By not knowing who Lindbergh was at 11:00 a.m. on May 21, 1927, I betrayed the fact that as a newspaperman I was being grossly overpaid at $15 a week. Nobody in the city room winced at my question, and Kospoth answered as if my ignorance were the most normal thing in the world: ”Crazy young feller thinks he can fly the Atlantic. He`ll never make it.”
This exchange disposed of Lindbergh for the day, and we went about our routine with no consciousness that drama was occurring somewhere over the North Atlantic. I don`t remember what I did that evening. It seems incredible that I would have stayed home during this period of exploring Paris, but quite as incredible that I could have roamed the streets without noticing that they had been more or less emptied. Subsequent reports put the number of Parisians who flocked out to Le Bourget to wait for Lindbergh as high as a million, which was a third of the total population of Paris at that time. Half a million would probably have been closer to the truth, but even that should have created a noticeable void in the streets and cafes. All Montparnasse seems to have moved to LeBourget, but I had not yet found Montparnasse. It was therefore in complete ignorance that I strolled into the office at eleven the next morning.
”Where the hell have you been?” Kospoth snarled. ”Get over to the embassy as quick as you can for the press conference.”
”What press conference?” I asked.
”Lindbergh`s,” said Kospoth. ”He made it.”
It was Whit Burnett, the magazine editor, who nicknamed the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune the ”Daily Miracle.” This appeared in an article he wrote for the American Mercury of January 1931, in which he added that it was one day a work of genius and the next a ghastly mistake. His story, ”Your Hometown Newspaper: Paris,” was actually about the Paris New York Herald, for which he had worked, but he had a good deal to say also about the Tribune, where he had not worked, a fact he seemed to regret.
Both the Tribune and the Herald owed their presence in Paris to the idiosyncrasies of the publishers of their parent newspapers in the United States. The epoch of the domination of great newspapers by sometimes spectacularly individualistic editors was drawing to a close, but James Gordon Bennett, Jr., who founded the Paris edition of the New York Herald and Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, who founded the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune, were members of a species not yet quite extinct. Journalism has lost something with the disappearance of the giants, not to say monsters, of earlier times. Boards of directors lack the color of the often eccentric, frequently tyrannical editors of the old school. The papers they produced were no doubt less expert than those of today, but their personalities produced publications more picturesque than have developed under the inspiration of managers obsessed with the intricacies of cost accounting.
A good many incredible anecdotes have been told about James Gordon Bennett Jr., some of them true–for instance, that he once happened to enter the press room just after a printer who was so drunk that he fell into a barrel of ink had been fished drippingly out. ”There is a man really immersed in his work,” Bennett said, and promoted him to editor-in-chief on the spot. (The staff, of course, reversed this decision as soon as the boss had forgotten about it.)
Bennett`s eccentricity eventually reached such heights that he found himself in deep trouble with the law and decided that it would be advisable for him to leave the United States. If my memory is exact, the trouble was involved with duelling, which would account for his choice of France, where duelling was then considered normal, as a land of exile, in which he lived for the rest of his life. It annoyed him not to be able to read his own paper at breakfast, so he created in 1887 the Paris edition of the New York Herald.
When Colonel McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, established its Paris edition thirty years later, his motives were more complicated. One theory was that he thought a newspaper in the country where the war was being fought would be strategically located to enable him to explain to an army that had not been intelligent enough to name him commander-in-chief how to conduct its operations.
The colonel`s own explanation for the founding of what was then called the army edition of the Chicago Tribune was that he felt it his duty to provide for American soldiers the news they wanted from home, which showed a rather cavalier disregard for the presence of the New York Herald, not to mention the army`s own paper, Stars and Stripes, of which he should have been aware for, if my memory is correct, both papers were printed on the same presses. This may have contributed to a confusion between the Tribune and Stars and Stripes that gave birth to the frequently repeated assertion that in its early years the Tribune was distinguished by the presence on its staff of a number of writers and journalists who later became famous. I have undoubtedly forgotten some of them, but I remember that they included Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, Heywood Broun (and even his wife, Ruth Hale), and James Thurber. I have found no trace of any of them among Tribune reporters except Thurber, but Alexander Woollcott at least was on Stars and Stripes, and some of the others may have been as well.
With or without their illustrious presence, the first issue of the Paris edition of the Tribune managed to struggle onto the streets on the symbolic date of the Fourth of July 1917, also chosen by the American army for its first parade down the avenue des Champs-Elysees–a token detachment, for there were not enough American soldiers in all France at that time to put any in the field.
The colonel had pledged that the army edition would not be published for profit (possibly he had not expected it to make any) and he was as good as his word. When the army edition ended its existence with the sailing of the St. Mihiel, carrying the last soldiers of the American Expeditionary Force home, Floyd Gibbons, then the most famous of Chicago Tribune correspondents, handed to General Pershing, in a well-publicized ceremony in January 1919, the profits of the Tribune`s year and a half of operations–112,000 francs, or $2,240. Without missing a day, the army edition of the Chicago Tribune was followed by the European edition of the Chicago Tribune.
Looking back on it from the remoteness of half a century, I have often wondered whether its prestige was really deserved, whether its glamor had not been overrated by those of us who viewed it through the rosy haze of softened memories. I was inclined to think so when Hugh Ford, a student of this period, located the bound volumes of the Paris Tribune. In 1976 he printed samplings from them under the title ”The Left Bank Revisited.” I read them first eagerly, and then with disappointment. The writing struck me as run-of-the-mill, not to say mediocre.
On second thought, I am not so sure that the nature of the material reprinted in Ford`s book indicates that the Tribune`s reputation was inflated. A newspaper cannot be judged on the basis of selected isolated articles. It is the spirit that animates it day after day that counts and it is perhaps impossible ever to recapture that spirit fully once the time and the setting in which it was manifested have become irrevocably a part of the past. For that matter, Ford was not trying to recapture the spirit of the Tribune; he was trying to recapture the spirit of the Left Bank in the 1920s and 1930s by reprintng what had been written about it in its heyday by the publication that had given the most attention to it.
Jules Frantz was certainly not immodest when he described the style of the paper he edited as ”brash, lusty and breezy.” Lawrence Blochman, best known as a mystery story writer, also a Tribune alumnus, went a little further when he wrote that the ”Paris edition did serve as a school of journalism for the international apprenticeship of many of the top names in American newsdom and letters.”
I would not have called it a school, except in the sense that any newspaper that provides the opportunity to learn by doing is a school. In this sense, the Tribune constituted a particularly good school. It was, measured by volume, a small paper–eight to twelve pages usually–and any small paper provides better basic training than a big one, for its modest scale permits, or even obliges, every member of its staff to become acquainted with all the phases of the production of a newspaper. But as a rule small papers are situated in small towns, and small towns have small-town mentalities. The Tribune was situated in a world capital, precisely the one bursting with an artistic and intellectual vitality unmatchable anywhere else. It was read by a cosmopolitan audience that demanded the intellectual level of a sophisticated metropolitan daily. The Tribune supplied it. Perhaps Thurber intended a compliment when he said that the Tribune was a country newspaper published in a great city.
The Tribune even achieved, during its last years, a high degree of technical excellence, something I did not then realize, having nothng to measure it against. We attracted from time to time big-city newspapermen
–usually because working for the Tribune allowed them to savor the pleasures of Paris–for six months or a year, or even two. All of them told me that we ran a fast desk, with a pace surpassing what they had been used to.
With surprise I discovered, when I returned to New York during World War II, that our temporary staffers from America had simply been telling the truth. I visited city rooms of the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune; they looked lethargic. The feverish atmosphere of the Paris Edition would, it seemed, have overwhelmed them. When I went to work for a New York daily myself, I had to admit that in Paris we had handled the news faster and better than New York copy desks could handle it.
If many of our alumni did indeed become ”top names in American newsdom and letters,” it was probably first of all because the kind of young men who were drawn to Paris when it was the center of a lively cultural life were also the kind of young men who were likely to achieve a certain eminence anyway, whether they had passed through the mill of the Tribune or not. If we garnered more of them than the Herald, that was because we were interested in the same aspects of Parisian life that interested them, and even participated in that life. ”Tribune columnists mingled with…the cultural adventurists from America, as well as Europe,” Hugh Ford wrote, ”…on the terraces of Left Bank cafes like the Dome and the Select, alert for undiscovered
idiosyncrasies, signs of genius or bits of gossip.”
The Tribune`s affinity with Montparnasse accounted for the occasional appearance in its columns of articles signed by some of the important actors on the Left Bank scene. They contributed their thoughts unsolicited and gratuitously when they had something to say to a larger public than that of the little magazines: There was really no way to reach it except through our paper. I do not recall the names of all the notables who thus served as occasional writers, but I remember that among them were Gertrude Stein, Ford Madox Ford, and George Antheil. As for regular staff members, almost everyone wrote about the doings of the Montparnassians at one time or another, occasionally under running titles that gave them virtually the status of Montparnasse columnists. The only staff member whose reporting appeared regularly enough, and lasted long enough, to really deserve the title of columnist was proofreader Wambly Bald, whose articles ran under the headng of ”La Vie de Boheme.” Hugh Ford called him ”the Boswell of the Lost Generation,” but in my opinion ”the Walter Winchell of the Lost Generation” would have been more like it. Janet Flanner said he was the only Tribuner whom none of the Montparnassians failed to read. ”Obviously,” wrote Frantz, ”he should have been on the editorial staff, but he repeatedly turned down my invitation to move upstairs.” He preferred to stay with the proofreaders, which wasn`t a bad choice. One indication of how deep cultural interest penetrated in the Tribune was that its proofreaders might have provided a relatively brilliant editorial staff for any other paper.
Three inseparables graced this staff–Bald, who served as the model for Van Norden in Henry Miller`s Tropic of Cancer and was not happy about it;
Alfred Perles, the original of Carl in The Tropic of Cancer, who would become Henry Miller`s biographer, and Miller himself. It may seem ironic that the most notorious writer of the period (the word ”notorious” is used deliberately, as being synonymous neither with ”famous” nor ”best”) should have been consigned to the Tribune proof room without ever having been permitted to write a line for the paper, and even more so that he should have been fired from the paper, as he said he had been. This claim was not strictly true, but the idea probably appealed to Miller`s quiet sense of humor. What actually happened was that Miller, who had worked for the paper only briefly, was invited to make a free trip through Belgium and took off without warning anybody. His place remained vacant for a couple of weeks, while efforts to reach him were unavailing; in the meantime the other proofreaders had to operate one man short. Frantz finally decided that Miller must have quit without giving notice, a phenomenon not unknown to the Tribune, and hired somebody to replace him. When Miller returned, he was hardly in a position to ask for his job back, and if my memory is correct, he didn`t. Miller was not made for keeping regular office hours and I suspect that he lost the job without regret. Being fired relieved him of boring routine work without offending Perles, who had gotten him the job, and it permitted Miller to revert to his probably preferred status of having no visible means of support except what he could cadge from others. Perles must have been speaking only for himself when he wrote in My Friend Henry Miller that their proofreading period was the ”most highly fertile of our life in Paris.”
I wonder if one of the chief reasons the Tribune employed such excellent men, from proofreaders to editor, was not that it paid them so badly. This assured the paper of being staffed by men who were willing to accept sacrifices for the sake of performing a fascinating task in a fascinating city. Writers who were interested in money first and their work second gravitated naturally to the better-paying Herald; those who put professional ardor first and money second came to the Tribune. Some newcomers started on the wrong paper, but there was a constant exchange of personnel between them, and in the long run the writers sorted themselves out and found themselves working for the papers that best suited their temperaments.
Poverty, within reasonable limits, had its privileges, foremost being the possibility of independence. Our masters in Chicago did not pay us enough to be able to dictate to us what sort of paper we should produce. You might say that we took part of our pay in the power to put out our kind of paper, which compensated for the poor return in terms of money. The less we were paid, the less it would have cost us to quit; and once established in Paris and known in the world of Paris-American publications, it was not difficult to find a new job–which, since we were at the bottom of the ladder, could only be a step upward. In short, the ownership of the paper was more vulnerable to the loss of its staff than the staff was vulnerable to the loss of its jobs. So we were left alone to create our own Paris Chicago Tribune, a paper decidedly not cast in the image of the Chicago Chicago Tribune.
