Transcript

9.11.25 · Smithsonian Magazine

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Speaker 1: Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for RADIOIE and today I
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will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September October twenty
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twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service
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intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities
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that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please join me
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now for the first article, which is part two of
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two years after Cormac McCarthy's death, rare access to his
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personal library reveals the man behind the myth. The famously
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reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books, ranging
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in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the
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Naked Mule Rat by Richard Grant. In the first part
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of our story, we learned about a rare opportunity to
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explore the author, Cormac McCarthy's personal library, which has provided
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unprecedented insights into the life of this famously reclusive novelists.
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McCarthy's final residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, houses an
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enormous and chaotically organized collection of approximately twenty thousand books.
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Scholars have undertaken the monumental task of cataloging this vast library,
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which includes annotated volumes that reveal much about McCarthy's intellectual
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pursuits and personal interests. The library's contents range from philosophical
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treatises and advanced mathematics to niche topics like the biology
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of the Naked Mulrat, reflecting MacCarthy's insatiable curiosity and polymathic intellect.
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The cataloging project, led by scholars like Brian Ginza, a
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scholar of literature and humanities at Texas Tech University, and
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Stacy Peebles, a professor of film and English at Center
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College in Danville, Kentucky, has uncovered fascinating details about McCarthy's
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life and work. MacCarthy's annotations and margin comments offer a
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deeper understanding of the influences and inspirations behind his novels.
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Despite his reputation for bleak and violent themes, some of
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his notes reveal a more philosophical and introspective side. The
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project has also highlighted McCarthy's eccentricities, such as his hoarding
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tendencies and his extensive collections of kitchenware and classic sports cars.
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Through this meticulous examination of his library, scholars hope to
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gain a more comprehensive understanding of McCarthy, though the mystery
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of his character may only deepen. Here now is part two.
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The cataloging was dusty, repetitive, eye straining work, but it
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was conducted with good humor and camaraderie, and you never
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knew what might come out of the next box. One afternoon,
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after looking through a bag about Cistercian Abbey's violin makers, metaphysics, metaontology,
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the incest taboo, and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization,
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I said, was there anything he wasn't interested in? Sewing? Perhaps? Nope,
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said Jonathan Elmore, an English professor at Louisiana Tech University.
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We've cataloged books on needlework and quilting. Rick, Jonathan's twin brother,
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noted McCarthy's keen interest in clothes and fashion, which could
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I granted, be described as sewing related. McCarthy was a
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long time subscriber to the fashion and style magazine W
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and he had annotated many of his books about men'swear.
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In his copy of the Suit, A Machiavellian Approached to
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Men's Style, MacCarthy penciled his opinion of slip on dress
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shoes disgusting Further down the same page, next to a
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sentence raising shiny buckled monk strap shoes, he wrote yet
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more horror. The scholars treated annotations like pieces of treasure
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and would read them aloud to each other. Inside Reclaiming
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History the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they found
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notes on a slip of paper, including a line about
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the assassin's bullet. It was going like a bat out
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of hell when it left the President's head, and in
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that crowd, it is a pure freak of chance that
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it didn't take out a citizens spectator. The historical figures
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who interested McCarthy the most, judging by the number of
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books he owned about them, were Albert Einstein one hundred
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and fourteen books, Winston Churchill eighty eight, and James Joyce
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seventy eight. Architecture is the dominant subject in this collection,
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with eight hundred and fifty five books. The human being,
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whom McCarthy most admired. McCarthy's younger brother, Dennis, confirms who
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was Ludovig Wittgenstein. The team cataloged a staggering one hundred
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and forty two books by or about the philosopher, with
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a high proportion annotated. McCarthy's fascination with Wittgenstein came as
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a surprise to the scholars, but it makes sense, as
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Rick Elmore, a philosophy professor at Appalachian State University with
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floral tattoos climbing up his neck, puts it, Wittgenstein was
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always asking how the systems we use to represent the
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world relate to the world we want to represent. It's
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one of the central questions in MacCarthy's work, with the
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exception of Moby Dick. In multiple gorgeous leather bound editions,
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the scholars found hardly any novels until they started cutting
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open boxes that Dennis retrieved from a storage locker in
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El Paso. Out came the entire canon of Western literature,
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from ancient Greece and Rome to the best novelists, poets,
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and essays of the nineteen seventies, nearly all in cheap,
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worn paperback editions. These are the books that he read
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in his twenties and thirties, and maybe into his forties.
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And he was broke that whole time, said Dennis. Once
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he got money, Cormack bought all his books and hard
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back if possible, and for the last forty years of
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his life, he read almost no fiction at all. Why.
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The answer stems from MacCarthy's deeply disparaging view of modern society,
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which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition,
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and heading towards social collapse and apocalypse. Cormack considered contemporary
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fiction a waste of time, said Dennis, because contemporary writers
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no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.
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One afternoon, Dennis was marveling at McCarthy's story telling abilities
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and comedic talents, and I asked him if there was anything,
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apart from housekeeping, that his brother had been bad at.
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He thought about it for a moment and said marriage.
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McCarthy was married and divorced three times. His wives needed
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more than he gave them. Denis said, the work always
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came first for cormac. He loved those women, but he
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loved himself more. He was a narcissist, and if he
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hadn't been a narcissist, he never would have achieved the
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same heights of artistic greatness. The most enduring love of
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MacCarthy's life was a woman named Augusta Britt, As she
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revealed last year in interviews with Vanity Fair magazine. They
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began a sexual relationship when she was seventeen and he
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was forty three, and he took her to Mexico to
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evade the FBI, who were after him for statutory rape
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and Man Act violations. Britt has said she didn't feel
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sexually exploited and credits McCarthy for saving her life by
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rescuing her from an abusive situation in Tucson, but some
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readers and commentators have found MacCarthy's behavior with her beyond
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the pale. Britt declined to comment for this piece. McCarthy
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and Britt were together as a couple for about four years.
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Even after they split up, he never stopped loving her.
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Dennis said he continued to see her on a regular basis,
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and they maintained a close relationship for the rest of
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his life. Piece by piece, the inscrutable mystique that MacCarthy
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built around himself is falling away. Two biographies are on
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the way to publication, one by a friend of MacCarthy's
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named Laurence Gonzalez, the other by literary biographer Tracy Dougherty
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and Britt might collaborate on a book with Vincenzo Barney
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who wrote her story and Vanity Fair. We also have
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McCarthy's library, which, perhaps more than any other source, can
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illuminate the mind of the man, who, as Peoples says,
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built his life on books. On the first day of
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the final cat logging session, Peebles let out a hooting
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sound upon finding a dead bat at the bottom of
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a box. The downstairs of the house had been steadily
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accumulating dust for more than two years since McCarthy's death,
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and it was still crammed with books. The McCarthy scholars Kormackians,
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as they call themselves, repacked the cataloged books, wrote the
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date and cataloged cms for Cormac McCarthy's Society, and stacked
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them up wherever space could be found. The annotated books
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went into separate boxes marked annotated, or were piled up
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on the pool table. The dead bat was left in
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the bottom of a book box. When the project began,
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Peoples had hoped that all the books could be kept
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together in a single collection in some sort of Cormac
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McCarthy memorial building, but that wasn't panning out. Dennis had
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arranged for the annotated books to join his brother's papers,
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which include the notes and drafts for his entire body
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of work at the Wickcliffe Collections Archive at Texas State University.
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The Santa Fe Institute wanted a selection of the most
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intellectually rigorous academic books for a small library it was
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planning to build in honor of McCarthy. The rest of
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the books were going to the University of Tennessee and Knoxville,
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where he enrolled twice and failed to graduate. In the
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digital realm, however, McCarthy's library will live on as a
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complete entity, and the public will be able to inspect
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its cataloged titles free of charge. Our goal right from
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the outset was to create an open access database listing
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all the books in his collection, Peeples said. Any One
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who wants to know what books McCarthy was reading and
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whether he annotated them will be able to log on
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and access that information. The University of South Carolina has
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agreed to build a website for this purpose and to
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publish a monograph by Peebles about the cataloging project. There's
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talk of scanning all the annotations at some point and
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making them available on the website, but that is still theoretical.
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Almost exactly a year after the project began. Stacy Peebles
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opened the very last box. Perhaps the best adjective for
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its contents is Cormackian. Peeples pulled them out and announced
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books about Mexican architecture and the French Renaissance Court, Cuker Guards,
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Metaphors and the Texas Rangers, The Neurobiology of Mental Illness,
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Architecture and Society in Normandy from eleven twenty to twelve seventy,
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and the Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons. She was
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unable to calculate the total number of books because the
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cataloging software didn't account for multi volume works. McCarthy's thirty
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six volume History of Utah, for example, registered as a
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single entry, nor did the software tally multiple editions of
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the same book, so McCarthy's thirteen copies of Moby Dick
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registered as one entry. The total number of entries was
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eighteen thousand, five hundred and twenty. Taking into account duplicate
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copies and multi volume works, Peebles felt confident that McCarthy's
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library contained just over twenty thousand books, with two thousand,
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one hundred seventy annotated. Driving away from the house with
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the taste of old book dust in my mouth, I
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marveled at the extraordinary force of McCarthy's curiosity. I thought
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about the books on acousto optics and lay intellectuals in
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the ninth century Carolingian Empire, the twenty two hundred dollars
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he spent on eight volumes of Horace Walpole's collected letters,
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the ten thousand dollars, and several uncashed royalty checks that
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he used as a bookmark in the memoir of William
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Faulkner's Niece. To peer in to someone's library is to
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peer into their brain. And here, it seemed, was a
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mind that wanted to know everything. Accompanying this article, did
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you know who was Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy is an
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award winning novelist whose works often explored the American West
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with darkness and complexity. Among McCarthy's many awards are a
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Guggenheim Fellowship in nineteen sixty nine, a MacArthur Fellowship in
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nineteen eighty one, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two
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thousand seven for The Road, and a National Book Award
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in nineteen ninety two for All the Pretty Horses. Next,
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the first magazines written for career women reveal a portrait
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of immense creativity and hope. Publications including Mademoiselle, Glamour and
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The Long Forgotten Charm, first emerged in the nineteen thirties
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to satisfy by an emergent force in the workplace by
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Kara Kino. Sometime during the Great Depression, a high school
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student named Helen Ralston complained to her father that she
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and her friends were fed up with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
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The French couture and luxurious lifestyles promoted in their pages
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were unattainable, she said, while the articles did not speak
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to the interests of young women or girls her age.
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There were another forty odd women's magazines on the market,
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but all were aimed at housewives. Luckily, for Helen, her father,
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Henry W. Ralston, a vice president of the New York
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publishing company Street and Smith, was in a position to
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address her concerns. Since the nineteenth century, his firm had
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been turning out men's and boys fiction by authors like
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Horatio Alger and Brett Hart, plus pulps and comic books
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like Detective Story and Buffalo Bill. Fired by this brace
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wisdom from his daughter, in February nineteen thirty five, Henry
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and his colleagues introduced Mademoiselle, the country's first magazine for
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young women, which also became the first career girl magazine
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in the United States. The extraordinary early history of Mademoiselle
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and of the similar publications it inspired is little known.
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A close study of their archives reveals an era of
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remarkable advancements for American women, poignant as it proved so fragile. Nonetheless,
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these women writers and editors helped write an early and
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important draft of twentieth century American feminism, and they did
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it in style. Mademoiselle's first issue, conceived by a primarily
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male editorial team, got off to an inauspicious start. Later,
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a newsagent told the editors that its few buyers were
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mostly men, who, drawn by the saucy French name, and
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perhaps also by the photo of a woman in a
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backless evening gown, mistakenly assumed it was a girly book. Instead,
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the issue contained a grab bag of material concocted for
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a youthful female reader, including fashion sketches, girl's adventure stories,
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and overwrought tales of romance, one concerning a Southern gent
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who shocks himself by falling for a Yankee at a ball.
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Humiliated by low sales, the editors swiftly withdrew the Sorry
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experiment from the newsstands and halted publication for a month
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to regroup. Thankfully, by then, they had hired Betsy Talbot Blackwell,
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a twenty nine year old journalist with more than a
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decade's experience in fashion reporting and marketing. Blackwell also had
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an adolescent stepdaughter, an impressive bullpen of writer friends on
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whom she could call, and above all, a keen sense
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of what young women wanted, something totally unlike their mother's. Magazine,
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Mademoiselle originally targeted women between the ages of eighteen and thirty,
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all of whom had come of age knowing they could vote.
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What nobody seemed to have noticed was that women had changed.
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Blackwell later reflected younger women were in revolt. Their ideas
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were different from their mothers. They were not interested solely
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in recipes or babies. They were going to college, they
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were getting jobs. She went after college women, publishing first
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rate writing by authors like the wildly popular French writer
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of the day known as Colette, and pulling together an
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advisory college board of students who sent in tips about
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fashions and social trends. The magazine drew more eyeballs with
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an annual August guest Editor's issue, also assembled by students.
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This gambit, for which Mademoiselle is best remembered to day,
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later helped launch literary stars like Silvia Plath and Joan Didion.
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Other attention getting ploys included a series in which a
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Hollywood makeup artist revealed beauty tricks used by actresses adapted
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for home use. When a self described homely nurse wrote
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in begging Mademoiselle to transform her from ugly duckling even
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into a pale, pink swan, the editor's created the first makeover.
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Nurse Barbara's metamorphosis made national news, winning a page of
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admiring coverage and Time magazine, while more makeovers followed. Mademoiselle's
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early success was born of Blackwell's radical notion that women
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were thinking, independent, minded beings, not mere domestic help meets.
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From the very first issue, she also championed the cause
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of what she later termed a fast growing forgotten minority group,
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the career girl. Not long before unemployment had been so dumped,
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overtaking a quarter of the population in nineteen thirty three
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that school boards and banks and many other employers fired
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married women to ensure jobs went to men, says Nelson Liechtenstein,
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who directs the Center for Study of Work, Labor and
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Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They said,
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we're defending the family, Liechtenstein observes of these employers, they
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weren't ashamed. Now came Mademoiselle, offering frank advice about where
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and how savvy women could find work. Its career column,
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flippantly titled I Don't Want to play the Harp, was
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aimed at those who would rather fly an ocean, split
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an atom, set a style than stay home. Cultivating Feminine
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Charms written by Helen Josephy, a well known journalist. Like
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most Mademoiselle contributors, the first offered a deeply reported account
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of how to break into radio. Joseph covered a different
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profession each month. Practical advice was balanced by lively discussions
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of social concerns newly relevant to young women competing in
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the concrete jungle. The magazine's advice column, lightheartedly called what
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to Do Before the Psychiatrist Comes, was written by Dorothy Dayton,
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a witty, hard boiled city desk reporter at the New
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York Sun. Dayton addressed issues like how much kissing was
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too much. She advised learning to hold one's liquor the
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better to make clearheaded decisions in the moment, or whether
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it paid to maintain one's virtue. Some moderns would say
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it pays only the psychiatrist, she joked. Dayton's musings on virtue,
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published in nineteen thirty eight, the year after birth control
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was legalized and all but two states summoned up a
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world that sounds surprisingly contemporary. Couples living together out of
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wedlock as not uncommon among you young people in the
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large cities, she wrote, adding that under some circumstances there
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is much to be said for it. Mademoiselle published its
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first all career issue that same year. By nineteen forty,
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the magazine, now bearing the tagline for smart young Women,
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had boosted its circulation from thirty seven thousand in nineteen
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thirty six to more than three hundred thousand, far exceeding
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that of the more fashioned focused Vogue and Harper's Bazaarre.
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It also carried more advertising than any other women's magazine.
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It also inspired competitors, starting with Glamour, created in nineteen
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thirty nine by Vogue's publisher Conde Nast as Glamour of Hollywood,
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the only magazine Nast himself created from scratch. The publication
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initially covered the aspirational lifestyles of movie stars, but spurred
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by Mademoiselle's continued success, Glamour swiftly refocused on so serving
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a readership of young urban women. Soon it was filled
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with job and career advice, as well as fashion suited
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to the rising star. As the magazine termed Smart Young
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career Girls, its tagline became for the girl with the Job.
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In nineteen forty one, Street and Smith one up to
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Conte Nast by launching its second young women's magazine, Charm.
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This one aimed at what the magazine termed the business girl.
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Although America hadn't yet entered the War overseas, Charms Raw
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raw Style anticipated the patriotic fervor that was to come.
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You like to pay your bills, of course you do.
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When column read that's typically American, that spirit of independence.
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Career girls would soon be asked to go to work
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for the country's good. By nineteen forty three, nearly seven
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point three million American men had gone to fight in
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World War Two, and the figure would ride to more
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than ten million by war's end. Women had to take
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over the jobs they left behind, and magazines became part
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of the government's campaign to persuade more of them to
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go to work. Starting in late nineteen forty two, the
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Magazine Bureau of the U. S. Office of War Information
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distributed a bi monthly guide filled with story ideas to
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editors and writers around the country. The first issue focused
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on woman power, which the guide termed the Big Story.
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For nineteen forty three, a supplement listed the many ways
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women could serve Uncle sam amid this flag waving career.
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Girl magazines began running stories about young women who had
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joined different branches of the armed services and about those
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volunteering at home. Mademoiselle started a series on jobs of
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particular importance to the war effort, ranging from statistician to
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personnel manager to farm hand. In many ways, it was
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a shock when the war ended and the shift to
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a peacetime economy began, as women were expected to relinquish
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many of the positions they'd attained while men were gone.
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If you are holding down a job which once belonged
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to a serviceman. One nineteen forty five charm story explained,
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there's a good chance you may have to give it
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up to him when he gets back. Young women were
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further discouraged from working by a rising tide of anti
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feminist books and articles. The most notorious among these was
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the nineteen forty seven bestseller Modern Woman, The Lost Sex,
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which ascribed many modern ills, including a post war uptick
24:42
in divorces and even the war itself, to the idea
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that women had ventured too far beyond their biological destiny.
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Written by the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and the Freudian psychoanalyst
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Mary Nea f Farnhum, it argued that modern women were
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the pivot around which much of the unhappiness of our
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day revolves. Farnum, the book's spokesperson, disseminated its claims in
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newsreels and articles in an eight part series and Glamour,
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of all places. She insisted that, rather than working, women
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must rededicate themselves to raising the next generation of young
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men who would rebuild the world, aided by psychotherapy if necessary.
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Betty for Dan, in her nineteen sixty three book The
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feminine mystique later blamed widespread melancholia among mid century American
25:35
housewives on the book's malign influence. As Glamour bent to farnum,
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other career girl magazines made a sudden about face, focusing
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on brilliant men instead of smart young women, the idea
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being that young women should now primarily concern themselves with
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the careers of the men in their lives. Emblematic of
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the trend was a nineteen forty seven Glamor story that
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profiled men working in exciting areas like radio or industrial design,
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all professional fields with the kind of future that might
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interest your man and mademoiselle. An article called the Men
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on their Minds discussed some of America's most popular college professors,
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offering nostalgic adulation where once they had enjoined young women
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to think for themselves. Charm sank lower. You've a head
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on your shoulders, remember it, burbled in a nineteen forty
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eight piece dedicated not to brains but to hairdoos. By
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the nineteen fifties, magazines that had once served career girls
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were now targeting women who considered raising children the best
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and seemingly only job available. Yet, despite these pressures, many
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women stayed in the workforce, As Liechtenstein notes, after a
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slight decline in the late night nineteen forties, more women
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were working by the early nineteen fifties than at the
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peak of World War II, although their jobs were often
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clerical in contrast to the more varied and responsible positions
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they'd held before, and some like Blackwell continued to find
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success long before feminism returned. In nineteen forty nine, she
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became a director of Street and Smith, the first woman
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in its history to rise to that role. That same year,
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the company killed off its original boys and men's pulp
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and dime novel business in order to focus on its
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more lucrative women's magazines. Blackwell also continued editing Mademoiselle until
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she retired in nineteen seventy one. I don't believe in
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equal pay for women, she said ten years later when
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she was honored an event in New York. They should
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get more. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for
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to day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
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for listening, and have a great day.