William Shawn

SOURCE: An excerpt from Here at the "New Yorker, "by Brendan Gill, Random House, 1975, pp. 388-95.

[Shown joined the staff of the New Yorker in 1933 as a reporter for the magazine's "Talk of the Town" section and succeeded Harold Ross as editor of the magazine in 1952. In the following excerpt, he discusses Ross's editorship of the magazine.]

Harold Ross presented himself to the world as a raucous, clumsy, primitive, somewhat comic figure. He said extremely funny things spontaneously and intentionally, and in his conversation and in his physical bearing he was funny unintentionally, or almost unintentionally, as well. He lent himself to anecdote. Because of this, and because his personal qualities were large in scale and included a formidable charm and magnetism, the serious and inspired work that he did as an editor tended at times to be lost sight of. Occasionally, when contemporaries of Ross talked about the old days on The New Yorker, one got the impression that he did very little to create it or run it—that in spite of his inadequacies, and somehow over his protest, a number of other people did what was necessary to put out the magazine each week. The implication was that Ross spent much of his time getting in the way of the talented people who worked for him. None of this, of course, is true. Ross founded The New Yorker, but he did far more. He gave it its character, he shaped it, he guided it through its formative period, he determined its basic policies and principles, and he edited it in its every detail for twenty-seven years. Some of the magazine's innovations—the characteristic literate, observant, very particularized, light-handed, timely writing that was to revolutionize the American magazine article; the Profile, the 'Talk of the Town' story, the 'letter' from abroad, all three in form and intention unlike anything that had gone before; the cartoon with the one-line caption—were there from the beginning. So was the then novel orientation toward New York City.

Of all the people Ross might have gathered around him, he selected those who had the talent, the temperament, and the outlook that were right for The New Yorker. They gravitated to The New Yorker for a reason, and they remained for a reason. Whatever gaps there were in Ross's own taste and understanding and appreciation he tried to compensate for through other editors. Once he had found his way, by trial and error, to a number of editors who supplied him with what he knew was missing in him, he came to trust them utterly. He would sometimes say of a piece of writing, 'This is over my head,' by which he meant that it was slightly beyond the normal boundaries of his taste; but he trusted the judgment of the other editors, and, besides, it wasn't over his head. With a few exceptions, Ross was not adept at working directly with writers and artists. From a distance, he greatly admired them, and he was sympathetic to their professional and personal problems; in their presence, he was ill-at-ease, and could be awkward, tactless, or confusing. But he swiftly discovered, or developed, a remarkable group of editors which included Katharine White, Wolcott Gibbs, William Maxwell, Gus Lobrano, and James Geraghty. By nature strikingly unsystematic, Ross dreamed of systems that would take care of virtually everything: a system that would serve as the magazine's memory; a system that would anticipate as many 'operational contingencies' as possible; a system that would keep track of the flow of proofs and memoranda; a system that would coordinate what the various members of the staff were doing; a system that could jump into the breach and turn out an issue by itself if necessary. He found an editor to design systems and watch over them. Ross wanted the magazine to be accurate. What he had in mind, however, was not approximate, or human, accuracy; it was absolute accuracy. Therefore, he established the first magazine checking department, the purpose of which was to back up the writers by checking every checkable fact that went into print, and he placed at its head an erudite editor equipped to take accuracy as far as it could go. Ross knew, roughly, what he wanted the magazine to look like, but he had no idea of how to go about making it look that way. His knowledge of typography and layout was sketchy. Nevertheless, within months he found the one make-up editor in the world, the legendary Carmine Peppe, who could provide him with the chaste and lovely pages that would properly set off whatever we published—and to this day the pages are Peppe's pages. Ross had no aptitude for keeping an organization running smoothly and in a relatively happy state, but he found people who could help him do that, too. He presided over it all—justly, nervously, and, for the most part, benevolently.

Every issue of The New Yorker represented hundreds of editorial choices, hundreds of decisions; Ross chose, and Ross decided. Somebody had to say what went into the magazine and what stayed out; Ross was the one who said it. He read proofs of everything that went into the magazine, and respectfully 'queried' anything he thought was questionable; his queries, in the course of time, influenced writers and other editors, set technical and literary standards, established a canon of taste, and laid the basis for a tradition of good writing which still flourishes. It was not someone else who led the magazine to avoid whatever was shoddy, shabby, cynical, petty, sensational, gossipy, exploitative, opportunistic, coarse, pedestrian, or banal; it was Ross.

Ross was an enormously intelligent man who worked almost entirely by instinct and intuition. He was not naturally analytical in his approach to a piece of writing or to a drawing. If he had a favorable response to something, or an unfavorable one, he felt no need to know why. If he laughed at a cartoon, that was enough for him; that meant it was funny, and he didn't think that his reaction or the humor itself should be, or could be, analyzed. He was unintellectual, at times even anti-intellectual. He once told me, half seriously, that he didn't want to know what any writer thought. And in a way he didn't. He was not at home with ideas, theory, speculation—abstract thought of any kind. He liked what he regarded as pure information. His working assumption, at least, was that there was such a thing as objective reporting. He wanted to know about events; he did not want to know what a writer's subjective response to the events was. It was hard for him to face the rumored possibility that a writer could approach a journalistic story with preconceptions, with a bias, with a point of view; and he appeared to hope that if these impurities were present, the writer would transcend them. At a minimum, he expected that the writer's point of view would not be expressed explicitly but would be implicit in the facts. Because Ross was suspicious of 'thinking,' the magazine that he founded and edited did not publish either essays or what are called articles of opinion. It was, fundamentally, a magazine of reporting, humor, fiction, and criticism. His feeling for reporting, humor, and criticism was sure and confident; his feeling for fiction was less so, and his feeling for poetry still less, and in these spheres he therefore relied rather more on the judgment of others. He shied away from the words 'art' and 'literature.' For many years, the word 'literary,' applied to some piece of writing—including fiction—was a house pejorative. But Ross enjoyed and was stirred by, valued and encouraged much that was in fact literary.

Ross was an editor who doted on immaculate writing and on stylish writing, which is to say writing that had style. He had a natural taste for simple, direct, colloquial writing, but he never failed to take delight in good writing of any sort, even writing that was elaborate or exquisite. He was equally open-minded in the field of comic art. He may have had his preferences in styles, but he was receptive to as many styles as there were talented and original comic artists. He never talked aesthetics—again, he would have shunned the word—but he was highly sensitive to graphic art. And, though he would have been embarrassed to admit it, he recognized beauty when it appeared. It was certainly not the least of Ross's talents that he was able to see talent in writers and artists before it was plainly visible to everyone. Also, he understood that talent developed more slowly in some than in others, and he was willing to wait. He gradually learned that the primary function of the magazine's editors, including him, was to create a structure and an atmosphere—a little world apart from the world—within which the writers and artists could fulfill themselves. The entire editorial staff was there, Ross realized, to serve the writers and artists, and then to bring their work to the reader in an appropriate setting.

Every publication must consider itself to be interested in the high quality of the work it publishes, but in Ross, I think, this interest ran especially deep. Not only was he determined to publish the best writers and artists he could find; once he had found them, he did everything possible to stimulate and encourage them to do the best work they were capable of. By being hospitable to the best, and expecting the best, he often received the best. Something else contributed to the high quality of the work published in The New Yorker. Unlike some editors, Ross was not diverted by external considerations. He did not care about 'names' or reputations; he published material he thought had merit, no matter who had done it. If a writer had a name, or acquired one, that did not rule him out, but it did not rule him in, either; he was treated like anyone else. If his work was seen to have merit and to be right for The New Yorker, it was accepted; if not, it was rejected. Unknown writers and artists were as welcome as known writers and artists; it was the quality of the work that mattered. Also, Ross did not have commercial considerations on his mind. He did not worry about whether what we published attracted advertisers or drove them off. Nor did he concern himself with building a large circulation. He concentrated on the quality of the magazine, and let the circulation find its own level. He did not think of how many people might like what we published. And he was indifferent to fashion. We published what pleased us, and we ignored the question of whether or not it was fashionable.

I have never been sure just what Ross really thought about facts. All I know is that he loved them. They were an end in themselves; they were self-justifying. I doubt whether he gave any thought to why it was good to gather facts and present them in journalistic form; he simply took it for granted that that was worth doing. As a young editor working for Ross, I never questioned the usefulness of facts. It was only in later years that I realized that facts in themselves might be meaningless or worthless, or might need defending. Ross was not tormented by questions of this kind. Scores of articles were written for The New Yorker because he himself was curious about something; he wanted to find out about a particular situation or person or event. He wanted the magazine to report on something not because he thought the public—or some hypothetical reader—wanted to know about it, or ought to know about it, but because he wanted to know. The impulse was not professional, it was personal. He used to say, 'We don't cover the news; we parallel the news.' But he had marvellous news judgment, and he knew what news to parallel. He had a vast, though not indiscriminate, curiosity, and it was that curiosity which set the magazine on the course it is still following. His appetite for facts was not unlimited, but it was large, and perhaps this explains why the magazine's reporting became as thorough as it did—for among the new standards he set were standards of thoroughness. Facts steadied him and comforted him. Facts also amused him. They didn't need to be funny facts—just facts. A series of factual statements set down with complete gravity could make him laugh because they took him by surprise or amazed him in some inconsequential way. Above all, facts—or some facts—were interesting to him. What was interesting to Ross, I always thought, really was interesting. What was dull to Ross really was dull. As far as I was concerned, Ross was the final authority on facts. Ross was also the final authority on humor. His element was humor. He generated it, he sought it out, he elicited it, he needed it, and he lived by it. If he thought something was funny, it was funny.

Ross was devoted to clarity and stood in awe of grammar. Poets, he recognized—with some displeasure—had to be ambiguous and obscure at times, but he saw no excuse for ambiguity or obscurity in prose. He wanted every sentence of prose in the magazine to be intelligible, and he struggled hard to achieve that aim. The words 'fuzzy,' 'cloudy,' and simply 'unclear' turned up often in his queries. He also wanted impeccable grammar. This seeming fanaticism about clarity and grammar, I think, was a form of courtesy to the reader. He didn't want the reader to be stumbling around in the murk, or to have to take time to decipher what someone was trying to say, or to be distracted from what was being said by the faulty mechanics of how it was said. 'We don't print riddles,' he often remarked. And we don't. (Being a non-formulator, he would not have thought of it this way, but his high standards of accuracy were a token of his more important high standards of truthfulness. In the same way, his high standards of grammar were a token of his more important high standards of journalistic and literary content, and of style.) In a refinement of his effort to attain total clarity, Ross tried to do away with indirection in writing—particularly in factual writing. He did not want facts to come in one moment later than they should. He wanted the reader to know everything he should know at each step of the way, and not be taken unawares by information he should have had at an earlier point. He did not want a writer to say that a character took off his hat unless it had been established that the character was wearing a hat. I interpret this avoidance of indirection, too, as a form of courtesy. Moreover, he did not want a writer to raise questions of any sort in the reader's mind (synonymous with his own mind) without answering them—if possible, immediately: he did not want the reader to be, as he said, 'tantalized.' (He said, 'A writer should never arouse curiosity without satisfying it'—and he was a man whose curiosity was easily aroused.) Finally, Ross asked for sense. He wanted everything in the magazine to make sense, to be rigorously logical. To assist him in his pursuit of clarity, grammar, and sense, he assembled a group of gifted editors who specialized in those matters.

Ross's ability to detect falseness of any sort and in any form was one of his important attributes as an editor. He was naturally drawn to what was genuine, authentic, real, true. His eye and his ear—and another sense or two that he peculiarly possessed—were affronted by a word, a phrase, a sentence, a thought, a bit of information, a line of dialogue, a short story, a piece of reporting, that was not the real thing, that was in one way or another specious, spurious, meretricious, dishonest. Although the branch of writing he knew best was journalism, his senses worked just as reliably with fiction. Even when a piece of writing was too rarefied for his taste, or outside the normal range of his interests or knowledge, or—in extreme cases—basically incomprehensible to him, he could tell whether it was the real thing or counterfeit. He could spot any kind of pretension or affectation instantly. Conversely, he looked for truth in a piece of fiction, a reporting piece, a cartoon, and he knew just what it was when he saw it. Without, I'm sure, realizing it, he was a connoisseur of authenticity.

Of Ross's own qualities, perhaps the most important was his honesty. The idea of distorting information, of tampering with facts, of saying something that you knew was incorrect or that you didn't mean, repelled him. From time to time, he referred to 'journalistic integrity,' by which he meant many things, some of which he could identify and some of which he could not. In any event, journalistic integrity was a religious matter for him. When, once, he said that The New Yorker was not a magazine but a cause—and Ross was a man who fled from 'causes'—he was speaking, in a sense, of integrity. Ross was no moral philosopher, and his social conscience was shaky, and he knew nothing whatever about politics, but he had a profound ethical sense when it came to journalism. The truthfulness and accuracy were part of it. The aversion to falseness was part. But there was something more. He held to some resolve—scarcely ever hinted at in words—never to publish anything, never to have something written, for a hidden reason: to promote somebody or something, to pander to somebody, to build somebody up or tear somebody down, to indulge a personal friendship or animosity, or to propagandize. There were no ulterior motives, no hidden purposes, however worthy; no concealed explanations. Everything that was published in The New Yorker was precisely what it purported to be, was published for its own sake. In addition, Ross was fair-minded, and he saw to it that the magazine was fair-minded. That meant being fair to every person we wrote about, and also being fair to the facts, whatever they were. These aims were seldom articulated. Ross was a secret idealist. He would have been unable to formulate his journalistic principles, but the principles were there, in his bones.

As a managing editor working for Ross, I always felt that he had some vision—never defined, never described, never mentioned—of what he thought a magazine should be, what he wanted The New Yorker to be, and I was trying to give it to him. I imagine that it was much the same for several other editors. If those of us now who are loosely bound together in this common enterprise manage every once in a long while to bring out an entire issue that might be called a work of art, it is because Ross, who thought he scorned works of art, prepared the way. In the early days, a small company of writers, artists, and editors—E. B. White, James Thurber, Peter Arno, and Katharine White among them—did more to make the magazine what it is than can be measured. Over the years, many other people contributed heroically to the mixture. But at the source, abounding in promise, was Ross.

Charles S. Holmes

SOURCE: "The New Yorker: Early Days," in The Clocks of Columbus: The Literary Career of James Thurber, Atheneum, 1972, pp. 90-112.

[Holmes was an American critic and educator. In the following excerpt, he discusses James Thurber's early years at the New Yorker.]

Joining The New Yorker in March of 1927 was the turning point in [James] Thurber's career, and perhaps in that of the magazine as well. He was thirty-two years old (older than most of the New Yorker staffers), a frustrated writer and wandering journalist who had not yet found himself or a place where he could do what he wanted to do. The magazine was in the process of developing from a doubtful experiment into an established reality, and Thurber brought to it the versatility and the kind of comic talent it was looking for. The New Yorker gave him the chance he needed to practice his craft as a humorist, and more important, it brought him into close association with two men who had a considerable influence on the shaping of his style at this critical moment in his development—Harold Ross and E. B. White.

In 1927 the magazine was moving into the black financially, and its special formula of original cartoons, superior reporting, and a miscellany of light essays and stories was beginning to take shape. E. B. White's "Notes and Comment" led off the magazine, and set the tone of intelligent observation and civilized prose which has been its hallmark ever since. "The Talk of the Town" (at that time done by Russel Crouse) followed, with its verbal snapshots of the New York scene; such soon-to-be-famous features as "A Reporter at Large" (chiefly the work of Morris Markey, who was to become one of Thurber's close friends), "The Wayward Press" (in those davs done by Robert Benchley), and the profiles of interesting contemporary people were beginning to establish themselves; and, perhaps the most original feature of all, the remarkable cartoons by such artists as Helen Hokinson, Peter Arno, Otto Soglow, and Garrett Price were giving the struggling new magazine a special luster.

The first two years of The New Yorker had been shaky, and few of Harold Ross's friends had given it much chance to survive. It first appeared on February 22, 1925, an unimpressive little magazine of thirty-six pages and very little advertising. The best thing about it was Rea Irvin's cover, showing the top-hatted nineteenth-century dandy inspecting a butterfly through a monocle. The public response was apathetic. Circulation dropped from an opening issue of 15,000 copies to a low of 2700 in August, and the magazine was losing $5000 a week. As Thurber put it in The Years with Ross, "The New Yorker was the outstanding flop of 1925, a year of notable successes in literature, music, and entertainment." Ross was driven to extraordinary measures to keep the magazine afloat. On one occasion, he tried to get new money by entering a poker game with some of the high rollers of the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, a little circle within the Algonquin circle, and managed to lose $29,000. He was saved at the last moment when Raoul Fleischmann, the original angel of The New Yorker, and Hawley Truax, who managed its business affairs for many years, went out and raised enough money to give the magazine a fresh start. Ross's rates were very low at first, and he sometimes had to pay his writers in stock rather than cash. The slenderness of the magazine's resources in the early days is neatly summed up in the anecdote in which Ross, meeting Dorothy Parker somewhere, asked her why she hadn't been in the office the day before to do a piece she had promised him, and she is reported to have replied, "Because someone was using the pencil."

Harold Ross himself seemed to have few of the qualifications for launching a magazine designed to appeal to a well-to-do New York audience. He had grown up in Colorado and Washington and had quit school early to follow the life of an itinerant newspaperman. He got his first newspaper job (on the Salt Lake City Tribune) when he was fourteen. In the early years of World War I he knocked around from city to city and from paper to paper, developing the fierce independence and the hardboiled pragmatism of the old-time reporter. During the war, he was on the editorial staff of the Stars and Stripes in Paris, where two of his colleagues were Captain Franklin P. Adams and Corporal Alexander Woollcott. After the war, he held a variety of editorial jobs, one on the American Legion Magazine and another (his last before starting The New Yorker) on Judge, the old family humor magazine.

Ross was self-educated, and his intellectual and aesthetic tastes were simple. Herbert Spencer was his philosopher, and the only writers he really liked were the manly ones, like Conrad, Twain, and 0. Henry. He knew nothing of modern fiction and never did get anything out of music, painting, or poetry. (He once instructed an assistant, "Never leave me alone with poets.") In experience, character, and manner he was the Western type: physically he was rawboned, his face was craggy, his hair stiff and unruly; his manner was casual and informal (meeting Sherwood Anderson for the first time, he said, "Hi, Anderson," and launched into a lecture on English usage, one of his favorite subjects).

Yet for some obscure reason, this ex-newspaperman from Salt Lake City was determined to put out a magazine which would appeal to a wealthy and sophisticated New York audience. His experience with Judge had convinced him that the old two-line He-She joke had had its day, and that no humor magazine could survive the attempt to reach a national middle-class family audience. His new magazine would be aggressively parochial. In the "Prospectus" which he drew up to attract backers, he announced that it would be "a reflection of metropolitan life." It would not be "edited for the old lady in Dubuque," he added, somewhat gratuitously. Its tone would be marked by "gaiety, wit and satire," and it expected to be "distinguished for its illustrations." This last turned out to be Ross's most accurate prediction, since he was lucky enough to get Rea Irvin to act as art director from the very beginning.

In spite of its low rates and uncertain future, The New Yorker attracted outstanding contributors from the beginning, precisely because it was new, open to experiment, not yet committed to a formula, and because Ross made it clear that he was looking for excellence. Early issues of the magazine carried pieces by Ernest Hemingway (a parody of Frank Harris's My Life and Loves), John O'Hara (a satiric look at the world of Ivy League alumni), and Elmer Rice (a series of reminiscent essays on his New York childhood), and its cartoons were making it the center of American comic art. By 1929 there was a solid ballast of expensive advertisements, and there was little doubt that The New Yorker stood alone as the magazine for the upper-middle-brow, upper-middle-income audience.

Ross had his limitations and eccentricities, but he was a great editor. He was a perfectionist with a special passion for clarity and accuracy. He had "an almost intuitive perception of what was wrong with something," Thurber recalled, and his marginal comments and opinion sheets were classics of meticulous editing—badgering, questioning, prodding, suggesting, until, as Thurber put it, you knew your story and yourself better than you had before. His famous questions, "Who he?," "What mean?," and such notations as "unclear" and "cliche" show his dedication to the ideals of precision and accuracy in style. He surrounded himself with dictionaries, especially Fowler's Modern English Usage and the Oxford English Dictionary, which he read, says Thurber, "the way other men read fiction." Sometimes his obsession with detail led him into ludicrous blind alleys. Coming across an allusion in a piece by S. J. Perelman to "the woman taken in adultery," he queried, "'What woman? Hasn't been previously mentioned.'"

In the weekly art conferences where the cartoons and covers were discussed and selected, he showed the same concern for clarity and accuracy. One story has it that when a cartoon was submitted showing two elephants looking at their baby, with the caption, "It's about time to tell Junior the facts of life," Ross asked, "'Which elephant is talking?'" On another occasion, when a drawing of a Model T delivery truck driving along a dusty country road was up for discussion, Ross turned to his assistant and said, "'Take this down, Miss Terry.… Better dust.'" The famous checking department of The New Yorker was simply an extension of Ross's passion for accuracy. His great dream was to get out a magazine free from all taint of error, and he used to say that despite the telephone company's careful checking, it had never yet got out a directory with fewer than three mistakes.

The ordeal of submitting copy to Ross's demanding examination was a valuable experience for Thurber, and he acknowledged the debt time and again. Looking back at the nature of Ross's influence from the vantage point of 1955, he told George Plimpton and Max Steele that while Ross was not the man to develop a writer, his passion for clarity was a healthy influence on all those who wrote for the magazine. "He was a purist and a perfectionist and it had a tremendous effect on all of us: it kept us from getting sloppy," he said. His admiration was not uncritical, however, and in later years he became increasingly uneasy about Ross's fussy precisionism, worrying in particular about its possibly damaging effects on writers with highly original styles like John McNulty. Ross's addiction to the comma as the key to clarity was always a source of contention, and he was capable of insisting that the phrase "the red, white, and blue" be punctuated in this way, while Thurber countered that it was better without any commas at all. Once, when he had had all he could take, Thurber sent Ross a stanza from Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" punctuated according to Ross:

She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.

Ross never set down his ideals of style in any systematic fashion, but implicit in all his editing was a demand for accurate reporting, stylistic clarity, and a casual, offhand manner. He set great store by the casual style as the proper trademark of the magazine as a whole. Hence the title of his departments—"Notes and Comment," "Profile," "A Reporter at Large," and so on. He liked to refer to the short pieces of fiction and humor featured by the magazine as "casuals." He wanted to avoid anything labored, studied, or arty, and much of his admiration for White and Thurber was based on the easy informality of their prose.

One of the chief reasons for Ross's astonishing success as an editor was his ability to surround himself with talent. Among those on the New Yorker staff in the late Twenties and early Thirties were Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Russel Crouse, Alexander Woollcott, Frank Sullivan, St. Clair McKelway, Ogden Nash, Clifton Fadiman, Clarence Day, and Robert M. Coates; and the list of those who were frequent contributors would include S. J. Perelman, Marc Connelly, Ring Lardner, Sally Benson, John O'Hara, Kay Boyle, John Collier, and Morris Bishop.

Certain people were particularly important in the shaping of the magazine in the early days. In addition to White and Thurber, there were Katharine Angell, Ralph Ingersoll, and Wolcott Gibbs. Katharine Angell (later Mrs. E. B. White) was the literary editor. She joined the magazine six months after it started, and Ross depended on her in all matters involving taste and culture. A staffer of those days said, "She had a sure, cold sense of what was good, what was bad, what was in poor taste. She balanced Ross." Ingersoll was with the magazine from 1925 until 1930, when he quit to become an editor of Fortune. Thurber recalls that it was he who created the formula for "The Talk of the Town" and who took care of the hundreds of managerial details necessary to keep the department going. "Without his help and direction … I could never have got "Talk of the Town' off the ground," he said.

Wolcott Gibbs was one of the three men Ross considered indispensable—the other two were, of course, White and Thurber. "If you and White and Gibbs ever left this magazine, I would leave too," Ross once told Thurber. Gibbs joined the magazine in 1927, just a few months after Thurber did, and like White and Thurber, he brought to it a remarkably versatile talent. He substituted for White on "Notes and Comment," he did some of The New Yorker's most famous profiles (those on Henry Luce and Alexander Woollcott are masterpieces of witty malice), he wrote short stories and superb parodies ("Death in the Rumble Seat" is surely one of the best of Hemingway parodies), and he conducted the theater and occasionally the movie reviews, where his wittily expressed disapproval of practically everything made him the delight and despair of readers across the land. "'Maybe he doesn't like anything,'" Ross once said to Thurber when they were discussing an article in Harper's complaining about Gibbs's crotchets as a reviewer, "'but he can do everything.'"

In addition to his other talents, he was, in Thurber's words, "the best copy editor The New Yorker ever had." In 1935 or 1936 he sent Ross a memo entitled "Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles," a distillation of the ideals of style which guided the magazine for many years. Thurber reprinted it in The Years with Ross. The emphasis in the memo is on a clean, functional, informal style, and it was just these standards which Thurber encountered when he first joined the magazine, at a time in his career when he was ready to give up journalese and find a voice of his own. Association with Ross and the early New Yorker writers was undoubtedly important in shaping Thurber's style, but with one notable exception, the influence was one of generally shared assumptions about writing rather than of the clearly demonstrable effect of one man on another. The exception was E. B. White, whose influence on his artistic development Thurber often and generously acknowledged.

White had been on the magazine less than a year when Thurber joined the staff. He was a graduate of Cornell, where he had edited the university paper, and he had tried his hand at newspapering in Seattle, where he found that feature-writing suited him better than conventional reporting. He came to New York in 1923, hoping to make his way as a writer, and went to work for an advertising agency. His literary models were the great columnists of the day—Don Marquis, F. P. A., and Heywood Broun—and he spent his spare time writing verse and short prose sketches. He began to sell to The New Yorker in 1925, and late in 1926 Katharine Angell hired him at a salary of $30 a week.

He was a sharp observer of the human and natural scene, and he liked to wander the streets of New York or to sit in Grand Central Station, watching the people. He was shy and reflective by nature, and he had always wanted to be a poet. The world he liked best was the rural village world of barns and horses and fields and trees. He carried a copy of Walden with him wherever he went. He had a natural easy prose style which could report the surface as well as suggest expansions of meaning, and this is probably what Marc Connelly meant when he said appreciatively of White that he "brought the steel and music to the magazine." His versatility was exactly what Ross needed in the early days, and he made The New Yorker famous for two of its departments—the "newsbreaks," those typographical garbles which unintentionally enliven the columns of many a newspaper, and the "Notes and Comment" page which opened the magazine.

The newsbreaks show White's talent as a professional humorist. They are, in general, unexpected explosions of the absurd in the midst of the commonplace, and his sure taste in selecting the best of these, and his comic inventiveness in creating the categories under which they were to appear—"Raised Eyebrows Department," "Neatest Trick of the Week," and "How's That Again?"—raised a standard feature of the humor magazine (both Punch and Judge collected newsbreaks) to the level of comic art.

Thurber's favorite among the thousands selected by White was this:

The Departure of Clara Adams

[From the Burbank (Cal.) Post]

Among the first to enter was Mrs. Clara Adams of Tannersville, Pa., lone woman passenger. Slowly her nose was turned around to face in a southwesterly direction, and away from the hangar doors. Then, like some strange beast, she crawled along the grass.

But it was the White of "Notes and Comment" that Thurber had in mind when he said that he "learned about writing from Andy White." In this weekly page of deceptively simple paragraphs and essays, White exercised his remarkable talent as observer and critic of the contemporary scene as well as poet and amateur philosopher. His manner was casual, offhand, and lightly ironic. His effects were always underplayed. What he did best was to take one of the small facts of everyday life and give it a sudden surprising extension of meaning. A good example of his material and method is the little essay "Accomplishment," which appeared in "Notes and Comment" April 20, 1929. It is a defense of jaywalking as one of the last possible expressions of individualism in an over-organized society. White develops the theme in a series of mock-heroic comparisons which invest the unthinking behavior of twentieth-century pedestrians with surprising significance.

We are a people of dangerous intent, and courage. The superannuated messenger, bundle under arm, faces death with a balance, a rhythm, a sense of time and motion that would make an American Indian walking the forests seem clumsy. Every citizen is capable of making crossings where the slightest error of judgment or faulty timing would crush him out. And for all his artistry, there is a fine simplicity in his performance, a lack of ostentation. He survives because he is fit. This is our security, our protection against invasion by the Visigoths. Strong men may come down, but they will never be able to cross our vehicular boundaries; hiding behind a phalanx of Checker cabs we will meet the enemy and they will be ours.

Thurber and White shared a closet-sized office for several years and found themselves in sympathy from the beginning. White was shy at first, and when Thurber suggested that they go out to lunch together one day, White demurred, saying, "I always eat alone." Soon, however, they were lunching together, drinking together, going to the fights at Madison Square Garden and to ball games together, and establishing a personal and creative rapport which was to last until the end of Thurber's life. After 1937, when White moved to Maine, where he stayed until 1943, they saw less of each other, but they sustained their friendship in a warm and lively correspondence which continued until the late 1950's. Their letters are full of domestic anecdotes, private jokes, and news of friends, as well as exchanges of opinion on public affairs, discussions of current literary projects, and mutual encouragement and appreciation. In their relationship, White was the older brother. Thurber always felt that it was White who had really discovered his talent; his first book was done in collaboration with White, it was White who insisted that The New Yorker use his drawings, and it was White's introduction to The Owl in the Attic which launched Thurber as a literary personality. When Thurber needed literary advice or help, it was White he turned to, as he did in 1943 with Many Moons and in 1950 with The Thirteen Clocks. Writing for the Saturday Review of Literature in 1938, Thurber called White "the most valuable person on the magazine," and spoke of his "silver and crystal sentences which had a ring like the ring of no one else's sentences in the world."

Thurber acknowledged few influences on his work. Among living authors he usually named only two—Robert 0. Ryder and White. Ross and Gibbs were influences, to be sure, but in their editorial capacities rather than as creative examples. The influence of White was direct and personal. In a 1956 letter he pays tribute to White and gives a curious account of the state of his own writing at the time he joined The New Yorker:

I can see by "Credos and Curios" that I matured slowly. Until I learned discipline in writing from studying Andy White's stuff, I was a careless, nervous, headlong writer, trailing the phrases and rhythms of Henry James, Hergesheimer, Henley, and my favorite English literature teacher at Ohio State, Joe Taylor.

I would use "in fine," "as who should say," and the like.… The precision and clarity of White's writing helped me a lot, slowed me down from the dog-trot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet. I rewrite most things five to ten or more times.

Thurber's debt to White was very real, but nowhere in his early New Yorker pieces is there badness of the kind he accuses himself of here. The charge applies to the self-indulgence of the Chicago Tribune Riviera edition feature story of the Wills-Lenglen tennis match, written early in 1926, but he had purged himself of this sort of thing before he began to write for The New Yorker in 1927. His generous statements of indebtedness (made many years after the fact) should not be taken too literally, but as affectionate hyperboles, speaking the truth, but overstating it for dramatic effect. What they really mean is that Thurber felt himself to be at a turning point when he joined The New Yorker, and that White stood out as a model of the kind of style he was developing on his own. White gave Thurber confidence in what he was already trying to do, and confirmed him in the direction he wanted to go. Specifically, he demonstrated to Thurber the artistic values of simplicity and understatement.…

During Thurber's first two years on the magazine, Ross refused to pay him extra for his contributions to the literary department, on the grounds that not getting paid for writing would make him concentrate better on his editorial duties. But Thurber turned out a steady stream of short pieces notwithstanding, and finally Ross relented and began to pay him the regular rates. Most of this work between 1927 and 1929 is best described by that over-used term, "transitional." He stayed within the established patterns of American literary humor with which he had been experimenting since college days—the paragraph, the anecdote of personal experience (usually dealing with the trivial misadventures of everyday life), the comic essay (a flexible form adaptable to a great range of subjects and modes), the parody, and light verse. Looming up behind most of these forms was the inescapable figure of Robert Benchley.

In a review of a posthumous collection of Benchley's work, Thurber called him "the humorists' humorist." This was not mere conventional praise of a departed colleague, for it was Benchley, more than anyone else, who gave definitive shape to the forms and subject matter of American literary humor in the 1920's and early'30's. Like Stephen Leacock, to whom he always acknowledged his debt, he saw the great comic subject of modern life as the predicament of the ordinary man confronted by a complex technological-business society which he neither understands nor approves, and by a host of minor domestic problems which he can never quite handle. Benchley's protagonist is usually the well-meaning bumbler, either as harassed father and husband or as slightly stuffy businessman, politician, or scientist. Thurber took over this figure and reshaped it to express his own temperament and personality, making it into a darker, more neurotic and complex character than Benchley's.

Benchley's art is essentially the art of parody, whether his subject is the style and form of a novelist or the language and values of popular culture. His literary parodies are humor and criticism of a high order. Who can ever feel quite the same about Dreiser after reading "Compiling an American Tragedy"? Thurber's own favorite was the parody of Galsworthy called "The Blue Sleeve Garter," and he once said in a letter, "I would rather have Benchley's 'The Blue Sleeve Garter' and Cyril Connolly's parody of Huxley than all the junk written between Washington Irving and the end of the Civil War." More than once he said that he would rather have Benchley's praise than anyone else's, and he summed up his view of Benchley as a force felt by a whole generation of writers of humor in his review of Chips Off the Old Benchley, in 1949:

Benchley got off to a fast start ahead of all of us on the New Yorker, and our problem was the avoidance of imitation. He had written about practically everything, and his comic devices were easy to fall into. White once showed me something he'd written and asked anxiously, "Did Benchley say that?" In a 1933 preface I said that we were all afraid that whatever we had engaged on had probably been done better by Robert Benchley in 1924.

Thurber's talent took its own shape, and his mature work is very different from Benchley's, but the lines it followed during its early development were the lines laid down by Benchley.

One of the first pieces Thurber sold to the magazine, an ironic fable entitled "News of the Day" (April 2, 1927). recalls Benchley's satiric treatment of popular sentimental attitudes. It is more flippant and superficial than Thurber's later fables, but one can see in this early piece the preparations for such classic reversals of popular folklore as "The Little Girl and the Wolf," with its moral, "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be." The brief anecdote tells the sad tale of little Marjorie Morrison, aged eleven, whose father has gone to Canada with a stenographer who subsequently murdered him, and whose mother has just killed her lover by choking him with an oil mop. A kindly adult world shields her from the ugly facts, but one day little Marjorie disappears and everyone is sure that she has learned the truth and killed herself.

And then along about five P.M. the next day little Marjorie came back to her aunt's house in the Bronx.

"My precious!" cried her happy aunt, "where has Aunty's precious been?"

"I'm booked solid for twenty-six weeks in vaudeville at five grand a month," said little Marjorie.

He followed the Benchley model in several anecdotes of personal misadventure, like "Camera vs St. Bernard" (June 7, 1928), dealing with the tribulations of the American tourist trying to get a camera repaired in Paris, and he did a number of parodies as well. Most of them are best forgotten, but one, a parody of Hemingway entitled "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (December 24, 1927), gives promise of better things to come. It is a re-telling of "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" in the Hemingway manner, and the comic incongruity between subject and style is effectively developed.

I went to the chimney and looked up. I saw him get into his sleigh. He whistled at his team and the team flew away. The team flew as lightly as thistledown. The driver called out, "Merry Christmas and good night." I went back to bed.

"What was it?" asked Mamma. "Saint Nicholas?" She smiled.

"Yeah," I said.

She sighed and turned in the bed.

"I saw him," I said.

"Sure."

"I did see him."

"Sure you saw him." She turned farther toward the wall.

In addition to the Benchley-style anecdotes and parodies, Thurber did a number of short stories and a rather unsuccessful profile of Myron T. Herrick in his first two years on the magazine. The profile was a new form, original with The New Yorker, and it was just in the process of development when Thurber tried his first one. The traditional journalistic biographical piece was almost always a success story with strong moralistic and inspirational overtones, but the New Yorker writers, after some early backing and filling, worked out the detached, ironic, somewhat skeptical view of the subject which has since become a trademark of the magazine.

He had already written a feature story on Herrick for the Kansas City Star Magazine in 1925, and the difference between the two pieces suggests the kind of influence The New Yorker had on Thurber as a writer. "The Evolution of an Ambassador" is a conventional journalistic feature article, praising the good work, personal charm and democratic instincts of an admirable American abroad. To the French, he will always be a hero for his famous response to those who urged him to leave Paris for a safer place in 1914: "There are times when a dead ambassador is of greater service than a live one." "Master of Ceremonies," Thurber's profile of Herrick in The New Yorker (July 21, 1928), takes a rather ironic view of Herrick's success story, balancing the record of his achievements against the implication that his position owed more to his nice smile and his cultivation of the right people than to his intellectual or political talents. The profile emphasizes Herrick's magnetism and his talent for the theatrical, citing as an example the famous quotation about the dead ambassador. This time, Thurber wickedly adds a detail absent from his earlier account: "Embassy men smile when you ask them if Herrick really said that. But the French will doubtless carve it some day on a monument to him."

Many of these early New Yorker pieces show Thurber staking out his own territory, assimilating the examples of Benchley and White, but shaping them to his own artistic purposes. "The Thin Red Leash" (August 13, 1927) is his version of the anecdote of humiliating experience, and he handles it in the way of White rather than in the way of Benchley. Benchley almost always employed the persona of the bumbler or the victim, and his anecdotes were usually heightened and stylized for strong comic effect. Thurber did many pieces in the Benchley manner throughout his career, but his own way was to draw more directly on autobiographical experience, to appear as himself, more or less, rather than to use a persona, to manipulate the material as little as possible, letting it assume a natural form, following White here, but unlike White, to treat it more fictionally than essayistically; that is to say, to treat it as a specific dramatic occasion rather than to generalize upon it.…

Thurber worked hard to develop his skills in the humorous essay and the fictional sketch, but between 1927 and 1935, when Russell Maloney took over, he did most of his writing for "The Talk of the Town." They were eight years of wandering the city and writing about its places and people. "I wrote about a million words for Talk in my time," he once recalled. Ross attached particular importance to this department and to White's "Notes and Comment" page which preceded it, because it was here that the tone of informal conversation which was his ideal for the magazine as a whole was to be established. In the early days there were weekly "Talk" conferences, attended by Katharine Angell, White, Ingersoll, and Thurber, during which Ross worried over the style and content of the department with the full force of his neurotic perfectionism. "Talk" was a group enterprise, depending on the reportorial energies and imaginations of a number of different people. Ralph Ingersoll and Bernard A. Bergman were the chief idea men for the department in Thurber's day, and Charles H. Cooke (the original "our Mr. Stanley") was the best reporter. Thurber was the rewrite man. He did his own legwork on a few items each week, but his chief job was reworking facts and anecdotes submitted by others.

Ross was always hard to please, and at first he was convinced that Thurber had worked too long on newspapers to do "Talk" properly. "'He can't write Talk the way I want it. He'll always write journalese,'" he said, and for three months he rewrote nearly every one of Thurber's contributions, filling them up with favorite expressions of his own like "and such," which he thought would give them a casual, offhand air. Thurber's "The studio walls are hung with oils and water colors, with here and there a gouache and silverpoint" became "The studio walls are hung with oils and watercolors, and such." It was not until the issue of December 2, 1927, after what Thurber called "three months of slavery" that Ross accepted and praised a piece by Thurber, and this only after forcing him to rewrite it six times. "'Now you got it,' he said. 'Write it the way you would talk to a dinner companion.'" The piece in question, "A Friend of Jimmy's," was a brief character sketch of a man named William Seeman, a friend of Mayor Walker's and president of the White Rose salmon cannery. It is an undistinguished sketch, but Thurber remembered it as a second turning point in his relationship with Ross.

Even so, the early days were full of conflict between editor and rewrite man. Ross's revisions were sometimes heavy-handed or finicky, and more than once he spoiled a good anecdote. On occasion, when things were at an impasse, Thurber would rewrite Ross's revisions and fake his "R" of approval on the sheet. Gradually the tension relaxed, as Ross came to realize that Thurber was exactly what the department needed. "Talk" was to be an entertaining miscellany of anecdotes about interesting people and events on the New York scene. It needed an easy informal style, blending the reportorial and the essayistic, and a strict economy of means. This is exactly what Thurber had to offer. His mastery of the art of paragraphing, which he had learned from the peerless Robert 0. Ryder of the Ohio State Journal, was the ideal apprenticeship for "The Talk of the Town." As Robert M. Coates, his old friend and colleague on the magazine, once observed, "'Talk' was just made for him, as he was made for it, and it is no more than simple fact to say he 'made' the department… into its present image." …

"The Talk of the Town" was Thurber's first unqualified success. It was in doing this weekly stint of informal reporting and commentary that he found the style he had been looking for—casual, economical, flexible. Looking back on Thurber's many accomplishments, Robert M. Coates said, "I think… that in some ways he was proudest of all his exploits in the old 'Talk' days, when after briefly studying some anecdote or other small item that had been sent in to us he would put it down beside his typewriter in the jammed-up little office we happily shared and proceed to rewrite it equally swiftly, giving it just the right turn of phrasing that added point and pungence—or when, seizing on a 'visit' suggestion, he would put on his hat and, demon reporter-like, go out to get the material for a piece on some landmark or other in our ever-beguiling city and come back and write it in time for our Thursday deadline."

The late Twenties and early Thirties were the high-water mark of "Talk." After a while, the weekly conferences were abandoned, and Ross's interest shifted to other departments. Thurber himself wearied of the routine after eight years, and quit in 1935. Thereafter it was handled by a succession of able writers, but in Ross's view, it was never the same after Thurber dropped out. Writing to Thurber in 1946, Ross lamented the decline of his favorite department: "Give me you, Shawn, and Cooke and I'll get out a Talk department," he said. "It's up to God to send some young talent around this place, and He's been neglecting the job. That's the trouble."

Looking back on his experience, Thurber described the "Talk" formula and the New Yorker form and style generally in a long letter to John McNulty written in the late Thirties. McNulty had joined the magazine in 1937, and during his first year or two he despaired of ever getting the hang of doing pieces for "The Talk of the Town" and "Notes and Comment." Thurber was by this time an acknowledged master of the New Yorker forms, and he could look at the magazine with some objectivity. His letter is primarily an effort to help and encourage his friend, but it is also a remarkable piece of informal literary criticism. He is sympathetic with McNulty's frustration, because he went through the same ordeal himself: "Ross ran my stuff through his typewriter for months, threw it away by carloads, often rewrote the things so I didn't find a phrase of mine left. I would try to imitate his rewrites of my rewrites, keeping in mind what he always said 'limber it up, make it easy and off-hand, like table-talk.' What came out often sounded like the table talk of bindle stiffs." Listening to Ross's advice will probably be more confusing than helpful, he says. "He's likely to fill you up with too many ideas and maxims and instructions!"

He could rattle off "Don't build it up, make it limber, we don't have to know too much, we want goddam it like table talk, interesting stuff, full of facts, to hell with the facts, we don't have to be experts, let yourself go, thousand interesting things in the city, for Christ's sake, etc. etc." I got bewildered. I finally figured what he wanted, in a way: "A man we know was telling us the other day about gaskets. Seems they are little funny kind of what's-its-names. Fellow named Pritch or Feep invents them, or imports them, or something of the sort. Otto H. Kahn has ninety-two and a Mrs. Bert Geefle of the Savoy Plaza seven. Nobody else has any, except Madame Curie who was presented with four thousand by the city of Nantes for telling the city what time it was one night when it called Meridian 1212 and got her by mistake."

Writing for "Talk" is chiefly a matter of learning the formula, and the formula is one of style. White "was the first guy to write perfect Talk pieces," and "everybody has in a sense imitated him." "It is a formula, all right," Thurber concedes, although it is not as tight as the sonnet. Everyone writing for "Talk" or "Comment" has to follow it—"John Steinbeck, Walt Whitman, Evelyn Waugh, and Shakespeare would all have to get the knack of it, if they got any stories printed."

Thurber then points out, reassuringly, that "Talk" and "Comment" are not typical of the magazine as a whole; in the other departments, the writer can write as he pleases. "People sometimes speak of a New Yorker style," he says, "but they are either thinking of Talk or of the form and shape of the casuals; what makes them look alike is their length and form. Where nothing runs much over 2 or 3 thousand words—as in casuals—there is bound to be a similarity of form." There is a subtle danger in this sameness of form, he confesses. Years of writing casuals have probably shaped his imagination for life, he says. "I find most of my stories, after I have typed them, run to 6 and a half or seven pages. I haven't tried for that. My brain has unconsciously formed that kind of mould for them. In a way this is bad, because everything I start—play, two-volume novel, or what-not, finally rounds itself out into 6 or 7 pages—seems complete, too." He goes on to define the casual. It is a form of its own, "neither essay nor short story, but a little of each.… Slighter than the short story, stronger than the essay." Ross always said that he would never use a short story, says Thurber. "I think he vaguely means by a short story something with more than four characters and at least three changes of scene." Sally Benson writes the purest casuals, in Thurber's opinion. "You never confuse her stuff with a real short story." Robert M. Coates, on the other hand, "has ingeniously managed to get short stories into the casual form."

The trademark of the New Yorker casual is the inconclusive ending. "We have invested, or perfected, something that is neither a happy ending nor an unhappy ending. It might be called the trailing off." Thurber is obviously a bit puzzled by this phenomenon, and he reaches out to baseball and ballet for analogies. "We seem to find a high merit in leaving men on bases," he says. "It's the ballet finish; rather than the third act tag or the black out. More people are left standing and looking in ballets and New Yorker casuals than in any other known art forms."

After having described the New Yorker form, Thurber warns McNulty not to try too hard to imitate it. "I don't care what the fashion in casuals is, nor should you," he says. "I read very few of them. It is easy to get New Yorker glut, casual fag. Don't read the magazine too consistently. If you read it from cover to cover it's like eating a two pound box of candy." It is bad to read it so much that "its little tricks of form and style keep running through your head." Finishing the letter the next morning, he adds a few maxims ("Don't let the magazine new-yorker you, mcnulty the magazine") and words of encouragement ("There's nothing more you have to learn from the New Yorker—the rest is what it's got to learn from you").