A leap of faith

I finished my book. For any writer, that statement carries tremendous weight. For me, the words are particularly profound, as it took me 17 years to earn the right to say them.

When I began work, Ronald Reagan was president, and I was a cocksure 32-year-old with thick brown hair and a couple dozen recently published articles in Esquire, GQ and the magazine that brought me to Los Angeles -- California. Today, I am a sobered and shockingly gray 49-year-old whose journalistic past lies buried under untold strata of masthead changes and evolutions in reportorial style. In fact, the book took so long that old colleagues who’ve lost track of me could be forgiven if their first thought upon hearing the title, “And the Dead Shall Rise,” is that I’ve produced not a work of nonfiction about the infamous Leo Frank case, but a memoir.

As I await the book’s October publication, I find myself both filled with a sense of accomplishment and beset by unnerving questions. Many of the questions center on what I will do with the rest of my life following a nearly two-decade hiatus from my chosen profession. Can I reenter a business that runs on young legs? Do I want to? But first, I must answer another, even harder question: Why did the book take so long to write?

Extraordinary material

Going in, I knew I faced a difficult task. The 1915 lynching of Frank, a Cornell-educated Jewish factory superintendent, is not only one of the 20th century’s most shocking crimes but one of its most significant, in that it both sparked the creation of the modern Ku Klux Klan and gave purpose to what was then a new organization, the Anti-Defamation League. The lynching, which took place just outside of Atlanta, was the culmination of a series of events that had begun two years earlier with the slaying of a pretty, 13-year-old child laborer named Mary Phagan. Frank’s conviction for the murder -- largely on the testimony of a black, self-confessed accomplice -- set off a battle between Jews and Gentiles, North and South. By the time the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, it was a nationwide cause celebre. Such is its import that in the mid-1980s, when an elderly man who as a boy had been a witness at Frank’s trial came forth with new evidence, the controversy resumed.

It was my 1985 article for Esquire on the revived interest in the Frank case that led to a contract with a publisher. At the outset, I thought the book -- which I conceived of as a double murder mystery and a social history -- would take five or six years. With that lengthy but still manageable time frame in mind, I began making research forays to Atlanta, where I was raised and where before moving to Los Angeles I’d worked for the Sunday magazine of the city’s newspaper, the Journal-Constitution. Because the Frank trial transcript had long ago mysteriously disappeared, I spent months in Georgia’s capital poring over blurry microfilm accounts of the proceedings. When not so engaged, I traveled to other cities -- Boston, Cincinnati and New York -- where either descendants lived or key archives were located. Following these trips, I holed up in my office. There, I organized my notes and -- because I didn’t yet appreciate the full measure of devotion the book would require -- wrote articles for what was then a new movie magazine, Premiere. Just that quickly, five years and most of the advance money were gone.

Running out of cash midway into a project is a common occurrence for writers of nonfiction books. To carry on, one needs either a very uncommon spouse or an unshakable determination -- preferably both.

Luckily, my wife, Madeline Stuart, believed in me and my book. And because she runs a successful business, she agreed to pick up the slack financially. We would approach the next years, she said, as if I were in graduate school; she would pay the bills, I would pursue the dream. (There was a codicil to the deal: When the book was done, we would reverse roles.)

As for my sense of resolve, it was strong, primarily because I realized that my material was extraordinary.

For one thing, I had unearthed a character whose pivotal role in the Frank case had been ignored in every previous recounting of the story. The Georgia-born lawyer William Smith initially had been aligned with the prosecution, but after the trial he switched loyalties to the defense. Not only did his character give me a dramatic pivot for the book, but it offered the chance to avoid what I termed the “Good Jew/Bad Yahoo” thesis that has informed most writers’ views of the case. In short, Smith was a sympathetic Southerner through whose eyes I could present a fresh and nuanced account.

I was equally enthused about another breakthrough. The Frank lynching’s place in American history notwithstanding, it has remained one of the nation’s great unsolved crimes. Unlike most lynching victims -- who were generally black, little known outside their communities and at best protected by indifferent sheriffs -- Frank was white, famous and housed in a well-guarded state institution. To abduct him at night, drive him 150 miles on unpaved roads to the hometown of the girl he was convicted of killing and lynch him at dawn the next day took money and connections. So too did the cover-up -- no one involved was even bothered, much less arrested. Much of my time in Atlanta had been devoted to the job of ferreting out how all of this had worked.

And so despite the fact that I was broke, I believed I was ready to continue with the task at hand. I was unprepared, however, for what happened next. I found myself gripped by a terrible depression that left me unable to work. It would take years before I realized the source of my despond -- it went all the way back to childhood. Though my parents always told me I could do and be anything in life, the manner in which they conducted their own lives conveyed a different message. A fear of taking chances, an inclination toward pessimism -- these traits were unconsciously endorsed in my home. Since adolescence, I had rebelled against them with considerable success. But in the face of the first truly difficult undertaking of adulthood, one that called for genuine self-reliance, I reverted to the scared little boy I’d once been. On July 6, 1995, three weeks before my 41st birthday, I made a telling entry in my journal:

“The childhood antecedents for my present writing difficulties are so powerful. I remember standing outside elementary school on the first day of first grade and refusing to go inside for fear that my shoes would come untied. I didn’t yet know how to tie my shoes and didn’t know what I’d do if they came untied. There’s something here -- a fear of taking first steps, of taking off in my own life.”

In such a frame of mind, my wife’s ability to keep a roof over our heads seemed like evidence of my own ineffectuality. (So too did the fact that many of my friends, as is the way in Los Angeles, were getting rich creating television shows or writing movies.) As for the Frank book itself, its ambitiousness was, oddly enough, also part of my problem. I had been brought up to be wary of greatness. Competence was all right, but greatness was out of reach. It was a form of risky behavior, and risky behavior was for others. Little wonder that my file cabinets full of original legal documents and interviews with the sons and daughters of the men behind Frank’s lynching came to assume the intimidating aspect of a Mt. Everest.

By 1996, 10 years into the book, I had completed only 300 pages -- about one-third of the projected manuscript. On most days, I wrote nothing, preferring instead to clean the house obsessively. On other days, I tore up what I’d written the previous day. And when all else failed, I outlined. (Color-keyed note cards, I told myself, were the ticket.) If I continued at such an agonizing pace, I would not finish until 2016.

I rarely talked about any of this -- not that people often inquired. To ask someone in my condition “How’s the book going?” would have been like asking a lymphoma patient “How’s the cancer going?” It was better not to bring it up. Over countless dinners, both close friends and relatives -- especially relatives -- contorted themselves to avoid engaging me. I did not blame them and was, in a way, thankful for their silence.

The way back

Sometimes, good news does come by telephone, and the call I got in early 1997 from a friend with two terrific books to her credit is a case in point. She knew of my struggles and wondered if I’d be interested in participating in a program she’d taken part in the previous summer -- Outward Bound. At first I was puzzled. Wasn’t this a program for troubled teenagers? It was, she said, but every year, Outward Bound runs a camp for writers and journalists. Among those in my friend’s 1996 group was the anchor of ABC’s “Nightline,” Ted Koppel.

Thus it was that on July 27, 1997, at about 2 p.m., I found myself clinging to a sheer rock wall 100 feet above the watery bottom of an abandoned granite quarry on Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine. Above me, standing on the summit, was the former Green Beret who was in charge. I was begging this combat veteran to pull me up. He would do no such thing, he replied. If I had made it this far, I could make it 10 feet farther -- even if they were vertical and, in my mind, insurmountable.

For what felt like a very long time, I looked for the way. Finally, it presented itself in the form of a horizontal crevice no wider than a knife blade and parallel with my right shoulder. Placing my weight on my left foot, I scissored my right leg up to that crevice. Then, making a leap of calculated faith, I removed my left leg from its toehold and with my weight now braced on my extended right leg, I used my full strength to pull myself up until the crevice that had been above me was my new toehold. I was halfway home. Another, similar move finished the job.

This was one path to becoming unstuck: thoughtful assessment followed by an unwavering application of will. As I was about to discover, however, there was another, more exhilarating alternative. No sooner had I regained my breath than I assumed the next station of the cross -- the one where I would rappel down a different section of the same rock wall I’d just climbed. Nothing about the first time one drops backward off a 100-foot cliff feels right. Nonetheless, after demonstrating the correct way to thread the rope through my hands, the lithe, twentysomething woman who now was my taskmaster assured me that all I had to do was let go. And I did -- cautiously at the start, then with a flourish. As I neared the bottom, I used the spring in my legs to bounce from the side of the quarry in what I imagined was a decent imitation of an Army Ranger.

In truth, I can’t say that when I returned to my desk in Los Angeles the next week, the rest of my book came easily. It did not. All the old, vexing problems still plagued me. It is a big book that not only attempts to bring two baffling murder stories to life but also to use them to illuminate a dark moment in the nation’s past. The final 600 pages took six, tortuous years. But compared with the pace at which I’d previously been working, I raced through these chapters. With only a few pages left to go, my wife -- knowing that I’d be too mortified to have friends attend a party celebrating the finished book if it really wasn’t finished -- sent invitations. Just hours before the guests arrived, I expressed the last chapter to New York.

Now that “And the Dead Shall Rise” is done, I look backward and forward with both dismay and grudging acceptance. I’m appalled that the task took so long, but I’m proud that I didn’t quit and grateful for the surer knowledge of myself that I gained during the excruciating process. In fact, I feel a surprising gratitude toward my parents. In my childhood, books were revered above every other object. This was, in the end, a tremendous bequest, one that sent me into the world with an unassailable sense of purpose. And as for the future, I feel certain that whatever it brings, I will plunge into it with confidence and just the slightest trace of a swagger.