The 50s Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by The New Yorker Magazine

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 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 Penguin Random House LLC.

  All pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker.

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

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  The 50s: the story of a decade / The New Yorker; edited by Henry Finder; introduction by David Remnick.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-679-64481-1

  eBook ISBN 978-0-679-64482-8

  1. United States—Civilization—1945– 2. Nineteen fifties. I. Finder, Henry, editor. II. New Yorker (New York, N.Y.: 1925) III. Title: Fifties.

  E169.12.A187 2015

  973.92—dc23 2015030067

  randomhousebooks.com

  246897531

  eBook ISBN 9780679644828

  FIRST EDITION

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Simon M. Sullivan

  v4.1

  a

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction · David Remnick

  PART ONE · AMERICAN SCENES

  A Note by Elizabeth Kolbert

  Success (On Jackie Robinson, TV salesman) · JOHN GRAHAM AND REX LARDNER

  Fallout (On radioactive debris) · DANIEL LANG

  Ahab and Nemesis (On Rocky Marciano vs. Archie Moore) · A. J. LIEBLING

  Mr. Hunter’s Grave (On a Staten Island cemetery) · JOSEPH MITCHELL

  The Cherubs Are Rumbling (On juvenile gangs) · WALTER BERNSTEIN

  PART TWO · ARTISTS & ENTERTAINERS

  A Note by Rebecca Mead

  The Perfect Glow (On Oscar Hammerstein II) · PHILIP HAMBURGER

  Throw the Little Old Lady Down the Stairs! (On John Huston and the making of The Red Badge of Courage) · LILLIAN ROSS

  Humility, Concentration, and Gusto (On Marianne Moore) · WINTHROP SARGEANT

  The Duke in His Domain (On Marlon Brando in Kyoto) · TRUMAN CAPOTE

  A Woman Entering a Taxi in the Rain (On Richard Avedon) · WINTHROP SARGEANT

  PART THREE · SHIFTING GROUNDS

  A Note by Jill Lepore

  The Foolish Things of the World (On Dorothy Day) · DWIGHT MACDONALD

  Notes and Comment (On the case against Senator McCarthy) · E. B. WHITE

  The Psychosemanticist Will See You Now, Mr. Thurber (On fifties jargon) · JAMES THURBER

  A Meeting in Atlanta (On an NAACP assembly) · BERNARD TAPER

  Letter from Chicago (On the Democratic Convention) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  Letter from San Francisco (On the Republican Convention) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  Letter from Washington (On Eisenhower and Little Rock) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  PART FOUR · FAR-FLUNG

  A Note by Evan Osnos

  No One but the Glosters (On a Korean War battle) · E. J. KAHN, JR.

  The Seventeenth of June (On an uprising in East Germany) · JOSEPH WECHSBERG

  The Old Boys (On Chiang Kai-shek) · EMILY HAHN

  Letter from Paris (On the Algerian War) · JANET FLANNER

  Letter from Gaza (On refugees in the Strip) · A. J. LIEBLING

  Cuban Interlude (On Cuba and its rebels) · NORMAN LEWIS

  PART FIVE · TAKES

  A Note by Malcolm Gladwell

  Ernest Hemingway · LILLIAN ROSS

  Jackson Pollock · BERTON ROUECHÉ

  Toots Shor · JOHN BAINBRIDGE

  Harold Ross · E. B. WHITE

  Sylvester Weaver · THOMAS WHITESIDE

  Emily Post · GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN

  Frank Lloyd Wright · GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN

  Bobby Fischer · BERNARD TAPER

  Mort Sahl · WHITNEY BALLIETT

  Leonard Bernstein · ROBERT RICE

  Lorraine Hansberry · LILLIAN ROSS

  I.B.M.’s New Brain · JOHN BROOKS

  The Nim Machine · REX LARDNER

  Data Processing Systems · JOHN BROOKS

  Election Results via Univac · PHILIP HAMBURGER

  The Perceptron Simulator · HARDING MASON

  The Home Freezer · BRENDAN GILL

  Jazz Class at Columbia · WHITNEY BALLIETT

  Vaccinating Against Polio · JOHN MCNULTY

  Marketing Miltown · THOMAS WHITESIDE

  Rock ’n’ Roll’s Young Enthusiasts · DWIGHT MACDONALD

  The Push-Button Phone · HARRIET BEN EZRA

  The Arrival of Videotape · LOUIS P. FORSTER

  The Quiz-Show Scandals · JOHN UPDIKE

  PART SIX · THE CRITICS

  A Note by Adam Gopnik

  The Vision of the Innocent (On The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger) · S. N. BEHRMAN

  Green on Doting (On Henry Green) · V. S. PRITCHETT

  Black Man’s Burden (On Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison) · ANTHONY WEST

  The Book-of-the-Millennium Club (On Mortimer Adler’s Great Books set) · DWIGHT MACDONALD

  Doctor Life and His Guardian Angel (On Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak) · EDMUND WILSON

  Good Tough Stuff (On On the Waterfront) · JOHN MCCARTEN

  No Sanctuary (On The 400 Blows) · JOHN MCCARTEN

  Bouquets, Brickbats, and Obituaries (On Guys and Dolls) · WOLCOTT GIBBS

  Something to Remember Us By (On Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) · WOLCOTT GIBBS

  Beep the Meem (On Marcel Marceau) · WOLCOTT GIBBS

  Shaw with Music (On My Fair Lady) · WOLCOTT GIBBS

  Points West (On A Raisin in the Sun) · KENNETH TYNAN

  Cornucopia (On Gypsy) · KENNETH TYNAN

  Peeping Funt (On Candid Camera) · PHILIP HAMBURGER

  Bananas in General (On TV comedians) · JOHN LARDNER

  Thoughts on Radio-Televese (On on-the-air language) · JOHN LARDNER

  Extremists (On Jackson Pollock et al.) · ROBERT M. COATES

  Styles and Personalities (On an Abstract Expressionism show) · ROBERT M. COATES

  The Mud Wasps of Manhattan (On tall buildings gone wrong) · LEWIS MUMFORD

  The Roaring Traffic’s Boom (On a congested metropolis) · LEWIS MUMFORD

  The Lesson of the Master (On the Seagram building) · LEWIS MUMFORD

  Jazz Records (On Sonny Rollins and Thelonious Monk) · WHITNEY BALLIETT

  Man with a Manner (On Glenn Gould at Carnegie Hall) · WINTHROP SARGEANT

  Jazz Records (On Coleman Hawkins) · WHITNEY BALLIETT

  PART SEVEN · POETRY

  A Note by Paul Muldoon

  Boy at the Window · RICHARD WILBUR

  Frau Bauman, Frau Schmidt, and Frau Schwartze · THEODORE ROETHKE

  Love for a Hand · KARL SHAPIRO

  The Artist · WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

  Living in Sin · ADRIENNE CECILE RICH

  Questions of Travel · ELIZABETH BISHOP

  Sparrows · HAYDEN CARRUTH

  First Things First · W. H. AUDEN

  Voices from the Other World · JAMES MERRILL

  Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor · SYLVIA PLATH

  Just How Low Can a Highbrow Go When a Highbrow Lowers His Brow? · OGDEN NASH

  The Arctic Ox · MARIANNE MOORE

  The Goodnight · LOUIS SIMPSON

  Lying Awake · W. D. SNODGRASS

  The Road Back · ANNE SEXTON

  PART EIGHT · FICTION

  A Note by Jonathan Franzen

  Taste · ROALD DAHL

  No Place for You, My Love · EUDORA WELTY

  The Oth
er Paris · MAVIS GALLANT

  Six Feet of the Country · NADINE GORDIMER

  Pnin · VLADIMIR NABOKOV

  The State of Grace · HAROLD BRODKEY

  The Country Husband · JOHN CHEEVER

  The Happiest I’ve Been · JOHN UPDIKE

  Defender of the Faith · PHILIP ROTH

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  THE NEW YORKER IN THE FIFTIES

  David Remnick

  UST THE OTHER day, feeling a ripple of melancholy after cleaning out desk drawers and stacking books into orange moving crates, I wandered into the office next to mine. After ninety years in a micro-pocket of midtown bordered by Times Square and Bryant Park, The New Yorker was heading to new quarters, at the southern tip of Manhattan.

  My colleague Pamela Maffei McCarthy greeted me at her door and, with a sly smile, pressed on me four fat folders. “You’re going to want to look at these,” she said.

  As deputy editor, Pam may have accumulated more files than anyone else in our offices, so I suspected that she was attempting a wily offloading maneuver, sticking me with a papery hillock of old expense reports. No backsies! But, after I took the files to my desk and started to sort through the delicate onionskin pages, I realized that this was treasure—hundreds of editing memos written by Harold Ross, who founded The New Yorker, in 1925, and ran it for a generation. The memos were dated 1950 and 1951, his last two years alive.

  Ross was suffering from lung cancer and other painful maladies in those final years, but his eccentric, unstoppable obsessiveness, his unembarrassed habit of questioning every matter of grammar, usage, and fact, no matter how niggling, seemed undiminished. Encountering “Bird of Passage,” a short story by a pup writer named Roger Angell, Ross riddled the query pages with numbered points of contention, a spray of editorial buckshot. A few pellets:

  I was told recently that banks stay open until 4 o’clock.

  Do people say executive, i.e., use it in conversation. It’s pretty much of a writer’s word.

  It is my recollection that most hotels have uncarpeted marble or floors that look like marble.

  Reading John Cheever’s short story “Clancy in the Tower of Babel,” Ross responds, “One technical point in this piece bothers me. Cheever has Clancy, his elevator man Clancy, around the building early in the morning and late of the evening.… I think under union rules, which govern these things, elevator men gain the day shift by seniority.” He senses that a reporting piece from Berlin by Joseph Wechsberg is overly sympathetic: “I still think it is too soon for us to go pro-German.”

  And, as he considers an essay by Lionel Trilling, you can practically hear the sigh of a man who set out to create a “comic weekly” surrendering to the demands of a graver sensibility: “I suppose there’s no other way of doing this, but it always bothers me when a reviewer writes as if he’s talking the book over with someone who has already read it, and knows what’s on this page.”

  In those days, Ross had to spend many days in the hospital. He was quick to disappointment and exasperation, and yet he had a successor in mind, an editor as seemingly recessive in manner as he had been aggressive and incandescent. William Shawn, a shy newspaperman from Chicago, worked in the early thirties for Ross as an “idea man.” Ben Yagoda writes in About Town, an excellent history of the magazine, that on Shawn’s first two days on the job he conceived ideas for ten Talk pieces, including the “Jac Mac Famous School of Acrobatics”; pigeon farms on Manhattan rooftops; a rat exterminator on Riker’s Island; and George Selkirk, the talented, if not quite immortal, outfielder whose destiny it was to replace Babe Ruth in right for the Yankees. Shawn made his mark as an editor by directing the magazine’s coverage of the Second World War. Ross came to think of him as indispensable. As he wrote to Kay Boyle, in 1949, “I can’t do anything with Shawn away, for the future is in his head.” When Ross died in December 1951, Raoul Fleischmann, the magazine’s owner, appointed Shawn. He remained in the job for the next thirty-five years.

  In his attention to detail and his urge to clarity, Shawn resembled Ross. Yagoda relates how Shawn sent a memo to Matthew Josephson telling him that his Profile of William Knudsen, a leader of the automobile industry, was “a stunning piece of historical reporting.” Then he wrote that he was appending “a few questions.” There were 178.

  But Shawn, who took over the magazine in January 1952, was a distinctly different personality. Shawn assumed for himself far more authority than Ross, who was prepared to delegate a greater amount to his various deputies, or “Jesuses.” Shawn was also quiet, subtle, secretive, elliptical, and, to some, quite strange. He was a variety of genius who enjoyed funny writing as well as serious fiction, supported completely the individual artists and writers on a profoundly variegated staff, and expressed his myriad curiosities about the world by sending writers out to explore its many corners. J. D. Salinger called him “the most unreasonably modest of born great artist-editors.” Beneath the modesty, however, was a steely tactical will. Harold Brodkey suggested that Shawn combined the qualities of Napoléon Bonaparte and Saint Francis of Assisi.

  Shawn was also working in radically different circumstances than Ross. In the early years of the magazine, Ross was often at odds with ownership and battling over questions of principle and money. As with most fledgling editorial enterprises, the central concern was existence itself. Would the thing survive? The New Yorker almost closed its doors more than once. I have on my wall a rueful letter from Fleischmann informing a business-side colleague that he was shutting the magazine down. It is dated May 1925—three months after the debut issue. There were many such moments of despair and rescue. But the magazine found its financial footing, and, by the early fifties, it was in happy synch with the postwar consumer boom. Educated middle- and upper-middle-class readers seemed to want what The New Yorker was providing, and advertisers identified the magazine as uniquely suited to reaching those free-spending readers.

  With that kind of security, and with so many editorial columns to fill, Shawn could think expansively about the magazine. He could build on the deepening ambitions of the forties with the plump resources of the fifties. If he wanted reporting from the newly independent country of Ghana, the big East-West summit in Geneva, or the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia, he did not consult the ledger books; he sent a writer. In fact, the sheer proliferation of advertising demanded that Shawn scramble in search of more and more editorial matter. This, he found, had an inevitable drag on quality. There is, in this world, after all, only so much talent at a given time—only so much good writing. At a certain point, he found it necessary to limit the pages in a weekly issue to 248—as fat as a phone book in some towns. In his tenure as editor, Shawn made innumerable hires, tried out countless freelancers, and ran long, multipart series—some forgettable, some central to the literary and journalistic history of mid-century America. His relationship to advertising was distinguished mainly by the ads he found too distasteful to accept. A manufacturer of bathroom fixtures once told me that his ads for bathtubs and sinks had been rejected, because, as Shawn told him, “They are in the bathroom, which means they are next to the, well, you know…”

  Decorum was important to Shawn, even though the world was changing. Rachel MacKenzie, a fiction editor, rejected Philip Roth’s forty-thousand-word novella “Goodbye, Columbus” less because of its length—the magazine had just run J. D. Salinger’s fifty-thousand-word “Zooey”—but, rather, because, as MacKenzie wrote, “taste would rule out here much of what is essential to the narrative.” The magazine accepted Roth’s “Defender of the Faith” but not his more frenetic story “Eli, the Fanatic.” “We all agree that there are remarkable things in the story,” MacKenzie wrote to Roth’s agent, “but we feel that it keeps sliding off into caricature and farce and that in the end it falls between realism and didactic modern fable, the emotional thread breaking and the lesson taking over.”

  Shawn was also wary of the Beats, perhaps the most lasting school
of literary outrage in the fifties. When the fiction editor Katharine White rejected the author of On the Road, she wrote, “We read with a great deal of interest John Kerouac’s ‘Go, Go, Go,’ and it makes us hope that he will have other short stories to send us.… We hope that Mr. Kerouac will try something for us that is not about this particular group of wild kids.” Similarly, the magazine, which was alive to the work of young poets like James Merrill, Adrienne Rich, and Sylvia Plath, was not a home for “Howl” or “Kaddish.” Jane Kramer would write a marvelous multipart Profile of Allen Ginsberg, but not until the late sixties.

  Critics like Seymour Krim worried that The New Yorker, which had exhibited so much bite in its first few decades, was now getting complacent and reserved in middle age. But no magazine can be a completist omnibus of the cultural or political moment, and this one never aspired to be one. History will inevitably find it wanting in some way or another. A reader looking in the fifties archives for a Profile of Chuck Berry will be disappointed. The coverage of jazz did not prove worthy of the form until Shawn gave Whitney Balliett a jazz column, in 1957, by which time rock and roll was under way. Shawn’s magazine was much more in the groove of its time with other arts, as some of the pieces here make thrillingly evident: Lillian Ross’s irresistible Hemingway Profile, Winthrop Sargeant’s Profiles of Richard Avedon and Marianne Moore, Berton Roueché’s piece on Jackson Pollock, Truman Capote’s barbed portrait of a youngish Marlon Brando, Thomas Whiteside’s Profile of Pat Weaver, the executive-maestro of NBC.

  One of the lasting triumphs of cultural reporting for the magazine in the fifties was Lillian Ross’s five-part series about John Huston, Hollywood, and the making of a mediocre adaptation of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. Ross had joined the magazine during the war, one of a small number of women who found a place there when so many men were in the service. Having obtained unfettered access to Huston, the cast, the set, and the relevant executives, Ross painted a dramatic, detailed, and wicked portrait of all the ambitions and compromises that go into even a failed and ephemeral production. Ross’s prose is direct, and unembellished, but the simplicity is deceptive. The influence of the work was significant. Norman Mailer, when discussing The Executioner’s Song, credited Ross as a pioneer in nonfiction.