An editors burial, p.10
An Editor's Burial, page 10
“Just the way I go about the business of living,” I said, metaphorically thinking on my feet. “I live among the sighted. I dress, I eat, I walk with the sensibilities of the sighted in mind. I hear the talk of the sighted from morning to night. My whole inner life is made up of visual assumptions. My unconscious must contain a whole reservoir of visual images and references. After all, I could see until I was almost four.”
“I can understand that in fiction you can invent visual details, but in other kinds of writing you will have to describe the actual way people look and what they wear,” he said. “How will you do that?”
I was stumped, and felt so frustrated that I almost had a murderous impulse against my beloved professor for throwing a realistic difficulty in my path.
“There are so many visual details about how things look that I just pick up by diligent use of my four senses,” I finally said. “How could it be otherwise, when people are constantly talking in images—‘It’s a bright day,’ ‘What a pretty blue dress she has on’ …”
I broke off. I felt tired.
“The subject of what visual images you have in your head and how you assimilate them from one day to the next would be worthy of book in itself,” Mulhauser said. “And perhaps only you could write it. Writers do best when they exploit their special gifts, and your special gift may be to explore the universe of the blind.”
“As I’ve told you, I feel I have done that in ‘Face to Face.’”
“That’s what you think now. But as you develop as a writer you will also develop as a person, and you’ll find you have more to say about the subject and greater skills with which to say it.”
The English tea, I had been brought up to think, was an occasion for chit-chat, not for talking about unpleasant or embarrassing matters. Among the reserved English, I had become as reticent as they were, and would certainly never have dreamed of getting into such a personal conversation, especially over tea. Mulhauser had brought out my confiding, American self, I realized, yet I wondered how I had come to bring up the subject. The only books I had ever hoped to write were scholarly ones. The fact that I was blind might be relevant to the method of my research but not to its results. I recalled that I had recently attended some lectures by Richard Pares, a historian I greatly admired. He was so enfeebled by paralysis that someone had to stand next to him and turn the pages of his lecture scripts, yet when people discussed his lectures after they were collected in book form, or wrote about his other books, it no more occurred to them to mention his physical infirmities than to mention, for instance, the youthful looks of Hugh Trevor-Roper when they were discussing his works.
“But I wish to be free of blindness—free of all the baggage that goes with it!” I cried.
Mulhauser apparently sensed the rising tide of my frustration, for he made no reply.
* * *
In 1988, when Mr. Shawn was no longer at The New Yorker, I asked him during one of our lunches if he had ever had any second thoughts about my writing as if I could see. While he was the editor, he had published my articles in that vein for twenty-seven years.
“No, I didn’t,” he said without a moment’s hesitation. “Your writing seemed totally convincing and natural to me.”
“How did you feel when people said that it was totally dishonest?”
“I didn’t worry about it, since it worked.”
To complicate matters, after I had written in that vein for more than twenty years I started writing like the blind person that I was. I brought up that subject and asked him how he had felt when, as it were, I switched horses in midstream. “I don’t think that any other editor would have allowed me to write in both ways,” I remarked.
“That was O.K.,” he said. “The writing, whichever way you did it, was completely convincing. I felt that whatever you wanted to do, as long as it worked, was O.K.”
The simplicity of his answer was stunning. In my years as a writer, I had seen many editors of books and magazines come and go. Each one had typed me as a blind writer or an Indian writer, for instance, and had been interested in my writing on only one or the other of those subjects. In contrast, Mr. Shawn, without having been given a word of preparation or explanation, had jumped in with me in my writing projects, each more outlandish and improbable than the last, as if he were my Siamese twin, who would have to accompany me wherever I went, even to the ends of the earth.
* * *
Of all the people I knew at The New Yorker who were eccentric, none was more captivatingly so than St. Clair McKelway. He had come to The New Yorker in 1933, at the age of twenty-eight, and was around right up to his death, at the age of seventy-four, in 1980. The son of a prominent Southern family, which numbered notable journalists among its members (a great-uncle of his, also named St. Clair McKelway, had been the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and from 1946 to 1963 his brother, Benjamin Mosby McKelway, was the editor of the Washington Star), he was an impressive figure in the office and on New York streets, for he had the air of a patrician about him.
In Ross’s day, when the office was small, McKelway did some of everything—hiring people, coming up with ideas for articles, encouraging newcomers, and editing their copy—and for three years, from 1936 to 1939, he functioned as Ross’s managing editor, or “jesus” (a corruption of “genius”): a sort of messiah that Ross was always searching for, to bring order to the chaotic office. As a jesus, McKelway is remembered for splitting The New Yorker’s editorial workings into two distinct divisions: one, called fiction, which encompassed not only short stories but humor, poetry, and memoirs; and the other, first called journalism but later fact when the term journalism proved too narrow to accommodate the wide range of creative nonfiction material that the magazine soon started publishing. Prior to this reorganization, editors had shuttled back and forth between different kinds of pieces, but afterward they concentrated on pieces within their own fields of expertise. Indeed, those divisions, together with the art department, became fixtures of the magazine.
McKelway is also remembered as a great spotter of talent. He brought in many of the writers—Joe Liebling, Joel Mitchell, John Bainbridge, and Philip Hamburger, to name a few—who during the war years developed a form of reporting that distinguished The New Yorker and set it on its course of profound writing done in a seamless narrative style. Nor was that all: it was McKelway who first recognized Mr. Shawn’s gifts, when young William Shawn was a Talk reporter, still a little wet behind the ears. Around 1937, McKelway made him one of his two assistants—the other was the esteemed and much beloved editor Sanderson Vanderbilt—and so prepared the way for Mr. Shawn to succeed him as Ross’s next, and last, jesus. Moreover, McKelway had a hand in some of the longest-remembered Profiles to appear in Ross’s New Yorker. He wrote a dissection, in no fewer than six parts, of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell; collaborated with Liebling on a sendup of the Harlem evangelist known as Father Divine; and was a valuable researcher for Wolcott Gibbs’s classic examination of Henry Luce and Time. On top of that, McKelway wrote and published in The New Yorker not only amusing pieces—about impostors and outlaws, among others—but also remarkable short stories, some of them set in the Orient, where he had spent five years before coming to the magazine. But what he will perhaps be most remembered for are his wild narratives about himself, which, as far as I know, have no parallel in the history of letters.
One narrative tells how during the Second World War, when he was serving as a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army Air Forces in Guam, he took it into his head that the illustrious Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was a traitor, and how he then set about exposing him by sending a radiogram to the Pentagon. The idea of the admiral’s treachery was a vast misinterpretation of events by McKelway, and General Curtis E. Lemay eventually had to apologize to the admiral in person on behalf of the Army Air Forces. McKelway ended up, as usual, in what Ross used to call “the bughouse.” Another narrative tells how during a vacation in his ancestral Scotland in the summer of 1959 he imagined that he had stumbled upon a Russian plot to kidnap President Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth, and the Duke of Edinburgh. Fancying himself an instrument of a counterplot run by British and American secret agents, he started chasing after any cars whose license plates happened to bear the initials of some of his New Yorker colleagues. What prompted these pieces were experiences he had had during periodic nervous breakdowns, but his talent was such that when he recovered he was able to write about his bizarre experiences with humor and grace, rather in the manner of a sane doctor observing the antics of an insane patient. “I have pretty much come to the conclusion that I have a great many heads,” he asserted in one piece. “I’ve counted and identified twelve separate and distinct heads, or identities, that I know I possess.” Mr. Shawn, who wrote many anonymous obituaries of staff members which appeared in The New Yorker, characterized him at his death in this way:
McKelway saw events, people, facts—what is ordinarily regarded as reality—through his own particular prism. He must have known that the reality other people accepted was coarse, cruel, and painful, so he avoided it and devised an alternative reality—one that was bearable to him and was a source of endless pleasure to his colleagues and his readers. He was no moralist. The behavior of nearly all people, including rascals and criminals, and plainly including him, came through to him as inherently funny. From time to time, he entered what was technically a manic phase but what he experienced as anything from “feeling good” to boundless euphoria.
McKelway became so used to his breakdowns that as soon as he felt one coming on he would check himself into a psychiatric hospital. Sometimes he was gone for months at a stretch. Whenever he reappeared, he seemed rested and cheerful and full of plans for catching up with all the things he had missed out on But the process wasn’t as easy as it sounds. I remember that once a fellow-patient of his at the hospital was Robert Lowell, who was probably the only established American poet never to have appeared in The New Yorker, and whom the magazine would have very much liked to publish. At the hospital, Lowell, himself suffering from a nervous breakdown, wrote four lines of what were mainly gibberish and showed them to McKelway, and McKelway accepted them on the spot, as if he were the editor. In due course, he presented them as a done deal to the real editor, whereupon Mr. Shawn was faced with the unenviable task of rejecting Lowell, and doing so in such a way that the poet would not feel snubbed.
McKelway once told me that if he had had his choice he would have lived right in the office when he was not in the hospital, because the office was where his “real life” went on every day. The jacket copy of his book “The Edinburgh Caper,” expanding on his Scotland article, noted that his “birthplace is rumored to have been a corridor near the watercooler in The New Yorker offices.” In all the years I knew McKelway, he never had an apartment of his own but lived in rundown residential hotels within walking distance of the office. I remember that once he was determined to upgrade his accommodations, but the place he chose was the Iroquois Hotel, just opposite the Forty-fourth Street entrance of our building. He rented by the month an inexpensive room that had a steam pipe running right through the middle of it, which left floor space for little more than a single bed and a couple of chairs. Although he was glad that it was already carpeted and that it would not require any new furniture, he was dismayed to learn that he was responsible for his own bed linens. At just about that time, he happened to meet a friend of mine named Marguerite Lamkin, a divorcée with a charming Southern accent, and he immediately asked her if she would go on a shopping expedition with him. (By then, he had been married and divorced four times. Although he had such a way with women that he was said to be friends with all his ex-wives, he seemed to think that they knew him too well for him to ask them to go shopping for bed linens with him.) Marguerite was a great fan of his writings and readily agreed, and they spent an afternoon getting the bed linens and a few sundries for his room. By the end of the expedition, McKelway had fallen in love with her, and he proposed marriage. An extremely civilized woman, she turned him down without making him feel bad, and afterward they remained good friends.
Most of the time I knew McKelway, he was single, and, like a number of us on the magazine who either were not married or had trouble staying married, he was at loose ends at mealtimes. One could cadge breakfast on the run, and one could find people to lunch with, but in the evenings married people disappeared into their own nests. They might invite friends like McKelway once in a while for a family meal, but most of the time he was left to fend for himself. He couldn’t cook and found little pleasure in sitting down to a lonely dinner.
On the same side of Forty-third Street as The New Yorker offices was the Century, a men’s club for writers, artists, and amateurs of the arts which served in the evenings as a watering hole for many bachelors and widowers. (It was so close to the office that when I was put up for the club I almost missed becoming a member because, on being asked by a worthy at my interview why I wanted to join, I failed to give an earnest answer, and said flippantly, “It’d make a great canteen.”) Every evening during the week, members gathered at six o’clock for drinks at the Round Table, on the second floor, and at seven-thirty they went up for dinner at the Long Table, on the third floor. The evening atmosphere was very much that of a Balzac boarding house. The group might contract or expand, but essentially it stayed the same, for its core came month after month, year after year, and, in doing so, became increasingly set in odd habits and quirky ways. Ned Perkins, a retired Yankee lawyer, who was one of the oldest members of the club, was convinced that Arthur, the waiter who got the drinks from the bar for everyone, was half deaf. At the Round Table, Ned would ring the bell furiously and shout out his order for a drink, even though Arthur knew exactly what he had every evening and had already assembled the makings on his tray—a shot glass of freshly squeezed lemon juice, a little baking soda, and water, along with a shot of Jack Daniels. Lewis Galantière, a rather quarrelsome French-American man of letters, seemed never to leave the club until he had complained to the manager about something—stale bread, hard macaroons, unripe cheese. Jo Mielziner, the Broadway set designer, who was ordinarily a mild-mannered man, was always getting into a hot dispute with Galantière about who was going to pay for the taxi ride home to the Dakota, where they both had apartments. (The rest of the members simply split the fare when they shared a taxi.) There was Dr. Stewart (no one called him by his first name, Harold), a gentleman from the South, who was always so cold that he if he could have he would have worn his overcoat to the Round Table. Charles Saltzman, a partner in Goldman, Sachs, who had been a general in the Second World War, was sure to lose his cool if someone came up and greeted him as General, for he insisted that such titles were appropriate only for professional soldiers, and he was not one. Hobey Weekes, an elegant bachelor and born clubman, was known to drink his way through the day—beginning at the Princeton Club, going on to the Coffeehouse, and ending up at the Century—without his storytelling faculties being in the least impaired. A few times, he invited McKelway as a guest, and McKelway took to the life of the Round Table and the Long Table and immediately became eager to join the club. Those who knew of his turbulent nature were a little wary of putting him up for membership, since there was no telling what capers he might get up to while covering the short distance from the Iroquois or The New Yorker to the Century. Still, with his eccentric talent, easy charm, and courtly demeanor, he was a born Centurion He was duly proposed and quickly elected. For some months, he was happier than I had ever known him. But, as he later said, “every apple has a worm in it, and the club is no exception.”
McKelway was a member for four years, from 1961 to 1965. He would arrive at the club at eleven in the morning and drink well into the evening, oblivious of the sure fact that at the end of the month there would be a reckoning in the form of a hefty bill. He was now carried by this member, now rescued by that. Every so often, he got a bit of money from The New Yorker or from a publisher and made a payment, but he could never catch up with his debts, and they kept on ballooning. He was warned that practically the only way a member could be expelled was by not paying his bills, and he was put on notice several times. He always pointed out that he would not have got into trouble if the club had required him to pay cash for whatever he ate or drank. The club tried to accommodate him, but in the end taking cash from only one member proved a nuisance for the bookkeeper. Anyway, the combination of his debts and the sight of him drunkenly stumbling down the grand staircase finally proved enough to get him ousted from the club.
Like many single people, McKelway used to get especially depressed during the holidays. He wished he were a minor Rip van Winkle, and could sleep through Christmas and wake up in the New Year. One winter, he hit upon what he thought was a marvellous way of getting through Christmas Day. He equipped himself with an impressive-looking briefcase, stuffed it with newspapers, donned a three-piece suit, as was his wont, and boarded a train for Albany. He got a table in the dining car and ordered an elaborate meal. Just as he had expected, the waiters were extremely deferential: they took him to be an important politician, whose business was so urgent that, Christmas or no, he had to travel to the state capital. In Albany, he got off the train and killed some time in the men’s room. Then he boarded a train back to New York, feeling sure that he would get the same deferential treatment from a new set of waiters. He marched into the dining ear. To his horror, the same staff was on duty and recognized him. His Christmas Day was spoiled, because he was sure that its members had guessed his ruse. He had always been mesmerized by impostors, since he himself was at the mercy of a number of identities at any given moment.
