The 40s: The Story of a Decade Read online

  Copyright © 2014 by The New Yorker Magazine

  Illustrations copyright © 2014 by Simone Massoni

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  All pieces in this collection, except as noted, were originally published in The New Yorker.

  The publication dates are given at the beginning or end of each piece.

  Letter reprinted by permission of The Shirley Jackson Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  The 40s: the story of a decade / The New Yorker; edited by Henry Finder

  with Giles Harvey; introduction by David Remnick.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-679-64479-8

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64480-4

  1. United States—History—1933–1945. 2. United States—History—1945–1953. 3. United States—Social life and customs—20th century. 4. United States—Social customs—1933–1945. 5. United States—Social customs—1945–1953. 6. United States—In literature. 7. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925). I. Finder, Henry. II. Harvey, Giles. III. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925). IV. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925).

  E806.f66 2014

  973.917—dc23 2013047082

  www.atrandom.com

  FIRST EDITION

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan

  v3.1

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction · David Remnick

  PART ONE · THE WAR

  A Note by George Packer

  Notes and Comment: September 2, 1939 · E. B. WHITE

  Paris Postscript (On the Fall of France) · A. J. LIEBLING

  Letter from London (On the Blitz) · MOLLIE PANTER-DOWNES

  Survival (On Lieutenant John F. Kennedy) · JOHN HERSEY

  Cross-Channel Trip (On D Day) · A. J. LIEBLING

  The Suspended Drawing Room (On post-Blitz London) · S. N. BEHRMAN

  D Day, Iwo Jima · JOHN LARDNER

  Letter from Rome (On V-E Day) · PHILIP HAMBURGER

  Hiroshima · JOHN HERSEY

  PART TWO · AMERICAN SCENES

  A Note by Jill Lepore

  Notes and Comment: July 3, 1943 · E. B. WHITE

  The Old House at Home (On McSorley’s Old Ale House) · JOSEPH MITCHELL

  Opera in Greenville (On a lynching trial) · REBECCA WEST

  Letter from a Campaign Train (On the 1948 presidential campaign) · RICHARD ROVERE

  Symbol of All We Possess (On the Miss America Pageant) · LILLIAN ROSS

  PART THREE · POSTWAR

  A Note by Louis Menand

  Notes and Comment: November 1, 1947 · E. B. WHITE

  Greek Diary: Communists, Socialists, and Royalists · EDMUND WILSON

  The Birch Leaves Falling (On the Nuremberg trials) · REBECCA WEST

  The Beautiful Spoils: Monuments Men (On Nazi art theft) · JANET FLANNER

  Come In, Lassie! (On the Red Scare in Hollywood) · LILLIAN ROSS

  Letter from Washington (On the North Atlantic Pact) · RICHARD ROVERE

  Die Luftbrücke (On the Berlin airlift) · E. J. KAHN, JR.

  PART FOUR · CHARACTER STUDIES

  A Note by Susan Orlean

  Notes and Comment: April 21, 1945 · E. B. WHITE

  Pollen Man (On Walt Disney) · ST. CLAIR MCKELWAY AND HAROLD ROSS

  Rugged Times (On Norman Mailer) · LILLIAN ROSS

  Lugubrious Mama (On Edith Piaf) · A. J. LIEBLING

  Gossip Writer (On Walter Winchell) · ST. CLAIR MCKELWAY

  Goethe in Hollywood (On Thomas Mann) · JANET FLANNER

  La France et Le Vieux (On Marshal Pétain) · JANET FLANNER

  The Hot Bach (On Duke Ellington) · RICHARD O. BOYER

  From Within to Without (On Le Corbusier) · GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN

  The Great Foreigner (On Albert Einstein) · NICCOLÒ TUCCI

  The Years Alone (On Eleanor Roosevelt) · E. J. KAHN, JR.

  El Único Matador (On Sidney Franklin) · LILLIAN ROSS

  PART FIVE · THE CRITICS

  Notes and Comment: December 12, 1948 · E. B. WHITE

  A Note by Joan Acocella

  CLIFTON FADIMAN

  Ernest Hemingway Crosses the Bridge (On For Whom the Bell Tolls)

  EDMUND WILSON

  Why Do People Read Detective Stories?

  Jean-Paul Sartre: The Novelist and the Existentialist (On The Age of Reason)

  LOUISE BOGAN

  Review of Lord Weary’s Castle (On Robert Lowell)

  GEORGE ORWELL

  The Sanctified Sinner (On The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene)

  W. H. AUDEN

  Port and Nuts with the Eliots (On “Notes Towards the Definition of Culture” by T. S. Eliot)

  LIONEL TRILLING

  Orwell on the Future (On Nineteen Eighty-Four)

  A Note by David Denby

  JOHN MOSHER

  The Great Hildy (On His Girl Friday)

  Zanuck’s Joads (On The Grapes of Wrath)

  Charlie’s Hitler (On The Great Dictator)

  Childe Orson (On Citizen Kane)

  DAVID LARDNER

  Pre-Eisenhower (On Casablanca)

  Blood and Premiums (On Double Indemnity)

  JOHN MCCARTEN

  Very Rare Vintage (On The Lost Weekend)

  None Better (On The Bicycle Thief)

  A Note by Hilton Als

  WOLCOTT GIBBS

  The Boys in the Back Room (On The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O’Neill)

  Well Worth Waiting For (On Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller)

  What a Wonderful War (On Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific)

  A Note by Peter Schjeldahl

  ROBERT M. COATES

  Assorted Moderns

  Georges Braque, and the American Abstract Artists

  LEWIS MUMFORD

  Rockefeller Center Revisited

  The Architecture of Power

  A Note by Alex Ross

  ROBERT A. SIMON

  Copland and Shostakovich

  Current and Recurrent (On Bernstein, Toscanini, and Armstrong)

  PHILIP HAMBURGER

  In the Hills (On Tanglewood)

  May Day at Loxford (On Benjamin Britten)

  WINTHROP SARGEANT

  The Violin and Szigeti

  A Note by Judith Thurman

  LOIS LONG

  On the retail customer

  On ready-to-wear clothes

  On American milliners

  On French fashion

  On college clothes

  PART SIX · POETRY

  A Note by Dan Chiasson

  Home Song · E. B. WHITE

  The Unknown Citizen · W. H. AUDEN

  The Ritualists · WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Night Journey · THEODORE ROETHKE

  Barroom Matins · LOUIS MACNEICE

  The End of the World · MALCOLM COWLEY

  The Blind Sheep · RANDALL JARRELL

  The Lovers · CONRAD AIKEN

  Sunday-Morning Prophecy · LANGSTON HUGHES

  A Poet Speaks from the Visitors’ Gallery · ARCHIBALD MACLEISH

  A Hundred Minnows · MARK VAN DOREN

  The Triumph of Education · HOWARD NEMEROV

  At the Fishhouses · ELIZABETH BISHOP

  Aspects of Robinson · WELDON KEES

  Awaking · STEPHEN SPENDER

  At Yearsend · RICHARD WILBUR

  What
I Know About Life · OGDEN NASH

  The Bight · ELIZABETH BISHOP

  Song for the Last Act · LOUISE BOGAN

  PART SEVEN · FICTION

  A Note by Zadie Smith

  The Second Tree from the Corner · E. B. WHITE

  The Jockey · CARSON MCCULLERS

  Graven Image · JOHN O’HARA

  The Patterns of Love · WILLIAM MAXWELL

  Act of Faith · IRWIN SHAW

  The Enormous Radio · JOHN CHEEVER

  My Da · FRANK O’CONNOR

  The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner · JESSAMYN WEST

  Symbols and Signs · VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  The Lottery · SHIRLEY JACKSON

  The Beginning of a Story · ELIZABETH TAYLOR

  The Ladder · V. S. PRITCHETT

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  THE NEW YORKER IN THE FORTIES

  David Remnick

  Gap-toothed and spiky-haired, Harold Ross arrived in New York after the Great War and soon became one of the city’s most fantastical characters. He was twenty-seven, an eccentric searcher shaped by a dropout youth in the American West and a knockabout start in the news business; before he enlisted, he’d worked for two dozen papers, some of them for no more than a few weeks. Ross had a lucky war. He battled the Germans by editing Stars & Stripes in Paris. When he landed in Manhattan, he took up residence in Hell’s Kitchen and went to work for a veterans’ publication called The Home Sector. He also worked for a few months, in 1924, for Judge, a Republican-funded humor magazine. In the meantime, he acquired a circle of young Jazz Age friends (he played softball with Harpo Marx and Billy Rose, shot ducks with Bernard Baruch) and conceived an idea for a fizzy Manhattan-centric magazine of his own—a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” he called it. For financial backing, he hit up a baking and yeast scion named Raoul Fleischmann. Ross never really liked Fleischmann (“The major owner of The New Yorker is a fool,” he once wrote; “the venture therefore is built on quicksand”), but Fleischmann gave him the wherewithal to lure artists and writers from his accumulating circle of friends, hungry freelancers, disgruntled newspapermen, and Broadway lights. Harold Ross was in business.

  From the moment he published the first issue of the magazine, in February 1925, he became one of midtown’s most talked-about characters. He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He could not afford to pay Hemingway’s short-story rates, and so—with the guidance of a fiction department led by a cultivated Bryn Mawr graduate named Katharine Angell (later Katharine White)—he went about discovering John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Shirley Jackson. His editorial queries (“Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”) got to the heart of things.

  Ross was in on the joke of his bumpkin persona, and later became its captive, a lonely, twice-divorced workaholic. But he marshaled that persona to lead, to cajole, to set a tone at the magazine that was high-minded in its studied lack of high-mindedness. Ross had the sort of editorial personality that caused his deputies and writers to weep, sometimes in despair, sometimes in gratitude. One day, he would send a note saying “WRITE SOMETHING GOD DAMN IT.” And then, on the occasion of good work, he would send a message reading, “I am encouraged to go on.” It was all in the service of the weekly cause. He was nothing if not clear. To break up his first marriage, he sent his wife a kind of editorial memo that left no doubt of her faults and his own. Thurber took a crack at portraying the man in The Years with Ross, and Wolcott Gibbs wrote a play, Season in the Sun, with a directive that the actor playing the Ross character ought to be able to play Caliban or Mr. Hyde “almost without the assistance of makeup.”

  The richest and funniest portrayal of Ross and the day-to-day affairs of The New Yorker, however, resides in his letters, which were edited, expertly, by his biographer, Thomas Kunkel. Those letters reveal the inner life of Ross—the irascibility, the devotion, the single-mindedness—and the evolution of his idea for the New York–based weekly. “Let the other magazines be important,” he said throughout the twenties and thirties. Ross was determined to keep things light, to publish fiction, humor, reviews, artwork, and reporting that avoided heaviness, pretension. His models included Punch, the British publication known for its cartoons, and Simplicissimus, a satirical German weekly. He disdained the quarterlies, academia, and analysis—the genre known to him as “thumb-suckers.” He prized shoe-leather reporting, vivid observation, absolute clarity, and conversational tone. He preferred a limited circulation (with expensive ads) to a mass audience. He wanted a magazine that was more stylish than Life, more upscale than Collier’s, more timely than Vanity Fair.

  Ross was not an especially political man. His racial views were retrograde, even for the times. He tended toward isolationism. When forced, he said, “I’m a liberal, though, by instinct. Human, you might say, and a meliorist by belief.” But politics and polemics were not in his early plans for the magazine; he intended to enjoy the Jazz Age, not sing the blues of impending crash. Editorially and commercially, he had conceived The New Yorker for the city’s “sophisticates,” a silvery, elusive sensibility that was defined, particularly in those prewar years, by an aloofness to the troubles of the world. The magazine’s dominant visual artist at the time was Peter Arno, an East Coast aristocrat, who, in his covers, portrayed the Depression, when he portrayed it at all, as a mild joke.

  Ross’s letters, particularly in the magazine’s first ten years, show little concern about money and the Depression, except where it concerns the complicated financial arrangements he had with his ex-wife or a drop in ad pages. Two financial subjects do seem to thrill him: the successful investment he made in Chasen’s, a smart-set restaurant in Los Angeles built by the vaudevillian Dave Chasen, and the hiring of editorial talent—particularly Katharine Angell, who raised immeasurably the ambitions of the fiction department, and William Shawn, who came to work on “fact” pieces and eventually led the magazine for three and a half decades. On the whole, standards of rectitude and taste, sometimes in the form of puritanical reserve, were more on his mind. In one prolonged letter, he has the energy to debate with E. B. White about the use of the phrase “toilet paper,” for instance, which Ross finds “sickening.” (“It might easily cause vomiting,” he insists. “The fact that we allow toilet paper to be advertised, under the name ‘Satin Tissue,’ has nothing to do with this matter.”) You can read your way through countless letters and think that the Depression did not exist; it hardly cast a shadow on The New Yorker. When James Agee and Walker Evans went off to investigate poverty in rural Alabama, it was for Fortune.

  There were those who noticed The New Yorker’s determined detachment. “In the class war The New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral,” Dwight Macdonald wrote, in a 1937 essay for Partisan Review called “Laugh and Lie Down.” “It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of dowagers and laundresses, of shop girls and debutantes.… Its neutrality is itself a form of upper class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle.” On September 6, 1940—one year after the Nazi invasion of Poland; six weeks after the magazine finished running St. Clair McKelway’s unflattering profile of Walter Winchell—Ross posted a confessional on the bulletin board that seemed to echo Macdonald’s point.

  MEMO TO The New Yorker STAFF

  September 6, 1940

  In the interests of avoiding possible embarrassment, I would report that I was kicked out of the Stork Club last night, or asked not to come in again (suavely), because the sight of me causes distress to Mr. [Sherman] Billingsley, the proprietor—something I’m doing my best to take in my stride. It’s b
ecause of the Winchell pieces. I don’t know to what extent Mr. Billingsley’s aversion extends into this organization, but it certainly includes McKelway.

  That’s not to say that Ross or his magazine was oblivious to the accumulating catastrophe. Ben Yagoda’s fine history of The New Yorker, About Town, scrupulously points out the signs of belated awareness: in 1939, Rea Irvin published a portfolio of drawings called A Nazi History of the World. At the end of the year, Frank Sullivan, in his Christmas verse “Greetings, Friends!,” included the couplet “Lebensraum he wants? So! Well, / Let’s hope he gets it soon, in hell.” The next year, Christina Malman drew a haunting charcoal cover of armed German soldiers watching over a long stream of downtrodden prisoners, many wearing hats, some wearing skullcaps.

  Still, the magazine did not figure out how to respond fully to such events until the forties. This anthology represents The New Yorker’s great turn, its journalistic, artistic, and political awakening. When the global conflagration began, Ross—to the surprise of his readers and even of some of his staff—proved himself prepared.

  In journalism, if not in world events, Ross could be prescient. He told Janet Flanner, as she was about to sail for France, “I don’t want to know what you think about what goes on in Paris. I want to know what the French think.” In those days of stubbornly dull and ritualistic news reporting, this amounted to revolutionary counsel. Ross was, in effect, asking Flanner to rely on observation and her own intelligence and voice; questions of form were up to her. In January 1940, he told A. J. Liebling, who was cooling his heels in France, waiting impatiently for a battle, “For the time being, I say mark time, and be prepared for excitement if it starts.” He gave much the same advice and freedom to many other writers—Mollie Panter-Downes, John Hersey, E. J. Kahn, Jr., John Lardner, and Rebecca West among them—as they set off on their assignments. He put the right players on the field, gave them enormous leeway, begged for copy—and when the time came they produced coverage of the war that was unmatched.