Lance Morrow - The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism

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Evil: An Investigation

The Best Year of Their Lives: Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon in 1948: Learning the Secrets of Power

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Remembering Journalism

Lance Morrow

New York London

2023 by Lance Morrow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Encounter Books, 900 Broadway, Suite 601, New York, New York, 10003.

First American edition published in 2023 by Encounter Books, an activity of Encounter for Culture and Education, Inc., a nonprofit, tax-exempt corporation.

Encounter Books website address: www.encounterbooks.com

Manufactured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.481992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Morrow, Lance, author.

Title: The noise of typewriters: remembering journalism / Lance Morrow.

Description: First American edition.

New York, New York: Encounter Books, 2023.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022028422 (print) | LCCN 2022028423 (ebook)

ISBN 9781641772280 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781641772297 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: JournalismUnited StatesHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC PN4867.M675 2023 (print) | LCC PN4867 (ebook) DDC 071/.3dc23/eng/20220901

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028422

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022028423

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For Susan

I have an afterimage of Clark Gable at the bus station in a trench coat, with his crooked smile, his shabby integrity. That, of course, is from It Happened One Night (1934). Frank Capra in his movies in the 1930s created morality plays about American journalism, turning newspaper reporters into Everyman, their consciences an ongoing test of the countrys notion of its emotional reflexes and decencies.

It Happened One Night is a masterpiece of emotional allegories: the entire country seen, for example, as a busload of beleaguered and essentially sweet Americans riding north through a terrific rainstorm in the middle of the nightand all of them singing The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze. There was a runaway heiress in the back of the bus with a handsome newspaper reporter, incognito. To be an American was to be like the daring young man on the flying trapeze. The ineffably American thing was a sweetness, an innocence, a vulnerability.

Or to be an American was to be like that spunky little wonder of the 1930s, Shirley Templewho was another allegory of the time: an innocent, unsinkable child making her way through a bad world.

A curious thing: There was, in the drama of journalism, an implication of childishness, of neoteny almost, as if to say that reporters never quite grew up or that journalism itself never quite learned to act like an adult. Editors, it is true, behaved like irascible father figuresthat was the part they were assigned to playbut the reporters by inference were irresponsible children, cases, almost, of arrested development: talented, perhaps, but wayward. Henry Luce was extraordinarily tolerant of alcoholics on the staff of his magazines (Time, Fortune, Life, and others), as if he thought that was the price he had to pay for good writing. Good editing, in Luces doctrine, emerged from sobriety, rectitude, and sound judgmenthis own missionary fathers virtues; but he was romantic enough to believe that inspired writing originated in some other part of the brain, in the region of eccentricity, recklessness, even paganism or madness. When he was an adolescent, the great press lord Luce had wanted to be a poet. He wasnt very good at it. He wrote knockoff Masefield (galloping heptameters). I think he remained wistful for all his life about the Byronic possibilities of the world, for which he knew himself to be unfitted.

The picaresque version of journalism in those days proceeded in a sequence of lovable clichs: the hilarities of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthurs play The Front Page or its even funnier movie version, His Girl Friday, or, in the British, Fleet Street version, Evelyn Waughs Scoop. (The 1938 novel was a cult favorite of college-boy journalists of my generation who gleefully quoted the line from the Daily Beasts nature columnist: Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.) In this rendering, journalism was always ridiculousbut endearingly so. The imbecile press magnate, Lord Copper, asks his foreign editor, Whats the capital of Japan? Yokohama, isnt it? And the foreign editor meekly replies, Up to a point, Lord Copper.

Those college-boy journalists had an inside joke:

President Roosevelt, what did you think of Brideshead Revisited??

I hate Waugh! Eleanor hates Waugh!

Very funny. The joke called me back to the time, in the summer of 1982, when the Israelis under Ariel Sharon besieged Beirut and shelled the city mercilessly for weeks to try to dislodge the PLO, the Palestinian Liberation Organization. A friend of mine, a Time correspondent, told me he survived the bombardment by retreating to the basement of his apartment building and, as the shells rained down, watching episodes of Brideshead Revisited, played over and over again on a VCR.

They were not entirely wrong, the clichs. Journalism was a rascala smoker and a drinkerand the life was picaresque: hectic, improvised, although at times as dull as a clerks. The pay was bad. You were broke half the time, and often hung over. But you were young enough to enjoy the scruffy mystique and a winking intimacy with big shotswith history itself (which, up close, was apt to look like a bit of a fraud). Did it add up to anything? I wondered. Henry Luce insisted that it did, but Henry Lucewith his money and power and the influence of his Presbyterian conscience upon the middle-class American mindwas a Big Picture man. (Luce believed in capitalizing Big Ideas and once sent a memo to his editors encouraging the practice.) He was certain that everything that fell beneath his gaze must mean something important.

People have forgotten Henry Luce. But he is, in some ways, the key to understanding journalism in the twentieth century. His career raised essential questionsabout the nature of journalism, about the politics of storytelling, about the morals of power. Luce was a brilliant American success storyand a cautionary tale.

The journalism I am speaking of owed a lot to the atmosphere of the Great Depression, which was a generation before my time but nonetheless lingered on as folklorea kind of warning and a moral framework: a lifestyle, an aesthetic.