Edward R. Murrow and the Proximity Effect
On a warm September afternoon in 1940, 1,000 German planes entered British airspace. The sky turned dark on what came to be called “Black Saturday.” The Heinkels moved so slowly you could see the iron crosses on their underwings. It was said to be a terrifying sight, and the roar of the bombers was thunderous. “I’d never seen so many aircraft,” wrote one RAF pilot. “As we broke through the haze, you could hardly believe it. As far as you could see, there was nothing but German aircraft coming in, wave after wave.”1 To an amazed Maurice Wood, in the vicinity of Big Ben, it was the “majestic orderliness” of the bomber formation that was most startling.2
A few minutes later, the East End went up in smoke. From a remote distance, London glowed a fiery red as enormous clouds of smoke rose up over the Thames. It was spectacular, even beautiful, said one observer four miles away from the first wave of bombs.3 It was havoc closer in. You could hear the whistling and then the boom, thump, thump, thump of German bombs. As the air-raid sirens howled, fires sped through dockyards and factories and warehouses and apartments. The flames were like living monsters.4 The streets were strewn with rubble, bricks, and broken glass and everything was black and yellow. Pedestrians lost their shirts and trousers in the suction of the bomb. Whole roads moved like ships at sea, rising and falling, and the bombers just kept coming.5 The Luftwaffe pounded London, leaving over 1,000 dead and 200 injured. The Heinkels were back the next night, waves of them. They would return night after night for two straight months of relentless bombing. By the time the Blitz ended in May 1941, over 40,000 civilians had been killed and nearly 1 million houses had been wrecked in London alone. On average, 150 German bombers flew over London each evening in fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.
Edward R. Murrow seated behind the CBS microphone, 1939. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, LC-USZ62–126486)
By the outbreak of war in Europe, nearly 62 percent of Americans were tuning in to news shows on a regular basis. Newspapers were not forgotten, but they struggled to keep pace. Radio had an obvious edge. It was quicker, free, and permitted multitasking. Moreover, radio transported listeners to the scene of the action.6 The “great miracle” of radio, wrote Rudolf Arnheim, lay in its “overleaping of frontiers.” This was radio’s secret. Radio in effect became a giant ear that extended the range of hearing to distances never before imagined.7 As Hadley Cantril and Gordon W. Allport wrote in a pioneering behaviorist study of radio in 1935, the listener was rarely confined to a single locale but could “jump through time and space with an alacrity that defied” other media. With the right sound effect, the listener could be placed in ancient Rome just as easily as in modern London.8 In the end, it didn’t matter where your Radiola was: radio took you there. You Are There, as CBS soon put it.
For many Americans, “there” was a London besieged by war. Edward R. Murrow covered the Battle of Britain and the nightly air raids on London with legendary brilliance, chronicling the bombardment in detail in his terse, highly descriptive style.9 Amid the acrid smell of high explosives and the piercing sounds of sirens, Murrow found the perfect venue for what would become a new kind of aural literature. Although Murrow has long been known as the founding father of broadcast journalism, he made a less-noticed contribution to literature as the inventor of the radio essay.
During the Battle of Britain, Murrow’s voice was listened to more than any other, and he was soon regarded as the eyes and ears of World War II. Surviving on coffee, cigarettes, and whiskey, Murrow became an icon almost overnight of a new kind of foreign correspondent. At a moment when broadcasting modes were being reinvented, Murrow’s style became a model for other journalists at CBS, especially the so-called Murrow Boys—Eric Sevareid, Larry LeSueur, William Shirer, and even Mary Marvin Breckinridge—who embraced the Murrow style with its drama of the narrative “I,” figurative language, conversational on-air persona, vivid imagery, short understated sentences, and bold sound effects, as an alternative to more conventional journalistic practices. As Eric Sevareid wrote at the time, Murrow was a Boswellian figure who threw out the strict, traditional formulae of news writing in order to achieve a more expressive, if not subjective, vision of wartime London. He was a “literary artist” trying to awaken American listeners to the urgency of the issue before them.10
Though rarely viewed as an essayist, Murrow’s style was essentially a literary feat, the function of which was to evoke a participatory sense of history that would infiltrate the collective mind of an American culture filled with deep-seated isolationist prejudices. While Murrow made no secret of his dread of Hitler, he avoided the kind of editorializing—network broadcast rules strictly forbade any direct expression of opinion—indulged in by radio commentators like Dorothy Thompson, H. V. Kaltenborn, or the BBC’s own J. B. Priestley. Instead, Murrow hoped to re-create for listeners the visceral drama of a war that for many back home was, if not irrelevant, at least unimaginable. To achieve this, Murrow had to construct a new voice for radio, one that could not be mistaken for that of the news commentator, the reigning king of radio nonfiction. Ironically enough, Murrow devised a form of broadcast that had more in common with George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and CBS’s Columbia Workshop than with traditional print journalism. It was a hybrid genre that borrowed from the modernist tradition of literary journalism as well as the emergent form of American radio drama. Like his contemporaries in radio drama, Murrow understood how thematizing radio’s own devices might lead to innovative broadcast work. If Orson Welles took advantage of the news commentator to blur fact and fiction, Murrow used that same figure to suggest a measure of false authority, which allowed him to redefine the terms of radio authenticity according to his own firsthand forays in and around ground zero. Like Archibald MacLeish and Norman Corwin, Murrow was not an adapter but worked with original material. His short, seemingly ephemeral essays in broadcast form were part of a broader literary continuum that, for a while, found a home in radio.
Like everyone else, Murrow took cover on that first day of the bombing of England. With two other journalists, he lay flat on the ground outside of London, as he explained in a CBS broadcast the following night (8 September 1940): “Before eight, the siren sounded again. We went back to the haystack near the airdrome. The fires up the river had turned the moon blood red. The smoke had drifted down till it formed a canopy over the Thames; the guns were working all around us, the bursts looking like fireflies in a southern summer night. The Germans were sending in two or three planes at a time. . . . They would pass overhead. The guns and lights would follow them, and in about five minutes we could hear the hollow grunt of the bombs. Huge pear shape bursts of flame would rise up into the smoke and disappear. The world was upside down.”11 After several months of a so-called Phony War (England waited nine months for the devastating bombardment to begin), there was finally action. Murrow’s broadcast conveys the excitement of witnessing the first significant assault on England. There was no mistaking the meaning of Hitler’s flying armada. War had finally come to England. Murrow’s “report” is not only charged with the thrill of the instant, as if he were waiting for this moment since first arriving in London, but it is also ambitious in a literary sense.12 As with most Murrow broadcasts, it went beyond the mere facts of an event and was rich in metaphor, irony, and high drama, exploring a range of emotions and experiences in subtle ways that surpassed the nightly analysis provided by America’s most well-known commentators. Murrow’s 8 September report describes the “blood red” of the moon, the smoke “canopy” over the river, the “fireflies” bursting from the big gun, “pear shaped” flames, and the “grunting” of bombs. It was not enough to limn each tableau in detail, however; Murrow also wanted to capture the immediacy of the scene, to evoke a you-are-there sensation for American listeners back home, which required a more purposeful use of figurative language. Murrow went out of his way to construct a radio-friendly mise-en-scène that would convey the nearness of war to an audience thousands of miles away.
The vivid picture of London in flames was not unlike the images described by other correspondents in London, such as Ernie Pyle, but Murrow’s metaphors also conveyed important information about himself: his flights of fancy were equal to the menacing flights of the Luftwaffe and called attention to his authorial role. As poet of the rooftop, the bard of shrapnel, Murrow fashioned a persona whose literary ingenuity and on-air presence were constructed to offset the brute erasure of a fascist offensive in what seemed, especially to Americans, like the end of Old Europe. Murrow’s literary persona was not that of the omniscient expert but shared with Orwell’s—and modernism’s—beleaguered narrators the struggle against the nightmare of history. Murrow’s voice was that of a fallible man whose role as foreign correspondent was rendered perilous by the difficulties of knowing how to make sense of the unprecedented destruction caused by the London Blitz.
His literary deftness conveyed much more than information about war’s grim realities to his audience. What Murrow sought to capture in his nightly broadcasts was the visceral (if not vicarious) experience of the upheaval suffered by the English in what was regarded as an extraordinary new phase of warfare, the sustained bombing of civilian targets. The novelty of the Blitz—of “terror bombing”—was as appalling as it was fascinating for many foreign correspondents. The Germans had utilized aerial bombardment before (on Guernica in the Spanish Civil War), but the intensity and duration of the London Blitz was unprecedented: fifty-seven nights of airborne violence. No one knew when or if a bomb would land nearby. It could happen at any moment. Murrow saw in Nazi aggression a threat not just to England but to all free people. The sense of common peril evoked by the imminent threat of bombing became a theme of his broadcasts. That such a danger could be endured was the implied promise of his intrepid on-air persona, which Murrow presented as the gutsy foreign correspondent roused to greatness by danger. The bombing of London brought out the best in Murrow, he wished his listeners to think, just as it brought out the best in Londoners.13
To an ear tuned to the verse plays for radio written by MacLeish and Corwin, Murrow’s metaphors may have sounded familiar. Murrow’s “blood red” moon, for instance, seemed a not-very-distant trace of the “bloody signs” of war described by the Studio Director in MacLeish’s Columbia Workshop radio play Air Raid (1938).14 Such echoes invested Murrow’s persona with a “prestige” quality and helped him position this new genre—what Sevareid called a new kind of “contemporary essay”—on the literary side of nonfiction. As Sevareid saw it, the value and uniqueness of Murrow’s radio essays lay in the fact that they were not radio commentaries, the form that had dominated the airwaves until now and the closest thing to nonfiction on radio.15 The radio commentary—the nightly fifteen-minute sizing up of the day’s events by authoritative radio personalities who enjoyed cult-like following—was, in fact, what the Murrow Boys, as Murrow’s colleagues were called, were up against as CBS’s fledgling news group scrambled to tell its stories.
The traditional radio commentator was a kind of aural columnist who rose to fame in the mid-1930s and remained a leading player in radio until 1950. As war broke out in Europe, twenty commentators broadcast regularly over the networks; by the end of the war that number had increased to an estimated 600.16 The radio commentator made a living by expressing strong opinions and uttering bold turns of phrase (Father Coughlin on the DuPonts: “This family witnessed American liberty in its cradle and is seemingly happy to follow it to its grave”).17 The most popular commentators, like Boake Carter, were indeed “flamboyant and dramatic,” as Sevareid suggested, and eventually got into trouble for being pretentious. Others, like Huey Long and Father Coughlin, were tub-thumpers who could easily (and did) fall into zealotry or demagoguery. Both Carter and Father Coughlin were forced off the air when concerned sponsors flew the coop.18
The more measured commentators, Raymond Gram Swing, Dorothy Thompson, Elmer Davis, and Lowell Thomas, enjoyed longer careers, offering listeners dignified voices to go along with their studious texts. Their broadcasts were often scholarly and worldly and could even resemble an academic lecture, along the lines of Elmer Davis, who favored an erudite style and liked to play the role of what Sevareid called the “public thinker.” CBS’s own H. V. Kaltenborn was by far the most celebrated radio commentator in America during the war, having been catapulted to fame during his exhaustive coverage of the Munich Crisis in 1938. Kaltenborn’s forceful style, his ability to carve up the muddle of European politics into a coherent narrative, lent his voice a professorial authority.19 His broadcasts were virtuoso performances, and his grasp of foreign affairs amazed many. His insistent and assertive, even if slightly overdetermined, manner fascinated listeners, as if Kaltenborn were imposing his American will on un-American material. Kaltenborn’s commanding persona projected an irrefutable air. To some, he seemed omniscient. Like the voice of Oz, Kaltenborn was an oracle at a troubled and confusing moment in time. He saw what was coming and did not mince words when forecasting doom, even if that role seemed to lie outside his task as news analyst. By the conclusion of the Munich Pact, Kaltenborn had become a household name. Radio Daily voted him America’s top commentator. He was awarded honorary doctorates. Hollywood even offered him a role in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (he played himself).20
The commentator, an early exemplar of the talk-radio host, lived by the spoken word. Because his relationship to radio was determined primarily by words and their meanings, he cared little for sound as sound, which was not included in his métier. Not so for Murrow. Murrow’s keen attention to the acoustic effects of the London Blitz was one of the special features of his reports. From the droning noise of the V-1 rocket to the tolling of Big Ben, Murrow’s embrace of nonverbal sound distinguished his essays from the rival broadcasts of the radio commentator. Murrow was especially enamored of the radio close-up. Early on, radio researchers had noted that one distinctive advantage of radio over other media lay in its ability to produce “close-ups” of acoustic events, such as the pouring of a drink, the clack of high heels, or the creak of a door. Sound effects were convincing, researchers like Cantril and Allport suggested, because the focal capacities of the auditory imagination play such an important role in sound representation.21 The sound-effects handbooks of the day took pride in describing scenes that could exist only in the listener’s mind, such as a Parisian sewer in Welles’s 1937 radio adaptation of Les Misérables (evoked by the “close-up” sound of Jean Valjean wading through water).22
For Murrow, the radio “close-up” was crucial to surmounting the great distance between continents, and for this reason he liked to imagine that his broadcasts would bring the war in Europe “much nearer to the wheat farmer in Kansas than any official communiqué.”23 Murrow relied heavily on what I call the proximity effect not only to close the gap between London and Kansas, but also to play out his idea of the radio essay. In radio, the proximity effect is a referential gesture that seeks spatial nearness to an acoustic source in order to localize meaning, as if language were not up to the task. When, for instance, Carl Phillips moves closer to the strange humming sound in the War of the Worlds, aiming his microphone at the sphere, he casts the meaning of the event as a function of the presence of sound. “Listen,” he instructs his audience, “I’ll move the microphone nearer.” In sound representation, the proximity effect is a focal maneuver that plays up the acoustic signifier over the signified. “No one,” Murrow reported in March 1941, “will ever describe adequately just what it feels like to sit in London with German bombs ripping in the air, shaking the buildings, and causing the lights to flicker, while you listen to the German radio broadcasting Wagner or Bavarian folk music.” This is partly why Murrow and his followers insisted on the importance of the on-the-spot immediacy of CBS’s new broadcasts.24 The radio commentator was typically studio-bound—in his commentaries there was no there there. The Murrow Boys, however, were in the field, up to their ears in the wreckage of war, flying combat missions with RAF pilots, speeding though air raids in convertibles, ducking bombs on rooftops, watching and listening to the “little people,” as Murrow liked to call ordinary English citizens, promising an unmediated glimpse of a besieged London. However naive, their belief in direct access to the action was part of their quest for presence, without which there could be no real understanding. To know the situation, one had to be there. As Murrow would say in his broadcasts, “Things must be experienced to be understood.”25
From the beginning, Murrow took deliberate measures to promote the impression of immediacy in the CBS-style radio essay. It would need to sound a certain way, which meant it would not sound like Kaltenborn’s or Gram Swing’s or Dorothy Thompson’s commentaries. “I want our programs,” he avowed, “to be anything but intellectual.” They would instead be “down to earth and comprehensible to the man in the street.”26 Murrow’s cadre of reporters would “describe things in terms that make sense to the truck driver without insulting the intelligence of the professor.”27 The goal was to limit as much as possible the emotional distance between the broadcast text and the listener.28
To that end, Murrow fetishized reporting that evoked specific locations, the effect of which was to make Americans understand that the bombing of England was not a remote event, off in the distance and unrelated. His signature opening, “This is London,” made famous by the emphatic “this,” represented a kind of territorial claim on behalf of CBS, as if England were a new frontier and Murrow an explorer. The strategy was as compelling as it was successful.29 In a relatively short time, Murrow came to embody the imperiled London in his broadcasts––was even called its “voice,” as if he had physically merged with the besieged city. Murrow still talking was proof that London had not yet been bombed back to the Stone Age, as many in America half expected. Murrow’s narrative presence was vital to this project, the promise of a participant observer who could not only see but hear what others could not. As an eyewitness to the destruction of London, Murrow pledged to live dangerously, to be near ground zero, documenting the everyday details of death and survival. More than any other foreign correspondent, Murrow relied on an immersive aesthetic that not only legitimized the radio essay as a new acoustic form but also recommended it as the most authentic genre for representing wartime London.
To friends and colleagues, Murrow’s desire to be near or at the scene of a bombing was strange. He seemed to be courting disaster. His boss, William S. Paley, believed Murrow harbored a death wish and instructed him to avoid aerial combat missions.30 Drawn by danger, Murrow presented his ground-zero adventures in his broadcasts as rites of passage, bringing him closer to some kind of indefinable reality that seemed, in the early surrealistic glow of war, difficult to find, especially during the so-called Phony War (as the delay of civilian bombing was called): “Yesterday afternoon I stood at a hotel window and watched the Germans bomb the naval base at Portland, two or three miles away. In the morning I had been through that naval base and dockyard and satisfied myself that the Admiralty communiqués reporting earlier bombings had been accurate.”31 If Murrow brought clarity to his listeners through a painstaking inspection of what he saw, these fact-checking tours often put him in harm’s way, by placing him in the vicinity of falling bombs and flying shrapnel.
Such escapades were risky, but they also played well to listeners back home, as Murrow’s sheer daring became an inseparable part of his broadcast persona. Ever the doubting Thomas in search of the “real,” Murrow demanded to see for himself the damage done by German bombs, refusing to take official communiqués at face value. “I have a peasant’s mind,” Murrow wrote.32 The following week, Murrow again returned to the coast of England on the lookout for bombs, racing over country roads in a convertible two-seater:
The damage done by an exploding bomb to windows in a given area is a freakish sort of thing. A bomb may explode at an intersection and the blast will travel down two streets, shattering windows for a considerable distance, while big windows within a few yards of the bomb crater remain intact. The glass, incidentally, generally falls out into the street, rather than being blown inwards. During the last two weeks I spent a considerable amount of time wandering about the south and southeast coast in an open car. Much of the time was spent in that section which has been termed by some journalists, but not by the local inhabitants, as Hell’s Corner. Now an open car is not to be recommended under normal conditions, for the weather isn’t right, but it’s helpful these days to be able to look and listen as you drive along.33
It was helpful indeed, so much so that firsthand looking and listening became Murrow’s signature method of reportage, an at-the-scene style that distinguished him from his peers.
It is little wonder, then, that Murrow had no tolerance for commentaries on the Blitz from a far-off country.34 In a report from 12 September 1940 (five days after the bombing of London began), Murrow summarized a broadcast by the popular radio commentator Dorothy Thompson. Her talk was sent by NBC from New York via shortwave radio and was a variation of an inspirational speech delivered by Thompson three months earlier in Montreal, also broadcast to London by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In the Montreal talk, Thompson appealed to England’s cultural tradition as a bulwark Hitler would never overcome, urging the British people to put their faith in Winston Churchill and in a history rich with spirits that hovered, in her view, around England: “Around you, Winston Churchill, is a gallant company of ghosts. Elizabeth is there, and sweetest Shakespeare, the man who made the English Renaissance the world’s renaissance. Drake is there, and Raleigh, and Wellington. Burke is there, and Walpole, and Pitt. Byron is there, and Wordsworth and Shelley.”35 Murrow’s criticism of Thompson’s belletristic tropes gave him occasion to subtly pitch his understated and on-the-spot style as a better alternative to the overblown studio commentary. Far away from the bombing, Thompson couldn’t possibly understand what Londoners suffered, Murrow seemed to suggest, not without firsthand experience:
Miss Dorothy Thompson made a broadcast to Britain tonight. Her audience was somewhat reduced, since the air-raid siren sounded just after she started speaking. She informed the British that the poets of the world were lined up on their side. That, she said, was a matter of consequence. I’m not sure that Londoners agreed that the poets would be of much assistance, as they grabbed their blankets and headed for the air-raid shelters. I think these Londoners put more faith in their antiaircraft barrage, which seemed to splash blobs of daylight down the streets tonight. . . . I know something about these Londoners. They know that they’re out on their own. Most of them expect little help from the poets and no effective defense by word of mouth. These black-faced men with bloodshot eyes who were fighting fires and the girls who cradled the steering wheel of a heavy ambulance in their arms, the policeman who stands guards over the unexploded bomb down at St. Paul’s tonight—these people didn’t hear Miss Thompson; they’re busy, just doing a job of work, and they know that it all depends on them.36
Murrow stopped short of calling Thompson’s broadcast corny, but his criticism is clear.
On one level, Murrow’s short broadcast on this occasion saluted (as it often did) the resilience of ordinary people, the everyday scramble of working-class Londoners to survive the devastating bombing. The rescue workers, firemen, ambulance drivers, policemen, nameless parents huddling with children in the London Tube—these were the heroes of Murrow’s broadcasts. On another level, Murrow took exception to Thompson’s out-of-touch musings. To suggest that the good intentions of poets in New York or in Paris or in San Francisco could come to the aid of embattled Londoners seemed, in Murrow’s view, silly. Thompson’s fanciful optimism, Murrow implied, was no match for the reality of bombs and blankets and bloodshot eyes. Thompson’s language was literary and distancing, if not patronizing. It reflected an Edwardian sensibility that sought cover from the Luftwaffe under a belletristic style that was hard for someone like Murrow, who harbored modernist misgivings about such idealism, to swallow. Murrow held to his hard-earned insights into the realities faced by war-bedeviled Londoners, repeatedly insisting that any real grasp of the bombing required immersion in the scene. You had to be there. To Murrow, Thompson’s style of radio commentary seemed suspiciously aloof. Safe in her New York studio, Thompson did not bear witness (as Murrow had) to the suffering and courage of Londoners.37 How could she possibly know their struggle unless she were there dodging shrapnel?38 Murrow’s allegiance to the victims of the Blitz—“I know something about these Londoners”—contained a large degree of moral empathy that could only arise from proximity to the tribulations of Londoners. As uttered by Murrow, the word “know” receives as much emphasis as the demonstrative pronoun in “This is London.” In both discursive moves, Murrow takes ownership of the narrative, inserting himself between the listener and the scene as a mediating consciousness. “These things must be experienced to be understood,” he often said.39 Murrow, of course, was protecting his turf (bombed-out London) from rival broadcasters. He was also branding his own genre, the radio essay, by distinguishing it from commentaries as something unique and authentic.40
Murrow knew that sound was essential to this project, and he was eager to transmit the aural effects of battle back to listeners in Kansas and Missouri. But this was easier said than done. British censorship forbade live locative (scene-specific) broadcasts by foreign reporters for fear of betraying sensitive geographical information, while American network radio banned the use of prerecorded materials. Despite CBS’s embargo on prerecorded sound, Murrow worked tirelessly with the BBC’s liaison office and the British Ministry of Information to ease restrictions on live broadcasts.
Murrow’s determination to feature “atmosphere” in his broadcasts—including the ambient sounds of planes, sirens, ambulances, and antiaircraft—followed the modernist practice of flirting with meaning at the border of sound and noise. He understood that nothing in print could rival the vivid acoustic uproar of recent American radio drama. In July 1940, Murrow witnessed such a moment when encountering a BBC mobile unit on the cliffs of Dover. The van was recording an afternoon skirmish between the RAF and German dive-bombers, which were attacking a British convoy in the English Channel. What caught Murrow’s attention was the sonic dynamics of the BBC report broadcast later in the evening. In his own report that night (14 July 1940), Murrow conveyed his excitement about the ability of the BBC’s audio engineer and reporter to compile a dramatic mix of ambient sound and narration that resembled a play-by-play analysis of a soccer match. The BBC: “You can hear our own guns going like anything now. . . . There’s one coming down in flames. Someone’s hit a German and he’s coming down in a long streak of smoke, coming down completely out of control, a long streak of smoke. The pilot has bailed out by parachute. He’s a Junkers 87 and he’s going flat into the sea. There he goes! SMA-A-ASH! Terrific pummel on the water! . . . There’s a little burst, there’s another bomb dropping.”41 What impressed Murrow most were the actual sounds of guns and planes. As Murrow explained in his own report that same night, British listeners (unlike American radio listeners, he may have thought) were able to hear the “cough of antiaircraft fire and the stutter of machine guns overhead.” They also heard warplanes and bombs.
That the BBC commentator (Charles Gardner) had recorded the sound of war as background to his analysis must have stirred a sense of déjà vu in Murrow, as these were the same sound effects that had been cued up in the Columbia Workshop’s invasion plays. The astute listener might have recognized that two different genres, broadcast journalism and radio drama, were merging in an unexpected moment of radiophonic cross-breeding. As Murrow explained in his report of 19 July: “Roaring out of the loudspeakers of Britain tonight came the thunder of one-thousand-horsepower motors of British fighters as they swept out over the Channel in two flights—the first to engage the German fighter escort and the second to tackle the bombers. Later we heard a description of Spitfires and Hurricanes driving Messerschmitts back toward the French coast.”42 Of Gardner’s commentary, Murrow had little to say other than to marvel at the “faintest trace of excitement in his voice.” He was much more interested in the idea of mixing voice with ambient sound, so as to turn a radio text into a radio play.
How different this was from the standard radio commentary. Live coverage of exciting events was novel to radio listeners on both sides of the Atlantic, and few models existed. Hence it was no surprise that the BBC’s Dover broadcast provoked controversy when some found “the hot little engagement” (as Gardner described the fight) too dramatic and sensational for “news.”43 If listeners had difficulty distinguishing between radio drama and a newscast, they could hardly be blamed. Such ambiguity was an occupational hazard of radio, whose representational codes were still in flux, especially in America, where air-raid dramas had blurred the line between fiction and reality. It is in fact hard to separate Murrow’s eagerness to exploit ambient sounds in his reports from the success of invasion narratives recently made popular on CBS.
CBS executives had reason to be nervous about Murrow’s use of sound effects.44 Barely two years had passed since the network aired Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds. For many, the panic revealed the powers and perils of radio. It wasn’t the idea of Martians that frightened listeners in 1938 so much as the clever simulation of live locative broadcasting. When told by authorities of the prank, many shrugged off reassurances that what they heard was merely a play, a fantasy. As one listener in Brooklyn complained, “What do you mean it’s just a play? We can hear the firing all the way here and I want a gas mask. I’m a taxpayer.”45 The dynamics of locative sound seemed to transcend realism. Sound was an influential medium, no one could deny.46 As CBS executive Ed Klauber professed, “I think we’ve learned something from all this, and that is not to simulate news.”47
One of the early lessons of prestige programming, especially on CBS, was that wordless sounds could have a powerful impact. Sound effects in radio drama were illusions, but in London Murrow was surrounded by the racket of real battle and was vexed by the ban that prevented him from recording it. As one biographer put it, Murrow was “itching” for action and for the ability to capture that action for audiences.48 After pressing the Ministry of Information for weeks, Murrow was finally cleared for a live remote broadcast—the first of which was the CBS program London after Dark, produced in partnership with the BBC and the CBC and featuring eyewitness accounts of bombing from different vantage points in London. The technical provisions of the program allowed Murrow to feature the soundscape of war-torn London, not as a sonic backdrop, but as the very subject of his broadcast. London after Dark took American listeners on a “sound-seeing tour” of blacked-out London. First there was Murrow at Trafalgar Square, then Eric Sevareid at Hammersmith Palais (in the middle of a dance floor while a band played “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” with air-raid sirens blaring in the background) and Vincent Sheean at Piccadilly Circus, followed by BBC interviews with train conductors at Euston Station. The program concluded with a J. B. Priestley commentary from Whitehall.
Murrow himself stood on the steps of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, microphone in hand. Nearby was a BBC equipment van. “This is Trafalgar Square,” he began in London after Dark. Murrow remained quiet for a moment, capturing ambient sounds with his microphone. “The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air-raid sirens. I’m standing here just on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields. A searchlight just burst into action, off in the distance. One single beam, sweeping the sky above me now.” Murrow raised his voice over the screaming ambulances and howling air-raid sirens. Double-decker buses growled by. “We’re just at the entrance of an air-raid shelter here and I must move this cable over just a bit so people can walk in. I’ll just let you listen to the traffic and the sound of the siren for a moment.”49
In Murrow’s radio work, the siren becomes much more than an indexical reference to danger.50 Murrow suspends his own text so that listeners might concentrate better on the rising and falling noise of the air-raid siren, as if it were another voice whose importance called out for a moment of silent respect. Murrow will defer to the siren much the way Carl Phillips yielded to the Martian hum, extending his microphone in the charged air in London after Dark: “The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of air-raid sirens. . . . I’ll just let you listen to the traffic and the sound of the siren for a while.” In the mind of the listener, the mournful howl of the siren becomes a psychoacoustic event with a wide symbolic spectrum; it conveys meaning beyond language and wordlessly captures the supreme terror of invasion. A year earlier, Variety magazine had warned readers of radio’s power to overwhelm listeners with acoustic excitement: “While it does not create the tensions of the day, radio elongates the shadows of fear and frustration. We are scared by the mechanized columns of Hitler. We are twice-scared by the emotionalism of radio. Radio quickens the tempo of the alternative waves of confidence and defeatism which sweep the country and undermined judgment. Radio exposes nearly everybody in the country to a rapid, bewildering succession of emotional experiences.”51 In 1939, networks banned broadcast of an air-raid alert because it was “unneutral,” meaning it was deemed sensational.52
As London after Dark continued, Murrow bent down and placed his microphone on the sidewalk in order to capture the sounds of civilians walking to the Underground shelter. This must have seemed odd to any Londoners passing by, the tall reporter in his formless raincoat squatting on the pavement with his instrument, tethered by a long cable to a BBC van. “I’ll just ooze down in the darkness here along these steps and see if I can pick up the sounds of people’s feet as they walk along,” Murrow said. “One of the strangest sounds one can hear in London these days or rather these dark nights; just the sound of footsteps walking along the street. Like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”
Murrow’s interest in “footsteps”—rather than in the voices of passersby—is motivated by his attraction to acoustic signifiers, to the sound object (l’objet sonore, in Pierre Schaeffer’s terms), as if by word of mouth alone he cannot capture the historical moment. In shifting the center of aural attention from the mouth of Londoners to their feet, Murrow turns away from the expected source of radiophonic meaning—speech and the logocentric—toward what Sevareid had called “the tap-tap-tap of Londoners’ footsteps as they went determinedly about their business.”53 As if anticipating the ephemerality of this acoustic moment, Murrow does not let the sound object speak for itself but instead supplements it with a metaphor: “the sound of footsteps . . . like ghosts shod with steel shoes.”54 It is a broadcast moment that will evoke Ezra Pound’s haiku “In the Metro” (1913): “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.” The contrast between the footsteps and the “grunt of bombs” is arresting. The warscape juxtaposes the noise of battle and civilian endurance. As it turns out, we cannot today detect those footsteps on recordings of the original broadcast—the inaudible footsteps are literally “hearsay.” Luckily, Murrow adds a verbal sign: in this case speech is filling in for an absence Murrow himself could never have predicted.
Considering its technological demands, London after Dark was an ambitious broadcast. But even more noteworthy were Murrow’s novel twists on reporting. By isolating one small part of London’s soundscape, Murrow engages in an act of selective listening that valorizes a single precise element, the footsteps. Jean-François Augoyard and Henry Torgue relate such acts of sonic valorizing to what they call the “synecdoche effect,” the use of intentional listening in organizing sound perception.55 The synecdoche effect was an essayistic trick by Murrow, a swerve from the more spectacular sound of war that was in keeping with his interest in the “little incidents” of wartime London. Murrow imagined it was these small events that conveyed the deeper meaning of London’s air war:
The scale of this air war is so great that the reporting of it is not easy. Often we spend hours traveling about this sprawling city, viewing damage, talking with people, and occasionally listening to the bombs come down, and then more hours wondering what you’d like to hear about these people who are citizens of no mean city. We’ve told you about the bombs, the fires, the smashed houses, and the courage of the people. We’ve read you the communiqués and tried to give you an honest estimate of the wounds inflicted upon this, the best bombing target in the world. But the business of living and working in this city is very personal—the little incidents, the things the mind retains, are in themselves unimportant, but they somehow weld together to form the hard core of memories that will remain when the last “all-clear” has sounded.56
The idea that “little incidents” bore larger meaning accurately captured the spirit of Murrow’s essayism and informed his strategy of selective listening. By isolating “little” sounds to tell a story, Murrow hoped to get around the representational difficulties (the problem of “scale,” as he notes above) that complicated reporting on the war. Murrow’s use of the proximity effect fit these tactics well. Murrow was putting America’s ear to the pavement.57 He could not, nor could his listeners, get any closer than this to wartime London. In such a way, he defined his own stance as a radio essayist as that of a master of acoustic vigilance.58 Microphone in hand, he would draw nearer the temporal flow of the moment, which could be arrested only by bombing.
On 21 September 1940, Murrow made his first live rooftop broadcast from atop the BBC’s Broadcasting House. “I’m standing on a rooftop looking out over London. At the moment everything is quiet.”59 Justly famous, Murrow’s rooftop broadcast is curious for its “blindness.” In the darkness of the blackout, Murrow could only guess where things were. The Blitz was something you could hear but not see—much like radio. When narrating the events of an air raid, Murrow rarely witnessed the source of his sounds. The planes were too high overhead to see, and the antiaircraft fire (despite its bursts of light) was as elusive as the falling bombs in the dark of night. These were disembodied sounds to which he gave a label, as though they were being described by a blindfolded man. “Sometimes when the Germans come over above the clouds,” Murrow reported, “it is possible to hear the whisper of high-flying aircraft and the growl of fighters diving with full throttle, interspersed with bursts of machine-gun fire. But nothing can be seen.”60 Murrow marveled at the invisibility of German planes. There was something “unreal” about this air war. “Much of it you can’t see,” he wrote, “but the aircraft are up in the clouds, out of sight. Even when the Germans come down to dive-bomb an airfield it’s all over in an incredibly short time. You just see a bomber slanting down toward his target; three or four little things that look like marbles fall out, and it seems to take a long time for those bombs to hit the ground.”61
In Murrow’s radio essays, the Blitz was a problematic event that defied common efforts to define its significance. Not only was the constant bombing of civilian targets—for fifty-seven consecutive nights—extraordinary, but the German assault posed perceptual challenges as well. To see in the dark under London’s blackout rules was nearly impossible, and like the V-2 rocket, which arrived without warning, the bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe could not be pinpointed until their detonation (although, ominously, they could be heard). As Murrow told others, “I can’t write about anything I haven’t seen.” But write he did. For Murrow, attentive listening was a critical way around these obstacles. This war was a modernist war, as Murrow intuited, and it required a modernist response. Acoustic vigilance was Murrow’s variation on modernism’s limited perspective.62 In his most forceful broadcasts, Murrow conveyed what could be heard but not necessarily seen.
The screaming of bombs and howling of sirens were recognizable signs, and they were a persistent presence in Murrow’s broadcasts. But even more interesting to Murrow were those sounds that were not so predictable, sounds that could be captured only in acoustic close-ups by selective listening. “One night I stood in front of a smashed grocery store and heard a dripping inside,” he reported on 13 September 1940. “It was the only sound in all London. Two cans of peaches had been drilled clean through by flying glass and the juice was dripping down onto the floor.”63 The dripping juice, like the footsteps at Trafalgar Square, was another “little incident” significantly amplified to a larger magnitude: “the only sound in all London.” Could anything be of less consequence in the midst of an apocalyptic war? If the footsteps (for Murrow) represented the persistence of Londoners in the face of annihilation, the pierced peach cans suggest a different story. Penetrated by flying glass, the slashed cans bleed, their juice dripping onto the floor. What exactly the moment might have conveyed to listeners back home is hard to say—the loss of life, human suffering, or just a destroyed can of fruit—but Murrow’s representation of himself as the perceptive listener, attentive to the eccentricities of meaning, is perfectly clear. That a commonplace can of peaches might hold such significance required some manipulation. Once Murrow’s small, quotidian sounds were isolated as the target of selective listening, they suddenly became bigger and more unusual, their reference points shifting under the literary work of suggestiveness. Murrow’s figurative expressions completed the acoustic close-up by reconfiguring the sound object’s meaning as something striking and uncanny (the footsteps of Londoners were “like ghosts shod with steel shoes”; the dripping juice “was the only sound in all London”).
The closer Murrow brought his listeners to the ordinary objects and events of bombed-out London, the stranger the war became:
The other night . . . I heard a sound as I stood on a street corner. . . . The sound that I heard was caused by the raindrops, but they were not hitting the pavement. It was a crisp, bouncing sound. Some of you have heard that sound as the rain drummed on a tent roof. Three people, old people they were, stood beside me in the rain and murk; they were on their way to the shelters. The bedding rolls were hunched high on their shoulders, and the blankets and pillows were wrapped in oilcloth. And a more chilling, brutal sound is not to be heard in London. As those three people squelched away in the darkness, looking like repugnant humpbacked monsters, I couldn’t help thinking after all they’re rather lucky—there are hundreds of thousands who haven’t even oilcloth to wrap their bedding rolls. Sounds, as well as words, get all twisted in wartime. Familiar harmless sounds take on a sinister meaning. And, for me, the sound of raindrops hitting windowpanes, tar roofs, or tents will always bring back those three misshapen people on a London street corner on a wet November night.64
In this vivid tableau, Murrow isolates the aural signifier (sound of rain), quickly detaching its effect from the expected referent (rainy streets, city weather, wet night), which would reduce the sound of rain to local ambience, mere rainfall. Murrow’s sound object is more peculiar than that. “The sound that I heard was caused by the raindrops, but they were not hitting the pavement.” Instead, the sound of rain was marking off three refugees, making known their plight. The benign raindrops acquire a “sinister meaning” in Murrow’s brooding meditation, just as the refugees come to resemble “humpbacked monsters.” As described by Murrow, the raindrops evoke the pain of displacement, not merely a wet night. The raindrops stir a search for meaning not programmed by experience or by conventional usage. In this gap between the known and the unknown—between rainy weather and the insidious effects of war—the raindrops stray from the rule of expectancy. What we hear gets distorted in wartime, Murrow says. “Familiar harmless sounds take on a sinister meaning.” These shifts in meaning were fundamental to Murrow’s effort to valorize his broadcasts as grounded in a unique kind of modernist awareness—an awareness of something that transcended our usual modes of perception and feeling. Walking the streets of bombed-out London was a growing encounter with a disturbing otherness.
The acoustic alertness of Murrow’s reports is what distinguished his project from the broadcasts of commentators, those studio-bound editorialists who pronounced from afar. Few of his reports were hard of hearing. Even when he could not capture live sound with a microphone, Murrow verbalized what he heard: The V-1 rockets, Murrow reported in 1943, “come over, sounding like a couple of dissatisfied washing machines hurtling though the air”; Berlin was “a kind of orchestrated hell—a terrible symphony of light and flame”; the bombers going out that night sounded like a “giant factory in the sky”; the tanks on the roads “sound like a huge sausage machine, grinding up sheets of corrugated iron.”65 Murrow’s sonic images are rarely objective but instead are idiosyncratic and distinctly figurative, and they project the image of the world as off-kilter (washing machines should not be streaking through the sky). Listeners may have been startled by Murrow’s metaphors, but such quirky imaginings were vital to his radio essays and cast the author as exemplary listener, one with an ear as acute as Poe’s Roderick Usher.
Listening may be a subjective act, but Murrow wishes to turn it into a public event, as if he were a human microphone. Sound, for Murrow, was history’s way of inscribing itself into the imagination of men and women. The sounds of this war—in Murrow’s words, the “stutter of machine guns,” “roaring fighter planes,” “screaming sirens,” “distant crump of bombs,” and endless “clamor of ambulance bells”—had never been witnessed by civilians before. They were unprecedented, defying familiar codes. “Maybe the children who are now growing up,” Murrow wrote, “will in future wars be able to associate the sound of bombs, the drone of engines, and the carrying sound of machine guns overhead with human tragedy and disaster.”66 But until then, Murrow would have to find his own meaning in the moment.
Murrow’s subjective engagement with the warscape of London was unique on radio, and his first-person meditations on the bombing of London marked the arrival of the essay on broadcast radio. For Murrow, the essayistic voice, which is personal and explorative, was a more authentic solution to problems posed by reporting on an anomalous war than the voice of the commentator, aloof and authoritative. Murrow’s broadcasts were at their essayistic best when in search of sound, especially when Murrow himself poked around the rubble of London for the telling sonic quotation.67 In such scenes, Murrow’s efforts to locate the significance of the moment were dependent on his sound-making skills, his ability to provide the eloquent acoustic close-up. Murrow demonstrated that even without a microphone the proximity effect was a powerful device in radio-making, since being close to the source of sound, Murrow seemed to think, was like being near the origin of meaning itself.
In unexpected ways, Murrow’s interest in the proximity effect defined the experience of listening back home as well. As the unpredictability of shortwave radio broadcasts from Europe put the burden of hearing on listeners, this meant that listeners had to draw nearer their radios than ordinarily necessary. They literally had to give the radio their ear.68