The cover of the April 20 issue of The New Yorker was an illustration by Constantin Alajalov of a woman in a nightgown, curlers and an Easter bonnet seated at a bedroom vanity pensively staring into the mirror as her husband sleeps. It was in keeping with the magazine’s cartoons that depicted women as feather-headed consumers, somewhat odd in that women made up much of the magazine’s readership. In one cartoon that week a stout matron asks her husband “Oh, did I tell you about the perfectly lovely compliment a saleswoman in Bonwit’s coat department paid me this afternoon?” In another, her virtual double, looking dubiously at a two story birdhouse, asks the sales clerk, “Wouldn’t the upstairs be awfully hot in summer?”
“Goings on about Town,” the front-of-the book listings and capsule reviews of plays, concerts, movies and other events of the week then, as now, was a key feature of the publication.
For “Talk of the Town” Brendan Gill visited the Knoedler Gallery centennial exhibition. Gill, who would become one of the magazine’s most celebrated staff members, was 31 in April 1946. A poet, short story writer and novelist, he had been born in Hartford to a prominent Irish-Catholic family and was a Yale graduate. That week Gill also contributed an interview with Captain William Heyer, an equestrian star of the Ringling Bros., Barnum & Bailey Circus, appearing that week at Madison Square Garden.
Albert Camus, who was visiting New York to promote the publication of “The Stranger, his first novel to be published in the United States, was the subject of another “Talk of the Town” piece, for which Lewis Thompson and A.J.Liebling were both credited. Liebling had joined the magazine in 1935 and became well-known for his wartime dispatches from Europe. After the war he took over “The Wayward Press,” a regular feature humorously dissecting the city’s newspapers, a task that formerly had fallen to the late Robert Benchley. Liebling was born in New York City in 1904, the son of a furrier. He graduated from Columbia.
Among the many short bits of whimsy in the April 20 “Talk of the Town” were the tale of the antics of a sparrow showing off a bit of ribbon in Turtle Bay, some humorous observations on signs about town and some funny things children say. There also was the customary dispatch from a Third Avenue bar. Robert M. Henderson wrote that the press needed to develop a way to convey the hidden meanings behind diplomatic niceties as the gossip columnists did to help readers decipher cocktail parties. Henderson was the forty-year old son of a Chicago business executive and a graduate of the University of Illinois. Another brief item dealt with the problem of apartment hunting in New York.
E.B. White expressed surprise that a Yale professor’s prediction of possible worldwide calamities from the scheduled A-bomb test at Bikini was consigned to the tenth page of the fourth section of The New York Times under the headline “Bomb Site Discussed.” Apparently, White notes, worldwide doom was no longer front page stuff. Forty-six year old White had been with the magazine since 1927. He was born in the affluent New York suburb of Mt. Vernon and graduated from Cornell and would later win a Pulitzer.
According to Ben Yagoda, fiction editor Katharine White waged an ongoing battle with editor-in-chief and founder Harold Ross to include serious poetry. Ross preferred light, easy-to-understand verse and was known to insist that poems undergo the same rigid fact-checking as articles. If he could have, he might even have had them rewritten in The New Yorker style. At one point in the thirties, after it had seemed White had won the poetry war, he proposed dropping poetry all together, but White argued him out of it. She was Katharine Angell when she joined the magazine staff in 1925. The writer and editor, who turned 54 in 1946, A New Englander by birth and Bryn Mawr graduate, left her first husband, a lawyer, and married a fellow staff member, the younger E.B. White, in 1927. One of her poet protégées, Elizabeth Bishop, who had first appeared in the magazine in 1937, had published her first book of poems, North & South, in 1946 and would later win a Pulitzer, was represented in the April 20 issue by “Large Bad Picture,” a nostalgic remembrance of a painting of Labrador by her great-uncle. Helen Bevington, whose first collection of accomplished light verse was also published in 1946, was in the magazine with “The Judas Tree.” Rosyrie Schulman contributed four lines on the Easter Parade.
Fiction in the April 20 issue included a short story by St. Clair McKelway about Hollywood. McKelway was a hard-drinking, much married, manic-depressive, womanizing son of a Presbyterian minister. His uncle and namesake had been editor of the Brooklyn Eagle and his less colorful brother was editor of the Washington Star. McKelway had preceded William Shawn as "fact" editor of the magazine but had left to serve as an Army press liaison during the war. He had come damn close to being court-martialed for accusing Admiral Nimitz of treason in a telegram sent to the War Department during one of his manic episodes. He later wrote humorously of this and other episodes. In April 1946 he was in Hollywood trying his hand at screenwriting and was about to marry his fourth wife, the widow of bandleader Hal Kemp and former wife of movie actor Victor Mature. He eventually returned to The New Yorker where he entered into a disastrous marriage with fellow staffer Maeve Brennan. Both eventually would be overcome by their mental problems and alcoholism. A lumpish man with an owl-like face and courtly manner, he had remarkable success seducing the wives and girlfriends of his associates.
Arthur Kober, a successful Hollywood screenwriter who had once been married to Lillian Hellman, contributed one of his Bella Gross stories to the April 20 issue. He had been writing for The New Yorker since the 1920s. His stories were not what we today would consider typical New Yorker stories but more in keeping with its roots as a humor magazine.. A high school dropout who had been born in Austria-Hungary, Kober had immigrated to America with his parents as a child. He had written the hit Broadway comedy “Having a Wonderful Time,” about New Yorkers at a mountain resort. His comic stories about the efforts of Bella Gross, a Jewish woman living with her lower middle class family in the Bronx, to find a man were told in dialect and ran in the magazine from 1925 to 1958. They were collected in several books, one of which, That Man Is Here Again was published in 1946. Not all Jews were amused by his depiction of Jewish life. Intellectual Isaac Rosenfeld expressed his distaste in Commentary in 1952.
Twenty-five year old Sloan Wilson was personally the type who could himself be the protagonist of a New Yorker short story. The son of an NYU professor, he had been raised in Connecticut in a family from that social class whose members had neither significant personal wealth nor control of other people's money but who had social and business ties to those who did and kept up appearances as best their salaries would allow. The pages of The New Yorker and the Connecticut suburbs were littered with their kind. The Wilsons were sufficiently affluent to afford a yacht. A handsome blond, Wilson had served in the Coast Guard after graduating from Harvard. He would later achieve fame with his novels Man in a Gray Flannel Suit, about conformity and its price in the corporate world of the 1950s, and A Summer Place. Both were made into popular motion pictures. He made his New Yorker debut in 1945 with the first of a series of stories about a young veteran. His April 20 story “A Party for Veterans” continued the series, telling of the vet’s experience as a returning Harvard student.
Brooklyn-born Paul H. Rohmann remembered a seventh-grade city music teacher. Under pressure by the school board to have her students do well on a citywide music appreciation test, she made up words to classical music to help them memorize the names of the compositions and their composers. The twenty-eight year old Rohmann, who was a graduate of Antioch College and became long associated with the Antioch Press, suspected he still muttered these mnemonics when he attended the outdoor concerts at Lewisohn Stadium on the City College campus, a popular summer pastime of the time.
William Morris head agent Abe Lastogel was the subject of a profile in the April 20 issue, primarily focused on Lastfogel’s experience as head of the U.S.O. camp shows. E.J.Kahn was the author. Kahn was the son of a prominent New York architect. He was born in New York City in 1918, graduated from Harvard and joined The New Yorker in 1937. One of the many staff members who were drafted during the war, Kahn contributed a series of articles on military life.
British novelist and short story writer Mollie Panter-Downes contributed a “Letter from London.” She had been writing her letters from London since the magazine had decided to take the war seriously. Yagoda credits her for setting the tone of the magazine’s wartime reportage, clear-eyed and good-humored but never facetious.
“Of All Things” was a column of short, newsy items in a light tone by Harold Brubaker, one of the magazine’s longtime contributors. He reported that the UN was moving to Flushing Meadows, which the city hoped would become its permanent home, and that the Polish had charged that German exiles in Spain were working on an atomic bomb. An indignant Franco had invited UN inspectors to investigate the calumny. At this point in time the Communist bloc was eager to topple Franco, seeing an opportunity to add the country to their wartime bootie. The Western nations understandably were hesitant to go after Franco with too much vengeance. Brubaker also noted the observation of the anniversary of FDR’s death around the world; the House even had taken time off from wrecking his programs to listen to listen to a eulogy, he wrote. The Republican National Committee used the words “confused,””confusing” and “confusion” 56 times in its assessment of Truman’s first year in office. The White House Easter egg hunt was called off in light of the worldwide food shortage. While food prices were being held in line, the cost of other things was rising; he cited the $1 haircut as an example.
Noted British writer Rebecca West reported on the trial for treason of Norman Baillie-Stewart, an officer in the British Army charged with passing military information to the Germans. West’s piece on the trial of William Joyce, the Brooklyn-born Irishman who became the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, in 1945, and subsequent treason trial of John Amery were among the magazine’s high points in the immediate postwar period. Later in 1946 she reported on the Nuremberg Trials for The New Yorker. Although she had written for a number of left-wing publications early in her career, her focus on treason would lead to a break with liberals in the 1950s when she justified Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings.
Robert M. Coates reviewed the Marc Chagall show at the Museum of Modern Art. Born in 1897, Coates had spent much of the 1920s in Paris as one of the Lost Generation of writers. He published more than 100 short stories in The New Yorker but it was his novels, one of which, The Bitter Season, was published in 1946, that demonstrated his taste for experimental writing. He had been the magazine’s book reviewer in the early 1930s, before becoming its art critic. He is credited for inventing the term Abstract Expressionism in 1946 to describe the emerging New York school of artists.
For a “Reporter At Large” piece Berton Roueche visited the partially demolished wasteland of what had been the Gashouse District and was about to become Stuyvesant Town. Roueche's article, the Stuyvesant Town project and the neighborhood it replaced is discussed in full detail on this page. Born in 1911 in Kansas City, Roueche (Roo SHAY) was the son of a business executive and also the husband of Eisenhower’s step-niece. A graduate of the University of Missouri, he had written for the St. Louis papers before joining The New Yorker in 1942. Also a novelist, he would become best known for his medical and travel reporting for the magazine.
“On and Off the Avenue” reviewed the barbecue grills and outdoor furniture being sold that spring at New York’s finest emporiums.
In “Current Cinema,” John McCarten, who had been writing on film for the magazine since 1945, reviewed the movies “The Kid From Brooklyn,” “Make Mine Music,” “Portrait of a Woman,” “The Virginian” and “From This Day Forward,” and the short film “Hymn of the Nations.”
George F.T. Ryall had been writing The New Yorker’s horse-racing column under the pen name Audax Minor since 1926. Ryall’s family owned racehorses and he previously covered the track for The World. A Canadian by birth, Ryall had been educated in England.. He also wrote several New Yorker Profiles and occasionally covered men’s fashion, automobiles, and polo.
For “Musical Events,” Robert A. Simon reviewed several recent concert performances at Carnegie Hall and the Ballet Theater’s recent stand at the Metropolitan Opera House. Simon was a New York native and Columbia graduate who had been reviewing music for the magazine since its inception in 1925. He also wrote librettos for operas and musical comedies.
Journalism critic A.J. Liebling stood in for Edmund Wilson to write the lead review for “Books,” in which he analyzed Top Secret, a critical account of the Allied wartime leadership by Ralph Ingersoll, who had returned from wartime duties to his position as editor of PM, a left-leaning New York daily tabloid of the 1940s. While at Fortune magazine he had set off a longstanding feud between Henry Luce of Time-Life and Harold Ross and was not a favorite of either.