The 40s: The Story of a Decade (56 page)

O
ne thing will never change: people are interested in other people. Empires crumble, traditions shatter, formats explode, trends wither, boundaries are perforated; what endures is our curiosity to know what’s going on inside the other guy. Magazines thrive because the articles they publish are the bound and printed satisfaction of that curiosity. From the start,
The New Yorker
devoted lots of its prime real estate to what it called Profiles. I’d even argue that Profiles are the single essential unit of
The New Yorker
’s identity, the one element that is indispensable to the magazine.

In the forties, Profiles were different, and maybe even had greater consequence than they do today. We did not know each other back then the way we know each other now. These days, Barack Obama sends us emails; the Pope tweets; celebrity divorces are posted in real time. We know, or, at least, we
feel
that we know, a great deal about people of power and prominence in the world, thanks to the nonstop digital gush of information—personal, professional, significant, ridiculous. In the forties, by contrast, the informational distance between celebrated people and regular people was vast. The people the magazine profiled were usually well recognized, but, for most of the public, they were well out of reach, and they kept tight control over their images. A Profile written at the length and with the intimacy encouraged by
The New Yorker
offered a rare chance to get close.

The magazine in the forties was staffed by giants of the form: E. J. Kahn, Jr., Lillian Ross, Janet Flanner, St. Clair McKelway, Joseph Mitchell. These writers didn’t invent the Profile, but sometimes it feels as if they had. Each had a distinct voice, but their writing had in common a tone of familiarity and authority—qualities that became the mark of a
New Yorker
Profile. Their pieces move at a majestic, leisurely pace. (So leisurely, in fact, that you could probably injure someone if you rolled
up all three installments of Richard O. Boyer’s Duke Ellington Profile and swatted him with it.) There is no paragraph up top announcing the purpose of the Profile or what the subject happens to be selling at the moment. There is no grand summing up at the end of the piece. There is never that self-conscious moment in which the writer makes a plea for taking the story seriously, even when the subject is obscure. A wonderful confidence underpins every one of these stories; it seems that the writers simply believed that their interest in any subject was justification enough for writing about it. As a reader, you notice only the writer’s decisions—what to include, what to examine closely, what to describe. You never feel that the story has been stage-managed by the subject or by a publicist or, for that matter, by an editor with an agenda. Readers sense that the story is authentic, and that it grew out of a genuine interest on the part of the writer, rather than out of a press release. Having grown up in the age of celebrity journalism, I was used to reading articles that were very obviously directed by some interested party. The first time I read these pioneering
New Yorker
pieces, I remember being amazed; I couldn’t believe you could really find stories like this, in which the writer, and not the subject, set the pace.

In many ways, the stories of this period are very external. The war—the hovering, hungry, uninvited guest of the era—is a constant, and so is the tail end of the Depression. Context, in these pieces, is everything; inner life, not so much. After all, this was a decade before psychotherapy got a popular foothold, and many decades before the advent of confessional journalism and the rehab memoir. The classic
New Yorker
Profile rarely speculates on psychology—a predisposition that continues to this day. Instead, clues to the makeup of the subject’s soul are scattered for readers to gather and analyze for themselves. The stuff that would set many writers on fire—scandal, for instance—is handled matter-of-factly and then set in context. For instance, in Janet Flanner’s Profile of Marshal Pétain, she notes that the elderly Pétain manages to preside over Vichy France with remarkable vigor. She then adds, almost casually, that his secret is the regular use of stimulants, probably Benzedrine or ephedrine, and that he valued his doctor so highly that he named him to a government post so he could accompany Pétain to high-level meetings. Marshal Pétain—a drug addict! This shocker would have been front and center in a typical story, and would have undoubtedly been followed by much armchair analysis on Pétain’s psychological wiring. But that’s not the
New Yorker
style and definitely not Flanner’s style, which is to carefully
layer facts around her subject and observe coolly as he or she goes about daily life. The result is more like a complex diorama built around an individual than like a tight-focus portrait against a blank background. Each of these Profiles, then, becomes much more than a sketch of a personality: each is a piece of time and history, channeled through one individual’s life.

The Profiles of this period are so good and so definitive that it seems petty to pick a favorite. But, if I had to choose, I would pick Lillian Ross’s “El Único Matador,” the Profile of the matador Sidney Franklin. There are so many things I love about this piece: Ross’s perfect ear for Franklin’s self-importance
(
“I am A Number One,” Franklin says. “I am the best in the business, bar none”); her comfortable mastery of the facts of the sport; her humor; her respect for her subject even when he seems a little silly; her gift for placing the small story of one obsessed individual into the larger setting of postwar Spain. Ross is very much present in the story, but as the passionate observer, eager to hear and see everything that can enrich the story and help make sense of not only Franklin but also the world around him. “El Único Matador” is a model of how to write a Profile. It is so fresh, so humane, and so vivid that it’s hard to believe it was written more than sixty years ago. It celebrates, most of all, the exquisiteness of human curiosity. I keep a copy of it on my desk when I work, because like all of these great Profiles, it is not only a lesson in how to write but also a lesson in how to live.

APRIL 21, 1945

W
alt Whitman turned in the ablest report last week and wrote the perfect account of the President’s last journey (and the processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night). It was quite natural that he should have, and it was ingenious of the
World-Telegram
to give him the space he deserved on the front page. Walt’s barbaric yawp, his promulging of democracy, his great sweep and love of the people, had been finding political verification during the past dozen years, and when he wrote of the slow and solemn coffin that passes through lanes and streets, through day and night, with the great cloud darkening the land, with the pomp of the inlooped flags, he was simply filing the continuing story of democracy, shoulder to shoulder with the Associated Press.

For a while after the President’s death, our thoughts were cool and amorphous—a private phenomenon which often attends grim public occasions. But a day or so later, in line of duty, we found ourself in the council chambers of those to whom Mr. Roosevelt’s death brought a secret sense of relief and the intimations of new life. It was there, by inversion, amid the hopes and yearnings of these people, that we again felt the flame of the President’s spirit, for here was the welcoming band, the reception committee, ready to reembrace the status quo, the special privilege, the society of the white Protestant élite, the clipped hedge that guards the inviolate lawn. Here were the conciliators, their hands outstretched to scratch the ears of all the dragons he had tilted with—injustice, compromise, intolerance. It was no wonder, as we walked home, that Walt’s old words seemed a perfect fit for the news, no wonder
so many millions were at that moment trembling with the tolling bells’ perpetual clang and muttering under their breath, “Here, coffin that slowly passes, I give you my sprig of lilac.”

· · ·

It seems to us that the President’s death, instead of weakening the structure at San Francisco, will strengthen it. Death almost always reactivates the household in some curious manner, and the death of Franklin Roosevelt recalls and refurnishes the terrible emotions and the bright meaning of the times he brought us through. By the simple fact of dying, he has again attacked in strength. He now personifies, as no one else could, all the American dead—those whose absence we shall soon attempt to justify. The President was always a lover of strategy: he even died strategically, as though he had chosen the right moment to inherit the great legacy of light that Death leaves to the great. He will arrive in San Francisco quite on schedule, and in hundredfold capacity, to inspire the nations that he named United.