Encounter with history
Linda Kay at her book launch
Photo by Kate hutchinson
Journalism professor Linda Kay has written a book called The Reading List about a pivotal relationship early in her career as a reporter.
The book began several years ago as her master’s thesis. She realized as she peeled back layers of incident and memory that she was dealing with the substance of a journalist’s craft: to determine, as far as possible, the truth.
In 1975, she was 22 and working on a daily newspaper in Paterson, N.J., when she met and befriended 66-year-old Nelson Algren, the rugged author of a celebrated novel about a heroin addict (The Man With the Golden Arm).
He had been sent there by Esquire magazine, which was then at the height of its popularity, to write an article about a high-profile case seen by some as a miscarriage of justice. Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a boxer, was in jail in Paterson for murder.
Algren never did get the truth about Carter, who was retried and convicted again. Eventually, the boxer was released from jail, though not pardoned. Carter’s story has been well documented in books and a Hollywood movie. He now lives in Canada.
However, Kay’s book is not about him, but about her reactions to Algren, whom she somewhat warily befriended. Sophisticated but truculent, he became her mentor, letting her tag along as he worked on his Carter piece for the magazine, and letting her write about him for her own weekly.
The reading list of Kay’s title refers to Algren’s effort to broaden her mind. His recommendations are a mixture of modern classics and books that were in vogue: The Good Soldier Schweik, Under the Volcano, Homage to Catalonia, Little Big Man, A House for Mr. Biswas, among others.
Kay soon left Paterson to work for big newspapers in San Diego and Chicago. She modestly suggests that she was the beneficiary of the eagerness with which employers were hiring young women for unlikely tasks, such as covering sports, to show their awareness of the new feminism.
However, Algren had made a lingering impression on her mind, and she kept picking up additional facts about him. It was years before she realized that the “French schoolteacher” he had had a long love affair with before she met him was the famous feminist Simone de Beauvoir.
Concordia’s eponymous women’s studies centre, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, was a co-sponsor of Kay’s book launch last Monday. The Reading List, a slim volume of 120 pages, is published by Hamilton Books, and is available at the Concordia Bookstore.