July 1959
Most people, I think, have only the haziest idea of what an editor of a magazine actually does; they have flickering pictures, gleaned mostly from tough, slick, usually American films, of characters - smart or rugged according to sex - who shout down telephones, frighten contributors, depend powerfully upon their secretaries, and, like the wilder and more rare species of animal, are extremely difficult to see, but if asked what editors were actually for, they would be hard put to it for a practical answer.
All this would seem true of Harold Ross, who was editor of The New Yorker from its beginning in 1925 until his death in 1951. Mr Thurber’s book is filled with ruthless affection, years of dramatic experience and his own merciful capacities for remembrance and the understanding of his subject, and is such a thorough portrait of this eccentric, brilliant, stormy man, that one does begin to see what an editor of this calibre means. He did shout down telephones; he was extremely difficult to see; he fought his contributors tooth and nail with every sort of consequence; he suffered from hours of gigantic gloom and anxiety which he furiously communicated to everyone round him. Yet the facts are that he founded and developed the most remarkable magazine which collected and made a staggering number and quality of writers and artists.
He spent two years trying to get the magazine started at all, and when he did, its first year was a sensational flop - a printing of fifteen thousand in February had dropped to twenty-seven hundred by August - staff was cut to a minimum and there is the melancholy story of Ross running into Dorothy Parker and saying: ‘I thought you were coming into the office to write a piece last week - what happened?’ Mrs. Parker turned upon him the eloquent magic of her dark and lovely eyes. ‘Somebody was using the pencil,’ she explained sorrowfully.
However, E.B. White (whose collected works from The New Yorker entitled The Second Tree From the Corner are delicious reading) joined the staff in 1926 and Thurber the following year: there were also casual contributions from a galaxy of writers that would make any contemporary editor’s mouth water; they didn’t get paid much, and they didn’t help often, and when somebody said to Ross at the time that ‘the part time help of wits is no better than the full time help of half wits’, Ross was able to retort with gloomy triumph that he had both …
When Thurber told him at their first meeting that he wanted to write, Ross snarled: ‘writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber, what I want is an editor.’ When Thurber, who had drawn from the age of seven ‘mostly what seemed to be dogs’, had coveted all the available copy paper in the office so that nobody could find a blank sheet to write a note, White suggested that some of the drawings should be used for the magazine, and started sending them in to Ross, who scowled: ‘How the hell did you get the idea that you could draw?’ Neither Ross nor Thurber were in the least disturbed by these preliminary skirmishes, and in fact Thurber both wrote and drew for Ross for the next twenty-five years, and when Thurber’s sight finally failed him, it was Ross who devised endless schemes for reprinting Thurber’s drawings.
Ross never let up on the smallest details - his private and very personal concept of perfection urged him far beyond the ordinary structure of what is called taste or policy to a meticulous obsessive care of every aspect of his beloved magazine. Copy, layout, artwork, captions, punctuation, even poetry - about which he said he knew nothing - had all run the gamut of his furious instinct, which somehow, in spite of his often disastrous administration of people, all seemed in the end to benefit by his frantic perpetual concern.
In Thurber and White he encountered what he needed - people who knew what they were writing, drawing or fighting about, who had an immense affection for him, and who, with their great talents, delectable humour, and desirable loyalty, always kept the whole enterprise in proportion.
Mr. Thurber’s book is not a formal biography: he says that he has not attempted to trace Ross’s life steadily from birth to death, but has taken aspects of his career and treated each one as an entity. Thus the book jumps about a good deal in time, but when one has accepted this - and the stories are so funny and fascinating that it is not difficult - the whole effect which Thurber aimed at is achieved: he writes delightfully about a man with whom he had a long and in many ways enviable relationship, and even Ross in his endless search for perfection could not have found anyone to record his achievements better than the unique and endearing Thurber.