Playing Back a Life
MULLER, GIL
Playing Back a Life Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times By Studs Terkel Pantheon. 316 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Gil Muller Associate Professor of English, LaGuardia Community College, CUNY;...
...He stands behind doors, listening...
...One that explodes with special brilliance occurs in a Rome cafe, where Terkel has an appointment with an Italian artist...
...and we know that the author and the waiter, having touohed each other's life, will muddle through...
...Consequently, he wonders at the start of this memoir if he can probe the voice within...
...Yet what he discovers in the pain, oppression and even failure (we must remember that Hard Times and Working are books about failure) of individual and collective lives is an affirmative note ?a sense of mortal community," as James Cameron, a gifted British journalist Terkel introduces as his mirror image, puts it...
...Neither does he, like Nixon (a Doppelgdnger blithely saluted early in this book), tape for dark and sinister purposes...
...Everyone hates Munson's guts—even his wife and family have left him...
...Like Cameron, Terkel "has been around...
...That's what he told me, I know...
...Tone and style suggest a loose, whimsical, anecdotal rendition of the autobiographical urge...
...There are a substantial number of such phrases in this volume...
...Talking to Myself is rare, compelling and perhaps great, because it adheres to this principle...
...So the words he uses to describe his friend Cameron could apply equally to him: The author has the heart of the innocent, the eye of the experienced, the style of the master...
...But it isn't fraudulent, I insist...
...He is given to lobby conversations, to chance arrivals and departures...
...My wife sighs...
...Anybody so much as scratches a nigger in that March is gonna deal with me...
...Author, "Nightmares and Visions" Studs Terkel, the world's foremost tape junky, admits to being a chameleon—adjusting his behavior to the person he is interviewing...
...Shaking his sickly Sony, shuffling like Chaplin into dangerous turf, this innocent abroad constantly changes colors, moving as easily with gangsters, corrupt officials, raoists, and mandarins of society as he does with people he admires and loves...
...I tape, therefore I am," he declares in self-parody...
...Terkel tapes compulsively, though he is no Krapp, recording existential trivia...
...She has been through this before...
...Nevertheless, he interrupts the waiter to translate for his wife...
...His mother emerges momentarily in the delightful sequences on their days at the Wells Grand Hotel...
...Large sections of Talking to Myself are devoted to the mem and women Who have very special seats at Studs' Place...
...And Terkel feels better, having received his latest fix...
...Indeed, many brutal facts are recorded in Talking to Myself, especially where they involve abuses of power and wealth...
...In one wonderful episode, the interviewer sits haunch to haunch with a National Guard colonel during the 1965 Montgomery March, swapping drinks (for Terkel is assuredly not abstemious) and listening to another plaintive tale...
...Goethe went to the core of autobiographical writing when he observed that "man knows himself only as he knows the world, and becomes aware of the world only in himself, and of himself only in it...
...Terkel refuses to dwell on the simple "facts" of his life, or to rely on the confessional mode...
...Further reading, however, reveals a complex tapestry that resembles the associative patterns of conversation, moving over characters and events without strict attention to chronology...
...Rather, he is driven to capture what Federico Fellini, one of his heroes, told him is the "poetry in us...
...One gets the feeling that he also has much more to tell us about his friends and himself...
...Yes, Terkel knows about suffering humanity...
...The work at first seems haphazard...
...The waiter feels better after recounting his tale...
...Still, he is gentle with them, laconic, almost gracious in satirizing without savaging, in never losing his sense of caritas...
...Merely one of the numerous soloists creating and performing, he waits (as he once explained his interviewing technique) for the phrase that explodes...
...To Terkel, the world and civilization are a Grand Hotel (not far from Bughouse Square), and he is the desk clerk, the chronicler of countless lives...
...the author's preoccupation is with his relationship to the much larger world...
...The FBI, Mayor Daley, Jack Kennedy and his "small brother," the media elite, Kissinger—none are among Terkel's favorite drinking companions...
...Felldni, Vittorio De-Sica (whose Bicycle Thief Terkel has seen 12 times), A. S. Neil, Nelson Algren, Billie Holliday, Ma-halia Jackson, and Big Bill Broonzy are some of the stars who share space with the scores of ordinary persons the author loves...
...and the author muses that if the Colonel bad been in charge the following evening, Viola Liuzzo might not have been killed...
...As is his fate throughout, he suddenly finds a harried waiter telling him his life story...
...Often, she has threatened to tell my sudden companions of my fraudulence...
...I hope he keeps talking to himself...
...And somewhat reassured by this neo-Cartesian certainty, the man who has become the oral custodian of our times offers us Talking to Myself, his latest reel...
...Haunted by the beauty of people and the drama of their existence, he understands, as he noted of Danielo Dolci, that life is a work of art...
...I know it," he writes, "though I don't understand a word...
...Northerners, activists, hippies, and assorted riffraff...
...At the same time, the deep structure imitates improvisational jazz—among the many kinds of music that have informed Terkel's approach...
...his brother Ben is a lightly sketched figure leading him into and out of adolescent scrapes...
...He can get what he wants out of people, good and bad...
...and his wife steps out of the Montgomery March to confuse his taping ploys...
...This sacramental vision of life allows the author to present himself as part of a collective memory: He gives a voice to people and events ranging from the 1920s to the present day, from his native Chicago to South Africa...
...Yet these private figures are kept at the periphery...
...Studs Terkel has had the advantage of a hotel upbringing...
...Colonel Al Munson is a cracker, but his devotion to duty overrides his dislike of blacks...
...He plays here a series of musical riffs placed upon a skeletal frame—his own life...
...Yet Munson too is suffering humanity...
...Charitable as Terkel is, he is also a charmer, a trifle crafty...
...He has left his Kilroy's mark on Chicago's wards, Montgomery's streets, South Africa's mines, exploring persistently "the fragile possibility against the brutal fact...
...Ah'm in charge of the National Guard that's gonna protect youah niggers tomorrow," declares Mun son...
...It is a grand moment, a communion overcoming the barriers of language...
Vol. 60 • July 1977 • No. 15
