For a guy whose output consists of one-and-three-fifths biographies, Robert Caro sure does get a lot of attention. He has published four books - a one volume life of Robert Moses and three of five proposed studies of the years of Lyndon Johnson - and been awarded the Pulitzer for two of them, along with two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle Award, the Francis Parkman Prize in History... you get the idea. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York has never been out of print and is required reading for any one interested in the city, its history, and how politics works, for better and for worse, in the daily lives of the citizens who ostensibly are the greatest force in the process of government. Head down to the Strand and you will see it on one of the main display tables, thick as a Peter Luger porterhouse and very nearly as expensive. Why does a biography of a man who built things in New York, written 37 years ago, continue to fascinate?
This is part of a larger question that I want to spend more time thinking about, but is worth posing here: why is the shelf life of non-fiction works generally so much shorter and narrower than that of fiction? Non-fiction outsells fiction and has for as long as those numbers have been tracked. The long tail of successful fiction can be extraordinary - J.D. Salinger famously was able to comfortably live as a recluse for fifty years off the residual checks he received each year for sales of The Catcher in the Rye - while works of non-fiction seem to fade as soon as the author has finished their interview with Jon Stewart. What works of non-fiction have lasted beyond the generation in which they were written? Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (though I know of no one who has actually read the fucking thing), Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Metaphysics, the essays of Montaigne, Walden and Civil Disobedience. If you want to count treatises, throw in Das Kapital, The Wealth of Nations, Utopia, The Federalist Papers. If you want to count fiction, The Bible outsells all these books combined. I don't pretend to know the answer here. Perhaps we aren't curious about old times. Perhaps the prose is clunky or stilted. Perhaps the subjects actually have become irrelevant.
Robert Caro has written four books. One of them is about Robert Moses, a high-ranking bureaucrat in New York City from the early 1920s until the late 1960s. The other three are about Lyndon Johnson, a largely-reviled politician who was active during the same time period. Caro is 76 years old now, and while he plans to finish the last of the Johnson books in the next two to three years, it is very likely that he will die with an oeuvre that consists entirely of life studies of two men whom most Americans either do not or would rather not think about. These facts should make him quixotic or obscure, but instead his works are not only best sellers, but remain vital years after their relevance should have faded. Only David McCullough can rival Caro for long-term interest and success, but McCullough also (ably) writes pretty standard biographies of famous men and events that are notable for the liveliness of the prose but also tend to be borderline fawning. When McCullough writes that Harry Truman used to begin each day with a small, bracing shot of bourbon, he interprets it as evidence of Truman's vitality. When Caro writes about Johnson dictating to his aides while simultaneously moving his bowels, he notes that this is evidence of Johnson's technique of bullying underlings into submission.
Works of non-fiction are true and factual, but there are many artistic and aesthetic conventions that make them feel less real, less alive than fiction. Subjects are often described using the sorts of code words that we use when speaking about the negative traits of loved ones. They are 'stubborn' or 'temperamental' or 'passionate' or 'driven' or 'earthy' rather than 'arrogant, abusive, self-absorbed, ambitious vulgarians.' Nods may be given to how a great man displays the 'attitudes of his time' towards minorities, women, lower classes, but to call such a leader a racist, sexist or classist asshole is just simply not done in the world of biography. Caro, however, trusts the reader enough to put his subjects on display and let the reader see how the ambition that made Robert Moses want to build something like Jones Beach or the Triborough Bridge is deeply entwined with the arrogance that drove him to bulldoze across the South Bronx to construct an expressway that has been congested since the day it was completed. This is different from some sort of journalistic 'show don't tell' type of writing, where the facts are presented and the reader is left to her own judgment. Caro is constantly editorializing and guiding the reaction of the reader, but he is constantly editorializing from both sides - showing us how a vision without power makes no improvement in the lives of the people that the visionary wishes to aid, and how that power to improve, once attained, isolates the visionary from those people he once helped.
In each of Caro's works, there is a single chapter where he goes out of his way to impress the reader. The narrative essentially breaks for a few dozen pages and Caro lays out the themes, his thesis, his research and paints a portrait so effective and complete that the reader is compelled to keep reading, almost like a cliff-hanger in a good piece of genre fiction. In The Power Broker, it's 'One Mile;' 'The Sad Irons' in The Path to Power; Means of Ascent has 'The Story of Coke Stevenson'; for Master of the Senate, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia.' What is fascinating about these episodes, and important in understanding why Caro's work has remained relevant is that the main characters of the biographies don't appear in them at all. 'One Mile' is a portrait of the South Bronx neighborhoods that Robert Moses destroyed when he put in the Cross Bronx Expressway, with special emphasis placed on East Tremont. It establishes the stakes involved for a group of people who were not even aware that they were players on the public stage. It shows what they had, what they lost, and why that mattered, even if such considerations were never important to Moses. It places the consequences of Moses' exercise of power in a context apart from the standard biographical recitation of accomplishments and their cost and size. 'The Sad Irons' spends twenty some-odd pages putting the reader into the daily life of a Texas housewife in the days prior to rural electrification. Caro's thesis in The Path to Power was that to understand Texas was to understand Lyndon Johnson, and in 'The Sad Irons' he makes his case that in order to understand Johnson's importance as an historical figure, you had to understand what he did for ordinary people in Texas. Caro doesn't imply that Johnson was wholly responsible for rural electrification. He gives most of the credit to FDR and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. He does, however, point out how hard Johnson fought for the bill, how much it meant for him during his sad time as a member of the House, and how immediate and vast the improvement was for the lives of the women out in the hinterlands from which Johnson had come. 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' gives the background of Johnson's opponent in the 1948 Senate race in Texas. Blake once described Coke Stevenson as 'what Reagan played on TV,' and that theme animates much of Caro's prose in the chapter. The 1948 election marks one of the first modern political campaigns in Caro's telling. Substance, embodied by Stevenson as a man of principle and accomplishment who is stoic and wishes to run on his record, is overwhelmed by showmanship, as practiced by Johnson in a series of radio jingles, broadcast speeches, helicopter leaflet dumps and other carnival tricks. That Johnson eventually wins the election through outright thievery and then proceeds to the Senate, where he rises to Majority Leader and shepherds the first civil rights bill to completion only adds to the irony. Finally, there is 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia,' which is essentially a mini-biography of Richard Russell. Like 'The Story of Coke Stevenson' in Means of Ascent, 'A Russell of the Russells of Georgia' presents us with an historic character that the reader can use to measure Johnson against. If Johnson in Means of Ascent is slimy and amoral, in Master of the Senate, he emerges as the hero. Caro spends sixty or so pages on Russell, who was a clever tactician, an effective Senator, a patriot in the truest sense (his high point comes when he plays Cicero to Douglas MacArthur's Antony and condemns the general as a demagogue bent on dismantling the republic), and a virulent racist. Without this portrait of what a Senator, particularly one from the South, could accomplish, and what he would not lift a finger to attempt, and in fact actively opposed for his entire career, the bravery and wit that Johnson displays during the 1957 fight to pass the first expansion of civil rights since Reconstruction exist without context. By spending so much time on Russell, Caro gives us insight into what Johnson could have become, which makes his eventual repudiation of that role seem transcendent.
There is much more that I could say about Caro's abilities as a writer and as a biographer. I'll settle for just pointing out a couple of things that convince me that he is one of our greatest living writers and that his works will continue to matter long after the BQE is replaced and Johnson's guns and butter economics have faded from the fore of American politics: first, when you read Master of the Senate, pay attention to The Dam - it begins as a metaphor, then becomes a literal thing, which in turn becomes a key bargaining chip to the deal that causes the metaphorical dam to give way and be swept aside by the twin forces of justice and power - the writing is so careful and elegant and fun that you may find yourself laughing out loud as Caro unfolds the tale; second, the announcement that the fourth volume of the Johnson biography would be published during the spring of 2012 has me looking forward to a book with an enthusiasm that I haven't felt since the announcement of The Pale King. I know the books are really long, but you have to trust me people - reading the 1400 pages of The Power Broker is a more valuable way to spend your time than just about any combination of smaller volumes you could finish during the same time period. Besides, the next Johnson book is allegedly going to be only around 700 pages. That's less than two Thomas Friedman tropes on how great everything is in India and could be in the United States if we all obeyed the precepts of Friedman's newest acronym.
One quick note: the quote up top is from an interview of Caro by Vonnegut. It's a long read, but it keeps one warm on cold dark nights.
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