Truman’s eyes, almost worse. He planned to be famous:
Like the mighty Condor,
Its vulture wings
Against a copper sky,
I have waited and watched,
For my prey!
My victim is immortality—
To be somebody and be remembered—
Is that not, too, your idle dream?
For in remembrance we hold life itself
Cupped tenderly in aged hands.
You say—“He’s a fool and a dreamer.”
I laugh and let my laughter,
Like a bright and terrible knife,
Go tearing through your hearts!
For you know and I know,
No matter how young, how old,
We are only waiting,
Waiting to see our names in Scriptures of Stone.
So it is today and so it will be tomorrow!
How could the world resist a will so determined, an ambition so pointed?
Even a young condor does not find its prey the day it leaves the nest, and Truman’s first step into New York’s literary world was also that of a fledgling. Sometime toward the end of 1942, or perhaps the beginning of 1943, while he was still attending Franklin, he found a part-time job as copyboy on
The New Yorker
, a magazine he and Phoebe only months before had been talking about in the hushed tones of worshipers at a shrine. Reading it every week in Greenwich, they thought it the ultimate in wit and sophistication, and to Truman, as well as many other young writers, its dingy offices on West Forty-third Street seemed like the best possible place, perhaps the only possible place, for a sensitive writer to find congenial employment. At last one of his dreams was coming true.
Working in that strange and eccentric place was not as enjoyable as he had envisioned, however, and there was none of the conviviality of a newspaper city room along those chilly and unfriendly corridors. Many writers never came into the office at all, and those who did seldom spoke. Introductions were rarely made, it was considered a grave breach of etiquette even to speak in the elevator, and people could see one another every day without exchanging so much as a nod. For years Edmund Wilson, the magazine’s literary critic, mistook the art editor for the fiction editor, for example, and one of the female staffers believed that a middle-aged messenger to the printer, who wore a black derby and carried an air of shabby gentility about him, was Wilson himself. When Truman arrived, much of the staff had gone or was going off to battle, and the atmosphere in those nineteenth-floor offices was even more rarefied and peculiar than it had been in peacetime. “
The New Yorker
is a worse madhouse than ever now,” complained E. B. White, “on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine. There is hardly a hormone left in the place….”
Although Truman probably did not know it when he walked in that first morning, aglow with excitement,
New Yorker
copyboys had never been looked upon as potential writers or reporters, as they often were at other publications, and with the war, they were held in even lower regard than before. They tended to be either old and decrepit, thieves, or whistlers—Harold Ross, the magazine’s editor, could not stand whistlers—and for one reason or another, many were hired and fired in the same week. Those who stayed were supposed to be silent and, if at all possible, invisible. Hiring Truman, then, was a sign of wartime desperation: by any measure, he was the most visible, least silent copyboy the magazine had ever had in its employ—or probably has had since. Indeed, those supposedly sophisticated people he and Phoebe had admired from a distance might just as well have been farmers from Iowa the way they gawked at him as he sharpened pencils and carried manuscripts. They were accustomed to odd-looking writers—the halt and the goofy, as White had called them; but they were not accustomed to odd-looking copy boys, particularly one who, in the words of William Shawn, then the nonaction editor,
Like the mighty Condor,
Its vulture wings
Against a copper sky,
I have waited and watched,
For my prey!
My victim is immortality—
To be somebody and be remembered—
Is that not, too, your idle dream?
For in remembrance we hold life itself
Cupped tenderly in aged hands.
You say—“He’s a fool and a dreamer.”
I laugh and let my laughter,
Like a bright and terrible knife,
Go tearing through your hearts!
For you know and I know,
No matter how young, how old,
We are only waiting,
Waiting to see our names in Scriptures of Stone.
So it is today and so it will be tomorrow!
How could the world resist a will so determined, an ambition so pointed?
Even a young condor does not find its prey the day it leaves the nest, and Truman’s first step into New York’s literary world was also that of a fledgling. Sometime toward the end of 1942, or perhaps the beginning of 1943, while he was still attending Franklin, he found a part-time job as copyboy on
The New Yorker
, a magazine he and Phoebe only months before had been talking about in the hushed tones of worshipers at a shrine. Reading it every week in Greenwich, they thought it the ultimate in wit and sophistication, and to Truman, as well as many other young writers, its dingy offices on West Forty-third Street seemed like the best possible place, perhaps the only possible place, for a sensitive writer to find congenial employment. At last one of his dreams was coming true.
Working in that strange and eccentric place was not as enjoyable as he had envisioned, however, and there was none of the conviviality of a newspaper city room along those chilly and unfriendly corridors. Many writers never came into the office at all, and those who did seldom spoke. Introductions were rarely made, it was considered a grave breach of etiquette even to speak in the elevator, and people could see one another every day without exchanging so much as a nod. For years Edmund Wilson, the magazine’s literary critic, mistook the art editor for the fiction editor, for example, and one of the female staffers believed that a middle-aged messenger to the printer, who wore a black derby and carried an air of shabby gentility about him, was Wilson himself. When Truman arrived, much of the staff had gone or was going off to battle, and the atmosphere in those nineteenth-floor offices was even more rarefied and peculiar than it had been in peacetime. “
The New Yorker
is a worse madhouse than ever now,” complained E. B. White, “on account of the departure of everybody for the wars, leaving only the senile, the psychoneurotic, the maimed, the halt, and the goofy to get out the magazine. There is hardly a hormone left in the place….”
Although Truman probably did not know it when he walked in that first morning, aglow with excitement,
New Yorker
copyboys had never been looked upon as potential writers or reporters, as they often were at other publications, and with the war, they were held in even lower regard than before. They tended to be either old and decrepit, thieves, or whistlers—Harold Ross, the magazine’s editor, could not stand whistlers—and for one reason or another, many were hired and fired in the same week. Those who stayed were supposed to be silent and, if at all possible, invisible. Hiring Truman, then, was a sign of wartime desperation: by any measure, he was the most visible, least silent copyboy the magazine had ever had in its employ—or probably has had since. Indeed, those supposedly sophisticated people he and Phoebe had admired from a distance might just as well have been farmers from Iowa the way they gawked at him as he sharpened pencils and carried manuscripts. They were accustomed to odd-looking writers—the halt and the goofy, as White had called them; but they were not accustomed to odd-looking copy boys, particularly one who, in the words of William Shawn, then the nonaction editor,
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