Southern Bookman

LSU historian Robert Mann's "Kingfish U" tells engrossing story of Huey Long's crushing love for LSU

LSU's band, football team and academic prestige rose under Huey Long's autocratic control of Louisiana during the dark years of the Depression.

After Long's assassination in 1935, the "Ole War Skule's" golden era crashed in scandal, leading to the imprisonment of LSU President James Monroe Smith and other university officials for a range of fraudulent schemes.

The wide-ranging federal and state investigations also led to the conviction of Gov. Richard Leche, for whom the university's law school had been named. His name was abruptly removed from the school's monumental building.

Long as governor and U.S. senator who still controlled the state embraced LSU like a smothering sugar daddy. He lavished money on school buildings, launched a medical school, and outrageously championed the school's band and football team.

LSU professor and noted historian Robert Mann entertainingly tells the story of Long and his proudest achievement in "Kingfish U: Huey Long and LSU," published by LSU Press.

An outlandish political showman, Long took trainloads of LSU students to football games in Nashville and Houston, leading the band on parades through the cities' downtowns. He also enjoyed giving pep talks to the football team, although Coach Biff Jones banned "the Kingfish" from the locker room before Long fired the former Army officer.

Rapidly increasing its student body and constructing new buildings after a move from downtown Baton Rouge to a bucolic new campus that had once been a plantation on the Mississippi River, LSU attracted nationally recognized professors, most prominently Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, editors of the university's prestigious and ground=breaking Southern Review.

As Mann relates, Long generally kept his hands off academic matters. But he brought his beloved university national comdemnation for attempting to censor the Daily Reveille, the school's student newspaper, after it published a letter criticizing his iron-fisted control of the LSU Board of Supervisors.

Smith's expulsion of seven Reveille journalists brought an investigation by the Southern Association of  Colleges and Secondary Schools. The organization placed LSU on probation, then dropped its investigation when the school affirmed its commitment to academic independence following Long's death.

But Long's meddling with the LSU Law School led to censure by the Association of American Law Schools, a minor part of a ballooning scandal that engulfed the university and Long's machine following his assassination in a hallway of his soaring state Capitol in downtown Baton Rouge.

Mann gives a complete account of the scandals, especially the involvement of Leche, Smith and a number of LSU officials who used LSU material and state funds for personal projects.

Smith, who led the university's flourishing during the Depression and originated the Southern Review, ended up serving six years in the state penitentiary at Angola.

Long, one of the most divisive leaders in American history, gave his poverty-stricken state modern roads, schools and hospitals and propelled a small state university to national prominence.

Mocked by national writers for his clownish behavior and accumulation of power, Long before his death gained a national following for his "share our wealth" programs, which still appear radical.

Mann gives a balanced picture of a politician beloved by Louisiana's long-exploited poor. As Mann details, blacks gained little from his programs.

The book contains wonderful vintage photographs of Long, decked out in three-piece suits and fedoras, acting as chief cheerleader. He's shown with the band and students, or huddling with cronies. One picture shows Smith with several cows; rural students during the Depression could pay for their tuition with livestock or crops.

While Mann praises Long's accomplishments, he presents a disturbing picture of Long's schemes to acquire more power.

Long's flamboyant career was in the end tragic, as Robert Penn Warren mined in his classic novel"All the King's Men."

Warren found in Baton Rouge "a world of a sick yearning for elegance."

Louisiana's dreams of greatness come mixed with corruption and buffoonery.

 

 

 

 

Farewell, Jimmy Buffett, America's wistful pirate

Jimmy Buffett was one of those American musicians whose songs defined a generational lifestyle.

Buffett, who died Sept. 1 of cancer at age 76, generated widespread appeal, reflected in tributes by esteemed columnists Maureen Dowd in The New York Times and Bob Greene in the Wall Street Journal.

The songwriter, author and entrepreneur also received warm praise from one of his generation's defining writers, Tom McGuane, his longtime-brother-in-law, married to Buffett's sister, Laurie.

McGuane disclosed that Buffett had wished to travel to the Telluride Film Festival for a showing of the documentary "All That Is Sacred," directed by Scott Ballew, but was too ill. 

The 34-minute film looks back at the 1970s literary circle in Key West, Fla., that included Buffett, McGuane, Miiami Herald columnist and novelist Carl Hiassen and their late friends, novelist Richard Brautigan, artist Russell Chatman, outdoors writer Guy de la Valdene and writer Jim Harrison.

At the time, Buffett was an unknown songwriter and singer, playing for his friends on acoustic guitar the songs he later made famous.

Like Buffett in his songs, McGuane, Brautigan and Harrison wrote with spare vernacular language, expressing a masculine desire to seek tests in the disappearing natural world.

After achieving widespread popularity for his music, Buffett went on to create an empire of restaurants and bars and residential retreats where his fans could pursue their Margaritaville lifestyle. His Parrothead empire was built on a desperation for lost youth.

One of his projects, the Margaritaville Vacation Club by Wyndham in downtown Atlanta, caused the destruction of the historic building at 152 Nassau Street where the first country song was recorded in the 1920s.

Despite protests and efforts to save the building, Buffett went ahead with the project. Like many Atlanta developers through the years, he erased part of the city's history.

Buffett's Margaritaville resorts reflected his generation's desire for an outlaw lifestyle mixed with self-indulgent luxury.

Yet his songs with their simplicity expressed more than nostalgia, finding deeper truths about regret, love and the American desire for freedom.

 

 

 

 

Ann Beattie's short story collection "Onlookers" reveals human costs of Charlottesville violence

Ann Beattie is one of the writers who fostered an American short story renaissance in the 1970s.

A longtime lover of her work, I was happy to discover her new collection, "Onlookers," set in Charlottesville, Va., where she previously taught at the University of Virginia and still has a home.

The book's stories take place during the Covid shutdown as Charlottesville residents still cope with the 2017 riot that broke out when a right-wing group protested the removal of Robert E. Lee's statue from the city.

A woman was killed in the violence, one of the defining events of the Trump administration and a precursor to the Jan. 6, 2021 attacks on the U.S. Capitol.

Reading the collection's long first story, "Pegasus," I enjoyed a reference to the Southern short story master Peter Taylor, who also once taught at the University of Virginia.  The story's main fictional character, a retired Charlottesville doctor, also mentions Taylor's wife, Eleanor Ross Taylor, an accomplished poet whose work deserved greater recognition.

As the story notes, the Taylors lived in the home where William Faulkner stayed during his noted late-career residency at Virginia. Faulkner in his  lectures at the university memorably discussed his fictional art and career. Recordings released several years ago reveal Faulkner's distinctive voice, as if he's carrying on a conversation with the listener.

I had the honor of meeting the Taylors at the Sewanee Writers' Conference, where Mr. Taylor gave a heroic reading while still showing the after-effects of a serious stroke. Following Taylor's death, the Library of America issued collections of his work.

Like Taylor, Beattie writes short stories that reveal human personality and its connections to family and place.

Beattie began by writing about young professionals and their struggles in New York City and other Northeastern settings. In "Onlookers," she displays an understanding of history and community often associated with Southern writers, beginning with Faulkner.

Now 75, Beattie has again renewed my love for the American short story.

 

 

Zadie Smith's new novel "The Fraud" raises critical storm

Zadie Smith's "The Fraud" awakened a couple of literary critics who dusted off their significance of the novel themes.

The Atlantic's Justin Kisner and New York magazine's Andrea Long Chu greeted Smith's Victorian-age saga with long essays that ponder whether the book represents the novel's decline or enduring cultural relevance.

Smith's turn to the historical novel revisits the Tichborne trial, which galvanized Victorian London in the early 1870s. Smith's narrator is the aspiring novelist Eliza Touchet, the real-life cousin by marriage to William Harrison Ainsworth, whose novels were once as popular as those of Charles Dickens. Touchet witnesses the sensational trial, also attended by Victorian literary celebrities like George Eliot.

In a recent essay in the New Yorker, Smith confessed to an obsession with Dickens, an influential presence in "The Fraud." Following her earlier examinations of the London immigrant neighborhoods in which she grew up, Smith turns her attention to the raucous 19th century metropolis.

Assessing Smith's career, Chu believes the writer's books have grown less daring and more conventional since her acclaimed first novel "White Teeth" in 2000.

Chu believes that Smith, chastened by a notorious putdown of "White Teeth" by the New Yorker's white male spear-carrier James Wood, has sought to assuage Wood's claim that her debut lacked "moral seriousness."

Kisner's also takes a long view of Smith's oeuvre, and her place as one of the few remaining "major" novelists. Striving for post-modern irony, Kisner skewers Smith's efforts to revive the Victorian novel's conceits.

Oh well. That Smith can stir such impassioned reactions gives hope that the novel still has a heartbeat.

 

 

 

 

 

Rose Styron's memoir "Beyond the Harbor" recalls global adventures, marriage to novelist William Styron

Rose Styron achieved an exciting, fulfilling life independent of her long marriage to the acclaimed novelist William Styron.

In her memoir "Beyond the Harbor: Adventurous Tales of the Heart," Rose Styron presents her contentious relationship with her husband as her most trying experience.

While Rose deeply loved and admired her husband, she at age 95 reveals deeper joy from her career as a human rights activist and her many friendships with famous people. 

The marriage produced four children, and after early years of sexual fulfillment and domestic satisfaction, "Bill's" mood swings, anger at her and their children and self-absorption erode her confidence.

As Styron's writing career takes flight, he discourages her poetry, even disrupting their Roxbury, Conn., neighbor Robert Penn Warren's affirmation of her work. The brooding novelist storms off from the social visit, dismaying Rose and Warren and Warren's family.

Giving up her poetry career, she launches her adventuresome life as an Amnesty International envoy, traveling around the world seeking to free political prisoners. During the last years of the cold war, she makes clandestine trips to Chile and Eastern European countries still ruled by the declining Soviet Union.

While he undermined her writing, Styron apparently didn't mind her hazardous trips, perhaps because it allowed him space to pursue extramarital affairs. In turn, Rose coyly admits to a few "one or two-night stands."

Rose expresses regret at slighting her children, especially her youngest, Alexandra, whose memoir "Reading My Father" delivers a devastating portrait of her father, confirmed by Rose's softer account.

She begins the book with a thrilling anecdote about a visit she made to Chile in 1974 during the Pinochet regime, which overthrew the Allende presidency with CIA assistance and killed thousands of Allende's supporters. Her then 16-year-old daughter Susanna made the trip with her, a risk that she now finds unsupportable.

With the suspense of a spy novel, with comic undertones, Styron looks back at she and Susanna playing with a red beach ball at a Santiago hotel swimming pool. Chilean women also in the pool whisper to them details about their husbands being detained by Pinochet's police. Looking back, Styron realizes that she and her daughter were in great danger of also being imprisoned or killed.

During her marriage, she also enjoyed a cascade of social events, tennis games and friendships with a dizzying array of well-known artists, actors, writers and progressive political leaders. Social events centered around the couple's homes in Connecticut and Martha's Vineyard was one satisfying element of her marriage.

After William Styron's death in 2006 after his well-known battles with depression documented in his best-selling book "Darkness Visible," she's taught at Harvard, revived her poetic career and continued her human rights activism for Amnesty International and Pen America.

Her recollections of her trips, friendships and social occasions flash by at breakneck speed, at times crashing. Her last chapters, when she slows down to describe her loyal support of Styron during his last years, display her best writing. Her sympathetic portrayal of the dying Styron is a heart-rending story of love and redemption.

After years of living in a pastoral Connecticut hideaway of writers, the Styrons made their permanent home in Martha's Vineyard, another enclave of the creative elite.

Styron's view from the harbor is a long one, encompassing much of the 20th century's literary and political history.

 

Discovery of old books recalls vanished era of multiple Atlanta bookstores

In a sudden urge to "declutter," I cleaned out a box full of papers and found some long-forgotten books.

A few were once heralded: Frank Kermode's "The Uses of Error," Northrop Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism," Cynthia Ozick's "Metaphor & Memory," Amy Clampitt's "What the Light Was Like" and a one-volume version of Douglas Southall Freeman's "Washington," abridged by Richard Harwell.

 Kermode's collection of essays and Clampitt's poems I vaguely remembered reading. I think I had made a start on the others.

Rereading Kermode's collection, I was intrigued to find the late critic's review of Princeton professor Peter Brown's lauded biography of St. Augustine, which began a re-evaluation of "late antiquity" after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

Brown in his St. Augustine biography and subsequent books revealed that the period long derided as "the dark ages" was  in reality a time of creativity and dynamic cultural change, especially in the eastern Roman empire, which lasted for centuries. Brown also made ground-breaking discoveries about Mideastern empires and the rise of Islam.

As the result of a laudatory review by the Washington Post's Michael Dirda, I'm reading Brown's autobiography, "Journeys of the Mind," which tells of his rise from a modest Irish childhood to a career as a world-renowned scholar.

In engaging un-academic language, Brown recalls his Oxford education, his joy at intellectual discovery, his travels to Iran and other parts of the Mideast, and his collaboration with other scholars.

Rediscovering the old books, I tried to remember where I might have acquired them, raising memories of long-gone Atlanta bookstores where I spent many hours through the years.

I remembered the first Borders Bookstore in a Roswell Road strip shopping center, before the business moved to a bigger space on Peachtree Road. Oxford Books was another shrine for booklovers that vanished, the victim of over-expansion. Phipps Plaza had a bookstore whose name I can no longer remember. In my years working at the AJC, I often visited a long-gone bookstore on the corner of Peacthree and Marietta streets.

Barnes & Noble and a few independent stores have survived the competition with Amazon and the decline in reading. For a brief moment, Atlanta was a paradise for book-lovers.

 

Bookforum's return an encouraging sign for literature

The revived Bookforum arrived in my mailbox Monday, brightening a stormy afternoon.

Bookforum appeared headed for the literary dustbin in December, when Penske Media closed the journal after purchasing sibling publication ArtForum.

After an outpouring of anguish over Bookforum's closing, the venerable Nation magazine stepped forward to revive the journal, known for its insightful reviews and cutting-edge coverage of the publishing world.

Bookforum's comeback issue picks up where it left off, like a hit show returning for the fall season.

The issue fully covers the summer's hottest novels, with Jane Hu's against-the-grain putdown of Emma Cline's "The Guest" and reviews of Paul Murray's "The Bee Sting," Jenny Erpenbeck's "Kairos," Lorrie Moore's "I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home, Annie Ernaux's "The Young Man," and Maya Binyam's "Hangman," among others.

Non-fiction also receives compelling attention, especially Jesse Barron's review of Nick McDonnell's memoir of growing up among the Manhattan elite, "Quiet Street: On American Privilege."

Speaking of American privilege, I was amused to see an ad for the Nation's Caribbean cruises, several headed for Havana. Nothing denotes left-wing elitism like Nation cruises.

In a welcome back message, Bookforum's editors told its loyal readers, "our mission is to continue the conversation where we left off, publishing essays by writers who are deeply engaged with books and contemporary culture."

Noting that the journal's future remains perilous, the editors said "We weren't sure we'd ever be able to make this magazine again, and the essays reflect our own preoccupation with death, rebirth, money, belonging, and the place of art in society."

After a summer of extreme weather, violence and political turmoil, Bookforum's return shines a light in the darkness.

 

Emma Cline's "The Guest" proves novel can still excite audience

Emma Cline's novel "The Guest" was sold out at my local Barnes & Noble Wednesday.

Cline's book about a young sex worker using her wiles to move from couch to couch in the Hamptons has been the talk of New York City this summer. Young women escape into the book while riding on the subway, and New York magazine featured "The Guest" in its book club discussions.

When I placed "The Guest" on hold at the Atlanta-Fulton County Library, more than 60 readers were ahead of me. As usual, the library system hasn't purchased enough copies of a popular book to satisfy demand.

The novel's distinctive green cover poked out of every hamper at a Hamptons beach, according to a New York magazine article.

All of the Hamptons denizens interviewed said she knew someone like the title character, who begins her summer escapades at the Long Island playground of the rich and accomplished after her wealthy middle-aged boyfriend dumps her.

Cline's novel mirrors the lifestyle of her readers, as F. Scott Fitzgerald did with "This Side of Paradise" and "The Great Gatsby."

The author of the critically applauded 2016 novel "The Girls," based on the Charles Manson cult, and the accomplished short story collection "Daddy," Cline like the Irish writer Sally Rooney has revealed the novel's validity to a new generation of readers.

With serious fiction supposedly dead, the popularity of "The Guest" proves that novels can still generate excitement in the age of social media.

 

London immigrants forging new English dialect, Times Literary Supplement reports

Charles Dickens wouldn't understand the English emerging in today's London.

With mixed-race people now the fastest-growing ethnic group in Britain, Multicultural London English will be the dominant dialect spoken in Britain by the end of the century, the Times Literary Supplement reports, citing author Tomiwa Owolade. The dialect is a mixture of Jamaican, cockney and African idioms and intonations, already widely spoken in many parts of the capital.

Owolade's "This Is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter" is one of several books on London's increasing multi-ethnic population reviewed in the TLS' latest issue by Krishan Kumar, a professor at the University of Virginia. 

Kumar in his review points out that racial relations in Britain escape the volatile conflicts roiling the United States, where the slavery of Virginia and other former British colonies keep shadowing the country's politics nearly 160 years after the Civil War.

According to Kumar, mixed-race people are the fastest-growing ethnic group in Britain, as the marriage between Prince Harry and Megan Markle, the Duchesss of Sussex, attests. Kumar estimates that 30 percent of Britain's population will be mixed race by the end of the century.

English, the world's dominant language, keeps evolving with multi-ethnic variations. Shakespeare's language will keep undergoing dynamic changes, as will Dickens'.

Dialect variations have long been part of London life, as reflected by George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion," the basis for the musical "My Fair Lady." In the play, the elitist Henry Higgins teaches proper English to Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl who speaks a raw Cockney dialect.

Prominent novelist Zadie Smith's novels give literary authority to the African dialect spoken in the London neighborhood in which she grew up. Smith's newest novel, "Fraud," will take place in Dickens' London, exploring Victorian society.

New writers will emerge from London's increasingly multicultural neighborhoods, adding new chapters to English literature.

 

Dave Eggers' short story "The Comebacker" marks Atlantic's return to popular fiction

Dave Eggers must be channeling Ring Lardner.

Eggers' short story "The Comebacker" in the current Atlantic reads like one of Lardner's baseball yarns from the early 20th century, updated to today's volatile social media world of sudden celebrity.

"The Comebacker" tells of a minor league pitcher who receives a brief burst of fame when called up to the San Francisco Giants.

Like Lardner, Eggers displays a knowledge of baseball clubhouses and press boxes. The hard-luck pitcher gains national media attention when his thoughtful, expressive replies to a sportswriter's questions goes against ballplayers' typical cliched responses.

Recalling the popular fiction that once defined mainstream magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and Esquire, the story turns on an unexpected plot twist that explains the pitcher's surprising eloquence.

With its baseball theme, simple moral message and entertaining writing, "The Comebacker" gives a welcome contrast to the Atlantic's typical weighty nonfiction articles, like a fizzy drink or a light dessert after a heavy meal.

The story's mainsteam appeal offers an unexpected treat in the Atlantic, differing from the complex plots and dense characterization of stories published in The New Yorker and Atlantic's longtime doppelganger Harper's.

The New Yorker and Harper's kept publishing fiction when the Atlantic several years ago devoted itself to reporting and analysis on politics, culture and social issues.

"The Comebacker" is an apt name for the Atlanic's welcome come back to short stories.

 

 

 

Noted Time magazine writer Lance Morrow looks back at news weekly's glory years

Lance Morrow gained fame as Time magazine's lead essayist in the twilight years of the news weekly's dominance in American society.

Morrow's "The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism," published by Encounter Books, venerates Time's power for most of the 20th century. He looks back with nostalgia, if not mourning, at the era when magazines held a central place in American culture, even after the arrival of TV.

He briefly mentions the New Yorker, founded in the same year as Time and notorious for a satire of Time's feverish writing style. While slighting Luce's other publications, he fondly salutes the Saturday Evening Post, which like Time was a mainstay of middle-class American life, with thousands of subscribers.

Part memoir, part discourse on journalism and writing, the book ranges from Morrow's start as a clerk and police reporter for the Washington Star, the nation capital's exalted, long-vanished afternoon newspaper, to his career at Time as a reporter, news writer and back-page essayist.

He and Carl Bernstein worked together at the Washington Star before Bernstein moved to the Washington Post and rose to fame for his Watergate coverage along with Robert Woodward. Morrow and Bernstein are still close friends.

In the book's meditations on journalism, which Morrow believes holds a place in society comparable to that of religion, he examines writers ranging from Joan Didion and Norman Mailer to John Hersey and Time's Otto Friedrich.

Avoiding detailed recollections of his years at Time, Morrow devotes much of the book to an admiring biographic profile of Time co-founder Henry "Harry" Luce, who exerted immense influence over American politics and culture from Time's founding in 1923 until his retirement as editor-in-chief in 1964.

While Morrow never worked under Luce's regime and had one brief meeting with him, he presents a thorough examination of Luce's life, from his childhood in China, where his parents were Protestant missionaries, to his leadership of Time. Morrow neglects Luce's innovative photo magazine Life, and the influential business bible Fortune and never even mentions Sports Illustrated, the ground-breaking sports weekly.

Morrow extols Luce as a beneficial force in American society, while recognizing his near dictatorial control of Time's news coverage. He defends Luce against detractors who denounced Time as giving its vast readership pro-American propaganda rather than honest news. The criticism of Luce gained force during his steadfast support of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

Luce's domineering personality, momentous career and fractious marriage to Clare Boothe Luce come alive in Morrow's laudatory portrait. Morrow makes a persuasive case that Luce did more good than harm, especially when compared with Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News. Morrow, who writes for Murdoch's Wall Street Journal, never mentions Murdoch.

In one of his few recollections of his journalism career, Morrow devotes a chilling chapter to the murder of Washington socialite Mary Pinchot Meyer, which shocked the nation's capital in 1964.

The sister of Ben Bradlee's first wife and one of President John F. Kennedy's lovers, Meyer was killed at around noon on Oct. 12, 1964, on the towpath of the C&O Canal near Georgetown University and the Potomac River.

Morrow, then a young police reporter for the Washington Star, was the first journalist on the scene. He recalls viewing Meyer's dead body, left alone by the police as they searched for Meyer's killer, neglecting to secure the crime scene. After a few minutes, detectives arrived and ordered Morrow away from the body.

While a troubled black man named Ray Crump was convicted of the crime, Meyer's murder raised conspiracy theories. She was the estranged wife of high-ranking CIA official Cord Meyer, and some believed that she was killed because she knew from her relationship with Kennedy of the spy agency's alleged involvement with the president's assassination. The gun used to kill Meyer was never found.

Morrow says he was obsessed with the case for years, but has given up collecting information about the slaying, He believes that Crump was the sole killer.

The book closes with a look at Time's 75th anniversary banquet in 1998 at Radio Music Hall. The gala event was attended by an all-star group of celebrities who'd been featured on Time covers through the years.

When Morrow walks out from the music hall to Manhattan's Sixth Avenue and sees the dark Time-Life building, he knows that Luce's "American Century" is over.