The storm
broke immediately after the publication of the first installment,
“Tiny Mummies,” and went on for months. There were many bizarre
moments and odd touches, but one stands out most vividly in my mind
to this day: J. D. Salinger checked in.
Salinger was The New
Yorker’s most celebrated fiction writer during Shawn’s time,
famous for the anguish he could make rise up between the lines of
seemingly casual, lighthearted prose. By now, he was also a famous
recluse, not quite as famous as Howard Hughes, but close. He was
holed up on a farm somewhere in New England, totally incommunicado
as far as the press was concerned. But now, for the first time
since the publication of the novel that made his name, The Catcher in the Rye, he
communicated with the press. He sent a telegram to Jock Whitney,
and he left nothing between the lines. It was the clearest, most
direct prose he ever wrote for publication in his entire
career:
“With the printing of that inaccurate
and sub-collegiate and gleeful and unrelievedly poisonous article
on William Shawn, the name of the Herald
Tribune and certainly your own will very likely never again
stand for anything either respect-worthy or
honorable.”
From that day to this, he has never
been heard from again.
Four other New
Yorker regulars also immediately sent letters to Whitney: E.
B. White, Richard Rovere, Ved Mehta, and Muriel Spark. Muriel Spark
said Wolfe’s “style of personal attack is clearly derived from
Senator McCarthy.” I groaned; at The New
Yorker even their epithets had liver spots on them. E. B.
White compared me to “a rider on horseback … sitting very high in
the saddle” dragging a small, helpless man along the ground “at the
end of a rope.” At first I was excited by my steroid-like bulking
up. Just a few months earlier, in the Talk of the Town, I had been
a child playing in a sandpile. Now I was Stark Wilson, the hired
gunslinger in Shane. Then I realized it was
merely preposterous. The small, helpless man on the ground was one
of the most powerful figures in American magazine publishing. The
heavy way up there in the saddle was a general-assignment newspaper
reporter who did man-on-the-street interviews (“How do you think
Governor Rockefeller’s divorce will affect his political future?”)
and crime stories (“Mrs. Tony Bender: ‘My Husband’s No Mobster!’”)
and wrote for a Sunday supplement in his spare time.
Others, thank God, wrote in to say
The New Yorker had it coming and to add a
note of grim biblical eye-for-an-eye humor. William Styron wrote:
“I was quite amused to read in Newsweek that
William Shawn feels that Tom Wolfe’s brilliant study of himself and
The New Yorker ‘puts the Herald Tribune right down in the gutter …’ I have become
fairly resilient over the years in regard to criticism, but since
the only real whiff of the gutter was in a review of one of my
books in the pages of The New Yorker, I
found Shawn’s cry of Foul woefully lacking in pathos. ‘I receive of the Lord that which also I delivered’
(Corinthians I:11, 23).” Barton Kane wrote: “There’s an old folk
adage that if you can’t take it, you should not dish it out.” He
cited The New Yorker’s skewerings of Luce
and Time and of The Reader’s
Digest and closed with: “Let him who is without sin cast the
first stone.”
That put things in perspective, the way
I saw it, but over the following couple of weeks the outcries began
spreading beyond The New Yorker’s inner
circle. Murray Kempton, a newspaper columnist much admired by
literary folk for his British-essayist mannerisms, tossed the
Trib and me into the aforementioned gutter
with a flourish of tropes and figurae
sententiae. Well … who cared? Kempton used so many elegant
British double and triple negatives, half the time you couldn’t
figure out what he was saying. But then Joseph Alsop, the
nationally syndicated political columnist, did likewise in a letter
to the Trib, and that was a bit of a
shocker. Alsop wrote out of Washington, and his column appeared in
hundreds of newspapers, but his home base—most of the columnists
had home bases—was the Trib
itself.
Then Walter Lippmann weighed in. He
consented to the publication of a letter he had sent Ved Mehta on
the subject of my New Yorker articles and
said I was “an incompetent ass.” Walter Lippmann! There is no
columnist today the equivalent of Walter Lippmann. He was the
dean—that was the word everyone used, “dean”—of American political
pundits. “Pundit” was another word everybody used when Lippmann’s
name came up. In fact, my impression was that it was expressly for
Walter Lippmann that the word “pundit” had been imported into the
English language from the Sanskrit. I tried to take the long view,
the larger view. At that time, 1965, the Berlin Wall was up, the
Soviets had the hydrogen bomb and the missiles to deliver the
payloads with, the Mideast was coming to a boil, China was a
restless giant—but Walter Lippmann had time to be interviewed about
a Sunday supplement and me. If so, then how bad a shape could the
world really be in? To tell the truth, that line of reasoning
wasn’t very reassuring. The great Walter Lippmann’s home base was …
the Trib, too!
J. D. Salinger, E. B. White, Murray
Kempton, Joseph Alsop, Walter Lippmann—although we tried to put on
a brave front, for about ten days there Clay Felker and I thought
the sky was falling down. But Jock Whitney, after the initial
shock, held firm, and I had never seen our maximum editor, Jim
Bellows, happier in my life. He loved every minute of it. He ate it
for breakfast and put some in his double espressos at night. After
a couple of weeks Clay and I realized the only thing that had
really changed in our lives was that we were beginning to be
invited to parties by rich and famous people we had never laid eyes
on before. It had to do not with us personally but with the
definition of “a party” in New York. In New York, a party was
something to which you invited people you didn’t know but figured
you should.
So Clay and I had become fairly
battle-hardened by the time the shadow of Lyndon Johnson’s White
House stole across our heads a few days later. Clay was sitting in
his little bullpen office at the Trib when
the telephone rang and a voice announced that “the White House” was
calling and that Clay should hold on. After he had held on a
properly deferential five minutes or so, a voice came on the line
and said, “This is Richard Goodwin. I’m calling from the White
House.” Richard Goodwin had been a speech writer and policy wonk
for John F. Kennedy and was now serving Lyndon Johnson. He
proceeded to tell Clay what poisonous, gutterish, despicable stuff
our New Yorker articles were. The bill of particulars was pretty
familiar by now. The only thing that made Goodwin’s different was
that he couldn’t let twenty-five words go by without interjecting,
“Here at the White House.” Golly, what were we to conclude? Johnson
was already sending half a million American troops to Vietnam on
the basis of a ten-cent gunboat incident in the Gulf of Tonkin.
What chance did we have? But by now Clay’s
instincts and Jim Bellows’s were the same.
“Excuse me, I don’t mean to interrupt,”
said Clay, “but if you’ll do me a favor and write down everything
you’ve just said on White House stationery and send it to me, I
promise you we’ll print it.”
We never heard another word from
Richard Goodwin there at the White House. The New
Yorker was far from finished, however. Dwight Macdonald, a
self-styled “man of letters” known in 1965 mainly for a long piece
in The New Yorker denouncing Webster’s
Dictionary for allowing too many new words through the portals of
approved English usage and into its recent third edition, wrote a
two-part attack on the Trib, New York, Clay,
and me for The New York Review of Books,
command central for America’s “intellectuals.” By now The New Yorker had decided to take a page from a master,
namely, Aristotle, who had advised that if the argument was giving
you problems—in this case, the argument that The
New Yorker was a dull magazine edited by a minimomaniac—then
go after the facts and try to invalidate the argument that
way.
Macdonald was joined in this task by
two of The New Yorker’s inhouse salt miners,
a journeyman writer named Gerald Jonas and my new acquaintance Miss
Adler. In an article published in the Columbia
Journalism Review, they drew up a vast list of “mistakes,” a
list notable for two things. One: half the items—such as the
museum-like preservation of Thurber’s wall drawings—were in due
course validated by New Yorker writers
themselves as they began to write their memoirs. Two: the other
half were things Shawn himself could have validated—or denied —but
the team of Adler & Jonas wrote as if there was no way they
could possibly ask him. They made much of my mentioning something
that was in point of fact constantly bruited about at The New Yorker itself, namely, that Shawn grew up
thinking it might easily have been he, instead of Bobby Franks,
whom Leopold and Loeb singled out for kidnapping. To try to prove
me wrong, Adler & Jonas went to Chicago to see an old lawyer
named Elmer Gertz, who had apparently hung on to transcripts of the
Leopold and Loeb trial. Nowhere could they find any record of the
two killers ever considering a boy named “William.” Honest, it
wasn’t all that hard. I found it three blocks from the Herald Tribune and one block from The
New Yorker, at the New York Public Library on West
Forty-second Street. But the larger question is: Why didn’t they
ask Shawn? He knew whether or not he grew up
thinking he might just as easily have been the target. What did
he have to say about it? He wouldn’t talk to
me, but we know he would talk to Miss Adler. In her own
New Yorker memoir (in 1999) she recounted
how she went in to see Shawn that very year, 1965, to try to block
publication of the greatest piece of writing to ever come across
his desk, Truman Capote’s four-part series, In Cold
Blood, and then got poor Jonas to join her in protesting to
Shawn in writing. Miss Adler found In Cold
Blood “lurid,” “sensationalistic,” and
“prurient.”
My biggest concern in reprinting “Tiny
Mummies” and “Lost in the Whichy Thickets” has been that readers in
the year 2000 would wonder what all the fuss was about. What was it
that would draw the likes of Joseph Alsop, Walter Lippmann, and
Richard Goodwin into the fray? Alsop, I was told later, envisioned
going out to pasture writing long think pieces for The New Yorker once he gave up the daily grind. And
Goodwin? Was it anything more than the usual power-muzzy courtier
showing somebody he could do him a favor? Quite possibly. Goodwin
had literary aspirations. The New Yorker had
published a solemn bit of poetry of his the year before and ran a
short story, a book review, and three solemn think pieces of his
over the next three years. And Dean Lippmann? Beats me. Who can
read the mind of a pundit?
Of course, the biggest puzzle of all
was Shawn himself. What on earth could have set him off to the
point of trying to stop publication of another magazine? The other
day somebody suggested to me it was because he thought my two
articles revealed to the world how close he was to Lillian Ross, a
matter Madame Ross, for reasons best known to herself, chose to
retail in embarrassing detail recently (1998) in her memoir of Shawn’s time at The New
Yorker entitled Here But Not Here. I
knew Shawn was closer to her than to anybody else at The New Yorker and said so. But if someone had come to
me back then and shown me chapter and verse of their “affair”—I
wouldn’t have believed it. I’m sorry, but they weren’t affair
material.
By the way, Renata Adler titled her
book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker
and opened it with the portentous sentence, “As I write this,
The New Yorker is dead.” I tried to tell her
that thirty-five years ago. I tried to save her decades of dead end
in her career. What else did she think “tiny mummies” and “the land
of the walking dead” were supposed to mean?