A salute to a lady who played Charles Lamb to New York
PAUL JOHNSON
Good reporters who are also vivid writers and sensitive human beings are rare. I can think of perhaps a dozen of them, led by the incomparable James Cameron and my old friend George Gale. Among this select company was Nora Sayre, who died recently. Most reporters roam the world, Nora usually stayed on her beat, which was New York. She loved that harsh, hard, competitive place, with its surprising sentimentalities and softcentre heart. Her mother was a New York World journalist, her father worked for the New Yorker. Her family had ranged widely over the USA. She wrote, 'It's eerie to remember that I got my name from the Gold Rush. My grandmother's uncle was a FortyNiner, searching for nuggets in Sonora, California. She was named after the town in hopes it would reward him, but he struck no gold at all. Still, I regret that the name was shortened to Nora by the time it came to me.'
Nora went to Radcliffe and was exceptionally well read and educated. She belonged by birth and upbringing, and by choice and vocation, to the breed of East Coast intellectuals, whom we would call upper-middleclass. They take it as their hereditary duty to civilise by their writings, and restrain by their active promotion of worthy radical causes the crass materialism and lusty intolerance of the great American human engine. Their influence is out of all proportion to their number. They stick together. Loyalty to their caste, in good times and had — especially the latter is their outstanding virtue. It saved them from extinction during the harrowing days of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the late Forties and Fifties, which destroyed many people Nora knew as a child, friends of her father, who had been a scriptwriter in Hollywood for a time. They were not exactly exclusive, for entry into their ranks was on merit and character. But that character was special and important; it implied intellectual and moral breeding, a kind of cultural refinement whose presence or absence in a person, irrespective of his or her abilities, was decisive. Given that character, the newcomer was made free of all the deep friendship of the clan. In a way, it was the American version of the Bloomsbury Group, but much widerflung and more varied, far less snobbish, and with none of the nasty habits which made the Bloomsberries so repulsive at times. Nora belonged by birth, and one of her adored mentors was the monstre saere of the sect, Edmund Wilson, to whom I think she was
related. At any rate, she was admitted to the intimacy of his thoughts and prejudices, and to the racy tales of his black housekeeper, who fiercely protected her master's interests. Nora's hilarious imitations of this splendid lady cannot now be repeated for fear of offending the racial thought-police.
I forget where I first met Nora. It was probably at the table of John Davenport, who held court every Saturday morning at the old Commercial in the King's Road, Chelsea, alongside such battle-scarred intellectuals of the period as John Raymond, Peter Duval Smith, Maurice Richardson and Philip Toynbee. This was the nearest equivalent, in London, to Nora's New York coterie, and she relished the experience of getting to know their special language and values, Like Mary McCarthy, Nora had a fondness for Davenport, and at one time, after his sad and early death, collected material for a book about him, but the subject proved elusive. Nora began to write for the New Statesman, with which most of us were connected, and when I became its editor I appointed Nora our New York correspondent, writing a weekly column on any subject she chose. She found this task delightful and invigorating and performed it with immense enthusiasm and success. Many of her columns are included in her excellent collection Sixties Going on Seventies. It gives a penetrating insight into those edgy times, the age of LBJ and Dick Nixon, when a new and liberated generation were striving to oust the old politicos who had got America into the Vietnam mess. The book has been justly compared to Edmund Wilson's own account of the slump years, The American Earthquake. Like Wilson, Nora took a close interest in the changing American language, and not the least merit of her book is its glossary of neologisms, a real peek into the period with such terms as nickelbags, spoolies, wigging out, quaaludes, fragging, ice (meaning to kill') and jive (meaning 'false).
What made Nora such a good reporter, and a riveting writer, was that while covering the big news stories like the notorious Democrat Convention in Chicago 1968, she always had her eyes open and her pen at the ready for the little things which make New York such an exotic and fascinating place to live in. One of her virtuoso pieces was a 1966 description of the epic and perpetual battle waged by New Yorkers over the disposal of rubbish. This involved detailed descriptions of exactly how a Private Incinerator Chute works or doesn't work, the precise meaning of the official term `putrescible waste', the functioning of what is called Garbage Court, and the lengths to which plain-clothes sanitation detectives will go to catch misusers of the city street bins. Nora regularly toured the shops to find out anything new in the way of sinister toys, shrink-clinic games for Christmas, and Easter commercial honors. She kept a close watch on the theatre and movies, especially the off-off-Broadway activities, barely noticed in those primitive times. She loved puppets, the eccentrics who played Santa Claus, circuses, street musicians and student editors. Anything that moved, purposefully and paranoically, along New York's springy sidewalks was her meat, and served fresh and sympathetically for British readers. She loved the city and its people virtually without reservation — she could get funny, epitomising quotes even out of slumlords as she called them — and defended its landmarks and traditions with fierce possessiveness against the forces of change. Her relationship with New York was akin to Charles Lamb's with London, and brought from her a similar quality of tender prose.
Nora, alas, had another thing in common with Lamb, a passion for nicotine. Lamb, when asked by Samuel Parr, the Whig Dr Johnson', how he contrived to smoke at such a rate, replied, 'I toiled after it, sir, as some men toil after virtue.' Unlike Lamb, who was always trying to give it up, Nora insisted that to smoke as many cigarettes as she liked was her God-given right and, in her particular case, even meritorious. I never knew any human being, with the sole exception of Ken Tynan, who was so religiously attached to the weed. Nora was a very private person, who guarded her domestic arrangements jealously. She had a brief marriage to a distinguished economist, which got off to a bad start when the groom insisted on bringing Nicky Kaldor with him on the honeymoon so that they could discuss economics together. Otherwise Nora pursued a solitary and, I suspect, at times lonely, path, guided by her strong sense of decency and honour. She had many friends, countless acquaintances, but her inner thoughts were a closely guarded secret, As with Ken Tynan, emphysema eventually claimed her life, a forfeit she paid bravely in her Manhattan fastness, She lived and died by New York, that black-and-white magic city, whose spells she recorded with such elegance.
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