Read The 40s: The Story of a Decade Online
Authors: The New Yorker Magazine
The 40s: The Story of a Decade (2 page)
IN THE FORTIES
David Remnick
G
ap-toothed and spiky-haired, Harold Ross arrived in New York after the Great War and soon became one of the city’s most fantastical characters. He was twenty-seven, an eccentric searcher shaped by a dropout youth in the American West and a knockabout start in the news business; before he enlisted, he’d worked for two dozen papers, some of them for no more than a few weeks. Ross had a lucky war. He battled the Germans by editing
Stars & Stripes
in Paris. When he landed in Manhattan, he took up residence in Hell’s Kitchen and went to work for a veterans’ publication called
The Home Sector.
He also worked for a few months, in 1924, for
Judge
, a Republican-funded humor magazine. In the meantime, he acquired a circle of young Jazz Age friends (he played softball with Harpo Marx and Billy Rose, shot ducks with Bernard Baruch) and conceived an idea for a fizzy Manhattan-centric magazine of his own—a “fifteen-cent comic paper,” he called it. For financial backing, he hit up a baking and yeast scion named Raoul Fleischmann. Ross never really liked Fleischmann (“The major owner of
The New Yorker
is a fool,” he once wrote; “the venture therefore is built on quicksand”), but Fleischmann gave him the wherewithal to lure artists and writers from his accumulating circle of friends, hungry freelancers, disgruntled newspapermen, and Broadway lights. Harold Ross was in business.
From the moment he published the first issue of the magazine, in February 1925, he became one of midtown’s most talked-about characters. He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored
knucklehead (“Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross, Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell. He could not afford to pay Hemingway’s short-story rates, and so—with the guidance of a fiction department led by a cultivated Bryn Mawr graduate named Katharine Angell (later Katharine White)—he went about discovering John O’Hara, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, and Shirley Jackson. His editorial queries (“Were the Nabokovs a one-nutcracker family?”) got to the heart of things.
Ross was in on the joke of his bumpkin persona, and later became its captive, a lonely, twice-divorced workaholic. But he marshaled that persona to lead, to cajole, to set a tone at the magazine that was high-minded in its studied lack of high-mindedness. Ross had the sort of editorial personality that caused his deputies and writers to weep, sometimes in despair, sometimes in gratitude. One day, he would send a note saying “WRITE SOMETHING GOD DAMN IT.” And then, on the occasion of good work, he would send a message reading, “I am encouraged to go on.” It was all in the service of the weekly cause. He was nothing if not clear. To break up his first marriage, he sent his wife a kind of editorial memo that left no doubt of her faults and his own. Thurber took a crack at portraying the man in
The Years with Ross
, and Wolcott Gibbs wrote a play,
Season in the Sun
, with a directive that the actor playing the Ross character ought to be able to play Caliban or Mr. Hyde “almost without the assistance of makeup.”