Thurber Tonight: About Wolcott Gibbs

If the cut-off signature in the lower-right corner of the jacket front looks familiar, it is indeed that of "Chas Addams," who's credited on the inside flap with the jacket design, which as you can see wraps around to the spine.

"Mr. Thurber has . . . 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."

-- Wolcott Gibbs, in his foreword to the 1958
anthology of his writing, More in Sorrow

by Ken

In last night's concluding installment of the opening chapter of Thurber's The Years with Ross, the author wrote about the aftermath of his transformation from Central Desk editorial "miracle man" to "dime a dozen" writer:

"I became one of the trio about whom [Ross] fretted and fussed continually -- the others were Andy White and Wolcott Gibbs. . . . Once, and only once, he took White and Gibbs and me to lunch at the Algonquin, with all the fret and fuss of a mother hen trying to get her chicks across a main thoroughfare. Later, back at the office, I heard him saying to someone on the phone, 'I just came from lunch with three writers who couldn't have got back to the office alone.'"

I'm not sure how well-known even White would be today if he hadn't found his way into the publishing big time with his children's books (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan -- all of which I have to confess I've always found all but unreadable). Gibbs today is hardly known, except in the form of pieces written by people wondering why he's so little known.

Eventually we're going to get around to some of Gibbs's own writing (as everybody who writes about him notes, it doesn't hold up all that well on its own, at least not without a certain amount of context or explanatory background), but tonight, simply in partial answer to the question "Who the heck was Wolcott Gibbs?," we have three documents: short ones by Thurber on Gibbs and by Gibbs on Thurber, and then the obituary White wrote for The New Yorker upon Gibbs's death.


FOR TONIGHT'S CIRCULAR RECOLLECTIONS
OF/BY THURBER, GIBBS & WHITE, CLICK HERE


TOMORROW NIGHT: either a sample of Gibbs's own writing, or some notes on the rift between Thurber and the Whites


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

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Thurber Tonight: Part 3 of "A Dime a Dozen" from "The Years with Ross"

So far in this opening chapter of The Years with Ross, Thurber has explained that The New Yorker's founding editor, who considered writers "a dime a dozen," bizarrely hired him to be one of his long series of editorial geniuses who by magic would make the magazine appear each week with effortless brilliance and perfection. It quickly became clear to Thurber how badly suited he was to this role; the trouble was getting Ross to understand. When he did, the whole relationship changed. -- Ken

"I became one of the trio about whom [Ross] fretted and fussed continually -- the others were Andy White and Wolcott Gibbs. . . . Once, and only once, he took White and Gibbs and me to lunch at the Algonquin, with all the fret and fuss of a mother hen trying to get her chicks across a main thoroughfare. Later, back at the office, I heard him saying to someone on the phone, 'I just came from lunch with three writers who couldn't have got back to the office alone.'"

-- Thurber, in "A Dime a Dozen"

FOR OUR THIRD AND FINAL INSTALLMENT
OF "A DIME A DOZEN," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW NIGHT: About Wolcott Gibbs (including Thurber on Gibbs, Gibbs on Thurber, and The New Yorker's obituary of Gibbs by E. B. White)


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

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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

#

Thurber Tonight: Part 1 of "A Dime a Dozen" from "The Years with Ross"

"Ross was never conscious of his dramatic gestures, or of his natural gift of theatrical speech. At times he seemed to be on stage, and you half expected the curtain to fall on such an agonized tagline as 'God, how I pity me!' . . .

"He once found out that I had done an impersonation of him for a group of his friends at Dorothy Parker's apartment, and he called me into his office. 'I hear you were imitating me last night, Thurber,' he snarled. 'I don't know what the hell there is to imitate -- go ahead and show me.' All this time his face was undergoing its familiar changes of expression and his fingers were flying."

-- Thurber, in "A Dime a Dozen," the opening
chapter of his memoir The Years with Ross

In the foreword to The Years with Ross, his account of "various aspects of the life and career" of the founding editor of The New Yorker, Harold W. Ross (1892-1951), based on his own 24-year association with Ross, Thurber explains:

This book began as a series of a few pieces for the Atlantic Monthly, but it soon became clear to me that the restless force named Harold Wallace Ross could not be so easily confined and contained. What set out to be a summer task of reminiscence turned out to be an ordeal of love. I say ordeal, not only because of the considerable research that had to be done, over a period of a year and a half, but because the writing of the pieces necessitated my dealing with so many friends and colleagues, whom I had to bother continually. I need not have worried about this, for, without exception, everyone I turned to for opinion and guidance and help seemed to drop everything and come running to my assistance. There are far too many of them to list here, but their names and their contributions to this collection of memories sparkle on almost every page.

From the very beginning of the enterprise, I determined that it should not become a formal schematic biography, of the kind that begins: "There was joy in the home of George and Ida Ross that November day in 1892 when their son Harold was born, and emitted his first cries of discontent and helplessness," and then proceeds, step by step, and year by year, to trace the career of the subject up until the day of his death. This book, perversely perhaps, begins with the death of its subject. The pattern is not one of strict and familiar chronological order, and the unity I have striven for, whether I have achieved it or not, is one of effect. I have taken up various aspects of the life and career of H. W. Ross, and treated each one as an entity in itself. The separate pieces are not progressive chapters, and the reader may pick up Ross at any point, beginning with any of the installments. Each one runs a deliberately planned gamut of time, in which the scheme is one of flashbacks and flashforwards.

The dedication of the book is:

To Frank Sullivan

Master of humor, newspaperman, good companion, friend to Ross, this book is dedicated with the love and admiration I share with everybody who knows him.

We last encountered Frank Sullivan via the affectionate introduction he wrote for the posthumous collection of pieces by his friend Robert Benchley, Chips Off the Old Benchley, in which he suggested that, given the frenetic nature of Benchley's dealings with his bank, "I should like to have seen this book enriched by a piece called 'Banking With Benchley' by the Bankers' Trust Company."

In the foreword to The Years with Ross, as we've seen, Thurber writes of the unstinting cooperation he received from the many New Yorker colleagues he consulted in the course of his research and preparation for the book. However, as the Atlantic Monthly pieces began appearing, even before the book's publication in 1959, he seems to have been surprised by the deeply unappreciative response of his old colleagues Andy (E.B.) and Katharine White. The rift between Thurber and the Whites had been a long time in the making, but The Years with Ross seems to have hardened it into an estrangement, which I hope we'll be able to look at a little as this miniseries unfolds.


TO READ OUR FIRST INSTALLMENT
OF "A DIME A DOZEN," CLICK HERE


TOMORROW NIGHT, IN PART 2 OF "A DIME A DOZEN":

We learn about Ross's dream of "a Central Desk at which an infallible omniscience would sit, a dedicated genius, out of Technology by Mysticism, effortlessly controlling and coordinating editorial personnel, contributors, office boys, cranks and other visitors, manuscripts, proofs, cartoons, captions, covers, fiction, poetry, and facts, and bringing forth each Thursday a magazine at once funny, journalistically sound, and flawless," and about the mostly wildly ill-suited people, like Thurber, he hired to fill the role of this genius.


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

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[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.

---

RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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[3/8/2011] Thurber Tonight: Part 3 of "A Dime a Dozen" from "The Years with Ross" (continued)

I

A Dime a Dozen

(from The Years with Ross -- part 3 of 3)

I made deliberate mistakes and let things slide as the summer wore on, hoping to be demoted to rewriting "Talk of the Town," with time of my own in which to write "casuals." That was Ross's word for fiction and humorous pieces of all kinds. Like "Profile" and "Reporter at Large" and "Notes and Comment," the word "casual" indicated Ross's determination to give the magazine an offhand, chatty, informal quality. Nothing was to be labored or studied, arty, literary, or intellectual. Formal short stories and other "formula stuff" were under the ban. Writers were to be played down; the accent was on content, not personalities. "All writers are writer-conscious," he said a thousand times.

One day he came to me with a letter from a men's furnishing store which complained that it wasn't getting fair treatment in the "As to Men" department. "What are you going to do about that?" he growled. I swept it off my desk onto the floor. "The hell with it," I said. Ross didn't pick it up, just stared at it dolefully. "That's direct action, anyway," he said. "Maybe that's the way to handle grousing. We can't please everybody." Thus he rationalized everything I did, steadfastly refusing to perceive that he was dealing with a writer who intended to write or to be thrown out. "Thurber has honesty," he told Andy White, "admits his mistakes, never passes the buck. Only editor with common sense I've ever had."

I finally told Ross, late in the summer, that I was losing weight, my grip, and possibly my mind, and had to have a rest. He had not realized I had never taken a day off, even Saturday or Sunday. "All right, Thurber," he said, "but I think you're wearing yourself down writing pieces. Take a couple of weeks, anyway. Levick can hold things down while you're gone. I guess."

It was, suitably enough, a dog that brought Ross and me together out of the artificiality and stuffiness of our strained and mistaken relationship. I went to Columbus on vacation and took a Scottie with me, and she disappeared out there. It took me two days to find her, with the help of newspaper ads and the police department. When I got back to the New Yorker, two days late, Ross called me into his office about seven o'clock, having avoided me all day. He was in one of his worst God-how-I-pity-me moods, a state of mind often made up of monumentally magnified trivialities. I was later to see this mood develop out of his exasperation with the way Niven Busch walked, or the way Ralph Ingersoll talked, or his feeling that "White is being silent about something and I don't know what it is." It could start because there weren't enough laughs in "Talk of the Town," or because he couldn't reach Arno on the phone, or because he was suddenly afflicted by the fear that nobody around the place could "find out the facts." (Once a nerve-racked editor yelled at him, "Why don't you get Westinghouse to build you a fact-finding machine?")

This day, however, the Ossa on the Pelion of his molehill miseries was the lost and found Jeannie. [Note that we've already read about the later misadventures of Jeannie in "Look Homeward, Jeannie." -- Ed.] Thunder was on his forehead and lightning in his voice. "I understand you've overstayed your vacation to look for a dog," he growled. "Seems to me that was the act of a sis." (His vocabulary held some quaint and unexpected words and phrases out of the past. "They were spooning," he told me irritably about some couple years later, and, "I think she's stuck on him.") The word sis, which I had last heard about 1908, the era of skidoo, was the straw that shattered my patience. Even at sixty-four my temper is precarious, but at thirty-two it had a hair trigger.

The scene that followed was brief, loud, and incoherent. I told him what to do with his goddam magazine, that I was through, and that he couldn't call me a sis while sitting down, since it was a fighting word. I offered to fight him then and there, told him he had the heart of a cast-iron lawn editor, and suggested that he call in one of his friends to help him. Ross hated scenes, physical violence or the threat of it, temper and the unruly.

"Who would you suggest I call in?" he demanded, the thunder clearing from his brow.

"Alexander Woollcott!" I yelled, and he began laughing.

His was a wonderful, room-filling laugh when it came, and this was my first experience of it. It cooled the air like summer rain. An hour later we were having dinner together at Tony's after a couple of drinks, and that night was the beginning of our knowledge of each other underneath the office make-up, and of a lasting and deepening friendship. "I'm sorry, Thurber," he said. "I'm married to this magazine. It's all I think about. I knew a dog I liked once, a shepherd dog, when I was a boy. I don't like dogs as such, though, and I'll, by God, never run a department about dogs -- or about baseball, or about lawyers." His eyes grew sad; then he gritted his teeth, always a sign that he was about to express some deep antipathy, or grievance, or regret. "I'm running a column about women's fashions," he moaned, "and I never thought I'd come to that." I told him the "On and Off the Avenue" department was sound, a word he always liked to hear, but used sparingly. It cheered him up.

It wasn't long after that fateful night that Ross banged into my office one afternoon. He paced around for a full minute without saying anything, jingling the coins in his pocket. "You've been writing," he said finally. "I don't know how in hell you found time to write. I admit I didn't want you to. I could hit a dozen writers from here with this ash tray. They're undependable, no system, no self-discipline. Dorothy Parker says you're a writer, and so does Baird Leonard." His voice rose to its level of high decision. "All right then, if you're a writer, write! Maybe you've got something to say." He gave one of his famous prolonged sighs, an agonized protesting acceptance of a fact he had been fighting.

From then on I was a completely different man from the one he had futilely struggled to make me. No longer did he tell White that I had common sense. I was a writer now, not a hand-holder of artists, but a man who needed guidance. Years later he wrote my wife a letter to which he appended this postscript: "Your husband's opinion on a practical matter of this sort would have no value." We never again discussed tearing down walls, the Central Desk, the problems of advertisers, or anything else in the realm of the practical. If a manuscript was lost, "Thurber lost it." Once he accused me of losing a typescript that later turned up in an old briefcase of his own. This little fact made no difference. "If it hadn't been there," he said, "Thurber would have lost it." As I become more and more "productive," another of his fondest words, he became more and more convinced of my helplessness. "Thurber hasn't the vaguest idea what goes on around here," he would say.

I became one of the trio about whom he fretted and fussed continually -- the others were Andy White and Wolcott Gibbs. His admiration of good executive editors, except in the case of William Shawn, never carried with it the deep affection he had for productive writers. His warmth was genuine, but always carefully covered over by gruffness or snarl or a semblance of deep disapproval. Once, and only once, he took White and Gibbs and me to lunch at the Algonquin, with all the fret and fuss of a mother hen trying to get her chicks across a main thoroughfare. Later, back at the office, I heard him saying to someone on the phone, "I just came from lunch with three writers who couldn't have got back to the office alone."

Our illnesses, or moods, or periods of unproductivity were a constant source of worry to him. He visited me several times when I was in a hospital undergoing a series of eye operations in 1940 and 1941. On one of these visits, just before he left, he came over to the bed and snarled, "Goddam it, Thurber, I worry about you and England." England was at that time going through the German blitz. As my blindness increased, so did his concern. One noon he stopped at a table in the Algonquin lobby, where I was having a single cocktail with some friends before lunch. That afternoon he told White or Gibbs, "Thurber's over at the Algonquin lacing 'em in. He's the only drinking blind man I know."

He wouldn't go to the theater the night The Male Animal opened in January, 1940, but he wouldn't go to bed, either, until he had read the reviews, which fortunately were favorable. Then he began telephoning around town until, at a quarter of two in the morning, he reached me at Bleeck's. I went to the phone. The editor of the New Yorker began every phone conversation by announcing "Ross," a monosyllable into which he was able to pack the sound and sign of all his worries anxieties. His loud voice seemed to fill the receiver to overflowing. "Well, God bless you, Thurber," he said warmly, and then came the old familiar snarl: "Now, goddam it, maybe you can get something written for the magazine," and he hung up, but I can still hear him, over the years, loud and snarling, fond and comforting.


RETURN TO THE BEGINNING OF THE POST

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

I

A Dime a Dozen

(from The Years with Ross -- part 2 of 3)

In those early years the magazine occupied a floor in the same building as the Saturday Review of Literature on West 45th Street. Christopher Morley often rode in the elevator, a tweedy man, smelling of pipe tobacco and books, unmistakably a literary figure. I don't know that Ross ever met him. "I know too many people," he used to say. The editor of the New Yorker, wearing no mark of his trade, strove to be inconspicuous and liked to get to his office in the morning, if possible, without being recognized and greeted.

From the beginning Ross cherished his dream of a Central Desk at which an infallible omniscience would sit, a dedicated genius, out of Technology by Mysticism, effortlessly controlling and coordinating editorial personnel, contributors, office boys, cranks and other visitors, manuscripts, proofs, cartoons, captions, covers, fiction, poetry, and facts, and bringing forth each Thursday a magazine at once funny, journalistically sound, and flawless. This dehumanized figure, disguised as a man, was a goal only in the sense that the mechanical rabbit of a whippet track is a quarry. Ross's mind was always filled with dreams of precision and efficiency beyond attainment, but exciting to contemplate.

This conception of a Central Desk and its superhuman engineer was the largest of half a dozen intense preoccupations. You could see it smoldering in his eyes if you encountered him walking to work, oblivious of passers-by, his tongue edging reflectively out of the corner of his mouth, his round-shouldered torso seeming, as Lois Long once put it, to be pushing something invisible ahead of him. He had no Empire Urge, unlike Henry Luce and a dozen other founders of proliferating enterprises. He was a one-magazine, one-project man. (His financial interest in Dave Chasen's Hollywood restaurant was no more central to his ambition than his onetime investment in a paint-spraying machine -- I don't know whatever became of that.) He 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.

When I agreed to work for the New Yorker as a desk man, it was with deep misgivings. I felt that Ross didn't know, and wasn't much interested in finding out, anything about me. He had persuaded himself, without evidence, that I might be just the wonder man he was looking for, a mistake he had made before and was to make again in the case of other newspapermen, including James M. Cain, who was just about as miscast for the job as I was. Ross's wishful thinking was, it seems to me now, tinged with hallucination. In expecting to find, in everybody that turned up, the Ideal Executive, he came to remind me of the Charlie Chaplin of The Gold Rush, who, snowbound and starving with another man in a cabin teetering on the edge of a cliff, suddenly beholds his companion turning into an enormous tender spring chicken, wonderfully edible, supplied by Providence. "Done and done, Thurber," said Ross. "I'll give you seventy dollars a week. If you write anything, goddam it, your salary will take care of it." Later that afternoon he phoned my apartment and said, "I've decided to make that ninety dollars a week, Thurber." When my first check came through it was for one hundred dollars. "I couldn't take advantage of a newspaperman," Ross explained.

By the spring of 1928 Ross's young New Yorker was safely past financial and other shoals that had menaced its launching, skies were clearing, the glass was rising, and everybody felt secure except the skipper of the ship. From the first day I met him till the last time I saw him, Ross was like a sleepless, apprehensive sea captain pacing the bridge, expecting any minute to run aground, collide with something nameless in a sudden fog, or find his vessel abandoned and adrift, like the Mary Celeste. When, at the age of thirty-two, Ross had got his magazine afloat with the aid of Raoul Fleischmann and a handful of associates, the proudest thing he had behind him was his editorship of the Stars and Stripes in Paris from 1917 to 1919.

As the poet is born, Ross was born a newspaperman. "He could not only get it, he could write it," said his friend Herbert Asbury. Ross got it and wrote it for seven different newspapers before he was twenty-five years old, beginning as a reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune when he was only fourteen. One of his assignments there was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution. Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends, the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), "How many fallen women do you have?"

Later he worked for the Marysville (California) Appeal, Sacramento Union, Panama Star and Herald, New Orleans Item, Atlanta Journal, and San Francisco Call.

The wanderer -- some of his early associates called him "Hobo" -- reached New York in 1919 and worked for several magazines, including Judge and the American Legion Weekly, his mind increasingly occupied with plans for a new kind of weekly to be called the New Yorker. It was born at last, in travail and trauma, but he always felt uneasy as the R of the F-R Publishing Company, for he had none of the instincts and equipment of the businessman except the capacity for overwork and overworry. In his new position of high responsibility he soon developed the notion, as Marc Connelly has put it, that the world was designed to wear him down. A dozen years ago I found myself almost unconsciously making a Harold Ross out of one King Clode, a rugged pessimist in a fairy tale I was writing. At one point the palace astronomer rushed into the royal presence saying, "A huge pink comet, Sire, just barely missed the earth a little while ago. It made an awful hissing sound, like hot irons stuck in water." "They aim these things at me!" said Clode. "Everything is aimed at me." In this fantasy Clode pursues a fabulously swift white deer which, when brought to bay, turns into a woman, a parable that parallels Ross's headlong quest for the wonder man who invariably turned into a human being with feet of clay, as useless to Ross as any enchanted princess.

Among the agencies in mischievous or malicious conspiracy to wear Ross down were his own business department ("They're not only what's the matter with me, they're what's the matter with the country"), the state and federal tax systems, women and children (all the females and males that worked for him), temperament and fallibility in writers and artists, marriages and illnesses -- to both of which his staff seemed especially susceptible -- printers, engravers, distributors, and the like, who seemed to aim their strikes and ill-timed holidays directly at him, and human nature in general.

Harold Wallace Ross, born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892, in a year and decade whose cradles were filled with infants destined to darken his days and plague his nights, was in the midst of a project involving the tearing down of walls the week I started to work. When he outlined his schemes of reconstruction, it was often hard to tell where rationale left off and mystique began. (How he would hate those smart-aleck words.) He seemed to believe that certain basic problems of personnel might just possibly be solved by some fortuitous rearrangement of the offices. Time has mercifully foreshortened the months of my ordeal as executive editor, and only the highlights of what he called "practical matters" still remain. There must have been a dozen Through the Looking Glass conferences with him about those damned walls. As an efficiency expert or construction engineer, I was a little boy with an alarm clock and a hammer, and my utter incapacity in such a role would have been apparent in two hours to an unobsessed man. I took to drinking Martinis at lunch to fortify myself for the tortured afternoons of discussion.

"Why don't we put the walls on wheels?" I demanded one day. "We might get somewhere with adjustable walls."

Ross's eyes lighted gloomily, in an expression of combined hope and dismay which no other face I have known could duplicate. "The hell with it," he said. "You could hear everybody talking. You could see everybody's feet."

He and I worked seven days a week, often late into the night, for at least two months, without a day off. I began to lose weight, editing factual copy for sports departments and those dealing with new apartments, women's fashions, and men's wear.

"Gretta Palmer keeps using words like introvert and extrovert," Ross complained one day. "I'm not interested in the housing problems of neurotics. Everybody's neurotic. Life is hard, but I haven't got time for people's personal troubles. You've got to watch Woollcott and Long and Parker -- they keep trying to get double meanings into their stuff to embarrass me. Question everything. We damn near printed a newsbreak about a girl falling off the roof. That's feminine hygiene, somebody told me just in time. You probably never heard the expression in Ohio."

"In Ohio," I told him, "we say the mirror cracked from side to side."

"I don't want to hear about it," he said.

He nursed an editorial phobia about what he called the functional: "bathroom and bedroom stuff." Years later he deleted from a Janet Flanner "London Letter" a forthright explanation of the long nonliquid diet imposed upon the royal family and important dignitaries during the coronation of George VI. He was amused by the drawing of a water plug squirting a stream at a small astonished dog, with the caption "News," but he wouldn't print it. "So-and-so can't write a story without a man in it carrying a woman to a bed," he wailed. And again, "I'll never print another O'Hara story I don't understand. I want to know what his people are doing." He was depressed for weeks after the appearance of a full-page Arno depicting a man and a girl on a road in the moonlight, the man carrying the back seat of an automobile. "Why didn't somebody tell me what it meant?" he asked. 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."


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[3/6/2011] Thurber Tonight: Part 1 of "A Dime a Dozen" from "The Years with Ross" (continued)

Without further ado, then, we proceed to the opening chapter of The Years with Ross. -- Ken

I
A Dime a Dozen

(from The Years with Ross -- part 1 of 3)

Harold Ross died December 6, 1951, exactly one month after his fifty-ninth birthday. In November of the following year the New Yorker entertained the editors of Punch and some of its outstanding artists and writers. I was in Bermuda and missed the party, but weeks later met Rowland Emett for lunch at the Algonquin. "I'm sorry you didn't get to meet Ross," I began as we sat down. "Oh, but I did," he said. "He was all over the place. Nobody talked about anybody else."

Ross is still all over the place for many of us, vitally stalking the corridors of our lives, disturbed and disturbing, fretting, stimulating, more evident in death than the living presence of ordinary men. A photograph of him, full face, almost alive with a sense of contained restlessness, hangs on a wall outside his old office. I am sure he had just said to the photographer, "I haven't got time for this." That's what he said, impatiently, to anyone -- doctor, lawyer, tax man -- who interrupted, even momentarily, the stream of his dedicated energy. Unless a meeting, conference, or consultation touched somehow upon the working of his magazine, he began mentally pacing.

I first met Harold Ross in February, 1927, when his weekly was just two years old. He was thirty-four and I was thirty-two. [That's Thurber in the photo, from around this time. -- Ed.] The New Yorker had printed a few small pieces of mine, and a brief note from Ross had asked me to stop in and see him some day when my job as a reporter for the New York Evening Post chanced to take me uptown. Since I was getting only forty dollars a week and wanted to work for the New Yorker, I showed up at his office the next day. Our meeting was to become for me the first of a thousand vibrant memories of this exhilarating and exasperating man.

You caught only glimpses of Ross, even if you spent a long evening with him. He was always in mid-flight, or on the edge of his chair, alighting or about to take off. He won't sit still in anybody's mind long enough for a full-length portrait. After six years of thinking about it, I realized that to do justice to Harold Ross I must write about him the way he talked and lived -- leaping from peak to peak. What follows here is a monologue montage of that first day and of half a dozen swift and similar sessions. He was standing behind his desk, scowling at a manuscript lying on it, as if it were about to lash out at him. I had caught glimpses of him at the theater and at the Algonquin and, like everybody else, was familiar with the mobile face that constantly changed expression, the carrying voice, the eloquent large-fingered hands that were never in repose, but kept darting this way and that to emphasize his points or running through the thatch of hair that stood straight up until Ina Claire said she would like to take her shoes off and walk through it. That got into the gossip columns and Ross promptly had his barber flatten down the pompadour.

He wanted, first of all, to know how old I was, and when I told him it set him off on a lecture. "Men don't mature in this country, Thurber," he said. "They're children. I was editor of the Stars and Stripes when I was twenty-five. Most men in their twenties don't know their way around yet. I think it's the goddam system of women schoolteachers." He went to the window behind his desk and stared disconsolately down into the street, jingling coins in one of his pants pockets. I learned later that he made a point of keeping four or five dollars' worth of change in this pocket because he had once got stuck in a taxi, to his vast irritation, with nothing smaller than a ten-dollar bill. The driver couldn't change it and had to park and go into the store for coins and bills, and Ross didn't have time for that.

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." He turned away from the window and glared at me as if I were on the witness stand and he were the prosecuting attorney. "I want to make a business office out of this place, like any other business office," he said. "I'm surrounded by women and children. We have no manpower or ingenuity. I never know where anybody is, and I can't find out. Nobody tells me anything. They sit out there at their desks, getting me deeper and deeper into God knows what. Nobody has any self-discipline, nobody gets anything done. Nobody knows how to delegate anything. What I need is a man who can sit at a central desk and make this place operate like a business office, keep track of things, find out where people are. I am, by God, going to keep sex out of this office -- sex is an incident. You've got to hold the artists' hands. Artists never go anywhere, they don't know anybody, they're antisocial."

Ross was never conscious of his dramatic gestures, or of his natural gift of theatrical speech. At times he seemed to be on stage, and you half expected the curtain to fall on such an agonized tagline as "God, how I pity me!" Anthony Ross played him in Wolcott Gibbs's comedy Season in the Sun, and an old friend of his, Lee Tracy, was Ross in a short-lived play called Metropole, written by a former secretary of the editor. Ross sneaked in to see the Gibbs play one matinee, but he never saw the other one. I doubt if he recognized himself in the Anthony Ross part. I sometimes think he would have disowned a movie of himself, sound track and all.

He once found out that I had done an impersonation of him for a group of his friends at Dorothy Parker's apartment, and he called me into his office. "I hear you were imitating me last night, Thurber," he snarled. "I don't know what the hell there is to imitate -- go ahead and show me." All this time his face was undergoing its familiar changes of expression and his fingers were flying. His flexible voice ran from a low register of growl to an upper register of what I can only call Western quacking. It was an instrument that could give special quality to such Rossisms as "Done and done!" and "You have me there!" and "Get it on paper!" and such a memorable tagline as his farewell to John McNulty on that writer's departure for Hollywood: "Well, God bless you, McNulty, goddam it."

Ross was, at first view, oddly disappointing. No one, I think, would have picked him out of a line-up as the editor of the New Yorker. Even in a dinner jacket he looked loosely informal, like a carelessly carried umbrella. He was meticulous to the point of obsession about the appearance of his magazine, but he gave no thought to himself. He was usually dressed in a dark suit, with a plain dark tie, as if for protective coloration. In the spring of 1927 he came to work in a black hat so unbecoming that his secretary, Elsie Dick, went out and bought him another one. "What became of my hat?" he demanded later. "I threw it away," said Miss Dick. "It was awful." He wore the new one without argument. Miss Dick, then in her early twenties, was a calm, quiet girl, never ruffled by Ross's moods. She was one of the few persons to whom he ever gave a photograph of himself. On it he wrote, "For Miss Dick, to whom I owe practically everything." She could spell, never sang, whistled, or hummed, knew how to fend off unwanted visitors, and had an intuitive sense of when the coast was clear so that he could go down in the elevator alone and not have to talk to anybody, and these things were practically everything.


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