Second Read — January / February 2007
Benevolent Dreamer
Ben Yagoda on St. Clair McKelway, who wrote with lucidity about his own mental illness.
By Ben YagodaLast summer James Wolcott reviewed The Complete New Yorker on DVD for The New Criterion. He concluded with a list of “future topics for inquiry.” Number one with a bullet point was this: “Why does A.J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?” Liebling’s continued popularity is not my subject here, though I will direct your attention to his description of a New York City boxing cornerman’s “satellite, a man who went by the name of Mr. Emmet. Mr. Emmet, a Bostonian, is so called because, as he explains, ‘I always hanged in Emmet Street.’ He has forgotten his former name, which was polysyllabic.” In my opinion, the creator of that last sentence deserves to be a role model for writers as long as there are writers.
To the McKelway part of the question, I say: Why indeed?
McKelway was a North Carolinian with journalism in his bloodlines: his great uncle, whose name he shared, had been editor of the Brooklyn Eagle; the family moved to Washington, D.C., and his brother Ben was to become editor of The Washington Star. Starting out as an office boy on the Washington Times-Herald, McKelway went on to the New York World, the New York Herald Tribune, the Chicago Tribune, and the Bangkok Daily Mail — relocating to Siam for four years being a characteristically unpredictable McKelway move. He came to The New Yorker in 1933, at the age of twenty-eight, just as the magazine was becoming a magnet for the best urban journalists from all the New York dailies. In a span of just a few years, the New Yorker’s founding editor, Harold Ross, recruited at least one reporter who continues to be a vibrant role model — Joseph Mitchell — and quite a few more who have been sorely forgotten, including Alva Johnston, Joel Sayre, and John McNulty.
McKelway’s first New Yorker piece was a profile of a New York City policeman, and he speedily established a niche writing about cops and various kinds of crooks under the magazine’s rubric “Annals of Crime.” He continued in this vein for thirty-six years, eventually collecting his pieces in two books, True Tales from the Annals of Crime and Rascality (1951) and Big Little Man from Brooklyn (1969), both unjustly out of print. McKelway was drawn not to gangsters, murderers, or thugs but to those he called “rascals” — the embezzler, the counterfeiter of one-dollar bills (this piece was eventually adapted into the 1950 film Mister 880), the second-story man, the impostor. Unlike most crime writers of that (and this) day, he didn’t judge or — what is harder to avoid — condescend to his subjects. Instead, he presented the facts, with tacit and sometimes explicit sympathy. More generally, McKelway helped cement what became the cornerstone of New Yorker fact writing (that was the preferred term, “journalism” sounding a mite pretentious): an understated, elegant, and witty stylistic stance, buttressed and to some degree created, by massive reporting.
His 1939 Annals of Crime piece “The Innocent Man at Sing Sing,” deserves to be included in any anthology of crime reporting, or maybe any anthology of reporting. It starts out this way:
Early in the evening of December 8, 1938, a young man named Philip Caruso went outdoors for the first time in two weeks. He had gone to bed with the grippe on Thanksgiving and had stayed there for twelve days before the family doctor told him he could get up and move about the house. He had stayed indoors for two more days, reading magazines and listening to the radio. He lived with his father and mother, five of his seven brothers, and a sister in a one-family house at 1957 Seventy-ninth Street, Brooklyn. He had a fever blister on the right side of his upper lip and he felt shaky from being in bed so long, but he was glad to get out of the house at last. He went straight to the cafeteria on Twentieth Avenue and Eighty-sixth Street, where he thought he might find some of his friends — clerks, office boys, and such who lived in the neighborhood. He found three or four of them at the cafeteria, as he had hoped, and sat down with them. He drank some coffee and they talked about the hockey matches then going on at Madison Square Garden. He remembers all this distinctly, for it was while he was sitting there in the cafeteria, talking with his friends, that two police detectives came in and arrested him on a charge of first-degree robbery, accusing him of having taken part in a holdup in July, four months before. He remembers the fever blister particularly; it was a singularly unfortunate blemish as things turned out. Although Caruso was as innocent of this crime as Chief Justice Hughes, he was tried, convicted, and sent to Sing Sing to serve a sentence of from ten to twenty years.
McKelway goes on to recount, with the same terrific precision of diction and fact, the chain of events leading to Caruso’s conviction and, after he had served ten months, to his exoneration and release. He gives us the overworked police detectives, the highly suggestible victim, the not greatly sympathetic or sharp public defender, the self-satisfied judge. Narratives of the wrongly convicted are common today, but not in 1939 — certainly not ones with the dispassionate rigor of this article. Melodrama is not on McKelway’s agenda. He merely wants to show us that, as he writes, the abuse of the judicial system and justice in Caruso’s case “may easily be typical of hundreds of other obscure cases which are tried hurriedly, without publicity.”
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