Genius in Disguise

by Thomas Kunkel

  Whatever misgivings he harbored about The New Yorker’s political stance, Ross, this time with Shawn’s counsel, was being much more decisive on the question of journalistic coverage. It was already clear there would be no repeat of its performance in the Depression—no feigned ignorance, no smug detachment. By the fall of 1939, the magazine had engaged Mollie Panter-Downes, who lived in Surrey and had contributed some short stories to The New Yorker, to provide a regular Letter from London. Panter-Downes, who published her first novel when she was just seventeen, was a writer whose grace and restraint mirrored her personality and lent her wartime dispatches complete authority. All that winter, as Britain braced for attack, and then the following summer and fall, when it staggered through the Blitz, her weekly letters were devoured by American readers, received like reassuring notes from a relative at the front, which in a sense she was. In a manner at once elegant and down-to-earth, Panter-Downes transmitted the anxiety and fear, but also the underlying British resolve, and even—Ross thanking his lucky stars—some of the black humor.

  At the same time across the Channel (which, Panter-Downes observed, “has suddenly shrunk in most people’s minds to something no bigger than the Thames”), A. J. Liebling was replacing Janet Flanner. “Genêt” left Paris intending to be away a few months and instead wound up exiled in America for more than five years. Flanner had been pressing for home leave for several years, to address her own exhaustion and to see her elderly mother, who was ill in California. Twice before in the previous year she had stayed put at The New Yorker’s explicit request; this time, increasingly anxious about the deteriorating situation in France, she was resolved to go. In mid-September 1939, just weeks after German tanks had stormed into Poland and with all of France bracing for the worst, Flanner set off for America.

  That October Liebling arrived in Paris in her wake. He was happy enough to be there but somewhat uncharitable about Flanner’s leave-taking, writing later that it was hard to conceive of a journalist “coming away from a story just as it broke.” Flanner was sensitive to the charge; her intention all along, she maintained, had been to return to France in a matter of months, but Ross wouldn’t permit it until her safety could be assured (which was certainly true). Whatever her intent or frame of mind, by the time Flanner actually booked her return passage to Europe in May 1940, the Germans were rolling through Belgium and the voyage was canceled.

  Like everyone else in France, Liebling thought the fireworks were about to begin; instead, he would spend the next seven months covering the “Phony War,” scrambling in frustration for material he considered meaty enough to send back to The New Yorker. But when France did fall in June, it fell shockingly fast. Liebling was chased out of the capital, like the French government itself, to Tours. Eventually he returned to New York for home leave and wrote a two-part reconstruction of the capitulation of Paris, the unthinkable event that, as White noted, finally made the war real for many Americans.

  Back home, Liebling was distressed by the general American apathy—including, in his opinion, Ross’s—toward the war, and in the summer of 1941 he returned to England. The worst of the Blitz was long past, and to some extent Liebling felt he was spinning his wheels again. Yet in digging up and recounting such stories as the nasty (and generally overlooked) pounding that the northern city of Hull had taken in the Battle of Britain, or the success of the BBC’s “V for Victory” campaign, he was serving as a kind of pathfinder for The New Yorker’s daring, unorthodox approach to war coverage. It was the “Reporter at Large” concept gone to battle. Ross and Shawn told him to leave the spot skirmishes, press conferences and predictable features to the newspapers; they wanted the untold story, the story behind the story, the story from the average citizen’s perspective. As Liebling’s biographer, Raymond Sokolov, put it, “In effect, Liebling treated war as if it had been Times Square with bullets. This was exactly the assignment … that Ross intended.”

  Meanwhile, at Ross’s urging, Flanner was channeling her own frustration by starting to cover the war long-distance. Debriefing anyone she could find coming out of France—friends, diplomats, American expatriates—she pieced together in December 1940 a portrait of occupation whose chilling headline said it all: “Paris, Germany.” The first thing all these witnesses agreed on, Flanner wrote in what must have had special resonance for her, was that “anybody who loved Paris and grieves at its plight is fortunate not to see it now, because Paris would seem hateful.” At about this same time, meanwhile, Rebecca West published the first of her occasional reports about the war’s impact on her own household in the English countryside. These more intimate pieces would serve as a kind of counterpoint to Panter-Downes’s letters, which were meant to sum up the news and sentiment of the nation as a whole.

  Throughout 1941, then, with the United States still technically a noncombatant, the war was The New Yorker’s dominant theme and its common thread. The magazine had long since abandoned any pretense to its old carefree tone. Domestic Reporter at Large pieces from shipyards, factories, and recruiting stations focused on American preparedness. Gibbs continued to wring his hands in Comment. Finding himself drafted, newly minted private E. J. Kahn, Jr., introduced readers to “The Army Life,” an engaging, open-ended series that wound up traversing the war from boot camp to the hellish battlegrounds of the South Pacific.

  All the while, Ross continued to search his conscience. By the spring of 1941, he had privately determined that America’s entry into the war was inevitable, but as he told E. B. White, he still wasn’t sure it was a good thing. “War, after all, is simple. It’s black and white,” Ross said. “It’s peace that is complex.”

  ——

  Since it was sunday afternoon when the bulletins from Pearl Harbor reached the East Coast, the New Yorker issue of December 13 was all but locked up. Ross could do little but tear up the Comment page and drop in some spot illustrations with martial themes. Mostly he mobilized the staff to work up war-related stories and art for the following week. They succeeded so well that the December 20 issue might just as well have been called “The New Yorker Goes to War.” All of Talk, all the major stories, the cartoons, even a few of the poems, dealt in some way with the dastardly Japanese or America’s response. It was as if all Ross’s earlier reticence had also been destroyed in the sneak attack.

  Reflecting the national temper, The New Yorker continued in this almost exclusively martial vein for weeks, even months. In time, however, the magazine settled into a more reasonable coexistence with the war, according it preeminence but covering the rest of life too. One could still read about the pennant race, the new books and movies, even stylish getaways that could be reached without burning up a year’s ration of gasoline.

  The New Yorker’s impassioned reaction to Pearl Harbor was not merely Ross making up for lost time; it was also a case of the old reporter responding to the fire bell. Shawn has rightly been given credit for bringing an unprecedented depth to The New Yorker’s war coverage, and one especially detects his hand in its iconoclastic approach and its willingness to gamble. He was what Ross called a good “hunch man,” and when one of his reporters suggested hopping a plane for some remote locale, not really knowing what kind of story he would find there, as often as not Shawn said, “Go.” Sometimes, however, it has been implied that without Shawn The New Yorker might have slighted the war as it had the Depression, and this contention is wrong. As a patriot and an editor, Ross needed no prodding to put The New Yorker squarely behind the war effort once the United States was in it. Unlike the Depression, which was amorphous, hard to understand, and arbitrary in its afflictions, war was a real story. It had action, pathos, and interesting, definable characters. It was about elemental forces: good and evil, life and death. In short, it was irresistible to Ross.

  Of course it takes storytellers to tell stories, and no sooner was America in the war than the drain on Ross’s staff began. The magazine’s talent depletion was so deep and inexorable that before long the editor was
regarding the global conflict as a personal affront, the result of “something I did to God.” Almost every able-bodied man who wasn’t drafted enlisted. The New Yorker service roster would eventually include such mainstay editors and writers as Geraghty, McKelway, Sanderson Vanderbilt, Rogers Whitaker, Geoffrey Hellman, Ted Cook (an idea man and Ross factotum), Hobart Weekes, Gardner Botsford, E.J. Kahn, Jr., John Cheever, Irwin Shaw, and Edward Newhouse. Ross found himself sending off to war some men even less suited to the military regimen, if this was possible, than he and his old Stars and Stripes cohorts had been. McKelway was a sterling case in point. Commissioned an officer in the Army Air Forces, he donned his new uniform one day and headed down to Penn Station and a train bound for his indoctrination. As yet, however, he had not had a single day’s military experience. As he strode through the terminal an enlisted man passed and snapped off a salute. Startled, McKelway responded the only way he knew how—with the three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

  So many staffers were being called up that Albert Hubbell, acting art editor in Geraghty’s absence, was only slightly taken aback when young Truman Capote grandly announced one day that he was through at The New Yorker. It seems he too had received his draft notice and was ordered to appear immediately for a physical. So the next morning Hubbell was surprised to find his unlikely clerk puttering around the office as usual. Hubbell asked why Truman wasn’t down at the induction center. “I’ve been,” he said. “They rejected me for everything—including the WAACS.” (Not long after, Capote would part company with The New Yorker anyway. He had infuriated Ross by purporting to represent the magazine at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, then offending Robert Frost by walking out of the room while the poet was in the middle of a reading.)

  Many of the staffers who were medically ineligible for military service found other ways to contribute. Lobrano, who badly wanted a Navy commission but was rejected for his poor eyesight, secretly worked weekends as a volunteer longshoreman on the Hudson docks. Philip Hamburger, also rejected for bad vision, went to work in the Office of Facts and Figures (later subsumed by the Office of War Information), run by Archibald MacLeish. When he broke the news to Ross, the editor sighed and said, “God bless you, Hamburger, you’re going to work for a horse’s ass.” (Hamburger also recalled that moments later, as he was heading down the hall on his way out, the ever-thoughtful Ik Shuman was suddenly chasing after him shouting, “Youth! Youth! You have a long-distance phone bill outstanding of a dollar forty-one cents.”)

  Ross wanted to do his fair share for the war effort, but watching this brain drain he grew bitter that The New Yorker was unable to wangle any of the draft exemptions that newspapers and other magazines—most conspicuously Luce’s—seemed to obtain so effortlessly. He figured that because his magazine published cartoons and had a sense of humor, it wasn’t deemed as “essential” to the war effort as those other outlets. So the exodus was unabated, and Ross’s paranoia built. At one point he became so panicked at the thought of running low on cartoonists—again, mostly draft-age males—that he arranged to put on “standby” status some of the magazine’s earlier artists, like Alice Harvey, who had long since fallen out of the book—and whose hopes, Hubbell said, were raised cruelly by the gesture.

  Losing writers and artists was bad enough, but the real affliction was the loss of so many editors—Weekes, Whitaker, Vanderbilt, and the like. This created a special hardship on Ross and Shawn, who were putting out the Fact side of the operation, including the weekend deadline material, more or less by themselves. Both maintained brutal hours all through the war, at least six and usually seven days a week. “I am up to my nipples in hot water,” Ross wrote Woollcott in 1942. “This war is much harder on me than the last one.” And he admitted to Katharine White, “The magazine is running us; we aren’t running it.” Cecille Shawn recalls messengers coming by the apartment on Sunday afternoons with stories for her husband to work on. The elderly couriers would sit on a bench in the foyer waiting for Shawn to finish as Cecille plied them with cookies and ginger ale.

  Beyond shredding his staff, wartime visited countless ancillary aggravations on Ross and The New Yorker. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, advertising fell off dramatically, down twenty-five percent from the previous year. Shortly thereafter the civil war against Fleischmann ensued, consuming huge amounts of Ross’s time and psychic energy, as did the Merritt Parkway fiasco. Paper was in short supply; the magazine was forced to use a thin grade of paper, and further rationing was always just around the corner. Staff and resources periodically became so short that several times during the war the editor and publisher seriously considered issuing The New Yorker biweekly, at least in the normally dead months of July and August. (Hardships notwithstanding, they could never bring themselves to do it.)

  Ross fretted over the military censors—his old Stars and Stripes reflexes kicking in—though in fact they proved little problem for The New Yorker. He was constantly pulling Washington strings to get his people assigned where they wanted to be, or where he wanted them to be—preferably at East Coast desk jobs, where they might conceivably lend The New Yorker a hand with some writing or editing on the side. But overseas communications were a recurring nightmare. John Lardner’s dispatch from Iwo Jima was missing in action for days until he learned his cable had been refused—by the New Yorker Hotel. (“I guess I will have to start writing for the pulp hotels,” Lardner joked.) Radiograms often arrived without punctuation; Ross told Rebecca West that it had taken three editors two full days to figure out that the passage in her cable that said “He left England under our law,” which they knew was wrong, should have read, “He left England. Under our law …”

  In this portrait from the early Forties, Ross’s thin smile masks the wartime stress. “The magazine is running us,” he told Katharine White, “we aren’t running it.” (Culver Pictures)

  Taken together, the pressures were enough to kill Ross—or so it seemed. In the bleak February of 1942, his ulcers kicked up so badly that he went into the hospital for two weeks. For all practical purposes, by this point he had already stopped drinking, and his doctors even persuaded him to give up cigarettes, though only briefly. But he was still working ferociously, and taking on the Nazis, the Japanese, Raoul Fleischmann, and the Bronx borough president all at one time had only made matters worse. The pain in his stomach was so debilitating that he was contemplating surgery. He did not relish the prospect of being cut open, and of missing that much work, and since he respected H. L. Mencken’s opinion on medicine, as on so many other subjects, he asked his Baltimore correspondent what he should do. Mencken told him to have the surgery.

  Ross might well have followed this advice but for the fact that he was steered instead to the famed Lahey Clinic in Boston. In late July he had an especially bad attack, and he gravitated to the care of an extraordinary specialist there, Dr. Sara Jordan, who preferred to treat ulcers with a combination of medicine and adjustments in diet and lifestyle. A world-renowned gastroenterologist, she considered surgery for ulcers the remedy of last resort, and she didn’t think Ross, as much as he was hurting, had yet reached this dire pass. To treat the latest flare-up she pumped him full of medication for three solid weeks—“I have taken it every few minutes,” he told Mencken, “through all of the well-known orifices of the body except the ears”—then put the patient on a more general, longer-term regimen. Ross tried his best to follow it—took his pills, watched what he ate, guarded his temper—and the following spring, back at Lahey for a checkup, he was much improved. “I have done everything right but work too hard, and smoke,” he reported to Mencken. “Otherwise, I have been like Christ in my simplicity and patience.”

  Ross was completely won over by Dr. Jordan, who became a good friend, and by her techniques, and he proselytized for Lahey to anyone who complained to him of so much as a stomachache. Even though he didn’t really like Boston itself, through the years he would come back often for routine checkups or treatment, and colleagues teased him
about the veritable apothecary that went everywhere he did. But with Dr. Jordan’s help he finally had his ulcers under something like control, and he always credited her with pulling him through the most stressful period of his life.

  Which is not to suggest that Ross had forsaken worry. In letters to the Whites that were progressively bleaker, he wailed and moaned constantly. In one meandering note to Katharine he actually used the phrase “Life is hell here” twice in the same paragraph. He badly wanted and needed The New Yorker’s First Couple back at the magazine and was not above sprinkling a little guilt on them if it would help do the trick. Finally, in the spring of 1943, he got his first really good news since the start of the war: White was giving up “One Man’s Meat” for Harper’s, and he and Katharine would return to New York and The New Yorker. For some five years White had been able to see through most of Ross’s ploys and stiff-arm most of his lunges, but the editor had made one point that the writer found hard to argue with: at this critical juncture in history, with perspectives sometimes changing literally by the hour, the fresh forum of The New Yorker’s weekly Comment would be infinitely more useful to White than the monthly column in Harper’s. Besides, there had always been an implicit understanding among the three of them that if a time came when the magazine was truly in a jam, the Whites, New Yorker family that they were, would be there for him. Now was that time. “The giants have come down from the hills!” a sarcastic Russell Maloney proclaimed upon their return, but there is no doubt that it was one of the most satisfying days of Ross’s professional life.