The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Joy of Beach Reads

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Our guest host, Vinson Cunningham, looks at the joys of the beach read, hitting Brighton Beach on a hot, muggy day to peer over readers’ shoulders. He relates his own fortuitous encounter with Lawrence Otis Graham’s “Our Kind of People,” after finding the book in a rented house on Martha’s Vineyard. Plus, Rachel Syme feels that “books have a season that they tell you to read them in,” and “summer is the season of the classic Hollywood memoir”; she shares three favorites with David Remnick. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, and I'm filling in today for David Remnick. Today I'm going to be talking about something very near and dear to my heart, which is the pleasure, especially in the summer, of stepping away from your device, from your phone, and indulging in the pleasure of reading. We're going to be hearing today from several of my colleagues at the New Yorker, but we wanted to start. start here at the beach because really what better place to open up a book. Yeah, Brighton Beach is basically the southernmost point of Brooklyn. Unlike many other beaches in New York, which feel very like destination-y, this feels like it's like a neighborhood beach where like somebody who lives two blocks away would come here to take a dip and then go back home. And there are people out having a great time, some in the water, some somewhere,

with their coolers, some hopefully with some books. Ooh, there's a book. Sir, I'm so sorry to start all you. Can I ask you what you're reading? Is it? Yeah, I'm reading Mononga by David McIre. I'm not sure if I pronounce his name correctly, but it's a history of the Mononga mine explosion in West Virginia in 1907,

which was the worst workplace disaster in American history. So light reading then, you would say? I guess not. Thank you so much for letting us intrude for a bit. I'm a... There's a kid who still watch, uh, Loonie Tunes. It's Elmer Fudd, you know. I'm hunting wabbits.

I feel like I'm hunting books right now. My name is Juliet. I'm 11. I'm reading a restart. It's for summer reading for school. school and it's about this boy who lost his who fell off a roof and then he lost his memory and he's trying to like restart his life so when you're reading for summer reading it means it's like a little bit like homework does that is it easier to do that when you're on the beach like this

it's kind of a nice nice thing to do I mean yeah my school starts in like a week because it starts a bit earlier than last time but it starts in it starts in a weekend I have to do this for reading. It usually takes me about, like, about a week to finish. And what other kinds of books do you like to read? I like Wonder. Wonders about a boy named August, and he has this, like, face disorder,

and he's been homeschooled his whole life. So he's going into a real school. He's making new friends. I really like that book. I reread it a lot of times, like four, I think. That's how I read as when I was your age, just rereading and rereading the same books over and over. Yeah, because every time you reread it, you find something new in it.

Yeah. Like, you see it in a different way every time you read it. Thank you so much for sharing with us. We appreciate it. Thank you. Have a good day. Have a great rest of your day. And good luck at school.

Thank you. Are you doing beach reading? Is this a Kindle with a book on it? Mm-hmm. Amazing. Would you mind if we interrupt your like very peaceful? looking moment here and just ask you what what it is that you're reading?

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows. That's number five? The last book? Number seven. Are this your first time reading Harry Potter? Mm-hmm. Okay, I'm not going to say anything about that. I think she knows what happens. No, I know what happens. Don't worry. Okay, okay. Can you tell us the name of the book that you're reading and just why you're reading it? What's, yeah.

I'm reading the autobiography of Malcolm X. why I'm reading it I am from Egypt born and raised so I never been exposed to the American culture, never been impressed by it and as a

like I'm working on my first documentary and I'm interested in filmmaking and trying to understand humans in general so for me knowing and trying to know about Malcolm X he's definitely one of the most

influential like he influenced the modern history of black community it's just he's a very interesting person with a very complex arc that for me like it's time for me to study like shame on me that I'm going towards my 30s and I don't know what I need really to know about him thank you that's I really appreciate it was nice it was nice to meet you we are I want to say a half a mile up the beach and Now we're up, I could be, that could be my sort of dramatic side-kicking it. But we are now approaching Coney Island.

You can see the roller coasters going. You can see the iconic letters of the cyclone and the people going up and down on that. You know that thing that terrifyingly goes up and down? I don't know the name of it. Hi, should I say, hi, my name is Susanna. And my name is Sophia. That's my mommy. She just came to America a year ago.

I would love it. And you're already laughing. So I would just love it if you could tell me what you're reading. Because this reading is awful. Oh my God, this is embarrassing. It's not, no weeding is embarrassing. Primitive Russian, the story. Oh cool.

It's not decent to read such books. This is what we call beach reading. It's light reading. It's not the most scholarly text. colorly text. And what's the, just very briefly, what is the plot? What, what, what happens in the book? A woman wakes, wakes up, and finds that she doesn't remember anything. She has lost memory, and then from that place, the story unfold. Oh, I know this word, unfolds. Ah, but as far as I understand, although I'm in the middle of the book, there is that there, is that there, um, fold.

A couple team, gangsters, and I'm sorry, the Russian police work in one team. They're always connected, yeah, Russian police. So, yeah, the life is difficult in Russia. Thank you. This has been so great. Thank you so much. Thank you, guys. We appreciate it.

And enjoy the rest of us. Brighton Beach, where I talk to these folks, is a bus ride for. from where I live. But recently I took a real vacation. It felt decadent. We went for two weeks, which made it the longest vacation I've ever taken. So I've been thinking a lot about how being away from home can change not just what you read, but also how you read it.

So for example, on this vacation, my wife and one of my best friends and I went to the town of Oak Bluffs in Martha's Vineyard, a famous place of resort for black people. I don't know about anybody else, but on vacation, I always bring these books with you, these other books that you think, you know, you bring a library that's like, and these are the things that I'm going to, you know, dutifully read. And it never happens, right? You spend all day outside, and when you get home, you're too tired. When you're on the beach, you nap instead of read, and you sort of let this, like, feeling

of guilt happen to you. What ended up happening, really, is that I got dragged, you know, step by step into the news. I read a bunch of articles about Andrew Cuomo. I let politics intrude on my vacation. I read a bunch about Barack Obama, who was on the island having his ill-fated birthday party at the same time that I was there. But really, the sort of thing that I keep thinking about over and over

was a book that I found on a shelf of the house that I was staying on. So this house that I rented was first bought in the 70s by a very famous black doctor and public house. health innovator. There was a very small shelf of books that seemed to speak to like the class of people that vacation over the summer in Martha's Vineyard. There was a book called Negro Land by Margo Jefferson, who was one of my favorite critics, and she's talking about the black upper classes. Also on that shelf was a book called Our Kind of People by Lawrence Otis Graham. I'd known of this book for a long time, and I'd known of Graham, who incidentally died last year, but I'd never read it.

I picked it up off the shelf and sat down on the couch and started to read. Our kind of people is about the black elite in America, these old-line black families, fraternal organizations, sororities, social clubs like Jack and Jill, and about vacation resorts. like Martha's Vineyard. And so in a way, I found myself strangely reading about the vacation I was having, or at least reading about the historical processes and accidents that led to the vacation that I was having. He talks in the book about being a kid and spending his entire summers there. He comes from this fairly wealthy black family.

He says, for three months each year, the three-block stretch of stores on Circuit Avenue and the short strip of sand along Seaview Avenue, which we blacks call the inkwell, was the center of our universe. So I would carry lines like that around me as I, in fact, walked down Circuit Avenue and walked along Seaview Avenue. When I swam in the Inquil, I had in mind the history of the Inquil as narrated by this person. And I'll be honest, like, at some points,

I was very off put by this book because it's, like, really self-consciously about an elite to which I do not belong. these sort of secret processes, especially with, you know, through fraternities and social organizations, that sort of winnow a kind of elite away from the working classes to which I feel that I've always belonged, right? So there's a moment where it almost showed me that maybe 40 years ago,

I wouldn't have belonged in this place. I didn't grow up with money. My family didn't own any land, right? And so reading this, reconnected me to that part of my history. But also, I write for the New Yorker magazine, and I, too, was on a vacation in Martha's Vineyard. And so walking the streets that were mentioned in the book,

it felt like trying on your big brother's pants and finding that, like, in some ways they fit, in some ways they don't. But like the sort of bagginess of those pants, right? The places where they don't fit is exactly the pleasure sort of dissonance of reading. This was, I guess, a way to indulge in my kind of vacation, which is like walking around thinking about why I'm there, like what forces propelled me to meet this place.

And especially in a place like Martha's Vineyard, which has got so many historical ties to black upward mobility and the forces of segregation making black people vacation in one place rather than another. And so it was a strange thing. I tend to take my reading as this kind of almost a cult practice. When something in my reading corresponds with what's going on in my life, I sort of just like tend to run into those little moments of confluence

and take them as a kind of magic or an offering or something like that. That sense that reading is a kind of doubling of life, that you're living twice, and that all the correspondence is between the, those two tracks in your life made life richer and more dense with meaning. I'm Vincent Cunningham, sitting in today for David Remnick. More to come. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Vincent Cunningham, sitting in for David Remnick.

We've been talking today about summer reading. And if you don't have a good book to dig into, let me recommend a story that just published in The New Yorker. It's called The Mom of Bold Action. It's by George Saunders, who's one of the truly great short storywriters. is working now. The mom in the title, the mom of bold action, is dealing with an incident. Her son was roughed up on the street, knocked down by an older man. So here's a scene read by George Saunders where the family's just been to the police station. But the son couldn't identify

the suspects. The three of him sat there a bit in the ticking car. I know I wasn't supposed to be downtown, Derek said. I just wanted to try it. Fair enough, Keith said. Such a a good dad. Reasonable man. Dear heart. Always fine with, well, everything. Even this, apparently. Fine with Derek breaking his promise. Fine with some random creep assaulting their kid and walking away Scott-free. She felt, if she was being totally honest, that back at the station, Keith had, well, not failed them exactly. She wouldn't go that far, but hadn't there been a time back in the old days when Keith, the powerful man of the house, would have pulled aside the other powerful man, the cop,

and between them, a deal would have been struck, and the two freaks would have been quietly let outside for a little talk, and oops, while out there had the living shit beat out of them, both of them, just to be sure. Well, that wasn't the best. That wasn't, you know, fair or whatever. But, geez, Neither one of those losers was exactly hitting the ball out of the park.

For the sake of argument, let's say that Keith and the cop choosing to err slightly on the side of proactivity had lightly, performatively, roughed up those two dopes. The one who'd done it wouldn't do it again. The one who hadn't done it, well, if in the future he ever considered doing something out of line, which he probably would, given the life he was leading. he'd think twice. Net result? A safer church street. Down which a nice kid like Derek could walk. Derek, in her mind, ambling down this old-timey church street,

waved to an elderly couple drinking iced tea on their porch. Go around back, lad, used the tire swing on the old apple tree, the husband said. His wife was up there knitting. He remind us of our own son, now a successful doctor, she said. Then dropped her yarn. ball, which rolled off the porch and the old guy made a joke about his back as he hobbled down the stairs to fetch it. Good people, salt of the earth. But Church Treat did not belong to them, or to Derek. It belonged to those two freaks who, because freaky, were somehow the most powerful players

in the whole idiotic deal. Why were rejects running this show? Seriously, it was all backward because nobody wanted to hurt anybody's feelings. Nobody was willing to say what they really thought. Nobody cared enough to take a bold stand for what was right. And things kept spiraling downward. They walked to the porch through a pile of leaves, which is no fun. Not today. Today was one more thing they had to do to get to the next not fun thing, which was dinner. This was real. This had happened. A guy had attacked her kid and suffered no consequences whatsoever and was probably off bragging about it to some other dead beats around a campfire or whatnot. And what was she doing about it? Going inside to boil pasta. The mom of bold action is a new story by George Saunders.

You can find it at New Yorker.com. And you can hear Saunders read the whole thing on our podcast, the writer's voice. I'm Vincent Cunningham. And I'm going to turn things back over to David Remnick, because everybody knows, David, this is your thing, or one of your things. A writer comes on the program and talks to you about what they've been reading or listening to or watching. Absolutely right, Vincent. It really is one of my favorite things. The other day I talked to Rachel Syme, who writes for us about fashion and culture, and we talked about what she's been reading. And for Rachel lately, it's all about glamour and old-fashioned show business. I always feel like books have a season that they tell

you should read them in. And for me, summer is the season of the classic Hollywood memoir. Well, mostly because they're glamorous and full of champagne and spangles and maribou, but also because, you know, in a time, especially in this early period of Hollywood, memoirs became this place where primarily women, actresses, could tell stories about misogyny, about racism, about onset abuse. that we're not getting told in the mainstream. What is the best one ever? What is the, you know, in spy novels, people say the spy who came in from the cold is like the model spy novel.

What is the very best celeb bio that you've ever read? You know, I think I have to say for me, it might be Gloria Swanson's 1980 mega doorstopper memoir called Swanson on Swanson, which is 500 pages or so, and covers basically the entire 20th century of entertainment. You know, she started in silent film and then had sort of a second life in Sunset Boulevard, and she was in love with Joseph Kennedy on the side, and so there's just political intrigue and the birth of Hollywood and parties at Hurst Castle,

and she is so high on her own supply. I swear, this is just like such a... I want to read you a little bit just to give you a sense of how much she loves herself. When she made Sunset Boulevard, her big assertion was that no other woman in Hollywood was brave enough to take on the role of Norma Desmond because it was a role of a has-been. And so she took on this role, obviously, it was the role of the lifetime. She's incredible in it. Louis B. Mayer had a dinner party to show the movie to a lot of Hollywood insiders.

and she said that it's so affected all of these older actresses that she had done this role. And she wrote, people clustered around me and I had trouble moving up the aisle. Barbara Stanwyck fell on her knees and kissed the hem of my skirt. I could read it all in their eyes, a single message of elation. If she can do it, why should we be terrified? She's shown us that it can be done. I have never read anything. I read it when I was a teenager for the first.

first time. And I feel like I had never read anything so self-aggrandizing and so self-mythologizing in my life that I was like, I didn't know you could do this, you know, that somebody could write this kind of buildings Roman for themselves. Gloria Swanson on Gloria Swanson sounds fantastic. I, you know, I read a lot of these music memoirs, too. And I'm not a big theater ago, but the Moss Heart memoir, Act One is pretty great. Act one. Yeah, Act one. That's a wonderful. I think, you know, New York Broadway memoirs are their own category, which would be great for the summer as well. And, yeah, that act one is great.

You know, Stephen Sondheim's finishing the hat. I mean, all these books that are about theater, I love backstage intrigue. I love anything that sort of tells you what's going on behind the cardboard and the paper your machet. You know, I like, anyway, anybody that peels back the curtain on showbiz, but the thing about celebrity memoirs that's always great is, like, as they're peeling back the curtain, they're putting another scrim up of, like, you know, obfusc. and elaboration and just basically saying that things happen that will never be fact-checked. And there's no fact-checking, by the way, on any book really still, but definitely not on classic Hollywood memoirs. I mean, they could be entirely fabricated. We're probably a little grateful for that.

Absolutely. What have you been reading lightly that hits the mark for you? Yeah. So another book that I think is really great for the summer, especially because it involves the summer activity, is Esther Williams' autobiography, called Millilions. million dollar mermaid, which for the people that don't know, she was sort of the inventor of the swimming picture. She was an Olympic level athlete, a competitive swimmer, and she actually qualified for the Olympics, but she couldn't go because the year that she was supposed to go was 1940 to the Tokyo Games,

and because of World War II, obviously those games never happened. So she changed tax, and she becomes this star of these crazy, trippy, technicolor swimming movies where Busby Berkeley is doing the choreography and all these women are jumping in a row. That move where all the women jumped one after the other, it's called the tiller because it resembles a plow. She basically invented synchronized swimming. Waterproof mascara was basically invented for her.

She had a fascinating life. She ended it by doing LSD with Carrie Grant, but that's a whole other story, but she does go into it in the memoir. Well, let's concentrate on the LSD with Carrie Grant. Well, Carrie Grant told her to do it because he was like, if you're depressed, it will open your mind and change your life.

and then she did it and she was like it did. And then I was really into it for a long time in the 60s. And it was, you know, she's like self-medicate. Esther Williams was an acid hit. That's fantastic. I think we're probably, she was closer to microdosing. God bless her. But yeah, I mean, she was an athlete.

So it's an interesting. It's almost like a sports memoir, you know. She's using her body in ways that are punishing. So there's this amazing scene in the book. It happens during the filming of her Blockbuster, 1950 picture, Million Dollar Mermaid. the title of her memoir as well. And for this film, she had to go on a 50-foot hydraulic lift and dive off.

Well, here's what happened. While she's up there, she realizes she's wearing the absolute wrong costume to do this kind of high dive. She's wearing a chain metal bathing suit thing and an aluminum crown, and she realizes that it's going to hit the water hard. She is being encouraged to dive off by Busby Berkeley and the director. They're all saying, jump, jump, jump. So she does. But in midair, and this is in her memoir, she literally says out loud to herself, oh, shit, because she knows it's going to be a terrible landing.

She hits the water with a thud. She breaks six vertebrae in her back, and then she doesn't work for six months. She is just out of commission. And then, as soon as she's healed, pretty much right away, the studio asks her to get back into the suit and start again. So that's being a contract player in Hollywood in the 1950s. Rachel, that is an amazing story, I mean, almost destroyed by the wrong swimsuit. Who else have you been reading? Well, I have been revisiting the second memoir by the great cabaret singer, actress, dancer,

Kitten extraordinaire, Eartha Kitt, who wrote three memoirs, I believe, but the second one is called Alone with Me. and it was written in the 1970s, and it's notable for many reasons, but the thing that I love most about it is her acknowledgement section, which is kind of a burn book of everybody who has ever wronged her over the years, where she starts out, by the way, by thanking the CIA, which the year before her autobiography was published, it was revealed had kept a dossier on her for years. And also she was being followed by them because she had said during a luncheon with Lady Bird Johnson that she was against the Vietnam War, which kind of blacklisted her. And the dossier basically said she was a woman of loose morals and not to be trusted. So in her autobiography, she opens it by saying, there are people in my life who have been more than incidental, but whom I found impossible to weave into the fabric of this work without digression.

So I couldn't quit the book without at random throwing a few brickbats or bouquets to, colon, the CIA who has established my reputation with men who want to believe that I'm an infomaniac, but who should leave the writing of fiction to authors who don't write it at the taxpayer's expense. Woo-hoo. Well done. I mean, spicy opening. Spicy opening. And do they write them themselves?

I mean, I'm an addict of books by a guy named David Ritz, who's an as-to person, who's done all these books with Aretha Franklin and Marvin Gay, B.B. King. And he's masterful at getting them to tell their stories in the way that you've never heard them before. but he's clearly shaping it and participating in this in this talent. Sure. So I'd say 90% of celebrity memoirs are not written by the celebrities themselves. It's a lot of, as told to Gloria Swanson's memoir is an interesting story because her memoir was co-written with a man named Brian DeGaugh,

who was an art gallerist in New York in New York who sold the book to Random House without her consent and then showed up at her door and said, you're going to work with me on this. And because she was 80 and ready to like cement her legacy, she was like, great. Wow. But that was a, that's a rare one. Usually they'll have a ghostwriter lined up. But then there are the memoirs that are undeniably written by the people themselves. And that's the last one I want to bring up with you today, which is, of course, the wonderful and amazing Carrie Fisher, who, I, I reread Wishful Drinking this year, which is a kind of extension of the one-woman show that she did. She was a brilliant writer in addition to a an actress, but that's my favorite of her memoirs, Wishful Drinking, because it gets so deeply into

her background as a Hollywood. Part of a Hollywood dynasty, I would say, but also a Hollywood dropout, a Hollywood resistor, somebody who's tied to it for the rest of her life, no matter how hard she tried to get away. I love that book because it's so raw and honest about Hollywood and how it messes you up. Rachel, is there a moment in Carrie Fisher's. books that really stands out to you? In the chapter about Star Wars, she is explaining that George Lucas wouldn't let her wear a bra because his theory about space was that in zero gravity

your body will expand so you couldn't wear underwear or something crazy. Okay, time. So he had a space underwear theory? Yes, he was like a bra wouldn't work, an underwear wouldn't work in space because when you're in space, your body expands and whatever. It left her brawless. Whatever, indeed. Jesus. So she had this whole funny theory about, he was like, your bra would strangle you in space.

That's basically what he told her. And so she wrote in her memoir, one of the greatest sentences I think written, and especially poignant given that, you know, she passed away. She wrote, I think this would make a fantastic obit. So I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight strangled by my own bra. So if someone has a sense of humor about being famous, it's definitely her. Well, these books sound like a great way to finish an arduous summer season in many ways.

Rachel, thank you so much. Thank you, David. Rachel Stein, who writes about style and culture for the New Yorker, and she's published a big piece about celebrity memoirs on our website with audio and images and readings of some of those favorite. books. It's a lot of fun and you can find it at New Yorker.com. That's it for me today. Thanks to my colleague and friend Vincent Cunningham.

Hope the rest of the summer, what little is left of it, treats you well. See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Rianan and Corby, Cala Leah, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.