The Years with Ross, page 1
Dedication
To Frank Sullivan
Master of humor, newspaperman,
good companion, friend to Ross,
this book is dedicated with the
love and admiration I share with
everybody who knows him.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Foreword to the Perennial Classics Edition
Preface
1: A Dime a Dozen
2: The First Years
3: Every Tuesday Afternoon
4: Mencken and Nathan and Ross
5: The Talk of the Town
6: Miracle Men
7: More Miracle Men
8: Onward and Upward and Outward
9: “Sex Is an Incident”
10: Who Was Harold, What Was He?
11: Up Popped the Devil
12: The Dough and the System
13: The Secret Life of Harold Winney
14: Writers, Artists, Poets, and Such
15: Dishonest Abe and the Grand Marshal
16: The Last Years
About the Author
Also by James Thurber
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword to the Perennial Classics Edition
James Thurber wrote The Years with Ross toward the end of his most productive and gifted period, and he managed to make both less and more of his subject than he quite intended. More, because he turned Ross, the creator and first editor of the New Yorker, into a legend: the Casey Stengel of American letters, the guy who wanted to know if Moby-Dick was the whale or the man and scribbled “Who he?” all over his writer’s copy. And this, in turn, made less of Ross—in the eyes of many New Yorker veterans, painfully less—because it turned him from the great and far-seeing editor they knew into a kind of Thurber husband who lucked out by hiring Thurber. For those who think that Ross really was like Stengel, i.e., a superb manager of talents who skillfully hid his shrewd judgment behind an assumed mask of colorfulness, it is easy to see Thurber’s Ross as a caricature, or even a betrayal.
This wasn’t Thurber’s intention, of course—his love for Ross shines from every page of his book—but if a competitive subtext emerges, it’s no surprise. No writer really thinks he couldn’t have done it all by himself. All writers pay extravagant compliments to their editors, while secretly thinking how lucky the editor is to have around a writer so magically adaptable and forbearing. In their hearts, writers think of editors as little as society ladies think of maître d’s: one tips them heavily and listens wide-eyed to their advice on the menu, but the point is to keep that table. (And, in their hearts, all editors think of writers as maître d’s do society ladies: spoiled, demanding children—if only, sigh, you could run a restaurant without them.) Thurber’s Ross is a wonderful comic figure—too comic, perhaps, for the taste of those who revere him. But Thurber revered him too, and the special virtue of The Years with Ross is that he manages to make a completely comic creation into a convincingly heroic one. Thurber’s Ross is half-beleaguered American white man, half-wide-eyed gee-whizzer; one part W. C. Fields on his sleeping porch, two parts the hero of Tom Swift and His Amazing Magazine; “an aw-shucks farm boy from Colorado trying to land a 1900 biplane in the middle of Fifth Avenue,” as Thurber himself put it so memorably.
What might help make this book matter for new readers in a new century (who can be assumed not to care less about how writers got paid under a “drawing system” in 1942) would be to take it away from New Yorker lore-making (and the New Yorker generally, and wouldn’t that be nice) and to concentrate on the thing that truly makes it matter: the story it tells about how writers and editors together, in the years between Pershing and Pearl Harbor, made a new kind of American music. Between what Thurber and his contemporaries were able to put in and what Ross and his contemporaries knew to take out, a style emerged that still strikes a downbeat for most good American writing today. Putting the New Yorker aside—and surely it is time we did; let the magazine speak for itself, as it must for as long as it lives—there is something permanent in The Years with Ross about how a writer learns to write, what an editor can teach him, and how the tone they shape together can be around for other writers when both of them are gone.
Thurber matters, still and first, because, even in his later, garrulous manner, his is one of the wonderful original voices of American writing. He is the most complicated, emotionally complex, touching, and original of all his generation of New Yorker writers. A. J. Liebling is funnier and larger-souled and infinitely more worldly. E. B. White is a more natural stylist (and the creator of a lot of what’s good in Thurber). Joe Mitchell is a more precise and self-conscious artist, with an artist’s sense of the mystery in all simple things. But Thurber, though an eclectic writer, is the most volatile, difficult, and, in a good sense, moody of them all—the most emotionally direct and, therefore, the most memorable. The style of understatement he learned from White in particular involved imposing a certain amount of taciturn discretion and fastidiousness on a man who was neither indirect nor modest, and the marriage of the two things—the modest style and the boastful guy, the crazy man and the sane sentences—made him among the most moving and soulful, not to mention one of the funniest, twentieth-century American writers.
He was also probably the best and purest tonal writer we’ve ever had. Thurber is a tonal writer in the simple sense that his is a voice we know rather than a set of jokes we laugh at. Where almost every comic writer before him comes at us in aphorisms or epigrams—or else in the epigram’s cousin from Milwaukee, the wisecrack—Thurber just makes sentences. (When he tried phrase-making, it always fell a little flat: “Let us not look before us in fear, or behind us in nostalgia, but around us in awareness,” which Ted Sorenson could have written.) Thurber is memorable in paragraphs and pages rather than in lines. He doesn’t “turn phrases”; he just turns the corner on to the next sentence. No one worked harder or went further to slim down the space between American speaking and writing voices, between the way we talk and the way we write. (Auden said somewhere that the one writer whom Max Beerbohm must have envied would have been Thurber, because he did with a natural sound what Beerbohm achieved with a lot of hard blowing.)
Though The Years with Ross is not Thurber’s very best writing, the natural tone is still there, and rereading it recalls how hard it must have been to do every time he did it. Some of the difficulties arise for technical reasons. Though it is hard to write sentences that sound like talk, it is even harder to know how to put them together, since the conjunctions of natural speech are mostly pauses and “ahem’s” and interjections. Insert “and’s” in their place and pretty soon, if you’re not careful, you’re stuck with a pseudo-biblical Irish croon, à la late Hemingway, whether you want it or not.
There are tricks to getting around this, and Thurber knew them all. By the time he wrote The Years with Ross these tricks had become second nature to him so that his performance is a little like the late Luis Tiant’s accumulated guile and instinct after the fastball has gone. There is the use of the right deflating words: “dogged,” “jumpy,” and “puzzled” make their usual Thurberian appearances. There is the trust that the reader can make the connections between sentences for himself so that all the “hence’s” and “thus’s” and “therefore’s” and “of course’s” that afflict an ordinary journalist’s prose can drop right out. Look, for instance, at these simple sentences, chosen pretty much at random:
He let an editor go in the early years because the man brought his wife into Ross’s office to meet him. Ross looked up and there she stood, seeming to be closing in on him from all sides. Very few women even among those employed there, could enter the inner sanctum of old Surrounded. Of the privileged females my second wife, Helen, was one.
This gets you just where you’re going (from a general idea to a new person), uses a funny image (of the encroaching woman) to get you there, and leaves out three-fourths of the stuff that most of us would have felt compelled to put in—all those apprehensive qualifications (who the editor was, when it happened, who Helen was, and what she’s going to do in the story) that usually go hand in hand with memoir writing.
Yet, though the apprehensive qualifications are left out, an apprehensive nervousness is left in. It’s funny that Thurber’s literary hero was Henry James, who seems all apprehensive qualification, until one sees that the effect of nervous energy, of a mind working naturally, can be communicated on the page equally well by elaboration or by omission—either very long and legato or very short and staccato, as in Miles Davis’s trumpet playing—just so long as you keep away from strict time.
Flat omission was one device Thurber loved. Another weirdly simple device that Thurber mastered is the unostentatious use of one- and two-syllable words. Take another passage plucked at random:
Ross didn’t like it at all when he found out, bumbling into what we called the Goings On room, that the girls there brewed both tea and coffee every afternoon, and he was appalled when he bumped into a Coca-Cola machine that had been installed when he was away. “If we have a candy counter, I don’t want to know where it is,” he bawled.
Here Thurber’s writing and Ross’s speaking voice really are made to run together, while the entire two pages that surround this little passage have exactly six three-syllable words—all obvious and easy ones (morosely, becoming, afternoon, understand, telegram, surrounded) with only one, “morosely,” requiring even a microsecond’s thought to recall what it means. The style makes space between word and thing so small that you forget you’re reading and just think you’re hearing, which is what a tonal writer is trying to make you think. It’s an extraordinarily, almost ridiculously, simple device; nonetheless, the atmosphere of naturalness it creates is enormously effective—oh, sorry. Let’s just say that when it works it works like a charm. (It also goes along with the elimination of semicolons, dashes, or any other punctuation aside from periods and commas. In the five pages on either side of the quote above there is one dash, and that’s for effect within a quote, and one semicolon, which should actually be a colon.) It sounds easy to do when you say how he does it, but it’s as hard as hell to do while still saying things worth getting said. (Though just doing it, if I did it at all right right there, gets the tone going.)
This is one of the things that make Thurber almost parody-proof. There isn’t an affected, or a finely turned, or a purplish sentence in the book. This may be why the writers who claim to have been turned on to writing by him, and they include everyone from John Updike to Wilfrid Sheed, never sound like Thurber but always sound like someone. To write like Thurber you just write well.
One of the things that make The Years with Ross something more than a magazine memoir is the way one senses Thurber’s need to put down his own story while also sensing the hard-won decorum which made him understand that writing down your own story was a little second-rate. He found (and partly invented) a figure, Ross, Thurber’s Ross, through whom he could be reflected. What we have, then, is essentially an autobiography with a deferred object at its center, like one of those Renaissance portraits whose ostensible subject is the Nativity but whose obvious preoccupation is the artist’s own portrait, over there among the shepherds.
Still, it’s Ross who’s there in the manger, and the need, or readiness, to find an editor to canonize was hardly Thurber’s alone. It spoke to a national need. Only Americans make their editors into saints, or even gods. English editors remain anonymous, occasionally popping up above the battlements to do something unexpected, like translating Proust. (English writers wouldn’t take editing, anyway. Dr. Johnson was as much a miscellaneous journalist as Liebling, but you could no more imagine him listening to an editor than talking to a horse: “Sir, your queries are impertinent, unmeaning, and unhelpful.”) French editors, though feared, are not quite revered, although French publishers often are. There is no one more powerful than a French editor in power, and no one more kicked around once he’s out. (In France, journalism is a direct form of politics, and no equivalent of the general interest magazine exists, despite valiant tries, because there is no general interest. The party line soon overwhelms everything else.)
The twentieth-century American need to have genius-editors is partly the result of the American need to have genius-everythings, which also gives us Irving Thalberg, Bill Walsh, and whichever media man helped win the last primary. It’s also partly the result of the isolation of American writers, a condition of American writing, which gives them a very tenuous relation to their audience. The editor becomes the audience, and so the dependency relationship grows. Yet the more important reason that the cult of editors began in America back in the twenties is that at the time everybody, from Wolcott Gibbs to Gertrude Stein, really was climbing Mount Plain, trying to ascend to a pure American tone. The editors played the role of the Sherpas, while the writers got to plant the flag. (Truth be told, editors don’t really mind this any more than Sherpas seem to, since they both get the incomparable pleasure of the insider’s headshake: “You shoulda seen it when it came in / when he started up the mountain.”)
Some future literary historian will be baffled by the idea of a distinct New Yorker style, but will immediately be able to see a common plain style running right through the American twenties, thirties, and forties. (That Thurber debuted in the magazine, as he reveals in this book, with parodies of Stein and Hemingway tells you something about the common background.) Editors who are, before anything else, taker-outers, lighteners of the overpacked sentence, played an essential role in getting up that mountain.
So in the annals of American mythologizing, the cult of Ross is the mirror image of the cult of Maxwell Perkins, with Ross wearing the comic, rumpled mask and Perkins the pensive, thoughtful one. Perkins, the Scribner’s editor who handled Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe, plays the role of the editor-as-pensive-sage. The key word with Perkins is “quietly”: “Perkins listened to Wolfe, nodding his head, then quietly removed six pages.” (If that sentence doesn’t actually exist in a memoir, it will.) The key word with Ross is “noisily”: “Ross noisily entered the room. Goddam it, Hamburger, he cried.” Yet shared by the soft-spoken man and the loud man was a gift for getting naturally garrulous, boastful, and self-involved people (i.e., writers) to make it sing by toning it down.
You could climb Mount Plain with a map taken from a high style—Joyce’s Dubliners, say—or from a low one, and Ross, crucially, grabbed it low. He got it from the small-town newspaper, which was in good shape in his and Thurber’s day. A baptism in small-town newspapering was one of the things they had in common. (Even the first-person plural “we,” which people for some reason persist in seeing as a New Yorker eccentricity or innovation, was the weary signature style of every American small-town editorial writer in the nineteenth century.) It was the old-time newspaperman’s values—the love of hard fact, the “Goddamnit there’s a story in this swizzle stick!” enthusiasm—that Ross brought to reporting, which turned it into literature. Straight statement, the power of the weird observation, unadorned observation, the love of facticity for its own sake—all of these things, applied to ambitious writing, kept it sane and funny. It is this cataloguing, empirical impulse, whose origin point is the catalogue of riverboats in Life on the Mississippi, which not only separates Ross’s New Yorker from other magazines but also sets Thurber’s casual as far apart from Beerbohm’s as Fitzgerald’s luxe is from Wilde. In reading Ross’s comment sheets, which Thurber includes in his book, what’s striking is not the scattershot digressions but how hard Ross works to get Thurber to pay attention to how simply turning a “dinner party” into a “buffet supper” might turn a gassy and talky casual into something credible.
Yet, though the house style was a subgenus of American Plain (just as Ross was one variety of the larger species, American Genius) there are as many plain styles as fancy ones, and what made Ross’s version special was that it was fact-besotted, rather than just fact-based. Most journalists treat facts gingerly, out of fear (“What if I get it wrong?”) rather than delight (“Isn’t it fun to get it right!”). The facts Ross liked best took the form of flat statements, preferably impersonal, rather than personal observations. (Hemingway, for instance, whose style is in lots of ways very close to Thurber’s, didn’t write out of facts so much as sense-impressions, his facts.)
The style Ross midwifed also wasn’t afraid of breezy generalizations—it thrived on them in fact—so long as they were funny, and Ross knew they got funny by being idiosyncratic. Joe Mitchell, for instance, depends a lot on what had already been done by Joyce and Hemingway, but what makes him different is that his particular flat, descriptive statements are usually universals, statements not about a scene but about a permanent situation, what this guy is always like. (“Commodore Dutch is a brassy little man who has made a living for the last forty years by giving an annual ball for the benefit of himself.”)
In that vein, it is still striking to see how much juice Thurber, in The Years with Ross, gets out of impersonal universal statements: not how the weather was but how this guy or that thing typically is—the highly particularized generalization, a house specialty. “[Ross was] by far the most painstaking, meticulous, hairsplitting, detail-criticizer the world of editing has known” is every bit as much a Thurber sentence as its near neighbor “Ross sat on the edge of the chair several feet away from the table, leaning forward, the fingers of his left hand spread upon his chest, his right hand holding a white knitting needle which he used for a pointer.”
