A blank sheet of paper holds the greatest excitement there is for me … What is this terrible infatuation, anyway?
WHEN THE YOUNGEST child of Samuel and Jessie White left home for Cornell University in 1917, he left Elwyn behind on the screened porch at Mount Vernon and at the summer lake in Maine. He metamorphosed into Andy. One of the minor legacies of the college’s cofounder, Andrew Dickson White—whose white-bearded emeritus figure could be seen haunting the campus until his death in 1918—was that many male freshmen with the surname White wound up nicknamed Andy. Most let the name slip away over time. Elwyn, however, embraced the new identity, because he had never liked his given names. In the family he continued to be nicknamed En, but he began to introduce himself as Andy.
He loved the hilly green Cornell campus, the boathouse at Beebe Lake, the stained-glass of beautiful old Sage Chapel, the nearby gorges and woods of upstate New York. From high atop East Hill, he could gaze across the rooftops of Ithaca to a narrow blue stretch of forty-mile-long Cayuga Lake, one of the glacial Finger Lakes. He had never before been around such a diverse group of people as his fellow students, whom he described in a fanciful list: “two men from Hawaii, a girl from Johannesburg, a Cuban, a Turk, an Englishman from India, a Negro from New York, two farmers, three Swedes, a Quaker, five Southerners, a reindeer butcher, a second lieutenant, a Christian Scientist, a retired dancer, a motorcyclist, a man who had known Theda Bara, three gnomes, and a lutist.”
When he was invited to join the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, he wrote to ask his trusty sister Lillian’s advice, telling her that he worried he would have to pretend to be someone he wasn’t. “For Heaven’s sake,” she replied, “don’t be scared.… You are just like everyone else underneath only you haven’t had enough practice in bringing it out to the surface.” She admonished him to take hot baths because cold water wouldn’t get him clean, to wear good clothes, and to stop calling a fraternity a frat because it sounded small-town. “You know that you have a much-to-be-desired brain, that you have fine instincts, that you have a sense of humor and a million other things that most boys want.” Soon he was wearing the owl tiepin adapted from the fraternity’s coat of arms, and in his senior year he was elected fraternity president. But his insecurities remained. On October 13, 1917, he wrote in his journal, “My English prof said the other day that bashfulness was a form of vanity, the only difference being that vanity is the tendency to overestimate your worth, and bashfulness to underestimate it; both arising from the overindulgence of self-consciousness.” Eventually he served on several Cornell committees, from the Manuscript Club to the Sophomore Cotillion, and sang in the secular choir.
Cornell was awash in military training. A member of the first class to enter during the war, and unable to enlist because of his low weight and slight build, Andy wrote a poem on the last day of August in which he imagined getting killed in action. He registered for the draft in mid-September 1918, but two months later the armistice was signed by the Allies and Germany—famously on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
His urge to write showed up everywhere. In a playful letter home to his mother as a sophomore, he wrote in paragraphs that hid internal rhymes: “This error corrected, I gracefully turn to the topics of interest, and first you should learn that in spite of the Ithaca weather’s contortions (this topic alone might assume large proportions), I now—this is really a subject for prose—am entirely rid of my cold in the nose.” He remained preoccupied with his health. Once he confided to his journal that he had been sick for a week: “I think I must have consumption. If I have, I will leave college and travel for my health.”
As a junior he took English 8 with William Strunk Jr., a friendly and amusing professor who parted his hair down the middle and blinked owlishly behind steel-rimmed glasses. Strunk was a forceful teacher who had strong ideas about grammar, diction, and other aspects of reading and writing. He enforced his point of view with his own forty-three-page pamphlet—available at the bookstore for a quarter—entitled The Elements of Style, which he referred to as “the little book.” It was full of rules such as “In summaries, keep to one tense” and “Do not join independent clauses with a comma.” Strunk had colorful classroom habits such as repeating himself while reciting a rule about concision, grasping his coat lapels and declaiming, “Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!”
Every Monday night a few students gathered at the Fall Creek Drive home of Professor Bristow Adams, where he and his wife hosted an evening of smoking and chat. Sometimes students lingered before the fireplace, which had Balinese and Navajo artifacts on the mantel and walrus tusks on the wall above, and talked until two in the morning. Andy would walk back home to the fraternity house in silent darkness, feeling as if his spiritual wrinkles had been smoothed out. He confided to his journal an affectionate comment about Bristow: “Sympathetic, kindly, and apparently without a care in the world, he is a fine balm for a frenzied spirit.”
Andy also found that his spirit was calmed by hard work. He gravitated to the college newspaper, the Cornell Daily Sun. One of only two dailies published by an American university—and also Ithaca’s only morning paper—its eight pages even carried national and international news, complete with an Associated Press feed that came in every night via the telephone line. It seemed sophisticated. Andy’s long-running connection with the paper raised his status until by his last year he walked across campus with unprecedented confidence. The paper carried a catchall column modeled after those of Don Marquis and F.P.A., to which Andy contributed. In his senior year, he wound up editor in chief of the Daily Sun and graduated with a passionate conviction that responsible, writerly journalism was a noble calling. He sometimes wrapped up an issue in the wee hours of the morning and then, before going to class, would nap for a couple of hours in the office, sprawled across the flatbed press like Archy sleeping under the typewriter keys.
At Cornell Andy experienced his first serious romance. Alice Burchfield, nicknamed Burch, was an intelligent, charming, and beautiful theater fanatic and chemistry major. Although wary of commitment, broadcasting a static of mixed signals, Andy dated Burch for the last half of his college years. Soon he began writing poems to her, publishing them in the Sun (without identifying her by name) under the pseudonym D’Annunzio. Even in this situation White thought in terms of animals. His first poem to Burch compared her eyes to the deepest and most appealing eyes he had ever before known—those of his dog Mutt, who lived with him in the fraternity house. For two years Andy and Burch rambled in the woods and watched boat races and meteor showers. But Andy hesitated to pursue the romance to a level of serious commitment. After graduation they wrote now and then, but soon they faded out of each other’s life.
All beginnings are wonderful.
IN 1923 ANDY moved to Manhattan and began submitting light verse and humorous paragraphs to columnists. Twenty-nine-year-old Lillian was commuting from the house in Mount Vernon, where she still lived with her parents, to work as a secretary in New York, and Andy proudly squired his beautiful redheaded sister around town. On the bustling streets, as he dodged leg-flashing flappers in cloche hats and bootleggers in overcoats and fedoras, he kept thinking that many gods in his literary pantheon walked the same island: Christopher Morley, Alexander Woollcott, Stephen Vincent Benét, Dorothy Parker, Ring Lardner. Ever since the St. Nicholas days in his childhood and the F.P.A. and Don Marquis columns of his teen years, he had enjoyed daily, weekly, and monthly updates from his favorite periodicals. His omnivorous taste led him to read the news from Russia in the Times and the news from Yankee Stadium in the Post, the classified ads in The Nation and the celebrity gossip in Vanity Fair. He particularly enjoyed Heywood Broun’s “It Seems to Me” column in the World, which was so popular the newspaper promoted it on giant billboards. A humorist and activist and essayist, Broun wrote about social injustice in the new prosperity following the war. American business seemed like a train that couldn’t be bothered to stop at the local stations; columnists such as Broun kept pointing out that many little people were being left behind or run over. Broun defended labor unions and often took up the cause of an underdog who had been vilified in the more government-fawning media.
Most of all Andy still enjoyed Don Marquis. Sometimes he would linger at the corner of Broadway and Chambers Street, looking up at the gray Italianate marble façade of the Sun building, home of Archy the cockroach. The building had Corinthian columns on the first floor and pediments above some of the windows on the second. At the north and south corners a square metal clock with three faces projected out from the wall, far enough that Andy could walk directly under it and look up at its underside. Its copper casing was already greening with age, although the newspaper had only moved there in 1919, after A. T. Stewart, the city’s first department store, moved uptown and left the space available. On the clock, the words The Sun stood above the octagonal, white face, and it shines for all was written below. Somewhere in that building, Andy would think as he loitered on his way home from work, Don Marquis types up his “Sun Dial” column and then goes out to a speakeasy for a drink or three before heading home. Meanwhile Archy would be crawling out of a stack of paper to type up his report from the underside—throwing his whole body at the keys, hammering out one letter at a time—and Mehitabel, his scruffy feline comrade, would show up to brag about her past life as Cleopatra. Andy also enjoyed some of Marquis’s more serious poetry, although much of it was replete with apostrophizing and archaisms. Andy liked the simplicity of a favorite line—which he almost adopted as his own motto—from Marquis’s 1915 collection Dreams & Dust, in his poem “The Name”:
My heart has followed all my days
Something I cannot name.
Animal characters often struck a chord with Andy, as did Archy’s melancholy view of life and his skepticism about the hypocrisy and cruelty in the world. Marquis’s saga featured such guest stars as a hornet addicted to eating beer-dazzled bar flies and a spider whose maternal lament took the form of a ballad denouncing flyswatters for killing the primary source of food for her children. Over the last few years, Archy had also become one of many voices crying out about the evils and inequalities of Prohibition, and Marquis had created another character, the Old Soak, for whom the difficulty in obtaining alcohol was a running theme. The tragic muddle of Prohibition had been in effect for five years. An Eighteenth Amendment had been proposed late in 1917, the year Andy started at Cornell, but it wasn’t ratified by enough states until more than a year later, and it took another year to go into effect.
Just as in childhood his anticipation of the monthly issue of St. Nicholas had been greatly enhanced by the suspense of contributing to it, so had his trips to the newsstand gained in importance as he sent out light verse and small stories to newspaper columnists. Christopher Morley ran Andy’s sonnet about a rooster in his column “The Bowling Green” in the Evening Post. Franklin Pierce Adams (F.P.A.) published a couple of Andy’s poems in “The Conning Tower,” the famous column that in 1922 Adams had moved from the Tribune to the World. Adams especially was considered a columnist who could lift other writers’ careers into a new level of fame. Andy dreamed of such a career boost coming his way.
This kind of writing paid little when it paid anything, so Andy supported himself with jobs at advertising agencies. First he worked in production for Frank Seaman, Inc., a bustling Fourth Avenue company whose founder had become a well-known advertising guru for both domestic and foreign markets. Occasionally Andy got to write copy, but for most of the first year he ran an electrotype machine, which produced duplicate plates for printing. The job allowed him to glimpse much of what came through the office. After the war, American marketing had become a carnival of pious boosterism, composed half of imperialistic imagery and half of the kind of joshing platitudes that Sinclair Lewis had recently pilloried in his novel Babbitt. A 1916 article had said about Seaman, “He is one of the men who saw early … that advertising is away bigger than smart description, pictures, and typography—that it is the heavy artillery of sales management, and that sales management employing the heavy artillery is generalship requiring the solidest grasp of fundamental business principles plus a generous appreciation of the intricacies of just common human nature.” Andy found such writing pompous and ridiculous. He disliked advertising and felt he ought to be doing more respectable work. He couldn’t bring himself to care whether one particular kind of window-shade material outsold another.
ONE DAY IN late February 1925, Andy strode the crowded, noisy floor of Grand Central Terminal, checking at newsstands for the debut issue of a humor magazine that he had been told was about to appear. The terminal’s latest incarnation was twelve years old, an elegant replacement for the Grand Central Station of Andy’s childhood, from which he and his parents had departed every summer for Maine. As he scurried past the four faces of the round-headed clock above the main information terminal, cigarette smoke eddied upward in light slanting down from giant windows that gave the echoing space its cathedral air despite the lack of stained glass.
He stopped to survey a newsstand. The New York Times happily reported robins and daffodils in New Jersey, a month ahead of the equinox. Film Fun had a color portrait of a laughing young woman in an eye-catching red swimsuit; a closer look revealed her to be Kathryn McGuire, Buster Keaton’s costar in his recent movies The Navigator and Sherlock, Jr. In deliberate contrast to the flashy mags, two-year-old Time’s stark white covers always showed a plain black-and-white drawing of a prominent public figure. This week it was Harry New, the postmaster general, who had been appointed by Warren Harding and then reappointed a couple of years ago, when Harding suddenly died and skinny little Calvin Coolidge became president.
Finally Andy found the new magazine. Its cover was in color but drawn in a calligraphic black brush line, showing a high-collared and top-hatted Regency dandy peering through a monocle at a hovering modernist butterfly. The magazine looked resolutely frivolous, a pose that Andy himself was known to adopt occasionally. In the pink clouds over this Beau Brummell’s head was a title in a sans-serif font that looked both modern and lighthearted: THE NEW YORKER. The first issue arrived on newsstands a few days ahead of its cover date of Saturday, February 21, 1925. Liberty and Collier’s cost a nickle, Photoplay and Good Housekeeping a quarter; Andy plunked down fifteen cents for this premier issue and hurried to catch his train.
The first issue of The New Yorker looked much like Judge and Life, neither of which was as limber in old age as it had been in youth. A cartoon showing an elegantly dressed man and woman strolling past a revival of the Victorian melodrama The Wages of Sin bore underneath it the kind of two-line overkill dialogue that had been standard-issue since Punch was in diapers, complete with scriptlike identification of the speakers:
UNCLE: Poor girls, so few get their wages!
FLAPPER: So few get their sin, darn it!
Later there was a similar setup, without a drawing, but this time it was inverted in what at first seemed like a mistake:
POP: A man who thinks he can make it in a par.
JOHNNY: What is an optimist, Pop?
On the first page, under the heading The New Yorker and an illustration showing the monocled dandy working at a desk with a feather quill, was a section entitled “Of All Things,” a gossipy tour of Manhattan, signed at the end “The New Yorker.” It included an apologetic note: “The New Yorker asks consideration for its first number. It recognizes certain shortcomings and realizes that it is impossible for a magazine fully to establish its character in one number.” This first slim issue reviewed a few books and plays, even some moving pictures. A two-page column called “Profiles,” whose heading bore a literal-minded illustration of people seen from the side, covered the Metropolitan Opera’s Italian-born impresario, Giulio Gatti-Casazza. The text wrapped around a caricature of sleepy-eyed Gatti-Casazza’s wedge-shaped beard and waxed mustaches and rakishly tilted fedora.
Andy liked that most items in the magazine were brief and amusing. He decided to submit a few paragraphs, perhaps some light verse, and see if they might be interested.
They were. During 1925 the magazine bought several brief pieces. His early contributions included a parody of advertising writing, one section of which also managed to include a favorite bird and a favorite time of year. Under the title “New Beauty of Tone in 1925 Song Sparrow” was the description “Into every one of this season’s song sparrows has been built the famous VERNAL tone. Look for the distinguishing white mark on the breast.” Another piece was about the travails of commuting. After a long trip out West with a college buddy, he had moved back in with his parents for a couple of years. Like many other families, they found this arrangement less than satisfying, and Andy also tired of the daily train commute to the advertising agency in Manhattan.
In November 1925 he moved into the city, settling into his first apartment, in Greenwich Village at 112 West Thirteenth Street, a four-story brick walk-up around the corner from Sixth Avenue. He roomed with three other Cornell alumni, in a two-bedroom apartment on the third floor, a sitting room and a single bedroom that held two dormitory-style bunk beds. Bob Adams and Gus Lobrano worked for Cunard, the shipping company; Mike Galbreath worked for the publisher McGraw-Hill. Rent on the two-room apartment was $110 per month, with Andy’s quarter coming only to $27.50, manageable even on the budget of an electrotype operator. His bank balance was also slightly raised by the small checks that trickled in from The New Yorker and elsewhere.
Although his first contributions were amusing and achieved their modest goals, late in the year he wrote up a real-life experience in a more distinctive tone of dry wit. He described a lunchtime encounter in a Childs restaurant. Starting out with a single family-owned location on Cortlandt Street in the 1880s, Childs had grown into the first major restaurant chain, a hugely profitable enterprise now serving dozens of cities with more than 100 locations. Instantly recognizable by their white marble tabletops on gleaming nickel legs and their white tile floors—they were sparkling clean, catering not only to economy-minded locals who didn’t have time for a leisurely lunch, but also to a populace newly afraid of old-fashioned germs. The waitresses—themselves an innovation when they were introduced around the turn of the century, when most restaurants hired only waiters—wore starched white uniforms and could be seen at a griddle in the windows, flipping pancakes.
When Andy sat down to lunch he was wearing a dark blue serge suit that looked good until a waitress spilled a glass of buttermilk on it. He hid his embarrassment behind performance. He gazed stoically down at the wreck of his clothing, thinking that so few dark spots showing through his now yellow-white coat made him resemble a fire-hall dalmatian. Reassured by his lack of anger, the waitress gave him a handful of paper napkins, with which he began to dab ineffectually. A woman at the next table issued unwelcome advice. Reassuring the crying waitress, Andy felt heroic. Aware that everyone was watching him, he rose, pulled on his overcoat, and, with theatrical nobility, slipped a dime tip under the edge of his plate. Then he went to pay his check, which came to seventy-five cents. He waved away the change, saying, “Let that take care of the buttermilk.”
Soon he wrote up the incident in a tone of placid virtue and sent it to the new magazine. In the story he even had himself think, “Perhaps this is one of those ‘smart backgrounds’ The New Yorker is always talking about.” His surprise Christmas gift was a check for the piece, which appeared in the last issue of the year, with its cover montage of holiday festivities—a champagne bottle in a bucket, opera glasses and tickets, a glittering diamond necklace. Apparently the magazine was doing well; the Christmas issue had been the largest yet, at fifty-six pages, and this one was also healthy-looking, including advertisements for Old King Cole cigars and a profile of Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. Andy’s story was tucked between a caricature of Harry Houdini, who was drawing crowds over at the spacious Forty-fourth Street Theatre—with its speakeasy, the Little Club, in the basement—and a caricature of the Russian actress Olga Baclanova, who was starring in the Moscow Art Theatre Musical Studio’s production of Lysistrata, which The New Yorker’s columnist described as “the naughtiest, most hilarious, most timely and by far the most entertaining play in town.” Andy’s story was on page 17, titled “Child’s Play” (incorrectly, because the name of the restaurant family was Childs, not Child). Under the title was the line “In Which the Author Turns a Glass of Buttermilk into a Personal Triumph.” The story covered almost the entire right page, opposite a piece called “Sex Is Out,” by none other than Robert Benchley. It was heady company for a young writer.
“ARE YOU ELWYN Brooks White?”
The woman striding purposefully toward him across The New Yorker’s reception area was in her midthirties, about seven years older than Andy. She had a straight and rather patrician nose, beautiful dark eyes under dramatic brows, and long, dark hair pulled into an elegant bun on the back of her head. She wore a stylish, expensive-looking dress and a string of pearls. With a slightly reserved but still charming smile, she introduced herself as Katharine Angell, and her voice, while warm and friendly, had an educated refinement to it.
It was late 1926. Angell was the editor who had bought a dozen or so of Andy’s light verse and brief humorous prose items over the previous year. She had invited him to drop by their small suite of offices at 25 West Forty-third Street and go to lunch with her and the magazine’s maestro, Harold Ross. Fourth in her 1914 graduating class at Bryn Mawr, Angell had majored in English literature and philosophy. Only a few months after founding the magazine, Andy soon learned, Ross had hired the sharp, well-educated, and witty young woman to read manuscripts for a couple of hours each day. Soon she became indispensable. The first head of the Fiction Department, she also participated in almost every other decision, from poetry and layout to cartoons and advertising.
Soon her boss joined them and they went out to a restaurant. At thirty-four, Harold Ross was gaunt and angular and pale, with small, intense gray eyes. He brushed his hair into a pompadour worthy of a cockatoo, and his nervous habit of running his big-knuckled hands through it didn’t calm it down. Even at first glance, Ross was a mass of contradictions. His chiseled, austere upper lip rested uneasily on a full, sensuous lower lip. Like his other features, they were constantly in motion, bouncing from a disapproving purse to a sudden good-humored smile showing a prominent gap between the incisors. His voice varied just as much, from a doglike growl to a higher-pitched Western twang. As if to make himself invisible, Ross wore a plain dark suit and tie. Despite his air of youthful distraction, he was already an experienced newspaperman, having worked for two dozen papers in his eighteen-year career, and having managed Stars and Stripes during the Great War. He had a distracting way of gesturing by flailing his arms about, and because of his ulcers, he ordered lunch only after a careful perusal of the menu. Beside Ross, the beautiful Mrs. Angell seemed an oasis of calm. Together, over the meal, Angell and Ross invited Andy to come to work for them part-time as a staffer at The New Yorker.
Despite his longtime daydreams of a successful writing career, Andy resisted, hesitating as usual over commitment. But Angell and Ross persisted. Especially after talking with Andy at lunch, Ross—who trusted his instincts and was always looking for new talent—decided he wanted Andy on board the ship of which he himself was the profane and restless captain. Over several lunches, they expressed their admiration for his writing and extolled the virtues of working for a burgeoning enterprise such as The New Yorker.
In the year and a half since its debut, the magazine had matured at a breakneck pace. Ross’s friends among the Algonquin Round Table—Robert Benchley, Arthur Kober, Marc Connelly, Dorothy Parker—were finally coming aboard, at least occasionally. (Few had taken the magazine venture seriously at first and most were still skeptical.) Ring Lardner had submitted one small piece. Ross was hoping to get Alexander Woollcott interested. The quality of the material was rising, although not quickly enough to suit Ross. He still quested after the perfect crew to staff his quixotic venture. He kept saying he was searching for the right “formula.” Although he yearned for the magazine to develop a unique persona, at first it was very much of its era. The brief paragraphs, usually humorous, that comprised the front departments of the magazine—“The Talk of the Town,” starting out with “Notes & Comment”—followed the popular catchall format of Andy’s own favorite columnists: Morley, Marquis, F.P.A. Each owed a debt to nineteenth-century forebears such as Eugene Field’s “Sharps and Flats” in the late 1800s. Unpredictable, even anarchic, the format permitted almost anything and in its honed brevity built up a kind of narrative momentum. He wanted Andy to take charge of this department.
Finally, in January 1927, Andy agreed to contribute new work every week and to show up every weekday, at least for a few hours, at a small office that was assigned to him. In return Harold Ross agreed to pay him $30 per week. Andy had left Frank Seaman and was now working part-time at a different advertising agency, J. H. Newmark, where he earned the same amount. Surely a frugal young man could live on $60 a week, especially while still rooming with three others. More important than the money, about which Andy had an almost cavalier attitude, was that at twenty-seven he had suddenly become a salaried professional writer.