The Noise of Typewriters

Editor’s Note: excerpted from The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism, by Lance Morrow

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 country’s 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 night — and 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. (In the twenty-first century, the American conscience would notice that there were no black people at all aboard the bus — and that fact would set up a ferociously different and opposite narrative line.)

Or to be an American was to be like that spunky little wonder of the 1930s, Shirley Temple — who 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 figures — that was the part they were assigned to play — but 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 Luce’s doctrine, emerged from sobriety, rectitude, and sound judgment — his own missionary father’s 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 wasn’t 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 cliches: the hilarities of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s play The Front Page or its even funnier movie version, His Girl Friday, or, in the British, Fleet Street version, Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. (The 1938 novel was a cult favorite of college-boy journalists of my generation who gleefully quoted the line from the Daily Beast’s nature columnist: “Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole.”) In this rendering, journalism was always ridiculous — but endearingly so. The imbecile press magnate, Lord Copper, asks his foreign editor, “What’s the capital of Japan? Yokohama, isn’t 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 cliches. Journalism was a rascal — a smoker and a drinker — and the life was picaresque: hectic, improvised, although at times as dull as a clerk’s. 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 shots — with 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 Luce — with his money and power and the influence of his Presbyterian conscience upon the middle-class American mind — was 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 questions — about the nature of journalism, about the politics of storytelling, about the morals of power. Luce was a brilliant American success story — and 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 folklore — a kind of warning and a moral framework: a lifestyle, an aesthetic.

During the Depression, the reporters were mostly New Dealers, while their publishers were overwhelmingly Republicans. Capra framed his stories around Americans’ anxiety about whether they are Good; they imagined that if they were not Good, they must be Evil. Or anyway, they must be Pretty Bad. 

At the same time, it became a complicated lesson of the twentieth century, starting in the 1930s, that when people try to be perfect, they turn into fanatics. That was the story in foreign countries — in Russia, in Germany, around the time of It Happened One Night, which got the Oscar for Best Picture in 1934. Could it happen here? Capra liked to show Americans being tempted by an evil genius (often played by Edward Arnold) — a newspaper publisher with a fascist agenda — but, at the end, returning safely to the arms of their sweet democracy, like Dorothy restored to the farm in Kansas. I sometimes think that the leftist tendencies of twenty-first-century media have their origin in the myths of Frank Capra’s movies.

There was a certain amount of decaying theology at work in all of this. In time, the country’s Calvinism — the founding religion — had settled for democratizing itself as a cult of emotions. Feelings — like money — give the country a least common denominator: a lingua franca in which people in a diverse society might communicate with one another and affirm their humanity and their citizenship as Americans. 

Now, instead of hard theological thoughts, the country moralized its feelings. Almost from the start, the need to justify the American enterprise had produced an elaborately sentimental self-image. The Frank Capra movies (for example, Meet John Doe and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) were a twentieth-century advance in that art — and so were Norman Rockwell’s anecdotal paintings, the glowing American allegories that illustrated covers of the Saturday Evening Post in the days when it was a great and influential magazine; my father was an editor at the Post in those flush times, after the war. 

The self-confident and sometimes preacherly and overbearing narratives of Henry Luce’s Time magazine had an immense moral and cultural influence upon Americans. As a child, Luce, a China missionary’s son, learned storytelling from the New Testament, from Christ’s parables — each of which teaches a moral lesson. Stories in his magazines would similarly instruct. Hotchkiss and then Yale exposed him to the moralizing Greeks and Romans, especially Plutarch, who sought the truth of things in the lives of great men.

In any case, mass-circulation American journalism (especially Luce’s) joined American politics and American religion and American movies in the restless project of making and remaking — or, eventually, unmaking — the national myth.

Journalism in the twentieth century proceeded on the assumption that there was such a thing as objective reality. The task of journalism, said Carl Bernstein — who was a companion of my youth, when we were picaresque rascals side by side on the dictation bank at the Washington Evening Star back in the mid-1960s — was to obtain “the best available version of the truth.” 

But in the writing and editing, objective reality tended to become subjective reality; facts were well enough, but important facts needed to be evaluated, judged — characterized. Which was the priority of a mythmaker like Luce — the hard facts of the case or the storyteller’s interpretation of them, the narrative line? Is journalism inevitably engaged in the working up of myths, whatever its pretensions to objectivity? A journalist needs a disciplined reverence for the facts, because the temptations of storytelling are strong and seductive.

I don’t mean that mythmaking is necessarily perfidious; in any case, it is inevitable. It’s a problem of storytelling and, so to speak, of entertainment. Where journalism is concerned, as I discovered over the years, the narrative line is not only a chronic problem of ethics but the key to culture itself — and even the glue that holds a society together.

But in the era I am writing about, questions like that were above our pay grade. We took it for granted that there was something called the truth and that it could be discovered. Start at the level of the cop’s truth: The victim was either white or black, male or female. The murder weapon was of a certain caliber. Someone had pulled the trigger. Who? I’m talking about hard facts that are beneath the radar of controversy, of politics. Such facts did not invite abstract speculation. 

Woodward and Bernstein approached Watergate as a crime story, not a political one; they would knock on doors like police detectives and find things out. Woodward and Bernstein were like the boy in the story of the emperor’s new clothes. In Citizen Kane, that great fable of journalism and American truth, an obscure clue like “Rosebud” might mean something. Find out what he meant by that, the editor told his boys in the smoky projection room at the start of the movie.
In the twenty-first century, on the other hand, journalism would find itself plunged into the metaverse. Politics and culture would migrate into the country of myth, with its hallucinations and hysterias — the floating world of a trillion screens. There might come to be no agreed reality at all.

* * *

You did not dignify journalism by referring to it as “journalism” (a word that is even now a little too grand, too self-important) unless you put the word “yellow” in front of it. You called yourself a reporter or a newspaperman. News ceases to be news the minute that people know about it. Newspapers were for wrapping the fish or swatting the dog or else announcing, in big, black headlines, a sudden turn in the movie’s plot (KANE CAUGHT IN LOVE NEST). The journalist and historian Eric Alterman went overboard in order to make the point: “Reporting was seen as a job for winos, perverts, and those without sufficient imagination to become gangsters.”

Contempt for reporters had a long history. General William Tecumseh Sherman hated them (and he had reason, for they sometimes made things up or, worse, they aided the enemy by publishing entirely accurate information about his army’s movements), and one day when he learned that Confederate guns had sunk a barge-load of Yankee reporters in the Mississippi River near Vicksburg, he laughed and cheered. The journalists swam ashore and survived, but at least they had gotten their notebooks wet.

When Janet Malcolm died in 2021, obituaries remembered the famous rant with which she opened her 1989 New Yorker magazine piece, later to become a book called The Journalist and the Murderer (about Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted of killing his wife and daughters, and Joe McGinniss, who wrote a book about the case). “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible,” she wrote. “He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.”

We have all been there at one time or another — gaining the source’s trust, smiling, and then betraying that trust. Any reporter, reading Malcolm’s rant, experiences a shudder of recognition and shame. But her indictment is too savage, and it belongs to the category of irrelevant generalization. What mattered, ultimately, was not whether you treated a source shabbily but whether you got the story and — who knows — wrote the truth. A (so to speak) secondary betrayal might be the price of getting the story right.

 
Some journalism earned promotion to the status of literature and, as such, survived. The Library of America collected two volumes of the best Vietnam War reporting — and some of it was splendid and enduring. I think of Joan Didion’s essays, some of them still wonderful, years after she wrote them; or of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, his reporting for Esquire from Vietnam. Or of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, first published in 1946 as the contents of an entire issue of Harold Ross’s New Yorker. With that book, Hersey achieved a journalistic sainthood that he did not quite deserve. Hersey, also the son of a China missionary, had started out as one of Henry Luce’s boys.

I think of some of H.L. Mencken’s essays a hundred years ago, which were often as unfair as they were hilarious. When he covered the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925, Mencken lampooned the entire population of Tennessee as snaggle-toothed and deplorable people, to use the adjective that Hillary Clinton would make famous later on; in truth, most of Tennessee’s people were nice enough, some of them nicer and better educated than Mencken himself and, in any case, more polite. The American South, he wrote, in his mode of literary vaudeville, was “the Sahara of the Boz Arts,” or “the chigger latitudes.” As if the bombastic, lager-swilling, cigar-chomping bourgeois sometime boor and occasional anti-Semite Henry Mencken, who lived with his mother in a row house on Hollins Street in Baltimore, was anything to write home about.

At a critical moment, as the country shifted its center of gravity from agricultural and rural to urban — from farm to office, from the harvester to the typewriter — Mencken awakened anxious middle-class Americans to the pleasures of throwing tomatoes at their parents and grandparents, at the places where they’d grown up, and at the churches where their parents worshipped: in Sauk Centre, Minnesota; Spoon River, Illinois; Winesburg, Ohio — to cite the literary points of reference. He taught middle-class Americans to dissociate themselves from — to repudiate — their origins. Mencken was very funny, and I love some of his essays. And he did strike blows for freedom of the press, and some of his targets deserved it; but all the same, he had a bad influence upon the country’s manners. 

Mencken taught his readers to think they were smart — to see themselves as an elite, decisively superior to the ignoramuses they had left behind in the backwaters of American life. The supercilious Mencken strain would become powerful in the twenty-first century’s culture wars. He taught bright Americans an idiom of contempt that would come back to haunt the country a hundred years later.

Is it possible that journalism is an art? Mostly, it settled for being a craft. Some of what passes for great journalism in America has had the quality of ranting, for the rant is a characteristic American art form. The news ran adjacent to the funny papers, and those fraternal twins influence one another: The news stories might be cartoonish and the comics (Dick Tracy, Little Orphan Annie, Terry and the Pirates) might borrow ideas from current events.

A cult of feelings, again: The more intemperate the rant, the more entertaining it is, the more the journalism may be esteemed — for the illogical reason that its intemperance speaks of its sincerity, its “passion,” as if passionate conviction were the same as truth — and speaks of what the Japanese call haragei. Haragei is a samurai virtue that is previous to reason, a sort of ferocious, inarticulate authenticity, which dwells in the hara, the belly of the individual. The belly in Japan is the equivalent of the West’s metaphorical heart. (In twenty-first-century America, a principle much like haragei would be sanctified as “my truth,” as in the expression “I must speak my truth.” My truth is true because it is mine, not because it is true.) In order to prove such authenticity, the Japanese of a former time found it might be necessary to commit hara-kiri. A man considered himself obliged to disembowel himself — displaying the contents of his belly for the world to see — thus showing that he had nothing to hide. Perhaps American journalists and politicians should embrace the custom. It might keep them honest.

A style of American ranting — which is, after all, the national genius — originated with Mark Twain and his brilliant invention, Huckleberry Finn. Huck had an improbably ethical (even noble) mind, a genius for mischief, and a violent, alcoholic father who slept with the pigs, and he told whoppers, which he called “stretchers.” He was a representative American character. Twain began as a newspaper reporter out west during the Civil War years. He perfected American humor on the model of “stretchers.” 

Journalism, unless you worked at the New York Times in the old days, was often heavy on bombast and fact inflation in the Mark Twain manner: sensational and sentimental, hilarious and squalid — the W.C. Fields touch. Chuck Jones, the great animator who invented Bugs Bunny, the Coyote and Road Runner, Daffy Duck, and other cartoon characters, used to say that he learned everything he knew from Mark Twain.

Academics and moralists were apt to condemn the newspaper trade, the craft (it was, please, not a “profession”), as validation (the intellectuals might have said) of Francis Bacon’s line about “mankind’s natural but corrupt love of the lie.” A lie is so much more entertaining than the truth. The charm of a lie is that you can always make one up; lying is easy, when you get the hang of it. You are not allowed to make up the truth (if you do, it’s a lie — or else you are a novelist). Intellectuals (including some who were journalists themselves) dismissed journalism as the illegitimate half brother of decent literature: the Smerdyakov of letters.
 
Most journalism evaporates in a day or a week. In Scoop, a veteran hack named Corker tells William Boot, “You’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that, it’s dead.”

Why bother about it, then, such a shabby, evanescent thing? The answer, I’d say, is that journalism is not, in essence, shabby or evanescent. That’s the cartoon version of it. One can have fun with it and tell the war stories and quote Evelyn Waugh; and it’s true enough, as far as it goes. But there is more to be said. Journalism touched the history of the twentieth century almost continuously — and sometimes altered it, changing its course from what it might otherwise have been. Journalism became a participant — an active principle of information or misinformation, a sort of adjunct metaphysics that has grown almost infinitely more powerful in the twenty-first century. Henry Luce was one of those who knew instinctively that news doesn’t die if you turn it into myth. That was the secret of his immense success and, in some ways, also his greatest flaw.
 
The mythmaker may be a great truth-teller — or a great liar. The morals of journalism are complex.

There is Bertrand Russell’s thought that “the universe is all spots and jumps, without coherence or orderliness... it consists of events — short, small, haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions just as truly as are catalogues and encyclopedias.” Lord Russell thought that people who seek order and unity and all of that have the minds of “governesses.” Certainly, Henry Luce had a touch of the governess in his character.

And yet the evanescence — the spottiness, the jumpiness — was not the point. One story naturally yielded to another, but the stories flowed on and on, and the flow was dynamic and continuous. The stories were the country’s counter-life or mirror-life, a way of seeing itself — even though half the time it might be as a cartoon or a scandal. Journalism ran along parallel to life or, rather, followed along just behind it, like the car full of gesticulating policemen in slapstick silent movies of a century ago — trying to arrest life, so to speak.
 
Think of it in another way: The point about the river of Heraclitus is not so much that it is never the same river twice (that’s a child’s or a pedant’s conceit) as that it is always the river, always filled with life and stories — a run of strong, living water.

the country’s counter-life or mirror-life, a way of seeing itself