Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  O’Hara’s ability to capture the mores and attitudes of places as different as Hollywood, Broadway, Long Island’s South Shore, Beekman Place, and Riverside Drive registered strongly with Gibbs. “The particular virtue of Mr. O’Hara,” Gibbs wrote, “may be that he is equally at home in all these worlds, understanding the idiom and moral climate and even the clothes and house-furnishings of each one as if he’d lived there all his life.” He regarded O’Hara not simply as a keen social observer but also as a skilled practitioner of the demanding genre of serious short fiction. In a blurb for “Over the River and Through the Wood,” Gibbs applauded O’Hara’s “rigid economy, accomplished without any sense of strain, that excludes all irrelevancies and still leaves nothing out. Each sentence, that is, has its clear purpose, carrying its full legitimate weight of information, and no more. This kind of writing is, of course, an editor’s delight. It is also the kind that leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that he is being offered the truth.”

  J. D. Salinger, among many others, agreed; he told Gibbs that Julian English, the central character in O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra, represented a hundred-fold improvement on Jake Barnes, the tragic hero of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Joel Sayre was impressed not only with O’Hara’s craftsmanship but also with his discipline. “No matter how bad things were, how broke, sick, sad or overhung he was, he kept turning those pieces out,” he said. “He was like a peasant having chores to do and doing them. Why, O’Hara got so that he could write when he was loaded. Countless times he rolled home late from some party, put paper in the typewriter, spit on his hands and stuck with it till he had a finished piece that went off to the magazine that very day—often without a word changed—and it was soon in print.”

  Ross, however, had terrible ambivalence about him. On the one hand, he recognized O’Hara’s value to the magazine. As early as 1934, the editor said, “At his best he is one of the foremost writers in the country” and indeed “has written more words for us than any other non-departmental writer.” On the other hand, Ross often had trouble with his subject matter, especially his apparent fixation on sex. Ross was delighted to run his “Pal Joey” stories about the venal yet raffish nightclub entertainer Joey Evans. But when Rodgers and Hart began working with the author to adapt the material for the stage, Ross confided in Gibbs, “How the hell is O’Hara going to make a musical comedy out of that character?” Nor did the literal-minded editor care for O’Hara’s artistry in its subtler moments. A good example of his befuddlement can be found in his response to “Fifteen Dollars,” which Gibbs, running interference for The New Yorker, conveyed to O’Hara verbatim:

  The ending must be clear, of course. I don’t know what it means and think you and Gibbs are guessing. I know in general, but I don’t get the significance of the blotting of the first check. Why? Why didn’t he just make out a $15 check [sic]. Also the Communism thing may be misleading, although it didn’t throw me off. I think the ending should clinch definitely the question of whether the boy is telling the truth. From earlier references, I suspected (and still suspect) that the boy is building up this girl to capitalize a weakness of his father’s for tosh-tosh people. O’Hara says earlier he was preparing to make a touch. Was he going out with such a girl or a little cutie with no automobiles and no wealth?

  In that same letter, Gibbs said he was rejecting another story, “Pretty Little Mrs. Harper,” because, similarly, “nobody at all knows what we’re supposed to deduce from the end.”

  “On the whole John needed very little editing,” said Katharine White. She estimated that Ross seldom made more than half a dozen inquiries on any of his manuscripts. But every one of those inquiries counted (Ross once spent more than a hundred words asking O’Hara if he was quite sure of his use of the word “starlet”), and Gibbs told the temperamental writer that he was simply trying to make “a very earnest attempt to reconcile your point of view and The New Yorker’s.” Katharine found him “unfailingly polite” when it came time for revision, yet suspected that it was “mostly because I was a woman but also perhaps because he knew I was head of the Department.”

  The men O’Hara dealt with, mainly Ross and Gibbs, were not as fortunate. Gibbs recalled that O’Hara entered his life “with some of the accumulating violence of a hurricane.” Once, the two were going over a manuscript, and as the process continued, their two voices began rising. Finally, O’Hara exploded, “Gibbs, you’re fucking my story!” and stormed out. He did not take well to having his stories turned down (“I have decided to reject your rejection,” he once told Ross), in part because stories tailored for The New Yorker’s particular requirements were often unsellable elsewhere.

  He had an extraordinary capacity for throwing his presumed weight around. “I am very discontented,” he fumed from Los Angeles in 1936. “I want more money and a lot of it. I also want Fleischmann fired and Fadiman transferred to As To Men and the signature, The New Yorkers, restored to Talk,† I also want The New Yorker to send for me, paying all expenses, to talk things over.” His cover letters were filled with self-aggrandizement and occasional self-abasement. “These pieces, and a slice of raw onion, will bring tears to your eyes,” he told Maxwell. He once sent Katharine White a one-sentence letter: “My pieces don’t run second.” Katharine, who found O’Hara “a lovable man” in many ways, also called him “the greatest egotist I have ever known.”

  “Somebody told me that O’Hara’s new book is the best thing he ever did,” Gibbs wrote. “Possibly O’Hara.”

  In fairness to his excesses, Katharine observed, “He started out with many handicaps. To begin with he was not attractive to look at generally, although his Irish blue eyes and broad face and even his acne-scarred skin were not unattractive when he was not in a rage. He knew he was a small town boy and at first he had a terrible inferiority complex in New York because of this.” O’Hara was equally ashamed of what he regarded as his lower-middle-class Irish background and, invariably, the fact that he had not gone to Yale, which he regarded as the entrée to class and respectability. Consequently, he set obsessive store by associations with and memberships in clubs and exclusive circles, and The New Yorker was literary cachet defined. “My little pieces in The New Yorker, unimportant though they are, are the only things that make the difference between my being dead and alive,” he confessed during his lean years of the early 1930s. “I don’t mean only that the money keeps me alive. I mean that I do nothing else, and except for them I might as well be dead.”

  In trying to puzzle out what the magazine wanted, O’Hara once put together a few rough thoughts. He shared them with his brother Tom, who was aspiring to write stories for the magazine:

  You probably won’t sell many—maybe not any—but they will criticize what you do send in a way that will enable you to discover, ultimately, what they like and don’t like. Don’t hesitate to use my name in writing to Gibbs, but don’t bother sending them anything that mentions the name of a celebrity, like F.P.A. [Franklin P. Adams]; don’t send them anything pertaining to journalism or advertising, no puns, no Greenwich Village stuff, nothing with a trick ending. . . . Be careful not to send them stuff that is too long, and don’t send them too many pieces. Write every day if you can, and send The New Yorker your best. (I’m a swell one to talk, who just got back two pieces.)

  It was sound enough advice. And yet an author could follow every piece of editorial guidance, could observe every absurd in-house rule, could even be published in the magazine regularly, and still feel ill treated. O’Hara’s insistence that his stories not run second found parallels in the complaints of the temperamental poet Louise Bogan, who objected to her serious, experimental verse being juxtaposed with what she regarded as “silly, vulgar drawings.” Gibbs, who himself was skeptical about “advanced and intellectual verse,” felt obliged to call Ross out on the matter when Bogan swore to resign “from all further contact with the New Yorker,” especially as resident poetry critic:

  She says that she has no
delusions of persecution, though she admits she has other delusions, and that it is a known fact that there are several people in the makeup department who dislike her extremely, and would go to any lengths to embarrass her, even to the extreme of ornamenting her verse with a drawing by Carl Rose which as far as she can tell is the damn silliest drawing she ever saw anywhere. She did not say that she thinks Carl Rose was asked to draw this picture for the sole purpose of insulting and degrading her, but that’s what she thinks. “Here comes an especially beautiful Bogan” she imagines them saying, “get out that damn Rose.” Just as somebody once willfully transposed the lines in a verse of hers so that it meant nothing and her freinds [sic] thought she’d gone bats.

  Gibbs did his best to placate Bogan; he protested to Ross personally about “the juxtaposition of the lovely and the obscene.” He acknowledged, “I guess there’s no question about her position in the poetry world. She is one of the most distinguished members of the ‘poetry gang’ and probably the most authoritative critic of their work.” But he also admitted he was “just buttering her up” in attempting to woo her back. Bogan saw through his flattery immediately:

  I meant what I said about resigning. —I need the money and the job, God knows, but under the circumstance, I would rather char. . . .

  You might intimate to Whitaker, Weeks [sic], and the other great human beings who are capable of these tricks, that it is terribly easy to hound a woman. With a man it is different. Even men with pasts are capable of giving people socks in jaws. But a woman can’t do this.

  And some women wouldn’t do anything. But they picked the wrong woman, in me.‡

  Yet in the end, Bogan served as the magazine’s poetry editor for forty years. Over roughly the same period, O’Hara became synonymous with the magazine. Such was the complicated, love-hate nature of the editor-author relationship at The New Yorker. Whether the issue was a semicolon, typography, placement among pages, or an entire theme, the tension was ever present. As Janet Flanner remarked, “Writers are uterine egotists [;] a good piece when finished feels like a baby and one wants it born and thought handsome at once.”

  * “And he heard the words of Laban’s sons, saying, Jacob has taken away all that was our father’s; and of that which was our father’s has he gotten all this glory.”

  † Clifton Fadiman was the magazine’s book reviewer at the time. “As To Men” was a short-lived column devoted to masculine fashion and style that was written by George F. T. Ryall, aka “Audax Minor,” who wrote the horseracing column for the magazine for more than fifty years. “The New Yorkers” was the collective authorship for “Talk” during a certain portion of the 1920s.

  ‡ Relations between Bogan and Gibbs had not always been this fractious. A few years before this exchange, she had written Gibbs, “[Y]ou probably use grammar more wittily than any man alive—with the possible exception of Max Beerbohm.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “MOST INSANELY MISCAST”

  “The New Yorker expects to be distinguished for its illustrations,” Ross wrote in his original prospectus for the magazine, “which will include caricatures, sketches, cartoons and humorous and satirical drawings in keeping with its purpose.”

  Considering that Ross was a prose man, he succeeded beyond his expectations. Ninety years after he put down those words, it is still received wisdom that the first thing a casual reader of The New Yorker will do is flip through and have a chuckle over the cartoons. The graphic legacy that Ross left is as significant as its journalistic counterpart: New Yorker art set so lasting a standard that the magazine is now the only general-interest periodical left in the nation that still fills its pages with the sight gags that were once a staple of the industry.

  Such durability and quality were evident almost from the beginning. As early as October 1925, when the magazine was still scrambling to find its audience, Ross noted, “Everybody talks of the New Yorker’s art, that is its illustrations, and it has been described as the best magazine in the world for a person who can not [sic] read.” Philip Wylie, one of Ross’s first permanent hires, recalled, “The one thing Ross had demanded till all heads rang with it—from early 1925 until it began to become fact, a year or so later, was this: ‘Get the prose in the magazine like the art!’ ” Ross eventually had plenty of worthy art to work with; before its tenth anniversary, the magazine was getting as many as a thousand drawings every week.

  Following World War II, the figure was up to 2,500.

  Part of the reason for this avalanche was the magazine’s ability to accommodate wildly different voices and styles. For many years at The New Yorker, its editors insisted that there was no such thing as a “typical New Yorker short story.” Assuming the assertion was true—and there are still many critics who would dispute it—the same could be said about its cartoons. The simple and charming “Little King” illustrations of Otto Soglow had as little in common with the stuffy clubmen and devilish rakes of Peter Arno as the abstract musings of Saul Steinberg had with the affected suburbanites of Whitney Darrow, Jr. True, some of the magazine’s staple subjects and situations proved more durable than others. Today The New Yorker’s illustrated spoofing of cocktail parties, breakfast table conversations, precocious children, psychiatrists’ offices, corporate boardrooms, and all other manner of middle-class neuroses is taken for granted.

  It shouldn’t be. What Ross had in mind for the magazine, and what he accomplished, marked a radical departure from what had been appearing in Life, Judge, and similar titles, as Thomas Craven noted in his 1943 volume Cartoon Cavalcade:

  Conceived in the spirit of the boulevards, The New Yorker departed from the old tradition of American humor, the tall tales and outlandish fables, which survive in the comic strips, and developed the funny idea with a witty, one-line caption to clinch the joke. The one-line caption had been used before, but sparingly and never with such originality and intelligence.

  The most pointed drawings of The New Yorker present an idea or predicament that screams for clarification. The drawing alone, more often than not, is enigmatical, but in conjunction with the surprising title beneath it becomes explosively funny. And the fun is clean. Though far from squeamish, this clever magazine has never played upon seductiveness or trafficked in nudity.

  Even the manner in which New Yorker cartoons were conceived and executed was different, Ross told the artist Alice Harvey:

  [B]efore the New Yorker came into existence, the humorous magazines of the country weren’t very funny, or meritorious in any way. The reason was that the editors bought jokes, or gags, or whatever you want to call them, for five dollars or ten dollars, mailed these out to artists, the artists drew them up, mailed them back and were paid. The result was completely wooden art. The artists’ attitude toward a joke was exactly that of a short story illustrator’s toward a short story. They illustrated the joke and got their money for the drawing. Now this practice led to all humorous drawings being “illustrations.” It also resulted in their being wooden, run of the mill products. The artists never thought for themselves and never learned to think. They weren’t humorous artists; they were dull witted illustrators. A humorous artist is a creative person, an illustrator isn’t.

  Much of the credit for this revolution in attitude goes to Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first de facto art editor. Large and good living, eleven years older than Ross, he was a worldly and charismatic figure. A one-time actor and member of the Players, the private theatrical and literary club on Gramercy Park, Irvin wore a fedora with a brim so wide that it resembled a ten-gallon hat. At his affluent peak, he stocked his home in Newtown, Connecticut, with an assortment of animals, including some horses that he called his “models.” But behind his genial eccentricities lay the sure eye of a former art editor of Life. In The New Yorker’s early, parlous days, Irvin provided necessary graphic gravitas. It was he who drew Eustace Tilley for the cover of the very first issue, modeling him on a caricature of the Count D’Orsay striking a pose with a walking stick. The c
aricature dated from the December 1834 issue of Fraser’s Magazine and was hardly representative of the smart, jazzy image that Ross wanted to project for his new magazine. But by adding the touch of having the fop look disinterestedly through a monocle at a butterfly, Irvin conveyed the essence of The New Yorker—a slightly condescending but consummately tasteful arbiter of the larger world.

  “At the very beginning, of course, Ross was fussing with the format of the magazine and here Rea Irvin was endlessly helpful. He drew all the small department headings and the big ones,” recalled Katharine White. “Rea was especially good on covers and on color, and was himself one of the great cover artists. The Eustace Tilley anniversary cover is one of the least beautiful of those that he did. He had studied Chinese art and many of his covers had a kind of Chinese look to them.”

  Thurber agreed. “The invaluable Irvin, artist, ex-actor, wit, and sophisticate about town and country, did more to develop the style and excellence of New Yorker drawings and covers than anyone else, and was the main and shining reason that the magazine’s comic art in the first two years was far superior to its humorous prose,” he said.

  The process gelled in The New Yorker’s famous art meetings that took place at two p.m. on Tuesday, the only day of the week that Irvin, who had other irons in his various fires, would actually appear in the office. In the beginning, the routine was simple: “Wylie would hold up the drawings and covers, and Irvin would explain to Ross what was good about them, or wrong, or old, or promising.”

  But as The New Yorker caught on, and Ross began bringing to these meetings the same eagle eye he brought to bear on the magazine’s written material, things became more complicated, with the proceedings dragging on for three hours or more. Hundreds of specimens had to be examined, discussed, criticized, accepted, and rejected. Ross would pounce at faulty draftsmanship, missing details, insufficient clarity, and other shortcomings, literally pointing out the problems with a knitting needle and asking, “Where am I in this picture?” “Who’s talking?” and even “Is it funny?” Frequently he didn’t get that far. When he would snort, as he often did, “Goddam awful,” “Get it out of here!” or “Cut your throat!” that would be the signal for Wylie or whoever was displaying the art to quickly bring up the next specimen.