Genius in Disguise Read online

  Rumormongers at the infant magazine wondered if the attraction wasn’t more than a professional one. While there is absolutely no evidence that this was so, there does seem to have been some kind of subterranean charge between Ross and the pre–E. B. White Katharine. This would hardly have been surprising. When they first met, they were young (both were thirty-three) and full of zeal. She found him delightful, if not especially handsome, and he of course recognized her for the beautiful, intelligent woman she was. When Katharine and Ernest Angell were about to travel to Paris, Ross gave her a letter of introduction to Ralph Barton, who was living there. It began, “This is to introduce Mrs. Angell, who is not unattractive,” an uncharacteristically forthright declaration from Ross. Katharine would prize the letter, calling it “the highest personal comment I ever got from him.”

  Katharine Angell and Ross, circa 1927. His inscription reads: “To Katharine Angell, God bless her, who brought this on herself.” (E. B. White Collection, Cornell University)

  Less enamored of Katharine was Jane Grant. She was somewhat jealous, as Ross himself conceded, although it’s not clear whether this was jealousy over a perceived rival or only the understandable resentment of a wife who saw as much of Ross’s editors as she did of Ross himself. (Jane never really liked Ingersoll, either.) By now, their marriage was fraying at the edges.

  In any event, things were about to change all around, for in 1926 Mrs. Angell did a most propitious thing, both for The New Yorker and for herself. She urged that Ross hire a young writer named Elwyn Brooks White.

  In the last issue of 1925, The New Yorker had published a casual called “Child’s Play,” signed by “E.B.W.” This was White’s amusing, self-deprecating account of a real-life mishap, when a waitress spilled buttermilk down his blue serge suit. The story’s protagonist, with cool head and great savoir faire, comforts the distraught waitress, refuses to be fussed over, and in general manages to turn the embarrassing situation into a “personal triumph.” White had been reading The New Yorker from its inception, and Ross had already published some of his light verse. But “Child’s Play” was a breakthrough for White, and in it Ross and Mrs. Angell recognized a fresh voice and clarity of style that approached their ideal. The following spring, after the magazine accepted two more White casuals, Mrs. Angell suggested to Ross that perhaps they should hire the mysterious contributor, whom neither had met as yet.

  E. B. White was born in 1899 to a well-to-do family in Mount Vernon, New York, in suburban Westchester County. By nature a nervous and diffident young man, he was so painfully shy that at times, when unfamiliar visitors called on him at The New Yorker, he would outwait them on the fire escape. He was only truly at ease when he was with family or close friends, or when he was in the country, pursuing farm chores or sailing his boat. His iron resolve, his inner confidence, seemed to surface only when he was expressing himself on a piece of yellow copy paper.

  At Cornell, White edited the campus newspaper and picked up his nickname (students named White tended to be dubbed Andy, after the university’s first president, Andrew D. White). Upon graduation, he worked at a series of tedious jobs—including, briefly, the American Legion News Service, housed in the same shabby building where Harold Ross was publishing the American Legion Weekly. But for White, who aspired to write, public relations was the dullest kind of work, and in the spring of 1922 he quit in order that he and a friend might embark on a grand adventure—crossing the country in White’s Model T Ford roadster, “Hotspur,” living by their wits and on pawned personal goods. Landing in Seattle, he worked for a while at a local newspaper, with indifferent results, before booking passage on a steamer to Alaska. But by the fall of 1923, broke and really no closer to his writerly goals, he returned to Mount Vernon to move back in with his parents.

  White took a nonwriting job at a New York City advertising agency but on the side continued to turn out light verse and gentle humor. These he regularly sent off to his heroes, the great newspaper humorists of the day—F.P.A., Christopher Morley, Don Marquis—and their occasional publication, more than anything else, sustained his ambition.

  When Ross invited White to come down to The New Yorker to talk about a job, he was looking for someone to handle a number of chores, among them Newsbreaks—those unfortunate newspaper gaffes—and various kinds of rewrite. However, as much as White admired The New Yorker, he proved a difficult sell. By now he had moved to a different ad agency, J. H. Newmark, where for thirty dollars a week he was writing automotive copy, and his organic insecurity was not easily overcome. There were many lunches with both Ross and Katharine, and much arm-twisting, before White, in late 1926, agreed to a compromise: he would come to work part-time at the magazine, but he would retain his Newmark job until it was clear to one and all that things would work out.

  White immediately justified Ross’s patience and in early 1927 came on full-time. He wrote like an angel, and there was little he couldn’t do. Soon the magic White touch was all over the magazine, from sharper Talk stories to his doctored cartoon captions to the instantly crisper Newsbreaks. An early example:

  Station WJAX will use 10,000 watts on a Sioux City woman charged with 1:45 Central Standard Time.—Sioux City (Iowa) Tribune

  That’s hard on any woman, no matter what she’s charged with.

  White would handle Newsbreaks for more than fifty years; it is estimated that he wrote more than thirty thousand of them. In good times and bad they remained for him a kind of creative umbilical cord to the magazine.

  So confident was Ross of his prodigy that he quickly turned over to him the magazine’s most prominent department, Comment. In White, he miraculously had found that thing he wasn’t sure existed, a seemingly effortless producer of crystalline prose that was at once unforced, bemused, ironic. White, in Marc Connelly’s words, “brought the steel and music to the magazine.”

  In Comment, employing the editorial “we,” White ostensibly spoke on behalf of the magazine, but the views therein were always his own, not Ross’s or anyone else’s. He might solicit the editor’s “guidance,” but he wrote what he pleased. As the title “Notes and Comment” suggests, his paragraphs were less conventional editorials than quirky, elegant observations on the passing parade. It was not White’s style—or Ross’s—to crusade in Comment, and if they did, it was in some suitably amateur pursuit (a big early success was their campaign to get the information kiosk at the old Pennsylvania Station moved to the center of the terminal). Neither innocent nor naïve, White nonetheless brandished a charming, otherworldly idealism that once led Ross to observe that he was “as impractical as Jesus Christ.” Still, it was an attractive quality, and one that helped explain White’s delightfully unorthodox worldview. As his biographer, Scott Elledge, points out, this was already apparent in one of his earliest Comment paragraphs. When in the wake of Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight in May 1927 the newspapers were filled with soaring prose about the self-effacing aviator, Ross doubtless fretted over what was possibly left to be said. White knew:

  We noted that the Spirit of St. Louis had not left the ground ten minutes before it was joined by the Spirit of Me Too. A certain oil was lubricating the engine, a certain brand of tires was the cause of the safe take-off. When the flyer landed in Paris every newspaper was “first to have a correspondent at the plane.” This was a heartening manifestation of that kinship that is among man’s greatest exaltations. It was beautifully and tenderly expressed in the cable Ambassador Herrick sent the boy’s patient mother: “Your incomparable son has done me the honor to be my guest.” We liked that; and for twenty-four hours the world seemed pretty human. At the end of that time we were made uneasy by the volume of vaudeville contracts, testimonial writing and other offers, made by the alchemists who transmute glory into gold. We settled down to the hope that the youthful hero will capitalize himself for only as much money as he reasonably needs.

  The preceding February, White had attended a friend’s party in Greenwich Village, where he w
as introduced to another aspiring humorist, James Thurber. Though meeting only now, the two knew a great deal about each other; in 1925, White’s newly married sister, a woman with “the lilting name of Lillian Illian,” had become friendly with Thurber and his wife on a cruise to Europe (Thurber was to spend the next year in France trying to become a “real” writer). After the party, White encouraged Thurber, who had already sold Ross one or two slight pieces, to come down to the magazine. Meanwhile Ross had somehow got it into his head that Thurber and White had been bosom pals for years, and this was enough for him to hire Thurber on the spot.

  Two years younger than Ross and five years older than White, Thurber was from a Columbus, Ohio, family whose sundry eccentricities fueled four decades of Thurberiana. He was inventive, wildly funny, and extremely sensitive. The last quality derived partly from a dreadful childhood accident; when he was six, a brother shot him in the left eye with a blunt homemade arrow. The injury blinded that eye, and years later rendered him completely sightless.

  After attending Ohio State, Thurber, like White, worked as a newspaper reporter, though with considerably more success (despite the fact that the Christian Science Monitor, for whom he was a stringer, consistently credited his stories to “Miss Jane Thurber”). Also like White, he wanted to write humor; he too had had submissions accepted by “The Conning Tower” and had watched the growth of the young New Yorker with more than idle interest.

  Unfortunately, Ross hired Thurber not as a writer—such creatures were “a dime a dozen,” Ross would famously, if not entirely seriously, maintain—but as an editor. The imaginative Thurber, forever prone to exaggeration even where his own life was concerned, made a great point (in The Years with Ross and elsewhere) that Ross had hired him as a Jesus. It is true that by this time the bruised Ingersoll had relinquished the role, meaning Ross may well have been on the lookout for another victim. But the position Thurber actually filled was Sunday editor, the person whose job it was to process late reviews and tend to the many last-minute details as the magazine was rushing to close. And if Thurber had any spare time, Ross had added unhopefully, he could write. In a short time, however, it became apparent to everyone that Thurber was no editor. He may have been a man of action—he was known to deal with reader complaints by burning them—but the administrative discipline and adherence to rules (in Gibbs’s memorable phrase, “insect routine”) required of New Yorker editors was antithetical to Thurber’s restless nature. He was miserable, able to do little original writing and working so many hours that he piled his soiled shirts in the corner of his cubicle rather than haul them to the laundry. Finally Ross relented; poking his head into the doorway of Thurber’s office one afternoon, he barked, “All right then, if you’re a writer, write! Maybe you’ve got something to say.”

  In emancipating Thurber, Ross did him a second great favor: he gave him Andy White as a roommate. The gifted Thurber scarcely needed anyone to teach him to write, but proximity to White naturally had a tonic effect on his own style, which he was always quick to acknowledge. “The precision and clarity of White’s writing helped me a lot,” Thurber explained to a friend, “slowed me down from the dogtrot of newspaper tempo and made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet.” Free to write, he unleashed a torrent of casuals and original Talk stories, in addition to his Talk rewrites.

  E. B. White, left, and James Thurber, shown here in 1929. White “made me realize a writer turns on his mind, not a faucet,” Thurber would say years later. (Courtesy of Mrs. Milton Greenstein)

  Already friends, Thurber and White now became soulmates. By the end of 1927 they were collectively responsible for most of the front of the book—Comment and Talk—and it was starting to sparkle. If White provided the steel and music, Thurber contributed the right amount of phosphate and mischief. They spurred each other on, wrote to please each other, and soon came to form a kind of double helix at the core of The New Yorker. As Brendan Gill said, at some point Ross realized that “though the magazine was his, the persona of the magazine must be White-Thurber.”

  The salutary impact of these two men transcended the pages of the magazine to the office itself. In an environment that was beginning to look like any other thriving commercial enterprise—dozens of somber people scurrying about, constant discombobulations from expansions and renovations—White and Thurber helped ensure that none of it was taken too seriously. White presented Ross with the decapitated head of a department-store mannequin (named Sterling Finny) that the writer had used to illustrate his parodies of the self-improvement ads; Finny remained on permanent display in the editor’s office, wearing a filthy wig, there to mystify many a guest. Thurber was a more devious cutup, as is evident from a prank he played on Rogers Whitaker. Whitaker edited copy forcefully and, with red pen, flamboyantly. One day Thurber burst into his office, leveled a (toy) pistol at Whitaker, and shouted, “Are you the son of a bitch that keeps putting notes in red ink on the proofs of my Talk stories?” Whitaker fainted.

  The fourth member of the Ross Quartet, arriving close on Thurber’s heels, was Wolcott Gibbs. Actually, his full name was Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, after the signer of the Declaration of Independence, but he hated the first name so much that he always went by the second. This he pronounced the same way Alexander Woollcott pronounced his surname—Wool-cut—which would lead to no end of confusion in the minds of readers, especially after Gibbs moved into Aleck’s old domain of theater criticism. Neither man was flattered by the unintended comparisons.

  Like every other person in New York, it seemed, Gibbs was a relation of Alice Duer Miller, and as she had with so many others, she sent Gibbs over to see her friend Harold Ross. Even by the editor’s inscrutable standards, it would seem Gibbs was spectacularly unqualified to work at The New Yorker. He was born in New York in 1902, but when he was a boy his family moved all around the Northeast and Midwest. Bright but a borderline ne’er-do-well, he was in and out of a succession of boarding schools, where he earned his spending money by selling Latin translations to classmates. Once out in the world, he had been, among other things, an insurance clerk, a chauffeur, an architect’s apprentice, and a brakeman on the Long Island Rail Road. In Gibbs’s one stint as a reporter, on a small suburban newspaper, his employer had hired him more for his tennis prowess than for his way with words.

  Still, somewhere in the high-strung, witty young man Ross divined potential, for he hired Gibbs as a copy editor. After he had covered the ground rules, such as they were, he dismissed Gibbs with a little headmasterish wave of the hand that was his trademark way of ending a conference, as if to shoo one from his office. Then as Gibbs reached the door, Ross piped up, almost as an afterthought: “I don’t give a damn what else you do, but for God’s sake don’t fuck the contributors.” It was clear, Gibbs later wrote, “that he spoke with the memory of some previous and painful experience in his mind.” He added that this was “the closest approach to a coherent editorial policy I ever discovered.”

  In many ways, Wolcott Gibbs was Ross’s most versatile hire. Quickly rising to become Mrs. Angell’s assistant, he proved a brilliant editor of fiction; like Ross, he had an instinctive and unerring sense for how words should go together on a page, and he was known to excise whole paragraphs from a manuscript with no one, including the author, the wiser. For several years, in White’s absence, he wrote Comment. He was an accomplished short story writer, an unequaled parodist, a discerning and feared drama critic. Gibbs led something of a sad life and turned a sour eye on the world, but this darkness manifested itself in some of the most acerbic and wickedly funny writing of his generation.

  These four lieutenants—Mrs. Angell, White, Thurber, and Gibbs—formed the foundation on which Ross could comfortably rest his magazine. Like their editor, each brought an outsider’s perspective to New York City, helping to inform The New Yorker with an appealing openness and inquisitiveness. More important, they gave Ross standards as high as his own, a common appreciation of the magazine’s possibili
ties, and phenomenal editorial range. In return, Ross gave them the extraordinary opportunity to invent themselves. Before Ross, all four had been somewhat adrift, personally and professionally, unknown and unfulfilled. After him, each had a hand in shaping contemporary American letters. For this precious gift, each repaid Ross with a lifelong devotion that bordered on hero worship.

  Wolcott Gibbs: Ross would come to say of him, “He can do anything.” (Culver Pictures)

  ——

  Two years into the great experiment, then, the matter of New Yorker personnel was falling into place, but there were still bugs to be worked out. That February saw a rare star turn. Ross published an odd little parody from Ernest Hemingway that may have persuaded the celebrated young novelist to stick to his day work; it would be his lone contribution to The New Yorker. At about the same time, the magazine ran a Profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay so riddled with factual mistakes that the poet’s mother trooped down to the office in person to protest. Ross sent out Katharine Angell to placate Mrs. Millay, and Katharine later said the embarrassing episode might have prompted Ross to start the fact-checking department.

  In the main, however, the magazine was charging confidently to that next level. When examining a weekly magazine, which in the course of a year publishes thousands of stories, drawings, poems, and miscellany, one must resist the impulse to read too much into any single gesture. Every now and again, however, Ross printed something that clearly signaled a shift in attitude. The Scopes report in 1925 was one, and in April 1927 there was another, a huge Profile of the enigmatic publishing titan William Randolph Hearst. Heretofore New Yorker Profiles were rather superficial: glib, not particularly probing, and running at most a little more than two pages. Now, suddenly, readers were treated to a five-part extravaganza. At a total of thirteen thousand words, the Hearst portrait was many times over the most substantial piece The New Yorker had published to date. Aside from compelling reading, it amounted to a declaration from Ross that some people, sometimes, warranted more serious scrutiny. Hearst, who no doubt had fascinated Ross from his San Francisco days, was a perfect candidate: millions knew the legend, but almost no one really knew the man.