In the summer of 1942, I graduated from high school and started classes at Johns Hopkins University. Because of the war, colleges were running full tilt year round, so my transition from high-school senior to college freshman happened immediately. One day I took the commencement tuxedo back to the rental shop and next day I was listening to Professor Francis Murnaghan lecture on differential calculus. This was an alarming experience because, after my first ten minutes in the course, I knew I was going to fail calculus.
Dr. Murnaghan was a spirited, rosy-cheeked gentleman with silvery locks, who spoke with a pronounced Irish brogue. His energetic classroom manner was like a theatrical performance by an Irish character actor with a fondness for pixie roles. He never said “calculus,” but always called it “the calcullus” and urged us to think of it as a beautiful machine capable of doing magic things.
“The calcullus, boys, is a fine and smooth machine,” he was fond of saying. I liked the poetic idea of mathematics as a mechanical magician, but could never grasp how this fine and smooth machine worked or how to make it do its magic for me. I was forever Stripping its gears, or, as Professor Murnaghan put it, “fudging the machine.”
In his brogue the word “fudge” came out sounding like “foodge.” When I made one of my frequent errors, he looked at my computations with alarm, then at me with pain before saying with sorrow, “You’ve foodged the machine, boy. You must never foodge the machine.”
From the first day in calculus I did not understand a thing Professor Murnaghan was trying to teach. Physics left me equally baffled. Dr. Hubbard, the physics professor, was said to be just as brilliant about ergs and dynes as Dr. Murnaghan was about “the calcullus,” and I believed it, because I was hopelessly lost in physics from his very first lecture. Dr. Hubbard’s style was the opposite of Professor Murnaghan’s. No Celtic flamboyance for Dr. Hubbard. He preferred the solemn, plodding, scholarly mumble. His sentences were thick, gray wool. Listening to them made minutes last for hours. His lectures, which began at the cruel hour of eight in the morning, affected me like chloroform. So did the textbook that was supposed to illuminate the lectures. Before the first week was out, I knew I was going to fail physics just as surely as I was going to fail calculus.
Neither course was required by the university. Taking them was my idea. I had picked up the notion, absurd as it turned out, that knowing physics and calculus would help my chances of becoming a navy pilot, which was my career ambition that summer. In the Battle of Midway, fought two weeks before I entered Hopkins, the navy’s carrier-based pilots had not only crippled the Japanese fleet, but also fired me with desire to become a hero of aerial combat. That August I would turn seventeen, and at seventeen I could try to enlist for navy flight training. It was a demanding program and not easy to get into, so I had signed up for physics and calculus to give me an edge.
By my third week on campus I knew it was a terrible mistake. Hopkins was open-minded about such things. I could drop both courses and be free, but doing so would leave my academic schedule full of idle time. That was dangerous. The university had given me a full scholarship for the freshman year with notice that renewal for a second year would require a good academic showing. Without that scholarship I would have to quit college. Herb and my mother were well off, all right, but tuition for a school year at Hopkins was $450, and they were not rich enough to put up that kind of money. Also, since I was living at Marydell Road and riding the streetcar to college, carrying a brown-bag lunch my mother packed every day, I was already imposing on them for free room and board. Having to ask them for tuition money, too, would have been shameful.
I was walking across the campus agonizing about all this one sunny summer afternoon when I saw Charlie Sussman headed my way with a resolute look in his eye. Sussman had been my friend in high school. He was a man of limitless enthusiasms, a Renaissance man, as I thought of him, because he was interested in absolutely everything. The range of his enthusiasms was frightening. In high school when I was completely ignorant of politics, government, and diplomacy, Sussman was constantly trying to drag me off to meetings of the Current Events Club to hear discussions that would open my mind to the complexity of public affairs. When I was so illiterate about music that I couldn’t understand why my friends were crazy about Benny Goodman, Sussman was urging me to listen to recordings of Kirsten Flagstad so that I might discover the glory of Wagnerian opera.
This day he had the usual gleam in his eye.
“Where you headed, Suss?”
On his way to learn newspaper writing, he said.
My head was filled with airplane fantasies and the agonies of physics lab, where my work on something called the torsion pendulum experiment was becoming a famous joke among my classmates. Newspaper writing? That crazy Sussman. What would he be into next?
Well, he said, he’d seen this notice on the bulletin board in Gilman Hall. The editors of the campus newspaper were going to give an hour talk on news-writing techniques. The session was open to all comers. Why didn’t I join him?
My mind a confusion of airplanes and the torsion pendulum, I said I wasn’t interested. This was a challenge to Sussman’s conviction that everybody ought to be interested in everything.
“Oh come on,” he said. “What else do you have to do?”
A good question. The answer was, “Nothing.”
He led the way to a small sitting room with an upholstered couch and a few chairs. A half dozen other students drifted in and sat down. Then came two older, worldly-looking men who took chairs facing us. Hopkins did not regard journalism as an academic discipline worth the attention of a great university, so gave no courses in it and had no journalism instructors. It did, however, budget a little money for a weekly campus newspaper called the News-Letter. The aged and wise men who now faced us announced that they were editors of the News-Letter, and one started talking about how to write a news story.
“The first thing to understand is the Four W’s…”
I listened with keen interest. Compared to physics and calculus, writing a news story seemed childishly simple. All you had to learn was Who, What, Where, and When, then write a sentence containing that information, and you were writing a newspaper story. It seemed irresistibly easy. Compared to the circulation end of journalism in which I’d toiled so long for Hearst, the reporting side of the business looked like picnicking on clean linen. It certainly seemed like more fun than calculus and the torsion pendulum. I decided I might give it a try.
The News-Letter appeared weekly if the editors were in the mood. Its office was a small room with a few battered wooden desks and a couple of arthritic typewriters in the basement of Levering Hall, which was the YMCA building. I wandered by a few days later, planning to tell the editor I had heard his talk about writing with the Four W’s and thought I could do that if he gave me a tryout. The only people there were the editor and his deputy. They seemed even more awesome than I remembered them. Out of respect, I stood just inside the door waiting silently until they might choose to notice me.
They were mourning the loss of most of their staff to the war. They seemed especially upset about the loss of their feature writer. From their conversation, I gathered he was the finest feature writer in the history of The Johns Hopkins News-Letter. This meant little to me, since I was vague about what a feature writer did.
They finally broke off and I was beckoned forward to state my business.
“I wonder if there’s any possibility you might need somebody to work for the paper.”
The interview was cursory:
“Baker…”
“Freshman…”
“Sixteen, but I’ll be seventeen in August…”
“No, I never worked for the high-school paper…”
The newspaper delivery route had required me to rush home as soon as school was out, so there had been no time for extracurricular activities, but I didn’t go into that. Although innocent about many things, I knew William Randolph Hearst had an evil reputation with college men as a tyrant of yellow journalism, and it seemed unwise to let these polished men of the world know that I had worked as one of his agents.
They studied me with obvious despair. The deputy editor turned to the editor and said, “God has obviously sent us our next feature writer.”
I did not miss the sarcasm.
“Do you write features?” asked the deputy, treating himself to a giggle, very pleased with his wit. I could see he thought me a hopeless case.
I said I didn’t write features, just thought I might like to try out for something on the paper, and had been passing by, thought I might just drop in and ask…
The chief editor interrupted.
“Do you like to dance?” he asked.
“I can’t dance,” I confessed.
“Good,” he said. “Neither can I,” and sent me to interview a student who was planning a tea dance.
I tracked down this impresario in the campus cafeteria. He was an ancient twenty-year-old in a gray three-piece suit with a gold key on a chain dangling across the vest. Black horn-rimmed eyeglasses and meticulously combed black hair completed a portrait of campus power. He was, I later learned, a splendid specimen of the creature referred to in News-Letter headlines as a BMOC. Big man on campus. Over coffee in the cafeteria, I wrung out of him the details of his dance program and committed everything to paper. The News-Letter printed it the next week almost unchanged. I had finally cracked the door into the glamorous newsroom side of the business where Cousin Edwin dwelt.
When the war ended and the navy sent me back to civilian life after two peaceful years of flying over the American southland, I felt too grown-up to go back to school, so toward the end of 1945 I took a job in the post office. The pay was good, but the work made me feel doomed. Every day I rode the number 8 streetcar downtown to the central post office, where a manager assigned me to a filing case. This was a big wooden box with pigeonholes for each of Baltimore’s three dozen branch post offices. A huge batch of incoming mail was dumped in front of me. My job was to scan the address on each letter, determine which branch office it should go to, and slide it into the proper pigeonhole.
Zip codes, which existed only in primitive two-digit form, were still not extensively used by letter writers. As a result, the job at first offered mental stimulation, since I had to learn the correct postal zone for each address that wasn’t accompanied by a zip code. For this I could laboriously consult a booklet the management provided, or yell for help from the old-timers surrounding me.
“What’s Catonsville?” I yelled.
“Twenty-eight,” a voice replied.
“3100 block of North Charles Street,” I shouted. “Is that twelve?”
And back came the reply, “No, it’s eighteen.”
The experienced help was cheerful about educating me, and for good reason. The boredom of the work was so mind numbing that they welcomed excuses to cry out. It was relief from deadly routine. Very quickly I learned Baltimore’s street addresses well enough to make the letters fly into the pigeonholes, but no matter how quickly I cleared away one great pile, another was always immediately put before me. It was my first experience of being inhuman. I felt that I was nothing but a tiny fragment of a gigantic endless belt. The old-timers, seated on their high stools, peering through thick eyeglasses, shoulders rounded by years of boredom, slapping envelopes into pigeonholes hour after hour, day after day, made me wonder if a job with good pay was really all I wanted of life after all.
There was small relief on days the magazines arrived. Because of their size, they had to be filed in huge cases six feet high. For this labor the floor manager chose four or five men younger than most, since the work meant standing for hours and moving hundreds of pounds of printed matter. It was a chance to stand upright, to move around, and chat while we worked. It was a lovely break from the silent, mindless, hunched-over grind of the letter cases.
The great backbreaker was Life magazine. Every Baltimorean with a mailbox seemed to subscribe. Once every week trucks dumped tons of Life onto the unloading platforms. Those were good days. We could be on our feet most of the day, moving, talking, keeping our minds from going to dust. Our talk was not stimulating, just mind-saving chatter and poor jokes, just enough like conversation to remind us we were human. We heaved Lifes and talked about nothing.
“You can have that Sinatra kid. He can’t touch Crosby.”
“I can’t stand either one of them. They don’t sing, they just breathe into the microphone.”
“What are you, one of those opera lovers?”
“Give me Vaughn Monroe any day.”
As a joke we always pronounced Monroe’s first name as “Vawjin”; it was not work that cultivated high wit.
“Vawjin Monroe! You’re kidding.”
“Vawjin can’t sing. He yells everything.”
“That’s what I like about him. I like a singer who opens his mouth when he sings.”
Change of subject:
“I went out to Carlin’s last night to see the wrestling.”
“That’s not wrestling. That’s show business.”
“Some of it’s real though.”
“You’re crazy.”
“No, some of it’s real wrestling. How about Jim Londos, did you ever see Jim Londos wrestle? Are you going to say Jim Londos isn’t a real wrestler?”
“The Golden Greek?”
“If Londos was a real wrestler, he wouldn’t have to go around calling himself the Golden Greek.”
When the Christmas mail rush ended I was ready to go back to college. Thanks to the G.I. Bill of Rights for veterans, which paid tuition and a small living allowance, the old problem of how to meet the bills no longer existed. This was another blessing for which I thanked President Roosevelt, and it confirmed my Depression-born faith in the New Deal and the Democratic party.
Returning to Hopkins that February, I soon drifted back to the News-Letter office. It looked the same as it had back in the summer of 1942, a little grimier maybe, the same old typewriters sitting on the same worn-out old desks. I went there looking for the company of people who liked to write.
Devoted to the classical university disciplines, Hopkins offered no writing program. If you had literary notions, you majored in English literature, which at Hopkins was assumed to have ceased in 1882 with the death of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. So students interested in writing, having no place else to turn, gravitated toward the News-Letter office, looking for others who had read the latest Hemingway and Faulkner novels and debated whether Scott Fitzgerald was truly first-rate and if it was childish to admire Thomas Wolfe. Most of us who turned up in the News-Letter office that February had little interest in journalism. All we wanted was to write something that we could afterward see in print.
Like all the newspaper offices I would later know, the News-Letter’s attracted people whose minds were open and interesting, people who were curious instead of preachy, people who distrusted people who had all the answers, people with a taste for the raffish, people who wanted life to be interesting rather than safe. They were mostly war veterans in their middle to late twenties and could talk authoritatively of an exotic world that extended from the shrines of Kyoto to the whorehouses of Naples. When I was weary of professors and library dust, and hungered for entertainment, the News-Letter office was the place to go.
There I found Wishmeyer, married and a veteran of the Italian campaign, scolding the entire staff for their ignorance of the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. Leo Flashman, the editor, was an infantry veteran and a driven man, determined to get out a paper on schedule once a week in spite of a staff that considered the work essentially childish and treated the office as a literary salon.
“Could you postpone the usual Unamuno lecture,” he asked Wishmeyer, “while we try to find some copy to take to the printer?”
Bill Gresham was the office radical. He was short, going bald, and bore a pronounced facial resemblance to the actor Edward G. Robinson, who was famous for “Little Caesar” and other movie gangster roles. He chain-smoked cigarettes and spoke authoritatively on everything, often exhaling powerful streams of smoke all over his audience while doing so, as if to show how little he thought of them.
In the war Gresham had been a gunner in a B-24 flying bombing missions for the Eighth Air Force over Germany, belted into the big bomber’s open waist, swinging the .50-caliber machine gun at the Messerschmidts and Focke-Wulfs swooping out of the sun with hammering guns. The damage showed in the trembling of his hands. Watching him light a cigarette or lift a cup of coffee to his mouth was a suspense-packed drama. Wishmeyer made a joke of these tremors.
“Tell us again about the flak over Frankfurt,” he said as Gresham’s quivering hand lifted a too full cup and splashed coffee over a textbook. I was shocked until I saw that Bill enjoyed being teased in this way. Wishmeyer, I saw, was using this cruel tone as a subtle way of reminding us veterans of the bloodless stateside war that being waist-gunner in a B-24 over Germany was not the frolic Hollywood made it out to be.
At first I disliked everything about Gresham: the way he looked, the way he dressed, the know-it-all way he talked, the assault-and-battery way he smoked his cigarettes, and, finally, the way he wrote in blunt, graceless sentences and paragraphs that made no music but seemed to be written with a sledgehammer.
Soon he became a good friend, and much later he became godfather to my first child, and long after that he became a trial and a tragedy, but that was in a future far distant from the time I am now speaking of, when the war had just had its happy ending and all prospects were bright for once poor boys who thought that the worst was behind them and they could never be corrupted.
Though I was younger and more inexperienced at war than most of the News-Letter crowd, they accepted me in the inner circle, probably because I could write campus-newspaper prose more rapidly and fluently than any of them. This was because I did not take it seriously. To me, working on the News-Letter was like playing newspaper. As a newsboy, I had spent too many years reading and studying real newspapers. In those years I had absorbed an instinctive sense of how the real thing was written and how to tell the real from the fake. A front page dominated by news of the senior prom could only be kiddie journalism to a man who had grown up on Hearst front pages packed with corpse-filled trunks, heiresses’ love nests, and international bank heists.
Thinking of the News-Letter as play, I did not strain at the writing, but went at it in a relaxed, offhand, playful spirit. It wasn’t serious, it certainly wasn’t work, and I did it for the pleasure and fun of it, which made it easy, often spoofing the stories shamelessly in a way that would have got me kicked out of any journalism school. I became a tireless writer of sophomore humor, then discovered the higher sport of parody. Soon I was handing the editor stories written in the baroque style of early Time magazine:
“Strode last week did receding-hairlined, lacrosse-playing Student Councilman Merle Debuskey into the Christian dullness of Levering Hall…”
Leo took journalism seriously, and patiently handed back my best thigh-slappers with a polite request that I tone them down. Poor Leo. He wanted terribly to be a newspaperman and knew he would never have the chance. After college he was going to take charge of his family’s furniture store. That was what his parents wanted, and Leo, who was the best of sons, could not bear to disappoint them, though it was newspaper work, not retail furniture, that he loved. Aware that his editorship of the News-Letter was the only newspaper career he would ever have, Leo was determined to do the job like a professional. He kept the worst of my horseplay out of the News-Letter, but since my skill at parody enabled me also to write a flawlessly dull news story in the style of the flawlessly dull Baltimore Sun, I quickly acquired a reputation as both a fancy and useful staff writer.
To keep me from losing interest, Leo, the editor in chief, cunningly invented the elegant and meaningless title of “managing editor” and gave it to me. Managing editor. It was the title that had haunted me since childhood. I understood what Leo was up to, and knew the title was meaningless, but nevertheless it affected me, and I took it more seriously than it deserved.
At Marydell Road I could not resist telling my mother: “You’ve now got another managing editor in the family.”
She was pleased and I was immodest enough to refrain from belittling this splendid title, so did not tell her the News-Letter was only a play newspaper and my title was a kind of joke. Joke it might be, but I now bore the same title as Cousin Edwin.
But of course I wasn’t really interested anymore in newspaper work, and my mother knew it. When I let her think my meaningless title carried weight, she said something like, “Now that you’re managing editor of the News-Letter, maybe you’ll start thinking again about a newspaper job when you graduate.”
I was thinking nothing of the sort. Journalism was not serious work. It was fun. Writing novels was serious work, and people who wrote them could be taken seriously, like scientists and mathematicians. Any sophomoric wise guy could write journalism, but it took an artist to write great novels. My ambition was to become a novelist, preferably a great novelist. I wanted to be the new Hemingway.