by Roger Angell
Ross was never sunny, but his powers of attention lighted him up, particularly when he was dealing with writers and their copy. One of his notorious query sheets turns up here in a 1948 letter to Thurber about a casual of his, "Six for the Road"—a routine (for the magazine) sort of notation in which Ross lists fourteen items worthy of the author's immediate attention. No. 11 is typical—"Very unexpected to learn at this late date that there's a bar in this place. Not mentioned before, and the definite pronoun has no antecedent"—but No. 3 brings Ross to near-frenzy: "This mixing up of a dinner party and an evening party that begins in the afternoon baffled me for quite a while, and I have come up with the suggestion that the party be made a cocktail party with buffet dinner. I think this is a brilliant suggestion. You never later have the people sitting down to dinner, nor do you take any notice whatever of dinner," etc. etc. One can almost hear Thurber's cries of irritation, even from this distance, but he has been poked or maddened into a tiny but perhaps useful fix, which was the main idea.
Ross's query list for the Thurber casual brings up his celebrated question to Vladimir Nabokov, on the galleys of the eighth chapter of his "Speak, Memory" series, which was electrifying the magazine in the late 1940s. Nabokov, describing a garden party at Vyra, a family country estate at the time of his boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, is at full tilt with "A torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of the nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats—" when Ross steps in marginally to ask, "Weren't the Nabokovs a more-than-one-nutcracker family?" Well, uh, yes—and, taking the infinitesimal point, the grand master Nabokov, surely the most abundantly gifted artist ever to appear in the pages of the comic weekly, steps back into the flow, bends over, and turns the nutcracker into a nutcracker.
It's surprising that Ross never saw himself as a writer, or succumbed to the notion that he was growing into one. I think he sensed instead that he was a genius appreciator of clear writing and strong reporting, and understood that the care and comfort of those who were good at it required full-time attention. When the first-rate Profiles reporter Geoffrey Hellmann decided to go to work for the betterpaying Life (it was a temporary aberration), Ross goaded him with "What is the temperature over there? Do you need any pencils?"
He is almost fatherly in a mini-crisis with the touchy Whites that blew up when a one-letter typo slipped into an E. B. W. proof—"hen" had become "her"—and he could always sound unfeigned appreciation for a writer's best, even in a rival magazine. In 1940, after White had published a piece in Harper's on the meaning of freedom, Ross wrote to him, "I think it is a beautiful and elegant thing, probably the most moving item I've read in years and worthy of Lincoln and some of the other fellows that really went to town." And he concludes, "Knock me down anytime you want."
Ross's New Yorker got better and deeper near the end of his tenure (he died in 1951), and the editor who had once expected so little of his contributors must have been startled by what was happening. Writing to John Hersey, whose account of the atomic-bomb destruction of Hiroshima had been given an entire issue, in 1946, he says, "Those fellows who said 'Hiroshima' was the story of the year, etc., underestimated it. It is unquestionably the best journalistic story of my time, if not of all time. Nor have I heard of anything like it." And when Rebecca West, who had written some notable pieces for the magazine, dedicated her book "The Meaning of Treason" to him, he was astounded—"just overflowing with gratitude and goodwill to you.... I consider that I have now crashed American letters, which gives me much amusement."
Ross knew his own value, but his tenure at the magazine, to hear him tell it, was all about process. He didn't give a damn what people thought about him or how he would be weighed; he just wanted to get the stuff right on the page. "It's all right for people to say that we are too fussy, that ten or twenty slightly ungrammatical sentences don't matter," he writes, "but if (from where I sit) I break down on that the magazine would break down all along the line." Similarly comes the confession "I still find journalism glamorous," in a long and uncharacteristically personal letter to the editor of Current Biography, in which he recounts, among other things, his departure from high school after two years, in favor of full-time newspaper work on the Salt Lake City Tribune. And, writing to the artist Gluyas Williams in 1934, Ross says, "I'm employed by The New Yorker...largely as an idea man. That's what I regard myself as, at any rate, and what I think my chief value to the magazine is." This city-room angle on the world elates the old sourpuss again and again in this refreshing and uncynical anthology. Who gets the royalties to "Happy Birthday to You"? he suddenly asks a Talk editor. To the actor Fredric March, he declares, "The belief that 'none' is a singular pronoun is an old American legend which grew out of an error made in a common-school grammar many years ago." To E. B. White, an accomplished countryman by now, he takes up a dictionary exploration of "compost," both verb and noun, which must have required three or four pages out of his Underwood. And in a memo to Shawn, his most valuable discovery, he wants additions to a coming June Talk piece that will explore more fully the story behind the home-plate umpire's little hand brush, and the ball capacity of his pockets. "Are these brand-new balls, or are they balls that have been played with some, and been knocked foul?"
For Ross, the invention of his magazine was just another good story. " The New Yorker is pure accident from start to finish," he wrote to George Jean Nathan. "I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started it. Within a year White, Thurber, Arno and Hokinson had shown up out of nowhere....And Gibbs came along very soon, and Clarence Day, and a number of other pathfinders I could name if I spent a little time in review....And Benchley was alive, for instance." They were lucky, too.
Ms. Ulysses
"Nobody said not to go," begins Emily Hahn's 1937 Reporter at Large piece "Round Trip to Nanking," and so, at the outset of the singularly bloody and dangerous Sino-Japanese War, she gets on a train in Shanghai and goes, carrying an evening dress tucked inside a hatbox. "There were young men, dinner parties, and dancing in Nanking," she offers by way of explanation. In 1932, after spending a year in the Belgian Congo, she determined, "with my usual sublime self-confidence," to walk out, via elephant trail, to Lake Kivu and thence all the way to the East African coast, accompanied by a baby baboon named Angélique and a pygmy guide. "Like all pygmies," she wrote, "he was incapable of getting lost." Her surprising first-person piece "The Big Smoke," about opium (her own opium smoking, I mean), begins, "Though I'd always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China." Actually, she went for the weekend, to drop in on an old friend, and stayed for nine years—a reasonable turn of events, to hear her tell it.
Hahn, who died in 1997 at the age of ninety-two, was the magazine's roving heroine, our Belle Geste: a reporter inveterately at large, whose work, arriving from all continents, encompassed a hundred and eighty-one pieces and eight decades. Her datelines, taken together with her smashing good looks—enormous, green-flecked dark eyes; an oval face; a plungingly intelligent gaze; and a generous mouth always on the edge of an arriving smile or giggle are misleading, suggesting another trenchcoated, news-hungry gal reporter among the guys, a Jean Arthur, or perhaps a beautiful, thrill-seeking flibbertigibbet, a Carole Lombard. She was something more rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss. Her pieces from the thirties and forties switch effortlessly between the Reporter at Large configuration and the offhand, first-person casual—a form famous for its lack of exclamation points. "She spoke of extraordinary things as if they were everyday," a former colleague of hers said; and I remembered that once, when she and I were talking idly in the hall, she murmured that she used to dream in Chinese.
What is disconcerting about her now that she has gone is how few of us, even among the old-timers, can claim a close friendship with
her, much as we admired her. "She was a sweet-tempered feminist, who didn't dislike men," William Maxwell said. "She didn't see why she shouldn't do whatever they did, including sexually." Philip Hamburger recalled first meeting her in the Oak Room of the Plaza, where Harold Ross introduced them. "A beautiful woman," he said, "and smoking the biggest cigar you ever saw. I always liked her but I can't say I really knew her."
Hahn had no end of friends, but she didn't hang out, she was always busy writing, or moving on—to Brasilia or Nairobi or the British Museum, to a zoo conference somewhere, or perhaps back to her home at Little Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, where she had a house, Ringshall End, and a happy long-term marriage to a University of London historian, Charles Boxer, whom she saw there for ninety days a year, thanks to the tax laws and to their shared preference for an intimacy built around absence. For years, she didn't have an office at the magazine, and we all counted ourselves lucky to catch a glimpse of such a staff celebrity, on the run between her books and her pieces, her departures and her children.
I was luckier than most, for I had first encountered Hahn under unforgettable circumstances. One day when I was twelve years old, she stepped out of a cab in front of our house on East Ninety-third Street, carrying a monkey in her arms—a monkey for me. Because my mother was her editor, she had heard about my boy-naturalist inclinations and had determined, all on her own, to find me the most ravishing (and most inconvenient) pet imaginable. "Don't let her bite you," she said, handing over a small, solemn-faced, greenish-brown macaque, with a belt around its waist. "If she does, bite her right back—bite her on the ear—and she'll never do it again." She was right about that, it turned out, but by then I was convinced that she always knew exactly the right thing to do.
Another Hahn moment has stayed bright in my mind. One morning in 1962 I was alone in a Down elevator at the office, when the door slid open at a lower New Yorker floor to admit Hahn. "Why, Roger—how are you?" she said.
"Not so hot, Emily," I said. "In fact, right now I'm headed for Idlewild, to fly to Juarez for a divorce."
"Well, good for you!" she cried instantly. "Trying to make yourself happy is the only thing anybody can do. That's what I've always said, anyway. Try not to worry about it."
The Mickey Hahn story (her mother gave her the nickname) remains fresh and vivid, even in the broad scale. Born in St. Louis, she grew up in a powerful and iconoclastic family sisterhood, and took a degree in mining engineering at the University of Wisconsin, mostly, it seems now, because no one there expected a woman ever to do such a thing. She took a cross-country trip in a Model T (E. B. White had already made the same pre-writer hegira), and arrived at an early age in the pages of The New Yorker, thanks to her perfeet pitch in the little arias of the casual. Her trip to the Congo lasted longer than she expected (she'd gone broke), but changes of scene and fortune came easily to her. In China next (where she became an official New Yorker correspondent), she had an extended affair with a married Chinese artist and poet, Zau Sinmay.
The main event of her life, one can say, began with a scandalous adventure: she fell in love with a British officer, Charles Boxer, and bore a daughter, Carola, out of wedlock. He was imprisoned by the Japanese after the fall of Hong Kong, and their reunion and marriage had to await the end of the war. She had remained free by claiming to be Eurasian (she looked the part), and contrived ways to visit him under the eyes of his captors. When it came time for her to accept repatriation she brought their child to her father's prison in a rickshaw, past the barbed wire, for a movielike farewell. She writes about the moment with her usual economy: "Charles was waiting. He must have guessed I would take some such risk this last time. He turned and started walking step for step with the coolie, and I broke yet another rule and turned my head and looked straight at him. So did Carola."
Given this flamboyant early résumé, and Hahn's ceaseless postwar journeys and writings (ultimately, there were fifty-two books), it should not come as a surprise if we sometimes overlooked both how lighthearted and how complicated she was, and what it was that she cared about in the end. What she tells about her two years in the Congo (in her early published diary, Congo Solo, and in a novel, With Naked Foot) isn't just the romance of being a lone young American in such a place but the cruelties that white men inflict on African women. Hahn's move to China and her affair with Zau Sinmay placed her in a cosmopolitan and historically turbulent milieu, which she wrote about in her best-selling biography of the Soong sisters; but her long-running series of placid New Yorker casuals, in which Zau becomes Pan Heh-ven, lingers on the ironies of colonial life, and of a traditional Chinese wife who is not permitted to cross the street alone. The best thing that Hahn wrote about her straitened years in Hong Kong during the Japanese occupation was a story, "The Baby-Amah," about Carola's nurse, who had to be left behind in 1943, when her employer had a chance to go home. A two-part Reporter at Large piece about that long trip home with her child, via India and Cape Town and Rio, with a shipload of missionaries and exchanged prisoners of war, barely touches on the risks and fears of a wartime journey but turns instead to the alcoholic misdeeds of some returning merchant seamen, whom she liked better than anyone else aboard.
Hahn gravitated toward the unexpected and the informal. She was an even more spectacular reader than world traveler. Her daughters remember mealtimes at home in Hertfordshire, with everyone at the table behind a book: their father invoked a rule of silence at meals, and their mother always broke it, with giggles and whispers. Hahn resolutely refused to learn the first thing about cooking, her younger daughter, Amanda, who was born in England after the war, cheerfully recalled the other day. "She kept offering to make us rice, but who wants rice?"
Hahn turned out major works of reporting—on the Philippines, and on diamonds and their history, for instance—as well as biographies of D. H. Lawrence and Raffles of Singapore, but an almost greater concurrent flow was made up of low-key memoirs and books and novels for children. In a multipart 1958 Reporter at Large piece, "Last Days of the Maharajahs," she makes small talk with a maharajah's wife as they sip a Coca-Cola at Phoolsagar Palace, and then finds out that Her Highness of Bundi has never visited the nearby city of Agra. She has never been anywhere, in fact. "You see," the Maharanee says apologetically, "I'm in purdah."
The central preoccupation of Hahn's later writing years was zoos and monkeys and wildlife preservation, and particularly primate intelligence and animal communication. She became a distinguished scholar of the subject, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. "Either you have gibbons in your blood or you haven't," she once wrote disarmingly, but of course it was a chance to dwell among the voiceless—how eagerly she seized it!—that drew her into the company of celebrity chimps and gorillas, like Washoe and Booee, Colo and Toto, and their painstaking keepers and researchers. When I went into her empty office (she'd given in and accepted one, after she reached her nineties) a couple of days after she died, I spied a bulletin board that was overflowing with yellowed newspaper stories and photographs of gibbons and tamarins and chimpanzees and gorillas. "OPEN-HEART SURGERY PERFORMED ON ORANGUTAN," one headline read. The photographs made me smile, the way monkey pictures do, and I thought of how Mickey Hahn had looked—that gleam of everyday transcendence—at the moment when she cut them out and pinned them up on her wall.
G.B.
i. The Music of the Spines
Shawn's office and Gardner Botsford's office were close to each other at the magazine, down at the east end of the nineteenth-floor corridor, but galactically separated in tone and context. An appointment or shy summons to see Shawn took you past an outer minion and through his rarely opened door; inside (he rose as you entered) he'd be at the middle of his long, altarlike desk, with ancient columns of manuscripts and galleys rising on either side. Many staff members, sharing notes later, found that any meeting with him, even a two-minute session, felt significant and uneasily exciting. If there was something deadly about these encounters,
it was probably your fault: you'd half-wanted to be taken in on a major decision or to become the recipient of another of Shawn's astounding compliments. Leaving, you let out a breath and hung a right into Botsford's place, a low-pressure chamber, where persiflage and laughter were encouraged, and high-level work was conducted in a low-key manner. Botsford's invariable reference to the magazine as "the comic weekly"—it was an early Ross description of his brainchild—was not intended to disparage Shawn or the complex and very different magazine that grew during his reign, but only to laugh a little at the immense seriousness that hung about the place in its upper middle age. Shawn actually appeared to believe that his New Yorker had come to represent something much larger than its individual issues, its Comment page, its range of talented contributors, and its loyal readers; perhaps it stood for, or even was, Western civilization itself. Botsford, his first lieutenant and most important and reliable editor of non-fiction, thought this was bushwa. He allowed himself pleasure over a pretty good issue, or a surprising Profile, or a telling Rovere column, but went home at the end of the day for an angst-free martini with his friends, and sometimes got through an entire evening without ever mentioning The New Yorker. Here's a passing bit of news about him I wrote in a Talk of the Town piece in 1999, after he'd retired:
A departing dinner guest at the Gardner Botsfords' apartment on Gramercy Park can find himself at a sudden loss for words, right in the middle of the thanks and farewells. The process is always the same. Somewhere between the promise to meet again soon and a parting hug, the visitor's gaze falls on a narrow, six-shelf wooden bookcase, there beside the elevator, where, willy-nilly, wandering attention picks up the book titles "Beginning Polo," "Music in Geriatric Care," and "Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva," all on the same row. What? Just down the line comes "Pray Your Weight Away" and "Selected Lithuanian Short Stories. " The elevator arrives and the thanks are distractedly resumed, but a helpless backward glance discovers "Toilet Training in Less Than a Day," on the shelf below, not far from "Modern Volleyball"and "The Sexual Christian." The door clanks shut, and up (in the little round window) go the host and hostess, who are smiling. They understand.
