Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [140]
“Ross always called the stories in the magazine ‘casuals,’ because that was what they were supposed to be, casual. He didn’t want a lot of short stories full of literary striving, vessel-popping, hungry-breasty suffering...” Short stories have never been called “casuals.” The term means a light article, personal in style and often reminiscent—what used to be called a familiar essay.
“The chief editor can—and is expected to—rewrite the piece any way he thinks will improve it. It is not unusual for the writer not to be consulted about it; the editor can change it without him, something that rarely happens at Time....[where] the writer always makes the changes himself, if possible. Practically every writer for The New Yorker, staff or free lance, goes through this routine, with the exception of a few people, like Lillian Ross, who are edited by Shawn himself.” It is not only usual but routine for the writer to be shown all proposed editorial changes and to be given plenty of chance to argue about them if he disagrees. Nor is it true that a few privileged writers are always edited by Shawn nor that they escape the normal routine. Some of my articles have been edited by Shawn, some not, but the procedure is the same. I agree that a fault of The New Yorker is a tendency to over-edit, as a fault of Clay Felker’s New York is the opposite, but the writer is consulted on all changes. Wolfe’s reference to Time must be “just funning.” I’ve written for Time and the only respect the editors showed for my prose was to leave my name off the final product that emerged from the assembly line.
“Part of Shawn’s job as embalmer is actual physical preservation. For example, there is The Thurber Room...” Wolfe thinks it preciosity that some drawings Thurber made on a wall in one of his offices have not been painted over: “...murals we have here. Museum! Shrine!” Those “people who...talked” gave him a specially bum steer on this museum-shrine, of whose existence I hadn’t previously been aware. He states: (a) the drawings were done “with a big crayon” because Thurber’s sight was failing; (b) the room is “right next to the men’s room because it was hard for Thurber to navigate the halls”; (c) the subjects are “nutty football players or something and a bunch of nuns [and] some weird woodland animals” (I’ll never dig his italics—does he mean football players are nuttier than, say, baseball players? Also note the usual fire-escape clause, “or something”); (d) the Shrine was preserved by mortician Shawn; and (e) it is now occupied by “a writer...[who] understands...nobody touches those walls, no other pictures of any sort go up on those walls.” The facts are: (a) the drawings were done with a thin pencil; (b) the Shrine is next to the ladies’ not the men’s room; (c) there are no nuns and there is a superb self-caricature which anyone but a Wolfe informant would have spotted; (d) the drawings were saved from being painted over not by Shawn but by the room’s present occupant, William Mangold, who (e) is not a writer but an editor and who apparently doesn’t understand, since he has put up on those sacred walls—the drawings occupy a space about ten by four feet on one of them—a bulletin board, two prints, a large calendar, and a larger map. And what if it had been Shawn who had saved these drawings from urban renewal? I don’t see how this would make him an embalmer. Our metropolitan Attila, Robert Moses, is an elderly version of Tom Wolfe; both are depressingly young at heart, both seem to feel somehow threatened by time, age, the past.
“Several years ago....they ‘leaded out’ the lines [of type] a fraction of an inch, put more white space between them. This made the ads—beautiful lush ads!—stand out more...” The space between