Nicholas Lemann is the Dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, a columnist for The New Yorker, and author of “The Big Test,” among other works of non-fiction.

A lot of magazine writers in my generation started on alternative newspapers. Particularly The Boston Phoenix and The Real Paper. And then to The Washington Monthly or The Texas Monthly.

I lead two allied lives. One as a magazine writer and one as a book writer. I'm happy to talk about the magazine writer side, but I want to start by talking about the book writer side.

I want to talk generally about how I work as a book writer and the book I’ve just finished, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy...and a little bit about the book I’m working on now, The Promised Land.

On "New Journalism" [1]
On His Process for Writing a Book
[2]On "Making a Narrative" [3]
[4]

On "New Journalism"

If you get a pet duck at a pet store, they'd tell you that there's this imprinting process and the first thing the baby duck sees is kind of what they're going to follow their whole life.

The equivalent thing in my life is the heyday of the New Journalism in the late '60s and early '70s which I read and really devoured as a kid growing up in New Orleans. And that has gotten imprinted on me and essentially it's what I think of as still what I do, or a variant on that...

Essentially the New Journalism was a movement in journalism in the late '60s and early '70s, and one of its problems as a movement is nobody could quite agree on what it was, and everybody would claim to be a New Journalist and then would define New Journalism...

Of the definitions of New Journalism, the one that I would follow would be the one outlined by Tom Wolfe in a wonderful essay called, “The New Journalism.”

What Wolfe says about the New Journalism is that it's “narrative journalism.” New Journalism books or the nonfiction novel, or whatever you want to call it, is book-length narrative. Wolfe put his particular spin on it—that he wants the journalistic book to be the equivalent of the 19^th Century kind of realistic social novel, crammed with social details. And he then has sort of gone on to do that and then to switch to novels instead of journalism...

I take the point that what New Journalism is, is figuring out how to write journalism – long-form journalism in the form of a narrative; that is, with characters, plots, setting. He suggests, and I agree, with a kind of third person, omniscient narrative voice. So, that essentially is what I try to do, at least in books. And I would try to do more in magazine writing, but it's a bit of a tough sell.

I have one caveat about this kind of journalism in books and have had for years, and that is that I find myself getting kind of curiously unrefreshed or undernourished by some of these book-length narratives. They clearly have a power and kind of work as literature, and they also work commercially, by the way. And it is true that there's a temptation to cross the line into fiction as in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and many other examples. But, you don't have to do that. You can do it and have it be genuine nonfiction.

How can you sort of do the narrative but “go big,” essentially? And I would say that as precursors, [David] Halberstam is a really important precursor, particularly with The Best and the Brightest, which is a fantastic book and one that had a huge impact on me. The book works as a narrative or nonfiction novel, but grapples with a truly big question which is, “Why did we get into the Vietnam War?” and gives a very convincing answer to it, and it really is a wonderful book and has stood the test of time.

I would argue that The Right Stuff by Wolfe is somewhat like that too—a success at narrative and marrying narrative to big theme and analysis. Wolfe is interesting because what he says he's doing is often quite different from what he actually is doing. What he claims he's doing is laying out this kind of very neutral narration. But what he actually is doing is combining that with introducing and discussing sociological concepts. His pose is such that he does not want to admit that he's doing that, but that's what drives the work...

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On His Process for Writing a Book

The way I tend to work on specific books is I start with a theme that I'm interested in and then look for a way to do it as a big narrative. I don't like to start with the narrative because then it's too easily boxed in with a very specific story that doesn't play big and doesn't deal with an important theme. So, for better or for worse, the way I work is I first pick the theme and then kind of go hunting and searching around for a narrative or series of narratives with which to express the theme, which takes forever, by the way...

For many years I've had the idea of writing something about success in America. Almost since I was in high school I remember thinking about this. I would state the subject a little differently now, but it just interested me because I think that the United States is so preoccupied with the idea of individual success that distinguishes our culture from other cultures and it hasn't been dealt with enough...

The reason it took so long to do is I just could not figure out how to do this idea as a narrative. The first step toward figuring out how to do it, and it was an important one, [is that] this book in a way is about my world. It's really hard to see your world clearly when you're in it and it's incredibly helpful just to step outside.

I started thinking about this at a time in the reporting on The Promised Land, when I was going a lot to the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, the notorious housing project. And the key thing about the Robert Taylor Homes from this perspective is [that it is] very close to downtown Chicago. I mean, there's this El line right next to it, and you sort of get on the El and in ten minutes you're in the Chicago Loop.

So, I guess, two points. One is that being there seemed to confirm my view about the universality of ambition or preoccupation with opportunity. Everybody I met there, contrary to the kind of stereotype of defeated, dependent, welfare recipient – everybody had some ambition or something that they wanted to be. It was just very rare to meet somebody who'd say, “You know, my life just isn't about anything.” They always had something.

And then the other thing that was very striking is in the world that I'd grown up in and still live in, it was a sense of these are all the things that I might want to be, and here's where I am now, and I know exactly what the routes are from Point A to Point B. There's a just very ingrained sense of how society works, where the levers are, where the routes are. What was interesting about the people in Robert Taylor Homes is they could sit in their apartments and they could look at The Loop, and they'd say, “That's where I want to be, here's where I am now, there's the El. I don't have a clue how to get from here to there two miles away.”

Very striking to me…this sense that there's a system that you're excluded from. It almost hadn't occurred to me that there was a system, and I mean it's sort of embarrassing to say it, but it hadn't. And then I just set my mind to thinking, well what's the system, and why is it so hard to get into? Maybe the next step to make this book work is just to define the system...

Another thing that was very influential to me at this point was stumbling upon an essay that's known to all sociologists called, “Social Structure and Animi” by Robert Martin, which was written in 1938 and is a brilliant, short essay that essentially states what I just said. Which is that people have goals and then there's a question of what your goals are and then there's a question of whether you have the means to get to the goals, and then if you don't have the means to get to the goals everything goes “kablouey” is what he essentially says, or in the technical sense animi sets in. That made it very clear to me.

So, anyway, I was kind of chewing on all that and then I can remember the exact moment that this all sort of started coming to me. I was sitting on a plane from New York to L.A., and I was reviewing a book. Let me just digress for a moment...I was reviewing a book for The Washington Monthly by a sociologist named E. Digby Balsall, who just died. He's the guy who invented the term “WASP,” and he's sort of talking in this book as he has for years about the decline of the WASP and the decline of what he calls the “Protestant Establishment.” And at one point in the book...he sort of tosses off this line and says, “The Protestant Establishment is gone and what it has been replaced by is the SAT Meritocracy.” And that's when I thought that's the story, or that's at least the doorway into the story. He's on to something and why do we have a SAT Meritocracy, or do we? And where did it come from? So, I just sort of got to the point where I thought that's what I will pursue...

The SAT test is administered by Educational Testing Service, which some of you may know, in Princeton, New Jersey, which in journalism has a reputation of being kind of more impenetrable than the CIA. And I just basically went on a fishing trip – total, naked fishing trip. I found out that the founder of ETS was a man named Henry Chauncy, and I wrote a letter to ETS and I said, “I'm writing this book on meritocracy and I would like to have access to the Henry Chauncy papers in the ETS archives.”

Now, in truth, I didn't know if there were any Henry Chauncy papers and I didn't know if there were any ETS archives, but I just thought, you know, if I wrote them a letter and said, “Open all your secrets to me,” they would say no and this might be a kind of entrance. And no answer. No answer. Then about six months later I got this one line letter back saying, “We have decided to grant your request. Please report to Princeton, New Jersey.”

And I went there and it turned out that not only are there Henry Chauncy papers, but there are voluminous Henry Chauncy papers. Henry Chauncy retired as President of ETS in 1970 and one of the things that he did when he retired was hire a historian to archive his papers. This guy had been working for 25 years organizing Chauncy's papers and no one had ever come to look at them.

So, the first step of the book was I just went to ETS and I spent two years at ETS going through these papers which were really interesting just in terms of giving you a picture of – if you accept that this is “the system,” or at least part of “the system” – this is it. This is the story of where the system came from and who invented it. So, I spent a lot of time at ETS…[and] sort of built that up as the first part of the story.

So, I started with ETS…in a sense, a kind of a pilot fish attached to a shark and the shark is higher education. Really, in the United States after World War II something remarkable in higher education and opportunity merged. And how that plays out is really what my story is…

The next question I posed to myself was this: One of the weird things about this explosive growth in higher education was, who thought of it? Kind of like those 1930s movies on gangsters where they go looking for Mr. Big. I sort of thought, well who's Mr. Big here? Who's idea was all this exactly? Where was it laid out? The standard answer to that is the G.I. Bill…[but] Clark Kerr, who was the Chancellor and then President of the University of California – a really remarkable figure actually, works quite well as Mr. Big. He's the person who really systematically put this whole thing into effect when he said, “I have got a formal structure of opportunity. In California I have built a system that will give a free education to every single citizen and we're going to take you, we'll process you, we're going to route you, and you're not going to have to pay for it. And you will get ahead and California will boom, and everything is going to be great and we have kind of solved all the problems of the world.”

So the first part of the book is ETS. The second part of the book is the rise and fall of the California Master Plan, and then the third part of the book…is the story of Prop 209 in California…and it follows perfectly, at least in my own mind. SATs are invented. ETS's biggest client is the University of California system. So, the thing that made this whole SAT business a national thing…and Clark Kerr was on the Board of ETS all through the '50s, and SATs were part of the growth of the Master Plan, and Prop 209 started…is a fight about the use of SATs at the University of California. I mean, it's about other stuff too, but that's the throbbing heart. The University of California-Berkeley is the most SAT-dependent in admissions in America. So, it's a wonderful way of kind of winding up all the themes into a final, big drama.

A big problem with this book all along has been it's a book about an abstract concept. This concretizes the concept. This is the first time in world history that you have politicians actually getting up and making speeches about meritocracy. So, it kind of takes it out of the seminar room and into the streets, in effect. So, actually the book ends on Election Night '96.

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On “Making a Narrative”

One other thing I'd like to talk about before I stop talking gets back to the narrative issue. The problem with the book as I've described it is how do you tie all this together and make it seem like one story? So, links become very important [because] essentially I'm writing a narrative that's a fake, but when you read it it seems real. It's a constructed story. A trial, or a murder, or a year in the life of a teacher is a naturally occurring narrative. What I'm doing is making a narrative. I don't want you to notice that as you're reading the book, but much of my work goes into making it look like it's a naturally occurring story, when it's really a bunch of disparate stuff that I'm pulling together into a story. Now, I was interested in linking the material…I wanted to sort of cut back and forth between the big makers of the world and the kind of ordinary people who are living within this meritocratic system that's been created. So, you get a real feel for what it's like to be growing out of the system…

I would kind of call it “The Baton Technique.” And the way it works is you meet a character, then you meet another character, and that person has a link to the first character, but then that person becomes the main character and you sort of lose the first main character. Then you're going on for a while, and then that person meets another person and then that person becomes the main character. And as the books goes along there's a little crosscutting. The advantage is, I hope, that you're not locked into having to follow people – setting up all the characters in the beginning and then having to follow them through the whole time when they become less interesting. You sort of get to hit them when they're their most interesting and then kind of let them fade. So that's what I'm trying to do in terms of narrative structure and, again, I won't know whether it's worked until I'm finished writing, but that's the goal.

When you stop your narrative line and want to open something up, how far can you go before you start losing the narrative? In a way it's not a very satisfying answer, but the answer is “voice.” You have to develop an authorial voice that is flexible enough to let you do that, which Halberstam does, for example, in The Best and the Brightest very well, and Wolfe does in The Right Stuff. Therefore, in my view, to do this kind of work you have to get away from that kind of very flat, affectless voice that was sort of invented by Hersey in Hiroshima, and to some extent picked up on by Capote in In Cold Blood.

Particularly Hiroshima, which is sort of the first nonfiction novel, I would argue, with third person omniscient narrative. You can't digress in the voice…It's so spare and so clean, and clearly he's trying to be kind of aesthetically Japanese somewhat in the writing, but it's so spare and so clean and so direct, it serves his end very well in a certain way, because it's a counterpoint to the horror of the war—of the bomb. You do better in that book by not saying the bomb is horrible, just by very calmly laying it all out. But in that voice, which is the dominant voice in that book-length narrative nonfiction, still you can't digress and talk about policy and make other points.

But narrative does not, in and of itself, preclude making these other points. And you don't have to have this kind of very rigid chapter approach where you say, “I'm going to have a narrative chapter, and now I'm going to have a policy chapter.” Instead you can develop a more flexible writing voice – it’s hard to do in a newspaper, I admit, but easier to do in a book – that will allow both kinds. And what I'd argue is that it's that extremely direct, spare, austere voice that will not allow you to get into the analytical stuff.

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