January 13, 2010
Princeton’s Moe Berg and other Americans at Work and Play
Nicholas Dawidoff
Author of The Catcher Was a Spy
Minutes of the 15th Meeting of the 68th Year
President George Hansen called the 15th meeting of the 68th year to order at 10:15 a.m. and led the approximately 90 attendees in the customary singing of the fourth stanza of Samuel Smith’s patriotic hymn, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”
Eliot Daley was then called upon to read his minutes of the meeting of January 6, when the speaker was Hugh Price, Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School. The well-suited title of his thought-provoking address was “Urban School Reform: Thinking and Looking Outside the Box.” Copies of these minutes are available on the Old Guard web site.
At the invitation of President Hansen, Jack Reilly introduced his guest Bob Comizzoli, who is a nominee for membership in the Old Guard, and Charles Podell introduced his guest, George Cody, who was attending as a visitor.
Jack Reilly announced for the Membership Committee that new members will be able to exchange their special first-year name tag for a regular name tag, and that in the future new members will be issued name tags with a removable new-member label that can be detached at the end of their first year.
The President then called upon Landon Jones to introduce today’s speaker, Nicolas Dawidoff, who was born in New York City in 1962, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1985, and shortly thereafter joined the writing staff of Sports Illustrated magazine, where he met one of Time, Inc.’s premier editors, Landon Jones! In 1989 Dawidoff was selected as a Henry Luce Scholar and spent a year in Thailandas a writer for the Bangkok Post. In 1991 he resigned form Sports Illustrated to become a full-time independent writer. Since then he has written four books and many articles on a wide variety of topics. He has been awarded several important literary fellowships, including the Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship at Princeton University in 2008.
Mr. Dawidoff’s book, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998) is a serious examination of country music that one magazine named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature. The Fly Swatter, a biography of his grandfather, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Of special interest to the Princeton Old Guard was his best selling biography, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1994). We had thought that was to be the subject of his address, but instead he chose to speak on the topic Life After Moe Berg: How Biographers Choose Their Subjects.
After a few introductory pleasantries, the speaker turned to his manuscript, which began with his description of an imaginary cocktail party for literary genres and the distinguishing characteristics of ten different kinds of writers one might encounter at such a gathering. He then narrowed his focus to the field of biography, which Mark Twain dismissed as an impossible form. While acknowledging that most good books require much hard work, Mr. Dawidoff asserted there is nothing like the sweat labor demanded of the authoritative biographer. “Learning as much as you can about the thirty thousand days and nights of another person’s life,” he said, “is among the most intense commitments a writer can make—an act of near self abnegation.”
There are many ways to write a biography, but the essential procedure involves first reading everything that has already been written about your subjects, finding out everything you possibly can about them. You must master the times as well as the life of your subject. Of course, you can’t use all the information you collect. Narrowing down is the hard part, and that’s why many books are too long. You have to select enough material to give the reader a sense of what the person was really like.
Now comes the serious thinking about why your subject did the things the way she or he did, who this person really was, and what it all means. Only then are you ready to decide on the structure, which is often chronological, but for the book he wrote about his grandfather was thematic. With Moe Berg, much of whose life he discovered was self-fabricated, Dawidoff decided to tell the story three times, the mythical Moe, the public Moe, and the personal Moe.
With the structure in place, it’s finally time to start writing. For most biographers this is the best part, though it represents only 15 percent of the biographer’s total time. Since 85% of your time is spent getting to know your subject, you better find someone who can sustain your interest, someone for whom you have strong feelings. That can put impartiality at risk, but Dawidoff is convinced that to write a truly insightful book about another person, a biographer must have genuine empathy for that person. “You don’t have to love Mussolini,” he said, “and you certainly shouldn’t excuse him, but if you aspire to write the definitive biography, you need to understand him, feel the world the way he did. In the process, you may discover you have more in common with Il Duce than you realized.”
Mindful of what some critics say about biography (Virginia Wolff called it poppycock; Freud blasted it as “the art of lies, concealment, hypocrisy, and flattery), the speaker then discussed the challenge of finding the right subject. Whom to choose? How to be sure? It takes patience. Dawidoff is drawn to unsung, underappreciated characters who begin on the margins of society, but who through force of character and some form of ingenuity, overcome adversities or birth or station and go on to live extraordinary lives. “I prefer conflicted people,” he said, “not failures exactly, but people who struggle.”
And now he himself is struggling to find his next subject, which has set him wondering about how the master biographers select their subjects and why. So for his Old Guard audience he arranged another imaginary cocktail party with only biographers invited, whom he considered to be some of the finest contemporary life writers: Thomas Powers, T. J. Stiles, Jean Strouse, Linda Colley, Hermione Lee, John Aubrey, Geoff Dyer, Robert Caro, Blake Bailey, Richard Holmes, and one whose thinking on the genre is in line with his own, Judith Thurman. The remainder of his address was a broad-ranging review of the styles and philosophies of these various writers, what attracted them to their subjects, and what makes them exceptional life story writers. Their experiences have confirmed Dawidoff’s own conviction that “seeing the world through the life of somebody else helps us to define ourselves, how we think, how we feel, love, hate, befriend.” You can learn much about biographers from what they write about their subjects.
Some critics disagree with Dawidoff’s viewing biography as unintended autobiography, labeling it an ill-founded compulsion on his part. To which Dawidoff responds: “We are who we are, and it seems to me that biographies only improve when biographers come to understand the unconscious motivations that bring them to their subject . . . The more writers give in to their personal feelings about their subjects and seek to understand them the more interesting their books will be.” Davidoff thinks that great biographers tell someone else’s story in order better to understand their own, though they probably don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.
The conflict between the strict rules of scholarship and the intimate impulses of biography bothers academic historians, who in the interest of objectivity are trained not to identify too closely with their subjects. Most biographers, on the other hand, think they alone can really understand their subject. That’s why Dawidoff wanted to write about his grandfather—because he loved and missed him. His boyhood admiration for his grandfather was part of his story. A biographer can’t be a sycophant, of course. You have to accept that your subject has blemishes and feel for the person in spite of them.
So who will be Mr. Dawidoff’s next subject? He is fascinated by a once-great non-fiction writer whose last thirty years were unproductive. A Southerner who rejected the South but kept going back in all sorts of oblique ways, this man found comfort in visiting an old African American graveyard on Staten Island. He lived as the consummate urbane New York writer but was buried back on the family farm in Carolina. What does that inner turmoil of roots and home say about him?
“What,” Mr. Dawidoff asked in conclusion, “does it say about me?”
There followed a lively twenty-three minute Q and A period during which in response to questions from the audience the speaker explained why he chose not to speak about Moe Berg, how he came to write about Berg, why he prefers to write about one person at a time, how he collects, remembers, and organizes so many details, and why it is important for biographers to be candid about any invented material, such as imagined conversations. What biographers hope for is lively, engaged readers, he said.
When asked about Moe Berg the spy, Mr. Dawidoff spoke at length about Berg’s baseball and academic background. He was a brilliant linguist of whom it was said “He speaks a dozen languages but he can’t hit in any of them!” When William J. Donovan was looking for recruits for the newly formed O.S.S., Moe Berg fit the bill. He was the only agent who knew about the Manhattan Project, and for that reason was selected to be the one to find out if the Germans were having any success with creating an atom bomb. Berg never went behind enemy lines, but the story is that the leading German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg was to speak in Switzerland. Berg had orders to attend the lecture and determine whether or not Germany was close to getting The Bomb. If so, he was to assassinate Heisenberg. But Moe was able to report that Germany was nowhere near that goal. Had the conclusion been otherwise, the story would have had a different ending and Moe Berg could have been famous for his role in helping to prevent Germany from getting the Atom bomb.
When asked about Berg’s psychological profile, the speaker replied: “I don’t know if there ever was one.” Berg wore nothing but gray suits, white shirts, and black ties. He never owned a car; he never married. Mr. Dawidoff went on to say that when he was writing The Catcher Was a Spy, he was very angry that Berg spent the last twenty-five years of his life as a vagabond, smooching off friends and relatives, and getting by on his charm. But Dawidoff’s anger turned to admiration for a man who was able to create such an amazing persona for himself.
There were other questions and comments, but these minutes are long enough. President Hansen declared the meeting adjourned at 11:30 a.m., whereupon the speaker was besieged by admiring fans who wanted to buy his books and get his autograph.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard S. Armstrong
Eliot Daley was then called upon to read his minutes of the meeting of January 6, when the speaker was Hugh Price, Visiting Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School. The well-suited title of his thought-provoking address was “Urban School Reform: Thinking and Looking Outside the Box.” Copies of these minutes are available on the Old Guard web site.
At the invitation of President Hansen, Jack Reilly introduced his guest Bob Comizzoli, who is a nominee for membership in the Old Guard, and Charles Podell introduced his guest, George Cody, who was attending as a visitor.
Jack Reilly announced for the Membership Committee that new members will be able to exchange their special first-year name tag for a regular name tag, and that in the future new members will be issued name tags with a removable new-member label that can be detached at the end of their first year.
The President then called upon Landon Jones to introduce today’s speaker, Nicolas Dawidoff, who was born in New York City in 1962, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1985, and shortly thereafter joined the writing staff of Sports Illustrated magazine, where he met one of Time, Inc.’s premier editors, Landon Jones! In 1989 Dawidoff was selected as a Henry Luce Scholar and spent a year in Thailandas a writer for the Bangkok Post. In 1991 he resigned form Sports Illustrated to become a full-time independent writer. Since then he has written four books and many articles on a wide variety of topics. He has been awarded several important literary fellowships, including the Anschutz Distinguished Fellowship at Princeton University in 2008.
Mr. Dawidoff’s book, In the Country of Country: A Journey to the Roots of American Music (1998) is a serious examination of country music that one magazine named one of the greatest all-time works of travel literature. The Fly Swatter, a biography of his grandfather, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Of special interest to the Princeton Old Guard was his best selling biography, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg (1994). We had thought that was to be the subject of his address, but instead he chose to speak on the topic Life After Moe Berg: How Biographers Choose Their Subjects.
After a few introductory pleasantries, the speaker turned to his manuscript, which began with his description of an imaginary cocktail party for literary genres and the distinguishing characteristics of ten different kinds of writers one might encounter at such a gathering. He then narrowed his focus to the field of biography, which Mark Twain dismissed as an impossible form. While acknowledging that most good books require much hard work, Mr. Dawidoff asserted there is nothing like the sweat labor demanded of the authoritative biographer. “Learning as much as you can about the thirty thousand days and nights of another person’s life,” he said, “is among the most intense commitments a writer can make—an act of near self abnegation.”
There are many ways to write a biography, but the essential procedure involves first reading everything that has already been written about your subjects, finding out everything you possibly can about them. You must master the times as well as the life of your subject. Of course, you can’t use all the information you collect. Narrowing down is the hard part, and that’s why many books are too long. You have to select enough material to give the reader a sense of what the person was really like.
Now comes the serious thinking about why your subject did the things the way she or he did, who this person really was, and what it all means. Only then are you ready to decide on the structure, which is often chronological, but for the book he wrote about his grandfather was thematic. With Moe Berg, much of whose life he discovered was self-fabricated, Dawidoff decided to tell the story three times, the mythical Moe, the public Moe, and the personal Moe.
With the structure in place, it’s finally time to start writing. For most biographers this is the best part, though it represents only 15 percent of the biographer’s total time. Since 85% of your time is spent getting to know your subject, you better find someone who can sustain your interest, someone for whom you have strong feelings. That can put impartiality at risk, but Dawidoff is convinced that to write a truly insightful book about another person, a biographer must have genuine empathy for that person. “You don’t have to love Mussolini,” he said, “and you certainly shouldn’t excuse him, but if you aspire to write the definitive biography, you need to understand him, feel the world the way he did. In the process, you may discover you have more in common with Il Duce than you realized.”
Mindful of what some critics say about biography (Virginia Wolff called it poppycock; Freud blasted it as “the art of lies, concealment, hypocrisy, and flattery), the speaker then discussed the challenge of finding the right subject. Whom to choose? How to be sure? It takes patience. Dawidoff is drawn to unsung, underappreciated characters who begin on the margins of society, but who through force of character and some form of ingenuity, overcome adversities or birth or station and go on to live extraordinary lives. “I prefer conflicted people,” he said, “not failures exactly, but people who struggle.”
And now he himself is struggling to find his next subject, which has set him wondering about how the master biographers select their subjects and why. So for his Old Guard audience he arranged another imaginary cocktail party with only biographers invited, whom he considered to be some of the finest contemporary life writers: Thomas Powers, T. J. Stiles, Jean Strouse, Linda Colley, Hermione Lee, John Aubrey, Geoff Dyer, Robert Caro, Blake Bailey, Richard Holmes, and one whose thinking on the genre is in line with his own, Judith Thurman. The remainder of his address was a broad-ranging review of the styles and philosophies of these various writers, what attracted them to their subjects, and what makes them exceptional life story writers. Their experiences have confirmed Dawidoff’s own conviction that “seeing the world through the life of somebody else helps us to define ourselves, how we think, how we feel, love, hate, befriend.” You can learn much about biographers from what they write about their subjects.
Some critics disagree with Dawidoff’s viewing biography as unintended autobiography, labeling it an ill-founded compulsion on his part. To which Dawidoff responds: “We are who we are, and it seems to me that biographies only improve when biographers come to understand the unconscious motivations that bring them to their subject . . . The more writers give in to their personal feelings about their subjects and seek to understand them the more interesting their books will be.” Davidoff thinks that great biographers tell someone else’s story in order better to understand their own, though they probably don’t realize that’s what they’re doing.
The conflict between the strict rules of scholarship and the intimate impulses of biography bothers academic historians, who in the interest of objectivity are trained not to identify too closely with their subjects. Most biographers, on the other hand, think they alone can really understand their subject. That’s why Dawidoff wanted to write about his grandfather—because he loved and missed him. His boyhood admiration for his grandfather was part of his story. A biographer can’t be a sycophant, of course. You have to accept that your subject has blemishes and feel for the person in spite of them.
So who will be Mr. Dawidoff’s next subject? He is fascinated by a once-great non-fiction writer whose last thirty years were unproductive. A Southerner who rejected the South but kept going back in all sorts of oblique ways, this man found comfort in visiting an old African American graveyard on Staten Island. He lived as the consummate urbane New York writer but was buried back on the family farm in Carolina. What does that inner turmoil of roots and home say about him?
“What,” Mr. Dawidoff asked in conclusion, “does it say about me?”
There followed a lively twenty-three minute Q and A period during which in response to questions from the audience the speaker explained why he chose not to speak about Moe Berg, how he came to write about Berg, why he prefers to write about one person at a time, how he collects, remembers, and organizes so many details, and why it is important for biographers to be candid about any invented material, such as imagined conversations. What biographers hope for is lively, engaged readers, he said.
When asked about Moe Berg the spy, Mr. Dawidoff spoke at length about Berg’s baseball and academic background. He was a brilliant linguist of whom it was said “He speaks a dozen languages but he can’t hit in any of them!” When William J. Donovan was looking for recruits for the newly formed O.S.S., Moe Berg fit the bill. He was the only agent who knew about the Manhattan Project, and for that reason was selected to be the one to find out if the Germans were having any success with creating an atom bomb. Berg never went behind enemy lines, but the story is that the leading German nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg was to speak in Switzerland. Berg had orders to attend the lecture and determine whether or not Germany was close to getting The Bomb. If so, he was to assassinate Heisenberg. But Moe was able to report that Germany was nowhere near that goal. Had the conclusion been otherwise, the story would have had a different ending and Moe Berg could have been famous for his role in helping to prevent Germany from getting the Atom bomb.
When asked about Berg’s psychological profile, the speaker replied: “I don’t know if there ever was one.” Berg wore nothing but gray suits, white shirts, and black ties. He never owned a car; he never married. Mr. Dawidoff went on to say that when he was writing The Catcher Was a Spy, he was very angry that Berg spent the last twenty-five years of his life as a vagabond, smooching off friends and relatives, and getting by on his charm. But Dawidoff’s anger turned to admiration for a man who was able to create such an amazing persona for himself.
There were other questions and comments, but these minutes are long enough. President Hansen declared the meeting adjourned at 11:30 a.m., whereupon the speaker was besieged by admiring fans who wanted to buy his books and get his autograph.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard S. Armstrong