paul sann journalism, letters, writing


  pete hamill on paul sann


                  Written for the DaCapo Press trade paperback reprint of "KILL THE DUTCHMAN!"


PREFACE BY PETE HAMILL

For me, reading this book again is to plunge into two separate rivers of nostalgia. One is Paul Sann's longing for his youth as a newspaperman. The other is my own aching desire to relive mine.

  Sann was my editor at the New York Post from the day in 1960 when I first walked into the old city room at 75 West Street and started to live my life. He was a lean medium-sized man with pouches under his eyes, a slit of mouth usually turned in an ironical grin, a cigarette always burning in his fingers, gray hair cut short and brushed straight back. When reading galleys or raw copy, he pushed his glasses up on his head and examined each word as if inspecting the defenses of an enemy. He had a taste for black gangster-style shirts and cowboy boots and good whiskey and was not immune to certain other bad habits: he gambled away many thousands on horses and football teams and the pitching of the Dodgers, Giants, Yankees, and Mets. He had a tough big city style that I first thought came from watching too much Bogart and later understood came right off the sidewalks of the harder New York of Prohibition and Depression. His tough exterior was, of course, almost entirely a sham, the artful defense of a man who acknowledges the ferocious subversive power of personal sentiment by denying its existence.

  In fact, he loved many people and places and things: his wife and his children, Red Auerbach and the Boston Celtics, good writing, Sugar Ray Robinson, the American West, the music of Rodgers and Hart, the city of New York, beautiful women, home run hitters, Smith Corona portable typewriters, and the New York Post.

  He went to work for The Post when he was seventeen and stayed for half a century, mastering along the way all the skills of his imperfect trade. He was a great reporter, a fine writer in the punchy tabloid style, an ingenious composer of page one headlines, a surgically precise text editor. He added the intangibles of mood, spirit, attitude that infuriated some newspaper people but allowed others to flourish. And he had one other skill for which no Pulitzer is ever awarded but is the mark of a great editor. He had an excellent eye for talent. He wasn't afraid of hiring people who were smarter than he was (or seemed to be) or who had more obvious abilities. Second-rate editors always see young talents as threats. Paul Sann saw them as angels. And so he hired and helped nurture such writers as Murray Kempton, Nora Ephron, Jimmy Cannon, Larry Merchant, Anna Quindlen, Ernest Tidyman, Clyde Haberman, Warren Hoge, Milton Gross, Ed Kosner, Don Forst, Alfred G. Aronowitz, to mention only a few of the hundreds of talented people who moved in and out of his New York Post.

  He was, in short, the greatest newspaperman I've ever known: tough, literate, intelligent, and profane--and extraordinarily generous. He produced two masterpieces. The Post was one of them, a flawed but stylish tabloid that went up against the products of the great Scripps-Howard and Hearst chains and survived.

  His other masterpiece was this book.

  It is, on one level, an homage to the Spirit of Gangsters Past. Dutch Schultz was a crucial part of the New York that Sann knew and loved when young. This was long ago, of course, before the Mob focused its rude talents on the peddling of heroin. In the days of the Dutchman, rumrunners were still socially acceptable and hoodlums were thought of as romantic, a feeling perfectly evoked in E.L. Doctorow's fine novel about the Dutchman, Billy Bathgate. Paul Sann was dead before Doctorow's book was published, but I think he would have liked it and quarreled with it. In spite of all his other talents, Sann was basically a reporter, with a fidelity for factual truth; he would have argued against the artistic liberties that Doctorow allowed himself. That's why I'm happy that this book is once more back in print. If you loved Billy Bathgate (as I did), you can read this history and discover what really happened.

  You will also hear the authentic voice of Paul Sann: skeptical, amused, sardonic, admiring. He at once celebrates the bad guys and judges them. He has enormous fun with the felonies of the era (which now have an odd innocence to them) and lovingly embraces the often arcane language in which those vanished gangsters expressed themselves. Much of the reporting here was fresh; Sann went back and found the documents and the survivors and gave the aging words a new life. He also uses his considerable literary intelligence to examine one of the most extraordinary accidental documents in our history: the last words of Dutch Schultz. These "ravings" (as they were called in the newspapers of the day) still have a Joycean energy and excitement to them. "Mother is the best bet," says the Dutchman, "and don't let Satan draw you too fast."

  Doctorow used the dying words in his novel. They also inspired a book by William S. Burroughs. But Sann explains most of them without robbing them of their poetry. We can hear the Dutchman now, dying of peritonitis in the Newark City Hospital, his men Abbadabba Berman and Abe Landau already dead, the words flowing freely and splendidly. Even Sann, whose explanations fill a chapter, can't solve the mystery of the couplet: "a boy has never wept/nor dashed a thousand kim." All these years later, the words continue to astonish. But this book doesn't astonish; it does something much more difficult. It illuminates. In the last years of the '60s, Sann sat down to write a book about one of the fabulous Jewish gangsters from an era that would die at Pearl Harbor. He did much more: he gave us the era itself, its attitudes, characters, and language, and made us understand how the big cities of America worked in the years between the wars. Reading it again, more than twenty years after its publication, I'm back in the old city room, about to rush out on a story, and I miss Paul Sann more than ever.

                                          PETE HAMILL
                                          New York City, May 1991


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