In this episode Kate is joined by Duke University historian James Chappel. James is the author of two books. His first book is titled Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, and it focuses on the transformation of the Catholic church in twentieth century Europe. But for his second book, which is out now, he has gone in a bit of a different direction. The new book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. We’ll get into how he moved between subjects, why he says he’s always writing, and how he took a mountain of fascinating research on the history of old age and retirement and turned it into one interesting and easy to read book.
If you'd like to support Drafting the Past and help to keep it going, you can make a donation at patreon.com/draftingthepast
Mentioned in this episode:
- Scrivener
- Did It Happen Here? Perspectives on Fascism in America, edited by Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
- Samuel Moyn
- Kristen Neuschel
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Hello there and welcome to Drafting the Past. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in each episode I interview a historian about their writing process. Today, I'm joined by Duke University historian, James Chappel.
James Chappel:
Thanks for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
James is the author of two books. His first book is titled Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, and it focuses on the transformation of the Catholic Church in 20th century Europe. But for a second book, which is out now, he has gone in a bit of a different direction. The new book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.
We'll get into how he moved between subjects, why he says he's always writing, and how he took a mountain of fascinating research on the history of old age and retirement, and turned it into one interesting and easy to read book. Here's my conversation with Dr. James Chappel.
James Chappel:
I majored in history as being undergrad. I went to Harvard College, I wrote a big undergraduate thesis on Isaiah Berlin, and I realized in the process of that, that's when I realized that this is what I wanted to do. It was really about being… I feel like my vocation is as a writer more than as a historian. And when I spent that year just going to the library every day with a big stack of books, I thought, "Wow, this is the greatest thing. This is what I want to do."
I was so into it that I didn't apply to graduate school. I had no plans at all in the spring of my graduating year. And so I went to teach English in China for a year, which was much more common. I'm dating myself as a historical relic. This is 2005, 2006. I mean, this was a very different moment in US-China relations. This was a very common thing to do for drift less or drifting liberal arts graduates. And I thought I'll apply to law school and history school and see where I get in.
I got into history school, went to history school at Columbia, wrote a dissertation, then book about the European Catholic Church. I did some public facing writing, whatever that means, in 2024. I wrote a little bit for The Nation or Boston Review and Descent, some places like that, which I have enjoyed doing. We can talk about that more. There are also some ways, I mean I've also pulled back from that some myself. There are some ways in which I found it not that fulfilling.
Yeah, so I wrote and published that first book, got a job at Duke, and then wrote the book on 20th century American aging that we're here to talk about today.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, let's start out with kind of nuts and bolts of your writing process. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
James Chappel:
Well, I definitely had a sort of… I had even still nourish a kind of fantasy vision of what my answer would be, where I have a nice office, I have a room of one's own, I have the tea, the whole thing. Even as a 41-year-old man who has never written that way, I still kind of believe that I should. I do not really have a routine. I mainly write at home. I now have small children, and so I write sometimes early morning, sometimes late at night. What I imagine my paradigmatic writing experience is like, I do a lot of writing on buses and airplanes. I don't know, I feel like I have very little writing that is even in my office.
I think that it's… I don't know. It's like writing in the laptop phase. It's a very peripatetic process for me and I don't know why. There's got to be some reason why I feel drawn to write that way or why I feel resistant to having a very firm routine. Because as you know, I mean that works for a lot of people, but it has not for me. And so if any listeners like me who just write in little stretches and can't get a routine going, I feel your pain. It's possible to write a book that way.
Kate Carpenter:
I'm sure that's reassuring for many people listening. How do you like to organize yourself?
James Chappel:
I do feel that I am a pretty organized and disciplined writer. The answer I just gave makes it sound as though I kind of don't take it seriously, which is not true. It's just that I don't fetishize the schedule or the environment. I do try to set kind of word limits or word goals, like I want to write 300 words today, 500 words today, whatever it is. I use Scrivener. I don't know if… Maybe that seems old-fashioned now. I don't know. I mean, are you familiar with the software?
Kate Carpenter:
I use Scrivener.
James Chappel:
Oh, you do? Okay. I can't imagine writing without it. I have a particular way I set up my Scrivener screens and if I can't have that, I feel like I can't write at all almost. I take it seriously in the sense that I do think it's important to always be writing. I am always writing. I do not distinguish between the research phase and the writing phase. In my experience, it's better to do these things together because it always happens. I mean, I've seen it happen in myself and in so many people, that there's something scary about writing.
There's the kind of fear of writing and there's so many procrastination tactics. There are obvious ones like smoking a cigarette or playing a video game or closing your computer. But research can also be a procrastination tactic, and I think that historians especially are prone to that because there is always more. There's always more that you can find. There's always one more archive. There's always one more book. There's always one more volume of the journal. And when you combine that with the imposter syndrome that all of us have, it leads a lot of us into a kind of black hole of research.
And so I feel that if I have a particular strength as a writer, it is an ability to be researching and writing at the same time, because as you're writing different questions emerge. I'm sure it's happened to you, it's happened to all of us. We spend a month in some rabbit hole and then at the end, you like, "Wait, that's just one sentence." And in the process of spooling out your chapter, you realize, "Oh, I need to do this other thing." Yeah, so I guess always be writing, is one thing that I would say.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you organize your sources?
James Chappel:
There's another way where I imagined that I would be much more structured than I am. I tend to use photographs and PDFs pretty sparingly. Part of my desire to always link together research and writing is, I very rarely go to the archive and come back with 10,000 pictures, which I then have to look through. Usually when I go to an archive, I force myself to take notes, to do critical work while I'm there and take notes and quotes that I think I might want to use. So I'll have a Word document or whatever, or in this case, a Scrivener page for every archive I go to.
I'll take some photos, but I tend a lot more to say, "Here's a file for this archive," and then I organize things pretty early by chapter. If I'm reading a bunch of secondary sources, I have in Scrivener a little folder called secondary sources like chapter two secondary sources, and I put everything that might be relevant in there, so that when I'm actually writing the chapter, I'm looking all around for stuff. Sometimes if a source is relevant for multiple chapters, I'll put it in multiple different places in Scrivener. So the idea is that… And I'll have another folder for primary sources.
So the idea is that Scrivener, you have multiple windows. For me, I have a window where I'm writing and the other window, I'm toggling between primary and secondary sources that I'm going to use for this chapter. That's my ambition for how I write. It doesn't come… I don't use Zotero or anything like that. I take a lot of pride in my footnotes. I love doing them myself. I also have never really learned how to use one.
Kate Carpenter:
So then what does your revision process look like? How do you think about that phase?
James Chappel:
I find revising to be very painful, because it's not as fun, right? The fun part is diving into your sources, coming up with your arguments, all that stuff, and then printing it out and reading it and seeing how flawed it is, and having to go back and do it. It takes a lot, I think of… I don't know what, mental fortitude, but it is really important. I remember my first book, I did a writing workshop on it with other faculty from Duke and I think one or two invited guests and an editor or something like that.
And of course like any author, what I wanted was everybody to just give me a round of applause and tell me that it is done. This is a one-minute workshop, this is the best book we've ever seen, etcetera, etcetera. Of course that didn't happen and I came away knowing I have to rewrite this whole thing again. It was so dispiriting. It took another nine months or whatever, but it was totally worth it. I had to. In this book too, Golden Years, I probably rewrote every chapter at least once or twice.
I really thought that having written a book once, that the second time it would just kind of flow from me, that I would just like, "Oh, now I know how to write a book, so I won't have to do as many revisions." But that was not true. I had to do as many revisions and rewrites on the second book as the first one.
Kate Carpenter:
Speaking of first and second books, your first book, the history of Catholicism in 20th century Europe, which as far as I can tell is a pretty different topic than the history of old age and retirement in the United States. What was it like to switch gears like that for a second book?
James Chappel:
I found it really energizing. There definitely was with the first book, it came out of a particular moment of post 9/11, sort of speaking a lot about religion and politics. When I was in graduate school, writing about religion and modern European history was sort of hot stuff. There were a lot of conferences. I had a lot of friends in the field, so it was very fun to write that book. And then when it was done and I was thinking, "Okay, I mean the logical thing for me to do is to write another book about this topic."
I still think there's a book to be written about Vatican II. There's anyone out there, a global history of Vatican II, I still think is a book someone's got it write. And for some reason, and a lot of people organize their careers that way, and I envy them. I think there's a lot of to be said for that, but I found that I could not do it. I found that I needed to… I think it goes back a little bit to what I said earlier about imagining my vocation as much as a writer as a historian, I found the idea of cementing myself as an expert in this particular thing, a noble enterprise, but not kind of what I wanted.
I felt like different questions had emerged from me for me, and I wanted to explore them. In the interim also, I mean this is something that marks me as a figure of great privilege, is that I had gotten tenure in the interim. And so if tenure is for anything, surely it has to be to allow yourself to explore different things. There is of course a thematic connection between the books. It's not like my second book is a totally different discipline. So the first book actually has a little bit about old age pensions, and when I wrote the book, I regretted what a short passage it was because on the one hand, it sounds so boring, but on the other hand I thought like, "Wow, it's actually a third of this country's GDP is going to old age pensions."
And the way they're imagined and the way they're structured seems super important and Catholics play a big role there, and Catholic ideals of the family and stuff like that. I originally was going to write a book about pension policies in Europe or in Germany, and I actually did some publications on that. For a number of reasons I decided not to. Well, one was the pandemic and the having of children. I mean this book was written over a course of two or three years when I wasn't even allowed to go to my office, let alone go to Germany. And as I'm sure some listeners can sympathize, when you have little kids at home, I'm not going to Dusseldorf for nine months. That's crazy. I can't do that.
So because it seemed impossible to write this European book in the way that I would want to, and also there was a matter of interest too. I mean this is probably happening in lots of different sub-fields, but European history is, let's say, not as strong as it has been historically. There's not that much interest in it, so I could not really find a publisher for history of old age in Germany. I mean, who's going to read that? People who buy books about German history in general is very small. The number of those who care about history of old age is like… Who's going to buy this book?
And so I guess when I was thinking what my actual disciplinary training prepares me to do, is to write a book that I would think is very interesting, but that I don't think there'd be much of a market for. I don't think it would make much of an impact. And so I thought, "Well, why don't I try just writing this book about America? I mean, there's sources that I can find here." There was a learning curve obviously to learn about American history, but I found that to be exciting. I don't know. I think it's fun to learn new things. Of course, I feel some nervousness about it. I felt some nervousness about writing about a different geographical area.
Methodologically, the two books are very similar, but obviously geographically they're not. And I felt nervous about that, but I actually… I don't know. Maybe once upon a time people were very zealous about gate keeping in these ways, but I don't think right now. I think right now people really welcome new perspectives and new people and interlopers and things like that. So I've so far at least, found myself very welcomed by Americanist colleagues.
Kate Carpenter:
Also, you moved from a University Press, your first book, to a Trade Press for the second book. How did that shift feel? What was that like for you?
James Chappel:
It's an experiment. I don't know. I wanted to try new things with this book. One new thing is writing about America, one new thing is writing with the Trade Press. So far I've had a great experience. I mean, I don't want to cast any aspersions on Harvard University Press which was great, the home of my first book. They did a great job, but it's different. They have different goals. They have different levels of resources they can bring to bear, especially for book publicity, and there is not a peer review process. That's the biggest, I'd say, single difference at least between this Trade Press and that University Press.
There's of course that the University Press went through peer review, and so that's why I think that for first books, that's very much recommended because it's for tenure and you really want to show that you have kind of… I don't know. Check the boxes of disciplinary expertise in your field. The Trade Press is not so concerned with that. It's not their job. Their job is to publish important books that will sell. I would say it's not like they are hostile to the idea. Actually, I organized my own workshop with some Americanist colleagues because that to me at least was important. So yeah, I don't know.
I would say actually so far with that exception, the peer review exception, I have not found the experience that different. Basic do not publish a lot of academics. They publish… Maybe if I were with Penguin or Norton or something like that, it would feel different, but I don't know that the writing… I tried to write a little bit more excessively, but there is room in Trade Press is like Basic for books that are academic books. I mean, one thing I discovered about myself is that I am fundamentally an academic writer.
I did wonder a little bit when I started writing this, "Do I have it in me to write something that will actually be a kind of gripping character driven yarn, the way that some historians can do?" And I discovered that I can't, that's not me. I don't know. I kind of tried a little bit, but it's just not how I was trained. It's not how I think about history. And so the book reads a little bit more academic, I think, than maybe how I initially envisioned, but I think that's just discovering who I am as a writer in the course of writing it.
Kate Carpenter:
To see more about how that discovery came to life on the page, I asked James to read an excerpt from his new book. Here's James Chappel reading the introduction to chapter two of Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age.
James Chappel:
"In November 1939, a woman named Ida Fuller retired from her job as a legal secretary in a small town in Vermont. She was unmarried and had no children. She was therefore the kind of person who would at most times in American history, have had a challenging time in old age. She might've had to rely on charity or even enter an almshouse. Fuller though knew that for the last few years she'd been paying for something called Social Security. She didn't know much about the program and had voted against Franklin Roosevelt, the president who made it possible.
All the same, she stepped into a government office to inquire. She didn't expect anything to come of her query, but she was in luck. As it happens, that was the very day the first application forms for the new program had arrived. She filled them out and just two months later, a check arrived in her mailbox with the auspicious number of 00-000-001. Ms. Ida Fuller thus entered the history books as the nation's first recipient of Social Security. Fuller was one of many millions of people whose lives were shaped by Social Security, which was the grandest expansion of the welfare state in American history.
It has played an incalculable role in shaping the American economy and the life course of American citizens. Social Security has also been the greatest poverty reduction program in American history. According to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, in 2022 the program kept 21.7 million Americans above the poverty line, most of whom were over age 65. The program also helped people with disabilities and some other target groups. This largely thanks to Social Security and its many amendments of which Medicare is one, that old age in America is as good as it is. Social Security hasn't just made old age better. The program was responsible for the invention of old age in this country.
Before 1935, there was very little sense that old age was a coherent stage of life with its own institutions and benefits. Youth was certainly understood that way as a time for state sponsored education, but old age was not. Not many older people were retiring and few of the institutions that we associate with modern aging existed yet, retirement communities, senior centers, nursing homes and so on. Social Security created for the first time, a legitimate expectation that Americans who look forward to 10 or 15 years of comfortable life on the far side of the labor market. It created, in other words, a broadly shared idea of what old age could be."
Kate Carpenter:
Talk to me about what goes into writing this passage.
James Chappel:
I find chapter introductions to be kind of a fun part of the writing. I usually do do them last. I find, and this is part of the revision process we talked about earlier, because I'm sort of always writing, one of the downsides of that is that I have to cut a lot of what I write, because I don't do a lot of research, rigorously outline my chapter and then write. Even though I ask my students to do that, it's not what I do. I write as I go, discover my arguments in the course of the writing, and then a lot of the revision has to do with whittling down the massive prose I've created to turn it into an argument.
And then a kind of fun part then is to say, "Okay, how can we introduce this chapter? How can I give it some kind of a hook for people?" As I said before, I have a hard time, I think in terms of in groups of people, big historical shifts, the kinds of things that I think are hard to narrate. And so I sought for each chapter introduction, to find some kind of exemplary anecdote. And this one about Ida Fuller is anyone who knows about the history of Social Security will have heard of her, but that's not many people. She was a minor celebrity in her time, and she was actually followed up on by journalists over the rest of her life. And I think she actually comes up again in a later chapter a little bit.
So I thought that by introducing her, it could help people put a face to it. I would say that the thing I did in that introduction that was a little bit different than what had been done with her before, was to think, "Okay, what would've happened to this woman absent to Social Security?" Given what we know about her, that she's unmarried, that blah, blah, blah, how does this impact her in particular? And so that was a little bit of a thought experiment that I did in that passage. And then the chapter itself then goes back time. It jumps back to about 1930 to narrate how we got to this moment when this older woman in Vermont is able to get this money from the government.
Kate Carpenter:
One thing that makes this book really a pleasure to read and I really enjoyed it, is just how direct and clear the language is and explained what are often pretty actually complex policy changes in ways that are not only easily understandable, but actually enjoyable to read.
James Chappel:
Oh, okay.
Kate Carpenter:
And I noticed when I was reading the acknowledgments, that you thank your students in part for that, for helping you really clarify the language. Can you talk a little bit about how you think about the relationship between teaching and writing?
James Chappel:
As much as I've talked about having a vocation as a writer, it's a reality of most of our lives, so we spend more time teaching than we do writing. You talked about… When you asked me about writing, I thought mainly about when I do it during the day. There's another question about when I do it during the year, which I'm teaching a lot and teaching grad students and to be a professor in 2024, I'm advising clubs. I mean, it's all kinds of stuff, so this is really kind of a summer enterprise.
You what I will say, something I've started doing this year for the first time, and this is another kind of privileged thing that maybe not everybody can do. I have rigorously stopped having any meetings of any sort on Mondays, and I've tried to say it's a no meeting Monday. This time is for writing. Monday is purely for writing, and I have found that to be a pretty good exercise so far this year, because it's very hard. Even grad students listening, it's very hard to find time to write when you're also teaching and applying for jobs and applying for fellowships and all that stuff.
So I offered to you as an idea, instead try to set aside a whole day for it in each week, because teaching can be like… I guess that's about the ways that teaching can be a distraction from writing. It makes it hard to write and teach at the same time because teaching is exhausting. You're getting ready to teach. I'm not a super social person, so I find it a little bit draining to teach. I find it hard to teach and write on the same day. But that said, I think that the practice of lecturing especially is really good for a writer, because I think that to lecture properly is to lecture in a way that anyone can understand you, and to try to have an imagined listener who is interested in your topic but knows nothing about it.
And I think having an audience member like that in mind as you write can be really important. It's hard to do. When you're writing a dissertation, your imagined audience is your advisor who you're trying to impress, and that fact, while very explicable, is behind the tortuous prose of many dissertations because you're trying to prove something rather than to explain something. The worst lectures that I see are when people are trying to prove how smart they are. That creates a lecture that cannot be understood. And so I think it takes a little bit of humility to say, "That's not the point of this lecture. I'm not trying to prove to you how smart I am. I'm trying to explain a concept to you."
I think that if you can take that sensibility, I think produces good lectures. It also produces, I think, good writing because I presumed in writing this chapter, that the reader had no idea what Social Security was because probably most people kind of don't. It's pretty complicated. It's a tax that comes down about things. It's like every four years everyone talks about how they want to save Social Security, but then if you ask the man on the street, exactly, how does this program work, people don't know. It's super complicated. And so it can feel like… I felt a little bit…
I don't know what the right word is, but when I was writing some parts of this book, I felt like, oh, this is so elementary. The experts will already know this. They're going to think this was boring. But I had to convince myself, remind myself, that's not who this book is for. That's what makes this also tricky though, 'cause that's who will actually review the book. And there's also a case in which it's possible that that's the only people that will read the book, but I tried to write it in a way that would meet people where they were.
Kate Carpenter:
I like that. I also think we take for granted even very well-educated, well-informed readers and reviewers are busy, and things that-
James Chappel:
Of course.
Kate Carpenter:
… Are not a huge slog. You talked a little bit about structure earlier in terms of you kind of imagined this potential character driven narrative and went a different direction. And I think the book's narrative structure, it's pretty straightforward and it's really lovely. I think it functions in a really clear way, but I also imagine that there were other ways you could have written it. How did you come to the structure you landed on?
James Chappel:
That's an interesting question. I've often thought this, that when you open a book, the structure always feels completely obvious. Like, here's a book right here. I don't know, I'm teaching this book. It's this book called Did It Happen Here?: Perspectives on Fascism and America. This is a big book that just came out, there's part one, it's about classic text. Part two is about fascist analogies. Part three is about this. Part four is about that. When you open a book and read it, that structure becomes very naturalized. You're like, "Of course that's the way to tell the story." You kind of start your critical evaluation there.
But as anyone who has written a book knows to figure out how to structure it is the hardest part. And with both of my books, the actual structure emerged pretty late in the day in terms of how I was going to intellectually organize these chapters. How are they connected to each other? Where do we put the temporal breaks? What periods are we covering? How many parts does it have? How many chapters does it have? I find that stuff to be extremely difficult, and this book is organized… And it was something that came pretty late. It's the kind of thing that probably any reader of the book will think like, "Oh, well, of course this is the most obvious…" This is the obvious way to organize the history of old Asian 20th century America, is that to organize it around terminology.
That for the first third of the century, older people were called the aged generally. In the middle third of the century, they were mainly called senior citizens, and since about 1975, they've been called older people as they are today. And so each of those terminologies is linked with a different kind of cultural and policy environment. So yeah, three parts of the book, each one's got a few chapters, bada bing bada boom, but it takes forever to get there. That was not how it started at all. In fact, the first entire draft of the book did not have that. When I had the book workshop, that was not the structure. I don't remember what the structure was, but it wasn't that, and I felt unsatisfied with the structure before.
I think it's important to come up with some kind of structure that the reader can understand pretty easily how the different chapters fit together, and how they create a historical arc. But it is hard to do that. And so I guess the piece of advice there for listeners, is if you've got a dissertation or a book with seven or eight chapters and you think, "Okay, they're kind of chronologically ordered," I would say, I don't know, push that a little bit further to think about how you can make the structure of your book work for you better.
Kate Carpenter:
I'm also struck that there's so much interesting information in this book. In fact, it's one of those rare books that while I was reading it and afterwards I kept bringing it up in conversation like, "Did you know this…" Which is really fun.
James Chappel:
That's great.
Kate Carpenter:
But I have to imagine there's also a lot more information about aging and retirement that you did not have room for in the book.
James Chappel:
Oh, yes. Yeah.
Kate Carpenter:
Or else you would've had a 600-page book.
James Chappel:
Yeah.
Kate Carpenter:
What were your strategies for deciding what would go into the book and what you would leave out?
James Chappel:
This is a painful question because so much is on the cutting room floor. This is another big piece of writing advice. Everybody says this, and if people use still use this terrible phrase of "kill your babies," that's still-
Kate Carpenter:
I think so, or murder your darlings. Yeah.
James Chappel:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We should stop saying that. I don't know. But the advice of… If there are parts of your writing that you are going to think are great, but if they do not work for your structure, they just got to go. You have to kill them because it makes your writing so much stronger. And this book had so many darlings that were murdered because there was too much to say. I mean, there's so much, there's so many individual stories, so many even thematic stories that I had to leave behind. I wanted a chapter about old age and the environment. I wanted a chapter about old age and technology. I have so much on these topics, but it just didn't fit.
The book is regular length, it's the regular… It's the contracted a hundred thousand words, and I couldn't make it fit. And so sometimes it feels like there's a choice between trying to cram in information and cutting stuff, even though you love it, in the interest of making a more readable book. I mean, it's not for me to decide if I did that successfully or not. I tried to do that, and I'm sure you believe me, there is so much in the cutting room floor of this book because it's a vast topic. So that's another thing about this particular book, is that the source base was challenging to identify. My first book was about Catholic intellectual history, and so it's pretty easy to imagine.
I mean, I feel like I made some innovative choices about sources in that book, but basically you can imagine a room with a stack of theology books and intellectual journals and the Pope's pronouncements and stuff like that. And basically that's the book. With this book, it's way harder because there's so many ways you could approach it. Like movies, TV, newspapers, individual stories, memoirs, memoirs of caregivers. The amount of material was overwhelming. I don't know if I even am able to stay to give advice about that because a lot of topics are going to be like that, especially people who are writing about the later 20th century, the amount of stuff that's digitized is just insane. It creates such a waterfall of information.
I guess all I would say is that I think that in a way that makes our job even more important, because when confronted with this waterfall of information, one thing that we can do as historians is try to put it on a thousand buckets and try to save it all and put it in our chapter. But another thing we can do is be the person who steps back and says, "What does this waterfall mean?" And choose a few examples to show us that waterfall. Because when regular people read history books, by which I mean books that you or I might write like professional historians, I don't think they ever say, "Oh, I wish there was more examples. Oh, I wish there was more individual vignettes." I think that always what people say is, "There's too much information here. It was too complicated."
I mean, you probably feel this way too. I feel this way. If someone sends me a book to review and it's 400 pages long and I open it up and every page is about some different thing, my heart sinks. And so I think… I don't know. I don't know what to say about it except that it is a duty incumbent upon us, I think to be partially selective in what we decide to discuss and to not discuss. That's a duty we have to the reader to say, "You, a reader are going to spend six hours of your time on this or whatever. I want to make it worth your while." I want to show you what I think is the diamonds I found in the rough, instead of giving you a bunch of junk that you then have to interpret.
Kate Carpenter:
I want to switch gears a little 'cause I want to go back to something you said that I thought was really interesting and I wanted to ask you about, which was that you talked about how you've written for some more public outlets, but that you've also kind of found that maybe not as satisfying as you thought you might and have pulled back. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
James Chappel:
Yeah, I'm not sure how firmly I believe that. I'm sure that it'll come and go in waves. I mean, the beauty and the pitfall of that kind of writing is that it's ephemeral, and it still takes a lot of time to do that. It takes a lot of time to write one. You see some article in The Nation or whatever, it's 1200 words. It takes a long time to write something like, at least for me to write something like that. And it probably is read more. It's definitely read more than something that you might write in an academic journal, but it also is read quickly and disposed of quickly.
It's not like you feel like you made a big impact on the public discourse. There are some historians out there who do this very well and I think are providing a kind of irreplaceable service to the public wheel. Most of us are not like that. Most of us do it because it's kind of fun, it's a change of pace. It feels important to make some kind of contribution to the public square when we can. But I think I'll say that there was a time in my life when I found that to be very energizing, and I imagine I will feel that way again. But right now, I don't feel that way right now I think, "Wow, we live in a world, talk about waterfall and then we say fire hose of information and a fire hose of takes."
And one thing at least I can do, is perform a different kind of labor and produce a book that could conceivably be read for a little bit, and could conceivably live beyond me and could be on a shelf. I don't know. I guess that is a little bit of a romantic feeling I have about books. And so I've already kind of started writing a third book just because I like the idea of writing books. It feels like a vocation to me.
Kate Carpenter:
Are there other writers who you look to for inspiration, people you read as either models of craft or historical work?
James Chappel:
We all have edible relations with our advisors. My advisor is Samuel Moyn, who I look up to enormously, he's been such an enormous help to me and so many other students. I think that something I've taken from him is a… Well, I don't if I've taken it from him or not, but what I've aspired to take from him is the clarity and a comedy of prose and a willingness to be wrong in the sense of to make an argument clearly enough that it is falsifiable. And I think that historians especially can have a tendency to pile up so many examples and qualifications, that the work becomes unfalsifiable. It's simply a mass of evidence that you've produced.
I mean, there's a time and place for that, absolutely. But it's not what I've aspired to be. I've definitely gotten from him the idea that every book or chapter is meant to make an assertive potentially wrong argument. And it is kind of your duty as a writer to name what you would think that is, and that's scary to do, but he always does that and he's attracted a lot of flack for it. And it takes some… I don't know what, writerly courage, but it's something that I aspire to, for sure.
Kate Carpenter:
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
James Chappel:
Ooh, I had an interesting experience with a faculty member here at Duke named Kristen Neuschel, who is a medievalist. And you've heard me say a few times that I consider writing to be a vocation of mine, and I would not have used that language five years ago. I would've considered myself to be a historian, a researcher, a teacher, etcetera. I was talking to her about writing, and she talked about the way she identifies herself as a writer first and foremost, and I had never thought about that before. I think that I had sort of assumed that I wasn't allowed to call myself that. Historians weren't allowed to call themselves that that was only for… I don't know, people who were cooler and sexier and poets or whatever. They're like, "We couldn't be a writer because I wasn't like Hemingway or something like this."
But then I thought, "No, I'm a writer." And there's so many historian writers in the past. The book I'm writing now is about C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis was a historian and he was a writer. He was a writer first and foremost. There's a whole [inaudible 00:37:36]. I mean, I don't know, there's so many people who are historian writers, that we can imagine ourselves as Huffstetter, like Woodward. There's so many that we can imagine ourselves as part of a lineage and I took that to heart. I think there's a way, and this is just, historians are different. Sometimes we think about ourselves as social scientists, like our job. We are basically sociologists who use some narrative.
And I probably at some points in my career have thought about myself that way. But I currently now think about myself more as a novelist who uses some evidence. So I think that that conversation with Kristen kind of clarified my… I don't know, my commitment to writing as a craft, which is why I wanted to do a podcast like this one. Once she told me that, it kind of crystallized something for me that had been true about myself, and it's probably true for a lot of listeners too. But it was an identity that I hadn't allowed myself to inhabit before.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, that to me gets back to the fact that we don't talk enough about craft in history. It keeps us from thinking of ourselves as writers.
James Chappel:
That's right. That's right. The thing about the way we read a book in graduate school is to kind of gut it for parts, basically. And well, what is the argument? What is the evidence, etcetera, and obviously, that's how I read a book still. There's a place for that. But no, we're making works. We're making works of art whether we like it or not, in the sense of art as a craft, we are producing something that we may as well be attentive to the ways we do it. And that's what makes the podcast like this so valuable.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, as we are speaking, Golden Years is not out yet, but it will be by the time this episode airs. So I know that you were deep in promoting it, talking about it. You have though hinted at-
James Chappel:
New listeners, unlike me now, you're a Golden Years fever.
Kate Carpenter:
Exactly.
James Chappel:
Golden Years fever is sweeping the country at the time of this-
Kate Carpenter:
It is everywhere.
James Chappel:
Wow. Yeah, this is a historical relic before the nation caught the fever. Okay.
Kate Carpenter:
Exactly, precisely. But you have hinted at, and I'll now ask you about a new project you're working on 'cause I am always really interested in how historians kind of move from subject to subject. So are you up for talking a little bit about the third book you're thinking about?
James Chappel:
Sure, yeah. I mean, for me, I have found that I talked before about feeling some anxiety around thinking of myself as a social scientist, because my historical concerns have always so closely mirrored, let's say, personal anxieties and personal concerns, which change as we age. I mean, I talked before about how I didn't think I could stick with the same topic. It was because I'm a different person than I was when I was 20 and I was thinking about that first project, when I was 25 or whatever. And so I wrote that first book in a moment when I was really grappling with my evangelical upbringing, and it was post 9/11, and I was really obsessed with religion and all this stuff. That was that first book.
The second book was about a period when I was having kids and getting older. I turned 40 while I was writing this book and I had aging parents, like a lot of us do. And I felt like, "Wow, the process of aging is something that is happening to me, I need to be thinking about this." And so that's what led to that book. And actually was like, I often find that the two books I've written and the one I'm writing, are all kind of… It is not so much about identifying gaps in the literature, but writing about books that I wished had already existed, that I wished I wouldn't have had to write this book.
I wanted to read a history of old age in America since Social Security, but there wasn't one. And so I thought, "Well, there ought to be one so I'm writing one." And so this new project I've started… I don't know. The risk of being too personal, I've started in the last year or two of my family started going to an Episcopal church. And so my kids are being baptized in the church and things like that. I'm thinking a lot about that tradition, which my family is from England, this is my ancestral tradition in a way. So I've been reading Milton and trying to imagine what it is to inhabit this particular Anglican Episcopal tradition.
And there was somebody who had been thrust on me so much that I had decided that I hated this person, without ever really giving it a thought. It was C.S. Lewis, and I thought, "Well, all right, now I should give C.S. Lewis a chance." And so I read C.S. Lewis and thought that he was an amazing person and thinker and writer and all this stuff, and I wanted to learn more about him. And the literature on him is almost… There's almost nothing historical about him. It's all kind of like theologians, literary scholars, people like that. It's great scholarship, but it's not history. And all of his apologetic works are written during World War II. And so I'm thinking right now really hard about what does it mean to be a Christian during wartime? What are our obligations?
And I thought, well, may, thinking about Lewis as a wartime Christian, as really all of his famous Christian writings come out during the war, could be an interesting way for me to grapple with those questions. And so I guess a piece of writerly… I don't know if I'm in any position to offer writerly advice, but something that has marked my career, and maybe some listeners would think there's something just allowed about it, is that it's totally fine to write about stuff that's impacting your life. 'Cause whatever we write about, for some we're going to have to bend. We're going to have to have some kind of libidinal pool to this material if you're going to get a book written, otherwise, it's not possible.
It's too much work. The work to reward ratio is way off, writing a book. And unless you're getting something from… Unless it's speaking to a pretty deep part of yourself, I don't think that you'll be able to write the book. That's definitely been true for me. Yeah, so that's one thread through my book projects.
Kate Carpenter:
Dr. James Chappel, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and talking about writing with me.
James Chappel:
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. You'll find links to James' books and other books mentioned in this episode at Draftingthepast.com. If you enjoyed the show, please share it with your friends. After all, friends don't let friends write boring history.
