Anything Goes_ A Biography of the Roaring Twenties - Lucy Moore [96]
Success was slow in coming and for a while the New Yorker was a standing joke even among its contributors. When Ross asked Dorothy Parker why she hadn’t come into the office to write a piece for him, she replied tartly, “Somebody was using the pencil.” Although magazine word rates were high during this period, Ross could afford to pay his writers very little. In the magazine’s first ten months he used 282 different contributors.
The editorial board Ross had assembled from among his Round Table friends often found it difficult to contribute, either because they were too busy or because contractual obligations to other publications (most often Vanity Fair) forbade it. To hide their identities they sometimes wrote under pseudonyms. Parker, who would become literary editor in 1927, turned in only one article and two poems in 1925. Bob Benchley, from 1929 the New Yorker’s drama critic, didn’t write anything for the magazine until it had been running nearly a year. Alec Woollcott’s column “Shouts and Murmurs” was not introduced until 1929. Henry Mencken only started contributing in the 1930s.
Ross’s friends’ early reticence was actually a blessing in disguise, because it forced him to seek out new talent, like E. B. White, James Thurber and the first “Talk of the Town” writer, Ralph Ingersoll, who perfectly captured the mood of “dinner table Conversation” that Ross hoped for. Gradually Ross and his team of writers and editors found their voice: informed but offhand, detached and amusing, always slightly tongue-in-cheek. By the end of their first year Scott Fitzgerald was writing to Maxwell Perkins from Paris asking for “all the gossip that isn’t in The New Yorker or the World.”
In the summer of 1925 Jane Grant wrote to her friend Janet Flanner, an aspiring writer who had just moved to Paris and was living on her “hopes and good bistro food on the Left Bank.” Grant told Flanner about Ross’s new magazine, and asked her if she would like to write for it. What was it called, Flanner asked—and was it any good? It was called the New Yorker, wrote Grant, and though it was not yet any good, it was going to be. Flanner was the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent for the next fourteen years.
Ross’s leadership was idiosyncratic. He was conscientious, enquiring, demanding and critical. James Thurber saw him as a mass of contradictions: “a visionary and a practicalist, imperfect at both, a dreamer and a hard worker, a genius and a plodder, obstinate and reasonable, cosmopolitan and provincial, wide-eyed and world-weary.” One day Ross called Thurber into his office. “Now in this casual way of yours here, you use a colon where anybody else would use a dash,” he said. “I’m not saying you can’t do it. I’m just bringing it up.” Thurber argued his point and Ross “agreed to let the colon stand, for he was, as I have said and now say again, at once the most obdurate and reasonable of editors.”
Ross’s own areas of knowledge were patchy in the extreme and he was profoundly suspicious of “anything smacking of scholarship.” Literature, music and art were virtually unknown to him. In 1931 the English painter Paul Nash came into the New Yorker offices to meet Ross, who greeted him with the words, “There are only two phony arts, painting and music.” Nash was a little surprised. “He is like your skyscrapers. They are unbelievable, but there they are.”
Dorothy Parker thought Ross “almost illiterate.” The only novels he had read were When Knighthood Was in Flower and Riders of the Purple Sage. He stuck his head around the corner of the subs’ office one day to ask, “Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?”
From the start the