It is hard to overemphasize how fresh The New Yorker’s voices in the forties were compared with what was in most other magazines and daily newspapers. The singular “house” voice, E. B. White, wrote with the alarm of his readers. White’s Notes and Comment piece on the occasion of the Nazi march on Paris captures the sense that the world was out of synch, the danger not so far from home:
An hour or two ago, the news came that France had capitulated. The march of the vigorous and the audacious people continues, and the sound is closer, now, and easier to hear.
To many Americans, war started (spiritually) years ago with the torment of the Jews. To millions of others, less sensitive to the overtones of history, war became actual only when Paris became German. We looked at the faces in the street today, and war is at last real, and the remaining step is merely the transformation of fear into resolve.
The feeling, at the pit of every man’s stomach, that the fall of France is the end of everything will soon change into the inevitable equivalent human feeling—that perhaps this is the beginning of a lot of things.
(White’s were typically the first pieces that readers encountered in each week’s issue, and a contribution of his opens each of the sections in this volume.)
Ross was not eager for the United States to enter the war, but his personal views were hardly the point. He dispatched one writer after another into the bottomless story, so much so that there were hardly any staff members left at 25 West Forty-third Street. Ross and Shawn and the rest worked nights and weekends to make their deadlines. They faced paper rationing. Circulation increased, but the circulation department collapsed under the weight of the draft. Ross feared that he would lose Shawn, and was relieved only when Shawn was exempted from service because he and his wife, Cecille, had a son. “The New Yorker is a worse madhouse than ever now,” White confided to his older brother, “on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine.”
What built the new reputation of the magazine was a string of pieces including Janet Flanner’s Profile of General Pétain, Liebling’s dispatches from all over Europe, and Hersey’s exclusive about a young officer named John F. Kennedy and his exploits rescuing his crewmates on the PT-109. When the Navy and Kennedy’s father, Joseph, tried to get Hersey’s piece moved from The New Yorker to the larger-circulation Reader’s Digest, Ross was uncompromising. He wrote to Joseph P. Kennedy, “All of these goings-on led us to believe that we were more or less being chivvied around by a bunch of heavyweights, and since we have long had a feeling here that we are kicked around a great deal by the big fellows, or in behalf of the big fellows, we were not disposed to lay down now.”
As the journalism deepened, the popularity of the magazine broadened. Between 1941 and the end of the war, in 1945, circulation went from 172,000 to 227,000. Some of that popularity was due to a free, pocket-size “pony” edition of the magazine that was distributed to men and women in the service. It was a marketing boon; many of them bought subscriptions when they came home.
The war made The New Yorker. And Ross knew it, even if the knowledge was tinged with regret. He feared pretension and self-importance almost as much as he feared a dropped comma. The second half of the forties was less tumultuous but no less transformative. The American Century, long predicted in jingoistic terms by Henry Luce, Ross’s bête noire, took shape. Postwar prosperity infused New York—and The New Yorker—with a greater sense of commercial and artistic ambition. The trauma of the war, too, was reflected in the stories of Salinger and Shaw and Nabokov. And despite his fear of pretension, Ross became less self-conscious about the life of the mind; Edmund Wilson was, notably, given the freedom to write about whatever captivated his interest, from the rites of literary culture in postwar London to the customs of the Zuni in New Mexico.
After the war, Ross was so exhausted, so worn down by his editorial struggles and his contentious relations with Fleischmann, that he threatened to resign. And yet, as the country settled into its great boom, he grew accustomed to more ordinary battles over galleys and page proofs and seemed to take a wry and renewed pleasure in them. “There is nothing to be done about [Edmund] Wilson’s editing that I know of,” he wrote to Katharine White. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here. Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather.”
When there were other battles to be fought, more serious ones, Ross was never fainthearted. Liebling, E. B. White, and Lillian Ross all wrote strong pieces about the more virulent forms of anti-Communism. (The FBI accumulated a file on Liebling, calling him a “careless journalist of the New Yorker set” and responsible for “the pinko infiltration of The New Yorker.”) Ross, without making much of it, stood by them all.
By the end of the decade, The New Yorker was flourishing, but Ross was a wreck. He suffered from ulcers, lung ailments, and general exhaustion. He was increasingly ceding authority to Shawn. In 1951, he wrote to his friend the writer Howard Brubaker, “I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me.” By the end of the year, Ross was dead. The fifties at The New Yorker were left to the men and women he had nurtured, hectored, cajoled, flattered, berated, agitated, mystified, and, yes, inspired.
A NOTE BY GEORGE PACKER
In late May 1940, the writer A. J. Liebling awaited the Second World War in “a little Marseillais restaurant on the Rue Monmartre,” dining on “Mediterranean rouget burned in brandy over twigs of fennel.” He had returned as a correspondent for The New Yorker to the city of his youthful adventures in food and other passions soon after the German invasion of Poland, in the fall of 1939, and he had spent the months of the Phony War in a state of suspended disbelief. Drawing comfort from the “gastronomic normality” of Parisian life, he convinced himself that the Nazis were overrated and the French would put up a tough fight—that this was a replay of the First World War. Even after the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg cut through Holland and Belgium “as through butter” and prepared to devour France, Liebling couldn’t believe in the coming catastrophe. “The rouget tasted too much as good rouget always had,” he wrote; “the black-browed proprietor was too normally solicitous; even in the full bosom and strong legs of the waitress there was the assurance that this life in Paris would never end.”
In some ways it was still 1925, the year of The New Yorker’s birth. Even after a decade of worldwide depression and rising Fascist power, the magazine remained dedicated to the sophisticated tastes of what its founding editor, Harold Ross, in a letter to prospective investors and subscribers, called “metropolitan life.” The main stage was New York, the tone ironic and detached, never passionately engaged, immune to shock. Ross prescribed that the weekly commentary be written “in a manner not too serious”; the magazine prided itself on never taking a political stand. Hitler made a few scattered appearances in its pages during the thirties, as tyrant or buffoon—notably in Janet Flanner’s three-part Profile in 1936, based on interviews with the Führer, whose anti-Semitism and race fanaticism received slightly less space than his vegetarianism and celibacy. In 1933, when few people outside Germany understood what Nazism portended, E. B. White, the anonymous voice of the magazine’s Comment, wrote, “Thus in a single day’s developments in Germany we go back a thousand years into the dark.” But two years later, he fell back into characteristic lightheartedness: “We predict that there will be no war in 1936, 1937, 1938, 1939, and 1940. There will be a small war in 1941 between Cambodia and Alberta over a little matter of some Irish Sweepstake tickets, and then there will be no war in 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945, and 1946. Our prophecy is no mere wish-fulfillment—it packs a heap of personal good feelings toward nations.” It was as if the magazine knew that the world of witty table talk, society portraits, and Broadway lowlifes was doomed, but, like a character in a Thurber sketch, it couldn’t bring itself to wake up from an entertaini
ng dream that had begun to quiver with sinister undertones.
At the end of the summer of 1939, with war apparently imminent, White’s Comment finally showed The New Yorker to be capable of shock. It sounded the note of a highly civilized sensibility forced to engage with something alien, ugly, and inescapable: “Today is Sunday, August 27th. Perhaps you don’t remember that far back, you who presumably now dwell in a world which is either at peace or at war.… If war comes, it will be war, and no one wants that. If peace is restored, it will be another arrangement enlarging not simply the German boundary but the Hitler dream. The world knows it can’t win.”
The war opened The New Yorker to the wider world. Without changing beyond recognition, it became a more serious magazine; without sounding like Time or The New Republic, it became political. It rediscovered places it already knew, perhaps a little too well (London, Paris, Hell’s Kitchen), and it discovered places that it had never imagined (Tunisia, the Marianas Islands). The Second World War was total war, involving cities, villages, and much of the world’s population, with battlefields in a hotel lobby or an uninhabited island. Partly for this reason, the coverage in The New Yorker benefitted from the fact that it was a literary magazine, matching writers to subjects in ways that produced some of the greatest and most original journalism of the war.
Ross deployed much of his available talent to cover the conflict. The New Yorker’s war correspondents included the magazine’s former managing editor, a movie critic, a sportswriter, humorists, and short-story writers, as well as some of its leading reporters. By happenstance, Mollie Panter-Downes, an English novelist living on a pig farm in Surrey, became the magazine’s London correspondent in time for Dunkirk and the Blitz, and her understated style perfectly captures the British talent for survival through disengagement that Americans learned to admire during the war: “Incidentally, the announcements of the first air-raid deaths are beginning to appear in the obituary columns of the morning papers. No mention is made of the cause of death, but the conventional phrase ‘very suddenly’ is always used. Thousands of men, women, and children are scheduled to die very suddenly, without any particular notice being taken of them in the obituary columns.”
The focus of The New Yorker’s war reporting is rarely the big picture. Grand strategy is almost never discussed; the Eastern Front, inaccessible to the magazine’s reporters, hardly exists; the names Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Stalin appear less often than those of ordinary soldiers. The largest event in human history is witnessed in small stories, through details and characters, in what the writer is able to see and hear—an elegant third-floor London drawing room exposed by bombing; a tearful conversation between a major and the sergeant he’s casually but deeply offended. The neutrality and omniscience of modern newspaper reporting are not the guiding principle here. The writer’s personal relation to the subject is often what gives a piece its insight and power. When the playwright S. N. Behrman visits London for the first time since the start of the war, he finds the nightly blackout terrifyingly total and eerily beautiful. Who would have known that London’s Underground shelters blasted American pop tunes all night long, if Behrman hadn’t made a point of going down into one?
Liebling—corpulent, witty, and pleasure-loving—becomes an unlikely correspondent with the U.S. Army in North Africa, and later goes on to cover the landings at Normandy and the liberation of Paris. While the memory of his French pleasures occasionally intrudes, like hunger pangs, Liebling’s exuberance is restrained, his comic impulses sobered up, his baroque prose style rendered more straightforward and exact by the vast, death-haunted experience in which he plays a small part.
The war consumed The New Yorker, along with the rest of the country. Ross begged the War Department for more draft deferments, complaining that he had lost half his editorial staff to military service, and making a case for the magazine’s importance to the war effort. In the journalism of the Second World War, the difference between civilian and military dissolved in ways that later became impossible with an all-volunteer army. New Yorker correspondents describe the soldiers they meet by their prewar identity (“He was a yacht broker in civilian life and often wrote articles about boats”; “All Riley wanted to do was finish the war and go back to the University of Texas”). A few contributed work to the magazine while still in uniform, while some writers joined the action as if they were members of the unit they were covering. In some of the terse, atmospheric frontline dispatches, it can be hard to tell which was written by a soldier and which by a reporter.
This closeness between observer and participant is accompanied by an open partisanship that became unthinkable after Vietnam. Panter-Downes says of her English countrymen, “The behavior of all classes is so magnificent that no observer here could ever imagine these people following the French into captivity.” St. Clair McKelway’s series on the strategic bombing of Japan is called “A Reporter with the B-29s,” but in fact McKelway was a public-affairs officer with the 21st Bomber Command of the Army Air Force—an official censor. He referred to the enemy as “Japs,” never once paused to consider the human cost of the incendiary bombs dropped on Tokyo, and revered the generals who were his direct superiors (including Curtis LeMay), while portraying them with subtlety and humor. In other words, McKelway wrote as a lieutenant colonel whose job was P.R., and who was also a great reporter on the staff of The New Yorker—a convergence of roles that would not occur at the magazine today. There’s a loss of plausible objectivity in the arrangement, but McKelway wrote about men at war with a frank and knowledgeable love that scarcely appears any longer in American journalism.
When the war was over, Ross realized that the changes in The New Yorker would be permanent. “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc., will be gradual,” he wrote to Flanner, in June 1946, “and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was, on account of having gone heavyweight to a considerable extent during the war.” The magazine was about to go even heavier. William Shawn, Ross’s deputy (and later his successor), had assigned a young novelist and reporter named John Hersey—the son of missionaries in China—to travel through occupied Japan and write about the effects of the atomic bomb. “Hiroshima” filled the entire issue of August 31, 1946.
Hersey’s method of re-creating the destruction of the city through the fate of six individuals produced a daring new form of journalism, modeled on fiction. It portrayed civilians in America’s hated enemy, Japan, for the first time as human beings. It rendered the destructive power of nuclear energy all the more terrifying for being brought down to its minute particulars—to the flower patterns seared from women’s kimonos onto their skin. The Second World War ended with two radical new shocks to human conscience: the death camps and the bomb. The first received its most eloquent testimony from survivors. The second shock was absorbed in the pages of The New Yorker, and transformed into literary art.
E. B. White
SEPTEMBER 2, 1939
This will be one of those mute paragraphs written despite the impossible interim of magazine publication, handed over to a linotyper who has already heard later news. Today is Sunday, August 27th. Perhaps you don’t remember that far back, you who presumably now dwell in a world which is either at peace or at war. It is three o’clock in the morning. The temperature in New York is 70 degrees, sky overcast. The long vigil at the radio is beginning to tell on us. We have been tuned in, off and on, for forty-eight hours, trying to snare intimations of our destiny, as in a butterfly net. Destiny, between musical transcriptions. We still twitch nervously from the likelihood of war at 86 on the dial to the possibility of peace at 100 on the dial. The hours have induced a stupor; we glide from Paris to London to Berlin to Washington—from supposition to supposition, lightly. (But that wasn’t a supposition, that was the Hotel Astor.) The war of nerves, they call it. It is one of those phrases that catch on. Through it all the radio is immense. It is the box we live in. The world seems very close at hand. (“C
ountless human lives can yet be saved.”) We sit with diners at the darkened tables in the French cafés, we pedal with the cyclists weekending in the beautiful English countryside, we march alongside the German troops approaching the Polish border, we are a schoolboy slipping on his gas mask to take shelter underground from the raid that hasn’t come, we sit at the elbow of Sir Nevile as he presents the message to the British Cabinet (but what does it say?). Hour after hour we experience the debilitating sensation of knowing everything in the world except what we want to know—as a child who listens endlessly to an adult conversation but cannot get the gist, the one word or phrase that would make all clear. The world, on this Sunday morning, seems pleasingly unreal. We’ve been reading (between bulletins) that short story of Tomlinson’s called “Illusion: 1915,” which begins on a summer day in France when the bees were in the limes. But this is Illusion 1939, this radio sandwich on which we chew, two bars of music with an ominous voice in between. And the advertiser, still breaking through: “Have you acquired the safety habit?” Moscow is calling New York. Hello, New York. Let me whisper I love you. They are removing the pictures from the museums. There was a time when the mere nonexistence of war was enough. Not any more. The world is in the odd position of being intellectually opposed to war, spiritually committed to it. That is the leaden note. If war comes, it will be war, and no one wants that. If peace is restored, it will be another arrangement enlarging not simply the German boundary but the Hitler dream. The world knows it can’t win. Let me whisper I love you while we are dancing and the lights are low.
A. J. Liebling
AUGUST 3/10, 1940 (ON THE FALL OF FRANCE)
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 2
