For Christmas, my daughters gave me The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry. I was glad they did… Talk about timely and relevant! How better to gain perspective than reading about the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918 to 1919?

The book does cast our pandemic in a new light. For 13 months, reporters have written about the coronavirus—the deaths, the lockdowns, the failures of public policy. As informative as they are, they make for dreary reading. And writing, too: can we agree using the word “surge” in connection with the coronavirus has become a lazy habit?

To read The Great Influenza is to appreciate how milder our plague has been; how much milder.

Have you contracted or grieved a loss from the virus? A century ago, you may have died. Nearly half of the Spanish flu’s victims were in their 20s and 30s.

Are you appalled at our death toll of 561,000 as of today (April 12)? A century ago, our body count was not just worse or twice as worse; it was three times worse.

The Spanish flu killed 675,000 Americans in a population of 105 million, according to scientists. That comes out roughly to 1 in 200 people. Applying that percentage to the U.S. population of 328 million last year, 1.6 million Americans would be dead. That’s larger than the populations of Hawaii, New Hampshire, or Maine.

Do you think policies such as lockdowns and universal mask mandates are overly prescriptive? A century ago, with President Woodrow Wilson more intent on defeating Germany in the Great War than the Spanish flu, the U.S. government was downright repressive.

Finding a magazine or newspaper critical of the government was a challenge. As the result of the Espionage Act of 1917, the Postmaster General could make sure it didn’t hit your doorstep. To make matters worse, saying or writing anything “disloyal, scurrilous, or abusive language about the United States government” was illegal. As the result of the new Sedition Act, you could be thrown into jail. Some people were, including a former presidential candidate and a sitting member of Congress (!), both socialists.

The Great Influenza has been called definitive. I think it could be a one-credit college course by itself. Whatever the case, by all accounts Mr. Barry is an authority on modern pandemics. Witness his interview with New Yorker Editor David Remnick 16 years after his book came out.

Even at 564 pages, The Great Influenza is no slog. It’s not “dull” or “dry,” the watchwords of academic (and many non-academic) histories. It’s not weighed down by understatement, which as Tom Wolfe wrote once, was the characteristic flaw of most journalism.

The voice of the narrator… was one of the great problems in non-fiction writing. Most non-fiction writers, without knowing it, wrote in a century-old British tradition in which it was understood the narrator shall assume a calm, cultivated and, in fact, genteel voice. The idea was the narrator’s own voice should be like the off-white or putty-colored walls that Syrie Maugham popularized in interior decoration… a ‘neutral background’ against which bits of color would stand out. Understatement was the thing. You can’t imagine what a positive word “understatement” was among both journalists and literati ten years ago. There is something to be said for the notion, of course, but the trouble was by the early 1960s understatement had become an absolute pall. Readers were bored to tears without understanding why. When they came upon that pale beige tone, it began to signal to them, unconsciously, that a well-known bore was here again, ‘the journalist,’ a pedestrian mind, a phlegmatic spirit, a faded personality, and there was no way to get rid of the pallid little troll [emphasis mine], short of ceasing to read. This had nothing to do with objectivity and subjectivity or taking a stand or “commitment”—it was a matter of personality, energy, drive, bravura… style, in a word… The standard non-fiction writer’s voice was like the standard announcer’s voice… a drag, a droning …

 

Use Repetition to Achieve Clarity

 Mr. Barry’s voice was clear, too. The book argues that Mother Nature can be a devil. To emphasizes this theme, it repeats words and phrases.

In a passage about the flu outbreak in late 1918, Mr. Barry uses one word to distinguish between the few heroic medical scientists and the rest who were humdrum:

Most, simply, were not good enough to address the problem with any hope of success. They tried anyway… A few investigators, possibly as few as a dozen, were smart enough, creative enough, knowledgeable enough, skilled enough, and commanded enough resources they were not a fool’s errand. They could confront this disease with at least the hope of success.

In a later chapter and throughout the book, Mr. Barry sprinkles the phrase “This was influenza, only influenza” throughout its pages. He wants to emphasize American’s naivete toward the Spanish flu.

So highly contagious was the infectious disease it sickened tens of millions of Americans and hundreds of millions worldwide. “This was influenza, only influenza,” he adds. A minority of the 2-3 million Americans who developed pneumonia suffered from terrific earaches and headaches and bleeding, so much so some doctors compared the effects of the flu to that of poison gas or the pneumonic plague. Yet even one brilliant pathologist discounted the symptoms. “It was only influenza,” he wrote. (Aren’t you glad Americans’ attitudes became sophisticated this time around?! … Or maybe not).

 Use Everyday Analogies

 While reading The Great Influenza at other times, I admired its plain-spoken concision. Some reviewers criticized the book as overlong. I say many sentences are brief and to the point.

In The New York Times, reviewer Barry Gewen praised the book’s writing. “(John Barry) is a good teacher, in part because he assumes his readers don’t know anything,” Mr. Gewen wrote. “He explains the technical stuff clearly, with nice, homey analogies: the difference between antigen drift and antigen shift, for instance, is presented in terms of football players changing their uniforms.”

From the Locker Room to Your Libraries and

Bookstores

Some background is in order: Mr. Barry was more than a former college football player (he played nose guard); he was a graduate assistant coach on a top-ranked Division I team. In his mid-20s, he was on the staff of the 1973 Tulane squad that finished in the AP college football poll top 20.

This is, for a non-academic historian, an unusual background. It also helps explain an unappreciated virtue of The Great Influenza: it marries style with substance.

Mr. Barry would have talked with both Tulane’s wide receivers about their technique and the head coach. He may have emphasized his points by repeating the same words. He would have spoken in words they understood. He would have evaluated his players and the other teams’ fairly.

He had no choice, really. To be incomprehensible, diffident, or ignorant would have put his job at risk.

Fulfilling those duties is solid training for a popular historian. In an interview, I asked Mr. Barry if his football background explained his writing career. “I don’t think coaching football has much to do with my writing,” he wrote in an email. “It’s entirely separate.”

With all due respect to Mr. Barry, I disagree.

His own words undermine this assertion.

In “Flexible Blocking Patterns: Football, Politics, and Other Blood Sports,” one of several undated articles he kindly sent me, Mr. Barry wrote the following paragraph: “It seems to me that a football coach—and maybe a politician committed to doing something as well—and a writer resemble each other in one way: each sits at the center of chaos and through vision and will, tries to order that chaos; more precisely, that vision acts like a crystal to precipitate an order out of possibilities that already exist.”

Mr. Barry sees writing and coaching as challenges for the heart and head. Each seeks to find an underlying unity, a workable organization or structure, a successful system.

Also, coaching football may have given Mr. Barry’s journalistic career an important break.

As a 39-year-old-reporter in 1987, he was given near-total access to House Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, a Democrat. He parlayed that gift into his first book, The Ambition and the Power: The Fall of Jim Wright: A True Story of Washington (1989). How did he pull off this journalistic coup? As he wrote in the essay, “I have long believed Wright agreed to cooperate because his first ambition in life was to be a football coach and I had coached football.”

To be sure, coaching football alone was not Mr. Barry’s secret sauce.

In a later interview, he said growing up he wanted to be a writer and a medical scientist. That makes sense. He put both qualities on display in The Great Influenza. What’s more, his journalistic chops shine in The Ambition and the Power, or in the sections I have read so far at least, the prologue and first chapter.

Nevertheless, Mr. Barry’s background as a football coach helps explain how a writer known for depth and a journalistic coup received style points from critics rather than takeaways.

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