The Mama of Us All

On the tombstone of our race, a famous writer has told us, there will some day be carved the single chilling remembrance: They copulated and read the newspapers. He didn’t go far enough, that writer. Our epitaph is actually going to read: They copulated with their newspapers. And who among us would have it otherwise? Who among us would prefer not to have tapped into the bloodstream of life through our intimate couplings with whichever newspapers we were living with, bedding down with, at one particular era or another? Certainly not the man from whom there issued, with such seeming disdain, the words above. Nothing was dearer to him than newspapers to the day he died, and on that day it was the arteries of our own death into which we tapped, for he was Camus.

We are married to our newspapers, we fall in love with them, we fall out of love with them, we commit adultery with them and against them, we ditch them, we divorce them, we remarry. Especially in our early, formative years is the whole thing like a huge ritual of teen-age courtship: between ourselves and a great waiting field of newspapers there are first dates, blind dates, arranged blind dates, pick-up dates, late dates, secret dates, steady dates, broken dates. There are the various thrilling, verboten differences of class and background (“I’m sorry, dear, but we just don’t allow that newspaper in this house”—which as a minor cliche of American drama and fiction must go back at least to the administration of James K. Polk). There is the counter-balancing impulse to model oneself after one’s parents and follow their standards. We are “brought up on” certain newspapers—another well-worn phrase. I was brought up on The New York Times and the now defunct New York Sun, an evening paper carrying the Wall Street results and business columns that my father would pore over, and the sports results and philately columns that we both would pore over, often side by side, passing the sections back and forth, under the same 1930’s baroque wrought-iron living-room standing lamp. I lived with the Times all through high school and college and, whenever I saw it, through the war. I was fresh from service when a literate older friend of mine—I mean about two years older—said he thought I should start taking up with the Tribune. It was a lot better written, he said. I tried it, found he was right, and stayed with the Trib for about ten years, when a modernization which included green newsprint on certain pages—they soon abandoned it—drove me back into the arms of the Times.

In the evening field I stayed with the Sun until its demise, if only for the baseball pages. That it was an absurd, arch-reactionary anachronism on every other page was something that didn’t impinge on me—and wouldn’t have bothered me either way—until around the time that F.D.R. entered the White House and I entered junior high school. Then...