by Tom Wolfe
Harold Ross! Practically nobody, except at The New Yorker, remembers what a … charismatic figure Ross was as The New Yorker’s founder and editor. James Thurber told a story in his book The Years with Ross that shows it, however. About a year after Ross died, The New Yorker entertained the editors of Punch, and a couple of weeks later Thurber was talking about the party with Rowland Emmett of Punch and told him it was too bad he never met Ross. “Oh, but I did,” said Emmett. “He was all over the place. Nobody talked about anything else.” Ross was from Aspen, Colorado, got mixed up with literati in Paris after World War I, and came to New York and entered the literary world with a kind of Rocky Mountain reverse-spin mucker stance, “anti-intellectual.” Ross was moody, explosive, naive about many things, and had many blind spots when it came to literature and the arts—and all of this partially disguised the real nature of his sophistication. Ross’s sophistication actually had a rather refined English—Anglo-Saxon—cast to it. To Ross, sophistication involved not merely understanding culture and fashion but avoidance of excesses, including literary and artistic excesses. He didn’t want anything in the magazine that was too cerebral, Kantian, or too exuberant, angry, gushing, too “arty,” “pretentious,” or “serious.” He used those three words, “arty,” “pretentious,” and “serious,” quite a lot. He didn’t want it to seem as if anybody were straining his brain and showing off or wringing his heart out and pouring soul all over you. This idea was very special, very English.
Great stuff! Ross started The New Yorker in 1925, and despite the depression, it was a terrific success. Sophistication in America! The thing was, in the twenties the New York intelligentsia still felt . . very colonial. They were like those poor Russian timber magnates who used to sit in their Bourbon Louis salons in St. Petersburg and make their daughters speak only French on Thursdays and talk to guests about “l’Opéra,” as though that great piece of angel’s-food cake were just around the corner on the Nevsky Prospect. They were terribly hung up on French Culture. In New York the model was English Culture. Ross may have had plenty of those lithoid Colorado eccentricities, but The New Yorker was never anything more than a rather slavish copy of Punch. Nevertheless, literati in America took to it as if they were dying of thirst. The need was so great that The New Yorker was first praised and then practically canonized. By the 1950s, funny things were happening. Some of The New Yorker’s host of staff writers, such as E. B. White, were receiving very solemn honors, such as honorary degrees at Yale.
No magazine in America ever received such literary acclaim before. Of course, it was hard to review the work of these New Yorker writers—e.g., Thurber, E. B. White, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, A. J. Liebling—and put one’s finger on any … major work. What had any of them done that would measure up to, say, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, or Steinbeck or Nathanael West? People who don’t really understand just see New Yorker writers pistling away their talents within the old Ross mold year after year, decade after decade, until finally somebody writes an affectionate obituary. But what is all this about major work? Never mind! Ross himself never minded it. They had achieved the perhaps small-scale but still special goal he had set for them—Anglo-Saxon sophistication—very well. Ecce homines! Tiny giants!
The atmosphere at The New Yorker itself, however, was something else. William Shawn came to New York in 1933, at the age of twentysix, with the idea of writing a book about The New Yorker. Instead, he joined the staff as a reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section. The “Talk of the Town” was nothing more than The New Yorker’s version of Punch’s “Charivari” section, but—all right!—in the United States, at any rate, The New Yorker was in a class by itself. One went to work there, and one—how does one explain it?—began to get a kind of … religious feeling about the place. There were already a lot of … traditions. From the first, according to his old friends there, Shawn felt as if he were entering a priesthood. Hierophants! Tiny giants—all over the place—Shawn could look out of his cubicle and there they were, those men out there padding along in the hall were James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, and Robert Benchley themselves. That gangling man out there with the mustache, that is James Thurber—one is not reading about James Thurber, that is he, and one is now, actually, physically, a part of his universe; one can study the most minute details about the man, the weave of his yellow-ocher button-up sweater, the actual knit of it, the way the loops of yarn intertwist, the sweater James Thurber has on—not a photograph of it—but the sweater he has on, has on his own body. Actually! Grace!
Harold Ross was forever looking for a managing editor who could somehow convert his conception of The New Yorker into a systematic, ongoing operation, and Shawn—faithful hierophant!—was the most successful managing editor he ever appointed. He was … totally committed.
There was a lot of speculation about what would happen to The New Yorker “after Ross”! One of the New Yorker writers, A. J. Liebling, said, “The same thing that happened to analysis after Freud.” He was righter than he knew. There was never any question of Shawn’s setting a new policy. The old Museum Curator just set to work with his whole heart. Tiny Mummies!
Part of Shawn’s job as embalmer is actual physical preservation. For example, there is the Thurber Room, the cubicle James Thurber had up there in his last days at The New Yorker. Thurber’s eyesight was failing, and he tried out some of his ideas for drawings with a big crayon on the wall; nutty football players, or something, and a bunch of nuns, some weird woodland animals on the order of the Barefaced Lie and the White Lie. James Thurber! The room is right next to the men’s room, because it was hard for Thurber to navigate the halls. The room is kept like the Poe Shrine in Richmond, Virginia; pure Poe, pure Thurber. The new man, the writer in the cubicle now, understands. Nobody touches those walls, no other pictures of any sort go up on those walls. The custodians stand around late in the day trying to decide how best to preserve these … well, one means, these things are not scrawls, I don’t care what Thurber would have said. These things are bona fide … murals we have here. Museum! Shrine! Maybe someday, all these offices of all these giants, like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, everybody, can be restored, like Colonial Williamsburg, all the original objects and curios, Benchley’s little porcelain hussar figures, Gibbs’s amber walrus, animals, and things, but for now—well, only the people who were working here when Ross was alive may keep offices in the old donnish clutter, all these things on the walls and so forth. The Mr. Old-Timers, like Brendan Gill, the movie critic, who has been here twenty-five years, or something like that, may keep all these vines growing all over his office—picturesque!—donnish clutter!—but we keep all these men on one floor, and as they retire or … pass on … the rule is, nobody else may do up rooms like that. Nobody else may put all those curios up on their walls, all those maps of Hartford, before the Turnpike, all that strange stuff—nothing on the walls but New Yorker covers. That is, of course, understood? One means, well, it is not a written rule or anything like that, but one soon gets the idea, by example, as it were, like this business of everybody wearing white shirts at the IBM offices. Nobody comes in and beats one over the skull with a rule book or anything, but the day may come when some unplugged bastard comes in with a light, practically thin ice blue shirt on, and about 3 p.m. a superior calls him into an office where the fluorescent ice tray on the ceiling hums, and he says, “Let me ask you, tell me, have you ever noticed any of our executives wearing a … pastel shirt like yours?” One means, well, of course, everyone was genuinely sorry, even stricken, over the death of A. J. Liebling, “Joe,” in 1963, but, well, the man did have the most unbelievable clutter in his cubicle, pictures right up on the walls of fifth-ranking bantamweight boxers with their hair pomaded, photographed against dark backgrounds on glossy paper with white ink inscriptions, “Best of Luck,” cretinish handwriting, circles over the i’s. The man went really rather beyond the orthodox donnish clutter. That was quite bad enough, but
his style, his writing style, yes, he did write under Ross, and he quite belonged here—no one will deny that for a minute—but doesn’t one think that Liebling was … baroque, and hearty at times, and did he really fit in around here?
Tenor! Yes! Shawn’s greatest task, of course, was not preserving these shrine rooms but preserving the style, the tenor of the magazine. The tenor, the atmosphere, is important. Newcomers are schooled in it immediately. To begin with, getting hired at The New Yorker is nothing merely personnel-office-like or technical. It is more like fraternity rushing. A person’s attitude is important. Everybody wants to know if the candidate will fit in, if he has the makings of a genuine … hierophant; not a lot of bogus enthusiasm and so forth, but more an attitude of—well, humility, about The New Yorker and its history. Humility has come to be a very important thing here, and lately The New Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically, that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college. After the age of forty-one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to hard-finished worsteds.
Earn one’s worsteds!
A lot of traditions are kept up very well. One is that the cocktail lounge in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and the Rose Room are actually a private club practically owned by The New Yorker. The Algonquin Hotel is across the street and down toward Sixth Avenue a little from the Forty-fourth Street entrance of The New Yorker building. The other cocktail lounge in there, the Blue Room, or whatever it is, and the other dining room—not the Rose Room but the other kind of hearty oak-woody dining room off the lobby—are not part of The New Yorker, and all kinds of hearty beef-trust people turn up in there, businessmen and one thing and another. But the cocktail lounge in the lobby—well, it is not actually, but it is practically a New Yorker club; you know? Or at least it seems so if one works for The New Yorker. It even looks like a club, a fine club like the Century Club. One sits in leather chairs at lamp tables and coffee tables and things, not at ordinary Formica cocktail-lounge tables, and there is a great deal of dark wood all around, and one summons the waiter by banging a little clerk’s bell on the table—just like in a club, one understands? Well, one means, it is a public place, but if one works for The New Yorker, he does not simply show up in there—the thing is, this is the place where Ross used to come, and Thurber, and everybody, and now Shawn sometimes comes there around six, but even Shawn watches himself. A lot of times he doesn’t even eat lunch in the Rose Room; for example, he and Lillian Ross will drift off up to this delicatessen near Rockefeller Plaza for a very quiet, unpretentious couple of corned-beef sandwiches. So one waits until he is invited to the Algonquin by some senior member of the staff. It is like the second round of initiation, like being really accepted. Months go by, but finally the day comes when Brendan Gill or another top member says, in this most offhand casual way, as if it really didn’t mean a thing, “Mr. Toddy, would you care to join me for lunch at the Algonquin?” Zoom! Grace!
Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker
William Shawn, editor of The New Yorker magazine—well, he is a very, as they say, homey person. That is one side of him. He is a small, quiet man, and he talks in this halting whisper. He seems to wear layer upon layer of clothes, all sorts of sweaters, vests, coats. He smiles, nods, nods, nods; he makes courtly, sort of down home pleasantries. And if—there may be an ashtray on his desk by now—but if there was no ashtray, he would go out himself! Mr. Shawn of The New Yorker!—and bring back a Coca-Cola bottle for use as an ashtray. Easygoing!
“Why—hello—Mr.—Cage—um—yes—how—are—yon—here—let—me—how—is—Mrs.—Cage—um—take—your—coat—oh-oh—didn’t—mean—to—um—there—if—I—can—just—slip—it—off—unh—here—have—a—”
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Shawn—”
“—a—seat—right—over—here—well—it—uh—always—does— that—ha-ha—well—now—oh—I—see—you’re—smoking—let—me—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Shawn, I didn’t-”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, please—perfectly—all—right—it’s—please—keep—your—seat—I’ll—be—right—back—”
Whereupon he goes out of the office, smiling, and comes back in a moment with an empty Coca-Cola bottle in his hand. He puts the Coca-Cola bottle on the desk for Cage to use as an ashtray.
So one can imagine Cage saying something like he has a great many viable ideas about this story, but it is funny, he can hear his own voice as he talks. The words are coming out all right—“several really very viable approaches, I think, Mr. Shawn”—but they sound hollow, as if in an echo chamber, because inside his brain all he can focus on is the cigarette and the Coca-Cola bottle. The thick glass in those bottles, and Jeezus, that little hole in the top there—it looks big enough, but if you try to knock the ash off a cigarette here into the Coca-Cola bottle, you see that the glass is thick and the hole isn’t big enough. Cage is practically down to the end of the cigarette—“Well, I’m not absolutely sure the ethnocentric idea works in a case like this, Mr. Shawn, but”—and then what is he going to do? There’s nothing to put the cigarette out on. He’s going to have to just drop the cigarette down the hole in the Coca-Cola bottle, and then it is going to hit the bottom of the bottle, and then it is going to hit the bottom of the bottle and just keep burning, you know? And there is going to be this little smelly curl of smoke coming up out of the Coca-Cola bottle, like a spirit lamp, and this filthy cigarette lying in the bottom, right there on Shawn’s desk, and obviously Shawn is not crazy about cigarettes in the first place, and old Cage hasn’t even sold him on the idea of the story—
But! That is the beauty of the man! On the outside he is quiet and homey, easygoing. Underneath, however—William Shawn is not nodding for a moment. Like the time the people in the Checking Department started having these weekly skits, sort of spoofing some of the old hands—does one really wish to know about how long that kind of thing lasted? That is a … rhetorical question. Shawn is not nodding. William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross.
To preserve The New Yorker just as Ross left it, exactly, in … perpetuity.
Yes! And to do so, William Shawn has done nothing halfway. He has devised an editing system that is in some ways more completely group journalism, or org-edit, as it is called at Novy Mir, than anything Time magazine ever even contemplated.
To start with, one can believe, most assuredly, that no little … comedians in the Checking Department are going to schmarf around in there doing skits about the old hands—the men who worked under Ross, many of them. Those men play an important part in Shawn’s system. The physical part of the preservation—such as preserving the Thurber Room—that was easy. Shawn’s hardest task was to preserve the literary style of Ross’s New Yorker. The thing to do, of course, was to adopt, as models, the styles of men on the magazine who had been working under Ross—the so-called Tiny Giants, viz., E. B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, James Thurber, A. J. Liebling, people of that sort.
Well, Shawn’s first step was brilliantly simple. In effect, he has established lifetime tenure—purity!—for nearly everybody who served under Ross. Seniority! Columnists and so forth at The New Yorker have lifetime seniority, and if any ambitious kids there aspire, they wait it out, earn their first pair of hard-finished worsteds by working and waiting for them; one understands? This has led to a certain amount of awkwardness. The New Yorker’s movie, theater, and art sections have come to have an eccentric irrelevance about them. They have a kind of knitsweater, stoke-the-coal-grate charm, but … somehow they are full of Magooisms. Such as: “It was evidently intended to be a very funny account of a lower-middle-class London family jam-packed with lovable eccentrics, but when, after thirty minutes, I found that nothing funny had happened and that my accustomed high spirits were being reduced to audible low moans, I got up and made my way out of the theater, whi
ch, as far as laughter was concerned, had been, and I suspect remained, as silent as a tomb.” Evidently intended; audible low moans; as silent as a tomb: huckleberry preserves! Mom’s jowls are on the doily!
The “Letter from London” and “Letter from Paris” features, written by two more seniors, have the same trouble. They started off in the 1930s, when not too many Americans were traveling to London or Paris, the idea being to introduce readers to what was current in the way of Culture and modes in Europe. Today all sorts of people fly to London and Paris all the time, and these “Letters” from abroad have taken on the tone of random sights seen from the window of a secondbest hotel.
Shawn, of course, is well aware of all this. It is just that he has a more … specific mission. Museum curator! He apparently wanted a permanent mold for The New Yorker’s essays, profiles, and so forth, and he did it with unerring taste. Lillian Ross! The last really impressive thing The New Yorker published under Harold Ross was Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway in 1950. Lillian Ross is no kin to Harold Ross, by the way. This piece of hers was terrific, and the technique influenced a lot of the best journalists in the country. She gave up the usual historical format of the profile entirely and, instead, wrote a running account of a couple of days she spent following Hemingway around New York. She put in all his little asides, everything, a lot of terrific dialogue.
