Hearing about someone else’s office politics can often be like eavesdropping on his class reunion, the narrative too narrowly tribal to interest those of us beyond the clan. Even so, for more than half a century, books about the inner workings of the New Yorker have attracted a loyal audience. Dale Kramer created this curious subgenre of American letters in 1957 with Ross and The New Yorker, his chronicle of the magazine’s origins under founding editor Harold Ross. Former staffer James Thurber followed in 1959 with his memoir, The Years With Ross, its popularity proving that New Yorker nostalgia was a going concern.
Reminiscences of life at the legendary periodical have been hitting bookstores ever since. In a striking testament to the staying power of the New Yorker brand, Janet Groth made a splash in 2012 with The Receptionist, her account of some two decades answering the phone at the fabled weekly.
We haven’t, as yet, been treated to a memoir from the magazine’s mailroom or its janitorial service, an absence some enterprising literary agent is no doubt trying to rectify.
What is it about the New Yorker that inspires such documentary zeal? The magazine’s stature rests largely on the idea that, in starting it in 1925, Ross created something truly singular: a cultural institution worthy, by virtue of its profound and enduring uniqueness, of an inexhaustible mythology. But in truth, at least one other magazine, H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury, advanced some of the innovations for which the New Yorker is now widely credited. Mencken began the Mercury in 1924, the year before the New Yorker’s launch, and it was an immediate cultural sensation. As Terry Teachout has noted, “It is hard to read about the United States in the mid-twenties without receiving the impression that except for Silent Cal, everyone in the country was either reading the Mercury or complaining about it.”
The New Yorker’s profiles and its iconic feature, “Talk of the Town,” owed much to similar content in Mencken’s magazine, which had, in turn, looked to the Smart Set, an earlier Mencken venue, for inspiration. But if the Mercury rivaled—or even eclipsed—the New Yorker in its early days, the appeal of Mencken’s journal proved far less durable. As Teachout explains, Mencken didn’t so much cultivate outside contributions as recast them in his own idiom, a lively argot of colloquial American and his ancestral tongue. “I saw my article appear in print colored with such words as privatdozent, geheimrat, bierbruder, and hasenpfeffer, which mystified my friends because I don’t know German,” one Mercury scribe reported. Almost every aspect of the American Mercury was unmistakably Menckenian, and as his reputation waned in the changing cultural climate of the Great Depression, the magazine faded with him.
But at the New Yorker, Ross proved better—if far from perfect—at developing writers as distinctive presences, creating an institution that has far outlasted his time at the helm. The New Yorker ideal was best summarized in a single sentence: “Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.” That principle wasn’t coined by Ross but by Wolcott Gibbs, a figure of the magazine’s early days who rests at the heart of Thomas Vinciguerra’s Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E.B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of The New Yorker.
Few people today remember Wolcott Gibbs, a lapse that Vinciguerra has spent the past few years seeking to correct. In 2011 he published Backward Ran Sentences, a 688-page anthology of Gibbs’s long out-of-print New Yorker writings, which ranged from short stories to casuals, profiles to personal essays, theater criticism to spot-on literary parodies. Gibbs was nothing if not versatile, a jack-of-all-trades who quickly proved his worth at a publication that, in its early days, greatly depended on writers who could wear many hats. The title of Backward Ran Sentences, drawn from a piece in which Gibbs flawlessly mimicked the inverted prose of Time magazine’s early period, hints at why he’s little remembered today. Imitating Henry Luce’s Time, however deftly, is a bit like serving up a killer impression of William Jennings Bryan. Who remains familiar enough with the original to grasp the genius of the spoof?
Gibbs’s little dictum about preserving an author’s style encapsulates his own style rather well. It’s pithy, direct, and funny; that little comic qualification, if he “has a style,” is classic Gibbs. But the idea behind the proverb—that there’s a purity in a good writer’s expression that should be distilled yet not destroyed—is also aspirational, pointing to the high standards that he set for himself and everyone else. Gibbs expected so much from people and life that he was invariably let down.
Vinciguerra goes to some lengths to describe Gibbs’s chronic sadness, which seemed very much the melancholy of a disappointed romantic. He was a broken man; but then again, so were many of the other writers that Ross seemed to attract. Like Gibbs, James Thurber and E. B. White had landed at the New Yorker after checkered stints in newspapering. They were all easily bored, lacking the discipline for newsroom beats covering local government. Ross used the restlessness of his recruits to good advantage, since his magazine, in its initial phase, aspired to a breezy mix of Gotham gossip, cultural chatter, and glancing observations of Manhattan street life. What Ross wanted, and what his stable of writers gave him, was a magazine as kinetic and capricious as the city it was created to cover.
Cast of Characters takes its title from a description of early staff members by White, and he was right to think of himself and his colleagues in theatrical terms. They were a self-dramatizing bunch; even White’s legendary shyness seemed, paradoxically, like a form of conceit. He was a master essayist who wisely knew that only “a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.”
White was prone to hypochondria and anxiety. Thurber, a celebrated humorist and cartoonist, was emotionally needy, his personality complicated by a childhood accident that had left him nearly blind. Gibbs, who hailed from a prominent family that had lost its fortune, could be morose and moody, his years increasingly shadowed by booze and pills.
Ross helped keep these misfits productive, a challenge that positioned him as the magazine’s house therapist. Taking Gibbs, Thurber, and White out for a meal one evening, Ross found Thurber barely able to navigate because of his vision, White nearly overcome by the heat, and Gibbs startled by a passing car. Returning to his office, Ross reported, “I’ve just been to dinner with three grown men who wouldn’t have been able to get back without me.”
The story underscores the degree to which Ross not only edited his staffers, but fathered them, too. Editing, like parenting, demands a bargain between control and independence, between setting firm rules and not setting too many. Ross struggled to strike the right balance, and Cast of Characters invites us to wonder how well the founding editor reconciled firmness with flexibility. Vinciguerra walks readers through the magazine’s painstakingly deliberative editing process, a regimen that sometimes bordered on the comically absurd. After profile writer Margaret Case Harriman described Helen Hayes in an early draft as “not beautiful in the classic sense,” a committee of editors had several meetings to discuss just how Hayes’s appearance should be characterized. Concluding a series of confabs rivaling the Council of Trent, the editors reached a compromise: “She is not strikingly beautiful.”
The copy desk “rules and guidelines could be maddening,” Vinciguerra observes, mentioning, as an example, a Byzantine back and forth about just when—and how—the term “prefabricated” could be used. Katharine White, the powerful fiction editor who had married E. B. White after he joined the staff, also worried that the magazine’s orthodoxy was stifling innovation: “We’ve always been purists and I do not suggest that we give up editing,” she cautioned. “I only suggest that unless we soon make a considerable revision in our habits in handling the work of professional writers, we won’t have any good fiction at all to publish.”
E. B. White also challenged the seeming penchant for rules for rules’ sake. He resented the New Yorker’s insistence on the editorial “we” in commentaries, even in sentences where it was clear that an individual, not a corporate entity, was doing the talking. White complained that the use of the first-person plural gave “the impression that the stuff was written by a set of identical twins or the members of a tumbling act.”
White stayed away from his full-time job for a time, finding a more accommodating home at Harper’s Magazine for the first-person essays he really wanted to write. Those essays, compiled into a classic collection called One Man’s Meat, are some of his best work. He eventually returned to the New Yorker office, but he’d had to leave it to reach his potential. Thurber also felt compelled to distance himself from the magazine, a change with equally meaningful consequences for his creative life. But Gibbs’s break proved more difficult. Away from the magazine, he was at loose ends, dying in 1958 at age 56 amid whispers that he’d committed suicide.
Ross himself had died in 1951, concluding what many have called the New Yorker’s “golden age.” William Shawn, who succeeded Ross as editor, attracted other talents, including John Updike and John McPhee; but the magazine’s pipeline of writers, fed from the Ivy League rather than street-level journalism, perhaps necessarily became more belletrist less pungent.
In 1949, Ross had led a campaign against the broadcast of commercials over the public address system at Grand Central Terminal, noting that people often used commuting time for reading. “No person can think of two things at the same time,” he argued. The practice was discontinued, but it foreshadowed the day when readers would have to compete with television, texting, Twitter, and a hundred other distractions. Cast of Characters is about the end of many things—including, quite possibly, an audience focused enough to appreciate any new golden age of publishing that might come along.
Danny Heitman, a columnist for the Advocate in Baton Rouge, is the author of A Summer of Birds: John James Audubon at Oakley House.
