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Episode 509: Howard Bryant Masterfully Braids History in ‘Kings and Pawns’
575 Plays9 days ago
"Characters make books. Why are these guys in opposition? And were they actually really? How can you be in opposition with someone you never met? How can you be in opposition with somebody who's essentially sharing the same plight you're sharing in the country? And that brings in the other character. It's Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of this entire book. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of that entire period," says Howard Bryant, author of Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America.
We’ve got Howard Bryant (@howardbryantbooks) back on the show for Ep. 509. Howard is the best-selling author of several books and his latest is Kings and Pawns: Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson in America. It’s published by Mariner Books.
Howard’s book takes a new framing on two iconic Black American icons of the 20th century. Very few people know much about Paul Robeson, who was a brilliant football player, but perhaps more famous as a baritone singer and stage actor. Jackie Robinson was the first Black American to play major league baseball, breaking the color barrier in baseball.
The two were separated by some twenty years, never met in person, but were pitted against each other during the second Red Scare, kings turned into pawns. The authoritarian, McCarythian overreach of the era very much echoes our current moment. Robeson’s career, his life, was ruined. It’s a complicated story brilliantly orchestrated by one of the best writers this country has on offer.
Howard is the author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron, Juicing the Game: Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, Rickey: The Life and Legend of an American Original, The Heritage: Black Athletes, A Divided America, and the Politics of Patriotism, and Full Dissidence: Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and he also was the guest editor of The Best American Sports Writing Series. You’re in for a treat. You can learn more about Howard at howardbryant.net and follow him on IG @howardbryantbooks.
In this episode we talk about:
- When you know it’s a book
- Who are your stars?
- How he reshaped the book by fixing the introduction
- How he bridged the gap between Robinson and Robeson’s timelines
- How Branch Rickey, this vaunted angle of integration, wasn’t exactly so holy
- And Howard’s favorite thing about writing
Show notes: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsorship
00:00:00
Speaker
This podcast is sponsored by the newsletter Pitch Club, the monthly substack where you read cold pitches and hear the authors audio annotating their thinking behind how they sold and crafted their pitches. Had pitch an agent, an editor, a feature to an editor, an essay to an editor, or a source.
00:00:23
Speaker
I think that's going to be really cool when I get into those pitches. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com forever free. Read a little, listen a little. I guarantee you're going to learn a lot.
00:00:34
Speaker
I'm no fun. i want to be fun. i want people to think that I'm fun. I think I'm fun, but I don't write about fun stuff.
Podcast and Guest Introduction
00:00:47
Speaker
it's the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show where I speak to tellers of true tales about the true tales they tell. I'm your sour soy milk in the back of the fridge, Brendan O'Meara.
00:00:58
Speaker
It's still good. It's still good. All right, we've got Howard Bryant back on the show for episode 509. Oh, my God. End of introduction. If you don't know Howard, then frankly, I don't care to know you. Have I thanked you for listening to the podcast lately?
00:01:15
Speaker
You have a lot of options out there, and whether you listen to this show at 1.5x, 2x, for 10 minutes or 70 minutes a week, I'm deeply grateful you've chosen to hang out for a bit and maybe get a little bit better.
00:01:30
Speaker
Feel a little less lonely. Feel a little less crummy. Maybe.
Discussion of 'Kings and Pawns'
00:01:35
Speaker
Howard is the best-selling author of several books, and his latest is Kings and Pawns, Jackie Robinson, and Paul Robeson in America. It's published by Mariner Books. Hey, I know those guys. Very sexy. Call me. Call me.
00:01:49
Speaker
Howard's book takes a new framing on two iconic black American icons, let's get redundant here, of the 20th century. Very few people know much about Paul Robeson, certainly not me, who was a brilliant football player, but perhaps more famous as a baritone singer and stage actor.
00:02:07
Speaker
Jackie Robinson was the first black American to play Major League Baseball, breaking the color barrier in baseball. And it's all been rainbows and sunshine ever since.
00:02:18
Speaker
The two were separated by some 20 years. They never met in person, but were pitted against each other during the Second Red Scare. Kings turned into pawns. The authoritarian, McCarthyian overreach of the era very much echoes our current moment.
00:02:35
Speaker
Robeson's career, his life was ruined. It's a complicated story, brilliantly orchestrated by one of the best writers this country has to offer
Supporting the Podcast
00:02:44
Speaker
in Howard Bryant. Show notes of this episode more brendanomero.com, hey, hey, where you can read blog posts and sign up for Pitch Club.
00:02:50
Speaker
The show can also be found on Instagram at Creative Nonfiction Podcast. If you want to help the show, you can sign up to be a patron at patreon.com slash cnfpod. Any paid tier gets access to the Flash 52 sessions, 52 weeks of writing Flash essays in community.
00:03:06
Speaker
Been fun so far. I've i'm been really enjoying it. If you don't want to part with your beer money, leaving kind ratings and reviews for the podcast and or the front runner cost you nothing but a couple minutes of your time. But my gosh, they are important.
00:03:19
Speaker
All these things are a vote in favor of what is the next thing I do. The wayward podcast listeners seeing a lot of reviews, the wayward book buyer seeing a lot of reviews be like, okay, i'm I don't know who Brendan is, but that it looks like it's pretty reputable.
00:03:36
Speaker
And here's a new review from Allie257.
00:03:40
Speaker
titled Reader, Writer, Listener. Five stars. As a reader and writer, I appreciate Brendan's knowledge and preparedness with his interview subjects. As a listener, I love the candid conversations that unfold.
00:03:52
Speaker
Awesome. Very cool. Thank you very much. I don't read my book ratings and reviews because my negativity bias will force end-of-life ideation. I don't know how many are there on Goodreads or Amazon for the frontrunner, but I read all the podcast ones.
00:04:08
Speaker
So Howard is the author of The Last Hero, a Life of Henry Aaron, Juicing the Game, Drugs, Power, and the Fight for the Soul of Major League Baseball, Ricky, The Life and Legend of an American Original, The Heritage, Black Athletes, A Divided America, and The Politics of Patriotism and Full Dissidence, Notes from an Uneven Playing Field, and he's also been the guest editor of the Best American Sports Writing Series. He's been on the Sports Reporters on ESPN, commentator elsewhere, he's all over the place.
00:04:38
Speaker
An amazing career, an amazing writer, and a great dude. You're in for a treat. You can learn more about Howard at howardbryant.net and follow him on Instagram at howardbryantbooks.
Interweaving Robinson and Robeson's Stories
00:04:48
Speaker
In this episode, we talk about, like, when do you know it's a book? Who Are Your Stars? How he reshaped the book by fixing the introduction. How he bridged the gap between Robinson and Robeson's timelines.
00:05:01
Speaker
How Branch Rickey, this vaunted angel of integration, wasn't exactly as holy as the narrative would suggest. And Howard's favorite thing about writing.
00:05:12
Speaker
Among other great stuff. Awesome stuff. Parting shot on the author's responsibility. I think it's high time we get on with it, CNFers. Cue up the montage.
00:05:31
Speaker
is the thief of joy, obviously. And like, he taught me how to throw a punch. That's kind of a big deal. Let me tell you a story. And i forgot to press record. This is going to have to interest somebody somewhere other than me.
Character-Driven Storytelling vs. Journalism
00:05:55
Speaker
So even just the last couple days, i've been watching Masterclass of the Duffer Brothers, the Stranger Things creators. And just I love listening to how like other and creative people talk through story and how they outline things, how they... go about the work in their way, even if it's not in my sandbox, so to speak. yeah And um it's been really cool. And I just wonder, you know, for you, Howard, just ah this could be a really good on ramp is just, you know looking at those other other creative media that maybe you like pluck from me like that helps your your the biography you write and the other ah narrative stuff you write.
00:06:31
Speaker
Well, for me, it's all always story. And I had to learn that. I mean, as a journalist, the first thing you are taught is the information. What's the information? Who, what, when, where, why? That's the stuff that we know. But then when you write books, you also realize that you know story or information without character is not a book. It's not a narrative.
00:06:53
Speaker
You gotta have characters. You have to have people that you are trying to tell this story through. Who are you following? Who are we listening to? who are we Who do we care about? Why do we care about them? What is their significance?
00:07:07
Speaker
It can't just be information. Otherwise, it's a textbook. yeah And I think that's one of the things that I really, really try to get better at. Every single book, it's that narrative storytelling, that narrative, that real narrative heft.
00:07:23
Speaker
Because it runs counter to what i what I do for a living. When you're a columnist, when you're writing, you don't have time to get into that kind of depth. You don't have you know you you talk about an issue, you sort of skim over the issue. It's a lot of flyover, a lot of polemic.
00:07:36
Speaker
And When you really get into a really, really, really good book, they you stay, and I refer to it as, and my friends don't always understand what I say, but I think you know people, try to get there with them. You try to stay in narrative.
00:07:50
Speaker
Stay in the narrative. If the if the story is about 1949, in You know, don't bring me back to 2025 or don't time travel too much. Really get into the the grist of what that time was. And the guys who really did it well, I was actually really, really honored. You know, two of my all-time favorites, ah David Marinus and Adam Hochschild,
Cold War Era and Race Relations
00:08:12
Speaker
they're so good at this.
00:08:13
Speaker
It's like when I was covering baseball and there were there were guys, you know, who wore the uniform and then there was Barry Bonds. And even the guys in the uniform would go, he we don't do what he does, right? And so there are there are so many really, really great storytellers. And I hate that term because it feels like it's fiction.
00:08:35
Speaker
It feels like it's make-believe. It's not storytelling. stories Our stories that we tell are true. But there is a craft to it. And there is a way to really dig into the narrative, stay in the narrative. And and when you are able to do that,
00:08:49
Speaker
The material is so rich and that's what you're really trying to hit. Yeah, when I interviewed David Gran most recently, a couple years ago, about the wager and how he creates tension and suspense in nonfiction when we kind of know the outcome and yet we're still very gripped. He's like, well, those characters in those moments didn't know the outcome.
00:09:13
Speaker
That's right. And so you're staying with them to your point of staying. you're in 1949, stay in 1949. You know, stay with them. What do like where is their head at? You always hear like Vince Gilligan talking about Breaking Bad.
Creating Tension in Known Outcomes
00:09:24
Speaker
like, where's Walt's head at? Where's Walt's head at? And that's how I disagree with that. Yeah. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt. I mean, I disagree with not with you, Brendan, but the idea that we already know the outcome, because if there's one thing that I struggle with deeply, it's whenever you take on a subject and you do this, you and I do the same thing.
00:09:41
Speaker
How much do they know? Right? I mean, you're the expert. You're the one who's immersed in this story. You're the one who knows that Jackie Robinson testified against Paul Robeson in July of 1949. And when I told people what I was working on the last several years, they're like, I never knew that. Right? I didn't hear that. I never, you know, in in some ways you're like, well, where you been? But you also recognize that you have to assume that the reader doesn't know what you know. And this is one of the great challenges when you're writing these books. How much does the public know? How much am I am I just you know going over material that everybody is yawning at because they already know this? Or is this new?
00:10:18
Speaker
Is it new material? And I found in this book specifically, and even in that when I did The Heritage as well, when we were talking about these different subjects, most people would say, i didn't know that.
00:10:31
Speaker
I think that the process is is correct. One, you stay in narrative. If you're if you're Vince Gilligan, yes, you're thinking, okay, why? you if If Gus Fring could simply recognize that this is business and not personal, he'd still be alive today, right? Stay in that you know in his mindset as a character. What is he thinking? He's thinking hatred. He's not thinking long-term. He's thinking, I hate this guy.
00:10:56
Speaker
These Salamancas, right? And if you're if you're working on on this project, you're trying to say, okay, we know that Jackie Robinson is now on a postage stamp. We know that he is legend. We know that he was the first Black player to to play in the 20th century, that he broke all of these different barriers. What we don't know is, what was he going through 1945?
00:11:17
Speaker
What was he going through 1946 and 47? How did he view...
00:11:23
Speaker
what he was doing when he didn't know how the story was going to end. And that's one of my favorite parts of the book, actually, is the recognition in 1949, right before he testifies against Robeson, before you know the anti-communist branch, Ricky, and the anti-communist forces come after him and say, look, we need you to do this you know for the sake of keeping America wholesome and healthy and the whole thing, right? They lay it on him pretty thick.
00:11:49
Speaker
He's incredibly disillusioned. That in 1949, he's in his fifth year in organized baseball. He signed in October 1945. So it's not just the fact that he you know it's not just the fact that that he had integrated the game in April of 47. He'd been signed in October of 45.
00:12:08
Speaker
So the door was open in October of 45 for other teams to come along and say, okay, Branch Rickey did this. Now we can do it too. And they didn't. On opening day 1949, there were seven black players in baseball, in the whole damn sport. And three of them played for the Dodgers, you know, and the other two played and and two more played for Cleveland.
00:12:31
Speaker
So that gives you that five of the seven black players in the whole sport played for two teams. What does that do to our narrative? And one of the reasons why I did this book in the first place was I was really, really just tired of this narrative that on April 15th, 1947, everything was fine.
00:12:49
Speaker
That Jackie Robinson showed up and then the world accepted him and baseball accepted him and there was a whole new day. That is not the case. The story of this is that Jackie Robinson came in with all of the anticipation that he was breaking ground and that he was doing what the country asked him to do and that he did put himself in as a pioneering figure.
00:13:11
Speaker
And by the end of his life was as disillusioned with this country as he'd ever been. That is a different story than we think we know about Jackie Robinson.
00:13:21
Speaker
Mm-hmm. Yeah, and when you're looking to take on a a book project, be it whatever ideas you're coming up with, yeah when do you know that there's kind of enough meat on the bone there for you to- When do you know it's a book?
00:13:34
Speaker
When do you know it's a book? Yeah, well, you know you and I did this a few years ago, um and i don't I don't want to repeat myself and bore you to tears on it, but you know I have my five steps of anxiety when I work on a book. um Step one is, do I have an idea?
00:13:50
Speaker
That's the very first thing. That is the question that you're asking. Okay, is it a book? Is it a magazine piece? Is it a newspaper article? Is it a podcast? Is it a document? What is it? What do we have here?
00:14:02
Speaker
This book I knew was a book. I knew it was a book because of three specific things. One, the introduction of the heritage, which I wrote in 2018, all about the black protest and the there ah the revival of the of the black athletic athlete of the political athlete.
00:14:20
Speaker
The introduction of that is Robeson in court, not in court, but in front of HUAC in 1956. So while I was working on the heritage, I'm sitting here deciding what the intro of that book is going to be, and it's Robeson.
00:14:35
Speaker
And while I'm digging in on this and while I'm working on this intro, I'm like, wait a minute, there's enough here for its own book. And I began to think more and more and more, i have been covering this sport for 30 something years.
00:14:50
Speaker
I went to college in Philadelphia. And when I got to Temple University in 1987, Paul Robeson had only been dead a decade. He died in 76. So his aura was still around the city, especially in the the black parts of the city.
00:15:05
Speaker
And I knew because I'd read everything I could about Jackie Robinson, and I'm such a huge Jackie Robinson fan, I knew that he had testified against Robeson in front of the House and American Activities Committee.
00:15:17
Speaker
And then I turned the page like everybody else. That's kind of a big deal, right? that's It's like, what did they tell us in J-School? If it's not supposed to be there, it's news, right? I mean, and I was sort of mad at myself for the number of times I had i had written that sentence.
00:15:34
Speaker
So not only did Jackie testify against Paul, but... He knew it was wrong by the end. He didn't really want to admit it was wrong.
00:15:46
Speaker
He had been criticized by the Black community for doing it. Malcolm X went after him. Those two went at it in in the early 60s. And I'd never put two and two together to say, let's just stop.
00:15:58
Speaker
and focus in on this relationship. What happened? What happened? And finally, when I was done with the Ricky Henderson book in 2022, I was like, this is the book I'm doing next.
00:16:10
Speaker
It was just so obvious. the The question was step two of the anxiety, which is, okay, how do I get it? You've got the idea. How do you get it? and And Paul Robeson is a legendary, gigantic figure, and nobody knows who he is.
00:16:26
Speaker
And so I've been thinking, okay, well, how do you get this book? Like where, you know, is the archival available? What's the material? There's plenty of material. Where is it? How do you get it? But on top of that, how do you tell this story? Because these two guys are not of the same generation.
00:16:39
Speaker
Robeson is 20 years, 21 years older than Jackie Robinson. So what is the construction going to be? How do you want to get this book? So i knew I knew it was a book from pretty much from day one.
00:16:51
Speaker
The question, the bigger question for me was, how do you get
Structural Challenges in Writing
00:16:54
Speaker
it? How do you construct this narrative? Do you have the chops to construct this narrative? Can you do it the way you want to do it? And so I had felt like the real way to do it, especially when I had recognized that these two guys had never met, which is incredible, which is impossible.
00:17:09
Speaker
how how did youve You've got Jackie and you've got Paul, and they're both in Harlem at the same time. The Black community is very, very small. right i mean Everybody in Harlem knows each other, especially when you're at that celebrity level. They all know each other.
00:17:22
Speaker
These two guys had never met. They're 20 years apart. One essentially replaces the other as the most famous Black American in the country. And they're placed in this adversarial position. So I decided I'm just going to do it doing a construction that I had never done before, which was alternate alternating chapters.
00:17:39
Speaker
And I know that gets a little dicey because you're doing time travel and you don't want to overlap. But I really did feel like it was metaphorically a great way to approach it because these two guys had never met. And the only way that they had overlapped was when you're talking about something political that ended up disillusioning both of them.
00:17:59
Speaker
Yeah, I love it was really masterful in how you you know braid their stories together because they had never met, but and yet were somehow in direct opposition to one another. But the way you write it, it does, even though they never come into contact, it does feel like they are in that constant conflict with each other throughout this Red Scare and the second Red Scare. Well, that's right. And and and so what do you do? So what were we just talking about? We're talking about characters.
00:18:25
Speaker
And it was the thing that I had learned most with my first book, Shut Out, which was once again, information does not sell books. Ideas don't sell books. Characters sell books. Characters make books.
00:18:36
Speaker
And we're talking about who, what, when, where, like how. Why are these guys in opposition? And were they actually really in opposition? How can you be in opposition with someone you never met? How can you be in opposition with somebody who's essentially sharing the same p plate you're sharing in the country?
00:18:51
Speaker
Why are you in opposition? And that brings in the other character. It's Branch Rickey. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of this entire book. Branch Rickey is the puppet master of that entire period. Branch Rickey is the guy who is credited and rightfully with the integration of Major League Baseball.
00:19:10
Speaker
But Branch Rickey also did not do this by himself. And yet it's fascinating to me that Rickey is one of the historical figures, historic figures, who essentially was so powerful And I think that the the story was so palatable to American ears who, you know, the American ears that don't want to hear about racism. They don't want to hear all this about and how hard things are. They want heroes.
00:19:39
Speaker
Okay, tell us what made us better. And Ricky has essentially never had his narrative challenged. Like every story we know about integration in baseball pretty much comes from Branch Rickey's version until now.
00:19:53
Speaker
And you start to realize as you dig into the research that Jackie didn't even want to do this. He didn't want to testify against. Why would you testify? Why would you want to testify?
00:20:05
Speaker
against one of the most famous black people in the country. You're not even a political person. Jackie has his political thoughts. He's ah he's a he's he's a citizen. But this is really the first time that he is becoming a that he is voicing his opinions un-american on an American political issue.
00:20:29
Speaker
why he Why would he do that? He did it out of a responsibility to Branch Rickey. He felt he owed his life to Branch Rickey. He felt he owed everything he had to Branch Rickey, not just personally, but Branch Rickey was the one white man who said, yeah, you deserve to play.
00:20:45
Speaker
Nobody else was doing it. And so brand so, you know, Rickey, I don't think he forced him, but he pretty much told him that this is something you have to do.
00:20:58
Speaker
And Robinson did it. He was reluctant to do it. His whole life changed in a lot of ways. Robeson's life changed in some ways. But when you're really thinking about tying these stories together, the common thread is not communist versus anti-communist. It's Branch Rickey.
00:21:17
Speaker
The grayness of Ricky's character, because the one we are fed over years is he was this great, ah yeah even said like great emancipator ah in in baseball.
Branch Rickey's Complex Role
00:21:27
Speaker
But he was thinking of integrating the sport, but it wasn't necessarily black American players. He had his eye at Latin America. He wanted nothing.
00:21:38
Speaker
Branch Rickey, let's just be very clear about this, wanted nothing to do with desegregation. And this is going sound very strange, but people, you know it's the both things can be true conversation.
00:21:53
Speaker
When you go back and and and read the history of the anti-slavery movement, there were plenty of people who were abolitionists. That didn't mean they liked black people. That didn't mean they felt black people were equal, or that they should share schools and housing and marriage and the rest of it with them.
00:22:10
Speaker
It meant that this institution needs to go. And Ricky was of that persuasion. Ricky was of the persuasion that everybody has ah should have a right to play baseball.
00:22:22
Speaker
That didn't mean that he wanted to to upend the the Jim Crow... um segregated nature of the United States. His attitude was, okay, let's open the doors.
00:22:34
Speaker
And he scouted in Latin America and he spent $25,000 looking for players outside of the United States. And his plan was that these players could come and play and then they'd go home.
00:22:47
Speaker
They'd go back to their own countries in the off season, that the American racial order would not be challenged. you would And you would essentially have, ironically, what you have right now, which is Major League Baseball is a white suburban American sport.
00:23:08
Speaker
that is reinforced by foreign labor. Everybody else down there is Dominican, Venezuelan, Cuban, right? So that's really what baseball looks like right now. So the Branch Rickey prophecy, the actual legacy of Branch Rickey, it actually happened.
00:23:20
Speaker
It just happened a lot later. It wasn't until he recognized that, oh, the best black players are actually in the Negro Leagues. He wanted nothing to do with the Negro Leagues. He had no respect for the Negro Leagues.
00:23:31
Speaker
He knew the price that was going to be paid by bringing in black players would have been all kinds of problems. And so the only reason that he got moved toward having to go and deal with Negro League players and signing Jackie Robinson was because he also wanted of the best players and the best players happened to be American.
00:23:52
Speaker
And that is a narrative that never gets discussed. That here's a guy, it's a lot like Levittown. you know World War two the Levittowns in New York and Pennsylvania, it's a housing issue.
00:24:05
Speaker
But those Levittowns were segregated. So there are a lot of people who wanted to solve one issue while avoiding another.
00:24:15
Speaker
And it doesn't change. And that was one of the questions in the book for me was, okay, is Brent Rickey a villain? Does that make him a villain? Yes and no.
00:24:26
Speaker
i mean, sure. it it' is it as Is it as tied up in a pretty bow and heroic as we thought it was? No. But the bottom line is that Branch Rickey did break the line.
00:24:39
Speaker
Branch Rickey did bring in Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey did put Jackie Robinson on the field. And the piece of it that I think is really, really compelling and unknown to a lot of people is how much they hated him for that.
00:24:52
Speaker
The rest of the baseball owners felt that Branch Rickey had betrayed them to the highest order, that it was the greatest betrayal when he did this. It was not a heroic moment. It was not a happy moment. There was only one other person who congratulated him and it was Horace Stoneham of the Giants.
00:25:07
Speaker
Nobody else wanted this. So it makes it complicated. You give Ricky credit for what he did, but you don't give him credit for something that happened sort of, I guess, by accident. If he had had his way, they would have signed a Mexican player or a Cuban player or a Dominican player, and this story wouldn't have been what it became.
00:25:28
Speaker
m Yeah, and I love the the title of the book as well. There's you know this nod to the bigger chess game that's going on globally. um But also here are these two these two kings in and Jackie Robinson and Paul Robeson, ah but who are also you know pawned by by other by other people. And here are these things like on ah on a chess board is like a note I made in my little book report in my other journal. was just like here are these It's like the kings get to the other side of the board and they get turned into pawns instead of pawns becoming kings. that is like verse It's really reverse how they get used. And then you know their careers in the case of Paul Robeson, was you know his life was ruined. His career was ruined as a result of all of this.
00:26:11
Speaker
Well, that's right. Well, and his life was already in the process of being ruined.
Impact of Political Pressures on Careers
00:26:15
Speaker
I think that, and that's one of the things that I wanted to be very sort of clear about was Jackie Robinson did not destroy Paul Robeson's career.
00:26:22
Speaker
Jackie sort of gave it the final push because of the violence that came afterwards and the mobilization that came after and the political utility. He served the political utility of having one black person criticize another. There's a lot of utility in that.
00:26:36
Speaker
There was a lot of utility in it back then. There's a lot of utility in it today. I always say the black person out there who is willing to criticize prominent black people will have a job for life because now you can't say it's racial.
00:26:51
Speaker
You can't say we're piling on it. you can't say you know You can say, hey, look, this person feels the same way we do. And there are plenty of black people out there who have played that role. And that's not a role that Jackie Robinson played very often.
00:27:04
Speaker
And that was one of the things in the title of the book. I mean, the title of the book comes from the fact that I love chess. I'm a chess player. And the metaphors just kept working. That was the, you know, that was the problem.
00:27:16
Speaker
Was, actually the problem was a good problem. It's like, when people would talk to me about the title of the book, the first thing, depending on who they were partisan-wise, if they were Robeson people, they'd be like, okay, who's the pawn? Is Jackie the pawn? Is Robeson the pawn? And,
00:27:33
Speaker
To me, the battle of it all was that we all are. Is that on the one hand, the Robeson people felt that Jackie was allowing himself to be used by this notoriously, really heinous committee. i mean, the House and American Activities Committee is one of the most notorious government bodies in the history of this country.
00:27:53
Speaker
And Jackie was allowing himself to appear on behalf of it, on behalf of right-wing segregationists that wouldn't shake his hand. They didn't want him to be equal, but there he was.
00:28:04
Speaker
And then of course, as we've all, depending on you know when you were born, the Cold War, you know why is Robeson supporting the Soviet Union? Why is he, you know they figured he was the one spouting Russian propaganda, sounds kind of interesting today. And then, of course, you had some other of the more radical black voices like a Malcolm X, who felt like the real pawn was the NAACP.
00:28:31
Speaker
and felt like it was the black organizations who continued to believe that this country was going to give you your rights. If you enlisted in World War I or World War II, then you would prove that you were American.
00:28:47
Speaker
If you testified in on behalf of American values, then people were going to view you as American. And it never happened. mean, the violence toward black soldiers was at its highest when black soldiers came home um from fighting for their know fighting for their country.
00:29:08
Speaker
And the question has always been, what does it take to be American? So a lot of this book was about strategy as well, was about, do you do you decide to to take on this role. And Jackie took on the role because he believed, as as Rachel Robinson says in the book, you know Jackie was one of my country, right or wrong.
00:29:30
Speaker
I have a piece of this. whether you you know Whether you're the Ku Klux Klan or whether you discriminate against me or whether or not you don't want me to play Major League Baseball, I am an American.
00:29:42
Speaker
And I have a right to this. And then there are you know there are the other people who would say, well, no, you allowed yourself to be used so no matter what you believe, this didn't work. It didn't work the way you wanted it to work.
00:29:53
Speaker
Hence the disillusionment later. So I thought there was a lot there. There was a lot to think about. There was a lot to talk about. you know I start the book. In fact, if you're looking at the galley, I kind of rewrote a lot of it. The galley is not really what all the book is about anymore. um but But it really is about that W.E.B. Du Bois question of two-ness.
00:30:14
Speaker
Can you be an American if you're Black and also still support, you know, and support the country knowing full well that you're a second-class citizen, that you live in Jim Crow segregation?
00:30:28
Speaker
Can you still say that you are a full-blooded citizen when your own country is telling you that you're not? Yeah. Yeah. And really what what sets a lot of this in motion is when Robeson's in Paris and he accepts this award and he says, you it's unthinkable that the American Negro would go to war on behalf of those who have oppressed us for generations against the country, which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind. And he's talking about the Soviet Union there. And that essentially like blows blows us all up. That's kind of like our inciting incident, if you will. Yeah, exactly. And it's also very interesting too, when you think about the history of it, when people wonder whatever happened to Paul Robeson, it's not just what happened to him, it's also what happened to that movement. There was in the 1920s and the 1930s, I mean, i there was a ah movement there to try to find a place where you you know where segregation was not going to be the defining characteristic of your life for African Americans. You see it in the Great Migration.
00:31:33
Speaker
And because of Cold War politics and because of how we've treated communism and because of who gets to tell the story and what stories get told, this sort of expat movement to the Soviet Union gets cut out of the Great Migration. It's the same principle. Where can I go and not be lynched?
00:31:51
Speaker
Where can I go to have a life? Of course it's attractive. Of course, it's something that you would you would consider. Why did you leave the South in the first place? Why did the people in Mississippi and Alabama and Georgia, why did they go to New York and Boston and Chicago and Detroit and LA and Oakland to get away from you know this sort of oppressive like you know the suppressive lifestyle? and A lot of people also went to Russia, very small number, but a lot of people went. It's not a small percentage, but a big number.
00:32:23
Speaker
And so the idea that Robeson was espousing was not very different. he was and he's in He's an original.
00:32:36
Speaker
And what did Muhammad Ali say about Vietnam? It's the same principle. The same principle is my problem is here, not there. I love the digressions, the wrong word, but maybe the little set piece that you have on Dubois. the Dubois is throughout the whole book, but then you kind of meditate on him a little bit towards the end of the book and how he's one of those forerunner generations. It seems like every 20 or 25 years, there's like another like sort of king. Yeah.
00:33:03
Speaker
ah and um But he, to your point of the Tunis, before he was leaving for Ghana, he said yeah you know he would concede the Tunis of America could not be conquered, writing, I was not an American, I was not a man, I was, by long education and daily reminder, a colored man in a white world. And you know that was that's kind of like that that game being played, and then the unfortunately these powerful black men being the pawns of the white supremacy.
00:33:30
Speaker
Well, and it's heartbreaking as well. i mean, when we think about this, when we started this program, we were talking about Rachel Robinson is 103 years old. And she is, yeah it's amazing to me that Jackie died in 72.
00:33:46
Speaker
She's been alive as a widow longer than Jackie was a alive, period. Yeah. Which is incredible. And Du Bois was born in 1868. Yeah.
00:33:59
Speaker
You know, and he dies in 1963 at 95 years old. And you think about all of the figures, he crosses he crosses Robert E. Lee, right? He he he crosses Trotta, you know, he he crosses Frederick Douglass, he crosses Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali and Jackie, he's the whole, and and and and all of them, he crosses everybody. It's fascinating. And not as a little kid, as an adult.
00:34:25
Speaker
he He overlaps with these folks and he's the the true great original black intellectual. When you look at all of the people that he sort of overlapped with. and And to me, I think one of the things that really attracted me about this project was...
00:34:43
Speaker
the longevity of a lot of these voices and how the voice has changed over time. um I really, really sort of felt when I was digging into the research and thinking about sort of how to sort of position all of this was this idea that you are going to fight for a certain set of principles And when it comes to the African-American story, so much of it is always just rooted in the Black story, what happened to Black people at that time. And the thing that made this story so you know so compelling to me was that we never really talk about African-Americans in the Cold War. We usually talk about Black issues when they are pertaining specifically to Black people.
00:35:32
Speaker
and everything else sort of goes out the window. And the Cold War is different from that because you've got so many of these figures who are right in the middle of whether it's the McCarthy period, whether it's before the McCarthy period, whether it is, um you know how do we deal with a lot of the the the the issues of race and fairness and class and all of these things are all taking place right during the same period.
00:35:58
Speaker
And I wanted to sort of bring this sort of black struggle into that tent. And I really thought it was sort of a compelling you know approach simply because we never talk about it that way. We never talk about you know what what was the the black relationship to the Cold War. They weren't like way over here. you you know Black citizens were right in the middle of it as well.
00:36:21
Speaker
Yeah, and something that struck me in the in the book as well that I had never given any thought to was on the African continent and how Robeson, among others, was really advocating for you know the decolonialization of that. But then there's this passage from Kingsolver that you wrote, but we're you know summing it up, where it was just like the the debts ah for, let's say, World War II were paid off of... like yeah The, you know, basically the raw materials of the African continent and just ah just thinking of that, of how that's all parceled up. It just it kind of blew my mind. i was like, oh, my God, just this the the gross exploitation yeah of how the empire was built and everything from World War II on.
00:37:08
Speaker
Well, that's right. And it sounds familiar. We're fighting over oil in Venezuela right now. I mean, this is what's happening. And I think that what I what i found fascinating about that is how we're taught about these movements.
00:37:23
Speaker
We're not even paying attention to the fact that it's all happening at the same time. So you've got the civil rights thing taking place post-war in the United States. At the exact same time, you've got the anti-colonial movements taking place in Africa. yeah All the independence movements are taking place at the same time. And what I thought was fascinating about it was the Cold War elements of it separated these two movements.
00:37:48
Speaker
And that this is the battle. This was the Du Bois battle versus the NAACP battle, which is this idea that there is a Pan-African sensibility that Black people in the Caribbean have the same racial plight as Black people in the United States, the same as in Europe and the same in Asia, the same Black and Brown battle.
00:38:10
Speaker
But because of communism, because of anti-communism, because of the Cold War, these two movements are decoupled.
Hypothetical Global Civil Rights Movement
00:38:17
Speaker
And so there's a romantic piece of it that African-Americans have had to deal with the role. There's the romance of what would have happened if King and X and Jackie had lived.
00:38:27
Speaker
These kings, if they had lived, what would those voices be? And then there's the other romance you of what would have happened had black leadership in the United States not succumbed to a lot of the red baiting and the red scare and the whole thing of running. Because a lot of the economic questions that we're seeing today were being battled back then.
00:38:50
Speaker
in terms of can you as a minority build wealth in this country? Do you need the Mamdani version of democratic socialism in this country?
00:39:01
Speaker
How do you get through? And there was a a huge, huge, huge thought, you know a huge a group of thought that believed that you needed a real sort of economic change And then, of course, when all of this, when when when the United States and the Soviet Union become so adversarial, people just ran for cover.
00:39:24
Speaker
Like that battle, you just not, yeah are you going to win that battle? um You can't win that battle. And that was the NAACP's position, which was, hey, we're trying to build our country here. We're trying to get a place where we can actually succeed here.
00:39:41
Speaker
And adding Cold War politics to it and being in opposition to the State Department and not it know and being on the opposite side of the common you know thought in the country, it's going nowhere.
00:39:57
Speaker
yeah it's It's just not gonna work. And so I really appreciated that sort of battle between whether or not it was even possible to couple the African and African-American struggles together when you add Cold War politics to it.
00:40:13
Speaker
When you're like setting down to to write and you get your materials yeah together, i just curiously thinking like how long, like when do you know, you know, you're ready to start writing?
00:40:27
Speaker
You know, when when do you know you have enough raw material to at least get that momentum going? it depends on how everybody works. And I i have decided, I think, that you know should I be fortunate enough to work on another book, I'm going to do a lot more before I put anything on paper. A lot of times I put things on paper so I have at least some sort of structure of where where I want to go because there's so much material.
00:40:49
Speaker
And the more you dig, the more the material changes and the more the focus changes. And I know some people that don't write, I know some writers don't write anything until they feel like they've got a majority of the material, until they've got their structure down. I know there are some people like myself where I try to outline heavily. I don't write a lot of chapters, I outline heavily in terms of like, what are the What are the focus points? And a lot of think times i end up, when I start writing, a lot of times I'll write the end of some chapters before. and I'll write those first. So I give myself an idea of where this thing is heading.
00:41:25
Speaker
just to create some boundaries because it can be so overwhelming. To me, the and i mean there's no answer to that question, but in my in my case, I always try to write what I know first and try to get that down as much as possible because then everything will then build from it. But I think that i do think that now some of these ideas are becoming so difficult and so complex, you have to really, I may even go, I don't think i'm gonna I don't think i would ever write once I had all the material, but I think I'm going to be doing a lot more research before I put anything in paragraph form.
00:42:00
Speaker
Yeah. It's, it's kind of, well, maybe with Kings and Ponds and maybe the shape of it ah felt evident early early on, but when does the shape typically start to reveal itself to you?
00:42:12
Speaker
and Kind of like a Polaroid coming into focus. I think it starts to come into focus when you realize who you're, who who's your Who are your stars? And then you start to connecting those dots. I think once I realized that it wasn't just Jackie and Paul, it was Jackie, Paul, and Ricky. Now you can start to now it's starting to look like something. yeah Okay, now we've got characters.
00:42:36
Speaker
um I think that was the first thing. I think the second thing was, maybe this is actually the first thing, is what are the bookends? Like, okay, where are we where are we going? Okay, we know Paul Robeson was born in 1898. We know Jackie Robinson was born in 1919. We know that Jackie died in 72. We know Robeson died in 76.
00:42:54
Speaker
Okay, but we also know that Rachel is still alive and we know that Jackie had a bit of a renaissance in the 80s and the 90s because of Rachel. So what are the bookends? Do we end this book at Robeson's death? Like, so that's also part of it when it starts to come into focus is you do need those, you know you need those guardrails.
00:43:14
Speaker
I mean, otherwise it just goes, it's it's my favorite thing about books is that unlike writing a magazine piece, you can take these tributaries and, you know, write a couple of pages on somebody else. um You know, you can do that, you know, which is which is what I did with Du Bois and and and in one of the later chapters in Ruth Shipley, one of the most notorious human beings that no one had ever heard of. This person who controlled the passports by herself, pretty much. She got to control who got to travel and who didn't.
00:43:42
Speaker
And so I think you start to, it starts to come into focus when you realize who you're focusing on, like what needs to be focused on. And I think one of the one of the last things that I that i did focus on and why i did so much rewriting on this was the recognition of you sort of step back. And as we were talking about earlier, what do people know?
00:44:06
Speaker
I think it's very, very clear. It was very clear to me that the book wasn't scary enough, that people just don't understand what the Red Scare really was, like what it was doing to people, what this country was doing to people.
00:44:22
Speaker
And yet the parallels to today, pulling people off of the street, it's not very different than ruining their careers because you're next to a neighbor said, oh, I saw Brendan at a communist party meeting.
00:44:33
Speaker
Your life's over. You get fired from your job. Your kids are ostracized. I mean, like this is a real period. And today, i don't think we have any idea that. So I also realized, I'm like, okay, you need to really dig in and emphasize what this meant, that the United States was not allowing people to travel if it disagreed with your political views.
00:44:57
Speaker
that, oh, you're a Democrat, we're not going to allow you to take a trip to Spain. We're not going to allow you to take your family to Jamaica. We're not going to issue you a passport because we have decided who gets to travel and who doesn't based on what you think about the world.
00:45:14
Speaker
I mean, that's insane. Well, Robeson couldn't even go to Canada when you didn't need a passport. He couldn't go to Hawaii. You know, I mean, that's insane, right? when used to He couldn't go to U.S. to He couldn't go to Guam. He couldn't go anywhere.
00:45:28
Speaker
He was under house arrest. And so to me, you know, what was the way, how do you convey that in a way that people will go, holy shit, right? Like in Adam Hochschild's book, American Midnight, the same thing was happening in the first Red Scare in World War one And you're going, wow, this is this is not democratic. But you had to convey that.
00:45:48
Speaker
And so one of the areas that I wanted to that i used was Robeson's occupations anyway, which is the theater and and acting and how what was happening in Hollywood and all of that that, that people's careers and their lives were being absolutely destroyed.
00:46:03
Speaker
On college campuses, they were being destroyed. Sounds familiar. you know the The list of professors who were considered communist. Albert Einstein was considered anti-American. right The number of people who were tainted with this accusation And so much of it also came through the popular culture. Like we see it today, you watch the Twilight Zone or you watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers or you watch all of these these old movies, the metaphor, the Manchurian candidate, the metaphor for all of these things is anti-communism, that your next door neighbor is not who they say they are.
Red Scare's Personal Impact
00:46:36
Speaker
It's this this paranoid, this creation, this this subtext of paranoia that has real life consequences. It's not just that the guy down the street is crazy. It's that we think the guy down the street is anti-American. and He disagrees with us and we're going to take his livelihood.
00:46:53
Speaker
That had to come through in the book and that Paul Robeson's life was destroyed by this, that they were literally you know trying to kill him three ways. First, they killed his career.
00:47:04
Speaker
Then they killed his reputation. Then they literally tried to kill him in peak skill. yeah And so that that this country, and you look at the cover of the book, you see the peaks go right at the bottom, the photo in on the cover, is this, that these these are supposedly your countrymen. this is these are These are citizens and they are enabled, are empowered to and to really impose physical violence on a group of people that are being called un-American.
00:47:36
Speaker
And the parallels to today are just obvious. Yeah. Well, and you were talking about the the rewriting a moment ago and when I was doing the front runner. I went through so so many rewrites to get it readable and everything. And ah I just what was that that process like for you, you know, with this book, just the the laborious reshaping and rewriting to make it, you know, as wonderful as it is? Well, it was construction. The construction was a beast. It was very, very difficult because of the age difference.
00:48:08
Speaker
So by the time paul by the time Jackie Robinson was in diapers, Paul Robeson was already a legend. So how do you get these two guys on the same page? And so if you do it chronologically, Jackie Robinson's not even going to be announced until you're half you know you know you're a third of the way through the book.
00:48:27
Speaker
And so the first iteration did some jumping back and forth for that reason. But then it just didn't feel right. It just didn't feel right. The book felt disjointed because you couldn't you couldn't get these two stories even because of the 20 year time difference. And because Robeson was such a huge, huge figure when Jackie Robinson wasn't even alive.
00:48:52
Speaker
So it's like, okay, are these, did I really mess this up? Are these two different books? Are these two separate books? What is the common thread to pull them together? So one of the ways that I felt like doing it was that I was like, ultimately, which is why the galley copy you have is not the same, is i just rewrote the intro.
00:49:10
Speaker
I was like, okay, so let's just introduce Jackie Robinson and who Jackie was and where Jackie was at his moment of peak. Right? which is the the the the winter after he testifies against Robeson, he is considered an American hero.
00:49:24
Speaker
This is the highlight of his life. He wins the and he wins the MVP that year. The Dodgers lost the World Series, but he won the pennant again. They made the World Series, and he is being lauded across the country and celebrated across the country as a true American hero.
00:49:40
Speaker
And that was the way to introduce, so at least you begin the book with the two, and then chapter one begins with Robeson. So now you've got them at least on the same page. And so the first two chats so the first two things you're reading in the book have both of these guys in real time.
00:49:55
Speaker
you know That was the big thing. the all Also, the original conceit of the book was to just tell the story of what happened in July of 49, when Jackie testified and said you know that It sounds silly to me that Robeson would say these things if he said those things, etc. But that's not it.
00:50:14
Speaker
Because Robeson has his rebuttal seven years later. So I'm realizing that the construction that I created in this book was we're going to do this thing about this moment in history that nobody knows. It's actually two moments in history.
00:50:28
Speaker
It's when Robinson testifies in front of Hueck and then Robeson testifies in 56 when he says you know that my father was a slave and he was born here and I own a piece of this, just like Jackie, I own a piece of this and no one's gonna take my country away from me.
00:50:44
Speaker
And so now the whole idea has shifted from this one moment to these two pivot moments. And so the whole sort of purpose of of writing this, or not the purpose, the aim then, is, okay, you've got one guy who was once the most famous black person in the world.
00:51:09
Speaker
And now you have another guy who is now the most famous black person in the world. They're pitted against each other for reasons that aren't going to satisfy either one of them. You've got to give them both their moment.
00:51:21
Speaker
You've got to give them both their apex. And then you've got to be able to tie them at the end into this moment of disillusionment. that And it goes back to the title.
00:51:32
Speaker
So by the time they're both finished, what got accomplished? I love the fact that Robeson maintained his principles. I love that. and i And I felt like that he...
00:51:46
Speaker
was able to maintain his dignity, but let us not underestimate all what this country did to him, that the the price for that is enormous. And also the the legacy of it, by the time that Robeson passes away in years, you know, Jackie, it's amazing that Jackie is 20 years younger than Robeson, but outlives him by four years, that Rachel really knew that this This is the his this is the the definition of legacy.
00:52:19
Speaker
When Rachel says there were two things that haunted us that we never got past. One was Jackie campaigning and supporting Richard Nixon in 1960, which people still talk about. Well, Jackie Robinson was a Republican. Yeah, exactly.
00:52:35
Speaker
That outlived him. It has outlived him. And the other is this, the testimony against Paul Robeson. you know And she said, we got bad advice. She's talking about Branch Rickey. I think we got bad advice.
00:52:48
Speaker
And I think that's just a fantastic way of saying it without saying it. Because Jackie was so loyal to Ricky and Rachel was loyal. They all understood their moment in history.
00:52:59
Speaker
But on this particular point, it did not serve Jackie very well. Over the course of your ah extensive research and the writing, like did your impressions or your opinions change one way or the other for ah Jackie and Paul at the center of the story?
00:53:17
Speaker
Well, there's the four pieces, right? There's Jackie, there's Paul, there's Ricky, and there's also the Black establishment. like I found myself enraged at some moments by the NAACP and by the Black leadership, but I also understood and That's what I mean about under does it come off just how disqualifying it was to associate with communism.
00:53:42
Speaker
At one point, it was fashionable and you know in the 20s and the 30s. As you see, if you watch Oppenheim or any of these movies, at some point it was, or if you read, obviously, if you read that history.
00:53:55
Speaker
and Then post-World War two the United States and Russia are building a nuclear superpower rivalry. It's it's untenable. And so while I'm doing the research, there's a part of me that is just saying that you know you're you're thinking to yourself, was there another way?
00:54:12
Speaker
was there and Why did the NAACP feel like it needed to go after Robeson the way that it did, with the venom that it did? It could have just stayed quiet.
00:54:24
Speaker
But that wasn't necessarily an option when you have all of your allies in government telling you, we need you to do this. We need you to denounce this man publicly. And they didn't do that.
00:54:35
Speaker
So I think that, yeah, the thing that I was really wrestling with throughout it was to get away from the good guy, bad guy narratives and say, this is very complicated for everybody. Everybody has got to sort of find their their peace with this.
00:54:50
Speaker
I never got to that point though, because I still, there's ah there is that part of me, you know if you like watch, you know if you read the history, you know you read the history of Ghana, you read the history of of Kenya and all of those and and um and all of those movements in the fifty s that up you know that changed the world, that changed the map. Look at a map of the of the world in and look at a map in All of those colonial uprisings what would they have been had the black leadership coupled those movements to our movement here.
00:55:24
Speaker
If the civil rights movement was actually a world movement, because all of those world civil rights actions were taking place. That piece of it was really sort of the growth for me. That was the the piece that I was, that I came out of it feeling like I could write another 200 pages on this.
00:55:40
Speaker
And the the focus of the book was on these two guys in this little moment in time, but that is ah is a great, great history. Yeah. Well, it's an amazing book, Howard. And um yeah, I'm so glad that we got to you know talk about it. I got to you know read it and everything gets to celebrated. And and um as we bring these conversations down for a landing, i always just love asking the guests, know, you in this case, just for a recommendation of some kind. That's just anything that's kind of making you happy that you want to recommend to the listeners out there. could be ah Well, there are two books out there. Well, I'm no fun. I want to be fun. i want people to think that I'm fun. I think I'm fun, but I don't write about fun stuff. And so because I never write about fun stuff, I have to sort of lean into that. like like People ask me, like i never i never really read nonfiction when I'm writing. I only read fiction when I'm writing a book because I don't want i don't want to buy osmosis
00:56:33
Speaker
you know, adapt somebody else's style, somebody else's material. You don't want to read that because then someone's going to come after you and say, oh that was my paragraph and whatever. So I never, I only focus on the research when I'm working on the book and then I read fiction when I'm not, you know, when I'm in the middle of a book project. However, there are two books that I just think are just brilliant about where we are. One is the Sven Eckert book, Empire of Cotton, which is unbelievable. I'm like, okay, how does it, again,
00:56:59
Speaker
We both write, I don't do what he does. but That's an incredible, incredible book, Empire of Cotton. The other one is is American Midnight by Adam Hochschild. um It is just tremendous. Those two books are really, really fantastic. I got to give my man, Wright Thompson, a shout out because he's the one who said, you got to read Empire of Cotton.
00:57:19
Speaker
But I also, I'm a movie guy. And so I love, love, love movies. And so... I'm reading um For Keeps, which is this like 1500 page compilation of all of Pauline Kael's New Yorker movie reviews. And that's been so much fun.
00:57:39
Speaker
I've really, really enjoyed that. So I do get to have fun. Oh, fantastic. Well, it was such a joy to talk to you, Howard, ah about your work. And I just appreciate you carving out the time to talk about the book and talk some shop. So just as always. No, thank you for having me. I love your podcast. I love the the fact that we get to talk about these things. People, and whenever I go to a a book event, this type of podcast is really what people want to talk about. They want to talk about process. I say this all the time.
00:58:07
Speaker
There's an artist in everybody. There's a writer in everybody. People want to, they they love stories. They like to hear stories. They like to tell stories. They want to tell their own story. And they really, really do love hearing about the process of making something happen. One of one of the things that I always say about writing is my favorite thing about writing is that you start with a blinking cursor, you start with a blank page, and it goes from nothing to something.
00:58:34
Speaker
And there aren't two people who would take on the same subject and end up with the same material and produce the same thing. Yeah. And it's a it's an ugly process by and large. No matter how skilled you are, it's messy. And it's good for people to hear that, well no matter your skill level.
Insights into the Writing Process
00:58:51
Speaker
But I love it, and I tell people all the time that the difference, there's only one difference between us who get to call ourselves authors and them who get to who can't, who say, I got a book in me and I just can't get it out. I got it right here and I can't. There's only one difference.
00:59:09
Speaker
And the difference is is that you went through the ugly. You went through the process and you finished and you hit send and it's done. It's the only difference. Finish your book. Oh, it's awesome. Well, little Howard, this is, well as I said, wonderful to get to talk shop with you. So thanks again for your time.
00:59:26
Speaker
Oh, my pleasure, Brendan. Call anytime.
00:59:34
Speaker
Yes. Awesome. Pretty great, right? Thanks to Howard for coming back on the show. Need to do a non-book promo pod with him where we just riff on writing and biography and stuff like that. I think that would be really fun. I think he would would really like that. I get the impression that hey he he would find that pretty fun. Don't forget to hit up the club. Welcome to pitchclub.substack.com. Okay.
01:00:00
Speaker
And follow the show. at creative nonfiction podcast on Instagram. below ah I can't say that without.
01:00:11
Speaker
boy All right. So I've riffed on this one in one form or another before this idea of the author's responsibility and book promotion and
Authors and Book Promotion
01:00:20
Speaker
marketing. I think it bears repeating.
01:00:22
Speaker
I was on a panel of some kind last year and one author. I've talked about this before, but I'm just going to bring it up again. And speaking to an audience of mostly want to be authors. you said something to the effect that it's not their job to promote their books, it's to write them.
01:00:39
Speaker
And this is malpractice. you know I'm here to argue that it's really no longer even your publisher's job to do that. Even though they technically have a marketing department, it's basically that in name only.
01:00:52
Speaker
Your expectations, no matter the size of the publisher, should be extremely low. and They're well-intentioned and by or large, very sweet. And yeah maybe they leverage a little bit of their weight for you, but make no mistake, 99% of the work is on your shoulders.
01:01:09
Speaker
It just is. And if you're starting your marketing work, when you turn in your final draft five or six months before your publication date, i sorry to say you are way too late.
01:01:23
Speaker
for my next book, assuming I can snag a book deal, is in the baseball world. And the moment that book contract is signed, and let's say I've got a three or four year runway between its when it's you know signed and published, I'll be not only starting my research and reporting on day one of that signature contract, I'll be building a database of book-related media. I'll but probably build that into my day. Just like do a half an hour of it every day, listing some people out.
01:01:51
Speaker
And then I'll be spending time making contacts in the world where my book will live in. you know I'm just going to target that audience. Find the sub stacks, find the newsletters, the podcasts, and make my appearance and my pitch in their world as seamless as possible. Plus, you've got to spend a little time listening or reading what they do. I hate few things more than getting pitches from authors and publicists who so clearly have never listened to the podcast, who so clearly haven't even read the description of the podcast.
01:02:20
Speaker
I mean, it's pretty, it's maddening. get it, some of the pitches I get. It's like, wow, ah a novel. I don't have novelists on the show. It's right in the title.
01:02:33
Speaker
But George Saunders, if you want to come on the show, please come on the show. The mistake I made with the front runner was not making more inroads with running groups and podcasts and influencer types and sub stackers and newsletter rures.
01:02:45
Speaker
I also put a little too much trust in my PR team. Nice as they were. i deep down, like way deep. I knew better. i should have known better and I did know better. And yet i there was a part of me that hung on to this hope that maybe, maybe they would take on a a little more or maybe I felt that their efforts would prove more fruitful than my own efforts.
01:03:11
Speaker
And it was totally the opposite. It was when I started doing things that things started to happen. That's when momentum happened. if I can even call whatever happened over the summer momentum.
01:03:22
Speaker
I don't know. I kind of blacked out the whole summer. That's no knock on them. That's my grave miscalculation of book promotion now. Yeah, it's all the author's responsibility. Build it into the budget, your time budget, your money budget.
01:03:38
Speaker
I'd say only do in-person events in towns and cities where you have a robust interpersonal network to put butts in seats. Otherwise, you're in for a disappointment. You know several disappointments. Let me count the disappointments.
01:03:54
Speaker
But you also don't want to be one of those authors who is like constantly posting and newslettering to the point of spamming, really. On some level, like part of your own book promotion is lifting up other people. It's going to events in person. That's tough. I understand. But it's it's part of the deal.
01:04:11
Speaker
um Attending virtual events. You have to put your skin on the line. You have to buy the books. You have to buy multiple books. Give some away. You have to blog about books. And really, really, really, you got to leave ratings and reviews. If you've benefited from a rating or review as a consumer or as an artist, you just need to be leaving these things. Build a habit.
01:04:33
Speaker
One or two sentences, boom, four or five stars, boom, done. If you one day want to ask for them, you got to give them on the reg.
01:04:44
Speaker
I see too many authors trying to steal all the attention. they I don't see them returning the favor. And maybe they are, but i'm I don't see it. And I'm kind of plugged into it a lot. I'm always paying a lot of attention to what people are doing and especially what people are not doing. I see them get exhausted from sharing their own work than saying, I need to peace out for a while. Okay, yes, rest for a bit, but don't reappear only when you have something to sell or a story to promote.
01:05:08
Speaker
Seth Wickersham is really good at this. He's always promoting like his friends and and people, you know books he's blurbed or just people in his network. you know that's That's what the good guys do. Of course, he was hustling the shit out of American Kings, but you know when he's got a a friend with a book coming out, you know he's he's sharing it to his Instagram stories. you know He's taking part. like how How easy is that? right and it just means It means a lot. I think you curry a lot of good favor by doing that.
01:05:37
Speaker
I don't think anybody is doing this particularly well, you know, by and large. I mean, I just mentioned Seth is doing that well, but In the totality of it all, and'm I'm not so sure people are doing it well, but I think it's because lot of us don't want to do it. And so we do the bare minimum or we do too much and we're still all trying to get a feel for it.
01:05:58
Speaker
And I don't know if there's a perfect example or even a good example out there because few of us were trained to be marketers. We want to be artists and leave it at that. Put a fork in that era, man. That's over. Maybe you'll win the lottery and be one of those anointed unicorn writers who has like an army of people making them a star.
01:06:16
Speaker
But for the rest of us, save yourself the frustration and find a way to get good at it. In the same way you've gotten good at your craft. You've got build that into your toolbox. We need to get excited for the selling and the promotion in the same way we might get excited to start a new book.
01:06:32
Speaker
It's a skill. It's a new hat. It's a different kind of costume. And you can get better at it. I just think that the sooner we get it out of our minds that we'll have help selling the thing and realize that it's on us and our networks and our communities, 99% of the way that it's on us, 99% of the way, the more we can surrender to that certainty and accept it as part of the totality of the job, yeah, the less jaded we'll feel about it.
01:07:01
Speaker
And maybe the more energized we'll feel about it and kind of look forward to it. Because that interest and that energy is infectious. I could say more, and maybe I already said too much on the topic, but it's something that's always front of mind for me and will no doubt come up again.
01:07:17
Speaker
so stay wild, CNFers, and if you can't do, interview.