Southern Bookman

Farewell, Julia Reed

Like fellow Mississippian Willie Morris, Julia Reed came home after a career in New York City magazine journalism to give voice to a new South.

Reed, who died at age 59 Friday in Newport, R.I. after a long battle with cancer,  first gained fame at Newsweek and Vogue, where she wrote profiles of the Clintons, Bushes and a range of entertainment, fashion and social celebrities.

After moving to New Orleans and her hometown of Greenvillle, Miss., she expressed the viewpoint of an upper-class, successful Southern woman who still revered the region's traditions, a group that had been underrepresented in Southern literature.

Reed's columns in "Garden & Gun" set the tone for the glossy publication, which built a strong readership as other magazines declined with articles and photos on Southern exceptionalism and nostalgia, travel, opulent lifestyles, upper-class entitlement, and music, food, literature, art, film and theater.

Born in Greenville, Miss., a moderate enclave of the race-tortured state, Reed was the daughter of businessman Clarke Reed, chairman of the state's then marginal Republican party.

The town, devastated by the 1927 Mississippi River flood, was known as the home of Pulitzer Prize winning editor Hodding Carter Jr.'s Delta Democratic Times.

"Lanterns on the Levee" author William Alexander Percy, his nephew, novelist Walker Percy, and Civil War historian and novelist Shelby Foote also lived in the Delta city. Foote and Walker Percy grew up together in in Greenville and were lifelong friends.

The Delta Democrat Times announced Reed's death with a long appreciation by biographer, historian, TV commentator and former Newsweek editor Jon Meacham, whose wife, Keith, was Reed's partner in an Internet-based business selling Southern-themed lifestyle products.

Meacham, who returned home to Nashville, Tenn., after his New York publishing years to write presidential biographies and other books, quoted novelist Jay McInerney, who called Reed Mississippi's answer to Dorothy Parker

Reed's personal essays for Garden & Gun and books on entertaining, food, drink, fashion and decorating also recalled Nora Ephron and the late Atlanta Constitution columnist Celestine Sibley. Like Rick Bragg, Reed built a loyal audience writing about Southerners clinging to their culture in a time of bewildering change.

But her voice was her own: distinctive, brassy, self-deprecating and rueful. She wrote with an authority that invited readership, no matter the subject. As with other writers of humor, her work was tinged with sadness.

Following other well-bred Southern girls in leaving home for her education, Reed attended prep school at the Madeira School for Girls in McClean, Va., before her college years at Georgetown and American University.

Reed's Madeira connection led to her first byline at age 19, when she was a university student working part-time at Newsweek. The magazine's editor sent her  to the campus to do an article after Madeira headmistress Jean Harris was accused of killing her lover, Dr. Herman Tarnover, the Scarsdale doctor.

A leading member of the Southern literary community, Reed expressed a post-racial Southern urbanism that flourishes in Greenville, Charleston and Birmingham as well as Atlanta, New Orleans, Charlotte, Houston and Dallas.

Along with books on New Orleans' hedonistic pursuit of food and drink, Reed wrote one of the best chronicles about the city's recovery from Hurricane Katrina, "The House on First Street: My New Orleans Story." She moved into the lavishly decorated Garden District home four weeks before the hurricane caused devastating flooding across the city.

Reed recently built a house that she called "the Folly" near her parents' home in Greenville. The house, featured in a recent photo spread in Garden & Gun, blended traditional Southern styles with modern luxury.

Her contributions to her native state included the Mississippi Delta Hot Tamale Festival, which raised money for education. Like Morris, she was honored by Mississippi's state government.

Among other great writers from the state, her work belongs to all of us.

 

 

 

W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939" speaks to present national emergency

After ignoring the Trump fog machine's malicious lies, I turned with hope and dread to September's arrival.

The foreboding and expectation recalled W.H. Auden's "Sept. 1, 1939," written as the world plunged toward World War II.

Auden's poem, which he disowned later in life, has the line "we must love one another or die," a pressing admonition for our times.

Writing about Hitler and Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, the poet praised and reproached America's complacent democracy. Little did he know the White House would be desecrated 80 years later by an idiotic, egomaniac American fascist.

The poem references the dives on New York's 52nd Street. Those jazz clubs where Charlie Parker played - Saturday marks the 100th anniversary of his birth in Kansas City - no longer exist.

Auden talks about New York's soulless skyscrapers, "the strength of Collective Man." Now, buildings at a height unimagined in Auden's time cast giant shadows over blighted streets where bebop was born.

Covid-19 has shuttered Auden's bars and theaters. After last spring's raging emergency, New York is one of the few places in America that has subdued the virus. The museums are reopening, but Broadway's lights remain shrouded in darkness.

People turn to poems like Auden's in times of national emergency. The popularity of "Sept. 1, 1939" soared after Sept. 11, 2001.  As another fateful September looms, the poem's message remains urgent.

 

SEPTEMBER 1, 1939 by W.H. Auden
	I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame.

After Hurricane Laura's devastation, Lake Charles the latest Gulf Coast city with broken dreams

My home state mourns another Louisiana city devastated by a hurricane.

Before Hurricane Laura pummeled Lake Charles just after midnight Thursday, the hometown of Tony Kushner and Lucinda Williams was already hurt by the Covid-19 pandemic and the oil industry's decline.

As often happens when hurricanes strike, terrible aftershocks kept coming. A chemical fire spewed toxic smoke Thursday morning as daylight revealed the horrifying extent of the damage.

Like other mid-sized Louisiana cities, Lake Charles pursues educational and cultural aspirations beyond its roughneck economy of  oil refineries, fishing and gambling. The city is the home of McNeese State University, and boasts an excellent symphony and local theater. The Calcasieu Parish school system pursues quality education for its students.

At the western edge of Louisiana's Cajun culture, the last Interstate-10 stop in Louisiana before Texas' petro fiefdoms Beaumont, Nederland, Orange and Houston, Lake Charles is one of those places where different cultures fuse.

Bracketed  by Lafayette and Lake Charles, the area's music mixes Cajun dance tunes, Western swing, country and western, and rock. The predominantly Cajun cuisine also embraces Mexican and black flavors, and Texas barbecue.

The city has inspired art: Kushner's musical "Caroline or Change" is set there, and Williams dedicated a song to her native city. Lake Charles is the setting of the Band's "Up on Cripple Creek."

Say a prayer for Lake Charles, a striving, ambitious town that must rebuild.

 

Farewell, Gail Sheehy

Gail Sheehy's "Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life" was a guide for anxious baby-boomers hitting the shoals of middle age.

The 1976 best-seller turned into a career project for Sheehy, who died Monday at age 83 in Southhampton, N.Y., from pneumonia complications.

Sheehy wrote several other "Passages" books as the self-important postwar generation tumbled toward old age. While derided by some for its glib generalizations, "Passages" was one of those books that capture the spirit of its era.

Before "Passages" brought her national fame, Sheehy was known in New York City as one of the stars of the old New York Herald Tribune and its successor, New York magazine. She was one of the few women writers who flourished at the Trib, whose lineup included Jimmy Breslin, Tom Wolfe and Dick Schaap in its glorious dying days.

In moving from the Trib's "estrogen" zone, the women's section, to the "testosterone" news department, Sheehy caught the attention of editor Clay Felker, the innovative co-founder of New York magazine. Sheehy and Felker entered into a torrid relationship that eventually led to a long-term marriage.

Along with influencing the New Journalism and inventing the city magazine formula of service articles, personality pieces, neighborhood reporting and investigative articles, Felker after leaving New York magazine bought Esquire and gave it new life. When his inventiveness lost favor with a new generation, he taught journalism at Columbia University.

Sheehy's "Daring: My Passages" is one of my favorite journalistic memoirs, an entertaining account of the high-powered New York cultural, social and political world. I particularly remember her recollections of the lavish dinner parties she and Felker hosted, whose guests ranged from Gloria Steinem to Henry Kissinger.

Along with the inspiration for "Passages," Sheehy recalls her journalistic career, from the heady days at the Trib through her work for New York and Vanity Fair.

One of her biggest New York magazine scoops was discovering the destitute relatives of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Edith Ewing Bouvier Beale and Edith "Little Edie" Bouvier, living in a run-down Long Island mansion. The article resulted in the "Grey Gardens" play and documentary.

She also discussed her article about going undercover to expose prostitution at the staid Waldorf Astoria. While she admitted in an introduction to the New York magazine piece that she'd invented characters, Felker deleted her disclaimer, according to her New YorkTimes obituary. Despite a wave of criticism that she had violated journalistic ethics, the article made a stir, and was turned into a movie.

For journalists, Sheehy repeated Felker's questions he asked a writer while producing an article: Why are things the way they are? (Sniff out the latest trend); What led to this? (history); How do things work? (who is pulling the strings or making the magic or making fools of us); How is the power game played in your corner of New York?

Sheehy's death came only a couple of weeks after that of Pete Hamill, another member of New York City's glorious journalistic era launched in the 1960s. A stellar generation is making its final passage. 

 

 

 

Informal study paid off for Elena Ferrante translator Ann Goldstein

Ann Goldstein's renown as the English translator of Elena Ferrante's novels began with impromptu Italian lessons.

A longtime copy editor at The New Yorker, Goldstein and some of her colleagues formed an evening group in the 1980s to learn Italian, according to New York Times writer Joumana Khatib's profile of Goldstein published in Monday's Arts section of the newspaper.

The group's purpose was to read Dante's "Divine Comedy" in the poet's original language.

From those informal lessons, rather than grad school studies, Goldstein gained the proficiency to be named Ferrante's translator by Europa Editions, Ferrante's publisher.

Building upon her fame as the translator of Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, Goldstein translated Ferrante's new novel, "The Lying Life of Adults," which comes out Sept. 1.

A departure from Ferrante's "My Brilliant Friend" saga, the book tells a different story about a young girl growing up in Naples's poor neighborhoods.

Goldstein's translations are credited with boosting the popularity of Ferrante's "Brilliant Friend" quartet, the story of two women's lifelong friendship beginning with their childhoods in Naples.

Known as a "literal translator," Goldstein captures the essence of Ferrante's language.

The New Yorker's copy desk chief when she retired from the magazine in 2017, the 71-year-old Goldstein has translated a number of other Italian books. She supervised the translation of Primo Levi's three-volume complete works.

While most readers today limit themselves to Dante's "Inferno," Goldstein's group also finished "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso." Goldstein in The Times article recommends completing the entire "Divine Comedy, " which established Dante's Florentine dialect as  the standard Italian language.

Her immersion in Dante gave Goldstein a grounding in the language's complexities. As revealed in the wonderful HBO adaptation of Ferrante's novels, Italians speak colloquial and more formal versions of the language. Goldstein's translations show facility in both.

Goldstein learned Italian at a relatively mature age, and without undergoing a formal higher-education curriculum. Her story shows the benefits of lifelong education and intellectual curiosity.

 

 

 

New Orleans haunted by Katrina and Houston remembers Harvey as new storms threaten

As the 15th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans approaches, the city is threatened by two tropical storms.

While tropical storm Marco weakened Monday morning, it will still bring flooding to New Orleans and southeastern Louisiana if it invades the state as expected.

Tropical Storm Laura reportedly will grow into a Category 2 hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico and make landfill Wednesday evening somewhere from Texas to Louisiana.

Houston, which suffered severe flooding from Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, is also keeping an eye on the new storms. Marco was expected to arrive in the Texas oil city as a tropical depression, which will bring flooding. The nation's fourth-largest city could also be hit by Laura.

We members of the Louisiana/Gulf Coast diaspora are lighting candles and saying prayers that our beloved coastal cities are spared death and destruction from this year's storms.

The sister coastal cities are already under siege from Covid-19. Major storm damage will further stress hospitals and emergency services battered by the corona virus.

Katrina brought enormous changes to New Orleans. It became a wealthier, whiter city as gentrification spread, lessening its cultural uniqueness.

Violent crime dropped, but murders and shootings have rebounded during the pandemic, as has happened in other cities. The flood protection system has been strengthened, though probably not enough, and the city has added more green space.

As with Katrina in New Orleans, Hurricane Harvey exposed the racial, economic and social divisions in Houston.

Houston, the South's most diverse city, has improved flood control, but the storms will worsen as climate change intensifies.

New Orleans and Houston, both built on sinking land surrounded by water, are endangered, no matter how much money is spent to lessen their vulnerability.

As climate change raises the hurricane threat, New Orleans and Houston will be a perpetual storm target. Temperatures will get warmer and rising sea levels increase the flooding risk even without rain. 

Both cities likely will be abandoned one day, relics of history rather than livable places.

Brian Kemp gets shivers over AJC's report on coronavirus failings

Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp this week echoed predecessor Gene Talmadge's attacks on "them lying Atlanta newspapers."

Kemp expressed his anger at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's article about a White House report that chastised Georgia for having the highest rate of covid-19 cases in the nation. Kemp accused the newspaper of playing "pandemic politics" and spreading panic.

"I will tell you that the media only focuses on the bad numbers," Kemp said. "They never focus on the good numbers."

Filling in for Talmadge nemesis Ralph McGill, AJC Executive Editor Kevin Riley noted that the newspaper mentioned a recent moderate decline in hospitalizations and new cases in Georgia, along with a reduction in positive tests.

But even with that improvement, Georgia led the nation in new cases, a Trump administration task force said, urging increased action to stem the disease.

"Though conditions in some areas of Georgia have improved modestly in recent weeks, the White House Coronavirus Task Force said Georgia remains in the red zone for severity of the outbreak as measured by rate of case growth and test positivity," the article noted.

After Kemp's blast at The AJC, Pulitizer Prize winner Mike Luckovich published a cartoon Friday depicting Kemp in a cemetery filled with Covid-19 victims' graves. Kemp's quote bubble says "why not focus on the good numbers?"

Kemp's feud with The AJC is one of the most heated between the state's executive and its most influential newspaper since the Talmadge years. In Talmadge's day, the Journal and Constitution were separate newspapers and bitter rivals, blasting Talmadge with different voices.

The merged newspaper has much less power, especially statewide, then it did in the era before TV and the Internet.

But the AJC's in-depth reporting on the Kemp administration's failures to control the coronavirus pandemic shows that strong local newspapers remain vital to American democracy.

 

William Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner" presaged today's cultural wars

Friday marks the 189th anniversary of the start of Nat Turner's rebellion, a four-day slave insurrection in 1831 that killed 60 white people in rural Southampton County, Va.

White novelist and Virginia native William Styron in 1967 published "The Confessions of Nat Turner," narrated by Turner, the revolt's leader.

Styron imagined much of Turner's character and the bloody events of the uprising, having little historical documentation beyond Turner's own confession in 1831 to prosecuting attorney Thomas Ruffin Gray, published a few years later as "The Confessions of Nat Turner: The Leader of the Late Insurrection in Southampton, Va."

While Styron's book won the Pulitzer Prize and initially received acclaim from predominantly white critics, black intellectuals protested his depiction of Turner, the blacks who joined the rebellion and white slave owners. They claimed that Turner was a heroic black figure and that Styron reduced him to a cultural stereotype. Styron indignantly responded that Turner was virtually unknown, even among the black community, and that as a novelist he had the right to re-imagine historical events.

The black anger culminated in the 1968 book "William Styron's Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond." In Styron's "This Quiet Dust," a 1982   collection of his non-fiction writing, the author said that his book "was the first novel in the long annals of American publishing to evoke such an immediate, entirely hostile attack."

Such attacks have become more frequent in recent years, with authors accused of cultural expropriation if they imagine characters of a different race, gender or sexual orientation. Styron's daughter, Alexandra, in a recent Atlantic essay compared the outrage over her father's book with that engendered recently by the publication of Jeanine Cummins' "American Dirt." 

In the essay, Alexandra Styron wondered if her father's book would even be published in today's cultural climate. She concluded that it would be, if written by a major author such as her father. But a little-known writer likely would be censored.

She points out that William Styron's close friend James Baldwin encouraged him to write the book and assume the voice of Nat Turner. Ralph Ellison also praised the book, as did black historian John Hope Franklin in a review in the Chicago Tribune, the only one written by a black writer in the thousands of newspapers that then existed.

Historian Eugene D. Genovese's defense of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" in The New York Review of Books ended the attacks on "The Confessions of Nat Turner."  The Marxist historian was known for his examination of slave life, "Roll Jordan Roll, The World the Slaves Made."

It must be admitted that the defense of Styron in a review revered among his intellectual circle looks like a closing of the ranks. While leftist, The New York Review was an organ of mostly white New York intellectuals who despite their liberal views on race closed their doors to many black writers.

Alexandra Styron admits her father' lack of humility in battling his critics. He felt the need to justify "The Confessions of Nat Turner" 15 years later in "This Quiet Dust." The title article, first published in Harper's magazine in 1965, tells about his visiting Southampton County in an effort to retrace Nat Turner's path. He republished the essay to counter black claims that he did insufficient historical research for the book.

The essay, which captures Southern whites' condescension toward blacks, shows Styron at his best.

After fruitless attempts to find surviving signs of the insurrection, Styron comes upon the ruins of the house he believes to be that of Margaret Whitehead, the only white directly killed by Turner. One of the black intellectuals' most heated criticisms of Styron was his imagined flirtation between Whitehead and Turner. 

In the novel, Turner reluctantly murders her at the instigation of another slave seeking to take over leadership of the revolt. Another violent black stereotype, the critics said.

Styron went on to write "Sophie's Choice." Although Harold Bloom accused Styron of antisemitism, the book escaped the controversy stirred by Nat Turner and gained widespread popularity, one of the last "literary" American novels that united the country's readership.

Supported by Henry Louis Gates and Spike Lee, and buoyed by Styron's enduring posthumous reputation, "The Confessions of Nat Turner" retains a strong readership, although it's generally avoided on high school and college curricula.

No doubt overly sensitive college students would object to its inclusion on class reading lists. Soon, no books will be acceptable, and English classes will be extinct.

"The Confessions of Nat Turner" drew the first shots in a cultural war that fully rages today.

 

ANWR oil drilling plan fans flames of climate change

Oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve would be the finale of the American frontier.

Donald Trump's Interior Secretary David Bernhardt on Monday opened the pristine 19-million acre ANWR to oil company leasing. The admnistration's act of vandalism sacrifices the sacred home of polar bears and caribou to corporate greed.

The action opens the entire 1.56-million acre coastal plain of the ANWR to leasing. Showing that the Trump administration will keep wreaking mischief even if it loses the election, Bernhardt wants the leasing done by the end of the year, making it difficult for Joe Biden to halt drilling. If Trump steals the election, oil wells will cover caribou nesting grounds.

Environmental groups will file suits to stop the action, and market forces might preserve the wildlife area. With the drop in oil prices and the technical difficulties of drilling in the ANWR, petroleum companies have expressed reluctance to bid on leases. Banks won't be eager to give loans for drilling.

Millions of barrels of oil reportedly lie beneath the ANWR, but those estimates might be understated. More seismic tests are required to determine the exact amount of petroleum there, but Bernhardt is pushing ahead anyway.

With the world reeling from climate change, the Trump administration pours more fuel on the fire.

 

 

New York Daily News says drop dead to newsroom

I felt a stab of sadness when I read that the New York Daily News is closing its newsroom, although the newspaper vowed to keep publishing with a cut-to-the-bone staff.

After an enjoyable one-week tryout at the Daily News in the 1990s, I consider myself an alum of the plucky tabloid, known for its photos and classic headlines like "Ford to City: Drop Dead" and "Headless Body in Topless Bar."

The News staffers showed much more generosity than the supercilious apparatchiks at The New York Times during a tryout at the haughty Sulzberger domain. While The Times rejected me, the Daily News offered me a job, which I reluctantly declined.

Newspapers and magazines have been soldiering on during the coronavirus pandemic, with staffers working from home. The Daily News, in cut-throat competition with the more conservative New York Post, concluded that it could save money by doing without its offices in downtown Manhattan. The melancholy announcement followed the death of Pete Hamill, the legendary former columnist for the paper who also briefly served as its editor.

The newsroom's demise brought a lament in The New Yorker from journalist Tom Robbins, who recalled the heady days of the Daily News in the 1950s, when its circulation was in the millions. The tabloid chased scoops with two airplanes and a fleet of radio-equipped cars. During the '20s and '30s, the Daily News was credited with helping immigrants learn English.

But the popularity of TV, New York City's loss of population to the suburbs and changing demographics beset the newspaper, before the Internet arrived like the meteor that killed off the dinosaurs.

Even as the Daily News went through changing owners, heavy losses and declining readership, the paper had columnists like Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, hard-hitting investigative reporters and engaging sportswriters.

Robbins nostalgically remembers the chaotic newsrooms of old, which remained noisy and pressure-packed even when computers replaced typewriters and news people quit smoking and hiding bottles of booze in their desks. But the Internet slashed staffs, bringing a funereal quiet before Covid-19 emptied newsrooms.

As a former Daily News reporter told Robbins, crowded newsrooms also fostered collaboration in the development of story ideas and the mentoring of young reporters by veterans. The newsrooms also gave a sense of family to the social misfits who found a place working for newspapers.

When I had my tryout, the Daily News was located at West 33rd Street and 10th Avenue, in a nondescript office building that also housed New York City's public TV channel. I stayed at a horrible Howard Johnson's Hotel near Macy's and walked to work each day. The streets remained full of people when I got off at midnight.

The copy desk chief, an intense, serious and highly professional young woman whom I found was the mother of two children, allowed me to work on several stories each night, and I loved writing tabloid-style headlines, with clever turns of phrase.

Unlike at The Times, my colleagues were very cordial and helpful. One older fellow, an Irishman, reminisced about the days when New York City had seven dailies, and an editor unhappy at one paper could find a job at another the very same night. I also marveled at the editor whose full-time job was to write the daily "wood," the front-page headline. He sat there for hours, staring at the screen, waiting for inspiration.

When I worked there, the Daily News was already suffering staggering losses, and would eventually declare bankruptcy. As Robbins notes, the newspaper kept rising from the dead, its staffers burnishing buttons that said "The Daily News: Too Tough to Die."

That was at the dawn of the Internet era. Since then, the tab has survived several deep newsroom cutbacks, plunging circulation and a troubled transition to online publishing. Perhaps the newspaper will keep going, but the Daily News without its newsroom is like the Tinman without his heart.