A SWELL GUY IF YOU IGNORE THE STALINISM?:

Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Terkel Dies at 96 (CARYN ROUSSEAU, October 31, 2008, The Associated Press)

For his oral histories, he interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

He would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."

Terkel also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities _ that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

"It was those loners _ argumentative ones, deceptively quite ones, the talkers and the walkers _ who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.

"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

Antipathy towards activists? Do we really honor a social historian by sweeping his history under the rug? Even if that's what he sought to do himself, Talking to Himself (Scott McLemee, 11/14/07, Inside Higher Ed)

In his first autobiography, Terkel noted that he had concealed some things. “There is a private domain on which I’ll not trespass,” as he put it 30 years ago, “nor does it, I feel, matter very much to others.” But the problem with either of his tellings of his own story is that the reader is rushed past some very important matters in his public life. I will come back to that narrative blindspot in due course. [...]

Terkel is a good storyteller, and it is a life full of raw material.. But there are points when his gifts as a performer (to use a word that subsumes his activity in front of the typewriter as well as the microphone) permit him to avoid as much as he expresses. When Talking to Myself appeared 30 years ago, Terkel’s way of discussing McCarthyism was rather jaunty. C’est la vie! How how lucky he was to have been blacklisted! Otherwise, think of the wonderful opportunities he might have missed. He might have ended up respectable and dull.

As the critic John Leonard pointed out at the time, however, that element of jokiness rang false. It seemed to be avoiding engagement with memories of what to have been a painful experience. In the new memoir, it sounds as if Terkel halfway concedes the validity of that point. Almost in so many words:

“I was fading fast,” he recalls. “During the blacklist, you’re not working for a time, you start thinking maybe you ain’t got something you thought you had. I knew my work troubles were for political reasons, but the situation seemed somewhat hopeless. There’s something that’s interesting psychologically, moments when you feel self-doubt: that is, was your talent there to begin with? Maybe you’re not that good....”

Terkel also admits that having the FBI show up at your door was hardly very pleasant. And then the jokey tone returns.Why, he’s afraid that his wife may have been rude to the agents, at times — and that could be embarrassing.....

So the wall of reserve comes down, for a moment, only to go right back up again. No doubt this is a matter of both generational style and personal temperament – of being the product of an era when discussing your troubles was considered bad form, especially for a man. Let alone one whose nickname reflected an enthusiasm for James T. Farrell’s trilogy of novels about a tough Irish working-class kid named Studs Lonigan.

But the reticence goes deeper than that. To get some perspective, we might have a look at an incident in the life of Terkel’s fictional namesake. I’m thinking of a scene near the end of the final novel in Farrell’s series. Studs Lonigan is close to the end of his days — about to succumb, at an early age, to illness and a hard life. It is the early part of the Depression. He’s hanging out with some friends when they see a demonstration. They watch people march by, carrying banners and placards with slogans:

DOWN WITH THE HOOVER WALL STREET GOVERNMENT
We Want Bread Not Bullets
DEFEND THE SOVIET UNION

The sight of a Communist rally has a complicated effect on Lonigan. He barely has words to express it. He has a sense of his own life being deep in a rut — indeed, almost over — while the lyrics of their revolutionary anthem proclaims that “a better world’s in birth.” They seem not just angry but happy. It is a strangely affecting moment, perhaps charged with the author’s own complex feelings. (Farrell himself did not join the party, but was sympathetic to it through the mid-1930s, after which he switched allegiance to Leon Trotsky’s following for a dozen years before settling into a kind of Cold War liberalism.)

So a reader of the novel gets a sense of the ambivalence that one guy named Studs feels upon encountering the Communist movement. But anyone looking for a comparable moment of insight in Terkel’s memoirs will have no such luck.

Now, it is possible that Studs Terkel was never a member of the Communist Party. But someone who mentions, as Terkel does, that he worked in left-wing theater groups, raised money for the Soviet-American Friendship Committee, and supported Henry Wallace’s presidential campaign in 1948 (the last gasp of any serious Communist influence in American political life) was fully integrated into its support network.

He had a relationship of some kind with the party – even if, for whatever reason, he was not a member. Most people who joined in the 1930s and ‘40s were in and out within a few weeks. (The problem of retention was a source of much grief to Communist leaders.) But Terkel’s references suggest a serious and long-term involvement, whatever his formal status may have been.

All things considered, it’s perhaps surprising that he is even as candid as he allows himself to be about his activism. But the lack of any clear sense of when he became affiliated with the movement, and why (and when he parted ways with it, and why) leaves the reader with only a vague sense of what must have been a profound fact of the man’s life.

At one point, Touch and Go quotes the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman: “Once a person joins a group, a demonstration, or a union, they’re a different person.” Terkel endorses the sentiment. “You become stronger as a result,” he adds, “no matter what the outcome.” Unfortunately Terkel leaves this only at the level of general advice, rather than showing how it applied in his own experience. [...]

Terkel was close to the Communist movement during the phase known as the Popular Front – when it abandoned the preposterously belligerent slogan “Towards a Soviet America” for the altogether more palatable catchphrase “Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism.” Its artists and writers and musicians tried to work in popular idioms. As good disciplined cadres, they would still read Stalin’s pamphlets; but they knew that radical doctrine, as such, would only get you just so far.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at October 31, 2008 6:16 PM