James Gleick and John Banville at the Key West Literary Seminar, 2014. Photo by Nick Doll.
The highlight of last weekend’s Key West Literary Seminar was a “conversation” between John Banville and Benjamin Black, moderated by James Gleick. In a comic twist, Banville, the Booker Prize-winning novelist and literary reviewer, occupied the same chair as the serial crime novelist Black. Gleick, a KWLS board member, interviewed the two-for-one writers with a deftness that brought Stephen Colbert’s deadpan brilliance to mind and elicited as many laughs.
The Pulitzer and National Book Award-nominated Gleick, known for the “startling, quirky, challenging perceptions” so perfectly suited for the stunt with Banville, broke ground with his first book Chaos: Making a New Science, in which he popularized the discovery of the "Butterfly Effect" and introduced the field of chaos theory to a new audience. In the 1990s, he wrote the science and tech-focused "Fast Forward" column in the New York Times Magazine, and he also cofounded The Pipeline, a pioneering New York City-based Internet service.
In his biographies of Isaac Newton and the physicist Richard Feynman, and in books like The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood and Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, Gleick cracks open unknown worlds, exploring, connecting, and distilling with a wondrous amount of study and generosity of spirit.
He splits his time between New York City and Key West, where I joined him this week for a conversation in his home office.
Biographile: Your subject matter covers such a broad range. When you meet someone new to your body of work, how do you generally introduce it?
James Gleick: I've never solved that problem. I never exactly intended to be a science writer, but people say that I am. I didn’t think that The Information, which is the most recent, was a science book, exactly, but to my surprise, it’s shelved in the science section. I think I write nonfiction. My background is in journalism. My latest books seem to be the kind that involve less reporting, meaning interviewing people, and more reading. As labels go, that turns me more into a historian or biographer, but I’m certainly not any kind of trained historian. So there you go. I’m ill-defined.
BIOG: How have your methods changed since the publication of your first book, Chaos?
JG: With Chaos, I didn’t agonize over any method because there was only one thing I knew how to do, and that was to write a kind of nonfiction narrative that comes from journalism, especially magazine journalism.
BIOG: So your process writing for the New York Times Magazine prepared you for the books?
JG: Yes, some of the pieces I wrote for the Times Magazine turned into the Chaos book. As I was writing those pieces, I was thinking of Gay Talese -- the kinds of profiles he wrote for Esquire. He was somebody I tried to emulate. Unsuccessfully, of course.
BIOG: Early in The Information, you say that the mathematician Claude Shannon was “most comfortable in the realm of symbolic abstraction.” Given your choice of subjects, would you say that also applies to you?
JG: No, I wouldn't say that about me. I’m interested in ideas, and in the category of books about ideas mine tend to focus on people more than most. Chaos was essentially a book about a set of ideas, but in the way it’s structured, it’s all about the people. It was one human story after another.
And, of course, biographies are automatically about people. But I had no interest in writing a biography of someone because I was interested in his personality or anecdotes. I wanted there to be an idea. You think there’s an automatic template for writing a biography of a scientist. You tell his life story and explain the work. But I felt that wasn't enough. I wanted there to be something more.
So the thing I struggled with in writing about Feynman [in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman] was: How do I justify to people who haven’t heard of Richard Feynman -- which, at that time, was practically everybody -- why they should care about him?
If you’re a physicist, a guy who won a Nobel Prize for solving quantum electrodynamics -- that’s something. But for most of us, that doesn’t have any obvious relevance to our day-to-day life, so why should we care? I won't say I solved that problem, but that was the essential challenge.
BIOG: Making his work accessible and relevant?
JG: Well, yeah. Those are the words that you use. But the basic thing is whether I’m boring myself -- whether I find things interesting. Chaos was sort of a perfect subject because it explored the kind of science that has all sorts of relevance to how you see the world. I think that’s why the book was successful. It struck a chord for exactly the reasons that I was interested in it in the first place. Feynman was more of a challenge, because a lot of that science is not automatically accessible. But I never think it’s enough just to take something difficult and explain it in words that we understand. It has to be about why we care, why it matters.
BIOG: In an interview at SUNY, Daniel Menaker praises your biography of Isaac Newton for being “Newtonian” in style. Do you consciously shift in style from book to book, or do you feel that you have a tone that carries through?
JG: I’ve been mostly not aware of choosing a style, or changing it, but I can see that some of my books are written differently. For example, Faster has kind of a peculiar style that I became aware of as I was writing, but I can’t explain it. I’m not sure what the Newton thing is that you’re referring to. Something archaic about it?
BIOG: Hmm, no. To me it seems very clear and direct, but also counter-intuitive.
JG: I’m thinking about it now because I’m writing another book [about the history of time travel], and I have to figure out what the style is going to be. And I do want it to be a little bit different -- less formal, less official, or authoritative. I’ve almost never used first-person in my books. At the very end of The Information, I shift into it a little bit, and I enjoy reading books where the writers are comfortable writing in the first-person and can be loose and funny. So maybe my new book will be a little more like that.
BIOG: I think working as a journalist -- or as a fact-checker, which I did for many years -- can help with writing in so many ways, but it can also train you to hold back from expressing your own opinions.
JG: Definitely. I always thought the goal of journalism was: You’re not the story. You have to disappear into the background and tell the story in kind of an omniscient way, which has its own perils because you’re not omniscient, and so part of the story has to be about what you don’t know.
That was tricky in writing about Newton. I hate the kind of prose style where a biographer says, “Some people believe that Newton did X, and others say Y, and here’s some evidence.” I don’t want to be taken out of the story like that. I don’t want to hear about these other people and what their opinions are. As a reader, I just want to be told the story. On the other hand, it would be dishonest for me to pretend to know things I’m not sure of. And so that creates a problem. Did Newton have a nervous breakdown? I had to stick to what I knew and somehow let the reader know what I didn’t know without digressing into arguments among contemporary people. Does that make sense?
BIOG: Definitely. In The Information, you cover a progression of ideas and balance that with profiles that are more substantial than character sketches, but less complete than full biographies. Did you still have to do a lot of the legwork of a biographer?
JG: I always try to use as much original source material as possible. In the case of Newton, so many millions of words have been written about him. I couldn’t even hope to read all of the standard biographies, and I didn’t want to regurgitate that stuff. I wanted to immerse myself in his papers and letters.
It’s all easier and easier thanks to the Internet to find old stuff, but I still went to a lot of libraries. For all the stuff about Charles Babbage and Ada Byron in The Information, I went to England to read their papers and things. Some are still in archives and aren't published. In the case of the people from our time, I was able to do some reporting and interviews. I talked to Shannon’s wife and people who knew him, as well as going through his papers, which are in the Library of Congress.
BIOG: How do you organize your work? I've seen writers’ offices with Post-Its all over the walls. Clearly you’re not doing that.
JG: It does look fairly neat today, doesn't it [laughs]? Usually my desk is an incredible mess with a pile of stuff on it. But more of the mess now is inside the computer.
BIOG: Would you say that working in technology has streamlined your process for organizing research and writing?
JG: I wish I could say yes, but over the course of the years, I've gone through every possible organizational piece of software -- all these programs that let you collect. I've yet to find a perfect solution.