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By Root 1027 0

out of town and disliked by Loeb; and the amorphous, fluctuating group of “prospects” who were later substituted for him precisely because they were his opposite in every way: small, weak, young, in town, not disliked by the murderers. “The plan by this time [early May, 1924] had changed...” the psychiatrists state. “It had been decided to secure any suitable young boy, mainly because he would be easiest to handle, and to select him without any emotion of dislike...They considered half a dozen boys, anyone of whom would do....” As for Wolfe’s “William” being “first”: if any name was “first,” in the sense of being in danger, it was not the shadowy “William” nor the real Shawn (who was not even interrogated by the police) but John Levinson, whom Wolfe doesn’t mention although his name appears throughout the record—he took the stand as a prosecution witness—as the victim selected the day before the murder. Levinson was very small and weak indeed—a nine-year-old fourth-grader at the Harvard School. When they missed him on his way home from school, they settled for Bobby Franks as a target of opportunity.

So there seems to be nothing in it. But suppose there was, suppose “William” had been the future editor of The New Yorker, what follows? Nothing much, I would say. But Tom Wolfe is a “must have” historian: “[He] must have felt as if the intellectual murderers...had fixed their clinical eyes upon him at some point....How could anybody in God’s world be safe if there were people like Leopold and Loeb going around killing people just for the...[his dots] aesthetics of the perfect crime. The whole story, and others about Shawn, supposedly help explain why Shawn is so...[his dots] retiring, why he won’t allow interviews,...why it pains him to ride elevators, go through tunnels, get cooped up—why he remains anonymous, as they say, and slips The New Yorker out each week from behind a barricade of...[his dots] pure fin de siècle back-parlor horsehair stuffing.” A record in the psychiatric standing broad jump, amateur division.

Wolfe’s polemic is sometimes justified, on the sauce-for-the-gander principle, by the fact that The New Yorker has run articles that were highly displeasing to their subjects, such as Wolcott Gibbs’s parody profile of Luce, the series on Walter Winchell and on the Readers’ Digest, maybe even some of my own things. But such articles were in prose, not Wolfese, so the reader could see where reporting ended and interpretation began; they were seriously researched and checked, the facts were facts; and they didn’t go in for amateur psychoanalysis. It didn’t occur to me that a psychobiography of Dr. Mortimer J. Adler was necessary to a critique of his Great Books set any more than in 1937 I had thought of rummaging around in the private life of Ross to explain what I didn’t like about his magazine. The printed record seemed to provide plenty of evidence. Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that Wolfe’s psychological inferences from the non-fact of young Shawn’s involvement in the Loeb-Leopold case are correct, it was gratuitously cruel to rake up this alleged—and indeed, mythical—boyhood trauma, since Shawn’s record as an editor can be evaluated without it.

“He is self-effacing, kind, quiet, dedicated, an efficient man, courtly, refined, considerate, humble and—Shawn uses this quiet business like a maestro.” Anti-alchemy: golden virtues reduced to leaden hypocrisies. I have found Shawn as an editor to be in fact kind, considerate, polite, self-effacing, etc. But Wolfe’s thesis requires that these qualities be interpreted as subtle ploys for domination.[4] His evidence is two anecdotes which, as is his practice, are attributed to no specific source and so are long in the telling since they need rhetorical beefing-up to conceal their factual emaciation. The first has Shawn trudging through a snowstorm at three AM to an un-named writer’s home where, with three inches of Pecksniffian apologies, he pulls an overdue manuscript out of the typewriter and scuttles off in mingy triumph: “Floonk, the door closes.