Masscult and Midcult_ Essays Against the American Grain - Dwight MacDonald [141]
“...Getting hired at The New Yorker is....like fraternity rushing. A person’s attitude is important. Everybody wants to know if the candidate will fit in, if he has the makings of a genuine...[his dots] hierophant....an attitude of—well, humility about The New Yorker and its history.” In the December, 1937, Partisan Review I published a ten-page critique of The New Yorker that was not marked by humility. Its title was “Laugh and Lie Down,” its line was: “The New Yorker is the last of the great family journals. Its inhibitions stretch from sex to the class struggle. It can be read aloud in mixed company without calling a blush to the cheek of the most virtuous banker.” A few months later Shawn asked me to do an article. I did three and in 1951, I became, at his invitation, a staff writer.
Perhaps I am an exception to the (alleged) hierophant-sycophant employment policy, though my neighbors on the 18th floor don’t strike me as especially humble about the magazine and its history. This is a matter of judgment, but my eyes tell me it is untrue that “lately The New Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college.” Why a small person (“physically”) can preserve a collegiate style of dress longer than a large one is not explained, but in any case recent arrivals have been of assorted sizes. Of the three he mentions by name, one is on the tall side and one is gigantic.
“Everything leads back to one man—Shawn. William Shawn—editor of one of the most powerful magazines in America. The Man Nobody Knows.” Except Tom Wolfe, who explains Shawn’s (alleged) personality and thus the (alleged) nature of the magazine he edits by an (alleged) experience in his boyhood that was (allegedly) traumatic: his (alleged) narrow escape from being murdered by Loeb and Leopold. These (allegations) are, in the boldness with which they are asserted, the ease with which they can be refuted, and the scope of the inferences drawn from them, unique in my reading of the American press, aside from certain political fantasias. Extrapolations from zero.
“In this story, one of the stories told repeatedly,” Wolfe begins, “it is May 21, 1924, and Richard Loeb is crouching in the weeds with Nathan Leopold, and he says, ‘Nathan, look! How about William Shawn—’” The words beginning “It is May 21, 1924” are printed in bold italics at the top of an otherwise blank column—New York’s typography is as advanced as its parajournalism, lots of white space in both—as an added kickeroo for the customers, who assume there must be something “in” such a big headline with the exact date nailing it down. But then, Wolfe daringly reverses his field. “Only they don’t tell it too well,” he scrupulously adds, though he doesn’t go so far as to tell who told “this story” or what if anything they knew about it. “In the first place, Loeb didn’t call Leopold ‘Nathan.’ He called him ‘Babe’ or something like that. And they would have never squatted in the grass. They had those great clothes on, they were social, one understands?”
One understands also that the metteur en scène is having it both ways, three ways in fact, first suggesting Shawn was the chosen victim of Loeb-Leopold, then, with an air of large candor worthy of Jeff Peters in O. Henry’s The Gentle Grafter, pooh-poohing this particular story, for all the typographical fanfare. But on such flimsy (“called him ‘Babe’ or something like that”) and whimsical (“those great clothes”) grounds as to suggest he is leaning over backward to be fair, and finally, having established his nothing-up-the-sleeves good faith, re-reversing his field with a sober paragraph—only two words italicised for emphasis in forty-eight lines—whose first sentence strikes the note of austere veridity, Truth naked and unadorned: “What the