Well after The New Yorker proved an editorial and financial success, Ross began pondering other ventures. In an echo of the days when he was hatching new projects to escape the grind of the American Legion Weekly, he toyed with the idea of a daily paper devoted entirely to ships’ news, as well as a periodical given over entirely to detective stories. He even invested in a paint-spraying machine.
It was all of no consequence; Ross’s commitment to his wunderkind was simply too single-minded. “Ross had no valid relationship with any creation excepting only The New Yorker,” said David Cort, who dealt with him on several occasions. “Ross did not care about the money in the enterprise; he cared only about the perfection of this insane impersonation of the sophisticated New Yorker, as a Norman in the year 900 might have wanted to look like a Gaul.”
Not all his staff felt the same way. The New Yorker might have been emerging as the best general-interest periodical in the country, paying reasonably well and affording space and expression for its people that other magazines could not. But its very consistency, and Ross’s insistence on uniformity of voice, proved frustrating for those who truly wanted to write from their hearts. And so it was, however improbably, that Gibbs, White, and Thurber all eventually began to make efforts to distance themselves from the magazine.
Thurber was the first to bolt. By the mid-1930s he was not only ready to settle down to a comfortable domestic life with his new wife, Helen, but was grappling with both progressive blindness and considerable ambition. His books My Life and Hard Times, The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze, and Let Your Mind Alone! were popular and critical successes. For The New Yorker, he reached beyond “Talk” and casuals and cartoons to write columns about tennis and other in-depth factual subjects. He wove the research of reporters like Eugene Kinkead into a popular series called “Where Are They Now?,” a retrospective look at news fixtures who had once commanded the public eye, like Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim the English Channel. Another focused on Virginia O’Hanlon, whose plaintive inquiry of “Is there a Santa Claus?” to the New York Sun in 1897 had yielded the most famous editorial in American newspaper history, composed by Francis Pharcellus Church and answering in the affirmative, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
One of Thurber’s efforts went down in journalistic and legal history. It was an update of the life of William James Sidis, a onetime child mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard at the age of eleven, the youngest student to enroll in the university’s history. Thurber’s examination of Sidis’s pathetic downfall, complete with details of a reclusive existence in a shabby Boston apartment and an obsession with streetcar transfer tickets, became the focus of a celebrated invasion-of-privacy lawsuit. Perhaps because these works were such a departure from his usual milieu, he signed them with the pen name “Jared L. Manley.”
Amid his writing, Thurber decided to “go away somewhere to get organized,” as Helen put it. And so the two spent a couple of months in Bermuda, where both Gibbs and O’Hara had honeymooned and where he would return periodically. On that peaceful island, he formed a fast friendship with Jane and Ronald Williams. The latter was the publisher of The Bermudian, and Thurber would end up contributing light essays to the struggling Caribbean publication, gratis.
It was the beginning of a general branching out. Thurber left the formal ranks of the New Yorker staff but negotiated a freelance arrangement. Freed from the strictures of office work, he wrote widely for other publications. In 1940 and 1941 he intermittently published a column called “If You Ask Me” in his old colleague Ralph Ingersoll’s upstart liberal newspaper PM. Eschewing most of the paper’s avowedly progressive political coverage, Thurber tended to focus on humorous subjects. Ross complained, “You’re throwing away ideas on PM that would make good casuals.” Thurber shrugged off the charge. “I was out from under the strict and exacting editing for which the New Yorker was and still is famous,” he said, “and I needed this relaxation and the hundred dollars a column Ingersoll paid me.”
He further refined his reputation as a professional misogynist, as he revealed in a self-conducted interview for Mademoiselle:
MLLE: If you had been born a girl, Mr. Thurber, what kind of girl would you want to be?
THURBER: That’s an interesting thought because I almost was a girl. My mother wanted a girl before I was born, so she did everything she could with prenatal influence to mark me—embroidered, cooked, sewed and looked at pictures of Mrs. Grover Cleveland all day long. But . . .
MLLE: It didn’t work?
THURBER: No, shortly after I was born they discovered I wasn’t a girl. A woman nurse brought me into this world—women have always influenced my life—and on top of breaking the news to my mother that I wasn’t a girl, she then told her that I had a full head of hair, and that children born with a lot of hair are never bright. That’s a prophecy still to be cleared up, of course.
MLLE: Supposing you had been a girl—
THURBER: Ah, I would have been a hussy. (Thinking) Or would I? No, on second thought I think I’d be the quiet, sympathetic-listener type of girl.
MLLE: Is that because, being a man, that’s the kind of girl you like?
THURBER: Probably. I like a girl who’ll listen while I talk—about myself.
By now he was beginning to return to Columbus, posturing as the local boy who had made good. And in 1940 he and his old friend Elliott Nugent triumphed on Broadway with The Male Animal. Nugent himself starred as Tommy Turner, a professor at a small university in the Midwest; the cast included a young Gene Tierney. The more typically Thurberian aspect of the comedy dealt with the romantic conflicts that arise when a football hero ex-boyfriend of Turner’s wife returns for a campus visit. But at the heart of The Male Animal was the issue of free speech, which would increasingly concern Thurber. An unwitting Turner becomes embroiled in campus politics when reactionary trustees threaten to fire him because he wants to read to his class the statement of the anarchist Bartolomeo Vanzetti, made prior to the pronouncement of his 1927 death sentence. Turner is driven to share the speech not as a political manifesto but as an example of crude yet eloquent English composition.
The production was not without incidents. At one point Thurber tripped over the footlights and tumbled into the orchestra pit while at a rehearsal. Daise Terry, who went to see the play with most of The New Yorker staff, was not particularly amused; she compared it to “an unfunny Thurber drawing acted out” and reported that McKelway and Gibbs, among others, “didn’t think it was a knockout by any means.” But in general the critics loved The Male Animal, likening it to Life with Father and The Man Who Came to Dinner. It ran for nearly 250 performances and established Thurber not merely as a man of letters but as a literary celebrity in the mold of Woollcott.
Not everyone was happy about Thurber’s new horizons. He received a poem from a fan who bemoaned his periodic absence from The New Yorker’s pages:
We Ask the New Yorker
Oh where has Mr. Thurber gone?
Admirers ask from night to sun (morn doesn’t rhyme either)
Has he forgotten how to write,
Or is it just in rage and spite
He draws his women with a curse?
(How he must hate them, book and verse)
When Friday comes we watch the clock,
We wait the postman’s cheerful knock,
The wrapper’s torn with hungry look,
We leap from “Notes” to Fadiman’s “Books.”
Alas! No Thurber can be seen,
Except a dog of noble mien
(So different from his vicious gals
Or timid men who shrink from pals)
Oh, Mr. Thurber, come back home,
Or write more often, as you roam.
Thurber was so tickled by this doggerel that he adorned it with a caricature of himself waving at four stern-faced men labeled “Gibbs, Maloney, O’Hara etc.” with the impish greeting “Hi, Fellas!”
White did not thirst for recognition as achingly as Thurber did, although the two did once make a half-hearted stab at collaborating on a play “about the difficulty people are experiencing in the decline of snobbery.” In any event White, too, was restless. He was also genuinely unhappy. In the eight months between August 1935 and March 1936, his father and mother died. In between these two losses, Katharine had a miscarriage, and their close friend and New Yorker mainstay Clarence Day passed away. “I see him roaming the Hereafter / Racked with unregenerate laughter, / I see him chuckle as he sings / Of devil’s tail and angel’s wings,” White pined.
On a professional level, he found himself chafing under The New Yorker’s limitations. He achieved periodic public attention with endearing pieces like “Farewell, My Lovely!,” his whimsical, nostalgic homage to his Model T “Hotspur” and his 1922 cross-country tour. But his energies were sapped by the demands and anonymity of “Comment.” In 1934 he published a collection of his items, titled Every Day Is Saturday. It was well received; Gluyas Williams told Katharine that it was “about the only thing that has cheered me up this fall.” His identity as the uncredited scribe behind the section now revealed, White asked Ross in 1935 if he could start signing his pieces. It had become “almost impossible to write anything decent using the editorial ‘we,’ unless you are the Dionne family,” he said. Anyway, the paragraphs were beginning to take on a life of their own:
Speaking for the writer of comment [sic], I can say that it tends to become (is) a mongrel department, or hybrid, half fish, half snail. . . . I feel that N & C are not, literally “the talk of the town.” Maybe they were originally intended to be, but it hasn’t worked out that way in practice. They are, specifically, editorial paragraphs with a bias or slant or conviction. And they are, to some degree, personal. . . . [I]t is pretty hard to write comment [sic]—or anything—over a long period of time without putting a lot of personal junk or notions into them.
But Ross, though he thought White’s contributions “among the best stuff being written today,” refused to divorce “Comment” from leading into “Talk” and rejected the notion of signed essays. “Your page is stronger anonymous, as an expression of an institution, rather than of an individual,” Ross explained. “I feel this very strongly.”
Impersonality and personal prejudice aside, White was also conflicted about the tenor of the section. “The suggestion has often been made,” wrote one critic of Every Day Is Saturday, “that the distinctive prose which regularly fills the opening pages of The New Yorker has as its base a kind of ambergris resulting from a peculiar unrest growing out of actual fear of (a) the telephone company, (b) perambulators, (c) hoot owls, (d) locked doors.” Though the observation may have rankled, it rang true. It was one thing to be irreverent during the Roaring ’20s or, at worst, mildly neurotic. But with the Depression dragging on and Europe edging toward war, White felt a gnawing obligation to be serious.
Thurber thought this attitude absurd. “Never has there been so much to laugh at,” he wrote White. He tried to convince him that a writer should be true to his métier:
It is the easiest thing in the world nowadays to become so socially conscious, so Spanish war stricken, that all sense of balance and values goes out of a person. Not long ago in Paris Lillian Hellman told me that she would give up writing if she could ameliorate the condition of the world, or of only a few people in it.* Hemingway is probably on that same path, and a drove of writers are following along, screaming and sweating and looking pretty strange and futile. This is one of the greatest menaces there is; people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grimly gray and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It’s a form of egotism, a supreme form. I’ve toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It’s as dangerous as toying with a drug. How can these bastards hope to get hold of what’s the matter with the world and do anything about it when they haven’t the slightest idea that something just as bad and unnatural has happened to them?
White attempted to thread the needle of his trademark light touch with bona fide social awareness in a March 13, 1937, “Comment.” With maximum indignation, he attacked FDR’s misbegotten attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Denouncing as “balderdash” the president’s insistence that those who opposed his plan were perforce anti–New Dealers, he called Roosevelt “a petulant saviour” and “an Eagle Scout whose passion for doing the country a good turn every day has at last got out of hand.” But instead of recommending outright opposition to the court plan, White said The New Yorker would “sleep on it.”
Ralph Ingersoll would not sleep on it. Having previously tweaked White’s “gossamer writing” in his Fortune article, the increasingly activist editor now protested his former colleague’s passivity. He accused White of “gentle complacency” and beseeched him, “Andy, Andy!! Doesn’t that well-fed stomach of yours ever turn when you think of what you’re saying? Let us sleep on suffering, want, malnutrition. Let us sleep too on young men who are so fond of phrasing things exactly that humanity never troubles them.”
Within a couple of months, whether inspired at all by Ingersoll or not, White decided he would cease writing “Comment” and take a year’s leave of absence. He was not interested in another job per se; the year before, he had turned down Christopher Morley’s offer to be editor of The Saturday Review of Literature. He and Katharine even refused Fleischmann’s suggestion that they assume joint editorship of The New Yorker. What he wanted was what he had always wanted—to write as he pleased, even if he was not quite sure what that would constitute. He also needed to scour himself of more than a decade of Manhattan living. Besides, he told his brother, “I want to see what it feels like, again, to let a week pass by without having an editorial bowel movement.” Assuming the pose of Eustace Tilley in the August 7 issue, he explained his rationale obliquely:
I want time to think about many people, alive and dead: Pearl White, Schoolboy Creekmore, Igor Sikorsky—I couldn’t begin to name them. I want to think about the custom of skiing in summertime, want to hear a child play thirds on the pianoforte in midafternoon. I shall devote considerable time to studying the faces of motorists drawn up for the red light; in their look of discontent is the answer to the industrial revolution. Did you know that a porcupine has the longest intestine in Christendom, either because he eats so much wood or in order that he may? It is a fact. There must be something to be learned by thinking about that.
Otto Soglow illustrated these vague thoughts with a drawing of Tilley departing the Plaza Hotel in a horse-drawn carriage, doffing his hat to well-wishers, chased by a Thurber dog.
White left The New Yorker with no definite intentions. He could not even explain himself fully to Katharine. “In the main,” he wrote her, “my plan is to have none.” He did, however, expect to make any number of trips to “places where my spoor is still to be found.” Katharine abided by her husband’s decision, even as she grappled with his absence. “I don’t think I ever missed you so much,” she wrote within a month of his departure. Ross, too, was hit hard by the loss of arguably his best writer. White tried to placate him. “Enjoyed working in your shop very much,” he wrote. “Will always remember it.” But Ross was bitter about White’s defection. “He just sails around in some God damn boat,” he griped.
By his own admission, White made “an unholy mess” of his time off. He had hoped to use his freedom to work “on a theme which engrosses me”—a long autobiographical poem, assembled from notes he had been scribbling for some time. But he never finished it. Seventeen years after his sabbatical, he finally published six parts of it in his collection The Second Tree from the Corner. Entitled “Zoo Revisited: Or the Life and Death of Olie Hackstaff,” it recounted his elusive feelings associated with some of the more significant locales of his past, places he revisited during his time away from The New Yorker. Among them were Mount Vernon, Bellport in Long Island—and especially Maine.
White had been drawn to Maine as a source of respite for years. Now he began to view it as a source of inspiration and even salvation. He reported to Thurber that he spent that Christmastime of 1937 “listening to the beat of tire chains against cold mudguards, studying tracks where the deer had pawed the snow under the little apple trees, sliding down hill, and ushering in the new year by going to bed and letting the Baptist church ring twelve clear holy strokes for me.” Captivated by an atmosphere that was “almost Currier and Ives in its purity,” he determined shortly thereafter that he and Katharine should relocate there.
Katharine acceded and found that the ensuing few years on the working farm that they purchased at Allen Cove were among her happiest. Fortunately, the experience was not quite the exile that it might have been; she ended up spending about half of each day working on manuscripts sent up to her from Manhattan and maintaining an active correspondence. Eventually, giving up her job for her husband’s sake did turn out to be harder than she had expected. But in these early days she reveled in her rural domesticity, as she told Ruth McKenney:
My life here is fantastic. You should see me trying to be a good farm wife, picking, canning, mopping and dusting, and at the same time keeping my 7½ year old from drowning, and my 17 year old from killing himself and his girl friends in wild night rides, and making my big daughter-scientist be domestic when she’d rather be losing all her few dollars on late night poker parties. (Not one of the three pays the least attention to me.) And on top of this trying to be a long distance editor. Then there are the dogs, the pig, the chickens, the turkey (only one!), the cows who are our boarders, all meeting disaster daily, and the vegetables and flowers that I’m supposed to tend.
The Whites’ departure from Manhattan ushered in a figure who would prove critical to The New Yorker’s continued success. Gustave “Gus” Stubbs Lobrano, born in the same year as Gibbs, had had a privileged upbringing in New Orleans, attending the excellent Newman School, a private institution originally designated for Jewish orphans. A couple of years behind White at Cornell, he met him on the Cornell Daily Sun. For a while in the 1920s they shared a Greenwich Village apartment with two other men; at one point the boarders included Lobrano’s future brother-in-law, Jack Flick. His clumsy amours in the small space proved amusing. Once when Flick was trying not terribly successfully to make time with a companion, White stuck his head into the living room and announced, “If you haven’t seduced her by one o’clock, forget it.”
Upon marrying in 1927, Lobrano left this arrangement and moved with his wife, Jean, to Albany, where he toiled for years at her family’s travel bureau. The business dwindled during the Depression. But in 1935, when White told him of a job back in Manhattan at Town and Country under Harry Bull, a fellow Cornell alumnus, Lobrano eagerly applied and was accepted. Three years later Katharine encouraged him to succeed her in the fiction department. Lobrano easily passed his editing test by expertly handling several pieces, Katharine assisting by providing him with a confidential copy of Gibbs’s “Theory and Practice” guidelines. His elegant, patient presence proved a natural fit for The New Yorker.
Lobrano was “a tall, diffident man” with “soft eyes and a shy smile,” remembered the Czech writer Joseph Wechsberg. “He was a Southern gentleman, a type I’d never met before. His politeness always put me on the defensive.” At the same time, he had little patience for substandard work. “He showed me the proof of one of my pieces and asked me gently, as though he were embarrassed, whether I would mind clearing up a few minor points,” said Wechsberg. “The proof had scores of penciled marks and remarks and queries written in the margins. I’d never seen such painfully edited copy.”
Once described as “the nicest soul that ever lived,” he was no pushover. When Edmund Wilson slammed Kay Boyle’s novel Avalanche as “pure rubbish,” Lobrano cheered him on. “Miss Boyle had exactly this sort of thing coming to her,” he wrote Ross. “Her book, which I read, miserably, installment by installment in the Saturday Evening Post, is sickening mush. And I’m glad that Mr. Wilson singled out Kay Boyle’s stylistic furbelows, including her exasperating trick of using the inanimate possessive.” Lobrano’s taste for good fiction was finely nuanced. “Something must be left to the reader’s imagination,” he once said. “After all, if he knows how to read, your reader probably knows how to think too.”
“He did not enter lightly upon friendship, as many a writer has lived to discover, and to be his good friend was a tremendously satisfying experience,” White recalled. “You felt you had hold of something solid.” Moreover, “[h]e had a subtle mind, an engaging wit, an almost flawless taste in literary expression, and an impatience with all forms of shoddiness.” Lobrano loved trout fishing, golf, and all manner of sports; he organized a children’s Sunday softball game in his Chappaqua neighborhood that sometimes included visiting authors. When Emily Hahn dropped by, she created a small scandal by presenting a friend who had brought a large painting of a nearly naked African chieftain. After the game, Lobrano treated everyone to sodas and sundaes at the town drugstore.
Unlike many other New Yorker staff members, Lobrano did not attempt to trade in editing for writing. He had little interest in the latter, publishing only a few short pieces in the magazine, most of them in collaboration. He formed tight associations with many of The New Yorker’s best short story writers: he played tennis with Irwin Shaw, hobnobbed with his Westchester neighbor John Cheever, and endeared himself so much to J. D. Salinger that the eccentric author dedicated his acclaimed Nine Stories collection in part to him. So high was the regard of S. J. Perelman, not exactly a sentimental specimen, for Lobrano that in his office he displayed a photograph of him along with pictures of James Joyce and Somerset Maugham. Frank Sullivan extolled him as “Gustavus Vasa.”
Lobrano was deeply grateful to the Whites for providing his professional deliverance. “I have been with the NYer for about nine months now (the period of gestation), and feel as though I have been born again,” he wrote Andy. “My old life, before I had to write letters of rejection to Frank Sullivan and call up Peter Arno every Wednesday, was tranquil and sheltered; but in spite of fear and indigestion and heartbreak the new life is better. I shall die sooner but, all in all, happier.”
As for White, when he wasn’t “catching mackerel or building a laying house for the pullets,” he was still keeping his hand, however reluctantly, in The New Yorker. At Ross’s request, he continued editing newsbreaks and contributed an occasional piece. But as he once told Gibbs (addressing him as “Gibbsy”), “You can’t support a farm on casuals—you have to get right out and sell the hay itself.” And so he began writing a monthly, occasionally disjointed column for Harper’s called “One Man’s Meat.” In addition to the three hundred dollars he would earn for each piece, the expansive 2,500 words he would contribute twelve times a year would afford him considerable creative freedom.
Just prior to White’s departure for Maine, a friend told him snidely that he hoped he would “spare the reading public your little adventures in contentment.” As it was, it was not contentment but concrete detail, undergirded by intelligent rumination, that marked much of “One Man’s Meat.” Outwardly, White provided details of what it was like to run a farm, to interact with homespun neighbors, and to engage in life’s daily business. But real emotion suffused the gentle prose. “Once More to the Lake,” for example, was a reminiscent account of a visit with eleven-year-old Joel to Belgrade Lake, where White’s father had taken him a generation before. Woven throughout were heart-seizing insights into such grand themes as aging, life, and death:
I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeling, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would not be I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy feeling.
“I wish I could believe that I’d ever be able to write as well as that,” Russell Maloney told White.
In “Clear Days,” amid breaking news of the Munich accord that would tear Czechoslovakia apart and make war inevitable, White found himself “steadily laying shingles” on his barn roof. He combined these two disparate elements through deft rhetoric: “I’m down now; the barn is tight, and the peace is preserved. It is the ugliest peace the earth has ever received for a Christmas present. Old England, eating swastika for breakfast instead of kipper, is a sight I had as lief not lived to see.”
“I think that ‘One Man’s Meat’ was the making of him as a writer,” said Roger Angell. “Freed of the weekly deadlines and the quaintsy first-person plural form of The New Yorker’s ‘Notes and Comment’ page, which he had written for more than a decade, he discovered his subject (it was himself) and a voice that spoke softly but rang true.”
Unlike Thurber and White, Gibbs had a hard time making a name for himself outside the magazine. He took a stab in 1931 when he published a comic novella, Bird Life at the Pole, that poked fun at the Antarctic expeditions that were then making headlines. The jacket copy, accompanied by a photo of Gibbs taken before he acquired his trademark thin moustache, noted that the author was “fond of lying in warm water, of having somebody bring him his breakfast in bed, and of money.” Around that time he also placed a couple of poignant short stories, “Another Such Victory—” and “November Afternoon,” in Harper’s Bazaar. The former carried strong hints of his impending breakup with Nancy Hale; the latter depicted a sensitive, Gibbs-like boy who tearfully breaks away from his preoccupied parents when, as a surprise, they come to see him play in a prep school football game.
But these efforts made little impression. The New Yorker seemed to be where Gibbs was destined to be. And so he remained in Manhattan, residing for almost twenty years in 317 East 51st Street. It was a spacious and comfortable duplex, but wall hangings in square or rectangular frames tended to emphasize its sagging structure. Therefore, in the living room, an oval frame circumscribed a portrait of Gibbs’s ancestor Martin Van Buren. The master bedroom had a blocked-up marble fireplace and an unused wood locker built into the wall. The dark, dirty compartment, concealed by an unhinged door, fascinated young Tony. One day when he asked what was inside, the mischievous Gibbs replied ominously, “Injun Joe.” The response terrified the boy, and Gibbs finally shone a flashlight inside the space to assure him he had nothing to fear. Out back was a small garden of “strangled vines” where Gibbs would amuse himself by using his hose to squirt his growing collection of cats as they tried to scale the fence.
By putting down roots in midtown, Gibbs tied himself ever more closely to The New Yorker. Following the Time parody, he attracted considerable attention with his 1937 volume, Bed of Neuroses. (The title contradicted Rule no. 24 of his “Theory and Practice”” guidelines: “On the whole, we are hostile to puns.”) Many of the pieces were simply light bits of nonsense. “To Sublet, Furnished,” took apart the subtle maneuverings of renting an apartment in New York; “Be Still, My Heart” concerned a fellow who could feign sickness at boring functions—and then, after curing himself, found he couldn’t escape these ordeals. Gibbs didn’t think much of the book; he called it “a perfect example of Nyer [sic] writing at its silliest—not a social dilemma in it that my six-year-old niece couldn’t solve by walking across the room.”
To come into his own as a writer, Gibbs found he needed to discharge at least some of his editing burdens. He never jettisoned this responsibility entirely, but he was relieved when William Maxwell came aboard in late 1936. Maxwell, like Gibbs and McKelway, was an editor who could also write. In Maxwell’s case, he did so during periodic sabbaticals from his forty-year tenure. His finely attuned, frequently autobiographical short stories and novels won both fans and prizes. He was a tutor and encourager in the Katharine White mold, and his roster of writers was sterling—Salinger, Welty, Nabokov, Updike, and Isaac Bashevis Singer among them. Alec Wilkinson, a New Yorker staff writer who would compose an adulatory tribute, called him “a port in the storm,” compared their relationship to that of a father and a son, and declared, “He so dramatically influenced my way of thinking about the world, and feeling about the world, and viewing the world.”
It took Maxwell a little while to develop that talent. When he arrived, Gibbs was interested mainly in fobbing off his art conference responsibilities onto him. But he also began breaking the young man in to the fine points of dealing with contributors, as Maxwell recalled:
One day Wolcott Gibbs asked me if I’d like to try some editing. He handed me a manuscript and walked away, without explaining what he meant by editing. I didn’t think much of the story, so I cut and changed things around and made it the way I thought it ought to be. To my surprise Gibbs sent it to the printer that way. And I thought, “So that’s editing.” The next time he gave me a piece to edit I fell on my face. I straightened out something that was mildly funny only if it wasn’t too clear what was going on. Gibbs was kind, and said that my editing revealed that there wasn’t very much there, but I got the point. In time I came to feel that real editing means changing as little as possible.
It turned out that after more than a decade of editing, Gibbs had accrued an unexpected benefit—a nearly pitch-perfect talent for assuming the voice of others. Gibbs, Thurber recalled, “was always able to fix up a casual without distorting or even marring its author’s style.” It was this ability that earned him his reputation as The New Yorker’s preeminent parodist.
Much of his work in this vein was a send-up of tired literary genres. In “Boo, Beau!” Gibbs skewered Esquire-type fashion trend pieces. Zippers, he declared, would henceforth replace suit buttons, “permitting the suit to be opened along the side, somewhat in the manner of a Parker House roll, and laid out on the floor. The customer, of course, will simply lie down on the opened suit, insert his arms and legs into the proper apertures, and zip himself up.” Fed up with the extravagant claims that publishers made for prolific but mediocre authors, he wrote “Edward Damper,” a book-jacket blurb whose eponymous scribe had, by age sixteen, already written one hundred novels and married five Miss Americas.
His specialty was parodies of particular writers. He imagined the tough-talking, red-baiting Hearst columnist Westbrook Pegler responding to little Virginia O’Hanlon’s query about Saint Nicholas: “You’re damn right there is a Santa Claus, Virginia. He lives down the road a piece from me, and my name for him is Comrade Jelly Belly.” Gibbs’s spoof of Sinclair Lewis, “Shad Ampersand,” caught Lewis’s overarching scene-setting (“The city of Grand Revenant, in High Hope County and the sovereign state of Nostalgia, has a population of 34,567”) and his ham-handed dialogue (“ ‘Shad!’ she trilled, and now she was a bell. ‘Wife!’ he clamored through their urgent kiss”). In “Future Conditional,” he captured Noël Coward’s sparkling self-indulgence. Depicting Coward as carrying on “during a period of considerable stress,” Gibbs wrote, “To this day I haven’t the slightest idea why social upheaval should invariably be attended by extreme personal inconvenience whose interest in it is, to put the thing mildly, academic.”
Gibbs pulled off parodies of writers as diverse as George Jean Nathan, John P. Marquand, and even his friend Sam Behrman. In “Shakespeare, Here’s Your Hat,” he displayed particular venom for William Saroyan’s “customary prefatory notes” to his published plays:
This play is a masterpiece. It is young, gusty, comical, tragic, beautiful, heroic, and as real as a slaughterhouse or some dame fixing her hair. It could only have been written in America, by an Armenian boy who is an artist and a lover and a dreamer. All at once. All mixed up. It could only have been written by Saroyan. . . . The cure for the American theatre is more plays like this one. More plays by Saroyan.
Though Gibbs took little pride in most of what he wrote, these pieces gave him particular pleasure for particular reasons:
The parodies are, I guess, my favorites because it is a form I like. Successful parody demands a good many things from a writer: it should be funny, as a piece of humorous writing, even to those who haven’t read the book and are therefore unfamiliar with the style being imitated or the plot satirized; it should contain a certain amount of real criticism of what the author is saying as well as his manner of saying it; and it should be pitched so little above (or below) the key of the original that an intelligent critic, on being read passages from both, might be honestly confused. Broad parody, or burlesque, is a tiresome and childish exercise.
After the Luce brouhaha, he began to branch out into full-blown Profiles as well. One of his earliest was of the gravelly voiced Amherst alumnus Burgess Meredith, who had recently made a memorable impression in Maxwell Anderson’s play Winterset. “His friends call him Buzz, or Bugs, and either of these in some vague way seem descriptive,” Gibbs wrote. He cited Meredith’s former living arrangements with a “genial salesman of pornography,” his peculiar talent for assembling acting troupes that always failed, and the time he got so plastered that he missed his stint on the NBC radio show Red Davis, resulting in $62,000 in canceled ad revenue. Naturally he took the usual swipes at his subject’s physical features: “His pointed face might more reasonably belong to a jockey . . . at the moment it has seemed to him suitable to let his ginger-colored hair grow long on top, so that in dimmer lights he looks rather like a chrysanthemum.” Far from being put off, Meredith thought that Gibbs’s “whimsical evaluation was fairly accurate” and a warm friendship ensued.†
Gibbs also took on Ingersoll when he began making a splash with PM. In its subtly barbed way, the two-part “A Very Active Type Man” was, wrote Ingersoll’s biographer, Roy Hoopes, “surprisingly gentle.” But Ingersoll was not amused when Gibbs sent him advance proofs. Unlike the case with Luce, no physical clash resulted; Ingersoll merely responded with a four-and-one-half page, double-spaced memo. He didn’t mind that Gibbs called him a hypochondriac, or recalled the time he was nearly thrown out of Yale, or wrote that “in general he has an air of having been rather loosely and casually assembled,” with protruding eyes, a pouting lower lip, and jaundiced skin. He did, however, register certain other objections:
(4) So help me God, cross my heart and hope to die, that story about the Weegee picture is fictional.‡ It is also typical of the kind of emphasis of [Dashiell] Hammett which is [a] complete distortion of fact. You can pin many screwier cracks than this on me. . . .
(5) . . . . [F]or God’s sake, lay off trying to pin on me that my operating technique or labor policy or whatever you want to call it is to embarrass me into resigning—which is standard Hearst technique. . . .
(6) and (6a) No kidding, I think that it is unfair to criticize me as a writer by quoting from a diary written on trains and obviously fragmentary and semi-garbled for the purpose of passing censorships. . . .
(9) There is no heating equipment connected with my 22 x 24 foot pool.
“I think I was offended,” Ingersoll later wrote Gibbs, “by the over-all picture of me as a man without taste—either in my own life or in my editorial values.”
In terms of sheer influence, Gibbs’s most potent Profile was probably “St. George and the Dragnet,” about Thomas Dewey, in 1940. Always suspicious of authority, Gibbs painted Manhattan’s Republican district attorney as so hard-driven that he was necessarily suspect. It was part of Dewey’s genius, Gibbs wrote, “to make the jurors feel that they are part of the prosecution, not a difficult feat with a blue-ribbon jury, which usually imagines that it has been divinely appointed to convict, anyway.” He imparted the DA’s inordinate passion with a couple of arresting sentences about his eyes: “These are brown, with small irises surrounded by a relatively immense area of white, and Dewey has a habit of rotating them furiously to punctuate and emphasize his speech, expressing horror and surprise by shooting them upward, cunning by sliding them from side to side behind narrowed lids. At climactic moments he can pop them side to side, almost audibly.” Far from impugning the man’s integrity, Gibbs thought it beyond belief, noting that reporters often called him “The Boy Scout” or, more simply, “The Boy.” He left out no obscure detail, down to Dewey’s admission that he drank more than three quarts of water a day.
The piece, with legwork supplied by John Bainbridge, was explosive. Suspecting that the Democrats had employed Gibbs, Dewey impounded his generally overdrawn bank account. Pegler, not yet the target of Gibbs’s pen, was in awe. The Profile was “a beautiful operation,” he wrote, one that “must command the respect of any colleague and the awe of those cleaver-and buck-saw butchers who cut a man up with woodsman’s strokes.” In fact, he thought the Profile was perhaps too good: “I submit that such a job as the boys have done on Dewey is likely to discourage any public servant and deter good men from entertaining public life.”
Amid these undertakings, Gibbs found himself stuck taking over “Comment.” Although White contributed sporadically to the section, Gibbs now assumed the magazine’s editorial voice. If his jottings lacked White’s unique panache, they were no less memorable. Here he was on the newly opened World’s Fair:
We spent an hour in the library looking at pictures of Old World’s Fairs and reading what contemporary opinion had to say about them. It might all have come out of Flushing this week. How strange and gratifying, our fathers wrote, that civilization should have culminated in their lifetime, that their Fair should have been the stick in the stand to mark the highest reaching of the tide. How quaint, we said to ourself, looking at the scrolled and turreted buildings at the old Chicago Fair. How quaint, we suppose our grandson will say when he comes across pictures of this one in all its streamlined and functional majesty. We tried to think what his Fair will look like, fifty years from now, but our mind, too, wouldn’t go beyond the miracles of the present. Perhaps, after all, we thought, 1939 will be remembered as the year when the human mind actually did reach the limit of its ingenuity, and Grover Whalen, the flower of a race, built the towers that could not be improved.
When hard-pressed for copy, he wrote about his children. Once he reported on a weird little ditty that four-year-old Tony chanted in the bathtub; it was sung “entirely on one note except that the voice drops on the last word in every line.” It began, He will just do nothing at all, / He will just sit there in the noonday sun. / And when they speak to him, he will not answer them, / because he does not care to. Gibbs called this remarkable achievement “one of the handsomest literary efforts of the year” and took a perverse pride in getting its key word, wee-wee, into print.§ He also wrote a touching paragraph about Tony escorting Janet to her first day of kindergarten. Years later, at a party at the house of the New York Post theater critic Richard Watts, a precocious young Jonathan Schwartz approached him. “I asked Gibbs what his favorite piece was,” Schwartz recalled. Standing by a bookshelf, Gibbs picked up one of his collections and pointed out the anecdote.
And when World War II began on September 1, 1939, Gibbs combined astonishment, revulsion, and prescience. The conflict, he predicted, would be waged against flesh and spirit alike, with the best military brains consumed with their murderous task:
[They] will now think continuously and cleverly of death—planning new and better ways to annihilate an army in the open field (the planes will be very useful this time); planning ways to crush and stifle men in their impregnable shelters (it is a tribute to our ingenuity that no shelter these days remains impregnable very long); planning bombs that set incendiary fires which can’t be put out (a much more economical way of destroying a city than the old-fashioned one of just trying to blow it up); planning death just as thoroughly and competently for old men and women and children as for the soldiers (this war will be quite impartial; it will play no favorites).
And yet Gibbs’s fit with “Comment” was strained. Back in 1931, when he had temporarily filled in for White on the section, Ross had not been impressed. “The trouble with Gibbs’ stuff is that it’s in one tone,” the editor said. “He hates everything, without qualification.” Almost a decade later Gibbs found himself not so much hating everything without qualification as being periodically paralyzed about speaking for the magazine on a regular deadline. He had no illusions about his strengths. He wrote White in Maine, “We all try very hard to keep Notes & Comment up there where you put it, but I’m afraid it is pretty gummy at best.”
How to escape the gumminess? Gibbs determined that the theater might be his ticket out. He had his reasons. Many years before, at Riverdale, his teachers had made him “a member of the rabble, a senator, a soldier, and assorted offstage vocal effects” in Coriolanus. The experience taught him mainly that “small boys are likely to make rather convulsive Romans.” Still, he was cast as a conspirator who stabbed Harold Guinzburg, the future founder of the Viking Press, in Julius Caesar.
His most memorable Riverdale Shakespeare experience was an open-air production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As he recounted in his casual “Ring Out, Wild Bells,” Gibbs played Puck, wearing a motley costume of his mother’s own devising that came equipped with myriad tiny bells. Telling Gibbs that he envisioned Puck as a mischief-maker in perpetual motion, the director instructed him to dance up and down continually, waving his arms and cocking his head. “I want you to be a little whirlwind,” he said. The results were predictably catastrophic. The tintinnabulation— “a silvery music, festive and horrible”—drowned out all the dialogue and so unnerved one of the on a magazine like fairies that when it came time for his big speech, the panic-stricken child unwittingly launched into a recitation of the Gettysburg Address.
Obviously Gibbs was not destined to be an actor. Perhaps, though, he could be a playwright in the mold of Thurber and The Male Animal. His attempts to mount a theatrical had begun as early as 1935, when he tried to collaborate with McKelway on a comedy whose main character would be Ross. “Gibbs wrote a perfect opening scene by himself and then we wrote some kind of draft of a couple of acts,” McKelway recalled. But they gave up almost immediately. “As others have done since, we had made the mistake of trying to do a play about ‘The New Yorker’ itself and about the real Ross, instead of a play about some believeable people who work on a magazine like ‘The New Yorker.’ ”¶
Gibbs got much further with a musical that he wrote sometime during the war. It was based in part on two of his short stories—“Feud” and “The Courtship of Milton Barker,” both of them concerned with comedic mishaps on the Long Island Rail Road. In developing the material for the stage, Gibbs wove a plot around a “virtuous brakeman” named Martin, his innocent girlfriend, Selena, and a traveling circus. In brief, Martin foils a plot hatched by a crooked railway cop and the nearly destitute circus owner—the father of a seductress named Juanita—to wreck the show for the insurance money. In the process, Martin wins the hand of Selena, who happens to be the yardmaster’s daughter. Gibbs called it Sarasota Special.
Written with an eye for visual spectacle (the suggestion of the circus pulling into the yards would make for “a nice, noisy night effect”) and an ear for appropriately placed musical numbers, it held some promise. Gibbs wrote an entire script and hoped that O’Hara, still triumphant from Pal Joey, would join him in bringing it to the stage. He did want proper credit. “I don’t want to be taken over by you, winding up as ‘additional dialogue by Wolcott Gibbs’ or based on a story by,” he told O’Hara. “In fact, [I] want it basically something like this now. Maybe I ought to get two thirds of the book as a matter of fact.” Gibbs even considered enlisting White to compose the lyrics because “[h]e isn’t doing anything that I know of.”
Sarasota Special never got off the ground.# Though competent and entertaining, it offered little to distinguish it from much of the Broadway dross against which it would have competed. It was “just the bunk,” Gibbs admitted years later. “It’s a faulty play. There’s one good scene in it that goes on for twenty minutes, but twenty minutes is not a play.” Anyway, he told O’Hara, “I am a hell of a writer to try a collaboration, being generally against other people’s ideas.”
As it turned out, Gibbs would indeed make a name for himself in the theater. But it would be from the audience, not the stage.
* Hellman, as much a fabulist as Thurber, denied that this exchange ever took place. In 1975 she told White that she had not seen Thurber in Paris at the time he reported. Moreover, she said, “I never said any such thing and I don’t believe anybody else ever said it, except maybe somebody in a nut joint pillow fight.”
† His friendship with Gibbs notwithstanding, Meredith was one of many who mangled his most famous line. In his memoirs he reported it as “Backward go the sentences until boggles the mind.”
‡ Arthur Felig (1899–1968), aka “Weegee,” was a famous realist photographer of New York City street scenes, lowlife, crime, accidents, and similar subjects.
§ The composer Celius Daughtery later set the incantation to music. Titled “Declaration of Independence,” it was recorded by Pete Seeger.
¶ Gibbs cannibalized the opening scene for his November 27, 1943, casual “Miss McManus and the Muse,” about an exasperating encounter between a frustrated poet and a by-the-book telephone operator in the switchboard room of The New York Literary Messenger, “a magazine of deep thought.” In McKelway’s estimation, the casual’s source material “was the only publishable thing in those whole two acts.”
# NBC broadcast a modified version ofSarasota Special, sans music, on May 6, 1960. Titled Full Moon Over Brooklyn, it was produced by David Susskind, directed by Jack Smight, and starred Robert Webber, Barbara Barrie, Elaine Stritch, and Art Carney. “It did not get uproarious,” wrote John P. Shanley in The New York Times, “but except for a tedious longish stretch in the middle, made for a pleasant enough hour.”