Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Otto Soglow illustrated these vague thoughts with a drawing of Tilley departing the Plaza Hotel in a horse-drawn carriage, doffing his hat to well-wishers, chased by a Thurber dog.

  White left The New Yorker with no definite intentions. He could not even explain himself fully to Katharine. “In the main,” he wrote her, “my plan is to have none.” He did, however, expect to make any number of trips to “places where my spoor is still to be found.” Katharine abided by her husband’s decision, even as she grappled with his absence. “I don’t think I ever missed you so much,” she wrote within a month of his departure. Ross, too, was hit hard by the loss of arguably his best writer. White tried to placate him. “Enjoyed working in your shop very much,” he wrote. “Will always remember it.” But Ross was bitter about White’s defection. “He just sails around in some God damn boat,” he griped.

  By his own admission, White made “an unholy mess” of his time off. He had hoped to use his freedom to work “on a theme which engrosses me”—a long autobiographical poem, assembled from notes he had been scribbling for some time. But he never finished it. Seventeen years after his sabbatical, he finally published six parts of it in his collection The Second Tree from the Corner. Entitled “Zoo Revisited: Or the Life and Death of Olie Hackstaff,” it recounted his elusive feelings associated with some of the more significant locales of his past, places he revisited during his time away from The New Yorker. Among them were Mount Vernon, Bellport in Long Island—and especially Maine.

  White had been drawn to Maine as a source of respite for years. Now he began to view it as a source of inspiration and even salvation. He reported to Thurber that he spent that Christmastime of 1937 “listening to the beat of tire chains against cold mudguards, studying tracks where the deer had pawed the snow under the little apple trees, sliding down hill, and ushering in the new year by going to bed and letting the Baptist church ring twelve clear holy strokes for me.” Captivated by an atmosphere that was “almost Currier and Ives in its purity,” he determined shortly thereafter that he and Katharine should relocate there.

  Katharine acceded and found that the ensuing few years on the working farm that they purchased at Allen Cove were among her happiest. Fortunately, the experience was not quite the exile that it might have been; she ended up spending about half of each day working on manuscripts sent up to her from Manhattan and maintaining an active correspondence. Eventually, giving up her job for her husband’s sake did turn out to be harder than she had expected. But in these early days she reveled in her rural domesticity, as she told Ruth McKenney:

  My life here is fantastic. You should see me trying to be a good farm wife, picking, canning, mopping and dusting, and at the same time keeping my 7½ year old from drowning, and my 17 year old from killing himself and his girl friends in wild night rides, and making my big daughter-scientist be domestic when she’d rather be losing all her few dollars on late night poker parties. (Not one of the three pays the least attention to me.) And on top of this trying to be a long distance editor. Then there are the dogs, the pig, the chickens, the turkey (only one!), the cows who are our boarders, all meeting disaster daily, and the vegetables and flowers that I’m supposed to tend.

  The Whites’ departure from Manhattan ushered in a figure who would prove critical to The New Yorker’s continued success. Gustave “Gus” Stubbs Lobrano, born in the same year as Gibbs, had had a privileged upbringing in New Orleans, attending the excellent Newman School, a private institution originally designated for Jewish orphans. A couple of years behind White at Cornell, he met him on the Cornell Daily Sun. For a while in the 1920s they shared a Greenwich Village apartment with two other men; at one point the boarders included Lobrano’s future brother-in-law, Jack Flick. His clumsy amours in the small space proved amusing. Once when Flick was trying not terribly successfully to make time with a companion, White stuck his head into the living room and announced, “If you haven’t seduced her by one o’clock, forget it.”

  Upon marrying in 1927, Lobrano left this arrangement and moved with his wife, Jean, to Albany, where he toiled for years at her family’s travel bureau. The business dwindled during the Depression. But in 1935, when White told him of a job back in Manhattan at Town and Country under Harry Bull, a fellow Cornell alumnus, Lobrano eagerly applied and was accepted. Three years later Katharine encouraged him to succeed her in the fiction department. Lobrano easily passed his editing test by expertly handling several pieces, Katharine assisting by providing him with a confidential copy of Gibbs’s “Theory and Practice” guidelines. His elegant, patient presence proved a natural fit for The New Yorker.

  Lobrano was “a tall, diffident man” with “soft eyes and a shy smile,” remembered the Czech writer Joseph Wechsberg. “He was a Southern gentleman, a type I’d never met before. His politeness always put me on the defensive.” At the same time, he had little patience for substandard work. “He showed me the proof of one of my pieces and asked me gently, as though he were embarrassed, whether I would mind clearing up a few minor points,” said Wechsberg. “The proof had scores of penciled marks and remarks and queries written in the margins. I’d never seen such painfully edited copy.”

  Once described as “the nicest soul that ever lived,” he was no pushover. When Edmund Wilson slammed Kay Boyle’s novel Avalanche as “pure rubbish,” Lobrano cheered him on. “Miss Boyle had exactly this sort of thing coming to her,” he wrote Ross. “Her book, which I read, miserably, installment by installment in the Saturday Evening Post, is sickening mush. And I’m glad that Mr. Wilson singled out Kay Boyle’s stylistic furbelows, including her exasperating trick of using the inanimate possessive.” Lobrano’s taste for good fiction was finely nuanced. “Something must be left to the reader’s imagination,” he once said. “After all, if he knows how to read, your reader probably knows how to think too.”

  “He did not enter lightly upon friendship, as many a writer has lived to discover, and to be his good friend was a tremendously satisfying experience,” White recalled. “You felt you had hold of something solid.” Moreover, “[h]e had a subtle mind, an engaging wit, an almost flawless taste in literary expression, and an impatience with all forms of shoddiness.” Lobrano loved trout fishing, golf, and all manner of sports; he organized a children’s Sunday softball game in his Chappaqua neighborhood that sometimes included visiting authors. When Emily Hahn dropped by, she created a small scandal by presenting a friend who had brought a large painting of a nearly naked African chieftain. After the game, Lobrano treated everyone to sodas and sundaes at the town drugstore.

  Unlike many other New Yorker staff members, Lobrano did not attempt to trade in editing for writing. He had little interest in the latter, publishing only a few short pieces in the magazine, most of them in collaboration. He formed tight associations with many of The New Yorker’s best short story writers: he played tennis with Irwin Shaw, hobnobbed with his Westchester neighbor John Cheever, and endeared himself so much to J. D. Salinger that the eccentric author dedicated his acclaimed Nine Stories collection in part to him. So high was the regard of S. J. Perelman, not exactly a sentimental specimen, for Lobrano that in his office he displayed a photograph of him along with pictures of James Joyce and Somerset Maugham. Frank Sullivan extolled him as “Gustavus Vasa.”

  Lobrano was deeply grateful to the Whites for providing his professional deliverance. “I have been with the NYer for about nine months now (the period of gestation), and feel as though I have been born again,” he wrote Andy. “My old life, before I had to write letters of rejection to Frank Sullivan and call up Peter Arno every Wednesday, was tranquil and sheltered; but in spite of fear and indigestion and heartbreak the new life is better. I shall die sooner but, all in all, happier.”

  As for White, when he wasn’t “catching mackerel or building a laying house for the pullets,” he was still keeping his hand, however reluctantly, in The New Yorker. At Ross’s request, he continued editing newsbreaks and contributed an occasional piece.
But as he once told Gibbs (addressing him as “Gibbsy”), “You can’t support a farm on casuals—you have to get right out and sell the hay itself.” And so he began writing a monthly, occasionally disjointed column for Harper’s called “One Man’s Meat.” In addition to the three hundred dollars he would earn for each piece, the expansive 2,500 words he would contribute twelve times a year would afford him considerable creative freedom.

  Just prior to White’s departure for Maine, a friend told him snidely that he hoped he would “spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.” As it was, it was not contentment but concrete detail, undergirded by intelligent rumination, that marked much of “One Man’s Meat.” Outwardly, White provided details of what it was like to run a farm, to interact with homespun neighbors, and to engage in life’s daily business. But real emotion suffused the gentle prose. “Once More to the Lake,” for example, was a reminiscent account of a visit with eleven-year-old Joel to Belgrade Lake, where White’s father had taken him a generation before. Woven throughout were heart-seizing insights into such grand themes as aging, life, and death:

  I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would not be I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy feeling.

  “I wish I could believe that I’d ever be able to write as well as that,” Russell Maloney told White.

  In “Clear Days,” amid breaking news of the Munich accord that would tear Czechoslovakia apart and make war inevitable, White found himself “steadily laying shingles” on his barn roof. He combined these two disparate elements through deft rhetoric: “I’m down now; the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved. It is the ugliest peace the earth has ever received for a Christmas present. Old England, eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper, is a sight I had as lief not lived to see.”

  “I think that ‘One Man’s Meat’ was the making of him as a writer,” said Roger Angell. “Freed of the weekly deadlines and the quaintsy first-person plural form of The New Yorker’s ‘Notes and Comment’ page, which he had written for more than a decade, he discovered his subject (it was himself) and a voice that spoke softly but rang true.”

  Unlike Thurber and White, Gibbs had a hard time making a name for himself outside the magazine. He took a stab in 1931 when he published a comic novella, Bird Life at the Pole, that poked fun at the Antarctic expeditions that were then making headlines. The jacket copy, accompanied by a photo of Gibbs taken before he acquired his trademark thin moustache, noted that the author was “fond of lying in warm water, of having somebody bring him his breakfast in bed, and of money.” Around that time he also placed a couple of poignant short stories, “Another Such Victory—” and “November Afternoon,” in Harper’s Bazaar. The former carried strong hints of his impending breakup with Nancy Hale; the latter depicted a sensitive, Gibbs-like boy who tearfully breaks away from his preoccupied parents when, as a surprise, they come to see him play in a prep school football game.

  But these efforts made little impression. The New Yorker seemed to be where Gibbs was destined to be. And so he remained in Manhattan, residing for almost twenty years in 317 East 51st Street. It was a spacious and comfortable duplex, but wall hangings in square or rectangular frames tended to emphasize its sagging structure. Therefore, in the living room, an oval frame circumscribed a portrait of Gibbs’s ancestor Martin Van Buren. The master bedroom had a blocked-up marble fireplace and an unused wood locker built into the wall. The dark, dirty compartment, concealed by an unhinged door, fascinated young Tony. One day when he asked what was inside, the mischievous Gibbs replied ominously, “Injun Joe.” The response terrified the boy, and Gibbs finally shone a flashlight inside the space to assure him he had nothing to fear. Out back was a small garden of “strangled vines” where Gibbs would amuse himself by using his hose to squirt his growing collection of cats as they tried to scale the fence.

  By putting down roots in midtown, Gibbs tied himself ever more closely to The New Yorker. Following the Time parody, he attracted considerable attention with his 1937 volume, Bed of Neuroses. (The title contradicted Rule no. 24 of his “Theory and Practice”” guidelines: “On the whole, we are hostile to puns.”) Many of the pieces were simply light bits of nonsense. “To Sublet, Furnished,” took apart the subtle maneuverings of renting an apartment in New York; “Be Still, My Heart” concerned a fellow who could feign sickness at boring functions—and then, after curing himself, found he couldn’t escape these ordeals. Gibbs didn’t think much of the book; he called it “a perfect example of Nyer [sic] writing at its silliest—not a social dilemma in it that my six-year-old niece couldn’t solve by walking across the room.”

  To come into his own as a writer, Gibbs found he needed to discharge at least some of his editing burdens. He never jettisoned this responsibility entirely, but he was relieved when William Maxwell came aboard in late 1936. Maxwell, like Gibbs and McKelway, was an editor who could also write. In Maxwell’s case, he did so during periodic sabbaticals from his forty-year tenure. His finely attuned, frequently autobiographical short stories and novels won both fans and prizes. He was a tutor and encourager in the Katharine White mold, and his roster of writers was sterling—Salinger, Welty, Nabokov, Updike, and Isaac Bashevis Singer among them. Alec Wilkinson, a New Yorker staff writer who would compose an adulatory tribute, called him “a port in the storm,” compared their relationship to that of a father and a son, and declared, “He so dramatically influenced my way of thinking about the world, and feeling about the world, and viewing the world.”

  It took Maxwell a little while to develop that talent. When he arrived, Gibbs was interested mainly in fobbing off his art conference responsibilities onto him. But he also began breaking the young man in to the fine points of dealing with contributors, as Maxwell recalled:

  One day Wolcott Gibbs asked me if I’d like to try some editing. He handed me a manuscript and walked away, without explaining what he meant by editing. I didn’t think much of the story, so I cut and changed things around and made it the way I thought it ought to be. To my surprise Gibbs sent it to the printer that way. And I thought, “So that’s editing.” The next time he gave me a piece to edit I fell on my face. I straightened out something that was mildly funny only if it wasn’t too clear what was going on. Gibbs was kind, and said that my editing revealed that there wasn’t very much there, but I got the point. In time I came to feel that real editing means changing as little as possible.

  It turned out that after more than a decade of editing, Gibbs had accrued an unexpected benefit—a nearly pitch-perfect talent for assuming the voice of others. Gibbs, Thurber recalled, “was always able to fix up a casual without distorting or even marring its author’s style.” It was this ability that earned him his reputation as The New Yorker’s preeminent parodist.

  Much of his work in this vein was a send-up of tired literary genres. In “Boo, Beau!” Gibbs skewered Esquire-type fashion trend pieces. Zippers, he declared, would henceforth replace suit buttons, “permitting the suit to be opened along the side, somewhat in the manner of a Parker House roll, and laid out on the floor. The customer, of course, will simply lie down on the opened suit, insert his arms and legs into the proper apertures, and zip himself up.” Fed up with the extravagant claims that publishers made for prolific but mediocre authors, he wrote “Edward Damper,” a book-jacket blurb whose eponymous scribe had, by age sixteen, already written one hundred novels and married five Miss Americas.

  His specialty was parodies of particular writers. He imagined the tough-talking, red-baiting Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler responding to little Virgi
nia O’Hanlon’s query about Saint Nicholas: “You’re damn right there is a Santa Claus, Virginia. He lives down the road a piece from me, and my name for him is Comrade Jelly Belly.” Gibbs’s spoof of Sinclair Lewis, “Shad Ampersand,” caught Lewis’s overarching scene-setting (“The city of Grand Revenant, in High Hope County and the sovereign state of Nostalgia, has a population of 34,567”) and his ham-handed dialogue (“ ‘Shad!’ she trilled, and now she was a bell. ‘Wife!’ he clamored through their urgent kiss”). In “Future Conditional,” he captured Noël Coward’s sparkling self-indulgence. Depicting Coward as carrying on “during a period of considerable stress,” Gibbs wrote, “To this day I haven’t the slightest idea why social upheaval should invariably be attended by extreme personal inconvenience whose interest in it is, to put the thing mildly, academic.”

  Gibbs pulled off parodies of writers as diverse as George Jean Nathan, John P. Marquand, and even his friend Sam Behrman. In “Shakespeare, Here’s Your Hat,” he displayed particular venom for William Saroyan’s “customary prefatory notes” to his published plays:

  This play is a masterpiece. It is young, gusty, comical, tragic, beautiful, heroic, and as real as a slaughterhouse or some dame fixing her hair. It could only have been written in America, by an Armenian boy who is an artist and a lover and a dreamer. All at once. All mixed up. It could only have been written by Saroyan. . . . The cure for the American theatre is more plays like this one. More plays by Saroyan.

  Though Gibbs took little pride in most of what he wrote, these pieces gave him particular pleasure for particular reasons:

  The parodies are, I guess, my favorites because it is a form I like. Successful parody demands a good many things from a writer: it should be funny, as a piece of humorous writing, even to those who haven’t read the book and are therefore unfamiliar with the style being imitated or the plot satirized; it should contain a certain amount of real criticism of what the author is saying as well as his manner of saying it; and it should be pitched so little above (or below) the key of the original that an intelligent critic, on being read passages from both, might be honestly confused. Broad parody, or burlesque, is a tiresome and childish exercise.