J. D. Salinger. (Archive Photos)
Nonetheless, Mrs. White was right about everyone being civil. Lobrano’s fiction department, like Mrs. White’s before it, was truly a collegial operation. The editors had their literary disagreements, naturally, but were not hobbled by them. One day in 1948 Shirley Jackson submitted a modern-day horror story that excited the editors, with the exception of William Maxwell, who voted against it as being too heavy-handed and gimmicky for The New Yorker. The others, including Ross, took Maxwell’s point, yet considered the story so mesmerizing that they simply had to publish it. It was “The Lottery,” which created a sensation when it appeared and went on to become one of the most anthologized short stories in history. Ross was as bewildered as everyone else, including the author, about the “meaning” of “The Lottery,” but he clearly appreciated it, saying later that it was “terrifically effective” and was destined to become a classic “in some category.”
Vladimir Nabokov. (Archive Photos)
Ross liked to gripe about the bumper crop of “grim” stories, of which “The Lottery” was one, that The New Yorker was now cultivating, and this grousing gave rise to the notion that he disliked them, which wasn’t true. He was sorry to see the corresponding falloff in humorous pieces, which no doubt provoked some of his curmudgeonly asides, but he enjoyed the darker stories too. James Geraghty recalled coming upon the editor reading a galley of Robert M. Coates’s “A Winter in the Country,” a melancholy but moving story about an old man who gives every indication that he is about to die, only to be revived miraculously by the onset of spring. “Well,” Ross said, a little melancholy himself, “maybe that will make up for six weeks of dull publishing.”
CHAPTER 14
RECLUSE ABOUT TOWN
In the fall of 1950, Gibbs, having determined to prove to himself and the New York theater community that he was capable of practicing what he had preached for ten years, saw his comic play Season in the Sun open successfully on Broadway. With its obvious autobiographical chords, it told the story of a magazine writer who runs off to his oceanside retreat to be a novelist (a “real” writer) and slip the bonds of his brilliant, tyrannical boss, Horace William Dodd, nakedly patterned after Harold Wallace Ross. (The stage directions: “Dodd should really be played by Harold Ross of The New Yorker but, failing that, by an actor who could play Caliban or Mr. Hyde almost without the assistance of makeup.”) Near the play’s end, Gibbs has the protagonist’s attractive young friend tell Dodd/Ross, “He says you’re the greatest editor in America.” To which Dodd/Ross replies, “Well, they’re a pretty seedy bunch, generally speaking.”
All through that year, Ross’s peers, seedy and otherwise, had been sizing up The New Yorker now that it had attained the venerable age of twenty-five, and many of them frankly did consider him the greatest editor in America. But as undeniably gratifying as this sentiment was, Ross actually was feeling strangely at sea just then, uncharacteristically uncertain in some of his judgments. To a great extent, he sensed the modern world overtaking him. A nineteenth-century man at heart—after all, he still bore the scars of a boyhood stagecoach accident, and considered air travel so unnatural that he never once set foot on a plane—he was uneasy with the terrible realities of the atomic age, like coming up with contingency plans to publish The New Yorker in the event New York City was bombed. (He decided that any surviving staff would relocate to the printing plant in Greenwich if it was still standing.)
As intransigent and romantic as Ross could be in his worldview, largely shaped as it was by people and events prior to 1920, he was not unsophisticated. Nonetheless, the brinksmanship and Cold War emotionalism of the late Forties and early Fifties had him flummoxed. He confessed as much to Howard Brubaker, who from 1925 contributed The New Yorker’s Of All Things column, a collection of humorous paragraphs that was a kind of poor man’s Notes and Comment. “I’ve never been up against a [situation] such as the present one,” Ross wrote. “War doesn’t buffalo me professionally, everything being black and white in wartime, and peace doesn’t, although journalistically it’s not as simple as war, but I’m baffled by this in-between business. I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe, and now look at me.”
Ross found it “incredible” that the United States was fighting in Korea (“It’s incredible for Americans, that is,” he told Rebecca West. “The English … have been banging around the world for centuries”). He stubbornly refused to take Korea seriously as a war until or unless Soviet troops showed up at the front, which explains why he resisted his own reporters’ appeals to cover it until it was almost over. He despised Communism but considered the “Red scare” in this country hysterical and overblown (“Goddammit, I have it on good authority there aren’t two hundred Communists in the whole goddamn U.S.A.”). As a close observer of the Alger Hiss case—Ross’s friend and New Yorker associate Lloyd Paul Stryker defended the former State Department official—Ross had serious doubts about Hiss’s guilt, though his skepticism sprang as much as anything from the fact that Hiss’s accuser, Whittaker Chambers, was at bottom a “Time man.” He appears to have had no higher opinion of Joseph McCarthy than of the many other bullies and blowhards he had come across, and he commended White and Rovere when from time to time they called the senator’s demagoguery what it was. Some would later accuse The New Yorker of being reluctant to confront McCarthy, and it is true that the brunt of the magazine’s criticism appeared in McCarthy’s real heyday, 1953 and 1954, after Ross was dead. (Earlier, White in particular hadn’t wanted to feed McCarthy’s virulent ego with too much ink.) Still, as early as May 1950 Rovere was exposing the Wisconsin senator’s bankrupt tactics and deploring the extent to which he had gummed up the works of government. He would keep up this drumbeat, in increasingly harsh terms, with Ross’s approbation.
On one hand, these disorienting political currents troubled Ross the same way they troubled thoughtful people everywhere. In his view, government should feed the hungry, help widows and orphans, and pretty much leave all else alone; yet now it seemed to be mongering fear and anxiety. He brought up his personal politics so seldom in the office that most New Yorker staffers simply assumed from his conservatism and his disdain for Franklin Roosevelt—“the only non-phony I have ever heard you voice animosity towards,” Frank Sullivan once told him—that he was a Republican. He was freer in his personal views with friends, and his letters reveal him to be less a partisan than a kind of Spencerian independent. In the 1948 election, for example, he said he couldn’t support Thomas E. Dewey, by now the governor of New York, about whom Ross’s feelings hadn’t really changed since Gibbs’s unflattering 1940 Profile. Yet neither could he vote for Harry Truman, despite the fact that the President was a devoted New Yorker reader. When Truman prevailed, Ross professed not to be surprised, explaining the upset to Mencken by borrowing an old Al Smith line: “Nobody ever shoots Santa Claus.” (Ross held the electorate less responsible for Truman than he did Roosevelt, who the editor maintained had suppressed every capable Democratic successor. He once confronted FDR’s son Elliott about this, and the young Roosevelt replied by way of explanation, “You don’t think my father thought he was ever going to die, do you?”)
But on another level what vexed Ross was less the political climate itself than the way it was buffeting The New Yorker. A conservative with an isolationist bent, he found himself running a magazine whose perspective was steadily growing more liberal and internationalist. If this paradox bothered him—and often it did—he had decided he could live with it as long as individual reporters didn’t suffuse their pieces with their personal politics. The changing world hadn’t changed his fundamental conviction that his job was to let intelligent people write about what interested them in a clear, entertaining way. What he found harder to swallow was the reputation his magazine was picking up in the process.
This ideological divergence between editor and magazine was not a sudden developm
ent, really, but a predictable by-product of the war. Certainly their coverage of the great conflict and its confused aftermath had helped put the “world” in the worldview of his young writers. Shawn had demonstrated more openness to political slants in journalistic pieces, and surely “Hiroshima” was nothing if not a giant billboard against nuclear war. There had also been White’s high-profile campaign for “world government,” an idea he propounded upon his return to New York in 1943, and The New Yorker’s first overtly political cause. For four years, in almost one out of three Comments, White had argued that if humanity was ever to rid itself of war, individual nations would have to subordinate themselves to some kind of global supergovernment. In some of his most eloquent writing, he tried to make people see that their deepest loyalties would have to shift from their nation to all of mankind. He argued less about the specifics of what this world government would be, or how it would work, than for its necessity and underlying principles. He was advocating not the United Nations itself, whose disappointing development he covered for The New Yorker, but something with more teeth in it. (Though written anonymously for Comment, White’s views were later pulled together in a book under his name entitled The Wild Flag.)
While the world-government campaign was widely followed and admired by many politicians and opinion makers, there is no question that a great percentage of the magazine’s largely conservative readership found it unsettling, even heretical. They did not expect or welcome such radical sentiments in The New Yorker. Especially in retrospect, the concept of world government is sweetly naïve, and Ross, calling himself a “complete cynic,” thought as much at the time. Personally, he took the glum view that once the war was over the world would return to its same old belligerent ways. Yet even if he was incapable of mustering any idealism of his own, he always admired White’s, and he encouraged the world-government theme. “My viewpoint is that if the people of the earth don’t get a new set-up, they are being offered a very remarkable line of writing and thinking anyhow,” Ross told him. “You (collective) can’t lose on that basis.… But aside from all that and from everything else, you made the Comment page what it is, God knows, and I have for long regarded it as yours to the extent that you want to use it. That is not only the right way to look at the matter, but very sound business, I am convinced. I say carry on without hesitation or qualm.” Still, both men would have to concede that they were a long way from the Penn Station information-booth campaign.
But when Ross surveyed his roster of writers from a political standpoint, he could only sigh. He saw virtually no Republicans; there were no good young conservatives out there who could write, he once lamented to Liebling. New Yorker writers were mostly Democrats, mostly liberal, and some, like Richard O. Boyer, outright leftist. While there is scant evidence that anyone really tried to use the magazine for aggressive proselytizing, something Ross would not have tolerated, by the same token a writer’s personal interests obviously colored his choice of subject matter. In 1950 E.J. Kahn, Jr., was moved to write a Wayward Press piece defending two friends, musician Larry Adler and dancer Paul Draper, who as a result of a very public lawsuit were being roughed up by the right-wing press as pro-Communist. Shawn bought the piece, but Ross didn’t see it until it was set in galleys. When Kahn ran into the editor, he was holding a proof. “Jesus Christ, Kahn, why did you have to write this goddamn piece?” he spluttered. “Now I have to run it.” It was a reaction nearly identical to the one Ross had had to Rovere’s controversial Washington Letter on integration, and it evoked from Kahn identical feelings of gratification and respect for his employer.
The price Ross paid for this kind of editorial scruple was watching his magazine increasingly attacked as “pink,” or even deeper shades of red. In some quarters The New Yorker was dubbed The New Worker. Onetime friends of Ross’s, like the influential columnist Westbrook Pegler, now blasted him in print for promoting the work of fellow travelers.
Certainly this was how the magazine was being viewed by the FBI. J. Edgar Hoover, as has been mentioned, was no fan of Ross’s anyway, and any small New Yorker dig at the bureau could be expected to provoke a response. For instance, in 1943 a one-paragraph Talk item related a tepid joke about an FBI agent who is supposedly conducting a background check. The agent says, “I notice, in reading over back copies of your college daily, that your friend was sometimes referred to as Lefty. Was this because he was interested in communistic activities?”
For this transgression Ross heard from the great man himself. The New Yorker, Hoover wrote, “has again seen fit to refer to an alleged question by an FBI agent.… If this were labeled as a joke, I, of course, could get a good laugh out of it. Since, however, it is given such a prominent place in the Talk of the Town, I think it is right to assume that you intended that it should be considered as factually accurate. Accordingly, I feel justified in asking you for the basis upon which the item was predicated.”
This was not the first or last time Hoover would harass Ross, and chances are he disdained the director less for his sanctimony and ham-handedness than for his stillborn sense of humor. According to the bureau’s own files, Ross was generally “evasive” when approached for explanations about matters like the Talk joke, and he once suggested that Hoover’s G-men could stand “an elemental education in politics, etc.”
Of course “evasiveness” only engendered more suspicion. While the FBI didn’t keep a dossier on Ross himself, it did so on many of his writers: Dorothy Parker (a thousand pages), Irwin Shaw, A. J. Liebling, Richard O. Boyer, Kay Boyle, John O’Hara, Edmund Wilson—even, amazingly, E. B. White and S. J. Perelman. They were among the hundreds of writers whose activities and attitudes the FBI was “policing” for Hoover. As Herbert Mitgang discussed in his book Dangerous Dossiers, files on the New Yorker writers were gathered for an array of reasons: Parker for her leftist causes, Liebling for making fun of Hoover in print, White for attacking McCarthyism, Perelman for advocating a fair shake for the blacklisted writers and directors known collectively as the Hollywood Ten. At bottom, however, all of them were suspected of somehow undermining what the bureau considered the American way of life.
A man who harbored so many “suspect” writers was naturally suspect himself. In a truly bizarre episode in 1949, John O’Hara decided for some reason that he wanted to become an operative for the Central Intelligence Agency and in his application listed Ross as a character witness. Charged with checking out O’Hara’s background and loyalty, the FBI apparently debated for weeks whether Ross’s opinion, given his own history with the bureau and the politics of his magazine, was even worth hearing. In the end they did interview Ross, who informed them that O’Hara was a “hotheaded Irishman” who hung out in bars a lot (for research), was belligerent when drunk, and was once a man of dubious morals. But he added that the writer had lately cleaned up his behavior and was in any event a patriot of the first rank. In spite of this ringing endorsement, O’Hara’s application was rejected.
Ross had no problem shrugging off the likes of Hoover, but the aspersions against his magazine were more bothersome. Just how bothersome can be seen in separate but near-simultaneous contretemps involving two of his veteran reporters, Janet Flanner and freelancer Richard O. Boyer.
A regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1931, Boyer was a conspicuously adroit reporter and writer; in later years he would produce an acclaimed biography of John Brown. He was also an avowed Communist who wrote for such publications as the New Masses and the Daily Worker. He had never tried to use the pages of The New Yorker for political purposes, and the editors took pains to make sure that his assignments avoided any potential conflicts. Still, his mere presence in the magazine was controversial, and suddenly, in the fall of 1949, Ross terminated his association with The New Yorker (though not a staff reporter, Boyer apparently was receiving some sort of drawing account). It is not clear what prompted Ross’s decision, though it was said he had discovered that the reporter was using New Yorker stationery for po
litical purposes.
Word circulated quickly in Boyer’s circles that he had been fired on account of his political beliefs. Just as Ross had been excoriated before by anti-Communists for the journalist’s presence in the magazine, now he was denounced by Boyer’s friends and associates for this “cowardly” act. In replying to some of these people, Ross characteristically declined to divulge details of what was in his view a personnel matter, but he did remind his correspondents of a technicality that he had also pointed out to Boyer himself: he couldn’t be “fired” because he was a freelance writer.
Against this prickly backdrop, an even more painful situation surfaced with Flanner. Its seed had been planted earlier that year when she had suggested profiling Léon Blum, the venerable French socialist and, during the Third Republic, prime minister. She was an ardent opponent of Communism, but she was captivated by the burgeoning socialist movement and by Blum, its leader and a man through whom one could tell virtually the entire story of contemporary France. On this broad basis, the magazine approved her proposal. Flanner researched the piece for months, and it began shaping up as a four-part series. Then in March 1950 Blum died. Flanner had known this was a possibility, given the politician’s advanced age and failing health, but it was her recollection that she had been given the magazine’s assurance that the Profile would run even if he died. Ross and Shawn didn’t remember it that way, and because The New Yorker did not run posthumous Profiles Ross wanted to kill it. Shawn offered to pay Flanner for the piece, to help her sell it elsewhere, or to get it made into a book. Flanner, though, felt double-crossed, and she attempted to find a way to have it appear in The New Yorker.
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