EDITED BY THOMAS VINCIGUERRA
Conversations with Elie Wiesel
Backward Ran Sentences:
The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker
For Robert Collins Christopher and Judith Crist
CONTENTS
Preface: A Christmas Greeting to The New Yorkers
Introduction: “EITHER COMPETENT OR HORRIBLE”
Chapter 1: “A LUDICROUS PASTIME”
Chapter 2: “INFATUATION WITH PINHEADS”
Chapter 3: “BOY, DO I LIKE TO HANDLE AUTHORS!”
Chapter 4: “MOST INSANELY MISCAST”
Chapter 5: “SOME VERY FUNNY PEOPLE”
Chapter 6: “AN OFFENSE TO THE EAR”
Chapter 7: “PRETTY GUMMY AT BEST”
Chapter 8: “A SILLY OCCUPATION FOR A GROWN MAN”
Chapter 9: “I AM A CHILD OF THE SUN”
Chapter 10: “ALWAYS POISON”
Chapter 11: “FLYING HIGH AND FAST”
Chapter 12: “THE MORAL CLIMATE IS AGAINST IT”
Chapter 13: “A LOT OF SUICIDAL ENTERPRISES”
Chapter 14: “WHOSE DAYS, IN ANY CASE, WERE NUMBERED”
Postscript
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Credits
Index
PREFACE
A CHRISTMAS GREETING TO THE NEW YORKERS
A cat may look at a king, I’m told,
So perhaps a poet may make so bold
As to send a greeting, on Evergreen,
To the staff of her favorite magazine
And hearty as bells in a country steeple
Say “Glad Noel” to the following people:
To Mr. Ross whom of course I’m able
To feature only as myth, as fable,
As an awesome figure I’ll never see,
An editorial deity;
To Mr. Gibbs who with consternation
Surveys my various punctuation;
To Mr. Mosher whom I have yet to
Pay a cherished and certain debt to,
Since he was the first to assure me, sighing,
I might write verse if I kept on trying;
To E. B. White who was one time haughty
Because I envied the Literati,
And would have kept me, I greatly fear,
With “Ivanhoe” and the Young Idear;
To Mr. Thurber, another myth
But one I’m better acquainted with;
And of course to the Lady of my Delight,
The small, superlative Mrs. White.
To them and anyone else I’ve missed
From a somewhat extemporaneous list,
I send my greetings (as note above)
And my ardent, but perfectly proper, love.
May the New Year bring you a lot of things,
Like pictures funny as Little Kings,
And writers writing hilarious stories
And scribes acquainted with Gotham mores,
For Talk of the Town a thousand thoughts
And never a one about Clever Tots,
(And not too many about their mammas);
Light verse poets who know their commas,
Millions and millions of new subscribers,
A host a fans and a dearth of gibers,
No libel actions with which to cope,
Printers infallible as the Pope;
And for Shouts and Murmurs (oh precious store)
One joke that’s never been heard before.
Ladies, gentlemen, all the staff,
Of my Christmas wishes that’s only half.
For you all blessings and none sent thinly
Is the holiday hope of
PHYLLIS McGINLEY (SIGNED)
(1934)
CAST OF CHARACTERS
INTRODUCTION
“EITHER COMPETENT
OR HORRIBLE”
The tensions of the summer of 1958 were in many ways typical of the ostensible peace that had followed the worst war in human history. In July a bloody coup killed the king, crown prince, and premier of Iraq’s pro-Western government, prompting the United States to send troops to Lebanon and Great Britain to do the same in Jordan. Hungary executed its former premier, Imre Nagy, two years after he had been kidnapped during the 1956 revolution. In Cuba, Fidel Castro continued to make inroads against the military government of Fulgencio Batista; within a few months, he would triumph completely and establish the first Communist foothold in the Americas. The space race was well under way, with Sputnik 3 and Explorer 1 whirling about just beyond the atmosphere, raising the terrifying specter of orbiting H-bombs.
If there was refuge from these and myriad other concerns, foreign and domestic, it could be found on Fire Island. Local vacationers had tentatively established the first permanent communities on this narrow, fragile barrier beach just south of Long Island in the late 1800s. Now the rhythms of the place were as reliable as the calendar. For nine months of the year, Fire Island was home to a mere handful of hardy souls. During the winter, they might subsist only on fish and potatoes; periodically they were cut off from the rest of the world by the ice that would choke the waters of the Great South Bay. But from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the population swelled to thousands of summer people in search of respite from hot apartments, torpor, and for the men anyway, their workaday routine. For those with money and inclination, it was a temporary semblance of heaven on earth. One writer would rhapsodize,
I guess I really like it here better than any place in the world, he thought, and for the moment his delight in Fire Island, in this one place where life could be slowed to the almost forgotten tempo of childhood, seemed as much as he could bear. The distance from New York, by train and boat, was only fifty terrestrial miles, but in spirit it was enormous. You ate and slept in the dark, untidy little houses that lay along the dunes between the sea and the bay, but most of your life was spent on the loveliest beach in the East, a narrow, sunny shelf that ran thirty miles along the Atlantic, from Babylon to Quogue, and here you just lay in the sun, and all the staggering complexity of your relations with others, the endless, hopeless bookkeeping of your personal morality with too many people, could be put aside for a little while. It was a state of wonderful irresponsibility, a time in which you belonged to nobody but yourself, on which there were no immediate claims from the world.
The author of this deeply felt passage, Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, was at first glance hardly the rusticating type. Most of his professional life had been spent on the staff of The New Yorker, which for much of the literate reading public was the last word in smart, urbane journalism. Founded by Harold Ross thirty-three years before, the weekly magazine, filled with rollicking prose and humorous drawings, quickly came to epitomize cynical, bustling Manhattan. Its writers, artists, and editors had thumbed their noses at Prohibition and roared their way through the last half of the 1920s. Then the existential challenges of the Depression, World War II, and ultimately the Cold War deepened and broadened the magazine’s outlook. As worldly as Fire Island was sleepy, The New Yorker was now a national and international forum for masterful fiction, factual reporting, penetrating poetry, and astute criticism. Its contributors were university professors and Pulitzer Prize winners, their work setting ever-higher standards for American letters.
Gibbs had been a major part of that effort almost from the beginning. Joining the magazine as a copyreader in 1927, he quickly graduated to writing short comic sketches and line editing. Soon he was dashing off deft short stories and proving so good an editor that he came to specialize in spoofing the work of others. A contributor to the magazine’s lead section of humorous true-life vignettes and anecdotes, “The Talk of the Town,”
he had for some years written “Notes and Comment,” the closest thing it had to formal editorials. His Profiles were sly, stilettolike dissections of their unfortunate subjects. So were many of the theater reviews he had composed since inheriting the job of first-string drama critic from Robert Benchley just before the war.
On this particular August night at “The Studio,” his Fire Island home, this thin, mustachioed, bespectacled man held before him a palpable reminder of that broad range—an advance copy of a collection of his best pieces, sent to him by his publisher, Henry Holt. The title, More in Sorrow, was a curious choice; it had been the headline of Gibbs’s review of an obscure 1942 production called Janie. But his critique had been as forgettable as its subject (“It is the kind of play about adolescence that, if it recalls your own youth at all, is apt to bring on only a dim embarrassment and perhaps a certain relief that the average man is young just once”), and Gibbs hadn’t included it here.
The cover, though, was ideal—a caricature of the worried-looking author drawn by his buddy Charles Addams, whose deliciously ghoulish cartoons were one of The New Yorker’s most popular features. Addams had appropriately sketched Gibbs as a lord high executioner in black cape and gloves, surrounded by a medieval-looking crowd that had presumably gathered to watch him cut down his literary victims. In that regard, the contents did not disappoint. Here, for instance, was “Death in the Rumble Seat,” a spot-on parody of Ernest Hemingway. (“If you don’t know anything about driving cars you are apt to think a driver is good just because he goes fast. This may be very exciting at first, but afterward there is a bad taste in the mouth and the feeling of dishonesty.”) Among the Profiles was one of former New York governor Thomas Dewey, twice-defeated Republican nominee for the presidency. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Dewey had shown as much capacity for headline grabbing as for crime busting; Gibbs conveyed his disdain for the man by dwelling on his strange physical features. “His face, on the whole, has a compressed appearance, as though someone had squeezed his head in a vise,” he wrote. “Altogether—smallish, neat, and dark—he looks like a Wall Street clerk on his way to work; unlike the late and magnificent Harding, he is a hard man to imagine in a toga.”
The pièce de résistance of the new book was “Time . . . Fortune . . . Life . . . Luce,” a maliciously gleeful evisceration of Henry R. Luce and his Time Inc. empire. Gibbs’s special stroke of wicked editorial genius had been to fold the details of Luce’s life and business operations into an over-the-top lampoon of Time magazine’s bizarre prose style. In pointing up Time’s appetite for rumor, bias, and outright sensationalism, Gibbs expertly limned the magazine’s patented neologisms and fractured syntax (“Timen have come to bulge to bursting six floors of spiked, shiny Chrysler Building, occupy 150 rooms”), its obsession with trivia (“eat daily, many at famed Cloud Club, over 1,000 eggs, 500 cups of coffee”), and especially its bafflingly inverted narrative form, using a phrase with which he would forever be associated: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” The result was so uproarious that even before it had hit the newsstands, Luce had hit the roof, seething over his public pillorying as an “ambitious, gimlet-eyed, Baby Tycoon.” That Luce issue had set a seasonal record, selling three thousand copies more than the one preceding it and making its author a temporary celebrity. “Everyone who read this parody will have echoes of it ringing in his mind when hereafter he sees Time doing one of its jobs,” crowed Bernard DeVoto. More than that, DeVoto said, Gibbs had performed admirably by taking some of the air out of the self-important, even dangerous Luce brand of journalism: “The sheet has been magnificently laughed at, and in a democracy ridicule is more effective than censorship.”
The imminent publication of the new book had cheered Gibbs. He had recently sworn off smoking and drinking, and the change seemed to do him good. And as was true every summer, Fire Island was a source of joy to him. It had furnished material for two of his proudest achievements. (He dismissed the Time parody as “a competently executed trick.”) The first of these was a series of nine short stories about the island’s colorful denizens and doings that had originally appeared under the heading “Season in the Sun” and had formed the basis of an eponymous hit Broadway comedy in 1950. The second was The Fire Islander, a weekly newspaper he had founded four years later to chronicle this most precious of locales. Though he had relinquished control a couple of years back, the paper continued to convey local information and intelligence to a grateful community readership.
Nonetheless, in the summer of 1958, the fifty-six-year-old Wolcott Gibbs was not looking forward. He was an alcoholic who had always tended toward depression, and More in Sorrow was a poignant reminder of the passage of time. The Luce Profile had come out in 1936, more than twenty years before. All the other pieces in the book similarly dated back a ways. As the author had noted with perverse pride, the collection contained “no references to juvenile delinquency, the atomic bomb, supersonic flight, Miss Marilyn Monroe, or any of the other phenomena peculiar to our times.” That was no accident: much to Gibbs’s regret, the wisecracking attitude that had driven so much of his work at The New Yorker was now largely consigned to the past.
Gibbs hadn’t been in The New Yorker for three months. The proximate reason was that the theater was dead in the summer. But his current lack of output went beyond seasonal cycles. Save for three stories and a poem, the magazine had published nothing of Gibbs’s for the past four years outside of his theater column. He had publicly mused that he might step down even from that. Small wonder that he observed in his introduction to More in Sorrow,
It occurs to me that writers don’t change much from the time they are thirty or thereabouts until they are laid away—permanently, I trust. As they grow older, they are apt to perform at somewhat greater length, age being garrulous, and their prose is perhaps a little more ornate, conceivably because they have so much time for the superfluous decoration on their hands; but the essence remains the same. An author is either competent or horrible in the beginning, and he stays that way to the end of his days, unless certain pressures force him into other and shadier occupations, like alcohol or television.
The August 23 issue of The New Yorker, now on the stands, was notable for the absence not only of Gibbs but of some of the major voices of its heyday. Harold Ross, the magazine’s guiding light—not to mention the nearest thing Gibbs had ever had to a father—was dead almost seven years. The insouciant Robert Benchley had barely outlived the war, dying in November 1945; when he passed on, Gibbs had affectionately observed, “He took up so much room in so many lives.” Gibbs’s good friend, the temperamental John O’Hara, author of trenchant fiction that was practically synonymous with the magazine, was still very much alive and spent summers near Gibbs at his place in Quogue. But still burning from a New Yorker drubbing of his novel A Rage to Live, he hadn’t published a short story in the magazine since late 1949.
There were other keenly felt lacunae. Nowhere in this issue—glimpsed only once so far this year in the magazine, in fact—was the eternally restless, maniacally funny, incessantly chatty James Thurber. His neuroses and insecurities, much like those of Gibbs, had found expression in innumerable short pieces about hopelessly harried persons menaced by a world with which they could barely cope—persons like his creation Walter Mitty, who had entered the vernacular as shorthand for an archetypal daydreamer. “I wish to Christ I had your grasp of confusion,” Gibbs had told him. But Thurber’s oeuvre was rather different from Gibbs’s. For one thing, he was a cartoonist as well. True, his crude, misshapen draftsmanship conformed to no accepted aesthetic; Dorothy Parker once said that his characters had the “semblance of unbaked cookies.” Yet their quirky truth telling held undeniable, almost universal appeal.
“The War Between Men and Women,” the title of one of his ongoing series, this one about the battle of the sexes, resonated wherever couples bickered. No one but Thurber could have conjured up a cartoon of a seal peering over a
bed’s headboard, overlooking an annoyed wife telling her befuddled husband, “All right, have it your way—you heard a seal bark!”
Thurber was a fantasist extraordinaire. His various “Fables for Our Time” imbued their animal subjects with a sharp twentieth-century sensibility and turned the received truths of Aesop and his ilk on their head by demonstrating that nothing in life is certain. His morals were shaggy dog lessons in unconventional wisdom, like “He who hesitates is sometimes saved” or “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy wealthy and dead.” Wordplay was his specialty. In a typical entry, “What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?” the narrator had to deal with a maid who mispronounces so badly that her references to “cretonnes for the soup” and a relative who passes his “silver-service eliminations” provided him with “the most satisfying flight from reality I have ever known.” The year before, Thurber had published The Wonderful O, wherein a pirate takes over an island and banishes the letter O along with, naturally, such things as love and hope.
Such charm was becoming rare for him. Totally blind for some years, Thurber had drawn his last cartoon, a self-portrait for the cover of Time, back in 1951. (By most accounts, that gesture and the accompanying story about him had buried the Lucean hatchet with The New Yorker.) His lack of vision now combined with a natural irascibility and a thyroid condition to make his writing and persona alike just plain ornery, even malicious. More than once, echoing Gibbs, Thurber had complained aloud about The New Yorker’s declining acceptance of humor. But then, he had long ago quit the staff of the magazine and transcended its pages, as triumphs like his smash Broadway show The Male Animal and the Time cover had shown. At the moment he was in London, where a few weeks prior he had been the first American since Mark Twain to sit down to lunch—to be “called to table”—with the editors of Punch. Still, Thurber could not escape The New Yorker. At the moment, in fact, he was writing a book about Ross, and Gibbs had just fired off a response to one of his several requests for memories and anecdotes.
Cast of Characters Page 1
