Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  CHAPTER 12

  WAR

  Nineteen thirty-nine was a year of colliding sentiments in New York, and the dichotomy was plain in the pages of Ross’s magazine. Like all Americans, New Yorkers were staring at Europe in alarm and disbelief; even for the carefree New Yorker, talk of war was hard to avoid. In his Comment paragraphs on Hitler, Gibbs was less a Cassandra than a derisive heckler, and the magazine’s cartoonists mocked the Nazis and Fascists in their gaudy raiment in a manner that recalled Ross’s lampoon of bedsheet-wearing Klansmen in Judge fifteen years earlier. By contrast, the magazine’s dispatches from Paris and London were simply grim, more so by the week.

  Yet for all this pessimism, optimism was only a train ride away. The 1939 World’s Fair, with its seductive vision of a future in shimmering glass and chromium steel, opened to justifiable fanfare in Flushing Meadows, New York. Ross, whom Thurber pegged as the original gee-whiz guy, was as dazzled as anyone else by the Olympian scale, the fresh thinking, the sheer spectacle of it all. He deployed New Yorker writers and artists as if for battle to cover the exposition: there were covers, Talk stories, and Profiles, even detailed double-page color maps of the fairgrounds. Like millions of other parents, Ross shuttled his child, then all of four years old, out to Queens to show her what kind of world she stood to inherit—assuming there would be a world left for her.

  At The New Yorker they were adjusting to one other major development in 1939, though one that readers didn’t know about and wouldn’t have cared about in any case. The quiet, unassuming William Shawn had been named managing editor for Fact. Week by week, story by story, he was taking over the journalistic side of the operation from St. Clair McKelway, who, as agreed to by Ross, was contentedly returning to writing.

  If some insiders were a little surprised by Shawn’s elevation to what was essentially second-in-command, their reservations had less to do with his editorial skills, which were considerable and well known, than with his utter incongruity with his superior. Where Ross was tall, ruddy-complected, and bristle-headed, Shawn was short (just over five feet five), pinkish pale, and balding. Ross was profane, Shawn punctilious in the extreme. Ross was rowdy, Shawn the picture of calm, a man who moved deliberately and never spoke above a stage whisper, as if conserving his strength for some unforeseen contingency. Ross was a footloose, social animal, Shawn a stay-at-home who seemed intimidated by the technology of modern convenience (his many phobias included riding in automatic elevators or in underground trains).

  Shawn was so decorous that no one, including Ross, ever wanted to hurt his feelings, which is one reason he usually got his way. The only other employee who could even approach him for courtesy was Truax. Of these two colleagues Ross once observed, only half kidding, that “when Hawley and Shawn try to go through a door together, nobody gets through.”

  The contrast between the two men was so pronounced, in fact, that it was easy to miss how at a more fundamental level they were soulmates. Each of them lived for The New Yorker. Each prized good writing, was a fiend for punctuation and accuracy, and preferred the spotlight to be on his writers rather than himself. And each had a passion for discovery; if such a thing was possible, Shawn was even more voraciously curious than Ross. Many people said of him that he simply could not be bored.

  Ross and Patty at the 1939 World’s Fair. (Courtesy of Patricia Ross Honcoop)

  Most important, Shawn’s will was the daunting equal of Ross’s. Someone meeting him for the first time might have taken him for meek, even mousy, but those at the magazine knew that beneath the facade there was steel. Especially where the editorial department’s welfare was concerned, Shawn could be even more hardheaded than his mentor, as Raoul Fleischmann was uniquely positioned to testify. In early 1961, a full nine years after Shawn had succeeded Ross as editor of the magazine, the publisher enlisted Katharine White’s help in persuading “that little devil—pardon me, little angel” to publish a table of contents in the magazine. “I haven’t been an astonishingly influential man since our inception,” Fleischmann admitted to Katharine. “Heaven knows I didn’t have any influence over Ross, and I can’t say I have any over Bill Shawn. I go good with elderly messengers.” (A table of contents didn’t appear in The New Yorker until 1969, the year Fleischmann died.)

  William Shawn began life as William Chon. He was born in Chicago in 1907 to a well-to-do family of Russian Jewish origin. Thinking he might be a writer, he changed his surname early in his career: Shawn sounded more writerly, and could not be taken, like Chon, for an Oriental name. Shawn’s father, Benjamin, ran a successful cutlery store called the Jack Knife Shop. His sensitive son’s interests ran more to music and literature, and the young man attended the Harvard School for Boys, a college preparatory school on Chicago’s South Side. But after two years at the University of Michigan, Shawn gave in to his wanderlust and headed for a more agreeable climate. He spent a few months as a newspaper reporter in tiny Las Vegas, New Mexico, then returned to Chicago as Midwest editor for the International Illustrated News, a Hearst photo service. In 1928, he married Cecille Lyon, a feature writer (and later editor) for the Chicago Daily News. Then, just before the Depression, Hearst closed its Chicago office and Shawn was out of a job. Cecille managed a leave of absence and the newlyweds sailed for Europe and a belated honeymoon. They wound up staying the better part of a year, Shawn picking up odd jobs playing piano in Paris nightclubs. He was an excellent jazz pianist and wrote some music for small theatrical groups. He enjoyed composing so much that he considered doing it for a living, only to find that composers were paid even less than writers. Besides, with no formal training, he thought himself only a capable amateur.

  Back in the States, Shawn did freelance work for the Chicago papers and even published some short fiction in the Sunday supplements under pseudonyms. By now, however, New York was exerting a strong pull on him. From the time he was first exposed to The New Yorker a few years after its inception, he had been enchanted by the magazine. Its literate style, understatement, and progressive approach to news all appealed to his own sense of how journalism should be produced. Almost immediately he aspired to work there, and in 1932 he got his chance. Through her newspaper contacts, Cecille Shawn arranged to have an interview with one of Ross’s lieutenants at The New Yorker, Don Wharton, who was in need of freelance reporters for Talk. When he invited her to give it a try, she mentioned that her husband was a reporter too; might he help? Wharton replied that he didn’t care who did the reporting as long as it was done right.

  Shawn took to the assignment with enthusiasm, if little initial profit. He would dig up information for Talk stories, turning over great piles of notes to E. B. White, James Thurber, or whoever happened to be handling rewrite that week. In return he got all of two dollars for every typeset inch of story that resulted. If a story didn’t run, he didn’t get paid. “It was practically starvation,” Shawn would say years later, but it was also opportunity, and he was shrewd enough to embrace it. His big break came courtesy of Alva Johnston, for whom he sometimes did legwork. The writer found Shawn to be so thorough and scrupulous that he commended him to Ross. Praise from his star Johnston was high praise indeed, and Ross hired Shawn for the Talk staff in 1933.

  A department where writers worked anonymously would seem to have been a natural fit for Shawn, whose reticence even then was almost painful. Yet it turned out that shyness wasn’t his only problem as a writer. Gifted as he might be, and he was gifted, Shawn was incapable of satisfying his own high standards. In more than half a century at the magazine, the only identifiable piece (it was signed “W.S.”) Shawn ever wrote was a 1936 short story called “The Catastrophe.” This was a fanciful, amusing tale of how a meteor destroys greater New York, after which the rest of the world shrugs and goes about its business. Shawn didn’t like “Catastrophe,” and despite the entreaties of his colleagues to compose more pieces like it, he never did.

  Almost from the start it was evident to his editors that Shawn was more comfortabl
e generating ideas than reporting or writing them, and in 1935 Ross obliged him by putting him in charge of compiling ideas for Talk, Comment, Profiles, and other nonfiction pieces. For this, Shawn not only drew on his own sources and observations but scoured the daily newspapers, press releases, and other correspondence that came into the office. He carefully typed up a synopsis of every idea, and each week he would march into the news meeting with a sheaf of these stuffed under his arm. The ideas were debated, and those deemed worth pursuing were parceled out to reporters. The idea job not only accentuated Shawn’s creative streak but forced him to become quickly attuned to what Ross was looking for in New Yorker pieces. He responded with the kind of efficient, organized approach that the editor always marveled at on those rare occasions when he saw it. Little by little Ross brought Shawn along as an editor, inviting him to sit in on story conferences, then easing him into the actual editing of stories. To Shawn, fifteen years his junior, Ross was a strong role model, even a father figure, and the younger editor soaked in everything.

  As was the case with Gibbs and both the Whites, Shawn’s professional experience prior to The New Yorker was virtually nil. Yet Ross could clearly see promise in Shawn’s creativity, in his intellectual range, and in his astonishing capacity to work, which rivaled his own. In 1936 Ross approved his promotion as McKelway’s assistant, whereupon Shawn took on even more responsibility, including editing Comment from time to time. In a letter to White in the summer of 1936, Ross noted of Shawn that “he’s bright, by all indications.” Still, to a degree he remained something of an enigma to the editor. This shy, abstemious young man was the antithesis of the hard-bitten, hard-drinking, boisterous editor of Ross’s experience, and his reserve could be almost unnerving.

  No doubt this was why Ross had some initial reservations about promoting Shawn again when McKelway’s job came open. New Yorker lore has it that his first reaction to the suggestion that he name Shawn managing editor was “Dismiss it from your minds.” Even if the story is accurate—and McKelway, who was pushing for Shawn, never indicated that Ross’s reluctance was truly serious—the editor’s innate confidence in the younger man overcame any lingering uncertainty. Ironically, that famous reserve of Shawn’s turned out to be a useful quality for Ross, for right away it was clear that theirs was a near-perfect match of temperaments—Ross the manic worrier backstopped by the efficient, unflappable Shawn, a person who not only had exquisite editing sensibilities but could get things done. Indeed, long after Ross had given up as hopeless his search for a Miracle Man, one had fallen into his lap.

  William Shawn: Despite a gentle mien, there was nothing timid about his will. (Hilde Hubbuck)

  Ross let his new managing editor run his department as he saw fit, but given his passion for the Fact side of the operation, he and Shawn worked virtually in harness. Shawn not only shared Ross’s taste in stories but enthusiastically embraced Ross’s creed that if an editor edited for himself first, readers would follow. Moreover, since Shawn’s interests encompassed the world, he was well poised to broaden even further what The New Yorker considered its editorial purview—an impulse that was about to come in very handy.

  Still, there were differences to be resolved. One of the biggest was in their respective attitudes toward written communication. Whereas Ross would dash off a letter or memo at the least provocation, Shawn had an almost physical aversion to committing anything (especially himself) to paper. In part because of this—Ross again adapting—the two conducted their business mostly in person. As it happened, their offices were as far away from each other as was possible on the same floor, at the points of a horseshoe on nineteen. Yet they consulted with each other every day. Whether they talked for hours or only a few moments, in Shawn’s office or in Ross’s, they always talked alone, the door closed. In complete candor they could get down to the nitty-gritty of personnel, pay, assignments, and how certain stories were or weren’t progressing.

  Mostly what they talked about, at least for the next six years, was war.

  ——

  On a bright Sunday morning, just hours after Britain and France had declared war on Germany and with the close of the September 9 issue pressing in on him, an uneasy Wolcott Gibbs sat down to reformulate the week’s Comment and grope for some perspective. As he gazed out his office window to catch sight of children on their way to skate in the park, or a nonthreatening plane flying low over the Hudson, the idea of the world being pitched into war again seemed not only unreal but beyond explication. Still, summoning his best impression of E. B. White, he made an eloquent job of it, concluding:

  The ten million men who will die are still just an arbitrary figure, an estimate from another war; the children who will be starved or bombed belong to people we can never know; the bombs themselves will fall only on strange names on a map. It will be another day or perhaps another week before we realize fully the implications of what we’ve read this morning, before the horror is personal and real. As a matter of fact, though, there’s no particular hurry. We’ll all have plenty of time to get used to war. It’s very likely that a good many of us will have all the rest of our lives.

  Well all have plenty of time to get used to war. A tragic and true enough sentiment, to be sure, and yet Ross wondered if he could ever get used to the idea. The fact was, he had seldom been so frustrated. He was desperately trying to figure out the right editorial stance for The New Yorker about the war, wondering how he might reconcile his own isolationist sympathies with a growing chorus demanding that the magazine be more aggressive. Moreover, his professional conscience was three hundred and fifty miles away in a boathouse on a Maine cove, writing for another magazine. “Great pressure is being put on me to have The New Yorker swing over strong to preparedness and the hop-right-over-and-aid-the-Allies viewpoint,” he wrote White in May 1940. “Wish you were here.”

  Up to that point Ross’s magazine had been scrupulously evasive on the question of American intervention. Only a few weeks later, however, when France fell to Hitler, an emotional White wrote a Comment (he still provided items on rare occasions) that for the first time implied that American involvement was not only a military necessity but a moral imperative. “Democracy is now asked to mount its honor and decency on wheels,” he wrote, “and to manufacture, with all the electric power at its command, a world which can make all people free and perhaps many people contented.” At about the same time, a bulletin went out to New Yorker artists reminding them that the hostilities in Europe had rendered much of their work unfunny, and some of it potentially callous. The editors cautioned them to be vigilant, sensitive, and, perhaps above all, flexible. The reality of war was setting in even on Forty-third Street.

  White’s Comment on the fall of France was one of his few contributions during the long prelude to American entry into the war. Ross’s political opinions from this period are known chiefly because he was carrying on an anguished correspondence with White—not as one concerned friend exchanging views on current events with another, but to beg his estranged writer, in increasingly desperate and coercive terms, to send in some Comment to relieve the flagging Gibbs (who was never really at ease with the subject of politics anyway, and particularly the politics of mass destruction). But even Ross’s threat to discontinue Comment, no doubt perceived as the hollow gesture it was, failed to move White.

  Their letters invariably waded into politics because White favored a more aggressive American response in support of the Allies, while the conservative Ross had grave misgivings, both about intervention as policy and about The New Yorker’s thumping the tub in any event. The editor’s letters reveal a man clearly wrestling with himself. The carnage he had witnessed in World War I remained vivid for him, and he could not bring himself to condone another American military adventure except as a last resort. He remained cynical about some interventionists’ true motives. Though the Anglophile in him prayed for Britain (he told a friend, “My very great fear is that the hell is going to be kicked out of England. J
esus”), he suspected that some people wanted the United States to enter the war essentially to preserve the Empire. If he had little use for the hard-line isolationist rhetoric of Lindbergh and others, whose crowd was taken to task in Comment, he didn’t hear anyone—and he was listening hard—making a truly persuasive case for intervention either. As he mulled the issue, he kept The New Yorker officially uncommitted. Now that both Ross’s parents were dead, about the only people in the world the editor ever felt he had to explain himself to were the Whites, and in a June 1941 letter to Andy he tried to do so:

  My decision is that we have been doing it right and that we ought to go on as we have been going, call it slacking, call it escapist, call it what you will. I’ll be goddamned if I’ve got the slightest bit of confidence in the opinions and emotions of all the people who have advised me, denounced me, ridiculed me, tried to lead me, etc. Nor have I any in myself. I have been an earnest clutcher for a straw but I haven’t got ahold of a straw yet. I doubt if there is any mind on earth that [can] work out a solution to the present situation or tell me what I ought to do, in positive action. I am, therefore, for drifting. After a great deal of thought, I think the thing for American publications to do is follow the President, for better or for worse.… I haven’t the confidence in him that a great many of you people have (although he may be just the man for a big philosophical situation such as this), but I don’t see anything to do but do as he says from now on.

  In this view, Ross added, he had been considerably heartened by a recent conversation with his old friend Robert Sherwood. The playwright was then counseling FDR on public relations, so Ross pulled him aside for some advice of his own. “Much to my astonishment,” he said, Sherwood told him that he thought The New Yorker’s wait-and-see editorial position was fine, at least for now. The fact was, Sherwood told him, Roosevelt was similarly inclined; he was determined not to commit the United States to war until the time was right. This struck Ross as reasonable behavior, especially for a Democrat.