The Kingdom and the Power (80 page)

The response to the pilot paper, and to a second sample, was mixed—some executives liked it, some did not, some wavered and waited, others who had originally opposed the idea continued to oppose it, asserting that a second newspaper would adversely affect
The Times
. Sulzberger had initially been excited by the project, but the more he thought about it, the more reluctant he became.
A second newspaper would require the creation of a philosophy that was different from
The Times
’, but was not inconsistent with it. There was also the problem of housing a second staff when
The Times
was having difficulty in fitting its present staff into the building, and there was the question of whether there was sufficient advertising revenue to support a new paper at a time when production and labor costs were higher than ever. Finally, there was doubt in Sulzberger’s mind that he and the other top executives could divide their energies without jeopardizing
The Times
; and so he announced that he was suspending the afternoon operation. Since the other New York publishers had come to the same decision, the city was left for the time being with only one afternoon newspaper, the
New York Post
.

Rosenthal was very disappointed by Sulzberger’s conclusion. Rosenthal had been very enthusiastic and optimistic about the new enterprise, and it had also represented his first major undertaking since he had become an assistant managing editor, and now he interpreted its rejection as a failure on his part. The other executives did not feel this way, at least did not express it; indeed, the afternoon editions had been so closely guarded that relatively few
Times
men were aware of Rosenthal’s involvement and hopes. Nevertheless, he was upset—his smooth, quick climb had been interrupted, and Sulzberger’s decision had hit him almost simultaneously with another aggravating bit of news. A book that he had coauthored with Gelb, a lengthy study of Daniel Burros, the Jewish Nazi who had committed suicide after reading McCandlish Phillips’ article, had been unenthusiastically reviewed in certain periodicals, including
The Times
’ own Sunday “Book Review.” Almost as disconcerting as the review was
The Times
’ choice of the reviewer—Nat Hentoff, a novelist and critic who had previously written disparagingly in the
Village Voice
about Rosenthal’s editorship of the New York staff. The
Voice
, in fact, had sharpened its sights on
The Times
with Rosenthal’s rise, or so it seemed to him, carping at such
Times
exclusives as the Harlem “Blood Brothers” story, and once printing in the
Voice
an anonymous article by a former
Times
man who blamed Rosenthal for the low morale in the newsroom and other changes for the worse.

Why the
Times
“Book Review” would send the Rosenthal-Gelb book, entitled
One More Victim
, to anyone on the
Voice
was both mystifying and infuriating to Rosenthal and Gelb, and they could not help but wonder if it had been done out of spite by some
subordinate editor on the eighth floor with a malicious sense of humor. If such were the case, a book editor could rather easily fulfill his intentions: knowing his stable of reviewers, knowing their literary leanings and vanities and pet grievances, their tendencies when dealing with certain authors or subjects or political philosophies, the editor had merely to match a particular book with a particular reviewer to get an almost certain result. This game of literary crossbreeding for invidious ends was not so possible on the lower levels of the Sunday “Book Review” when Markel had been the high potentate: in those days an effort had been made to shepherd the books of important
Timesmen
, or books by friends of
The Times
, into the hands of genial reviewers. But now the
Times
“Book Review,” no doubt tired of its bland old image under Markel and also following the more rapier style of
The New York Review of Books
, was trying to forge a sharper product. John Simon, known as “Bad John Simon” in New York cultural circles, was back writing for
The Times
, his dispute with Markel a forgotten issue.
The Times
had recently published a number of reviews that had drawn protests from readers claiming that the critics’ well-known political positions and prejudices precluded any chance of a fair review (e.g., Sidney Hook’s review of Dr. Meyer Zeligs’
Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss)
. And
The Times
was also publishing critiques that seemed more unjustifiedly venomous than any in the past (e.g., Wilfrid Sheed’s assault on William Styron’s
The Confessions of Nat Turner
).

With regard to the Rosenthal-Gelb book, the assignment to Hentoff had been made by a bright young iconoclast who had recently joined the “Review”—a man who read the
Voice
and who, in the absence of Francis Brown, head of the department, had sent the book to Hentoff with an awareness that the review might produce a bit of flack. Although no sanctions were levied against the impolitic editor, it was a fairly good bet that, among the 6,354 employees of
The Times
, his future was not now the brightest; nor would his erudition and literary judgment henceforth be considered so trustworthy as, for example, that of Eliot Fremont-Smith, the daily critic, who had written favorably about
One More Victim
.

Fremont-Smith, a neat and tweedy man of thirty-eight, had come a long way from his own days as a book critic for the
Village Voice
. A graduate of Antioch, with graduate work at Columbia
and Yale, he had started out on
The Times
in the Sunday “Book Review” but had moved to the position of daily book critic in 1965, assuming the role of chief literary tastemaker that had been the function of Orville Prescott. It is remarkable on
The Times
how the title makes the man, and how the deprivation of that title suddenly does the opposite: Orville Prescott for years had been the terror of the book industry, an arbiter whose every approving nod could supposedly sell a thousand books; and yet when Prescott was replaced as the principal critic by Fremont-Smith, and although Prescott in semiretirement continued to review books in
The Times
and elsewhere, there was suddenly no longer fear nor felicity over the pronouncements of Prescott. However, Fremont-Smith, upon inheriting the mantle, soared to oracular heights; his words were reprinted in publishers’ ads, he was the brahmin of Brentano’s, the literary guide to ladies in Great Neck. Like his predecessor, he received more attention and earned more money from writing about other people’s books than he probably could have from his own. Worse, he might never know if he could write his own. A critic spends his best years reading other men’s words in quiet rooms, refining his own taste, making greater demands on his contemporaries, and most critics have neither the time, nor perhaps the nerve, to be tested themselves—their taste is possibly too good for their own good. The critic also knows that as a critic he has made enemies, and should he venture forth with a book of his own, they will be waiting in the wings to see that he gets his due.

So it is a rather vexatious life for the
Times
critic who writes well and who nurtures secret ambitions to gamble on his talent. His choice is to step down from his pedestal and risk being at the mercy of such men as he had been, or to try to play it safe within the House of Ochs, hoping that he will not be adversely affected by executive changes and will not lose touch with contemporary taste in literature, as it appeared that Prescott had done in his final years. Prescott had become a white-haired gentleman who fancied the traditional and who seemed offended by the literary outcroppings and droppings of the mid-Sixties, and this had hastened the appearance of his successor. Bright-eyed, sharp,
engagé
, an astute individual who knew better than to send a
Times
man’s book to Nat Hentoff, Eliot Fremont-Smith was the sort of modern critic that Clifton Daniel wanted—a versatile journalist who could write an interesting and intelligent review, could carve with the
best, and could parry and tiptoe when a situation seemed ticklish, as perhaps it was when the book by Svetlana Alliluyeva had been scheduled for review. Fremont-Smith had handled it well, not dismissing the work as a nonbook that had been trumpeted in the West for its propaganda value, but rather rhapsodizing the fact that Stalin’s daughter was indeed alive and safely on American shores. In another column, reviewing
The News Media
by John Hohenberg, Fremont-Smith managed to work in the opinion that while criticism of the press was desirable, and while influential criticism was lacking, the particular brand of press coverage exhibited in the
Village Voice
was not the answer. The
Voice
, he wrote, “appears increasingly to have its own personal and political ax to grind, and is probably counter-influential”—a sentence that did him no harm with the front office.

As the emergence of Fremont-Smith had caused
Times
readers to forget Orville Prescott, so did the new theater critic, Clive Barnes, make readers forget Stanley Kauffmann and, to a degree, even Walter Kerr. Shortly after Kerr had replaced Kauffmann as the daily drama critic, and after the disappearance of the
World Journal Tribune
, there was great concern both on Broadway and within
The Times
about the excessive power of
The Times
’ single critic; and it was Kerr who suggested that the paper have two drama critics—one who would review plays for the daily edition, the other who would write a roundup every week for the Sunday drama page. Kerr, wishing to take a longer view of the theater, volunteered for the Sunday assignment, and he was replaced on the daily beat by Clive Barnes, a short, bouncy Englishman of thirty-nine who, though primarily a dance critic for seventeen years, was very knowledgeable about the theater. Barnes was also sufficiently energetic to handle both ballet and drama criticism; he had insisted, in fact, that he be allowed to retain his position as a ballet critic, dance being his overwhelming passion, and he contemplated a schedule whereby he would attend most Broadway first nights and ballet second nights, altering the routine on occasions by attending, as Stanley Kauffmann had done, the final Broadway previews.

It was somehow hoped that the combination of Barnes and Kerr would split the power of the drama chair and provide readers with a divergent view of the theater. But the new arrangement did nothing of the sort—it merely shifted the daily spotlight away from
Walter Kerr to Clive Barnes. Kerr’s weekend reviews sometimes appeared a week or ten days after an opening, and they lacked the immediacy of Barnes’ quick appraisals. No matter what Kerr wrote in his weekend column, the verdict was in,
The Times
had spoken. Another reason that the focus had shifted to Barnes was his more lively and lucid prose style. Since leaving the
Herald Tribune
for
The Times
, Kerr’s style seemed to have lost some of its edge and vivacity; it was as if, in coming to
The Times
, he had been affected by the increased power, the awesome responsibility; the weight of the institution seemed to be pressing upon him. Clive Barnes, however, had not worked in the shadow of the
Times
building for years; had, in fact, known very little about
The New York Times
when it had first sought to hire him in London. Barnes had occasionally seen copies of the paper on London newsstands and in the offices of British publications, but what he had seen was the slim, unimpressive overseas edition, and he had not become aware of
The Times
’ full influence until he arrived in New York.

Nevertheless, being a man who took neither himself nor his surroundings too seriously, Barnes continued to do what he had done before, which was to write about a great many things at great speed, pounding a typewriter with two tireless fingers, relying on his instinctive judgments. And his style had an instant freshness; his intellectuality seemed brilliantly dashed off and not intended to be ex cathedra. Barnes was witty and clever, and this helped him in his delicate task on
The Times
: instead of condemning a play in an exacting manner, as Kauffmann might have done, Barnes was capable of treading lightly, of adroitly conveying two things at once, of sometimes both praising and criticizing a production in a single sentence, thus preserving his own integrity and perhaps a bit of the box office. In reviewing the Broadway production of Joseph Heller’s
We Bombed in New Haven
, Barnes wrote:

In Barnes’ appraisal of two of Harold Pinter’s short plays, “Tea Party” and “The Basement,” he wrote:

There was also working in
The Times
’ Cultural-News department at this time another critic who was gaining wide attention—a dark-eyed, dark-haired, determinedly dowdy young woman of twenty-nine named Renata Adler. Born in Milan of American parents, a graduate of Bryn Mawr, Miss Adler had attended the Sorbonne and had received a master’s degree in comparative literature at Harvard. Prior to her joining
The Times
as its film critic in November of 1967, she had spent five years on the staff of
The New Yorker
, writing on a variety of subjects—the clamorous existence of New York disc jockeys, the Civil Rights march in Alabama, a New Left convention in Chicago; “Talk” pieces, and occasional reviews on films and books, the most memorable of which was a merciless vivisection of the work of novelist Herbert Gold. That Gold could have continued to be a productive writer after that review was an indication of rare resolve on his part; and that Miss Adler, who in person seems so disarmingly sympathetic and tentative, could have written the review was a revelation of another sort.