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-Hello and welcome back to Book Lust.
I'm Nancy Pearl.
My guest today is Brad Bigelow, who is both a writer
and an editor and an unearther of books that he believes
and I believe should be reissued.
Brad, thank you so much for coming on the show.
-Thank you so much for inviting me, Nancy.
This is such a treat.
-I was really interested, of course, in your brand new
book, “Virginia Faulkner: A Life in Two Acts,”
because in many ways, it seems to me that
it encapsulates your mission in life.
Because Virginia Faulkner, I certainly
had never heard of her.
And it turns out when I read the book
that she's this fascinating woman
who was seen by many as the next Dorothy Parker.
She was a... she wrote a novel. She—
I mean, she had this fascinating life.
And how come I never heard of her?
And how did you discover her?
-Well, thanks for that.
I know I've been writing about neglected books for—
I mean, it's been my passion, honestly.
I mean, I went to the
University of Washington there in Seattle,
and I used to cruise up and down the stacks
of Suzzallo Library,
which is an amazing world resource.
And just pulling out books that I didn't recognize.
And through that, I discovered
early on, just as an undergraduate, that I
that there were a lot of books in the world
that were not the ones that were on the course
syllabus and the reading lists or in the surveys.
They were not,
you know, the recognized great works of literature,
but they were still great books,
good reading experiences, learning, well-written,
well-crafted, whatever.
And they just, you know,
didn't have the good luck of getting recognized.
So for many years, I kind of was on the hunt
and have ever since been looking
for these kinds of books and one that I had heard about,
and this is probably almost 20 years ago,
was this book called—and it probably didn't show up well,
but it's called “My Hey-Day,” which is purported
to be the memoirs of a character
named Princess Tulip Murphy, as told to Virginia Faulkner.
I read this book, and it's become my habit
whenever I read a book
and I find it, you know, particularly interesting,
I will look a little bit
about the author and his or her story.
And when I looked at Virginia Faulkner,
there was very
little reference material about her.
But you do see in one of these kind of
assemblages of author
biographies that are in the reference
sections of a lot of libraries,
there is a little, you know, half
page blurb synopsis of her biography.
And it said she went to this school in Rome.
She went to Radcliffe,
she worked for The Washington Post.
She published several novels.
She worked for MGM.
She had a Broadway show, and then she's an editor,
editor in Lincoln,
Nebraska, at the University of Nebraska Press.
And that seemed like
such a strange left turn to take in a career.
I did no further research at that point,
but it always stuck in my head.
And when I went to
I retired from NATO and I went to grad school
at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England,
in a biography program.
And I was looking for subjects.
Well, the pandemic hit and all of these subjects
I had been considering that would have required
archival research I had to set aside.
So I went back
and looked at
Virginia Faulkner because a lot of stuff
I could find online and I found people
I could contact who were tremendous in sharing material.
And I yeah, I started to realize
what an interesting life this was
over and above the value of her writing, you know,
and I think that was sort of one of the breakthroughs
that I had in writing
this book was it's not a traditional literary biography
because I'm not really trying
to show how her life illuminated her work.
She just had an interesting story.
And of course,
part of her interesting story
was the fact that she sort of had a midlife crisis
that involved dealing with her alcoholism and depression.
And that is probably some of the reasons
why she ended up back in Lincoln, Nebraska.
And I think quite remarkably rebuilt her life.
And I think that's
one of the reasons I wanted to call it “A Life
in Two Acts,” as it goes back to the F. Scott Fitzgerald
quotation, which was included in “The Last Tycoon,”
about there are no second acts in American lives, and
that's simply untrue
In the case of Virginia Faulkner.
She and I think is particularly relevant
in terms of Fitzgerald's use of that.
You know, the fact that that was his statement
because he, of course,
spiraled into alcoholism, even though he wasn't drinking
right at the end.
But he ruined his health and he ruined his career
because he was an alcoholic.
And there were
many other writers associated
with Hollywood
in those days who followed the same trajectory.
And instead of going down that path, Virginia Faulkner
goes back to Nebraska.
She takes a complete, totally, you know, not very noteworthy job.
In fact, I quote a line that she tells
with some writer that,
you know, the writer will get at the end of the project...
The writer gets his or her name on the cover.
The editor just gets older and more tired.
And, you know, and she devoted
she I mean, she saw the opportunity to
bring back numerous writers and most notably
the work of Willa Cather, who she considered to be the—
and she I mean,
it was very much her mission to bring Willa Cather back.
Well, to bring Willa Cather to the level
of being recognized as a great world writer.
-I didn't know about your, your degree in biography.
What, what draws you to that?
-That’s a good question.
I think, for one thing, I'm fascinated by other lives.
I mean, I am in constant really in
in awe of the choices people make
because, you know, life doesn't come with a roadmap
or a set of instructions no matter how
many self-help books get published every year,
we don't have a map of
how to navigate our way through life.
And so I
always find it illuminating to see how other people took
on these challenges.
-Are you thinking about doing another another
biography or like, constantly think about somebody or.
-I have a number of subjects I'd like to deal with.
I think the next book project I'm working on at the moment
is sort of more of a I don't want to call it
a group biography, because a group biography
typically implies that there's a groupness to the authors.
But I am a huge fan of what are known as pre-code movies.
The movies that Hollywood produced
in the first five years of talking pictures
when there was relatively loose enforcement
of the morality codes and things like that.
And the thing that I'm most I mean, there's a lot of stuff
written about pre-code movies on the film side,
but what no one seems to have drawn attention to
is the fact that at that time, when movies
went from silent to sound, the studios
needed films that they could stuff full of dialogue.
And that meant that they at that time
they used far more heavily than any time afterwards,
they used magazine stories, Broadway plays and novels,
and in many cases, the novels or the writers
responsible for those kind of got played up as stars
as much as the stars on the screen.
And then there was also this period where there was
I mean, this
was the height of magazine readership in America,
you know, The Saturday Evening Post and Liberty
and Cosmopolitan and all of these magazines
that were coming out every week
stuffed full of short stories and serialized novels.
Newspapers were serializing novels.
And it's just that sort of ecosystem that was
going on at that unique period where there are even
I found cases where writers on the payroll of Hollywood
studios wrote novels that got serialized in newspapers
just to sort of provide
another marketing outlet for the movie.
So that I find that's an interesting one.
And there's some interesting writers of that period.
Ursula Parrott is one whose novel
“Ex-Wife” has come back and been pretty well celebrated
because Marsha Gordon has written
a biography of Ursula Parrott, who is a fascinating woman.
But there were a lot of others: Vina Delmar, Katharine Brush,
Faith Baldwin;
just a remarkable series of writers who were extremely
commercially successful and popular and not junk,
I would say, I am not interested in it
because they're junk,
but so that's kind of my I've got to still figure,
as you can see,
I haven't perfected my elevator speech of that.
(laughter)
-Now I know I'm glad you haven't perfected it,
because that was
that was just the kind of thing I wanted to hear.
Faith Baldwin was
one of those was one of those writers
that is a little bit of a a little bit of a shock.
-I mean, yeah, she was, I would say, quality-wise,
she's on the bleeding edge of the spectrum of formulaic,
workmanlike prose junk,
junk stuff because she produced
a phenomenal rate and for decades.
-Yeah. Yes.
And did the studios then bring in—like William Faulkner
wrote, you know, wrote for the movies and of course,
you know,
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote for the movies.
We know all about that.
-There were many who,
you know, came out to Hollywood and stuck their
toe in the water and said, “Thanks,
but I'm happy with my life on the East Coast
and I can make plenty of money and
I'm not going to do that.”
But they were they're happy to sell the film rights,
but they let somebody else do the adaptation.
-Yeah. Oh, my gosh.
Listen,
we have to hurry up and finish this
so you can get to work on that book.
I think that's a fascinating idea.
-I don't see anybody has kind of followed that thread.
-No. -You know, and the studios had literary editors
who were sitting in New York just ferociously reading books
and writing reports
and buying properties because they were so desperate
for material
and the cycle was so fast.
So like
two of the best known actors and terrific actors
and actresses from that time, Joan Blondell and James
Cagney were appearing in a play,
actually based on a German story.
But it was a play in
it was appearing on Broadway called Penny Arcade,
and it was picked up as a property, and it came out
like six months later with the two of them.
It was both of their first
screen appearances in a movie called Sinners' Alley.
And yeah, I mean, it just like
that cycle was happening all the time.
-I just finished recently reading
a novel called “The Original,” which is and
looks at a particular period in Katharine Hepburn's life.
And I think that it's a novel that you would not
be disappointed in.
It's pretty wonderful because it's that period in a way.
And one of the things that I didn't know
is that The Philadelphia Story was a play.
-Yeah, Philip Barry. -And yes, and that Howard
Hughes bought it for Katharine Hepburn,
and that's what was her comeback film.
So that all fits in so well.
Oh Brad, you must do that.
All right, so
with with your
your neglected books,
writing about those books
and choosing some books
to be reprinted,
do you have some interesting
ones coming up?
-Yeah.
Well, I'll probably let me highlight
one that won't come out until next year,
and it's going to be a real bear to produce.
This is a book I came across.
I was
you know,
I spend
a ridiculous amount of time looking at old book reviews
and newspapers and magazines and things like that.
And as I said, it's often the, it's often
not the one that says
this is a great novel that catches my eye, right?
I mean, sometimes it's sort of like
this is an odd way to write a book,
which sort of sets off my spidey sense, so to speak.
So I was looking and I saw
this, and I want to I want to say
it was like an Indianapolis newspaper.
It was anyway,
it was about a professor who is giving a talk
in, say, '37 and '38, something like that
about the great novels of World War One.
And he mentions or it's mentioned in that article,
that his assessment of the best
American novel of World War One was Mary
Lee's “It's a Great War!”
And I went “huh”?
I mean, I actually studied
the literature of World War One
when I was an undergraduate,
and I thought I knew it pretty well right
then, and numerous books written about,
you know, Paul Fussell's
“The Great War and Modern Memory”
is one of the best,
you know, works of sort of historical criticism around.
And it just completely drew a blank.
And I looked into it and I found out that it was
this novel written
by an American woman who had gone over with the YWCA
to run
canteens for the GIs for the Doughboys
and written a novel that came out in ‘29.
And it was actually considered for the Pulitzer Prize.
But the Pulitzer Prize
committee backed off because they were a little bit
there was sort of pressure from the American Legion and
not to push, because it is so candid about
the reality of war and the fact that not
all of our soldiers were were great heroes
and that it was an ugly, you know, experience.
And so I tracked it down.
It's quite a long novel.
So it's like 600 pages long.
I mean, in impressionistic prose,
so there's lots
of ellipses in it,
but it's very much stream of consciousness as
it's experienced by this woman who is clearly a
fictional counterpart for Mary Lee, the author.
But it's
vivid and it's compelling.
And, you know, you don't feel like,
my gosh, there's 600 pages.
You're just—
it's such an in-the-moment kind of book.
It is so terrific.
And so it came out in '29.
In '30, it got good reviews,
certainly was considered for the Pulitzer,
but it just fell off the face of the earth.
It's been out of print since 1930
and and
virtually nobody knows about it.
And so we're going to bring that one back.
And I you know, I think it's
it's a good example of the kinds of books
that we're looking for.
I look for
for the Recovered Books series, which is, first and foremost,
it's a well-written, well-constructed book.
It's a compelling read.
You know, it's a contemporary reader can pick it up
and not feel like they're slogging through
an outdated, archaic text.
It's also something that
fills what I
would call a hole in that jigsaw puzzle.
And I know you're a big jigsaw puzzle
fan and and, you know, the
the I
look at many of these things that we're doing as filling
missing pieces in the jigsaw puzzle of literature.
You know, that the impression
that the stuff that you can find in print,
the stuff that's covered in the surveys of literature,
that that's all there is.
There is such a misleading idea.
-Is there a biographer, Brad, that you always turn to
with great anticipation and are never disappointed?
-Well, Robert Caro, let's let's face it.
-Yeah.
-He's incredible.
The research.
You know, I think there are many others.
I mean, a series
that I would love to see come back
is the series that Van Wyck Brooks did in the thirties
and forties and fifties.
I think it was called
“Makers and Finders,” or “The Flowering of New England,”
“New England Summer.”
You know that is such a tapestry
of American literature throughout the 19th century.
Really a remarkable book that I still keep a copy,
you know, one of the volumes by my bedside for the
when I can't sleep in the middle of the night
to pull it up, because it's always so, so interesting.
-I was thinking about William Manchester's
series, about Churchill, right.
He, he—I think that's maybe even still in print.
-And actually, I will say there's
biographer named Ray Boomhower
who's written about a number of journalists.
He wrote about Ernie Pyle and several others.
But I'm pretty sure
he is working on a biography of William Manchester now.
-Oh, that would be very interesting.
Yeah.
-Manchester was a novelist,
and one of the books I have in my stack here to read
It's in the fifties.
I forget the name of the the title of the book,
but he wrote a novel of Baltimore
and sort of how the
the numbers racket leads into this whole,
you know, conspiracy infecting the police,
the police and the politicians, etc.
in it.
It's like it's to me, when I heard about it, I thought,
this is like The Wire in 1950s Baltimore.
I got to read that.
-Oh that's.
Yeah, I know, I know.
I feel the same way about all of these lost books
as you do when you know the idea that it doesn't that
that we should look for good good reads just solid
good reads that are nicely written and
And when you know, when we think about
why people aren't reading or are they reading or
whether they reading, I often think that we underestimate
what people would read if they knew about the books.
-Yeah, I mean,
one of the reasons I'm passionate about what
we're doing with the Recovered Books series
is that, you know, I've been writing
about neglected books for 20 years.
I have this website, I think I do a decent job,
but frankly, it hasn't meant books were,
you know, it hasn't changed the literary world in any way.
Putting a book in print
makes such an overnight difference,
you know, when people can get it, frankly, one click away
or find it in their local bookstore,
they're going to read it.
If the book is something you have to get through
interlibrary loan, which I love, interlibrary loan,
one of the greatest things on the planet.
But the truth is 99 people out of 100 would will shy away
from the idea of ever requesting something.
Yeah, through interlibrary loan. -Right.
Brad, I do wish we could talk longer,
because I feel like we could go on
and just be book people together.
I would love that.
And I do hope when you come back to Seattle,
we could get together in person and talk books
and thank you for thank you for coming on the show.
-Thank you for inviting me. It was wonderful.
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