The Years Without Ross

A kind, anonymous reader of this blog reminded me that the James Thurber piece I referred to in my November 21 post was “Preface to a Life,” which is the preface to a collection of his entitled My Life and Hard Times. I read it again after that reminder and loved it just as much as I had when I was a teenager. I recommend it.

My favorite Thurber piece is not an essay, but his memoir, The Years with Ross. It’s about the time he spent working at The New Yorker under the direction of Harold Ross, the magazine’s founding editor. I recall reading that S. J. Perelman, another hero of mine and a New Yorker colleague of Thurber’s, didn’t much care for the book. He said it made the staff of the magazine look like a bunch of amateurs playing at journalism. Oh well. I still loved it. And didn’t everything seem like a bit of a lark at the end of Thurber’s pen? What did Perelman expect?

I’m sure I read the book because my dad had liked it. And I suppose it was after reading it that I became a fan of The New Yorker. I imagined I was reading Harold Ross’s magazine, the same one Thurber and Perelman had worked for. And E. B. White and Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley and Dorothy Parker. To me there was a quaintness in its pages that made that easy to believe.

At college I read it religiously in the current periodicals room of the library and tried not to laugh out loud. In those pages I learned some things about writing and marveled at a great many writers. I wondered how Mavis Gallant could be so damned prolific (she seemed to be in every third issue). I found Mark Strand, Donald Barthelme, and, just before Tina Brown took the magazine’s helm, Ralph Lombreglia.

When Brown stepped in I lost some of my interest in The New Yorker. There was a lot of noise about how she was going to revamp the thing I loved to make it current – appeal to modern magazine readers – and I didn’t much care for the sound of it. What did I know about the monumental task of keeping a magazine in the black ink, even in those days? What did I know about The New Yorker, for that matter? Not much, as it turns out.

As I took a Google-assisted look back at the magazine, Harold Ross, and James Thurber, I stumbled upon a Time article from 1960. It pointed out that while The New Yorker had tried to continue to be Ross’s, in the nine years since his death it had changed. William Shawn was a different kind of editor who edited a different kind of magazine.

Shawn seems to have been the sort who didn’t want to offend writers by tinkering too much with their material, while Ross had insisted that writers not offend him by blundering around with his vision of The New Yorker, of journalism, of that restless animal called English.

The Time article talks about the importance of The New Yorker’s ad pages in 1960. They’d become as classy and artistic as the editorial content. They brought in money. Under Tina Brown, the magazine became less quaint, more hip, more marketable. Maybe I was too hard on Ms. Brown. And maybe I romanticized Ross and Thurber too much. If the black ink doesn’t flow, magazines die. And, what the heck, if I squint real hard I can still see Harold Ross and his staff in its pages.