Genius in Disguise Read online

  We walked over to Union Square the other morning to dry out our soul in the sun, and sat a while with the dismal on the benches—the men who were thinking, and waiting. (We ourselves were only waiting.) Before leaving the Square, we read the motto on the monument, a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: “How little do my countrymen know what precious blessings they are in possession of …” Uneasily we glanced around at our countrymen. The only precious blessing most of them were in possession of was the cup of coffee they had recently got from the relief shanty nearby. In such graven words, it seemed to us, the disconsolate must taste the ultimate bile.

  At about this same time The New Yorker’s cartoonists were unsheathing their pens too, lacerating government policymakers and defrocked tycoons with equal gusto. (Conservative in his personal finances as well as in his politics, Ross had little sympathy for those who were ruined by what he regarded as foolish stock-market speculation. Though many of his high-flying friends lost huge sums in the 1929 crash, what little money he then had was still tied up in The New Yorker.) And eventually some recognizable victims of the times, such as Erskine Caldwell’s beaten-down characters, turned up in the prose as well. Yet on the whole these remained tiny islands in a New Yorker sea of privilege and prosperity. This was especially so when one factored in the advertisements, which remained relentlessly upscale, aimed at people whose decisions involved their next vacation rather than their next meal.

  Perhaps Ross believed that by poking fun at anyone and everyone, the lecherous old poop as well as his dizzy scullery maid, The New Yorker inoculated itself against charges of insufficient concern. Yet as the Depression wore on and its human toll mounted, this detachment increasingly came off as hard-hearted, the usual focus on pigeon roosts and potholes less good-natured than strangely cold.

  The critic Dwight Macdonald, who years later joined The New Yorker himself, smartly articulated this view in 1937 when he chastised the magazine in the Partisan Review. “In the class war The New Yorker is ostentatiously neutral. It makes fun of subway guards and of men-about-town, of dowagers and laundresses, of shop-girls and debutantes.… The New Yorker’s position in the class war, however, is not so simple as its editors would have us believe. Its neutrality is itself a form of upper-class display, since only the economically secure can afford such Jovian aloofness from the common struggle. In times like these there is something monstrously inhuman in the deliberate cultivation of the trivial.”

  Given his innate sensitivity and his experience with Comment, White might have concurred. He too had been increasingly disturbed by the disparity between the worlds of The New Yorker and the average New Yorker. This nagging sense of guilt was one of the causes of his second serious bout of discontent with the magazine, which in turn led, in the summer of 1937, to his only separation (albeit a temporary one) from it. A quarter century later White’s guilt was still there. As he told a friend in 1963, “The New Yorker was, of course, a child of the Depression, and when everybody else was foundering we were running free, and I still feel that I escaped the hard times undeservedly and will always go unacquainted with the facts of life.”

  There is no evidence that Ross himself ever experienced this level of anxiety, but to the extent that The New Yorker’s laggard response to this national crisis was a mistake, it was one he would never make again.

  On the business side The New Yorker was never seriously threatened by the Depression, managing a profit even in its bleakest years. The only period of genuine worry was the nervous election year of 1932, when the magazine shrank enough (it ran to a meager forty-eight pages in the dead summer months) for Ross to squeal, revenue fell off sixteen percent, and circulation slipped from 121,000 to 113,000 (the only real interruption of growth in Ross’s stewardship). In the wake of this scare, the magazine cut salaries across the board by ten percent in February 1933; the cut was restored in early 1934. The election of Roosevelt was good for The New Yorker, primarily because of Repeal. By late 1933, beer and liquor advertisements began dribbling in, and by 1934 they amounted to a veritable torrent of found revenue. The depressed price of paper helped the magazine’s bottom line, and its city edition turned out to be a godsend at a time when magazines relying exclusively on national ads were badly squeezed. While The New Yorker profited, its competitors fell, one by one, to the wayside. Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair was subsumed into a sister publication, Vogue, in 1936. The same year, Henry Luce bought Life’s nameplate in order to launch his splashy new picture magazine. Old Life’s emaciated subscriber list went to Judge, but it didn’t help; it too succumbed in 1939.

  ——

  Perhaps because of the times, or perhaps simply because he was maturing, Ross was becoming much less cavalier in his handling of personnel. By the early Thirties, The New Yorker was a dream destination for many newspaper reporters and editors, owing not only to its editorial freedom and excellence but to its financial vitality. It was during this time that a young Boston newspaperman, Charles Morton, who had sold the magazine several casuals, was summoned to New York to talk to Ross about a job. They had arranged to meet at the magazine on a Sunday evening, and Morton was so anxious that he walked around outside for thirty minutes until it was time to go up.

  Beyond the night watchman, it appeared that the only other person in the building was Ross. The New Yorker offices were cramped and stark; an unwitting visitor might have assumed that the many cubicles housed accountants or actuaries but for the telltale artistic flourishes, such as the huge Thurber characters looming on the walls. Along one corridor, for instance, he had drawn a life-size man walking along without a care in the world. Just around the corner, however, a life-size woman was waiting for him with a club in her hand.

  Ross was friendly, garrulous, persuasive. As usual, his approach to the job candidate was to evoke sympathy for himself. All evidence to the contrary, he whined about his inadequate staff and moaned about being unable to cover certain subjects for lack of the right reporter. He was expert at making a recruit feel he was the only person in the world who could steer this foundering ship free of the shoals. Sure enough, before long Morton was compelled to reassure Ross that things would be all right. “I was chattering away about what I felt to be the magazine’s virtues and how various weaknesses might be shored up when I noticed Ross eyeing me intently.… ‘Goddammit,’ he said, ‘let me talk.’ ”

  He wanted geniuses, Ross told Morton. He had three—White, Thurber and Gibbs; they could do anything—but he was always on the lookout for another. Maybe Morton was it—though the odds, Ross was quick to add, were against it. They would see during a three-month trial. The excitable young man was so intoxicated at the mere suggestion of genius that he failed to detect the inherent warning in these words. Ross also insisted that Morton obtain a leave of absence from his Boston newspaper first. “Ross was firm about the leave,” Morton would write. “He knew a great deal more about himself and his wants than I did. He was not running a school in which promising young men were brought along and promoted; neither was he hiring anyone as an encouragement.”

  The confident Morton thought this precaution surely unnecessary. He didn’t know it yet, but Ross was looking out for him. The editor knew how difficult an adjustment The New Yorker was for most newspaper people; he had seen it dozens, maybe even hundreds, of times. “He did not wish to uproot a Massachusetts family and a man with a job and cast them adrift in New York at the darkest point of the Depression,” Morton said later.

  In fact, things didn’t work out, as Morton struggled with the magazine’s unique reporting and writing demands. One Thursday, with his probation nearly over, Bernard Bergman, then managing editor, walked up and said, “Mr. Ross thinks you should plan to go back to Boston when your three months are up.” Mortified but not really surprised, Morton decided that under the circumstances it would be best if he cleared out immediately rather than hang around as an object of pity, “the failure who would not leave.” He asked an office boy to settle up his pay, said
a few good-byes, then returned to his boardinghouse to pack. A few hours later the office boy came by in a panic. “Ross had just told him that by leaving on Thursday instead of finishing the week I was beating The New Yorker out of two days’ pay, and if I did not return the money, Ross was going to take it out of the office boy’s pay.” The misunderstanding only deepened Morton’s humiliation (“I was leaving not only as an incompetent but also as untrustworthy, if not downright dishonest”), but eventually it was cleared up.

  Outwardly, Ross seemed to be maturing too, or at least he was trying harder to look the part of the editor of a sophisticated magazine. He had yet to forgo his high-top, lace-up shoes, but he was wearing a better cut of suit (invariably dark) and had begun combing his hair back. This last amounted to a hopeless exercise, however, not only because the grand pompadour was beyond taming (it always seemed on the verge of springing back upright), but because he was constantly mussing it; one of his nervous tics was scratching his head, usually reaching across the scalp with his right hand to attack the left side. Just as rigorously he was cultivating other idiosyncrasies. He forbade whistling in the halls and discouraged staffers from speaking to him in the elevators (not to be antisocial, but because when he was identified as the editor of The New Yorker, invariably his fellow passengers turned out to be closet writers or cartoonists). For a large and vital man, he had a notoriously limp handshake. Then there was a curious manifestation of his shyness or self-consciousness: when he came to work, he tended to trudge straight into his office without a word, virtually oblivious to anyone who might happen to be around, as if hoping that his arrival might go undetected. But once there, he was “in,” ready to circulate, chatty enough to tell a colleague all about last night’s dinner with Benchley at “21.” In so doing, said James M. Cain, who preceded Bergman in an unhappy stint as managing editor, Ross would punctuate his story with hands that somehow managed to be animated and lifeless all at once. “They droop off his wrists like dead things,” Cain remembered, “all the fingers hanging separately, and seeming to have grown twice as long. There is something about them as final as the undertaker’s patent pulley that lowers the coffin down in the ground. After they get it in you might as well go home. There ain’t no more after that.”

  Of course it’s altogether possible that lifeless fingers and limp handshakes were only Ross’s subliminal way of conveying how taxing his job was—work, these slack limbs seemed to say, that sapped the last measure of his energy. If so, the gesture was not completely hyperbolic. Editing a weekly magazine in Ross’s aggressive fashion was extraordinarily time-consuming and nerve-racking, with hundreds of moving parts to account for and potential disasters to sidestep. If done well, the work was also invisible; a good editor could nurse along a story or picture for months but leave no evidence of his involvement in the finished product. Fortunately two rare memos from May 1931, wherein Ross spelled out shortcomings in two consecutive issues, demonstrate how his editorial mind was turning at this time. The critiques are also worth excerpting as concrete proof that his fabled reputation for “sharpshooting”—that is, editorial nitpicking—was no exaggeration:

  Notes on the Issue of May 2, 1931

  GOINGS ON: Theatre: Blurb on “Vinegar Tree” misleading. Does it mean “renewing whatever comes along handy?” or “renewing whatever old love comes along handy?”

  Art: Peggy Bacon is not an American Hogarth. Not the same sort of thing at all. Very misleading.

  Opera: The Bluehill Troupe. What are they? Amateur or Pro? Aida. What company gives? Not mentioned.

  Sports (Wrestling): Landos vs. Szabo wasn’t Landos vs. Szabo but probably shift to Steele was announced too late for correction. (Racing): Maybe Pimlico Preakness and trains should have been listed considering that it is listed under “On the Air.”

  TALK OF THE TOWN: “Mercury” personality piece very questionable. Much too old. Sure to get letters from people who knew him once saying he’s been dead for two years. “Sir Walter” a type anecdote. Very old. “Outposts”—George Gray Barnard still working? Pretty flat department on whole.

  Page 21: Auslander poem “Excavations in Ur” pretty trite, the kind of stuff for the Ladies Home Journal, not us. Brubaker item about Mr. Coolidge laughing off suggestion that he become Speaker of the House is about three weeks late. Alfonso item faces end of Sullivan’s Alfonso piece. Did Brubaker mean to be funny when he said Prajadhipok is “King of Persia”?

  The Oarsmen: Lines 6–7 “attention should be drawn to New Haven and Yale,” meaning New London and Yale? Otherwise redundant. Department good on the whole.

  Feminine Fashions: Are all hats (French models) mentioned in “And in New York” to be had only at Saks-Fifth Avenue? If not, why not mention other places? A little development of themes like this, instead of stopping with one retailer, would help the department.

  As to Men: Why mention Tripler’s particularly for soft tab ready-to-wear collars? These can be had anywhere.

  The Current Cinema: A little slipshod in spots. For instance, “Gunmen appear in both Dude Ranch and Gun Smoke, in both cases by some coincidence moved from their urban haunts to the wilds of the West, and in both cases they are bettered—bested, I should say, even—by the honest ranch folk. In Dude Ranch Jack Oakie does most of the besting—” But Jack Oakie doesn’t represent the “honest ranch folk.” He’s a traveling actor.

  Horse Shows and Hunts: A pretty poor department. Hard to follow what horses he’s talking about, and what shows or events they were in. Covering of Maryland Hunt, very inadequate. It was the event of the week in this field.

  Books: Still no fiction being reviewed. Best sellers neglected. Also some books of special interest to New Yorker readers—Orange Valley by Howard Baker, for instance. Think continuation of blurbing Thurber’s and Gibbs’ books inadvisable. Lincoln Steffens Autobiography not yet noticed.

  Notes on the Issue of May 9, 1931

  TALK OF THE TOWN: 1st Comment piece: Model Brassiere Company is not “topmost tenant”—only one of several on 41st floor; not eleven hundred feet up—less than five hundred. Last Comment piece: On X-ray photographs—pretty thin and very old. Better to have killed. “Planet’s Rival”: Never possible to see Venus in daylight with street telescope. “Extant”: A pretty trite and pretty thin anecdote. “Ex-Queen”: The Queen of Spain was not Princess Ena, but Victoria Eugenie. Three out of first four pieces of Talk, about money.

  Page 22: Drawing of ship not so good in midst of text about “My Dream Ship.”

  Art Galleries: Is Eilshemius an established painter?

  The Oarsmen: Department continues good.

  On and Off the Avenue: Valuable write-up of Hattie Carnegie. Mention of Frida Mueller, “an enthusiastic reader writes in to say,” sounds as if Long had not investigated. That seems like bad policy—seems to imply that maybe other things haven’t been either. Misleading to reader.

  Motors: We’ve laid it on a little thick about Marmon. Had a full write-up of this same car last winter. Same dope about it.

  Books: Still no fiction reviewed. I think this department is a little dull and longwinded and gives too much space to rather heavy books. Should review more books at briefer length.

  The critiques are vintage Ross: they range all over the magazine’s landscape, reveal a remarkable catholicity of knowledge, and raise questions of fact, tone, balance, and credibility. (As can be seen, Ross would no more unduly promote his staffers’ books than he would take a reader’s word for a shopping tip.) They also underscore what its editor was trying to accomplish with his New Yorker—a journal he insisted be at once amusing, informed, up-to-date, and completely trustworthy—and by now he had largely succeeded.

  The critiques also remind us just how much the magazine was a direct extension of the man. If there had been an organization chart—a New Yorker document that never was, since titles there have traditionally been as transitory and useful as pixie dust—it would have resembled not the conventional pyramid but a wagon whe
el, with Ross at the hub and spokes shooting off in every direction. Nothing, from major Profile to tiniest Newsbreak, went into the magazine without his approval. It remained difficult for him to articulate his intentions and standards; instead, he demonstrated them, by trial and error, in the magazine itself, and gradually a collective understanding of New Yorker material emerged. Those people who couldn’t decipher his wishes were largely gone, most carrying with them an impression of Ross as an impossible lunatic. The people who were left understood him perfectly and formed a hard, protective core around him. (Many of these people considered Ross impossible too, but less a lunatic than an inspired eccentric.) By now this core, besides the Whites, Thurber, Gibbs, Rea Irvin, and Rogers Whitaker, would have to include such New Yorker stalwarts as Talk writers Geoffrey Hellman, the stylish chronicler of old-line New York, and Charles Cooke, the first Our Man Stanley; two of Gibbs’s old school chums, Hobart Weekes, who would become the magazine’s maven for style and grammar, and the colorful Fred Packard, who succeeded Whitaker in running the checking department; and such key staff as the temperamental but brilliant Carmine Peppe, who oversaw the magazine’s layout and makeup operations, and the tyrannical Daise Terry, who presided over a cowed clerical staff.

  Like Ross, these people put The New Yorker ahead of all other considerations, even personal ones. Back in 1929, when White suddenly dropped from sight (on the spur of the moment he had decided to intercept Katharine on her train trip to Reno), a panicked Ross compelled Thurber to tell him where his friend had gone. White was hurt by this because he had sworn Thurber to secrecy. Ross subsequently tried to explain to him that Thurber had squealed only out of a larger loyalty to The New Yorker. Replied White, “The New Yorker is a cesspool of loyalties.”