Next up on the essays shelf:
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
The “Talk of the Town” pieces can be about show biz people, businessmen, or just interesting Manhattan locals. There’s got to be some news “hook”: so-and-so came to town today, so-and-so has been staying at the Waldorf all summer, so-and-so is currently on Broadway. And if it isn’t happening in New York, then “Talk of the Town” doesn’t care. They are meant to be short, snappy, gossipy, and yet concise. Omit needless words (to quote a famous “Talk of the Town” author).
I love this collection because the pieces are short, nothing over 2 pages long, and so the diversity of people profiled is fantastic. But even better, it is organized by decade, starting in the 1920s. And so you can basically watch the development of, well, America, through reading these pieces. People who later became household names (i.e.: Orson Welles, and others) are first featured here, doing their little New York thing. I love the historical-snapshot aspect of the pieces. While they are brief, they can contain entire worlds. You know, a piece on the first shipment of alcohol coming to the United States since Prohibition was lifted, contains in its essence the history of the Jazz Age. The pieces have such great feel.
Joel McCarten’s piece is from 1945, so already you can imagine what the hell is going on in the larger world. But, as with all “Talk of the Town” pieces, the author trains his microscope on just one tiny element of the enormous event of World War II.
Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took that now-iconic photograph of the Marines (and one Navy corpsman) raising the flag following the Battle of Iwo Jima. The photo didn’t have to wait for generations to be recognized as important. The reaction was instantaneous. It was a photo that went round the world (and continues to do so). It’s probably one of the most famous photographs ever taken. Certainly at the top of the list. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Photography (in the same year it was taken, a first). Joe Rosenthal was signing copies of that photo for the rest of his very long life (he died in 2006).
John McCarten, who wrote this “Talk of the Town” piece on Rosenthal, notes that Joe Rosenthal has stopped off in New York City on his way down to Washington. The A.P. had organized a full schedule of sight-seeing, publicity appearances, and all-around brouhaha for Rosenthal for his brief weekend in New York. McCarten managed to get some time with him, though.
The two men talk. “Masterpiece” is only three paragraphs long, but its essence is vast. I’ll just excerpt a bit of it. This is all well-trod ground for war buffs, photography buffs, WWII buffs … but it’s fun to hear it without decades of retrospect.
And, as always, with the chatty and yet strangely formal very distinctive “Talk of the Town” tone. I love it.
It’s 1945.
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
Joe – nobody ever calls him Joseph – freely admitted that all the hoopla about the picture had come as a surprise to him. “I wasn’t around when they raised the first flag on Iwo – the little one,” he said. “My shot was taken about three-quarters of an hour later. I went up the mountain with the detail that was sent up with the big flag and the flagpole, along with a Marine Corps movie man and a Marine Corps still man. I took one picture when the staff was halfway up, another when it was all the way up, and then I got a lot of Marines to stand around cheering to make my last one. When they wired from Guam that my flag picture was very good, I thought they meant the last one. All my stuff from Iwo was shipped out in negative, and I never had any idea how the picture looked till I got back from Guam and saw how it developed.” When Joe’s picture was published, a commentator on the Blue Network said that the picture had been carefully posed by Joe. Later, he retracted the canard. “It wouldn’t have been any disgrace at all,” Joe told us, “to figure out a composition like that. But it just do happened I didn’t. Good luck was with me, that’s all – the wind rippling the flag right, the men in fine positions, and the day clear enough to bring everything into sharp focus.”
Joe has been taking pictures in the Pacific since January, 1944, when he got out of the Maritime Service, in which he had served as a photographer. Because of weak vision, he’d been turned down by the Army, Navy, and Marines before the Maritime Service took him in. Since he took his flag-raising picture, his draft board in San Francisco has honored him by stepping him up from a 4-F to a 2A-F. He worked around San Francisco as a photographer for fifteen years before the war, and joined up with the A.P. when it absorbed another news agency he was working for, in 1938. A serious character, Joe gave us a few technical details about his masterwork that we pass along to any camera sharps among our readers. The shot was taken with a Speed Graphic, between f/8 and f/11 at 1/400th of a second, on an Agfa Ansco Superpan Press film pack, against an overcast sky, with camera visibility about five miles. Joe got his composition in line by standing on a sandbag on top of some stones he piled up on the rim of Suribachi’s crater. Joe said that the raising had no perceptible effect on the Marines fighting at the foot of the mountain because they were too exhausted to rejoice. Incidentally, there are six Marines in the picture, although everybody thinks there are four or five.
