection of some previously published articles, new essays and a Paris Review interview, Caro shares what goes into the writing of an inquiry into the ascent of a person to power, and into how it transforms innumerable lives. Johnson, who became President upon John F. Kennedy’s assassination and then went to win the election in 1964, had already been a towering presence in the U.S. Senate, pushing historic legislation that expanded civil rights. To his credit were expansion of voting rights and health coverage, and also, more darkly, the American military involvement in Vietnam.
In Working , Caro walks the reader through the paces of his research and writing process. Among these was the early objective “that in order to write about political power the way I wanted to write about it, I would have to write not only about the powerful but about the powerless as well — would have to write about them (and learn about their lives) thoroughly enough so that I could make the reader feel for them, empathize with them, and with what political power did for them, or to them.”
Never assume
For instance, to understand the circumstances that made Johnson, Caro and his wife, Ina, moved home to Texas’s Hill Country. But being there, the learning was not just about the terrain that Johnson rose from; he found that as a Congressman, the future President had transformed lives by bringing electricity there, that the women of these parts were profiles of “a magnificent courage” too. Caro’s wife would make fig preserve and tag along with him in an effort to make the women open up — and one did so in a blisteringly educative way when she told him, “You’re a city boy. You don’t know how heavy a bucket of water is, do you?”
Caro keeps interviewing subjects to get the telling details that make the reader think she’s there at the scene being recreated — for instance, he kept putting questions to Johnson’s laconic chauffeur till he yielded the detail that while campaigning Johnson would talk to himself in the backseat, saying it was “his own fault” if the outing hadn’t gone well, and then rehearse what he would tell those voters the next time.
Caro’s persistent and copious interviews are legendary. Besides tracking down interviewees, and chasing them for multiple conversations, he is conscious of the power of the interviewer’s silence to make folks reveal important detail: “When I’m waiting for the person I’m interviewing to break a silence by giving me a piece of information I want, I write ‘SU’ (for Shut Up!) in my notebook.”
He also heeds early advice. A newspaper boss once told him about documents, “Turn every page. Never assume anything.” A professor told him he’d never realise his potential if he didn’t “stop thinking with your fingers”, that is, writing last-minute to a deadline. Caro decided to “slow myself down, to not write until I had thought things through”. He elaborates on this process of multiple drafts, outlines, organising notes, etc. But perhaps the most important part in slowing down is his method of writing his first drafts in longhand, and then doing later drafts on a typewriter. This is why he will not commit to a deadline.
Once the fifth Johnson book is done, there will be a memoir, Caro promises. Till then, Working is an important reminder of what it takes out of a writer to produce great writing.
Mini Kapoor is Ideas Editor, The Hindu.
mini.kapoor@thehindu.co.in
