The art of thoroughness

The life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes in his book Representative Men, “showed us how much may be accomplished by the mere force of such virtues as all men possess in less degrees; namely, by punctuality, by personal attention, by courage and thoroughness.” I’ve never forgotten this sentence, in large part because the qualities that Emerson lists—apart from courage—are all so boring and mundane. Emerson, I think, is being deliberately provocative in explaining the career of Napoleon, the most overwhelming public figure who ever lived, in terms of qualities that we’d like to see in a certified public accountant. But he’s also right in noting that Napoleon’s fascination is rooted in his “very intelligible merits,” which give us the idea, which seems more plausible when we’re in our early twenties, that we might have done the same thing in his position. It’s an observation that must have seemed even more striking to Emerson’s audience than it does to us now. Napoleon rose from virtually nothing to become an emperor, and he emerged at a moment, just after the fall of a hereditary monarchy, in which such examples were still rare. A commoner could never hope to become a king, but every citizen could fantasize about being Napoleon. These days, when we tell our children that anyone can become president, we’re more likely to take such dreams for granted. (It’s noteworthy that Emerson delivered this lecture a decade before the election of Abraham Lincoln, who fills exactly that role in the American imagination.) As Emerson says: “If Napoleon is Europe, it is because the people whom he sways are little Napoleons.”

This is true of other forms of achievement, too. I’ve been thinking about this passage a lot recently, because it also seems like a list of the qualities that characterize a certain kind of writer, particularly one who works in nonfiction. I can’t speak for the extent to which courage enters into it, aside from the ordinary kind that is required to write anything at all—although some writers, now more than ever, display far greater courage than others. But the more you write, the more you come to value the homely virtues that Emerson catalogs here, both in yourself and in the books you read. Even fiction, which might seem to draw more on creativity and inspiration, is an act of sustained organization, and the best novels tend to be the ones that are so superbly organized that the writer can take the time to see clearly into every part. To stretch the military analogy even further, there’s a fog of war that descends on any extended writing project: it’s hard to keep both the details and the big picture in your head at once, and you don’t have time to follow up on every line of investigation. All books inevitably leave certain things undone. For a writer, personal attention and thoroughness come down to the ability to keep everything straight for long enough to develop every element exactly as far as it needs to extend. One of the attractions of a book like The Power Broker by Robert Caro is the sense that every paragraph represents the fruits of maximal thoroughness. The really funny thing is that Caro thought it would take him just nine months to write. But maybe that’s what all writers need to tell themselves before they start.

There’s a place, obviously, for inspiration, insight, and other factors that can’t be reduced to mere diligence. But organization is the essential backdrop from which ideas emerge, exactly as it was for Napoleon. It may not be sufficient, but it’s certainly necessary. Our university libraries are filled with monuments to thoroughness that went nowhere, but there’s also something weirdly logical about the notion of giving a doctoral candidate the chance to spend a few years thoroughly investigating a tiny slice of knowledge that hasn’t been explored before, on the off chance that something useful might come of it. Intuition is often described as a shortcut that allows the thinker to skip the intermediate steps of an argument, which suggests to me that the opposite should also be true: a year of patiently gathering data can yield a result that a genius would get in an instant. The tradeoff may not always be worth it for any one individual, but it’s certainly worth it for society as a whole. We suffer from a shortage of geniuses, but we’ve got plenty of man-hours in our graduate schools. Both are indispensable in their own way. To some extent, thoroughness can be converted into genius, just as one currency can be exchanged for another—it’s just that the exchange rate is sometimes unfavorable. And it’s even more accurate to say that insight is the paycheck you get for the hard daily work of thoroughness. (Which just reminds me of the fact that “earning a living” as an artist is both about putting a roof over your head and about keeping yourself in a position to utilize good ideas when they come.)

And it gives me hope for my current project. John W. Campbell, of all people, put it best. On July 5, 1967, he wrote to Larry Niven: “The readers lay their forty cents on the counter to employ me to think things through for them with more depth, more detail, and more ingenuity than they can, or want to bother achieving.” This is possibly my favorite thing that Campbell ever said—although it’s important to note that it dates from a period when his thinking was hideously wrong on countless matters. A writer is somebody you hire to be thorough about something when you don’t have the time or the inclination. (Journalism amounts to a kind of outsourcing of our own efforts to remain informed about the world, which makes it all the more important to choose our sources wisely.) I’m about halfway through this book, and it’s already clear that there are plenty of other people who would be more qualified than I am to write it. My only advantage is that I’m available. I can think about this subject every day for two to three years, and I can afford to spend my time chasing down details that even a diligent writer who only touches on the topic tangentially wouldn’t be able to investigate. All writing comes down to a process of triage, and as I work, I’m aware of potential avenues that I’ll need to leave unexplored or assertions that I’ll have to take on faith, trusting that someone else will look into them one day. The most I can do is flag them and move on. There are also days when even the humdrum qualities that Emerson lists seem impossibly out of reach, and I’m confronted by the physical limits to how thorough I can be, just as I’m aware of the limits to my insight. As a writer, you hope that these limitations will cancel each other out over a long enough period of time, but there’s no way of knowing until you’re finished. And maybe that’s where the courage comes in.

The dark and indefinite shore

The dreams and premonitions of Lincoln are also a part of this drama, to which they contribute an element of imagery and tragic foreshadowing that one finds sometimes in the lives of poets—Dante’s visions or Byron’s last poem—but that one does not expect to encounter in the life of a political figure: Lincoln’s recurrent dream of a ship on its steady way to some dark and indefinite shore, which seems to prophesy that the war would be going well, since it had always been followed by a victory; his ominous hallucination, after the election of 1860, when, lying exhausted on a sofa, he saw in a mirror on the wall a double reflection of his face, with one image paler than the other, which his wife had taken as a sign that he would be elected to a second term but that he would not live to complete it…On his way back to Washington from his visit to Richmond just after the city’s surrender, he read to his companions on the boat the scene from Macbeth that contains the lines:

                                  Duncan is in his grave;
After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well;
Treason has done his worst: nor steel, nor poison,
Malice domestic, foreign levy, nothing,
Can touch him further.

The night before Lincoln was murdered, he dreamed again of the ship approaching its dark destination. He had foreseen and accepted his doom; he knew it was part of the drama. He had in some sense imagined this drama himself—had even prefigured Booth and the aspect he would wear for Booth when the latter would leap down from the Presidential box crying, “Sic semper tyrannis!” Had he not once told Herndon that Brutus was created to murder Caesar and Caesar to be murdered by Brutus? And in that speech made so long before to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, he had issued his equivocal warning against the ambitious leader, describing this figure with a fire that seemed to derive as much from admiration as apprehension—that leader who would certainly rise among them and “seek the gratification of [his] ruling passion,” that “towering genius” who would “burn for distinction, and, if possible…have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves or enslaving freemen.” It was as if he had not only foreseen the drama but had even seen all around it with a kind of poetic objectivity, aware of the various points of view that the world must take toward its protagonist. In the poem that Lincoln lived, Booth had been prepared for, too, and the tragic conclusion was necessary to justify all the rest.

—Edmund Wilson, Patriotic Gore

Let us now forget famous men

“More books have been written about [Lincoln] than any figure in human history, with the possible exception of Jesus Christ.”

The photo above was taken three years ago by my then girlfriend, now wife, at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois. I didn’t get to go, alas—I was living in New York at the time—but the museum, as I was endlessly informed over the next few days, is tons of fun, with elaborate dioramas of the White House, Ford’s Theater, and other family-friendly attractions, including life-size figures of the entire Lincoln clan. When I saw the text of the plaque above, though, I was outraged, for reasons that might seem hard to understand at first. Here’s my verbatim response, at least as well as I can remember: “What about Napoleon?” I demanded. “What about Napoleon?”

You see, I like Napoleon. I like him a lot. Twenty or so books about Napoleon line my shelves, and I’m always on the lookout for more, the older and more adulatory, the better. Why? Emerson’s essay from Representative Men provides a decent starting point, but the short answer is that Napoleon is the most fascinating person I know in world history—”among the most perceptive, penetrating, retentive, and logical minds ever seen in one who was predominantly a man of action,” as Will Durant nicely puts it. He’s the foremost figure of Western history, a man who, for all his flaws, embodies more than any other individual the limits of human energy, intelligence, and ambition. And I was pretty sure that more books had been written about him than anyone else, including Lincoln.

And yet here’s the thing. Napoleon came from almost nothing, and became emperor of Europe. At his coronation, he took the crown out of the Pope’s hands and placed it on his own head. He was, by almost any measure, the most purely productive human being who ever lived. But these days, all that most people could say about Napoleon, if they recognized the name at all, was that he was a short little guy with a funny hat. (Not that short, by the way: he was 5 feet, 7 inches, or roughly the height of Tom Cruise.) That’s what time does: it reduces even the most monumental figures into caricatures of themselves. Two centuries is all it took to turn the leading light of Western civilization to Ian Holm in Time Bandits. It will happen to Lincoln, too, if it hasn’t already happened.

Napoleon, of course, isn’t alone. I was recently reminded of this whole kerfuffle while reading Dean Simonton’s Origins of Genius, inspired by the Malcolm Gladwell article I mentioned last week. Simonton mentions the work of the psychologist James McKeen Cattell, who, back in 1903, made one of the first systematic attempts to rank the thousand most eminent men in history—there were hardly any women on his list—by toting up mentions in major biographical dictionaries and tabulating the results. Here’s his top hundred:

Napoleon, Shakespeare, Mohammed, Voltaire, Bacon, Aristotle, Goethe, Julius Caesar, Luther, Plato, Napoleon III, Burke, Homer, Newton, Cicero, Milton, Alexander the Great, Pitt, Washington, Augustus, Wellington, Raphael, Descartes, Columbus, Confucius, Penn, Scott, Michelangelo, Socrates, Byron, Cromwell, Gautama, Kant, Leibnitz, Locke, Demosthenes, Mary Stuart [the only woman on the list], Calvin, Moliere, Lincoln, Louis Philippe, Dante, Rousseau, Nero, Franklin, Galileo, Johnson, Robespierre, Frederick the Great, Aurelius, Hegel, Petrarch, Horace, Charles V (Germany), Mirabeau, Erasmus, Virgil, Hume, Guizot, Gibbon, Pascal, Bossuet, Hobbes, Swift, Thiers, Louis XIV, Wordsworth, Louis XVI, Nelson, Henry VIII, Addison, Thucydides, Fox, Racine, Schiller, Henry IV (France), W. Herschel, Tasso, Jefferson, Ptolemy, Claudius, Augustine, Pope, Machiavelli, Swedenborg, Philip II, Leonardo da Vinci, George III, Julian, Pythagoras, Macaulay, Rubens, Burns, Mozart, Humboldt, Comte, Cousin, Cuvier, Justinian, Euripides, Camoens.

Now, much of this list remains unimpeachable. The top ten, in particular, would presumably be very similar today, though Bacon would probably give place to Newton, and we’d need to find room for Einstein and, yes, Lincoln. (Also, hopefully, for some women. The only other women, besides Mary Queen of Scots, to make Cattell’s top two hundred were Elizabeth and Joan of Arc, although, at this rate, it’s only a matter of time before we see Sarah Palin.) But with all due respect to my French readers, when I see names like Guizot, Bossuet, Thiers, Comte, and Cousin, among others, my only response is a blank stare. And this is coming from someone who loves Napoleon.

All in all, though, Cattell’s list reminds us how quickly even major reputations can fade. (For an even more sobering reminder, look no further than the bottom of his top thousand. Fauriel, Enfantin, Babeuf, anyone?) And I have no doubt that a contemporary list of the top hundred figures in history, like this one, will look equally strange to a reader a century from now. Just because you made the list once, it seems, doesn’t mean you’ll stay there.

Quote of the Day

The newspapers once published a story about a noted psychologist, and quoted him as saying that the four words that most easily arouse emotion in Americans are Lincoln, mother, doctor, and dog. This news fired the imagination of one young writer, who immediately wrote a story and topped it with what he described as the most ideal title of all time: Lincoln’s Mother’s Doctor’s Dog.

—Scott Meredith, Writing to Sell