INTRODUCTION
REDISCOVERED SAINT
ADAM GOPNIK

St. Clair McKelway is a New Yorker author of the Golden Age—okay, one of the Golden Ages—whose work, out of print for a long time, is now mostly unknown and overlooked (the temporary condition of most good writing, so no big deal there.) He was a standby on the magazine from the mid-thirties to the mid-sixties, with a significant break in the forties when he worked as a public relations officer in the Air Force, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, in the Pacific. Through all that time, he was as well known to New Yorker subscribers as any of the writers whose names are more familiar now, as well known and as keenly relished by readers as Liebling and Mitchell and White and those few others whose reputations have been rehabilitated, as they liked to say in the old Soviet Union, by the suffrage of readers and the backward looking hopes of publishers.

McKelway could do it all—comment, stories, profiles. He was especially skilled as a rewriter of other people’s troubled stuff, a gift that helped save The New Yorker career of the great A.J. Liebling. But he was most famous for his pieces about odd crimes and strange criminals: imposters, rascals, embezzlers, con men, counterfeiters, and the like. In those saner days, publishers were willing to put out barely veneered collections of magazine pieces without a pretense of more than minimal thematic unity, and so McKelway’s pieces could be found in books as well as in the magazine. That’s where I found him first, actually, in an old edition of his 1951 collection True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality, which Mark Singer, the master “Talk of the Town” hand of the time, loaned me when I was a young pup reporter beginning to write “Talk,” too.

There were so many of these that a “McKelway crime story” was as much a signature item as a Trillin murder piece is now. What made McKelway’s pieces so startling, and so much better than, say, Herbert Asbury’s romantic crime books, was the solidity of their reporting, their reliance on assembled fact, and the charm of their tone. They are thorough without being dull, and funny without feeling forced; crime reporting drained of melodrama and sensation, those tabloid things replaced with sly irony, wit, a love of detail, and a feeling for the sad realities of human character. McKelway’s are fact-based pieces that have, as reviewers like to say, the excitement and surprise of fiction—only not of big fiction, but of exquisitely shaped small fiction, of an O’Hara story. All set in New York, and all bending toward some odd edge of character revelation, they render the outer edges of experience as the normal shape of life.

McKelway wrote about process servers and insurance men and embezzlers and imposters with a clear hard edge that allowed for a curious kind of compassion. Firebugs are dangerous and have to be suppressed, but they are otherwise normal men who just happen to be in love with the look of flaming warehouses. “He was an admirable man except for that one quirk,” the embezzler’s wife says about McKelway’s embezzler, the Wily Wilby, and the reader accepts the judgment. Quirks of the higher and odder kind are McKelway’s real subject—with the understanding that a quirk of distinction is simply a quiddity, and life is made up of those.

McKelway’s is a New York still largely middle class and lower middle class in make-up, where the cops and process servers and fire inspectors came from essentially the same immigrant pool of Irishmen and Italians and Jews as the small time crooks and insurance defrauders and firebugs. It’s the prose reality of Damon Runyon’s poetic dream world. McKelway’s stories are not exactly “three dimensional”—their cartoonish clarity and stenographic elegance are part of their charm—but they bear the same relationship to Runyon, or to tabloid newspaper reporting, that Peter Arno’s cartooning does to a newspaper comic strip. They are deceptively simple, not simply deceptive.

Where the great Joe Mitchell’s gift was for urban fable, McKelway’s was for the short, significant parable. His stories aren’t illustrative of trends or tendencies in modern crime or modern manners. He takes it for granted that there will always be more or less the same number of firebugs and coiners and for that matter crazy generals, and that, apart from their vocational oddities, they will always be in other respects like the rest of us. The typical magazine “trend” piece says, almost always falsely, “More and more people are acting this way!” The classic McKelway piece says, accurately, “Very, very few people act this way, which is what makes the ones who do so interesting.” This belief in the thing for its own sake, which was shared by his generation of New Yorker craftsmen, creates the equanimity that distinguished their work, and still sets it apart from most other journalism: All of them assumed universals of eccentricity, duplicity, and political corruption, and other universals of good fellowship, comradeship, and ironic appreciation as counter-weights. The reformer’s rage was as alien to the style as the reactionary’s revulsion.

“Mister 880,” which became a (pretty good) movie, is perhaps the best known of all these crime pieces and is a perfect example of the McKelway style. The subject is a counterfeiter of almost absurdly small ambitions and extravagantly crude capacities: He makes fake one dollar bills, and makes them badly, with Washington’s name misspelled as “Wahsington.” The Secret Service embarks on a twenty-year search for him, and, maddeningly, can’t find him because of his smallness, the deliberate inconsequence of his crimes. Along the way, McKelway broods on the loneliness of old men, the history of bad money (and of good), and ends his tale with a beautiful irony, almost too neat to believe.

(Let me add right here, in a paragraph-long parenthesis, that that dollar may, just may, be what Huck Finn calls a stretcher. McKelway, in his lovely confessional story called “The Cockatoo,” admits that his first published newspaper article was more or less made up, though harmlessly so, and there are often in McKelway’s writing bits of shapely storytelling and sprightly dialogue that belie their factual surface. The truth, politely held in a vault on West Forty-third Street, is that writers of his generation worked with a general understanding that a story could be kneaded into shape as long as the kneading was done gently and with good purpose; the well-wishing tone of their work is due in part to its being gently held in hostage to the good will of the subjects. Character can only be revealed, in the shortish span even of a long magazine piece, by a certain element of caricature; the license of cartoonists to draw a black outline and exaggerate an eyebrow was the license they claimed, with the understanding that it wouldn’t be used maliciously—when, in later years by other writers, it began to be, the license was revoked.)

The strongest, and longest of these “rascality” pieces is McKelway’s profile of the Harlem holy man (and gentle fraud) called Father Divine. That’s the one in which he rescued Liebling’s career, with terrific long-term effects for the magazine, and, really, for American literature. Liebling, as he later admitted, had a hard time adapting his wiseguy newspaper feature style, all short punchy paragraphs and local-color jokes, to the pages of the magazine, and in the mid-thirties he seemed likely to leave, or be pushed out. Reporting the Father Divine story practically to death, he ended with what he admitted ruefully was essentially a thesis on comparative religion. (It is, though, typical of what separated Liebling from the pack that he was capable of writing such a thing.) McKelway took it over, recast it as a narrative, and made it into a terrific piece, salvaging Liebling’s career at the magazine and giving him a template of how erudition and detail could be sublimated into storytelling-style rather than left dangling in bunches. To be sure, Father Divine looks a lot more plausible as a figure to us now, since we understand what Libeling and McKelway only imply—that if there was a lot of con man in him there was also a lot of dignity and quiet resistance to white rule. And no one who has read contemporary literary criticism will fail to respond to Father Divine’s language, so much like it, and which shows how far pure word power can take a man: “God is not only personified and materialized. He is repersonified and rematerialized. He rematerializes and rematerialates. He rematerialates and He is rematerializable. He repersonificates and He repersonifitizes.”

MCKELWAY’S CHOICE OF subjects and heroes, whether Mr. Eight-Eighty or Father Divine, was always just right. But, as with all writers worth reading, what matters is the quality of his line, the standard of his sentences. His prose style is a beautiful instance of the Old New Yorker faux naïf: sly and sober-faced, with a lot more reading and intelligence just beneath the surface than the writer feels is quite mannerly or classy to let on. The gently ironic edging unto the disbelieving sardonic, a strong edge of mockery made generous-seeming by the curiosity and complicity of the mocker—we are all just this quirky, the prose says, and yet only some of our quirks are allowed. Condescension and a too easily amused tone is the risk; wry wisdom and a sense of classical proportion, the reward. This passage, again from “Mister 880,” is typical in its details and delights:

Counterfeiting is a prehistoric form of gainful skullduggery. The idea of money was conceived somewhere on the other side of antiquity, and so was the idea of counterfeit money. The idea of money is older than the idea of counterfeit money, but older, perhaps, by no more than a few minutes. There is evidence of the use of both the genuine article and the counterfeit article in the earliest recorded civilizations, and it has been established that primitive tribes had both good money and bad money before there were any civilizations to record. It seems that immediately after certain people realized that they could easily make tokens to represent cumbersome property, such as collections of animal skins and stores of foodstuffs, certain other people awoke to the fact that they could just as easily make tokens to represent the tokens that represented the cumbersome property. The two ideas are so closely related that they are practically twins, and, like the products of the ideas, they are hard to tell apart. If it were not for counterfeit money, the story of money might be simply beautiful. As it is, the pattern formed by the fateful entwinement of money and counterfeit money is intricately grotesque.

This lovely intertwining—or fateful entwinement, as he would have written—of research and plain relation, is, in its carefully gauged mock-simplicity, the classic New Yorker sound at its best. It’s all said as lucidly as can be, but the fun lies in the choice to turn an encyclopedia entry into an entertainment: Let’s take something that everyone makes solemn, or lurid, and treat it lightly. This is a simple idea—a modest idea—of prose, but it’s a potent one. It infuriated some people then, and it still infuriates some people now, who feel threatened by a craft they experience as condescension and by a surface of delight they imagine as highhanded and insufficiently crabby, inadequately malicious. But its satisfactions are real, too. In a sentence such as that one on counterfeiting a lot of reading, economic theory, and anthropological history has been neatly compressed for the reader’s benefit not just into the simplest possible language, but into the most pregnant possible language. You couldn’t possibly say it more neatly than that: An alarming anthropological complexity has been reduced to a sequence of aphorisms. Or take this description of the dubious dance of bonding your employee-boss relations, from “The Wily Wilby”:

When the first news stories appeared in the New York papers about Ralph Marshall Wilby’s embezzlement of $386,921.29 from the Knott Company, he was described as a “trusted employee” over and over again. All the stories made a point of rubbing that in. In Wilby’s case, as in the cases of most embezzlers in these times, the cliché was inaccurate and its use indicates an old-fashioned and romantic idea of the relationship between bookkeepers and the people who employ them. The ugly truth is that the higher a bookkeeper climbs in the accounting department of a firm, the lower the estimate of his trustworthiness becomes in the minds and hearts of his employers . . . One of Wilby’s best friends at the Knott corporation, and seemingly one of his greatest admirers, was the company’s treasurer, Mr. Casey. It was Casey who had encouraged and aided Wilby’s progress from the position of traveling auditor to that of chief accountant and assistant treasurer. Yet this same Mr. Casey, acting for the corporation in what a romanticist would have to consider an abominably gelid manner, had bet the Travelers Insurance Company (which insures all kinds of people besides travelers) that Wilby would someday steal of the corporation’s funds. The Travelers Insurance Company had bet that Wilby wouldn’t. This wager was represented by a bond of three hundred thousand dollars, the terms of which were that the Knott corporation would pay the Travelers Insurance Company an annual premium of a good many thousands of dollars as long as its chief accountant and assistant treasurer didn’t steal any money from the corporation.

In a passage like that, classic McKelway, a lot of information has to be conveyed, in detail, and at the same time something has to happen somewhere in the sentence to assure the reader that the crate hasn’t just been packed tight for the sake of packing. The minutiae are there, down to the last twenty-nine cents. But the thing explodes with McKelway’s cynical-cunning explanation of the real meaning of bonds for employees, and nothing could be wittier than his explanation of that practice of bonding as a series of bets placed by the corporation against its employees, and by the insurance company on them. “The Travelers Insurance Company had bet that Wilby wouldn’t” is the comic payoff to all the patient, coaxing explanation that has come before. Classic NewYorker style is a method of turning argument into ornament, and reporting into wit. (Bad NewYorker style, involved just that kind of dutiful packing, which had the look of good writing without actually being any good, made by writers who had learned the sober assembly of the body parts but forgot the twist in the tail.) It strives for the simplicity of the man in a worn monogrammed shirt and a pair of old plaid shorts on the beach on Fire Island, not the simplicity of a guy who has moved to Vermont and put on overalls. (And when E.B. White did move to Maine and put on overalls, his style became folksier and less brittle-lucid.) McKelway’s personal history is more vexed than his style. In an extended try at self-revelation, in the confessional story “The Cockatoo,” McKelway gives us a picture of his early years, as the restless son of an upper-middle-class house hold in Washington D.C. with a father who died too soon, leaving his son permanently unhappy with school and dreaming of a life as a newspaperman, a romantic occupation in those days. Later, we learn a lot about his life in the army, working for the “mad bomber,” General Curtis Lemay, still an admired figure in those days when his attention was on beating Japan rather than on ending the world. (McKelway’s complacency at Lemay’s plan to drop jellied gasoline on hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians, though entirely of its time, may make us more than uneasy now.)

Yet deeper inlets of unhappiness run below the jaunty surface. Married five times—make up your own joke—and often, it’s related, sparring with mental disturbances, McKelway had such a happy style that it is easy to miss the current of misery that runs just beneath it. His work floats on a sea of liquor. The hard edges of heavy drinking in those years were so nicely upholstered that the reality—of men and women in the grip of an addiction as soul-and life-destroying as meth addiction is now—tends to float away from our consciousness, as it was designed to do. Realizing how much hard and disastrous drinking is going on in some of McKelway’s writing is as startling as it might be to have discovered our actual fathers at five o’clock with rubber tourniquets around their arms, cheerfully injecting heroin into their veins.

The charming “The Edinburgh Caper,” for instance, is on the surface a kind of Cary Grant-Hitchcock thriller with a shaggy-dog story structure. Yet the whole point of the beautifully rendered intrigue is its ultimate inconsequence: The “caper” turns out to exist only in the tipsy mind of McKelway. But beneath that is the realization that one is also dealing—as one scotch after another goes down the drain and one charming warm Scottish bar after another is visited—with a drunk at the inner edge of paranoia. (One of the things about writing alcoholics is that they convince themselves that social drinking is all they’re doing until they suddenly find themselves all alone and raving, wondering what happened to the pals.)

The competition in self-destruction between McKelway and one of those wives, the beautiful and doomed writer Maeve Brennan, who wed him in the mid-fifties, are still part of the magazine’s saddest legend. Brennan, whose “Long-Winded Lady” pieces for the “Comment” section of the magazine remain a model of plaintive urban haiku, has had a revival lately, and gotten a biography. Her descent from a Holly Golightly high-heartedness into madness and isolation is one of the more heartbreaking of literary stories. Yet there is no better picture of New York life during the mid century than her work and McKelway’s superimposed: Brennan’s poignant, lyrical, and a little pixilated, all midtown Italian restaurants and pigeons taking flight at twilight; McKelway’s comic and low-life obsessed, all penny arcades and Times Square kids.

Drinking this way is the Celtic Curse, of course, and when McKelway’s Scots drinking met Brennan’s Irish kind, some records were set which people still talk about; records only for sadness, of course, since hard drinking ends no other way. (John Updike, a few months before his death, remarked to a friend that the industry and accomplishment that set his work, and that of his great Tweedledee, Phillip Roth, apart was simply the consequence of not drinking, and not even having to take the time to dry out.) Yet McKelway manages to use even his drinking to good effect, making us sense in “The Edinburgh Caper” that the line between paranoid fantasy and intelligent work is so fine as to be nonexistent even in the minds of those engaged in it. (James “Jesus” Angleton would have been a perfect McKelway subject.) You also have to envy McKelway the license he enjoyed. No one now would publish “The Edinburgh Caper”; where all the fun (and in a way the deeper point) is that nothing actually happens. The joy is in the space between the expertly paced narration, potentially sinister and significant, and the balloon-popping deflations that wait around every period and paragraph break.

In a queer way, “major” figures, even minor major figures, like Liebling and Mitchell and White and Thurber, are hard writers to use as models, because what they do depends so entirely on who they are and what they’ve been through that you have to become them to write like them. To write a Liebling sentence, with its baroque braiding of high literature and low life, Parisian suave and race-track savvy, you have to have lived a bit like Liebling, and have a mind like his. But McKelway, like his other unduly forgotten New Yorker contemporary, Wolcott Gibbs, offers a real model for all writers, as he supplies pleasure to all readers, because what works in his stuff is all there in his stuff. Though his style can’t be reduced to rules, it can be summed up as recommendations: find weird data, funny facts, and align them nicely; listen to strange people and give them space to talk; keep a cartoonist’s license but not a caricaturist’s smugness; rely on the force of simple words, but don’t be afraid of big ideas, or of the stuff of history, if you can make it sound like learning casually attained. Above all, keep your voice hovering just above your material, neither below it “subversively” nor alongside it chummily, but above it, a few light and happy inches over the page. If McKelway’s love of quirks and mastery of the light style still sound to some like a recipe for what is called whimsy—well, as Nabokov said emphatically to Edmund Wilson, all good writing is whimsical in the end, and the best is never lost for long.