St. Clair McKelway was one of the interesting group of drunks that Harold Ross gathered around him at The New Yorker. McKelway was also an excellent writer, but I have a hunch that his profession as a drinker seriously interfered with his profession as a writer. (A late friend of mine, who knew him, remembered that McKelway was always going into one sanatorium or another to dry out, after which he would promptly go back to the bottle.)

Reporting at Wit’s End: Tales from the New Yorker (Bloomsbury), is a fascinating and welcome collection of McKelway’s pieces from the magazine where he spent most of his career — he worked there for more than 30 years, from the mid-30s to the 60s, and died in 1980 at the age of 74.

McKelway specialized in long take-outs of in-depth reporting written with a deceptively graceful style of a length — 30-50 pages! — that no magazine would publish these days. I would also wager that McKelway was guilty of a fair amount of the quote-cooking that was permitted in those days, at that magazine.

Like A.J. Liebling, he liked con artists and rogues — the main piece here is a very long piece on the Harlem huckster Father Divine. McKelway didn’t have Liebling’s sense of humor, but then Liebling, as Adam Gopnik notes in his introduction, was a wise guy who just happened to find his way into journalism.

One of McKelway’s five wives was Maeve Brennan, and, given their mutual alcohol intake and her mental instability, it must have been a train wreck out of Eugene O’Neill.

Whatever the chaos of McKelway’s life, the best of his stories are as eminently worth reading now as they were 50 and 60 years ago.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week…

fainhead: gladness; willingness.