by Gay Talese
My uncles then spoke tenderly to her, as did some of the other people who stood behind them. There were a dozen people in the room now, some that I was seeing for the first time. My eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and I noticed on my grandmother’s bureau, next to a crucifix and statue of Saint Francis, some wood-framed photographs, one of which showed my parents at their wedding reception in Brooklyn. As my grandmother sank back onto her pillows, we were ushered out of the room by my aunts and led downstairs, where coffee that had been poured in small cups, and a tray containing cookies and fried pastry, awaited us.
A man of about my age, carrying a child in his arms, called out to Lucio and told him to tell me that he was my first cousin—his father was one of my father’s brothers—and that we had the same first name. He was my height, just as slender, and had dark brown hair and eyes similar to mine. He was wearing overalls, a cotton shirt, and boots crusty with dried mud. After I had embraced him, he asked Lucio to apologize for his appearance, explaining that he had been working in the fields and had come here directly on learning of my visit. He said he was excited and pleased to be meeting me. Then, seeing his young sons standing near the door among a crowd of adults, he waved them over and presented the two of them, ages seven and five. They raised up on their toes so I could kiss them, and the older boy introduced himself in English.
“I am Peppino,” he said.
Later, I met their mother, a cheerful young woman with a round face, who was wearing a slightly oversized faded brown dress that I believed had been on sale a few years before in my mother’s shop. The woman said that her house was next door, and that her grandmother and my grandmother were sisters. She also said that she and her husband were expecting their fourth child in early autumn, adding that they were both very happy about this.
They are happy, I thought, and this impression accompanied me down the hill to the train station. My kinsmen in Italy—so poor, living so simply, so accustomed to hand-me-down clothing—were at peace with themselves, were resigned to their circumstances, were contented in ways that my family in America rarely seemed to be. This was particularly true of my father. He hardly ever smiled and was often contentious. I recall how sensitive and defensive he seemed to be whenever the issue of his failure to revisit Italy arose, and how he took every opportunity to suggest that his homeland was a hopeless and uninhabitable place, fixed in its ways and at fault for making him incompatible with it. Once when a customer in the store was commenting critically about the polluted industrial air hovering over Pennsylvania and New York, my father replied, “Well, if it’s pure air you’re looking for, you’ll find plenty of it in my part of Italy, where the people are practically starving to death!”
On the way back to Naples, I thought about the consequences of leaving home forever; boarding a train, sailing across the ocean, and never returning to one’s country. Lives of succeeding generations were changed forever by this single decisive journey. Were it not for my father’s restive nature and willfulness, I might have ended up working in the fields of southern Italy with my cousin and kinfolk, eagerly anticipating the birth of a child and finding joy in simple pleasures.
You people must get out of here! You must pack your bags and bid good-bye to this place!
I was saying this under my breath to the seemingly complaisant black people I saw shuffling along the sidewalks and the dirt roads of Selma as I explored the ghetto with the deacon from Brown Chapel, collecting impressions for the magazine piece I was writing for the Times in May 1965. As a reporter, I had been trained to be objective, not to become emotionally involved, but in Selma, inwardly at least, I could not help myself—I was reacting critically, even angrily, toward many of these blacks who appeared to be reconciled to their surroundings. On my notepad I made comments that would remain private, but they reminded me of my no-fun father and, alas, myself, and how I had felt about my relatives in Calabria. But I toned it all down for the Times, and in the Sunday paper of May 30, 1965, I wrote:
The rain has stopped in Selma, the storm is over. It is now May and it is a bright hot sun that beats down on Sylvan Street and makes pie crust of bumpy dirt roads, bakes the concrete pavement, scorches the grass. All along Sylvan Street are lined red brick houses, identically designed, and within them live the Negroes who, back in March, were hosts and hostesses to hundreds of whites who came to “make witness” in Selma.…
They are passive Negroes, by and large, and if they are going to make advances, they must be led, must be mobilized, must be marched by civil rights leaders. And today most of the leaders and civil rights freedom-fighters—both black and white—have abandoned Selma. They have either returned to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or Atlanta; or perhaps they have found a new cause in another town … in any case, they are not in Selma, as any tourist who wanders into the Negro quarter of this town can see.
On Sylvan Street, that famous street of so many crowds ago—that street in which Negro and white demonstrators, nuns and S.N.C.C. boys and Radcliffe girls and labor leaders joined hands and stood all day and night in a driving rainstorm and sang “We Shall Overcome”—that street today, deserted except for a few small Negro children playing in the gutter and some adults who slowly come and go, is a street where the Movement is now crawling.
16
ALTHOUGH I HAD LEFT THE STAFF OF THE TIMES AT THIRTY-TWO in 1965, I had since written an occasional book review for the Sunday edition, or an article for the sports section, or an essay for the op-ed page, which welcomed outside contributions; and when I learned in 1990 that the black leaders of Selma were marking the silver anniversary of Bloody Sunday with a large demonstration and a parade, I contacted a senior editor whom I had known from our days together as reporters and asked if he would help get me assigned to cover the story.
I was then fifty-seven and lost in the languor of my book about my Italian ancestry. What I thought I needed was a quick fix, a jolt of journalism to stimulate and motivate me with its urgent expectations, and finally to reward me, however briefly, with a sense of satisfaction and reassurance that a good piece printed in the Times can bring to a long-unpublished writer.
While the ephemeral gratification of daily journalism had not long sustained me even in the early days of my career, it was equally and lastingly true that I had never had so much fun as a writer as when working on daily assignments, hastily leaving the Times building to cover late-breaking events in and out of the metropolitan area, accompanied sometimes by a Times photographer and being joined at the site by my journalistic rivals from other newspapers. Some of these reporters I liked personally, drank beer with on weekends, competed with assiduously on stories, and later shared rides with back to our respective newsrooms to face the deadlines and struggle with our leads and constructions. We were one-day wonders, or so we believed; never before, or since, had I had so many friends and colleagues among my contemporaries with whom I had so many common interests and complaints.
We grumbled constantly about our copyreaders, who were the first people in the newsroom to read what we had written, and they had the authority to arrange our articles and to trim them or rewrite them extensively without consulting us and without removing the bylines that identified us as the authors. We suspected that these desk-bound deprecators and grammatists, these humorless scriveners and censors of our work, privately envied the freedom and the modicum of fame we enjoyed as news gatherers in the outside world; I ordinarily returned home from the newsroom at 8:00 p.m. fearing that one of the heavy-handed copyreaders had mangled my lead, had blue-penciled most of my favorite phrases. Three hours later, I was likely to be found standing on the sidewalk in front of my neighborhood newsstand awaiting the Times delivery truck bearing bundles of the first edition, which would reveal to me whatever butchery had been imposed upon my prose. Even at a distance of many blocks, I could spot the hulking dark truck coming closer and closer through the traffic, its roof rimmed with tiny lights. As it pulled into the curb and as the wire-bound bund
les of the Times were tossed onto the pavement and were clipped open by the news vendor, I stepped forward to buy the paper and flip through it until I found my article and saw how it had survived the scrutiny and judiciousness of the copyreader.
If it had been changed to blunt my meaning or had otherwise been manhandled, I would hurry to a sidewalk telephone and dial the director of the copydesk, asking that my byline be removed from the article. After he had digested my disgruntlement and reviewed what had been done, he would usually say that my work had been improved by the copyreader’s changes and that it might be appropriate for me to be communicating my thanks rather than my displeasure. If I remained adamant, insisting that what had been printed in the first edition under my name was unrecognizable to me—a statement I would shout above the street noise while quoting from a carbon copy of the original, which I had pulled from my pocket—the director would sometimes agree to restore what I had written, and these words would appear hours later in the second edition. If, however, he decided to reprint the copyreader’s version in the second edition, then my byline would be removed.
But this would not be the end of it. A memo describing my agitation with the editing would be placed by the director in the overnight box to be perused on the following morning by the city editor, who disliked hearing about the remonstrations of his reporters against what he assumed to be the emendations of the paper’s standard-bearers on the desks, although such quibbling had become increasingly common among the younger reporters in the newsroom during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The top editor of the Times, the Mississippi-born Turner Catledge, had made it known that he hoped the newswriting would become livelier, saying that the era of just-the-facts journalism was insufficient now that television was the first to reach the public with the text and pictures of late-breaking news. I had been transferred at Catledge’s suggestion from sports to general news in 1958 to become part of his plan to emphasize writing as well as reporting in the main section. But changes occurred slowly at the Times, he once told me, adding that the paper often reminded him of an elephant. It was huge, reliable, and stubborn. It was slow to learn new tricks and was clumsy. If it was expected to dance, it had better dance well; otherwise, it could look mighty foolish in public. He therefore knew that a considerable amount of practice, patience, and time would be necessary to make an impression upon the tradition-bound mind-set existing within the paper’s nerve center, which was its sprawling block-long newsroom occupying the third floor of the fourteen-story Times building on West Forty-third Street. Catledge would sometimes survey the newsroom through the pair of binoculars he held while standing outside the door of his corner office, and what he saw in front of him were endless rows of gray metal desks and multitudes of people seated or strolling about—dozens of senior editors and mid-level editors, and battalions of copyreaders flanked by desk clerks and other supernumeraries, and hundreds of reporters of varying ages and specialties, some of them newly appointed to the staff, like myself, others being senior citizens adhering to the rather fusty, formulaic style of reporting that had been in vogue when the publisher had been Adolph Ochs, who died in 1935. Although the present publisher—Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was married to Ochs’s daughter and only child—was fond and supportive of Catledge, the old guard in the newsroom were stalwart shrine keepers who believed it might be perilous to tinker with the Ochsian formula (straight facts, no frills) and encourage instead a stylish flair that more properly belonged in the newsroom of the Times’s near-bankrupt rival, the New York Herald-Tribune.
The latter was long known as a writers paper, led in the early 1960s by such stars as Tom Wolfe and Jimmy Breslin. The Times had always been a reporter’s paper, a recorder’s paper, one that each day published a record of every fire in New York, the arrival time of every mail ship, the names of every official visitor to the White House, the precise moment the sun set and the moon rose; in its long history, the Times had never hired journalistic stars with a marquee status that made them indispensable to the paper in a box-office sense or any other. The Times was an ensemble. It was a gigantic gray institution of subdued luminosity. And the aging traditionalists, sharing few of Catledge’s concerns about the future impact of television journalism upon the newspaper’s readership, were certain that the continued prosperity of the paper was secure as long as its top executives and its proprietors remained faithful to Mr. Ochs’s dictums.
Allied with this conservative and cautious mode of thinking was my city editor, a stout, stern old-time reporter named Frank Adams, who did not welcome me to his staff with a handshake after Catledge had maneuvered my transfer, nor offer me a raise during the nearly four years I worked under him. But the main enforcer of tradition on the Times was one of its assistant managing editors and its premier deskman, a lean, fastidious, and deceptively ingratiating tyrant named Theodore M. Bernstein, who concealed his disesteem of Turner Catledge with a convincingly gleeful response to the banter and aphorisms that Catledge delivered during editorial meetings—typical Catledge sayings: “Never plow around stumps.” “Don’t overrun more than you can overtake.” “The time to fire a man is when you hire him.” “There is only one indispensable man on this paper, and modesty prevents me from mentioning his name.”—and who revealed his indifference to Catledge’s desires about newswriting by slicing and surgically removing from the paper any turn of phrase, indeed any article in its entirety, that did not conform to what he, Theodore M. Bernstein, believed was properly printable in the Times.
In all my years on the paper I had never once heard it said that Turner Catledge had arrived in the morning expressing any dissatisfaction with what Bernstein had done there the night before. Catledge never revealed himself openly, being characteristically circuitous. He was a tall, ruddy, carefully groomed, chubby southerner who favored dark pinstriped suits and preferred to communicate inferentially through hints, gestures, and what his friends called “Catledgisms.” On those occasions when he felt compelled to redress office misdeeds that he deemed intentional or otherwise an affront to his authority, his form of retribution was typically so subtle that his targets were often the last people to know that they had become his victims. He had risen through the ranks as a political correspondent in Washington, and he had learned at the feet of the capital’s leading wheelers and dealers how to manipulate people, how to stroke and assuage and cajole and eventually achieve his objectives.
Before I left the paper in 1965, my frosty boss Frank Adams had been eased out as the city editor by Catledge, and Theodore Bernstein had been marginalized following the appointment of two newly elevated editors who outranked him and were answerable to Catledge. However, when I first joined the newsroom in 1958, such stratagems were a long way from reality; Catledge was operating slowly and patiently, as befitted the choreographer of an elephant. And young reporters like myself were meanwhile left to fend for ourselves, to complain at our own risk to the copydesk, knowing that our grousing would sooner or later come to the attention of Frank Adams and might result in our not getting an assignment for a few days, or perhaps an entire week. This had sometimes happened to me and to others among my more querulous young colleagues—we were “benched,” as athletes often were by their discontented coaches; in our cases it meant that we sat at our desks for prolonged periods without hearing our names announced over the city editor’s microphone, which was how we were summoned to learn the locale and the subject of our story if Adams had included us on the daily assignment sheet. There were always many more reporters on duty than there were stories to appear in the next day’s paper (management believed it was better to be overstaffed than shorthanded when major incidents unexpectedly occurred) and so having one’s name bellowed through the third-floor sound system was usually music to a reporter’s ears—it signaled that one was chosen, one was in the day’s starting lineup. And while it was considered bad form to ever exhibit an outburst of merriment, satisfaction, or relief, it was nonetheless a common sight in the newsroom for
beckoned reporters to rise quickly from behind their typewriters and to stroll friskily up the aisle toward the big front desk, where the city editor stood waiting, sometimes holding the microphone in front of his chest, as if it were a trophy he was about to award to a worthy recipient. As I sat watching from a rear row in the newsroom, listening intently, hoping that the next name I heard would be my own, I was often reminded of televised scenes from Hollywood on Oscar night, and I also thought back to my boyhood days as an altar boy at High Mass on the Jersey shore, standing at the rail while a priest hoisted his aspergillum in my direction, sprinkling me with holy water ritualizing the renewal of my baptismal vows. Reporters could well believe that they were in a state of grace when facing Adams to receive their instructions; they were true and trusted Times men, and most of them had habitually subordinated themselves to the judgment of the copydesk and were therefore in his favor.
We who were not in his favor rarely reacted with inner feelings of gratitude on those occasions when we were called before him to receive an assignment; far more frequently than otherwise, we commiserated with one another in the back of the newsroom before dispersing ourselves to our appointed destinations, being collectively convinced that each of us had been assigned to cover a story that was uninteresting, inconsequential, and ultimately destined to be cut to shreds by the copydesk, if not killed entirely by Bernstein. When we were proved wrong—that is, when our assignments ended up as page-one stories, drawing letters of approval from readers—then, of course, we took full credit. It had been our writing skills and creative approaches to these assignments that had transformed what had been ordinary to something extraordinary. On the other hand, if our assignments had proved to be as pointless and unpublishable as we had predicted, then all the blame belonged to our superiors. How could any reporter write about something so bereft of substance, so ill-conceived and banal?