Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  It was true “enough. But nobody in America apparently was doing anything about it. There was the old Life, and there was Judge, two family magazines whose stock-in-trade was deaf old ladies, comic valentines, he-she jokes, and a dreadful series of contributed saloon gags called Krazy Kracks. Sophisticated New Yorkers might wince at this stuff, but the instinct to wince was merely satisfying proof of their own urbanity.

  Yet there was one man who winced for a living. He was coeditor of fudge, and as he corrected its laughing copy every wince was a stab at his pride, his taste, and his patriotism. He would reach in his drawer and finger the pages of Punch and Simplicissimus and sigh over the superiority of Europe. He quit his job and turned to improve American humor with the almost suicidal frenzy of a Strindberg hero. He was impossibly cast for this part. He wanted to found a sophisticated, ironic metropolitan weekly. He was a gawky outlander, a runaway from a small town high in the Rockies, an itinerant newspaperman who had bummed his way to San Francisco, a doughboy who had gone AWOL to run an American army magazine from Paris, a cantankerous, poker-crazy, all-swearing, all-drinking westerner—Huck Finn in a slept-in business suit and cracked yellow shoes. He was, however, the H. Ross of “F. P.’s” little item. He looked for a wealthy backer and found one in the socialite heir to a yeast fortune.

  In February 1925 he put out a thin, unlikely-looking firstborn. It combined Punch’s Charivari with Judge’s two-line jokes. It had some comic strips barely dignified as “panels.” There were a few local advertisements, some caricatures of actors, and art notes by “Froid.” Its only note of superiority was a derisive promise that it would not be edited for “the Old Lady in Dubuque.” Ross called it The New Yorker.

  From that start, it lost two thousand dollars a week. It took three years and the outpouring of seven hundred thousand unrequited dollars to turn the red ink into black. Today, we are told, it may be bought by almost anybody with several million dollars to spare.

  In 1950, a book appeared to celebrate that twenty-fifth anniversary, a miracle of longevity nobody knowledgeable about journalism, least of all H. Ross, could have imagined in the early days of its penury and of H. Ross’s groping all over town to find a writing style that would fit the model magazine he held in his imagination. He never did find it, which only proved something terrifying about Harold Ross that no contributors, early or late, ever guessed at when they first encountered this naive lunkhead. It was the totally unsuspected perfectionism of his mind and the unanswered question of where he got it from. He had quit high school and, with precious little education, wanted to be and became a newspaperman. He had read one whole book through and never pretended otherwise. What nobody anticipated before they turned in their copy was his probing, unsleeping, fussy, appallingly unforgiving intelligence. He kept on his desk what he called his two “bibles”: Fowler’s Modern English Usage and Mark Twain’s devastating diagnosis of the flatulence and related prose disorders of Fenimore Cooper. But he by no means regarded Fowler as gospel—he liked his precision and wit but when Fowler moved over the line from clarity to pedantry, Ross moved in on him as brutally as he did on any and every contributor, except two writers whose styles most nearly approximated to the impossible ideal: E. B. White and James Thurber.

  Ross’s literary ignorance made him no respecter of persons, however eminent. A writer who quoted Tennyson’s “Nature red in tooth and claw” was immediately corrected. Ross’s amendment read “Nature red in claw and tooth” with a note to the effect that a bloodthirsty animal would grab its prey by the claws before lifting it onto the teeth.

  By the time the magazine’s final proofs were passed on to the printer, Ross had read every line, much of the copy two or three times over. Before that longed-for Tuesday twilight, every contributor to the current issue had received, with his galley proofs, a typed page of numbered notes. They could run to ten or fifteen comments, varying from an abrupt single word (“Bush-wah!”) to a brief note of advice (“Could trim here” and “too detailed”) to exasperated comments on the writer’s dumbness (“Outside of what? And sheriff who? Who’s he?”) or verbosity (“For God’s sake, there’s no point in enumerating all these subsidiaries.”)

  Also unaccounted for was his exquisitely neurotic feel for syntax, a gift or a tyranny passed on to his deputy and nonfiction editor, William Shawn, who shared a similar sensitivity. (A book review I wrote in which I noted that the young and rebellious Churchill “almost completely ignored the school’s syllabus” evoked a pained marginal comment: “The New Yorker does not recognize degrees of completeness.” Touché!)

  For Ross, there was no such thing as an “established” writer. Whether you were famous or a first contributor, your piece was subjected to the same disinterested, ruthless scrutiny, and every piece was accepted or rejected on what Ross alone decided were its merits—a procedure that in the later years outraged some authors presumed by the rest of the world to be the most treasured of The New Yorkers writers. John O’Hara and even James Thurber frequently went into apoplexy at this brutal treatment. Such was Ross’s writhing perfectionism that none of the permanent staff could remember a time when he ever wrote the comment “good” or “what we want.” The best he was ever known to concede was “in the direction of what we want.” “Comes the revolution,” said Dorothy Parker, “and it will be everybody against Ross.”

  Because Ross went on looking for gold (“what we want”) among the unlikeliest prospectors, and because he took no eminent writer for granted, he came by the end of the magazine’s first decade to be showered with the best American writing, both from the celebrated and the obscure. He had given transatlantic fame to a crop of former unknowns: Dorothy Parker, Ogden Nash, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Frank Sullivan, and among the cartoonists Peter Arno, Charles Ad-dams, Otto Soglow, Whitney Darrow, and George Price. Alva Johnston resurrected the odd, intimate character sketch from where John Aubrey had buried it over two centuries ago and called it a “profile.” The best reporting talent of the newspapers had been combed to establish a department, “A Reporter at Large,” glorified by such previously unseen blushers as James Mitchell and A. J. Liebling. Less celebrated than Ross’s recruitment of writing talent was his remarkable feat in discovering and exposing a cornucopia of comic artists. By the end of its first decade, the magazine had a stable of cartoonists as expert and personally distinguishable as Punch ‘s in England. Here again, Ross’s hand performed ruthless but curative surgery. He blotted out Punch ‘s explanatory captions, sometimes running to five lines: Father (an army Colonel returned from India who has just heard of his son’s engagement):… Son (who is apprehensive about his father’s approval) … etc., etc., etc. Ross preferred, or rather dictated, an unattributed single line in quotation marks. If there was any doubt who was being spoken to he would note in the margin of the proof: “Open this mouth wider” or “No point if she’s talking. Make clear.” Occasionally, as with a naked man holding his nose and drowning in a shower, Ross gave four reasons, having to do with door locks, drains and other sanitary conveniences, why it was impossible for a man to drown in a shower. He held the drawing back from publication for a month, even though it was by the star artist, Peter Arno. The farthest Ross was ever known to go by way of expressed admiration was an appreciative “Right!” to George Price’s own comment on his series of the old lumpen couple in the rickety beach house, where every water pipe, television connection, wall plug and oven accessory was beautifully drawn in. “No plumber,” said Price, “ever criticized my drawings.”

  In its twenty-sixth year, The New Yorker had become an American institution, confident, prosperous, unsinkable. Now it entered its dangerous age. Ross himself knew it. He complained that looking among the young for new ideas, new writing, he found them weaned and bred to write a pallid imitation of the New Yorker style. Some of us feared, a decade or more ago, that to escape that fate (an incurably pallid New Yorker), the magazine might consciously try to change its prose style, to stiffen its character.
In 1938, there appeared a cover drawing that belonged to no artist we knew. It was, though, by the ribald Peter Arno. It was of a herd of bowed heads: the Nuremberg victims. It showed at a shocking glance how alien to the oncoming world of violence was The New Yorker we cherished. For Hitler was outraging urbanity everywhere, like a Dostoevsky lunatic let loose in a country club.

  We were wrong. E. B. White had set the tone of the “Talk of the Town” comments, indeed of the magazine’s persona, and he had developed a modern vernacular style as original and influential as any since Sir Richard Steele’s. But suddenly, he applied it to the great and grave issues of the day. The New Yorker was led into battle by a man who wrote like an angel and now felt like a man. And, to the honor of the unlettered grouchy Ross himself, the effect of his fussy and exacting standards over fifteen years was to produce suddenly a small team of war correspondents as gifted and memorable as any who covered the Second World War. And, after the war, the magazine melded, without strain or affectation, its new seriousness and its old irony and grace. Unfortunately, Ross never lived to see how completely he had transformed the civil face of English-American journalism, more than any editor this century. He died suddenly, in December 1951, just as he was fearing the magazine was about to decline into a pale imitation of the original, a “sophisticated” magazine as the word is understood by what he called “those fancy readers” of the fashion magazines.

  11

  The Legend of Gary Cooper

  (1961)

  When the word got out that Gary Cooper (who died aged sixty) was mortally ill, a spontaneous process arose in high places not unlike the first moves to sanctify a remote peasant. The Queen of England dispatched a sympathetic cable. The president of the United States called him on the telephone. A cardinal ordered public prayers. Messages came to his house in Beverly Hills from the unlikeliest fans, from foreign ministers and retired soldiers who never knew him, and from Ernest Hemingway, his old Pygmalion, who had kept him in mind, through at least two novels, as the archetype of the Hemingway hero: the self-sufficient male animal, the best kind of hunter, the silent infantryman padding dutifully forward to perform the soldier’s most poignant ritual in “the ultimate loneliness of contact.”

  It did not happen to Ronald Colman, or Clark Gable, or—heaven knows—John Barrymore. Why, we may well ask, should it have happened to Frank James Cooper, the rather untypical American type of the son of a Bedfordshire lawyer, a boy brought up in the Rockies among horses and cattle to be sure, but only as they compose the unavoidable backdrop of life in those parts; a schoolboy in Dunstable, England, a college boy in Iowa, a middling student, then a failing cartoonist, failed salesman, an “extra” in Hollywood who in time had his break and mooned in a lanky, handsome way through a score or more of “horse operas”? Well, his friends most certainly mourn the gentle, shambling “Coop,” but what the world mourns is the death of Mr. Longfellow Deeds, who resisted and defeated the corruption of the big city; the snuffing out of the sheriff, in High Noon, heading back to duty along the railroad tracks with that precise mince of the cowboy’s tread and that rancher’s squint that sniffs mischief in a creosote bush, sees through suns, and is never fooled. What the world mourns is its lost innocence, or a favorite fantasy of it fleshed out in the most durable and heroic of American myths: that of the taut but merciful plainsman, who dispenses justice with a worried conscience, a single syllable, a blurred reflex action to the hip, and who must face death in the afternoon as regularly as the matador, but on Main Street and for no pay.

  Mr. Deeds Goes to Town marks the first jelling of this fame, and The Plainsman the best delineation of the character that fixed his legend. These two films retrieved Cooper from a run of agreeable and handsome parts, some of them (in the Lubitsch films for instance) too chic and metropolitan for his own good. At the time of Mr. Deeds, an English critic wrote that “the conception of the wise underdog, the shrewd hick, is probably too western, too American in its fusion of irony and sentimentality, to travel far.” He was as wrong as could be, for the film was a sensation in Poland, the Middle East, and other barbaric regions whose sense of what is elementary in human goodness is something we are just discovering, perhaps a little late.

  It is easy to forget now, as always with artists who have matured a recognizable style, that for at least the first dozen years of his film career Gary Cooper was the lowbrow’s comfort and the highbrow’s butt. However, he lasted long enough, as all great talents do, to weather the four stages of the highbrow treatment: first, he was derided, then ignored, then accepted, then discovered. We had seen this happen many times before; and looking back, one is always shocked to recognize the people it has happened to. Today the intellectual would deny, for instance, that Katharine Hepburn was ever anything but a lovely if haggard exotic, with a personal style which might enchant some people and grate on others, but would insist she was at all times what we call a “serious” talent. This opinion was in fact a highly sophisticated second thought, one which took about a decade to ripen and squelch the memory of Dorothy Parker’s little tribute to Miss Hepburn’s first starring appearance on Broadway: “Miss Hepburn ran the gamut of human emotions from A to B.”

  Marilyn Monroe is a grosser example still. Universally accepted as a candy bar or cream puff, she presented a galling challenge to the intelligentsia when she married Arthur Miller, a very somber playwright and indubitably un homme sérieux. The question arose whether there had been serious miscalculation about a girly calendar that could marry a man who defied the House Un-American Committee. The doubt was decided in Miss Monroe’s favor when she delivered pointed ripostes to dumb questions at a London press conference.

  At least until the mid-1930s there was no debate about Gary Cooper because he presented no issue. He belonged to the reveries of the middle-class woman. He reminded grieving mothers of the upright son shot down on the Somme; devoted sisters of the brother sheep-ranching in Australia; the New York divorcée of the handsome ranch hand with whom she is so often tempted to contract a ruinous second marriage in the process of dissolving her first. To the moviegoer, Cooper was the matinee idol toughened and tanned, in the era of the outdoors, into something at once glamorous and primitive. He was notoriously known as the actor who couldn’t act. Only the directors who handled him had daily proof of the theory that the irresistible “stars” are simply behaviorists who, by some nervous immunity to the basilisk glare and hiss of the camera, appear to be nobody but themselves. Very soon the box offices, from Tokyo to Carlisle, confirmed this theory in hard cash. Then the intellectuals sat up and took notice. Then the Cooper legend took over.

  For the past quarter century, Cooper’s worldwide image had grown so rounded, so heroically elongated rather, that only some very crass public behavior could have smudged it. There was none. After a short separation he was happily reunited with his only wife. He spoke out, during the McCarthy obscenity, with resounding pointlessness and flourished the banner of “Americanism” in a heated way. Most recently, there has been a low-pressure debate in progress in fan magazines and newspaper columns about whether his “yup-nope” approach was his own or a press agent’s inspiration, like the malapropisms of Sam Goldwyn, another happy device for blinding mockers to the knowledge that they were losing their shirts. This was decided a week or two ago by the New York Post, which concluded after a series of exhaustive interviews with his friends that Cooper’s inarticulateness was natural when he was in the presence of gabby strangers, that gabbiness was his natural bent with close friends. He could probably have transcended, or dimmed, bigger scandals or more public foolishness than he was capable of, because he was of the company of Chaplin, Groucho Marx, W. C. Fields, Bogart, Louis Jouvet, two or three others, give or take a personal favorite. He filled an empty niche in the world pantheon of essential gods. If no cowboy was ever like him, so much the worse for the cattle kingdom. He was Eisenhower’s glowing, and glowingly false, picture of Wyatt Earp. He was one of Walt Whitman’s troop of
democratic knights, “bright eyed as hawks with their swarthy complexions and their broad-brimmed hats, with loose arms slightly raised and swinging as they ride.” He represented every man’s best secret image of himself: the honorable man slicing clean through the broiling world of morals and machines. He isolated and enlarged to six feet three an untainted strain of goodness in a very male specimen of the male of the species.

  12

  Robert Frost

  (1973)

  It was a splendid day in Vermont when they buried Robert Frost, the sky without a cloud, the light from the white landscape making every elm and barn as sharp as a blade, and the people crunching quietly through the deep snow and squinting in the enormous sun.

  It is a harmless sentimental custom to bury men who have been supreme in some craft with a visible symbol of their mastery: one thinks of composers whose tombstone is inscribed with a lyre, and cricketers who were laid to rest with a floral wreath of a bat and a ball. Few men must have gone to their graves amid such an exhibition of the tools of their trade as Robert Frost did the other day. From the smallest object on the horizon, a clump of evergreens or a mountaintop, to the most domestic scenery that was close at hand—a maple tree, a country store, a spade—everything the mourners saw or passed among had been the subjects of his poems and the objects of his lifelong meditation. He was once called “an original ordinary man,” but whether we ordinary men are ready or able to understand an original among us is another question. And I wonder how many Americans could have honestly agreed with President Kennedy that Frost had “bequeathed this nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” Because if his poetry was as plain as its surface, it was very ordinary indeed. And if it was as deep and difficult as his best admirers said, the understanding audience for it must have been as small as it always is for great poetry.