Of Editors and Men: Will Irwin on and Off the Record
THE MAKING OF A REPORTER. By . G. P. Putnam’s Sons. $3.75
REPORTERS are born so, but these fifty years Will Irwin has lived up to the full possibilities of his profession. If he had been riding the hook and ladder to every fire since his boyhood he could scarcely have been more active. It is hard to picture him doing anything in preference to smelling out the news or writing at a hard gallop. Give him the stuff for a story, put the pressure on, and he ascends straight into heaven.
Of education, as schoolmasters know it, Will Irwin has had little. To be fired from Stanford University at an early age probably did little to curtail his book learning, for he took important post-graduate courses in the two best schools for the Making of a Reporter that America has yet established. He studied his profession first on Dana’s Sun when Chester Lord was in the saddle — “When you saw it in the Sun it was so” — and where office discipline was complete. And then Irwin served a long term on McClure’s Magazine in the great days when it took Sam McClure about fifteen minutes every morning utterly to disorganize the office and to give every member of the staff the separate inspiration of his young life.
The legendary Sun
The Brotherhood of Dana’s Sun is still the legend of news-paperdom. The tale of the dissolution of the World may have touched a sharper note of sentiment, but the Sun remains America’s classic newspaper, where all for one was really one for all, and where the art of writing, and still more notably the art of writing headlines, was taught so that it could never be forgotten. At that school, Will Irwin learned much: tireless
investigation, zest and buoyancy in writing, absorption in the job. But though he may have taken the course in Accuracy it was not a lifelong lesson, for in this book of his any old hand can detect errors of fact and occasionally, I think, errors of impression.
At McClure’s School for Genius, too, be did not learn everything that was taught. Although McClure could not write himself, he could get others to do it in a manner little short of miraculous. If there was one quality in literature which he admired, it was the gift of understatement. This reviewer well remembers the teacher in electric action. “Always,” McClure would say, running his hands through his perpetually dislocated hair, “understate the facts. Always, always, always understate the facts. Why, when I call Tom Platt a moral leper, I always understate the facts.” Will Irwin never fully learned this lesson. His emphasis usually thumps the point.
If F. P. Adams knows almost everything, Will Irwin has certainly known almost everybody. To any man who has lived through the same days, his chronicle is absorbing. After McClure’s, Irwin jumped to the Saturday Evening Post and was directed by the gifted Lorimer; thence to Collier’s where Bob Collier, who for some of us is a legend all by himself, was in charge and Norman Hapgood’s cool, ironic talent was in the ascendant. Magazine stories took him here, took him there, took him for a ghostly interlude to a land of Spooks, took him back to California, and to Europe many times, where he described a number of dramatic phases of the war.
At Northcliffe’s instigation he did a remarkable job of bringing ihe war home, and in the teeth of the War Office hauled out the facts. Never idle, if a breathing spell occurred Irwin would fill it with a novel or two, or just a book, or half a dozen stories. He was in the war and in the peace up to his neck. He was even in the censorship; and when a miserable peace followed a horrible war, he dreamed dreams with his lifelong friend, Mr. Hoover, of two cars for every garage and eternal economic felicity.
The book is alive with anecdotes and incidents, told with gusto and the love of life, but the remarkable men Irwin met at every turn of the road do not wholly come alive. Perhaps his most interesting personal sketch is of that strange and eerie genius Homer Lea — humpback, dreamer, prophet, and general in the Chinese Army, to whom a vision came of the future history of Japan and America.
Will Irwin is a lovable man believing in his friends, and in spite of indignation against the wicked, a natural lover of mankind. It is an honorable trait in him to stick fast to his friend Mr. Hoover, through the very thick and the extremely thin, to have a kindly word even for President Harding, to damn the sin and love the sinner. He has lived a good life, a mad life, a successful life, and the record of it is a captivating peep-show of an age that is past.
ELLERY SEDGWICK