Ten Years, One Book

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By WARREN GOLDSTEIN

"So tell me," my wife, Donna, said one day, not exactly out of the blue, "is this book going to take 10 years?"

Since I'd been assuring everyone — my publisher, myself, my family, and the living subject of my biography, the former Yale University chaplain William Sloane Coffin Jr. — that this was a five-year project (well, maybe six), I leaped to defend myself. "No, no, impossible, unthinkable." The capacity for self-deception is powerful.

Three years earlier, we'd been taking a late-spring walk in the park while our kids played, when my wife asked me: "Why don't you do the Coffin biography?"

A longtime United Church of Christ minister, Donna had been serving as Yale's first associate chaplain when we met (I had been in graduate school), and she had known for years the former chaplain who had become a famous antiwar and antinuclear activist. When she wrote to Coffin to thank him for giving the keynote address at the 200th anniversary of our town in New York, she inquired, fatefully: "Who's doing your biography?"

"No one," he answered. "Biographies are of dead people." He wrote again soon, however, hooked. "Do you think anyone would read it?"

I loved the idea. I had written previous books on sports history, but Coffin's life would get me into material I was teaching — the civil-rights and antiwar movements — as well as stuff I'd lived through but wanted to know historically: Yale, religion and politics, the 60s. I wrote him, and he began checking the idea (and me) out. He invited us to Vermont to meet his wife, Randy. After a night of drinking far too much (years later he told me my bottomless glass was no accident), during which I (apparently) confessed to my personal ambitions for the book, we had a deal.

Now an assistant professor, I immersed myself in the masses of material in their attic, spending days gently unfolding onionskin letters, photocopying thousands of pages of correspondence that covered decades of experience — lugging the rest down Interstate 91 to my study. Then I really hit pay dirt by ending up in possession of the rediscovered files of the Yale chaplain's office during Coffin's tenure: 23 disorganized boxes' worth.

My study, formerly an elegant library with excellent afternoon light, had become an archive. I thought it was heaven. Donna felt that we had regressed to graduate school.

We embarked on "life with Bill," listening to his sermons in the car, watching them on TV, arguing about his mother's parenting. For all the focus on the newest member of our family, this felt like a heady time. I got a book contract (with a delivery date in three and a half years) and a grant for the next academic year to finish the research and start writing. I didn't.

What went wrong? Well, the project was much bigger than I anticipated. The papers seemed endless, and there was a larger context to study. I said that to no one.

Until Donna began asking about chapters. How many had I done? Had I developed a schedule for the rest of the book? Donna's a planner. But since I didn't have good answers, worried that what I'd written wasn't very good, and occasionally wondered what I'd gotten myself into, I resented those "intrusions" into "my book." I tried to work harder; family life became more threatening. The idea of taking a long weekend away scared me. I never went on vacation without bringing chapters to edit.

Just as many people feel jealous of a spouse's attractive boss or close colleague, Donna found herself helplessly resentful of a project (her idea!) that absorbed so much of my time, intellectual energy, and emotional intensity. But how else could I write about the antiwar movement, say, or about Coffin's marriages and how they failed in a blur of booze, affairs, and inattention?

Was the book more important than she was? Not exactly, but sometimes, well, yes. After all, while a good marriage engages and excites our strongest and most vulnerable selves, and sometimes our souls, those "best parts" aren't predictable. I knew, however, that every single time I sat down at my desk, the book demanded that I work at the absolute peak of my intellectual and writing ability. So what had begun as a book project became a far more dangerous liaison.

I didn't accompany Donna on her sometimes job-related jaunts to exciting places (Hungary, Morocco, China); instead, I got to do single parenting. That didn't help the book progress much, and resentment flowed freely both ways.

Four years older, with a national reputation established when I was still studying for orals, Donna hoped this book would help me catch up to her — in salary and prestige. Sexism had more arrows in its quiver than either of us had realized. I didn't mind being out-earned nearly as much as my feminist wife minded out-earning me. My advance, the largest either of us had received, was long gone, and who knew when the second half would come? Freelancing made money but slowed down the book. We both dreaded family-budget discussions.

Some of Donna's friends began dropping unpleasant little hints about the book, wondering if something was "wrong." Our own conversations took on a testier tone. In retrospect, the wonder to me is that the book ever got written (note the passive voice). Donna took another position. We moved, she was forced to travel. We raised three children through adolescence with the most egalitarian parenting I knew. Home more, I handled more trips to the orthodontist and Hebrew school. I also got a new job, earned tenure, became department chair, won an NEH fellowship, worked on Ken Burns's baseball documentary, and developed a freelance-writing career.

But I completed the book only when I finally faced the reality that it was going to take 10 years, started ignoring the conversations in my head about who wasn't going to like it, claimed the imperfect product as mine, and made a schedule I kept to.

One day it was done; a year later it came out, and I didn't get a single bad review. Coffin had called me on Christmas Eve, bound galleys in hand, to tell me I'd nailed the only thing he really cared about — the relationship between religion and politics.

The book got me promoted to full professor, brought me some nice speaking and writing gigs, and earned me my university's scholarship prize — but no Pulitzer, no film deal, no prestigious job offers. And our marriage? Well, because we really do love each other, and therefore, deep down, each of us is willing to allow the other to be who we are, we survived and even celebrated our 25th anniversary last year.

I also know, viscerally, that we couldn't take another go-round. For several years, I stayed away from even the idea of another book. Then one came calling, with a tight timeline, and I did it in six months. As I write, I'm fondling the copy that arrived in yesterday's mail.

Warren Goldstein is chairman of the history department at the University of Hartford. He is author of William Sloane Coffin Jr.: A Holy Impatience (Yale University Press, 2004).