In a recent PBS biography of Pope John Paul II, the novelist Robert Stone said, "When I was 15 or 16, for the usual rationalistic reasons, I abandoned faith. It wasn't until years later that I realized that half my head was missing . . . I had lost an important way of interpreting human experience. So I began to have faith again." In his new biography of Fawn Brodie, Newll Bringhurst tells how a similar decision by Brodie at age 20 caused her to abandon faith not just in Mormonism but all religions and God. Unlike Stone, she stubbornly defended that position for the rest of her life.

"Fawn McKay Brodie: A Biographer's Life" is itself a model biography. Bringhurst writes lucid, readable prose and the whole book moves as smoothly as a new car over freshly paved road. He has great empathy for his subject and he also posesses that old-fashioned virtue, objectivity. Because Brodie left a great amount on paper about her emotional life, Bringhurst is able to carefully describe Brodie's inner life without resorting to the kind of psychobiographical speculation that helped make Brodie's work so hotly controversial.

At one point in her life, Brodie wondered why she had spent so much of it in contention. Bringhurst's use of her full name in the title is a key to the "why" of that long-lived contention. She was the daughter of one General Authority and the niece of a president of the LDS church, David O. McKay. When she wrote a highly critical biography of Mormon founder Joseph Smith, "No Man Knows My History", it caused an irreparable rupture with many in her family and religion.

Her biographies of Smith and of Richard Nixon are full of rage against their subjects. The Nixon book is especially breathtaking in its meanspiritedness. Bringhurst traces the source of that rage to her childhood (a rage so profound that 10 pages can't go by in this book without a withering, contemptuous quote by Brodie about some aspect of Mormon culture.) She was a fierce perfectionist; her daughter Pamela says Brodie only began to relax and enjoy life after she had been diagnosed with terminal cancer "and by then it was rather late" (indeed, many medical people believe that lifelong rage can produce cancer.) Her father was a poverty-stricken, gentle man who Brodie saw as all his life under the thumb of his famous, more assertive brother. Her mother was an intellectual who felt smothered by the "provincial" rural atmosphere of Huntsville, Utah. Brodie's son Bruce felt that his mother "wished she were a man" who would be judged by her accomplishments, and not for charm and looks "as women are" (although Brodie was a great beauty in her youth.)

She went off to the University of Chicago and began to change from the sheltered, devout Mormon girl she had been. Her family were stauch Republicans; she became an ardent liberal Democrat. She married Bernard Brodie, a non-Mormon who became one of the nation's foremost experts on nuclear weapons (the paradox of the free-thinking Fawn's marriage to a prominent figure in the military-industrial complex is one that Bringhurst doesn't explore.) She came to believe that Joseph Smith was a "conscious deceiver" and set out to prove it in a book.

Was this rebellion against a stunted, deprived upbringing in backwards Utah, like some angry exile from Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon? Bringhurst's vivid recounting of her early years rings a bell with this resident of Wasatch County, who has heard parallel stories from his parents and grandparents. But Juanita Brooks grew up in a very like environment and managed to retain her faith; perhaps she had a more believing, less tortured heart. (A good compainion to Bringhurst's fine book is the equally enlightening biography of Brooks by Levi Peterson.)

Even Brodie's much celebrated book on Thomas Jefferson, it can be argued, was influenced by her perfectionism. She was "obsessed" (her word) by the sexuality of all her subjects (she just knew Nixon was a repressed homosexual.) So it was only natural that she should foreground Jefferson as sleeping with a slave, a very imperfect act. Brodie maintained that her book was motivated only by admiration for Jefferson. But if you were to ask the average high school senior what he/she knows about him, I bet the answer would be "he sexually exploited his slaves" first, and "the Declaration of Independence" only second.

Brodie's anger limits the usefulness of her books. Their cumbersome, outmoded Freudian psychological framework renders much of their conclusions obsolete. The Nixon biography was supplanted by more sympathetic views only a few years after its publication. She was a member of a generation of midcentury intellectuals who were securely liberal in their political outlook and confidently secular in their religious and cultural opinions. How it must have astonished them to see the rise of Nixon and Reagan, the fall of socialism, the the refusal of religion to go away (Bringhurst tells of Brodie's mixture of pride and disgust on a trip to Peru when she discovered how the Mormon church was flourishing in Latin America.)

In the end, hospitalized for her final illness, she saw her devoutly Mormon brother Thomas and cried out for a priesthood blessing. Then, reconsidering, she wrote a statement "repudiating Mormonism forever." In many ways she lived an exemplary life according to LDS cultural traditions: she was a devoted mother who worked hard. It took her over ten years to finish her second book because of her devotion to her young children. But there is a real undercurrent of tragedy in Bringhurst's book. (She suffered from recurrent depression and her mother and grandfather took their own lives.) One wonders: what would she have accomplished if she has used all of her head instead of just half?

R.W. Rasband
Heber City, UT
rrasband@hotmail.com