The Talk of the (Seedy Side of) Town

Craig Seligman in The New York Times:

In the annals of injustice, as The New Yorker might phrase it, the obscurity into which St. Clair McKelway has fallen amounts to a literary crime. His writing for the magazine rivaled that of his far better-remembered colleagues, Joseph Mitchell and A. J. Liebling, both of whose careers he was instrumental in promoting. From 1936 to 1939, he served as The New Yorker’s managing editor in charge of fact (as opposed to fiction) pieces. During those crucial years he played a major role in solidifying the magazine’s non­fiction style — “the choreography,” as Ben Yagoda describes it in “About Town,” his history of The New Yorker, “of the extraordinary number of facts the writer had collected.” Today he’s all but forgotten.

I remember him, though, because I knew him — briefly. In 1978 The New Yorker hired me as a typist; it was my first job out of school. Since the typing pool wasn’t overburdened with work, occasionally some of us would be lent out for odd jobs. One summer day I was informed that Mr. McKelway had turned up and needed baby-sitting. (I’m not sure that was the word used, but it was clearly the meaning.) So we settled in an empty office and I took dictation for a memoir about his stint in the early ’30s as editor of The Bangkok Daily Mail. (I still have the eight pages I typed up, headlined “A Reporter at Youth’s Goal.”) Mostly, though, we just sat around and smoked, and I listened to him talk. I’d been given to understand that he was kind of crazy, and I was supposed to keep him out of the halls, where Maeve Brennan, one of his five ex-wives (and another New Yorker writer with a storied past), was wandering around in a state even battier than his. I knew I was in the presence of a legend, but the place was crawling with legends. It would be years before I read him and finally grasped what made him one.

More here.