Though never a "writer" of the first rank, he nevertheless was a unique contributor to American letters and a vital link to the current of idealistic indigenous radicalism that once enlivened it. "P.S.: Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening" is, as the title suggests, a bit of an afterthought in a long career heavy with well-deserved honors that included a 1985
This posthumously published collection is what might be called in conventional terms a miscellany, which, the author says in a characteristically charming preface, was culled by his son, assistant and "caretaker" (his wife of 60 years, Ida Goldberg, died in 1999) from fragments in his workroom. It includes a bang-up interview with
There's an unconventional but sentimentally touching Christmas story-- set in the lobby of one of the
Another includes this sequence:
"I did have a glancing acquaintance with the garage where the
Through a window
Good as the Baldwin interview is -- and it's first-rate -- the small jewel at the heart of this collection is a personal review of that perennial Chicago Art Institute favorite,
"The scissor-faced customer, his seared companion, and the bone-weary counterman hold you; the slightly hunched back of the loner, whose face evades you, haunts you forever. Yet, that alone isn't what Hopper is about. It is the light that is the hero. Or is it the darkness of the street outside? One is artificial, the other is natural; both are given equal weight. As Alexander Eliot observed, 'The dark is less lonely.' Here are all the open-all-nite beaneries you have ever experienced. Here is everyman's lonesome valley. . . .
"The cold of the city was touched by Hopper as by no American painter, before or since. The woman, nude or half-dressed, usually near the window, was his most intimate human.
"Hopper once said that truth in art is what's truly modern, so that 'Giotto [could be] as modern as Cezanne.' It certainly makes Hopper infinitely more contemporary than any Now you can name. Renewed wonder and humility -- the artist's own phrases -- are what he's all about."
There's much to argue about in that appraisal (and the usual leavening of Midwestern defensiveness) but nothing that doesn't command consideration and a great deal that's sturdy and honestly edifying.
Everyone's story
The interesting thing about the oral history that elevated Terkel from a local, albeit well-loved, radio personality to bestselling author and national literary celebrity is that he came rather late to the game -- and it wasn't his idea. It's hard to recall, now that nearly every research library and university in the United States and Britain has one or more oral history projects in process and the genre's techniques have been codified, that the term "oral history" first appeared in 1948 in a New Yorker profile. The subject was a fixture of
The term, however, caught on, and the concept exploded in the 1960s, when fashionable left-wing politics suddenly led historians to realize that the human story had a "Rashomon" structure and could be told as relevantly from below as above. (Or, to borrow the sentiment from Rainsborough, one of the proto-republicans in Cromwell's army, "The poorest He in England hath a life to lead as the greatest He." It is the habit of obvious truths to hide in plain sight, awaiting "discovery." Jan Myrdal's "Report From a Chinese Village" piqued the interest of André Schiffrin, Pantheon Books' legendary publisher and editor-in-chief, and he prodded Terkel to undertake a similar project from the streets of Chicago.
Schiffrin made a shrewd choice in Terkel. He had a decent man's interest in the lives of others, a probing but gentle curiosity and an intuitive grasp of what psychotherapists would come to call "active listening." He was streetwise by background and, though he'd imbibed his radicalism straight from the heady air of Chicago's famously raucous and contentious Bughouse Square, he wasn't one of the legion of autodidacts it produced. He'd studied philosophy at the
Terkel was blacklisted in the early 1950s and emerged from the experience unbowed and un-embittered. His radicalism was of the old native sort. It did not flirt with notions of creating new men to inhabit worlds reformed into perfection; it simply asked the American nation to live up to its ideals, so that its people might express their goodness. As Terkel once told an interviewer: "I've always felt, in all my books, that there's a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence -- providing they have the facts, providing they have the information."
Rutten is a Times staff writer.
timothy.rutten@latimes.com
