Hochschild

For one thing, there is more of it. McPhee has now written some 30 books, while some of the most notable New Journalists lapsed into silence. Truman Capote never published another substantial nonfiction book after In Cold Blood, nor did Michael Herr after his remarkable reporting of the Vietnam War collected in Dispatches. McPhee, however, has steadily averaged close to a book a year. Some of us for whom it’s a struggle to get a book out every five or six years feel he should be prosecuted under the Fair Labor Standards Act.

McPhee’s choice of subjects is driven by certain personal predilections. Among other things, he is drawn to geology (four books), practitioners of ancient arts (The Survival of the Bark Canoe), eccentrics (The Headmaster), the American wilderness (Coming into the Country), and people obsessed by unusual technology, as with the blimp enthusiasts of The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed. He also has found wonderfully fertile terrain by simply doing things that small boys dream of. For what other thread connects his flying with a bush pilot, traveling the seas on the bridge of a merchant ship, crossing the country in the cab of a railway engine, and going on maneuvers with the Swiss Army? In an age besotted by celebrities, the people McPhee has chosen to bring alive on the page are not presidents, singers or movie actors, but country doctors, canal-boat pilots, pinball players, produce sellers in a farmers’ market, aid workers in Africa, a long-haul trucker, and the man responsible for cutting and grooming the grass at Wimbledon.

Like so many of the people he writes about, McPhee is a consummate craftsman. There are many aspects of his craft that a fellow writer can envy, from his keen, loving ear for the quirks and rhythms of American speech, to his arsenal of tools – including shifts of tense you only notice on the second reading – for nimbly hopping about in time. But I’m here to talk about his engineering.

A few years ago I was with a young cousin, a college student who told me she was majoring in civil engineering. “I’ve never really understood,” I asked her. “What’s the difference between an architect and an engineer?”

“Ah,” she said. “An architect is the person who plans what the skyscraper is going to look like from the outside. An engineer is the person who makes sure it doesn’t fall down.”

I’ve always felt that when we think about writing, we pay too much attention, in these terms, to the architecture, and not enough to the engineering. We focus on the outside of the skyscraper – the sparkle of someone’s prose, images, metaphors, bits of description – and not enough on the innards: the structure, the plot (a word that applies to nonfiction as much as to fiction), the careful doling out or withholding of information to create suspense, all of which, in the long run, ultimately determines whether or not we keep on reading. A piece of writing can sparkle aplenty from one paragraph to the next, but if the inner engineering isn’t there, our attention wanders. This is all the more important when someone writes, as McPhee usually does, of relatively unknown people, in whom we have no interest to begin with. For the writer, this sets the bar higher.

A key secret of McPhee’s ability to make us care about his vast and improbable range of subject matter lies in his engineering. From the pilings beneath the foundations to the beams that support the rooftop observation deck, he is the master builder of literary skyscrapers. Other writers may have more glittering prose (although his often glows bright) or weave more elegant metaphors, but no one has built such an interesting and varied array of structures. With many authors of narrative nonfiction, even well-known ones, I often feel that structure is almost an afterthought: An array of lively scenes is arranged more or less chronologically, with one that feels like a good place to start placed at the beginning and one that seems to wrap things up placed at the end. But when McPhee picks up his pen, I sense a writer thinking long and shrewdly about structure before he even puts a word on paper.

Consider, for example, his wonderful portrait of the late Thomas Hoving, director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. A lesser writer might have followed Hoving around for a time and interwoven that material with background information about his childhood and comments that others made about him. But McPhee does it differently. He assembles roughly a dozen scenes from Hoving’s life: some from the present (Hoving answering the mail, talking with his wife, hunting art for the museum in Europe) and some from the past (getting into trouble in high school, working in a clothing store and realizing this was not for him). Almost all involve closely observed or reconstructed interplay and dialogue between Hoving and other people. And then McPhee arranges them, just as one might find an artist’s work on the walls of a museum, not in chronological order. The headline on the article? “A Roomful of Hovings.” (It is the title piece in one of McPhee’s many collections.)

Examples of similarly imaginative structure appear in almost all his books. Levels of the Game, for example, is built around a single tennis match, between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in the 1960s. It begins with the opening serve and ends with the final point. But into this one match are woven portraits of two players who differ radically by style of play, politics, background, race, and approach to life. In the article “In Search of Marvin Gardens,” McPhee uses the Monopoly board – whose street names all come from Atlantic City – as his starting point to explore the real Atlantic City, right down to the jail. The city, of course, turns out to be a far shabbier place than the one conjured up by the thousands of dollars of play money on the Monopoly board. The structure therefore reinforces the impact of the piece; as McPhee put it in a recent Paris Review interview, “Structure is not a template. It’s not a cookie cutter. It’s something that arises organically from the material.” But I think he understates his point, for surely in the Atlantic City article, and in many others, he must have had an engineering blueprint in mind in order to decide what kind of material to gather.

Sometimes the structure McPhee uses is an ancient one. In “A Forager” (another piece in A Roomful of Hovings), he spends an entire week with his subject, Euell Gibbons, an expert in edible wild plants, gamely munching on dandelions, watercress, ground cherries, chicory greens, and the like along the way. A week in the life of someone is, of course, virtually the very oldest narrative structure there is, going back to the Book of Genesis. Layered on top of that is another classic narrative structure, at least as old as The Odyssey, for McPhee and Gibbons spend that week on a journey, by canoe and foot, eating their way along the Susquehanna River and then a portion of the Appalachian Trail.

Sometimes McPhee devises a framework of columns, beams, and trusses entirely his own, as in one of his most anthologized pieces, about another journey, “Travels in Georgia.” Here he follows a man and a woman on a strange trek across that state, telling us in great detail how they poke about in streams, swamps, and roadside ditches, make notes on clipboards, and collect a strange variety of stuff, including the carcasses of small animals that have been struck by cars. Who are these people, we wonder, and why on earth are they doing this stuff? That’s what keeps us reading, because it’s what you withhold that makes suspense. We’re nearly half way through the piece before we learn that its subjects work for an obscure state agency that has to do with designating protected areas for endangered plants and animals. All good narrative writers purposely withhold some information for a while, but I’ve never seen one bold enough to withhold the very profession of the people he is profiling.

* * *

To my mind, McPhee’s engineering masterpiece is his Encounters with the Archdruid, the text of which, like almost all of his books, first appeared in The New Yorker. A portrait of the environmental activist David Brower (1912-2000), it is structured like no other biography or profile you will read. Brower was a militant, not a compromiser or deal-maker, and his passionate, lifelong defense of the American wilderness against any threat dependably left his enemies fuming. And so the book is arranged around three prolonged encounters between the “evangelical” Brower, as McPhee calls him, and people who detest everything he stands for.

The first is a prominent mining geologist named Charles Park, whose entire life has been devoted to targeting deposits of valuable minerals, wherever they are found. He was a man who believed, McPhee says, “that if copper were to be found under the White House, the White House should be moved.” How does McPhee bring him together with Brower? He takes the two of them camping and hiking for a week or so in the Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington State. The setting is shrewdly chosen: Glacier Peak is a federal wilderness area, “not to receive even the use given a national park, not to be entered by a machine of any kind except in extreme emergency, not to be developed or lumbered – forevermore.” But there’s a key exception: mining claims, including a huge one held by Kennecott Copper, remain valid, and, at the time the men were making this trip, for more than a dozen years into the future new claims could still be made. To display two political enemies in combat, McPhee could not have picked a better battleground. Park chips away at rocks with his geologist’s tools, curious about what metals could be mined here to feed the American economy; Brower praises the beauty of the mountains, still unravaged by men like Park. Almost any writer, doing a story like this, would have elicited these rival points of view by interviewing the two men separately. McPhee, however, brings them together, where, with spectacular scenery in the background, they argue at length, providing him with writer’s gold: dialogue.

The second encounter McPhee sets up, again for what appears to be a week or so, is between Brower and a businessman who wants to build a vast housing development on a wild island off the coast of Georgia, complete with an airport suitable for private jets. Compared to the first encounter, the conversation between the two antagonists is much more polite. However, the businessman, Charles Fraser, has great contempt for environmentalists, calling them “druids.” He tells Brower, “I call anyone a druid who prefers trees to people” – hence the book’s title.

The third encounter is the most dramatic, and threaded through it, providing its narrative backbone, is one of the more spectacular journeys available in the lower 48 states: going down the Grand Canyon by raft. In the 1950s and 1960s some of the most furious American environmental battles were over the building of dams. As McPhee puts it, to environmental types:

The outermost circle of the Devil’s world seems to be a moat filled mainly with DDT. Next to it is a moat of burning gasoline. Within that is a ring of pinheads each covered with a million people – and so on past phalanxed bulldozers and bicuspid chain saws into the absolute epicenter of Hell on earth, where stands a dam. Conservationists who can hold themselves in reasonable check before new oil spills and fresh megalopolises mysteriously go insane at even the thought of a dam. …  possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphors of existence, and dams destroy rivers.

David Brower regarded the building of the Glen Canyon Dam, upstream on the Colorado River from the Grand Canyon, as “the greatest failure of his life,” McPhee says. But after losing that battle, he went on to furiously wage and win several others, stopping Bureau of Reclamation plans to build two more large dams in parts of the Grand Canyon itself. His arch-enemy in this prolonged warfare, the proud builder of the Glen Canyon Dam, defeated for the moment in the later struggles, was Floyd Dominy, longtime commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, in effect chief dam-builder for the U.S. government.

McPhee’s swift brush strokes make Dominy leap off the page: “He appears to have been lifted off a horse with block and tackle. He wears bluejeans, a white-and-black striped shirt, and leather boots with heels two inches high. His belt buckle is silver and could not be covered over with a playing card. He wears a string tie that is secured with a piece of petrified dinosaur bone. On his head is a white Stetson.”

“Dave Brower hates my guts,” he tells McPhee, who goes to see Dominy in his office:

“…I can’t talk to preservationists. I can’t talk to Brower because he’s so God-damned ridiculous. … I had a steer out on my farm in the Shenandoah reminded me of Dave Brower. Two years running, we couldn’t get him into the truck to go to market. He was an independent bastard that nobody could corral. That son of a bitch got into that truck, busted that chute, and away he went. So I just fattened him up and butchered him right there on the farm. I shot him right in the head and butchered him myself. That’s the only way I could get rid of the bastard.”

“ ‘Commissioner,’ I said, ‘if Dave Brower gets into a rubber raft going down the Colorado River, will you get in it, too?’ 

“ ‘Hell, yes,’ he said. ‘Hell, yes.’ ”

In the very next paragraph, in one of McPhee’s adroit leaps in time and space which a lesser writer might have needlessly elaborated, all three men are on the river, approaching a set of rapids at Mile 130.

In this section of the book, as in the first panel of McPhee’s triptych, the heart of the story is the verbal combat between two antagonists. Their repartee has all the more drama because it takes place in front of an audience – a boatload of tourists who had no idea that these characters would be aboard when they signed up for a few days of camping and rafting down the Grand Canyon:

At Mile 144.8, triumphantly brandishing a map, “‘We are entering the reservoir,’ Brower announces. ‘We are now floating on Lake Dominy.’

“ ‘Jesus,’ mutters Dominy. 

“ ‘What reservoir?’ someone asks. Brower explains. A dam that Dominy would like to build, ninety-three miles downstream, would back still water to this exact point in the river.

“ ‘Is that right, Commissioner?’ 

“ ‘That’s right.’ 

“ …The other passengers are silent, absorbed by what Brower has told them. 

“ ‘Do you mean the reservoir would cover the Upset Rapid? Havasu Creek? Lava Falls? All the places we are coming to?’ one man asks Dominy. 

“Dominy reaches for the visor of his Lake Powell hat and pulls it down more firmly on his head. ‘Yes,’ he says.”

Brower gets the best of this exchange, but Dominy scores in a few others. Their argument continues when McPhee takes the two of them for a boat ride on Lake Powell, the huge lake formed by Dominy’s Glen Canyon Dam – which, of course, covers much of what had once been Glen Canyon:

Brower pointed to strange striations in jagged shapes on the opposite canyon wall. ‘That is hieroglyphic, written centuries ago by God Himself,’ he said. 

“ ‘Yeah? What does it say?’ said Dominy.

“ ‘It says, “Don’t flood it.” ’

A few additional little touches – the kind of thing that could pass too hasty a reader by – make McPhee’s tri-part structure more sturdy, like rebar hidden in concrete. In each of the three sections, for example, a bulldozer appears. McPhee and his subjects encounter one as they walk out of the Cascades: “Half submerged, its purpose obscure, it heaved, belched, backed, shoved, and lurched around on the bottom of the Suiattle (River) as if the water were not there. The bulldozer was stronger than the river.” In the middle section, the developer Charles Fraser talks cheerfully about moving sand dunes out of the way with a bulldozer. And in the final section, “on a shelf behind Dominy’s desk, in the sort of central and eye-catching position that might be reserved for a shining trophy, was a scale model of a bulldozer.”

Encounters with the Archdruid is not a perfect work: The middle panel of the triptych is weaker than the other two, and McPhee skims too lightly over Brower’s darker side, which included but was not limited to his tendency to tangle with friends as well as enemies. But as an imaginative feat of structure – and as a case where a writer has, quite openly, brought his characters together on a succession of brilliantly chosen stages – it is unmatched.

After being awed by the engineering of Encounters with the Archdruid, I found it a revelation to learn that in McPhee’s mind the idea for the book’s structure preceded his choice of its subject. In that same Paris Review interview, he describes how, many years ago, he got bored with doing profiles of a single person (although that is a form that he has reverted to frequently and well), and wanted to write pieces about people in relationships: “A dancer and a choreographer. … A baseball manager and a pitcher.” Out of this came Levels of the Game. Then “I got ambitious. I decided to escalate, and I had the idea of writing a triple profile – a three-part piece in which three people would be separately profiled as they related to a fourth person. … So I wrote on my wall: ABC over D. I stuck it on a three-by-five card, in big letters. ABC over D. That’s all I knew.”

Eventually, McPhee settled on David Brower as D. “Now, who were going to be the three others?” He knew only that they should be people who hated everything Brower was trying to accomplish. After Brower agreed to the idea, McPhee and a friend “and various other people in Washington got together a list of seventeen possibilities.” They were scattered around the country and the world, and after many months of negotiations, the list was finally narrowed down to three.

An alert reader will notice one small graphic survival of McPhee’s three-by-five card in the finished book. On the title page – and repeated on the title pages of each of the book’s three parts – are three small black triangles above a line, and one small triangle beneath it. So this was truly a case where the engineering of a skyscraper came before the decision about what the building was going to contain. But like the beams in a brick-and-mortar skyscraper, and the structural bones in all good pieces of writing, that engineering is invisible to the casual reader. Those little black triangles on the title page are its only remaining symbol; like the signature of an artist on a canvas, they are the trademark of a literary engineer extraordinaire.

***
Reprinted with permission from Understanding the Essay, edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter (Broadview Press, 2012)

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books and other magazines, and is the author of seven books. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, as was his recent To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918. His Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and PEN USA Literary Award.

For more installments of “Why’s this so good?” see our archives. And check back each Tuesday for a new shot of inspiration and insight. 

The final ingredient is that of plot. How do you unfold a story, and how do you unfold it in a way that is going to hold the reader’s attention? Here, I think the essence is the withholding of information. Keep people on the edge of their seats. Keep them wondering what’s going to happen.

That line, “meanwhile, back at the ranch” comes, of course, from the cliché of the Western movie, where something happens: the stagecoach is robbed, and the villain grabs the heroine off of the stagecoach, galloping off into the desert with her tied to his saddle. And then you switch to another line of action, leaving the moviegoer wondering. “Meanwhile, back at the ranch,” something else is going on.

This is the oldest technique in storytelling, switching back and forth between different strands of a plot. Every Shakespeare play does this. Every TV soap opera does this. And so I’m always looking for those “meanwhile, back at the ranch” moments, when I can leave the story hanging at a suspenseful point, when people are wondering what’s going to happen next.

Telling the story of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire was ready-made for this technique, because it stretched out over 50 years’ time, and there were many moments of either great discouragement by the abolitionists or of false hope – or where something else made the action stop for a time. I tried to make use of those, and I made sure that when I stopped the action, I had another strand of the plot going somewhere else that I could turn to and pick up. For example, once such moment where it was obvious to me that I should pause the action: Parliament had much more power than the king by the 18th century, but the king still had to sign all legislation before it became law. So if the king was indisposed in any way, that meant that things had to come to a stop, because a law couldn’t become finalized.

Of course, God’s gift to a writer, once again, was King George III, who went mad. People went mad in much more colorful ways in the 18th century than they do now, I think. He believed he could look through a telescope in his palace and see Germany. He went out and shook hands with tree branches. He planted steak in the ground to see if it would grow into a herd of cattle. All kinds of things.

When the king went mad, it meant things had to come to a stop in Parliament, because if they passed a law, he couldn’t sign it. I end a chapter with King George III going mad; that brings the action to a stop. I switch to another strand of the action, leave the reader waiting for a chapter or two, and then come back. And, ah, “The king was restored to sanity.” How, by the way, did they know he was restored to sanity? He sat up in bed one morning and sang “Rule, Britannia!” to his wife and daughters, and that was taken as a sign of returning sanity.

Here’s another moment I tried to make use of that way: The abolitionists were deeply discouraged in 1789. They had tried and failed to get a bill abolishing the slave trade through the British Parliament. The argument that was always made against them was that if Britain stopped the slave trade, then “our great rival, France” would get all the business. Suddenly, in July 1789 comes the news that there’s been a revolution in France, and the Bastille has fallen. The king is out, and the abolitionists’ friend, the Marquis de Lafayette, has become mayor of Paris. All sorts of other friends of theirs were in important positions. So they felt enormous hope, and they immediately dispatched their chief organizer, Thomas Clarkson, who’s sort of the central figure in the book, to Paris.

As it turned out, that was a false hope, because the French Revolution’s embrace of human rights, it soon became apparent, did not extend to slaves. But I don’t want to tell the reader that right away. I want the reader to feel that there’s a moment of hope – but leave the reader in suspense as to whether that hope will be fulfilled. So I end a chapter with Clarkson going to Paris, then turn to another strand of the action, and only come back again and reveal the disappointment of Clarkson in Paris a chapter or two later.

I’m always looking for places where I can pause the action. Often they are times when in actual life as it was happening, there was indeed a period of weeks or months when people didn’t know how things were going to turn out.

For example, in the book about World War I I’ve just finished, there is a moment soon after Britain introduced conscription when they hadn’t completely sorted out what they were going to do with people who refused to fight. There were 49 conscientious objectors who were imprisoned in Britain and then told that “It doesn’t matter that you’re saying you won’t fight. You’re being sent to the army in France – where the penalty for disobedience is death.” They were put on a train in custody, sent through London to Southampton, and put on a ship for France. As their train passed through London, one of them was able to toss a piece of paper out the window pleading for help. A sympathetic railway worker found it and immediately alerted the organization that was the central organizing point for conscientious objectors.

The people there, of course, were frantic and contacted the War Office and members of Parliament, trying to find out what had happened to these people, who as far as they knew were on their way to the front in France, where they would be shot if they refused to obey orders. Nobody knew what their fate was going to be. Then, a couple of weeks later, a smuggled message from France got through to England. All they were able to say was “We are being held in Boulogne.” The pacifists in London immediately dispatched two clergymen to Boulogne, and they also sent a delegation to see the prime minister demanding that these men not be shot.

But there were weeks when no one knew whether these 49 conscientious objectors were going to be shot or not. And there again, I tried to use that as a suspense point, to pause the action, end a chapter or a section of a chapter with their fate hanging in the balance and pick up another strand of the action. Which was very easy to do, because it was right at that moment that the final preparations were being made for the Battle of the Somme, all of which was going on just a few miles from where these folks were being held. Finally they were reprieved at the last moment, and sentenced to prison instead of death – but that piece of information I didn’t want to give out right away.

The hidden storyteller

These, then, are some of the basic storytelling techniques. I think that even people who don’t think of themselves as knowing them unconsciously do use them. We use them in conversation every day. We use them often very skillfully when we tell stories to small children, because the only way you can get a child to pay attention is if you can make the character really colorful, if you can make the story really suspenseful, if you can make your listener  wonder what’s going to happen next.

I’m just saying that you have to apply these techniques in writing as well, and that you can do so in writing that meets the highest scholarly standards. Can you apply it in every type of historical or social science writing? Not necessarily, but you can do it in many, many kinds of writing.

I’ll just end by telling you a little story. Whenever I write something, especially when I do a book, I always like to send a draft to people who know much more about the subject than I do. Since I write about history and I tend to jump around in times and places to pick a subject, there are always people out there who know a whole lot more about the subject than I do, because they’ve been studying it all their lives. They’re specialists in it. I’m always afraid that they’re going to resent an interloper coming into their field, but never is that the case.

When, for example, I finished “Bury the Chains,” the book on British slavery and abolition, I asked half a dozen different people whose writing I knew and in many cases learned a lot from – all but one in the academic world – to read the manuscript. All of them agreed to, and five of the six followed through and actually did so.

What really moved me was this: They did make enormously valuable suggestions correcting factual errors that I had made – and being helped to find such things before the book was published was what I was hoping for when I sent it to them. But what pleased me to no end was that although none of these people were what I think of as popular narrative writers, several of them saw the spirit of what I was trying to do – and made literary suggestions as well. One of them said, “Well, you make a lot of this character later on. Don’t you think you should introduce him earlier?” Somebody else said, “I think you could build things more suspensefully by reversing the order of these two chapters,” and he was right. These were people who don’t write this way themselves but they were willing and eager to help somebody who was. Somehow that moved me and made me think that there’s really a hidden storyteller in all of us, and that those two cultures of writing don’t need to be so separate after all.

[Watch for Hochschild’s next book, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” coming this May.]

The next key ingredient in the trio I mentioned is character. Telling history through a set of characters is by no means the only way to do it, but it’s certainly a powerful one. What works for me is finding a network of characters who, in one way or another, are connected to each other, and trying to evoke a period of history or a story of something such as the anti-slavery movement through that networked group of characters. I think that’s a powerful form of storytelling because, here again, life itself unfolds this way. Each of us is at the center of such a network. A variety of people have connections to each of us, and many of them have intricate connections with each other.

Of course, playwrights, novelists, and screenwriters tell their stories in the same way. It’s never a succession of characters who have no connection to each other that we meet in a movie or play or novel. They’re members of the same family, or they’re friends, or they fall in or out of love, or they’re rivals.

So I always go looking for such characters, for some way of finding a web of people through which I can tell a story. My book “King Leopold’s Ghost” was about King Leopold II of Belgium and his conquest of the Congo, the brutal system of forced labor that he imposed there, and the extraordinary opposition to this system that created the first international human rights campaign of the 20th century.

As soon as I began looking into this story, I felt that a marvelous web of interconnected characters had been handed to me on a platter. There was King Leopold himself, who was God’s gift to a writer. He was extremely greedy, shrewd, brilliant, charming, devious, and just as evil in his personal life as in his political life. (He was not on speaking terms with two of his three daughters, and cheated on his wife with a succession of teenage girls.) It’s great if you can find people like that. Then he had these opponents, Edmund D. Morel, a muckraking British journalist, who went after him for 10 years, trying to expose what he was doing. Roger Casement, an Irishman in the British consular service, wrote a very important report outlining how King Leopold’s system worked. George Washington Williams, a black American journalist, was the first person to blow the whistle on what Leopold was doing in the Congo. And, as a steamboat officer on the Congo River, who comes sailing into the middle of the story but Joseph Conrad.

You could not make up characters who were as interesting as these real people – and you also couldn’t have arranged the relationships between them, which were ideal for my purposes as a storyteller. Morel and Casement saw each other many times, and each of them left a written record of the first time they met. Casement met King Leopold, Leopold sent somebody to try – unsuccessfully – to bribe Morel to shut up. Casement and Joseph Conrad were housemates in the Congo. George Washington Williams met King Leopold. He didn’t meet Joseph Conrad on the Congo, but their steamboats crossed paths on the Congo River, and we can figure out from shipping schedules exactly what day it was. I’m always looking for a web of characters like that.

In the book I’ve just finished on the First World War, what I was trying to do was to retell the story of this war, not in conventional historical terms of a fight between one side and the other, but rather in terms of a struggle between people who thought it was noble and necessary and people who thought it was absolute madness and refused to fight. I wanted to get examples of both these types of persons into the book – the war resisters on the one hand, and, on the other, the generals, cabinet ministers and so forth who orchestrated the fighting.

For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out how to get both these different types into the book. As I said, I don’t like to do a series of disconnected portraits of people. And then I suddenly got a clue. One day I was reading a very boringly written scholarly article about a well-known British woman pacifist named Charlotte Despard, an ardent opponent of the war. She wrote a best-selling anti-war pamphlet and traveled the British Isles throughout the war speaking against it. Before the war, she had been very active in the militant wing of the movement for women’s suffrage and had gone to jail four times for that cause. An ardent advocate of Irish independence, after the war she became a founder of the British communist party. She was involved in every radical cause of the day.

In one sentence in this article, the writer said, “Of course her activities were deeply distressing to her brother.” And it gave his name – Sir John French – which I recognized. He was commander in chief on the Western Front! So I thought, “OK, this is going to be an interesting relationship.” I immediately knew both of these people were well-known enough that there would be abundant documentary sources.

Even though there are two biographies of Despard and at least four of French, none of the biographers, amazingly, were interested in this brother-sister relationship. Despard’s biographers were feminists; French’s biographers were military historians. I think each set was a bit embarrassed by the fact that the sibling was of a very different sort. They were not interested in their relationship at all, but that’s what interested me. Then I realized that this would be the perfect way to tell the story of the war in the way that I wanted. I began to look for other such divided families, families where there was one brother was at the front and one in prison as a war resister, or something like that. I found three such families or family-and-friends groups who form the human networks at the core of the story. There are some other people who come into the story, but I bring them in only because they have a connection to one person or another in these three central family groups.

Again, I have that feeling that one sometimes has when writing or reading history, that this is more interesting, more colorful, more unexpected, than any novelist could possibly invent. History just gives us these people, and it’s for us to make use of them.

One of my favorite characters, for example, is a Scotsman named John S. Clarke, who grew up in a circus family. At the age of 17, he became the youngest lion-tamer in Great Britain. He worked in the circus for some years, then became involved in radical politics. He ran guns to revolutionaries in Russia. He was vigorously opposed to Britain taking part in the First World War.

A friendly policeman tipped him off that he was about to be arrested. He went underground, all the while publishing an anti-war Socialist newspaper. Throughout the the war it was printed secretly. The police were never able to shut it down. Finally he surfaced again, when it was safe to come up, in 1920 or so. He later became a Labour member of Parliament and ended his life spending a decade on the Glasgow City Council. And when he needed some extra money or got bored, and there was a circus in town, he went back into the ring – and was the oldest lion tamer in Great Britain.

You couldn’t make up someone like this. Or if you were a novelist, and did make up someone like this, people wouldn’t believe you. But this fellow was real, and I have a picture of him in the book with his arm around a tiger.

A former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Adam Hochschild has written several nonfiction books, including “Bury the Chains” and “King Leopold’s Ghost.” His next, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” will be published in May. Read part 1 of Hochschild’s talk, on the divide in writing about history for academic and lay audiences, and part 2, on using setting and scenes in nonfiction storytelling. Or skip to the final installment, which covers the importance of plot in historical narrative. (Or watch the hour-long video in its entirety.)

An essential ingredient of any writing that is going to reach out and grab the reader’s attention is evoking where the story that you’re talking about takes place. It’s something worth spending a lot of time figuring out how to do.

I’ll give you an example from my last book, “Bury the Chains,” which is the story of the anti-slavery movement in the British Empire. There’s a crucial meeting that takes place in that book, May 22, 1787, when the first interdenominational anti-slavery committee was formed in London. It marked a real landmark in the history of human rights, I think, and took place in a Quaker bookstore and printing shop in a little courtyard, which is still there today in London’s financial district – although unfortunately the printing shop is not – called George Yard.

I was trying to evoke this moment, time and place, and trying to describe what the scene was like. We know what happened at the meeting, because we have minutes that were taken, but we don’t have a description of the scene. However, there are building blocks that you can use to put together a scene like that. I spent a lot of time scanning newspapers of the time. I began to see advertisements for other businesses in George Yard. There was a pub there. I saw an ad from a fellow who gave dancing and fencing lessons. These were some of the things that took place right in this little courtyard where the printing shop was. I could not find a description of this particular printing shop, but there is a vast amount of material on what 18th-century British printing shops looked like – and also a great many paintings and drawings. I spent some time studying books on the history of printing.

That enabled me to construct a scene. And I said, in effect, “This is not a description of this particular place, but it’s what a printing shop of 1780s London would almost certainly have looked like.” We know a lot of things about it. We know that the compositors would be working at slanted wooden tables with big trays on them with compartments, one little compartment for each letter of the alphabet, large and small. We know that it would have been lit by tallow candles, and that the ceiling would have been blackened by this candle smoke over time. We know that in every printing shop, there were wooden racks overhead and a special tool, sort of a long pole with a clothespin-like gizmo on the end, that was used to take freshly printed sheets that had many pages of a book printed on each side of them and lift them up and put them on these wooden racks so that the ink could dry. We know, therefore, that these sheets of paper would be hanging down from overhead.

We also know what a printing shop of the time smelled like. We know that because printers used a woolen pad at the end of a pole to clean the ink residue off the press each time before the page of type was disassembled. The ink residue got onto the woolen pad, and the best thing for getting it off the woolen pad, because it has a very high ammonia content, was human urine. There would be buckets of this sitting around the edge of the room.

So we know what the place smelled like. From all these things, we can really assemble a picture – sight, sound, smell – and I’d like to think that that is something that carries the reader into the scene, the setting where the story took place.

Whenever possible, when I’m writing history, I like to go to the spot where a particular episode took place. I did a book some years ago about how Russians were coming to terms with the legacy of Stalinism. In terms of the actual reporting and research, it was the most fascinating project I’ve ever worked on. A lot of it involved interviewing people who’d been prisoners in Stalin’s vast gulag, or people who’d been secret policemen or guards in the gulag, and then talking to Russian historians, schoolteachers and other people today, trying to figure out how they were coming to terms with this period. I wanted to see what these old gulag camps had actually been like, to try to better imagine what it was like to be a prisoner in one.

Well, it turned out that although there had been several hundred such camps all over the Soviet Union, any of them reachable by road today had long since been disassembled and stripped for building materials. There were only a few in a distant corner of the country, an area called Kolyma, which is right across the Bering Strait from Alaska, that were so remote that they couldn’t be now be reached by road. The only way you could get to them was by helicopter. I was able to get a ride on a helicopter from a guy who normally made his living taking around bear hunters. We went to some of these camps.

It was just extraordinary, even 50 or 60 years later: these old wooden watch towers were still standing there; barbed wire, now rusted, was surrounding them. Those buildings which had been wood for the most part had collapsed, but those that were made of stone were still there, and the one building that was certain to be made of stone in each such gulag camp was the internal prison within the prison, for prisoners being punished for some infraction. And standing inside one of these places, its wooden roof long since gone, but crosshatched iron bars still on the cell windows, looking out through these iron bars at this barren, desolate landscape that looked like the other side of the moon, partly covered in snow, even in June – it was an incredible experience. I hope that evoking it through having been there helped carry the reader a little bit farther into what the experience of living through that time must have been.

Sometimes when you go to a place, the absence of something is what’s interesting. For example, the book that I’ve just finished writing – it will be out in May – is about the First World War. There’s one episode in it where I’m quoting an Australian infantry officer who was in combat in France a couple of weeks into the Battle of the Somme. He describes seeing what must have been one of the very, very last cavalry charges ever to take place in Western Europe. A small group of horsemen came galloping up the slope, disappeared over the top of a ridge and were never seen again, never came back. I was spending a week traveling around the old front lines in France and Belgium, and I thought, “I’d like to see the place where this happened.”

I went to the spot, and what was fascinating to me was that there was barely any slope or ridge that you could see. The slant of the ground was so gentle, there’s no way you could call it a hill. And that made me realize that all of these descriptions, these eyewitness accounts of battle I’d been reading describing what the landscape looked like, were all written from the point of view of someone who was either peering out of a trench, or if in no man’s land, was flat on the ground, trying to make as low a profile as possible. If your eyes are 3 inches from the ground, anything looks like a hill, and even the slightest rise looks like a ridge. So that was an important realization for me.

Scenes in storytelling

Related to the category of setting is the whole business of scenes, or episodes. To what extent can you tell a story in scenes? I’m always looking for these when I write history. I like to be able to construct a scene because that’s the way to reach people. Movies unfold in scenes. When you go to watch a feature film, you don’t expect a narrator standing there for 9/10 of the time telling you what’s going to happen, and then a brief scene and then more narration. No, you expect the whole thing to be in scenes. The same thing applies when you read a novel. And of course, life itself unfolds in scenes, episode after episode as we go through our days.

It’s sometimes quite easy to construct a scene historically. If several participants in a meeting have left an eyewitness account of what happened, that may give you enough data. If it was a public event, it may well have been covered by the press, and you may be able to get several accounts from journalists who were there.

Sometimes you can get everything that was said, verbatim. That’s why trials make such good subject matter, because if the court reporter was accurate, you have almost every word that everybody on both sides said. In Congressional or parliamentary debates, you’ve also got a word-for-word account. Those kinds of events are precious to a writer, because you’ve got back-and-forth dialogue.

From looking at the slavery debates in the British Parliament, I think my favorite moment was when at one point in the House of Commons they were arguing about a bill to ban the British slave trade. Somebody from the pro-slavery forces rose and said – and I’m paraphrasing: “This would be a terrible thing, because we’ve got tens of thousands of British sailors on slave ships who would all be thrown out of work, and the ships would have to rest idle in port and would have not work either.” Whereupon one of the abolitionists stood up and said that this was like saying, “I’ve got this stable of six horses here, and they are only suited for robbing gentleman on the highway and not for any other purpose. So therefore you should not make any laws against highway robbery.” I really treasure being able to find moments of dialogue like that.

Now here’s a problem I sometimes run into in constructing a scene, and I’m sure those of you here who have written history have experienced the same problem. You have rich data from which to construct a scene, eyewitness accounts, dialogue and so forth, the scene is colorful and dramatic – but it seems peripheral to what you’re writing about.

I had a couple such moments in writing “Bury the Chains.” One of them, for example, happened in 1798. The prime minister of Britain, William Pitt the Younger, fought a duel: pistols at 12 paces. It’s not every day that a prime minister fights a duel, so there were a number of vivid eyewitness accounts of this event.

It was fought at Putney Heath, outside London. It was a wild area, an area where hangings took place. As the duelists and their seconds and supporters went out to this area early in the morning, there was a corpse of a highwayman swinging in the breeze. It was also an area were furtive lovers crept off to meet out of sight, and some of these folks were disturbed behind some bushes by the people going to the duel.

So you have all this detail. Furthermore, there were the people dueling. There was William Pitt, the prime minster, who was extremely thin, thin as a rail. The member of Parliament with whom he was dueling – and this was over some alleged insult, the nature of which is long forgotten – was a man named George Tierney, who was extremely plump. So the joke of the day was that an outline of Pitt should be drawn on Tierney’s body, and only shots within it should count.

Unfortunately the duel did not have to do with abolition, but it was too good a scene not to use. So I looked for ways I could draw connections from this moment to the story, and I found some. William Pitt had been strongly with the abolitionists, but at this point in time, he was weakening in his support for the anti-slavery cause. And the duel greatly hurt his previously very close personal relationship with William Wilberforce, the anti-slavery leader in Parliament, because Wilberforce was an extremely pious man who was deeply upset not only that his friend Pitt had fought a duel but that he had fought a duel on a Sunday. So their relationship became strained. And Pitt subsequently completely lost his fervor for the abolitionist cause. Can we say that the duel was a cause of that? Not really, but it was a good moment to take stock of the decline in his support for anti-slavery.

Tierney, as it happened – the person Pitt fought – was a staunch abolitionist, as was his second, Gen. George Walpole, who I was able to make into a character in my book and introduce a little bit earlier. He had quite an interesting story. He had been an army general in the British West Indies and was sent to repress a rebellion of former slaves. He ended up so much respecting the people he was fighting that he became something of a lobbyist for their cause in England. So knowing that he would appear in the duel scene, I introduced him earlier in the book and then was able to bring in a little more information about him when we met him in this duel.

A former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Adam Hochschild has written several nonfiction books, including “Bury the Chains” and “King Leopold’s Ghost.” His next, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” will be published in May. Read part 1 of Hochschild’s talk, on the divide in writing about history for academic and lay audiences, or check out the third installment, which addresses the importance of characters in historical narrative. Or watch the hour-long video in its entirety.

Half a century ago, the novelist and physicist C.P. Snow wrote about how these days we live in two cultures, where scientists and humanists seem to have lost the ability to talk to each other. I think today writers and intellectuals live in a different world of two cultures – one that has to do with whether you are writing for your fellow specialists or for a wider audience. There’s almost an assumption that writing is either academically rigorous and directed at fellow scholars or that it’s less careful and directed at a wider audience.

I encounter this assumption in all kinds of strange ways. A number of times I’ve received letters or emails from people who’ve liked a book of mine and have written me to say “how much I enjoyed your novel.” I always bristle, because even though I wish I were capable of being a novelist, I’m not, and I immediately want to write back and say, “Wait a minute! That book had 850 footnotes! Didn’t you see them? I wasn’t making anything up.”

People seem to assume that if they find something readable or lively, it’s likely to be a piece of fiction. Similarly, I think there is sometimes an assumption among scholars that your work will not be taken seriously if it sounds too accessible. I’ll give you a curious example. Years ago, there was the famous Masters and Johnson study of human sexuality. I remember that, in an interview at the time, Masters and Johnson said that they had deliberately written their first book, “Human Sexual Response,” in a cumbersome style so that it would be taken seriously by health professionals.

I’ve never actually read the book, but I looked it up the other day and just copied down a couple of sentences. And boy is it cumbersome! You wouldn’t think people could write about sexuality this way, but they do:

In brief the division of the human male’s or female’s cycle of sexual response into four specific phases admittedly is inadequate for evaluation of finite psychogenic aspects of elevated sexual tensions. However, the establishment of this purely arbitrary design provides anatomic structuring and assures inclusion and correct placement of specifics and physiologic response within the sequential continuum of human response to effective sexual stimulation.

If you know what that means, you’re doing better than I am.

They also wanted their findings to reach a larger audience, so they specifically arranged for somebody to write, with their cooperation, a popularization of these books. It’s ridiculous to me – why can’t you write the same book for both audiences?

Of course, we didn’t always have two cultures of writing this way. For example, someone who also had a good deal to say about human sexuality, Sigmund Freud, wrote in quite a beautiful way that was accessible to people far beyond specialists in the field.

Historians from an earlier time, like Francis Parkman or Henry Adams, expected their work to be read by the general public. When Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote his “History of England,” he said he would only be satisfied if it displaced the latest novel from women’s bedside tables.

How did these two different cultures of writing come into being? I think most of it has to do with the rise of universities and of specialized departments within them.  There is, of course, a vast amount of good that happened with all this: Knowledge was advanced; standards of scholarship and research were raised. But aspects of the way all this happened have exacerbated the divide between two cultures of discourse, two cultures of writing.

First of all, when you look at how universities operate, there’s always the question of what gets rewarded. What gets you tenure? What gets you a promotion? It begins, of course, with writing a proper dissertation, and then with scholarly publication in your field. And almost always, in every academic field, the proper object of study is considered to be something, or some aspect of something, that nobody has studied before. Now, that can be all very well, but, on the other hand, why not study something that others have studied or written about before, but write it better? Why not write it for an audience that didn’t know about this subject before?

Furthermore, the kind of writing that is usually most rewarded in the academic world is writing for peer-reviewed scholarly journals and university presses. Again, I think there is a good side to this. I know that when I write history and I’m relying for some material on secondary sources, I tend to trust something that’s in an academic journal more than I would an article that appears elsewhere, because I know it’s been through a careful filtering process.

And I also think that whether they’re in the academic world or not, all writers should, and all really good writers do, get some kind of peer review on their work. They show what they do to other people who really know the subject and get their critique. That’s all fine. But writing for scholarly journals and presses inherently creates a pressure for a kind of writing that is heavily studded with complimentary references to other scholars, because you never know which reviewer the Podunk University Press or the “Journal of Ephemeral Phenomena” is going to send your manuscript to. So you put in references to everybody else who’s had anything to do with the topic you’re writing about, so you’ve got your bases covered.

In the particular field in which I do most of my work – history – there’s another explanation that I came across recently for something that may have exacerbated the divide between writing cultures, advanced by University of Chicago historian Peter Novick. I don’t know enough to know whether this is true, but it’s an interesting thought. He says he believes the divide between the two types of writing in the field of history was exacerbated following the Second World War when the wealth of foundation grants newly available to historians meant that a university historian who wanted to earn extra money on the side could apply for a grant as opposed to trying to earn that money by lecturing to the general public.

I do take encouragement from the fact that there are many people who bridge that gap that gap between writing cultures, and who do so very successfully. They are bilingual, so to speak, producing work that is taken seriously by other scholars and that also is accessible to the general public. I can think of many such people, some from the academic world: the late Stephen Jay Gould, an important paleontologist who also wrote beautifully for a wider audience; historians like Simon Schama, Jill Lepore and Joseph Ellis; a literary critic like James Wood; and Jared Diamond, professor of both geography and physiology at UCLA, whose book “Guns, Germs and Steel,” became a longtime national bestseller.

Then there are people who came from outside the academic world but who are also respected within it: a particular heroine of mine, the late Barbara Tuchman; historians such as Hugh Thomas and Thomas Pakenham; and there are plenty of others one could name.

What does it take to bridge that gap? It doesn’t require a peerage, though both Pakenham and Thomas have one. It doesn’t even require being British, although they, Schama and Wood are British. I think it takes mainly the strong desire to do both things. That is, to be both accurate and careful and deep – if that’s not too pretentious – in what you write, and to reach a wider audience.

And to reach that audience, it’s very important to think long and hard about how to tell the story. Now Paul Kramer suggested that I talk to you about some of my own experiences in trying to do this, in using storytelling techniques in writing history, and I’m going to do so, but I want to stress in advance that none of this is in any way whatever original with me. Most of it goes back thousands of years, back to the ancient Greeks, where playwrights were using these same techniques – Aristotle wrote about them in his “Poetics.”

When I think about the principal storytelling techniques, I begin with what my high school English teacher told me to pay attention to when I read a novel: setting, characters and plot. These are absolutely vital building blocks of storytelling, and they are much too important to leave to the novelists. Any of us who are interested in writing history or nonfiction that reaches beyond specialist readers have to use them as well. The only difference is that we have to play by a different set of rules than novelists do. We’re not allowed to make anything up.

A former editor of Mother Jones magazine, Hochschild has written several historical narratives, including “Bury the Chains” and “King Leopold’s Ghost.” His next book, “To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918,” will be published in May. For more, check out part 2 of Hochschild’s talk, on the importance of setting and scenes in storytelling. Or watch the hour-long video in its entirety.

In recent years I have mostly written character-based history. The first source materials I turn to are memoirs and biographies. When I’m researching people from long ago at the library, I’m often the first person to check out their memoir since the 1920s or 30s. If I check out a biography, it has almost always been borrowed much more recently. Biographers are driven by something different than memoir writers. Biographers craft their stories, emphasizing the dramatic rise and fall in a someone’s life. They usually put more energy into pleasing the reader. Memoirists, by comparison, are sometimes driven by the desire to get their lives down on paper.

In memoir, ego is too often a key element of the process. The impulse to write memoir is the impulse to resist death, to leave some trace of ourselves on earth. These impulses are entirely understandable, but risky motivations for a piece of writing. They make it too easy to forget the most important person, the reader. The reader wants to be delighted, enlightened, entertained – to have his or her attention held throughout the act of reading.

Many memoirs don’t work because the things that most of us tend to celebrate about ourselves are less interesting than those things that hold readers’ attention. For example, a happy marriage makes less interesting reading than an unhappy childhood. Failure is often more interesting than success. Nobody is going to be interested in your high school or college years simply because you lived them. They’ll only care if something really significant or unusual happened to you there.

A first thing to ask yourself about personal narrative is: What portion of my experience will resonate with other people? Most of the memoirs that really work are about one aspect of the authors’ lives, one particular element of the human experience. My own experience in memoir writing is just one book, “Half the Way Home: A Memoir of Father and Son.” It’s still in print 20 years after it was written, almost certainly because it’s not “The Memoirs of Adam Hochschild.” It deals only with one aspect of my life, my relationship with my father. It’s also short: slightly more than half the normal length for a book.

A lot of people write me letters about “Half the Way Home.” For the most part, these readers don’t say what I would like them to say: “Oh, your book was so beautifully written.” Instead, they usually go on for three or four pages telling me about their relationship with their own fathers. These letters tell me that people read memoirs because they want to compare the author’s life with their own lives.

Before you decide something is worthy of inclusion in first-person narrative, test it. Tell the story to a half-dozen friends and see how they react. What questions do they ask you? Do they draw the same lesson from the experience that you did? I’m a big believer in using friends as a sounding board. If you have already written the story, ask them: Does this work for you? Where do you get bored? Where are you interested?

Our experiences are meaningful to us merely because they happened. They are meaningful to other people because of their larger implications, their echoes. If you don’t find something that will have a clear echo or significance for someone else’s life, don’t write about it. To find those echoes, hold those experiences up to the light and examine them carefully. This is the first and most important lesson for writing about personal experiences.

Adapted from the presentations “Memoir: What Goes in and What Stays Out,” from the 2001 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism and “Turning Personal Experience Into Narrative Writing,” from the 2002 Conference. Edited by Mark Kramer and Wendy Call.