Erik Larson
Author
of The
Devil and the White City talks with Robert Birnbaum
 Posted:
March 24, 2003
© 2003 Robert Birnbaum
Images by Red Diaz/Duende Publishing
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interview
Erik Larson has written The Naked
Consumer, Lethal Passage, the bestselling Isaac's
Storm and now The Devil and the White City: Murder, Magic
and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. His journalism
has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Time, The New Yorker,
The Atlantic, Harper's and other publications. Erik Larson
lives in Seattle with his family that includes a number of other
species. He is currently wandering the dark land of the pre-Next
Idea.
The Devil and the White City is a deftly
written book that commingles the story of Dr. H.H. Holmes, a serial
murderer, and the advent, planning and execution of Chicago's World
Fair of 1893.
Robert Birnbaum: If you lived in
New York City, would you have written this book?
Erik Larson: If I lived in New York City, would
I have written this book? Yeah, yeah, I would.
RB: You make reference in the book to the feelings of inferiority
that Chicagoans had—I am not aware of any books that have
giving proper due to this significant event, the World's Fair of
1893—perhaps besides the book you referenced…
EL: City of the Century
RB: My sense is that someone living in New York wouldn't
pay attention to something about Chicago's history.
EL: (Laughs) Yeah, it might be. I actually don't
know how New York feels about Chicago these days. But I know in
Chicago there still is this insecurity.
RB: The Second City Complex? Even though it is not the Second
City anymore.
EL: Still the Second City Complex, yeah. But, I don't think
it would have any impact on me whatsoever. The way I came to it
was story first. I didn't even know about the Chicago element, chip
on the shoulder, until I got into the research.
RB: How did you come to write this book?
EL: Here's how. It really dates to 1994. That's when I read
The Alienist by Caleb Carr. What I loved about it was this
evocation of old New York. And I thought at the time it would be
interesting to try to do a non-fiction book about a historical murder
and see if I could produce some of the same effects. I started reading
about the history of murder and fairly early came across Dr. H.H.
Holmes. I didn't want to do a book about him because I didn't want
to do some lurid, slasher book. There is something about Holmes
that at the time struck me as being like murder porn. I just didn't
want to do it. I wanted something that had character and charisma
and so I continued looking for other murders that might be worthwhile.
And along the way I started looking into a murder that had a connection
to a hurricane and that's what led me to my previous book which
was Isaac's Storm. Then I came back again to the idea of
doing this non-fiction about a murder, about a real murder and remembered—after
trying out a dozen other ideas, this guy Holmes. But what had particularly
intrigued me in the interim was this connection to the World's Fair.
I didn't know anything about it. I knew there had been a major World's
Fair in there somewhere. But I didn't know the details. Then I started
reading about that World's Fair. And that's when I got hooked and
realized, "Wait a minute." Here was this monumental act
of civic good will. It really was. This massive act of civic good
will and literally in the same place, at the same time, was the
opposite, this dark, dark character. And that's what lured me. This
idea that the two things happening at once—dark and light,
ying and yang, however you want to look at it. And, in fact, I would
not have been interested in just doing a book about the Fair. Nor
would I have been interested in doing a book just about Holmes.
But together they made a sort of unity. That I found kind of magical.
RB: You wouldn't have been interested in doing a book about
the Fair despite its pivotal role in 20th Century America?
EL: That wasn't the point. The point was to explore this
time, to invite readers into a world of the past that they could
just sink into the mystery and magic of the period. And the two
stories were the way to do it. I never questioned that.
RB: It seems on the face of it, before I read the book,
a contrivance, but I think that you delivered on the promise of
weaving the two stories.
Where
historians go wrong, the professional, academic historians
is that they leave the best stories literally in the footnotes.
As if they are too frivolous to tell in the actual body of
a text. |
EL: Well, the thing is, and it has to do with the original
conception. I never doubted that they went together. The question
was ultimately doing the research and then seeing how they would
fit together. Literally, the fates of both guys were linked by this
event.
RB: Meaning Holmes and [architect] Daniel Burnham?
EL: Both men in a sense were characters—if you distilled
the accomplishments, if you strip those away, both men really have
a lot of the same characteristics. Both were very bright men and
both embodied the attitude of being able to do anything, which is
what characterized the Gilded Age. Both had blue eyes, so there
was this sense that they were really opposite sides of the same
coin—as trite as that sounds. But that's really what the appeal
was. It was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde, which incidentally was
a popular book in that era.
RB: You are exhibit a lot of integrity here. I think that
it could have been possible to milk these stories for two separate
books.
EL: Maybe.
RB: You don't think that they are both compelling stories
apart?
EL: No. No, I don't, actually.
RB: Well, that explains why you didn't pursue them separately.
EL: One thing that came up after I'd really gotten
into the book, when I was thinking about how actually to put the
pieces of the story together. One of the things that struck me is—
that from a strategic standpoint—my goal is to be read and
to transport people back to this time. I don't consider myself a
historian. I am not locked in by any need to do a deconstructionist/feminist
look at the World's Fair. Nor do I feel required to do the definitive
book on the Fair. Which I would not have wanted to do because there
were a lot of boring things at the Fair. But one of the along the
lines of trying to make this a book that would appeal to the maximum
number of readers was that there was a strategic benefit to having
this serial killer in the book that I hadn't appreciated before.
That is, many people declare, "I don't read non-fiction."
And many people say, "I don't read fiction." What I wanted
to do was to get that crossover audience, to get people to break
out of their molds. Get the people who only read fiction to read
some non-fiction for once. And one portal for that was the idea
of this serial killer. A serial killer now being a standard vehicle
for many mystery stories. And it became my thinking that with a
serial killer at the Fair I would be drawing readers who would be
lured in by that. But it was my hope that once being lured in, they
would be further and more powerfully seduced by the, technically
speaking, more classical narrative of Daniel Hudson Burnham and
his struggle to build the Fair. And I am finding that is the case.
People are telling me that.
RB: That's a little dangerous, trying to anticipate what
readers are going to be interested in?
EL: Yeah, but that's the art of writing. It's not so much
trying to anticipate what people are going to be interested in.
In the end, I wrote this in the way I did because I liked it. I
wrote this because this is what I really liked. But, any kind of
good writing requires a certain amount of strategic thought about
what the impact is going to be on readers.
RB: I suppose somebody else could have made a mess of this
weaving the two narratives. You wrote it well.
EL: But also, one has to think strategically about how to
put these things together—how from a technical standpoint
to manage the cutaways, the transitions. And that boiled down, is
anticipating how the audience will react to the material. For example,
when you end something with a cliff hanger, you are deliberately
anticipating that readers will read that and say, "Ah, something
is going to happen." But then you cut next to the Holmes section.
They go through that, but they are still thinking that something
is going to happen in the Fair section. Then they go back—
it's all the technical tricks of fiction applied to the real life
stories of Burnham and Holmes.
RB: I was glad you added some color detail like the menus
of important meals and the list of medical treatments at the Fair
—including one case of extreme flatulence. You got me hooked
immediately when you stated that a thousand trains a day passed
through Chicago at the time.
 EL:
(laughs) That was one of the discoveries I made that really fascinated
me—mean discovery for myself—was the nature of Chicago
in that period. I realized I had known nothing about Chicago in
the 1890's. And it was this huge bustling, powerful, dangerous urban
space. And that was a real magical thing to me and one thing I also
wanted to convey.
RB: I had never seen it referred to as the 'Black City.'
EL: In newspaper articles there were periodic
references to the 'Black City', the 'Gray City' and that applies
to the broader Chicago. And the White City was, of course, the Fair.
RB: That was period of time when Chicago was arbitrarily
annexing areas simply to become a more populous city?
EL: The Fair came after that period. They were still debating
what to do and then came the annexation. And that was aimed at building
Chicago up through admittedly artificial means to become the second
most populous city in the country.
RB: Which was previously Philadelphia. I want to get back
to your notion that Holmes and Burnham were two sides of the same
coin. Holmes seems to be the first major example of psychopathy.
EL: He's not the first major example because obviously psychopaths
existed all along, but he was clearly an example of a full-blown
psychopath at a time when people didn't really understand what that
was.
RB: Was that the time when that word 'psychopath', entered
the mainstream discourse?
EL: At that time…the term at that time that
was commonly being used was—and again people didn't really
understand people like this—to encounter Holmes was not say,
"Wow, this guy's insane." You couldn't. People lacked
actually the vocabulary for describing somebody like Holmes. But
there were people who had been identified by the medical community
as lacking some moral core, these people were referred to as 'moral
imbeciles.' Then it became 'psychopath,' then 'sociopath', and today
the more sanitized term is people suffering from 'anti social personality
disorder.'
RB: Tell me again why you think Burnham and Holmes are alike.
EL: The main thing is that they embodied this sense of being
able to do anything they chose. And being able to function at a
miraculous level. Beyond what one might have assigned was possible.
That's one thing that characterized the Gilded Age—the sense
that there were no limits. Holmes with murder, Burnham with trying
to build this Fair in record time. That's the primary area of similarity.
But in other ways as well. They were both creatures of the time
when the city was on the rise. Urbanization was really beginning
to take force. Burnham being a prime mover of it and Holmes used
it to his advantage—the fact that people disappeared all the
time in Chicago. The fast growth of the city allowed him to operate
without discovery until after the Fair. He used technology and trains.
Burnham used trains and so forth and the telegraph, in a fluid way
that would surprise us today, if we went back in that era, how fluid
it was. And strictly on a physical level. I love that blue eye parallel.
There is a quote in the book that one person wrote about the parallels
between blue eyes and murderers. They were in their own ways architects
Burnham in a professional and grand scale…
RB: Holmes was a bad architect.
EL: Yeah but for a concept that was darkly brilliant.
RB: You suggest Holmes' limitless abilities at the same
time you doubt the higher number offered about how many homicides
he committed.
EL: I do doubt the two hundred number. I don't see a discrepancy
there. The New York World estimated at one time that as
many as two hundred people, typically young woman disappeared during
the fair because of Holmes. Based on my research, I think that's
too extraordinary.
RB: Somebody would have noticed.
EL: I don't know that. But the New York World
is just too extreme and was at that time. I feel probably several
dozen is not a bad number for his lifetime. The thing is, nobody
can say for sure, but it could be two hundred. I am just saying
I doubt it.
RB: He didn't limit himself to just women. He killed young
children.
EL: He was a full-service psychopath. He did not limit himself.
My take on it is that his preference was for young attractive women,
but he was not averse to killing men when he saw some other potential
gain, typically financial. This guy was—calling him a thoroughly
bad man doesn't even do it justice. This was a guy who had no moral
core.
RB: Reptilian.
EL: That is the best description.
RB: Why doesn't he have the same reputation as other …
EL: As Jack the Ripper? I don't know. In some ways [Holmes]
was even creepier. Skeletons and gas chambers and so forth. I think
what it comes down to is that Jack the Ripper, when he did his killings,
those were never solved. Patricia Cornwall not withstanding [a reference
to Ms. Cornwall's reported expenditure of five million dollars to
solve the Jack the Ripper case]. They were never solved.
RB: (Laughs)
Labor
in particular is taught in an excruciatingly boring way. Yet
it's a very powerful story in American history. Full of violence
and blood and manipulation. |
EL: There was always a hint of the Royal family being involved
in some way. Plus you had London fog and all that stuff. It was
the perfect combination of things to lodge this guy as the symbol
of evil forever. [In]Holmes, ultimately the case was resolved. He
was discovered and brought to justice and executed. So there was
an ending. There was not that lingering question.
RB: Well, he was brought to justice for one murder.
EL: Yeah, but suffice it to say he paid the ultimate price.
He was executed and whether he was executed for the right murders,
he obviously did those final murders. But it's like today with the
snipers in Virginia. They'll be tried first on the FBI employee
slaying. We knew they did the others. But it is one of the mysteries
of history. Just like with Isaac's Storm. How come people
didn't know of that hurricane? It was massive news at the time it
struck and it was forgotten outside Texas. Same thing with Holmes.
The coverage of this case once the revelations began to come to
light was unbelievable. This was national news, all over the country.
And in foreign countries as well.
RB: What does it say about our sense of our own history?
EL: I'm not going to knock us today for not remembering
a serial killer.
RB: Among other things.
EL: Among other things, yeah. But I am a little surprised
that the World's Fair of 1893 has fallen so into obscurity. That
also has to do with a lot of how we as a culture have taught history.
Which I think needs a lot of work. One reason not a whole lot of
time has been spent on the World's Fair of 1893, I suspect is because
it doesn't fit a grand theme.
RB: A gateway event to the 20th Century?
EL: Well, yes, but…
RB: Crackerjacks, zippers…22,000 pound cheeses…
EL: Well, I agree. Obviously, I wrote this book to talk
about all these great things. To me the two narratives are vehicles
for talking about those cool stories. And the real trick was as
deftly as I could, pare out the stories that slowed or confused
the narrative—but keep those rich stories in there. People
don't teach the rich stories in high school and even in college.
I can just about guarantee that if somebody were to teach a course
on the on World's Fair of 1893 today in a college, what they would
emphasize would be the Congresses of Religion, of Women, of Politics
and so forth—I found them boring. Essentially, they were paper
after paper delivered by people. Some college course would probably
focus on that because that's where the weight is. To me the best
things are the stories. Where historians go wrong, the professional,
academic historians is that they leave the best stories literally
in the footnotes. As if they are too frivolous to tell in the actual
body of a text.
RB: Recently Nicholas Lehmann mentioned, in a piece in the
New Yorker on FCC Commissioner Bill Powell, a conversation
he had with his high school aged son about history. He came away
with the observation that the trouble with studying American History
is that here is too much of it. Meaning that too much emphasis was
placed on minutiae. And that the juicy stories were left out.
EL: I agree with that. A history teacher could take my book
and use that as a text for a full semester course on the Guilded
Age. And as a gateway to the 20th Century. Because of all the forces
that came to play in the World's Fair that I talk about in the book
including the rise of Labor. Labor in particular is taught in an
excruciatingly boring way. Yet it's a very powerful story in American
history. Full of violence and blood and manipulation.
RB: Especially in Chicago.
EL: Especially in Chicago, the Haymarket Riot and so forth.
But to teach it in the context of the Fair. You can't isolate forces
in history, forces work together, they coalesce to create things
like the Fair. If you were to simply study the rise of labor in
a vacuum you would miss all these other things. That's one of the
fascinating things that people miss—people who wrote about
the Fair wrote about Holmes in passing. People who have written
about the Holmes have written about the Fair in passing. It's like
no one stepped out and said wait a minute, "The magic is that
these two things happened at the same time." What forces, what
caused that to happen? Which is what I bring to the party. It's
these little stories that make history come alive.
RB: Was Pendergast, who assassinated Harrison, the mayor
of Chicago, was he a bit player except for his killing? Did anyone
know anything about him until he shot Mayor Harrison?
EL: No. Once he was a known person the newspapers went back
to his teachers and so forth. People who knew him knew he was nuts.
But he had no significant role at all. He was just a crazed immigrant
newspaper vendor who bought his appearance on the world stage with
a gun. That's what it was. He faded completely from view.
RB: No memorial to him?
EL: No memorial.
RB: Speaking of memorials, where in Chicago is the cemetery,
Graceland?
 EL:
It's way up North. I blundered my way up there with a map. Graceland
was one of the real treats, one of the discoveries of my research
journey. I went out there on one of those rare days (I was told),
in Chicago, in August where it was brilliant but still cool and
dry. What a beautiful place. So well kept. I had done most of my
research by then. To see all those people in the same place. It
was very powerful. It was as if they were all still alive and still
at some exotic club just standing around have drinks and smoking
cigars.
RB: And the Palmer gravesite is the most impressive?
EL: Definitely, the most prominent. It's also on the only
hill, in the cemetery. There are these two marble sarcophagi overlooking
everything.
RB: It's a minor story in the book. But I thought one of
the most heartfelt and engrossing ones was about the poor woman
architect who was hounded by Mrs. Palmer. The poor girl who had
the distinction of being the only woman architect is hectored by
this know nothing society dame. And she finally has a break down.
EL: She finally has a breakdown. I loved that story. The
thing I could really empathize with, through the century, was when
she did this design and then Mrs. Palmer opens the decoration to
whatever the women provide. Can't you just see that? It's like…
RB: It's crazy.
EL: It would make anybody crazy. And there was this quiet—here
was that poor architect dealing with that with Mrs. Palmer. But
there was also Olmstead and he was dealing with that too. And he
was fed up. He was fed up with people dicking around with his stuff.
And just those very human moments are what appealed to me.
RB: What became of her. Did she just fade out?
EL: She just faded from history. I don't think she did anymore
architecture. She literally—boom—an empty space. But
that was her moment.
RB: The other kind of side bar stories, Walt Disney's father
worked at the fair.
EL: It's so tantalizing when you think of it. And actually
he was very changed by the Fair, in terms of his financial circumstances.
It was very good to him. Which is why he was going to name Roy,
Columbus.
RB: Columbus Disney.
EL: That's just too perfect, right?
RB: And Frank Baum [author of the Wizard of Oz] was influenced
by the Fair.
EL: I have no doubt. There was an essay by John Updike about
Baum and Updike makes a connection with the White City. In fact,
Baum and his artist wrote one of the Wizard of Oz books from an
office in the Palace of Fine Arts. So there was always that connection.
I'm speculating in this, agreeing with Updike, that this had an
effect on his view of Oz.
RB: Is the Museum of Science and Industry the one remaining
building from the Fair?
….that
is what's missing today. We don't have that sense of civic
honor. You don't have that sense of chauvinism to the degree
that we care about something just because we care. If any
thing, what this book is a celebration of that long dead sense
of community. |
EL: Here's the story. The Palace of Fine Arts was like other
structures, a temporary structure, meant to last for the six months
of the Fair and then to be broken down as salvage. The people loved
the memory of the Fair so much there was a drive to turn the Palace
of Fine Arts into a permanent building. Which meant rebuilding it
in place with permanent materials. That is now the Museum of Science
and Industry.
RB: And that was money from Julien Rosenwald of Sears.
EL: A lot of Sears Roebuck money which accounted for the
bulk of the restoration. It's a fantastic museum.
RB: Has there been any commemorative celebration of the
Fair in Chicago?
EL: In 1993 there was a half-hearted, not a big deal, homage
paid. But it wasn't on any tremendous scale, It's another thing
I find striking about some of these great lost events. That not
only are they lost, but nobody tries to reincarnate them at the
major anniversaries. The way they did with certain other things.
The way they did with Pearl Harbor. The hurricane in Galveston was
largely— there was no significant monument to the dead of
that hurricane until the year 2000. Finally, there was a big celebration.
The same with the World's Fair in Chicago. People are familiar with
the idea that there was this thing but nobody really knows what
it was.
RB: You want to take a stab at why people become regionally
or locally chauvinistic? Is it just some version of tribalism?
EL: I know it is not as powerful a force as it once was.
Today we are almost play acting with out attention to sports teams
and so forth. It's really a corporate affinity than a regional affinity.
It's funny. I gave this manuscript in its first draft to a number
of people. An architect in Chicago, a forensic psychiatrist in Seattle,
and a number of writer friends who I trust as readers. Two of them,
younger, asked the same question, "Why did Chicago want the
Fair?" They loved the book. But they weren't clear on why Chicago
wanted the Fair. Which I found striking because having done the
research there was no question. Of course, Chicago wanted the Fair.
It was a question of civic honor. I realized, when I heard these
questions, that is what's missing today. We don't have that sense
of civic honor. You don't have that sense of chauvinism to the degree
that we care about something just because we care. If anything,
what this book is a celebration of that long dead sense of community.
RB: I agree. I think we saw a faux rendering after the September
2001 bombings. New Yorkers were expending much energy extolling
the virtues of New York and why it warranted their love blah, blah,
blah.
EL: Maybe it takes a shockingly tragic event like that to
make people wake up to the fact that they, "Yeah, there is
something special about this territory." I don't know. The
whole nation woke up to a sense of who we are.
RB: It seemed like a lot Newyorcentric case of special pleading.
EL: There are pockets of—not civic good will, I think
that's gone now, but there are pockets of this lingering regional
chauvinism. And New York has always been one of those pockets.
RB: You live in Seattle. How do people view Seattle? Great
coffee?
EL: Seattle does not have the same sense of chauvinism
that San Francisco has. San Francisco—I lived there a couple
of times and it's always had this feeling of, "We've got it
all. Nobody comes close to us in cool and weather and scenery."
Seattle has never had that chest thumping, "Hey we're Seattle
and we're proud of it."
RB: Is there a lively literary scene? What is distinctive
about Seattle?
EL: I wouldn't say it was a lively literary community but
there are a lot of writers there. It's diffuse. People spend their
lives in private. The overriding thing I sense in Seattle, a deep
satisfaction with the elements. The weather, it's great place to
be especially in the summer time.
RB: What's next for you?
EL: I don't know. I'm in that dark country looking for the
next idea.
RB: How do you that?
EL: That's a good question. I always…
RB: (laughs)
EL: I have certain things that I do to make me feel as if
I am getting out of that dark country and one of these is that I
deliberately read widely and promiscuously, to the point where…
RB: I may try that myself, promiscuous reading…
 EL:
Yeah. And I mean it actually. Like I will go in to the University
of Washington's Suslow Library, which is a fantastic library—one
of the best I have ever worked in. And fortunately it’s open
stack and so there is what I refer to as the serendipity effect.
Which is only found in libraries, not on the Net. You go to a location
in the library and you have this diaspora of vaguely related books.
I will go into the stack and go to an area and randomly pick out
books or walk up and down the stacks and pick out a book and see
what it's about and maybe start reading it, maybe not. Just to get
my mind thinking about stuff. Then also it comes down to maybe there
is something in a book you read. I had never read The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich. So I read that as part of the idea
search. There are a half a dozen books based on things that I saw
in that book that had been under done and were never done and would
probably make great books. But they are not my books. So there are
ideas I try and on cast aside. I'm just in that process now of trying
on a million ideas and I have one or two that would be fine books.
The only question is that the thing I need to do next.
RB: Are you committed to do only doing non-fiction?
EL: Yeah. Previously, when I was a mainstream journalist
I always wanted to do a novel. To do something creative that was
just me. But what I found with Isaac's Storm, initially and with
this book also, is that for now at least, maybe I don't have a novelist's
sensibility, but what I do have is a terrific ear and eye for the
little stories that bring an era alive. The best way to convey those
stories is in the world of non-fiction. Often the best stories of
the past are so bizarre that they wouldn't work as fiction. That
paradox. You couldn't tell the story of Holmes as fiction or the
Fair as fiction because it's too over the top. Nobody would believe
it.
RB: I have read a number of novels by young writers that
are set in historical settings and depend on factual history: Daniel
Mason's The Piano Tuner, David Liss' The Coffee
Trader and Darin
Strauss' The Real McCoy…
EL: These are novels set in powerful historical contexts.
I have a theory about that. I think we as a culture, in terms of
literary achievement, went through a period where it was the interior
story that everybody wanted to do. It was the University of Iowa
school of fiction that I found incredibly tedious, I have to say.
We are sitting in a New York apartment and the story never leaves
it and never leaves the masturbatory contemplation of the heroine
or hero. What writer felt and readers felt that they wanted more
of the great stories. The big stories, which is what fiction was
all about a hundred years ago. And going back into history and writing
novels based in a strong powerful historical context is a way of
getting at those stories again.
RB: Not only has fiction dug into history but fictional
techniques seem to be employed regularly by non-fiction writers…
EL: Right. But I would argue that is not a new thing. When
you go back a hundred years and you read the non-fiction of a hundred
years ago it's stories. Look at Shackleton's own best seller, after
his journey. Which was also forgotten and brought back to life just
in the last five years. In a way, it’s a pendulum that is
just swinging back.
RB: Well, thank you.
EL: Thank you. This was fun.
____
|
