9.11.25

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome. This is Rebecca Shore for RADIOIE and today I
will be reading the Smithsonian Magazine dated September October twenty
twenty five. As a reminder, RADIOI is a reading service
intended for people who are blind or have other disabilities
that make it difficult to reprinted material. Please join me

(00:21):
now for the first article, which is part two of
two years after Cormac McCarthy's death, rare access to his
personal library reveals the man behind the myth. The famously
reclusive novelist amassed a collection of thousands of books, ranging
in topics from philosophical treatises to advanced mathematics to the

(00:44):
Naked Mule Rat by Richard Grant. In the first part
of our story, we learned about a rare opportunity to
explore the author, Cormac McCarthy's personal library, which has provided
unprecedented insights into the life of this famously reclusive novelists.
McCarthy's final residence in Santa Fe, New Mexico, houses an

(01:07):
enormous and chaotically organized collection of approximately twenty thousand books.
Scholars have undertaken the monumental task of cataloging this vast library,
which includes annotated volumes that reveal much about McCarthy's intellectual
pursuits and personal interests. The library's contents range from philosophical

(01:29):
treatises and advanced mathematics to niche topics like the biology
of the Naked Mulrat, reflecting MacCarthy's insatiable curiosity and polymathic intellect.
The cataloging project, led by scholars like Brian Ginza, a
scholar of literature and humanities at Texas Tech University, and
Stacy Peebles, a professor of film and English at Center

(01:52):
College in Danville, Kentucky, has uncovered fascinating details about McCarthy's
life and work. MacCarthy's annotations and margin comments offer a
deeper understanding of the influences and inspirations behind his novels.
Despite his reputation for bleak and violent themes, some of

(02:13):
his notes reveal a more philosophical and introspective side. The
project has also highlighted McCarthy's eccentricities, such as his hoarding
tendencies and his extensive collections of kitchenware and classic sports cars.
Through this meticulous examination of his library, scholars hope to

(02:35):
gain a more comprehensive understanding of McCarthy, though the mystery
of his character may only deepen. Here now is part two.
The cataloging was dusty, repetitive, eye straining work, but it
was conducted with good humor and camaraderie, and you never
knew what might come out of the next box. One afternoon,

(02:58):
after looking through a bag about Cistercian Abbey's violin makers, metaphysics, metaontology,
the incest taboo, and the material foundations of ancient Mesopotamian civilization,
I said, was there anything he wasn't interested in? Sewing? Perhaps? Nope,
said Jonathan Elmore, an English professor at Louisiana Tech University.

(03:23):
We've cataloged books on needlework and quilting. Rick, Jonathan's twin brother,
noted McCarthy's keen interest in clothes and fashion, which could
I granted, be described as sewing related. McCarthy was a
long time subscriber to the fashion and style magazine W
and he had annotated many of his books about men'swear.

(03:46):
In his copy of the Suit, A Machiavellian Approached to
Men's Style, MacCarthy penciled his opinion of slip on dress
shoes disgusting Further down the same page, next to a
sentence raising shiny buckled monk strap shoes, he wrote yet
more horror. The scholars treated annotations like pieces of treasure

(04:09):
and would read them aloud to each other. Inside Reclaiming
History the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, they found
notes on a slip of paper, including a line about
the assassin's bullet. It was going like a bat out
of hell when it left the President's head, and in
that crowd, it is a pure freak of chance that
it didn't take out a citizens spectator. The historical figures

(04:34):
who interested McCarthy the most, judging by the number of
books he owned about them, were Albert Einstein one hundred
and fourteen books, Winston Churchill eighty eight, and James Joyce
seventy eight. Architecture is the dominant subject in this collection,
with eight hundred and fifty five books. The human being,

(04:55):
whom McCarthy most admired. McCarthy's younger brother, Dennis, confirms who
was Ludovig Wittgenstein. The team cataloged a staggering one hundred
and forty two books by or about the philosopher, with
a high proportion annotated. McCarthy's fascination with Wittgenstein came as
a surprise to the scholars, but it makes sense, as

(05:18):
Rick Elmore, a philosophy professor at Appalachian State University with
floral tattoos climbing up his neck, puts it, Wittgenstein was
always asking how the systems we use to represent the
world relate to the world we want to represent. It's
one of the central questions in MacCarthy's work, with the

(05:39):
exception of Moby Dick. In multiple gorgeous leather bound editions,
the scholars found hardly any novels until they started cutting
open boxes that Dennis retrieved from a storage locker in
El Paso. Out came the entire canon of Western literature,
from ancient Greece and Rome to the best novelists, poets,

(05:59):
and essays of the nineteen seventies, nearly all in cheap,
worn paperback editions. These are the books that he read
in his twenties and thirties, and maybe into his forties.
And he was broke that whole time, said Dennis. Once
he got money, Cormack bought all his books and hard
back if possible, and for the last forty years of

(06:19):
his life, he read almost no fiction at all. Why.
The answer stems from MacCarthy's deeply disparaging view of modern society,
which he considered lost, divorced from nature, history and tradition,
and heading towards social collapse and apocalypse. Cormack considered contemporary

(06:40):
fiction a waste of time, said Dennis, because contemporary writers
no longer have a legitimate culture to feed their souls.
One afternoon, Dennis was marveling at McCarthy's story telling abilities
and comedic talents, and I asked him if there was anything,
apart from housekeeping, that his brother had been bad at.

(07:01):
He thought about it for a moment and said marriage.
McCarthy was married and divorced three times. His wives needed
more than he gave them. Denis said, the work always
came first for cormac. He loved those women, but he
loved himself more. He was a narcissist, and if he
hadn't been a narcissist, he never would have achieved the

(07:23):
same heights of artistic greatness. The most enduring love of
MacCarthy's life was a woman named Augusta Britt, As she
revealed last year in interviews with Vanity Fair magazine. They
began a sexual relationship when she was seventeen and he
was forty three, and he took her to Mexico to
evade the FBI, who were after him for statutory rape

(07:46):
and Man Act violations. Britt has said she didn't feel
sexually exploited and credits McCarthy for saving her life by
rescuing her from an abusive situation in Tucson, but some
readers and commentators have found MacCarthy's behavior with her beyond
the pale. Britt declined to comment for this piece. McCarthy

(08:08):
and Britt were together as a couple for about four years.
Even after they split up, he never stopped loving her.
Dennis said he continued to see her on a regular basis,
and they maintained a close relationship for the rest of
his life. Piece by piece, the inscrutable mystique that MacCarthy
built around himself is falling away. Two biographies are on

(08:32):
the way to publication, one by a friend of MacCarthy's
named Laurence Gonzalez, the other by literary biographer Tracy Dougherty
and Britt might collaborate on a book with Vincenzo Barney
who wrote her story and Vanity Fair. We also have
McCarthy's library, which, perhaps more than any other source, can
illuminate the mind of the man, who, as Peoples says,

(08:55):
built his life on books. On the first day of
the final cat logging session, Peebles let out a hooting
sound upon finding a dead bat at the bottom of
a box. The downstairs of the house had been steadily
accumulating dust for more than two years since McCarthy's death,
and it was still crammed with books. The McCarthy scholars Kormackians,

(09:20):
as they call themselves, repacked the cataloged books, wrote the
date and cataloged cms for Cormac McCarthy's Society, and stacked
them up wherever space could be found. The annotated books
went into separate boxes marked annotated, or were piled up
on the pool table. The dead bat was left in
the bottom of a book box. When the project began,

(09:43):
Peoples had hoped that all the books could be kept
together in a single collection in some sort of Cormac
McCarthy memorial building, but that wasn't panning out. Dennis had
arranged for the annotated books to join his brother's papers,
which include the notes and drafts for his entire body
of work at the Wickcliffe Collections Archive at Texas State University.

(10:07):
The Santa Fe Institute wanted a selection of the most
intellectually rigorous academic books for a small library it was
planning to build in honor of McCarthy. The rest of
the books were going to the University of Tennessee and Knoxville,
where he enrolled twice and failed to graduate. In the
digital realm, however, McCarthy's library will live on as a

(10:30):
complete entity, and the public will be able to inspect
its cataloged titles free of charge. Our goal right from
the outset was to create an open access database listing
all the books in his collection, Peeples said. Any One
who wants to know what books McCarthy was reading and
whether he annotated them will be able to log on

(10:52):
and access that information. The University of South Carolina has
agreed to build a website for this purpose and to
publish a monograph by Peebles about the cataloging project. There's
talk of scanning all the annotations at some point and
making them available on the website, but that is still theoretical.

(11:13):
Almost exactly a year after the project began. Stacy Peebles
opened the very last box. Perhaps the best adjective for
its contents is Cormackian. Peeples pulled them out and announced
books about Mexican architecture and the French Renaissance Court, Cuker Guards,
Metaphors and the Texas Rangers, The Neurobiology of Mental Illness,

(11:36):
Architecture and Society in Normandy from eleven twenty to twelve seventy,
and the Gun Digest Book of Assault Weapons. She was
unable to calculate the total number of books because the
cataloging software didn't account for multi volume works. McCarthy's thirty
six volume History of Utah, for example, registered as a

(11:58):
single entry, nor did the software tally multiple editions of
the same book, so McCarthy's thirteen copies of Moby Dick
registered as one entry. The total number of entries was
eighteen thousand, five hundred and twenty. Taking into account duplicate
copies and multi volume works, Peebles felt confident that McCarthy's

(12:19):
library contained just over twenty thousand books, with two thousand,
one hundred seventy annotated. Driving away from the house with
the taste of old book dust in my mouth, I
marveled at the extraordinary force of McCarthy's curiosity. I thought
about the books on acousto optics and lay intellectuals in

(12:41):
the ninth century Carolingian Empire, the twenty two hundred dollars
he spent on eight volumes of Horace Walpole's collected letters,
the ten thousand dollars, and several uncashed royalty checks that
he used as a bookmark in the memoir of William
Faulkner's Niece. To peer in to someone's library is to
peer into their brain. And here, it seemed, was a

(13:05):
mind that wanted to know everything. Accompanying this article, did
you know who was Cormac McCarthy. Cormac McCarthy is an
award winning novelist whose works often explored the American West
with darkness and complexity. Among McCarthy's many awards are a

(13:26):
Guggenheim Fellowship in nineteen sixty nine, a MacArthur Fellowship in
nineteen eighty one, a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in two
thousand seven for The Road, and a National Book Award
in nineteen ninety two for All the Pretty Horses. Next,
the first magazines written for career women reveal a portrait

(13:49):
of immense creativity and hope. Publications including Mademoiselle, Glamour and
The Long Forgotten Charm, first emerged in the nineteen thirties
to satisfy by an emergent force in the workplace by
Kara Kino. Sometime during the Great Depression, a high school
student named Helen Ralston complained to her father that she

(14:12):
and her friends were fed up with Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
The French couture and luxurious lifestyles promoted in their pages
were unattainable, she said, while the articles did not speak
to the interests of young women or girls her age.
There were another forty odd women's magazines on the market,
but all were aimed at housewives. Luckily, for Helen, her father,

(14:36):
Henry W. Ralston, a vice president of the New York
publishing company Street and Smith, was in a position to
address her concerns. Since the nineteenth century, his firm had
been turning out men's and boys fiction by authors like
Horatio Alger and Brett Hart, plus pulps and comic books
like Detective Story and Buffalo Bill. Fired by this brace

(15:00):
wisdom from his daughter, in February nineteen thirty five, Henry
and his colleagues introduced Mademoiselle, the country's first magazine for
young women, which also became the first career girl magazine
in the United States. The extraordinary early history of Mademoiselle
and of the similar publications it inspired is little known.

(15:22):
A close study of their archives reveals an era of
remarkable advancements for American women, poignant as it proved so fragile. Nonetheless,
these women writers and editors helped write an early and
important draft of twentieth century American feminism, and they did
it in style. Mademoiselle's first issue, conceived by a primarily

(15:46):
male editorial team, got off to an inauspicious start. Later,
a newsagent told the editors that its few buyers were
mostly men, who, drawn by the saucy French name, and
perhaps also by the photo of a woman in a
backless evening gown, mistakenly assumed it was a girly book. Instead,

(16:07):
the issue contained a grab bag of material concocted for
a youthful female reader, including fashion sketches, girl's adventure stories,
and overwrought tales of romance, one concerning a Southern gent
who shocks himself by falling for a Yankee at a ball.
Humiliated by low sales, the editors swiftly withdrew the Sorry

(16:30):
experiment from the newsstands and halted publication for a month
to regroup. Thankfully, by then, they had hired Betsy Talbot Blackwell,
a twenty nine year old journalist with more than a
decade's experience in fashion reporting and marketing. Blackwell also had
an adolescent stepdaughter, an impressive bullpen of writer friends on

(16:51):
whom she could call, and above all, a keen sense
of what young women wanted, something totally unlike their mother's. Magazine,
Mademoiselle originally targeted women between the ages of eighteen and thirty,
all of whom had come of age knowing they could vote.
What nobody seemed to have noticed was that women had changed.

(17:14):
Blackwell later reflected younger women were in revolt. Their ideas
were different from their mothers. They were not interested solely
in recipes or babies. They were going to college, they
were getting jobs. She went after college women, publishing first
rate writing by authors like the wildly popular French writer

(17:35):
of the day known as Colette, and pulling together an
advisory college board of students who sent in tips about
fashions and social trends. The magazine drew more eyeballs with
an annual August guest Editor's issue, also assembled by students.
This gambit, for which Mademoiselle is best remembered to day,

(17:57):
later helped launch literary stars like Silvia Plath and Joan Didion.
Other attention getting ploys included a series in which a
Hollywood makeup artist revealed beauty tricks used by actresses adapted
for home use. When a self described homely nurse wrote
in begging Mademoiselle to transform her from ugly duckling even

(18:20):
into a pale, pink swan, the editor's created the first makeover.
Nurse Barbara's metamorphosis made national news, winning a page of
admiring coverage and Time magazine, while more makeovers followed. Mademoiselle's
early success was born of Blackwell's radical notion that women

(18:41):
were thinking, independent, minded beings, not mere domestic help meets.
From the very first issue, she also championed the cause
of what she later termed a fast growing forgotten minority group,
the career girl. Not long before unemployment had been so dumped,
overtaking a quarter of the population in nineteen thirty three

(19:04):
that school boards and banks and many other employers fired
married women to ensure jobs went to men, says Nelson Liechtenstein,
who directs the Center for Study of Work, Labor and
Democracy at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They said,
we're defending the family, Liechtenstein observes of these employers, they

(19:26):
weren't ashamed. Now came Mademoiselle, offering frank advice about where
and how savvy women could find work. Its career column,
flippantly titled I Don't Want to play the Harp, was
aimed at those who would rather fly an ocean, split
an atom, set a style than stay home. Cultivating Feminine

(19:47):
Charms written by Helen Josephy, a well known journalist. Like
most Mademoiselle contributors, the first offered a deeply reported account
of how to break into radio. Joseph covered a different
profession each month. Practical advice was balanced by lively discussions
of social concerns newly relevant to young women competing in

(20:10):
the concrete jungle. The magazine's advice column, lightheartedly called what
to Do Before the Psychiatrist Comes, was written by Dorothy Dayton,
a witty, hard boiled city desk reporter at the New
York Sun. Dayton addressed issues like how much kissing was
too much. She advised learning to hold one's liquor the

(20:32):
better to make clearheaded decisions in the moment, or whether
it paid to maintain one's virtue. Some moderns would say
it pays only the psychiatrist, she joked. Dayton's musings on virtue,
published in nineteen thirty eight, the year after birth control
was legalized and all but two states summoned up a

(20:52):
world that sounds surprisingly contemporary. Couples living together out of
wedlock as not uncommon among you young people in the
large cities, she wrote, adding that under some circumstances there
is much to be said for it. Mademoiselle published its
first all career issue that same year. By nineteen forty,

(21:13):
the magazine, now bearing the tagline for smart young Women,
had boosted its circulation from thirty seven thousand in nineteen
thirty six to more than three hundred thousand, far exceeding
that of the more fashioned focused Vogue and Harper's Bazaarre.
It also carried more advertising than any other women's magazine.

(21:35):
It also inspired competitors, starting with Glamour, created in nineteen
thirty nine by Vogue's publisher Conde Nast as Glamour of Hollywood,
the only magazine Nast himself created from scratch. The publication
initially covered the aspirational lifestyles of movie stars, but spurred
by Mademoiselle's continued success, Glamour swiftly refocused on so serving

(22:00):
a readership of young urban women. Soon it was filled
with job and career advice, as well as fashion suited
to the rising star. As the magazine termed Smart Young
career Girls, its tagline became for the girl with the Job.
In nineteen forty one, Street and Smith one up to

(22:20):
Conte Nast by launching its second young women's magazine, Charm.
This one aimed at what the magazine termed the business girl.
Although America hadn't yet entered the War overseas, Charms Raw
raw Style anticipated the patriotic fervor that was to come.
You like to pay your bills, of course you do.

(22:42):
When column read that's typically American, that spirit of independence.
Career girls would soon be asked to go to work
for the country's good. By nineteen forty three, nearly seven
point three million American men had gone to fight in
World War Two, and the figure would ride to more
than ten million by war's end. Women had to take

(23:04):
over the jobs they left behind, and magazines became part
of the government's campaign to persuade more of them to
go to work. Starting in late nineteen forty two, the
Magazine Bureau of the U. S. Office of War Information
distributed a bi monthly guide filled with story ideas to
editors and writers around the country. The first issue focused

(23:27):
on woman power, which the guide termed the Big Story.
For nineteen forty three, a supplement listed the many ways
women could serve Uncle sam amid this flag waving career.
Girl magazines began running stories about young women who had
joined different branches of the armed services and about those
volunteering at home. Mademoiselle started a series on jobs of

(23:52):
particular importance to the war effort, ranging from statistician to
personnel manager to farm hand. In many ways, it was
a shock when the war ended and the shift to
a peacetime economy began, as women were expected to relinquish
many of the positions they'd attained while men were gone.

(24:12):
If you are holding down a job which once belonged
to a serviceman. One nineteen forty five charm story explained,
there's a good chance you may have to give it
up to him when he gets back. Young women were
further discouraged from working by a rising tide of anti
feminist books and articles. The most notorious among these was

(24:33):
the nineteen forty seven bestseller Modern Woman, The Lost Sex,
which ascribed many modern ills, including a post war uptick
in divorces and even the war itself, to the idea
that women had ventured too far beyond their biological destiny.
Written by the sociologist Ferdinand Lundberg and the Freudian psychoanalyst

(24:55):
Mary Nea f Farnhum, it argued that modern women were
the pivot around which much of the unhappiness of our
day revolves. Farnum, the book's spokesperson, disseminated its claims in
newsreels and articles in an eight part series and Glamour,
of all places. She insisted that, rather than working, women

(25:17):
must rededicate themselves to raising the next generation of young
men who would rebuild the world, aided by psychotherapy if necessary.
Betty for Dan, in her nineteen sixty three book The
feminine mystique later blamed widespread melancholia among mid century American
housewives on the book's malign influence. As Glamour bent to farnum,

(25:41):
other career girl magazines made a sudden about face, focusing
on brilliant men instead of smart young women, the idea
being that young women should now primarily concern themselves with
the careers of the men in their lives. Emblematic of
the trend was a nineteen forty seven Glamor story that
profiled men working in exciting areas like radio or industrial design,

(26:06):
all professional fields with the kind of future that might
interest your man and mademoiselle. An article called the Men
on their Minds discussed some of America's most popular college professors,
offering nostalgic adulation where once they had enjoined young women
to think for themselves. Charm sank lower. You've a head

(26:29):
on your shoulders, remember it, burbled in a nineteen forty
eight piece dedicated not to brains but to hairdoos. By
the nineteen fifties, magazines that had once served career girls
were now targeting women who considered raising children the best
and seemingly only job available. Yet, despite these pressures, many

(26:53):
women stayed in the workforce, As Liechtenstein notes, after a
slight decline in the late night nineteen forties, more women
were working by the early nineteen fifties than at the
peak of World War II, although their jobs were often
clerical in contrast to the more varied and responsible positions
they'd held before, and some like Blackwell continued to find

(27:18):
success long before feminism returned. In nineteen forty nine, she
became a director of Street and Smith, the first woman
in its history to rise to that role. That same year,
the company killed off its original boys and men's pulp
and dime novel business in order to focus on its

(27:41):
more lucrative women's magazines. Blackwell also continued editing Mademoiselle until
she retired in nineteen seventy one. I don't believe in
equal pay for women, she said ten years later when
she was honored an event in New York. They should
get more. This concludes readings from the Smithsonian Magazine for

(28:05):
to day. Your reader has been Rebecca Shore. Thank you
for listening, and have a great day.