Cast of Characters

by Thomas Vinciguerra

  In their pursuit of accuracy, the checkers ran down newspaper clippings, hunted up dusty reference works, grilled the authors, and frequently contacted the subjects of the articles themselves. There seemed to be no limit to the obscurity of the facts that Packard in particular was called upon to establish. “Mr. Ross says that he has heard that there is an error in the title of the Spanish movie marked on the attached tearsheet,” Ross’s assistant Louis Forster informed him. “Somebody says that ‘padre’ should be ‘patria’, or some such. Would you please let me know about it, and may I have a translation of the title.” Packard once wrote to the Justice Department to determine if the position of “Executive Assistant to the Administrative Assistant to the Assistant Attorney General” did in fact exist. The staid reply was that although there was no such title, the department did have “an Executive Assistant to the Attorney General, an Administrative Assistant to the Attorney General, and the Assistant to the Attorney General.” For a listing of purveyors of homemade foods, he seized on a vendor who had informed him, “I regret that we cannot ship our Xmas cookies as they are too fragile. We sell them for $1.25 per lb. plus carrying charges.” Packard responded, appropriately, “Dear Mrs. Jones: Thank you for your note. We don’t understand, however, what you mean by ‘carrying charges,’ since you say you cannot ship your Christmas cookies. We would be grateful if you would explain how you mail your boxes.”

  Not that mistakes didn’t slip through. One evening while riding the bus home, Packard found himself flipping through a typically thoroughly checked issue of the magazine and found to his horror that the name of world heavyweight champion Joe Louis had been misspelled “Joe Lewis.” Packard dropped the magazine and, as his astonished fellow passengers looked on, began sobbing.

  Assuming that a manuscript cohered enough to make it past macroscopic line editing, it was then subjected to the microscopic nitpicking of copyediting. Punctuation, grammar, usage, and style were as of much concern to Ross as storytelling and tone. “Ross has two gods,” said the writer John McNulty. “Upper Case and lower case.” No detail was too small; a particular fetish was the deployment of commas. “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim,” said White. As if in confirmation, someone once scrawled on Gibbs’s office wall, “Wolcott (‘Comma’) Gibbs.” He accepted the rebuke. “Since I’m one of the oldest people around here in point of service,” he was later able to claim, “they aren’t supposed to change me around much in the copy room. They make up for it by punctuating the hell out of me.” Thurber, particularly protective of his copy, once burst out to Ross, “[I]f youse guys want to go around sticking in commas you know where you can stick them.”

  The copy desk’s rules and guidelines could be maddening. “Did you know,” White asked Thurber, “that Weekes was compiling a New Yorker style book which is longer than Gone With the Wind and more complete than Mencken’s American Language?” This exhaustiveness was matched only by its capriciousness. The editor Ik Shuman once came up with a list of words and phrases that he said should be “blacklisted, or, at least, queried until further notice,” among them “turn of the century,” “oddly enough” and “audition (as verb).” With the utmost solemnity, Whitaker once determined the conditions under which the term “prefabricated” could be used. “It seems that all refrigerators are prefabricated, i.e. all ready to be plugged in when they come,” Gibbs told White. “Bathtubs are not prefabricated because they have to be painted and soldered to do the plumbing. This seems to me a fine and foolish distinction, and I wouldn’t bother with it. Boy, do I like to handle authors!”

  Astute contributors realized that for all its difficulties, the editing process served them well. “The editors I had at The New Yorker quietly helped me in peculiar, small ways,” recalled Irwin Shaw. “One thing they taught me was the value of cutting out the last paragraph of stories, something I pass down as a tip to all writers. The last paragraph in which you tell what the story is about is almost always best left out.”

  “I wish editors were always right about everything, or else always wrong,” wrote Clarence Day, author of the beloved “Life with Father” series, to Katharine White. “I wish Ross and you and the copy room never caught me with my pants down. Sometimes when Ross opens his box of little grammatical rules and disallows my best blasts of music and punctures my bag-pipes [sic] I wish to God I could exchange places with him for a minute. At other times however I’m obliged to him damn it. And I’m often grateful to you.”

  These attitudes tended to be the exception. “Since I never write, for publication, a single word or phrase that I have not consciously examined, sometimes numerous times,” Thurber informed Ross, “I should like to have the queriers on my pieces realize that there is no possibility of catching me up on an overlooked sloppiness. I think I can say this, without smugness, but with some fire.” Gibbs himself threw up his hands to Ross at one point: “I wish you and your associates would let up on the ‘indirection’ theme for a while. There are crises in English composition when pronouns have to precede their nouns and even when the first mention of a person, place, or thing is not necessarily definitive. See Genesis 31:1.”*

  In fact, by the time he began stepping down as Katharine White’s assistant in late 1936, Gibbs had become so appalled—and yet so amused and even impressed—by the magazine’s editorial quirks, any number of which he had ruthlessly enforced himself, that he composed an in-house memo entitled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” He began by declaring, “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.” Gibbs then proceeded to lay down some rules and observations designed “for bringing order out of this underbrush.” Among them:

  1. Writers always use too damn many adverbs. On one page recently I found eleven modifying the verb “said.” “He said morosely, violently, eloquently, 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.

  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.

  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.

  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 a 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.

  19. The more “As a matter of facts,” “howevers,” “for instances,” etc. etc. you can cut out, the nearer you are to the Kingdom of Heaven.

  23. Writers also have an affection for the tricky or vaguely cosmic last line. “Suddenly Mr. Holtzmann 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.

  30. Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style.

  “How many of these changes can be made in copy depends, of course, to a large extent on the writer being edited,” Gibbs said as he neared his conclusion. “By going over the list, I can give a general idea of how much nonsense each artist will stand for.”

  There is no record that he ever actually did. But Katharine White took up the challenge. Following a series of public slams against New Yorker fiction—including a review stating that the stories Irwin Shaw did not publish in the magazine were better than the ones he actually did—she wrote an anguished memo to Ross. “I rather think that if we polled all our contributors, we’d find more dissatisfied than happy ones on this matter of editing,” she said. “I feel that too often we have to ask for changes to meet preconceived standards of our own that may be good standards but that, if insisted upon, make our fiction less individual than it would be if edited less and even if it was far less perfect and precise.”

  She ticked off a list of dissatisfied contributors, among them Kay Boyle, Mary McCarthy, John Hersey, A. J. Liebling, Irwin Shaw, and Clarence Day. “Many of them write so badly that they haven’t a leg to stand on,” she acknowledged, “but some write well and even the foreigners like to feel their individual style can be kept.” She pleaded, “We’ve always been purists and I do not suggest that we give up editing. I only suggest that unless we soon make a considerable revision in our habits in handling the work of professional writers, we won’t have any good fiction at all to publish.”

  This kind of consideration toward authors was typical of Katharine White. “ ‘Maternal’ is the word that best describes her concern for the work and lives of writers and artists,” said William Maxwell, a trusted adjutant in her department for decades. “They found themselves confiding to her. When they turned work in, they felt she was on their side, and in fact she was.” She once sent a five-and-one-half-page letter to Jean Stafford filled with ideas about how to salvage her short story “The Children’s Game.”

  She held fiercely to her standards. “I believe in all of us expressing our ideas in loud clear tones and don’t believe in our being polite or sparing feelings,” she told Maxwell, and she practiced what she preached. Thinking that she might approach P. G. Wodehouse to write for the magazine, she read hundreds of pages of his Jeeves stories to get their flavor. She did so “without one smile,” she told Ross, finding the stories not only formulaic but “boring and feebleminded.” She dismissed their former colleague Raymond Holden’s novel Chance Has a Whip as “the g-d-est trash I ever read,” composed by an author who “never could write prose.” She once agonized over whether to encourage her own sister, Elizabeth, to embark on a Profile; the best she could muster up about her sibling’s literary ability was “She can write English.”

  Gibbs considered Katharine White “the most ravishing creature he ever knew.” His was a minority opinion. In her person, she was—in a word that almost everyone who met her used at one time or another—formidable. “I was intimidated by her,” said Ross’s private secretary, William Walden. Gordon Cotler, a contributor and staff member, referred to her as “the terrible Katharine White.” He recalled, “When she stomped down the hall, everyone trembled.” Austere, proper, and not particularly humorous (one writer called her “a cold-blooded proposition”), she was known to everyone who worked with her as “Mrs. White.” In all the time that Gibbs was her deputy, he was never able to bring himself to call her by her first name. When asked why, he replied, “I always had a feeling it would [be] like taking your finger out of the dike.” Even Clarence Day, one of her more welcome contributors—as well as a bona fide friend—cowered before her. He once sketched himself on hands and knees outside her door, identifying himself as a “worried caller trying to see if you’re mad at him.” In another drawing he depicted himself reproaching a dinosaurlike creature perched above a prostrate figure labeled “KSW”: “That’ll do, Fido. Don’t kill her—She didn’t mean to hurt me I guess.”

  Katharine commanded such authority because Ross had utter faith in her. “I regard Mrs. White as essential to the magazine, along with White, more essential than the entire business organization put together, and most of the editorial,” he told Raoul Fleischmann. “She is irreplaceable, which very few other people are.” So complete was his trust, said the humorist Frank Sullivan, that in the event of disaster, “He didn’t want anyone to run the magazine except Mrs. White.”

  It must be said that if one got to know her as a friend, and won her respect as a writer, there would be revealed a woman of considerable sensitivity—“a velvet hand in an iron glove,” as the catchphrase went. Sullivan went so far as to call her “sainted.” Her letters to her favorite authors were filled with compliments and praise, “way beyond the call of ordinary niceness,” said one contributor. “If you are too cross with me I shall weep, so don’t be,” she wrote Clarence Day when rejecting one of his “Father” stories. When she told Will Cuppy, “It is many ages since you have sent us anything and we hope that you will have some humorous material for us before long,” the paranoid humorist responded with his thanks but also his suspicions: “I’ll surely try something else if I can recover from my delusions of persecution and [a] bad cold. I hate to think that there is a Hate Cuppy Movement in full swing, but I’ve checked up on it and it seems to exist. I have never really had any fun in life except when I had stuff in the New Yorker, so you can see that I’m in earnest about trying.” Katharine’s response was both reassuring and firm: “I think the ‘Hate Cuppy Movement’ must be purely a figment of your imagination, so you’d better quickly get over your delusions of persecution, as well as your bad cold.”

  In the course of working so closely with Gibbs, she appears to have had a civilizing influence on him. As caustic as he could be in his internal memoranda, he was generally polite when dealing with authors either via mail or in person, urging them to keep trying their best. One day over cocktails, Jerome Weidman was bewailing the agonizing life of a writer, fraught as it was with contradictory, often counterintuitive, standards of acceptance and rejection. Taking a sip of his drink, Gibbs responded with an inspiring soliloquy:

  There is abroad in the land a lamentable tendency to confuse failure with quality. The notion that because nobody will buy it, it must be great, is as foolish as the belief that a rookie who can’t find the plate is obviously major league material. I’m sure the history of publishing is full of stories about great manuscripts that editors are too stupid to buy. I’m equally sure the word “full” is an outrageous exaggeration. Human beings make mistakes, and editors are human beings. It’s been my experience that, by and large, material that merits publication manages somehow to get published. The boys in the ivory towers are probably doing worthwhile work, but I think it’s worthwhile only to themselves, the way an aspirin is worthwhile to a man with a headache. It isn’t really art. It’s therapy. Therapy for the man in the ivory tower, I mean. It’s foolish, even inhuman, to be against that kind of therapy, but it’s equally foolish, and to me even more inhuman, to try to foist the treatment on the healthy. What the man up there in the ivory tower produces is worthwhile only when it has value to the man down in the street. . . . Always write as well as you can, without ever forgetting how important it is to keep trying to write better than you can, but never forget that writing is a form of communication, probably the noblest form ever invented by the human animal, and for God’s sake don’t ever stop battling us to pay you higher prices for what you write.

  “Few of the people who were fortunate enough to know him better than I did realized, I find, how thoughtful a man he was,” Weidman concluded.

  Weidman got advice of a rather different sort from a fellow short-story writer who was also a friend of Gibbs. “Once a writer has finished a story to his own satisfaction,” this man said, “there’s only one thing he can do to improve it, and tha
t’s tell the editor to go fuck himself.” It was the sort of thing one could expect from John O’Hara, a doctor’s son from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, who exerted as profound an influence on The New Yorker’s content as anyone ever did.

  O’Hara first appeared in the May 5, 1928, issue of the magazine with “The Alumnae Bulletin,” a two-hundred-word monologue of a woman reading her college magazine’s class notes. For this he received fifteen dollars from the irascible John Mosher, who had previously rejected O’Hara’s contributions as too “elliptical.” He began publishing casuals with astonishing rapidity, making his early reputation with fourteen sketches about the “Orange County Afternoon Delphian Society” and an equal number of arch pieces devoted to the “Hargedorn & Brownmiller Paint and Varnish Co.” But these were mere “finger exercises,” Gibbs said. Before long O’Hara would become, by popular and critical acclaim, a master of the short story and especially the kind of short story that Katharine White would frequently favor—largely devoid of narrative momentum, heavy on dialogue and suggestive anecdote, concerned less with plot than with establishing mood and character. Although she encouraged O’Hara’s ambition in that direction, it was Gibbs who truly brought out the best in his work. “He carried O’Hara along with me,” Mrs. White acknowledged—so much so that the writer dubbed his fictionalized version of his hometown “Gibbsville.”