by Kitty Kelley

Any roll call of saints must include the name of Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897), who escaped from slavery in North Carolina and documented its pernicious evils in her extraordinary book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. First published in 1861, the memoir smashed the Southern euphemism of slavery as a “peculiar institution” and pulverized the myth of the so-called Free North, which, she writes, also “aped the customs of slavery.”

Like most abolitionists, Jacobs dedicated her freedom years to helping others flee bondage. She wrote her book “to arouse the women of the North” to realize “the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage.” She wanted to convince people in the Free States that slavery was a foul pit of abomination.

American slavery began in 1619 when a Dutch man-o-war docked in Jamestown, Virginia, and sold the 20 Black men onboard to white colonists. By 1860, one-sixth of the population of the United States consisted of slaves. To read Incidents in 2020, in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, when the president of the U.S. cheers the Confederate flag, is to experience a time warp forcing reflection on the decades since Jacobs published her searing narrative.

Did she ever imagine that it would take four years of Civil War, three “slavery” amendments to the Constitution (the 13th, 14th, and 15th), plus the 24th Amendment in 1964 (outlawing poll taxes) and the Civil Rights legislation of 1960, 1964, and 1968, to give African Americans a path to equality?

Jacobs also established the Jacobs Free School, knowing that literacy led to liberty. The fact that an enslaved woman could read and write is in itself phenomenal because the Anti-Literacy Laws in most slave states made the educating of slaves a criminal offense punishable by fines, floggings, and imprisonment. These laws arose out of the fear that, once slaves became literate, they could forge the documents required to escape to freedom.

Jacobs writes with amazing style and grace, saying she was taught by “a kind mistress” with whom she lived until she was 12. Jacobs then went on to secretly teach others, including “an old black man” (age 53) named “Uncle Fred,” who begged her for “learnin.” Within six months, he had read through the New Testament, and she marveled at his progress. Here she adopts a dialect of the unlettered, which jars modern sensibility, but it was her way of differentiating between the literate and illiterate:

“Lord bress you, chile,” said Uncle Fred. “You nebber gibs me a lesson dat I don’t pray to God to help me to understan’ what I spells and what I reads. And he does help me. Bress his holy name.”

Jacobs tells readers there are thousands like Uncle Fred, who “are thirsting for the water of life, but the law forbids it, and the churches withhold it.” She beseeches missionaries who go abroad to instead stay home and preach to America’s slaveholders that “it’s wrong to traffic in men, to sell their own children, to violate their daughters…And to shut their brethren [from] the light of knowledge.”

She centers her story on the villainy of her master, a white doctor who tries to bed her as a young child while his wife, although jealous, looks the other way:

“Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation.”

The physician’s wife was “totally deficient in energy [to work] but she had the strength to sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped ‘til the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash. She was a member of the church.”

Young and pretty, Jacobs frequently “passed” because “in complexion my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow, and were termed mulattoes.” But being attractive was a heavy burden for a slave:

“If God has bestowed beauty on a slave, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave…Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women…[T]hey have wrongs and suffering and mortifications peculiarly their own.”

Writing with 19th-century decorum, Jacobs shrouds the grisly rapes and violent sexual assaults endured by female slaves as “the guilty practices of the Master,” “his unspeakable acts,” and “wrongs which even the grave does not bury.”

She enraged her master by taking a white lawyer as her lover and having his two children. The lawyer, who became a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, purchased the children from the doctor and let them live with Jacobs’ grandmother, a freed slave.

The lawyer did not free the children, however, because, as she writes, a white man “may have a shoal of colored children without any disgrace, but if he is known to purchase them with the view of setting them free, the example is thought to be dangerous to their ‘peculiar institution,’ and he becomes unpopular.”

At the age of 27, Jacobs engineered her escape, which so enraged her master that he hired bounty hunters to chase her down. She managed to evade capture, though, even when she secretly returned to North Carolina.

With sly cunning, Jacobs wrote a letter to the doctor indicating she was walking free on the streets of New York. She got it smuggled to a fleeing slave, who, in turn, had it posted in the North and delivered back to North Carolina, where Jacobs was hiding — splayed in the crawlspace of her grandmother’s attic — a few hundred yards from the doctor’s home. Her ruse insured her safety as she waited for the opportunity to free her children.

Jacobs hid in her grandmother’s attic for seven years — and could barely stand up straight when she finally emerged — before abolitionists purchased freedom for her and her children. But while she was grateful, she writes, “I despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged to him or his.”

Her grandmother, who protected the family, lived to rejoice in Jacobs’ freedom, but soon Jacobs received a somber letter with a black seal. She writes that her beloved grandmother had gone “where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.” She concludes her narrative by cherishing what she had fought for in bondage:

“Readers, my story ends with freedom, not in the usual way, with marriage…or a hearth or home…which is still my dream…[but] I and my children are now free.”

(Note: A collection of slave narratives, part of the WPA Federal Writers’ Project of the Great Depression, is housed at the Library of Congress. Click here to view it.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

“Mary Todd Lincoln remains America’s most provocative First Lady,” writes Jean H. Baker in the first sentence of her preface to the 2008 edition of her 1987 work, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography. Some might dispute her premise of “most provocative” by pointing to Eleanor Roosevelt, Nancy Reagan, or Hillary Clinton, who all managed to set the country’s teeth on edge during their husbands’ presidencies.

Yet, as provocative as they were, none was ever institutionalized for insanity like Mary Todd Lincoln, who was committed to an asylum at the instigation of her only surviving son, years after her husband was assassinated while sitting next to her at Ford’s Theatre on April 14, 1865, “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.”

By then, the Lincolns had buried two of their four sons, and she would bury a third a few years after Abraham’s death. Her dressmaker, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, wrote of the former first lady’s inconsolable grief: “[Her] wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions.” To show such raw emotion was considered unseemly behavior for a 19th-century woman, another blight on a battered public image.

Streaked with tragedy, Mrs. Lincoln, like Queen Victoria, wore widow’s weeds for the rest of her life. With few friends and scant resources, she turned to shamans and seers and spiritualists for emotional support, and to health spas for relief from physical ailments.

As a young woman, Mary Todd was smart and assertive, with a flair for drama. Highly educated, she spoke French fluently and wrote with grace. Born in Kentucky, a slaveholding state, she left her wealthy Confederate family to move to Springfield, Illinois, where she met Abraham Lincoln, whom she shrewdly predicted would become president of the United States.
Unlike other women of her era, Mary was politically astute and relished being her husband’s helpmate in pursuing his career. She continued as his political advisor in the White House, which prompted the men around the president and the male historians who revered him to brand her as “unwomanly.” She was certainly not a woman of her time, which is why Baker describes her as “among the most detested public women in American history.”

Mary Todd Lincoln did not know her place. She was expected to present herself as a demure wife, concerned only with hearth and home. Later, as a presidential widow, she was expected to fade from public view, but she refused. She needed to be acknowledged for herself and applauded as the wife of a great man.

Always in financial straits, she haggled with merchants to get lower prices, frequently refusing to pay. She battled Congress over her pension, fought with her son over her inheritance, and drew national scorn when she offered her extravagant White House wardrobe at public auction to pay off her debts.

In 1996, the establishment of the National First Ladies Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio, convinced Baker that the study of presidential wives had been elevated from its “former status as a frivolous female diversion [to a] legitimate historical endeavor of social, political and cultural importance.” A professor emerita at Goucher College with three published works on the Civil War era, Baker was well equipped, with the reissuing of her biography, to present Mrs. Lincoln with a new feminist sensibility.

Previously, first ladies had been relegated to small dress-and-dish displays in their husbands’ libraries, but now, with their own museum, presidential wives could be considered seriously. So Baker sought to position Mary Todd Lincoln as a victim of unsympathetic patriarchal portrayals, rather than “a one-dimensional human being, a stereotype of the best-hated faults of all women.”
On that, she succeeded. Her well-written biography — with its 2008 updated preface — presents Lincoln in all her messy complexities and confounding contradictions.

Yet reviews were mixed. The New York Times praised Baker’s study as “rich in new research” and “wider in scope than any published to date,” but faulted her for not determining decisively whether Mary was insane and deserved to be incarcerated or merely temperamental and difficult. The Christian Science Monitor applauded Baker for writing an “excellent, enticing book” and turning “biography into social history at its best,” but made no mention of Mrs. Lincoln’s incarceration.

Surprisingly, no reviews of the biography noted the treachery of Lincoln’s only surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, who was humiliated by his mother’s public displays and engineered a trial to have her committed. Mary Lincoln managed to prove herself mentally competent and left the asylum, saying she could never forgive her “monster of mankind son,” and would end her days “childless.” Mother and son never spoke again.

Sadly, Mary Todd Lincoln, like King Lear, learned “how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

From the title, Swing Kings, readers might think Jared Diamond is writing about Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman. But while there’s music to be found in his subject, he’s actually addressing the basso profundo revolution in baseball: the batter’s swing.
Swinging a bat that actually connects to the ball is considered to be the toughest skill in all of sports, and Swing Kings tells the story of renegades who’ve rolled over conventional coaching to hit home runs, and in the process, have revolutionized Major League Baseball.

The sport has continually changed from the dead-ball era (1899-1920) to the live-ball era (1920‑2020), and one of the more dramatic changes was illustrated in 2003 by Michael Lewis’ Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game. In the years since that book was published, followed by the 2011 movie “Moneyball,” starring Brad Pitt, the front offices of MLB have been filled with executives who’ve adopted the statistical-analytics approach to baseball (“sabermetrics”) to evaluate players and have become known as the Moneyball Generation.

Now comes a new generation of “swing kings,” who’re homering into history by throwing away the old traditions of staying back on the ball and hitting to the ground. Instead, serious hitters are switching up their stance, redirecting the bat path, and aiming for the sky, all anathema to old-school teaching. Diamond documents this revolution in detail (punishing detail for non-obsessives), and his book arrives at a most propitious time: in the midst of a global pandemic.

Normally, being published during a national lockdown would be an author’s worst nightmare — no book tour, no signings, no buzz — and, for a Wall Street Journal sportswriter like Diamond, no baseball. But there might be a silver lining because his audience is avid. They are fans who’ve been forced into their bunkers and won’t see opening day until possibly Fourth of July weekend, and then only on television.

Gallup’s most recent poll shows that more than 60 percent of Americans are sports fans, so Diamond’s publisher is banking on their need to read something beyond BaseballAnalysts.com, BaseballDebate.com, BatSpeed.com, SetPro.com, and TheHittingVault.com.

Since 2017, home runs have dominated the sport, and that’s because some players finally stopped listening to hidebound batting coaches who continue, as Diamond writes, to teach batters to “stay back, swing down, bring your knob on a straight line to the ball, be short and quick, and ‘squish the bug’ — the oft-cited cue to a hitter to rotate his back foot upon swinging, as if he were smooshing an ant.”

Diamond acknowledges the rapture of home runs, an attraction in baseball from its beginning. “The ability to drive the ball far, to send it soaring high into the sky, was sexy. It was exciting. It was a sign of immense strength and power, of great masculinity and virility.” Then, just as he was rounding the bases with home-run prose, he stubs his sexist toe: “Even back then, chicks dug the long ball.”

In the 2000s, desperate players who needed to up or resurrect their game started making secret pilgrimages to the California batting cage of Craig Wallenbrock, “the Oracle of Santa Clarita.” Wallenbrock preached a radical gospel of “lag position” in swinging, which Diamond chronicles pitch by pitch and player by player.

As one example, after two years with “the Oracle,” the Houston Astros’ J.D. Martinez learned to swing in a way that defied all conventional wisdom and raised him from baseball’s reject bin to the Boston Red Sox for a five-year contract worth $110 million, guaranteed.

Wallenbrock worked with Doug Latta in the Ball Yard, a training facility that Latta owned in Chatsworth, California, which became a mecca for serious hitters eager to explore new ideas. Together, Wallenbrock and Latta became to baseball what Jobs and Wozniak were to technology.

They were game-changers who busted the baseball brotherhood to produce unorthodox home-run hitters, but like all who challenge the establishment, they were treated like porcupines at a picnic. Now, 20 years later, they’re finally being celebrated as geniuses. The takeaway here for anyone: Follow your passion, challenge convention, be counterintuitive, welcome diversity, and embrace innovation.

Diamond had a dual goal in writing Swing Kings, his first book: to report the home-run revolution within Major League Baseball, and to apply the new swinging principles to his own game. He wanted to wow his colleagues in 2019 when playing in the equivalent of journalism’s World Series, an annual two-game showdown for New York and Boston sportswriters, who play one game at Yankee Stadium and the other at Fenway Park.

As a result, he inserts himself off and on in the narrative, cutting from first person to third, which, unfortunately, makes for a herky-jerky read. But he lays out his report in serviceable style with no prose thrills, leaving the poetry of baseball to Roger Angell. And, by his own admission, Jared Diamond is a sportswriter who covers baseball better than he plays it.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

If the definition of wunderkind is to teach writing at Harvard at the age of 25, meet Roger Rosenblatt. He decided when he was “almost three years old” that he wanted to be a writer, and he promptly ascended into the literary stratosphere, earning a Ph.D. in literature and writing short stories, essays, articles, speeches, plays, books, and poetry.

He was a columnist for the Washington Post, editor of U.S. News, literary editor of the New Republic, and director of education for the National Endowment for the Humanities. For three decades, he wrote essays for TIME, including a cover essay, “A Letter to the Year 2086,” chosen for the time capsule placed inside the Statue of Liberty at its centennial. His essays for the PBS NewsHour won two George Polk Awards, one Peabody, and an Emmy.

Now, at 80, Rosenblatt has written his 20th book from his lofty perch as distinguished professor of English and writing at Stony Brook University.

As you can see from the cover, the title confuses. Big red letters blare “THE STORY I AM,” while smaller black ones murmur, “Mad About the Writing Life.” Be assured that both are appropriate. Rosenblatt has culled from his previously published oeuvre to write this book, proving that he’s indeed “mad about the writing life,” particularly his own, which more than validates the big red “I” — because the story is all about him and his passion.

Rosenblatt is not a man stooped by modesty. He writes of his trip to Dublin to study with Frank O’Connor, the great Irish short-story writer who idolized William Butler Yeats. O’Connor, also unencumbered by insecurity, spoke often of his relationship with Yeats, always putting himself on the same high rung. Rosenblatt writes: “I shall never forget the day he told me, ‘Roger, you are the best writer since me and Yeats.’ Such a wise man, O’Connor.”

In addition to O’Connor, Rosenblatt name-drops E.L. Doctorow, Alex Haley, and James Salter, all once blessed to be in his circle, while he archly dismisses William Strunk and E.B. White, saying their Elements of Style is a “mere grammar guide” hardly worth reading.

Just when you’re tempted to throw Rosenblatt’s book into the bin marked Egoistic Excess, you land on words that expand your heart: “Until my daughter, Amy, died, I had always believed that good things would simply befall me…I’d led a charmed life but then…”

Ten years ago, the wunderkind and his wife were walloped by the worst that can befall parents, forced to bury their 38-year-old daughter, a pediatrician, whose sudden death left behind a husband and three young children. Without hesitation, the 70-year-old grandparents moved in to help their surviving family.

Rosenblatt does not believe in God, so he could not derive comfort from religious faith. In fact, he states, “My anger at God remains unabated.” Instead, he writes to keep his daughter alive, to keep death at bay, to make life endurable:

“As a young writer, I was the dandiest cleverest wit and wise guy — a cinch if one possesses the meager gifts. But…after witnessing enough pain and plain courage in the world, I simply reversed course and started writing about the life before my eyes.”

He’s borrowed well from a lifetime of learning and sprinkles his prose with the poetry of Roethke and Stevens and Wordsworth. Occasionally, he waves his own wand to hyphenate words most effectively: “The Spaldeen-moon hangs low”; “turrets that look like witch-hat tops”; “day hook-slides into night.”

He believes that all writing is essay writing, “an endless attempt at finding beauty in horror, nobility in want — an effort to punish, reward and love all things human that naturally resist punishments, rewards and love.”

As a writer, Rosenblatt feels he’s improved because of his daughter’s death:

“My work is sharper now, and more careful. Happily would I trade all the books I’ve written…for one moment with my daughter Amy alive, but since that bargain is impossible, I write to fill the void her death created.”

Rosenblatt shares his creativity with his graduate students, once giving each a flower and instructing them to write a one-page essay about what it smelled like. “Follow your nose,” he told them. “You will plunder the past to explain the present and make the present more intense.”

This book of writing fragments — some chapters are a page, others a paragraph — is not to be read for instruction. Rather, it’s a hymn of praise for the craft of weaving words in order to survive, which Roger Rosenblatt sings to himself with style and grace.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

The cover of Pelosi by Molly Ball shows its subject in high heels, big sunglasses, and a bright, burnt umber coat, looking movie-star glamorous. The picture captures her leaving a White House meeting with President Trump, where she’s once again left him flatfooted and flabbergasted. It wasn’t the first or last time Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi would bring the president to heel.

On their first introduction, she’d made herself known as No Nonsense Nancy. Three days after his inauguration, Trump invited her and other congressional leaders to the White House for a reception. The newly elected president, who’d lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by almost 3 million votes, confounded his guests by saying, “You know I won the popular vote.”

He’d cobbled together some dubious anecdotes and tried to impress his guests, who knew better. Embarrassed for him, they shifted uncomfortably, and no one said a word. Then the speaker broke the awkward silence.

“That’s not true,” she told the president. “There’s no evidence to support that.”

Under the crystal chandeliers of the White House, Pelosi had spoken up like the child in the Hans Christian Anderson fairytale who shocked the kingdom by telling the naked emperor he wasn’t wearing any clothes.

Nor was this her first presidential tangle. She’d cut her teeth years before on George H.W. Bush shortly after coming to Congress as a representative from California. When the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989, crushing Chinese demonstrators demanding reform, Pelosi, who represents one of the largest concentrations of Asian Americans in the U.S., denounced the “butchers of Beijing.”

She proposed legislation to waive student visa requirements to allow pro-democracy students to stay in San Francisco rather than return home to be persecuted. President Bush, once envoy to China, threatened to veto any legislation that might affect international relations.

Pelosi’s bill passed the House and the Senate, but Bush vetoed it. The House overrode his veto, but Bush lobbied the Senate by writing personal notes to Republican wives, telling them to tell their husbands that he promised to issue an executive order that would have the same effect as Pelosi’s legislation but not tie his hands. Bush prevailed by five votes in the Senate.

Months later, with still no executive order, writes author Molly Ball, Pelosi “was furious” that the president thought he could flick off “the little bleeding heart liberal from San Francisco.” Somehow — Ball does not explain how — the Washington Post came into possession of one of Bush’s notes promising the order. The story embarrassed him into acting, and he quickly issued it.

The reader is left to wonder if “the little bleeding heart liberal” had had something to do with how the Post got its story, or if the story was simply serendipitous for Pelosi and her legislative initiative. Such a missing detail is a rounding error for a journalist of Ball’s stature, especially since she had access to Pelosi to write this book, following the two cover stories she’d written on the House speaker for TIME.

Ball reports that she conducted more than 100 interviews for the book, most of which she folded into the narrative without attribution. Such is the dilemma of writing about a powerful person still alive and able to exercise immense influence.

The book is expertly crafted and thoroughly researched, but readers are kept at a remove, being deprived of on-the-record quotes from Pelosi’s family — including her husband, five children, and in-laws — as well as friends, political adversaries, staff, supporters, donors, and colleagues past and present. Did Ball consider asking former Speakers Newt Gingrich or John Boehner to hold forth, or inquire of Tom DeLay, the former Majority Leader, about his political negotiations with Pelosi?

Ball tells us that Madam Speaker doesn’t drink or smoke or say bad words — and, a devout Catholic, she never gossips. She walks the marble floors of the U.S. Capitol in four-inch heels, gets her hair done every morning, and dresses like a woman worth $60 million, a figure that doesn’t include her Georgetown penthouse overlooking the Potomac, the mansion she shares with her husband in San Francisco, or their 16.5-acre vineyard in Napa Valley.

As the most powerful elected woman in the country, Pelosi has become a target for Republicans, and she wears her bull’s eye with pride. Still, it is startling to read that, in 2010, the GOP spent $70 million to air 161,203 ads attacking her — and, in 2018, they spent $100 million more.

Pelosi’s proudest legislative achievement is getting the Affordable Care Act passed for President Obama. When the legislation was floundering, she bolstered him: “You go through the gate. If the gate’s closed, you go over the fence. If the fence is too high, we’ll pole vault in. If that doesn’t work, we’ll parachute in. But we’re going to get health care reform passed for the American people.”

Obama devotees may be dismayed to read that, while he was focused on his own reelection in 2012, he refused to contribute anything to congressional campaign committees, including Speaker Pelosi’s. At the time, she was celebrating 25 years in Congress with a weeklong festival, including lavish fundraisers and concerts with Bono and the Grateful Dead.

All she wanted was a personal appearance from Barack Obama. She pleaded with his campaign strategists, reminding them of all she’d done for the president. They refused, saying her toxic image might hurt him. Finally, she called Obama herself, but he didn’t take her call, and he never called her back.

Makes you understand the wisdom of Harry Truman, who said: “You want a friend in Washington? Get a dog.”

In that instance, Obama barreled down a one-way street marked “me, me, me,” while Pelosi maneuvered multiple lanes marked “you,” “me,” and “us.” Following his re-election, the president came to value the speaker as the best ally he could have to push his legislative agenda. With her, he achieved healthcare, cap-and-trade, and Wall Street reform, plus a massive stimulus package. She was, in her own words, “Mother Loyal.”

Pelosi is less a life story than a legislative treatise and a detailed testament to the laws No Nonsense Nancy has proposed and gotten passed in her more than three decades in Congress. To this day, Obama praises Pelosi as “one of the most effective legislative leaders in history.”

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Addiction memoirs are a particular genre. They present unequal parts of noir autobiography, gothic fiction, sci-fi and dystopian horror, along with bits of black humor. They are books about recovery, which can only be written by those who have jumped off the train headed for oblivion. Their stories of survival plunge readers into realms of degradation that kill all but the lucky and the brave.

A few such memoirs, like David Carr’s The Night of the Gun and Mary Karr’s Lit, ascend as literary revelations. But, whatever the prose, each addiction memoir validates hope and proves that demons can be conquered. The victory usually comes at the cost of steel bracelets, nights behind bars, sleeping in alleys, suicide attempts, several stints in rehab and then a solid 12-step program, all of which Carder Stout illustrates in Lost in Ghost Town: A Memoir of Addiction, Redemption, and Hope in Unlikely Places.
Stout’s name will resonate with Georgetowners who remember his family from when they lived, as he writes, in the “7,000-square-foot mansion … that was a hundred years old” at 31st and P Streets. His parents partied with Washington’s nouveau riche society from the ’70s to the ’90s, regularly chronicled in the glossy magazines Dossier and Washington Life, celebrants of charity balls and embassy galas.

If money is life’s report card, the Stouts got straight As — for a while. “My dad said, ‘You must always act rich,’” Stout writes.
His father, Anthony Carder Stout, known as Tony, founded National Journal, then established a foundation to build a memorial in France honoring Americans who served in World War II. The $4 million he raised from veterans for the memorial mysteriously disappeared, and Stout was forced off his own board. “He conned the vets,” writes his son. Following a report of mismanagement by the General Accounting Office, the Internal Revenue Service began investigating, which led to an expose by 60 Minutes. Then the FBI moved in, and Tony Stout fled town.

His mother, Julie Jeppson Stout Park, known as Muffy, was an heiress of Norton Company of Worcester, Massachusetts. Stout writes he had “mad love” for his mother, but “she live[d] inside a bottle of vodka.” For a while “[s]he was the Grande Dame of Georgetown society, throwing lavish parties in her palatial mansion. After my father left her, she had a string of drug-addled boyfriends who robbed her of her dignity before they left her.” Weak from years of alcoholism, Muffy Stout fell down a flight of stairs to her death in 2008. Tony Stout, having run through millions, died broke nine years later.

Stout paints a lacerating portrait of his parents, particularly his father, who was never around while he was growing up. “I didn’t know where my dad was most of the time. There were always bags in the hallway, and I didn’t know if he was coming or going. When he was there, he got mad a lot and when he yelled, it felt like the whole house shook.” He recalls his father as “a small man with a big opinion of himself … [he’d] find a lady and run off somewhere and leave his kids behind.”

While Stout is unsparing when he writes about his parents, he’s equally unflinching about himself, first as an adolescent: “the stealing, the eating disorder, the cheating on girlfriends, the lies, the betrayals, the evil wishes and the time I wore girls’ underpants to school in the second grade.” Then, as an adult, a crippling addiction to crack cocaine took him “to the other side … I was dead.” He describes “one botched suicide attempt” when he “ingested an entire bottle of Advil PM with a fifth of bourbon and a heroin chaser. I ended up sleeping for thirty hours.”

You can’t get more of a cliché than a trust-fund baby neglected by rich parents, loved only by the family’s black maid, who tumbles into drug addiction, stealing and selling family heirlooms to support his habit as he careens towards self-destruction. But Stout elevates the cliché to a colorful saga of chapters that alternate between the sunny streets of Georgetown and the bloody back alleys of Ghost Town in Los Angeles.

The spirited narrative is a tribute to his college degree in creative writing. Stout puts his Ph.D. credential on the cover of the book. This might seem a bit of braggadocio, until you read his press release and realize the degree took him 10 years of study to achieve. His perseverance deserves as much applause as his scholarship and sobriety.

Carder Stout now lives his happily-ever-after life in Southern California with a wife and two young children. As he relates at the end of his book, he is a practicing psychologist, treating “a clientele that includes Oscar, Emmy, Tony and Grammy winners.” He opens his memoir with a ringing endorsement from Gwyneth Paltrow, followed by praise from actors Will Arnett and Billy Crudup. You then understand why Stout’s main drug dealer called him “Hollywood.”

Originally published in The Georgetowner

by Kitty Kelley

Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007) was a storyteller known for her childhood fables, religious tracts, and fanciful science fiction. Although she wrote 50 books, her masterpiece was A Wrinkle in Time, which won the Newbery Medal in 1963. The book, still in print, inspired two Disney film adaptations, plus a TV movie and a 2018 theatrical film directed by Ava DuVernay, starring Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey.

Now, to further burnish L’Engle’s legacy, Charlotte Jones Voiklis has compiled a book of her grandmother’s earliest short stories entitled The Moment of Tenderness. Most of the 18 stories in the collection were written in the 1940s and 1950s and re-imagined and revised to reappear in other forms in L’Engle’s later works. As short stories, they were never published at the time, and probably for good reason.

While fascinating to a loving grandchild, the average reader might be less than dazzled by “the scraps and stories and studies” Voiklis found in boxes yellowed with age in her grandmother’s study. Voiklis maintains that the stories show the writer’s growth, which may be enough to satisfy only her most devoted fans.

L’Engle, who majored in theater at Smith College, moved to New York City and tried to succeed as an actress in the 1940s, writing short stories on the side that she could not get published. On tour for “The Cherry Orchard,” she fell in love with a fellow actor, Hugh Franklin. They married in 1946 and, having given up on succeeding on stage and short on money, they moved to Goshen, New York, where they opened a general store.

Such biographical details help to more fully understand L’Engle’s fiction, in which she poured out the truths of her life as a child abandoned by her father and a wife betrayed by a philandering husband who took mistresses throughout their marriage.

Deeply religious and drawn to make-believe, L’Engle wrote several revisionist memoirs that read as fantasies. In one, she wrote that she was sent to boarding school because her father was gassed in the war. In reality, her parents wanted to live their own lives — and her father lived a long, carousing one before dying suddenly of a heart attack.

In another memoir, L’Engle presented her marriage as content and happy: “There in the chapel of the church, Hugh and I made promises, promises which for forty years we have, by some grace, been able to keep.” Her family, aware of Franklin’s many affairs, dismissed L’Engle’s 2004 memoir in the New Yorker as “pure fiction.”

The keystone of this collection, which gives the book its title, tells the story of two couples living in Mt. George, Vermont, a setting much like Goshen, where the village is divided into natives and nouveau riche newcomers. The couples meet and socialize. One husband, a doctor of “quiet earnestness” born in Mt. George, listens intently to the other wife, a newcomer, while their spouses whirl gaily at the country club dances on Saturday nights.

The man’s attentiveness is in itself a moment of tenderness for the wife, who is pregnant, and she decides she wants this general practitioner to deliver her child, rather than the wealthy obstetrician her husband prefers.

She is besotted with the gentle doctor’s hands, his brief touch of care and concern. He becomes the family’s doctor, making house calls to tend to her and her children. “[I]t is not love I want from him,” she relates, “just those little moments of tenderness.” This culminates later in an unexpected kiss from the doctor, followed by an abject apology. “This is something I’ve never done before,” he said. “Please believe me.”

Shushing him, the wife says:

“Why…we aren’t going to let it make any difference. We aren’t going to have an affair…so why shouldn’t we say it just this once? There’s so little real love in the world, isn’t it wrong not to acknowledge it when it happens. What you’ve just said is going to make all the difference in the world to me, just to know that somebody sees me as a human being…as me. And it can’t hurt anybody, can it, if you know that I’m thinking about you and caring when you’re up all night and tired and maybe discouraged sometimes? We’re not going to say it again or let it make any difference in the way we live our lives, so how can it be anything but good to have said it just this once and to know it for always.”

The doctor looks at her with a steady, serious gaze. “What a wise little star you are. Yes, we’ll always know, and the knowledge will be good.

Ah, the magic of a such a moment of tenderness — an elegiac title for an affectionate, if ill-advised, tribute.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Racing in the European Grand Prix is like playing at Carnegie Hall, singing at the Met, or scaling Mt. Everest: it is the epitome of excellence, achieved by few, but thrilling thousands. Enzo Ferrari called it “this life of fearful joys.”

In 1938, the Grand Prix involved something more than two race-car drivers pitting themselves and their countries’ fastest automobiles against each other in a 100-lap race for superiority. In that particular year, the Grand Prix came down to:

Dreyfus vs. Caracciola
Delahaye vs. Mercedes
France vs. Germany
Good vs. Evil

In his newest book, Faster: How a Jewish Driver, an American Heiress, and a Legendary Car Beat Hitler’s Best, Neal Bascomb documents every detail of the contest between René Dreyfus, an American-financed French Jew, driving a Delahaye 145, and Rudi Caracciola, representing Germany in a Silver Arrow Mercedes. It was a titanic struggle between two nations that would lead one to humiliating defeat and the other to resounding victory.

Bascomb begins the story in 1933, when Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany and, as leader of the Third Reich, makes a major speech promoting Germany’s automobile industry, which he pronounces his “beloved child.” Hitler’s Silver Arrow Mercedes and their blond, blue-eyed drivers stood for more than sporting prowess.

“They represented the master race conquering the rest of the world,” Bascomb writes, showing that Daimler-Benz wasted no time ingratiating itself with the Fuhrer by immediately increasing production of military trucks, armored vehicles, aircraft frames, and tanks. Soon, Nazi propaganda trumpeted, “A Mercedes-Benz victory is a German victory.”

Within five years, Germany had annexed Austria. In March 1938, a month before the Grand Prix, Caracciola, Germany’s premier race-car driver, issued a public proclamation endorsing Hitler’s policies and supporting the Anschluss:

“We racing drivers are fighters for the world-class German automobile industry. Our victories are at the same time triumphs of German engineering and workmanship. The Fuhrer has once again given our factories the opportunity to build racing cars…their unique successes over the past four years represent a glorious symbol of the efforts of our leader.”

The glamour attached to the 1938 Grand Prix drew worldwide attention, and victory seemed assured for Germany as Dreyfus, unlike Caracciola, did not have a world-rated record of wins. In addition, the Delahaye 145 seemed like a plodding mule next to Daimler-Benz’s sleek thoroughbred.

But Dreyfus had the financial backing of American Lucy O’Reilly Schell, a rally driver herself. The only child of wealthy parents and “decidedly nouveau riche and unapologetic about it,” she inherited millions from her father’s fortunes in construction, factories, and real estate, and married a man who didn’t work. So she financed their shared passion for racing.

The wealth of detail in this book will rivet automobile enthusiasts; others might want to take a pass. For example, “The prototype Mercedes engine, a supercharged 3.3 liter straight-eight…was…not a revolutionary design, [but] it benefited from ultraprecise construction and a host of improvements, allowing for horsepower measurements 50 percent greater than the Alfa P3.”

Those familiar with race routes will recognize the locales in which Bascomb chases every hairpin turn, every straight, and every rise and fall: La Turbie outside Nice; the Nürburgring in the Eifel Mountains; Montlhéry, south of Paris; Monaco through the streets of Monte Carlo; and Pau on the edge of the Pyrenees between Spain and France.

The author whirls readers around curves, bullets down hills, and twists ulcer-making bends with death beckoning at 250 mph. “Grand Prix racing was like all motor car racing,” Bascomb writes, “balanced on the very brink of death.”

Documenting the 100 laps of the 1938 Grand Prix demands much from a writer whose verbs must ricochet off the page like rocketing electrons: zoom, careen, brake, zigzag, swoop, streak, charge — faster and faster and faster — until victory is finally achieved.

Only then does the Frenchman step out of his Delahaye 145 in front of Hitler as the band strikes up “Le Marseillaise” to celebrate France’s triumph over Germany. René Dreyfus was to the French what Babe Ruth was to Americans: a bona-fide hero, which gives Neal Bascomb’s eighth book a Cinderella ending and a surefire film adaptation.

Crossposted with Washington Independent Review of Books

by Kitty Kelley

Journalists will enjoy this memoir, but anyone who’s suffered a setback or come face to face with failure will profit and take heart. By looking back on his life, Martin Tolchin (known to everyone as Marty) offers a way forward, and not just for those trying to succeed in journalism.

He shows that what it takes to survive and thrive in any profession is courage, which, Winston Churchill said, “is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities … because it is the quality which guarantees all others.”

Tochin begins his book, Politics, Journalism, and the Way Things Were: My Life at the Times, the Hill, and Politico, at the beginning, growing up in the Bronx, the only child of progressive parents. Not quite a red-diaper baby, he was enough to the left that he joined a Marxist study group at the Bronx High School of Science.

This — plus attending a Pete Seeger concert and receiving a pamphlet from Katharine Hepburn that began, “I speak because I am an American” — was enough to mark him as a “subversive” during the McCarthy era.

With self-deprecating humor, he writes: “I graduated from Bronx Science by the skin of my teeth.” He had no chance to enroll at an elite East Coast university. “My college adviser said, ‘We’ll start in Colorado and work our way west.’ That’s how I ended up at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City after a short stint at Idaho State College in Pocatello.”

Following college and law school, he joined the Army, but as a “subversive” he could not practice law unless he named the names of those in his Marxist high school study group. He refused. “So three years of law school went down the drain,” he writes.

In addition, he was given only a general discharge, which marked him for years, until the Supreme Court struck down the Army’s policy of withholding honorable discharges for political activities prior to induction.

Yet there are no bitter recriminations in Tolchin’s narrative, which is suffused with gentle humor, including the time he was in the Army and crept into a darkened Carnegie Hall late one night with a date. Spotting the piano in the middle of the empty stage, he began playing, and the maintenance men, enchanted, began lighting the hall tier by tier.

“When I finished they applauded. I think my uniform prompted their kindness, but the fact is I’ve played Carnegie Hall,” he writes.

After his Army stint, unable to practice law, Tolchin took a two-day course offered by the Veterans Administration titled “How to Get a Job.” He shares the wisdom he learned: First, decide what you enjoy doing; if you do what you love, you’ll never regret working. Then, write no fewer than 100 CEOs of the companies that do the work you want, offering to work in any capacity as long as there’s room for advancement. Then, initiate — don’t respond — by saying: “May I call your office on (date) to ask for an appointment.”

Tolchin wrote 110 such letters. One of the four responses he received was from the New York Times, where he started as a 25-year-old copyboy. Looking for stories to write, he haunted laundries, churches, police stations and restaurants, always asking: “What’s everybody so upset about in the neighborhood?” Inevitably, he got a good story.

After chasing cops and cons, he landed on the women’s page writing features. Lured to the newsroom, he could not write under deadline, he admits. So the Times put him on “night rewrite” from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m., and within 18 months he was writing 1,000 words an hour.

Tolchin worked for the paper for 40 years, covering the good and the great. After retiring as a White House correspondent, he started The Hill as a weekly newspaper; it now operates as a U.S. website. Then, at 76, he helped launch Politico, now a global website. Finally, at 92, he’s decided to retire … “for the time being.”

His is a thoroughly delightful book by a writer who puts the smile in likability. My only carp is with the publisher’s presentation — a skimpy paperback with tiny type, squeezed margins and no photo gallery. It’s like giving someone a cashmere sweater in a sack. The package is unworthy of the present.

Tolchin’s book deserves to take its place in the pantheon of journalistic memoirs with Growing Up by Russell Baker, My Life and the Times by Turner Catledge, Personal History by Katharine Graham, A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht, Letters to the Nation by Molly Ivins and  by Jeannette Walls.

Given the sorry statistics facing journalism today, one wonders about the future of that pantheon, considering the Gallup poll Tolchin cites that shows Americans’ trust in journalism has fallen since 1976, when it was at an all-time high of 76 percent, to an all-time low of 32 percent.

Tolchin doesn’t analyze what happened in those four decades to cause Americans to lose trust in the media, but he reports an eye-popping political cleavage: the level of trust in the press is 76 percent for Democrats, 42 percent for Independents and 21 percent for Republicans.

Despite these sorry statistics, Tolchin remains an optimist, and in the classes he teaches he encourages students to pursue journalism. “If you’re interested in people and ideas, enjoy constantly learning and want to have an impact on your community, nation and the world, you should seriously consider a career in journalism. It’s given me a great ride.”

The same can be said for his book.

Originally published in Georgetowner March 11, 2020