(NANCY PEARL) Hello and welcome to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl, my guest today at the Women's University Club
in Seattle is Daniel James Brown,
author of The Boys in the Boat.
Daniel, thanks so much for coming by today.
(DANIEL JAMES BROWN) Oh, thanks for having me, Nancy.
-Spending your afternoon with us here.
-I wouldn't be anyplace else.
How did you come up with this story
that you wanted to base your third book on?
-This is a story that it literally walked
into my living room one day about six years ago
in the person of my neighbor, a lady I knew only as Judy at the time.
Judy had been reading one of my earlier books
to her father, and he was in hospice care at her home.
He was enjoying that earlier book and he wanted to meet me.
And so she asked me if I'd come down and chat with them.
And so I don't know if it's the next day or the day after that.
I went down and I, I met a gentleman named Joe Rantz,
and Joe was in his late nineties
and he was on oxygen.
And but he was very bright minded, very clear and articulate.
And he began to talk to me.
We talked a little bit about that earlier book.
And then he began first he began to tell me about his
very poignant story of growing up during the Depression.
He I don't want to give away too much of the book,
but he had a very hard time in the Depression.
He was basically abandoned by his parents at a very young age
during the Depression, and that caused him all kinds of difficulty.
And then he began to talk about how he had begun to row
on the crew at the University of Washington in 1933
and how ultimately he had
wound up rowing with his crewmates
representing the United States in Berlin in 1936,
rowing for the gold medal against, amongst others, a German boat
and rowing in front of Hitler
and Goebbels and Goering and all the top Nazis.
And as he began to tell me the story, as he told me this story,
I was just absolutely mesmerized by it.
-Did you get goose bumps? -I did.
I got goose bumps.
And I knew right away it was a great story.
And I also noticed that as he told me the story,
whenever he began to talk about any of the other boys
who had rowed with him, he would tear up.
And that became quite conspicuous after a while.
Anyway, at the end of the conversation,
I just asked him flat out, I said, Joe,
can I write a book about your life?
And he paused a moment and he shook his head and he said,
No, I don't want you to write a book about my life,
but you can write a book about the boat.
And at first I didn't know what he meant.
I thought he meant the
husky clipper, this beautiful George Pocock built
cedar shell that he and his crewmates had raced in.
But then he gave me to understand that what he meant by that was
more than that.
It was the other boys in the boat.
And even more than that, it was this almost perfect thing that they had
become together 75 years before that summer in Berlin.
It was very important to Joe
that the book be about what they had all done together.
And so I started the next day, basically,
I set out to write the book in that spirit.
-Did you start by doing other research
or to re-interview Joe Rantz or what?
-I was right in the middle.
I was nearing the finish line with another book, so
I was simultaneously working on that previous book, that other book.
And and then I began to interview Joe and
sort of doing juggling the two things together,
because Joe was in the last few weeks of his life,
I wanted to get as much of his story as I could.
So I wound up doing both for a while.
But basically I wanted to capture Joe's story before I began
to do the other kinds of research I knew I would need to do.
And then I went on to interview the family members of the other
eight fellows in the boat over the course of the next couple of years.
All of these families of these nine,
there's eight oarsmen and one coxswain in the boat.
So all nine families have been sitting on this story for 75 years,
and they were all extremely excited when they discovered
somebody was going to write a book about it. So they came to me
with boxloads of
photographs and diaries and letters and news clippings
and just this wonderful treasure trove of material.
And and somebody from each family sat down with me
and gave me many, many hours of interview about their
father or grandfather, as the case might be.
So I was very blessed by having the cooperation
of so many people that were close to the story.
-So with so much information at hand
that you had accumulated from the relatives and
of these nine boys, how did you keep to the through line?
-Well, I sat down partway through the process and I wrote
a synopsis of the entire story.
But it wasn't the usual book synopsis is like a page
or a page and a half.
And this was actually turned out to be a 17 page synopsis,
which is hardly a synopsis.
But the exercise forced me to
to conceive of the beginning, the middle and the end,
and to understand the arc of the story
that the climax of the story, the resolution of the story.
-How did you become interested in in narrative nonfiction,
what we call these days, narrative nonfiction?
-Well, I've always read a lot of narrative nonfiction.
I'm a big fan of people like Tim
Egan and David Raskin and Laura Hillenbrand.
I love that kind of writing.
So it's what I've tended to read for the last ten
or 15 years, for one thing.
And the other thing is I started writing.
The first book I wrote was called Under a Flaming Sky,
and I started writing that when I came across a box
of newspaper clippings and letters my mother had stored in the attic.
It was about a forest fire in which my great grandfather had died
and in which my grandfather and his mother escaped on a burning train.
And so I dug into this box of materials,
and I just, I thought the story was great.
And so the way I thought best to do that was rather than just a dry
history of the fire,
I wanted to write it in a novelistic style,
which is basically what narrative nonfiction is, is writing
nonfiction in a novelistic style.
So that first project sort of taught me how to approach a topic, and
and that seemed to work out for me.
-And how did you then go about choosing the subject,
the Donner Party
for your for your next book, and how long did it take in between?
-It, I had just finished the previous book when my editor
then at HarperCollins immediately asked me what was next.
And I wrote her a one
page email, a synopsis of the story that had been in my head
about the Donner Party and boom, we had a book.
So and it unfolded quite quickly.
But that book also, there was a kind of a family connection to it.
My great uncle, who was a very young man, 16,
and his father had been amongst those who actually they had led
the first rescue expedition up into the Sierra Nevada in the spring
of 1847 to reach the Donner Party and start bringing people out.
So I had always had this family connection with that,
with that story.
And and then when I dove into it, I just decided that it wasn't my
my own family's connection that was most interesting to me.
But the story of a young woman named Sarah Fosdick Graves,
who was one of several young, relatively young,
healthy people who hiked out of the Sierra Nevada that winter
and got word out to the rest of the world
of what had happened up in the High Sierra.
So, again, it was a family connection
kind of thing that got me got me going.
-I imagine you're in the process of trying to figure out
what to do next.
-I am.
-And and what is that like?
-That's agonizing.
Basically,
the problem is or the issue is that
it takes four or five years for me to write one of these books.
And if you're going to spend four or five years on a topic
literally every day, because when I'm working on a book,
I'm thinking about it.
If not writing seven days a week for the whole time.
So if you if you spend that much time with a topic,
you really have to love it.
-Right.
-And so I am I'm looking for story ideas.
I'm getting people are have been sending me sheaves of paper
about grandpa or grandma.
And I haven't had time to look through all those materials yet.
I'm hoping to find something good there.
-You read American history.
You're fond of American history.
-I read everything from popular history to very academic history.
When I was writing this book about this
University of Washington crew, The Boys in the Boat, one of the
threads of the narrative is what was happening in Germany
during 1933 through through 36.
I wanted to know what was unfolding and in the new Nazi state there.
And so I spent a lot of time
reading academic histories of the rise of the Nazis,
even though I knew I was only going to use
a tiny fraction of what I was learning.
I wanted to have a comprehensive sense of of the history
that was going on in Germany.
-I could imagine in reading the history to look for that
kind of idea,
something that hasn't been explored so much that you can...
-Sure.
I love the whole process of researching a book because
even though I had that 17 page synopsis and the arc of the story,
I knew I would find things along the way that I that would enrich it.
And if so, I would take things out of that synopsis
and put other things in as the research process went on.
So for me, it's always
been a kind of iterative process, the writing and the research.
I get a I get a sense of the overall arc of the story,
but then as I start writing each scene or a chapter,
I'm also researching as I go along.
And so I find interesting things that I
that I need to add along the way.
-When did you see the video that Leni Riefenstahl did of the race?
-I didn't see it early on. I saw it
relatively late in the writing, and I was glad to see that
that film matched my understanding of what was happening.
Leni Riefenstahl's film.
It's just one clip from a much longer film called Olympia
that was part of the Nazi propaganda, of course,
surrounding the 1936 games.
And, you know, Riefenstahl's a very complex topic.
She has to this day.
She has defenders because she was a great artist.
But it's also become increasingly clear, particularly in recent years,
that she was very much serving the interests of the Nazi state.
And that film is very much a deliberate piece of propaganda.
-Were you a rower?
-I was not a rower, and I'm still not a rower.
Rowing is brutal stuff.
I was very concerned about that when I that very day I met Joe.
One of the things I was wrestling with in my mind is
how are you gonna write a book about rowing if you're not a rower?
And so I got a lot of help from the folks down
at the University of Washington
Shell House, the coaches and the young men and women
both down there who row and other rowers
that I came to know in the process of writing the book.
And they read various drafts of the manuscript.
And I learned a ton about rowing along the way.
And I've I've really been gratified as I've gone around the country
talking about the book, is that so far the rowers
seem to be saying that I got it right.
So that's very gratifying.
-When I was reading this, I was thinking of other teams
sports, baseball, football, hockey, what.
Whatever.
But it seems that there's something a little bit special
about the act of rowing in like an eight man, nine man boat.
-I don't think there's anything quite like it in the world of sport
or perhaps anywhere else in terms of the degree of cooperation
and synchronization and trust that are involved.
When you're rowing an eight,
particularly at the level we're talking
about a national championship or an Olympic gold medal,
every blade of every oar has to enter the water at precisely
the same moment, at
just the right angle, be pulled with just the right amount of strength
and so on and so forth.
All these very small details of movement have to be synchronized.
But more than that, the psychology of the nine
people in the boat, they all have to be aligned
and they all have to be working together.
And so there's this enormous element of trust that goes into
building a championship crew.
And that's actually a really important part of the story,
because partly because
Joe Rantz,
who's the thread that holds the story together,
because he was abandoned as a young man, grew up not trusting anybody.
And in order to become successful at crew, he had to learn
to overcome that, to start trusting the other boys in the boat.
And and that really becomes sort of the tension at the center
of the book of whether he can or can't reach that level of trust
and and become as good as he was capable of becoming.
-So in some ways, it's also a coming of age story.
Yeah. And overcoming the past.
-Rowing is really the stage on which there is this very personal story
coming of age of this of this one young man.
As much as I wanted the book to be about all the boys together,
and I think it is, there is also definitely
this very personal story of this one young man at the heart of it. And
and I think
I think calling it a coming of age story is is absolutely right.
-I have to say, before I read this book,
I never knew that that the US had won the gold medal.
-The Jesse Owens story, I think, rightly eclipsed
all other stories about the Olympics that in 1936.
It's a great story, it's a great American story.
And it's a great story partly because it's one of those stories
that reminds us who we are as a people.
It reminds us that we value certain things like fairness and equality.
And so I think that story tended
to eclipse all other stories that summer.
The other interesting thing is that the Jesse Owens story
is a story about a great individual achievement.
And to my mind, this story about these boys in
this boat is also a great American story.
It's a story about what we can do when we come together
and literally pull
as one when we climb into a boat and learn to pull together.
For me, the book really the story is a kind of metaphor
for what that generation of Americans did
when they confronted the Depression
and the necessity of winning World War II.
They found a way to come together and to pull together
and to to accomplish great things
by trusting one another.
You know, they I think partly they learned humility.
They learned humility
because of the suffering they endured in the Depression.
They learned
there were forces in the world more powerful than they were.
And that humility
I'm speaking now of the whole generation
or as representatives of their of the generation,
they learned through their humility.
They learned to trust one another.
And so for me, as I say, the story of these nine boys
in some ways just encapsulates
what what so many Americans did in that generation.
-Do you want to revisit that,
that generation in other books?
-I'm tempted to the it's hard when you write about them
not to want to come back to them.
One of the things that
that first meeting I had with Joe,
one thing, one of the reasons his story really resonated with me
was that my own father was of the exact same generation.
Born, I think the same year that Joe was.
My own father had, his father died
right at the beginning of the Depression in 1929.
So he was 14 years old.
The same year, the same age that Joe was when he was abandoned
and he had to give up his, he was hoping to go to law school,
and he was unable to do that because of the ravages of the Depression.
So I immediately empathized with Joe because his story was so much
like my father's and so much I have found talking to people
who've read the book about so much like the story of their fathers,
my readers, fathers and mothers,
that it's very hard
not to want to spend more time with that generation.
If I do write another 30s book, then I would like
to find a different angle on it to keep it fresh, of course.
-Were you always drawn to narrative nonfiction?
To nonfiction? As a young reader?
Actually, as a young reader, no. I read mostly fiction.
I mean, I was an English major in college, and so,
like all the English majors, I read all the great novels
and the classics, and I still read a lot of fiction.
But in terms of my own personal style
and what fulfills me, I think that
I think I'm going to stay away from fiction.
It's hard to be constrained by the facts, you know?
I mean, there are times when you wish that
the facts turned out differently than they did,
and there are times when you you long for the freedom that a novelist
has to just go in whatever direction would make a great story.
But on the other hand, there's a certain amount of comfort
in the fact that the story does exist
and you don't have to invent a plot.
The story is there.
Your job is to tell it well and to unearth
the essential elements of it that will
be meaningful to a reader. So
on the whole, I think I'm happier writing nonfiction.
-I'm thinking of Robert Frost’s quote about free verse,
which he despised, basically, and he said,
Writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net.
And in some ways, that's what nonfiction
is, playing tennis with a net. -With a net, right.
The net the net is always there and the ball's got to get over it
and you and you know, it, there are definitely times
when you would prefer that things were different than they are.
But a good story is a good story.
And there are plenty of good nonfiction stories out there
to work with. The trick’s just finding them.
-I was thinking also when I was reading this, if this were fiction,
it would be a totally unbelievable story.
-Right. -I mean it would be one of the things you said.
Oh, come on. -Right, right, right.
-That kind of thing.
-That's right.
And, you know, I was I was thinking that when when I do
look for a new topic, one of the things I like to look for
is some element of improbability in that topic.
I think that in all my books, if you look at them,
there's something about the story that was improbable.
And if you can find a true story
that has an element of improbability, I think you're not
guaranteed success because there's a lot of work
to do to write the book well,
but it's a big step forward in terms of finding an interesting story.
If there's something
unlikely at work in the story.
-How much research did you do looking at old newspapers from UW?
I mean, did you make use of the great archival collection
the library has?
-Yeah, I spent
probably 100 hours or more in Suzzallo Library on the University
of Washington campus, hunched over microfiche readers,
reading newspaper clippings from or newspapers from the 1930s.
And it's interesting, I didn't just read this coverage of the races.
I discovered early on that one of the things I
wanted to do was bring alive
Seattle during the
Depression as the the setting for this book.
And so I found that after I read the sports columns about the crew,
I would often linger and read the whole paper for a given day, often
just some arbitrary day in 1933 or 34,
just sort of read the paper from cover to cover to see
what all was going on in Seattle in 1934.
You know what movies were playing at the local theaters,
what the other cultural events that were going on, what the
there were great labor disputes going
on through all these years down on the waterfront here in Seattle.
And so just sort of
taking Depression-era Seattle into my head,
even though, again, I knew I wouldn't use 99% of that material,
I found it really helpful when I did sit down to write
the story, having a detailed knowledge
of the setting helped allow me to bring it to life.
-When they did win the gold at the Olympics,
were there headlines in the papers here?
-Kind of a tragedy, actually.
Royal Brougham, the great Seattle sportswriter, was in Berlin.
And immediately
after, after the race sat down and wrote a seven or eight page
detailed account of the race and wired it back to Seattle.
And the sportswriters at the PI had gone on strike that morning,
and his story never did get published.
As far as I know, it's never been published.
And then the boys,
they didn't all come home at once and have a ticker tape parade
here as they had had when they beat California the year before,
there was literally a ticker tape parade up First Avenue in Seattle.
There was nothing like that
when they won the gold medal in Berlin,
they came home in dribs and drabs
and immediately set about
trying to find jobs because it was still the Depression
and they still had the problem
ahead of them getting through another year of school.
So they went about mostly they put their gold medals
in sock drawers and went back to work.
And to a large extent, the story just sort of fell by the wayside.
-And did the families still have those nine gold medals?
-Yeah, well, there's various tales
about the gold medals and their fate.
Joe's was interesting, Joe.
Joe's gold medal
he brought home and put it in a sock drawer or something.
And and then years later,
when Judy was an adult,
they went looking
for the gold medal, and they couldn't find it anywhere.
And. And they gave it up for a lost.
And many more years passed and they decided to put a new roof
on their house and in the attic and some insulation material.
They found the gold medal
and apparently a
squirrel or a rodent of some kind had taken a liking to it.
There was a little nest there.
And the gold the gold medal was in the nest.
And so it is now and it is a display case.
-Is there one one episode
or one aspect that you wish that you had been able to include
but had to be edited out or you couldn't quite fit it in?
-Because this was Berlin in the 19- mid-1930s,
I did an enormous amount of research about the Holocaust,
even though the Holocaust really hadn't unfolded yet,
the groundwork was being laid, Dachau was being built that summer,
and so I spent weeks and weeks researching various aspects
of how the beginnings of the Holocaust
were beginning to unfold in Berlin,
and in particular in particular in the little village
where these guys were quartered during the games.
And I wrote quite a bit about that,
that ultimately we had to cut out of the book
because as interesting as it was and as heartrending as it was,
it it just didn't really contribute to the to the narrative.
So, you know, having
touched the Holocaust even a little bit in this book,
it's hard, this is another problem I'm having as I try
to figure out a next topic, that is such an overwhelming story.
It's hard to see any historical story,
as matching it in significance.
So that's always in my mind, too.
I think there's a million great Holocaust stories to be told still.
-Were any of the boys Jewish?
Did any of them have that sense that they were doing something?
-By and large, I should start off by saying that like most Americans
that summer that they went there, they were not very interested
in what was happening in Germany.
They didn't want America involved in European affairs.
But one boy, the the the coxswain Bobby Moch,
while they were in New York at the Olympic training facility,
they're getting ready to go to Berlin.
He wrote to his father back in Seattle and asked
if he could have the address
of their relatives in Germany and Switzerland
because he wanted to visit them while he was over there.
And a couple of weeks later, or I suppose it was more like
ten days later, he got a letter from his father
and he opened the envelope
and inside there was another envelope
and on the front of that envelope it said open this in a private place.
So Bobby Moch took it out in a field and sat under a tree
and opened this letter and in the letter,
his father told him that his family heritage was Jewish,
something Bobby had never been told before.
And and Bobby started crying by his own account.
He wasn't crying because he was Jewish.
He was crying because he realized his father had felt it necessary
to keep this from
all their friends and associates and neighbors
and even his own family, even in America.
And we forget that there was still a lot of anti-Semitism
in the in the US in the 1930s.
So Bobby Moch discovered this before he went to Berlin that that he was
his heritage was Jewish and that was that was pretty amazing.
But, you know, the fact is nobody really knew yet what was coming.
So if it had been ten years later, it would have been
entirely different.
-Daniel I feel like we could go on talking for,
you know, many other, many other half an hour shows,
but I think we have to wrap it up.
And I just want to thank you again for for doing this.
It's just a wonderful book.
And I have to say, I'm just looking forward to your next book.
-Great, thank you.
-Whatever it may be. -Yeah, whatever it may be.
-Thank you, Daniel.
Thanks.