Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Besides Sleep, My Love, McKelway also managed a credit on The Mating of Millie with Glenn Ford and Evelyn Keyes. But by this time he realized he was kidding himself. Though his salary was “reasonably fabulous,” he found that after taxes and expenses, it was buying him no more than about three hundred dollars a week had bought him in Manhattan before the war. “I am in my usual shape,” he told Katharine White, “just ahead of the waiter with the check.”

  So McKelway retreated to The New Yorker, convinced he was in the grip of a professional downturn. “Melville once said that there is a Cape Horn in every man’s life,” he wrote Ross. “White says he’s been rounding it now for about six years and that a heavy fog seems to be coming up ahead. It’s the sixth or seventh time around for me, of course.” Working for the first time on salary, without “the illusory comforts of unsound salary advances,” he had a brief but unhappy stint as a fiction editor, filling in for Lobrano, who had just suffered a heart attack. He also flirted with becoming a foreign correspondent. He spent most of his working hours “scheming not writing,” prompting his physician to characterize him as an “ambitious beach-comber and unsuccessful businessman.”

  Finally he found his strength, as he had years before, with the “Annals of Crime” section, drolly relating the rascally malefactions of colorful felons in prose laced with offbeat revelations and a straightforward arrangement of facts. In “Mister 880,” he examined the peculiar case of the counterfeiter Edward John Wellman:

  He was a personable middle-aged man, an Estonian by birth, an unlucky horse player, and an accomplished ice skater. When he began to glide and pirouette, other skaters would slow up, or stop altogether, to watch him. He was known at all the ice-skating places in and around New York. He picked up pocket money at some of them from time to time as a skating instructor. He was jolly with the children and had a courtly manner with the ladies. Descriptions and photographs of him were sent by the Secret Service to all race tracks and all skating rinks, and a little over three months after he skipped bail he was arrested at Tropical Park race track, in Florida. He had been passing pewter fifty-cent pieces all over Miami and vicinity and betting on the races with his profits. In his car, the Secret Service found seven hundred and eighty-nine phony half dollars, thirty-five pounds of pewter, a bottle of silver chloride, a can of sodium cyanide of potassium, some silver that he used for plating the coins, and the other paraphernalia he required to turn out finished fifty-cent pieces. He could make them without even getting out of his car, a 1941 Buick.

  With pieces like this, McKelway stayed firmly within The New Yorker’s orbit.

  John O’Hara, on the other hand, did not. Almost from the beginning, his relationship with the magazine had been by turns sycophantic, boastful, humble, and maddening. In 1934—the same year Woollcott announced his ostensible resignation—the prickly O’Hara had lit into Ross for failing to sufficiently appreciate his first and best novel, Appointment in Samarra. “I felt that The New Yorker, that great impersonal organization The New Yorker, might have taken the book a little less in stride,” he groused. “As Woollcott would say, you-all flew into a great state of calm, when I thought that since I am practically exclusively a New Yorker product, you might have taken cognizance of the book in somewhat more concrete fashion.”

  It would be as unfair to characterize O’Hara as entirely self-centered as it would be to say the same about Woollcott. Many, including Katharine White and O’Hara’s stepson C.D.B. “Courty” Bryan, would attest to his essential humanity; the latter characterized him as “an intensely shy, warm, gentle man” (emphasis in the original). When it came to his reputation and reception, however, O’Hara was uncompromising. Hence he erupted when Brendan Gill slammed his 1949 potboiler A Rage to Live as tantamount to “a catastrophe.” Much has been written about the fracas—that Thurber supposedly claimed Gibbs had written the review, that the clue was the use of the adjective “discursive,” that Gill was out to shaft O’Hara, and so on. The upshot was that O’Hara broke off relations with Ross, infuriated by what he regarded as a betrayal. Ross, O’Hara fumed, “had called me the master. Then this clown comes along and flays me as a bumbling incompetent. You can’t be both. There are various degrees of treachery, and I consider The New Yorker’s printing such a scurrilous review to be treachery of the lowest kind.”

  Gibbs did what he could to patch things up, writing to Lobrano:

  I went down to Princeton last weekend and had lunch with O’Hara. He would really like very much to write for us again, because there is really no other place for his short stories, but his conditions, of course, are grotesque. He wants an apology, from somebody in authority, for Gill’s review of his book, and he wants what you might call a punitive punishment payment for the pieces he might have written if we hadn’t annoyed him so. I asked him how much he thought this would amount to, and he said that, well, in a good year he had made as much as $10,000 from us and so, since he had lost five years, he felt that morally we owed him $50,000. He has a feeling that this may be a little excessive, but that it is a figure at which negotiations might start. . . . In any case, I felt that he wanted this intelligence passed along to you, and I do so. You might offer to pay him ten dollars and shoot Gill. Your problem, of course.

  A break, at least for a while, might have been inevitable. For some time, O’Hara had wanted more money than The New Yorker could pay him. And with A Rage to Live, it was clear that he would be focusing not on stories but on novels, notably Ten North Frederick and From the Terrace. O’Hara also needed the sort of self-expression that The New Yorker could not always accommodate. Less than a year after Rage was published, he issued in The New York Times Book Review a fulsome endorsement of Hemingway’s Over the River and Into the Trees, in which he called Papa “the most important author living today, the outstanding author since the death of Shakespeare.” Arthur Kober was astonished. “All the people I spoke to thought the guy had gone off his rocker,” he told Gus Lobrano. “Me, too. His style, a combination of kiddie-stuff and hard-guy writing, makes me think that his pubic hairs have gone to his chest.”

  Even Gibbs, close to O’Hara though he was, rolled his eyes at his old friend’s steadily mounting self-indulgence, never more so than following one of his “Appointment with O’Hara” columns in Collier’s. O’Hara had written,

  I have lived an extremely full life, experiencing exquisite pleasure and all but unbearable sorrow and pain; loving some, hating a few, pitying many and scorning the contemptible; joyful of my accomplishments and stung by my failures. Throughout it all I have been pleased by the circumstance that has enabled me to earn my living at the job I love best, which is writing. I am a simple, worldly-wise man and practically nothing except stupid cruelty can shock me, and I never have written a word for the purpose of shocking anyone else. But I have often been disgusted by people who take pleasure in scatological humor, in the telling and the listening, and yet are genuinely or otherwise offended by any and all reference to the function called sex.

  Those sentences “made me jump,” Gibbs told Thurber. “He sounds like Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It must be wonderful to think of yourself so majestically and even more wonderful to have no misgivings about putting it all down for a national magazine.”

  If O’Hara’s growing preoccupation with sexual frankness and his own ego were keeping him out of The New Yorker, the flights of fancy now being taken by Thurber and White were another matter. Thurber was putting down longish, downright experimental works, some of them almost phantasmagorical. One of these was The White Deer. This fifteen-thousand-word children’s book, he told friends, was “a new version of the old fairy tale of the deer which, chased by a king and his three songs, is transformed into a princess.” It was considerably more than that: in conveying the narrative, Thurber demonstrated his linguistic virtuosity with alliteration, inside references (he deployed Ross’s catchphrase “Done and done”), and weird words, e.g., whinkering. With such facility, he was with increasing
frequency turning verbal cartwheels.

  He admitted as much in his foreword to The 13 Clocks. Calling this inventive contrivance an example of “escapism and self-indulgence,” he explained, “Unless Modern Man wanders down these byways occasionally, I do not see how he can hope to preserve his sanity.” In many ways, it was perhaps Thurber’s most self-consciously literary effort to date. Much of it was purely whimsical: to win the hand of the Princess Saralinda, a prince must secure for her uncle—an evil duke—a thousand precious jewels. He attempts to do so through a woman who weeps not tears but gems. However, she can produce them only via laughter, as opposed to sorrow. In the course of this adventure, the duke cruelly murders time itself by stopping his castle’s thirteen clocks. The 13 Clocks was a literary tour de force, replete with limericks, Jamesian allusions, unconventional narrative constructions, and even code words that the author had retained from his army-clerk days, among them Golux, Todal, and Hagga.

  White was not entirely enthused. He praised The 13 Clocks as “a wondrous tale and very musical and melancholy.” Still, he suggested it was too complicated—“so concentrated a diet, with new characters and events and twists appearing in almost every sentence.” He was also baffled by Thurber’s offbeat paragraphing and found his foreword “defensive—as though you were prematurely sore because the wrong people were reading your book or the right people weren’t.” White tweaked his old friend: “I think you are just sticking out your zatch, and many a tosspan and stutfart will run you through.” Taking the criticisms in stride, Thurber revised.

  When it came time for White to compose his own children’s confections Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web, he adhered to conventional storybook narrative. Still, he broached quite grown-up themes in his plain prose. Fern’s tenderhearted concern for Wilbur, Charlotte’s selfless rescue of the runt of the litter, and her own aging and death—offset by the legacy of her many progeny—are wholly moving. As for Stuart’s never-ending journey at his eponymous book’s end, White over the course of myriad letters always resisted letting readers know what was ahead.

  He was already a household name among adults. Now he was a familiar figure to children as well. Indeed, in the case of Stuart Little, youngsters warmed to the work more than some grown-ups did. Edmund Wilson enjoyed the first page but told White he was “disappointed that you didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka.” Anne Carroll Moore, the former children’s librarian of the New York Public Library, thought the book “non-affirmative, inconclusive, unfit for children, and would harm its author if published.”

  No such controversy attended the publication of Charlotte’s Web. Read aloud by countless teachers in countless classrooms, consumed by youngsters themselves, it would become one of the top-selling children’s paperbacks of all time. Curiously, it took a while to take hold. “So far,” White told his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, not long after its initial printing, “Charlotte’s Web seems to have been read largely by adults with a literary turn of mind. I have had only a sprinkling of childhood reaction to the book—those vital and difficult precincts—and will not know for a little while how it sits with the young.” Soon enough he would, with volumes of juvenile fan mail to prove it.

  In some respects, Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web may have represented the best expression of White’s tentative, not always successful, ventures into fabulism. One of his most unusual Harper’s contributions had been a dreamlike elegy to New York City. In it, a Manhattan expatriate named Volente returns to town and checks into a mysterious building called “The Hotel of the Total Stranger.” On his way there and once settled, he fantasizes:

  New York lay stretched in midsummer languor under her trees in the thinnest dress, idly and beautifully to the eyes of Mr. Volente her lover. She lay this morning early in the arms of the heat, humorously and indulgently, as though, having bathed in the night, she had emerged and not bothered to put anything on and had stretched out to let the air, what air there was, touch her along arms and legs and shoulders and forehead, he thought, admiringly.

  Memories trickle back—including the Childs’ restaurant incident with the buttermilk, which had revealed “the enormously important discovery that the world would pay a man for setting down a simple, legible account of his own misfortunes.” White concluded, purplishly, “Oh inscrutable and lovely town! oh [sic] citadel of love.”

  In 1952, more than a decade after this enigmatic piece saw print—and in the same year that he published Charlotte’s Web—White teamed improbably with McKelway to work up a screen treatment, expanding and trying to deepen it by having the hero visit his office on a deserted Saturday afternoon. There he encounters a nameless and mysterious girl who is determined to leave New York for vague reasons—“money, disappointment in love, unsuccess,” etc. He does his best to persuade her to stay. Though he fails, his own on-again, off-again romance with New York comes through in the last lines. There, he hears the sound of the Queen Mary’s horn, carrying “the whole history of departure and longing and loss.”

  It was a bizarre excursion, and White was aware of its shortcomings. “I vacillate between thinking that this is the most promising thing to hit the screen since Theda Bara and thinking that there is really very little here to work on,” he told McKelway. In the end, the strange film was never made. But if it had been, it would have given White the opportunity to “swipe stuff directly” from his notable essay “Here Is New York” and given it even wider exposure.

  White had written the seven thousand words of “Here Is New York” at the Algonquin during the sweltering August of 1948, having been commissioned to do so by Roger Angell for Holiday magazine. The tone was bittersweet. Much of the piece is a love letter. “New York is to the nation what the white church is to the village—the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying the way is up,” White wrote. He retreated into youthful nostalgia—his memories of the El, the profusion of daily newspapers, his life in Greenwich Village.

  He also bewailed the city’s gigantism: “It is a miracle that New York works at all. The whole thing is implausible. Every time the residents brush their teeth, millions of gallons of water must be drawn from the Catskills and the hills of Westchester. . . . Long ago the city should have experienced an insoluble traffic snarl at some impossible bottleneck. It should have perished of hunger when food lines failed for a few days. It should have been wiped out by a plague starting in its slums or carried in by ships’ rats.” And in a chilling foreshadowing of September 11, he despaired of the city’s vulnerability: “A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate millions.” Of one thing White was sure: the place was on its way to “becoming a capital of the world.”

  It was one of White’s best-remembered efforts. “I regard you as I do one of two teachers I know—irreplaceable,” wrote Jack Arbolino, a Columbia University admissions officer. “I already feel foolish in praising you. Just take this as a fan letter.”

  For Gibbs, meanwhile, little gelled outside The New Yorker. He got nowhere with adapting Joseph Hergesheimer’s novel Balisand and his literary idol Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson. His attempt to revive the nineteenth-century musical The Belle of New York similarly fizzled.

  Still, he remained convinced that he could do as good a job on Broadway as any of the hacks who were succeeding there. In 1946 he published some Mittyesque daydreaming (dedicated “with a Peck on the Cheek for James Thurber”) with the title “The Secret Life of Myself.” In it, he imagines himself effortlessly doctoring a stinker of a script and saving the play from disaster. For good measure, he even condescends to take over the lead role at the director’s behest. It is all a fantasy, conceived in the brief interval during which he has fallen asleep while watching the actual production, only to be rudely awakened by Elinor.‡

  Finally, Gibbs hit on a largely autobiographical approach th
at worked. While recovering from his pleurisy operation, he decided to cannibalize his nine “Season in the Sun” stories and craft a comedy with the same title. In some preliminary notes, he sketched out his theme:

  [A] time is apt to come in almost every innocent writer’s life when it occurs to him that he ought to be making rather larger or anyway deeper footprints in the sand. With White, this took the form of the Brotherhood of Man and packing his whole family rather arbitrarily off to Maine. With the writer in this play, it is reduced and simplified to the point where he just feels it is high time he got away from a corrupt and urban environment and wrote a novel inspired by the feeling a man is apt to get about America—if he picks up Walt Whitman rather late in life. There is, however, a minimum of social signifigance [sic] in the play; it is mainly just silly.

  In assembling his disparate pieces into a dramatic whole, Gibbs depicted his alter ego George Crane as a reformed drinker. Though a respected and successful writer at an unnamed weekly humor magazine, he approaches middle age upset by his perceived lack of achievement. So he has quit the periodical and holed up on Fire Island to work on a great American novel. As the play opens, George unloads to his wife, Emily, about life, conventionality, and the hell of other people. His central statement is a cri de coeur about how Manhattan has wrecked his compatriots. “They’re vacant, used-up people,” he complains. “Most of them came to New York—as I did—full of all kinds of hope about the fine jobs they were going to have and the wonderful lives they were going to live. It took quite a while for it to get to them, but it did.”