Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [137]
Reviewing a collection of Tom Wolfe’s articles in this paper last August, I considered them as examples of a new kind of reporting that has become widespread, namely, “parajournalism,” a bastard form that has it both ways, “exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.” The articles on The New Yorker, which were not in the book, carry the genre to its ultimate of illegitimacy, or what I hope is such: the free-form shaping of an Image in the manner of a press agent with fewer inhibitions about accuracy than obtains in the more reputable public relations firms. I think it worth examining them in some detail.
The first article is headed: “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!”—a jocose echo of Bernarr MacFadden’s Daily Graphic, whose “bogusity” and “aesthetique du schlock” Wolfe admires: “But by god the whole thing had style.” Or of the extant National Enquirer (“Jimmy Cagney Admits: I HATE GUNS”). Some interpret the whole thing as a spoof—the author when pressed on humdrum matters of fact edges in this direction—but the theory breaks down because there are distinct traces of research. A parodist is licensed to invent and Tom Wolfe is not the man to turn down any poetic licentiousness that is going. He takes the middle course, shifting gears between fact and fantasy, spoof and reportage, until nobody knows which end is, at the moment, up.
Omerta! [he begins] Sealed lips! Sealed lips, ladies and gentlemen! Our thing!....For weeks the editors of The New Yorker have been circulating a warning among their employees saying that someone is out to write an article about The New Yorker. This warning tells them, remember: Omerta. Your vow of silence....
One wouldn’t even have known about the warning...except that they put it in writing, in memos. They have a compulsion in The New Yorker offices, at 25 West 43rd Street, to put everything in writing. They have boys over there on the 19th and 20th floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off each other...because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. “Boy, will you take this, please....” Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars...[who] were boys when they started on the job, but the thing is, The New Yorker is 40 years old...[and] they all have seniority, like Pennsylvania Railroad conductors.
The paper the thousands of messages are on is a terrific rag-fiber paper....Manuscripts are typed on maize-yellow bond, bud green is for blah-blah-blah, fuchsia demure is for blah-blah-blah, Newboy blue is for blah-blah-blah, and this great cerise, a kind of mild cherry red, is for urgent messages...
The name and address are correct. The rest is parajournalism.
No warning, verbal or written, reached me, nor do I recall any such warning in the fifteen years I’ve had an office as a staff writer, nor has inquiry turned up anyone else who does. If Wolfe saw a copy of this (alleged) memo, it is odd, or would be in real journalism, that he doesn’t quote from it. Odder was an admission he made, a few days after his first New Yorker piece appeared, when he and Clay Felker, his editor at the Sunday Tribune, were interviewed on Tex McCrary’s radio program. On the whole, it was a gemütlich session. McCrary: “I felt that Tom Wolfe...used the feather end of the quill rather gently, and tried to tickle.” Wolfe: “That’s right, we were just funning.” Felker: “The New Yorker has pretty much always bored me. It is not my kind of journalism.” McCrary: “Yeah, I’ve got to confess to me it’s the late afternoon of a faun.” But there was one awkward moment. McCrary: “You said in your piece, and I couldn’t tell whether you were writing with tongue in cheek or not, that Mr. Shawn put out a notice that everybody who works for The New Yorker don’t...talk to anybody from the Trib, in effect. Was that true