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Interview: Stephan Talty

Stephan Talty is a widely published journalist who has contributed to The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Men’s Journal, Time Out New York, Details, and many other publications. He is the New York Times best-selling author of Empire of Blue Water and Mulatto America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture. His latest release is The Illustrious Dead: The Terrifying Story of How Typhus Killed Napoleon’s Greatest Army.

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BWI: What is it about Napoleon that continues to draw interest? Is it his deeds, his character or the wonderment of what might have been if he had succeeded?

ST: It’s his audacity, first and foremost. He was relentless in how he dared himself to take on the next enemy and I think people respond to that refusal to turn away from challenges, even if he should have.

I also think he had the makings of a good or even great novelist. He could turn and look at his tragedies, even when they were fresh, and turn out these epigrams that Stendhal or Tolstoy would have envied. Very few leaders can see themselves and his contemporaries as fully and deeply as Napoleon could. And he could be very funny.

BWI: In a blog entry for Powell’s back in 2007 you wrote that you were reading War and Peace in preparation for writing what is now The Illustrious Dead. Did you read any other Russian fiction as well? In what ways did reading War and Peace assist you in writing The Illustrious Dead?

ST: Dostoevsky. I read some Russian poems about the invasion, but beyond Tolstoy, I really tried to stick to memoirs and letters of those who were actually involved in the war. Their writing is so good it’s depressing—it’s so far above the war memoirs we see today. It’s the same when you read letters from the Civil War. They were fluent with the language in ways that we’ve lost. And they had an ability to evoke scenes and emotions that just takes your breath away.

BWI: You make the point in the book that there had been successful attempts to stop the spread of typhus particularly on board ships, but that the sharing of medical information was not very widespread. Do you think that any blame should fall on Dr. Larrey for not recognizing or countering the spread of typhus?

ST: No, I don’t. Medicine was really a bespoke art, as I write in the book, and Larrey and his contemporaries can’t be blamed for failing to find the solution to typhus. Healing in the early 19th century was a mixture of folk arts, superstition, trial-and-error method and competing theories that sometimes worked and often didn’t.

Larrey worked under abysmal conditions and was personally quite brave. I do think a certain kind of genius could have put the clues together and come up with an early version of germ theory, because the component parts of the idea were available at the time. But you can’t blame people who tried and failed to understand the hugely complex phenomena that was contagious disease.

BWI: Napoleon picked his officers by merit rather than their social standings. If he had succeeded in Russia do you think he would have structured his government similarly, by merit rather than social status? Do you think that Napoleon would have settled down and ruled or looked for other territories to conquer?

ST: Napoleon was well into his reign by the time he invaded Russia, so he did have a chance to pick people for his government. He believed in “careers open to talent” and in many ways he promoted a society that was far less class-bound than his predecessors. But he wasn’t Thomas Jefferson; he wanted the best men for the positions because he was a pragmatist and he wanted to succeed.

I don’t believe he would have ever been satisfied as an administrator, although he often said that’s all he wished for. I think that, even if his major enemies were defeated and Europe was at peace under the French tricolor, he would still have looked for opportunities for mischief at the very least.

BWI: Both Captain Morgan and Napoleon had a charisma that bound men to them. Were there other common character traits that drew you to their stories? Who is next?

ST: They were both brilliant on the day of battle. They both surprised people by attempting missions that few gave any chance of success. They were both actors, in a way. They enjoyed the drama of their own lives. Risk brought both of them alive. But Morgan could never have conceived of the things Napoleon achieved; he was happy with his little fiefdom in Jamaica.

My next book is on the Dalai Lama and his escape from Tibet in 1959. His Holiness is a very different sort of man, but in that journey across the Himalayas he had to think deeply about what violence does to men and societies. Unlike Morgan and Napoleon, he turned away from it.

BWI: How does your journalistic background influence the writing of your books? Do you prefer journalism to writing books? How does your method of research change for different types of projects?

ST: Journalism—especially at a newspaper—teaches you to write simply and directly, and that is enormously helpful. It really chops your style down and forces you to write declarative sentences and build from there.

My method of research really doesn’t change from book to book. And I prefer alternating between magazine pieces and books. I can’t research a book for eight hours a day week after week without wanting to fly off to Rio or Trinidad. Journalism gives you the chance to dive into the world and then come back to your book.

BWI: As a journalist, what do you think about the problems occurring in the newspaper industry now, such as the many newspapers that are going out of business and the staffing cutbacks? Are more of your colleagues turning to writing books or screen plays?

ST: It’s awful and inevitable what’s happening to newspapers. I’m as guilty as anyone—I read the New York Times online. But as a reader and someone interested in the world it’s thrilling to have so much great writing and reporting available on the web. And I think that what the New York Times and the Atlantic magazine do will never go away—it’s the small towns and medium sized cities that will see some of the less glamorous reporting disappear.

BWI: What do you want people to take away from your books?

ST: Pleasure. And a feeling that they learned something unexpected about the way we live.

BWI: In all the interviews you have done for your books, are there any questions that you wish that you had been asked?

ST: When I was a journalist writing about movies, I always asked actors and directors what they dreamt about when they were making a film. That would be a great question—but I don’t dream about my books.

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