[Donaldson is an American critic and educator who has written several studies of twentieth-century American literary figures, including Ernest Hemingway and John Cheever. In the following excerpt from a review of several books about the New Yorker, Donaldson examines changes in the magazine's content and editorial policies over the years.]

The dust jacket of Here at The New Yorker, with its cartoon gallery of thirty-six of the magazine's present and past luminaries, promises much the sort of anecdotal reminiscence that Brendan Gill delivers within. But there is only one cartoon of Gill himself, which hardly suggests how ponderously he bulks in his own version of the New Yorker's history. To some extent this is inevitable, for Gill is after all a survivor, having labored among the cubicles on West 43rd Street since 1936, and over that space of time having, as he disingenuously confesses, written more words published in the magazine than anyone else alive or dead. For all that, readers may learn more about Gill and his bitchiness than they care to know, for his strategy in the book is to ingratiate himself, establish his qualifications, and then lay about him with a blunt axe.

From behind a veneer of modesty Gill reveals that he emerged from a prosperous and literate family, that he triumphed as a prep-school poet, that at college he was tapped for Skull and Bones (a name "held in awe, and not at Yale alone"), that he wrote a damnably good if widely unread novel, that writing is not work but play to him, that he loves parties and enjoys his life, and that he considers Wallace Stevens a greater poet than Robert Frost (apparently because Stevens did not resort to "an unseemly scrambling to attain a place at the top of the steeple" and was altogether nicer and more respectable).

A similar bias against the unseemly seems to lie at the root of the malice with which Gill attacks Harold Ross. Ross, who founded the magazine and edited it from its inception in 1925 until his death in 1951, has since been the subject of three books, including James Thurber's bittersweet and moving The Years with Ross. The most striking thing about the editor, all critics agree, was the contrast between his rough-hewn appearance and gutter language and the sophistication and polish of the magazine that he built to such indisputable eminence. For that accomplishment, however, Gill allows him very little credit indeed. Ross was more lucky than good. As a young reporter he had been "conspicuously raffish and incompetent." As an editor his aggressive ignorance led him to pose such classic queries as "Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?" (Jane Grant, who was married to Ross, maintains that he affected such ignorance as a way of intensifying the paradox between the elegant magazine and his own background as a Colorado boy who never went to college.) What's more, according to Gill, Ross's editing consistently disimproved his copy. The editor's sole virtues, in Gill's view, were that he insisted on absolute fidelity to the facts and that the endless stream of queries issuing from his office forced the New Yorker's contributors, through some alchemy, to write better than they knew how.

Gill reserves his most withering comments for his former editor's personal, not professional, failings. Ross, one is told, gambled foolishly, clung to unlovely bigotries, blasphemed continually, and "was a notorious coward." Worst of all, with his gap-toothed "monkey face agape," sloping shoulders, and arms hanging almost to his knees, he offended Gill by looking more like an ape than a man and by behaving accordingly on social occasions. Even in his Fabian Bachrach portrait, according to Gill, Ross stared "into the camera with the air of a small-town crook arrested for having tried to hold up a bank with a water pistol." Unlike Gill he did not love parties, and at weddings or nightclubs he "radiated a continuous intensity of unease." The poor chap simply had no manners at all. Once, in the Oak Room of the Plaza Hotel, Ross pelted the Gills' table with spitballs; belatedly, and with heavier firepower, Gill has returned the barrage.

Here at The New Yorker, it should be admitted, has at least one hero besides its author, and that is William Shawn, the shadowy figure who took over as editor of the magazine in 1951 and still holds the reins. Gill also includes graceful good-natured sketches of several of the New Yorker's artists, including Saul Steinberg, William Steig, and Peter Arno. But those who are his manifest superiors as writers do not fare so well. Toward Edmund Wilson Gill is uneasily respectful; toward Stanley Edgar Hyman, gently condescending; toward John O'Hara and Thurber, openly nasty. These two are pilloried through apostrophe ("Oh, but John O'Hara was a difficult man!") and apposition ("Thurber, that malicious man" and "Thurber, that incomparable mischief-maker"). Gill fell out with both of them after Thurber, practicing one of his frequent—and frequently cruel—practical jokes, persuaded O'Hara that Gill's unfavorable review of A Rage to Live (for most of his career on the New Yorker, Gill has been a reviewer of books, films, or plays) had really been written by Wolcott Gibbs. It is not entirely clear why Thurber should have insisted on this falsehood, except that, as Gill puts it, it was in his nature "to wish to inflict pain," or why O'Hara should have swallowed the misinformation whole, except that he was forever suffering, in Gill's phrase, from "fancied slights." In any event the incident had the effect of cooling whatever potential friendships may have developed between Gill and either of those two masters of short fiction, though once Gill relented long enough to take his son Michael, a Thurber devotee, around to the Algonquin where they both listened as the "old, blind, witty, dying cockatoo" talked a blue streak at them.

There is another explanation for Gill's antipathy toward such illustrious figures as Ross, Thurber, and O'Hara: for all his longevity on the New Yorker, Gill has not until recently ranked as one of the magazine's insiders. Dale Kramer in Ross and The New Yorker (1951) mentions Gill but once. Jane Grant's Ross, The New Yorker, and Me (1968) contains no reference to him at all, and neither does Burton Bernstein's detailed and thorough Thurber, published in 1975. Only half a dozen times in fifteen years, Gill admits, did he and Ross lunch together; "given the difference in our temperaments," he explains, "there was no likelihood that I would be one of Ross's buddies." No, nor one of O'Hara's or Thurber's or even E. B. White's, who shared an office with Thurber and, Gill thinks, taught him practically everything about writing.…

Though the New Yorker is far from dead—indeed, it may be a more important national periodical now than ever before—it too has become decidedly less humorous in its advancing age. Brendan Gill returns time and again to invidious comparisons between the shaggy Ross and the elegant Shawn, contrasting the former's nicotine-stained fingers, for example, with their nails "grossly rimmed with dirt," to the latter's large, well-kept pianist's hands. But he takes no account of a more important distinction suggested by Shawn's own assessment of his predecessor. Ross, his successor wrote, served as the magazine's "final authority on humor. His element was humor. He generated it, he sought it out, he needed it, and he lived by it. If he thought something was funny, it was funny." When Ross died, almost exactly at the midpoint of the New Yorker's fifty years, it began to miss that sure sense of the comic which, up to 1951, had been the magazine's trademark and its glory.

In the beginning Ross had modelled his fledgling magazine after Punch. Like its model it ran cartoons and illustrations but placed primary emphasis on text. The format of the text betrayed further influences: the New Yorker's typographical restraint, its front-running "Talk of the Town" (a straight steal from Punch's "Charivari" of London gossip), its short-fiction pieces (still called "casuals" after the British style), and its character sketches or "profiles" are all directly traceable to its famous and long-lived English progenitor. Ross mixed into the pot his own obsessions with accuracy and readability. A perfectionist, he established a checking department and sought each week to produce a technically flawless issue. He insisted, too, on excision of all highfalutin language and elimination of all possible confusions in the copy which crossed his desk—and everything crossed his desk then just as everything crosses Shawn's now. Moreover he had the gift of attracting brilliant talents to work at his side, most notably White and Thurber; and with their aid he began to reshape the New Yorker's humor into something quite different from that published across the Atlantic.

Punch's forte has always been wit of a satiric bent. But the developing New Yorker, especially the sketches of White and Thurber, fashioned a gentler, tenderer humor. One of White's earliest contributions … illustrates the distinction. A waitress at a Child's restaurant clumsily spilled a full glass of buttermilk over his new suit, and in her distress uttered an abject "In the name of God," began to sob, and fled to the kitchen. "The waitress came trotting back," to let White tell his own story, "full of cool soft tears and hot rough towels. She was a nice little girl, so I let her blot me. In my ear she whispered a million apologies, hopelessly garbled, infinitely forlorn. And I whispered back that the suit was four years old, and that I hated dark clothes anyway. One has, in life, so few chances to lie heroically." In this short piece White laughs at no one's expense, and he even enlists our sympathy on behalf of the hapless waitress. Thurber accomplished much the same effect in depicting the funny but touching misadventures of his bumbling Little Man. Though the New Yorker has never entirely abandoned satire, it achieved its finest moments in pieces like these, where wit gave way to humor, the barb to the benediction.

In 1965 the irreverent Tom Wolfe published an acid dissection of the New Yorker in the rival New York, then the Sunday Herald Tribune magazine. Wolfe excoriated Shawn for his aversion to personal publicity and subjected him and his publication to a vicious ad hominem attack. Though the New Yorker's reputation had prospered until, according to Wolfe, it had "become—new honors!—the most successful suburban woman's magazine in the country," it had actually deteriorated and "mummified" because of Shawn's insistence, as "the smiling embalmer," on changing nothing about Harold Ross's creation. Wolfe's attack was not only cruel but quite wrong, for the New Yorker in 1965 resembled the one of 1950 more in appearance than in reality, and the changes are still more pronounced ten years later. The New Yorker has become more serious and much wordier. Where Ross generated humor and attracted its practitioners, Shawn's gift is for locating talented "fact" writers and giving them their head. As his latest book demonstrates, Sid Perelman is still occasionally doing his business at the old stand, making his marvelous lists (his impressions of India encompass "the quaint customs, the colorful temples, the succulent food buzzing with flies, and the deep wisdom that we in the West could learn from their philosophy"), inventing his wonderful names ("Mr. Fleischkopf, who had wisely refrained from Anglicizing his name to Meathead," the yummy Chinese Candide Yam, the stockbroker Worthington Toushay), striking mock-heroic poses as lover and fighter ("the rogue's impertinence tempted me to box his ears, but since they were obscured by a luxuriant growth of hair, I had no time to hunt for them"), and poking extravagant fun at the booboisie (a Yahoo asks him as a writer to discuss the relative merits of Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins, provoking the answer: "Gosh, who can say? It's like trying to compare Balzac with Tolstoy. I mean, they're two colossi"). But Perelman's comedy is basically logomachic, and no true humorists have come along (not even the clever Donald Barthelme nor the super-hip Woody Allen) to replace the long-dead Thurber and the semiretired White.

Instead the New Yorker under Shawn has vastly intensified its capacity for indignation and its eagerness to express itself on national and international issues. Shawn not only published all of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, for example, but found in John McPhee an amazingly readable interpreter of the natural environment. Similarly the New Yorker not only printed all of John Hersey's Hiroshima and inveighed early and often in Notes and Comments against the war in Vietnam; but in Jonathan Schell, whose long series on the Nixon administration ran this past summer, and in Richard Harris, author of the terrifying If You Love Your Guns, the magazine has added to its staff two of the nation's most incisive reporters of the political scene. New Yorker fiction does not seem quite so good now as twenty years ago, but both Calvin Trilin and Michael J. Arlen have recently published affecting literary portraits from the twenties, Trillin's on Gerald and Sara Murphy, Arlen on his father.

On the basis of Levels of the Game, the best book about tennis since William T. Tilden's Match Play and the Spin of the Ball forty years ago, and the brilliant articles in his new Pieces of the Frame (there's a fine one on Wimbledon, and a stunner on an animal lover and her travels in Georgia) the prolific McPhee qualifies as the best of the impressive stable that Shawn has recruited, nearly all of whom have been carefully ignored by Gill. Still the New Yorker is not nearly so much fun to read as it used to be, and nostalgia for those good old days probably has a lot to do with the commercial success of Gill's book. In 1960 the New York Times described the New Yorker as "the best literary magazine in the English-speaking world, big or little." If that's true, and many readers would agree that it still is, it says a good deal about the present perilous state, in that world, of both fiction and, especially, humor.