The Battling Memoirs of The New Yorker
In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth. Before doing so, however, he sat around with the boys in the bar and thrashed out what exactly he meant to create. The same is true, pretty much, of Harold Wallace Ross, who begat The New Yorker. Until the first issue was published, on February 21, 1925, the magazine was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Yet the spirit of Ross, aided by his wife and co-begetter, Jane Grant, had been busy. A prospectus for their forthcoming project came out in the fall of 1924. It kicked off with a sturdy pronouncement: “The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human.” As opposed to what? Avian? Venusian? Microbial? Howlingly lupine?
Clearly, the plan was to spread the word, so that the magazine would be under discussion well before it made an entrance. “It would be so attractive, gay, and informative, that it would be an asset on any library table.” Such were the cheerful hopes of Grant, who seems to have trusted that any future readers would, by definition, have a house with a library. There The New Yorker would lounge, unfurled, beside the whiskey decanter and the smoldering cigar.
Grant’s recollections are part of her memoir, “Ross, The New Yorker and Me,” which was published in 1968. Note that there is no comma—no Oxford comma, that is, beloved of this publication and often scorned elsewhere—before the conjunction. One shudders to think how Ross, whom Grant divorced in 1929, and who died in 1951, would have reacted to so echoing a lack. “Ross, The New Yorker and Me” is just one in a stack of books about him and about his successor, William Shawn, who, as the magazine’s editor from 1952 to 1987, was a match for Ross in the fastidious management of a text. The entire stack could be crowned with the heading “Fanfare for the Comma Men.”
The magazine is now a hundred years old: not a bad score, though it falls short of that racked up by the actress Eva Marie Saint, who reached her own centenary last July. (What’s more, given that The New Yorker played no role in “North by Northwest,” how much do we really have to crow about?) There is no more tempting occasion for the backward glance; what’s remarkable is how many glancers there have already been in the course of decades past. Writers, editors, and residents of varying tenures; the nostalgic, the acidic, and the disturbingly blithe; those who seek to set the record straight and those who prefer it kinked—all have, at some point, leafed through what they recall of their spell at The New Yorker and fed the leafings into a book.
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A list would include, in addition to Grant’s book, James Thurber’s “The Years with Ross,” from 1957; Brendan Gill’s “Here at The New Yorker” (1975); “About The New Yorker and Me” (1979), by E. J. Kahn, Jr., plus its blockbuster sequel, “Year of Change: More About The New Yorker and Me” (1988); “Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker,” by Ved Mehta, which came out in 1998, as did Lillian Ross’s “Here But Not Here”; Renata Adler’s “Gone”(1999); “A Life of Privilege, Mostly” (2003), by Gardner Botsford; Alison Rose’s “Better Than Sane” (2004); and “Let Me Finish” (2006), by Roger Angell—or, as he was credited in his first piece for the magazine, in 1944, Cpl. Roger Angell. (A fine joke, the notion that he was ever of lowly rank.) Janet Groth’s “The Receptionist” (2012) brings up the rear in style.
Mention should also be made of “Avid Reader” (2016), by Robert Gottlieb, who edited The New Yorker from 1987 to 1992. It’s true that, of the book’s nine chapters, only one is devoted to the magazine; far more space is consumed by Gottlieb’s labors in the publishing trade, at Simon & Schuster and at Knopf. Nonetheless, “Avid Reader” is, thus far, the only memoir by anyone who has captained the ship at The New Yorker. Neither Harold Ross nor William Shawn wrote a book about being on board. (The only piece that bore Shawn’s name—or, at least, his initials—in these pages was “The Catastrophe,” a cursory fantasy, of 1936, in which New York is demolished by a meteorite and consigned to oblivion. Make of that what you will.) Even if they had been so inclined, they wouldn’t have had the time, so unflagging was their industry on behalf of the magazine. Who wants to pontificate about the place, let alone reminisce, when there’s an issue to close?
What we do have is a eulogistic fragment of Shawn on Ross, tied like a flag to the end of Brendan Gill’s book. It’s a loyal and fair-minded tribute to a man who, however eccentric, held fast to the cause of fairness, and who took both pleasure and refuge in the solid ground of facts—infinitely more dependable than the shifting scree of ideas. Ross, Shawn reports, “once told me, half seriously, that he didn’t want to know what any writer thought.” A sound principle, I’d say, bettered only by the specific command that Ross gave an assistant: “Never leave me alone with poets.”
Landing at The New Yorker, in 1993, I stepped into unknown territory, with only a couple of writers to show me the way. One was Pauline Kael, whom I was never to meet but into whose volumes of movie reviews I had often delved, in fearful reverence, trying not to jab myself on the prickles. The trouble was that Kael’s work taught you a hell of a lot about motion pictures, and quite a bit about Kael, yet very little about the magazine.
My other guide, “The Years with Ross,” was more instructive, not to say daunting. “A man’s past dropped away, and his life began anew, when he went to work for the New Yorker,” Thurber wrote. Not until then had it occurred to me that West Forty-third Street was a tributary of the River Jordan. Thanks to Thurber, I learned that Peter Arno’s first captioned drawing had appeared in the magazine in the fall of 1925, and that S. J. Perelman and Ogden Nash didn’t show up to the party until five years later. It was also revealed that Ross’s worship of accuracy did not extend to his own spelling. “Significance” came out as “signigifance.” One other surprise: profane though Ross could be in conversation, his cheek was easily mantled with a blush. He refused to visit Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, because “stained glass is damned embarrassing,” and Thurber once confounded him, on his birthday, by sending a dozen red roses to the New Yorker offices. When Ross bridled, Thurber threatened to add a card that read, “In everlasting memory of those Riviera nights.”
To my innocent ears, the whole thing had, and retains, the ring of a classic Thurber fable—true to him, if not to the historical record. Infectious, too; so consistently nonplussed is the author by the basic mechanisms of existence that, if we’re not careful, we come to forget what it feels like to be plussed. What I picked up, however, from murmurs—never shouts—at the magazine was an impression that there was Something Not Right about “The Years with Ross.” Was it warped in its vision of its subject? Awry, perhaps, in not giving credit where it was properly due? I never did plumb the mystery. As late as 2003, it was startling to find Gardner Botsford, in the midst of his otherwise temperate memoir about a lengthy stretch as a New Yorker editor, refer in passing to “Thurber’s terrible book.”
Order might be restored, I reckoned, by switching to a slightly less distant version of events. I opened Gill’s “Here at The New Yorker” and was buoyed to discover that his arrival at the magazine, in 1938, had been as flummoxing as mine. Gremlins had infested the very typewriter with which he was supplied: “When one typed an ‘s,’ it invariably came out a ‘w.’ Thiw led to wingular effectw on my prowe.” More baffling was what he called “the total absence of any camaraderie in the office.” The custom, Gill added, “was to speak as little as possible, and then as dourly as possible. One never touched another person except by accident.” Happily, this was no longer the case in 1993. Not that I skipped down the corridors arm in arm with Joseph Mitchell and Harold Brodkey, but there were no barriers to free speech. The indestructible Gill, still strolling the fairways of the magazine, was more than welcoming to a greenhorn.
