Southern Bookman

Revisiting Mark Twain's vision of racial healing in "Huckleberry Finn"

Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" is one of those frequently banned American classics, perceived by black readers as racist despite its anti-racist message.

Published in 1884, seven years after the end of Reconstruction and the restoration of white supremacy, Twain's novel relates the friendship of the adolescent white boy, Huckleberry Finn, and the runaway slave Jim before the Civil War. The two travel upon a raft down the Mississippi River, meeting a host of characters along the way.

For years, "Huckleberry Finn" was a staple of high school and college reading lists, until black objections over Twain's use of the "N-word" to describe Jim led to its removal. Some also viewed Jim as stereotypical, and his black speech as demeaning.

Written in several dialects of the American South and mid-South, "Huckleberry Finn" was the first novel written in the American vernacular, departing from the proper British English to which earlier American writers conformed.

Ernest Hemingway said that all American literature derived from Twain's book. It established American language, comparable to what Dante did for Italian with "The Divine Comedy" and Chaucer for English with "Canterbury Tales."

With scenes rich in comedy and fictional irony, "Huckleberry Finn" exposes the hypocrisy and mediocrity of the antebellum South, skewering the Lost Cause mythology's pretensions. As Jim Crow laws and racial violence spread, Twain stands for racial brotherhood.

Huck at first sees Jim as inferior, but comes to realize his humanity.  A caricature at the beginning of the book, Jim grows more complex as the novel progresses.

Raised in mid-South Missouri, Huck during the book grows closer to Jim, rejecting the pro-slavery mores of his antebellum upbringing. When Jim is captured by two despicable con-men, Huck decides to free his friend, although he's been conditioned to believe this is morally wrong.

In one of the great moments of American literature, Huck follows his heart instead of his culturally formed conscience, declaring, "I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself, Alright then, I'll go to hell."

London black writer Desiree Baptiste in the Aug. 21-28 Times Literary Supplement discusses re-reading "Huckleberry Finn" during the Covid-19 quarantine.

After the George Floyd slaying and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests across the globe, Baptiste finds "Huckleberry Finn" relevant to today. "Is Huck Finn, I wondered, American fiction's first white ally?"

It's doubtful that many of Baptiste's contemporaries would give "Huckleberry Finn" such a sympathetic reading. Many blacks consider Twain's language as hurtful, negating his message of racial tolerance.

Baptiste shows why the still revolutionary novel lights a path to healing America's legacy of racism.

 

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.

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.

 

 

 

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.

 

Geoff Dyer extols Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove"

British writer Geoff Dyer in a recent Times Literary Supplement essay expressed his admiration for Larry McMurtry's "Lonesome Dove."

Dyer said that he avoided reading McMurtry's long novel about a cattle drive from Texas to Montana in the 1870s because it was overshadowed by the success of a TV miniseries based on the book.

But during the coronavirus shutdown in Britain, Dyer picked up the novel, and found himself entranced by McMurtry's tale about two retired Texas rangers deciding to lead a company of cowboys on the cattle drive from their Texas ranch, Lonesome Dove.

Dyer praised McMurtry's writing for drawing him into the story without calling attention to itself, in comparison to the ornate style of Cormac McCarthy in "Blood Meridian." He also praised McMurtry for his descriptions of natural beauty, and his characters' life-and-death struggles with nature.

The piece was one of the few appreciations of McMurtry's work in a "serious" literary journal. Perhaps because of the popular movies and TV shows based on McMurtry's novels, alluded to by Dyer, or his high productivity, McMurtry has been underappreciated by literary critics. Dyer's essay will bring McMurtry deserved appreciation as a major American writer.

Along with "Lonesome Dove," McMurtry's novels have resulted in the award-winning popular movies "Hud," "The Last Picture Show" and "Terms of Endearment." The TV and movie success has detracted from the books' reputations, but they are all accomplished. "The Last Picture Show" particularly deserves recognition as one of the great American novels of the 1960s.

McMurtry's productivity rivals that of Joyce Carol Oates, but he has ventured into more genres than her. Along with his many novels, McMurtry has found success as a memoir-writer, screenwriter, essayist, historian, literary critic and biographer. He is also a noted book collector and bookstore owner.

While I've found his novels uneven in recent years, I've loved his memoirs and essays. His three memoirs about his experiences in Hollywood, as a book collector and as a writer are essential reading for anyone interested in American culture. "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at 60 and Beyond" ranks with William Styron's "Darkness Visible" in depicting depression.

Like Dickens, another favorite of film-makers discounted because of his popular appeal, McMurtry has created a gallery of memorable characters.

McMurtry has mainly written about Texas, his native state, and he's tagged as a "regional writer." If so, he's done for Texas what Dickens did for London.

As Dyer acclaims in his TLS essay, McMurtry's accomplishment is universal. He stands among the top American writers of his generation.

 

 

Pete Hamill's death brings sorrow for lost era of American literature

Pete Hamill, who died this week at age 85, was the last lion of a great age of American literature.

Hamill and other writers who emerged in the 1950s and 1960s were known for their "new journalism," in which novelistic techniques were employed in the reporting of actual events. But they also wrote novels, short stories and essays, following Gore Vidal's dictum that writing is writing, and a good writer should be proficient in every genre.

The era brought abuses; New Journalism stars were accused of inventing scenes and dialogue in presenting situations believed to be factual. But, overall, the era raised journalism to a high literary level, and energized the novel.

Hamill, and his sometimes competitor, sometimes colleague Jimmy Breslin, raised the literary quality of New York newspapers, especially the now struggling tabloids The New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and the Daily News. Before owned by Rupert Murdoch, who ousted Hamill as editor, the Post was a literary liberal daily, owned by Dorothy Schiff. 

Before writing for New York tabloids, Breslin was a star of the old broadsheet Herald-Tribune, which despite its star writers succumbed to the New York City newspaper strike of the 1960s. That strike killed off a number of New York papers. For years a bastion of liberal Republicanism, the Herald-Tribune gave beneficial competition to The New York Times.

I was amazed at reading in Hamill's obituaries that he published short stories in The New York Post and Daily News, like Isaac Bashevis Singer contributing Yiddish stories to the Jewish Forward.

While the New York Times sometimes publishes fiction, it's hard to imagine a writer today finding a steady outlet for short stories in a newspaper.

Along with Hamill, like Breslin best known for his newspaper columns, the era gave us New Journalism pioneer and Herald Tribune stalwart Thomas Wolfe, novelist and ground-breaking journalist Norman Mailer, cultural critic Dwight MacDonald, jazz critic and free speech champion Nat Hentoff, political journalism chronicler Timothy Crouse, columnist Murray Kempton and the satirical gonzo malcontent, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.

Along with courageous reporting on the Vietnam War, racial discrimination, economic inequities and American and international politics, a dazzling group of rock critics emerged: The Village Voice's Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs of Creem and Rolling Stone, and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph J. Gleason who shifted from jazz to rock, especially covering the San Francisco psychedelic scene.

Along with Thompson and Crouse, Rolling Stone developed writers like Joe Eszterhas, Cameron Crowe and P.J. O'Rourke, who evolved into a compelling conservative/libertarian critic.

The scene was hetero-male-dominated, but Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Mary McGrory, Eve Babitz, Vivian Gornick, Ellen Willis, Jill Johnston and others broke through the boys' club.

For those of us longing for literary glory in stifling Southern towns, magazines and newspapers from New York City were like oxygen tanks sent to those drowning beneath the sea.

Harold Hayes' Esquire, Jann Wenner's Rolling Stone, Willie Morris' Harper's, Clay Felker's New York magazine, Dan Wolf's Village Voice, I.F. Stone's Weekly and George Plimpton's Paris Review allowed us to claim membership in a hip, urban community.

While my conservative alma mater LSU swung to frat parties on football weekends and a general complacency, it offered outlets for European films, avant-garde music and literature beyond the bounds of our English course curricula. (My French teacher, a nice Southern lady, was shocked when I asked about Rimbaud.)

Vietnam Moratorium Day brought out a surprisingly large crowd, filling the Parade Grounds where compulsory ROTC cadets drilled in years past. Withstanding the taunts of flat-topped frat boys, many held small wooden crosses in support of anti-war speakers.

Even after the slaying of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, and the election of Richard Nixon, those writers gave us hope for a better America. My sadness at Hamill's death is intensified by the knowledge that those dreams crashed. But even in these dark days, the heroic life of Hamill inspires us to keep the flame alive.

 

 

Pete Hamill's "A Drinking Life" a classic memoir

Pete Hamill, who died Wednesday at age 85 after a fall, is receiving acclaim as a swashbuckling newspaper columnist, editor and novelist.

His 1994 memoir, "A Drinking Life," deserves more recognition. I'm not that familiar with Hamill's other work, but I consider "A Drinking Life" one of the all-time best journalistic memoirs, along with Joe Queenan's "Closing Time" and Willie Morris' "North Toward Home."

As with James Joyce's Dublin, Hamill's Brooklyn comes alive with recollections of landscapes, places and vivid characters. The book moves from Hamill's rough boyhood in a poor Irish family to his finding fame and influence in Manhattan.

But his childhood memories show Brooklyn captured his heart. After years in Manhattan, he recently moved back to his native community, where he died at the same hospital where he was born.

Hamill was one of the last New York City newspaper columnists with widespread readership and immense power. He was also a fine novelist, essayist and editor. But for me, "A Drinking Life" is his pre-eminent work.

 

 

Isabel Wilkerson vs. Margaret Sullivan

Two prominent women journalists displayed jarring disparities in separate "Fresh Air" interviews this week.

Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, promoting her new book "Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy," frequently used the embarrassing empty phrases "sort of" and "you know." An interview transcript revealed that she used "you know" in nearly every sentence and "sort of " often to unnecessarily qualify factual information.

The next day, black journalist Isabel Wilkerson delivered flawless English in promoting her new book, "Caste: the Origins of Our Discontents." A former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of the acclaimed "The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration," Wilkerson conveyed complex information without faltering.

Sullivan's interview was conducted by "Fresh Air's" Dave Davies, who himself resorted to frequent "you knows." Here is one of Sullivan's statements, lamenting the loss of cultural critics at the Buffalo News, where Sullivan served as managing editor before a stint as The New York Times' readers' advocate and her job at the Washington Post.

"Our arts and our culture and, you know, sort of our society as a community, I think becomes less knitted together and weakened."

In contrast, here is a passage from Wilkerson, in response to Terry Gross' question about Wilkerson citing a Nigerian playwright who said there are no blacks in Africa.

"It's so shocking to our ears, because, of course, we say that there is an entire subcontinent of people who we would view as Black, but what she was saying was that until you come to the United States, they themselves do not see themselves as Black, they are Igbo ... or they are Yoruba or whatever it is that they are in terms of their ethnicity and identity.

It is only when they enter into a multilayered caste structure ... a hierarchy such as this, do they then have to think of themselves as Black. But back where they are from, they do not have to think of themselves as Black, because Black is not the primary metric of determining one's identity."

Sullivan is part of the white dominant caste that Wilkerson examines, yet showed less command of the language than Wilkerson, who fought to overcome racism as a member of an oppressed lower caste. Sullivan's vital message and impressive gathering of information were uncut by the verbal tics that made her sound more like a high school sophomore than a distinguished author.

While Gross and Wilkerson didn't discuss the discrimination against white and black women by the white-male dominated hierarchy, Sullivan unconsciously showed that even successful women lack full confidence. The "sort of" also denotes a need to qualify statements, a manifestation of the "on the other hand" objectivity now under fire in newsrooms.

Wilkerson gave some dismaying examples of how prejudice hampered her career. In one incident, a white male interview subject refused to believe she represented The New York Times.

Some blacks see the use of perfect grammar and spelling as sanctioning the white hierarchy. Academic debates are raging over "prescriptive" vs. "descriptive" linguistics.

Wilkerson, while exposing the devastation of America's caste system, eloquently uses the dominant caste's language, which has led to her success. "Caste" received a glowing review Wednesday from New York Times critic Dwight Garner,  a member of the white male establishment.

Sullivan's tics might be seen as minor. Yet, they undermined the authority of her arguments. Her "you knows" and "sort ofs" detracted from her alarming message about the decline of local journalism.

Wilkerson's perfect diction echoes the complaint that blacks have to perform better to succeed. As Sullivan promotes her important book, she should consult a voice coach to improve her speaking.