New York in the '50s (11 page)

Murray was to cover the story for the
Post
, and he'd also been asked to do a piece for
The Nation
, which he didn't feel he could or should write in addition. He picked up the phone and told the editor of
The Nation
that he ought to let a young guy named Dan Wake-field do the story for him. Completely on Murray's recommendation,
The Nation
gave me a letter of introduction as credentials and the bus fare for the trip (I think it amounted to forty bucks).

When I got the assignment, a line came into my head by John Reed, who wrote somewhere that when he knew he was going on one of his first foreign stories, it was like “being on the edge of a beautiful dream.” I was there. The dream was not just the story, and not just the nightmare of Emmet Till's death, but the opportunity of being on the scene to transcribe in my own words a meaningful
moment in American history, and the promise of doing it again in other places, for other big stories.

On the bus that took me to Sumner (“A Good Place to Raise a Boy,” a sign just outside town proclaimed with what seemed now a dark irony), I purposely sat next to a Negro woman, as if to show my comradeship. She smiled and asked me, “Are you a young lawyer?”

“No, ma'am,” I said. “I'm a reporter, from New York.”

It was on that trip that I first felt justified in identifying New York as my home. I went around the racially tense town in the Delta—even knocking on people's doors to interview them about the controversial case that was making headlines—proudly identifying myself as a reporter for
The Nation
, “in New York.” It was hardly a way to win favor. Just being a reporter from up north was enough to get me taken for a ride by two sheriff's deputies, who dropped me in the middle of nowhere so I had to walk back to town in the gathering dark. I was lucky a ride was all they gave me.

I felt no fear because I was young and naïve, and also because Murray Kempton was there, to introduce me to the other reporters and make sure I knew what was going on. He saw to it that I had a room in town, and that I got out of there when the other reporters left for a motel in the bigger, less tense city of Greenville to write their stories, so I wouldn't be the lone Yankee in Sumner after the trial.

The trial in the small, sweltering, segregated courtroom was indeed classic, with the murdered boy's uncle, an aged Negro field hand named Moses Wright, testifying against Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the two white men accused of the brutal murder. Their acquittal was a foregone conclusion of white supremacy ruling over law. The drama set the stage for the conflict to come, the struggle for civil rights in the South, in which Mose Wright was only the first of the long-oppressed people of his race to stand up, in the face of threats and against the whole weight of tradition and power in the region, and proclaim the right to the freedom they were supposed to have received the century before.

I sat up all night writing so that I could file my report at Western Union the next morning, to make the deadline. I finished at dawn. The lead of my piece summed up my perception of the trial and the situation we were now to observe as it went through its struggle
to change in the decade to come: “The crowds are gone and this Delta town is back to its silent, solid life that is based on cotton and the proposition that a whole race of men was created to pick it.”

The Nation
ran the story, “Justice in Sumner,” with my byline, and suddenly I was a published writer in a national magazine. I bought up all the copies at the local newsstand and passed them out like cigars—this, in fact, was a birth. The editors and, more important, the publisher of
The Nation
liked the piece and wanted me to come in and meet them and talk about doing more work.

The offices of
The Nation
were at 333 Sixth Avenue, at the corner of West 4th Street in the heart of Greenwich Village. There was nothing colorful, however, about the dreary old building that housed the magazine. You took a rickety freight elevator to the fourth floor and saw an elderly telephone operator at one of those old-fashioned switchboards with wires that plugged into little sockets to connect calls, the kind you see in black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties. The operator also acted as receptionist, and you waited until she finished answering and connecting calls to say who it was you wanted to see.

The editor in chief was Carey McWilliams, a liberal journalist who had written a well-respected book called
Factories in the Field
, an account of migrant workers in California. Carey's working-editor garb was a gray cardigan sweater he buttoned halfway up his white shirt with tie; his jacket hung on a coatrack by his desk. He always had on those shoes specially formed for the feet, which reminded me of the kind Frankenstein wore—one
Nation
contributor, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, called them space shoes. Norman, in fact, called Carey “Space Shoes” or “Space” or “Old Space,” a nickname that made me giggle and seemed so suitable I couldn't help using it for McWilliams myself, though we never said it in front of him.

Norman was the only
Nation
writer I knew who was, like me, under thirty—the rest of the staff seemed to be over forty or even fifty, which was ancient to us. Norman was an Italian-American anarchist from Boston with an Oberlin College degree who was working on a book about Sacco and Vanzetti. I stayed on his cot in a cold-water flat in the North End when I visited Boston, and he slept on a blanket on my floor when he came to New York.

We were both young and crazy for literature and experience, and to us Carey McWilliams, with his space shoes, buttoned-up cardigan, and thinning black hair slicked straight back from his pale forehead, seemed like the ultimate square. The image was reinforced by what we regarded as his sober, right-thinking, well-meaning, unexciting editorials. McWilliams seemed like the safe, predictable liberal, the person who believed in all the correct causes but without any passion or fire.

At least Norman—or Di G, as he was known—could charm Carey, as he could almost anyone, with his wild-man Italian enthusiasm, which he played with great élan. Carey and I simply never hit it off; we worked together and maintained a polite manner toward each other, but really felt no rapport.

After a pleasant but somewhat strained talk with McWilliams when I returned from Mississippi, I was taken in to meet the new publisher of
The Nation
, a ruggedly handsome, intellectually rough-around-the-edges man named George Kirstein. He looked as if he might have stepped out of an
Esquire
ad, with his sharp suit and tie, brilliantly shined shoes, well-coifed hair, and strong tanned face, weathered from the sailing he did on his yacht. George was direct, irreverent, sometimes impolite, and enjoyed a good laugh, a big drink, and a hearty meal.

In the hushed, serious atmosphere of the magazine, which had the dank aura of one of those cobwebby storerooms lived in by spinster sisters preserving the ancient family archives (the remains of the 1930s radical left wing), Kirstein seemed as colorful and refreshing as the playboy of the Western world. He was a wealthy man whose Boston family had made a fortune (Filene's department store was among their businesses) and given generously to good works and culture. George was a Harvard graduate who served on the National Labor Relations Board during World War II, and who injected a needed transfusion of money into the ailing
Nation
when he became publisher, the year I wrote my first article.

Kirstein suffered what seemed to me an unnecessary intellectual inferiority complex because of his two artistically prodigal siblings, the New York City Ballet director Lincoln Kirstein and the literary biographer Minna Curtiss, who had written a book on Proust. George's public image was that of the crass businessman among the
artistes
, which I think he cultivated in self-defense, yet I found his the most original mind at
The Nation
. McWilliams had the reputation of the brilliant liberal editor, yet to me his ideas often seemed recycled or geared to special causes of the magazine designed to spur bulk sales to a particular union or pressure group. It was George who wanted to try something new all the time—including me, which of course was one of the reasons I liked him.

“We could use a young guy like you,” he said when I met him. His office was in the one bright room at the end of the floor, with windows that offered a view of the surrounding commercial and apartment buildings of the Village. He tamped his pipe and said he'd like me to do some more on-the-scene reporting, to provide something current among the long-range think pieces on politics, economics, public policy, and the arts that were the principal fare of the magazine.

Not surprisingly, this struck me as a wise and perceptive policy. A year or so later, when I had an offer to write for another publication, Kirstein proposed a weekly retainer of $75 in return for my writing two articles a month for
The Nation
. In the meantime, I was happy to free-lance for them at their going rate of $40 per article.

More than any other writer I knew, C. Wright Mills's friend and neighbor Harvey Swados embodied the search to live and do his work in a commercial world and maintain his commitment as an artist. Though a little more than a decade older than me and my generation, he served as a model for many of us, wrestling with problems we were just confronting or foresaw down the line as part of the struggle to live and write. He wrote most of his first novel,
Out Went the Candle
, on the commuter train to New York from his home in Valley Cottage, in Rockland County, while he worked in the office of Israel Bonds, writing publicity. After that experience he decided that a writer shouldn't have another job that drew on his ability to write, requiring him to use his craft for a lesser purpose than literature, which divided his mind—his very self—between art and commerce. That dilemma became a theme of his work and the subject of his novel
False Coin
.

Next he went in the opposite direction and got a laboring job, working on the assembly line at the Ford plant in Rockland County.
Out of that experience he drew the material for an insightful book of connected stories,
On the Line
—yet the job left him so exhausted, he found it hard to write in what time was left, so he gave up that route too. After that, he took a part-time position teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence. His teacher's salary, combined with grants, fellowships, journalistic assignments, and modest book advances, enabled him to support his wife and three children, in a home filled with books, talk, laughter, and music (Harvey played the piano and flute, his daughter Felice the harp) which I loved to visit.

Though I wasn't even considering starting a family, Harvey and his wife and children were the kind I'd have wanted. They showed me that family life was not only possible for a writer but could even be fulfilling, stimulating, and fun, with great books, Bach cantatas, and even a goat, which they kept in their yard in Valley Cottage and got milk from.

Harvey had an active social conscience as well as a creative imagination, and he loved to do journalism on the model of George Orwell, going down into a coal mine to write about what conditions were like, talking to the men on the assembly line at the Ford plant to explode “the Myth of the Happy Worker.” He wrote essays and articles for magazines like
The Nation
and
Dissent
that paid little but adhered to his own principles—expressed in the title of his collection of some of those pieces,
A Radical's America
—and allowed him to get his message across without compromise. Few were as dedicated, or as pure in sticking to principle, as Harvey.

We all took different routes for survival, trying to write and make a living at the same time. The year Bruce Jay Friedman began working as a magazine editor, he published his first short story in
The New Yorker
(“Wonderful Golden Rule Days”) and found time to write fiction after hours. He also helped many other young writers get their start or keep financially afloat by buying their stories for the men's adventure magazines he was running. “When I was in charge of the four magazines,” Friedman says, “I needed thirty-six stories a month. I only had a staff of five or six, so I was dependent on an army of free-lancers. Someone recommended a guy called Mario Puzo, and I hired him on the basis of a novel he wrote,
The Dark Arena
. He thought my hiring him was the kindest thing anyone ever did, but I was just trying to make my own job easier by getting
a good writer. He worked for me for five years while he was writing
The Godfather
. Mario probably wrote two billion words for me. I'd have an illustration done of some battle, and then enlarge it and show it to him. It would be some fictitious scene from World War II, because we'd run out of real battles and we couldn't just keep storming Anzio month after month. He wrote these novels we called book bonuses, and I was so enthusiastic about his work I put my own job on the line and demanded that our publisher break our salary cap of $500 per book bonus and pay Mario the unheard-of sum of $650. Mario thought it was fabulous. We've been friends ever since, and he still thanks me for that raise to $650.”

Aspiring writers who had editorial jobs or even wrote unsigned pieces for magazines still wanted to have their own work published under their own name, and so they looked to the “little magazines” for outlets. “Before I got my first byline at
Vogue
,” Joan Didion remembers, “I was sending things to other magazines. The first piece I ever published was about a quiz show I'd been on. I sent it to
The Reporter
first and got a nice note back, but they didn't take it. Then Noel Parmentel, who had written for
National Review
, sent it to
NR
and they published it. I got to know Frank Meyer, who was editor of
NR
's back-of-the-book section, and began writing for him.
NR
started the writing careers of many people, like me, Renata Adler, John Leonard, Arlene Croce. All of us started writing our first freelance pieces for Frank Meyer.”