Southern Bookman

Oscar Wilde's Wife Rediscovered

Didn't watch "Hemingway and Gellhorn" after all, after Mike Hale's pan in The New York Times convinced me that the HBO movie would be cliched and loaded with bad Hemingway dialogue. Sometime when I want to spend two and a half hours reliving the Hemingway myth, I'll probably watch it on On Demand.

In these days of shrinking print products and signs of cultural decline, small advances are worth celebrating. The London Review of Books has mysteriously shown up at the Barnes & Noble bookstand, and I spent several enjoyable hours on Memorial Day quaffing Guinness Stouts and reading the LBR, particularly Colm Toibin's educational and entertaining review of a new biography of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance, and an annotated edition of Wilde's "The Portrait of Dorian Gray." Sad to say, before reading the review, I was unaware of Wilde's wife, or the two sons that he fathered with her.

As with so many other previously little known women married to famous men, Constance appears an interesting woman, with an admirable, long-tested loyalty to Wilde. "Feminist" critics and historians continue to illuminate the lives of women who played signicant roles in their men's lives of greatness or notoriety. Not only are these women like Constance Wilde or Clover Adams, whose accomplishments don't match those of their husbands but whose lives are worth examining. They also include those such as Gellhorn, whose more substantial achievements were long underappreciated.

I hope the LBR remains for sale at the Barnes & Noble. A few months ago, the Times Literary Supplement made a similar appearance, then disappeared. When I asked a B&N employee, he claimed the TLS hadn't sold enough copies to remain. I hope the LBR makes the cut; the copy I bought recently was the last one, so perhaps it's selling.

Frank Deford's sportwriting life

I listened with pleasure to Bob Edwards interviewing Frank Deford about Deford's recent memoir "Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter." Edwards and Deford, two old pros of the media game, blended perfectly.

That I had read the book added to my enjoyment of the interview on satellite radio. Deford, despite a surprising fondness for worn-out cliches, has the gift of readibility. His stories about his early days at Sports Illustrated and about the athletes he's met went down like fine champagne. Today's ESPN generation might not remember some of the players Deford writes about -- Elgin Baylor, even Bill Bradley -- and could learn that today's hyper sports environment didn't spring up from nowhere.

Referring back to those cliches, and interjectiions such as "Heavens to Betsy," the book does show signs of careless writing and today's lower editing standards. For example, Deford makes a big point of how his name is frequently misspelled DeFord, but then it's misspelled that way throughout the book. I read the memoir in e-book form on my Nook, which made me wonder if ebooks are taken from unedited versions. I've felt with other ebooks that the editing standards for them are even lower than those for printed books. Deford's sentences can have a breathless, run-on quality, as if dictated off the top of his head.

I also wondered about his assertion that he was the first national writer to do an article on Bill Bradley when Bradley was at Princeton, Deford's alma mater. John McPhee's book "A Sense of Where You Are" is my first memory of Bradley. Perhaps Deford wrote his Sports Illustrated profile of Bradley before McPhee wrote his book, excepted in the New Yorker, as I recall. Deford might be right that he was the first one to write about Bradley, but I'd be curious to know for sure.

Deford amusingly writes about his stint as editor of the National, the great failed experiment of a national sports daily. Several of my colleagues at the AJC left to follow the National dream, including the late Van McKenzie, whom Deford warmly remembers.

Listening to Deford and Edwards chat and laugh together like a veteran vaudeville team, I realized that Deford overcomes the drawbacks with his generous, magnanimous spirit. He's a throwback to the days when sports were not taken so seriously and possessed a mythic, magical quality. Today's sports-talk yakkers, stats junkies and overpaid, entitled athletes have taken away a lot of the fun. Deford sounds, and reads, like a man whos's had fun.

Robert Caro, dinosaur rock star

Robert Caro's "The Passage of Power," the fourth volume of Caro's massive Lyndon Johnson biography, is receiving the kind of attention that books usually don't receive any more. The 78-year-old Caro, who has been working for decades on the biography, has been profiled in the New York Times magazine and Esquire, and the book has been reviewed universally, including Bill Clinton's rave on the front page of the Times Book Review.

Ironically in this era when movies for adolescents generally receive this burst of attention, articles on Caro emphasize his old-fashioned techniques. He works in an office in New York City, writing first in longhand, then on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. Shunning the computer and the Internet, he keeps cross-referenced paper files, kept in metal cabinets, in the once familiar manila folders. He's also drawn attention for his obsessive accumulation of details and the long delays in publication of each volume that has appeared so far. Times columnist Joe Nocera recently ridiculed Caro for this need to account for every minuscule piece of Johnson's life. He also disdained Caro's continued delays in finishing the project. At 78, Caro  has not yet examined the bulk of Johnson's presidency.

While Nocera's hit job smacked of an envious middleweight swinging wildly at a heavyweight, Nocera scored some hits. Caro's compulsive acculumulation of facts, ancient techniques and relentless editing and rewriting can seem pathological. Yet, in reading Nocera's piece, I wanted to defend Caro as one of the last, if not the final, upholders of an ancient tradition of scholarship and writing.

I'd recently read Natalie Dykstra's fine biography of Clover Adams, the tragic wife of pioneering American historian Henry Adams. Dykstra shows Henry Adams as very similar to Caro in his constant uncovering of details and stretching projects into mulitiple volumes. I wanted to tell Nocera that Caro deserves honor and acclaim for searching for the truth no matter what it takes.

Still, Adams finished his massive history of the United States under the Jefferson and Madison Administrations much faster than Caro has done with his work. And, the descendant of John Adams and John Quincy Adams later published his "Education of Henry Adams" and "Mount St. Michel and Chartres."

As as reader, I bailed out of the Johnson project after Caro's first two volumes. His look at Johnson's years as the master of the U.S. Senate bogged down in legislative minutia. The New Yorker published an excerpt of the "Passage of Power," Caro's  account of the Kennedy assassination, which captivated me. I'll probably make an effort to read the entire book, which begins with Johnson's effort to gain the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960, examines his lost years as Kennedy's vice president and ends with Johnson's leadership in passing landmark civil rights legislation.  The look at Kennedy's presidency from Johnson's viewpoint promises to give a fresh account of "Camelot."

By the way, the title "The Passage of Power," strikes me as odd. This has a passive tone, as if the power passed to Johnson in some magical, mysterious way. It almost sounds as if it were a normal passage of power, as happens when an incumbent ends his two terms, or loses an election. The title's bland construction denies the historical reality that Johnson gained power because of the assassination.

Encountering the Nook

Now I've entered the e-book world, having received a Barnes & Noble "Nook" for Christmas. I've used the Nook for reading the celebrated "Pulpwood," the collection of magazine writing by John Jeremiah Sullivan. After reading orgiastic reviews by the New Yorker's James Wood and others, I wasn't that blown away by Mr. Sullivan, whose work struck me as remote, and emotionally un-engaged. Too much about him, not enough about his subjects, although he did introduce me to an old blues song I'd never heard of, 'Last Kind Words Blues."

I also used the Nook, which always reminds me of the old nasty word for female genitalia, to purchase Patti Smith's memoir of her friendship with Robert Mapplethorpe. I also downloaded quite a few classics, either free or for $1, such as Alexander Pope's translation of "The Odyssey," James Joyce's "Ulysses," etc. In some ways, I find the Nook easier reading than a book, easier to rapidly skim through, so I thought I could at last finish Joyce's work and others. In searches of what's available on the Nook, I've found some puzzling and distressing omissions. One day, I suppose, I'll try movies, TV shows and movies on "The Nook."

Speaking of magazine writers, I've read two pieces, Wood's and one by David Brooks, that calls all magazine pieces "essays." The term can refer to pieces used to be known as "articles," i.e. factual works based on reporting. I thought the term essay referred to personal, reflective pieces, although an author can write an essay on subjects outside of the self, such as books, paintings, cities, places. Yet, I was curious that the term essay has been expanded. Is this a cover for the blending of fact and invention? Would celebrated pieces such as Norman Mailer's look at Vietnam Moratorium Day, or Tom Wolfe's look at the Merry Pranksters, be called essays, not reporting? 

On a trip to New York, I discovered a recently released collection by a vintage New Yorker writer, Wolcott Gibbs. He was a triple-threat man, doing articles, short stories, theater reviews, "Talk of the Town" pieces. His most famous piece, I suppose, was the paradoy of old Time-ese, "Backward Ran the Sentences Until Reeled the Mind." Reading Wood's piece on Sullivan, which claimed for Sullivan territory covered long ago by New Journalists like Mailer, Wolfe and Gay Talese, I felt a similar dizziness.

 

Farewell, Christopher Hitchens

At Christopher Hitchens' death, I recall in some amazement how much of his work I've read. Before completing his memoirs, "Hitch-22," I regularly read his columns in Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate, as well as collections of his essays. I first started reading him years ago in "the Nation," when he was an unalloyed member of the left. I've also read some of his other books, such as his appreciation of Orwell.

Reading his book reviews for the Atlantic in his recently released volume of collected essays, I return to my earlier opinion that he was at his best writing about literature, although he perhaps was better known as a political and social polemicist. Although he never wrote fiction or poetry, or at least published any, he possessed as a critic a perception of imaginative writers' purposes and how well they accomplished them.

At times in his political writing, I felt he was a fraud, a charlaton with opinions a bit too glibly stated. He was always, though, an engaging writer who challenged thought, an examinatioin of my own opinions and conceptions. I liked his swaggering, wise-guy personality. His takedowns of Mother Teresa, Kissinger and Bill Clinton remain in my memory, bolstering my skepticism and natural propensity to shun idols.

His final writings gave excruciating details about the progress of the cancer that killed him. A final piece in the current Vanity Fair vividly renders the pain and humiliation of a terminal patient. It reads like great fiction, making me wish that he had written novels and short stories.

He dies at 62, the same age my father died of cancer nearly 30 years ago. Hard to imagine the world of thought and language without Hitchens' distinctive voice.

A light on John Berryman's spiritual side

The Catholic intellectual journal Commonweal miraculously reappeared at the Barnes & Noble a few weeks ago, along with the Times Literary Supplement. I hadn't seen either publication on the newsstands for years, and their reappearance sparked my flickering hopes that print culture was not in rapid decline. Alas, the TLS quickly disappeared, and when I inquired, the clerk, with the gravity of an undertaker or a doctor with bad news, said "we are no longer carry it." Not enough buyers, he said. However, Commonweal remained.

The other day, I at last picked up a copy, to read an article on the new translation of the Catholic liturgy, which will be imposed upon us in November. The old English liturgy has been the once recited at Mass since the 1960s, when the Latin Mass passed away in the days of Vatican II. I'd read an article in The New York Times about the new translation, which sounded awkward, convoluted, tone deaf, unmusical, etc., if allegedly accurate.

Unforunately, I found the Commonweal piece on the new liturgy as dull and wooden as the new translation itself is supposed to be. Luckily, though, I found a moving article on John Berryman and his late "Eleven Addresses to the Lord."

The article recounted Berryman's struggles with alcoholism and despair and how a conversion experience in a a rehab center had led to the "Addresses." Tragically, the conversion didn't take, not did the alcoholism cure, and Berryman killed himself by leaping off the Mississippi River Bridge in Minneapolis.

Elizabeth Kirkland Cahill's piece places Berryman as one those spiritual seekers who swerve between great doubt and great faith. His "Eleven Addresses to the Lord," found in his 1970 "Love & Fame," one of the first poetry books I bought as an adult, reflect that conflict. Cahill doesn't even mention Berryman's best-known work, "The Dream Songs," with which he is saddled. It's one of the masterpieces of his generation, but its popularity has taken away attention to Berryman's other work. It's refreshing that she concentrates on his religious poetry.

Many of the poets of Berryman's generation were known for their personality extremes. While Berryman wasn't medically diagnosed as manic depressive like his sometimes admirer Robert Lowell, Berryman showed all of the erratic behavior and mood swings of his peers. 

Berryman's longing for religious grace and spiritual healing was among his most admirable features, along with his handling of the vernacular as a poet and his depth as a scholar and critic. Thanks to Cahill for examining this side of him. The piece made me wish for a "Collected Poems" of Berryman, as has been done for Lowell. Editions of "Dream Songs" abound, but I would love to have all of Berryman's work collected in one place.

 

Garry Wills' Effervescent Adventures

I've read many of Garry Wills' books and articles over the years, finding compatible his mix of erudition and clear writing. I especially liked his book on Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address," in which he explored the rhetorical sources of the great president's work. Another favorite was his small biography of St. Augustine. However, I was disappointed by later works on the Gospels and Jesus' life. These books, although showing Wills' deep learning and strong Catholic faith, I found difficult to read. Whether Wills' talent to keep me absorbed in difficult material had faltered or whether my concentration abilities had declined I cannot say with certainty; probably a bit of both.

One day, I heard Wills interviewed on "The Bob Edwards Show" about his new book, "Outside Looking In, Adventures of an Observer." Wills was captivating in discussing his memoir, based on his reminisces of characters he had encountered during his dual life as a journalist and academic. Wills claimed himself an outsider because he was an academic doing magazine journalism for Esquire's Harold Hayes and the National Review's William F. Buckley and a journalist in the academic world of Northwestern and other schools. Despite his high success in both realms, he didn't really feel like he was really a "member" of each guild. While a a strong Catholic, learned in classic Greek, who recites the rosary every day, Wills also feels apart from the Catholic faith, in opposition to papal doctrines, which he discounts with deep historical knowledge.

The Wills interview made me want to read the book. I searched for it in a Borders in San Francisco, but it was absent from the bio section, although a computer search claimed it was in the store. Then, I found it in my familiar neighborhood Borders. At first I resisted, the went ahead and bought it, one of the few books I've purchased in several months, finding my library excellent in offering new books.

I consumed the somewhat slight book in a couple of days. Like recent memoirs of Larry McMurtry, the Wills' book shows evidence of quick writing and superficiality, yet that very lightness makes it entertaining. Wills encounters a diverse cast of characters, from Jack Ruby to obscure MLK lieutenant James Bevel, to Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, James Hoffa, and others. The book gives a quick and accessible history of political and literary culture from the 1960s through today. The most vivid portrait is of William F. Buckley, showing his zany energy and charm. Also captivating is Wills' account of his relationship with his wife Natalie. "Outside Looking In" was like a letter from an old friend, with whom I share a similar outlook. Yes, I understood perfectly Wills' frequent feeling of being "Outside Looking In."

A Decline in Passion for Books?

Slate media critic Jack Shafer recently lamented that he no longer reveres books as he once did. Shafer said that he once collected books, stacked them in his home, fondled their covers,and honored authors and books' transcendent cultural value. Now, he says, he rarely if ever even attends a book party.

Book party invitations seem a superficial manifestation of a love for books, but I know what Shafer means. I also don't experience the passion for books I once had. Once the publication of "big" fall books excited me, but no more. I still go to bookstores and libraries, yet it more and more feels out of habit than enthusiasm.

My home is loaded with books from years of collecting. A few old favorites I take down to re-read, such as my old graybound "Norton Anthology of English Literare, Vols. I and II," from my college days. I like being surrounded by books, as Anthony Powell's title said, books do furnish a room. Yet, I do not purchase as many books today as I once did. Fewer and fewer books do I find interesting enough to take home on impulse.

Still, I maintain a stack of books beside my living room chair. Although I detect a falloff in my passion for books, I still feel satisfaction at discovering an interesting book at the library. Poetry books especially still excite me. Perhaps I'm just not taken by those books heralded by arbiters like the Sunday New York Times Book Review. Books still matter to me, but as Shafer reflects, their hold is weakening. I am undoubtedly affected my the general drop in books' importance, along with that of newspapers, magazines and literary journals.

Shafer made an interesting comment about the rise of the Kindle and the e-book, that perhaps they would put the emphasis on reading, not the book. I once considered books, with their cover designs, photographs and artwork, as works of art. With the Kindle, they are more and more vehicles of information and entertainment, not artifacts. Shafer could be right that such devices indicate the primacy of content, the irrelevance of form.

New York Times Glows for Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns"

Authors Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Wiener recently complained that The New York Times' literary coverage is biased toward white male authors of "literary fiction." Sniffed Picoult in a Tweet, that venue of well-considered literary thought, "Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren't white male literary darlings." Picoult and Wiener whimpered over the massive attention the Times gave to Jonathan Franzen's new novel "Freedom," although the Times wasn't alone; Time magazine put Franzen on its cover.

If such a bias exists, it apparently doesn't extend to "creative nonfiction," a phrase that makes me uneasy. Recently, the Times has twice reviewed black woman writer Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns," and this week profiled Wilkerson. Wilkerson accomplished the literary trifecta of having her book reviewed by Times literary top gun Michiko Kakutani and receiving a front-page rave on the cover of the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The profile of Wilkerson was done by longtime literary journalist Charles McGrath. Wilkerson is basking in the warmth of the New York Times' many suns.

Her book is a massive look at the "great migration," during which a huge number of blacks fled the Jim Crowe South for Northern and Western cities.  The Times reviews, along with a recent strong review in The New Yorker, call the book a major work. In an inspiring show of perseverance, Wilkerson took 15 years to finish the book, interviewing 1,500 blacks who'd left the South. However, she focuses on the stories of just three people, which raises the question whether she decided to aim for commercial attractiveness rather than in-depth scholarly writing of more appeal to an academic audience.

Wilkerson's title comes from the great black writer Richard Wright, who said that the black migration to the North was in search of the "warmth of other suns." Her book draws attention to the horrid South where black men were frequent lynching victims and segregation was deeply enforced. Wilkerson uncovers strange evidence of how deep the system ran; blacks and whites were forbidden to play checkers in Birmingham parks. That thankfully vanished world today seems unbelievable even to those who lived through it, and writers like Wilkerson are to be commended for showing the brutal reality of those days.

McGrath's profile of Wilkerson is readable, yet superficial. He points out that Wilkerson lives in Atlanta, although she "commutes to Boston, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Boston University." While not elaborating further on that commute, the piece says Wilkerson moved to Atlanta in 2001 "for reasons unconnected to the book." Those reasons are never detailed. However, Wilkerson says that she discovered that "she needed to be here, only I didn't know it." She continues, "I needed to look through the exile's heart and feel that distant, rejecting, hurtful feeling," adding "I needed to come here to see what they left."

Undboutedly, discrimnation and racism remain in the South, yet the piece doesn't delve into how Wilkerson "saw what they left." McGrath, nor Wilkerson, ever reflect upon Atlanta's status as a mecca for Southern business and culture, even in the mean old days of Jim Crow. Atlanta's reputation for tolerance has been overstated --a destructive race riot occurred here in the early 20th century -- yet it still offered blacks prospects for commerce, education and artistic expression sorely lacking in the rest of the South. I would have been interested in Wilkerson's views on Atlanta's history and present status as a center of black achievement. But McGrath apparently didn't follow up on this.

Also crying ouf for further elaboration is the statement "... the book, influenced by Steinbeck's 'Grapes of Wrath' and the films of Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh, rotates in a novelistic way among three main characters whose stories are interspered with broader, more gneral inter-chapters." Steinbeck, Robert Altman and Steven Soderbergh? Creative nonfiction, begone.

"The Warmth of Other Suns" sounds like an deep examination of a major historical subject, although male historians, whether white or black, would wish for similar attention. Also, as McGrath quickly points out, Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize for the Times as a features writer for the newspaper. Cynics will likely wonder whether her connection with the paper played a role in the attention giver her book.

The controversy about whether the Times plays literary favorites could only arise in regard to that newspaper, the only one that runs separate reviews in its regular Arts section and in an independent  Sunday book review. Most newspapers around the country are cutting back or eliminating their book reviews. However, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has recently had a resurgence in running reviews and writing about authors, generally connected with the recent Decatur Book Festival. The AJC in a surprising sign of local knowledge, even had its own superficial profile of Wilkerson.

The disturbing trend of reduced book coverage is countered by an announcement I saw somewhere in Internet land that the Wall Street Journal will soon run a separate book review. While this is welcome, I hope the WSJ continues running as well its outstanding daily book reviews, along with its book coverage in the Friday and Saturday "weekend" sections. I'm suspicious that the arrival of a separate book review will lead to the elimination of book coverage elsewhere.

While alarms keep ringing (sorry, Mr. Orwell) about declines in reading, these literary stirrings show an abiding interest in books and publishing, and not only in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Books on a broad number of subjects keep coming out. And the proliferation of events like the Decatur Book Festival reflect a deep and committed love of reading and books.

Yet disturbing signs are everywhere; I discovered this week that the long-established Louisiana Book Festival has bene canceled, because of state budget cuts. This left me with the chilling recollection that a state austerity movement after Huey Long's downfall led to the demise of LSU's Southern Review, later revived. The distinguished LSU Press and Southern Review were threatened by a first wave of budget cuts last year. With further drastic budget cuts looming, and an aversion to increasing taxes, the LSU Press and Southern Revew are again threatened. This year, they are celebrating 75 years of literary excellence. 

 

New Yorker Writer Off-Base in View of Churchill Speeches

New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik asserted in a recent piece on Winston Churchill that Churchill's famous World War II speeches are examples of abuses of the English language cited by George Orwell in his essay "Politics and the English Language."

After rereading Orwell's essay and the speeches that inspired Britain to oppose Hitler's Germany, I think Gopnik is off-base. Gopnik accuses Churchill of using the hackneyed phrases condemned by Orwell as "dying metaphors."  Yet, Churchill's work is remarkably free of such, although he does have coinages such as "the storm of war." Either Gopnik has a poor understanding of Orwell's points, or he's making a facile attempt at controversy.

Orwell actually praised Churchill as one of the most human of politicians, and named his tragic character in "1984" Winston.

Although he makes several inflated generalizations, Gopnik's piece overall gives a good summary of books on Churchill and his wartime leadership. Churchil has been criticized for insisting on sideshow attacks such as the invasion of Sicily before the direct invasion of Europe, but Gopnik in general supports Churchill's strategic thinking.

Gopnik didn't mention one of the best biographies of Churchill, that of the late William Manchester. Alas, we only have two volumes of Manchester's work, which covers Churchill's early career. Manchester's mental decline in his later years sadly prevented him from finishing the work, and he never examined Churchill's wartime years.