Hooking Up

by Tom Wolfe

  This story gave a wonderful picture of this big egomaniac garruling around town and batting everybody over the head with his ego as if it were a pig bladder. The piece impressed Ross, and that gave Lillian Ross the right cachet around The New Yorker, right off. A small, quiet, inconspicuous, sympathetic girl from Syracuse, whose father had run a filling station and kept a lot of animals, she had a great deal of womanly concern for underdogs. Also, her prose style had a nice flat-out quality about it, none of those confounded curlicues of the man at the other extreme, Liebling. Liebling verged on Ross’s Anglo-Saxon sin of “excess,” straining at the brain, as they say. Anyway, Lillian Ross’s style became the model for the New Yorker essay.

  That was all right, but most of the boys never really caught on. All they picked up were some of her throwaway mannerisms. She piles up details and dialogue, dialogue mainly, but piles it all up very carefully, building up toward a single point; such as, Ernest Hemingway is a Big Boy and a fatuous ass. All that the vergers who have followed her seem to think is that somehow if you get in enough details, enough random fact—somehow this trenchant portrait is going to rise up off the pages. They miss her strong points—namely, her ear for dialogue and her point of view—and just run certain sport devices of hers into the ground. The fact-gorged sentence is one of them. Lillian Ross wrote another essay that also had a lot of impact, about the making of a moving picture, The Red Badge of Courage, and the opening sentence of that story was the ruination of at least fifty “Letters” and “Profiles” by the New Yorker foot soldiers who followed in her path. That sentence read:

  The making of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie “The Red Badge of Courage,” based on the Stephen Crane novel about the Civil War, was preceded by routine disclosures about its production plans from the columnist Louella Parsons (“John Huston is writing a screen treatment of Stephen Crane’s classic, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ as a possibility for an M-G-M picture”), from the columnist Hedda Hopper (“Metro has an option on ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ and John Huston’s working up a budget for it. But there’s no green light yet”), and from Variety (“Preproduction work on ‘Red Badge of Courage’ commenced at Metro with the thesp-tests for top roles in drama”), and it was preceded, in the spring of 1950, by a routine visit by John Huston, who is both a screen writer and a director, to New York, the headquarters of Loew’s, Inc., the company that produces and distributes M-G-M pictures.

  Miss Ross was just funning around with that one, but The New Yorker’s line troops started writing whole stories that way. Unbelievable! All those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss. They are still doing it. One of the latest is an essay in the March 13 issue. It began with what has become The New Yorker formula lead:

  One afternoon just after the spring semester began at the University of California, I passed on my way to the Berkeley campus to make a tour of the card tables that had been set up that day by student political organizations on the Bancroft strip—a wide brick sidewalk, outside the main entrance to the campus, that had been the original battlefield of a free-speech controversy that embroiled and threatened the university for the entire fall semester.

  That is just the warm-up, though. It proceeds to a New Yorker style specialty known as the “whichy thicket”:

  But, unlike COFO workers, who still can’t be sure their civilrights campaign has made any significant change in Mississippi, F.S.M. workers need only walk a block or two to witness unrestricted campus political activity of the kind that was the goal of their movement, and to anyone who has spent some time listening to their reminiscences, the F.S.M. headquarters, which is a relatively recent acquisition, seems to be a make-work echo of the days when the F.S.M. had a series of command posts, with names like Strike Central and Press Central—a system of walkietalkies for communication among its scouts on the campus—and an emergency telephone number, called Nexus, to be used when the regular number was busy.

  Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoooaaaaaaugh!—piles of whichy whuh words—which, when, where, who, whether, whuggheeee, the living whichy thickets. All that was from a story called “Letter from Berkeley” by Calvin Trillin, but it is not a rare case or even Trillin’s fault. Trillin can write very clearly, very directly, left to his own devices. But nobody is left to his own devices at The New Yorker today.

  Shawn has … a System.

  The system is Shawn’s refinement of Harold Ross’s query theory and operates something like this: Once an article is accepted, some girl retypes it on maize-yellow paper and a couple of other colors, and Shawn sends the maize copy to a chief editor. The other two copies go to the research department (“Checking”) and the copy style department. The copy style department’s task is seeing to it that the grammar, punctuation, spelling, and word usage in the piece correspond to The New Yorker’s rules on the subject. Sentences phrased in the form of a question, for example, must end in a question mark, no matter how far they have roamed from the idea of asking a question by the end of the sentence. An example, from “Talk of the Town,” again of March 13, runs: “Leave it to the astonishing Italians to bring off the reverse, however, for who should fly into New York from Milan the other morning, for a five-day stay, but a hundred and thirty-six of Italy’s most prominent—not to mention liveliest and most talkative—painters and sculptors, each bringing with him five or more works, to be sold here at a series of charity auctions to benefit two New York hospitals: the Italian Hospital, on West 110th Street, and the New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, on West Fiftieth Street?”

  The chief editor can—and is expected to—rewrite the piece in any way he thinks will improve it. It is not unusual for the writer not to be consuited about it; the editor can change it without him, something that happens only rarely at Time, for example. At Time the writer always makes the changes himself, if possible. Practically every writer for The New Yorker, staff or freelance, goes through this routine, with the exception of a few people, like Lillian Ross, who are edited by Shawn himself. Meanwhile, the researchers down in the checking department are making changes. The researchers’ additions often take the form of filling in blanks some writer has left in the story. He may write something like: “Miss Hall appeared in Sean O’Casey’s ( t.k. ) in 19(00) …” and the researcher is supposed to fill in the blanks, t.k. standing for “words to come” and (00) for “digits to come.” This is precisely the way the news magazines operate. The researcher then comes up with “Miss Hall appeared in Drums Under the Window, a play by Paul Shyre based on Sean O’Casey’s autobiographical work of that name, in 1961.”

  Next, the rewrite editor’s changes, the copy stylist’s changes, and the researchers’ changes are collated and the whole thing is set on a Vari-Typer machine. The Vari-Typer machine sets the story up with even margins on each side of the page, approximating the width of an actual columns in the magazine. A lot of copies of this Vari-Typer version are made, and then the paperwork really begins. Somehow, after this point, the sentences in the story, well, they begin to … grow longer and longer.

  One Vari-Typer copy goes back to the chief editor, two more go back to the researchers and the copy stylists, another goes up to Shawn’s office, and one goes to a “query” editor, and sometimes to two “query” editors. The query editors play an intramural game. Ross devised it. The goal is to punch a hole in every weak spot they can find in a story, really give it a going-over. According to the rules, objections are to take the form of questions—“queries.” The editors compete to see how many biting, insulting, devastatingly ironic questions they can pose about one piece. The New Yorker‘s reigning champion at “querying” is a veteran of the Ross era, Rogers Whitaker. Players may hit a story for artiness, pretentiousness, overexuberance, overassertiveness, overanything, or for plain wrong thinking, unintentional double meanings, or other naïvetés. If it isn’t otherwise vulnerable, they can hit it for vaguen
ess. There are quite a lot of queries on that score. The query takes some such form as “Are we really to assume that there are more than eighteen living persons who remember a play by Paul Shyre, based on a book by Sean O’Casey, entitled Drums Under the Window? Are we sure it was not Drums Under the Milkweed or Weeds in the Milk Drums Under the Window? Where did it play—at the Ciudad Trujillo World Fair of 1955?”

  This query goes back to the chief editor, who rockets it to the researcher. By now galleys are flying all over The New Yorker, and the old boys, the magazine’s senior-citizen messengers, are upping the shoopshoop gait in the halls. The query will eventually end in a sentence that reads, “Miss Hall appeared in Drums Under the Window, which was a play by Paul Shyre, based on an autobiographical book by Sean O’Casey, and which ran for (00) performances at the ( t.k. ), an Off Broadway theater, in 1961.” The writer may or may not be in on this editing and checking and shuffling. So many galleys are going around so thickly that there is only one hope for ever getting some version of the story into the magazine: the … Transferring Room!

  In this room a small group of people is hunched over tables, pulling all these sheets together, copying everybody’s scrawls and queries onto a set of master galleys. The old boys are trundling these things in, from the researchers, the copy stylists, the chief editors, the query editors, from all over, and master copies are sent back to the chief editor, to Shawn, and to the researchers. Everybody muses and puzzles over it one last time. The author then is given a glimpse of what an … interesting … mutation his story has undergone if somebody calls him in at that point to answer queries about facts and do the needed rewriting. And finally, as the culmination of this great … evolution, the homogenized production is disgorged to the printers—in Chicago, via electronic impulses—and the New Yorker Style is achieved.

  One might think that sensitive young writers would get upset about this, that they would take one look at these thickets of perhapses, probablies, I-should-says, at the long, tendrilly whichy clauses that have grown up in their prose—and get, well … upset.

  But! That is not so. A writer gets used to it very quickly, as soon as he gives himself what one disparager called the “auto-lobotomy.” Paradise! The System! We! Ambrosial org-lit!

  Out of the org-maw, however, come some unique and even important articles from time to time. John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” for example. That was Shawn’s inspiration. He prevailed upon Harold Ross to devote practically an entire issue of The New Yorker to Hersey’s account of the bombing of Hiroshima. It may have been one of those memorable fat documents of our times that nobody reads, such as the issues of The New York Times that carry accounts of the deaths of people like Stalin and Churchill or Presidential State of the Union messages. Everybody goes out and buys these nice, fat, full news bricks and never throws them away; or reads them. One puts them in there on the shelf in the closet and preserves them, as in a time capsule, through move after move, from town to town, from urb to suburb, hanging on to these documents of our times. But that is all right. “Hiroshima” was unique. Rachel Carson’s book The Silent Spring was first published in The New Yorker. So was James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” which was expanded into the book The Fire Next Time. Articles like these have had a tremendous impact nationally. Baldwin’s, for example, became the favorite bogey-whip for white liberal masochists all over the country. Flay us, flay us, James, us poor guilty, whitey burghers, with elegant preacher rhetoric. Terrific!

  So The New Yorker has the biggest literary reputation of any magazine in the country, for both nonfiction and fiction. Yet, curiously enough, it was not The New Yorker that launched James Baldwin in slick magazines. It was Esquire. James Baldwin, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Joyce Carey, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, James Jones, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Ezra Pound, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Nelson Algren, Bruce Jay Friedman, Norman Mailer, Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, J. D. Salinger—that is a roster not of New Yorker writers but of Esquire writers. Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” appeared first in Esquire. Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up appeared first in Esquire. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Lewis, Arthur Miller, Baldwin—all made frequent contributions to Esquire at one time or another. Salinger was published in Esquire long before he was published in The New Yorker. Damon Runyon, Stephen Vincent Benét, James Gould Cozzens, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Marquand, Thomas Wolfe, Philip Wylie, Frank O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, William Humphrey, James Jones, Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, William Saroyan, Louis Auchincloss, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia, Herbert Gold, Nelson Algren, Isaac Bashevis Singer—that is a list not of New Yorker writers but of Saturday Evening Post writers. For the last fifteen years The New Yorker has been practically out of the literary competition altogether. Only Salinger, Mary McCarthy, John O’Hara, and John Updike kept them in the game at all. Recently, Updike’s stories have become more and more tabescent, leaving The New Yorker with only one promising young writer, Donald Barthelme.

  The New Yorker comes out once a week, it has overwhelming cultural prestige, it pays top prices to writers—and for forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement. Esquire comes out only once a month, yet it has completely outclassed The New Yorker in literary contribution even during its cheesecake days. Every so often somebody sits down and writes an affectionate summary of The New Yorker’s history, expecting the magazine’s bibliography to read like some kind of honor roll of American letters. Instead, they come up with John O’Hara, John McNulty, Nancy Hale, Sally Benson, J. D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, John Collier, John Updike—good, but not exactly an Olympus for the mother tongue.

  The short stories in The New Yorker have been the laughingstock of the New York literary community for years, but only because so few literati have really understood Shawn’s purpose. The New Yorker has published an incredible streak of stories about women in curious ruralbourgeois settings. Usually the stories are by women, and they recall their childhoods or domestic animals they have owned. Often they are by men, however, and they meditate over their wives and their little children with what used to be called “inchoate longings” for something else. The scene is some vague exurb or country place or summer place, something of the sort, cast in the mental atmosphere of tea cozies, fringe shawls, Morris chairs, glowing coals, wooden porches, frost on the pump handle, Papa out back in the wood bin, leaves falling, buds opening, bird-watcher types of birds, tufted grackles and things, singing, hearts rising and falling, but not far—in short, a great lily-of the-valley vat full of what Lenin called “bourgeois sentimentality.”

  Ten years ago, in the St. Patrick’s Day issue, there were two short stories, one by Sally Benson and the other by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sally Benson’s was about an old couple out in the bourgeois rural countryside somewhere, out by the old highway in the “Cozy Nook” tourist home. There is a little cracker-barrel philosophizing about how the times are passing them by, there’s a new expressway over there, a-yuh, a-yuh. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s is entitled “My Father, My Mother, the Bentleys, the Poodle, Lord Kitchener, and a Mouse.” Lord Kitchener is a cat. The story begins with a woman, the “I” of the story, describing in detail the bed she was born in. It had a starched white valance stenciled with dog paws. The story even goes back before that, to her mother’s recollections of her childhood in India.

  Ten years later, in the St. Patrick’s Day issue for 1965, there are two short stories, one by Linda Grace Hoyer and the other by John Updike. Linda Grace Hoyer’s has a grandmother reminiscing about her Hanseland-Gretel, walk-in-the-gloaming childhood somewhere out in a rural bourgeois big house and grounds. John Updike’s is about an unrequited flirtation, over tea, between an A
merican novelist and a Bulgarian poetess, both of them possessed with … inchoate longings.

  But! Shawn knows exactly what these stories are like. He knows exactly what the literati think about them, and he doesn’t care what they think. Shawn has a more serious purpose. He is preserving Harold Ross’s concept of “the casual.” Ross always called the stories in the magazine “casuals,” because that was what they were supposed to be, casual. He didn’t want a lot of short stories full of literary striving, vessel-popping, hungry-breasty suffering, Freudian sex-mushed swooning—this kind of “serious” short-story writing did not fit his English concept of sophistication. Thurber’s farces—they were perfect. Mild reminiscences were fine, the kind somebody might tell you at the Players Club. Clarence Day’s reminiscences of Life with Father—they were first published in The New Yorker and were made into a hit play, and they were casual.

  Unfortunately, since the war, very few good writers have come along who are not in some kind of “arty” tradition, as Ross would have seen it. And Shawn—ever perfect custodian!—has remained faithful to the Ross formula. He has found writers who can write casuals. Of course, there are not many Thurbers around, so he has had to make Clarence Day his working model. Many of the casual writers he has found are women, and so it comes out Life with Mother, but that is all right. Occasionally, and most happily, they are talented writers like John Updike who somehow have a feeling for the formula.

  Furthermore, it may all be the wettest bathful of bourgeois sentimentality in the world, but … it works. Even Lenin would see that and appreciate it. All these stories—Life with Mother, sentimental grandma, inchoately longing Young Homemakers, unrequited flirtation—they, after all, add up to the perfect magazine fiction for suburban women. Not all women but suburban women. The other women’s magazines, such as the Ladies’ Home Journal and Redbook, and McCall’s and Good Housekeeping place somewhat more … elaborate demands upon fiction writers. The stories they run tend to get the girls into bed, and the heroes are often considerably more revved up than they are in The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s stories are more like the stories the other women’s magazines used to run thirty years ago. But—perfect!—since World War II America has … developed … a kind of woman for whom recent-antique women’s magazine stories are just right, especially in The New Yorker. Suburban women!