Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  Gibbs was also souring on his job, he told Thurber:

  My own secret feeling about The New Yorker is that it is deteriorating at almost exactly the right rate for me. I seem to be wearing very thin as a writer and the theatre stuff I am doing now would be embarrassing if it appeared in the magazine we used to know. It seems adequate enough, though, when it runs along with twenty-thousand-word literary enigmas, exhausted little jokes by S. J. Sullivan-Perelman, and book reviews pointing out that in many ways O’Hara is a better writer than Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner.

  He now found himself subjected to gratuitous blue pencils. “I figure there are seven people who edit me in one way or another and they try to earn their money by making little lunatic last-minute changes, particularly the man in charge of superfluous punctuation,” he wrote. “I have no objection to clarity but I don’t like having jokes twisted around in order to be perfectly comprehensible to my cleaning woman.” So, determined to maintain what remained of his own voice, he embarked on a project that turned out to be uniquely close to his heart.

  Gibbs was not entirely enamored of what was lately happening on Fire Island. The intrusive arrival of telephones and television paralleled the growing crassness of certain summer people. Mel Brooks, who literally lived next door to Gibbs, typified this devolution. Once, trying to get a rise out of his neighbor, the in-your-face Brooks asked the aloof Gibbs what it would mean if he saw his, Brooks’s, house being swept out to sea. “I think, Mr. Brooks,” Gibbs responded, not especially interested in Brooks’s home or Brooks himself, “that it would mean it would be about half an hour until mine went, too.”

  Nonetheless Gibbs remained devoted enough to his summer retreat to launch the seasonal weekly newspaper The Fire Islander in 1954. His motives were various. In part he wanted to annoy one of his neighbors, Leo Shull, the founder of the Fire Island Press and the entertainment-focused Show Business magazine. Gibbs could forgive Shull for dedicating himself to “the exposure of unlisted private telephone numbers, home addresses of active producers, playwrights, and directors, their favored haunts, and the most likely time they may be reached at any hour of the day or night.” But his choler rose when Shull showed up Fire Island’s impostures—editorializing, for instance, “The parties are incessant. We used to cover 3 to 4 a day and up to 7 on Saturdays, besides making the 4 nitespots [sic]. Cocktail parties start at 5 . . . and run till 2, usually, sometimes till dawn.”

  Anyway, Gibbs wanted to publish a newspaper that would be “written in something resembling the English language—a project hitherto unheard-of in the short and troubled annals of Fire Island journalism.” His most keenly felt editorial declaration was his terse pronouncement, “I’m in love with the goddam beach.”

  It was indeed a romantic enterprise, reminiscent of his Long Island cub reporter days nearly thirty years before. Gibbs’s statement of purpose repudiated his past and embraced his present:

  We worked once on a Long Island weekly where the lady in charge of social notes saved herself a good deal of time and bother by confining herself almost exclusively to the activities of a Mr. and Mrs. Gil Manifold and their charming daughter, Belle, all of whom happened to be cousins of hers. The subscribers were told practically everything about this pleasingly named family, right down to what they ate for breakfast, but they heard very little about anybody else. It was generally felt that the Manifolds got a little monotonous. The Fire Islander will try to avoid this kind of reporting.

  Gibbs floated The Fire Islander with a thousand dollars, kicked in by himself and Bill Birmingham and a third local partner, Herman Wechsler, a fine art dealer who owned the FAR Gallery at East 65th Street and Madison Avenue. Wechsler, a tasteful and literate graduate of New York University, brought considerable intellectual cachet, having known Ezra Pound and the art historian Meyer Schapiro. The operation was conducted on “one half of a desk” at Birmingham’s waterfront office. For legwork, Gibbs turned to a series of young men, some of them recommended to him by a minor dean at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. In general he was less than enthused by the recruits; he declared one of them “as dim as Miss Bush League.”

  One of his more successful candidates was Constantine Karvonides. A young veteran of Scholastic Magazines, the Bowdoin College graduate saw an ad in the Herald Tribune announcing that Gibbs was recruiting reporters for a new newspaper and realized, “Jesus Christ, this job is for me.” Though it was only May, Gibbs was already out at the beach, but Elinor suggested that Karvonides join them there. The trip was memorable; Elinor called on a local veterinarian to chloroform the family’s eight cats for the ferry ride. About halfway across the bay, they arose from the anesthetic and began screeching. When the party alit on Ocean Beach, to be greeted by Tony and a convoy of express wagons, the feline howling climaxed, with local shopkeepers sticking their heads out of windows and doors to see what was going on. Once the entourage was in the house, the cats started climbing the walls. “That was my introduction to the family,” said Karvonides.

  The Fire Islander was assembled at the Ryder Press in Freeport, an establishment that also printed an in-house newsletter for American Airlines and literature for a religious sect that emphasized prophecy. After putting the paper to bed on Thursdays, the small crew would try to get the last ferry back to the island, sometimes making do at various bed-and-breakfast type establishments. For Tony, that was a luxury; usually he would find himself crashing in the car of his “totally incompetent” colleague St. George Bryan, Courty’s brother, or at the printing plant itself. “I could just find a big stack of crumpled-up papers and sleep on that. It was pretty soft.”

  The production of the first issue was fraught with drama. As the deadline approached, a nervous Gibbs—who had not been drinking for the week prior to publication—started up again. On this occasion the print shop owner joined him and, as the presses began to roll, passed out. Rather than return to Ocean Beach, Gibbs got into a taxi with Karvonides back to Manhattan. He had no money, so he had the driver pull up to “21,” where he pressed the doorman for fifty dollars; the astonished attendant gave Gibbs twice that amount. “At that point, the cab driver was thinking, ‘Get me the fuck out of here,’ ” said Karvonides.

  The bulk of the May 28, 1954, debut number of The Fire Islander constituted the sort of small-town items Gibbs had known at the East Norwich Enterprise, the North Hempstead Record, and the Nassau Daily Star. “Police Boat for Islip,” “Group Seeks Support of Land Owners,” and “Seasoned Angler Forecasts Usual Woes for Fishermen” were typical headlines. There was a good dose of inside information and innocent gossip, such as “William Randolph Hearst, Jr. [is] a guest at Flynn’s Ocean Bay Park Hotel this Decoration Day weekend.” But Gibbs, determined to bring as much sophistication to the enterprise as he could, called on friends for literary and artistic ballast. In that first issue, the self-described “visiting gourmet” Nathaniel Benchley had a funny piece about favored local recipes, including “Potage P. W. Wrenn, Jr.,” in honor of New Yorker contributor Philip Wrenn. John O’Hara scraped up some surly memories of a 1938 Fire Island visit, his ego on full display: “I am a venal man, a mercenary, and a true artist.” Charles Addams made the most on-target contribution, a cartoon of a beach house equipped with a lifeboat hanging from its side. The caption, uttered by one passerby to another, was “They worry about hurricanes.”

  The backbone of Fire Islander copy came from local talent. Bill Birmingham turned out to be a fine writer and did a column called “Beach Combings.” Another column, “On the Beach,” was written by Roger Hall, a maverick veteran of the OSS who once predicted that had the organization not existed, he would “have been shot by a firing squad on his own side.” To distribute each week’s 2,500 copies, Gibbs enlisted able-bodied boys, including Tony Stern, to trundle the ten-cent newspaper to local shops via the ubiquitous express wagons. The paper would not be hawked on the boardwalks, said its founder, because “I don’t like kids yelling around the streets.
”

  In a small way, Gibbs became a crusading editor. He and his cohorts covered and editorialized about the need for a proper boat basin, a youth center, decent tennis courts, and more authority regarding overnight guests. Their biggest issue was control of the dunes. On the front page of the August 20, 1954, edition, Gibbs spotlighted the proposed purchase of a ten-thousand-dollar “Tracto-Shovel” that could move up to a thousand yards of sand in a day. The matter was clotted by local interests like the Pastorfields and turf wars among state legislators and such nettlesome parties as Robert Moses.

  Gibbs wanted to transcend these parochial concerns by drawing on the skills of professional writers. They were, he remarked, “as abundant out here as crabs.” Nonetheless, the solicitation process mortified him. “I’m sure this is the God damndest [sic] request you ever got,” he told George Price by way of asking for a drawing. He suggested that Thurber write a piece that began, “I’ve never been to Fire Island, and the ideas I’ve formed of it from people I know are etc etc. . . . but I do [know something] about country journalism. It is a sucker’s racket.” Admitting that his venture was “hell’s own imposition,” Gibbs beseeched White:

  I have been mixed up in a lot of suicidal enterprises in my life, but nothing like this. As you can see from the samples, I’ve been printing a writer of sorts each week, and I’m committed to go on doing it. At the moment, though, the summer looks terribly long, and I’m damned if I can see how I’m going to make it. You ought to be the last person I’d try to drag into all this, because I know damn well that you don’t write much for fun, but it is quite a situation for me. Five hundred words or so, dealing with anything you know about rural journalism, beaches, fish, birds, or just the weather would be the best thing that could possibly happen to me. I am embarrassed about the whole thing, but certainly not enough.

  Gibbs ultimately printed material by Lucius Beebe, John Lardner, Al Frueh, John McNulty, Whitney Darrow, Mary Petty, Robert Day, William Steig, Frank Sullivan, Saul Steinberg, John Crosby, Ann Honeycutt, Carl Rose, Allan Dunn, and Arthur Kober. He even paid The New Yorker five dollars to reprint one of Mosher’s Fire Island stories and persuaded Frank Modell to draw the newspaper’s banner—a couple of small houses, the island’s water tower, and its landmark lighthouse. Not everyone enjoyed their dealings with The Fire Islander: after Gibbs’s neighbor Herman Wouk turned in a piece, he solicited a contribution from his old radio boss, Fred Allen; Allen registered his dissatisfaction, with a distinctive lack of capital letters:

  mr. gibbs promised to send me a copy of the paper the week the piece was used. after waiting for two weeks for the paper to arrive i sent him a note and one dollar enclosed to send me a copy. he returned the dollar and said i was lifetime subscriber. i still have not received the paper. i am thinking of withdrawing as a contributor. i don’t mind not getting paid for my product but i resent being ignored. i may go over to the Shull group next summer.

  Under Gibbs, The Fire Islander was an informative, literate, and quirky start-up. It even garnered attention on an NBC news segment (“We simulated a publication meeting on the porch,” said Karvonides). But it was just too big an undertaking. Shortly before Independence Day 1956, Gibbs turned the paper over to a new group that included a collection of teenage editors. In a farewell both fond and jaundiced, he expressed pride in what the scrappy newspaper had accomplished. “Contrary to persistent rumors, the reason we felt obliged to abandon it ourselves was not financial,” he wrote. “The real trouble was that each of us who ran it was primarily engaged in another business from which unhappily his living came.” He signed off, “We expect to be visible as contributors from time to time, and the paper will, of course, always have our best wishes and our first spiritual support. . . . Beyond that, however, we are as dead as so many dinosaurs. It may be just as well.”

  For other New Yorker mainstays, much of the Eisenhower decade was mainly comfortable, productive, and rewarding. A. J. Liebling had ongoing problems with obesity but published a worthy stream of “Reporter at Large” and “Our Footloose Correspondents” pieces. He also found a growing reputation as a newspaper critic in the magazine’s “Wayward Press” column.

  John O’Hara did not particularly suffer from his break with The New Yorker. Indeed, from his memorabilia-lined study in Princeton, “thousands of good words were issued every week,” encompassing novels, short stories for slick magazines, and his “Appointment with O’Hara” column. Although he never realized his dreams of winning the Pulitzer and Nobel prizes, he did snare the National Book Award for fiction for Ten North Frederick in 1955. The book was a popular success as well, selling more than 65,000 copies in its first two weeks and, after passing the million-copy mark, earning him an engraved silver cigarette case from his publisher, Bennett Cerf.

  Amid his amorous misconduct, Charles Addams remained reliably macabre and funny, his career proceeding “in an ever-rising, unbroken curve”—an accomplishment, Irwin Shaw said, that “none of the rest of us” could claim.

  White did not coast on the critical acclaim of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s Web. He continued to turn out “Comment,” casuals, spoofs (Gibbs regarded one of them, a take-off on Hemingway titled “Across the Street and Into the Grill,” as among the funniest things he had ever read), assorted dispatches, and personal essays. White collected the best of these in The Second Tree from the Corner in 1954. Befitting his gradual recognition as a latter-day Thoreau—his literary idol—he returned periodically to Allen Cove and the semihomespun life. There, following the death of Ross, he lived on and off for several months out of the year. Finally he and Katharine returned to Maine for good. He made clear where he would hang his hat from now on in the first of his “Letter from the East” pieces, which appeared shortly before Christmas 1955. He affectionately referred to his domicile as “Wormwood”:

  At Wormwood, each season carries a hundred foreshadowings of the season that is to follow—which is one of the things I love about it. Winter is rough and long, but spring lies all round about. Yesterday, a small white keel feather escaped from my goose and lodged in the bank boughs near the kitchen porch, where I spied it as I came home in the cold twilight. The minute I saw the feather, I was projected into May, knowing that a barn swallow would be along to claim the prize and use it to decorate the front edge of its nest. Immediately, the December air seemed full of the wings of swallows and the warmth of barns.

  It was from Maine that White completed his updated version of his mentor Will Strunk’s The Elements of Style. Jack Case, an editor at Macmillan, wished the project on him after reading his “Letter from the East” of July 27, 1957; it had been a rambling essay that somehow ended up with a reminiscence of Strunk and his “little book.” In revising the work and adding his afterword, “An Approach to Style,” White departed from Strunk in some ways, emphasizing certain grammatical and rhetorical bugbears of his own. But he did not disagree—nor would Ross have —with the professor’s most forceful observation: “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

  “My single purpose,” the ever-modest White told Case, “is to be faithful to Strunk as of 1958, reliable, holding the line, and maybe even selling some copies to English Departments [sic] that collect oddities and curios.” In that he succeeded. Although there has lately been a small backlash against the prescriptive, even rigid tone of The Elements of Style, it remains a touchstone of prose composition, required reading in uncounted classrooms and a phenomenon in terms of the millions of copies it has sold. White gave Katharine leave to redact his handiwork. “She is a better grammarian, organizer, teacher, editor, and mother than I am,” he said.

  The death of Gus Lobrano had taken place at an
awkward time for Katharine, just as she and Andy were contemplating their permanent retreat to the Pine Tree State. With circumstances mounting, she set about preparing the future of the fiction department. However, when she resigned in 1957, she left no designated successor. Rather, Shawn and Maxwell and others would deal with particular authors. For several years Katharine would continue to edit manuscripts from the farm, much as she had done back in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

  But her editorial expression now found its voice mainly in columns under the heading of “Onward and Upward in the Garden.” In these pieces she delighted in seed catalogs, horticultural history, the process of planting, and related backyard matters. Not all readers were fascinated. In Fact magazine, the feisty David Cort, late of the Luce empire—with whom both Katharine and Gibbs had crossed swords over some rejected contributions back in 1930—summed up one of her contributions thusly:

  Mrs. White has a lawn. Lawns are great. George Washington’s lawn, or bowling green, was “just north of the vegetable garden.” (Remember that.) Her father’s handyman. Mumblety-peg, played on lawns. Grass. Lady gardeners. Espaliered fruit trees back of lawns. Firewood. Jane Austen. Berries, bamboos, house-plants. Finally, the marigold must not be made our national flower, because it is Mexican. Up the goldenrod.

  The assumption that anyone might want to pay to read such material was “sheer insolence,” Cort wrote. Nonetheless, Katharine’s disciples remained beholden to her. “I am very sad, for myself and for the magazine, for I think as an editor you are irreplaceable, and probably personally responsible for a giant part of the magazine’s excellence in the last thirty years,” John Updike wrote when she stepped down. “I don’t know much about editors, but you have a freshness of reaction to printed words whose effect on me has always been tonic.”