The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  In many ways, the stories of this period are very external. The war—the hovering, hungry, uninvited guest of the era—is a constant, and so is the tail end of the Depression. Context, in these pieces, is everything; inner life, not so much. After all, this was a decade before psychotherapy got a popular foothold, and many decades before the advent of confessional journalism and the rehab memoir. The classic New Yorker Profile rarely speculates on psychology—a predisposition that continues to this day. Instead, clues to the makeup of the subject’s soul are scattered for readers to gather and analyze for themselves. The stuff that would set many writers on fire—scandal, for instance—is handled matter-of-factly and then set in context. For instance, in Janet Flanner’s Profile of Marshal Pétain, she notes that the elderly Pétain manages to preside over Vichy France with remarkable vigor. She then adds, almost casually, that his secret is the regular use of stimulants, probably Benzedrine or ephedrine, and that he valued his doctor so highly that he named him to a government post so he could accompany Pétain to high-level meetings. Marshal Pétain—a drug addict! This shocker would have been front and center in a typical story, and would have undoubtedly been followed by much armchair analysis on Pétain’s psychological wiring. But that’s not the New Yorker style and definitely not Flanner’s style, which is to carefully layer facts around her subject and observe coolly as he or she goes about daily life. The result is more like a complex diorama built around an individual than like a tight-focus portrait against a blank background. Each of these Profiles, then, becomes much more than a sketch of a personality: each is a piece of time and history, channeled through one individual’s life.

  The Profiles of this period are so good and so definitive that it seems petty to pick a favorite. But, if I had to choose, I would pick Lillian Ross’s “El Único Matador,” the Profile of the matador Sidney Franklin. There are so many things I love about this piece: Ross’s perfect ear for Franklin’s self-importance (“I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none”); her comfortable mastery of the facts of the sport; her humor; her respect for her subject even when he seems a little silly; her gift for placing the small story of one obsessed individual into the larger setting of postwar Spain. Ross is very much present in the story, but as the passionate observer, eager to hear and see everything that can enrich the story and help make sense of not only Franklin but also the world around him. “El Único Matador” is a model of how to write a Profile. It is so fresh, so humane, and so vivid that it’s hard to believe it was written more than sixty years ago. It celebrates, most of all, the exquisiteness of human curiosity. I keep a copy of it on my desk when I work, because like all of these great Profiles, it is not only a lesson in how to write but also a lesson in how to live.

  E. B. White

  APRIL 21, 1945

  Walt Whitman turned in the ablest report last week and wrote the perfect account of the President’s last journey (and the processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night). It was quite natural that he should have, and it was ingenious of the World-Telegram to give him the space he deserved on the front page. Walt’s barbaric yawp, his promulging of democracy, his great sweep and love of the people, had been finding political verification during the past dozen years, and when he wrote of the slow and solemn coffin that passes through lanes and streets, through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land, with the pomp of the inlooped flags, he was simply filing the continuing story of democracy, shoulder to shoulder with the Associated Press.

  For a while after the President’s death, our thoughts were cool and amorphous—a private phenomenon which often attends grim public occasions. But a day or so later, in line of duty, we found ourself in the council chambers of those to whom Mr. Roosevelt’s death brought a secret sense of relief and the intimations of new life. It was there, by inversion, amid the hopes and yearnings of these people, that we again felt the flame of the President’s spirit, for here was the welcoming band, the reception committee, ready to reembrace the status quo, the special privilege, the society of the white Protestant élite, the clipped hedge that guards the inviolate lawn. Here were the conciliators, their hands outstretched to scratch the ears of all the dragons he had tilted with—injustice, compromise, intolerance. It was no wonder, as we walked home, that Walt’s old words seemed a perfect fit for the news, no wonder so many millions were at that moment trembling with the tolling bells’ perpetual clang and muttering under their breath, “Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.”

  · · ·

  It seems to us that the President’s death, instead of weakening the structure at San Francisco, will strengthen it. Death almost always reactivates the household in some curious manner, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt recalls and refurnishes the terrible emotions and the bright meaning of the times he brought us through. By the simple fact of dying, he has again attacked in strength. He now personifies, as no one else could, all the American dead—those whose absence we shall soon attempt to justify. The President was always a lover of strategy: he even died strategically, as though he had chosen the right moment to inherit the great legacy of light that Death leaves to the great. He will arrive in San Francisco quite on schedule, and in hundredfold capacity, to inspire the nations that he named United.

  · · ·

  Today, tomorrow, or some day not far off, the great wish, the long dream, will come true—the end of war in Europe. There may be no surrender, no last laying down of arms, but the victory will be there just the same, the bloody miracle which once seemed hardly possible will have come to pass. “You and eleven million other guys,” said the American sergeant to von Papen when he said he wished the war were over. President Roosevelt loved these eleven million other guys very much, and he was well aware that war’s end for the soldier in arms would be war’s beginning for all the rest of us combined, and for the soldier, too. The President knew this as well as any other man, or better. The guns that spoke in the Hudson Valley last Sunday morning, and Fala’s sharp answering bark, were the first salvo of his new fight—for freedom, human rights, peace, and a world under law.

  St. Clair McKelway and Harold Ross

  NOVEMBER 1, 1941 (ON WALT DISNEY)

  While many of our readers were seeing Walt Disney’s new picture one day last week, we personally were sitting in a hotel room watching Mr. Disney himself imitate a bee. This is the age of journalistic privilege. “In the studio, I’m the bee that carries the pollen,” Mr. Disney told us. Rising, in illustration, he held out his two cupped hands, filled with invisible pollen, and walked across the room and stood in front of a chair. “I’ve got to know whether an idea goes here,” he said, dumping some pollen into the chair, “or here,” he went on, hurrying to our side of the room and dumping the rest of the pollen on our knees. “Do you draw any more at all?” we asked. “If I do, I don’t show my drawings to any of my artists,” he said, walking about restlessly. “I’ve got too many good artists out there. To draw, you’ve got to get off to yourself. You’ve got to have nothing else on your mind. I have to talk so much I can’t draw. Suppose I’m making a new character like Dumbo. Well, who the hell is he? What’s he like? What does he feel? Can you make him fly? You’ve got to keep experimenting, and you’ve got to keep talking and throwing away a lot of stuff.”

  Mr. Disney, it developed, has been in South America for the last six weeks or so, gathering pollen for a series of shorts he intends to produce, based on that continent. He took with him, in addition to Mrs. Disney and a sister-in-law, a director and an assistant director, three artists to make sketches of typical South American scenes, three artists to make sketches of typical South American characters, two writers who concentrated on ideas for stories, a composer, and an animator. They flew to Rio and from there to Buenos Aires and on to Santiago, where the Disneys took a ship for New York, leaving the rest of the troupe to fly on independently through Peru, Ecuador, etc. “We were getting lots of
stuff,” Mr. Disney explained, “but when I saw that boat in Santiago I decided to let the boys finish up by themselves. I’ve got good men working for me. You know, the hardest thing to get is a good man who has a sense of humor. A man with a dramatic sense but no sense of humor is almost sure to go arty on you. But if he has a really good dramatic sense, he’ll have a sense of humor along with it. He’ll give you a little gag when you need it. Sometimes, right in the middle of a dramatic scene, you’ve got to have a little gag. I’m going to make these South American pictures simple and not arty. The best way is to work off the cuff. Don’t have any script but just go along and nobody knows what’s going to happen until it’s happened. That was the way we did with Snow White. I’d say to a songwriter, ‘Look, at this point we got to have a song that expresses love,’ and he’d write one. ‘What the hell happens next?’ the boys would ask me. ‘I don’t know, but let’s try this,’ I would say.

  “After the South American stuff, I may try to make a picture with live actors in it. I’d like to do that. I’d cut out about half of the dialogue, first of all. Then I’d work animation in, only you wouldn’t know it was animation. I don’t want any more headaches like the Nutcracker Suite. In a thing like that, you got to animate all those flowers, and boy, does that run into dough! All that shading. That damn thing cost two hundred thousand dollars—just the one Nutcracker Suite. We’re getting back to straight-line stuff, like ‘Donald Duck’ and the ‘Pigs.’ But to do that you got to watch out for the boys with the dramatic sense and no sense of humor or they’ll go arty on you. You got to keep feeding them pollen.”

  Lillian Ross

  OCTOBER 23, 1948 (ON NORMAN MAILER)

  We had a talk the other day with Norman Mailer, whose novel The Naked and the Dead has been at the top of the best-seller lists for several months now. We met him at Rinehart & Co., his publishers, in a conference room that had, along with other handy editorial equipment, a well-stocked bar. We’d heard rumors that Mailer was a rough-and-ready young man with a strong antipathy to literary gatherings and neckties, but on the occasion of our encounter he was neatly turned out in gray tweeds, with a striped red-and-white necktie and shined shoes, and he assured us that he doesn’t really have any deep-seated prejudices concerning dress. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got all the average middle-class fears.” He thinks the assumption that he hasn’t got them grew out of his meeting some of the literati last summer when he was wearing sneakers and an old T shirt. He’d just come from a ball game, and it was a very hot day. “I figured anybody with brains would be trying to keep cool,” he said.

  Mailer is a good-looking fellow of twenty-five, with blue eyes, big ears, a soft voice, and a forthright manner. Locating a bottle of Scotch in the bar, he poured a couple of drinks. “If I’m ever going to be an alcoholic,” he said, “I’ll be one by November 2nd, thanks to the rigors of the political campaign. I’ve been making speeches for Wallace. I’ve made eighteen so far and have another dozen ahead of me. I’m not doing this because I like it. All last year, I kept saying that the intellectuals had to immerse themselves in political movements or else they were only shooting their mouths off. Now I am in this spot as a result of shooting my mouth off.” In general, Mailer told us, the success of his novel has caused him to feel uncomfortably like a movie queen. “Whenever I make an appearance,” he said, “I have thirty little girls crowding around asking for my autograph. I think it’s much better when people who read your book don’t know anything about you, even what you look like. I have refused to let Life photograph me. Getting your mug in the papers is one of the shameful ways of making a living, but there aren’t many ways of making a living that aren’t shameful. Everyone keeps asking me if I’ve ever been psychoanalyzed. The answer is no, but maybe I’ll have to be by the end of another five years. These are rough times for little Normie.”

  Mailer’s royalties will net him around thirty thousand this year, after taxes, and he plans to bank most of it. He finds apartments depressing and has a suspicion of possessions, so he and his wife live in a thirty-dollar-a-month furnished room in Brooklyn Heights. He figures that his thirty thousand will last at least five years, giving him plenty of time in which to write another book. He was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, but his family moved to Brooklyn when he was one, and that has since been his home. He attended P.S. 161 and Boys High, and entered Harvard at sixteen, intending to study aeronautical engineering. He took only one course in engineering, however, and spent most of his time reading or in bull sessions. In his sophomore year, he won first prize in Story’s college contest with a story entitled “The Greatest Thing in the World.” “About a bum,” he told us. “In the beginning, there’s a whole tzimes about how he’s very hungry and all he’s eating is ketchup. It will probably make a wonderful movie someday.” In the Army, Mailer served as a surveyor in the field artillery, an Intelligence clerk in the cavalry, a wireman in a communications platoon, a cook, and a baker, and volunteered, successfully, for action with a reconnaissance platoon on Luzon. He started writing The Naked and the Dead in the summer of 1946, in a cottage outside Provincetown, and took sixteen months to finish it. “I’m slowing down,” he said. “When I was eighteen, I wrote a novel in two or three months. At twenty-one, I wrote another novel, in seven months. Neither of them ever got published.” After turning in the manuscript of The Naked and the Dead, he and his wife went off to Paris. “It was wonderful there,” he said. “In Paris, you can just lay down your load and look out at the gray sky. Back here, the crowd is always yelling. It’s like a Roman arena. You have a headache, and you scurry around like a rat, like a character in a Kafka nightmare, eating scallops with last year’s grease on them.”

  Mailer has an uneasy feeling that Dostoevski and Tolstoy, between them, have written everything worth writing, but he nevertheless means to go on turning out novels. He thinks The Naked and the Dead must be a failure, because of the number of misinterpretations of it that he has read. “People say it is a novel without hope,” he told us. “Actually, it offers a good deal of hope. I intended it to be a parable about the movement of man through history. I tried to explore the outrageous propositions of cause and effect, of effort and recompense, in a sick society. The book finds man corrupted, confused to the point of helplessness, but it also finds that there are limits beyond which he cannot be pushed, and it finds that even in his corruption and sickness there are yearnings for a better world.”

  A. J. Liebling

  NOVEMBER 15, 1947 (ON EDITH PIAF)

  One of our men, who used to admire Edith Piaf, the tiny French singer, in Paris in 1939, was afraid that she might have brightened up her repertory for her engagement at the Playhouse here, on the theory that Americans demand optimism. He was so concerned that he went over to the Hotel Ambassador to see her before he took a chance on going to the show to hear her—said he wanted to remember her in all her pristine gloom, and not be disillusioned. In Paris, he said, she used to stand up straight and plain in front of a night-club audience—no makeup, a drab dress—and delight it with a long series of songs ending in a drowning, an arrest, an assassination, or death on a pallet. At the finish of each, the listeners would gulp a couple of quick drinks before the next began. “She was a doleful little soulful,” our man remarked sentimentally. He made an engagement with her for one o’clock, and when he called on the hotel phone at that hour, she thanked him in French for being so punctual. “I forgot to set the alarm clock,” she explained, “and if you hadn’t come, I’d have gone on sleeping.” Our man went up to the chanteuse’s living room to wait while she dressed, and while waiting there saw some pencilled notes lying on a coffee table beside a book titled L’Anglais sans Peine, open to a chapter called “Pronunciation of the English Th,” which began, “Some people who lisp pronounce without wishing to do so the two sounds of the th as in English perfectly.” The notes were in English and were obviously for introductory speeches for songs that Mlle. Piaf was going to sing in French. Knowing that
she had never appeared before an English-speaking audience, prior to her current engagement, he concluded that she had been memorizing the speeches with L’Anglais sans Peine as a reference.