‘Working’ by Robert Caro

Robert Caro is considered by a great many people not only to be the finest living biographer, but one of the greatest biographers of all time. His contribution to life writing surely ranks alongside that of Boswell, Strachey, Ellman and Holroyd. He is as admired and influential a figure in his field as anyone.

A New Yorker who started out as an investigative journalist before turning to biography, Robert Caro’s reputation rests on his authorship of five extraordinary books.

In 1974 he published ‘The Power Broker’, a vast 1,300-page classic biography of a public official called Robert Moses (1888–1981), who somehow managed to accrue a vast amount of personal power in the middle of the twentieth century. He used it to build many of the bridges and highways that criss-cross New York City and its environs, as well as its parks, blasting away all opposition to his plans decade after decade and destroying whole neighbourhoods in the process.

Having won the Pulitzer Prize, Caro went on to devote his life to researching and writing a definitive multi-volume biography of President Lyndon Johnson (1908 -1973). Four volumes have appeared to date: The Path to Power (1982), Means of Ascent (1990), Master of the Senate (2002) and The Passage of Power (2012). Mr Caro has been working on the proposed fifth and final volume for well over a decade and refuses to give any indication of when it is going to appear. This is a matter of some concern to his many admirers who are keenly awaiting it and are increasingly concerned given that he is now ninety years old.

Robert Caro would like, if he is granted enough time in good health, not only to publish Volume Five of The Years of Lyndon B. Johnson, but also a full-scale personal memoir. Possibly realising that this may turn out to be an impossible dream, in 2019 he published this short book called ‘Working’, which is part-memoir, part treatise on biographical writing and which also includes the text of a long interview he gave in 2016 to The Paris Review, discussing the approach he takes to his work.

I read most of ‘Working’ when it first came out, but recently decided to listen to the audio version, which I would heartily recommend as Robert Caro narrates it himself with terrific charm and modesty.

There is a huge amount in this book about the art of writing serious biography. I guess the main points he makes concern his utter dedication to the cause. Caro is more than a perfectionist. He admits that he cannot read absolutely every paper relating to LBJ and his presidency, but he spent years in the archives while researching each volume, conducted many hundreds of interviews (often returning to talk to interviewees multiple times) and even went as far in the 1970s as to move to the Texas Hill Country where Johnson grew up in order to gain a better understanding of its communities and how they shaped the future president. That is not something that most biographers could or would do, but they certainly can and should do something else that Caro insists on doing, namely walking around relevant neighbourhoods so as to build an intimate appreciation of the geography of a subject’s life and the lives of others connected to it.

His dedication was evident from the very beginning of his career as a biographer. While researching ‘The Power Broker’, he and his wife Ina, who is also his sole research assistant, exhausted their savings and even sold their house in order to enable him to carry on with the project.

Moreover, the book sets out his underpinning philosophy, which is as admirable as his thorough technique. Caro’s biographies set out not only to paint a portrait of his subjects’ lives, but of the times they lived through and shaped. He writes social history as well as biography, blending the two elements together to terrific effect.

Then there is the writing style he adopts and champions. He is as concerned to write books which are absorbing from a literary perspective as they are full and accurate. He wants the reader to be emotionally engaged, to turn the pages and to experience the life story he is telling, and not just to learn about it. Exhaustive research is important, but so is good storytelling.

The final message I took from reading ‘Working’ is that underlying everything is Robert Caro’s fascination with the way that his two subjects – Moses and Johnson – went about acquiring power, accumulating more and more of it and then retaining it and deploying it to achieve their ends.

The problem here, of course, is that much of what Robert Caro has to say is deeply unpleasant. Both Moses and Johnson behaved badly, and on occasions, ruthlessly and dishonestly. They emerge from his biographies as deeply flawed human beings – anything but hero figures. So ultimately he has therefore devoted his career to writing about two men with vast egos and whose conduct he frequently finds pretty reprehensible. He acknowledges their extraordinary achievements but has many deeply serious reservations about the methods they used to fulfil their ambitions.

I just hope that Robert Caro lives long enough to see the final volume of his Johnson biography published to the acclaim it surely will be, crowning a writing life of extraordinary achievement.