Andrew Marantz on Janet Flanner's "Führer"

Janet Flanner's job was never easy, exactly, but for the first decade it wasn't all that morally freighted.

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Beginning in October of 1925, using the pseudonym Genêt, she mailed her editors at this magazine a fizzy bimonthly column under the rubric Letter from Paris. Instead of telling readers what they needed to know-that was what newspapers were for she focussed on what they might want to know: the new fad of backless dresses in the cabarets, the rising cost of champagne. "She thought of herself as a high-class gossip columnist," Brenda Wineapple writes in her biography "Genét."Striving for an "unflappable, ever-ironic" style, "she did not predict outcomes, take sides, or search for causes. Obviously, this itself was a side, but Janet was not yet willing to admit that." The New Yorker was inventing its voice, and Flanner was in the clique of tinkerers. "Lunched with D. Parker," she wrote to Harold Ross, the founding editor, from her rented fourth-floor room on Rue Bonaparte. "How dare you say Thurber uses more parenthesis than I?...I'll stop, (if I can.)"When Flanner first arrived in Europe, as an expat from Indianapolis, she was still married, technically, to a man; but they soon divorced and she lived openly (in both senses) with her female partner, the poet Solita Solano. They were chummy with everyone who was anyone: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Djuna Barnes. Flanner roamed the Continent, filing