Cousin Edwin had not crossed my mind for a long time. The old fantasy no longer entertained me. Life had kept me too busy once Mimi and I were married.
There was the money hardship to worry about, and fatherhood, and family problems that came with creating a new generation, and family problems that came with the aging of the old generation. My mother had started falling inexplicably. A tumble down cellar steps broke her shoulder. There were brief instants when she was disoriented and lost. Petit-mal seizures, the doctor said. While I was in London she had a convulsive seizure, a bad fall. The doctor put her on medication.
Herb’s larynx had been removed because of cancer just before I went to England. Afterward, unable to speak, he was out of work for months and hopelessly depressed. It was my sister Doris who saved him, laboriously teaching him to speak again ventriloquially, bringing him back into contact with the world, making him smile again. His unemployment benefits ran out, and money was needed at Marydell Road.
Doris, now married and living in the neighborhood, helped provide it. Doris seemed to have shouldered the full burden of Marydell Road. Far away from it, in London, leading the good life, I felt guilty about leaving the headaches for Doris to handle, and sent a little money, and wrote my mother faithfully every week.
Problems like these probably mean you are grownup and, I suppose, come with the territory. So does the forgetting of childhood fantasies. Getting the London job had gratified my fierce yearning for success instilled by my mother. It was far more wonderful than any realistic expectations I had ever had. I couldn’t hold it forever; it was for eighteen months, two years at most; Buck had made that clear from the start. I couldn’t imagine any job anywhere in journalism, however, that could make me happier. For the moment, I had fulfilled childhood’s dream of glory.
As for losing all interest in Cousin Edwin, that had happened even before my luck turned. He had died in December 1951, and the news scarcely touched me despite all those years of having his greatness held up for my envy. Now I would never meet him, and it didn’t matter. Not a bit. I had never really expected to meet him. The whole business had been fantasy. The great Cousin Edwin, no smarter than anybody else, had never been real, so the death had no emotional impact on me.
The Sun’s story of his death, however, prompted me to pick up the newsroom copy of The New York Times. That was something I didn’t often do, pick up the Times. It was heavy going, full of writing that made you think of people playing pianos with boxing gloves on. Its obituary on Edwin ran for six columns, a length normally reserved for the world’s shakers.
The obit was singularly lifeless, giving no suggestion that he had ever had more than two breaths of humanity in him. By then I had written enough obits to recognize the symptoms. Whoever had written poor Edwin’s send-off had been too floored by reverence or fear to dare suggest that he had once been human. Buried in this lump of indigestible dullness about “indefatigable energy” and “unusual competence,” however, was a startling piece of information. At age nineteen he had graduated from Randolph Macon College and made Phi Beta Kappa. Maybe Edwin James had been smarter than anybody else, after all.
By the time I had been in London a year, thoughts of Edwin never crossed my mind. I was too contented with the way my own life had turned out. In London I was at the top of the ladder and enjoying excessive praise from Baltimore. All ambition seemed to have been satisfied. My mother had taught if I worked hard I could amount to something, could make something of myself. She had been proved right, yet I was vaguely dissatisfied. Now that I seemed to amount to something, how was life different? Once you had made something of yourself, life should change, shouldn’t it?
Though I couldn’t put this uneasiness in words, I felt that success ought to make life more satisfying, ought to bring a peace of mind, a maturity, a serenity toward life, which I did not feel. Well, I was not yet thirty. With ambition satisfied, I had half a lifetime ahead to do the fine things: to cultivate my mind and sensibilities perhaps, to develop a philosophy that would put me at ease with the world, to do worthy things for those less lucky than I, to do…
I didn’t know what.
So when 1954 came around and Buck offered to move me to Washington and become White House correspondent, I jumped at the opportunity. White House correspondent: That seemed even more glamorous, more important, than London correspondent. Living the cultivated life of mind and spirit and doing good and worthy things to enrich the soul could wait a bit. Buck was offering me a chance to be even more successful.
I was discovering, though I didn’t realize it then, that hunger for success was bred so deeply into so many Depression youngsters that we were powerless to stop chasing it long after we had achieved it. Or had “made it,” as the slang of that era had it. The hunger to “make it” was the motor that ran our ambition, and it was almost impossible to turn off.
If we made it, we were not satisfied. We wanted to make it big. If we made it big, we wanted to make it bigger. About this time, self-mocking people who had been Depression children began talking about the “rat race.” The self-mockery didn’t stop many from running it, though. Ten years later our own children would strike brutally at us by rejecting the successful lives we had prepared for them, but in 1954 nobody, absolutely nobody, could foresee that terrible time.
Neil Swanson was fired and Buck was given the top editorial job the same day. That was in early January. Buck sent a cryptic cable saying Swanson was no longer with us. A flood of letters from newsroom friends said, “Fired.” Explanations were muddled. The most titillating had it that Swanson had outraged the paper’s owners by ordering news of his latest marriage placed in the society column, a space sacred to Marylanders of bluest blood, hence verboten to Swanson of Minnesota and his bride, who had written the Evening Sun’s column for teenagers.
The larger explanation was plain. The death of Paul Patterson, long president of the Sun company and Swanson’s patron, had brought new managers to the head of the boardroom table, and they didn’t like Swanson. One way or another, they were going to have his head.
“The unanimity of the rejoicing around the office surprises even me,” Ed Young’s letter of early January reported. “There wasn’t a tear shed anywhere, and the holiday mood hasn’t let up even yet.”
Like all great news people, Ed had a glandular compulsion to be the first to break big news, and the Swanson story by this time was old news, so before going into it he went right to the big story.
“This is not official, and I want you to be properly impressed when you hear it from authority, but the present plan is…”
Buck wanted to transfer me to Washington to cover the White House. The Sun hadn’t had a White House man since Joseph Short left the job to become President Truman’s press secretary.
Buck’s letter came five days behind Ed’s. He wrote generously about Swanson, except for a reference to taste that was reminiscent of the lecture he had given me years ago about covering a high-school reunion.
“For five or six years he has been extremely indulgent to me, has let me go my way, has scarcely ever breathed down my neck and in many ways, as you know, he is an extremely able newsman… But it is kind of nice not to have to put up with what frequently seemed to be shocking examples of bad taste…
“Away with these trifles and to business. It is my present plan, which has the blessing of the throne, to send you to the Washington Bureau on a permanent basis somewhere around mid-summer. Unless, of course, you have serious objections. The front office has authorized a replacement for Short and you are my idea of that replacement…
“It will surprise me a great deal if you have any objections because, as you know, our Bureau seems to me the ultimate in American newspapering and since you appear to have decided, after some quakings in the stomach, to make a career of this business, Washington ought to be for you.”
This letter came two days before the first anniversary of my arrival in London.
Washington bureau. White House correspondent. These were big, heavy, serious words. I wrote back immediately and started planning to depart London in June. The best year of my life was over.
The scared young man who abandoned his trunk in the fog at Waterloo Station last January was now long gone. I did not kid myself, though, by supposing I had become a man of the world. My childhood theory of God as Cosmic Joke Player still shaped my reaction to life’s blessings. Be careful, I told myself; this could be the start of a heartbreaking practical joke, so play it cautiously, don’t get carried away, don’t enjoy it too much.
Still, for the first time in my life I felt almost grownup. I had been to Paris, sat in the Abbey for the coronation, dined in the Bank of England, lunched at the House of Lords, and driven a peer of the realm up a hill backward.
I had been to the Derby, where Gerry Fay taught me how to bet the horses, and had learned that the Derby was pronounced “Darby.”
I had been to Dublin, where Gerry taught me the words to “Kevin Barry” and “The Old Orange Flute.” There I had walked through St. Stephen’s Green at midnight with ten Dubliners, all of us bubbling with Guinness, and heard them joke about the American passion for tracing Leopold Bloom’s route through Dublin and argue to a rage about attempts to revive the Celtic tongue.
I had been to Canterbury, destination of Chaucer’s pilgrims, stood by the altar where Thomas à Becket was murdered by Henry II’s assassins, and sent my mother a postcard picture of the cathedral on which I scrawled, “Very old town.”
I had been to the Isle of Man, where I learned that a Manx cat has no tail. I had been to Scotland, where I learned that the people were called “Scots,” their culture was called “Scottish,” and the only thing Scotch was their whiskey, which they spelled “whisky” to distinguish it from inferior intoxicants like bourbon, rye, and Canadian whiskey.
I had learned a great deal about drinking. Though weak on knowing when to quit, I knew which ales could be as devastating as a third martini and which caused flatulence. I had developed a taste for French wine and learned that some years produced better wines than others. I had seen this dramatically illustrated at a large luncheon given by the Foreign Correspondents Association at the Savoy when Mimi and I were seated at a table with Ruggiero Orlando, the correspondent for Rome Radio.
Ruggiero was short, intense, voluble, charming, and a passionate conversationalist. His uncle Vittorio Emanuele had been prime minister of Italy during World War One and, with Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George, was one of the Big Four who wrote the Versailles Treaty. An enemy of fascism, Ruggiero had had to flee Mussolini’s Italy in fear of his life. His ability to talk more entertainingly than any other foreign correspondent in London lent him an authority that wine stewards were quick to recognize, and at lunch that day it was Ruggiero who was handed the wine list.
I watched intently to learn what wine this wise man of the Old World would order with this particular meal. Scarcely pausing in his nonstop conversation, Ruggiero glanced at the list, said, “Latour 1947,” and resumed talking. The wine steward returned with a bottle, uncorked it, poured a little wine into Ruggiero’s glass, and waited for approval. Still talking, talking, talking, Ruggiero lifted the glass, fell silent just long enough to sip, then turned mournful eyes to the wine steward.
“This is not a Latour 1947,” he said. “It is a 1949 Lafite.”
The wine steward looked at the bottle. Ruggiero was correct, absolutely correct. The wine steward begged forgiveness a thousand times until Ruggiero sent him away with orders to fetch the Latour ’47. I had heard of wine expertise on that level, but had always thought it a joke. Having learned better, I was struggling to learn the difference between a drinkable wine and one that was going to vinegar.
I had also seen famous men up close and learned to speak to them without blushing and stammering. Tommy D’Alesandro, Baltimore’s mayor, came to London at coronation time.
“We had dinner together and had a long chat,” I wrote my mother.
“And oh yes, I went to the Correspondents dinner on Wednesday where I met General Marshall and General Bradley. God, I sound like a gossip columnist. Governor Earl Warren was also there…”
There was a steady flow of celebrated people making themselves available for interviews, ranging from movie stars like Gary Cooper to American politicians like Adlai Stevenson to Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. Eden periodically talked foreign policy, but not for attribution, with the American reporters, but rarely said anything that justified the trip to Downing Street. British government people traditionally treated their own press with contempt and generally made themselves unavailable to the American press, and since trying to see any of them was a waste of time, I soon gave it up.
Winston Churchill was prime minister. He cultivated an aura of grandeur, very much as General de Gaulle did, by, among other things, withholding the Presence from all but the elect. His abuse of the press, for which he was notorious, rose from the fact that he considered himself a journalist and regarded his thoughts, speeches, and writings as marketable commodities that were not to be given away so long as American publishers were willing to pay large fees for them.
Being prime minister exposed him occasionally to the press, since it required frequent appearances in the House of Commons. There I saw enough of him from the press gallery to justify talking about him with impressive authority.
The most valuable part of my London education, however, took place in the writing department.
I arrived in Fleet Street with the police reporter’s weakness for overwrought language and passion for clichés, and indulged both for the first few months. Some of my early stories read like parodies written for a burlesque on journalism.
Reporting a minor political squabble in the Labour party, I started the story by writing:
“In a stormy four-hour session behind closed doors…”
When Moscow reported Stalin near death, my story began:
“London is a tense world capital tonight, keeping a death watch on Moscow and nervously speculating about a struggle for power in the Kremlin.”
I had flawless instincts for the worn-out expression: for the “stormy session” held—where else?—“behind closed doors.” For the “tense world capital,” the tired old “death watch,” the “nervously speculating” population, and in the Kremlin the shopworn “struggle for power.”
My most shameless performance was a story about the sudden departure of Soviet Ambassador Andrei Gromyko from London for New York:
“A cloak-and-dagger attempt to get out of London in complete secrecy shrouds the purpose of Gromyko’s trip in darkest mystery.”
With “cloak-and-dagger” and “complete secrecy” up to their old trick of putting a “shroud” around “darkest mystery,” I had composed a sentence so rich in newspaper cliché that it was a travesty on the trade. There was no mystery about Gromyko’s trip. My own story said in the second paragraph that he was on BOAC Flight 509 and would arrive in New York next morning, while the fourth paragraph quoted him as saying he was going to attend a meeting of the United Nations.
The only mystery was why the Sun published it instead of dropping the entire story into the wastebasket.
The answer was that the Sun believed in learning by doing. As a beginning reporter, you were thrown into the police stations to sink or swim. If you qualified for assignment to Washington or overseas, the Sun assumed you were smart enough to know what you were doing. Copyreaders rarely changed anything you wrote, no matter how dreadful it might be. Once promoted to the big time, you were given a lot of rope. A reporter could also learn by making a fool of himself. So went the theory, and the Sun dared to live by it until it became obvious the offender would never learn anything, in which case he was tucked away in an inconspicuous niche where he could no longer embarrass the paper.
The tumult and storm in my writing those first few weeks probably stemmed from my lack of confidence in a job that seemed far too advanced for me. To compensate, I was tearing the language to tatters every time I sat down at the typewriter. This was acceptable tradition in American news writing, though the Sun’s best writing reporters, like Tom O’Neill and Price Day, were too good to go that route.
What settled me down was daily exposure to the Manchester Guardian’s stories. They seemed masterfully written. Many read like polished essays. I read them with delight and growing fascination, because they proved that journalism did not have to be an assault on the mother tongue. It could be quiet, subtle, understated, or just dully matter-of-fact, yet still make the reader’s mind tick over.
Coming from a journalistic tradition that licensed hotshots to make the language churn and steam, I was excited to discover that quiet could often pack more punch into a story than turmoil could. I was profoundly taken with the example the Guardian provided in covering a foreign-policy speech by Anthony Eden in the House of Commons. This was the sort of speech always breathlessly described by American reporters as “a major foreign policy address,” and I was floundering around at the typewriter, struggling to make the story sound like one of the vital events of the decade, when the Guardian story was dropped on my desk.
It was by Harry Boardman, a lovely writer who used pen, ink, and longhand script to compose his daily report from the House of Commons. His opening paragraph on the Eden speech that day said:
“When he rose in the House Mister Eden had nothing to say but made the mistake of saying it at great length, omitting hardly a single flatulent Foreign Office cliché.”
It was a revelation. It was breathtaking. The simplicity of it! The rightness! How easy it was to express the truth by keeping the language plain.
I had already written several hundred words of excitable prose about the Eden speech and meant to write several hundred more. Boardman’s story changed my plans immediately and changed my theory of journalism forever.
I scrapped the long story in my typewriter and wrote a new one of just four paragraphs. With Boardman’s courage, my story dismissed Eden’s speech as “long-winded” and offered an example to illustrate:
“The objective is to create the conditions for the expansion of world production and trade and for that purpose to secure international action leading to an effective system of multilateral trade and payments over the widest possible area.”
Until that night I had held religiously to the American faith in “objective journalism,” which forbade a reporter to go beyond what the great man said. No matter how dull, stupid, unfair, vicious, or mendacious they might be, the utterances of the great were to be reported deadpan, with nary a hint that the speaker might be a bore, a dunce, a brute, or a habitual liar.
For a reporter from an important American newspaper to question the value of “objective journalism” was worse than unthinkable. It was subversive. It was revolutionary. Now I was not just questioning it; I was thrusting my own judgment into the story by calling the speech “long-winded” and by publishing one of Eden’s sillier statements, which tended to satirize him. Harry Boardman, a conservative elderly gentleman who wrote plain, quiet English and had no use for typewriters, had set me on the path to revolution. After that I began sneaking my judgments into stories where I thought they would broaden a reader’s understanding.
The Guardian reporters I knew best would have winced at the overheated stories of my early London days. Getting excited offended their principles, whether the provocation was alcohol or deadlines. The low-key style was their way of life. Though Gerry Fay became a dear, lifelong friend, it was only years later, while reading a book of his autobiographical pieces, that I learned he had landed on D Day in Normandy, a major in the British army under notice that he would probably not live through the day, but lucky enough to survive several days in the thick of the fighting before being wounded by a sniper. Telling war stories was bad form, like writing overwrought English.
Gerry’s father, Frank Fay, and his uncle Willie had been instrumental in creating the Abbey Theatre in Dublin to produce the works of Yeats and Lady Gregory, but pride in his family theatrical history did not tempt Gerry to do much horn blowing about it.
By contrast, I’d had an American childhood. “Might as well blow your own horn because nobody’s going to blow it for you,” was my mother’s advice. Blowing your own horn was the American way. Maybe that accounted for the bombast of American journalism. The British of the war generation had no horn blowing in them. Their style was quiet, introspective, ironic.
Though many Guardian writers probably had heroic stories to tell, the only one I ever heard was Mark Arnold-Forster’s. Mark was short, very thin, very blond, very pale, and very quiet. He looked too frail to send out in a high wind, much less on a mission for heroes. Yet Mark had commanded one of five small torpedo boats that attacked the German battle cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau as they steamed through the English Channel one day when the rest of the British navy was far away on other business.
I heard the story several times from colleagues who marveled at the courage of it, and tried one day to learn from Mark how it felt to attack a battleship with a torpedo boat.
“It felt jolly good to get back,” Mark said, and changed the subject.
After learning to relax at the typewriter and winnow a little of the snorting and roar out of my writing, I began looking for good stories that didn’t require shouting. Duty required keeping up with the diplomatic comings and goings and periodically filing some British political news, but I quickly realized that such stuff was small chaff even to the few Americans who kept abreast of great affairs. Britain’s shrinkage to small-power status had begun. The stuff that once made big news from London no longer seemed very important to the superpower mentality developing back home.
I abandoned the pretense that the empire hadn’t folded and started reporting Britain as a big, gaudy feature story. I wanted to shake free from outdated press claptrap about worried Whitehall, fearful Downing Street, and the uneasy Bank of England and concentrate on material that would make readers back in Baltimore feel what it was like to be in England at this moment when an old order was dying.
This kind of coverage fit my need to try a quieter, more intimate style of journalism. What’s more, you didn’t have to strain to find story material. For a reporter who thought the human comedy was a better story than the balance-of-payments deficit, England was a paradise.
There was always a good story to be had from the sin front. One day it might come from the Church of England’s newspaper, denouncing apartment-house living as “licentious, corrupt, and ungodly” and attacking the typical apartment dweller as “a pagan living a life of materialism and concubinage.”
On another, the House of Commons might be quaking before the anger of the Lord’s Day Observance Society. This was a powerful lobby whose purpose was to prevent repeal of Sunday blue laws enacted between 1625 and 1780. In 1953 these accounted for what was known as “Gloomy Sunday,” because they forbade dancing, billiards, sporting contests, and theater performances, and shortened pub hours. When a member of Parliament named Parker proposed repealing them, the fury of the gloom lobby was so intense that the House of Commons voted five-to-one against him. In the debate, Parker disclosed the dangers of threatening a Christian’s Sunday calm:
“I have never received so many abusive letters as I have since I put my name to this bill. Some of the sentiments expressed are very surprising. Many people have wished me to drown with a millstone round my neck; others have said they would like to see my eyes put out and be there when it is happening.”
This naturally led me to a pub at Sunday noon to report on what beer drinking was like on a day when pubs could open for only two and a half hours.
“Sunday beer drinking is pursued at a murderous pace. Knowing that he has exactly 150 minutes before the taps run dry, the Londoner storms the pub door on the dot of noon… Neither man nor woman loses time by removing coat and scarf. Beer must be absorbed, guzzled, swilled, choked down, poured in, right down to the final precious second of drinking time, and there is no time for waste motion… The clock is every man’s enemy. It must be watched like a traitor, or before he realizes it, the careless drinker will find it has struck the fatal hour and sent him out with volume for one last pint unfilled.”
The incessant English struggle to make the punishment fit the sin provided enlightening stories about the motherland of America’s puritanism. Hangings were frequent affairs. They usually followed within a matter of weeks after the death sentence was imposed. British acquaintances tended to boast about this swift administration of capital punishment. So unlike the dreadful fuss you people make over it in the States, you know. I’d been there less than a year before a story cropped up which left no doubt whatever, except to embarrassed cops and prosecutors, that they had hanged an entirely innocent man.
I was not yet nervy enough in my journalism to point out that at least they had hanged him without prolonged delay, thus sparing him the pain of prolonged contemplation of the ancient rule that the law and justice need not coincide.
Another day, and the House of Commons had a proposal to restore the ancient punishment of flogging for violent crimes not severe enough to justify hanging. Magistrates and judges were enthusiastic, but not for flogging with the cat-o’-nine-tails. The “cat” made heroes of its victims, one judge observed. “Birching” was the judges’ preference. This would involve beating miscreants across the buttocks with a long bundle of water-soaked sticks.
“When laid on by a chief warder who knows his business,” Lord Chief Justice Goddard argued, the birch “not only gives them a taste of something unpleasant but leads to considerable ridicule.”
There was foolishness everywhere, even in Downing Street, where the British aptitude for getting it all wrong about sex was illustrated when a group of female college students staged a demonstration in bathing suits in February. The coldness of London’s February must be felt to be believed. Reading’s men, it developed, had invited some French girls to a traditional campus bash, declaring English girls “not glamorous enough.” The Reading women wanted to refute this libel in front of the prime minister himself. Hence, the bathing suits. Hence the ghastly blue legs, the goose pimples, the palsied shivering of the young woman who knocked at Churchill’s door. The door was opened. A man appeared. He was not Churchill. She handed him a written defense of the Englishwoman’s sex appeal and ran for woolen blankets.
I thought Americans would like to know if foreigners were as ga-ga about kid music as Americans were, so when the American howler Johnny Ray opened at the Palladium, I chose to cover that instead of reporting the Foreign Office view of what Marshal Tito’s visit to London really meant. Ray was the first crooner in the history of his art to cry his way to the top of the sales charts. His triumph, which came from recording songs about weeping, was said to be symptomatic of some lugubrious neurosis in the American psyche, which manifested itself in delighted squeals when frail young men wept to music.
At the Palladium I established that if there was any neurosis, the British had it too:
“Throughout Ray’s performance, his own wailing was answered by the shrill, ecstatic yowls and squeals of the girls…
“The moment everyone was waiting for came when he threw his head back, gulped a great lungful of air and expelled the words: ‘If you kah-rie-rie-rie…’ A girl near the front row screamed, ‘He’s crying!’
“The entire house strained forward to see better and Ray turned his face full into the spotlight. There, sure enough, tears stood out in the corners of his eyes and his face bore an expression of woe seldom seen except over open graves.”
And so forth. Only later did I realize how blessed I was to be working for the Sun in London. No other paper would have tolerated such a cavalier approach to covering the seat of the empire or put up with a reporter who believed that the work should also be fun for the reader. It was obvious, though, that with Buck in charge in Baltimore and with Washington—the White House!—ahead of me, I was in the happiest of all possible situations.
What happened at that moment was right out of my wildest childhood fantasy about Cousin Edwin. The New York Times came knocking at my door.