Reading Note:
Shibboleths
11 May 2015
The weather, having so recently been unseasonably cold and damp, is now correspondingly warm and humid: we’re at the receiving end of a tropical storm. The building’s air conditioning has not been turned on yet, so I’m dependent upon the kindness of breezes. As anticipated, the apartment has excellent cross-ventilation, and sometimes it is almost windy inside when the air is still on the sidewalk. There is, however, the small matter of humidity, which is always sapping. As a bit of armchair science, I have taught myself that it is not the humidity but the low pressure that wears one out: low pressure allows molecules in the body (and everywhere else) to expand, and, as we all know, expansion leads to oppression. Did I ever tell you that I grew up just a few blocks away from the home of Don Herbert, TV’s Mr Wizard?
Equally ridiculous, I’m afraid, is the first line of co-author Timothy Dwyer’s capsule bio, printed beneath his photograph on the dust jacked of Hissing Cousins: The Untold Story of Eleanor Roosevelt and Alice Roosevelt Longworth (Marc Peyser is the other co-).
Timothy Dwyer was raised on Long Island’s Eaton’s Neck, swimming distance from Theodore Roosevelt’s homestead at Sagamore Hill.
It’s a shibboleth. If you think that that’s an appropriate introduction, and not the worst kind of adolescent boasting cum name-dropping, then kindly get off the bus right now. The statement would be interesting only if we could go back in time, to when Sagamore Hill was new, and there weren’t quite so many souls within swimming distance. Come on: we’re talking Nassau County here, not Mount Desert.
I took a harsh view of Messrs Peyser and Dwyer when I came across a blooper that really ought never to have happened in the first place. That it wasn’t corrected by the co-author who wasn’t responsible, or by the book’s editor(s), shouts to me of End Times. I won’t quote the passage, just the dreadfully wrong attribution:
Lady Astor’s “400 list”
People make mistakes when they’re working in a hurry, but some mistakes are truly unimaginable. Something has to be wrong in the brain of a mind that can put “Lady Astor” on the same circuit as “400 list,” at least when that brain has the resumes of these gents. The list of four hundred names that Ward McAllister is said to have developed with his patroness and protégée, Caroline Schermerhorn Astor — Mrs Astor to you — became a shorthand reference to the cream of New York society, of which Mrs Astor was a pillar. She was painted by Sargent’s teacher, Carolus-Duran, and her dates are 1830-1908. She and McAllister estimated that her ballroom could comfortably accommodate four hundred people, so the story goes. Which of course would have yielded a list of closer to two hundred names, unless this was for a dancing-school class. Which I don’t think so. Mrs Astor came from an ancient Patroon family, and her maiden name pops up all over town. New York town, that is.
Lady Astor — no less presumably Nancy Langhorne Astor than “Mrs Astor” is the subject of the preceding paragraph, and not just any Lady Astor — was the famous hostess of the Cliveden Set, British Tories who were inclined to go on and on appeasing Hitler. Yes! Lady Astor belongs to a decidedly later generation. Her dates are 1879-1964. She came from an ancient Virginia family, and she was the first woman to take a seat as a Member of Parliament. The following tireless story is told:
Lady Astor: Winston Churchill, if you were my husband, I should poison your coffee!
Churchill: Madam, if you were my wife, I should drink that coffee!
It amuses me to think of what kind of list Nancy Astor might have run up. A list of people to be especially mean to, probably. She was very beautiful (one of her sisters was the “Gibson Girl” model), and she was not stupid; but she was a great old dragon. I’m surprised that she didn’t actually poison somebody’s coffee.
The authors’ bios on the Hissing Cousins dust jacket mention that Mr Dwyer has at Time, and that Mr Peyser also worked at Condé Nast Traveler. Both also appear to have worked at Newsweek. Thus they are journalists who have toiled in lush vineyards. Even if they couldn’t keep the actual ladies straight, they ought to have known as well as they know their own names that Lady Astor —> Britain, “400 list” —> New York, and that these wires do not cross. Am I arguing that everybody ought to know about Mrs Astor and her list? Of course not. I’m arguing, however, that anybody who knows enough about it to mention ought to get it right.
Update: And they do get it right, on page 38. But the “Lady Astor” associated with the “400 List” on page 12 is indexed to “Astor, Lady Nancy.”
***
I spent the weekend reading the new biography of Joseph Mitchell, the New Yorker writer who famously showed up for work every day but didn’t produce anything for publication for nearly thirty years. Man in Profile, by Thomas Kunkel, is not a bad book at all. Kunkel’s discussions of Mitchell’s reportorial fabrications are important case studies in the literary breach of journalistic ethics, and Kunkel goes no further than cocking an eyebrow. He never quite says that Mitchell’s deceptions were justified by Mitchell’s achievement — and by achievement here I mean not his “getting away with it” but his having created nonfiction masterpieces that are more fully human because of his manipulations — but his unwavering belief that Mitchell’s work is great literature is exoneration enough.
The problem with Man in Profile is that it is not informed by the prose style for which The New Yorker is famous — a style to which Mitchell made rich contribution.
Like all young reporters, Mitchell was intoxicated by the romance of newspapering in New York. He loved the fact that every day brought a new, unexpected assignment. He thrilled when the newspaper’s huge presses rumbled to life, shaking the building and tingling the nerves. (73)
That’s another shibboleth: if you can imagine reading that passage in The New Yorker, with its sequence of hyperventilating verbs, its jejune second sentence, and the demand for a direct quote posed by the third, then kindly admit that you only look at the magazine “for the cartoons.”
The New Yorker is a great magazine, and perhaps the most vital literary artifact in the English language, not because it publishes ground-breaking articles about important subjects, although it does do plenty of that. (So do a lot of other periodicals.) What distinguishes The New Yorker is its concern for language, for balancing all of the demands that we make of speech. We want clarity, but we want comprehensiveness; freshness, but finish. We want to learn things, but without the tedium of the classroom. We want to be surprised, but never baffled. Other attempts to reconcile these conflicts have always fallen far short of The New Yorker‘s accomplishment. (At Time, for example, the style became precious and self-conscious; I’ll never forget the fatuous self-satisfaction of a pun, made in the late Sixties: “Now that flower children have gone to pot…”) The magazine’s solutions are not the only ones imaginable (nor are they permanent solutions), but they are the most consistent, and also the most highly pitched: the writing at The New Yorker is extraordinarily ambitious. It wants to be read by everyone, but it makes no concession to vulgar banality. It pursues the dream of being smart without being smug, arrogant, or condescending. Finally, The New Yorker treats language not as a sacred transformer but as a wearable garment that, like all clothes, ought to fit comfortably. The greatness is therefore easy to overlook. Celebrating a self-effacing master like Joseph Mitchell may a pastime limited to readers and writers who know how hard it is to write such seemingly easygoing prose, but all will be well so long as Mitchell is generally read.