Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations

Howell Raines: Coming Full Circle

Howell raines Coming fUll CirCle Before Howell Raines left the New York Times in 2003, I visited with him at the New York Times offices in Manhattan, a place of energy, dynamism, and push. In 2006 I caught up with him again in a far more relaxed, and reflective, setting. Oxford, Mississippi o n abreezyafternoonatRowanOak,HowellRaines,hiswife, Krystyna, at his side, saunters beneath the whispering cedar trees leading to William Faulkner’s historic home. The former executive editor of the New York Times, on book tour for his new memoir, The One That Got Away, has not always moved at such a leisurely pace. For forty years as the Birmingham native spent workdays chasing stories as a reporter or presiding over publication from an editor’s chair, he was fueled by what he calls “the adrenaline” of daily newspapers, a cycle he likens in his book to building a house “every day, for time everlasting, amen.” In 2003, however, in a saga played out before the nation, Raines lost his job as executive editor in the aftermath of a scandal involving plagiarism and lying by a young reporter, Jayson Blair. “My career ended in the most unexpected way,” he says. Raines is now, he says, “getting a chance to visit the road not taken.” At age 62, the newspaperman who won a Pulitzer Prize in feature writing and later presided over seven Pulitzers for the New York Times after the terror- 100 THE JOURNEYERS ist attacks of September 11, 2001, finds himself, in the traditional sense, unemployed . In his light-beige linen suit, open-collar shirt, and Panama hat, he is contemplative—“I’m no longer addicted to stress,” he says—looking through Faulkner’s house not as a tourist or journalist, but as an aspiring author. That aspiration is not just to be published, as he is already an author of a novel, Whiskey Man, an oral history, My Soul Is Rested, and a first memoir, Howell Raines, author of The One That Got Away. Photo by Bruce Newman, courtesy of the Mobile Press-Register. HOWELL R AINES 101 Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, but “to climb the mountain” of a new novel about the Civil War. “Newspapers were the love in the second chamber of my heart,” he says. In the first chamber, from the days he was an undergraduate at BirminghamSouthern and did his master’s in English at The University of Alabama, was the love of books. “I’ve come full circle,” he says. As Raines enters the room where Faulkner’s typewriter sits near the window , he is captivated by the Nobel laureate’s eccentric method of outlining the novel, A Fable. Faulkner scrawled the outline on the wall. Raines peers closely. “I can use help with my plots,” he says, laughing. $ Rowan Oak curator William Griffith has brought out a Faulkner treasure, though, that entices Raines even more. “Can I hold it?” he asks. Griffith nods. Raines picks up Faulkner’s fishing rod as though handling a sorcerer’s wand. Griffith tells Raines he is a fly-fisher, too. The men talk about bonefish versus carp. “Carp,” says Griffith, “are much spookier than bonefish.” He asks Raines questions about Faulkner’s rig. Raines balances it in his hands. Fishing is a powerful theme in Raines’ life, and The One Who Got Away devotes much of its text to Raines’ fly-fishing adventures from islands in the Pacific to rivers in Russia. One of the two biggest fish that got away in the memoir is a blue marlin that Raines fights for seven and a half hours on an expedition in the company of his best friend from Birmingham days, Tennant McWilliams. The other, metaphorically speaking, is the New York Times. As Raines looks around the property outside the author’s home—the stable, the cookhouse, the cabin where Faulkner’s “Mammy,” Dilsey, lived—he converses comfortably on topics ranging from fishing, to religion, to Faulkner’s understanding of race relations, to the inspiration for him of “late life” artists who continued to do dynamic work into old age like W. B. Yeats and Pablo Picasso. And he talks about roads not taken, and detours, too. Raines says he had gotten a contract to write The One That Got Away, several years ago, intending it to be a sequel to Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis. But he ultimately gave the money...