Author: Craig Fehrman

Craig Fehrman is the author of Author in Chief (February 11, 2020). Find out more at his website http://craigfehrman.com.

Welcome to the Wide World of . . . Urban Squash?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in All History is Local History, Features, Sports

[New Haven Advocate]

In this week’s New Haven Advocate, I’ve got a long story on Squash Haven, a local nonprofit that follows the after-school orthodoxy except for one thing: its kids play squash. This focus raises some obvious questions (namely: Why turn to such an expensive and elitist sport?), and I try to touch on them in the story. Still, the people at Squash Haven are doing great work and getting great results. It’s tough to question that.

I should add that the story might seem a little fractured or jumpy since, for a lot of reasons (most of them my fault), the reporting dates back to 2008. I did go back this month to check on my group of middle schoolers, and several of them are heading to a national squash tournament. I’m sure they—and Squash Haven as a whole—will do New Haven proud.

What Is a Ghostwriter?

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Dissertation ephemera, Politics

[Los Angeles Times]

In today’s Los Angeles Times, I’ve got an op-ed that is, among other things, a quasi-defense of political ghostwriting. I start with an anecdote about Eleanor Roosevelt and her first lady memoir This I Remember (1949), and one point I want to make is that these issues have been with us for a while. After all, Bess Truman, Eleanor’s successor, told a reporter in 1952 that “everyone else connected with Washington has written a book. I am certainly not going to compound the felony!”

A few weeks back, I wrote a separate essay for The American Prospect arguing that most readers, historically, haven’t cared about ghostwriting. Even today, when a political book’s behind-the-scenes details get served up as news, ghostwriters matter only as an extension of their clients. (Sarah Palin’s ghostwriter was widely criticized, but who can name Joe Biden’s?) Still, there are a few people—usually professional writers—who get worked up about ghostwriting. The Times op-ed is aimed at them; I think it also works nicely as a counterpoint to my Prospect essay.

One other thing: in addition to her 20-plus books, Eleanor Roosevelt also wrote for magazines and newspapers. I highly recommend her “My Day” column, and, thanks to The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, you can read them all online. Just on the subject of This I Remember, you’ll find columns on Humphrey Bogart asking for an autographed copy and on Eleanor’s writing process (and note there her casual, authorial repetition of “I”). But one column in particular resonates with both the op-ed and my recent New York Times essay on the history of the first lady memoir. On November 11, 1949, Eleanor writes:

I have just been told that though the manuscript of my book as it appeared in McCall’s did not make a mistake, there is one in the book which I hope can be corrected in future editions. In some way a slip was made in referring to Mrs. Mary McLeod Bethune as “the late” Mrs. Bethune. Since she is now trying to raise large sums for her college and is most active, I am sure I could not have overlooked such a mistake. But one never can tell what one’s eyes will do when one had read a manuscript many, many times. I only wish here to apologize to her and assure her that it will be changed in the future editions.

“Because there isn’t a woman in the country who isn’t perishing to know what it’s really like to be the wife of an American president today”

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books, Dissertation ephemera

[New York Times]

In this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, I’ve got an essay on the history of the first lady memoir. (It’s already online.) Laura Bush’s Spoken from the Heart gives us 12 such books,[1] and a few are genuinely good. I single out Lady Bird Johnson’s White House Diary for praise, but even the more prosaic examples are worth our time. In 2003, a professor named Robert Watson compiled a list of first lady biographies. Watson’s top five are no surprise: Jacqueline Kennedy (who’s been the subject of 37 biographical books), Eleanor Roosevelt (35), Hillary Rodham Clinton (27), Mary Todd Lincoln (19), Dolley Madison (16), and Abigail Adams (13). But 17 first ladies had received zero or one biographies. And while that ratio is improving—see the recent biographies of Helen Taft and Louisa Adams, both mentioned in my essay—I find it brave, and even inspiring, that these women were writing their own stories when no one else would.

One way to measure the impact of Lady Bird’s Diary—and I wasn’t able to get into this in the essay—is to look at when the first lady memoir became a distinct genre with its own history. Publishers loved to market early first lady memoirs as disposable women’s lit. (While doing the research, I posted an example of this; this post’s title, taken from a White House Diary ad, is another.) Journalists and reviewers didn’t help things. The NYTBR review of Edith Wilson’s memoir that I quote in the essay erroneously called it the first first lady memoir. At least a reader wrote in with a stern correction.

The craziest example of this came in the coverage of Lady Bird’s Diary, which kept describing it as the first such book “since the memoirs of Abigail Adams.” I’m not sure what’s worse: that this ignores several first lady books or that it invents a historical document. I emailed Edith Gelles, author of the excellent Abigail Adams: A Writing Life, and asked for her help: “Abigail’s only ‘journal,'” Gelles confirmed, “was a brief diary that she kept of her journey to England.” So what are “the memoirs of Abigail Adams”? The best theory I’ve got is that a frazzled journalist scanned the title (but not the contents) of the 1840 Letters of Mrs. Adams, The Wife of John Adams. With An Introductory Memoir By Her Grandson, Charles Francis Adams. The “memoir” is a biographical sketch written by Charles—similar in format to what he did for John Adams’s oeuvre a few years later. Nevertheless, someone said something about Abigail Adams and memoirs. A few repetitions and we ended up with Abigail Adams’s phantom autobiography.

Contrast this with today: as First Lady, Laura Bush could quote from Lady Bird’s Diary; now, as a first lady memoirist, she can explain how she “wanted to give people a sense of what life is like in the White House, even in mundane ways. . . . [That wasn’t] really a part of the other First Ladies’ memoirs that I read. ” (Of course, this comes from her cover story in the latest Ladies’ Home Journal; some things never change.) You won’t find anything like Laura’s awareness of writing in a tradition until after Lady Bird. Even though Eleanor Roosevelt wrote more than 20 books, for example, the coverage of A White House Diary never mentioned her as an antecedent.

That’s one reason I describe Eleanor as an “outlier” in my essay. But Eleanor was also an outlier in her grasp of the first lady tradition. In her syndicated newspaper column for Januray 25, 1939, she writes:

I went to bed fairly early last night and read the last installment of Mrs. Woodrow Wilson’s memoirs. I find the editor’s notes, which skip over what you feel must be interesting reading, a little disconcerting. I suppose this is done to keep more of the interest for the book, which will appear later.

————–

[1] Books aren’t the only form for memoir, of course, and several first ladies wrote autobiographical essays. I’ll mention Grace Coolidge’s example—to avoid confusion as much as anything else since, in 1993, her series of essays for American Magazine (along with some unpublished material) was issued as Grace Coolidge: An Autobiography.

Keeping Pace

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Dissertation ephemera

This weekend, I’ve got a couple of new essays related to my presidents-and-their-books project coming out. With them finished, I’ve been catching up on some reading, and I can now highly recommend Political Memoir: Essays on the Politics of Memory (1994), a collection of essays edited by George Egerton.

The book originated at an academic conference, and its contents range from India to Canada, from military lifers to American presidents. The best chapter tells the story behind Harry Truman’s memoirs—in fact, it’s written by Francis Heller, who served as Truman’s last (and best) hope in that book’s long succession of ghostwriters. (You can read most of Heller’s essay, which is breezy and accessible, here.)

But I was also captivated by another essay in the collection: Stephen Ambrose’s “Nixon and His Memoirs.”  Ambrose starts by suggesting that Nixon, as an author, “believed that the past should serve the needs of the present.” Next, he explains Nixon’s motivations: “the contempt he feels towards those who report on his activities and actions, and the contempt he feels for the public at large.” Finally, in my favorite sentence, Ambrose observes that “[Nixon] continues to produce books and articles at a pace professional writers cannot equal.”

It’s hard to argue with any of this, but the best context for enjoying these quotations is Ambrose’s own authorial career. After all, by 1994, he was already implementing his Fordist approach to writing history—though we would need to wait a few years for the plagiarism scandals that he (and Doris Kearns Goodwin) somehow managed to shrug off. Still, I’d say we can describe Ambrose’s reaction to the scandal as downright Nixonian: a selective tweaking of the facts; a stiff arm to the press; and, through it all, a pace that most professional historians could not equal.

I realize that I never linked to Richard Rayner’s incredible exposé of Ambrose’s lies about his relationship to Dwight Eisenhower, which ran in a recent issue of The New Yorker. Rayner debunks both Ambrose’s origin story (that Eisenhower called on him to write his biography) and his account of the “hundreds and hundreds of hours” they spent together. Seven of the nine interviews cited in the footnotes to Ambrose’s The Supreme Commander (1970), for example, simply could not have happened. Is it any wonder that, in contrast to, say, Heller’s essay in Political Memoir, which is scrupulously sourced, Ambrose’s includes only two footnotes—each to the first occurrence of a Nixon book?

Details’ 1996 Profile of David Foster Wallace

by Craig Fehrman, posted in Books

I bought David Lipsky’s Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace the day it came out—bought it at 9:02 a.m., in fact. Like a lot of readers, I found there to be too much Lipsky, but at least it didn’t come at the expense of Wallace. Their transcript includes lots of great stuff; one thing that struck me was the references to a contemporaneous profile of Wallace by Details writer David Streitfeld. Here’s Wallace:

  • “Like Streitfeld thought I would never be his friend after the thing came out in Details” (18)
  • “They’ll take seventy pictures, and a Details shot’ll come out” (19)
  • “I’m more or less a regular person. And this was Streitfeld’s whole thing: ‘Are you normal, are you normal, are you normal?'” (42)

In the online expanse of Wallace fans, I couldn’t find even a citation—much less a copy—of this profile. So, with the help of Yale’s ILL division, I tracked it down. The above picture is, in fact, the “Details shot.” (Since I was working from a .pdf of a scan, this is the best I could do. Still, it’s easy to understand Wallace’s trepidation toward future photo shoots.)

Streitfeld’s profile is short—around 1,500 words—and a little predictable. That said, it’s miles better than the smug (and now oft-cited) New York Times Magazine profile by Frank Bruni. (Bruni breaks the story of Wallace’s “special tooth polish to combat the effects of the tobacco he chews,” and I couldn’t help but think of his recent profile of Scott Brown, where, again, Bruni finds a “plastic container used to hold a teeth-whitening mold.” One more instance of Bruni uncovering a clandestine dental product and I’m calling bullshit.) Streitfeld also adds a few details and intonations to the standard picture of Wallace: his Illinois home’s proximity to a slaughterhouse; the pizza coupons on his fridge; and, most interesting of all, I think, some closing insights into his religion. (Who knew Wallace twice failed the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults?)

The other important thing about Streitfeld’s profile, of course, is that it’s now a primary source in the history of Wallace’s literary reception. If you look at the timeline of Infinite Jest’s publicity (and factor in magazine lead times), it seems Streitfeld was the reporter who got there first; their interview took place around December of 1995, as Streitfeld cajoled Wallace into buying some Christmas lights. But Streitfeld never put the profile on his website. Even more improbably, Details never put it on theirs—not even during the rush of obits and tributes that followed Wallace’s suicide.

So I’m going to pull a Gawker and just post the full text after the jump; if anyone wants me to take it down, they can contact me here. But I hope they don’t. Streitfeld’s profile makes a nice counterpoint (or chaser) to Lipsky’s book.

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