The Narrative
It is all there is
The Lost City of Z, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Old Man and the Gun, The White Darkness and The Wager by David Grann; and Isaac's Storm, The Devil in the White City, Thunderstruck, Dead Wake, The Splendid and the Vile and The Demon of Unrest by Erik Larson
It’s not late but the days are so short it may as well be midnight. Or outside there’s a pandemic and you’ve got nothing to do but read.
You are on the New Yorker payroll or possibly you are a young man who wants to write something good for once in your sorry life. You’re a young man who hopes to have what other people call ideas. You’ve never had an idea before, but you think it would be nice to get one close at hand. Other people have ideas, you think, so why not me?
Where do ideas come from? They come from the specific, the painfully specific, or they come from the absurdly general. The formless and the cosmopolitan ideas. People root around in archives to find the one piece of paper — the overlooked, unpublished journal in the difficult hand, the diary that has been used as the basis for an undergraduate thesis sixty years ago but languished ever since — or they think quite simply and seriously: I wonder what happened to some of the men who were sent around the world with Anson? Where did all of them end up?
What writers like Erik Larson and David Grann have is the ability — quite rare — to make a cohesive whole out of a series of parts. To read an academic history at all is to be deluged with an additional layer, a layer of theory and projection intended — deliberately intended — to mystify the lay reader and to prove the membership of the author of a guild, a priestly class. A class to which the reader is denied access.
Members of that class might talk like this.
While it is reasonable to conjecture that the intensified market created by the opening of this new route to exchange those particular commodities may have included, even typified, certain features of the signal mercantilism of the era, it is true also — and cannot be forgotten or minimised — that contemporaneous concepts of autonomy and asset transferability problematised the relationship between vendor and purchaser and gave political actors, already present and operating, more capacity to exert new and overt pressures in hitherto under-noticed ways.
What did an extract like that teach us? What did it really say?
Versus: ‘There were glassy waters and ragged, white capped waters and brackish waters and transparent blue waters and rolling waters and sunlit waters glittering like stars. One time, Bulkeley wrote, the sea was so crimson it “looked like blood.”’
That’s from The Wager. It’s rather pretty, and serves a purpose.
Which would you rather read?
Would you rather read meteorological data explained to you in the form of a table, or would you rather read Isaac’s Storm, which snaps between the storm itself — now merely hot air above an ocean thousands of miles from its destination of Galveston, Texas, and soon so much more — and the city itself, placidly awaiting its nemesis? About the technical specs of the Marconi machine, or how Marconi’s invention was used to catch the claimed wife-killer Dr Hawley Crippen as he fled across the Atlantic in a fast boat, certain no one on board had twigged his real identity?
A list of those killed on the Lusitania, or the tear-stained details of arranging the funerals for those same lost souls?
The Grann and Larson school believes that documentation can provide the telling, indeed, the all-important quote which seems so apt it must be fictional until you check the notes. Indeed, the narrative must be built around those quotes. But this can only work if you spend inordinate time, great pains, constructing a story, a real story, which goes neatly around real events. The university does not produce work like this.
But it is the opposite of the kinds of daily journalism in which quotes are thrown in to leaven the broth. A trick by which some journalists, the writers of analysis pieces, might even trick themselves into thinking they have done something clever and chic — finishing a piece on a quote from one of their sources which seems to sum it all up. The journalist believes doing that is très élégant, that they are not in a very real way wasting their time and their meagre talents.
Don’t completely believe that the Grann and Larson way is much different from daily journalism — all its triumphs and its failures. They’re just better at it.
The Larson—Grann school and its work can contain wild speculation and judgments authorities do not like. Grann’s whole thesis of The Lost City of Z — in effect Percy Fawcett’s idea of a truly lost civilisation in the jungly wastes of South America — has been pretty aggressively disputed by men like the explorer John Hemming, an expert in the rainforests whose books populate Grann’s own bibliography.
But let’s not kid ourselves, here. What would the appointed experts, the high priests, say about the imaginative taking of one side — an untethered side, a theosophical anti-scientific side, a romantic side — in a century-old controversy of which no answer has yet definitively emerged? What would you rather read?
What would you rather read? University history, as itemised by Walter Scott’s esteemed authority Dryasdust — or narrative, pure narrative? The latter, the latter. It’s all there is.