The New Yorker Radio Hour - Bonus: “The French Dispatch” Reads The New Yorker

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Wes Anderson’s new film, “The French Dispatch,” is about a magazine, and it was inspired by Anderson’s long-standing love of The New Yorker. In this special episode, introduced by the articles editor Susan Morrison, cast members read excerpts from classic works associated with the magazine. Bill Murray reads a letter from the editor Harold Ross to an angry writer, Steve Park reads James Thurber, and Elisabeth Moss reads E. B. White. Owen Wilson reads Joseph Mitchell’s piece on rats; Frances McDormand reads Mavis Gallant’s record of the 1968 student uprising in Paris; Tilda Swinton reads a Calvin Tomkins art-world profile; and Jeffrey Wright reads James Baldwin’s “Equal in Paris,” a remarkable indictment of French institutions. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is a bonus episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm Susan Morrison, the articles editor at The New Yorker, and I'm going to be your host for this special installment. Wes Anderson has a new movie out this fall. It's called The French Dispatch, and it concerns the doings of a weekly magazine called The French Dispatch that is uncannily like the New Yorker. Over the next 10 years,

he assembled a team of the best expatriate journalists of his time and transformed picnic into the French Dispatch. A factual weekly report on the subjects of world politics, the arts high and low, fashion, fancy cuisine, fine drink, and diverse stories of human interests set in faraway Cartieres. He brought the world to Kansas. It's an anthology film, presenting four stories from the French dispatch, each of them an homage to a classic piece from the New Yorker's past. Travelogues, political reportage, food reviews. Anderson has collected some of those stories in a new anthology called An Editor's Burial,

which you might think of as a kind of literary soundtrack. And this week, as a bonus, we've got the stars of the French Dispatch to read some of the classic New Yorker pieces in that collection. Shrink the Maskhead, cut some ads, and tell the foreman to buy more paper. I'm not killing anybody. Bill Murray's character in the movie, Arthur Howitzer Jr., the French Dispatch's editor and founder, is sort of one part Harold Ross, who was the New Yorker's founder,

and one part William Sean, who was the New Yorker's second editor. It's kind of interesting is that Bill Murray was actually friendly with Sean. He once cleared an elevator for him because Sean liked to ride an elevator all by himself. And Murray also was friendly with Sean's companion and New Yorker writer Lillian Ross. And when Lillian wrote a very early talk piece about Wes Anderson, she quoted Murray saying that he liked working with Wes Anderson because he didn't ever make actors feel that they were obliged to be entertaining. Here's Bill Murray reading a letter from Harold Ross, the real Harold Ross.

May 16, 1941, letter to Brendan Gill after receiving a prank gift of a skunk to convey his sense of neglect. Dear Brendan Gill I got your letter all right and carried it around showing it to various people until it got sidetracked under something. Receit of the skunk didn't bother me much, but it puzzled me, and I mentioned the matter around.

I used to be bothered by such happenings, but I don't even blink anymore, for I've become reconciled to from six to 12, people being mad at me at any given time. I've come to accept that as normal and routine. Every week there is a certain amount of peak over drawings and stories turned down, something printed about somebody in the magazine, etc. I now go on the principle that a journalist isn't entitled to friends or an editor either. This is the most difficult magazine in the world to get out, and it involves, I think, more people in contact with them than any other.

It's appalling. When you count up the people in the office, artists, humorous, fiction writers, idea men, agents, fact writers, you have a total of two or three hundred. Moreover, the turnover is heavy. A lot of promising young people around here are gone. After a fairly short while, writing for the movies or other magazines or somewhere, you do me only one injustice. I don't try to scare anyone, although I don't give a damn if I do, probably. I didn't try to scare you. The profanity was natural. My manner is not unorthodox. but I've given up trying to curb it, for often as not it serves, astonishingly, to put people at their ease. I think it relaxes more people than it excites.

I hope so, anyway. Sincerely yours, H.W. Ross. P.S. As I look back on it, I did intend to get better acquainted with you because I was interested. in your work and counted on it. I did keep in touch with you religiously, though, if not firsthand, and still do, HWR. Ross had a gruff exterior, but he was fiercely protective of his writers and staff people. One of the people he valued most was James Thurber, an editor, writer, cartoonist, an all-round utility player. Here's Stephen Park reading James Thurber's memories of Harold

Ross. Ross was at first few, oddly disappointing. No one, I think, would have picked him out of a lineup as the editor of the New Yorker. He was meticulous to the point of obsession about the appearance of his magazine, but he gave no thought to himself. In his new position of high responsibility, he soon developed the notion, as Mark Conley has put it, that the world was designed to wear him down. Ross was never conscious of his dramatic gestures or of his natural gift of theatrical speech. At times he seemed to be on stage, and you have expected the curtain to fall on such an

agonized tagline as, God, how I pity me. After six years of thinking about it, I realized that to do justice to Harold Ross, I must write about him the way he talked and lived, leaping from peak to peak. I had caught glimpses of him

at the theater and at the Algonquin, and like everybody else, was familiar with the mobile phase that constantly changed expression, the character voice, the eloquent large-fingered hands that were never in repose, but kept darting this way and that to emphasize his points, or running through the thatch of hair that stood straight up, until Ina Claire said she would like to take her shoes off and walk through it. There were so many different Rosses, conflicting and contradictory, that the task of drawing

him in words sometimes appears impossible, for the composite of all the Rosses should produce a single unmistakable entity. The most remarkable man, I have ever known and the greatest editor. If you get him down on paper, Walcott Gibbs once warned me, nobody will believe it. The death of Arthur Howitzer, the French Dispatches editor, sets the film in motion. When Harold Ross died in 1951, there was an outpouring of obituaries, including an extraordinary one by E.B. White's probably best known as the author of Charlotte's

Webb, but as an early key editor and writer on our staff, He basically invented the voice of the New Yorker. Here's Elizabeth Moss, reading from White's obituary. The report of Ross's death came over the telephone in a three-word sentence that somehow managed to embody all the faults that Ross devoted his life to correcting. A grief-stricken friend in Boston, charged with the task of spreading the news, but two days to talk sensibly said,

It's all over. He meant that Ross was dead, but the listener took it to mean that the operas, was over. Here, in three easy words, were the ambiguity, the euphemistic softness, the verbal infirmity that Harold W. Ross spent his life thrusting at. Ross regarded every sentence as the enemy and believed that if a man watched closely enough, he would discover the vulnerable spot, the essential weakness. He devoted his life to making the weak strong, a rather specialized form of blood transfusion to be sure, but one that he believed in with such a consuming passion

that his spirit infected others and inspired them and lifted them. Whatever it was this contagion, this vapor in these marshes, it spread, none escaped it, nor is it likely to be dissipated in a hurry. His ambition was to publish one good magazine, not a string of successful ones, and he thought of the New Yorker as a sort of movement. He came equipped with not much knowledge in only two books, Webster's Dictionary and Fowler's modern English usage. These books were his history, his geography, his literature, his art, his music, his everything. Some people found Ross's scholastic deficiencies quite appalling

and were not sure they had met the right man. But he was the right man. And the only question was whether the other fellow was capable of being, tuned to Ross's vibrations. Ross had a thing that is as least as good as and sometimes better than knowledge. He had a sort of natural drive in the right direction, plus a complete respect for the work and ideas and opinions of others. It took a little while to get on to the fact that Ross, more violently than almost anybody, was proceeding in a good direction and carrying others along with him under torrential conditions.

He was like a boat being driven at the mercy of some internal squall, a disturbance he himself only half understood, and of which he was at times suspicious. In a way, he was a lucky man. For a monument, he has the magazine to date, 1,39 issues, born in the toil and pain

that can be appreciated only by those who helped in the delivery room. These are his. They stand, unchangeable, and open for inspection. So let's do some inspecting. The Great City began as a cluster of tradesmen's villages. Only the names remain unchanged. The bricklayers' quarter.

The butcher's arcade. Pickpocket cul-de-sac. In the movie, the character that Owen Wilson plays is Herb St. Sazirac. In the film, Sazirac is described as writing, only about hobos, pimps, and junkies. He's based on Joe Mitchell, the original low-life reporter. For the New Yorker, he covered the waterfront. One of his most famous pieces was about the city as a playground for rats.

A note of caution, ickiness ahead. Here's Owen Wilson reading Joseph Mitchell. In New York, as in all great seaports, rats abound. One is occasionally in their presence without being aware of it. In the whole city, relatively few blocks are entirely free of them. They have diminished greatly in the last 25 years, but there are still millions here. Some authorities believe that in the five boroughs there is a rat for every human being. The biggest rat colonies in the city are found in random structures or near the waterfront,

especially in tenements. Live poultry markets, wholesale produce markets, slaughterhouses, warehouses, stables, and garages. They also turn up in more surprising places. Department of Health inspectors have found their claws and tail tracks in the basements of some of the best restaurants in the city. They nest in the roofs of some of the L stations

and many live in crannies in the subways. In the early morning hours, during the long lulls between trains, they climbed to the platforms and forage among the candy bar wrappers and peanut hulls. There are old rat pass beneath the benches in at least two fairy sheds. In the spring and summer, multitudes of our species, the brown rat, live in twisting, many chambered burrows in vacant lots and parks.

There are great colonies of this kind of rat in Central Park. After the first cold snap, they begin to migrate, hunting for, for warm basements, herds have been seen on autumn nights, scuttering across Fifth Avenue. The rats came out by twos and threes in some side streets in the theatrical district, practically every morning around 4.30. The scow-shaped trucks that collect kitchen scraps from restaurants, nightclubs, and saloons all over Manhattan for the pig farms in Sakakis, New Jersey, roll into these streets at that time.

Shortly after the trucks have made their pickups, if no people are stirring, the rats appear and search for drop scraps. They seem to pop up out of the air. Away from their nest, they're usually on the edge of hysteria. They will severely bite babies. There was an epidemic of this a year or so ago in a row of tenements in the Wallabout neighborhood in Brooklyn. And they will bite sleeping adults. ordinarily they flee from people, if hemmed in, and sometimes if too suddenly come upon, they will attack. They fight savagely and blindly in the manner of mad dogs. It is dangerous to

poke at them. They're able to run right up a cane or a broomstick and inflict deep, gash-like bites on their assailant's hands. A month or so ago in broad daylight on the street in front of of a riding academy on the west side, a stable boy tried to kill a rat with a mop. It darted up the mop handle and tore the thumbnail off the boy's left hand. They are least cautious in the two or three hours before dawn, and they are encountered most often by milkmen, night watchmen, scrub women, policemen, and other people who are regularly abroad in those hours. The average person rarely sees one.

When he does, it is a disquieting experience. Anyone who has been confronted by a rat in the bleakness of a Manhattan dawn and has seen it whirl and slink away its claws rasping against the pavement, thereafter understands fully why this beast has been for centuries a symbol of the Judas and the stool pigeon of soullessness in general. In alcoholic wards, the rat is the animal that most frequently appears in the visual hallucinations of patients with the DTs. In Ireland, in fact, the DTs are often referred to as seeing the rat. That's Joseph Mitchell writing in 1944.

Now we're going to jump ahead to a whole different era of the New Yorker. This is the late 1960s. The touching narcissism of the young. What do they want? Freedom. I'm completely disaccar with all those that I've come down to vote. How dare you? Stop picturing.

Go make love. Francis McDormon's character, Listen to Cremence, is mostly based on Mavis Gallant, with a dash of Lillian Ross thrown in. Gallant mostly wrote jewel-like short stories set in Paris, where she lived,

but she covered the student uprisings of 1968 as well. Here's Francis McDormand, reading from Mavis Galant's, the events in May. May 4th, H.T. Cotton Traffic Jammer and San Michel in midst of student disorders, says this is different. They all seem very young. He sees a barricade made apart cars they have moved away from the curb. It's very impatient. Hates disorder. Talk with M.B., she saw the police charge outside the bazaar brazerie. Says their apartment full of tear gas. They live on the fifth floor. Wouldn't let her daughter talk on the telephone inside of windows. Police think nothing of throwing grenades into houses. I doubt if they could throw one up to the fifth floor. Says gas makes it impossible to sleep at night.

Crowds, traffic jams, see a crowd. I feel the mixture of tension and curiosity that is always a signal of something happening, and I hear shouting and see police cars. I duck into Saint-Germain metro. I hate these things. See more pictures and papers and accounts, surprising of how the students far from fleeing,

regroup and charge. May 6th. In the night, hear that familiar wave of sound as during the Algerian crisis in 1958. Get dressed, go out as far as Carrefour Rasbao. All confusion. Students do not run. It is not 1958, after all. Attack in a kind of frenzy that seems insane. The courage of these kids. Don't get too near. See what is obviously innocent bystander hit on the ear by a policeman. decide not to tell anyone as friends would have fit. All night shouts, cries, harsh slogans chanted, police cars, ambulances, cars going up and down my one-way street, running feet. I open a shutter and see that I am the only person on the street at a window. Are they scared or respectable or

what? Scared of police or of students? May 14th yesterday at the big demo. The woman professor kept looking at me coily with her head to one side and speaking to me as if I were a plucky child recovering from brain fever in a Russian novel. Turned out she thought I was an Algerian, and that was her way of showing she wasn't racist. Brief flash of what it must be like to be on the receiving end of liberal kindness, the awful sugar. The police. The police involved in last night's tobacco had been brought in from Brittany, where a Breton nationalist had been staging a strike. They traveled all night. From the morning, when they arrived from their breakfast time, say, they were given no more food. They stood from noon until two o'clock in the morning without one

scrap of food. They stood. They didn't sit down. And they watched the barricades going up, knowing they were going to have to demolish them and the kids behind them. At around two in the morning, they were given the order to charge. They had been given clubs to hit with and gas bombs to throw. What were they supposed to do? Boy who lives in my building tells me a story that sounds like a dream. How the people who lived on those streets showered the students with saucy-saint chocolate and brought them coffee, not the police. How some of the students actually began to talk to the police, not arguing, discussing, talking, he says seriously, about their problems and, do God, the structure of society. The CRS were just people and not all of them.

middle age, some of them only boys. At around two, their order came, regroup, get back on your lines, put on your helmets, and charge. He says it was unreal, dreamlike, the tear gas, the armed men with those great round shields, the beatings, but they were the same men. Talk with young Barbara. The German students are being deported, she tells me, but we need them here. They are organized. They can tell us what to do. We are. We are. We are, Yes, we need the Germans. Her mother, who spent the war years in a concentration camp, says nothing. I feel as if I were watching two screens simultaneously.

De Gaulle's still invisible, says nothing. The most eloquent and certainly loudest artistic voice of his rowdy generation. How'd you learn to paint this? In the French dispatch, Tilda Swinton plays the art critic J.K. L. Berenson, a character inspired by Rosamund Berne. Bernier was not a writer for the New Yorker, but a public lecturer on art. She was the subject of a delightful profile by Calvin Tompkins. Swinton nails her speaking style.

Imagine being paid to talk. I've been a listener all my professional life, and here I am talking everybody's head off. I'm not a scholar or an art historian. As a matter of fact, I've never gone to lectures. Once I went to hear Owen Panofsky, but that's about it. When my marriage to George Bernier ended in 1969, it was more cruelly a divorce from our magazine, L'Eye. I'd gone from Miro, Matisse, and Picasso, to

absolutely flat. All at once, I had nothing to do. I just cried all day. Finally, an art historian friend named Michael Mahoney persuaded me to give 14 lectures on modern art to his students at Trinity College in Hartford in the fall of 1970. I was terrified at the start, but it worked. I am probably the only person you know who hasn't been psychoanalized. Those lectures literally saved my life. I was careful to avoid the famous men who have breathed on me, sort of gossip, though it's hard when the artists you're discussing

are collaborators and friends, even dear friends. And, well, this all led to an invitation from Rice University, where I spent a month in 1971 as a guest of John and Dominique Dominique. Roberto Rossellini was staying with them too, and we became great friends. What a talker! He would sit down at the breakfast table and say,

Pascal, nave not a raison, or something similar, and we'd be off on that for now. The Metropolitan Museum heard about my Rice lectures, and signed me up for the fall of 1971, and I have been book-solid ever since, from places as far apart as the Grand Palais of Paris,

where I lectured on the painters of the School of Paris, and Yakima Washington, where I spoke last spring on contemporary French painting. I must say, after one of my early lectures at the Met, I overheard one woman in the audience say to another, well, she's obviously slept with Legge. I wonder what she'll have to say next week about Brock. Actually, I never slept with any of them, worse luck.

But I'm enjoying it all very much. In fact, I've recently had two of the biggest thrills of my life. The first was dancing the Charleston and the black bottom with Merce Cunningham at the Whitney Museum dinner for Sandy Calder. Merth Cunningham And later John Cage told me that Merce had said he enjoyed it

The second was flying across the country for a lecture getting off the plane and seeing a huge sign in red lights that read Welcome to Yakima Rosamund Berne

Lieutenant Nescafier He is fanatically celebrated among cooks, cops and capitans not to mention squealers, stooleys and snitches as the great Jeffrey Wright plays a food writer named Roebuck Wright, who's one part James Baldwin and one part, A.J. Liebling, who is the New Yorker's correspondent on eating and boxing. To prepare for the part, Wright watched tapes of Baldwin debating William F. Buckley in 1965 of the Cambridge Union. Here's Jeffrey Wright reading from James Baldwin's essay, Equal in Paris.

I consider the French an ancient, intelligent, and cultured race, which indeed, they are. I did not know, however, that ancient glories imply, at least in the middle of the present century, present fatigue, and quite possibly paranoia, that there is a limit to the role of the intelligence in human affairs, and that no people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it. This price, they cannot, of course, assess, but it is revealed in their personalities and in their institutions. The very word institutions from my side of the ocean where it seemed to me we suffered so cruelly

from the lack of them had a pleasant ring as of safety and order and common sense. One had to come into contact with these institutions in order to understand that they were also outmoded, exasperating, completely impersonal, and very often cruel. Similarly, the personality, which it seemed from a distance to be so large and free, had to be dealt with before one could see that if it was large,

it was also inflexible and, for the foreigner, full of strange, high, dusty rooms, which could not be inhabited. One had, in short, to come in contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket weaving project, nor yet an act of God, was something neither desirable nor undesirable, nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. Special thanks to Bill Murray, Stephen Park, Elizabeth Moss, Owen Wilson, Francis McDormon,

Tildes-Winton, and Jeffrey Wright for sharing their talents with us. You can read, see, and hear more about the French dispatch and the writers who inspired it at New Yorker.com. The French dispatches in theaters on October 22nd, and editor's burial, journals and journalism from the New Yorker and other magazines, is in bookstores now. James Baldwin's equal in Paris

appears in Notes of a Native Sun published by Beacon Press. I'm Susan Morrison. Thanks for joining us.