C OV ER S T ORY
F6 Sunday, January 30, 2011 • THE BULLETIN
After 60 years, a promise kept Family secrets at heart Barnaby Conrad writes the story Sinclair Lewis once suggested “The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth” by Barnaby Conrad (Council Oak Books, 258 pgs., $25)
By Adam Nagourney New York Times News Service
CARPINTERIA, Calif. — The last time Barnaby Conrad saw Sinclair Lewis, three years after he served as Lewis’ personal secretary, they were at a bar in Paris and, by Conrad’s account, Lewis was thoroughly drunk. But not so drunk that he couldn’t chastise his former secretary for failing to execute a book idea that Lewis had handed him one morning at breakfast: a novel based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating President Abraham Lincoln and had embarked on a secret life in the American frontier. “You are never going to be a writer unless you write that book,” declared Lewis, the Nobel Prize-winning author of “Elmer Gantry” and “Babbitt,” as Conrad recounted the moment recently. Talk about pressure. “It was always on my mind,” he said. That was 1950, shortly before Lewis’ death. And now, 60 years later — this must set a record for late authors — Conrad has published “The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth.” The novel follows the arc of the story Lewis sketched out: from Booth’s escape from the barn where history has him cornered and killed by Union soldiers, to a frontier town where, after being goaded into playing Lincoln at a county pageant, he was assassinated by a drunken fellow Lincoln hater. The conversation in the bar was no idle talk. Lewis and Conrad had signed a contract dated Aug. 7, 1947, stipulating that upon
NASA Continued from F1 A panel that oversees safety at NASA took note of the uncertainty in its annual report, released this month. “What is NASA’s exploration mission?” the members of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel asked in their report. The panel added: “It is not in the nation’s best interest to continue functioning in this manner. The Congress, the White House, and NASA must quickly reach a consensus position on the future of the agency and the future of the United States in space.”
‘A bad outcome’ A nagging worry is that compromises will leave NASA without enough money to accomplish anything, and that — even as billions of dollars are spent — the future destination and schedule of NASA’s rockets could turn out to be “nowhere” and “never.” In that case, human spaceflight at NASA would consist just of its work aboard the International Space Station, with the Russians providing the astronaut transportation indefinitely. “We’re on a path with an increasing probability of a bad outcome,” said Scott Pace, a former NASA official who now directs the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. A NASA study, completed last month, came up with a framework for spaceflight in the two next decades but deferred setting specific destinations, much less timetables for getting there. One of the study’s conclusions was that trying to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 — as President Barack Obama had challenged the agency to do in a speech last April — was “not prudent,” because it would be too expensive and narrow. Instead, the study advocated a “capability-driven framework” — developing elements like spacecraft, propulsion systems and deep-space living quarters that could be used and reused for a variety of exploration missions. The track record for large aerospace development projects, both inside and outside of NASA, is that they almost always take longer and cost more than initially estimated. If costs for the
Stephanie Diani / New York Times News Service
Barnaby Conrad, who recently finished writing “The Second Life of John Wilkes Booth,” is shown at his studio in his home in Carpinteria, Calif. Conrad promised Sinclair Lewis over 60 years ago that he would write the book based on the conceit that John Wilkes Booth had escaped capture after assassinating Lincoln and lived a secret life on the frontier. publication Lewis would collect 30 percent of the earnings. It seems safe to say that Lewis’ warning was not borne out. “The Second Life” is Conrad’s 35th book, part of a variegated career of writing, painting, sculpture and bullfighting. (That ended at 36 when he was gored in Spain and almost died.) And, not incidentally, Conrad spent 10 years as the proprietor of one of the great celebrity hangouts in San Francisco — El Matador, named after his 1952 book, “Matador,” his single best seller. When asked what took him so long to finish, Conrad nearly bounded from his chair. “What took me so long to start it!” he shot back, correctly, eyebrows arching. When Lewis hired him to work at his home in Williamstown, Mass., Conrad was 25, struggling with his first book, about an affair with his housekeeper in Spain (don’t worry if you missed it) and thrilled to land an assignment
with such an acclaimed writer. “I had to drive him around, and I had to have three meals a day with him,” said Conrad, an intellectually spry 88, settling back in his chair on a warm day of crystalline beauty in this community south of Santa Barbara. “He could be pretty irascible. But he was a character.” His service to Lewis lasted five months. Lewis fired Conrad and left for Europe, taking as his escort (in Conrad’s telling) the young woman that Conrad thought he had been dating. Conrad wasn’t entirely smitten with the Booth idea. Even the Paris run-in couldn’t get him going. What moved him was his son, Barnaby Conrad III, a writer and magazine editor who in 2009 had joined Council Oak Books and was hunting for new acquisitions; a year later, 59 years after Lewis died, he signed his father for an advance of $5,000. “I basically lit a fire under him again,” the younger Conrad said. As a rule, family members probably should avoid editor-writer collaborations — the writer-editor
heavy-lift rocket swell, the project could, as Constellation did, divert money from other parts of NASA. Thus, many NASA observers wonder how the agency can afford to finance both the heavylift rocket and the commercial space taxis, which are supposed to begin flying at about the same time. “They’re setting themselves up again for a long development program whose completion is beyond the horizon,” James Muncy, a space policy consultant, said of the current heavy-lift design. “The question is, what does Congress want more? Do they want to just want to keep the contractors on contract, or do they want the United States to explore space?” He called the situation at NASA “a train wreck,” one “where everyone involved knows it’s a train wreck.” Constellation, started in 2005 under the Bush administration, aimed to return to the moon by 2020 and set up a base there in the following years. But Constellation never received as much money as originally promised, which slowed work and raised the overall price tag.
— over the next decade. If the country was not willing to spend that much, NASA should be asked to do less, the panel said.
Support wanes for the moon goal When Obama was running for president, he said he supported the moon goal. But after he took office, he did not show much enthusiasm for it. His request for the 2010 fiscal year did not seek immediate cuts in Constellation but trimmed the projected spending in future years. The administration also set up a blue-ribbon panel, led by Norman Augustine, a former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, to review the program. The panel found that Constellation could not fit into the projected budget — $100 billion over 10 years — and would need $45 billion more to get back on track. Extending the space station five years beyond 2015 would add another $14 billion, the group concluded. The panel could not find an alternative that would fit, either. It said that for a meaningful human spaceflight program that would push beyond low-Earth orbit, NASA would need $128 billion — $28 billion more than the administration wanted to spend
Constellation canceled Last February, when unveiling the budget request for fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration said it wanted to cancel Constellation, turn to commercial companies for transportation to low Earth orbit and invest heavily in research and development on technologies for future deepspace missions. The Obama budget requested more money for NASA — but for other parts of the agency like robotic science missions and aviation. The proposed allotment for human spaceflight was still at levels that the Augustine committee had said were not workable. In pushing to cancel Constellation, one Obama administration official after another called it “unexecutable,” so expensive that it limped along for years without discernible progress. “The fact that we poured $9 billion into an unexecutable program really isn’t an excuse to pour another $50 billion into it and still not have an executable program,” said James Kohlenberger, chief of staff of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, at a news conference last February. At the same news conference, Lori Garver, NASA’s deputy administrator, noted that Constellation, without a budget increase, would not reach the moon until well after the 2020 target. “The Augustine report made it clear that we wouldn’t have gotten to beyond low Earth orbit until 2028 and even then would not have the funding to build the lander,” she said. But with the new road map, NASA may not get to its destinations any faster. As for the ultimate goal of landing people on Mars, which Obama said he wanted NASA to accomplish by the mid-2030s, it is slipping further into the future.
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relationship is fraught enough as it is — but the son did some fairly hands-on editing to help achieve this difficult birth. “I’m more into the highbrow intellectual style,” said the younger Conrad. “Dad is more into being the tale teller. So he’s fun to work with. You’d think he’d be, ‘Hey don’t tell me what to do.’ But no.” Lincoln’s assassination has been the subject of as many conspiracy theories as John F. Kennedy’s; last month, descendants of Booth said they wanted the body in his grave exhumed to determine if it was genuine. Despite having written “The Second Life,” Conrad is not among the skeptics. “No, no,” he said when asked if he thought Booth had escaped. “People love to think that.” He does subscribe to another theory: that the assassination was a conspiracy hatched by Edward Stanton, who was Lincoln’s secretary of war. His home here — a beach cabin that he and his wife, Mary, built 45 years ago and that has been extended into a ramble of rooms and studios — attests to the sheer diversity of his pursuits. The walls are heavy with paintings by Conrad: a languorous one of Mary hangs in the dining room, and a stern and intimidating portrait of Lewis is in the living room. There are the framed telegrams from John Huston and Jose Ferrer proposing to turn “Matador” into a movie, which never happened. There are photographs of the bullfight where Conrad was gored. There are also telegrams from another writer and bullfight enthusiast, Ernest Hemingway, with some passing criticism of Conrad, reflecting a rivalry between two men who never met. Approaching 90, he has no intention of slowing down. He still writes in longhand, doesn’t own a computer and neither knows nor seems to care how the Booth book is selling. Just as well: On the day of the interview his Amazon ranking stood at 559,985. But no matter. He is on to book No. 36; the subject is his time with Sinclair Lewis. And more than anything, he is glad this 60year-old writing assignment has been completed. “I feel relieved,” he said.
of new Edwards novel “The Lake of Dreams” by Kim Edwards (Viking, 400 pgs., $26.96)
By Joy Tipping The Dallas Morning News
Kim Edwards’ debut novel, “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” in 2006, whooshed like a tsunami through the literary landscape, becoming a huge best-seller and earning fierce loyalty among her readers. Edwards followed “Memory Keeper” with republication of her 1997 collection of short stories, “The Secrets of a Fire King,” which was well-received but not nearly as popular as “Memory Keeper”; fans were clearly waiting for the next novel. They can rejoice: “The Lake of Dreams” is finally here, and it’s a doozy, although it lacks the emotional heft that made readers clasp “Memory Keeper” to their hearts. Still, it’s gorgeously written and, for a book with a mystery at its core, refreshingly introspective. Like Elizabeth Kostova (“The Swan Thieves”), Edwards is an author who’s not afraid to linger and pause, to let a character sit with a thought or problem and work it out on the page. You won’t find car chases here or pounding suspense, but patient readers will come away with human insight worthy of a psychology text and a lot more interesting to read. As in “Memory Keeper,” a family secret drives “Lake of Dreams,” a puzzle that goes back generations and traces its roots to a collection of intertwined circumstances. Among them are the 1910 appearance of Halley’s comet; the suffragist movement in upstate New York; and the burgeoning early 20thcentury industry in the Finger Lakes region, with glassworks taking the lead, both workaday glass and stained art glass in the tradition of Louis Comfort Tiffany and John La Farge. The story is set in the fictional Lake of Dreams, one of a bevy of hamlets strung like beads along the Finger Lakes. Heroine Lucy Jarrett, in her
(Kim) Edwards’ book is ... busy, and it’s complicated, but as a finished, carefully woven product, it turns into something luminously beautiful. late 20s, returns home from Japan, where she’s living with her boyfriend, Yoshi. Lucy has spent her young adulthood moving frequently, state to state, country to country, refusing to perch anywhere for long. Once at her mom’s lake house, Lucy gets quickly drawn back into family drama. There’s a hint of “Hamlet,” with Lucy’s not-so-beloved Uncle Art assuming much of what she considers her father’s rightful place (he died years ago in a boating accident), and also strain over her mother’s new romance and ongoing friction with her brother and cousins. She’s also shaken by renewed proximity to glass artisan Keegan Fall, who was her teenage romance. When Lucy discovers some old letters and pamphlets and a swath of beautifully woven cloth, tucked away in a window seat, it leads her back in time to ancestors she’d never heard of: Rose Jarrett and her daughter Iris. Rose, it seems, may have been the model for a series of glorious stained-glass windows that Keegan is restoring for the local church. But why were she and Iris expunged from the family history? There are almost too many issues to keep up with here: women’s rights, American Indian rights, artistic integrity, family squabbles (and possible murder, it turns out), the tug of freedom vs. the comfort of familiarity. Edwards’ book is much like her plot-central piece of cloth that was woven with interlocking moons and vines: It’s busy, and it’s complicated, but as a finished, carefully woven product, it turns into something luminously beautiful.