DownWithTyranny!: [3/9/2011] Thurber Tonight: About Wolcott Gibbs (continued)

Again, as a down payment toward some of Gibbs's own writing -- though we do have a sample here -- we have tonight documents linking Thurber, Gibbs, and White.

(1) THURBER ON GIBBS

We return here to the foreword to The Years with Ross. Near the end Thurber writes:

I was finishing the last six chapters of this book in London in the summer of 1958 when I got the news of the untimely death of Wolcott Gibbs, one of the most important figures in the career of Harold Ross and in the history of his magazine. I have no words that would adequately express my deep shock and my sense of personal loss. There have been many deaths of New Yorker people since I went to work there so many years ago, each of them a sad and grievous blow to the rest of us. I am partly consoled, in the case of Wolcott Gibbs, by the closeness and warmth of our relationship during the writing of this book.

Even though he was in the hospital at the time, he took on the considerable task of editing the chapter called "Dishonest Abe and the Grand Marshal" and later of supervising the galley proofs of "The Last Years," since I was in Europe when they came from the printers. A fortnight before he died, he sent me a letter in answer to one of my many queries. It was a letter typical of Wolcott Gibbs at his best -- sharp, ironic, funny, and, I am glad to say, cheerful. He had in his hands, before he died, that fine new collection of his best work over the years, More in Sorrow. In his Preface he said that he was pleased with the way I had written about his New Yorker career in this book. Wolcott was not a man easy to please, and no one's pleasure gratified me more than his, and no one's judgment meant more to me.

(2) GIBBS ON THURBER (AND ON HIS OWN CAREER)

Here's what Gibbs had to say in the foreword to More in Sorrow referenced by Thurber:

The time I spent on The New Yorker (from 1927 up to now) has been covered by Mr. James Thurber in his book called The Years with Ross in a manner that should serve always as a model for such reminiscences. In addition to a phenomenal memory, Mr. Thurber has enormous perseverance in research, a wit and style that have always commanded my stunned admiration, and, I should say, a romantic heart that has enabled him to think of his place of business as the most picturesque establishment in publishing history. This is a touching illusion, and I hesitate to correct it. Instead, I think, we will just pass on to something else.

Because of a late-blooming and therefore more than usually passionate energy, I have contributed more words to The New Yorker than anybody else in its thirty-odd year span. It is certainly unnecessary to go into the nature of these works, except to say that they included practically everything this side of women's fashions and horse racing, two fields in which my information was generally felt to be inadequate, though not by me. The important, or perhaps the merely numbing, thing is the matter of sheer volume, and here I yield to no man. Year in and year out, regardless of the world's condition or my own, I thumped away, and the drifting pages were gathered up, numbered, and, after some superfluous hocus-pocus known as editing, despatched to the Condé Nast Press in Greenwich, Connecticut, where they were translated to type and eventually distributed to the public as part of a magazine.

In my opinion, the selection that follows contains the best of this staggering output, or at any rate the part that pleases me most. I will be grateful, and rather startled, if anyone agrees.

(3) WHITE'S SEND-OFF FOR GIBBS

This appeared on page 83, the last editorial page, of The New Yorker of August 30, 1958. Although unsigned, the obituary was generally known to have been written by E. B. White.

WOLCOTT GIBBS

The death of Wolcott Gibbs on August 16th in his house on Fire Island was, of course, reported in the papers, and his stature as a drama critic noted. Here at the magazine we tend to think of him in an earlier phase, before the theatre became his chief concern. He came to The New Yorker in 1927, from the top of a boxcar on the Long Island Raii Road, where he had been employed, and of all the early arrivals, in those days when the magazine watched the skies for signs of salvation, he seemed somehow the most promising. He had the manner and appearance and speech of a native New Yorker; he dressed appropriately; he seemed uninterested in, if not scornful of, any other city; he was young, talented, humorous; and he was obviously a pro, able to do his work without regard to the many difficulties that prevailed. Even more implausible was the fact that he appeared to be (and turned out to be) professionally ambidextrous: a natural editor, a prolific and good and versatile writer -- gifts rarely combined in one person.

Long before Gibbs slipped into the critic's seat at the playhouse, he was turning in an editor-writer performance at The New Yorker that has never been equalled. His judgment on humor, or fiction, and on art helped form the magazine and shape its course. He was a stern critic of manuscripts, just as, later, he became a stern critic of plays, but he was a friendly and a humorous one, and writers found him kind, helpful, amusing and amused. Often the Editor would have been far happier to publish a Gibbs opinion sheet than the manuscript to which it was attached. In fact, if these spontaneous and unguarded opinions of his could be released to the world (and they most assuredly can't be), they would make probably a funnier and sounder critique of creative writing in the late twenties and early thirties than has ever been assembled.

Gibbs filled our gaping pages with satirical sketches, profiles, parodies, reminiscences, and comments. All of his stuff was good, much of it was superb -- sharp, memorable, and funny. His style had a brilliance that was never flashy, he was self-critical as well as critical, and he had absolute pitch, which enabled him to become a parodist of the first rank. The parodies are in a class by themselves: Huxley, Hemingway, Marquand, Saroyan, Lewis, Pegler, Maxwell Anderson, the rewrite men of Time -- a long list. Luckily, these great parodies, together with some other material, will soon reappear, in a new book; Gibbs was studying an advance copy of this book, cigarette in hand, when he died. Parody was his favorite form, because it was the most challenging. ("I found them harder and more rewarding to do than anything else.") It is safe to predict that this will be the most distinguished collection of parodies in American letters to date, and it will certainly be the funniest.

Wolcott Gibbs was too high-strung to live at peace with the world; he exhausted himself fighting rear-guard actions in private, inescapable wars of the mind and spirit. He was a tortured man. ("There was a hard ball of panic in his stomach," he wrote of one of his characters, who could only have been himself.) He enjoyed the society of cats and the relatively tranquil companionship of a few well-tempered friends. Of late years, he fought against the odds of poor health. Two important things happened to him about twenty years ago: he fell under the spell of the theatre and began contributing the reviews that won him the respect of the theatrical world and the gratitude of paying customers, and he fell desperately in love with Fire Island, where the sun and the wind and the untidy civilization of that relaxed and accessible sandbar supplied him with ingredients missing in Manhattan. Fire Island was his Riviera, his Left Bank, his South Sea Island. We who knew and loved him felt particularly grateful that he managed to be there when he died, where he most liked to be, right in the middle of his season in the sun.

When he was a youngster attending the Riverdale Country School, Gibbs once strode the boards; he played Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," wearing a costume covered with tiny bells. The director gave him explicit instructions for portraying the part; "I want you to be a little whirlwind," he said, and the young actor soberly accepted the assignment. He leaped and shook throughout the show, his bells effectively drowning out the voices of all the other members of the cast. This episode came back to us, remembering Gibbs as we used to know him in his first flights of editorial duty. He was a singularly restless co-worker, a sheet of copy paper always in his machine, and the rapid bursts of composition audible as you passed his door. He was, in all truth, a whirlwind; and in these office can still be heard the pure and irreplaceable sound of his wild bells.