by Henry Kisor
Psychologists ought to be careful about exaggerating this phenomenon, of building it into a nonexistent barrier between hearing child and deaf parent. They must keep in mind that of all the interlocking relationships children develop with their parents, one of the most important is an unspoken one, a kind of companionable silence. Just as my father demonstrated, with wordless example, how to ride a bicycle, how to catch a ball, how to swing a bat, how to wield a paintbrush, how to hammer a nail, and how to saw a board, so have I shown my sons. Some things can be learned only by showing, not by telling, and if we are lucky, our fathers will have a knack for that. Mine did. And as I watch Colin building a wooden cabinet in the basement or Conan rocketing a line drive into left field, I think I did, too.
Finally, there’s the matter of their father’s position in society. Until recently, most deaf breadwinners worked at menial jobs if they were unlucky and the blue-collar trades if they were lucky. They may have achieved considerable pride and dignity in their work, but early on, their children noticed the low value society placed on their parents’ labor. From a very early age, however, Colin and Conan have been aware that their father occupies a position of some respect and consequence in the community. His name is in the paper frequently, his picture in it every weekend. He serves on committees and juries and often travels on business. Can it be lost on the boys that their father perhaps has enjoyed a larger share of good fortune than some others?
9
In the beginning Colin couldn’t have cared less what his daddy did for a living. When I became book editor of the Chicago Daily News in March 1973, he was not yet four. Besides, the week I was appointed his little brother was born, and that was much more important.
The road from the copy desk to the book editorship wasn’t without false turns and bumpy passages. I’d dreamed of the job since my days as a part-time critic in Wilmington, but such a goal had seemed almost unattainable. I had had little experience as a critic, and assumed that heavy-duty academic credentials were also necessary. All that was needed, it turned out, was a love of books and a willingness to pay a few dirtyfingernailed dues.
In 1970 one of my night desk mentors was elevated to the job of assistant managing editor in charge of features. He suggested I move with him to his new department to get a taste of another kind of journalism. The proposal at first seemed unattractive. Why give up local, national, and foreign news—matters of consequence—for the fluff of society columns, food and fashion stories, and comic strips? That was women’s stuff. Features was where the lady writers hung out, while we hardened cigar chompers held sway in the city room, except for two “girl reporters” who covered “safe” beats such as the library and school boards. (One was Lois Wille, who later would win two Pulitzer Prizes, and the other was Georgie Anne Geyer, later the star of the Daily News’s foreign service and a renowned globe-trotting syndicated columnist.)
But a new wind was beginning to sweep through American daily journalism. We didn’t know it at the time, but events—prodded by the rise of feminism and the Vietnam War—had started to blur the line between journalism aimed at men and that intended for women, as well as the roles of those who did the writing and reporting. A new sense of social responsibility was beginning to seep into the features columns. Coverage of high-society charity balls came to seem less important than stories about birth control and Montessori schools. Service journalism—food and fashion—was still timely, especially in attracting advertising, but was no longer the queen of the features department.
Working the features copy desk gave me experience in handling these broader kinds of stories, which we called, a bit contemptuously in the beginning, “soft” stories. “Hard” stories concerned murders, stock-market swings, and the latest body count in the Ia Drang Valley. I soon noticed that features writers seemed to take a different approach to their subjects. They tended to be more thoughtful, less dependent on formula, and not quite so driven by sensation as their hard-bitten confreres on “cityside.” I began to learn new respect for them.
All this is not to say that copyreading in the features department was an unalloyed adventure. There was also a great deal of routine drudgery that involved checking recipes, clipping canned sewing-column features, and dealing with reader-participation contests, and I hated and was bored by it.
But along with the enervating dog work came other opportunities. Sharing the features department with the “women’s pages” was the arts and amusements department, which covered movies, theater, nightlife, art, classical and popular music—and books. The Daily News’s book section was part of Panorama, one of the country’s first and best weekend arts and entertainment supplements.
At its head was Richard Christiansen, who also doubled as secondstring theater critic behind the distinguished syndicated columnist Sydney J. Harris. Dick (who is now the entertainment editor and theater critic of the Chicago Tribune) is not only a first-rate and demanding “pencil editor” but also every bit as good a writer as any of his critics. A smile of approval from him was and is as rare and bright as a shiny new gold coin. I didn’t think I could meet his exacting standards.
But Van Allen Bradley, the paper’s veteran literary editor and a renowned rare-book specialist, presided over the book columns. Like so many older editors of those times, he loved to take young journalists under his wing and help them along in their careers. He had the time and space to do so, for those were still relaxed days in newspapering, when staffs were much larger and less pressured than they are today.
As soon as I told him that I had written book reviews in Wilmington a few years earlier, he turned to his commodious cabinet of review copies and pulled down a clutch of first novels. Why not try an omnibus review of these? he asked. He liked the result, published it, and paid me the munificent sum of $20, the standard reviewer’s fee of the time.
Van introduced me to the works of Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson, who were not lofty academic theorists but journalists, working critics who rolled up their sleeves and took a reader’s-eye view of newly published books. Not for them the arcane mysteries of textual criticism in the classics but the simple questions: “Is this book worth reading? Why or why not?” Aimed at the intelligent, educated, but nonspecialist newspaper and magazine reader, their criticism was broad, even rough-and-ready, yet rooted in careful scholarship and delivered in graceful prose.
Wilson especially found pearls in places other critics would dismiss as trivial. He thought, for example, that the Sherlock Holmes stories were “literature on a humble not ignoble level. . . . The old stories are literature, not because of the conjuring tricks and the puzzles, not because of the lively melodrama . . . but by virtue of imagination and style.”
These were eye-opening words to a reader who had approached literature chiefly as an exercise in scholarly inquiry, and they made me read Conan Doyle in a new way, as well as Dickens and other authors once considered purveyors of popular trash. Literature, Wilson taught me, belonged to the people, not the professors. He showed how even lowly entertainments could be written with as much skill and insight as works of high culture, and some of them would last.
I soon began to contribute reviews regularly, and after a time also began to write Panorama’s weekly column on paperbacks. By this time I had been “promoted” laterally to production editor for Panorama. The job entailed handling not only all the copy and headlines for the section but also page layout and especially composing-room work, directing printers in the makeup of the pages. But now, for the first time in my newspaper career, my deafness seemed to be a dragging anchor. The composing rooms of the old days were noisy places, filled with the clatter of Linotypes, the rattle of heavy-wheeled page trucks, the hammering of machinists, the whine of conveyor belts whisking copy down from the editors on the floor above, and the shouts of “straw bosses,” or subforemen. I did not have an easy time making myself understood over the din.
At least in the beginning, the printers resented me, and some of th
eir resentment was justified. I had had the misfortune to learn the basics of composing-room tasks from an impatient, high-strung editor who believed the only way to deal with printers was as an adversary who watched their every move critically. Not for a while did I discover that printers, perhaps the most intelligent and thoughtful workers in the skilled trades, responded best to treatment as equals. They had a stubborn pride and would not be pushed.
Not a few, I am convinced, also distrusted me because I was deaf, and for complex reasons. For a long time, the printing trade was a haven for deaf workers, because many of its skills don’t require the ability to communicate easily. On a major metropolitan newspaper such as the Daily News, however, the deaf were limited largely to Linotype keyboarding and proofreading, both solitary pursuits. Foremen passed them the few orders they needed with paper and pencil or in crude sign language. The deaf didn’t work the elite jobs “on the line” as page makeup specialists. And though a skilled worker’s production was respected by his hearing union mates, his inability to communicate easily with them—and sometimes the cultural eccentricities of his deafness—ensured his second-class status. To some of the hearing printers, I was a “dummy” who was trying to rise above his station, and therefore was not to be taken seriously. Many didn’t want to follow my requests. (Not orders; no editor who wants to get his product out on deadline ever gives orders to a printer.)
Also, the early 1970s were a time when everyone knew that cast-metal “hot type” was on the way out, soon to be replaced by phototypesetting and pasted-up page makeup. That new technology would eliminate more than 75 percent of the jobs in the composing room. A few printers regarded my intrusive presence as a deaf editor as part of the wave of the future.
I also received no sympathy from the deaf printers themselves. Why should they have given me any? Not being able to hear didn’t make me one of them—not unless I used sign language. I couldn’t communicate with them any better than could a “hearie” straw boss. I felt awkward among them and they with me.
For many months I truly felt like an outsider in the Daily News’s composing room. The very depths came one Friday afternoon during my first year in the Panorama job. I was having a sweaty, frustrating time trying to communicate with a lone printer, a substitute for the vacationing regular makeup man. There was much to be done on the Panorama pages, just ninety minutes away from final “lockup,” and we were falling further and further behind. I tried to shout above the din of printers a few feet away, hammering together the last pages of the final-markets edition of the Friday paper before its own deadline. The printer, doubly frustrated by the unfamiliar job and the peculiar babble of the editor trying to direct him, turned and threw up his hands before his compatriots. “This dummy!” he shouted.
I saw his words and boiled with rage. The printer was a black man, and I am ashamed to say that I came close to replying in kind, with a racial epithet. But somehow I bit the word down and just glared silently at the fellow, who dropped his eyes in embarrassment as he realized that I had understood him. “I know what you said,” I thought fiercely, hoping he could read my mind as my face grew redder and redder. “And I’m not going to forget.”
We both, however, forgave. Tempers often flared under deadline pressure in the composing room, but real grudges were rare. After that, whenever we passed each other on the composing-room floor, that printer and I would nod silently to each other, sometimes with a slight smile. I don’t know what went through his mind. Perhaps he was acknowledging that I was the aggrieved party in that little dustup and that it was good of me not to take the issue any further.
After the first year, however, the printers and I settled in more comfortably with each other, although some of the old-timers did keep their distance. I became good friends with a few of them, and one even invited me home to the biggest, most elaborate Italian dinner his wife could produce. Winning eventual acceptance by this tough, proud bunch gave me a good deal of satisfaction.
Nonetheless, under the best of circumstances the Panorama job was a difficult, sweaty one, because the composing-room work was squeezed in largely at slack times between the daily paper’s six or more editions. We never locked up more than five minutes before deadline, and many was the time we blew it by ten or fifteen minutes, inviting frenzied phone calls from the pressroom, which had its own deadline. On a few occasions we missed the late commuter trains carrying the early state editions of the weekend paper to the far corners of Illinois, and stern inquiries came down from the front office.
When the book editorship fell open in early 1973, I immediately applied. Dick Christiansen had left the Daily News to take over the helm of a fledgling city magazine, and the book editor, M. W. Newman, moved into his position. Van Allen Bradley had retired just two years before.
The book editorship of a major metropolitan newspaper is a post of some prestige, and it normally goes to a writer or editor of some renown, often a published author. Though I’d had regular weekly bylines as a reviewer and as the contributor of the little column on paperbacks, and had built up a small reputation on the paper as a competent stylist, I was still a nobody. But I held a few good cards.
For one thing, there was only one other applicant from within the paper, a reporter who’d written an excellent literary biography. He was well respected and a better writer than I. But he was also a prickly, difficult fellow, and nobody on Panorama needed another burr under the saddle. Moreover, the paper was not inclined to go outside to hire a distinguished and expensive name. By then the slow leaks in circulation, the paper’s lifeblood, had turned into a raging hemorrhage. Marshall Field, the owner of the paper, had long before ordered budgetary belt tightening, including a clampdown on salaries.
I was available, and I was cheap. The paper could pay me the minimum Newspaper Guild critic’s scale. Nobody knew if I could truly do the job, but I hadn’t bungled the ones I had had, and in some of them I’d even acquitted myself creditably. To some of my superiors I seemed a good risk. Perhaps in the post I could build a wider reputation. Again, as had happened so often in my life, people saw enough potential in me to persuade themselves to take a chance.
In the beginning of my new job, I felt pinched by my inability to use the telephone. Much of the book editor’s life deals with selecting books for review from the hundreds of galley proofs and finished copies that arrive from publishers each week. Once those books are selected, reviewers must be found for them. Fortunately, Van Allen Bradley had built up a thick card file of reviewers, many of them distinguished authors, and his successors had added to it. Picking prospective reviewers for a given book wasn’t a difficult task. Getting hold of them was.
Couldn’t I ask a secretary or an editorial assistant to call them? Why, certainly, the managing editor said, whenever they’re not busy. He was certain they’d be happy to help me out. The features department, however, had a normal complement of secretaries and editorial assistants, which is to say very few—three worn and harassed women to do gofer chores for the whole department of more than fifty reporters and editors. That was all the impoverished Daily News could afford. There are no luxuries at a newspaper on its last legs.
They tried, bless them, they tried. But it just didn’t work. All they had time to say to the prospective reviewers was something rushed and breathless, like “I’m-calling-for-Henry-Kisor-book-editor-of-the-Daily-Newsand-would-you-review-the-new-book-by-so-and-so?”
An abrupt solicitation like that would not do when all the book editor could offer the reviewer was $25 ($50 if he happened to be a famous writer) and the competition paid three, four, or even five times that. No. One had to approach the matter with care and indirection, greasing the way with a little flattery, and persuade the prospective reviewer to appreciate that public understanding of the book at hand would be ill served in the absence of the reviewer’s considered and invaluable opinion.
And if the prospective reviewer asked point-blank if the chances of his next volume earning a noti
ce in the Daily News would be improved by his consenting to take the proffered book, one had to find new ways of saying no without quite appearing to do so. Promises like that couldn’t be kept in book sections so small that barely a dozen volumes could be reviewed each week.
So it fell to the U.S. Postal Service to carry my pleas. As in Wilmington, I felt like a suitor wooing from afar. Three-sentence notes wouldn’t do, either. In the beginning, when I was still new, I’d compose long letters introducing myself as inheritor of the distinguished legacy of the previous book editors, then allowing as how they had spoken so highly of the recipient of the letter, and it was with high hopes on behalf of the eager readers of the Chicago Daily News that I proposed he review the latest book by so-and-so. Much of it must have been nauseating and all of it transparent. Enough of it, however, was sufficiently amusing so that perhaps 25 percent of the prospects said yes.
When they said no, I had to scramble to find another prospect in time to get the book to him and the review back, to get into print just as finished copies of the volume arrived in the stores. After all, there were two other competing book sections in town, at the Sun-Times and the Tribune, and this was the city celebrated in Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page, in which reporters commit all but mayhem to get the story before the competition. Even book editors hate to get beaten.
When time was truly pressing, I’d ask the editorial assistants to make those quick phone calls and hope for the best. Often I’d take the calls home to Debby and explain the situation to her so that she could make them. She never complained and used her best honeyed tones to sweet-talk the reviewers into doing my bidding, and more often than not was successful. However, I always hated to ask her to make these calls. Relying on other people to do my work has always frayed my ego, and it still does. Taking my work home for my wife to do was especially troubling. Deaf people, by and large, dislike being what they consider bothersome to others and will walk an extra ten miles to avoid it. But for me there was no other choice if the job was to be done.