Erik Larson in the City of Books
Dave Weich, Powells.com
"In Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century amid the smoke of industry and the clatter of trains there lived two men, both handsome, both blue-eyed, and both unusually adept at their chosen skills."
So begins The Devil in the White City. And there ends all similarity between those two men.
Daniel Burnham, architect of some of America's most famous structures—the Flatiron Building in New York City and Union Station in Washington D.C., to name two—would, as director of works for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, organize a six-month fair on the shore of Lake Michigan that attracted 27.5 million visitors during one of the worst depressions in American history. Among the many novelties introduced to American culture at the fair were Cracker Jack, Shredded Wheat, belly dancing, spray paint, alternating current, the Pledge of Allegiance, and a wondrous giant wheel that against all odds managed to "out-Eiffel Eiffel."
The fairgrounds, designed by Burnham and a team of architects and engineers that included Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, and Louis Sullivan, employed as many as twenty thousand workers at once. "A single exhibit hall," Larson notes, "had enough interior volume to have housed the U.S. Capitol, the Great Pyramid, Winchester Cathedral, Madison Square Garden, and St. Paul's Cathedral, all at the same time." The fair alone consumed three times as much electricity as the city of Chicago.
Dr. H. H. Holmes, born Herman Webster Mudgett, a physician and hotelier, was meanwhile living and working in Englewood, only a short "L" ride from the fairgrounds at Jackson Park. Although no one would know it until long after Burnham's fair closed its gates, during the great event Holmes was nearby developing his enterprise as America's first urban serial killer.
"You've got to respect a book that makes you keep flipping to the back cover, double-checking that it is nonfiction," Adrienne Miller admitted in Esquire. "[T]he heart of the story is so good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already."
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"As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find." San Francisco Chronicle
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"Good as it is as disaster narrative, Isaac's Storm also shines as a character study, as an anatomy of hurricanes, and as a lively exposé of bureaucratic stupidity." Washington Post Book World
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"Larson takes us past the absurd myths, past the numbing statistics, and into the face of reality....Journalism at its highest." Los Angeles Times Book Review
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"Goes a long way toward capturing Olmsted the man.... [A] biography that communicates, with feeling, the ups and downs of Olmsted's career as well as of the profession he helped to invent." The Wall Street Journal
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"A knockout period mystery, infused with intelligence, vitality, and humor." Library Journal
Dave: There are two distinct story lines running through The
Devil in the White City. How did you decide to present them together?
Erik Larson: It dates back to 1994, even before Isaac's
Storm. I had read The
Alienist by Caleb
Carr, which is a story about a fictional serial killer, but what I loved about
that book was its evocation of old New York. At the time, I was looking for
a book idea. I'd finished Lethal
Passage, and I thought to myself, Wouldn't it be interesting to do a
nonfiction book about a historical murder?
I started doing some research, and I came across the serial killer
in this book, Dr. H. H. Holmes. I immediately dismissed him because he was so
over-the-top bad, so luridly outrageous. I didn't want to do it. I didn't want
to do a slasher book. It crossed the line into murder-porn. So I kept looking,
and I became interested in a different murder that actually had a hurricane connection,
where I of course got distracted by the hurricane and wrote Isaac's Storm.
I was once again looking for a book idea, and I remembered Holmes, but I specifically
remembered that there was this World's Fair thing in the background. I thought,
I'll read about the fair. I had nothing better to do. I'd dismissed about
a dozen ideas and I was getting sort of antsy. I started reading, and that's
where I got hooked. I was enthralled by the things that I found. On almost every
page of this book that I read I would stop and think, This happened? This
happened? This happened?
I felt very strongly that I didn't want to do a monograph-like history book
on the World's Fair of 1893, but the thing that was most striking about the
preliminary research was here was this guy, this serial killer, one of the darkest
characters of American history, operating literally in the same place and the
same time as this marvelous fair built by Daniel Burnham. The juxtaposition
was just too compelling. That's what drew me to the book. To me there was never
any question that that was the story.
Dave: The story of the fair is so full of detail. I was reading the
book while traveling in California, and once or twice a day I would update my
companions about the latest developments: what Holmes was up to and the accumulating
details from the fair.
It must have been a massive challenge to organize so much information. A lot
of the most interesting details aren't exactly central to the story.
Larson: It was in fact a huge event, and mine is not the definitive
look at the fair. I left out significant portions of the things that happened.
I don't get at all into the Board of Lady Managers controversy, which consumed
a good deal of press ink at the time; I don't get into any of the congresses
—the Congress of Religion, of History, of Politics, and so forth—
because essentially they were conventions within the fair where people read
papers to crowds, and they were excruciatingly boring.
One of the things I've always loved is collecting telling little details.
If there's anything I bring to the party in this book and in Isaac's
Storm, I think I have a good eye for details. If they titillate
me, if they excite me, then I know that readers are going to enjoy them. To
me, the two strong narratives, Holmes and Burnham, were vehicles for throwing
in those great little stories. That was the delight of the research and the
writing—things like the fact that Cracker Jack was introduced at the
fair. These are things that stick in the narrative.
The trick is determining when you have enough stuck in and when you have too
much. That's where I have to rely on my readers, my friends who are writers
that I trust, and my editor, who is one of the great all-time editors?
Dave: Who is that?
Larson: Betty Prashker. She has great instincts. But my wife is my
first line; she's my secret weapon. She's probably the finest natural editor
I've ever encountered. She goes through manuscripts, and we have little codes
for what needs to stay, what needs to go, and what's boring. That really helps.
When she starts snoozing I know that it's got to go.
But it was a huge amount of stuff and I didn't even come close to capturing
everything at the fair. In fact, I'm learning now about things I wish I'd known.
I got a call the other day from a friend of mine. She said, "I was sitting down
at breakfast this morning with my Quaker Oats, and I was reading the container,
and there's a reference to the World's Fair!" That kind of thing.
Dave: So how do you organize all that material?
Larson: The thing I always tell my writing students—I'm not
a full-time instructor, by any means, but periodically I've taught writing students
—what I always tell them is that the most important thing in narrative
nonfiction is that you not only have to have all the research; you have to have
about 100% more than you need. That's sort of my rule of thumb: If you have
twice as much stuff, you can feel comfortable that in the end you will have
enough.
And you not only have to have it; you have to know where it is. That's
the tricky part. I do many arcane things to help me remember. For example, as I'm doing the initial research and I read
something that makes me laugh or makes me feel some emotion, or I just think,
I didn't know that happened, I note in the margin that I
had that reaction. Because two or three years down the line you forget, and
sometimes you just need to remind yourself, Yes, once upon a time, this was
very funny. Now it's second nature to me, but once it was very funny. It's
sort of like what you hear about pilots: when they're flying through weather,
they have to trust their instruments. You can't see the horizon and so forth.
It's the same thing. I no longer feel it's funny, but I know it was funny once,
and that's very important to keep track of.
Dave: It seemed to me that you drew out Frederick Olmsted, through his ideas,
theories, and plans, more than most of the other characters. In terms of balance,
there's a surprising amount in the book from his point of view. Did you find
more in his letters or in public records, or did you simply feel that he helped
draw out the story more than the other engineers?
Larson: I came to like Olmsted a lot. I fell in love with his character.
Actually, in the early drafts of the book there was a lot more Olmsted than
there is now. He wrote a lot—reports, letters to his sons and partners
—and he was very expressive. The richness of detail?that's of course very
valuable, but I just loved the sense of Olmsted at this point in his career:
what was going on with him, how he felt about things. He took on the fair late
in his life as a way to elevate landscape architecture. Then, when he is ailing,
he has to go through this whole torment; he has his own personal loss, Codman's
death.... I just found him to be a very humane character, with a lot of traction,
if you know what I mean.
I could have kept on writing about him for a long time. In fact, I had considered
making him the main character for a while. After I'd initially thought about
the fair and the killer, the question became: How do I tell about the fair?
Because I didn't want it to be a static background. I didn't want it to be "everything
you always wanted to know about the 1893 World's Fair" with no story, which
is a very easy trap to fall into. I needed a character to tell the fair story
through, and I'd considered Olmsted might be that person. It would be Olmsted
and the serial killer.
Initially, in fact, it was Olmsted, the serial killer, and Burnham—
a tripartite narrative. But as I went along I quickly realized that the Olmsted
story was not going to work for a variety of reasons, and I really felt that
the Burnham story was the key, the story of leading this effort and overcoming
all these obstacles. Although Burnham did prove to be something of a sphinx.
Significant blocks of his letters are missing, and big chunks of his diary.
The gentleman who appointed himself the caretaker of Burnham's diaries had taken
the liberty of destroying portions of them, I guess to protect Burnham's reputation.
What was he saying in those diaries? He was a little harder to pierce. Nonetheless,
the events he dealt with were very compelling.
But that may explain why you feel that balance. Olmsted is a very important
character. There's more about him than you might expect in a dual narrative.
Dave: Another major figure, one who's not as thoroughly present in
the narrative, is George Ferris. We don't learn much about him, but what drew
me to him was not only the hubris of this task that he had set for himself,
but the idea that he'd construct and deploy his wheel virtually without testing.
Larson: That's the compelling thing about the Gilded Age, that sense
of unbounded creative energy without the buffering forces that would exist today.
That's what really struck me about the Ferris Wheel also: that they just went
ahead and built this thing, and on such gigantic scale. And it worked. It was
a marvel of engineering, and it even survived the great storm that hit the fairgrounds.
I just love that. And I love the fact that Ferris had done it responding to
a challenge by Burnham.
I knew I had to have that in there—and that's where the balance becomes
very tricky. I knew I had to have Olmsted in there; I knew I had to have Ferris
in there. How do you get them in there as well as the two central narratives?
How also do you fit Prendergast and what ultimately happens with him?
It all happened.
In fiction you probably couldn't include all those additional characters.
You'd have to have them more finely woven into the two primary narratives. But
real life is real life.
Dave: One figure sitting outside all this—literally, he's
operating just outside the fairgrounds—is Buffalo Bill, whose story is
amazing. Critics and readers talk about the architectural and engineering advances
described in the book, but the scale of promotional invention going on at the
fair was astounding. Buffalo Bill and Sol Bloom, in particular, are pretty much
inventing new forms of marketing.
I love the story about how the fair decided it couldn't afford to have a special
free day for the city's poor children, so Buffalo Bill lets kids into his Wild
West Show for free and even feeds them ice cream. In the process, he attracts
17,000 people.
Larson: There, too: that's the beauty of real life. As I did the research,
I didn't know anything about Sol Bloom. Suddenly he crops up in the research
process and I'm sidetracked; I'm instantly enthralled by this guy. What a wildman,
and a young guy, too.
And Buffalo Bill is one of my long-time favorite characters. Ever since I
wrote Lethal
Passage I've been interested in Buffalo Bill and his Wild West Show. Now
here he is, dismissed as an incongruity, so he sets up camp outside and just
about upstages the fair. He was such a flamboyant character.
But you're right: It really was the dawn of effective promotion. Both those
guys were pivotal.
Dave: Holmes visits the fair a couple times, but his story intersects
the one you're telling about Burnham most forcefully toward the end of the
book when Detective Geyer finds a victim with a trinket from the fair. That
detail brings the two storylines into one messy but congruent whole.
Larson: It's great that you mention that because for me that was probably
the single most telling two-line sentence in the book. That is where the two
narratives at last touch. Although, believe me, I did look to see if Burnham
ever encountered Holmes or if Holmes ever encountered Burnham. You can bet that
if anybody ever buys this for the movies Holmes is going to be stalking Burnham
and Burnham is going to save the day on the Ferris Wheel, a la The Third
Man.
That line to me was the pivotal line in the book. Writing is a very tactile,
physical process for me. When I'm arranging a book, it's in pieces on the floor,
and I'm literally moving things around. No matter how hard you try, you cannot
do it on a computer alone. You have to have the broad sweep on your floor or
on a table or something. Everything has a physical shape. And what I began to
see in my mind was something like two comets approaching, coming so close, just
having this delicate connection and nothing further—which you can get
by with in literature. You can't get by with that in the movies.
It seemed to be the moment when the two stories touched, and when I came across
that detail in the research, I knew it. This is it. This is where the stories
touch.
Dave: This book and Isaac's
Storm describe events only seven years apart. At the center of each book
is a city trying to prove itself: Chicago in one and Galveston in the other.
Galveston is competing with Houston to become the dominant Gulf port of Texas?
Larson: Yes, very much so.
Dave: While Chicago is competing with New York, and other maybe less
tangible issues of civic pride.
Chicago really did seem to pull it off, though. Galveston got stomped.
Larson: Galveston got absolutely stomped, yes.
And Chicago did pull it off, although interestingly, Chicago never fully
pulled it off. Within Chicago there is still this feeling, not justified at
all, that they are second to New York. You do an interview in New York, and
no one ever asks afterwards, "What do you think about New York?" Never. But
in Chicago, I get that question all the time. "So what'd you think about Chicago?"
It's very endearing. But the fair definitely did raise Chicago's profile.
Dave: Isaac's
Storm describes a series of failures that result in tragedy. Cuban forecasters
were saying that a hurricane was headed for Texas; meanwhile, not only was the
U.S. Weather Bureau dismissing those warnings, it was actually suppressing them,
hiding them from the public. Consequently, businessmen are going out to lunch
in the middle of the most destructive storm of all time.
Larson: Those guys going to lunch didn't know the storm was coming.
They didn't really understand. There were storm warnings, and there was odd
weather, and once they were in the restaurant clearly they realized that something
was up because they were making jokes with each other about how bad things were
outside. But nothing like that was going to stop a 1900 businessman in Galveston,
Texas. No mere storm was going to keep you from going to lunch downtown.
I think that's one of the traits of the Gilded Age. Nineteen hundred was the late, late
Gilded Age, the end of the whole Victorian, late Gilded Age thing, but that
was the attitude. It's like the real world didn't apply.
So much of what Isaac's
Storm was about—and so much of what Devil
in the White City is about—is attitude. The attitude that colored
these eras is reflected in little things like going to lunch during a storm,
and it's reflected in big things like Ferris building his wheel without thinking
about the fact that it could kill two thousand people if it fell over.
Dave: In a writing class I once took, the professor suggested that
any story could become more complicated, or at least the characters would become
more complicated, if someone were to lie. She was talking about fiction, of
course.
Isaac's version of what he did when the storm hit is very much in question.
And I can't get over the fact that in Holmes's confession he claimed to kill
people that were still alive. As if he hadn't killed enough. These people are
tremendously complicated.
Larson: Maybe someday I'll do a novel, but right now, I so much enjoy
narrative nonfiction. The research appeals to me—I love looking for pieces
of things in far-flung archives—but the beauty is that the complexity
of the characters is there. You don't have to make it up.
The difference between a terrific novelist and one who's not so terrific is
that sense of nuance, the thing that makes one character more believable than
the next. In a nonfiction book, the nuance is there. It's just a matter
of paying attention to it when you come to it, and not trying to gloss it over.
The result is that you have complex, detailed characters without even necessarily
thinking about it. They just appear.
Like Olmsted. How complex a character is that? Haunted by disease, haunted
by bureaucracy. And that very touching period toward the end of his narrative,
where he's concerned that Burnham is losing faith, that Burnham is relying on
his chief superintendent. What a modern situation this man was facing! It's
sort of like The
Quiet American. He feels his underling is usurping his own role
because Burnham is paying more attention to the underling. It's very touching,
especially for a genius like Olmsted to have to deal with. And that's the
kind of nuance that, if I were writing a novel, I'm not sure I could have come
up with. Or at least made it believable. But real life is wonderful.
Dave: What fiction does that for you? Who are the authors that manage
to create that degree of nuance?
Larson: The book that comes to mind is Mickelsson's
Ghosts by John
Gardner, which remains in my perception the richest, most detailed, most
nuanced portrait of a man that I have ever read. That is, in my view, one of
the most brilliant books I've ever read.
Dave: At the very beginning of The
Devil in the White City, you describe the influx of young, single women
coming to Chicago. You quote Jane
Addams:
Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly
released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended
upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs.
Again and again, the narrative comes back to this idea of the anonymity that
Chicago provides, both as an opportunity for people to make fresh starts and
also for someone like Holmes to prey upon them. It's been ten years since you
wrote The
Naked Consumer, but it seems that you couldn't have a more stark contrast
between the anonymity Chicago offered in 1893 and the rigorously recorded life
—by the government and by large corporations—of an American today.
Larson: On one level you can feel that's the case—that the anonymity
is gone—but I think to some extent that's almost an illusion. Maybe it's
what we want to believe. If you choose to, you can be even more anonymous in
today's culture. Even though in 1893 cities were growing and the potential for
anonymity was increasing, the fact is that there were still patterns of social
behavior that prevailed. The sense of community, everyone going out to the dance
hall together, everybody going to hear speeches, everybody going to the fair....Today,
you have the opportunity to completely shrink from society and still function.
As we know from the elderly on their own in a big city, they're virtually invisible,
sadly.
What was significant at the time of the fair was that the anonymity of an
urban existence was new. The rise of an urban, industrialized city was a new
phenomenon. There were more opportunities for anonymity if you chose them or
if they happened to fall upon you. But I'm not sure it's that different today.
It just may seem to be if you feel like the credit bureaus are checking up on
you and so forth.
Dave: When people ask me about Devil
in the White City, inevitably I end up talking about how strange it is to
read about the work of architects, engineers, and businessmen alongside the
story of a psychopathic serial killer. But that's part of the appeal.
Larson: I had a sense from the start that if I did a book about the
World's Fair alone, I'd get some readers who were really into fairs, but not
that big a readership. And if I did the Holmes thing, I might get some people
who read about serial killers, but authors have written about Holmes before.
There's a book called Depraved
by an author named Harold
Schechter that took a look just at Holmes.
I write to be read. I'm quite direct about that. I'm not writing to thrill
colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that's not
my goal. I sort of have the Steinbeck
approach to writing: I want to be accessible and I want to convey something
—in this case, a powerful sense of this past time when community
was breaking down. But it was community that really powered the fair and drew
all these people together at one place in one time. While that sense of community was breaking
down, the potential for a serial killer was developing. These forces were warring
at the end of the nineteenth century.
What I hoped was that the serial killer story would lure fiction readers to
the book. I might actually get people who say, "I only read fiction," to come
over to nonfiction and then become seduced by the Burnham narrative—and
find it perhaps even more compelling. I'm delighted to say that I'm finding
that's the case. People initially interested in the serial killer are finding
the Burnham story more complex. Indeed, from a technical standpoint, it's the
more classical narrative. A guy starts out with one set of assumptions. The
first thing that happens, you know, his partner dies, so he's spinning off in
another direction and almost abandons the whole project. He comes back to it,
has even less time than when he started, and all these new obstacles begin to
appear. I mean, there had been foreshadowings of financial distress, but one
of the greatest depressions in America literally began the week that the fair
opened. How amazing! A novelist probably couldn't get away with that, but in
real life?
I've been delighted to find that people are finding themselves entranced by
the fair narrative. Though they still like the Holmes thing, as I do, too. But
that helps explain why even mystery bookstores now are having me in to sign
books. I consider that a major coup for nonfiction.
Erik Larson
visited Powell's City of Books on March 13, 2003.
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