The Eccentric Editor

New Zealand Listener, Volume 41, Issue 1054, 6 November 1959, Page 12

The Eccentric Editor

THE YEARS WITH ROSS, by James Thurber; Hamish Hamilton, English price

(Reviewed by

A.S.

F.

RITING a profile of Harold Wallace Ross, foundereditor of the New Yorker, is a project about as straightforward as explaining Einstein’s theories to Lil Abner or Li'l Abner’s to Einstein. An appearance of lucidity might be contrived by listing his acts and attributes in three columns headed Genius, Uncertain, and Idiotif a decision could be made about which item belonged under which. James Thurber, who worked with Ross for 25 years and knew him as well as most, attempts no such foolishness. Instead, he exhibits by turns the affection, bafflement, admiration, exasperation-the total uncertainty-which Ross aroused in him in life. Thurber’s nearest approach to a generalisation is that, "The New Yorker was created out of the friction produced by Ross Positive and Ross Negative." Ross Negative was the man who tried to make an executive editor out of James Thurber; Ross Positive was another man who had the good sense to let E. B. White alone. But a gratuitous score or so of other Rosses clutter this pure dialectic. One was the Ross seeking his Miracle Man, "a dedicated genius, out of Technology by Mysticism, effortlessly controlling and co-ordinating editorial personnel, contributors, office boys, cranks and other visitors, manuscripts, proofs . .. and bringing forth each Thursday a magazine at once funny, journalistically sound, and flawless." Another Ross was the perfectionist who, if the Empire State Building was mentioned in a piece, was not satisfied till a checker had telephoned to verify that it was still there. Yet another Ross only once found the nerve to sack a man, then tried to. atone for his act by calling his best artist, Peter Arno, and sacking him too. Then there was Ross. the Gee-Whiz Guy, marvelling at Admiral .Peary’s 36-ton meteorite, dearly loving a great big glittering exclusive fact. And what is to be made of a man who courageously placed in

his humorous magazine the drawing of a woman holding up her child so that, over the heads of the crowd, it could witness a lynching? The same man, this, who refused a picture of two Arab fighters leaving a body-strewn field, one saying, "Some of my best friends are Jews." Ross had the perception to have Thurber redraw Carl Rose’s cartoon of a fencer cutting off his opponent’s head and crying Touché! "Thurber’s people,’+ he said, "have no blood." He was also the first to see the film possibilities of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Yet for nearly 15 years he was too obtuse to notice that his best writers earned about as much ‘as a "ribbon clerk’s salary," though in fairness it must be said that his private secretary robbed him of 70,000 dollars without his noticing that either. Asked why he published "stuff by that fifth-rate artist Thurber," Ross had the wit to defend his own. "Third-rate," he corrected. But he was generally slow in repartee as well as markedly short on learning. He once poked his head intq the checking department to inquire, (continued on next page)

"Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?" and when he questioned a reference to William. Blake-‘"Who he?"-it was an astonished Gee-Whiz Guy who found that one of his staff could tell him the answer, right out of his head. Two-hundred-and-seventy-four pages of this wondrous eccentricity do not wholly remove the impression that Ross might equally well have edited a successful tabloid. Believing that the only two characters universally known were Sherlock Holmes and Houdini, he refused to countenance learned, literary, or cabalistic references without explanation, and, in matters of taste, the impression is that he never entirely ignored the famed "old lady in Dubuque." In addition he possessed .the newsman’s nose which tells an editor when something is wrong with a story. (He once returned a perfectly smooth piece of Thurber’s with the opinion that eight lines had somehow been dropped. He was wrong. It turned out to be seven lines.) Whether editorial qualities essential to a newspaper can properly be applied to higher forms of literature may be open to dispute: the New Yorker is there to affirm that they can. Because of Ross, journalism, in many a writer’s mind, has ceased to be a naughty word. A paradox of Ross’s nature was his ability to retain finely talented writers in spite of his own literary limitations. Thurber resolves this by observing that both the writers and the magazine had a hand in the matter: that the flame, not the candle, attracts the moths. This is what Ross might have called chicken-or-egg stuff, a begging of questions which occurs more than once and is probably explained by the writer’s proximity to his subject-an experience not yet to be recollected in tranquillity. For the rest, readers of Thurber need only be told that The Years with Ross are as Thurberish as ever. Others, knowing nothing of Thurber or Ross, should begin to find out right here. Ross himself might aptly be left where Thurber met him, "standing behind his desk, scowling at a manuscript lying on it, as if it were about to lash out at him."