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factual errors without necessarily, or probably, changing their general line. Shawn could have benefited by accepting Wolfe’s cards-on-the-table invitation to respond to his “statements”—a ploy for extracting information from a recalcitrant subject that was not unknown at Fortune—only if he had rewritten the articles completely, which would have been improper as well as impractical. Confronted with this situation, Wolfe had three possibilities as a journalist: to find some reliable informants; to look into the back issues; to give it up. As a parajournalist with a reading block, he found another solution: “Ah love! could you and I with Him conspire / To grasp this sorry scheme of things entire / Would we not shatter it to bits—and then / Remould it nearer to the heart’s desire?” We would. He did.

[1] Wolfe unaccountably missed Christina Paolozzi, a young Italian noblewoman who achieved celebdom by no more complicated strategy than stripping to the waist and allowing Harper’s Bazaar to photograph her, from the front. But Gay Talese, an Esquire alumnus who now parajournalizes mostly in the Times—in a more dignified way, of course includes her in his recent collection, The Overreachers along with Joshua Logan, Floyd Patterson, Peter O’Toole, Frank Costello, e tutti quanti.

[2] “Infarcted” sums up Wolfe’s stance: “Pathol. a circumscribed portion of tissue which has been suddenly deprived of its blood supply by embolism or thrombosis and which, as a result, is undergoing death (necrosis), to be replaced by scar tissue.” Necrosis! Scar tissue! Santa Barranza! Eeeeeeeeeee!

[3] Her book, of course, is not part of any “court records,” and her quotations from the Bowman-Hulbert Report, to which Volume 9 of the record described above is devoted, despite her claim that “These reports are quoted in full, except for the unprintable matter,” do not agree with Volume 9. She reprints only a small portion of its 302 pages. The stylistic variations between what she calls full quotations and the psychiatrists’ report there are considerable.

[4] As Hannah Arendt wrote, in a letter the Tribune didn’t print: “The editor is guilty of a ‘passion for anonymity,’ of love for perfection and dedication to his work, of competence, refinement, courtesy and modesty. These qualities ‘add up’ to qualifying him for burying the dead. What then must I do, according to your author, to prove I am alive? I must be vain, blow my own horn, use my elbows, be inconsiderate and above all not polite: my lack of manners, my shouting will wake up the dead! Your author goes on. ‘One means well, of course.’ But this is not a matter of course in literary circles. That to mean well is a matter of course in the offices of The New Yorker belongs among the many qualities that make the magazine unique.”

[5] I found few usable items for my Parodies anthology, for instance, in the hundred years of Punch, whose humor has always tended to be rather broad, and square, which may be why none of the great English parodists, from Calverley to Beerbohm, published much there. The New Yorker, on the other hand, was my chief source for modern parodies.

[6] For the figures in this paragraph I am indebted to Gerald Jonas, as I am to Renata Adler for some of the material on the Loeb-Leopold case. Both are colleagues of mine at The New Yorker and have written a factual analysis of Wolfe’s articles on The New Yorker which will appear in the Winter, 1966, number of the Columbia Journalism Review, along with an evaluation by Leonard Lewin of the journalistic implications of the affair for the Tribune.

Norman Cousins’s Flat World

I have been complaining for a long time without much effect except on those already in agreement (a common deficiency of American kultur-critics from Poe on) that the trouble with our culture is that it’s neither proletarian nor aristocratic but petty bourgeois.[1] Middle-class, middlebrow—the all-too-democratic expression of the first great modern nation to begin its history unencumbered by either a peasantry or a nobility. As de Tocqueville noted, with