The Once and Future Newspaperman

This reviewer had the increasingly rare privilege of working on a college newspaper that was, in fact, a newspaper — we had our own presses, painted green, that churned out in glorious full color all the university gossip fit for broadsheet, five days a week, plus a weekly for arts and culture. The presses were operated by two ancient, crocodilian Bostonians who scared us all a little, Cyclopes toiling in the Aetna of the collegiate fourth estate.It was part of that “Citizen Kane” world, conjured now by Lance Morrow in his new essay collection. “The Noise of Typewriters: Remembering Journalism” is part memoir, part primer, part eulogy — for part of Mr. Morrow’s claim is that the world of Kane is gone, just like my college paper’s presses. “Being there is one of the imperatives of journalism,” he writes. “Or it used to be, before the age of screens, which changed everything.”Mr. Morrow, a newspaperman born to the cloth, comes from that vanished world. The son of the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a reporter for the Evening Star, and for years an essayist at Time, he has had a front seat at the pageant of the press. Through 31 gem-like chapters, Mr. Morrow walks us through the worlds he’s known in a series of discursions, encompassing classical Japanese literature and unsolved murders and the first computers.Yet Mr. Morrow is not truly discursive or unfocused; a handful of obsessions dominate. First, the “metaphysics” of the press: What is it for? What is its ethical content? Second, the decline of the press: Where are the legends of the past? Otto Friedrich, Joan Didion, the Alsops, John Hersey — each has here an epitaph. Finally, the fixation and person of Henry Luce, the Time-Life magnate, creator of the American Century.Luce founded the newsmagazine as we know it. His manners and his politics put off his fashionable left-wing writers and editors. He had failings — an overbearing manner, a broken marriage. He was hated by presidents and intellectuals. Yet, as Mr. Morrow writes, “Luce’s skills as a journalist were formidable. He was probably a better reporter than anyone who worked for him — and his correspondents and editors were among the best (some of them).” Like Tacitus (or Gibbon, his imitator and one of the towering prose stylists of the English language), Mr. Morrow has a trick for the gnomon, the sententia: “Harry Luce was a preeminent mythmaker of the twentieth century.” Elsewhere, he writes: “I used to think that the great American themes — the binaries — were Success and Failure. Now I think that, more deeply, the themes are Innocence and Guilt.” And, “All journalism implies a concealed metaphysics.”Above all, Mr. Morrow is a charming and self-aware guide. “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,” he writes of the old days. This rule, by the way, is reflected in The New York Sun style guide — a sign of its worth and probity. Mr. Morrow offers the alternative: “You called yourself a reporter or a newspaperman.”A newspaperman — when this reviewer flexes his shoulders under the title, that feels right, though he mostly works for magazines. “So many of us wanted to be novelists and poets; newspaper reporting was an initiation, a kind of slumming,” the Harvardian Mr. Morrow writes. Maybe. But, slum or not, it’s an agreeable neighborhood; anyway, we like it. “The Noise of Typewriters” captures why. It may bring readers.

The Once and Future Newspaperman

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