by Tom Wolfe
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?
1 With a tip of the hat to Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger and their delightful book The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium: An Englishman’s World (London: Little, Brown and Company, 1999).
2 The term “neurometric” is closely identified with John, who has devised both the Neurometric Battery, a comprehensive system for analyzing brain functions, and the Neurometric Analyzer, a patented instrument for making use of the Battery; but John had nothing to do with Neurometrics, Inc. He describes the Battery in Neurometric Evaluation of Brain Function in Normal and Learning Disabled Children (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989).
3 Recounted by the British prison psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple in the magazine City Journal.
HOOKING UP. Copyright © 2000 by Tom Wolfe. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.picadorusa.com
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under license from Pan Books Limited.
For information on Picador Reading Group Guides, as well as ordering, please
contact the Trade Marketing department at St. Martin’s Press.
Phone: 1-800-221-7945 extension 763
Fax: 212-677-7456
E-mail: [email protected]
Several of these pieces originally appeared, in slightly different form, in The American Spectator, Esquire, Forbes ASAP, Harper’s, New York, The New York Times Magazine, and The Tatler. “Ambush at Fort Bragg” first appeared in Rolling Stone.
First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
eISBN 9781429979023
First eBook Edition : January 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Tom.
Hooking up / Tom Wolfe. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-42023-4
1. Title.
PS3573.0526 H66 2000
813’.54—dc21
00-058748