This Old Man

by Roger Angell

  We saw him now and then after this, back in New York, where he was a vibrant presence at dinners given by our friend and near neighbor Eileen Simpson. He was a world-class conversationalist, with flowing ideas and a smoky laugh. He died in 1996, at fifty-five: a shock to the world. Another New York celebrity, of course, and almost a friend of ours. Now he has become a companion, ever since I started memorizing poetry as a prop to my declining brain, and came upon his “A Song,” which first appeared in The New Yorker in 1989. Each of its four stanzas begins with “I wish you were here, dear.” The third one goes:

  I wish you were here, dear,

  I wish you were here.

  I wish I knew no astronomy

  when stars appear,

  when the moon skims the water

  that sighs and shifts in its slumber.

  I wish it was still a quarter

  To call your number.

  Shouts & Murmurs,

  February, 1993 / September, 2013

  PAST MASTERS: HAROLD ROSS

  MAN OF LETTERS

  Harold Ross, the founder of this magazine, in 1925, and its uniquely attentive shaper and editor until his death twenty-six years later, has achieved a niche of fame and obscurity that would appear to keep him mercifully safe from the attentions of a fresh biographer. Exempt from the yappings and shin-bitings that have greeted recent memoirs centering on his successor, William Shawn, Ross stands upon a farther hill like a Martin Van Buren of American journalism: a good man of whom one knows just about enough. In truth, Ross himself was patronized and misrepresented in posthumous books about him and his magazine written by celebrated colleagues. James Thurber’s “The Years with Ross” (1959) managed to suggest that Thurber himself, not Ross, had been mainly responsible for the magazine’s reputation, while Brendan Gill’s “Here at The New Yorker,” published in 1975, savaged him for his boorishness and limited education, and diminished him by anecdote. These lingering hurts were put away in 1995 by Thomas Kunkel’s “Genius in Disguise,” a foursquare, fully researched biography that cleared up some paradoxes about the man (Ross the gap-toothed Aspen rube as one of the founding sophisticate members of the Algonquin Round Table; Ross the habitual “Goddamn”er and “Oh Christ”er who wished to protect young women on his staff from the sight or sound of the shorter expletives; Ross, the publisher of Nabokov and Edmund Wilson, asking “Is Moby-Dick the whale or the man?” and so on). Ross is also a central figure in the balanced and useful new “About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made,” by Ben Yagoda, which draws upon six decades of archives while assessing the magazine’s fortunes during its accumulating editorships and extremely various eras.

  No serious reason remains, then, for anyone but scholars or obsessives to take up still another book about Ross and his “fifteen-cent comic paper,” which suggests that the latest entry, “Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker’s Harold Ross,” should be read simply for pleasure, in which it abounds. The collection comes from Thomas Kunkel, a grateful biographer, who notes in his introduction that Ross, who never wrote a word for the magazine, “was, with the possible exception of the protean Edmund Wilson, the most prolific writer in its history,” if one counts the letters. Prolific in this case doesn’t necessarily mean lengthy. “I hope your God-damned stomach is better since you’ve quit writing,” Ross writes to E. B. White (whose furlough was temporary). To the poet William Rose Benét, he is encouraging and corrective, in thirteen words: “We like your stuff, God knows, but this verse, damn it, is obscure.” To James Thurber, he notes, “While bathing this morning, it came into my mind that what that dog is doing on your New Year’s cover is winking, dog winking. I’m not exactly clear on how a dog winks but it’s probably as you’ve drawn it.” In 1930, the unknown young John O’Hara receives “I don’t know of any job and I’m not likely to hear of one, but if I do, I will let you know. Maybe the only thing for you to do is to keep on writing and become a writer.” O’Hara complies, and then some, and hears a different tone fourteen years later: “Dear John: I regret to report that there is nothing doing as to the proposed $3,200 advance. I formally put it up to the big-scale fiscal man and the result was a laugh, in which, in the end, I joined.”

  These are excerpts, but almost every letter in the book’s four hundred and eighteen pages contains similarly brusque and entertaining clarities—the Rossian nub—which makes this a read-aloud, or read-across-the-room, sort of book. One-sentence mailings turn up as well, even in the daunting condolence form: “White: Was very sorry to hear about your father, and send my sympathy, which is about all I have to say, except that after you get to be thirty people you know keep dropping off all the time and it’s a hell of a note.”

  Ross wrote letters all the time, frequently logging several hours at it in a single day. Some were handed over to secretaries for correction and retyping, but surviving New Yorker editors and writers who recall the steady thrash of Ross’s old Underwood upright emanating from his nineteenth-floor, West Forty-third Street office have told me that they looked forward to perhaps receiving something from the daily outpouring of inquiries and encouragements or afterthoughts. The messages, pristine in type in the book, actually arrived in an imperfect rush of grimy black lines on yellow copy paper, with hurried X-ings out and pencilled-in corrections; sometimes Ross would produce an opening three or four lines of gibberish—it looked like code—before noticing that in his hurry he had placed his fingers on the wrong deck of keys. Ross often stalked the halls, hunched and scowling with the burden of his latest idea, but these in-house letters, conveying the same urgent and dishevelled impression, also appeared to bring him into your office, so to speak, and nearly in person. When Brendan Gill took exception to the sense of intimidation his boss sometimes conveyed, Ross wrote back, “I don’t try to scare anyone, although occasionally I don’t give a damn if I do probably.”

  The notes, in any case, got passed around, and, as Kunkel has observed, were often tucked away for posterity, in spite of their dashed-off informality. Salutations are curt and pauses for throat-clearing or attitude-seizing absent. The man was too busy for bonhomie or style. He hid very little and knew what was on his mind—an ever-increasing burden that he groaned and complained about even in the act of dealing with it—and amazingly shortened the distance between his thoughts and their departure. He always sounded like himself, which is the whole trick.

  Ross had a full-scale life away from the magazine as well, and one finds him making a backgammon date with Bennett Cerf, firing off a reminder to Noël Coward that he has tickets to take him to the circus, offering to sell Jimmy Cagney a used tractor for four hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents, and imploring Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy to help with a wartime shipment of Haig & Haig to Chasen’s restaurant, in Hollywood, of which he was a backer. His divorce from his first wife, Jane Grant, and the arrangements for her support become a clenched-teeth obbligato running through the book, once producing a letter to her lawyers which he famously signed, “Very truly yours, Ross, Ross, Ross, Ross & Ross, sgd / H. W. Ross, B. H. W. Ross.” But there is no levity within the position papers, ultimatums, and near-resignations that follow the trail of his lurid struggles with Raoul Fleischmann, the publisher and co-founder of the magazine, whom he mistrusted (with some reason) and in the end despised.

  Kunkel calls Ross an “organic complainer,” which is another way of saying that he was victimized by his insistence on quality and clarity in his magazine, and by the natural scarcity of editors and writers who could produce it. When the irreplaceable Whites moved to Maine—E.B., his prime stylist and the writer of the weekly Notes and Comment page; and Katharine, a formidable fiction and all-purpose editor (here fully disclosed as my stepfather and mother)—Ross somehow suppresses outrage. “If you will do a very little bit of timely Comment it will help out,” he says to White (who had begun writing his longer “One Man’s Meat” columns in Harper’s). To Mrs. White, who continued editing from long distance, he writes,
“As to your sharp-shooting of the issues, and your recent memo about this, I say do it your way. I deplore your way, but since you can’t do it another way, I’ll settle on it.”

  The loudest outcries went to writers of humor, on whom he was almost pathetically dependent. “I have come to expect little from writers, including writings,” he grumbles to Frank Sullivan, a friend and funny man, whom he often addressed more directly. “I cannot refrain from urging you to write a piece. If you don’t do one, you are a little bastard” comes at the conclusion of a 1941 note that began, “Dear Frank, old fellow.” He is still at it in 1946: “GOD DAMN IT, WRITE SOMETHING! As ever, Ross.” He would not have used the capitals to a writer of less ability.

  His health and his teeth weren’t good (“Honest to Christ, I am more dilapidated at the moment than Yugoslavia,” he writes to White), and office troubles had begun to compound themselves in wartime, when so many editors and artists and staff writers went off to the service that he found himself at his desk seven days a week, and seriously considered scaling down to two issues per month. But Ross loved the work, there’s no getting away from it, and a tinge of enjoyment sifts into a summary whine of his, to Alexander Woollcott: “I am up to my nipples in hot water, what with half of the staff going off to war, a limitation of fifty-seven gallons of gasoline for six weeks, the Holy Name [Society] demanding that we stop printing ‘son of a bitch,’ and so on. This war is much harder on me than the last one.”

  —

  ROSS WAS NEVER SUNNY, but his powers of attention lighted him up, particularly when he was dealing with writers and their copy. One of his notorious query sheets turns up here in a 1948 letter to Thurber about a casual of his, “Six for the Road”—a routine (for the magazine) sort of notation in which Ross lists fourteen items worthy of the author’s immediate attention. No. 11 is typical—“Very unexpected to learn at this late date that there’s a bar in this place. Not mentioned before, and the definite pronoun has no antecedent”—but No. 3 brings Ross to near-frenzy: “This mixing up of a dinner party and an evening party that begins in the afternoon baffled me for quite a while, and I have come up with the suggestion that the party be made a cocktail party with buffet dinner. I think this is a brilliant suggestion. You never later have the people sitting down to dinner, nor do you take any notice whatever of dinner,” etc., etc. One can almost hear Thurber’s cries of irritation, even from this distance, but he has been poked or maddened into a tiny but perhaps useful fix, which was the main idea.

  It’s surprising that Ross never saw himself as a writer, or succumbed to the notion that he was growing into one. I think he sensed instead that he was a genius appreciator of clear writing and strong reporting, and understood that the care and comfort of those who were good at it required full-time attention. When the first-rate Profiles reporter Geoffrey Hellman decided to go to work for the better-paying Life (it was a temporary aberration), Ross goaded him with “What is the temperature over there? Do you need any pencils?”

  He is almost fatherly in a mini-crisis with the touchy Whites that blew up when a one-letter typo slipped into an E.B.W. proof—“hen” had become “her”—and he could always sound unfeigned appreciation for a writer’s best, even in a rival magazine. In 1940, after White had published a piece in Harper’s on the meaning of freedom, Ross wrote to him, “I think it is a beautiful and elegant thing, probably the most moving item I’ve read in years and worthy of Lincoln and some of the other fellows that really went to town.” And he concludes, “Knock me down anytime you want.”

  Ross’s New Yorker got better and deeper near the end of his tenure (he died in 1951), and the editor who had once expected so little of his contributors must have been startled by what was happening. Writing to John Hersey, whose account of the atomic-bomb destruction of Hiroshima had been given an entire issue, in 1946, he says, “Those fellows who said ‘Hiroshima’ was the story of the year, etc., underestimated it. It is unquestionably the best journalistic story of my time, if not of all time. Nor have I heard of anything like it.” And when Rebecca West, who had written some notable pieces for the magazine, dedicated her book “The Meaning of Treason” to him, he was astounded—“just overflowing with gratitude and goodwill to you…. I consider that I have now crashed American letters, which gives me much amusement.”

  —

  ROSS KNEW HIS OWN value, but his tenure at the magazine, to hear him tell it, was all about process. He didn’t give a damn what people thought about him or how he would be weighed; he just wanted to get the stuff right on the page. “It’s all right for people to say that we are too fussy, that ten or twenty slightly ungrammatical sentences don’t matter,” he writes, “but if (from where I sit) I break down on that the magazine would break down all along the line.” Similarly comes the confession “I still find journalism glamorous,” in a long and uncharacteristically personal letter to the editor of Current Biography, in which he recounts, among other things, his departure from high school after two years, in favor of full-time newspaper work on the Salt Lake City Tribune. And, writing to the artist Gluyas Williams in 1934, Ross says, “I’m employed by The New Yorker… largely as an idea man. That’s what I regard myself as, at any rate, and what I think my chief value to the magazine is.” This city-room angle on the world elates the old sourpuss again and again in this refreshing and unironic anthology. Who gets the royalties to “Happy Birthday to You”? he suddenly asks a Talk editor. To the actor Fredric March, he declares, “The belief that ‘none’ is a singular pronoun is an old American legend which grew out of an error made in a common-school grammar many years ago.” To E. B. White, an accomplished countryman by now, he takes up a dictionary exploration of “compost,” both verb and noun, which must have required three or four pages out of his Underwood. And in a memo to Shawn, his most valuable discovery, he wants additions to a coming June Talk piece that will explore more fully the story behind the home-plate umpire’s little hand brush, and the ball capacity of his pockets. “Are these brand-new balls, or are they balls that have been played with some, and been knocked foul?”

  For Ross, the invention of his magazine was just another good story. “The New Yorker is pure accident from start to finish,” he wrote to George Jean Nathan. “I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started it. Within a year White, Thurber, Arno and Hokinson had shown up out of nowhere…. And Gibbs came along very soon, and Clarence Day, and a number of other path-finders I could name if I spent a little time in review…. And Benchley was alive, for instance.” They were lucky, too.

  Books, February, 2000

  OFF WE GO

  Yesterday brought a foggy morning to Brooklin, Maine—“Imagine that!” said our presiding chairman and speaker, Richard Freethey, striking the lone note of irony of the day—or so it seemed at 8:50 A.M., when the Brooklin Band (white shirts, tan pants) struck up with “America the Beautiful,” and the last seats in the double row of folding chairs reserved for veterans and creaky elders filled up, while arriving families of every size walked in from their cars, parked along Route 175, and stood beside and behind them. The Fourth in Brooklin is always celebrated with a 10 A.M. parade—floats and fire trucks, Model Ts and shined-up ancient roadsters, and kid- and Lab-laden pickups—that forms on Steamboat Road and beyond, and, honking all the way, streams slowly along past householders waving from their aluminum lawn chairs, makes the turn between the Brooklin General Store and the Friend Memorial Library, and heads out along Naskeag Road. This year was different, beginning as it did with the earlier dedication of Brooklin’s Veterans’ Memorial—a sizable new chunk of gray granite, with a tilted, bronze, message-bearing face, standing in front of three dazzling white flagpoles and, farther back, the modest Brooklin Town Hall, once known as the Brooklin School. The Veterans’ Memorial arrived only after a great deal of dedicated local planning and fund-raising, but it was also something of a catch-up, as Freethey reminded us, since several other local towns got theirs up shortly after the Civil War. />
  But never mind. Everything about this event—the flag-raisings, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Dedication, and the rest, was perfect and perfectly unsurprising, unless you count Ms. Eleanor Tarr’s sweetly unadorned, dead-on soprano rendering of the Anthem, or young Nicholas Bianco’s poised delivery of “Taps,” gently echoed by Aaron Glazer’s more distant trumpet from a patch of grassland not far from the Brooklin Cemetery. There had also been a moment when Freethey introduced seventeen surviving Brooklin veterans of the Second World War and the Korean War.

  The Fourth of July, Brooklin, Maine, 2014 (Credit 10.1)

  None of this, perhaps, would be worth noting so carefully if you didn’t happen to be one of the old guys there who had doffed his baseball cap when his name came along, and felt his heart beating oddly. At ninety, I belong to the generation that was called into service almost en masse, sixteen million of us, in 1942 and 1943, and went off to war. We had to go, no two ways about it, and, bitching and groaning, we left school or quit our jobs, said goodbye to our parents and wives or girlfriends, and went and got the great bloody, boring thing done, and came home again, most of us. Mine was an easy war, and I’ve always felt a bit awkward with that Greatest Generation wreath that Tom Brokaw generously draped on us. Not for me, thanks, if you please, except on this particular holiday morning. Sitting among elderly serviceman friends and neighbors—among them Henry Lawson, who ran the engine division of my brother’s boatyard for so many years; Russell Smith, whose wife, Madeline, used to keep one of his discarded work boots out on their porch, full of petunias; and Steve Parson, a longtime summer pal of mine, who went to Guadalcanal in his teens and never talked about it afterward—I saw the crowd swell to a hundred or more as groups of folks and their amped-up, flag-bearing kids stopped by on their way to the parade. The sun, I noticed, had begun to get the best of the fog, just as we knew it would, and I felt, well, yes, thank you, thank you very much.