LOUIS "STUDS" TERKEL, born 1912, is one of the great American broadcasters, in the liberal tradition of Ed Murrow rather than the right wing demagoguery of Rush Limbaugh or his spiritual ancestor from the 1930s, Father Coughlin. Some would say he represents the very best of America, in the way that H. L. Mencken and the great defence lawyer Clarence Darrow once did.
Terkel deserves a biography and, and even though this book is what Kant might have called a prolegomenon to any future biography rather than a full life itself, it is well worth having. The late Tony Parker, master of the taped interview, was the nearest Britain ever got to a Studs Terkel and his colloquies with Terkel and those who know him make up an attractive volume.
Terkel's claim to fame is threefold as radio journalist, as editor and as oral historian. Hard Times, an oral history of the Great Depression, is a classic of hobo life to be set alongside Jack London's The Road. And Terkel deservedly won the Pulitzer Prize for The GoodWar in 1984 - the American experience in the second World War as seen by the Brechtian commonman. A man of the Left whd suffered for his beliefs through McCarthyite blacklisting in the 1950s, Terkel is a believer in the motto allegedly invented by William Randolph Hearst (though seldom implemented by the magnate): "A good newspaper should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
Terkel is very frank to Parker about his Jewish upbringing, his neurotic, manhating mother and his abandonment of legal studies at the University of Chicago in the late 1930s. Like many people interested in dozens of different things, he found a niche in journalism and in 1954 began his long running radio show on WFMT, Chicago.
He is one of those people who can put anyone at ease, duchess or dustman, and get the best from them in an interview. Part of the secret is his phenomenal memory and power of total recall for people and their conversations, but another part is due to that much over used word, charisma. The Terkel who emerges from these pages is a deeply lovable man, compassionate, wise, witty and humorous. It is no wonder that his friend J.K. Galbraith described him as "more than a writer . . . a national resource". His enduring faith in the innate goodness of his fellow humans once led him to describe a Klansman he interviewed was as "deep down a really nice guy". This, from a man who has always battled racism and is a hero to American blacks is a tribute to the breadth of his human sympathies.
A book like this, with so many testimonies from admirers, could easily turn into a hagiographic Festschrift, but Parker allows Terkel's right wing critics to have their say. Some would claim, also, that Terkel's ecstatic eulogy of his friend Nelson Algren shows poor literary judgment. And Parker includes examples of the famous Studs interviewing technique going wrong there is a disastrous interview with the mercurial and difficult Sir Georg Solti, but then not for nothing is the Hungarian maestro known in London orchestras as "the screaming skull". Following in the footsteps of the master, Parker himself sometimes comes to grief: a three page interview with the theatre director Joan Littlewood ends with the Stratford sage saying not a single word of significance about Terkel but plenty about herself, her predilections, and her dislike of Sir Peter Hall.
Terkel himself never puts a foot seriously wrong, at least in my judgment. Who could not warm to a man who rejects easy demagoguery as follows: "Do you have what's called phoneins' in your country, interviews with studio guests and listeners call in and put questions to them? ... Tell me something - did you ever hear one that didn't sound phoney?" And who, while being grilled by Senator McCarthy's committee in the 1950s and, instructed that now was the time for all good Americans to stand up and be counted, stood up and said: "One".
Given Terkel's liking for Thomas Hardy (his 1972 volume, Working, is dedicated to Jude Fawley, aka Jude the Obscure), the most appropriate valedictory epigraph for him (not used by Parker) would be the words with which Marty South laments Giles Winterborne at the very end of The Woodlanders: "You was a good man and you did good things."