Is Nonfiction Literature?

Thanks to the miracle of Google Alerts (and my own vanity in setting up alerts for "T.J. Stiles" and "The First Tycoon"), I ran across an interesting blog entry by a fiction writer who uses my book to ask a fundamental question: Is nonfiction actually literature?

The blog entry is here, with follow-ups here and here. The blogger writes,

Somehow the fact that a given story has already come and gone just takes a bit of the edge off for me. The fact is that I live in the world post-Vanderbilt: a better understanding of his influence on the world won't drastically impact how I live in it.

Fiction, on the other hand, still has the ability to change my world. The slightest bump in the arc of a story, the most unexpected development in a character, can shift my entire worldview. The possibility gives me that little bit more urgency.

Just imagine how awkward my position is when I address such a comment! What this blogger is discussing, and very thoughtfully I might add, is a profound yet highly subjective engagement with writing. Simply put, there is no telling him he's wrong. He speaks of a very recognizable effect of literature upon the reader—yet not all literature speaks to all readers with the same impact.

Of course, the highly debatable aspect of this comment is the distinction between fiction and nonfiction in producing this effect. I cannot tell this reader that he must feel this profound result from reading my book, but I can argue that there is plenty of nonfiction that produces it in plenty of people. For this reason, the great writer Richard Rhodes argues that nonfiction deserves a title more dignified than the mere negation of fiction; it should be called verity, he argues. I wholeheartedly agree, but I'm too chicken to try to change the world on this point.

Even this blogger, in his follow-ups, concedes that there is nonfiction that has this effect on him. So his point actually ends up reduced to the mundane observation that not every book hits every reader the same way, whether it is fiction or nonfiction. (I never feel guilty about throwing down a book that doesn't enthrall me, even if it's highly praised or a classic. Since I will never have time to read all the books reckoned as great literature, I just move on to another.)

I must say, though, that I was conscious of what makes a book "literature" when I was writing The First Tycoon. I aspired to excellence; I hoped to achieve some level of profundity. This meant not merely research, not merely asking deep historical questions, but doing my best to engage in fine writing, to explore the human condition, to illuminate the irreducible contradictions of personality, to engage the unanswerable question of the place and role of the individual in the great current of history. I tried to unearth a lost mentality—to show that what we take for granted in our view of reality is, in fact, the result of millions upon millions of people thinking and rethinking and reshaping their existence over the centuries.

I cannot tell anyone that he or she must be moved by my work. But I truly believe that we nonfiction writers can and do write works of literature, and that the world is a better place when we strive for the profound as well as the enlightening.

Interview on Writing Biography

The website Big Think has posted a 30-minute interview with a slightly jet-lagged me. You can view the full thing below, or go here for excerpts from the full interview.

What's notable about this interview, for the purpose of this particular blog, is that it touches upon many of the themes I have discussed before, and will discuss again:

• Telling good stories and asking big questions

• The necessity and near impossibility of looking beneath the surface of a life

• Research and its uses

• Understanding someone's character

• The fraught question of the uses of biography—the practical messages, as it were

Nothing new, but covers a lot of my favorite ground when it comes to writing.

Stiles Media Mayhem

It won't be long before there will be new National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, but I'm still doing OK when it comes to press attention. And some of it has to do with the subject of this blog, the art of writing biography.

First, Lewis Lapham interviewed with me for his show on Bloomberg Radio, "The World in Time." You can listen to it here.

And, on Sunday, July 11, the Washington Post publishes a review I wrote of Niall Ferguson's new biography of Siegmund Warburg, High Financier. It's already available online, here.

It's worth contrasting this review with my previous review, of Nathaniel Philbrick's The Last Stand, which I wrote for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. You can read it here. That's because I find fault—or at least express less than total satisfaction—for nearly opposite reasons. Philbrick's book was a great read, a truly vivid account of a dramatic moment. But if Philbrick was solid on the writing front and backed it up with good research, he didn't do much with the history—by which I mean the fresh analysis, the deep thinking, that creates knowledge or changes how we think about the world. It was the work of a talented storyteller. That's no small thing. I respect this book, and would recommend it. But this is what it is; it is no more than that.

Ferguson, on the other hand, proves himself a very fine historian but lagged in his writing. Not that it was bad. Rather, I would say that he made choices that reflected a scholarly approach, rather than a writerly approach. For example, he broke up his subject's life into its constituent elements, essentially taking us through his career again and again, each time addressing a different field of activity. It was a bit like Groundhog Day, but without the same sense of impending resolution. This is precisely the sort of method one expects in a monograph, not a book touted as a potential bestseller. And that's a bit curious, because Ferguson has produced a string of bestsellers, so you would imagine he knows how to move a reader briskly through the pages, but here he does not. Again, I respect this book, and would recommend it. I wouldn't call it fun reading, though it was enlightening.

For the serious but literary biographer, there is a delicate balancing act between analysis and narrative, between interpretation and storytelling. It's not easy, and I can't claim to be perfect at it myself. (The many discarded drafts of my manuscripts offer evidence that it ain't easy for me.) But I believe the most successful biography strives for this balance, not sacrificing one side for the other, but finding ways in which each can strengthen the other.

Oh, I almost forgot: The interview with Lapham gives a pretty good capsule description of my attempt to do just this with the life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. It's twenty minutes, and we cover a lot of territory—rather more efficiently than I did in my book.

Virtue v. Necessity

With my two biographical subjects to date, Cornelius Vanderbilt and Jesse James, I confronted figures who left behind no collections of papers. True, Vanderbilt left a far greater paper trail than James (who was a fugitive, after all), but in both cases I lacked many personal papers that gave insight into each man's thoughts and feelings.

As the old saying goes, I made a virtue out of necessity. I tried to situate these men in richly drawn historical contexts, in order to understand them better—inside as well as out. I not only attempted to paint their physical worlds, their tactile experiences, but also to ask fresh questions about their times. I thought about the meaning of the events and developments that defined their lives, and provide fresh interpretations where warranted. In addition, I fleshed out the lives of secondary characters, as I researched the people and issues that surrounded my subjects.

This contextual approach can be satisfying on both the levels of both reading and scholarship. One one hand, I tried to transport my readers into a very different time and place, to make it seem real, populated by individuals with conflicting agendas and personal quirks. On the other hand, I feel that I got a better grip in the true significance of these men.

There's a danger to this contextual approach, of course: That the writer will get so taken with a historical topic that the book ceases to be a biography at all. Some took issue with Jesse James for precisely that reason. I don't blame them, though I still wouldn't write that book any differently, at least not in that respect. But I recognize that not all readers will follow me into the context, in the way I've described here.

With my next subject, I find myself in a very different situation, with virtually opposite perils. I am writing a book about George Armstrong Custer, who wrote many, many letters that were very, very long. They have been well collected in a number of archives.

In reviewing other biographies, I have sometimes taken them to task for getting lost in their sources. With a superabundance of manuscripts, a kind of writerly intoxication can set in. There's no longer the sense of pressing necessity, when it comes to establishing the context or filling secondary characters with life. Strange as it is to say, a biography must be more than the main subject, the main subject, the main subject. It must change perspective, step back to look at the world, follow the lives of those who intersected with the person at the heart of the book.

After criticizing others for this failing, I only hope I can get it right.