From the WSJ Opinion Archives
BOOKSHELF
A Yale Man at War
From D-Day to The New Yorker, Gardner Botsford tells it all.
I can already hear the grumblings below deck. Another World War II memoir? Groan. Another New Yorker memoir? Double groan. And with a title like "A Life of Privilege, Mostly," it sounds as if the author is going to while away pages polishing the family silver and contemplating his own reflection.
Naysayers, however, are going to have to find another punching bag on which to practice reverse snobbery. This is no genteel exercise in narcissism or nostalgia. From its opening pages Gardner Botsford's journey into the past capsizes expectations and carries the reader along in a swift, crackling current free of fuss and pretention.
The book is packed like a treasure chest with unexpected goodies, some of them courtesy of other writers, such as Wolcott Gibbs's 10 tips on editing and hilarious, gossipy letters from The New Yorker's "Long-Winded Lady," Maeve Brennan. The postcards from the front lines (Gen. Patton in full regalia "looked like an overstuffed owl seeking out mice") and generous helpings of New Yorker lore make this the most engrossing military-literary memoir since Paul Fussell's "Doing Battle" and James Salter's "Burning the Days."
1942. Gardner Botsford--young, married, wife pregnant--inducted into the military in the men's room of New York's Grand Central Palace, sworn into service "to the music of flushing urinals." Shipped overseas, he finds himself in London during the Blitz. Hyde Park is studded with antiaircraft guns, tube stations have been converted into coed dormitories and the restaurants serve slop lousy even by British standards, yet the shared adversity and danger make everyone feel doubly alive.
One night Mr. Botsford is invited to a party by a nice English couple where the entertainment is a woman in a tiger-skin get-up with a six-foot whip. Ripping off their clothes in a frenzy, the guests began "circling the room like cats in a cage" as the tiger lady's whip snapped at lagging bottoms. Mr. Botsford and a lieutenant in a kilt beat a hasty exit, racing each other down the stairs. It's like a scene out of Anthony Powell or Evelyn Waugh, a bit of macabre comedy that seems innocent compared with the grotesqueries of the bloodshed ahead.
Taking part in the landing at Normandy on D-Day, Mr. Botsford goggles awestruck at the apocalyptic vista--"the heavens roaring from one edge of the horizon to the other"--and observes that what can't be captured or communicated later in civilian life is the psychosomatic feel of war, "especially the feel of fear." Later in the campaign he literally stares death in the mouth when the telephone-pole barrel of a "monumental tank" aims point-blank at his head. Fortunately, the tank is one of ours and out of the turret pops a soldier who rushes to embrace Mr. Botsford. "It was Nelson Works, who had sat right behind me in Sociology 102 all sophomore year at Yale."
1945. Mr. Botsford's tour of duty had interrupted his stint as a Talk of the Town reporter at the New Yorker, where he had trained a microscopic eye on topics such as the history and composition of the golf ball. He returns to the magazine after sailing home, prepared to resume previous duties. Before the war, he writes, life at the New Yorker had been like a Hollywood version of journalism, a rakish jaunt; but the magazine has changed in the intervening years ("everyone in the office was grayer and more serious"), and Mr. Botsford has changed too. He soon realizes that he's no longer content to ponder the humble golf ball.
It's William Shawn, the managing editor under Harold Ross, who spots in Mr. Botsford the makings of an editor. For the next four decades Mr. Botsford soothes porcupine egos, watches marriages and psyches alcoholically dissolve, and contends with Shawn, journalism's Jewish Zen master of passive resistance, only to come up with handfuls of air.
Mr. Botsford has no thunderbolt revelations to hurl about Ross and Shawn, two of the greatest tunnel-visioned geniuses and obsessive nitpickers of 20th-century journalism (Ross could release "clouds of minutiae" over a single mischosen word), but he replenishes their reputations with anecdotes and perceptions that bring them brimming into close-up.
Shawn's personality, in particular, is a ghostly mansion of muffled corridors, trapdoors and secret compartments--the home of "a hermetically sealed intellectual." Suffocating as Shawn's grip on The New Yorker became by the end, fed up as Mr. Botsford was by his machinations and martyr poses, he takes umbrage when Shawn is deposed as editor and his successor, Robert Gottlieb (who had once boasted, "I'm a living legend among publishers"), mocks Shawn's "shy mannerisms" in his presence. It was one thing for intimates to make light of Shawn's squeamish quirks, but Mr. Gottlieb was an outsider goofing on a dignified old man whose job he was about to take. "He laughed and laughed, and I got madder and madder."
Such tough gallantry sets this book apart from the wistful remembrances of other Ross-Shawn veterans, many of whom equate the demise of the magazine they loved with the death of their fond illusions. Mr. Botsford, who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, left his illusions back in the mud and snow and has a hardier sense of the human comedy than the forlorn pencil-pushers for whom the New Yorker was a hushed sanitarium where the messengers made their rounds on little mice feet. The humor, sympathy and sadness of this memoir, which come together most affectingly in its roll-call of those dead by drink or suicide (Maeve Brennan, John McCarten, Richard Harris, Seymour Krim), bear the personal stamp of a man in full.
Mr. Wolcott is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.
