Listening to the Voice of the Terkel

By Paul Gray

TALKING TO MYSELF

by STUDS TERKEL 316 pages. Pantheon. $10.

Next to Richard Nixon, the person whose career has been most dramatically affected by the tape recorder is Studs Terkel. Although he earned patchy renown as a Chicago radio-TV personality, Terkel's national prominence came through three books crammed with transcripts of other people's conversations: Division Street: America, Hard Times and Working. The subjects changed with each book, but Terkel's theme did not: I hear America speaking. All the while the most provocative talker was a rumpled man with floppy white hair and an omnipresent cigar--the one who was asking the questions, and listening.

Free Floater. In Talking to Myself Terkel, 65, is listening to his memories. What he chiefly recalls are the people he has met and the stories he has been told. As an autobiographer, Terkel is modest to the point of evasion. Given the chance to tell all about himself, he elects to tell almost nothing. "I'm constantly play-acting," he says with unusual self-consciousness during an interview with Ivy Compton-Burnett. "Here, with you, I begin to talk like you. When I'm with a Chicago hoodlum, I talk like him. I'm a chameleon." This free-floating identity comes with the territory that Terkel long ago carved out for himself. Through sheer unobtrusiveness, he has become a man after Henry James' dictum: one on whom nothing is lost.

His early days provided Terkel with plenty to find. He grew up in the city that produced the fictional Studs Lonigan and Augie March and the real Al Capone. His mother owned a boardinghouse and later leased a hotel near the Loop. Its lobby was a stage set filled with bit players of the '20s: drifters, grifters, autodidacts, a few nuts and bolts from the political machine. Some of the guests, Terkel remembers, "favored me with little nickel blue books: writings of Eugene V. Debs, Clarence Darrow, Thomas Paine, Bob Ingersoll, Upton Sinclair, Voltaire." Young Terkel was ripe for this heady blend of populism and indignation. The political passion of his life was conceived in 1924 when Fighting Bob La Follette ran for President on the Progressive ticket. "There were two other candidates," Terkel notes, "one of whom won."

Chicago gave the young man daily lessons in the difference between high ideals and street-level reality. During a state election in 1930, Terkel was paid $5 by one candidate to watch the voting at a local fire station. He re-creates a scene that was to be repeated through the decades: "There are a number of familiar faces among the voters. That is, they've become familiar, having entered the polling place several times this day ... In some instances, the X marked on the ballot has been in the nature of a proxy vote on behalf of some dear departed, whose name is still among those registered."

Spliced between such scenes, in no chronological sequence, are vignettes drawn from breadlines in the '30s and civil rights marches in the '60s, from on-the-road problems of black musicians in the '40s and off-the-air problems of blacklisted performers in the '50s. Terkel's range as a historian is determined by the range of what he saw and heard --a limitation in other reporters, perhaps, but a vast license in Terkel's case. He was in Chicago when Dillinger was shot and in Selma in 1965. He has also elicited conversation from just about every notable from Bertrand Russell to Mahalia Jackson--and he is still at his listening post at Chicago's WFMT.

Indefatigable Romantic. Terkel's prime failing is his unwillingness to contradict--or entertain a critical thought --about anyone who was nice enough to spend time with him. He listens rhapsodically as British Director Joan Littlewood says, "I'm sick to death of all these silly old political and social and educational systems which have got in the way of human expression." Not a word from Terkel, wondering whether those systems are not perhaps products of human expression. On the evidence of Talking to Myself, Terkel has rarely sought out people who actually run things. An indefatigable romantic, he prefers the "mute, inglorious Miltons" among the underdogs: the Welsh miner with a taste for the impressionists, the Cockney waitress with a Bruegel print on her wall, the Swedish miner who quotes Gibbon. Terkel is moved by what he takes to be the oppression of such people. As he presents them, though, they seem to be doing very nicely indeed.

Yet Terkel goes a long way to ward correcting the sociological imbalance between charts and characters.

The latter have always consumed him.

The law degree he earned from the Uni versity of Chicago never displaced his curiosity about people -- or made him a dollar. In retrospect, Terkel's decision not to practice law looks inspired.

He might have made a passable attorney; he has proven an entertaining and invaluable witness.

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