This formal portrait of Ross, taken in 1944 by Fabian Bachrach, still hangs in the New Yorker offices. (© Bachrach)
Four decades after his passing, The New Yorker’s angel of repose remains an abiding if ethereal presence at the institution he loved so well. A flattering formal portrait taken by Fabian Bachrach during the war hangs prominently on the main editorial floor of the magazine’s new offices, across Forty-third Street from its old ones. Ross’s even gaze meets yours no matter from what angle you approach, and he wears a wry smile, as if he knows something about you that he shouldn’t, which usually was the case. Passing him, veteran members of the staff half expect to be stopped by that flat, slightly nasal western voice that remains as vivid for them today as it was fifty years ago. Ross would say how much he enjoyed that last piece, and just perhaps suggest that it was too long. The voice is reassuring, mischievous, secure.
In 1956, in accord with his final wish, the remains of Harold Wallace Ross were dispersed not over the canyons of Manhattan or the tranquil woods of Stamford, but over the emerald mountains of Aspen, Colorado.
APPENDICES
I. THE NEW YORKER PROSPECTUS
Written and distributed by Harold Ross in the fall of 1924
ANNOUNCING A NEW WEEKLY MAGAZINE
THE NEW YORKER
The New Yorker will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called radical or highbrow. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers. It will hate bunk.
As compared to the newspaper, The New Yorker will be interpretive rather than stenographic. It will print facts that it will have to go behind the scenes to get, but it will not deal in scandal for the sake of scandal nor sensation for the sake of sensation. Its integrity will be above suspicion. It hopes to be so entertaining and informative as to be a necessity for the person who knows his way about or wants to.
The New Yorker will devote several pages a week to a covering of contemporary events and people of interest. This will be done by writers capable of appreciating the elements of a situation and, in setting them down, of indicating their importance and significance. The New Yorker will present the truth and the whole truth without fear and without favor, but will not be iconoclastic.
Amusements and the arts will be thoroughly covered by departments which will present, in addition to criticism, the personality, the anecdote, the color and chat of the various subdivisions of this sphere. The New Yorker’s conscientious guide will list each week all current amusement offerings worthwhile—theaters, motion pictures, musical events, art exhibitions, sport and miscellaneous entertainment—providing an ever-ready answer to the prevalent query, “What shall we do this evening?” Through The New Yorker’s Mr. Van Bibber III, readers will be kept apprised of what is going on in the public and semi-public smart gathering places—the clubs, hotels, cafes, supper clubs, cabarets and other resorts.
Judgment will be passed upon new books of consequence, and The New Yorker will carry a list of the season’s books which it considers worth reading.
There will be a page of editorial paragraphs, commenting on the week’s events in a manner not too serious.
There will be a personal mention column—a jotting down in the small-town newspaper style of the comings, goings and doings in the village of New York. This will contain some josh and some news value.
The New Yorker will carry each week several pages of prose and verse, short and long, humorous, satirical and miscellaneous.
The New Yorker expects to be distinguished for its illustrations, which will include caricatures, sketches, cartoons and humorous and satirical drawings in keeping with its purpose.
The New Yorker will be the magazine which is not edited for the old lady in Dubuque. It will not be concerned in what she is thinking about. This is not meant in disrespect, but The New Yorker is a magazine avowedly published for a metropolitan audience and thereby will escape an influence which hampers most national publications. It expects a considerable national circulation, but this will come from persons who have a metropolitan interest.
The New Yorker will appear early in February
The price will be: Five dollars a year
Fifteen cents a copy
Address: 25 West 45th Street, New York City
Advisory Editors
Ralph Barton George S. Kaufman
Heywood Broun Alice Duer Miller
Marc Connelly Dorothy Parker
Edna Ferber Laurence Stallings
Rea Irvin Alexander Woollcott
H. W. Ross, Editor
II. THEORY AND PRACTICE OF EDITING
NEW YORKER ARTICLES
This was written by Wolcott Gibbs around 1937, apparently at the request of Katharine White, who was then trying out a succession of new fiction editors. Though it has passed into New Yorker legend, “Theory and Practice” was a working document and fairly reflected the magazine’s guidelines and tastes of the time.
——
The average contributor to this magazine is semi-literate; that is, he is ornate to no purpose, full of senseless and elegant variations, and can be relied on to use three sentences where a word would do. It is impossible to lay down any exact and complete formula for bringing order out of this underbrush, but there are a few general rules.
1. Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page, recently, I found eleven modifying the verb “said”: “He said morosely, violently, eloquently,” and so on. Editorial theory should probably be that a writer who can’t make his context indicate the way his character is talking ought to be in another line of work. Anyway, it is impossible for a character to go through all these emotional states one after the other. Lon Chaney might be able to do it, but he is dead.
2. Word “said” is O.K. Efforts to avoid repetition by inserting “grunted,” “snorted,” etc., are waste motion, and offend the pure in heart.
3. Our writers are full of clichés, just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliché undoubtedly is one, and had better be removed.
4. Funny names belong to the past, or to whatever is left of Judge magazine. Any character called Mrs. Middlebottom or Joe Zilch should be summarily changed to something else. This goes for animals, towns, the names of imaginary books and many other things.
5. Our employer, Mr. Ross, has a prejudice against having too many sentences begin with “and” or “but.” He claims that they are conjunctions and should not be used purely for literary effect. Or at least only very judiciously.
6. See our Mr. Weekes on the use of such words as “little,” “vague,” “confused,” “faintly,” “all mixed up,” etc., etc. The point is that the average New Yorker writer, unfortunately influenced by Mr. Thurber, has come to believe that the ideal New Yorker piece is about a vague, little man helplessly confused by a menacing and complicated civilization. Whenever this note is not the whole point of the piece (and it far too often is) it should be regarded with suspicion.
7. The repetition of exposition in quotes went out with the Stanley Steamer:
Marion gave me a pain in the neck.
“You give me a pain in the neck, Marion,” I said.
This turns up more often than you’d expect.
8. Another of Mr. Ross’s theories is that a reader picking up a magazine called The New Yorker automatically supposes that any story in it takes place in New York. If it doesn’t, if it’s about Columbus, Ohio, the lead should say so. “When George Adams was sixteen, he began to worry about the girls he saw every day on the streets of Columbus” or something of the kind. More graceful preferably.
9. Also, since our contributions are signed at the end, the author’s sex should be established at once if there is any reasonable doubt. It is di
stressing to read a piece all the way through under the impression that the “I” in it is a man and then find a woman’s signature at the end. Also, of course, the other way round.
10. To quote Mr. Ross again, “Nobody gives a damn about a writer or his problems except another writer.” Pieces about authors, reporters, poets, etc., are to be discouraged in principle. Whenever possible the protagonist should be arbitrarily transplanted to another line of business. When the reference is incidental and unnecessary, it should come out.
11. This magazine is on the whole liberal about expletives. The only test I know of is whether or not they are really essential to the author’s effect. “Son of a bitch,” “bastard” and many others can be used whenever it is the editor’s judgment that that is the only possible remark under the circumstances. When they are gratuitous, when the writer is just trying to sound tough to no especial purpose, they come out.
12. In the transcription of dialect, don’t let the boys and girls misspell words just for a fake Bowery effect. There is no point, for instance, in “trubble,” or “sed.”
13. Mr. Weekes said the other night, in a moment of desperation, that he didn’t believe he could stand any more triple adjectives. “A tall, florid and overbearing man called Jaeckel.” Sometimes they’re necessary, but when every noun has three adjectives connected with it, Mr. Weekes suffers and quite rightly.
14. I suffer myself very seriously from writers who divide quotes for some kind of ladies club rhythm. “I am going,” he said, “downtown” is a horror, and unless a quote is pretty long I think it ought to stay on one side of the verb. Anyway, it ought to be divided logically, where there would be pause or something in the sentence.
15. Mr. Weekes has got a long list of banned words beginning with “gadget.” Ask him. It’s not actually a ban, there being circumstances when they’re necessary, but good words to avoid.
16. I would be delighted to go over the list of writers, explaining the peculiarities of each as they have appeared to me in more than ten years of exasperation on both sides.
17. Editing on manuscript should be done with a black pencil, decisively.
18. I almost forgot indirection, which probably maddens Mr. Ross more than anything else in the world. He objects, that is, to important objects, or places or people, being dragged into things in a secretive and underhanded manner. If, for instance, a Profile has never told where a man lives, Ross protests against a sentence saying “His Vermont house is full of valuable paintings.” Should say “He had a house in Vermont and it is full, etc.” Rather weird point, but it will come up from time to time.
19. Drunkenness and adultery present problems. As far as I can tell, writers must not be allowed to imply that they admire either of these things, or have enjoyed them personally, although they are legitimate enough when pointing a moral or adorning a sufficiently grim story. They are nothing to be light-hearted about. “The New Yorker cannot endorse adultery.” Harold Ross vs. Sally Benson. Don’t bother about this one. In the end it is a matter between Mr. Ross and his God. Homosexuality, on the other hand, is definitely out as humor, and dubious, in any case.
20. The more “as a matter of facts,” “howevers,” “for instances,” etc., you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.
21. It has always seemed irritating to me when a story is written in the first person, but the narrator hasn’t got the same name as the author. For instance, a story beginning: “George,” my father said to me one morning; and signed at the end Horace McIntyre always baffles me. However, as far as I know this point has never been ruled upon officially, and should just be queried.
22. Editors are really the people who should put initial letters and white spaces in copy to indicate breaks in thought or action. Because of overwork or inertia or something, this has been done largely by the proof room, which has a tendency to put them in for purposes of makeup rather than sense. It should revert to the editors.
23. For some reason our writers (especially Mr. Leonard Q. Ross) have a tendency to distrust even moderately long quotes and break them up arbitrarily and on the whole idiotically with editorial interpolations. “Mr. Kaplan felt that he and the cosmos were coterminus” or some such will frequently appear in the middle of a conversation for no other reason than that the author is afraid the reader’s mind is wandering. Sometimes this is necessary, most often it isn’t.
24. Writers also have an affection for the tricky or vaguely cosmic last line. “Suddenly Mr. Holtzman felt tired” has appeared on far too many pieces in the last ten years. It is always a good idea to consider whether the last sentence of a piece is legitimate and necessary, or whether it is just an author showing off.
25. On the whole, we are hostile to puns.
26. How many of these changes can be made in copy depends, of course, to a large extent on the writer being edited. By going over the list, I can give a general idea of how much nonsense each artist will stand for.
27. Among other things, The New Yorker is often accused of a patronizing attitude. Our authors are especially fond of referring to all foreigners as “little” and writing about them, as Mr. Maxwell says, as if they were mental ornaments. It is very important to keep the amused and Godlike tone out of pieces.
28. It has been one of Mr. Ross’s long struggles to raise the tone of our contributors’ surroundings, at least on paper. References to the gay Bohemian life in Greenwich Village and other low surroundings should be cut whenever possible. Nor should writers be permitted to boast about having their telephones cut off, or not being able to pay their bills, or getting their meals at the delicatessen, or any of the things which strike many writers as quaint and lovable.
29. Some of our writers are inclined to be a little arrogant about their knowledge of the French language. Probably best to put them back into English if there is a common English equivalent.
30. So far as possible make the pieces grammatical, but if you don’t the copy room will, which is a comfort. Fowler’s English Usage is our reference book. But don’t be precious about it.
31. Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style. Try to make dialogue sound like talk, not writing.
III. ROSS QUERY SHEETS
Harold Ross’s “query” sheets were long enumerated lists of comments, suggestions, and quibbles that occurred to him as he read over pieces planned for publication. His query sheets on a Profile or Reporter at Large piece would be much longer, but these two examples from 1948 typify the nature and tone of his editorial comments.
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Ross’s notes on Frank Sullivan’s “The Cliché Expert Testifies on the Tabloids” on June 30, 1948:
1. As Hollywood stars are listed here, and as at lb it says all people in the foregoing list are automatically included, I guess film stars shouldn’t be mentioned again at 1b.
2. Haven’t the tabs got a better adjective than pretty here. That seems ordinary. On other hand, maybe it is their word, though.
3. In view of fact that Graphic has been out of business many years, suggest tense change marked, to take better cognizance of this fact. It’s twenty years, I think; whole generation has grown up—and gone to war.
4. Well, does the Kinsey report mention rape? Surprises me that it does, for I’ve heard of no rape quotes from that book (which I haven’t read).
5. Here a peculiar point, and one that has long obsessed me. The tabs use exotic wrong, nearly always. Exotic means, merely, foreign. But they apply it to domestic ladies freely. A man who worked long on the Daily News told me that News rewrite men were given a list of ten or twelve words to use in stories and headlines that sounded snappy, would be thought by the readers to mean something more than they really mean, or something other than they really mean, something snappy—and wouldn’t be libelous. At head of list was exotic. Tab readers are supposed to think that exotic means erotic. It would be libel to call a lady erotic. I guess. Sullivan might possibly go into this with a questio
n or two—on this unusual use of the word, but doesn’t matter. I’m just writing this to be interesting.
6. Seems to me might be cut as marked, as obvious, or something.
7. This brusqueness doesn’t seem in character for Mr. A, somehow. Hasn’t he always been more diplomatic, more graceful than this?
——
Ross’s notes on Peter De Vries’s “If the Shoe Hurts” on October 26, 1948:
I think this is a pretty darned good piece now, cleaned up a little bit, and maybe an 8. Am querying Mr. Lobrano on that.
1. One place it needs a little fix, it seems to me, is here, for this is inconsistent with the facts as revealed in the conversation narrated in the piece. Meeley didn’t merely send them away with an adage. He talked almost entirely in adages, one platitude after another. Just to talk to him was to listen to these adages. He didn’t merely conclude with one of them, as stated here.
2. And this garbled adage is out of character. All the adages he quotes in the conversation with Disbrow are straight, not garbled, not mixed up.
3. No real antecedent for the it here. Think De Vries should put in something equivalent to these activities in his own non-flat way. Also, if she was merely dubious, as stated at 3 a, it is hardly right to say she took a view of the activities. Dubiousness is not taking a view, I think; it’s lack of a view. Think what’s wrong is the dubious, think the wife was definitely exasperated, or some such. And, the “I don’t know” sentence, which seems to me to convey practically no meaning at all.
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