Genius in Disguise Page 31

  Ross was no less frustrated about Andy’s defection. With White out of the picture, the daunting task of producing Comment fell mostly to Gibbs. What seemed to come so easily to White came so hard to Gibbs that the responsibility only tweaked his propensity to drink, which only made Ross more nervous. Comment, being opinion, was the one part of The New Yorker he had never been altogether comfortable with anyway—“I never did know how to lead off the magazine,” he was often heard to mutter—but he had been entirely comfortable with White. Now White was gone. He continued to edit Newsbreaks from Maine, but apparently both Gibbs and Ross were counting on him to submit some Comment and miscellany. Evidently they had underestimated White’s need for a clean break. Not long after Andy left, an anxious Gibbs told him, “I think it’s a crime that you should be out of this book altogether, and wish to God you’d write something—verse, casuals, fables, anything at all. I thought you were going to do some more fables, and so did Ross, who often speaks about it, with his fingers in his hair. ‘He just sails around in some goddamn boat,’ he says. I think you would find this pitiful if you could hear him.”

  As discouraging as the Whites’ departure was, Ross could at least be cheered by one happy development that distinguished The New Yorker of the late Thirties. This was the explosion of reporting talent at the magazine, and the growing prominence of their journalism. These new voices belonged to young writers, most with newspaper experience but all with freer, more interpretive writing styles than was typical of the dailies. They drew on the fiction techniques of narrative, character development, shading, and irony to tell their stories—stories that just happened to be true. Their so-called literary journalism was a hybrid of a very high order.

  Ross loved news, considering it his specialty, and had come to be very choosy about his reporters. For every one he hired, he passed on ten others because he could not countenance sloppy reporting or a lazy imagination. He especially had no use for reporters who talked a good game but who fell down at the typewriter. Anyone starting to explain a good story in person to Ross as often as not was cut off with, “Get it on paper.” No sooner had he promoted St. Clair McKelway, who knew a thing or two about getting it on paper, than Ross told him, “We’ve got to have more journalism.” Thus charged, McKelway in his three years built a breathtaking roster of reporters.

  A.J. Liebling had been at The New Yorker about a year by then, but he was struggling and had yet to see a byline; it was McKelway who made a magazine writer out of him. McKelway lassoed Liebling’s good friend and colleague from the World-Telegram, Joseph Mitchell, who already had sold Ross a few freelance pieces. McKelway hired Sanderson Vanderbilt, Jack Alexander, and the acclaimed Times reporter Meyer Berger. He hired E. J. Kahn, Jr., and Brendan Gill after Katharine White had bought casuals from them and called them to McKelway’s attention. He hired a promising recruit just out of the Columbia School of Journalism, Philip Hamburger. (In typical New Yorker fashion, after Hamburger turned in some sample Talk stories to McKelway, the editor mumbled something unintelligible and dismissed the young job candidate. Hamburger assumed he had washed out until McKelway rang him up a few days later to say, “Where are you?” “What do you mean?” said Hamburger. Said McKelway, “I hired you last week.”) McKelway also recruited David Lardner, the precocious twenty-year-old son of Ross’s old crony Ring, and John Bainbridge, who a few years later was helping McKelway torpedo Winchell. (Other notable contributors to The New Yorker’s journalism of this time were freelance reporter Richard O. Boyer, who wrote dozens of incisive Profiles, and Emily Hahn, who was sending back from the Far East not only delightful short stories but also news dispatches.)

  At Ross’s New Yorker, journalists tended to arrive in distinct waves that paralleled larger developments at the magazine. The first wave comprised those reporters present at the creation, or nearly so: Janet Flanner, Morris Markey, Lois Long, Murdock Pemberton, Geoffrey Hellman, Niven Busch, Charles Cooke, Alva Johnston. The second belonged to the early Thirties, when The New Yorker was growing more prosperous and ambitious: reporters McKelway, Eugene Kinkead, William Shawn, and Margaret Case Harriman (daughter of Algonquin owner Frank Case and a specialist in show-business Profiles), and the critics Lewis Mumford (who covered art and, with Ross’s imprimatur, produced the first substantive architectural criticism in America) and Clifton Fadiman (who, while not as entertaining as Dorothy Parker—who was?—gave the magazine’s book department some sorely needed depth and its first real credibility within the publishing community). Liebling, Mitchell, et al. were the third wave. The fourth wave rolled in during World War II, when so many experienced reporters were serving in the armed forces or otherwise in government, or were working abroad for The New Yorker. Newcomers to the magazine at this time included some remarkable women who finally erased Ross’s suspicion of female reporters—Andy Logan and Lillian Ross (no relation)—as well as Berton Roueché and Richard Rovere, critic Edmund Wilson (he replaced Fadiman on books at the end of 1943), and celebrated contributors Rebecca West and John Hersey.

  However, it was the third wave, the class of the late Thirties, that probably did the most to advance the innovative, literate reportage that became a New Yorker trademark. They set the standard for all the great New Yorker reporters who followed, as well as the so-called New Journalists of the Sixties. (Some of these later lights seemed to think they were creating a new art form, but the truth is that they were still playing stickball and delivering newspapers when The New Yorker was perfecting “literary journalism.”)

  Of course these New Yorker writers didn’t exactly invent the form either. They had a godfather in New York’s own Stephen Crane, and in Europe, as Lillian Ross and others have noted before, the tradition can be traced back to Turgenev and Defoe. One also cannot discount the profound influence on Ross of the romantic war correspondents of his youth, such as Richard Harding Davis. Indeed, Ross’s great achievement with literary journalism, just as with Talk, or with Newsbreaks, or even with Profiles, was less a matter of invention than of reinvention—that is, reviving a moribund form, giving it a metropolitan slant, then polishing it to a high gloss.

  For many people, the great New Yorker reporting tradition was epitomized by a pair of Joes: A. J. (for Abbott Joseph) Liebling and Joseph Mitchell, two close friends who could not have come from more dissimilar backgrounds. Liebling, son of an immigrant Jewish furrier and his wife, was born on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, while Mitchell was the scion of an old North Carolina planter family, whose father was not pleased to see him forsake tobacco for the typewriter. But New York brought them together in their many shared passions—for newspapers, for literature, for good food expertly prepared, and for the city’s abiding parade of characters. Each man was a peerless stylist. Liebling could usually be found smack in the middle of his stories, which he told with virtuosic gusto. By contrast, Mitchell stood outside his tales, the observer who misses no remark, and spun his pieces out in immaculate, understated prose. Together, they introduced New Yorker readers to a grittier side of the city than they were accustomed to, either in their lives or in their magazine. Liebling and Mitchell inhabited the city’s wharves and fish markets, its smoky boxing halls and greasy “beefsteaks,” which were gluttonous political feeds. Their subjects were Liebling’s tummler, his pugs and pols, Jacob and Lee Shubert, the vainglorious Roy Howard; and Mitchell’s gypsies, his high-steel Indians, the denizens of McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, and Joe Gould, the enigmatic and erratic compiler of an “oral history of our time.” Liebling would come back to the office and write in self-satisfying torrents. Mitchell, on the other hand, was deliberate when he wrote, meticulously assembling his stories with infinite patience. (McKelway, in fact, said he was able to persuade Mitchell to come to The New Yorker only by promising him a salary instead of the drawing account that other reporters got. The mere idea of a draw “terrified him,” McKelway would recall, “as indeed it should have.”)

  Liebling would have done well to take a cue from
his cautious friend. He went into the hole as soon as he joined The New Yorker and never climbed out in more than twenty-five years there. This was partly attributable to his rocky start at the magazine. It took him several years to figure out how to go from glib but straightforward newspaper stories to the more complex demands of longer pieces. This deficiency, in fact, nearly derailed his first major New Yorker effort, a debunking Profile of a charismatic Harlem evangelist known as Father Divine. Always a first-rate reporter, Liebling had amassed terrific material for his exposé, but his various drafts were shapeless, hopeless blobs; he seemed to be writing less a New Yorker Profile than a “million-word book on comparative religion,” he said. Desperate, Ross called in McKelway for a consultation. The latter imposed some organization on the material and rewrote much of it, though he left large chunks just as Liebling had written them. The result was an extraordinary multipart Profile that carried the bylines of both.

  Friends and intrepid reporters, Joseph Mitchell, left, and A. J. Liebling helped establish the New Yorker tradition of “literary journalism.”

  (From the collection of Philip Hamburger)

  Despite Ross’s constant admonitions against straying too far beyond the Hudson River, in the early Thirties The New Yorker inevitably had expanded the scope of Profiles to such national and international figures as Lindbergh, Einstein, Stravinsky, and FDR. Ross had been more successful in keeping the approach to Profiles broad and relatively brief—brushstrokes still showing, as it were—which was his original intent, but this was changing too. By the middle and late Thirties, the Profiles, as well as the magazine’s reporting generally, were becoming more muscular and multifaceted. Even more significant, they were exhibiting a sharper point of view from the writer, as McKelway and Liebling demonstrated in their study of Father Divine. This is how they began the second part of the Profile, entitled “Who Is This King of Glory?”:

  George Baker, who by a process of multiple birth had become The Messenger and then Major J. Devine, was born a fourth time, and then a fifth time, almost as soon as he established himself in Sayville, Long Island, in 1919. He became Rev. J. Divine, dropping the military title and adopting a vowel which gave the name a supernatural significance. Then almost immediately afterward he became Father Divine (God). He has been God ever since. A few weeks ago his disciples in Harlem stretched a streamer of black-and-gold silk across the throne of Heaven, the headquarters of the cult, on West 115th Street, with the blaring legend:

  FATHER DIVINE IS DEAN OF THE UNIVERSE

  But that is rank hyperbole. The promotion to Dean of the Universe is simply a gratuitous expression of the enthusiasm of his followers and does not represent a formal rebirth. Neither in the early years in Sayville nor in the later years in Harlem has Father Divine ever hinted that he considers himself to be anything more than God.

  Having persevered to see Father Divine actually in print, Liebling was at last on his way to becoming a magazine writer, and his work would truly come into its own a few years later under William Shawn, McKelway’s eventual replacement as the top nonfiction editor. For Joseph Mitchell, the transition from newspaper to magazine was less traumatic. He is a great talker, spinning out thoughts and stories in long, looping sentences gilded with his Carolina accent. More to the point, he is a great listener, and whenever possible he prefers to let his characters carry along their stories in their own words. Here is Mitchell on Mazie, a no-nonsense lady with the proverbial heart of gold who spent her days and nights selling tickets at a dime picture show near the Bowery:

  On her walk, Mazie usually tries to steer clear of other well-known nocturnal Bowery characters. Among these are the Widow Woman and the Crybaby. The Crybaby is an old mission bum who sits on the curb for hours with his feet in the gutter, sobbing brokenly. Once Mazie nudged him on the shoulder and asked, “What’s the matter with you?” “I committed the unforgivable sin,” he said. Mazie asked him what the sin consisted of, and he began a theological description of it which she didn’t understand and which she interrupted after a few minutes, remarking, “Hell, Crybaby, you didn’t commit no sin. You just prob’ly got the stomach ulsters.”

  Ross, who had spent so many of his own reporting years profitably working the wrong side of the tracks, appreciated Mitchell’s fascination with New York’s underbelly, but he worried about it too. Once he told Mitchell, “You know, you write about a pretty depressing people. You’re a pretty gloomy guy.” Then he added thoughtfully, “Of course, I’m no goddamn little ray of sunshine myself.”

  Mitchell and Liebling were not the only reporters, as is sometimes assumed, transfiguring New York street life into New Yorker prose. In 1935, for instance, Meyer Berger used a Profile on the doyenne of Brooklyn’s Irish mafia, Anna Lonergan, to examine the violent world of the waterfront—a world not without its comic ironies.

  Back in the twenties, every time there was a killing in Irishtown, the newspapers would label it “dock war murder,” but Anna Lonergan says that was a lot of journalistic prittle-prattle. When Jim Gillen was killed on Jay Street in 1921, for example, his death was attributed to dock trouble, but the motive was something entirely different. Wild Bill Lovett killed Gillen for pulling a cat’s tail. “Bill always hated to see anyone hurt a animal,” Anna says.

  If Mitchell, Liebling and Berger were operating in neighborhood nooks and crannies, other reporters, most notably Flanner, were taking The New Yorker into the world’s presidential palaces and glitter domes. Flanner had quietly undergone a metamorphosis as remarkable as that of the magazine itself. Her style, in personal letters as well as Letters from Paris, was always elegantly iconoclastic, a touch rococo. At times editors had to deal with her obscurities—one of them called it simply a matter of “unknotting” her—but over the years it became clear that few reporters were her match for intellect, wit, or sheer power of observation. With the encouragement of both Ross and Mrs. White, Flanner had gradually branched out into broader pieces: some Letters from London, for instance, Profiles of such cross-cultural figures as soprano Lily Pons and couturiere Elsa Schiaparelli, and a richly detailed two-part examination of England’s Queen Mary. It had also been impossible for Flanner to ignore the political winds whipping up all about her, particularly after the bloody Paris riots of 1934. As Genêt’s Paris columns inevitably contained more politics, Ross offered no objection, which she correctly took as his sanction.

  Yet in their new boldness, the occasional misstep served as a reminder that both The New Yorker and Flanner were working uncharted territory. In early 1936, she wrote an ambitious three-part Profile of Adolf Hitler entitled simply “Führer.” Thoroughly researched and handsomely written, the piece was indicting in its way, as Flanner found the man as repugnant as his politics—in fact indistinguishable from them. Yet in her strenuous effort to remain detached, as Ross would want her to be, there was an odd bloodlessness about the Profile; her understatement had the unwanted effect of almost trivializing the horror of Hitler’s racial views and already murderous behavior. Some New Yorker patrons mistook Flanner’s reluctance to be overtly censorious of Nazism for sympathy. The author was said to have been startled upon learning that in Berlin many considered the piece positive.

  ——

  In his otherwise catholic prospectus for The New Yorker, Ross made no mention of fiction per se, only a pledge, near the end, to publish “prose and verse, short and long, humorous, satirical and miscellaneous”—what might be called the kitchen-sink clause. The editor liked fiction, supported and encouraged it, and had an intuitive sense of what was good and what wasn’t. But it didn’t touch his soul the way factual writing did, didn’t move him in the same way it obviously moved William Shawn, who as a young man thought he might write fiction for a living. This is one reason serious fiction was slow to develop in The New Yorker, probably the last major piece of the formula to fall into place. In the beginning it simply was not a Ross priority.

  This also helps answer the nagging question of why some of the ma
jor names of between-the-wars literature—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, and others—were in the magazine infrequently or not at all. There were other reasons, of course, chief among them that when The New Yorker was founded there were dozens of magazines competing for top fiction, many paying substantially more than Ross could afford. There was no logical reason for a Scott Fitzgerald to submit to an upstart when he could make so much more money at Collier’s or The Saturday Evening Post. Ross said as much himself in 1929, when he made a halfhearted pitch for more material from Fitzgerald: “You wouldn’t get rich doing it,” he wrote, “but it ought to give you satisfaction.” Likewise, Ross, a now-and-then fishing companion of Hemingway’s, years later admitted to the writer’s wife that “in the early days I never went after him because we didn’t pay anything.” By the time The New Yorker was so well-off that money wasn’t the obstacle, its preferences and idiosyncrasies were so apparent that one cannot conceive of certain writers—Faulkner, say—bending themselves to fit in.