Genius in Disguise Read online

  Every aspect of New Yorker editing followed from this kind of perfection fixation—perfection being a commodity, Russell Maloney once observed, that Ross thought belonged to him, like his watch or hat. When asked, the editor was inclined to attribute the magazine’s zeal for accuracy to its publication of Newsbreaks—people who live in glass houses, and all that—but his perfectionism was a more satisfactory explanation. The same went for the magazine’s aggressive approach to grammar and punctuation, for New Yorker editors took their cues, after all, from a man who could hold forth for hours on the application of the serial comma. A British professor once asked Thurber why New Yorker editors placed a comma in the sentence, “After dinner, the men went into the living room.” “I could explain that one, all right,” Thurber said. “I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.”

  There were two distinct levels of editing at The New Yorker: the macro (story selection and assignment, rewriting, working with authors, etc.) and the more famous—or infamous, some would say—micro (the rigorous fact-checking, copy-editing, and proofreading procedures, with various redundancies and fail-safes meant to keep inaccuracies and typographical gremlins at bay).

  In late 1936, Ross took a huge step toward working out the macro side of the equation when, after a decade of consternation, trial and error, he finally brought the Jesus parade to a halt. Heretofore his organization problems stemmed from the fact that while his mind’s eye always conjured managing editors who could do it all (including, should it ever become possible, assume his job), his experience was that they could usually do about half. Those who could edit couldn’t administer, and vice versa. Among other complications, this situation kept fiction editors like Mrs. White and Gibbs working on journalistic pieces, on which they had next to no expertise. After Stanley Walker’s disappointing washout, and after Ik Shuman rapidly demonstrated that his strength was in numbers, not words, in desperation the editor turned to a bright but junior member of the staff. St. Clair McKelway was not only a superior reporter and writer but was already spending half his time editing Fact pieces when Ross asked him to be managing editor.

  McKelway agreed to take the job on two conditions. First, he was willing to do it for only three years; second, he wanted Ross to reorganize, by establishing a clear demarcation between fiction and nonfiction. Under this setup, McKelway would be responsible for all the journalism, Mrs. White the fiction, art, and poetry, and no longer would either side involve itself in the affairs of the other. Ross agreed to both conditions. Beyond this, he gave Shuman all the administrative business that had saddled previous Jesuses. With McKelway’s prodding, he finally had hit on a logical solution to his most vexing management problem. As his assistants, McKelway took two of Ross’s most promising young editors, Sanderson Vanderbilt (who, while not one of the Vanderbilts, nonetheless found it a most useful surname for a working journalist in New York) and the quietly confident William Shawn.

  Only thirty-one when he was named managing editor, McKelway already was well on his way to becoming one of the most accomplished and colorful figures in New Yorker history. Son of a prominent Southern family that had produced both notable journalists and ministers, he had just returned to the Herald Tribune after five years in the Orient when Ross recruited him in 1933. Unlike so many other newspaper practitioners, he immediately understood what the editor was trying to do with The New Yorker, and he quickly began turning out stories that reflected his personality: graceful, unhurried, stylish, and sparkling with what Shawn would later call “the lightest of light touches.” On the streets of New York and among his New Yorker colleagues, the tall, well-dressed McKelway cut a dashing figure. In the late Thirties, sitting down over drinks to review John Bainbridge’s early job performance, he had only one criticism: “Be more debonair.” McKelway was the kind of fellow who could marry and divorce five times, yet remain good friends with all his ex-wives.

  He was also, as it happens, an eccentric of the first rank, courtesy of severe manic-depressive illness that worsened over the years. He used to say his personality could fragment itself into twelve different “heads.” If this condition made his behavior occasionally bewildering, it only served to increase his colleagues’ esteem and affection for him, even as it added whole chapters to New Yorker lore. It was McKelway who, while serving as an Air Force information officer in the Pacific during World War II, somehow persuaded himself that Admiral Chester Nimitz was a traitor and fired off a telegram to the War Department saying so. This earned Nimitz an apology from the Air Force and McKelway a trip stateside for safekeeping. Years later, while traveling in his ancestral Scotland, McKelway became convinced he had stumbled onto a diabolical Soviet plot to kidnap President Eisenhower, Queen Elizabeth, and Prince Philip. Such was his unique talent that when the manic-depressive episodes passed, he was able to write about these adventures in psychosis with great style and humor for the magazine.

  The dapper St. Clair McKelway, standing at right, was managing editor for Fact for three years. He once told one of his reporters to “be more debonair.” Here he attends a party with Wolcott Gibbs, seated, and Alan Campbell, husband of Dorothy Parker. (UPI/Bettmann)

  With a clearer division of labor in place, the entire editing system at The New Yorker became more coherent. Which is not to suggest the gauntlet was any the less formidable. From the start The New Yorker scrutinized, debated, and poked at its stories more than any other publication in America. Its procedures reveal so much about Ross and his magazine that they warrant some examination.

  Everything began with the acceptance of a piece. Fact stories usually were pursued only after the idea had been approved by the Fact editor and/or by Ross. Authorized Profiles and other specific story ideas were “reserved” by individual reporters in a fat book; they could reside there untouched for years, but other writers knew to steer clear. A reporter, by now usually someone on The New Yorker staff rather than a contributor, would work directly with his “assigning” editor—at the time this would be McKelway, Shawn, or Vanderbilt, and later such editors as Gardner Botsford. Once the main reporting was done and a writer had produced a first draft, the two would sit down and begin working on the manuscript line by line, agreeing on strengths and probing it for weaknesses.

  On the fiction side, stories were considered only upon submission, even by the biggest names or regular contributors. (One reason The New Yorker published so little F. Scott Fitzgerald—a handful of poems and casuals—was that he wanted a commitment before writing, and the magazine declined to make an exception for him.) Of course, unlike new writers, whose manuscripts were appraised by a first reader, the O’Haras, Kobers, and Bensons had regular editors too—Mrs. White, Gibbs, or Maxwell, and later Gus Lobrano, Rogers Whitaker, and Roger Angell—and their stories got prompt consideration. In any case, several editors read a submitted story and offered their opinions before a decision was made to buy or reject.

  From this point, whether a piece was fiction or nonfiction, the editing and production process was more or less the same (though often corners were cut when material was being hustled into the magazine). Once a piece was set up in proof, copies went to the assigning editor, a copy editor (who read it scrupulously for grammar, spelling, and general sense), and the fact checkers. A fact checker was expected to do what the name implied—check every verifiable assertion of fact. A Profile or lengthy Reporter at Large might well take a week to check, involving long hours in the library, calls to embassies, or even conversations with the subject of the story. On the other hand, checking the “facts” in a short story—for instance, if a writer casually referred to traffic on Forty-third Street, it had better be running west rather than east—might take only a few hours.

  Once all these marked-up proofs came back, a collator put them onto a single master proof. This was what the assigning editor then used to do the final editing on the story, and this was when the process could get considerably m
ore interesting. Depending on the editor and author involved (or more important, depending on the latter’s sensitivities), an editor might go over the story in person, on the phone, or by mail, and he might or might not show the writer the proof—which, after all, could be a disheartening document. Resolving obvious factual errors and misspellings was no problem, but subjective matters—questions of cuts, suggested rewordings, punctuation, profanity—were often much thornier. Louis Forster vividly recalled one occasion when John O’Hara dropped by to go over a short story with Gibbs. The two men were devoted friends—O’Hara named his fictional hometown Gibbsville—but when the writer was drinking, friendship was no protection from his temper. Forster, whose office was just across the hall, began to notice their voices rising, then becoming more animated, until suddenly there was a veritable explosion: “Gibbs, you’re fucking my story!” With that, O’Hara stormed out.

  However, this contretemps was the exception. New Yorker editors, whose job was dealing with delicate egos, strove to make the editing process more collaborative than adversarial. They were tactful with writers, even deferential, and their preferences were always couched as suggestions; The New Yorker never demanded. Still, these suggestions could be most firm, and the writer who wanted to see his story actually published in The New Yorker discounted them at his peril.

  It didn’t take The New Yorker many years, then, to develop a reputation for supreme finickiness among writers, many of whom likened its editing to a pasteurization process. At times even a venerated elder like E. B. White tired of the compulsive fiddling and said it helped bring about a “sameness of sound” from otherwise disparate voices. “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act,” he once said, “outlining the victim.”

  This kind of talk invariably upset Ross, who had created the system for his own peace of mind and with the best of intentions, yet who knew full well that in their zeal to scrub out the copy stains his editors sometimes got carried away. It was not a subject he addressed often, but in 1945 he went into it at some length in a letter to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, one of whose stories, “Miriam’s Houses,” had just emerged from this treatment. As Ross explained it, while he and his editors did raise many points,

  what [we] do is query … for in the long run the story is the author’s and is run over the author’s signature, and if the author wants to retain some bad grammar or some ambiguity, or even print two or three words upside down, we let them do it if the story is good enough to get by with the defects, or what we consider the defects. We’ve got to accept or reject what the author wants in the long run, in toto. We do put up a hell of an argument about details sometimes, though, and occasionally we have to hand back a story we think we have bought because the author won’t yield on points we consider important. (The worse the writer is, the more argument; that is the rule. There are a vast number of writers around who can’t write. They get by through diligence, application, and various other qualities that are not primarily literary.) …

  The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important. For one thing, an editor is a good trial horse; the writer can use him to see if a story and its various elements register as he or she thinks they register.… For another thing, editors perform a technical function in small matters that I suspect writers shouldn’t concern themselves with overmuch. I think writers, or most writers, ought to let editors backstop the small, more or less technical points. The trouble with our querying system is that it sometimes makes writers self-conscious; they get to thinking—oh, Christ, three or four people are going to pick flaws in this—and they freeze up.… Most of the writers think we are helpful at times, if a nuisance generally. We are unquestionably captious and careless frequently and occasionally we suggest changes for the mere sake of change, or for a peculiar personal feeling, but we try not to cram our theories, little or big, down writers’ throats.

  Different writers took different views on the magazine’s editing regimen. O’Hara, obviously, could be violent on the subject, and yet when he wasn’t drinking he accepted editing well. James M. Cain, having become intimately familiar with the magazine’s rigmarole, politely declined Gibbs’s invitation to submit some stories not long after he left: “I am gradually starving to death, but I think on the whole I would rather be dead.” John Cheever complained of repeated efforts to cut his story endings, and Emily Hahn said that the fact-checking tried her patience. Edmund Wilson, as usual, had especially strong feelings. In a screed to Katharine White, he asserted that “the editors are so afraid of anything that is unusual, that is not expected, that they put a premium on insipidity and banality. I find, in the case of my own articles, that if I ever coin a phrase or strike off a picturesque metaphor, somebody always objects.”

  On the other hand, care breeds care. Irwin Shaw said that more endings should be lopped off, and H. L. Mencken lauded The New Yorker’s scrutiny as “something that deserves high praise in this careless world.” In fact, it appears Ross’s own assessment was about right. Of the nearly two dozen veteran New Yorker writers interviewed for this book, the great majority said that for all the occasional, inevitable irritations, they found the magazine’s editing process reassuring and believed it improved their work.

  However loudly or quietly the questions in a given story were resolved, it was then reset into a revised proof. This meant that the piece theoretically was ready to appear whenever it was needed—which, given The New Yorker’s “Be prepared” motto, could mean right away or a year from now. Material might be scheduled three or four weeks ahead, but typically a given issue’s lineup wasn’t firm until that very week. The issue in progress was called A issue, one week out was B issue, two weeks out was C issue, and so on; the issue just gone to press was X issue. With so many moving parts and so many Ross rules to follow—e.g., no more than one talking-animal cartoon per issue; the first cartoon in the magazine must have a caption; the theater and film columns could not run adjacent to each other—production of the magazine involved intricate choreography. The New Yorker’s wheezing, septuagenarian couriers were familiar sights on the New Haven rail line as they lugged manuscripts, proofs, artwork, and pasted-up pages back and forth between the office and the Condé Nast printing plant in Greenwich, Connecticut. As an issue’s deadlines descended, coordination was so close that any small slip could create havoc. Gardner Botsford said he once inadvertently brought the magazine to a dead halt the night before it went to press when he mislaid the London Letter by the water cooler.

  Except for Woollcott’s one-page Shouts and Murmurs column, New Yorker pieces were never cut to fit a page. Since they had already been edited to what was considered their rightful length, it was up to the magazine’s makeup wizards to build the pages around them. This they did by juggling cartoons, dropping in the distinctive “spot” illustrations (five thousand of which were kept ready for use), and filling in column endings with Newsbreaks. Once a page was ready to go to the printing plant, a page proof was pulled, and the story would be read again. It was not until a final proof was initialed by a designated proofreader that it was deemed all right to print.

  In other words, between the time an author turned in a manuscript and the time it appeared in The New Yorker, a piece might be scoured fifteen or twenty times by six or eight different people, all in the name of perfection. However, perfection is not only an elusive target but a maddening one, and the editing wars helped spark off some of the magazine’s more legendary animosities, such as that between two charter New Yorker characters, Rogers Whitaker and Fred Packard. The tart-tongued Whitaker, so charming to pet writers or his many performer friends, could be a bully with his underlings. In the magazine’s early years, one of these was Packard, a bon vivant and man of considerable charm, who himself would go on to run the checking department for many years. When he was still working for “Popsie,” Packard once threw out some important ga
lley proofs by mistake, and Whitaker made him wade through the building’s filthy trash bin to retrieve them. At another time, when Packard had missed a mistake in a story, Whitaker had him memorize the galley proof on which it had appeared, then repeat it aloud to him. Little wonder then that through the years, as each man cultivated countless friends and admirers, Whitaker and Packard would never have a kind word for each other.

  Former New Yorker checkers, who are, by and large, a fastidious lot, discuss their work with great pride, and certainly they were aware how much solace Ross derived from their labors. Still, this only increased the pressure on them to be right. Every mistake that wiggled into The New Yorker was investigated to see how it had occurred, and if it was a factual error that had slipped past a checker, he was generally held to be more at fault than the writer who made the mistake in the first place.

  Therefore the checkers would go to storied lengths to get a fact right. William Mangold, who succeeded Forster as A issue editor, first came to The New Yorker as a checker, and he recollected one especially memorable assignment from Ross. Dwight Eisenhower, then U.S. Army chief of staff, was about to become president of Columbia, and Ross believed that the head of the university, founded as Kings College by the British two centuries earlier, was supposed to be a High Episcopalian. No one around seemed to know the general’s religion, so Ross asked Mangold to find out.

  Mangold scoured every conceivable source, but turned up nothing except a passing mention in the Daily News that Ike had grown up belonging to a small sect in Abilene, Kansas, known as the River Brethren. Ross had never heard of the sect and yelled, “The Daily News! We can’t go with something like that on the word of the Daily News!” He told Mangold to call Eisenhower’s staff in Washington. A helpful aide there made some inquiries, but he too came up empty. When Mangold, a bit desperate by now, pressed him, the aide asked why the information was so important, and Mangold replied that the editor of The New Yorker needed to know. At that the aide excused himself, and a few moments later Ike himself got on the line: “Son, what can I do for you?” Startled, Mangold nonetheless blurted out that he was trying to learn whether as a boy the general had belonged to a sect called the River Brethren. Said Eisenhower, “That’s right.” Mangold thanked him and reported back to his commanding officer, who was never more tickled than when he got his information straight from the horse’s mouth.