Books: Anniversary Waltz

HERE AT THE NEW YORKER

by BRENDAN GILL

406 pages. Illustrated. Random House.

$12.95.

The New Yorker Founder and Editor Harold Ross was a man of many maxims. Among them: “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.” Assuming that his readers had no interest in reading about his writers, Ross kept intramural gossip out of his magazine, and so has his successor William Shawn. Yet neither editor could stem the tide of moonlight memoirs by New Yorker staffers. James Thurber gave Ross himself a full-dress treatment in The Years with Ross (1959). Now, on the magazine’s 50th birthday this week, comes Brendan Gill’s account of his nearly 40 years with everybody at The New Yorker.

Molelike Creatures. On the opening page Gill seems to side with Ross. New Yorker writers, he claims, “tend to be lonely, molelike creatures, who work in their own portable darkness and who seldom utter a sound above a groan.” In theory, no one who was not there gives a damn about this loving reliquary —anecdotes, old cartoons, floor plans and interoffice memos. Might it not be more fun to curl up with a rollicking treatise on varieties of corn blight or infrastructure at the Bank of America?

No, decidedly not. A seasoned New Yorker writer can make even New Yorker writers interesting. Besides, from the beginning, Ross’s humor magazine attracted remarkable talents: Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, S.J. Perelman, John O’Hara, Edmund Wilson, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Price. The list can (and in Gill’s telling does) go on and on.

Inevitably, the book is more concerned with The New Yorker then than now. Gill’s memories are mostly ebullient. They include, of course, Ross, that “aggressively ignorant” Midwesterner who bullied The New Yorker into shape. Thurber’s portrait remains definitive, but Gill adds amusing embellishments. Once Gill included the Tennysonian phrase “nature, red in tooth and claw” in a “Talk of the Town” item. Ross’s notorious innocence in literary matters (“Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?”) prompted him to change the reference to “nature, red in claw and tooth.” Gill explains as best he can: “His literal-mindedness being what it was, I suspect that he must have worried it out that an animal seizing its prey would bloody its claws before it got around to bloodying its teeth.”

The author is considerably more circumspect when it comes to Shawn, who “has become famous by eschewing fame and is today one of the best-known unknown men in the country.” As self-effacing as Ross was extraverted, Shawn’s best-known and perhaps only offhand mot was uttered to a young “Talk” reporter: “Go out and mill.”

Gill’s account is laced with some acid. John O’Hara is drubbed for his vanity and status seeking. Thurber is recalled as a man “never so happy as when he could cause two old friends to have a falling out.” Gill justifiably twits Movie Critic Pauline Kael for long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons “suitable for people with a glum view of life.”

Truth and Beauty. A glum view of life at The New Yorker! Gill does not dwell on this paradox, but it is not hard to explain. Ross, Shawn and the rest have successfully set up as taste makers over a 50-year period when cultural presumptions have changed horrendously. The New Yorker remains a throwback to Matthew Arnold’s Victorian faith in a secular religion of truth and beauty. Eustace Tilley, the magazine’s monocled symbol, is clearly an Arnold disciple turned dandy. To be impeccable, graceful and hard-hitting all at the same time is demanding work. So is hanging on to a upper-middle-class audience without seeming frivolous or snobbish.

These are dangers that Gill’s book does not always sidestep. In truth, he sometimes rushes to embrace them: “It is obvious that the New Testament would make far more satisfactory reading if it had been the handiwork of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Shawn.”

The reader is left to wonder how the Good Book might have been better if it began, say, “We chanced by Bethlehem the other evening, where, much to our Surprise …”

Paul Gray