Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Strangely, even after almost twenty years of speaking for the magazine on and off, White continued to wonder about his ability to do so. He was proud of his “Comment” contributions, as signaled by his desire in the mid-1930s to sign his name to them. Still, he was not entirely sure that he had mastered the form in particular or his voice in general. “Don’t be discouraged if you never learn anything about the English language,” he once told Alice Burchfield. “She is a very fickle mistress. I have made love to her for ten years with scarce a smile for my pains.”

  Ross had no such doubts. He was determined to get White back into the book and was frustrated when he couldn’t. “He has gone to Maine and writes about ewes,” Ross told Benchley. “If I ever read about another ewe I am going to cut my throat and leave my body to the Office of Production Management to be made into soap.” It was true enough; White was focused on his farm and Harper’s. Some of his entries for the monthly publication were strained (“Morning comes and bed is a vise from which it is almost impossible to get free”) and even inaccurate (“Hitler and I are about the same age”).

  But in general White was becoming more broad-minded and worldly—quite a change from the time when writing about “the small things of the day” contented him. A good example is one of his last “One Man’s Meat” pieces, wherein he took up the subject of capitalism and profits and the nature of homo sapiens in relation to both. He began his essay with an account of a hook that had been put through his cow’s nose. From there, he transitioned easily into a reflection on the controlling, dehumanizing effect of money:

  The true shape of man is an elusive thing. One thing I am sure of—he is a natural-born gambler whose normal instincts in this regard have long been frustrated. He has commonly been interested less in security than in gain, less in safety than in risk, and he has always been a fool for anything that gave him a chance at the jackpot . . . Low wages infuriate him, but all wages bore him. The trouble with the profit system, as far as this man was concerned, was that he seemed to bear no relation to the result. It could prosper without his prospering too. He felt lonely and out of things. It could fail and he still felt lonely and in need of another job.

  Shawn seized on these words. “I found it distinctly painful to read White’s piece,” he told Ross. “If ever anything belonged in The New Yorker, that did. It’s White in one of his best veins, I think, and on a theme that is exactly right for us. In a wartime Comment department, we need something like that occasionally, something of importance—solid but not heavy. I wish that you, or we, could prevail upon White to do more along these lines for us.”

  As it turned out, Ross didn’t have to. White had done well enough with his Harper’s stint, and his collected columns won the Limited Editions Club’s Gold Medal, presented every three years to the author of a book likely to achieve “classic” status. So powerful was the reach of this anthology that when a Japanese sniper broke into the office of a public relations officer in the Marianas, the intruder stole a copy of it. “Although some one might accuse you of giving aid and comfort to the enemy,” Roger Angell confided in his stepfather, “at least it is an enemy with pretty good literary tastes.”

  But while “One Man’s Meat” had given him space and a byline, White realized he was bound by inclination and expression to The New Yorker. “Running a column in your paper has been a lot of fun, not to say a privilege, and I’d like nothing better than to feel that I was able to go right on doing,” he told Harper’s editor Frederick Lewis Allen in March 1943. “But I don’t, and I know that nothing can change that.”

  And so, with as much wiggle room as he could negotiate, White agreed to resume writing “Comment” on a more or less regular basis in early 1943. Ross could not have been happier, given that he could not afford Gibbs’s self-proclaimed inability to weigh forth weekly on an entire world locked in mortal combat. He offered White considerable freedom and emoluments:

  Well, I am, of course, greatly pleased. The [Harper’s] column was always a sour dish to me because of the circumstances, the principal circumstances being that I thought it deprived us of your Comment and casual writings, and that was always hard to take. You’ll have to admit, however, that although I was dutifully persistent, I was tactful. What I’d like tactfully to do now is divert that wordage here but I haven’t got any arguments other than the old ones, and I won’t go into them, except to say that I think the opportunity for you to do something with the Comment department is golden and that I wish for all concerned, including the people of the United States, that you would size [sic] it. Or I’ll say that I hope you do. . . . We’re willing to make any kind of deal you want on Comment, as well as on anything else, as you so well know from wheedlings [sic] in the past. If a regular income is a factor (I will treat of [sic] this subject very carefully) that can easily be arranged, too, possibly with a bonus to pay your taxes with at the end of the year. Or any such. . . . Of course, we can fix up a weekly income proposition without any specific oblications [sic] on your part, any that might be a burden.

  Ross’s blandishments notwithstanding, White found it difficult to return to The New Yorker. He and Katharine had made a life for themselves in Maine, ewes and all. Resettling in busy Manhattan would be an adjustment. There were other issues: in Katharine’s absence, Gus Lobrano had established himself as master of the fiction department. He had not only inherited from his predecessor a stable of contributors “whom Katharine was not quite comfortable handling” but had recruited many others. Now he was faced with the return of his self-assured mentor to the office. Lobrano may not have been caught entirely by surprise. Katharine’s observations to him about office procedure and editing amid the flurry of her departure for Maine were as clear as her hope that she could somehow continue to have a hand in executing them:

  Now, of course, promptness in handling [manuscripts] involves much more than sending out the check. It involves getting the piece read and getting Mr. Ross to read it and okay it. Then it involves getting the piece edited. We used to keep in our minds the pieces that we had written opinions on and sent to Mr. Ross and if he seemed to delay in replying on them we followed him up through Mr. Winney or Mr. Shuman. More often than not a piece that is delayed in his reply you will find in your discussion folder. I used to wander in to Mr. Winney’s desk and look through my discuss folder almost every day. If there was stuff in it that it would be advisable to have an answer on before the regular weekly Mr. Ross-discuss-period I would ask for a special session if he were in town. This doesn’t often happen but once in awhile [sic] it is advisable. As soon as Mr. Ross says to buy a piece, unless it can be paid for by a flat payment, Mr. Gibbs and I used to put the editing of that piece as a first call, the only thing taking precedence over it being red tag timely stuff to read for opinion. Occasionally we would get stalled in editing a piece and keep postponing it. That will happen to anybody. You try editing a piece and it just doesn’t work. If that were the case we would sometimes admit defeat and ask the other person to try editing it. Perhaps you too will find me useful, and each other useful, on such occasions.

  There was no doubt that Katharine was useful, or that both she and her husband loved Lobrano. He was their “dear friend,” Katharine said, and indeed “Andy’s oldest and closest, almost.” The feeling was mutual. “Everybody thought she was wonderful,” said Lobrano’s daughter, Dorothy. “But everybody had their problems with her. She was very regal.” With her return, things were never quite the same among the three old comrades. Katharine did not insist on completely recapturing her domain, yet she would not be ignored. To her credit, she sensed the tension inherent in her reappearance. She acknowledged it was “a difficult, sticky situation calling for tact on both our parts. I had trained Lobrano to be an editor, and now he was my boss.” Compounding the matter, Lobrano suffered from what Thurber called a “unique cycle of apprehension.” Still, despite occasional disagreements over manuscripts, they had “many, many happy times together during that period
.”

  As for White, he was soon busy batting out weekly “Comment” again with his customary aplomb. Almost immediately he would be making some of the most far-reaching political observations of his life. In the meantime, he allowed himself an ample measure of his old fun. Shortly after D-Day, he applauded the adjutant general’s order to keep “books which are full of political implications” out of the hands of servicemen. This list of banned works included One Man’s Meat. Reveling in being placed on a sort of literary enemies’ list, White cheekily fessed up that at least three of this subversive volume’s entries “were deliberately calculated to influence the soldier vote.”

  One of the essays was about the catarrhal trouble of Daniel Webster, a notorious Whig; another was about the opening of the World’s Fair, a bald excursion into internationalism; and the third was a thinly veiled fiction piece about a boy and a sick sheep, a story so drenched with political implications that it gives us the Republican twitches just to think of it.

  * A reference to a central character in R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End, originally played in 1928 by Laurence Olivier.

  † After Shawn died, his image would be tarnished by revelations—not exactly unknown to many associates—that he had long had an extramarital affair and raised a child with The New Yorker reporter Lillian Ross, who was no relation to Harold Ross.

  CHAPTER 12

  “THE MORAL CLIMATE IS AGAINST IT”

  In 1946 Simon and Schuster published a book called While You Were Gone: A Report on Wartime Life in the United States, a collection of essays meant to appeal both to those on the home front, as a sort of taking of domestic stock, and to returning veterans, as a primer on what they had missed. The contributors included Allan Nevins, Margaret Mead, Norman Corwin, Carey McWilliams, Lewis Gannett, Thurber, and Gibbs. Gibbs’s entry, titled simply, “The Theatre,” offered many examples of plays both good and bad from the previous four years, as well as some critical thoughts about drama in general. He concluded with what was for him an uncharacteristically humane observation—that the Broadway he had been so glibly covering would never be the same, with much of its future content to be informed by an unprecedented holocaust of man’s own making:

  The young men who have known the dull, dirty, murderous business of war at first hand are still to be heard from. Many of them are still in Europe or the Pacific, and it is still too soon to expect very much from those who have come back. The atom bomb, too, is bound to call for certain readjustments in any serious playwright’s thought. The appalling explosions that mushroomed over Hiroshima and Nagasaki shook the foundations of every idea in the world, and men need a little while to look around and think.

  Gibbs knew what those “appalling explosions” meant. So did Ross. When, in The New Yorker of August 31, 1946, he put forth the 31,347 words that would later be issued in book form as Hiroshima, he took the magazine in an irrevocable new direction. This journalistic landmark by John Hersey was, The New Yorker suggested upon his death in 1993, “the most famous magazine article ever published.” For Ross, it was certainly the most significant. “I don’t think I’ve ever got as much satisfaction out of anything else in my life,” he told Irwin Shaw.

  Hersey was an expatriate of the Luce domain. His uncanny biographical overlap with Gibbs’s “baby tycoon”—birth in China, education at Yale, membership in Skull and Bones, postgraduate work in England—had been fortuitous. But Hersey broke with Time-Life when he realized he could no longer abide his boss’s ever mounting slanting of the news. He found a more conducive atmosphere with Ross, for whom he filed a number of fine war stories, including “Survival,” which pretty much enshrined John F. Kennedy as the hero of PT-109. His Pulitzer Prize for his novel A Bell for Adano was another coup. Now he found himself grappling with the human toll of the atomic bomb.

  The idea for the piece was Shawn’s. After all the newspaper ink that had been spilled about the twin atomic attacks, Ross’s right-hand man was not especially concerned with the scientific principles or the military thinking that lay behind the bombs. With an editor’s instinct, Shawn sought a close-up angle on the actual effects of their unique horror. The story came together in improvisation and haste. Hersey arrived in Japan in late May 1946 and spent a mere three weeks collecting material from both official and unofficial subjects. Soon enough he produced some 150 pages that floored Ross, despite some 200 queries on his part. The New Yorker’s founder grasped the power of Hersey’s understated, close-up reporting and its focus on six survivors. It was, Ross told Rebecca West just as Hersey’s work was about to hit the stands, “one of the most remarkable stories I have ever seen.” Moreover,

  It wasn’t a series of pieces, as our series go, and it couldn’t be, by its nature, and we finally decided that it wouldn’t work as a serial, so we decided to use it all at one time, although it would take most of an issue. After a couple of days more of reflection, we got into an evangelical mood and decided to throw out all the other text in the issue, and make a gesture that might impress people. . . . [N]ext week’s issue will be a very peculiar one. I don’t know what people will think but a lot of readers are going to be startled.

  Originally scheduled for the first anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing, Hersey’s work ran a few weeks later. The timing didn’t matter; the piece was pivotal and, by most accounts, changed the orientation of the magazine. Never before had The New Yorker engaged in such a radical departure from its familiar format; virtually the entire number was given over to Hersey’s account, the better to heighten its impact. No cartoons graced the sixty-eight pages, lest they detract from the tenor of the story. As unhappy as much of the magazine’s war reporting had been, it had generally included dabs of irony and dark humor.

  But this was different. “I’ve just read that long Hiroshima article from beginning to end,” one woman told Helen Hokinson, “and I just wish you’d tell me what was funny about it!” She would have done well to have read the editor’s preface: “The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city.* It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.”

  Apart from showmanship, Ross had a handle on his readership. A veteran himself, he realized that the millions of servicemen who had come back were forever changed. Many were now New Yorker readers, having gotten hooked on an undersized, slimmed-down “pony” edition of the magazine distributed to them overseas. Above all, he grasped that a new world was dawning for humankind and his brainchild alike.

  Like Ross and Gibbs, White recognized what was going on. In a bitter poem called “Alamogordo,” he despaired of manmade fission and envisioned the site of the first atomic blast as a national tourist trap:

  Build the museum, O builders! Have it ready for me when I come.

  Then, when the radioactivity has been dissipated and the rays no longer threaten my white corpuscles,

  Letter the proper sign and let me in. And don’t forget

  To give the date. I like dates.

  July 16, 1945.

  Give the hour, the minute, the very second of the blast.

  Exactly five-thirty A.M. “Beginning of the atomic age.”

  Alamogordo, Alamogordo—my last pilgrimage. Earliest bomb crater in the atomic world. Most famous deathsite [sic].

  Note, ladies and gentlemen, how the effect radiates in all directions,

  With color and shading gradually growing darker like the petals of a flower.

  Those who are hungry will find an appetizing, moderately priced

  Meal in the Nuclear Snack Bar, just outside the gate, and

  Clean rest rooms.

  Take home a souvenir of atomsite [sic] for the children.

  For much of the first half of the 1940s, White had been concerned with war. Now he d
etermined to occupy himself with peace. This he did by pressing the cause of world government. At the time, the notion that nations might cede their own prerogatives and spheres of influence, and form a sort of global congress, was not preposterous. After all, it was inevitable that other countries would get the Bomb and bring about the specter of utter destruction. Anyway, if democracies could join Communists to defeat fascists, then anything was possible.

  It was a romantic, even messianic mission that had begun as long before as 1940 when White declared, “I have given up planning a perfect state for America, as it is too small a field. Henceforth I shall design only world societies, which will include everybody and everything.” Now White stumped regularly for globalization in “Comment.” By one estimate, nearly a third of his contributions to that section, starting in the issue of April 10, 1943, and extending into 1947, contained at least one paragraph about his vision. “Science is universal, music is universal, sex is universal, chow is universal, and by God government better be, too,” he wrote Ross in 1944. His exhortations accelerated when, in April 1945, he covered the San Francisco Conference, which yielded the United Nations. In two “Reporter at Large” dispatches, he could barely contain his enthusiasm at the prospect of supranational cooperation:

  I just went on down the hall to the big press room, where forty or fifty men and women, of several shades of color and many shades of opinion, were belaboring the keys. The room had the wonderful sound that orchestras make just before they swing into action. I sat down and began tuning an Underwood and studying the notes of the New World Symphony. Next to me sat a girl reporter from, I think, one of the local papers. She was relaxed in front of a still typewriter and was deep in a magazine. I glanced cautiously at the title. It was called Fantastic Adventures.