The New Yorker makes another unforced error! (probably)

A few weeks back I found a small but blatant error in the New Yorker, when author Daniel Mendelsohn managed to confuse “turbine” with “cylinder” when describing the engines of the ill-fated Titanic. In this week’s NY, Joan Acocella has a rather rambling article on dictionaries. In the midst of a discussion on slang, she recounts the following:

In Norman Mailer’s 1948 war novel, “The Naked and the Dead,” the G.I.s use “fug.” In what may be an apocryphal story, Mae West, meeting Mailer at a party, said, “Oh, you’re the guy who can’t spell ‘fuck’!”)

Well, I don’t know if you can make an unforced error reciting an apocryphal story, but I’ve seen that item half a dozen times, and it’s always been attributed to Tallulah Bankhead (or her press agent), and it certainly makes a much better fit with Tallulah than Mae.

However it was retailed, it was certainly passed around a lot, and Norman couldn’t have appreciated being on the wrong end of a widely shopped witticism. But he got his own back, a little, by simply appropriating the bit for his own uses in his early sixties semi-blockbuster, An American Dream, recounting the travails of Stephen “Raw Jock” Rojack.* Raw Jock’s wife, a castrating Upper East Side diva, invites a “dangerous” black jazz singer (a black Frank Sinatra, more or less) to one of her fashionable parties. “I don’t go for that society shoot,” he snidely RSVP’s. “Oh, dear. The poor man must be trying to spell ‘shit,’” she ripostes.

*Yes, “Raw Jock.” Mailer’s moil, one fears, left more than psychic scars.