In Ederle Bio, A Channel-Crosser's Defiant Spirit

TERRY GROSS, host:

The English Channel is a mere 21 miles across at its narrowest point. But its powerful tides and abrupt shifts in weather makes swimming the Channel one of the most difficult athletic feats on the planet. In the summer of 1926, only five men in recorded history had swum the Channel. Then an American teenager name Gertrude Ederle stuck her toe in the Channel waters and made history. Book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review of "Young Woman and the Sea," a new biography of Ederle by sportswriter Glenn Stout.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN: When Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel and to set a new speed record for doing so, died six years ago at the age of 98, I remember routinely glancing at the photos on the newspaper obituary pages and thinking that she looked quaint. Certainly her modest tank suits with their boy-leg cut gave her, to my eye, an air of premature mustiness. So did the old fashioned name, Gertrude. In over 20 years of teaching, I'm pretty sure I've never had one Gertrude among my students.

My split-second dismissal of Ederle as quaint is why Glenn Stout's new biography of her, called "Young Woman and the Sea," struck me as poignant far beyond the powers of his somewhat lumpy writing style. Because, as Stout makes clear, Gertrude Ederle, known in her youth as Trudy, was once the glorious epitome of the modern American girl of the 1920s. She was sporty, muscular, and plucky. She even daringly bobbed her hair. When Ederle made her world famous swim in August of 1926, she was 19 years old and she listened to the strains of hot jazz as she swam the frigid storm-tossed waters of the Channel. The crew aboard a little tugboat beside her spun gramophone records - tunes like, "Yes, We Have No Bananas," and "Sweet Georgia Brown."

Ederle, as Stout emphasizes, was forward-looking but no feminist. She took on the Channel — smearing her body in sheep grease and diving in to master a feat achieved by only five men — simply because there were no swimming records left for her to break. Her supportive father had promised her a red Roadster if she succeeded. And, indeed, she got that snappy car, as well as a ticker tape parade down Fifth Avenue. New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker told the teenager: when history records the greatest crossings, they will speak of Moses crossing the Red Sea, Caesar the Rubicon, and Washington the Delaware, and frankly, your crossing of the English Channel will take place alongside these.

But Walker's prediction proved to be nothing more than a politician's bloviations. By the early 1930s, Ederle was working as an anonymous swim coach at a public pool outside New York. Her fame had evaporated as quickly as sea spray on a sun-warmed beach towel. Stout's biography does a good job of fishing Ederle out of the deep waters of historical forgetfulness and setting her in the context of her times — the Roaring Twenties, when public fascination with sporting events, as well as with stunts, had reached new heights.

I cautioned, a moment ago, that Stout's writing style is lumpy because he often bloats Ederle's story with chapter-long digressions about, for instance, Native American swimming techniques or like the chapter devoted to the geological history of the English Channel. A leaner biography would have been even more evocative. Ederle, Stout tells us, began swimming as a child on resort beaches in New Jersey. She suffered significant hearing loss after having measles at age five, and the silence of the sea clearly felt comforting to her. Ederle once said in an interview that, to me, the sea is like a person, like a child that I've known a long time. It sounds crazy, I know, but when I swim in the sea I talk to it. I never feel alone when I'm out there.

After joining the nascent Women's Swimming Association, Ederle began to wow her teammates and coaches, particularly when she got out of pool competitions and onto the open water of the ocean. She won gold medals in the 1924 Olympics, but, on her first attempt to swim the Channel in 1925, she became sick and disoriented and had to give up. Stout gives credence to the story that Ederle's Channel guide — a resentful old buzzard named Jabez Wolffe — may have put poison in the bottle of beef tea he passed to her as she swam.

Ederle's second try was golden, despite the heavy wind, rain and fog that set in during her 14-and-a-half-hour swim. In the thick of the storm, when deep ocean swells made it hard for the panicked folks on the tugboat to keep Ederle in sight, they wanted her to quit. Someone shouted at her to: come on out, girl. Ederle, lost in her partial deafness and in the joy of swimming, took a while to respond. According to those aboard, she eventually looked up, smiled, and shouted back: What for? It may have only been a fleeting moment, but the way Stout tells it, it just may have been the best moment of Gertrude Ederle's life.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed "Young Woman and the Sea," by Glenn Stout. Coming up, Ken Tucker reviews Wilco's new CD. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.