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By Root 1143 0

Part One was headed “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of The Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!” It sketched in bold strokes, letting the facts fall where they may, an action painting of a bureaucratic, arteriosclerotic, infarcted organism that was dead but didn’t know enough to lie down and of William Shawn, its editor, “the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer” who took over after Harold Ross died in 1952.[2] The second part debunks the magazine itself: “For forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement”—compared, that is, to Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post. There is no space here to consider the truth of these propositions or the methods by which Wolfe attempts to demonstrate them beyond noting that, as a staff writer with an office at The New Yorker for the last thirteen years, I find his facts to be often not such, especially when some atmospheric touch depends on them; his snide caricature of Shawn to be a persona (convenient for his purpose) rather than the real person I know; his evaluation of the magazine to be hung on a statistical gimmick it would be courteous to call flimsy; his research such as it is wouldn’t get by the editor of a high-school yearbook; and his ignorance of The New Yorker’s present and past—he thinks Ross was trying to imitate Punch—remarkable even for a Doctor of American Studies turned parajournalist.

Somehow Tom Wolfe has managed to miss a target broad enough to have profited by some sensible criticism. He has also revealed the ugly side of parajournalism when it tries to be serious: to deal with a forty-year run of a weekly magazine and to fabricate a persona without the collaboration of the person involved. What with his own reading block and Shawn’s refusal to be interviewed—his privilege, I should think, perhaps even his constitutional right, cf., Justice Brandeis on “the right to privacy”—Wolfe was reduced to speculations on the nature of the magazine and its editor. These are sometimes plausible, sometimes not, but they always fit into a pattern that has been determined in advance of the evidence, like Victorian melodrama or the political tracts we used to get from Germany and Russia in the ’thirties. It is not surprising that Wolfe got away with it, making an instant reputation as a rebel and bad man which didn’t do any harm to his book later. The first resource of a parajournalist is that his audience knows even less than he does—and it was a bold, slashing attack on a sacred cow, an Institution, The Establishment. That fellow Wolfe, he really gave it to The New Yorker! David and Goliath. It’s hard for the class-mass audience to see that, today, Goliath is sometimes the good guy. He’s so much less entertaining than David.

“Newspapers are only as good as the ideas and information they succeed in conveying. And this means not only putting facts down on paper, but doing so in such a way that they get off the paper and, in a meaningful and orderly fashion, into the minds of the readers.” When I read these admirable sentiments in an editorial in the New York Herald Tribune of April 19th last, I was puzzled because the day before the Tribune’s Sunday magazine had published the second of two articles on The New Yorker by Tom Wolfe which seemed to me extreme examples of the opposite: their ideas bogus, their information largely misinformation, their facts often non-facts and the style in which they were communicated to the reader neither orderly nor meaningful.

Was this an Aesopian apology by some of the Tribune’s editors, I wondered, for what their colleagues on the Sunday edition had just been up to? Or was the emphasis on getting facts “off the paper and into the minds of the readers”—or rather into their cortical reflexes, for Wolfe’s bazooka aims lower than the cerebrum—a justification of his kind of reportage, so much more readable and, hopefully, sellable than the fact-bound approach of the Tribune’s great solid successful competitor. Whatever its intent, the editorial suggests the Tribune’s dilemma,