Reporting at Wit's End: Tales from the New Yorker

Among the many pleasures of reading The New Yorker are its occasional pieces on the annals of human frailty (and accomplishment). For nearly all of the 1930's. 40's and 50's, The New Yorker's go to guy for many of these reports was St.Clair McKelway. Now Bloomsbury USA has republished 18 of McKelway's more memorable efforts in this 619-page trade paperback edition, "Reporting at Wit's End." It begins with a knowledgeable introduction by Adam Gopnik, one of the magazine's current stars. First a word about the book's title. McKelway literally found himself at his wit's end more than once and, as a result, under psychiatric care. Two of the longer pieces in the collection, "The Blowing of the Top of Peter Roger Oboe" and "The Edinburgh Caper" are McKelway's own accounts of two memorable occasions when his paranoid imagination got the better of him. Next, a word about the strengths and weakness of compiling so much choice McKelway in one volume. It is a great treat to discover one of The New Yorker's "Annals" pieces in the Table of Contents of the latest issue. My favorites are those dealing with uncommon criminals, imposters, and other screwballs lurking in the byways of Manhattan. Great treats, but piled one on top of another like a Dagwood sandwich, these articles lose something. My suggestion, don't slog through them over the course of a week or a fortnight, but read one or two at a time and put the book aside until you are ready for another helping. When you do get to them, you are in for some great treats. Among those I most enjoyed are "Mister 880" and "The Big Little Man from Brooklyn." The subject of the first of the two, an elderly widower, supplemented his modest pension by printing and passing crudely counterfeited one dollar bills. Careful never to pass more than one bill at a time or to bilk the same victim twice, Edward Mueller confounded the U.S. Treasury for ten years and was apprehended only after a fire in his apartment smoked him out. The big little man of the other piece was an imposter par excellence. He passed himself off as what he wasn't, medical doctor, penologist, naval officer, State Department official, you name it, not for monetary gain but for the pleasure he took in the roles he assumed. McKelway, if I not mistaken, not only admired the man, but identified with him and, may have envied the lengths to which his wit took him. You will also enjoy "Some Fun with the FBI," McKelway's account of Harry Bridges watching the F.B.I. watch him; "Who Is This King of Glory?", the story of Father Devine's miraculous appeal to the thousands who worshipped and supported him in the style to which he quickly became accustomed, and "The Rich Recluse of Herald Square," whose fortune attracted a raft of suitors and their lawyers each hoping for a piece of the action. It will bring to mind Charles Dickens' account of Jarndyce and Jarndyce in "Bleak House." One final note. The cover price of "Reporting at Wit's End" is $18.00. The cu

The master of the classic New Yorker character driven long profile, McKelway largely ignored the Park Avenue bluebloods and the silk stocking crowd, and instead plumbed the depths of the great city's underclass, focussing on its unique and singular "rascals" with near affection and an amazing forensic attention to detail.

How good are these essays? Well, I remember reading them in old copies of `The New Yorker' many years ago, that my grandmother had. They increased my fascination of the city and people in it where I spent most of my summers. Here is the real New York. There are stories from the 30's, but they could still be of today, as are the works done in the 40's, 50's and 60's. Most are stories of New York and the interesting people McKelway profiled, such as; a counterfeiter of $1 bills, and a man who posses as a naval officer among others and is able to meet the president in the White House. There are a few exceptions to the stories of New York characters; when he was a runaway from home and those done mostly when he was a public relations officer and with them you will see perhaps a different side of Curtis LeMay The quality of the writing allows you to glimpse these people and places even if you have never been near his subjects or New York. McKelway's thoughts and words are extraordinary. It's a delight to find an author, that as you finish reading their work, you not only regret it ending, but you immediately go to find other creations by them. St. Clair McKelway is one of those authors and this collection of his essays is worth the time to sit and read and absorb his descriptions of life and most of all the characters he depicted.

Roger Angell wrote a short description of McKelway's 37 year tenure at "The New Yorker": "McKelway, a brilliant and prolific writer, had been a staff member of The New Yorker since 1933, and in that time also became its first managing editor for factual stuff. He hired numbers of young reporters who went on to celebrated careers with the magazine, including E. J. Kahn, Philip Hamburger, and Brendan Gill.... His best-known piece was six-part Profile of Walter Winchell, but his favorite subject was oddball criminals, like a master embezzler he called "the wily Wilby," or an inveterate forger of one-dollar bills known as Mister 880. He had a lovely touch." One of his best series covered was a four-part article from 1945 about American bomber squadrons in the Marianas Islands: "The rain fell on the just hardened concrete of the runway, on the black-topped asphalt of the taxiways and hard-stands, splashed into the faces of the ground crews crouching in pup tents alongside the places where the homecoming B-29s would park, if they ever did park. It fell on the surrounding white-capped sea. It washed away some of the unfinished roads leading from the airstrip to the air crews' quarters; it flooded already muddy roads and walks in wing and group and squadron establishments on the bluff over the sea; it ruined the previous day's work of the Army Engineers, who were building three-lane asphalt highways to the unimpressive headquarters of the island commander on Saipan's highest hilltop; and it made a mess of the carefully graded terraces between the closely packed Quonset huts where the administrative business of the island would be carried out weeks later when a fresh invasion force took off from Saipan to invade Iwo Jima. It fell on the cemeteries of the Marine and Army men who had been killed in the battles that won the Marianas from the Japanese." All of McKelway pieces are long and consist of countless small facts that bring his subjects, and particularly the scoundrels he loved to write about, to vivid and believeable life. Many of the essays in this wonderful collection came from his regular column, "The Annals of Crime." True Tales from the Annals of Crime & Rascality is an earlier collection of some of his contributions to the Annals. He does just as well with the good guys: Harry Grossman swam across the bay to a beach in East Quogue, where he served papers: "This is an outrage" she said when Grossman put the damp subpoena on her lap. "An outrage is it?" he replied. "Suppose I get cramps? Suppose I get drowned? Would that be an outrage or wouldn't it?" He swam back across the inlet, full of righteous indignation. My first serious magazine subscription was to "The New Yorker". In a sense, I grew up with the magazine, and McKelway was one of my best tutors. This wonderful collection seems as alive to me today as it was back in the 1950s when I first starting reading them. Robert C. Ross 2010