Episode 100! I’m thrilled to welcome historian of science Dr. Jessica Riskin.
Jessica is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. She’s the author of three books and has edited two additional collections. She has also written extensively for academic journals and has published some highly entertaining book reviews and essays for the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Her newest book, and her first with a trade press, is The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It’s a biography of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose early theories of evolution have been discredited and ignored. But in this book, Jessica traces his life, restores his thinking, and shows not only that we have Lamarck all wrong, but also what we lose when we turn away from his expansive approach to science. It’s an interesting subject, but in Jessica’s hands it transforms into a deeply engaging, witty, surprising, and fascinating read. I loved learning more about how her love of novels helps her bring the past to life, how transformative it has been to work with great editors, and how she manages to write a book that is both a delightful read and a persuasive argument.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Jessica Riskin's faculty website
- Jessica Riskin, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
- Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
- Riskin at the The New York Review of Books
- Riskin at Los Angeles Review of Books
- FriXion Erasable Markers
- Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
- Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
- Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
- Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome to Drafting the Past. This is a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I’m your host, Kate Carpenter. This is the 100th episode of Drafting the Past, which feels monumental to me. I’m so grateful to everyone who has listened, who has joined me as a guest, and who has helped to spread the word about these interviews. Every time someone emails or comes up to me at a conference to tell me how the show has helped them, it feels incredible. I thought about shaking things up for the 100th episode, but in the end, I decided that the best way to celebrate was to do what we do best here: a fascinating, inspiring conversation with a historian who thinks deeply about research and writing. This interview was a bit of a gift to myself, though, since I got to chat with one of my intellectual heroes for this one. For episode 100, I’m thrilled to welcome historian of science Dr. Jessica Riskin.
Jessica Riskin 0:53
Well, thank you so much for inviting me. I'm really happy to be talking with you.
Kate Carpenter 0:56
Jessica is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. She’s the author of three books and has edited two additional collections. She has also written extensively for academic journals and has published some highly entertaining book reviews and essays for the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Her newest book, and her first with a trade press, is The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It’s a biography of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose early theories of evolution have been discredited and ignored. But in this book, Jessica traces his life, restores his thinking, and shows not only that we have Lamarck all wrong, but also what we lose when we turn away from his expansive approach to science. It’s an interesting subject, but in Jessica’s hands in transforms into a deeply engaging, witty, surprising, and fascinating read. I’ve been recommending it to people since I finished it. Jessica’s name has been on my list of dream podcast guests since I started the show more than four years ago, and it was a treat to finally get to ask about her writing process. I loved learning more about how her love of novels helps her bring the past to life, how transformative it has been to work with great editors, and how she manages to write a book that is both a delightful read and a persuasive argument. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Jessica Riskin.
Jessica Riskin 2:26
I've been writing for a really long time, but I've only recently, I think pretty recently, started trying to write for a more general audience. So, I've been doing academic writing, you know, since the 1990s in grad school, and I think I always was interested in trying to write in a way that would be compelling and accessible, and not too jargony, and so on. But it's really, I would say, it's in the last maybe 10 years or so that I have started really focusing on the aspect of it that is storytelling and really trying to have the story carry the argument rather than, you know, have an argument with little stories in it. I think it's partly from, I started writing for the New York Review of Books, review essays, and other venues, the LA Review of Books, and places like that, which are, you know, not, I guess it's not super mainstream, but it's still kind of beyond the academic world, and I discovered that I really love doing that kind of writing. It's, it's actually a lot more fun, I think. Storytelling is kind of the essence of historical scholarship, and it seems to me, anyway. And the funny thing is, I've been saying that to my students for such a long time, I've been saying to them the heart of historical scholarship is storytelling. And then it's only recently that I really kind of took that to heart, and really-- oh, and one other thing I'll say about it is that I am a great lover of novels. I really, I read a lot of novels, and I sort of can't get through the day without having a novel in progress, you know. And so I think partly the reason why it's more fun to write in a narrative way, it feels to me more like the experience of reading a novel, writing in a kind of novelistic narrative way, so yeah, I've arrived at that fairly recently.
Kate Carpenter 4:03
What does your writing practice look like? When and where do you like to write?
Jessica Riskin 4:07
Well, one thing is that I am a night owl. I think really I would love to be somebody who gets up at dawn, and you know, I have this fantasy of getting up at dawn and making a cup of tea and sitting down in the early morning, and everything is calm. I will never be able to do that. I can do that if I have, like, nine hours of jet lag from flying back to California from Paris. Then I could do that for a day or two. But basically, I'm a night owl, so I tend to write in the afternoon and evening, and even late into the night. I think most of my PhD dissertation was written between like 9pm and 3am so maybe going along with that is that I really have to be not quite in pajamas, but almost in pajamas, you know, I have to be in really comfortable clothes, and I have to be able to be all curled up and like not in a public setting.. I can't really compose text in a public setting, or you know, in formal clothes or anything like that. And then beyond that, I think what I do now, I'm not sure. I think I used to do things in a more organized way, so I would have sort of an outline, and I would, you know, go methodically through my outline, or at least something closer to that. And now, nowadays, I just find myself jumping in some place where I have a scene or an idea of a vignette or something, a small part of the story. I jump into that and start writing that, and then I kind of work out from there, and the larger, whatever it is, essay or book takes shape around that. But for this most recent book, The Power of Life, I actually, this is the first time I've done it this way, I worked on a proposal with an agent, my agent, Toby Mundy, he, he was wonderful. He was very patient and very encouraging, and very patient, and willing to, you know, go through a long, long process of developing a proposal with me and coaxing me through it. And so I developed a proposal that was sort of like the book in miniature. It was like, I'm not sure how long it was in words, it was like maybe 50 or 60 pages, single spaced, you know, of text with all the descriptions of all the chapters and everything, and so then when I went to write the book, it was sort of like taking the proposal and expanding it outward from the… it was almost the book already in miniature.
Kate Carpenter 6:17
Wow. When you say a long, long time, how long did it take to work on that proposal?
Jessica Riskin 6:22
Well maybe it wasn't that long, but it was a few months. It was maybe, maybe a few months over the course of a year, you know. We would sort of work on it intensively, and then I would get distracted by other things, or it would take a while for us to get back to each other, and. Yeah, but it was, it was a pretty long process when I think about, I gave him an initial version of it that he sort of politely said, yeah, this isn't gonna, this won't work, and so I kind of, you know, sulked about that for a few days, and then went back to the drawing board, and I think at that point I also showed it to my son, who is now a grad student in history, which is sort of lovely, and he reads everything, I show him everything now. And so I, I got the message back from Toby, my agent, that he didn't think it was a good, that wasn't going to work well, the first version, and I was sort of in a grouchy about it. And I showed it to Oliver, my son, and he read it, and he said, "You know, I think he has a point." And so, yeah, the feedback is also a really important part of my process, and I always tell my students this also, that nobody can write without help, you know, you need, you need feedback, you need people reading and commenting on drafts, and I really encourage, you know, I think sometimes, especially undergraduates are worried, you know, that it might be cheating. It's the opposite of cheating. You should always show everything, you know, show it to your friends, your roommates, your whoever you can get to read and respond. For me, that's essential.
Kate Carpenter 7:38
Besides Oliver and your agent, are there regular people that you look to for feedback, or does it just depend?
Jessica Riskin 7:44
Oh my gosh. Well, at all levels. So, actually, I'm really lucky that all of my whole immediate family are people who, like, my husband, Chris, reads everything. My mother is a literary scholar, Myra Jehlen, her name is, and my father - I come from an academic family. So, my father, Carl Riskin, is an economist and a very good writer. Both of them always, I show them everything. My daughter, Madeline, is now a graduate student in classics, studying, she's a linguist, she studies ancient languages and modern languages. So, my immediate, all my immediate family, that might be sort of unusual, I think. But then beyond that, with this book, it was not peer reviewed, and so because you know it's Riverhead Books, which is Penguin Random House, so trade presses don't do peer review. For me, that was a bit terrifying. Everything I've ever published has been very peer reviewed, and I did not want to go out into the world with a non-peer reviewed book, so I actually wrote to like 15 colleagues, friends, colleagues. Some of them were people that I didn't know yet. I just knew them by their work, and I said, "Would you read my manuscript?" And extraordinarily, all of them did at least part of it. A few of them did the whole thing. So, yeah, I have a colleague in Paris, in Paris, Pietro Corsi, who's a Lamarck scholar, who read every word of it. Another historian, Richard Burkhardt, Chip Burkhardt, read every word of the manuscript. Ludmilla Jordanova, I didn't know her at all, and she, not only she read the manuscript, but she invited me to come speak at Durham, where she teaches, and stay in her house, and she hosted me for a few days, and she's now become a good friend, so yeah, really, I've been incredibly lucky in family, friends, colleagues, my colleagues at Stanford, also friends and colleagues there. Yeah, so I've been very lucky.
Kate Carpenter 9:35
Now, are you a person who likes to write every day, or do you have sort of phases where you're focused on writing and others, where it's, it's less of a priority?
Jessica Riskin 9:42
Oh, if only I could write every day. I mean, the problem is that it's very hard for me to write new, generate new text while teaching, because teaching is so absorbing, and it's such a continual, the rhythm of it, you know, is sort of unremitting during a quarter when I'm teaching. And I find that I mostly am able to write in the summer in my non-teaching quarter, because we have a quarter system at Stanford, so that's, I teach two of the three quarters, or the third quarter I'm still around, and you know, doing supervisions and going to meetings and stuff, but I'm not teaching scheduled courses, so that I can, I can carve out time to write, and then I, what I can do while teaching is, I can sort of go over things that I've already, that are already underway, you know, I can revise, I can respond to people's comments, I can, I can tinker, I can do that kind of work, but actual original writing, I need more mental calm, so that's more kind of summers and non-teaching quarters and sabbaticals and things like that.
Kate Carpenter 10:40
How do you see the relationship between your research and your writing? Is there a point in research where you start writing, or are they always intertwined?
Jessica Riskin 10:48
I think they're intertwined somewhat. I have trouble thinking without writing, so if I'm doing research, I mean, you know, I'm I'm doing research in order to think about it and what it means and what I might do with the various things I'm finding, I kind of need to start writing. So I would say it's sort of a back and forth between research and writing. I'm always engaged in some combination of the two.
Kate Carpenter 11:11
How do you like to organize your research? Are there tools that you use?
Jessica Riskin 11:14
Oh gosh, I think I am very old school in that regard. So I know people have all kinds of programs that they use, and I use Microsoft Word. I really like databases and things like that. I I have made little attempts, but I think that people get so.. at least I have gotten so entrenched in my ways of doing things that it's very… it would be very hard to shift, you know. So, I'm super careful about notes as I go along, because I think that people who use database programs, they sort of do the notes for you, so you kind of, you don't really have to worry about it, but for me, I have to make absolutely sure that everything is perfect in the, you know, I keep a running bibliography and notes as I go along, and I have this system where I use Chicago manual style, the format of bibliography and notes, so I have the exact same format in every note, you know, the short format citation in every single note, and then the long format citation in this running bibliography that I keep, and then what that means is that things don't get tangled up if I move blocks of text around, you know, if you have an initial note that has the full information in it, then all your other notes refer back to that. Then, if you move blocks of text around, everything gets messed up. So, I don't do that. I just have the same-- that may be more than you wanted to know about how I can get by without using a database.
Kate Carpenter 12:34
That's fantastic. I love to hear everyone's nitty gritty details, and I know that the listeners do too. What does revision look like for you?
Jessica Riskin 12:43
I think I'm getting the impression just talking to you about my own process that in fact there aren't really… all the phases of it are kind of mixed together, so the research and the writing are kind of mixed together, but then the writing and the revising are also mixed together, because I'm always churning, and you know, I'm always revising. But it's true that at a certain point, so maybe it has to do with printing. At a certain point, the text stabilizes enough, you know. I'm kind of writing and revising and writing and revising and writing and revising, but then the text stabilizes enough that I am ready to print it out and sit down with it. You know, usually it has to lie fallow for at least a few hours or something. I've got to get my mind away from it enough, and then you know, sit down with just the print out and a pen. I have these erasable pens, you know, friction markers that I like to use, those bright colored erasable pens, and go through it with that, and I see it very differently on paper than on the screen. So, I do think that printing is essential, and maybe for me the revisions are, you know those moments of printing and going over it with a bright colored pen, and then also when I get feedback from people, when I send it to people and get feedback from them, that's another way of marking a kind of revision. So the writing and the revising are all one in the same thing, but then it's punctuated by these moments of real revision when either I print or I send out for feedback to a friend or colleague, and then, and get that back, and work through it.
Kate Carpenter 14:04
How does the process of writing and working look different when you're, say, writing for New York Review of Books, or an outlet like that, versus working on a book?
Jessica Riskin 14:14
Well, the New York Review of Books has been a revelation to me, I have to say, I have never had editing like I have there, I really wish that the editors at the New York Review of Books would edit every single thing I ever write. They're just incredible. I mean, they're these extraordinary people, very erudite and very smart, and kind of broad thinking, deep thinking and broad thinking both, somehow. They're very young. The people I've worked with there are extremely young, which I wouldn't have known. You know, there's like a new generation that have taken the place over. My main editor there, when I first started out, was a guy named Andrew Katzenstein, who's really an incredible writer and editor and thinker, and he's left the Review now, and now I'm working with an equally incredible person, Max Nelson, but then there's one main person, but then there are like two or three other people who read each thing, and they all comment on it, so the mar, the marginal comments become really interesting conversations among all of these people. I would say two or three, or sometimes four other people, well altogether two or three, or even four people altogether edit, and it goes through a number of major revisions each time, and the results are always just… it has a huge effect on the essay that comes out. It's much better, much, much, conceptually, much stronger, and in terms of just the artistry of it, I think the elegance of it is largely thanks to this editorial process. They're really, they're really tremendous.
Kate Carpenter 14:14
That's fantastic.
Jessica Riskin 15:01
So, that's been a revelation. I've never had that anywhere else, I don't think. You know, certainly not in academic, with academic presses, which is surprising. I would have thought that academic presses would have been more focused on editorial, the editorial process, rather than less so. But, in my experience, they're, they are less than than a place like the New York Review of Books, or like Riverhead. So, Courtney Young, my editor at Riverhead, really did a careful edit of the manuscript, and then we went back and forth in a littler way, once or twice, but she did one global big edit, and it's invaluable, really.
Kate Carpenter 16:16
Yeah, that's wonderful. I want to dig in to, I have so many questions about the book and your writing, but the first question that I really want to ask reflects my overall reaction to the book, which was that as I was reading, all I could think was that it seemed like you were having a really good time writing this book. There's so much that's fun about it. I mean, I pulled up the table of contents here because I just loved even the chapter titles, you know, The Reluctant Zoologist, A Very Branchy Tree, The Battle of the Mollusks. They kept making me laugh, and you have these very fun introductions to each part that are are in sort of a stylized voice. First of all, I wondered, did you have fun writing it, or is that an effect you're putting on? But really, my question is, How did you bring that voice and that delight, I guess, to the work itself?
Jessica Riskin 17:03
Oh, well, thank you so much, first of all, for saying that, that makes me really happy, because that, I mean, that's exactly what I was hoping for, is that people would have fun reading it. I did have fun writing it. I mean, sometimes I was, you know, obviously it's not always fun, sometimes it's a struggle, and you know, I would be upset and think, oh, this isn't going well, it's no good, but, but for the most part, I had much more fun writing it than in the past, and I think partly that's, as I mentioned, you know, I've just been discovering how much more fun it is to write in a narrative way. I love novels, and I love reading narratives and hearing stories, and so I sort of… I, it's funny how long it took me, you know, I really feel like a late bloomer, how long it took me to put together my love of reading novels and hearing stories with, you know, maybe writing, trying to write in that way, and so I really did enjoy it. And the last phases of writing were, what would it have been, fall of 2024 I guess, is when it was fall, winter 2024 There was a moment when we had family visiting over the holiday, but I had to finish the manuscript. I had a hard deadline for the manuscript, and our wonderful neighbors were away. They lent me their house, so I could escape over there and write while we, our house was full of family, and I would be going over there every day during the holidays, you know, long days of writing all by myself in their beautiful attic sort of library room, and people at my house kept on saying, "Oh, you poor thing. Boy, you're really working so hard. It's incredible, you know. Good for you for working so hard." But actually, I was sort of loving it, you know, the kind of being totally engrossed in the story and totally wrapped up in it that way. It was hard, but it was also something, I really loved it. To the extent that when I finally submitted the manuscript, I felt relief. But then immediately after that I felt sort of sad, like, oh, it's gone, you know, it's gone. I, what am I going to do tomorrow? I won't have this to work on. So, yeah, I did. I did enjoy it, the headings and the titles, and all of those details about it. I was trying to have it be novelistic seeming, and so those come, I think, from, you know, in which our hero, et cetera, et cetera, those come from reading a lot of 18th and 19th century novels, Jonathan Swift and Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope, and trying to sort of channel some of that slightly hokey, I think it was even in the original a little bit self-consciously cute or hokey, and certainly now in the transplanted version it's pretty hokey, but I enjoyed doing those.
Kate Carpenter 19:20
What else do you feel like you bring from your love of novels to a book like this?
Jessica Riskin 19:24
Maybe a sense of trying to evoke the interiority of the characters, and that can be… So that's one of the things that I like about novels, reading novels, is when they can really make characters come alive and seem like real people that you know, and that you can have mental conversations with, and I really wanted to try to do that with Lamarck and with the other characters in this book, so you know, I hope I succeeded to a degree doing that. At the same time, there was a kind of interesting limit on it, you know, because there's there's only so much that it's possible to know. And then a little bit more that it's possible to sort of speculate in an informed way about, and then if you're not writing fiction, you kind of have to stop there, right? Otherwise, I could, I could try to write a historical novel about Lamarck, then then there's no limit, but for a work of nonfiction, you kind of have to stop, and so it can be hard to do that. So for example, Lamarck's first wife, Rosalie De La Porte. They were married for, what is it, 20 years, 15 years, something, a very long time. They had six children together, and everybody I showed the manuscript to, or even before that, when I was working on the proposal, everyone wanted to know more about Rosalie, like who was she, and how did she feel about things, and what was their relationship like, and you know, they, they went through lots of struggles together, and how did she live those? And the thing is that there's almost zero information about her, really almost nothing, and so I can sort of make little attempts, and and try and indicate grammatically where I'm speculating, you know, I do try to do that, use grammar to indicate conditional, you know, this is this is a speculation, but otherwise I'd have to write a novel and make up Rosalie, which would be a fun thing to do, but it would be a really different exercise, I think. I noticed in The Return of Martin Guerre, Natalie Davis's book The Return of Martin Guerre, she tells us a story about these characters in 16th century France, and she, she has, you know, lots of archival evidence about what they're thinking and feeling, but there are limits to it, and she very brilliantly uses grammar to kind of spin a story around what is possible to know, but also very clearly indicate the limits of what she knows and what she's imagining. So, I was thinking of that sometimes.
Kate Carpenter 21:38
If you're up for it, I think I'll have you read this excerpt from chapter four, so we can talk a little bit more about it.
Jessica Riskin 21:43
Sure, I would love to. “If you’re an herbivore, constantly in danger of being devoured by a lion, you must do a lot of running, and you become slender and swift. If an idiot friend has attempted to lift you by the head, causing a career-changing neck injury (unless it was scrofula), and then your overbearing older brother has refused to let you become a musician, and then you’ve unsurprisingly turned out to detest banking, and then that same overbearing older brother has borne you off to a bucolic retreat for a year, where you’ve fortuitously gotten to go botanizing with Jean-Jacques himself, but your family still wants you to adopt a practical profession, such as medicine, you decide to try a bet-hedging sort of combined approach: medicine, okay, but also botany. At age twenty-eight, Lamarck began training in both subjects concurrently. For several years he followed courses in anatomy, physiology, and botany at the King’s Garden and the School of Medicine in Paris, including those taught by the young comparative anatomist Félix Vicq d’Azyr, four years Lamarck’s junior. Vicq d’Azyr performed dramatic and rather creepy demonstrations that, even decades later, remained in Lamarck’s mind, such as when he showed that a severed frog’s heart would respond to stimulus as much as twenty-four hours after its removal from the frog, thereby demonstrating the great irritability of tissues in simple animals. To these formal curricula, Lamarck added a third subject in the form of an independent study. From the high, narrow window of his Parisian garret, he could see nothing but clouds; contemplating these, he became a student of meteorology. The formation and dispersal of clouds was the subject of Lamarck’s first remarks before the Royal Academy of Sciences. Around the same time, he also began a collection of shells that grew to become one of the biggest and most beautiful in the city; this was a fashionable pursuit and an expensive one, but he probably struck a deal with some Parisian shell merchants, trading his growing expertise for occasional rare specimens. In this way, by self-exertion and adaptive response to environmental pressures and possibilities, Lamarck by around age thirty had undergone a veritable transformation of species from a brash, adventure-seeking teenager to a contemplative naturalist immersed in the many forms of living things and their constantly changing milieu.”
Kate Carpenter 23:50
So I love this passage because it could have just been sort of traditional biographic, you know, here's what happened next in his life, and instead it has this wonderful voice, you summarize what has happened in the first three chapters in this incredibly fun way that really points to the absurdity not only of Lamarck's young life but perhaps of everyone's young life and how they end up where they are. And of course it echoes sort of his life and then his scientific theories. What went into putting this passage together?
Jessica Riskin 24:19
It occurred to me that Lamarck's idea, his sort of principal idea, that living beings are always striving and always responding to their environment creatively, and trying to carry out their projects in whatever way they can, and developing new ways of doing it, you know, that's sort of his central idea is about, is that living organisms are constantly remaking themselves through this creative striving and responsiveness, and it occurred to me that that really applies to his own life, that he may very well have had in mind his own striving, because he was forced to repeatedly sort of change approaches and change environments and adapt to new constraints. And each time he kind of remakes himself, you know, he remakes himself from a seminary student to a soldier to, you know, a series of attempts at things. to a botanist to a zoologist, and he's constantly having to remake himself. So it just struck me that he may very well have had himself, his own life in mind, or if not, certainly as a biographer, I could make that connection.
Kate Carpenter 25:23
I'm also struck that you use a run-on sentence to excellent effect in that first paragraph.
Jessica Riskin 25:28
Yeah, that's a very long sentence.
Kate Carpenter 25:30
It is, and it's wonderfully comedic, and I-- do those sort of things come out naturally as you're writing, or do you think about them more consciously?
Jessica Riskin 25:37
You know, I think that one just… I don't think I did think about it very hard. I think that one just sort of happened. I, if you get into a kind of narrative rhythm sometimes, or a voice, you know, they can kind of take over. The book involved a lot of rewriting and a lot of editing. It's not like it just came out in one flow, but little bits like that sometimes. I think that one did come more just as on a on a roll.
Kate Carpenter 26:00
I have to say that one of the things I really love about this book also strikes me as potentially one of the hardest things about writing it, which is that you have this beautiful central narrative that is so engaging, so easy to read, but you also sometimes kind of take us on little paths of other people's stories of details in Lamarck life that aren't necessarily part of the main story, other historical details. It seems quite tricky to balance keeping the story moving forward and also incorporate all these things that add extra life to it. How did you think about putting those things together?
Jessica Riskin 26:35
I wrestled with the question a lot. Well, one big question is that the last quarter of the book, part four, happens after Lamarck's death and brings the story of his science up to the present day. And initially, I think my editor, and various people who are kind of advisors, readers, and I also, we all felt perhaps that it was a little strange to end a biography, to have a biography in which the main character dies three quarters of the way through, you know, and now he's gone, so there was a question of maybe trying to build all of the late material after his death into the earlier part and kind of have flash forwards and you know go back and forth, but it seemed ultimately too complicated to do that, and I really also wanted to make the point that this is a biography, yes, but it's not just a biography, it is also it's a biography with an argument about the history of biology and about the history of science, even more broadly, and so I thought perhaps that having that last part would make it clear that it's a biography with a larger mission, and then then there's another moment I think that may be, especially, you know, an example of a, an excursion, an aside, which is the story of Jeanne Baret, the cross-dressing, world-traveling naturalist, who's the subject of a chapter, and she was a went on Bougainville's voyage and collected specimens that Lamarck ended up using. I kind of wrestled with the idea of whether I could take a departure from Lamarck and have this other main character for a whole chapter, and in the end I decided to do it partly because it's such a wonderful story, which other people have told, but also Lamarck was in a curious position because he was living his life at the seat of an empire, there he was in the in the Garden of Plants in Paris, at the kind of headquarters of an empire, and he had specimens from all around the world, therefore, at his disposal. He himself didn't travel very much at all. He went on one or two trips, two trips that I talked about in the book, to Central Europe, very local, sort of comparatively, you know, compared to Bougainville's voyage, extremely local little trips that he went on, and other than that, he had a global view of things because of the specimens that were being sent back to Paris, that then ended up being, he ended up being in charge of, and so I really thought it was important to bring in the global and imperial setting of his research, and the kind of the role played by travelers, French travelers who are part of this imperial project.
Kate Carpenter 29:13
I also want to ask about structure, that, this is it's it's a chronological story for the most part, you know, it's a biography, and they tend to be chronological. Every once in a while, you kind of, you kind of get a little slippery with time in a, in a fun way, especially if you maybe introduce a side character. We kind of slip into the future for a second to find out what happens to them down the road, and then we come back to the story. I also wondered how you thought about that structure. Did you, did you map that all out? Did it just kind of come out that way?
Jessica Riskin 29:41
I wouldn't say I mapped it out, I kind of wrestled with it locally each time it came up. What I tried to do was to say, to kind of always orient the reader with regard to the chronology of Lamarck's life, even if we were going off with somebody else and going earlier or later. I would try to say something like, well, at this point Lamarck was, you know, still in Provence with his regiment, or at this point Lamarck was arriving in Paris to study botany, or something like that, so that his, his life would be the kind of timeline, and everything else, even if we departed from it, we could mentally locate the things that we're talking about on the timeline of his life. That was, that was, I guess, my technique for trying to keep it coherent, even while taking excursions, chronological as well as geographical excursions.
Kate Carpenter 30:25
That makes sense to me. Another thing that I loved about this book is that Lamarck's Paris, especially the Garden of Plants, but the places he lived, the places he interacted with others, they really come to life in this book, Paris itself, but Paris in this time as well. How did you work in the details of that setting? I know you know there are points in the book where even you are in the setting, but how did you think about making sure that was present throughout?
Jessica Riskin 30:52
Thank you. That's lovely to hear. I mean, I start in the prologue with a sort of explanation that initially I couldn't get into the libraries and archives, because I was starting to write during the pandemic lockdown, and everything was closed. And then I realized that the garden itself is the kind of setting for the emergence of evolutionary theory, even before Lamarck, he was working on the basis of earlier people who had been living and working in the garden also, and so it just struck me that some of the trees that were there during his lifetime, and even earlier than his lifetime, are still there and still alive. So I sort of started thinking of them as characters in the, in the story who are actually still alive, and you can still go and meet them in person, you know. And so I tried to think of that setting that I think led me to imagine the whole story kind of unfolding in a setting, in a particular setting, you know. It doesn't all take place in the garden, but the garden is the kind of headquarters of it. It's the nexus of the story, and that helped me to… and it's a place that I really love. It's very beautiful, it's very fascinating. Now it has all kinds of personal memories for me, because my kids have grown up partly going there, and so it helped me to sort of be imagining myself into a particular setting, and then taking, taking again excursions from there. I think that's part of it, and part of it also, again, thinking novelistically. I wanted to call the book, actually, by the title that Lamarck had in the Museum of Natural History that was established during the French Revolution. He was, this is how he made his transition from botany to zoology, is that rather than being assigned a chair in botany, which is what he wanted, the revolutionary committee in charge of this reorganization assigned him the professorship in insects and worms, and so he had to become a zoologist of insects and worms at age 50, remake himself again, the creative striving and adjustment to environment. I thought that The Professor of Insects and Worms would be such a great title, and it would sound like a novel and everything, but I was persuaded that that wasn't a good idea. So, The Power of Life is his own phrase, at least I'm borrowing the phrase from him. Anyway, so I was thinking novelistically the whole time, and I think that led me to try and imagine each event taking place, what it would feel like, what it would look like, what people's emotions would be.
Kate Carpenter 33:07
When you were going through sources, did you specifically look for details that would, that would help you establish place? I'm especially thinking about describing Lamarck and his family's various residences, which really--
Jessica Riskin 33:18
Oh, I did.
Kate Carpenter 33:19
--came to life for me.
Jessica Riskin 33:20
I did, I did, and, oh, I have a funny story about this, except that I'm not sure I can remember all the particular details. I was trying to tell the story of Lamarck's encounter with Napoleon, the famous story that is told by it, was told by Arago, the astronomer and physicist, who was a young man present for this encounter, where Lamarck tries to present his zoological philosophy, his magnum opus, to Napoleon, and Napoleon snubs him publicly, and you know, sort of reduces him to tears of humiliation. And this is a story that Arago told, and then has been retold a couple of times, and people have told it as taking place on a cold day in a salon of the Tuileries Palace on a cold day. When I was looking, I could not find any evidence. How do we know that it was a cold day? And so I first had to find out what day it was, and I did that by going through the records of the, the Institute, the National Institute. I managed to figure out what day, it took some searching, because there are various different meetings, and, but I found what day it was. It was a November day in 1809 and then I want to find out what was the weather on this day in 1809 and I was trying and trying various means of figuring it out, and then I, I gave up in frustration. I was actually sitting on a bench in Oxford with my husband in a park, we were, we were visiting our daughter, who was getting set up in Oxford to study there. Anyway, we just happened to be sitting on a park bench in Oxford, England, and I said to him, I can't figure out what the weather was on November, whatever it was, third, 1809, I have no idea what the weather in Paris was. I can't figure it out. I'm going to the bathroom. I went to the bathroom, and I, when I came back from the bathroom, Chris was there on his phone. He's like, 'I found it, I found it.' And he had found the weather in Paris on that day by looking in. Was it the… it was one of the Paris newspapers that reported the weather every day, reported the weather of the previous day. And so he had found it sitting on a park bench in Oxford. It's kind of incredible, what the internet, I mean, there are all kinds of bad things that it has brought us, but that is kind of an extraordinary thing. That sitting on a park bench in Oxford in 2024 you can find out the weather on November 3, 1809 in Paris.
Kate Carpenter 35:34
That is extraordinary. I wondered, this is your first biography. Sometimes historians can feel a little complicated about biography. How did you think about your approach to writing a biography?
Jessica Riskin 35:46
Complicated, how? I mean, I guess one occupational hazard is that, is the danger of falling in love with your subject, and I was worried about that on the one hand, but at the same time I do admire Lamarck. I think his approach to biology and his version of evolutionary theory is one that is much richer and more complex than the mainstream one that took hold by the turn of the 20th century and has been sort of maligned, so it is in a sense, explicitly about recovering historically, and also I think, I hope, scientifically, giving a kind of historical background to people who want to also scientifically recover some of his ideas and approaches. So, on some level, you know, I was on some level explicitly engaged in that work that has a kind of normative component to it. I wasn't pretending to be objective or neutral in any way, so I suppose that's one element of it, you know. Because the book ends, the last sentence of the book, spoiler alert, the last sentence of the book is "Lamarck was right," and that is taking a stand, you know. And I, so I did realize, okay, I'm taking a stand in this book, I'm not doing the kind of dispassionate, neutral historian stance, and in fact I would say that part of what I'm interested in about Lamarck's model of science is the way in which he assumes he and others, I mean, I think Darwin made the same assumption, the assumption that interpretation is built in to knowledge, that all knowledge is interpretive, that we are drawing on a kind of mixture of philosophical and humanistic and literary and esthetic and creative and empirical understanding, you know. Lamarck, I mean, he identified over 6000 species, he was deeply involved in a very technical kind of taxonomic work, but he also was writing philosophically and lyrically, and so that kind of mixture of approaches is, it's very different from the model of science that took hold around the turn of the 20th century, according to which science is meant to be objective and dispassionate, and somehow a view from nowhere, and I reject that model, I think. You know, it's not, it's not possible. You can't be objective. There's no such thing as objectivity in that sense. Interpretation goes all the way down. So, instead of aspiring to objectivity, I think it's better to aspire to transparency about your interpretive… Try to be as transparent as possible, and open, and explicit, and self-aware as possible about your interpretive principles. And so, in the book I was trying to do that, you know, to be not objective but transparent and self-aware and transparent about my interpretive principles. I will say one other thing about that, actually, which is that I did ransack all of Lamarck's papers and writings to try and find whether he had anything to say about categorizations of humans by sex, by race, by class, by any of those things. I did that partly I just wanted to know anyway, but also to kind of keep myself honest, you know, because I felt like maybe I'm heroizing him, I better find out, you know, the full story. And so I really ransacked, and as far as I can tell, this is one of the really interesting things about him. I don't think he ever did. He never categorized humans by any of those hierarchical categories, by class, by race, by sex, by anything, which is quite striking, given first of all that he devoted his, a lot of his career, to taxonomy. He was always taxonomizing invertebrates. He was very interested in taxonomy, and everybody all around him was heavily engaged in doing just that, in arranging humans hierarchically by category. Everyone around him, so the fact that he never did it to me is really striking. On the contrary, he, in, when he talks about human beings, he does it in a kind of universalizing way between sexes, between races. I mean, he just… he kind of universalizes in his comments about humans, and I think that, I don't know, I connect it with the fact that his theory of living beings, including human beings, is the opposite of reductive. It is not a reductive theory. It's about creative and self-transforming possibilities. He, you know, and even with non-human living beings, he ends up with not with a strict hierarchy, but with a very branchy… you mentioned the title of the very branchy tree, you know, this kind of outward branching structure where you have differences between species in which neither one is higher or lower, so I just… I associate his, the fact that he didn't rank humans with the non-reductive nature, fundamental nature of his theory.
Kate Carpenter 40:27
I was thinking about something you said early, which was the sort of idea of transitioning from an approach to writing history where you have a central argument with stories attached to it versus telling a central story that communicates an argument. Your argument is very clear in this book, and yet no reader would feel, I think, that they're ever being lectured about about what your central argument is. Did you have to work to make it feel that way? How did you keep yourself focused on narrative with argument sort of in the analysis of that narrative?
Jessica Riskin 41:01
Yeah, no, I really did. I mean, I really wanted the story to carry the argument, you know, the story of Lamarck's life. And then after he died, in part four, it was a little harder because he's gone, so the through line of the story is gone. So then I had to do it in an individual stories, but I really throughout, I really wanted the story of Lamarck and his science to carry the argument about the way that this particular narrow reductive model of living beings has taken a stranglehold of science, you know, over the last almost 200 years. That was really, that was my, that was my goal, that was my overarching goal, and I suppose I'm trying to think, how I… I know it was a struggle to do it, but I'm not sure exactly I can explain how I did it. I think I, any time I felt myself lapsing into the kind of standard academic, you know, "I argue that" type of thing, or I, "now we have seen that," and "now we will," each time I found myself lapsing into that kind of thing, I would sort of try to take it out and figure out some way of conveying it via the narrative. And it was… but I guess it was both a struggle to do it, but also a pleasure, because again, it's so much more fun. It really is more fun to do it that way. I think it's more fun in the writing, as well as in the reading, but it's hard, it's a little ineffable, just feel it feels a little ineffable to describe how I guess being very hyper aware of the goal, so that you have to keep returning to it each time, each time you deviate.
Kate Carpenter 42:32
I have just a couple of more questions for you. The first is, I'm curious, what the best writing advice you've ever gotten is, or perhaps the most influential writing advice.
Jessica Riskin 42:41
Maybe write before you're ready. Is that Peter Elbow? It's from a classic writer's manual that I remember. I worked as an undergraduate in the writing center as a peer writing advisor, but my fellow peer writing advisors were much more… I don't know, I was kind of a science nerd in high school, so my peer advisors were much more knowledgeable about literary things and writing and stuff like that, so one of them was a great partisan of Peter Elbow, but I can't remember if it came from that manual, but the slogan was "Write before you're ready," and I think that that is an important-- you're never ready, you will never be ready, right? I mean, you can, you know, do years of research and it still feels like, oh, there's so much I don't know, and I'm not sure. And that's the thing of it, is that you never do get-- the only way to be ready is by doing it. To me, anyway. As I say, I can only think by writing, so I just have to, you'd have to jump in and start, and for me, anyway, once I've jumped in and started, things become much more clear that prospectively I couldn't have thought through. I have to think them through in the doing. So I guess maybe that slogan, write before you're ready, would be the most influential piece of advice I've had.
Kate Carpenter 43:49
Absolutely.
Jessica Riskin 43:49
And maybe another one, actually, I'll just add one more, which is, and I, again, I can't remember who told me this, but somebody, when I first started trying to write for trade presses, said you should have in mind a college sophomore. And that was enormously helpful to me, just because I, I know a lot of college sophomores, I teach them annually, not just sophomores, but Stanford undergraduates in general are great to have in mind, because, as the audience, you know, to have an audience in mind while you're writing, I'll say this is even more important advice than write before you're ready, because having a particular audience in mind while you're writing really helps to not be obscure, you know. You imagine you write something and you imagine this particular student or group of students, are they going to understand what that means? Are they going to find that interesting? Are they going to be compelled enough to turn the page? Maybe not. And Stanford undergrads are perfect, they're very smart, they're very curious, they're very kind of open-minded and broad thinking, but they're not expert in anything yet. So, jargon is not going to work. And so that really, that's been really a good thing to have in mind, my students, and I would say that when my two children became kind of college student age--now they're grad students, but at the point at which they became kind of college student age--it was even more vivid, you know, to have them in mind, because I really wanted them to be able to read and appreciate and be interested in what I was writing, and so I really had them very present, you know, very vividly apparent to my mind's eye and mind's ear when I was writing.
Kate Carpenter 45:18
That's fantastic. Are there any books you've read recently that you have recommended?
Jessica Riskin 45:23
You know, I'm always very appreciative again of books that have a story that carries the argument. One example of that, but it's not recently, you know, it's maybe it's 15 years old or something like that now. But my friend Ken Alders' book, The Measure of All Things, which is, I don't know if you know that book, it's about the metric system, it's about during the French Revolution, the revolutionary regime wanted to define a meter, I mean, they wanted to establish the metric system, but at the heart of that, they wanted to define the length of a meter, and they wanted that to be a natural measure, and so they sent out these two astronomers to go surveying, they wanted to make it be some fraction of the, was it a 10,000,000th of the meridian that goes through Paris from the equator to the pole, and so they send these astronomers to go surveying arcs of the meridian, you know, surveying the meridian. But they're traveling through what becomes enemy territory, unbeknownst to them, and it's a sort of crazy story. I mean, the idea that you could have a natural measure, when, of course, it's a convention, is already a kind of crazy idea. So, Ken tells this story very beautifully. I mean, it's very hilarious and farcical, and also very much about the real emotions of these poor people, who are, you know, have this almost actually impossible task that's fraught by political changes and things. And then, so the story is very fun and wonderful, but then the argument that it carries is about the idea of an objective measure, and the kind of impossibility of that. It's sort of the argument is what I was just saying before, that all knowledge is interpretive, that all science is a social construction, but not in the sense that that means that anything goes, simply in the sense that you can't eliminate the social dimension of it. So it's not a relativist argument, but it is an argument about the constructiveness of scientific knowledge. I think it's that's beautifully done, The Measure of All Things. And in general, I mean, I mentioned Natalie Davis's book, The Return of Martin Guerre, and I love Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms. Micro histories often are very good at having a story that carries an argument, so yeah, those are the ones that I think of.
Kate Carpenter 47:29
Those are excellent recommendations. Before I let you go, because I am hopelessly nosy, I have to ask, are you working on another project? Will there be more narrative in your future?
Jessica Riskin 47:39
Yes. Well, I'm just starting to think my way into a next project, but actually the problem I'm having is that the, it's not obvious how to do it as a story, and I really am now attached to this idea of writing stories. So, what I'd like to write about is something I sort of mentioned a few minutes ago, which is the divorce between the sciences, between science and the humanities. Basically, it seems to me that in the period of Lamarck, and through Darwin, through the 19th century, it was possible to do a kind of science that was also philosophy and also literature, and you know, creative and esthetic, and all of those things together, a kind of more integral way of knowing the world, and Darwin, I'll just say, because we've been talking about Lamarck, but Darwin was an absolutely beautiful writer. I think he was a beautiful, The Origin of Species is an extremely beautiful text, and I think that literature was the medium of Darwin's science. It wasn't just that he had his ideas and then he put them into writing, but that writing was the medium, really, of the science itself, so that's true, he died in 1882, so you know that's true all the way through the end of the 19th century. And then around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, you have this rift between science and every other, people promulgating the idea. Many of them were neo-Darwinists who were offering this kind of revised version of Darwinism, according to which the living world is kind of passive machinery, and science is the engineering account of passive mechanical parts. So, people like August Theismann and Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley, in the promulgation of this view of evolution, they're also promulgating a view of science as absolutely distinct from anything humanistic or creative, and I think it's, there's a whole politics to that, which is really interesting. I think it's terribly impoverishing, you know, it's like that fragmentation. It was a very powerful model of science, but also somehow a kind of that fragmentation of the intellectual world has been unfortunate, and now at this moment in the crisis that we are currently facing, of a kind of all-out attack on science and education and knowledge and the living world, we really need to recover a kind of integral intellectual world in order to respond to it. And so I'm interested in that, in the relations between the sciences and the humanities, but it's much harder to tell as a story, or maybe I would be able to tell it as a kind of cluster of stories, like a collection of stories around that theme. So I'm just working my way into trying to figure out how to do that.
Kate Carpenter 50:13
I can't wait to see what you, what you come up with. Dr. Jessica Riskin, what a delight for me to get to talk to you about your writing process, and to ask how you put this book together. Thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Jessica Riskin 50:24
Thank you so much. It's really been wonderful talking with you. Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 50:27
Thank you to Dr. Jessica Riskin for joining me on this episode. Find her new book, The Power of Life, in the episode show notes in your podcast player or at DraftingthePast.com. If you purchase books through those bookshop.org links, you’ll support our guests, and you’ll also be helping to keep the show going, since we get a small commission with each purchase. Thanks to you for listening, to this and each of the previous 99 episodes. Here’s to the next 100.
