Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Other editors accomplished what they could at a remove. Rogers E. M. Whitaker ended up at the Pentagon, attached to the supply service and working in the office of the chief of transportation. He managed some editing but made clear to Shawn that he was overwhelmed:

  I am still shaking down into my work, have no secretary yet (she arrives next week), am going to school six hours a week, may be sent away to school (another one, which will be my third) for six weeks, may be transferred from Specialist Corps to the Army of the United States (I have already been told to make application), have a swollen arm (four injections in it), have to salute five hundred times a day, don’t get enough sleep or enough to eat, have been too busy even to phone Hamburger and Hellman, think the Army is unnecessarily underrated by civilians in general, wish I didn’t have to live in Washington, am losing a little weight, don’t get The New Yorker (will someone put me on the mailing list?), haven’t been paid a nickel yet, don’t know when I’ll ever see New York again, would like to know Hobey’s address, and expect the war to end Sept. 17, 1945 (please file for reference).

  In an altogether dissimilar vein was the curious case of St. Clair McKelway. Like Lobrano, he faced stiff opposition from Ross when he determined to sign up. “He considered that I was a deserter because I accepted a commission in the Air Force when the Air Force asked me to take one,” he told Thurber. As if to tweak the editor, McKelway once underlined his rank of “Major” ten times in closing a letter he sent to the office and jotted, “Pvt. Ross please note.”

  The war brought out both the best and the worst in him. In 1942, after the famed Doolittle Raid on Tokyo, he published a trenchant “Comment” on how the military might have improved the promotion of this audacious, morale-boosting attack. McKelway’s piece so impressed the top brass that he soon landed a spot as a public relations officer on the staff of Curtis LeMay. Assigned to the 21st Bomber Command of the Twentieth Air Force, he attained the rank of lieutenant colonel and was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation that Arthur Kober mistook for a Purple Heart.

  Under LeMay, McKelway seemed to be in his element. He had long had a fascination with flying; back in 1919, perhaps inspired by the nonstop transatlantic journey of Alcock and Brown, he had penned a boyishly romantic ode to taking wing:

  I

  If you were a great big soldier man

  With gold braid on your coat

  How would you like to go up in a ‘plane? [sic]

  In a great big flying boat.

  II

  If you were a great big soldier man,

  With gold braid on your pocket

  How would you like to sail in a plane

  And let the big wind sock—it?

  III

  If you were a great big soldier man

  With gold braid on your cap

  How would you like to sit in a cloud?

  As you would in your mother’s lap.

  IV

  If you were a great big soldier man

  With a nice little boy like you

  Don’t you think you’d come down some nice spring day

  And let him nose dive too?

  McKelway saw duty in the China-Burma-India Theater and the Marianas and published an arresting four-part series shortly before Hiroshima about the activities of his unit, which conducted the first high-altitude precision bombing raids over Tokyo. In addition to relating the activities and the nuts and bolts of his unit, McKelway offered a vivid impression of his commander, LeMay: “He had the kind of toughness that comes from, or with, innate goodness and hard, clear honesty, especially when the possessor of such qualities has been faced, in his youth, with reality at its damnedest.” He offered a soldier’s stolid reflections on the conflict, e.g., “I do not know when again, in war or peace, any of us will have exactly the same feeling of a secret gathering of strength in a remote place for a great cause.”

  And he discussed his brothers in arms, concluding with the story of Staff Sergeant Henry Eugene Erwin of Bessemer, Alabama. During a March 1945 incendiary strike over Japan, a phosphorus bomb that he was supposed to drop on the enemy blew up in his face. Its smoke and fumes sent his B-29 into a spin. Blinded, scarred, spattered with white-hot phosphorus, Erwin somehow managed with his bare hands to toss the still-live twenty-pound monster out the window and save the plane. For this, he received the Medal of Honor.

  McKelway faced his own form of danger. At one point, based in Guam, he was forced to land in a Japanese jungle and hide out incommunicado for three weeks for fear of any radio signals being intercepted. The incident was not without humor. An air force surgeon who was with him took the unexpected opportunity to psychoanalyze his current writer’s block. At the end of the ordeal, the doctor declared, “I have the answer—it’s very simple—you are a very lazy man!”

  St. Clair McKelway was hardly lazy. His problem, rather, on top of his alcoholism, was bona fide mental illness. His symptoms did not become apparent until the war. But when they did, they exploded. By all indications, he suffered from some form of a multiple personality condition, convinced that within his brain there dwelt no fewer than “twelve separate and distinct heads.” Shawn reckoned that eleven of them “were acutely romantic, one of them was practical and sensible, nine of them were imaginative, three of them were dangerously imaginative, three or four of them were industrious, and none of them were earthbound.”

  McKelway accorded each of these fellows a name in the form of a number and tried desperately to sort out their respective traits. Six, Seven, and Eight, for instance, were “on the whole, fairly level-headed chaps.” Two and Three were a tad flighty, having once “gone off on a wild goose chase of overenthusiasm [sic] connected with the Times Literary Supplement.” At the outset of his illness, he appeared to have had only two personalities, “one of them Presbyterian and the other King Henry VIII.” But manifold visitors within his skull finally lanced him. By far “the most useless, reprehensible and all-round delinquent of the McKelway dozen” was “poor, doleful” Twelve, who “had never in his whole life had so much as a word of encouragement from the other eleven.”

  In Guam, McKelway’s internal mental battle came to a head; he began having boozy blackouts and disappearing for a week at a time. Once he accidentally sent an uncoded message that gave the route of a B-24 that was carrying seven generals, including “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell and Field Marshal Harold Alexander. Had the Japanese intercepted it, they surely would have shot the plane down. Gradually, against a backdrop of liquor, four bouts of malaria, and the hothouse atmosphere of the jungle, McKelway came unglued. At the same time, in a classic case of interservice rivalry, he was convinced that the all-powerful navy was hampering the operations of the fledgling air force and grabbing credit for its victories.

  The blow-up came in the spring of 1945 when the navy prepared to issue a press release that McKelway somehow thought would endanger future B-29 operations and maybe even goad the Japanese into bombing Iwo Jima, which was by now under American control. Invoking an obscure regulation that allowed a press censor to protest directly to the War Department under certain circumstances, he fired off to Washington an obscenity-filled dispatch that accused Admiral Chester Nimitz of high treason. “I got more and more worked up as I wrote,” McKelway recalled, “and toward the end the things I said seemed to me muddleheaded if not hysterical.” Among other rants, he charged Nimitz with the “compulsive practice of fellatio.”

  The fallout was rapid. As soon as McKelway’s superiors got wind of what he had done, they gently confined him to the medical ward. Word of the incident reached all the way to General of the Air Force Henry “Hap” Arnold, who reportedly yelled, “Kill the s.o.b.!” McKelway was neither killed nor court-martialed but rather was whisked out of Guam and shipped stateside into the arms of Walter Reed. Years later he would record the bizarre episode in a rambling, detail-choked but wholly coherent story called “The Blowing of the Top of Peter Roger Oboe.” By his account, when he subsequently met Nimitz at a coc
ktail party at the Overseas Press Club, they greeted each other cordially, the admiral perhaps not realizing who he was.

  Back in midtown, Ross faced concerns of his own. The government was clamping down on the use of paper for civilian purposes. New Yorker employees had to endure such preemptive measures as blackouts and air raids—mixed up with their usual neuroses, as Maloney told the Whites:

  As you doubtless know, we had our first genuine air-raid alarm last week. The alternate senior post warden, Post 6 and 10, Sector B, Zone 1, 17th Precinct (me) was out on the street in a twinkling, fully equipped and still sound asleep. Lee Simonson came charging out of the house next door, waving a flashlight, so I said to him, in the reasonable tone of a warden soothing a frantic citizen, “Lights out, sir.” “Don’t go Captain Stanhope on me,” he said.* Miriam and I are both wardens, but we have only one helmet between us, as yet. With the most chivalrous intentions in the world, I can never make up my mind whether to make her wear it, or wear it myself. If it’s a real raid, the helmet is useful armor, of course; but the chances are heavily against any given helmet being genuine, and in that case the wearer of the helmet just looks like a fool. Generally speaking, the wardens were pretty efficient in the emergency; it was the higher-ups that fell apart. Probably you read that the big siren in Radio City never sounded, because the man who was supposed to sound it somehow got the door to the roof stuck so he couldn’t open it.

  Far more important, the staff was hemorrhaging. Maloney referred to those who were left in the office as “little 4f’s and 4h’s at 25 West 43rd st [sic].” Daise Terry reported to Katharine White that of the fifty-nine people on one editorial floor, “a dozen or more are wandering through the halls with batches of proofs till 9, 10 and 12 o’clock at night, and on Sundays a crew of 6 or 8 is here till all hours.” To Andy, Terry confided, “I practically live in the office now. It’s a funny place; Mr. Gibbs says The New Yorker is now a bunch of giggling women and pickaninnies—the latter category being made up of two office boys, the most colorful and interesting members of the staff at the moment.”

  The lack of able bodies was so acute that the magazine was forced to hire a substitute telephone receptionist. He was 4F, supposedly because of a bad heart. Little did the staff realize the real reason he was available. “About 7 o’clock the old board was blazing with lights and the buzzers roaring and nobody responding,” said Terry. “Bashing out to see what was wrong, [we] found the boy writhing on the floor in an epileptic fit!” At one point, she simply surrendered to the realities of the war: “Things move in such mysterious and underground methods that I’ve given up trying to figure out who is who and what he does. I honestly don’t believe anyone here knows the whole setup at present; one hears on all sides the question ‘who is he (or she) and what does he do?’ ”

  There was one bright spot to this disorganization—namely, the blossoming of William Shawn. In his own quiet way, he was a formidable character, his soft yet indomitable persona earning him the nickname “The Iron Mouse.” Born “William Chon” in Chicago in 1907, he put in two years at the University of Michigan and, when not playing piano in nightclubs in both the States and in Paris, struck out as a reporter for various papers and news services, including the obscure Las Vegas (New Mexico) Optic. He was drawn to The New Yorker in the early 1930s and got his start by contributing freelance “Talk” pieces.

  Shawn’s specialty was carrying out legwork for Alva Johnston and other reporters. He earned minor sums for background research into such varied subjects as the Roosevelt family, the New York City bartenders’ union, deaf-mutes, the ushers at Radio City, the Gulf Stream, General Electric, gangsters, bridges that spanned buildings, and “freaks.” By the end of 1933, Ross had hired him for the “Talk” staff. Slowly, unobtrusively, he set about carving out a domain; by 1939 Ross was calling him “shepherd of the fact stuff.” Unlike the boisterous, roughhewn Ross, Shawn was courteous, soft-spoken, and discreet.† But to Ross, what mattered was that this small, slight man had an enormous capacity for clear thinking and all manner of editorial work. Ross was palpably relieved when it became evident that the army would not snatch him. “Shawn is now highly eligible, on paper,” he told White, “but by God I don’t think he would make a soldier.”

  Shawn was a perceptive judge of talent, especially as the staff became ever more thinly stretched. He was quick to grasp Gibbs’s value in many capacities to the magazine. “Gibbs is the perfect New Yorker personality in Ross’s mind,” he said. “Ross feels that Gibbs can do no wrong.”

  Yet even as Gibbs’s all-around utility was manifesting itself more strongly than ever, he was beset by personal challenges. His father-in-law died in May 1939. His mother passed away the following January. Uncle George, who had footed the bill for Gibbs’s education, and seen to it that his nephew was brought up in safe surroundings, followed her a few months later. Then in May 1942, Gibbs’s cousin and mentor Alice Duer Miller succumbed. Amid these family heartaches, raising Tony and Janet, and doing his theater work, Gibbs largely stopped going to the office (“too many children and fairies,” he grumbled) and functioned almost exclusively “in squalor” from home. At the same time, absent various workhorses, Ross had to lean on Gibbs to fill in on miscellaneous duties.

  So on top of writing “Comment” and the theater column, contributing stories and sketches, and editing in general, Gibbs reluctantly returned to the cartoon slush pile. And in the wake of David Lardner—who had followed Mosher as movie critic—he got stuck with reviewing films. With increasing weariness, from December 1944 to September 1945, he found himself screening such divergent fare as Son of Lassie, The Three Caballeros, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Colonel Blimp, and God Is My Co-Pilot. Occasionally he was entertained, but on the whole the experience left him disillusioned and exhausted. When he turned in his final cinematic copy, he hoped it would be “the last movie piece I’ll have to write this side of the grave.” He summed up his frustrations in a fierce essay, “The Kingdom of the Blind,” for The Saturday Review of Literature. “It is my indignant opinion,” he wrote, “that ninety percent of the moving pictures exhibited in America are so vulgar, witless, and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum.” Content and aesthetics aside, he spent a good deal of space attacking the “small but fascinating literary comedy” of film reviewing itself. He scored the racket in general, pointing up the average movie critic’s tendency to rely on flabby adjectives when afforded only a limited amount of time and equally limited space:

  The result is that he has developed a very special vocabulary in which words come to transcend their exact and customary meanings—in which, in a sense, they are detached from the language and inflated like little balloons, and presently sent spinning, lovely, iridescent, and meaningless, into the wild, blue heaven of critical prose. “Luminous” is such a word. . . . “Taut” is another . . . There are a great many of these wonderful words—“haunting,” “lyric,” “brave,” “tender,” “compassionate,” and, above all, “poignant” occur to me in passing—and they are invaluable in imparting such a comic air to a conversation that it is never quite apparent just what precisely is being discussed.

  White was so impressed by this analysis that he included an excerpt of it in The Elements of Style.

  That was to come later. For the moment, Gibbs was more concerned about keeping the pages filled. The grind of the war was wearing. “It probably doesn’t sound exhausting to write 2500 words of criticism a week; it is, though, especially when you have to look at ten or twelve of the God damn things, film and flesh,” he told the novelist Joseph Hergesheimer. “Last week I reviewed no less [sic] than four moving pictures and three plays, and the next few weeks look no easier. All this stuff (and, by the living God that made us, stuff it is) has to be written over the week-ends [sic]. I think I shall just have to be denounced by you and Mr. Mencken, with whom, however, I’ll be in spirit. I’m sorry, but I am employed by a war and
there is nothing to be done about it.”

  He broached his burden to Shawn:

  Unlike White I am capable of turning out two or at the most three pieces a week which to me seem respectable. Confronted, however, with the responsibility for an entire department, I find (A) that the pressure keeps me from doing good originals and (B) that the rewrite, naturally written in various idioms, usually ends up by sounding like an inane parody of White. The fact, I’m afraid, is that I have very little enthusiasm for messing around with other people’s work and, although I spend hell’s own amount of time on it, it comes out dead as a mackerel. . . . I want to go on record as saying that I can’t work this way permanently, spending at least fifty percent of my time doing stuff that bores me to death, or else sitting around worrying about it, so that I can’t write anything I want to.

  Quite apart from the crushing workload, Gibbs felt he was doing a poor job with “Comment” and could not live up to White’s standard. “The last time I looked at it,” Gibbs confessed, “all the items began ‘Plucking at the counterpane of the future’ and wound up ‘his broken heart comma his little bankrupt dreams.’ Readers are not going to stand much more of this kind of crap, and I myself am tired of people in restaurants whispering ‘That’s Gibbs, the pansy mystic.’ ”

  Ross was aware of Gibbs’s struggle. Even before Pearl Harbor, the editor fretted that the writer was “fidgety” about filling “Comment” and confided to Katharine that he was always relieved when her husband could submit editorial observations:

  At least three of those comments, [sic] were superb, absolutely first class White and there’s nothing better. The rest were all right certainly, and all told they were a God-send [sic]. They braced Gibbs up considerably. My diagnosis of his panics on Comment is that he gets the quakes when he thinks of the long yawning gap ahead with no help in sight and spends his time worrying instead of working. If he has help he relaxes and works. White’s sending in a big batch of comment [sic] resulted in Gibbs doing an equally large batch and putting us well ahead. . . . Gibbs is worn out and stale and needs help, and God knows is entitled to it if we can give it to him.