Usually, I’m a writer who has a pretty clear idea of what he intends to do and goes pretty directly at it. Men of Tomorrow, for example, started as an idea to tell the story of the battles over the ownership and control of Superman between his creators and his publishers, both as a human story and as a way of looking at how our ways of creating mass entertainment were hammered out messily in the middle of the last century. About the only big shift it went through in the research and writing was that it tilted more toward the birth of the comic book business out of the immigrant Jewish culture, so I blew through a lot of the later parts of the story (e.g. Jerry Siegel’s creative struggles with Mort Weisinger in the early ‘60s) more quickly.
But I guess just once in my life I had to let myself unmoor the craft, point toward the open water, and see where the wind took me. Because the book I’m pulling together now is nothing like the book I set out to write.
But I guess just once in my life I had to let myself unmoor the craft, point toward the open water, and see where the wind took me. Because the book I’m pulling together now is nothing like the book I set out to write.
The idea came, originally, out of my Men of Tomorrow research. I had become intrigued by the very strange figure of Bernarr Macfadden, bodybuilder turned fitness guru turned publisher of confessional magazines, who represented a lot of what fascinated me about the weird popular culture of the 1920s and '30s but who didn’t really fit into a book about comics. So when I sat down to come up with my next book, I thought of one I called Mad Fortune, about the confessional magazines and other junk magazines as viewed through Macfadden's bizarre life and personality. And that’s the idea I sold to Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
I’d barely gotten into the research on that when I began to realize that it wasn’t enough to hold my interest, that it would inevitably become mainly a biography of Macfadden, and I really didn’t want to write just a biography, especially of a guy who was strange and intriguing but not very deep or complex. So I took it more into Macfadden’s relationship with censorship and the whole battle over what people could and couldn’t reveal in print in the early 20th century—especially as that played out in the overlooked but very influential True Stories, True Crime, True Confessions genre, which Macfadden created. Which I also liked because it brought me back onto the turf of Killing Monsters, where I wrote some, but not nearly as much as I wanted to, about the history of our “culture wars" over mass entertainment.
In researching that, I discovered Anthony Comstock, the great American moral censor of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, who was Macfadden’s first serious antagonist. I found that particularly interesting, because Comstock and Macfadden’s battles were mostly over the latter’s right to run physical fitness exhibitions and publish cautionary stories about venereal disease, which seem so beneficial to us now but were so threatening to so many people then. Somewhere in there, my working title changed to American Madness.
So I started to write about Comstock as Macfadden’s antagonist, although I still saw the story as being mainly viewed through the latter. Which, after a while, was starting to bog me down, although I couldn't figure out why. I hit my first frustrating dead spot.
Then came the stroke of luck that I’m still grateful for: someone else wrote a biography of Bernarr Macfadden. Specifically, Mark Adams did, with his very entertaining and highly recommended Mr. America. Mark was very generous and gave me a whole stack of notes and research contacts he’d compiled, but even more than that he made me rethink my book. Bernarr Macfadden isn’t like Abraham Lincoln, the kind of guy who’ll support an infinite number of biographies. I knew that I needed to reduce the Macfadden part of my story significantly and crank up the Comstock and other elements, so no one could mistake this for “another book about that crazy bodybuilder from a long time ago.”
Which was hugely liberating, because that’s when I realized how stifled I was feeling by having to focus everything on the crazy bodybuilder. And I hadn’t been able to see that, because I was holding onto this idea that the book shouldn’t change too much from my original conception. Like I said at the beginning, I wasn’t the kind of writer who did that kind of thing.
Luckily, my patient and forgiving editor, Eric Chinski, supported me in the new direction, and the book was reborn as The Undressing of America. Now it was about the whole cultural battle over exposure, concealment, sex, health, privacy, the body, and all that stuff—a battle we’re still feeling the repercussions of—as it developed through the decades of Comstock and Macfadden's careers from 1865 to 1930. The focus would still be on those two, and their legal conflicts would still be the central action, but it would include a huge number of other people around them: Mencken, Dreiser, Ziegfeld, Rutherford B. Hayes, all kinds of people.
The thing was, the more I wrote about Anthony Comstock, the more I realized that he just didn’t make sense to a modern consciousness unless you understood where he came from. His moral thinking was so preposterously black and white, his assaults on the most innocuous (and most valuable) material were so violent, that he could only come off as some sort of delusional crank—which made it impossible to understand how he had so much public support and so much political power.
To make that comprehensible, I had to tell the story of the antebellum reformers from whom he sprang and who provided the momentum for his crusade, those complex and extraordinary people who launched the temperance movement, the YMCA, and abolitionism—and first made “indecent” publications a target of holy wrath—because they believed they were founding the Biblical millennium on earth. Which required a new front section of the book, a sort of long prologue, that I at first thought could start in 1851 (founding of the YMCA), then realized would have to start in 1840 (arrival of a man named Morris K. Jesup in New York), and finally would have to stretch back to 1827, when moral combat broke out over a ballet dancer’s lifting skirt.
At a certain point, after I’d researched most of that and written a big chunk of it, I realized that this was all just too much for one book to handle. I found the story of “America’s first culture war” more interesting (at least for the moment) than any of the rest of it, and I knew that I could never give it its due if I had to squeeze it into the first quarter of a book covering an entire century.
The punchline of all of this is...a book that started essentially as a biography of Bernarr Macfadden won’t have Bernarr Macfadden in it at all. This one’s going to have to cut off before he was born. I still have (and like) the rough draft of the book in which he’s a major player, the original Undressing of America, and I’ll be happy to see that one published as a follow-up to this one. With this book to stand on and refer to, I’ll feel much more confident about telling Comstock’s story. (And, if nothing else, I’ll understand Comstock’s background much more myself. One of the functions of writing a book is so the writer can understand his own material...but that’s another post.)
Basically, I’ve written a book and its sequel. Except I wrote the sequel first, so the book that gets published first is the one I wrote second. I’ve spent years researching and writing two big books at once, neither of which will look much at all like the book I originally contracted to write. Hardly what I set out to do—but now I can’t really imagine doing it differently.
The hard part now is the title. The Undressing of America was conceived for the second half of the story, and it’s a perfect title for that. But after years of hyping “my next book, The Undressing of America,” it’ll feel strange to come out with some other book and have to explain that Undressing is still out there. But that I think I’ll discuss with my editor.
Of course, there’s also the other “next book,” Lost Hero, my collaboration with Nicky Wheeler-Nicholson, which I’m certain will be pretty much what it's been planned as, because Nicky’s going to make damn sure it is. I’ve kind of forgotten what that feels like, honestly. It’ll be a nice change.
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