Not a School for Scandal?

IT WAS NO ordinary newspaper, you must understand," the author, a former writer for The Crimson and The New York Times, writes, and he wasn't referring to The Crimson. White, who worked at The Times from 1974 to 1978, has written a novel highly critical of the "Gray Lady," transparently disguised here as the New York "Globe," (Just in case readers don't get the message, they are quickly told three times in the novel's first three pages of the Globe's "stately," "black" and "great" Corinthian masthead.) True Bearing is a novel about The Times; about journalism and reporting; about shipping; about relationships; about integrity.

It is also about David White. Hired after a stint at the paper's Paris bureau as an office boy to Tom Wicker, White eventually filled The Times' shipping reporter slot, covering the nation's largest harbor. With the onset in 1977 of the "New" New York Times--"The Living Section," a jogging column and other concessions to profitable pop journalism practiced by other papers but sternly resisted by The Times----White's editors decided that shipping wasn't sexy, abolished the beat, and shunted him off to the hinterlands of the suburban Westchester edition. Disillusioned, White quit to become a free-lance writer. In True Bearing, 24-year-old Henry Williams is the last of a long breed of waterfront reporters of a great New York newspaper ("a behemoth, a giant rising twenty-two stories over Sixth Avenue") who, after falling in love, of course, quits to become a free-lance writer when his beat vanishes and he is faced with the impending transfer to the "Verve" section.

Zipping through Boston last week as part of a four-city tour, White emphasized that the novel (his first) and its characters are fiction. But his bitterness at the turn the paper has taken, especially the new sections, and at the end of the waterfront reporter tradition, still lingers. "Aside from the South Bronx, the decline of New York Harbor is the most important untold story in New York Cityy right now," White said over coffee at Tommy's Lunch.

THE NOVEL, chronicling the young reporter's struggle for Truth and the big story in the big city amidst villanous editors, grizzled and/or washed-up veterans and properly eccentric sources, gives a vivid if somewhat melodramatic picture of the most influential--except perhaps for the Peking People's Daily--newspaper in the world:

The newsroom of The New York Globe stretched all the way from Forty-eight Street to Forty-ninth Street, a space of one city block, nearly two full acres filled with four long rows of reporters' desks...At deadline time, as six o'clock drove down upon the men and women, it would churn with action and the reporters would rock in their seats like the pistons of a vast, Teutonic engine screaming at maximum force. There were over one hundred reporters attached to the City Desk alone, and when their telephones began to fire, when their typewriters began to rattle like a line of Gatling guns, when the forest of beefy arms with sleeves rolled up began to lunge and punch and jab at the keyboards, the full fury of the men and women boxing their news into print would fill the whole, long room with crackline force.

True Bearing--the title reters to the steady course of protagonist and the path of an oil tanker involved in the collision he investigates--is a journalism junkie's equivalent of the idealized novels treasured by teenage hockey players in Manitoba ("Peter Plays Right Wing") or little leaguers in Williamstown ("A World Series for Johnny"). Though more serious than those efforts, True Bearing is essentially a novelized version of the kind of aspiring journalist who spent his childhood years listening to all-news radio, idolizing Woodward and Bernstein and "Scotty" Reston instead of Mays and Yastrzemski, and waiting up all night to catch the next morning's Times.

The book flows well, and White effectively evokes the hard news soft news conflict and the resulting newsroom tensions. While an air of stereotype pervades some of the characters and situations, those interested in the inner mechanisms which fuel the machine that ultimately deposits a pile of distinctive and allegedly definitive newsprint at your door should find True Bearing an abosorbing read.