He continued, “Gradually all the voices—in reality, one voice, the placid, rather foolish voice of America on Sunday afternoon—took up the incredible story from the Pacific. It came in slowly—disjointed, fragmentary; contradicting itself every now and then.” Gibbs discussed the preliminary gabble but gradually summoned hold of the enormity of the disaster, conveying what details he could snatch from the airwaves—“A man in a private plane over Diamond Head, just flying for fun, shot down by two planes,” “three hundred and fifty men killed by a direct hit on the barracks at Hickam Field,” and so on. For the summing up, he registered controlled disbelief:
The old nightmare of the Yellow Peril, a comic bugaboo almost as long as we can remember, is a strange thing to have come true in the early afternoon, with the radio on and the Sunday papers still only partly read. Like practically everybody else, we’ve been sure for a long time that war was bound to come, but we never thought that it would come like that.
Years before war arrived on America’s doorstep, the staff of The New Yorker, like most sentient people in the country, had known it was on the way and that the United States was destined to be part of it. But following the government line, and absent a casus belli, they did not say so explicitly. Ross, though fully aware of the danger approaching, was terribly conflicted. Never much of a crusader, he determined to steer as middle a course as he could until the United States entered the conflagration. So he sounded ever-more ominous warnings and printed unhappy dispatches from overseas while refusing to straitjacket the magazine into any particular stance.
In a three-page, single-spaced letter to White he agonized over the life-and-death prospects at hand. He was not at all sure that the country would prevail, but he knew that the United States had for all intents and purposes joined the cause:
Internationally, there is no question that there is a way of dodging the fight (your phrase) indefinitely. . . . We can cut ourselves off from the rest of the world, reorganize our economy to exist on our domestic activities alone, and live happy ever after. . . . We can sit tight for a generation or a century, until things blow over. We can’t be invaded or bombed, or harmed. . . . People are saying everything. Thurber wants war at once, and a hell of a lot of other people do. To most of these people, our entrance into the war can only mean victory. They don’t see a possibility of a German victory. Pinned down, there isn’t one in one-hundred [sic] of them who can go further with an outline of future action than a stand-off of Germany. . . . All the talk and all the thought, including mine, is beside the point, however, I think. My solemn conviction is that we are going into the war, and going in soon, for better or for worse, whatever the responsibility, whatever the chances. In fact, we seem already to be in it.
As far as the magazine’s stance was concerned, he had no doubts. “The policy of the paper to date is generally approved,” he declared. “Flanner, who spent the week-end [sic] with me, thinks our policy has been right—to my astonishment. Lobrano does and so do most others. I think even Thurber doubts if we should try to become a leader at this time. Christ there are enough leaders, from Dorothy Thompson, Winchell and the Evening Post down. It isn’t leaders of opinion the U.S. lacks now.”
Individual contributors were allowed to follow their own consciences. Finding himself “depressed and shaken” by Germany’s invasion of Poland, Thurber sat down in his room at the Algonquin and within a few hours sketched out the thin text and extraordinary drawings that constituted The Last Flower. This allegory about the fallout of “World War XII,” and the fragile potential that humanity might be able to recover from it—with both hopes for peace and the prospect of another war simultaneously emerging in the last pages—turned out to be his favorite book. It was White’s, too, and he commended his good friend’s artistry and perception:
It is a fearsome picture. Centuries seem to hang motionless, time crawls like a slug on a garden wall. There is an unspeakable hopelessness in the drag of its years. Then suddenly, turning the pages, you find motion and pace in the world again. You see the rebirth of beauty, culture, love. Groves and forests flourish again, children run and laugh, dogs come out of exile, towns and cities spring up, and the world quickens to the singing of troubadors and the antics of jugglers. There is a magnificent sweep to this rebirth. Thurber does it all in just a few pictures, using his stock characters, yet you feel his agitation. Then you turn the penultimate page and find, once again, soldiers on the march, soldiers in unending columns, harbingers of the dreary familiar death of men and painting and love, and the new shooting of young students against the wall, and the burning of the books, and all the revolting sad contemptible rigmarole which we know so well.
Clearly, White was no warmonger, but he knew that America’s hour was at hand. Drawing on the political consciousness he had begun summoning during the Depression, he set about quietly preparing the country for battle. In Harper’s he registered disgust at the slipshod logic of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s best-selling anti-interventionist jeremiad The Wave of the Future. White thought some of her observations about the character of the German people and their grievances were sound enough. But he found her notion that there was something to be said for fascism appalling. “The fascist ideal, however great the misery which released it and however impressive the self-denial and burning courage which promote it, does not hold the seed of a better order but of a worse one, and it always has a foul smell and a bad effect on the soil,” he wrote. “It stank at the time of Christ and it stinks today. . . . There is nothing new in it and nothing good in it, and today when it is developed to a political nicety and supported by a formidable military machine the best thing to do is to defeat it as promptly as possible and in all humility.”
Following the day of infamy, such arguments were moot. As usual, White rendered the attack in approachable terms:
My wife was getting a hot-water bag for somebody, and somehow she managed to lose the stopper down the toilet, beyond recall. This grotesque little incident seemed to upset her to a disproportionate degree: it was because she felt that, now that the war had begun in earnest, there was no excuse for any clumsiness in home nursing. The loss of the stopper suddenly seemed as severe a blow as the loss of a battleship. Life, which for two years had had a rather dreamlike quality, came instantly into sharp focus.
Any irresolution that Ross may have still possessed on December 6 evaporated when the bombs dropped on December 7. For a few desperate days, there was little he could do editorially. “The Japs got me this week,” he wrote to Gibbs. The cover of the December 13 issue, a peaceful early wintertime barnyard scene by Ilonka Karasz, remained in place. Ross did tear up small chunks of “Comment” and “Talk,” giving the lead spot illustration over to an amalgam of shells, submarines, parachutists, gunners, tanks, and planes; the spot drawing on the next page was of two sailors sharing a smoke.
Apart from Gibbs’s ruminations about the sneak attack amid a football game, though, the only written evidence in the front of the book that the United States was now mobilized was a “Talk” piece by Russell Maloney and Philip Hamburger. Describing a visit to the Japanese consulate at Radio City “the day before the bombers flew over Honolulu,” it captured the calm yet surreal scramble for visas on the eve of battle that spilled over into the Japan Institute across the hall:
We had a conversation, somewhat irritable on both sides, with a Mr. Shimanouchi, the assistant director of the Institute. He said there wasn’t going to be any war, that the only reason the Institute was folding up was lack of funds, caused by the recent freezing of Japanese credits here. “The war bloc in Japan is just a small, influential group, like your America First people,” Shimanouchi told us soothingly. “Japan is friendly, and desires peace in Asia.” We mumbled something about the bombings in China, but he had a ready answer. “Chinamen are always dying anyway, in floods or epidemics,” he told us. We hissed at Shimanouchi, without bowing, and broke off relations with him.
It was all quite preliminary.
The next week, the December 20 issue was filled with reaction and outrage. “We’re sure that a lot of very unpleasant things still lie ahead of us,” Gibbs wrote in one of several paragraphs of “Comment,” “but we doubt if anything can be much more unpleasant than the uncertainty, frustration, and bitterness that lay between Munich and Manila. On the whole, we’d say we feel much better now.” There were “Talk” stories about blackout preparations, air raids, and similar domestic precautions. “Soldier,” a poem by Harry Brown, drew on the Trojan War as an allegory (“It is not known what happened to his body./Dogs got it, perhaps, though it is to be presumed/That his wife and children, granting, of course, he had any,/Became slaves in, say, Argos. And Troy, of course, went down”). McKelway turned in a densely detailed “Reporter at Large” feature about fourteen compatriots who were inspired to enlist in the navy simultaneously.
There were also relevant cartoons. Charles Addams drew a pack of wolves chasing a German staff car. Carl Rose depicted a stout businessman asking a Japanese American from behind a chain-link internment screen, “Tell, me, Togo, where did you put the Napoleon brandy?” And Irvin turned in a grotesque, full-page image of two Nipponese dignitaries—complete with buck teeth, top hats, and swastika-swathed kimonos, backed by bombers and parachutists—announcing, “If you want to know who we are/We are the gentlemen of Japan.”
Within a couple of weeks Gibbs made his own personal statement in a short story called “Some of the Nicest Guys You Ever Saw.” Most of it was given over to a desultory barroom reminiscence of his days as a cadet in the Student Army Training Corps at the Hill School. It wrapped up with a haunting vision:
The clear sky pricked with a million stars reminded him of the Germans. It was just the night for them. He looked up at the thin, silver spire of the Chrysler Building towering on his left, a block or so ahead. That would probably be the way the bastards would come, if they did—over from Long Island, flying high and fast, in strict and orderly formation.
The New Yorker had gone to war. And before long, that war would alter the fundamental character of the magazine—transforming it from a “gagmag” into a journalistic enterprise of unparalleled depth and dimension.
In many ways World War II was the perfect subject for The New Yorker, offering as it did the opportunity to cover readily identifiable, robust subjects in articles larded with the sort of tangible facts that Ross loved. And the sheer enormity of the conflict afforded the magazine an international scope that it could scarcely have imagined upon its founding. Staff members and freelancers like Walter Bernstein, E. J. Kahn, Jr., Joel Sayre, Daniel Lang, and Robert Lewis Taylor reported from far afield. The domestic front was rife with material, too. The draft, military training, gas shortages, ration booklets, gold-star mothers, military bureaucracy, shipbuilding, factory quotas, and other stateside issues were all grist for the pages.
The correspondent who set the tone for much of the coverage was A. J. Liebling. A Francophile, he wangled an assignment to the Continent in October 1939. He did so, as he put it, “by telling McKelway how well I could talk French. McKelway could not judge.” For more than six months, he grappled to cover the boredom and strangeness of the sitzkrieg. But when the Germans smashed into France, he got caught up in the fate of Paris and fired off pieces filled with Rossian worm’s-eye detail:
By now there were perceptible changes in the daily life of Paris. There was no telephone service in the hotels, so you had to make a special trip afoot every time you wanted to tell somebody something. Taxis were harder than ever to find. My hotel, which was typical, had six floors. At the beginning of the war in September the proprietor had closed the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors. Now I was the only guest on the second floor, and there were perhaps a half dozen on the first. The staff, naturally, dwindled like the clientele. Every day somebody said goodbye to me. One by one the waiters left, and then it was the headwaiter, who had been kept on after all of his subordinates had been dismissed.
When Paris fell, Liebling groped his way back to the States. But he would soon enough return to the front, spending months in Tunisia and memorably setting foot on Omaha Beach on D-Day sixty-five minutes after H-hour. His account of a German shell fragment that hit both personnel and rations in a landing craft, turning its deck sticky with a sickening coagulation of blood and condensed milk, remains one of the best-remembered images of New Yorker war reporting. On battlefields and in tents, Liebling set down the same blunt prose that he had displayed with such fleshy domestic characters as Father Divine and the con man Hymie Katz.
“Liebling treated war as if it had been Times Square with bullets,” wrote his biographer, Raymond Sokolov. His gusto extended to the off-hours; whenever he could, the gourmandizing correspondent indulged in all amenities available to him. Before leaving New York for Normandy, he took the precaution of shipping a pound of caviar to himself. “Then on Xmas Eve,” he boasted, “I ‘shared’ it with some friends—8 oz. for me and the rest for them.” He also reported, “At the price of a few tears you can sleep with any woman in England.”
Another major war contributor was Gibbs’s friend John Lardner. Although he wrote about the war for Newsweek, his most memorable pieces were done for The New Yorker. He filed memorable dispatches about the action in North Africa and Italy, ultimately ending up in the Pacific for the invasion of Okinawa. “John was naturally brave,” wrote Liebling. “When he saw blinding bomb flashes at night, he used to walk toward them to see better.”
In Lardner’s case, the war struck home more personally than it did with any other contributor. His brother, James, had already been killed fighting for the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Then in 1944 his brother David insisted on becoming a correspondent. While still in his early twenties, David was doing a yeoman’s job at The New Yorker, writing “Talk” pieces, film reviews, the “Notes on Sports” department, and even Lois Long’s old “Tables for Two” column. But he wanted to go to the front. Reluctantly, Ross acceded. David Lardner filed one dispatch while attached to the First Army—a “Letter From Luxembourg” that ran in the October 21 issue. Even before it appeared, however, Liebling telegraphed grim news to Shawn:
URGENT GET THIS TO BILL EVEN IF HE NOT IN OFFICE STOP DAVE LARDNER WAS KILLED THURSDAY NIGHT OCTOBER NINETEENTH STOP DAVE AND ANOTHER CORRESPONDENT WERE COMING OUT OF AACHEN IN JEEP STOP THEY GOT INTO MINEFIELD AND SET OFF THREE MINES STOP JEEP DRIVER WAS KILLED IMMEDIATELY STOP DAVE HAD MANY WOUNDS AND DIED THREE OR FOUR HOURS LATER STOP PRINCIPAL WOUND WAS HEAD INJURY RECEIVED WHEN HE HIT GROUND AFTER BLOWN FROM JEEP STOP.
Liebling signed off SORRY SORRY SORRY
Gibbs had the sad task of writing the brief obituary. He saluted the young Lardner as “a remarkably able and perceptive writer, and he was still very young—twenty-five—with almost everything left to be written. We liked and admired him as much as any man we have known, and we have never printed a paragraph with deeper sorrow than we print this one.” Thurber, as always persnickety about The New Yorker’s tendency to be “more bloodless than sophisticated,” was responsible for that final wording. “I insisted that ‘regret’ be changed to ‘sorrow,’ ” he wrote Lobrano, “telling Ross for God’s sake not to let the magazine deteriorate into that vein.” A dozen years after Lardner’s death, he was still crowing about the change.
David Lardner may have been the only literal New Yorker casualty of the war. But losses of another sort arrived in the form of a manpower drain. At one point, more than thirty writers or artists were out of the office, and not all were reporting from the front. Many were simply in uniform. Their absence distressed Ross no end. “I don’t know what will become of us,” he told White. His concerns were not exaggerated. “The office is quite literally putting up a struggle for existence these days,” Maloney said.
It did not help that John Mosher passed away suddenly on September 3, 1942, at the age of fifty. His death followed a tumultuous year during which his companion, Philip Claflin, enlisted in the army, his dog died
of poisoning, and his heart began giving out. “I always had the feeling that the first serious thing that happened would knock him over,” said a rueful Ross. Admire Mosher though he did, the resolutely heterosexual Gibbs had not particularly liked him, especially when the two shared an office and Mosher was having romantic trouble. (“I don’t remember ever being more uncomfortable with anybody in my life.”) But when he composed Mosher’s obituary, Gibbs extolled the man as “witty, perceptive, and informed by a deep and tolerant knowledge of the world.” It was not just public praise. Privately, Gibbs confided, “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was the greatest wit I ever knew.”
Ross, whose commitment to The New Yorker was total, could forgive death more readily than what he regarded as misguided notions of patriotism. Gus Lobrano put in for a navy commission pretty much over his boss’s dead body. After lauding his fiction editor to the director of naval officer procurement as “sober, tactful, thoughtful, kind, patient,” Ross added, “It is a wry pleasure that I take pleasure in commending him to you because he is what is called an important key man on this magazine, and I deplore the fact that the government is not, for the present, exempting from military service such important, older men, with wives and children to support.” Lobrano didn’t get his commission, so he spent weekends working as a stevedore for the Lehigh Valley Railroad, getting up at five a.m. to get to the North River docks along the southern Hudson. He made a good enough impression that he was able to lunch with the Lehigh’s president; on that occasion, he complained about the conditions in the lavatory. “I’ll bet you’re the only man who uses it,” the official responded.
Cast of Characters Page 28
