Thurber Tonight: Part 2 of "A Dime a Dozen" from "The Years with Ross"

"[Ross] dreamed of perfection, not of power or personal fortune. He was a visionary and a practicalist, imperfect at both, a dreamer and a hard worker, a genius and a plodder, obstinate and reasonable, cosmopolitan and provincial, wide-eyed and world-weary. There is only one word that fits him perfectly, and the word is Ross. . . .

"Ross had insight, perception, and a unique kind of intuition, but they were matched by a dozen blind spots and strange areas of ignorance, surprising in a virile and observant reporter who had knocked about the world and lived two years in France. There were so many different Rosses, conflicting and contradictory, that the task of drawing him in words sometimes appears impossible, for the composite of all the Rosses should produce a single unmistakable entity: the most remarkable man I have ever known and the greatest editor. 'If you get him down on paper,' Wolcott Gibbs once warned me, 'nobody will believe it.'"

-- Thurber, in "A Dime a Dozen"

In last night's first installment of the opening chapter of Thurber's The Years with Ross, the author recalled his first meeting with the New Yorker founding editor, in 1927, when the magazine was two years old.

I told him that I wanted to write, and he snarled, "Writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber. What I want is an editor. I can't find editors. Nobody grows up. Do you know English?" I said I thought I knew English, and this started him off on a subject with which I was to become intensely familiar. "Everybody thinks he knows English," he said, "but nobody does. I think it's because of the goddam women schoolteachers."

Tonight we learn about the lifelong Ross fantasy into which Thurber found himself woefully miscast. -- Ken

FOR TONIGHT'S MIDDLE INSTALLMENT
OF "A DIME A DOZEN," CLICK HERE


IN TOMORROW NIGHT'S CONCLUSION OF "A DIME A DOZEN"

Thurber orchestrates his escape from the job of Ross's organizational genius, to join the ranks of the "dime a dozen."


THURBER TONIGHT (now including BENCHLEY TONIGHT and WILL CUPPY TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

#