Southern Bookman

Sylvia Plath, Joan Didion and other women found New York City sanctuary at Barbizon Hotel

If I could travel back in time, I'd sit in the lobby of the Barbizon Hotel.

Grace Kelly or Joan Didion might pass by, or a Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School student, wearing a hat and white gloves.

The Barbizon Hotel, at the corner of East 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue, was the sanctuary of young women seeking careers, or husbands, in New York City.

Occupying one floor, the Gibbs school offered charm classes and secretarial courses, along with lectures by academics such as Columbia poet Mark Van Doren.

A modeling agency signed young ingenues hoping to appear in department store catalogs and magazine advertisements. After years of discrimination, a resident started her own agency that protected models' rights.

Historian Paulina Bren in "The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free" tells the stories of the famous and anonymous women who called the hotel home from 1927 through the 1980s. The women enjoyed a variety of amenities, including a pool and beauty parlor. Men couldn't go past the lobby. The place was like one of those romantic Manhattan movies.

"The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free" is one of the few new books that entice me. According to so-far positive reviews, it evokes 1950s-era New York style and an age when women were gaining economic and social independence.

New Yorker writer Casey Cep in a review in the magazine's current issue praises Bren's colorful account and gives her own expansive history of the hotel.

Sylvia Plath, like Didion, was one of the college students selected by Mademoiselle magazine to live for a summer in New York City at the hotel and work as guest editors. The aspiring journalists also received etiquette training and met literary and political luminaries.

Plath based her posthumous novel, "The Bell Jar," on her depression-shadowed Mademoiselle experience, and Didion recalled the hotel in her essay, "Goodbye to All That."

Women have not yet achieved full freedom. Bren shines a beacon for the future in "The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free."

 

 

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Lawrence Ferlinghetti

City Lights Bookstore shone through the fog and darkness of the San Francisco night, a beacon that made me think I was dreaming.

That was my first of several visits to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's fabled bookstore in the city's North Beach neighborhood. Each time, I felt a special sense of reverence and grandeur, as if at a World Heritage site.

Ferlinghetti, who co-founded the bookstore in 1953 as a mecca of free expression, died Monday at 101 at his home in San Francisco. His City Lights Publishing Co. gave the world "Howl" and other revolutionary literary works.

The cause of Ferlinghetti's death was interstitial lung disease, a scarring of the lungs, rather than Covid. But Ferlinghetti's the latest exemplar of American freedom and creative spirit lost during the pandemic. The covid era has brought a devastating toll on American culture. 

Associated with the Beat generation, although Ferlinghetti called himself the last of the generation of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, Ferlinghetti was arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," after Ginsberg's electric reading of the poem at San Francisco's Six Gallery in October 1955.

Ferlinghetti's City Lights Publishing won a court case upholding "Howl's" literary value,  a landmark for freedom of expression.

An acclaimed poet, novelist, travel writer and painter, Ferlinghetti was a major culture figure whose death deserved front-page recognition in The New York Times rather than display at the back of the Business section.

Ferlinghetti's "Coney Island of the Mind" is one of the few poetry books to achieve best-seller status. Last spring, he published a charming memoir, "Little Boy," capping a multitude of works written during his career. He also was a tireless activist for progressive causes.

The Times' obituary, while noting his Navy service during World War II, shamefully neglected to mention that he was a veteran of D-Day. It also failed to note that he visited Nagasaki after the United States' nuclear bombing of the Japanese city at the end of World War II. Seeing Nagasaki's destruction inspired Ferlinghetti's lifelong pacifism.

When the pandemic threatened City Lights' survival last spring, supporters rallied with contributions to keep the bookstore and publishing company going.

In his later years, Ferlinghetti lamented the high-tech industry's corporate forces ravaging his beloved San Francisco. Soaring housing prices, income disparities and gentrification sapped the social freedom and economic diversity that first drew him to the city.

Ferlinghetti's gone but the soul of San Francisco will keep beating at long as City Lights shines on Columbus Avenue.

 

 

 

 

 

Baltimore Sun escapes hedge fund's clutches

A white knight has arrived to save the Baltimore Sun from the rapacious Alden Global Capital hedge fund.

Wealthy hotel magnate Stewart W. Bainum Jr. has reached a deal to buy the Sun for $65 million, rescuing the Baltimore paper from Alden Capital's purchase of Tribune Publishing for $630 million.

Bainum's nonprofit Sunlight for All Institute will acquire the Sun, if Alden shareholders agree. The nonprofit will also publish the Annapolis Capital Gazette and other Maryland newspapers, according to a New York Times article.

Alden Capital, notorious for stripping assets and firing reporters at local newspapers, will buy the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, Orlando Sentinel and other once flourishing newspapers published by the Tribune company.

Chicago Tribune journalists have waged a campaign against the Alden deal, pleading for a local business leader like Bainum to save the newspaper.

Under the Tribune company, the Daily News has already suffered major staff cuts and the closure of its newsroom. Alden will cut whatever meat's left on the bones of the tabloid.

Alden's MediaNews Group gained notoriety for ravaging the Denver Post and other newspapers, laying off reporters and selling off assets. Journalists have complained about the lack of pens and notepads, and unheated work spaces.

Tribune newspapers outside of the Sun could also find a savior: Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a major Tribune stockholder, must approve of the deal with Alden.

But Soon-Shiong is unlikely to want to buy other newspapers after his at first promising ownership of the Times has hit rocky times with falling ad revenues and disappointing online subscriptions.

The Sun's long demise is one of the saddest stories in local journalism. The home of H.L. Mencken, the Sun in its heyday won 15 Pulitzer Prizes and had an extensive network of foreign correspondents.

Noted journalist Russell Baker, later a brilliant New York Times columnist, began his career at the Sun.

Baker in "The Good Times," the second volume of his memoirs, gives a memorable account of covering Queen Elizabeth II's coronation when he was the Sun's London correspondent.

William Manchester, famed for his accounts of the John F. Kennedy assassination and a major biography of Winston Churchill, sadly never completed, was another Sun reporter.

David Simon, who went on the create HBO's "The Wire," also worked for The Sun, along with his wife, the detective novelist Laura Lippman.

Simon devoted a season of "The Wire" to the decline of the Sun after the Tribune purchased it from Baltimore's Abell family, who had run the paper for years. In Simon's portrayal, the new owners weaken the newspaper by emphasizing soft features over hard news.

Bainum promises to bring the Sun to new vitality, although the nonprofit model is disheartening for those who remember when newspapers were thick with advertising. If saved from Alden, the Sun can keep giving Baltimore in-depth news coverage.

 

On Presidents' Day, I'm thankful for regular heartbeats

Presidents' Day brings the sixth anniversary of my suffering a ministroke in the Lenox MARTA station and a week's stay in Grady Memorial Hospital.

The quick action of a MARTA policeman and a transit system employee in calling an ambulance, and the emergency medical technicians' giving me a shot of something, limited the damage. Pretty soon, I could remember my birthday.

In the hospital, my rapid heartbeat was diagnosed as A-Fib, which had hurled a blood clot to my brain. The highly professional nurses weren't very warm and cuddly; they'd seen a lot during their careers. I underwent an ablation, the first of several efforts in subsequent years to keep my heart in regular rhythm.

As my condition improved and regressed, I received a shifting regimen of scary drugs. That didn't keep me from nine days at Piedmont Hospital beginning with the 2019 Labor Day weekend. The nurses and doctors became like family. As my heartbeat remained out of control, I underwent another medical procedure, and was at last released. But my A-fib returned.

When a new program of drugs faltered, my cardiologist last September decided to insert an electronic pacemaker into my heart, and that's changed my life.

During my one-day hospital stay, I admired the devotion of my nurses, one an Eagles fan and the other a New York City wise guy, and the medical engineer, a Georgia Tech grad who could slow or speed up my heartbeat with her computer.

The country has undergone wrenching change since I suffered my ministroke in 2015. My children and other family members have found new opportunities and achieved amazing accomplishments.

I have also grieved over the deaths of old friends and colleagues. They gave me so much laughter and friendship over the years.

Suffering from heart failure at Piedmont Hospital at the end of summer in 2019, I watched construction workers in hard hats do their jobs. I received my pacemaker last fall at the new Marcus Center they completed.

As John Donne said, no man is an island.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New generation of black film-makers re-examines 1960s protests

Film-makers keep revisiting the radical politics of the 1960s.

Following "The Trial of the Chicago Seven," "Son of the South"  and "One Night in Miami," the assassination of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago in 1969 is re-examined in director Shaka King's "Judas and the Black Messiah."

Hampton's killing in a police ambush is also touched upon in Aaron Sorkin's "The Trial of the Chicago Seven," with the historical timeline altered.

The charismatic speaker is depicted giving legal advice to fellow Panther Bobby Seale, initially a defendant in the trial of radical leaders accused of plotting the riots at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. The defendants were eventually acquitted of the charges.

"Judas and the Black Messiah" explores FBI informant William O'Neal's betrayal of Hampton, 21 when he was murdered in one of the 1960s' worst acts of violence.

Wall Street Journal film critic Joe Morgenstern gave the film a glowing review Friday, especially praising the performances of LaKeith Stanfield as O'Neal and Daniel Kaluuya as Hampton.

In "One Night in Miami," Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke engage in an imagined civil rights debate.

As with "The Trial of the Chicago Seven," historical distortions push the boundaries of dramatic license.

Director Regina King and writer Kemp Powers illustrate the spectrum of black fame and commitment from Malcolm's radicalism to Cooke's mainstream popularity.

As ancillary onlookers to the debate, Brown and Ali express the additional ambiguities and pressures of athletic stardom.

When Seale's case is separated from that of the white radicals, "The Trial of the Chicago Seven" loses dramatic intensity.

Sorkin puts a gauzy 21st century liberal gloss on Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger, John Froines and Lee Weiner. Instead of a historically accurate drama, the film is a liberal fairy tale.

Black filmmakers Regina King, Shaka King, Powers and "Black Messiah" scriptwriter Will Berson reach for a more radical vision. They seek a renewed reckoning with the 1960s black protest movement, which the nation failed to achieve at the time.

 

Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, Jim Brown and Sam Cooke talk things over in "One Night in Miami"

It's a dull party when Malcolm X invites Jim Brown, Sam Cooke and Cassius Clay to his hotel room for talk and vanilla ice cream after Clay wins the heavyweight boxing championship on Feb. 25, 1964, in Miami.

But the dramatic intensity builds to a knockout punch in director Regina King and writer Kemp Powers' "One Night in Miami," showing on Amazon Prime.

The four really did get together after Clay beat Sonny Liston in Miami to take the heavyweight crown at age 22.

But there's little historical record of what they said to each other. Powers, who wrote the screenplay based on his play, imagines an impassioned debate over black civil rights.

A raging dispute between the popular soul singer Cooke and the Black Muslim leader Malcolm brings the film's dramatic climax.

Malcolm accuses Cooke of pandering to white popular tastes and not stirring protest with his music. Cooke defends himself, pointing out that his song-publishing and recording company increases opportunities for black artists.

Brown and Clay - soon to announce his membership in the Nation of Islam and his name change to Muhammad Ali - also express the ambiguities of black fame.

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Malcolm, Eli Goree as Clay/Ali, Aldis Hodge as Brown and Leslie Odom Jr. as Cooke raise the film above an almost fatal profusion of flaws.

After a sputtering, aimless start, the gathering at Malcolm's room brings focus and momentum for a rousing finish. What risks terminal dullness succeeds like a well-made play.

Goree's portrayal of Clay/Ali is uncannily accurate, down to the register of the fighter's famous voice. At times, Goree's too flamboyant, edging toward caricature. He captures Ali's ebullient spirit, with a dose of implausible self-reflection. His increasing qualms about Muslim life make his immediate conversion unconvincing, countering Clay's historical enthusiasm.

As the tormented, introspective Malcolm, Ben-Adir delivers the film's defining role. Alienated from Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammad, he's planning to leave and form his own organization. Ben-Adir portrays Malcolm as a black American Hamlet, torn between intellectual rationality and emotional turmoil.

The film implies that Muhammad conspired with the FBI in Malcolm's assassination almost exactly a year later. Increasingly paranoid, Malcolm keeps glancing at shadowy figures whom he believes are following him.

In one of the film's dramatic highlights, he's shown fleeing with his family when their home is firebombed.

The film in one of its most glaring inaccuracies implies that Ali followed Malcolm, when the boxer turned against his mentor and remained loyal to the Nation of Islam founder.

Known for his stunning portrayal of Aaron Burr in "Hamilton," Odom gives the most in-depth performance. His Cooke ranges from hip show-biz self-indulgence - he, in contrast to Malcolm stays at the ritzy Fontainebleau - to reflective self-doubt.

Suggesting that Cooke went on to greater success, the movie neglects to mention his death less than a year later in a sordid murder at a seedy Los Angeles motel.

Hodge as Brown gives the most conventional performance, showing signs of the violence that has marred Brown's career. He expresses Brown's primitive attitudes toward women that match his history of sexual abuse.

All of the talk of black dignity clashes with the group's dehumanization of Liston. Clay taunts Liston as an ugly bear, and Malcolm and the others also view the fighter as a brutal beast.

While several references are made to contemporary events - Clay's meeting with the Beatles in Miami a short time before the fight, the killing of four young girls in the Birmingham Church bombing - no mention is made of Martin Luther King and his civil rights movement, despite its prominence.

Outside of the controlled space of the hotel room, King's direction is uneven. The play is enlivened by secondary performances by Beau Bridges as a family friend of Brown who shockingly displays his racism, Michael Imperioli as a bizarrely ebullient Angelo Dundee, Ali's manager, and Lance Reddick as a menacing Black Muslim bodyguard.

The movie takes even more historical liberties than Aaron Sorkin's Netflix production "The Trial of the Chicago 7." The two films, both streaming after limited theatrical runs, give alternating visions of 1960s protest movements.

"One Night in Miami" is similarly flawed, but more coherent dramatically. At the end of the film, Odom's stirring performance of Cooke's anthem "A Change Is Gonna Come" renews the promise of the '60s.

 

Christopher Hitchens' widow, agent seek to stop independent biography of writer

Christopher Hitchens is still stirring controversy, nearly a decade after his death.

In a hyped-up literary feud that Hitchens would have mocked, his widow and literary agent are seeking to halt a planned biography of the writer.

Carol Blue-Hitchens and Steve Wasserman sent an e-mail to Hitchens' associates asking them not to cooperate with author Stephen Phillips, who has a contract with W.W. Norton to publish "Pamphleteer: The Life and Times of Christopher Hitchens" in 2022.

The rarefied dispute gained momentum with a New York Times article Tuesday, following biographer David Nasaw's condemnation of Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman in a recent essay in the Nation.

Nasaw, the award-winning biographer of Andrew Carnegie and Joseph P. Kennedy, accused Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman of engaging "in a kind of censorship" and pointed out that efforts to control a subject's image through authorized biographies often backfire.

Calling Hitchens a significant figure of his times, Nasaw defended Phillips' effort to present opposing views of him.

A longtime writer for the Nation, Hitchens broke with his leftist colleagues over his support for the Iraq war and his increasingly misogynistic writing. A gifted raconteur, Hitchens frequently appeared on TV and as a public speaker.

As a leftist writer earlier in his career, Hitchens gained notoriety for books exposing Mother Teresa and Henry Kissinger. A noted atheist, Hitchens reportedly shunned religious conversion while dying of cancer in 2011.

The email by Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman sounds like something from a satirical novel by David Lodge or Richard Russo, or even Evelyn Waugh, if e-mails had existed during his life.

"Dear Family, Friends, Colleagues, Fellow Scribblers, Brothers & Sisters, Comrades:

We are aware that a self-appointed would-be biographer, one Stephen Phillips, is embarked on a book on Christopher. We read his proposal and are dismayed by the coarse and reductive approach. We have no confidence in this attempt at the man in full. We are not cooperating and we urge you to refuse all entreaties by Mr. Phillips or his publisher, W.W. Norton.

Feel free to contact us with any questions as you may have.

In solidarity,
Carol & Steve

Carol Blue-Hitchens, Executor of the Estate of Christopher Hitchens
Steve Wasserman, Literary Agent"

As The New York Times article pointed out, the email is self-defeating because it would silence those with the most favorable views of Hitchens. And those close to Hitchens are resisting; Hitchens' brother, Peter, a British conservative columnist, talked with Phillips, the Times article said

It's unlikely that Phillips can find many new revelations about Hitchens. He himself wrote the revealing and entertaining memoir "Hitch" before his death and has appeared in memoirs and a recent novel, "Inside Story," by his close friend Martin Amis. Former colleagues like Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn attacked Hitchens in print.

Phillips' title, "Pamphleteer," does seem limited. Hitchens was much more than that. But he wrote in the spirit of old-time pamphleteers like Thomas Paine. Perhaps the title is metaphorical.

Hitchens was a public intellectual who courted controversy. Blue-Hitchens and Wasserman's dubious campaign against Phillips runs counter to Hitchens' ideals.

Joan Didion and Rachel Kushner share year of the essay

Rachel Kushner was born in 1968, the year Joan Didion published "Slouching Toward Bethlehem."

Didion's collection is seen as a touchstone of that volatile year, which saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, violent protests of the Vietnam War, and the riot-torn Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Kushner, the author of the acclaimed novels "The Mars Room," "The Flamethrowers" and "Telex From Cuba," grew up in an environment shaped by those tumultuous times.

Like Didion, she received a West Coast upbringing, primarily Californian, and the gift of keen observational powers. Unlike Didion's youth in a traditional middle-class home, Kushner was raised by free-spirited parents who followed the hippie ethos that Didion atomized.

Primarily known for her essays and non-fiction reporting, Didion also published two edgy, innovative novels that set the stage for Kushner's further examinations of the California counterculture's broken illusions.

Now, the writers are sharing the cultural spotlight with the publication of essay collections. The two books show the affinities and polarizations of two significant writers from different West Coast generations.

The 86-year-old Didion's "Let Me Tell You What I Mean" publishes previously uncollected "Points West" columns she wrote for the Saturday Evening Post, along with other material. She shared the column with her late husband, John Gregory Dunne.

While this sounds like the emptying of an aging writer's file for commercial gain, the collection has received strong reviews.

New Yorker writer Nathan Heller in a convoluted appreciation of Didion's career in the magazine's current issue, faintly praises the new collection in passing. The separate essays are a reversion from her "collage" technique in "Slouching Toward Bethlehem" and "The White Album" of stitching together several previous essays into a new piece, he says.

He also cites the irony of Didion, who opposes sentimentality in her work, becoming the object of popular commercial branding. Didion's "Blue Nights," her memoir about her wrenching grief over Dunne's unexpected death, softened her image and broadened her popular appeal.

Kushner's "The Hard Crowd," a collection of essays from 2000 to 2020, will showcase an aspect of her work overshadowed by her novels.

The book, coming in March, is also receiving a burst of attention. The New Yorker - there it is again - published "The Hard Crowd," Kushner's riveting memoir of growing up unfettered in a rough part of San Francisco.

Its harrowing look at urban squalor at the margins of American life contrasts with the beauty of the language. It's the best piece of writing the magazine has published recently.

Harper's magazine in its current issue offers another Kushner essay, about her dangerous participation in an illegal street motorcycle race in Baja, Mexico, in her younger days. The piece veers from horror and alarm to humor and exuberance.

While Didion foreshadowed Kushner's West Coast sensibility and tolerance for extreme experience, they differ in a crucial way.

Kushner revels in direct experience, while Didion stands at the edges, an unflinching observer.

 

Joe Biden begins a new American chapter

After all of these years, I most remember the inauguration of John F. Kennedy.

Our class at Glasgow Elementary School in Baton Rouge, La., watched the event on television, hearing our new leader with his Boston accent herald the rise of a new generation with the stirring words, "And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country."

Kennedy was 43 years old, taking over from the aged Republican Dwight Eisenhower.  Our new president, Joe Biden, is 78, a member of a generation that has been in power in Washington for three decades.

Yet, after the devastation of the Trump years, today feels like a new beginning for the country.

Kamala Harris, our new vice president, sets a historic legacy and holds the standard for a new America.

Biden has announced an ambitious agenda to tackle problems neglected during years of stalemate.

The times are daunting, with the country torn by political turmoil and losing thousands a day to the Covid epidemic. 

After many years of joy and sorrow, Joe Biden's hour has come. Like Kennedy, he's uplifted by his Irish heritage and Catholic faith. As on that bitterly cold day in 1961, the nation begins a new chapter.

 

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" enters public domain

F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is blossoming with new editions following the expiration of the classic novel's copyright on Jan. 1.

Along with the numerous republications of the work published in 1925 - along with Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" - author Michael Farris Smith has published "Nick," a prequel exploring the life of narrator Nick Carraway before he moved next door to the eponymous Jay Gatsby's Long Island mansion.

"The Great Gatsby" details Gatsby's quixotic and tragic effort to win the love of the entitled Daisy Buchanan through an invented past and fraudulently obtained wealth. Carraway observes Gatsby's rise and fall, with witty and pointed commentary about Gatsby's lavish life and the other characters. He comes to see Gatsby as a heroic tragic hero, and Daisy and her repellent husband Tom as soul-less, materialistic monsters.

The novel's entering the public domain has also fostered reappraisals, including a recent piece by New York Times literary critic Parul Sehgal that questions whether the novel is really that great. Like other writers of his era, Fitzgerald has been criticized over his negative depictions of women and anti-semitic characterizations.

Similar to J.D. Salinger's "A Catcher in the Rye," Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" is praised for its distinctive first-person voice, rather than the complexity of its characters and plot.

A commercial failure when first published although praised by T.S. Eliot as a major advance in American fiction,  "The Great Gatsby" can be read in one sitting. Fitzgerald's language, filtered through Carraway's observations, has a poetic precision in which every word matters.

The story of Gatsby's doomed love for Daisy Buchanan skewers the excesses of American capitalism in the "Roaring '20s," before the stock market crash that ushered in the Depression. Many of the passages, including the famous ending about "the dark fields of the republic," live on in the cultural memory.

New York Times critic Wesley Morris in an introduction to one of the new editions says rereading the book gave him a fresh appreciation of Fitzgerald's understanding of how Americans constantly reinvent themselves.

But I don't believe I'll return to "The Great Gatsby." The book glows in my memory, Fitzgerald's words forever bright.