Let Me Finish

by Roger Angell

  In Shawn's latter days, in the early eighties, he began training McGrath as his possible successor at the top—a better candidate, I believed, than the previously tapped Jonathan Schell or Bill McKibben, whom Shawn had been forced to abandon, to his great distress, when faced with strong opposition from much of the staff. Shawn, though well along in his ninth decade by now, did not want to go at all, of course, and the McGrath apprenticeship, like the others, languished on the vine. One afternoon, piqued and frustrated by the whole thing, Chip determined to force the issue after his eye had fallen upon a dilapidated life-size, cotton-stuffed dummy that had lately been kicking around the fiction department in various low poses and positions. Chip called me into his office on our twentieth floor, which by chance lay directly above Shawn's, on the nineteenth. "Listen," he said, his eyes wildly alight. "It's time for action. I'm dressing the dummy up in my shirt and tie and this old Press jacket. Then I get Shawn on the phone and say, 'Mr. Shawn, this is McGrath and I can't stand it one more minute! Look out your window'—and then, ZAM, here I come, straight down past him, with maybe a whole bunch of galleys tied to my hand. That should settle things, wouldn't you think?"

  "Do it," I said.

  Only he didn't.

  In time, all the young fiction department people of that era took their leave, one by one, and moved up to distinguished careers elsewhere: Chip (who had become the fiction editor and, under Tina Brown, the magazine's deputy editor) at the Times; Dan Menaker as a top editor and then the top editor at Random House; and, a later arrival, Deborah Gottlieb Garrison, who is a poet in addition to her other talents, to a double post in publishing as an editor with Pantheon and the poetry editor of Knopf. She'd begun at the magazine as a summer intern. I think back on them at times as my protégés or children but in reality they were Shawn's. There in the late seventies and early eighties, we were regularly publishing stories by Raymond Carver, Donald Barthelme, Peter Handke, Alice Munro, Ian Frazier, William Trevor, Mary Robison, Stanislav Lem, John Updike, Garrison Keillor, Muriel Spark, Veronica Geng, Edith Templeton, Max Frisch, George Trow, V. S. Pritchett, and Ann Beattie, which felt enough like a renaissance or a great party to make us feel that we'd all had a Medici hand in it, though there's an equal chance that it was just the luck of the draw: a lot of very good writers getting hot at the same time. Either way, we loved it.

  These fragments of Shawn will not be amplified into a portrait or position paper, even though there may be some fresh things still to be said about his great gifts and his diffident, relentless eminence. It saddens me to realize that I have joined those who have no wish to linger within the great William Shawn National Forest after its recent strip minings. He was amazingly generous and friendly with me, and, I believe, almost relieved that he did not need to count me among his acolytes. Here comes one last Shawn story, to lighten us up: a family tale. It's opening night of his son Wallace Shawn's new play "The Hotel Story," in the summer of 1981, at the La MaMa Theater, on East Fourth Street. The theater was a tiny one, with no room backstage, which meant that the large cast—there are seventy-six characters—had to stand about in costume on the street until it was their turn to go on. Ann Beattie, a friend of Wally's, had volunteered to play the walk-on bit of a hooker, and during the intermission that first evening saw the playwright's parents standing uneasily together under the marquee, with Shawn in his customary dark suit, black shoes, and funereal necktie. "Mr. Shawn!" she said enthusiastically, hurrying toward the startled editor, who blushed and bowed, and, staring at the creature before him in platform shoes, pink stockings, clingy skirt, purple eye shadow, and thick crimson lipstick, at last recognized a valued contributor. "Miss Beattie?" he whispered, his cheeks scarlet. "What are you doing here?"

  Barthelme I want back, as well. Nobody reads him much these days, not even "The Indian Uprising" or "Views of My Father Weeping"; not "Critique de la Vie Quotidienne" nor "Paraguay" nor "Kierkegaard Unfair to Schlegel"—the titles jump out at you, just like his writing. Not Paradise, a novel, nor the limpid "Overnight to Many Distant Cities." Categories seemed to accumulate around him of their own accord, but a brief rundown of some common ingredients in his fiction brings back his unique swirl of colors and contexts: museums, headlines, orchestras, bishops and other clerics, babies, savants and philosophers, animals (gerbils, bears, porcupines, falling dogs), anomie, whiskey, fathers and grandfathers, explorers, passionate love, ghosts (zombies and others), painters, princes, balloons, nothingness, places (Paraguay, Korea, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Thailand), young women, angels, and a panoply of names (Goethe, Edward Lear, Klee, Bluebeard, Cortés and Montezuma, Sindbad, President Eisenhower, Eugénie Grandet, Snow White, Captain Blood, the Holy Ghost, Daumier, the Phantom of the Opera, St. Augustine, and Hokie Mokie the King of Jazz). This explosion of reference, this bottomless etcetera, probably accounted for his brevity—short stories and short novels—and for the beauty of his prose. His names and nouns were set down in a manner that magically carried memories and overtones, bringing them intact to the page, where they let loose (in the reader) a responding flood of recognition, irony, and sadness. The Barthelme sentences, which seemed to employ references or omissions in the place of adjectives or metaphors, were sky blue—clear and fresh, and free of all previous weathers of writing. It was this instrument that allowed him to be offhand and complex and lighthearted and poignant all at the same time. In an early story, "Philadelphia," a man named Mr. Flax describes an imaginary tribe and culture in this fashion:

  The Wapituil are like us to an extraordinary degree.... They have a Fifth Avenue.... They have a Chock Full o' Nuts and a Chevrolet, one of each....They have everything that we have, but only one of each thing.... The sex life of a Wapituil consists of a single experience, which he thinks about for a long time.

  Many readers had difficulty at first cottoning to writing like this. They were put off by Barthelme's crosscutting and his terrifying absence of explanation, and those who resisted him to the end may have been people who were by nature unable to put full trust in humor. Donald was erudite and culturally rigorous, but he was always terrifically funny as well, and when his despairing characters and ragged scenes and sudden stops and starts had you tumbling wildly, freefalling through a story, it was laughter that kept you afloat and made you feel there would probably be a safe landing.

  He was also an inspiring teacher of young writers, eventually becoming the centerpiece of a celebrated program at the University of Houston, in his old home town, to which he returned in 1981. I once told Donald that I'd been talking with an old pupil of his, a young man who'd also taken writing courses under John Barth, at Johns Hopkins. It was clear to this fellow that Barthelme was the better writer, but he'd decided that Barth, in a very close contest, might have been the better teacher.

  "God damn!" said Don.

  "Why, which did you want?" I said, startled.

  "Both!" Don cried. "Both, of course."

  He died at fifty-eight, in 1989, and his not knowing that he's out of contention for the moment is the only comfort I can find in that. Reviewers of his day called him a postmodernist or a minimalist or both, but his effect on readers—or on readers like me, at least—had nothing to do with groups or attitudes. The attitude I see him in is sitting and smoking in my regular armchair at my place—he always did this—with an expiring expression of sociability on his face as the warring forces of intelligence and kindness and alcohol and privacy and preoccupation inexorably begin to distance him from the gathering even as he wishes to stay on and keep the evening's sadness at bay. We counted on each other—a great many people felt this way about him—he perhaps seeing in me an older, semi-establishment New York guy who appeared to laugh or cower at the same things he did, and who also, as an editor, could reliably comb the hay out of his writing (this was his phrase). Dazzled, I stuck close to him because he knew so much—art and jazz and philosophers and gumbo—and because he had quickly and surprisingly taken me and Carol and John Henry in with his wife Bi
rgit and their daughter Anna and, later on, his wife Marion and their daughter Kate, at their place on West Eleventh Street. We were family, and on evenings and weekends got to share his strange, smart friends and his dashing, knifelike thoughts, as we hung together (in both senses) through the scary seventies and on into the eroding eighties. "Equanimity," he said, "begins with breakfast." As long as he's here in the same city with me we'll be all right, I used to think—or was that something Veronica Geng said?

  One day in the late sixties, Donald needed to get somewhere upstate and dropped into his neighborhood Hertz office for a rental. All went well until it was revealed that the applicant did not possess a credit card. "We'll need some identification, then," the Hertz man said unhappily. "What is your occupation, Mr. Barthumb?"

  Don—already sensing the onrushing scene from "Mondo Donaldo"—confessed that he was a writer. He wrote books.

  "What are some of your books?" said the Hertz guy, slightly retrieving the application form that lay between them.

  "Well, Snow White."

  "You wrote Snow White? Any others?"

  "I have a new one just coming out, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. It's a collection."

  "Well, there's a lot of that going on these days, isn't there?" said Hertz. "That'll be seven hundred dollars down, cash."

  Three more New Yorker friends, as seen in short pieces I wrote about them in the magazine, will wrap up our office visit, although Harold Ross, the first subject, would be startled at such familiarity. He knew me as a contributor and, uneasily, as a grownup version of the kid he'd sometimes run into at the Whites' place. He died five years before I went to work at the family store, but I seemed to find him—or hear him, almost—in a new collection of his letters that I reviewed early in 2000.

  Oh, Christ

  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 "God-damn"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 About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made (2000) 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 most recent entry, Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross (Modern Library), should be read simply for pleasure, in which it abounds. The collection comes from Kunkel, the 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. Onesentence 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 penciled-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 or question, but these in-house letters, conveying the same urgent and disheveled 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 (and former bootlegger) 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, By 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 e
nd 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, 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 (as he invariably addressed her), 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."