Genius in Disguise Read online

  How to explain such a feat from a frontier lad with a tenth-grade education? It wasn’t merely that Ross had the kind of mischievous mind that drove him to scour a newly published atlas for mistakes; or that he insisted writers not arouse a reader’s curiosity without satisfying it; or that he was so passionate about grammar that he read Fowler’s four daunting pages on the distinctions between “which” and “that” for his own amusement. And certainly it wasn’t just luck, though there was some of that, too. Ross’s New Yorker represented an almost magical confluence of an idea, a time, and a place, arriving just after New York emerged as a world city, yet before the pervasive presence of television: that brief window when an erudite little “comic paper” could be a major cultural force in a way that is unthinkable now. It was also a time when young and gifted practitioners of the fictive, factual, comic, and illustrative arts seemed to be everywhere, waiting only for a passerby to pluck them up. Ross himself often reinforced this impression of The New Yorker as a phenomenon of editorial serendipity. “I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started it,” Ross told George Jean Nathan. “Magazines are about eighty-five per cent luck. All an editor can do is have a net handy to grab any talent that comes along, and maybe cast a little bread on the waters.”

  If Nathan knew better than to swallow this whole, less knowing people didn’t. Many figured Ross must be the luckiest fisherman around, while others spoke of the roughneck with the miraculous “genius for finding talent” as if he were an idiot savant. This genius, as E. B. White observed, was really a “diligence in looking at everything that comes in—every picture, every manuscript. [Ross] also believes that talent attracts talent: you get talent if you publish a good magazine, you get tripe if you publish tripe.”

  And talent, the editor understood, was the key. He never stopped searching for it or, once he had found it, nurturing it. On that point Fleischmann had been absolutely correct: Ross had a respect for creative people that bordered on veneration; everyone else, himself included, was meant to be in their service. Needless to say, this was an attitude that writers and artists didn’t come across every day. Once they understood Ross’s mystical, unwavering faith in them, they were free to validate it. He championed them even if he didn’t always grasp their ideas—say, in the case of a Lewis Mumford or an Edmund Wilson—or was uncomfortable with their linguistic invention, as he sometimes was with Vladimir Nabokov. As William Shawn once put it, “By being hospitable to the best, and expecting the best, he often received the best.” Ross operated his New Yorker less as a magazine than as a kind of great laboratory where associates were encouraged to pursue individual projects, yet in that pursuit advanced a common cause. His laboratory was invigorating, even intoxicating.

  Why? Primarily because the editor encouraged people to write or draw what they wanted, the way they wanted (within a certain New Yorker framework of “good taste,” to be sure); all Ross desired, he seemed to say, was to help them find their rightful audience. With certain favorites—White, Thurber, Benchley, Arno, Arthur Kober, Gluyas Williams, Charles Addams, to name only a few—he was not above wheedling or begging for new material. To his intimate Frank Sullivan, not a letter passed that didn’t include the line “Write me some pieces” or increasingly adamant variations thereon—“Write me some pieces, goddammit,” or “GODDAMMIT, WRITE SOME PIECES!” To a writer, an editor like this was almost too good to be true.

  Besides his faith, Ross gave his people strength and the comforting knowledge that he would always be there for them, whether this meant troubleshooting a complicated Profile or covering an emergency hospital bill. It was the kind of unending commitment that probably cost Ross any real chance at a stable home life, but he had long ago, and consciously, made this trade-off.

  Add to this Ross’s intrinsic understanding that writers and artists are different from other people and must be treated—tolerated, he would more likely harrumph—as such. He believed that the same unique vantage point that made creative people insightful could also render them vulnerable, impractical, and maddeningly unreliable. (“I wish I were a writer and could take a summer off,” he told Geoffrey Hellman just before the writer boarded an ocean liner for Europe.) Ross’s style had less to do with coddling his people—“If you can’t be original at least be interesting,” more than one chastened writer heard him say—than with protecting them. “I … think he thought that people with talent didn’t in general know enough to come in out of the rain,” said William Maxwell, “and he was trying to hold an umbrella over them.”

  If so, the canopy was high and wide, for there were so many to shelter and so much to protect them from: bruised advertisers, irate Profile subjects, hostile theater producers, carpetbagging book publishers. From the time in the Twenties when Ross told a clothing retailer to go ahead and pull its New Yorker advertising—Marcia Davenport had written that the shop’s models were “ill groomed”—he stood squarely behind his writers and seemed immune to intimidation. Edmund Wilson, hardly an unqualified fan of Ross (he considered the editor anti-intellectual, which was true, and something of a philistine, which wasn’t), nonetheless hailed that integrity. “When publishers wrote complaining about me, he would simply hand me the letters and tell me to pay no attention,” Wilson wrote. “His independence and refusal to be blackmailed or bullied was one of his most admirable qualities.”

  Even the occasional priest and nun bounced off Ross’s protective shield. Whenever he said “I live the life of a hunted animal”—and he often did—he was bemoaning occupational hazards like spot visitations from the profanity watchdogs of the Holy Name Society. The irony was that Ross so disliked seeing blue language in The New Yorker (“This is a family magazine, goddammit”) that he expunged the great majority of his spirited staff’s “hells,” “damns,” and “bastards” long before they hit print. Those profanities that made it, however, were there because they were essential to a given story, and in such cases no amount of protesting could budge him. (He devised an effective Holy Name defense; as he explained to an appreciative Mencken, whenever the society’s delegations turned up in the lobby looking for the man in charge, he sent out the brilliantly troubled Kip Orr, “who looks at them with a bleary eye and exudes a stale whiskey odor.”)

  Ross’s protective impulse reached beyond the office directly into the lives of his staff and contributors. He pioneered the then-heretical idea of reassigning the rights to a story or artwork to its creator once it had appeared in the magazine (not to mention handling the copyright paperwork and helping contributors find secondary markets for their work). Beyond this, he endlessly hectored book publishers for their alleged exploitation of his writers. This kind of gesture naturally merged with his personal generosity, about which literally every senior New Yorker writer has a story. He secured a larger apartment for Hamburger’s expanding family (“I saw your wife on the street today. For Christ’s sake, she’s pregnant”). When Emily Hahn returned from China, he secretly brought in her mother from Chicago to surprise her at the pier. During World War II, when Ross’s secretary feared that something had happened to her brother, an intelligence officer serving in Burma, Ross used his military contacts to learn that the young man was fine. During and after the war, he sent relief packages of food and scarce sundries to Rebecca West and Mollie Panter-Downes in England, and to Janet Flanner in France. He paid for Russell Maloney’s funeral long after the writer had left The New Yorker, and he gave an office boy twenty dollars to buy a new raincoat. He routinely bought pieces he had no intention of publishing to help out struggling writers, and kept his old friend F.P.A. on the magazine’s payroll (scouring the Congressional Record for Newsbreak material) when, in the columnist’s final years, his career hit the skids. To the chagrin of the business side, Ross carried dozens of writers who were hopelessly in debt to the magazine, and forgave some of their obligations altogether.

  For this kind of loyalty and respect, Ross was more than repaid in kind. Other places, most conspicuously T
ime Inc., paid better, but they offered nothing like this kind of paternal attention from the top. “I think the attraction was that you knew it was the best magazine being published,” explained John Bainbridge. “I had friends working at Time, and they were taking holidays and living in nice places and not worrying so much about the rent. We were worrying about the rent most of the time. But we were sustained by the fact that we were not writing for Henry Luce. We were writing for Harold Ross.”

  Given literally hundreds of staff members and contributors to tend, Ross did a considerable amount of his shepherding by correspondence. This was especially true in the late Thirties, when so many of his key people departed New York City—the Whites having left for Maine and a farm, Thurber for Connecticut and fame—and later, during the war, when his staff scattered to the far reaches of the globe. In his New Yorker tenure Ross wrote tens of thousands of letters, not just tossed-off notes or memos but long, involved, impassioned models of the epistolary art.

  Examining this trove, one cannot help but appreciate the staggering amount of his time Ross devoted to his sensitive, skittish charges—time spent kvetching, scheming, explaining, and long-distance hand-holding. More than this, though, one instantly grasps the other great weapon in Ross’s management arsenal: his expansive, infectious humor, often as not employed at his own expense. It turns up everywhere—for instance in his scribbled postscript to a 1943 letter to Samuel Hopkins Adams, after the editor was profiled in Harper’s: “I didn’t read [it]. The hell with it. E. B. White said it was the dullest document of the year and I don’t want to get bored by myself.” Or in this friendly admonition to Arthur Kober: “Several of you writers … have had passing reference to me as dynamic, boisterous, mad, violent, impatient and so on, when everyone whom I ever associated with knows that I am one of the longest-suffering and pleasantest and, at heart, quietest men alive today, a sort of gentile Christ. I had a straight flush the other night that gave me a momentary lift, but only momentary.…”

  Other random samples from the Ross files:

  When Margaret Case Harriman once turned up unexpectedly in the Midwest, Ross professed amazement at the range of her wanderings. “For instance, what in God’s name were you doing in the Hotel Mayflower, fifty rooms, European plan, Fireproof, Ralph G. Lorenz, manager, Plymouth, Mich.? Don’t answer; regard the question as rhetorical. It’s all too sordid, probably.”

  In 1947, in a letter to Nunnally Johnson, Ross explained how he ferreted out a case of mistaken identity involving New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell: “I could have asked Joe Mitchell himself, of course, but I am a trained newspaperman and don’t get my dope in any such half-baked way as that. After going as far as I could with my office inquiries, I then referred to Who’s Who. There I find that Doris Stevens is married (2nd) to Jonathan Mitchell, not Joseph, and I find that Jonathan was b. Portland, Maine, 1895, worked on the New York World, and wrote a book, Goosesteps to Peace, 1931. Not only is the first name different, but it would be contrary to the nature of our Mitchell to write a book called Goosesteps to Peace.”

  One day after the war, during a writing sabbatical from the magazine, Maxwell ran into Ross on the street at about one in the afternoon. Ross asked what he was doing in town, and Maxwell said he had tickets for a show—neglecting to mention that the performance was in the evening. Ross assumed Maxwell meant a matinee, and this bothered him; he told a coworker that he had been under the impression that only women attended matinees. Maxwell later straightened him out, and Ross wrote back: “I am enormously relieved to learn that you didn’t go to a matinee of those shows. I don’t like the feeling that I know men who go to shows in the afternoon. It’s worse than smoking reefers and, I believe, practically the same as subsisting on the fruits of fallen women.”

  In a letter to White, Ross addressed his shortcomings: “I am not God.… The realization of this came slowly and hard some years ago, but I have swallowed it by now. I am merely an angel in the Lord’s vineyard.”

  A note Ross left one afternoon for a napping E. B. White. (E. B. White Collection, Cornell University)

  Ross often referred to himself as “an old double-standard boy” when it came to profanity. As if to prove it, he once returned a reworked story to Frank Sullivan, using the occasion to admonish Sullivan, John O’Hara, and others to “stop writing letters to me full of [profanities] because they are apt to be read by pure young girls around this office, and I don’t want them corrupted.” Then, returning to Sullivan’s story, he added, “Don’t hesitate to complain if you think I’ve fucked up this piece.”

  In the early Forties, Ross got so far behind in his payments to Jane Grant that he became embroiled in a series of increasingly sharp exchanges with her law firm, Chadbourne, Wallace, Parke & Whiteside. One day in exasperation he wrote, “Long life to the legal profession! In just about ten years you boys will have this country so thoroughly tied up that it can’t turn a wheel, and then everybody will just go gracefully out of business.” He signed the letter H. W. Ross, of “Ross, Ross, Ross, Ross & Ross.”

  The personality that shines through these letters explains why to the editor of The New Yorker humor was not merely a pleasing adjunct to the magazine but a part of its core. Even in preparing otherwise “straight” stories, Ross’s writers were not to lose sight of this. As Thurber noted, “He didn’t like his facts bare and stark; he wanted them accompanied by comedy—you unwrapped the laugh and there was the fact, or maybe vice versa.” In his long career no single thing discouraged Ross more than having to watch the Depression, Fascism, and the Cold War drain all the humor out of the world.

  ——

  Roger Angell, the distinguished baseball writer and long time New Yorker fiction editor, remembers having lunch one day with Ross not long after Angell had returned from the war and published his first few pieces in the magazine. The conversation was proceeding agreeably when suddenly Ross asked, “What about this Hemingway? Is he any good?”

  Angell smiled, thinking he was being teased. Hemingway had been his literary hero in college, Angell recalls, “and at the time everyone knew he was the number-one writer in the world.” But looking at his companion he could see the editor was quite sincere in his question. Ross might have his own opinion of Hemingway (he did, and it was decidedly mixed), but at this moment his curiosity had overtaken his doubts, and he was genuinely interested in a different and younger perspective.

  In fact, when discussing the essential Ross, one always returns to his bristling curiosity. New Yorker editors were constantly struck by the scope and arcana of his knowledge, from the vagaries of plumbing to the sex life of the eel, and when Ross didn’t know something he wanted to find out. In his play Season in the Sun, Wolcott Gibbs only slightly exaggerates this quality when, in the closing moments, a character explicitly based on Ross is seen hungrily reading the encyclopedia entry for “hurricane” even as the real thing bears down on him. (Gibbs once tried to help remedy Ross’s ignorance of the classics by dragging him to a production of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II. The experiment was a dismal failure. It was bad enough when Ross saw that there were two different characters named Bardolph, but when Rumour opened the play with a long speech describing, as Gibbs said, “what isn’t going to happen,” it was all too much. “What kind of writer would put in a dame like that just to fuck me up?” the editor asked.)

  Ross’s lack of a formal education bothered him for years and contributed to his natural insecurity, though in the end he came around to the idea that it was probably just as well. Had he been better educated, chances are that he would have been much less curious, or perhaps less willing to ask the kinds of blunt questions that accounted for so much of The New Yorker’s admirable clarity. Consider his famous query “Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?” There is no doubt he asked it, though there is considerable disagreement among New Yorker people about whether he was serious or only having a bit of fun. But the point is that it doesn’t matter, because it was precisely the kind of que
stion he would have asked if he didn’t know the answer. He never worried about egg on his face, never pretended to know something if he didn’t.

  On the other hand, to take the reverse side of the “Moby Dick” argument, Ross often pretended not to know something when in fact he did. He made it his business to be informed about a good deal more than he let on, be it a writer’s rocky marriage, Europolitics, or maybe even Herman Melville. Yet by occasionally “presenting himself” (Shawn’s phrase) to the world as a bit of a rube, Ross could use his rusticity to great advantage. Playing the Colorado hayseed, a dim fellow who needed things explained to him in one- and two-syllable words, he might elicit from a writer that perfect word to clarify a muddy sentence, or the right fact to finish an incomplete thought. Likewise, he was aware that bedroom humor was too easy and unworthy of The New Yorker. By eschewing it, ostensibly on the grounds that it offended his prudish sensibilities, he kept his writers and artists striving for more honest and therefore satisfying kinds of humor. Of course, the fact that many of these same writers and artists blithely failed to see what he was doing also suited Ross; sometimes it was simply more efficient, and easier on the digestion, to get his way playing the philistine than to engage in philosophical arguments over every disputed comma or brushstroke.

  Besides, those who chose to explain Ross chiefly in terms of his alleged ignorance and curmudgeonly pose discredited all his other fundamental qualities. Ostensibly he may not have been what one might imagine as the editor of The New Yorker. Then again, countless people said that a single conversation with him revealed a mind so keen, a curiosity so expansive, and a humor so droll that afterward it was hard to imagine anyone but Ross editing the magazine. Some contemporaries likened him to Twain and Mencken, others to Sandburg and Frost, all of whom flashed a genius grounded in, and resonating with, the American experience. Or as Peter De Vries put it, Ross, like those other men of letters, reminds one that “America’s great contribution is not plastics but quarter-sawed oak.”