Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [139]
His style uses devices of suggestion, powerful as they are crude, which transform the subject so violently as to make it impossible to tell what it looked like in its pristine, or unparajournalized, state. These devices range from exclamation marks, italics, and pregnant dots in the epistolary style of Queen Victoria and our own debutantes (what he can....suggest with a few well-placed........’s!) through a vivid terminology of invented terms like “aluminicron suits” and “‘big lunch’ ties” combined with obscure anatomical words like “ischium” to the grand finale—everybody on stage, please!—which has Shawn musing over the 40th anniversary:
One can envision William Shawn patting the arm of one of his beautifully, not obscenely, beautifully stuffed chairs in his Fifth Avenue apartment, pat pat pat pat pat pat. Pat, he can keep time with one of these...Dixieland records there on the hi-fi....Bix is right in the middle there, in the middle of “I Can’t Get Started”....And—the final brick in the indestructible structure!—one can afford an exclamation point in the privacy of certitude!—his successor, it is said, is Roger Angell. Heritage! Genes! Harmony! Ross! Roger Angell is managing editor under Shawn just as Shawn was managing editor under Ross....and—the Ross cachet that man has. Angell is the son of Katherine Angell and the stepson of E.B. White. Katherine Angell was one of the original staff members...It all locks, assured, into place, the future, and....toot-toot-boopy-clap City Lights pat pat pat Bix! Bix hits that incredible high one, the one he died on, popping a vessel in his temporal fossa, bleeding into his squash, drowning on the bandstand, like Caruso. That was the music of Harold Ross’s lifetime, the palmy days....and here, on that phonograph, those days are preserved....Done and done! Preserved! Shawn, God bless you! Pat pat pat pat pat pat.
The End. It seems impossible but Wolfe has managed to get wrong the only two facts underlying all that echolalia. Shawn may or may not, in the privacy, of his certitude, have picked Roger Angell as his successor, but Angell is now one of several fiction editors and not managing editor, a post that has been unfilled since Shawn left it. And I am informed that Bix Beiderbecke died in 1931 (in bed, of pneumonia) four years before “I Can’t Get Started” was written. He might have been thinking of Bunny Berigan who made two famous recordings of the song—except that Berigan also died in bed, of pneumonia.
“Well all I can say is that it is a great system they have going up there,” Wolfe writes, having set the stage, creating by unfacts and parafacts his tone poem of The Land of the Walking Dead, absurdly ritualized as Mandarin China, solidly ossified as Pharaohnic Egypt complete with (tiny) mummies. “But—nevertheless, people talked. These....[his dots] people talked!” Doubtless, since the omerta Vow of Silence is a myth, but either they were putting him on or they were remarkably poor observers. The errors are of two kinds: innocent and tendentious. The former is the kind of mistake any sloppy reporter might make, such as omitting the third editorial floor, the 18th, giving the wrong address for Shawn’s home at the time of the Loeb-Leopold murder and the wrong floor for his present apartment, and stating the change of printers took place “several years ago” instead of one year before his articles appeared. Since no special point depends on any of these errors, I call them “innocent,” due to mere ignorance and sloth. By “tendentious” mistakes, I mean ones that help the picture of The New Yorker he is trying to create, I mean the uncritical acceptance of whatever rumors, unverified impressions, anonymous anecdotes, and old wives’ tales fit his thesis. They are so abundant that the Augean labor of cleaning them up must be limited to a few of the more egregious:
“...Only the people who were working here when Ross was alive may keep offices in the old donnish clutter, all these things on the walls and so forth....Nobody else may put all those curios up on their