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By Root 1139 0

or were you just kidding?” Wolfe: “Well, there were plenty of warnings going around over there. I’m sure he never actually wrote a warning that specific, but I think as the 40th anniversary of the magazine came up this year...they began to reinforce quite heavily their long-standing policy of discouraging articles about themselves.” Tex should have kept his big square mouth shut. Asking a writer like Wolfe to distinguish between what is “true” and what is “just kidding” is looking for trouble. If Shawn didn’t write a warning “that specific,” then how specific? Did he write anything? Does Wolfe know anything, really, beyond his inference (“I think”) from the undeniable fact that 1965 is the 40th anniversary of The New Yorker?

If the editors have any compulsion about putting “everything in writing,” it is negative; they avoid memos with neurotic consistency and are addicted to vocal communication, by phone or face to face. In the six years I was a staff writer on Fortune, two or three front-office memos came to my desk every week; Luce rather prided himself on his inter-office style—“Let neophyte X remember the log-cabin spirit that founded this enterprise,” he once wrote, denying the petition of a newly hired writer for a desk of his own. But it’s dull here, maybe two or three memos a year and on matters like group insurance, no cosa nostra stuff.

Wolfe is comical about those aged office “boys” with their “kindly old elder bison shuffles shoop-shooping along” as they deliver stacks of phantom memos. But in fact all but one of the office boys are in or just out of their teens. (Nobody ever calls them “Boy!”—he must have seen The Front Page on the Late Show.) The exception, who doesn’t wear starched collars, came here not in 1925 or 1935 or 1945 but in 1953, after retiring from service at the University Club. He collects the mail efficiently and, pace the author’s geriatric obsession, without any visible shoop-shuffling.

That “terrific rag-fiber paper” is not used for memos or anything else, useful as such a detail is for creating Wolfe’s atmosphere of prissy elegance. Manuscript paper used to be “maize-yellow” (or orange) but was changed to white a year before Wolfe’s articles appeared. Those other precious color distinctions don’t exist. “Blah-blah-blah” is what journalists, real ones, put in their first drafts meaning look it up. Wolfe lets it go at that, his motto being Si non è vero, è ben trovato—If it isn’t true, it should be. That “unit tasks” are as mythical as the nutty colors he invented for them—“Newboy blue,” “fuchsia demure”—is immaterial in this kind of parajournalism. He is for once right about cerise being used for Rush messages but since all messages for some reason are cerise-Rush this morsel of actuality proves to be a distinction without a difference. And why is “cerise” italicised and why is it “great”? Everything has to be some color.

I apologize for dwelling on trivia but I see no other way of dealing with a rhetoric that builds up, with many little “knowing” factual touches, a general impression which only those with some acquaintance with the subject can detect as unknowing and unfactual. Such readers are always in a negligible minority, else how could our big circulation press exist? Also working for the parajournalist is the tendency of the uninformed, or almost everybody, to accept as truth whatever is boldly asserted as such. Hitler observed that most demagogues are timid and so venture only small lies which are found out because the masses, also petty-minded, can see through the retail lying they do themselves; but the masses will accept “the big lie” because they cannot imagine anyone daring enough to try it. The late Senator McCarthy showed this weakness is not limited to Germans. The difference between Tom Wolfe and such types is that he doesn’t tell lies, big or small, since lying is a conscious process, recognizing the distinction between what is and what it would be convenient to assume is. He seems to be honestly unaware of the distinction between fact and fabrication. You might call