My Friend, Bill Buckley

26:03And National Review not only objected to the trial, they did so quite coarsely and crudely with caricatures of upper, you know, parodies of Upper West Side liberals, you know, Goldie and A.B. worried about Eichmann. I mean, it really feels like the old style anti-Semitism. But let's not forget, you know who else condemned the Eichmann trial? The United Nations, because they thought it was a terrible violation of Argentine sovereignty for Israel to kidnap him. And one of the things I say to a lot of sort of concerned Jews who are very unhappy about the world today is one of the consolations. I'm now in my mid 60s of getting old is when people say there was some other time when people were less, were more broad minded.

26:46Yeah. You know, I don't know. I've been there for quite a lot of the existence of the state. and the world has been pretty consistent that anything Israel does to defend itself or the interests of Jews from their murderers is wrong. It's always wrong. And why can't you Jews be better Christians and turn the other cheek when people try to kill you? That has been a recurrent theme. Yeah. Well, you may remember, David, it was the legendary Golda Meir who made that case, made the case for the trial in the United Nations. And then Buckley became one of her great admirers, went to Israel to interview her.

27:20And of course, what turned Buckley around on Jews was the 1967 war. And when he saw that they could be allies, war against communism. And as Novik points out in that book, even most Jews didn't want to talk about the Holocaust at the time Eichmann was tried. It was too recent a memory. There were questions about loyalties and isn't the real war now against the Soviets. So those were complicated issues then as they remain today. No, I remember it was trauma. People did not want to talk about, I mean, I came from a family that were not survivor, but were escapees that were. So of my father's extended family, like 95 % were murdered in Poland between 1939 and 1945.

28:10If his parents had made slightly different decisions. He would have been murdered around the time of his 11th or 12th birthday. My grandfather, to whom I was very close, my father's father, lost most of his siblings, both of his parents, to murder. He never talked about it. And not because he was ashamed. He couldn't open that box. But I want to go back to the, again, I'm starting at the end. One of the things, I think you and I talked about this when you were working on the book. One of my suggestions to you, one of the things I've always thought about is we need to see him much more as a creature of the 1960s literary world like Truman Capote, like Gay Talese, like these other, when novelists still mattered in American life, that he was a literary figure.

28:50He was an intellectual figure. And he was there in the days when TV thought, we don't want to just put on some goon. We want to put on somebody who was on Broadway or was a professor somewhere. And one of the things that changed, not just in the conservative world, but people, well, why not just put on some goon? People like the goons. You don't have to have started your career on Broadway. You don't have to be a professor somewhere. We'll just put you on the air. Yeah. And what was interesting too, when Buckley did it, he started Firing Line in 1966, of course, after that brilliant performance in the Merrill debates.

29:26So here's something I want to add about that, David, which is that you're absolutely right that Buckley came into his own as a literary figure in the days when Mailer, Capote, Baldwin, Vidal, he knew them all, were on the cover of Time magazine, right? The thing that Trump still lusts for, and Butler was on the cover of Time magazine. And so when he ran for mayor, he didn't want his literary friends to think he was taking it too seriously. So he played the kind of aristocrat, and it was just sensational. And that's how he got the television contract after that. He was a good debater too. He didn't always win as we know, but he was deft.

30:08He was clever, good listener. He had a lot of charm, never talked down to his audience. I think one of the things that I take away from the experience of your book is, I don't think it's in any way true that the America of the 1950s and 60s was more literate than the America of today. Obviously, that can't be true. Many more people have concluded many more years of formal education. Much of our life is much more sophisticated and ironic, but there are two things. That world was very much still a text-based world that people today make ironic references to songs and movies, but they don't really make them to books, and certainly not to major books.

30:45And second, it was a world of emulationism, where people wanted to be thought of as more literate than they were, whereas we live in a world, to coin a word that Bill Buckley would not approve of maybe de-emulationism, where people who are quite literate pretend to be less because they pour the bucket of shit over their own head before somebody pours the bucket of shit upon their head for them. And so you get this kind of false demotic culture, whereas in Bill Buckley's time that America had, Time Magazine would put the doll and the others on the cover, not because they thought you were going to read their books, but because they thought you should.

31:22And the purchaser would say, yeah, I probably should. I'm not going to, but I feel like I should. And now nobody, no, no, I'm not going to do any of those assignments. TL, DR, too long, didn't read. The first major assignment Whitaker Chambers had at Time Magazine when he was hired in 1939 was to write an analysis of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. And they said, my God, he actually has the languages to do it. You know, he knew the six or seven languages. Yes, it was the term that was used a lot. David Renai worked at the Times beginning in the late 90s was aspirational. This was the idea. People look to it.

32:01Even Trump has a little of that with Buckley. Bob Costa, the great journalist, Robert Costa told me people don't realize or they forget that Bob was originally a reporter at National Review for a couple of years. That's where I first met him. Okay. And he said, Trump came by once, and he said, he talked about Buckley, the celebrity. Buckley, the famous guy in New York. And Trump used to speak that way about Mailer and other literary figures. Had he read them? No. But they occupied a place in the culture that doesn't exist now. Well, that makes, because one of the ways that the world has changed is, I mean, people are always the same.

32:44that different aspects of our common humanity move to the fore and move to the back at different periods in history. And one was, there are periods that are very moralistic and there are periods where people are embarrassed of moralism. And so the 60s and 70s were a period when people were really sick and tired of moralism. And we are now in a very moralistic period. So anyone who read, I suspect most of the reception you're getting, people who read those early chapters will have one question, was Bill Buckley a racist or not? Were the Buckley family racist or not? and by any by today's definitions yeah for sure i mean they were you know often could be quite individually kindly and they were certainly had good manners but yeah for sure and i think a lot of them are contemporary adages well that i don't need to know any more than that that's it end of story yeah end of story and you think you know there was a period when people would say we remember the moralists of the 1840s and the 1870s and now it's the 1960s and we're embarrassed by them and We think we need to know more.

33:39And you know what? It turns out that history is full of important and interesting people who did bad things. So I think we're a little out the other end of saying, I can't look at Picasso anymore because he was abusive to women. If you can't look at Renoir, he was on the wrong side of the Dreyfus affair. Can't listen to this musician. Can't read this writer because they turn out to be terrible human beings. And most artists turn out to be pretty defective personalities. is probably what makes them artists in the first place. Yeah, we may be moving into, again, I think if I think of American culture as alternating between Puritan phases and post-Puritan phases, we were in a pretty accelerating Puritan phase from about 1990 to the early 2020s.

34:22And it does look like we're now heading into, I don't know how far we will go. In the 1960s, it went pretty far. I don't know how far we'll go in our post-Puritan phase, but I think we're heading in that direction. I want to talk about a very haunting question you ask at the end of the book about was Bill Buckley a great man or not. Did you ever arrive at a settled conclusion in your mind about that? I didn't. You know, the surprise for me, David, was how complicated he turned out to be. I'd always thought the idea was Whitaker Chambers is a complicated, tormented guy. And he's the hedgehog. And Bill Buckley is a kind of debonair fox.

35:00And he's got his nose in a million different things. And he's having fun all the time. And then I began to think something a little different, that there was something tormented in him. I had material on that that I now sometimes regret not including. So I'm going to share a little bit of it with you. One was an interview I did with the first widow of the great literary journalist, John Leonard, who had been a protege of Buckley, who had this amazing talent. Yes, he had help from Christopher, who discovered you, and some others. But earlier, it was Buckley and his colleagues, Frank Meyer, who were finding these very gifted young writers.

35:43Some of them are still in college. One of them was John Leonard. Bill Buckley read something he'd written in a short-lived magazine called Ivy about Greenwich Village. It's 1959 and invites Leonard in to talk with him. And they have a wonderful exchange, which I describe someone in the book. But when I interviewed his widow, the first of his two wives, Tiana Leonard, after John died, and I'd interviewed John for the book She described what it was like going out to Stanford, Connecticut, the house you knew and I knew, where Bill and Pat and Christopher Buckley lived those many years, where Christopher still lives, on the Long Island Sound, beautiful home, gated community.

36:26And so Tiana Leonard, who's very young, 20, 21, she's a Radcliffe graduate, John Leonard, been kicked out of Harvard for not going to class. And she said being in the home was kind of magical. So I said, well, what about Pop Buckley? What was she like? She said, you know, I never met her. She was never there. She was leading another life somewhere. She said, but at one point, young Christopher Buckley came in. And David, you and I both know and esteem Christopher Buckley. We've had many conversations about all these things. and Tiana Leonard said he was brought in by a nanny, by a nursemaid. He clearly adored his father, but she said there was something inexpressibly sad in his eyes.

37:16She said, he reminded me of Christopher Robin. A little boy retreats to his room, creates a universe. Christopher Buckley became the great Washington satirist of his time. Henry Adams is a novelist of his time. We get there's a reward, there's a recompense. But she said there was something very sad about it. And then John Leonard, when I had an interview that one of my predecessors, John Judas, wrote a very good book about Bill Buckley back in the 80s. He didn't include this in his book, but John generously gave me his tapes and transcripts. And John Leonard said, you know, all those years, I thought I went on Bill Buckley's yacht.

37:58He said, but then I realized I never did. There was something instinctively that kept me away from it. He said, I don't think Bill realized the impact he had on the slightly younger people around him, what a force of nature he was. And he said, for Bill, and this is part of the Catholicism, he said, the abyss isn't there. He just doesn't seem to see it. And I don't know if that's true or not. I think maybe it was true for his friend and rival, as I discovered, Ronald Reagan. That relationship turned out to be much more fraught than I think anyone else had known. But is it really possible that Bill Buckley didn't look inside?

38:49One other guy said this too. This will interest you, David. Bill Rusher, the longtime publisher of National Review said about Bill Buckley. He said, he is the least introspective person I've ever known. And I said, did he keep a diary? I wonder what's in those diaries. Well, the answer is he wrote public diaries, which were published. His best book is Cruising Speed, I think. And that's a public diary. The private interior life, was it sealed off from himself? was he not able to to to bridge it that's what i think maybe happened i believe so no one is intelligent and profound and spiritual as bill buckley would not have an inner life but people often decide to um some people have basements that are usable and some people have basements that are sealed off and i think that was true i think he looked out um and i think the the motion um but you say so many things things there that i want to build on i just want to say something about pat Buckley because one of my favorite quotations comes from her.

39:49We're both Canadians. She comes from Vancouver. I knew her Canadian side family. I knew her brother, Austin, who was always a man of incredible kindness to me and to my family. But my favorite Pat Buckley quote was she was, for a long time, the presiding genius. I don't know if she had a formal title of the Metropolitan Bowl. And sometime in the 19th, which was part of New York societies that used to be, i.e. not run by oligarchs and billionaires and Hollywood people, but like society with a capital S, but not this, you know, people can afford to mount their own interplanetary expedition. But in the 1990s or thereabouts, she handed over control to a new generation of women who were younger and much, much richer.

40:27And the thing became the met ball became the flamboyant thing we know today. And a reporter from one of the newspapers in New York called Pat Buckley for a quote about this transition, hoping to get something envious or spiteful, which the natural reporter instinct. And there are a lot of reasons for that. So there are three or four rounds of fencing where the reporter is asking for the quote and Pat Buckley is withholding it. And finally, Pat Buckley says impatiently, I know what you're looking for, ducky, and I'm not going to give it to you. And then this has entered into our family lore. Whenever you have an unwanted media inquiry, I know what you're looking for, ducky, and I'm not going to give it to you.

41:10love that she was a funny and brilliant woman too and let's not let's um but i want to ask try take a stab at your question about great greatness bill buckley succeeded beyond all expectations if you would ask bill buckley young bill buckley of 1955 what would success look like in the year 2005 and he would describe you know transformation of the republican party into a conservative party you know consistent political success of people who identified themselves as conservative of competition to be the most conservative national review, of course, surviving half a century. And the wishing genie would say, granted, you got it all.

41:47Everything you imagined in 1955 you wanted. Only when you get there, it turns out that's not exactly what he had in mind. I think that's one of the things he was wrestling with when he died in 2008, is he'd won, but he had imagined something that was more intellectual, more rarefied, where people like Rush Lim Limbaugh would have their place, but the leadership would look more like people like Bill Buckley. And that's not what happened. And so it's this kind of complicated tangle of getting what you want only to discover when you get it. It wasn't quite what you thought you had in mind. And the other thing that is complicating your question of greatness is great men in the capital G, capital M, usually not very nice men.

42:29Because usually, actually, the qualities of drive and determination and ruthlessness that it takes to achieve the things that are conventionally called great are not in accord with those gentle qualities of personality. And I think one of the things we're left struggling with is he was a good man. He was a really good man. And when I think about the impact on my life that he had, it is not really an intellectual influence at all. The influence, because I'm a much less generous person than he is. so i'll periodically get these appeals from various people earlier in their careers can i help them can i do something for them and i always i react to that always with a certain inward i'm going to confess this inward feeling of tiredness like oh one more thing i have to do i do i have to do it and then i would think bill did it bill did it a thousand times more often than i did and a thousand times more generously and kindly and enthusiastically than if he could do it and he did it for me.

43:24So I sort of owe it to him to be in that way more like him. He was a giving person. He was a kindly person. He was someone who always thought well of others. And so those are not the fact that you don't climb Mount Everest with those qualities. But when you get to the top of Mount Everest, it's covered with garbage. Yeah. No, that's so well put. Henry Kissinger said once, he may even have said it to me when I interviewed him. He said, the only president he'd known, who was really kind of a good man, who wasn't crazy, I think is what he said, was Gerald Ford, the guy who never wanted the job, because that's the kind of person you have to be.

44:03For a while, I would bristle a little bit at some of Ross Douthat's columns when he would say, well, the real problem with our cult of personality goes back to Barack Obama. But it doesn't begin with Obama, but he's not entirely wrong to see that something was going on there that was not beneficial. And in fact, as we know, the number of Democratic office holders in Obama's years really shrank. The party was actually kind of hollowed out in some way by him. But Bill was a movement builder. And that's where you see the connection between the personal life and the public life. The favors he did for me, and I mentioned some of them in the book, really defied belief.

44:47And the one that stays with me the longest is when I could not get my intellectual idol at the time, and he still is in many respects, Gary Wills, to answer a letter I'd written him asking about his one meeting with Whitaker Chambers for the first biography, because Wills mentions it, that wonderful little book, Confessions of a Conservative, how he'd had a lunch with Chambers, hilarious lunch with Chambers. And I wanted this for the book. And I also was hoping for an opportunity to talk to Wills. Well, in those days, as you know all too well, David, the early 1990s, when you sent somebody a letter, you typed it and put it in an envelope and stuck it in the post and hoped you heard and nothing came back.

45:33And I happened to mention this casually to Bill Buckley because he would phone me periodically to see how the book was coming along, he would initiate the phone call, which is remarkable, because in the early 1990s, there was no more famous intellectual in America than Bill Buckley. And so I told him what had happened with Wills. And then not long after, I got a phone of Bill calls and says, I hadn't spoken to Gary Wills in 20 years, but now he's waiting for your phone call. And I've been turning that incident over in my mind ever since. Why did he do it? And then I realized he didn't want to be on bad terms with Gary Rose.

46:11I gave him an excuse. And also, the book, my book at that moment mattered more to Bill Buckley than whether he and Gary Rose continued their spat. Well, I found time and time again, Wills and others would say to me, in effect, there were better writers than Bill Buckley. There were better thinkers. They wrote more lasting books. But Bill Buckley was, in the older term, a bigger man than they were. He's a bigger person than Joan Didion. He's a bigger person than John Leonard. The last time I saw Bill Buckley, three weeks before he died, he said to me, is there anybody in your life that you're always chasing down because you never hear from them?

46:55And I said, well, I don't know. There aren't really all that many people in my life and not many ever chase me now. And he said, well, I find this with John Leonard. He said, I always have to call him. And then all he does is talk about himself. And I let Bill Buckley at the end of his life is still hurt that this young apostate wasn't kinder to him because Bill Buckley would never be that way. And I think one reason is he grew up as the middlest of middle children, the sixth born 10 children. And so he was surrounded by children who were more loved than he was or more taken care of than he was.

47:36And he felt lonely. He needed company, He liked to have people around him. I saw, the last time I saw him would have been about 2005 or 2006, shortly before his death. Danielle and I went up to Connecticut for dinner. It was a small dinner party with Pat Buckley and a friend of hers from New York who was in her world of fashion and the arts and Bill. And Bill was in great discomfort. You could just see that, that just physically, his body hurt and he was as gracious as ever. But you can see the toll and the toil that went into being so gracious. And I remember having this, as you said, this tremendous insight.

48:15I knew I might see him again one more time. This may not be literally the last time I saw him, but certainly the last significant time. And some good angel whispered in my ear. And this is something that gives me great satisfaction when I think maybe this is a good place to end the conversation. I thought of all the things he'd done for me since we first met in 1982 and all the kindnesses and all the interests he'd taken. And how he all, as you say, with John Leonard, he always, and partly because I didn't dare. How could I presume on his time? He always initiated. He always reached out to me.

48:45And I said, you know what? He's always giving. He never can get as much as he wants. I mean, we're all needy people. And so I spent a few minutes just talking about his life and what his life had meant to me, my admiration for him, his impact on me. and as daniel said you can see his eyes light up like little candles like he that they had never they you were giving him oxygen that he didn't get in sufficient supply and i look back on that evening so i'm really glad i did that and we did not talk about me that evening we talked about him and and what he'd meant you know i sometimes think with christopher hitchens a friend of yours friend of bill's we're so lucky to have youtube because people who knew hitchens only through his writings would not know why he was so important.

49:30It was only if you watch him in action that you understand why he was so important. With Buckley, the writings and even the TV, which exists, you have to talk to people who know him to know why he was important because his influence, his importance was profoundly personal. He was a model of how to live, of the kind of person to be. And whatever you think of his politics and whatever you think of his writings and the novels, some of them are okay, some of them are not so okay. the tv appearances they you know what is more ephemeral than tv but this impact of this this generous large person i mean that there are going to be people in this coming you know people for whom i did favors will do favors to others and at the end of the chain no one will know is because you know i overcame my reluctant nature because of the memory of this big and good man and he was as you've said, a man of feeling really more than intellect.

50:26The intellect was there and the enormous, almost comical vocabulary and Rococo syntax and all the rest, but he was very much a man of feeling. He felt at least as comfortable with my wife, Kathy, as he did with me. And when he saw me come to his house alone, he'd say, well, where's Kathy? He's too close a sibling for a sister born before and a sister born after. And I know one of my detractors has written about the feminization of American culture. Well, it wasn't really the worst thing that happened. Bill Buckley had a great deal of a kind of tender, what she would think of as feminine solicitude towards the people around him.

51:08Well, as I said, I've warned people at the beginning, this was not going to be a biographical. If you want to know the facts of this book, Listen to the great Andrew Sullivan podcast. Read the book itself. Although it's long, it's a two or three day read. It is so lively and engaging. And there's so much about so many things and so many people from this long period of Bill Buckley's life. I thoroughly enjoyed the book. I heartily recommend it. Sam, what an achievement you have done. Thank you for taking the time. It wasn't exactly – it was the graduate seminar, highly specialized and highly personal rather than the undergraduate, all the facts and figures.

51:43Those are available. I recommend the book if you want to know every last you do. Such a pleasure, David. I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

52:28A few months ago, I invited Atlantic staff writer, Charlie Warzel, onto The David Frum Show. As podcast hosts, we talked about the pressures and temptations of the medium. Outrage often gets rewarded. Nuance does not. Charlie doesn't take that bait. On his show, Galaxy Brain, he covers the ways technology is changing how we think and how we live. Not just the obvious stuff, but the subtle ways it shapes what we believe, how we talk to each other, how we see ourselves and our neighbors. If you've ever wondered how smart people end up believing implausible things online, Galaxy Brain is worth your time.

53:06It's thoughtful, surprising, and a little unsettling in the very best way. Find it wherever you listen or watch.

53:40States. I got interested in Booth Tarkington a long time ago because of my interest in the vagaries of literary reputation. How does somebody go from winning the Pulitzer Prize twice to being completely forgotten by almost all readers and insulted by literary critics? I looked up Bob Gottlieb, the former editor and critic, had an appreciation of or an article about Booth Tarkington in The New Yorker in 2019 in which he wrote, the harsh reality, though, is that the candidate for the great American novelist had dwindled into America's most distinguished hack. Now, you may have seen some of the movies based on Booth Tarkington's novels.

54:20In 1942, Orson Welles released a film based on Tarkington's novel, The Magnificent Ambersons, published in 1918. And Alice Adams, the book I will talk about today, was made into a movie in 1935, starring Katharine Hepburn. So you may have run into those. But the novels themselves, novels they did fade now Tarkington wrote a lot not everything is worthy of remembrance but these two novels really are and I but let's talk first about why they faded Tarkington was got himself on the wrong side of almost every culture war that was being fought in the 1930s he was from Indiana and although he went to school in Princeton he stayed in the Midwest almost all of his life at a time when the cultural life of the country was being more centered than ever in New York He was a Midwesterner.

55:04He was also, at a time when the art was tending towards social criticism, he was not a social critic. He mostly observed what he saw around him, and he mostly accepted what he saw around him. He was not a modernist. That is, although his novels are recognizably modern, when you read them, they will not feel old-fashioned to you the way a 19th century novel would. There are no breakthroughs. There are no innovations. There's no Hemingway here. He doesn't make the novel different from what it was before it came into his hands. and uh his art not only were his artistic views but his personal views were generally react conservative and even reactionary now he was not an out there like t.s aliator ezra pound he was not a fascist he was not sympathetic to authoritarianism he supported the u.s war effort in both world war one and world war two he was a believer in the league of nations and the united nations but he was an opponent of franklin delano roosevelt he was a critic of the new deal He was very anti-socialist and anti-communist.

56:00And while he was not, by the standards of his day, a segregationist or co-kluxer, he accepts the racial attitudes of his time. And one of the things that makes Alice Adams, the book I'm going to talk about today, a little uncomfortable to read, or more than a little, is there's a comic scene in the middle, a dinner party that goes wrong. And a lot of the comic or so-called comic or intended comic energy comes about through racial stereotyping of the family's hired cook for the day. and it doesn't make very nice reading a century later. So that's all there. But here's what is also there and why Alice Adams is a book that when I found it on a shelf a long time ago, it made an impression on me.

56:35And when I returned to it intervals as I do, it continues to make an impression on me. Alice Adams is a book written by a man about the ambitions and aspirations of a young woman. And this young woman, her family's down, they're sort of from the middle class of their Indiana town, but they're downwardly mobile. At a time when the town is growing and booming because of the industrialization of the First World War and everybody around them is getting richer, they're getting poorer. And they're being pushed out of the social class in which they had spent most of their lives. And the family struggles to stay in that class with a lot of pretensions.

57:10That leads to the disastrous dinner party with the racist comedy scene. What they mostly look to is their daughter's marriage. Alice Adams is attractive and charming, and they hope if she makes an advantageous marriage that can secure the family's position. And a lot of the energy of the book is about the effort to secure an advantageous marriage. But the thing that makes the book new and keeps it going is in the end, the marriage project fails. I mean, Alice is very young. She's presumably going to marry somebody else, but this particular marriage project fails. And Alice decides that she has to make her own way in the world.

57:43Now, I haven't read enough books to say this is the first time in American literature, literally the first time that The problem of female ambition or the fascination of female ambition, apart from marriage, apart from sexuality, is studied by a novelist, and especially a male novelist. Maybe someone else did it before. But this is one of the very first times, and it's really striking. The question of how women are to make their way in the world, how they are to combine their romantic and sexual lives with their other kinds of aspirations, that's something that mostly gets quite harsh in critical scrutiny.

58:16Tarkington in Alice Adams gives it sympathetic scrutiny. Alice has to make up her own mind that she is responsible for her own life. It's going to be what she makes of it before she gets married. And marriage will not be the answer to her problems. Work will be. And I have always been very moved by how the novel ends. So Alice, one plan after another has fallen through. One set of illusions after another has fallen through. Attempts to hold on to gentility through bluff and bluster and marriage, those have all fallen through. The terrible dinner party scene, that has fallen through. Alice, as she walks around her town, regularly passes a secretarial school.

58:54And she looks up at it and she always just shudders at it. She doesn't want to do it. And at the end of the novel, she passes by the secretarial school. And this time, she makes a different decision. And I'd like to read this to you because it moves me. As she sees the sign for the school, her pity for herself vanished more reluctantly. but she shook it off and tried to smile at it and at her romantic recollections at all of them. She had something important to think of. She passed the tobacconists and before her was that dark entrance to the wooden stairway leading up to Frinka's business college, the very doorway she had always looked upon as the end of youth and the end of hope.

59:35How often had she gone by there, hating the dreary obscurity of that stairway? How often had she thought of this obscurity as something lying in wait to obliterate the footsteps of any girl who should ascend into the smoky darkness above. Never had she passed without those ominous imaginings of hers, pretty girls turning into old maids, taking dictation. Old maids of a dozen different types, yet all looking a little like herself. Well, she was here at last. She looked up and down the street quickly, and then, with a little heave of the shoulders, she went bravely in, under the sign and began to climb the wooden steps.

1:00:12Halfway up, the shadows were heaviest. But after that, the place began to seem brighter. There was an open window overhead somewhere she found. There was an open window overhead somewhere she found, and the steps at the top were gay with sunshine. I think it's a beautiful description of hopes and ambitions realized. And it's impressive that somebody would do that a hundred years ago about a young woman and not a young man. I think of that when I read about young women in the news who are being criticized for not managing their ambitions in ways that meet other people's understanding. It's a difficult destiny to be young, a difficult destiny to be young and female.

1:00:49And it's difficult to make your way in the world on your own by yourself. Booth Tarkington thought about it a long time ago. And with all his flaws as a novelist, I don't know that anybody's thought about it better since. So Alice Adams by Booth Tarkington. thanks so much for joining me on the David Fromm show today thanks so much for viewing or listening whichever platform you use I hope you will like and subscribe share the program on the platforms you use remember always the best way to support the work of this podcast if you're minded to do it is to subscribe to the Atlantic you can follow my work on the Atlantic by signing up for a David Fromm alert on the Atlantic website and to those of our listeners and viewers in the United States I hope you will have a very happy Thanksgiving I look forward to seeing you next week back here on The David Frum Show.

1:01:55This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grime. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Abed is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor. I'm David Frum. Thank you for listening. Still waiting in line? Again? That's time you'll never get back. Save time and money with Stamps.com. Over 4 million businesses have skipped the line with Stamps.com. Join them to save up to 90 % off carrier rates from your computer or phone right now. Print postage for certified mail, registered mail, and packages in seconds.

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