As a young woman, the writer Vivian Gornick struggled to write. Day after day, she would sit at her desk and stare at a blank page, unfocused and unmoored. She had at that point been married twice, and each time had thought being married would help her work. Each time she was wrong. She wanted, more than anything, to work—so what was in her way? She went to a psychoanalyst to try and answer this question. In her first session, Gornick laid out her dilemma, to which Dr. F, a woman, replied: “You have a lot of problems with men. I think that’s what we should work on.”
Gornick was incensed. “Problems with men!” she said. “Is that what you think this is all about?”
“What do you think it’s all about?”
“It’s about me not working! That’s what this is all about.”
“Oh, I see,” Dr. F. said. “You don’t want to marry the Great Man, you want to be the Great Man.”
•
Walking through Manhattan one October evening last year, I thought about Gornick and Dr. F. and the “Great Man.” I’d just attended a screening of the documentary Turn Every Page, about Robert Caro and his half-century-long collaboration with the late editor Robert Gottlieb. Going in, I knew embarrassingly little about Caro, just that he was a Pulitzer-winning author and generally unparalleled journalist whose biographical tomes were definitive. He had struck me, from afar, as your classic Great Man, someone who loomed large in the cultural imagination on the basis of his extraordinary achievements, who had rightly earned the reverence—and was beyond reproach—of us mere mortals. By the end of Turn Every Page, Caro seemed to me not just a Great Man, but a fundamentally good one. I was more than a little enamored. Cutting through the darkness of Madison Square Park, I didn’t know if I wanted to marry Robert Caro or if I wanted to be Robert Caro. I knew I couldn’t do both.
“You say something like that to me again,” Gornick snapped at Dr. F during that first session, “and I’m out of here.” Dr. F. never said anything like that again, and the two women remained doctor and patient for many years. Would I have responded to Dr. F with the same venom, I wondered? Maybe Dr. F. would have been right: I actually don’t want to marry the Great Man; I want to be him—I think. Then I look at Robert Caro onscreen and I’m not so sure.
Caro was born in New York City in 1935. His father was from Poland and his mother died when he was young. After graduating from Princeton in 1953, he embarked on a career in journalism, eventually landing at the Long Island paper Newsday. He excelled at research and reporting. Among the many articles he wrote during his time there was a series on the planning and proposed building of a bridge that would stretch across the Long Island Sound. It was 1963, and the powerful urban planner Robert Moses was championing the construction. In his columns, Caro strongly advised against it, but marveled at how Moses had bent government officials to his will. This little-known series laid the foundation for The Power Broker, a biography of Moses, which would put Caro in the limelight for decades to come. When he started working on the book in 1967, he decided that this wasn’t to be a hagiography. As Caro says early on in Turn Every Page, with The Power Broker he “was not interested in doing a book just to tell the story of a great man.”
Over the next five decades, Caro made writing about power—the men who have it and how they use it—his life’s work. All six of his books are dedicated to his wife Ina, the only researcher with whom he has ever collaborated. In interviews, he’s called Ina his “entire research team,” and “the only one I trust to do it.” At one point in the film, Caro pulls a framed black-and-white photograph of the two of them from the bookcase in his office. They look incredibly young and beautiful. It was taken, he says, the moment they first met. The pair married in 1957; Robert, 22, was freshly graduated from Princeton and Ina, 18, a student at Connecticut College. Within a few years, they had a baby and a house that Ina loved on Long Island.
Reading The Power Broker, it’s hard to quantify Ina’s contributions to the book, but we have pieces: On a Sunday morning in August 1967, the couple went to Jones Beach State Park and, for two and a half hours, stood at the entrance of the parking lot and tallied visitors by race (Moses had employed various tactics to keep people of color out of the park). A sheet of paper with their tallies survived, and is currently on display at the New York Historical Society. His tallies are indistinguishable from hers.
As work on the book dragged on and money got tighter, Ina sold the beloved house on Long Island without telling her husband. They moved to an apartment in the Bronx that neither of them liked. In those years, the Caros were broke. But when the book was published and Caro won his first Pulitzer in 1975, money would never be a problem again. Finally, he could focus on the work.
•
As Caro began work on his next project, a multi-volume biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, he struggled to capture the essence of the Texas Hill Country community where Johnson grew up. Caro, a lifelong New Yorker, told Ina they needed to move there. “Why can’t you do a biography of Napoleon?” Caro recalls her saying in his 2019 memoir Working. (Ina would go on to write two books on French history.) “But Ina is always Ina: loyal and true,” he continues. “She said, as she always says: ‘Sure.’” So they moved to rural Texas. When Ina is asked, in Turn Every Page, whether the move felt like a sacrifice, she cheerily replies: “Oh God no, it was exciting! It was so different from anything in New York. I mean, it was a whole new world.”
One sweetly staged photo from the Hill Country years shows the couple with 79-year-old Ava Cox, a cousin of LBJ. The bonneted Ava, standing beside a well behind the Johnsons’ homestead, hands them a bucket. The Caros, looking like catalog models, flash open-mouthed smiles, Robert’s hand clasping Ina’s shoulder. In Working, Robert writes that it was Ina who secured vital access to the lives of women like Ava Cox:
At the beginning, these women… who were so unaccustomed to talking to strangers, particularly about personal matters… weren’t giving me the details I needed. Ina solved that. We had three figs on our property. Ina taught herself to make fig preserves, and when she started bringing a jar with her as a gift, suddenly these women were her friends, and were showing her—and then, when she brought me back with her, showing me—things I will never forget. … [A]s Ina became friends with them, they told her intimate details that they would never have told me…
Ina is invaluable, but her contributions are often invisible, immeasurable. She opens doors for Caro to walk through. Early in Turn Every Page, Ina says that growing up she always wanted to be either a dancer or a researcher—I wonder if Caro had been a choreographer if she would have gone the dancing route. Maybe not: Later in the documentary, we watch her sitting beside her husband in the LBJ library, each of them sifting through stacks of materials and taking copious notes. Ina looks rapt, resolute, utterly in her element.
The dynamic is a well-worn one: The Great Man and the wife who labors in his shadow. Like Caro, Nabokov dedicated all of his books to his wife, Vera, and like Ina, Vera wasn’t just a helpmeet but a collaborator: “Vera Nabokov participated in her husband’s work to an unprecedented degree,” writes Stacy Schiff in her 2000 biography of the woman whom she calls a “full creative partner in everything her husband did.”
On top of her literary duties—an editor, translator, reader, and assistant to her husband—Vera shouldered all domestic responsibilities as well. Anything to ensure that her husband’s work went uninterrupted, that his genius could flow free. “Nabokov didn’t even fold his own umbrella,” quips Jenny Offill in her 2014 novel Dept. of Speculation. “Vera licked his stamps for him.”
I’d like to love and admire a man enough to lick his stamps for him, to move to Hill Country for him. To feel such purpose and sureness. Sitting at my desk right now, writing into the void, trying to be Great, I feel neither purposeful nor sure. Still, pursuing great work seems a safer bet than pursuing romantic love. My manuscript will never leave me; my work belongs entirely, permanently, to me. In Dept. of Speculation, Offill’s protagonist has a Post-it note above her desk that reads “WORK NOT LOVE!” The former, she says, “seemed a sturdier kind of happiness.” This feels true, yet for women like Ina and Vera, work and love were intertwined—they could not choose one over the other. To survive, they sublimated any aspirations they might have had for Greatness, instead applying their talents in service of their husbands’ work.
I’ve sometimes thought that if a man loved me enough I wouldn’t need to pursue Greatness in my work, that his affection would seal up whatever void my ambition is trying to fill. Ina and Vera themselves, it seems, were somewhat sated by love after all. Their men adored them and provided them an opportunity to live a life of the mind, to do the work they wanted to do, even if did go uncredited. Given the constraints of their era, this likely appealed. As the apocryphal Freudian maxim goes, “Love and work, work and love—that’s all there is.” Still, I wonder what might have roiled inside these women—the occasional flash of bitterness or a nagging sense that there could be something more.
•
Literary partnerships like the Caros and the Nabokovs have long fascinated critics and scholars. Phyllis Rose’s 1983 book Parallel Lives was one of the first to study the gendered power dynamics at work in the marriages of writers like Charles Dickens and George Eliot. Though she focuses on Victorian-era unions, Rose’s insights are evergreen: “Whatever the balance, every marriage is based upon some understanding, articulated or not, about the relative importance, the priority of desires, between its two partners.” I wonder whether the understanding between Robert and Ina was reached tacitly or spoken of aloud.
More recently, Carmela Ciuraru explores literary marriages in her book Lives of the Wives, which studies the writerly partnerships of Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante, Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard, among others. Ciuraru finds that, in most cases, wives abandoned their own ambitions entirely to focus their energy on “liberating their husbands from the tyranny of everyday life.” I.e., folding umbrellas, licking stamps; picking up and moving to the boondocks.
This approach was fulfilling for these women until it wasn’t, Ciuraru explains. When Elaine Dundy, for instance, first married theater critic Kenneth Tynan in 1951, she was overjoyed: “I had gained the love of an extraordinary man. And, finally, I had been discovered,” she wrote in her 2001 memoir, Life Itself! “Not by world acclaim, as planned, but by a lover.” How lucky she was to have “a genius in my own bed.” But the harmony didn’t last long. After the success of her 1958 novel Dud Avocado, Tynan threatened to divorce her if she ever wrote another book.
At a recent fundraising dinner for a literary magazine, I was seated next to a respected historian and political scientist, now in his nineties. I asked him if he knew Robert Caro. “Bob Caro!” he said. “I know him well.” The historian and his wife—who, to my amazement, was sitting across from us at the circular table; she had swapped her name plate with mine, he said, because she thought married couples shouldn’t sit next to each other at dinner parties—had gone out with the Caros many times.
I asked the historian to dish, and dish he did. He said Ina had always struck him as resentful of Robert’s success because her two books never did very well. This made me sad to hear, of course, but it also made me feel vindicated. Watching Turn Every Page, reading Working, and perusing the Caro archives, it was sometimes hard to believe how amenable Ina was—in Caro’s words, “loyal and true.” But perhaps there was more to the story, some simmering resentment that signaled thwarted ambition. What would Ina have written had she had more time to herself, I wondered.
•
Most days, Caro, now almost 87 years old, wakes up, dresses himself in a suit and tie, and walks down the street to his private office on the Upper West Side. Then he sits at his typewriter and sets to work on the final installment of the Johnson pentalogy. He’s been working on it for 10 years, and his publisher stopped breathing down his neck long ago. “I do everything possible to make myself remember this is a job I’m going to, and I have to produce every day,” he told the Times in 2012. “The tie and the jacket are part of that;” a sartorial gesture of self-discipline, synthetic momentum.
I find this ritual endearing, but also instructive. To take yourself and your work seriously, and self-isolate as needed. “Let’s put it mildly: He’s industrious,” Gottlieb says of Caro in Turn Every Page. “And that is a quality I honor and admire more than almost any other. Because anyone can be adorable. But not everyone can be industrious—with results.” That Caro’s memoir is entitled Working comes as no surprise—his life and work are one in the same. (Were Ina not part of Caro’s work, I wonder how much she would be part of his life.)
It was actually through Working, not the biographies, that I first discovered Caro. I was an undergraduate, perusing the first floor of the best bookstore in my college town, a musty multistory mecca that had been there for 60 years. I was there with a classmate on whom I had an all-consuming crush. He was a good writer; with some discipline, I wondered if he could become Great.
Lazing through the aisles, he pointed out a slim hardcover with a photo of a man at his desk on the cover. My crush said he lovedthe author, Robert A. Caro. I didn’t know the name, but I liked the way my crush lit up upon finding the book. To see him this animated, this smiling, was rare—it accentuated his preternatural beauty. I never forgot the book’s cover: the warm tans and browns of Caro’s desk and bulletin board, the red and black serif text on a white backdrop.
It didn’t take long to realize that my crush was adorable but not industrious. I, on the other hand, had long overcompensated for my perceived lack of adorableness with extreme industriousness. Yet I sensed that he, like me, wanted to be Great. He admired Caro’s work ethic, and must have known, on some level, that he’d never match it. Who could? At one point, soon after we started spending time together, I wondered, if he and I ever got together for real, how it would work, two writers both striving to be Great. I couldn’t marry the Great Man and be the Great Man. But I quickly realized that I would not have to choose: I detected no Greatness in him.
•
In Turn Every Page, Gottlieb says that Caro is more of a “romantic” than he lets on, and suggests that he began his volumes on LBJ with a great deal of admiration, only to grow disillusioned the more he learned about Johnson’s character. What matters more: being a Great Man or a good one?
Some critics have accused Caro of buying into and propagating “the Great Man theory of history.” Developed in the 19th century by the writer Thomas Carlyle, whose inequitable marriage is scrutinized in Rose’s Parallel Lives, the theory is rooted in Carlyle’s argument that “the history of the world is but the biography of great men”—those natural-born leaders, geniuses, and heroes (always men) whose choices determine the fate of the rest of us.
Caro has balked at this critique of his work. “I don’t believe that I’m writing a ‘great-man theory of history,’” he told the New York Times in 2019. “I believe that what I’m writing about are the rare individuals who can harness political forces and bring something out of them, either for good or for ill.” Indeed Caro’s books are less about individual men than systems of power. Really, his subjects are the ones who most buy into Great Man theory—Moses and LBJ believed themselves to be Great Men, and many of their supporters and allies did too.
When I think about Great Man theory, I worry sometimes that it undergirds my life in the wrong way, that I understand my own personal history as a series of relationships with men, those mentors and love objects whose choices have determined the course of my life. I owe everything to him; I haven’t been the same since he left. The urge to chalk everything up to them is potent.
Two autumns ago, I visited the New York Historical Society with a man I loved very much. It was his birthday, a perfectly crisp Saturday in October. He had mentioned once that NYHS was his favorite place in the city, so I suggested we spend the day there. We floated through galleries and up grand marble staircases. I took his picture as he sat behind a replica of the Resolute desk, looking handsome and important. Then we stumbled upon a brand new exhibition of Robert Caro’s archives. My knowledge at this point was still superficial—I knew only the book that had lit up the face of my college crush—but I knew enough to be enraptured by the exhibit. My beloved, a historian himself, was equally interested. It was a treasure trove of Caro’s handwritten drafts, transcripts, and notes written on little index cards:
Don’t put in any
more on RK in the
1st section. Don’t
ruin that wonderful
rhythm
DON’T RUIN IT!
The Only Thing That Matters
is what Is On This Page
Is there desperation
on this page?
That last note really struck me: it sounded like a bit of self-policing, a light admonition, Caro warning himself not to show how desperate he was to prove his point or sound smart or meet his deadline, not to let his sweat drip onto the paper below.
Turn Every Page, which I saw a year later, proved this interpretation wrong. At one point in the film, Caro describes the constant feeling of desperation that shaped Johnson’s identity: he was a striver, and ruthless in his methods. This particular note, now encased in glass in the NYHS, was an aid-mémoire to capture this feeling. In Working, Caro explains: “I tried to infuse the descriptions of [Johnson’s] campaigning… with a rhythm of desperation. And I actually had a note card attached to the lamp on my desk here… as a reminder to myself.”
A year after we visited the Historical Society, I wrote a letter to the man I loved very much. I told him what I’d learned about Caro’s note. I let slip that in the many months since he’d left the city and me along with it, I’d thought about him daily, felt him like a phantom limb. There was desperation on the page.
A few weeks later, I returned to the Historical Society alone. It was pouring rain. Sopping wet, I walked up a marble staircase and made a beeline for Caro. There was so much that I’d missed my first time around:
Goodness—Caro’s typed notes for his 1964 Newsday article “Anatomy of a $9 Burglary.” The article reported on a recent cut-and-dry case of petty larceny. But Caro being Caro, he unearths the heartbreaking story of the accused thief’s wife, whom the article doesn’t identify by name but his notes identify as 37-year-old Gloria Valentine. In red pencil, he’s drawn an arrow pointing to her name and written: “Protect Her.”
Greatness—A photo of Caro, Ina, and four-year-old son Chase with Governor Nelson Rockefeller, dated April 26, 1963. Caro’s blazing 1963 investigation into predatory land sales, published in Newsday as a series called “Misery Acres,” prompted the New York State legislature to pass laws protecting the elderly from such scams. Robert and Ina are radiant. Even his hair, slicked into a handsome coif, shines.
Industriousness—Caro’s 1971 planning calendar, in which he tracked his daily word counts when writing The Power Broker. He counts how many words he writes per day. Zero on Sundays and most Saturdays. During the week, anywhere from 400 to 2,600. On the weekdays when his word count is low, he usually writes why. “(sick)” appears a few times. “(lazy)” even more.
And then there was the painting: A 1974 acrylic by Joe McGarrity, which had appeared on the cover of a magazine supplement. In the upper lefthand corner looms the disembodied head of Robert Moses, staring ahead menacingly. Behind his head is the Verrazzano Bridge, and below it the cover of The Power Broker. On the bottom right: Robert and Ina, flashing dazzling smiles. A bespectacled Caro is in the foreground with Ina behind him, her face partially obscured by his. Robert looks away; Ina looks at him. The devotion in Ina’s gaze rattled me. I had the urge to feel some sort of indignation on her behalf for being painted like a doting accessory wife. But if I was married to Robert Caro, I guess I would look at him like that too.
Examining the painting, I identify with Ina—I am Ina: prone to obsession and awed by Greatness, oft-enchanted by men and still in thrall to one in particular. But Caro is who I want to be. Turned away from Ina, his eyes are locked on something we can’t see, some truth to which only the Great are privy. His power, his vision—all apparent in this one depiction. Yet that’s not what draws me to this man, not why I want to crawl into this painting and inhabit him. The shameful truth: I just want to feel Ina’s loving gaze on my cheek.