Also not in the current magazine was E. B. White. Like Thurber, he had done much to set the tone of The New Yorker. “It would not be unfair to say that if Ross created the body,” declared a former colleague, “Thurber and White are the soul.” Like Thurber, he hadn’t been on the staff in years. And like Thurber, he had developed a style uniquely his own, one simultaneously simple and elegant that expressed itself in what one admirer called “some of the most moral, living prose produced by hand in the country.” White had started innocently enough; his first pieces were bits of light poetry and whimsical, slice-of-life encounters and musings. But soon the quiet young man’s supple way with words was finding a regular home in “Notes and Comment” and defining its very form. “I think of White as the conscience of the magazine,” Ross said.
White’s material melded an understated strength, a deceptively offhand wryness and an utter lack of pretense that became a model for the rest of The New Yorker. When FDR took action at the very start of his administration to stem a bank panic, White didn’t weigh in with ponderous thoughts about presidential power or the climate of economic fear. Instead, he observed, “The town was strangely quiet the first morning of the bank holiday. Every time a liner in the river blew its whistle, people jumped. We had a feeling that if anybody had broken rank and started down the street at a fast trot, the whole town would have followed him, thinking he knew where to go.”
“White’s prose had almost nothing in common with the kind I had been instructed to turn out by the various men who had been in charge of my early education,” said Gibbs, “but I had sense enough to realize it was superior.” And perhaps because he was at heart not primarily a jester or satirist but rather an essayist and belletrist, White seemed to have little trouble adjusting his bailiwick to shifting social landscapes. His scope was considerable, his output correspondingly diverse. At various points he had pleaded for world government and against McCarthyism. As opposed to Gibbs, who relied on Fire Island as a genuine escape from his work, White had long used his farm at Allen Cove, Maine, as a sanctuary that freed him to traverse larger issues in the guise of homely wisdom. “Death of a Pig,” for instance, while ostensibly about its title subject, was really a poignant reflection on the eternal human condition. He was still doing “Comment” in his own inimitable way; reacting recently to the prospect of the Soviet canine cosmonaut Laika, White wrote, “The Russians, we understand, are planning to send a dog into outer space. The reason is plain enough: The little moon is incomplete without a dog to bay [at] it.”
His real passions were to be found in the pieces that he was now infrequently dispatching as “Letter from the East,” “Letter from Maine,” or “Letter from the North.” Here White would ruminate about the state of his affairs or those of the world, often simultaneously. The previous summer, in the course of a single column, he had crafted some two dozen paragraphs that encompassed the persistence of mosquitoes, the evils of nuclear waste and testing, and the grammar and usage lessons taught by his old Cornell English professor William Strunk—these last shortly to form much of a new edition of the soon-to-be-classic writing primer The Elements of Style. To top things off, White was a beloved author of children’s books. By this time, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little were as much a part of the juvenile canon as anything by Laura Ingalls Wilder or A. A. Milne. As he closed in on his sixtieth birthday, White was an American literary original. If Thurber had been the first Yankee since Sam Clemens to be called to the Punch table, it was because White had declined the honor, out of “panic,” some years before.
Gibbs, Thurber, White, and their compatriots had come a long way from their start during what Corey Ford—who had bestowed the moniker “Eustace Tilley” on The New Yorker’s top-hatted, Beau Brummell-esque cover mascot—called “the time of laughter.” Precisely when that laughter had stopped, or had at best softened to a chuckle, was anyone’s guess. The moment might have come with the passing of Benchley; when O’Hara got the news, he said he felt like “the party was over.” Perhaps the turning point was the “noiseless flash” that the New Yorker writer John Hersey had found in a city called Hiroshima. For Gibbs, it may well have been with the final performance of a quintessential torch singer he had celebrated in “Comment” less than two months before Pearl Harbor:
Helen Morgan’s singing belonged in a speakeasy. The sad, boozy, rakish little songs she sang just fitted the peculiar temper of the period, providing synthetic tears for the synthetic gin. Her death brought back to us all the dark, illicit rooms we used to sit in, full of love for our fellow-lawbreakers, full of large theories about nothing, full of juniper berries and glycerine. We’re going to miss “My Bill” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine,” just as we have long missed all the other things that went with them—the chained and mysterious door, the proprietor reputed to be a celebrated gunman, the beautiful young women so determined not to go home with the men who brought them, the whole sense, in short, of being mixed up in a novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, another singer of the day, who also died before his time.
Whenever the end might have come for Gibbs’s laughter, it came for the rest of him on the Saturday night of August 16, 1958, when he climbed the stairs of The Studio to his bedroom, his copy of More in Sorrow close at hand.
“The New Yorker, like New York itself, is always better in the past,” wrote the critic Joseph Epstein. “Did the magazine, founded in 1925, have a true heyday? People differ about when this might be. The New Yorker’s heyday, it frequently turns out, was often their own.”
True enough, but few would deny that a certain golden age of the magazine flourished between the two world wars. Much of it was attributable to the three men whom Ross described as his staff “geniuses”—Gibbs, Thurber, and White. Their tripartite editorial unity extended to their personal relationship with Ross, as he had discovered in the summer of 1947 when he took them to dinner. White was so dizzy from the heat that he thought the sidewalk was rising up to attack him. Gibbs found himself in a whirl after a car whizzed past him the wrong way on a one-way street. As for Thurber, he could barely navigate with his impaired vision. When the editor got back to the office, he proudly called out, “I’ve just been to dinner with three grown men who wouldn’t have been able to get back here without me.” Thurber agreed. As far as Ross was concerned, they were a “trio about whom he fretted and fussed continually.”
By all rights, that trio was really a quartet. Historians of The New Yorker point out that more than anyone else it was White’s wife, Katharine, one of Ross’s earliest hires, who transformed the magazine’s poise, especially insofar as its fiction was concerned, from glib, easy, and even smug into deep, revealing, and memorable. Ross probably did not lump her with his other geniuses because as a man’s man, he always treated women as a breed apart. Moreover, the self-assured and self-possessed Katharine did not require continual fretting and fussing. Quite the contrary: she was so organized and visionary, said White, “I can’t imagine what would have happened to the magazine if she hadn’t turned up.”
But whatever the exact number and composition of this inner circle—and it included, in addition to those aforementioned, names either famous or obscure like Peter Arno, St. Clair McKelway, Russell Maloney, Alexander Woollcott, Hobart Weekes, and Gustave Lobrano—its members and their associates would go down in magazine history. Rarely has such a group of literary and artistic talent been assembled at a single place at a single time. Rarely would it leave so enduring a mark.
CHAPTER 1
“A LUDICROUS PASTIME”
When, late in his life, James Thurber gathered in book form a series of pieces he had published about Ross and The New Yorker in The Atlantic Monthly, he titled one chapter “Who Was Harold, What Was He?” He actually spent the entire book trying to answer that question. Like many others, he found his boss so elusive a target that he couldn’t quite pin him down. “There were so many different Rosses, conflicting and contradictory,” Thurber wrote, “that
the task of drawing him in words sometimes appears impossible.”
Thurber was right, as the testimony of those who worked with and knew Ross shows. Was he “warm and personal” (Harpo Marx) or possessed of “a general tenor of irritable stupidity alternated with capricious acts of cruelty” (Edmund Wilson)? Was he “a kind person” (Harriet Walden) or someone who “found it hard to be entirely kind to others” (A. J. Liebling)? Was he “a vitally intelligent man” (Janet Flanner) or “the most uncompromising lout, hick, clod and boor I think I have ever met” (David Cort)?
At least a few things about Ross’s unlikely swath through the literary establishment are certain. “I am frequently regarded as ignorant, I guess, because I haven’t a conventional college education,” he told John O’Hara. He acknowledged, too, that his magazine had succeeded against most odds. “The New Yorker is pure accident from start to finish,” he confided to George Jean Nathan. “I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started it.”
And there is ample evidence from a constellation of parties that Ross’s more outrageous mannerisms and habits, the ones that have entered the realm of popular anecdote, were bona fide and pervasive. Ross did indeed discourage people from talking to him in the halls, lope through them scowling and preoccupied, exclaim “Jee-sus!” in frustration, complain aloud “I am sorely pressed,” swear like a sailor, pound out memos with such rapidity that entire sentences had to be X’d out, type “Who he?” or “Bushwah” upon encountering a previously unmentioned name or piece of nonsense, run his fingers through his hair in exasperation, resort to underlings to do the firing for him, and take his leave by muttering, “God bless you.”
But in recent years, a more nuanced view of Ross has emerged. Ultimately more revealing than any aspect of his makeup or the role that fate may have played in his success is an understanding of what he set out to do as an editor, and how he did it.
Harold Wallace Ross was born on November 6, 1892, in Aspen, Colorado. From his father, George, who had been a grocer, carpenter, contractor, scrap dealer, and especially, silver miner, he inherited a determined entrepreneurial streak. From his mother, Ida, a former teacher, he received a high regard, even a reverence, for the English language. When the young Harold came home from the classroom, Ida gave him additional books to read and lessons to learn. The instruction made its mark. Decades later, when confronted with copy he regarded as confusing, mangled, or just plain sloppy, he would cry, “God damn it, all I know about English is what I learned in a little red grammar and Jesus Christ, this ain’t it!”
Ross was tall, rangy, and rawboned, with a majestic pompadour, a pendulous lower lip and a noticeable gap between his front teeth. More important than his physiognomy was his verbal finickiness, a trait that struck some people, even the punctilious Edmund Wilson, as “annoying or comic.” He insisted on direct prose leavened not by adjectives or figures of speech but by the strength of simple structure and composition. “Ross had an unquenchable thirst for clarity,” said E. J. Kahn, Jr., “and to slake it one simply had to learn to write better.”
That was because Ross was a reporter to his core. By the time he was twenty-five, he was the veteran of a fistful of newspapers—the Marysville Appeal, the Salt Lake Telegram and Tribune, the New Orleans Item, and the Denver Post among them. (“If I stayed anywhere more than two weeks, I thought I was in a rut.”) He also put in time at the Atlanta Journal, where he distinguished himself with his coverage of the Leo Frank case. Though a perfectly respectable practitioner of his trade, Ross was a “tramp”—a working stiff who went from town to town as the jobs became available. If his prose was no better than workmanlike, it had the virtue of being accurate and straightforward and concerned with facts above all.
“I have never been sure just what Ross really thought about facts. All I know is that he loved them,” said his successor as editor of The New Yorker, William Shawn. “Facts steadied him and comforted him. Facts also amused him. They didn’t need to be funny facts—just facts.”
When he was in his early twenties, Ross found that his appetite for facts was being ever more whetted both by the rigors of big-time journalism and by the culture of the cities that fostered it. When he joined the Call & Post of San Francisco around 1915, the metropolis had largely rebuilt itself from the devastation of the 1906 earthquake. It glittered with business and life, as embodied by the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the world’s fair that opened in the City by the Bay just as he was arriving. Ross’s appreciation of the wider world was enhanced when he enlisted in the army’s Eighteenth Engineers regiment in World War I. Before long he had joined the staff of Stars and Stripes and would eventually become its editor. When not in the fields of France or at the office, he spent what time he could in the cafés and byways of Paris. There he was often joined by several comrades, including Alexander Woollcott—on hiatus from his job as drama critic of The New York Times—who with him made up the S&S ad hoc editorial board. Sometimes they would discuss what they would do after the war. Ross apparently “liked the idea of a high-class tabloid. Occasionally there was talk of a magazine that would report a city in somewhat the manner they were trying to report the war. There would be humor and personalities and straight descriptive writing, all aimed at an intelligent audience.”
It would be a while before Ross reached that goal. Upon his arrival in the United States in the spring of 1919, he began work on the veterans-oriented publications The Home Sector and the American Legion Weekly. He was now in New York City, the center of the country’s cultural and business universe. He had made previous tentative forays into the area’s journalism, just as the tinderbox of Europe was about to explode; he had worked briefly at the Hoboken, New Jersey–based Hudson Observer and the Brooklyn Eagle. Now he and the city alike had grown up. Ross had become a seasoned reporter, writer, and editor, while Gotham was undergoing an unprecedented boom in theater, finance, building, nightlife, and publishing.
The time was right for The New Yorker. A magazine that would, as he put it in his prospectus, “be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life,” with the emphasis on “gaiety, wit and satire,” was in line with popular titles like Vanity Fair, Life, and College Humor. Ross, however, set his sights not on a national audience, as those periodicals did, but on a more concentrated local one. Knowing that advertising is the lifeblood of any magazine, he realized that it made little sense for a New York retailer to try to appeal to readers far outside the metropolitan area. Thus The New Yorker (a name coined with apparent effortlessness by a Broadway press agent named John Peter Toohey after much sweating by others) would draw on the commerce, as well as the creative talent and raw material, of the immediate vicinity.
Focusing on New York had another advantage. By deliberately not casting a wide readership net, Ross could eschew the tired, corny, middlebrow tone that infected ostensibly humorous entries like Judge—which, by an odd coincidence, he had reluctantly edited for five months in 1924 prior to finally committing to The New Yorker. And he sidestepped a tendency toward sameness that often colored even the best national magazines. As Groucho Marx punned in The Cocoanuts, which opened on Broadway less than a year after The New Yorker debuted, “Remember, there’s nothing like Liberty—except Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post!” Ross started The New Yorker, White said, “more in contempt of what was being published rather than with any notion of how to improve it.”
Finally, the content of The New Yorker would eschew certain areas in which some of its potential competitors had come to specialize. Ross’s new magazine would not delve into muckraking like Collier’s. It would not engage in outright advocacy and activism like The Nation. It would not dwell on political analysis like The New Republic. Instead it would play up personalities, light humor, poetry, fiction, and cultural criticism.
Many other magazines offered these features. But The New Yorker would, after some experimentation, put them together in one uniquely assembled package. Readers would first be able to a
nswer the question “What shall we do this evening?” by skimming the listings in “Goings On About Town.” This would be followed by a more general appraisal of their environs through the collection of musings and random intelligence that Ross called “Notes and Comment.” Referred to in shorthand as “Comment,” it fell under the rubric of “The Talk of the Town,” the balance of which was devoted to largely anecdotal matter. Casual contributions, interspersed as the years went by with serious short stories, solid reportage, and bona fide criticism, would eventually constitute a singular formula.
The New Yorker‘s main benefactor was Raoul Fleischmann, of the wealthy yeast-making family. Initially convinced to pledge half of the estimated $50,000 start-up—Ross and his wife, Jane Grant, contributed roughly the other half—Fleischmann would over the first three years of the magazine’s life spend some $700,000. Even for this exorbitant amount, he would receive ample payback. Reportedly, within just a couple of years of the magazine’s founding, he was offered three million dollars for his shares of stock, an offer he turned down.
Ross had met Fleischmann through the poker games of the Algonquin Round Table. The two were never more than ancillary members of that fabled and frequently overestimated group of writers, critics, artists, and all-around literary bons vivants. Still, Ross had a personal connection to the assemblage. He had met Jane during the war via Woollcott, her colleague at The New York Times. In 1922—along with Hawley Truax, Woollcott’s Hamilton College friend and classmate—the three moved into a cooperative apartment arrangement at 412 and 414 West 47th Street. The quasi-salon quickly became the site of many alcohol-infused revels, card games, and other forms of horseplay. Woollcott, of course, was a mainstay (and in his own mind, grand panjandrum) of the Algonquin set, and into the Rossian orbit he drew its marquee names—Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, Heywood Broun, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker, who dubbed the 412-414 setup “Wit’s End.”
Cast of Characters Page 2
