February 25, 2012 Class Dinner Presentation

I remember '69

Here we are, going back, going back: so let's go back to April of '65: LBJ is in the White House, Bill Bradley will soon leave Princeton, and you have a letter of admission. Mine came 6 months later, when the English Department hired me as an Instructor, straight out of grad school at UVA. I arrived here in the fall of '66, your sophomore year, and some of you may remember me, a nervous, edgy, 25-year old who had never taught a day in his life.

Princeton was my first job, and I never thought it would be my last. But 46 years later I'm still here, to my great surprise and pleasure. I retired in July of '08, began to live on a pension just as the market crashed, and…that fall I returned to the classroom, still my favorite place on campus, teaching Thoreau and Melville and, my very first film course, called American Noir. Last week we read and viewed Casablanca; next week, Murder My Sweet.

The students are fascinated and bewildered: they know little about World War II, or the 50s and 60s, or b/w film: they're a sheltered and law-abiding bunch, born 1994 or so; to them, Rick in Casablanca needs a better lawyer, and maybe some counseling. (They also say the real hero of Moby-Dick is Captain Ahab, not that hippie slacker Ishmael.) I attribute their libertarian leanings to reading too much Ayn Rand. But we press on, boats against the current: by June, they may all abandon McKinsey for the Occupy movement.

At Princeton I've seen stranger things, including an SDS leader who swore that before turning 30, he would bring down the Establishment. Today he is an affluent orthodontist, working in Beverly Hills. It's unusual for a professor to spend his career at one university. For me, it's been an honor, if also hard work. American lit was popular and we were short-handed. Over the years, I created 58 new courses, advised 262 Senior theses, and 100 dissertations. The good part: I worked with the best students in the world: bright, ambitious, and challenging. They pushed me to see that learning is a two-way exchange, a collaboration from all sides of the room.

Although Princeton began as a Presbyterian school, it also reflected the spirit of PA Quakers: the simple stone buildings, the compact campus, and the small classes, where we share ideas. Harvard and Yale are top-down, corporate places; Princeton is still a village, a Meeting, a mission to the world. And its best ambassadors have always been the alumni, bearing witness with their lives to the partnership between a campus and its tribe. No other American school nurtures so profound a collaboration between people and place.

What is collaboration?

In its Latin root, the word collaborate means to work together, to co-labor on a common project. Its synonyms include co-operate, pool, team. Seventy years ago, the word acquired a bad rep, when attached to traitors who helped the Nazis; but today it again means cooperation, mutual creativity; combining talents so that 1+1=3 or even more.

Collaboration usually makes us think of pairs, a duet. We assume they are of equal power, or else that one is the star and the other support, like a golfer with a caddy, or musician with arranger. In hospitals, surgeons and nurses form teams, though often the nurse is the better healer. Architects work with contractors, film directors with directors of photography. When the outcome is truly successful, both parties feel they did less than half the work.

When artists collaborate, they often speak of a Third Voice or Third Hand, a merged and transformed identity, a joint voice unlike their previous selves. Think: Rodgers and Hart, Lennon-McCartney, Hall & Oates. Often they are opposites, defined as adversaries: Freud & Jung, Magic & Bird, Jobs and Gates.

If a third person enters the mix, they get less credit: Watson and Crick discovered DNA…by lifting the first images of its structure from Rosalind Franklin. Often the dominant figure gets the credit. Together, Braque and Picasso created Cubism, but the volatile Spaniard became the star, and the quiet Frenchman slipped aside.

Often ignored are wives who form half of a creative pair: Erick and Joan Erikson worked together for 66 years, but he drew the salary, had his name on the books, won all the fame. Or the example of Coosje van Bruggen, wife to Claes (clahss) Oldenburg: they created 40 massive public sculptures: he did the drawings, she chose colors and sites, but only his name is on the work.

The uses of collaboration

So collaboration is more common than we think; what are its uses? In organizations that gather intelligence or enforce law, teamwork breaks down turf wars and ends infighting. At the same time, when we define achievement as plural, not singular, problems arise: who gets the credit, the bonus, the award? How do we value group projects over solitary effort?

We have this trouble because we learned a simple, seductive model for history, that it's made by heroic individuals, "great men" like Churchill and FDR. But in truth, innovations mainly come from crowds moving along complex social paths. Groups produce changes, but often we can't see the groups. Perhaps you recall Thomas Kuhn, who argued that ideas in science change as groups come to believe them. What we see depends on where we stand—and with whom.

Another problem: sharing and collaborating are not common behaviors. Animals rarely agree to share; humans do it about one time in three. Our usual tactics are finders-keepers and grab-all-you-can, even if we can gain more by working together. As the lawyers and executives among you probably know, not many people will chose a profit-sharing plan over a large inheritance.

Where does it best work?

The strong new trend in science and mathematics is networked collaboration. You post a problem or a progress report on a blog, you invite others to contribute, they share ideas and experiences; and everyone saves weeks if not years; researchers around the world now use this method to study everything from galaxies to dinosaurs.

During our present Great Recession, collaboration is reviving in daily life, an improvised consumer economy that we last saw in the 1930s, as growing numbers of people now share, barter, or trade goods and services, from baby-sitting pools to clothing swaps to co-op grocery stores, thanks to eBay, Craigslist and the like.

Collaboration today most clearly rules in art and entertainment. But while those who produce the songs and shows invariably do so through teams and workshops, culture-vultures still cling to the Romantic myth of the lone artist. And it is a myth, sometime even a dangerous one.

As an example, take writing; no one does it alone. Many writers would not have reached print without great editors. At Scribner's, Maxwell Perkins rescued from oblivion Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, none of whom knew how to write novels. At Viking Press, Malcolm Cowley searched the "slush pile," the unsolicited manuscripts from unknown authors, and found a long roll of Scotch-taped paper by one Jack Kerouac: it became On The Road. Far more writers collaborate than you think. The obvious partners put two names on a title page, like Burdick and Lederer, The Ugly American, or Knebel and Bailey, Seven Days in May. But other partners are ghosts: Norman Mailer, Larry McMurtry, and Wallace Stegner all received extensive help from others without acknowledgement.

The Dana Hand experience

Whether out of innocence or ignorance, Anne and I did not have that difficult a time when we set out to write our first novel. Before collaborating we had long independent careers, writing 18 books under our own names and hundreds of essays, articles, and reviews for major newspapers and magazines, from the NY Times to National Geographic. In writing fiction, we still use research and reporting, but now we create "back stories," what happened to characters before now; and "story arcs," the plan for the narrative that connects time and place, and the characters and their relationships.

What matters to us most is Story: telling a series of events in a gripping, suspenseful manner. Our prime directive is: Keep the Pages Turning. (Maybe we learned how by keeping students awake in lectures and precepts at Princeton; she is a grad alumna, from '81, and for many years she taught writing here and at NYU.)

As collaborators, our methods are consistent: we begin by talking over ideas, then we dive into research, write thousands of notes, and bring those together in a useful order, storyboarding the novel scene by scene. Finally we start writing a draft and passing it back and forth for revision.

No, we don't split up the chapters; one of us starts and the other follows. With Deep Creek,I wrote the first draft and Anne revised; with the current book, Shadow Falls, just the reverse is working. Either way, we revise constantly, going through 9 or 10 drafts, before we share it with our agent in NY. She makes more suggestions, and then a fair copy goes to publishers, who de-cide to buy the book or not, and then on through a long succession of copy editors, proof readers, until it faces the least predictable audience of all, reviewers and the public—many of whom now post their own reviews, generous or not, on Internet blogs and book sites.

Deep Creek is a first novel, by a new name: Dana Hand. We write under a pseudonym, borrowed from our two families, Dana from hers, Hand from mine. The publisher said Howarth and Matthews sounds like a law firm, so we went for something short, unisex, and easy to spell. Our book tells a story based on actual events: In the Pacific Northwest, the 1887 massacre of over 30 Chinese gold miners. Although local whites wanted to ignore the crime and pardon the killers, a brave trio go into wilderness to hunt them down, with surprising results.

In two senses, Dana Hand writes a new kind of fiction: first, it's genuinely collaborative; we each create 50% of the text; and second, we use the very latest computer-assisted tools in research, data analysis, and word processing. One of my Princeton achievements is humanities computing, starting in 1979 with line-at-a-time writing, and continuing today in my film course: we use online readings integrated with streaming video.

To an unusual degree, we controlled the writing and editing of our novel, and because trade publishing is now so chaotic, we also learned advertising and marketing; selling several thousand books on our own. The reward was a sheaf of great reviews, steady sales (still) and, to our surprise and pleasure, a Washington Post listing of Deep Creek as a Best Novel of 2010.

We also wrote a screenplay, and our agents in New York and LA are even now negotiating with a major studio to turn Deep Creek into a motion picture. That is a long way to travel for two kids from the Midwest, and we feel that Princeton helped us, all the way. So let us say to you that collaboration might guide your retirement years. Our dream was a novel; perhaps yours is a string quartet, a ceramics show, or an African safari, of the sort we've led twice for Princeton Journeys.

A double act, I have found, can be its own reward. You discover so much about your favorite partner. In the case of Dana Hand: yes, Anne and I do sometimes specialize. I write the sex scenes. But she does the violence.