Turn Every Page — Julian Girdham

Turn Every Page, the 2022 documentary film by Lizzie Gottlieb, opens with the sound of a typewriter. It closes with the sound of Chet Baker’s ‘Do It the Hard Way’:

Do it the hard way, and it's easy sailing
Do it the hard way, and it's hard to lose
Only the soft way has a chance of failing
You have to choose.

That song plays over a scene in which two of the most extraordinary men of letters of our time, Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, are discussing the former’s writing in an editing session. The ‘two Bobs’ had worked together for 50 years; since this film by his daughter was released, Gottlieb has died at the age of 92. We only hear Chet Baker’s voice: Caro insisted the sound was turned off for this very ‘private thing’. Just beforehand the two octogenarians had scoured the publishers’ offices for a yellow pencil for the editing process: someone offered a summarily-rejected propelling pencil. Only a single yellow pencil would do.

For those of us who are Caro fans - and there are a lot all over world - Turn Every Page is catnip, as was his 2019 book Working: researching, interviewing, writing, where some of the elements of the film also appeared. All of us are waiting, tensely, for the final volume of his stupendous biography of Lyndon Baines Johnson, surely the greatest such work of modern times. Turn Every Page tells the story of its genesis, following Caro’s first book The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the fall of New York, another behemoth about a larger than life man, who built most of New York. The first LBJ volume, The Path to Power, came out in 1982, and here we are 42 years later waiting for the fifth and last. And Caro is now 88.

The good news is that, judging by this film - though the footage was shot a handful of years ago - Caro seems as sharp, alert and determined as ever. His publisher says he is working as hard as he can: there is nothing we can do but wait. His long-term collaborator Gottlieb says that the other Bob’s determining quality is ‘industriousness’: ‘anyone can be adorable’. Industriousness is only partly the story, of course: one of the reasons so many of us are evangelical about these books is that Caro’s style is so compulsive. It is almost impossible to stop reading any of his doorstopper volumes once you start. Caro is a master story-teller in structural terms, but also his prose is a drug, its narcotic rhythms propelling you on and on; in one sequence in the film, he explains how he found a model for a passage in the introduction to The Power Broker in the catalogue of the ships in Homer’s Iliad.

Gottlieb was the greatest of all modern editors; he says he worked on between 600 and 700 books, and name-checks the likes of Toni Morrison, Bill Clinton and Joseph Heller (he claims credit for the digits in the title Catch-22, previously Catch-18). One of the fascinations of this film is how different the two men were. Gottlieb says he was born with too much energy. Despite living beside Central Park during his childhood he did not go into it: when his mother ordered him to spend an hour in the open air he went only just outside the apartment block door, reading beside the doorman. His career took in editorship of the New Yorker (he promised to keep on working with Caro despite the demands of that job, and kept that promise) and working with ballet companies; his completist collecting tendency included shelves of tacky women’s bags, arranged in the bedroom - his wife said she ‘hated’ them. Caro seems more single-minded, always immaculately dressed, working in a tidy study-apartment with the structure of his book organised by sheets pinned to the wall, typing out his hand-written first drafts on his Smith-Corona Electra 210 (he owns 14 of these machines). His writing integrity is absolute: he loves researching and ‘hates’ writing, but there are no short-cuts: he rewrites over and over again, is shown listing adjective-choices, says that no-one will ever know that he has not cut corners, but he must do it like this. The books have to endure beyond death.

These two very different New Yorkers built a deep working relationship over decades. They were in ‘a perpetual state of war’ over punctuation, from 1970 when Gottlieb started his obsession with Caro’s distinctive use of the semi-colon, claiming

It would be worth fighting a Civil War over a semi-colon.

That relationship kicked off with The Power Broker, an enormous tome that had to have - deep breath - 300,000 words cut out of it to avoid a second volume, and as Gottlieb says, it was all wonderful material. (Imagine if now, given Caro’s success over the years, a publisher produced a restored two-volume edition!). They regularly refer to their rows, but in the end they were bound together by their professionalism and dedication to the work that amounted to a kind of love. In a startling comment, Gottlieb says King Lear is the text that matters most to him, and he summarises his relationship to the biographer with Cordelia’s words to her father:

Love, and be silent.

It is a joy to watch a film which documents the writing of some of the greatest works of our time, writing which began in the pre-internet era. The work embodies the deepest level of knowledge imaginable, perhaps old-fashioned virtues of patience and accuracy, and that extraordinary industriousness that Gottlieb highlighted. ‘Turn every page’ was the instruction of Caro’s earliest editor in journalism: never take anything for granted in your research, never assume anything.

We also have the privilege of catching sight of a quirky secret that is very different to Gottlieb’s handbag display. Caro is still banging out the material on his typewriter - no laptop for him - and Lizzie Gottlieb asks where his ‘back-up’ is. For all these decades he has been taking carbon copies of the completed pages back to his home apartment at the end of the day, and stuffing them in a 6-foot long cubby-hole above his refrigerator. Every now and then he mounts a ladder and pushes the papers back to make more room, but by now the compartment is almost full. Caro cannot be too far from completing his immense task, and while his editing partner is now silent, the rest of us just await the final result of this act of love, done the hardest way.

More: this NYT article from 2021 by Dan Barry features some fabulous photos of Caro and his working environment by Jonah Markowitz.