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By Root 1080 0

like Roosevelt, he was neither a revolutionary nor a Hooverian mummifier. But Dr. Tom Wolfe (Ph.D., American Studies) doesn’t dig the past: it’s so...past. When he writes “Ross started The New Yorker in 1925, and despite the depression it was a terrific success,” one wonders when he thinks the Depression started, also whether he knows that the magazine was a terrific failure for its first two years and survived only because Raoul Fleischmann added $500,000 to his original stake of $25,000. His cultural history is equally dubious. He thinks that among New York sophisticates of the middle Twenties “the model was English Culture,” that “The New Yorker was never more than a slavish copy of Punch” and that, therefore, “The literati in America took to it like they were dying of thirst” and “No magazine in America ever received such literary acclaim before.” The last statement may be explained by ignorance of the nineteenth-century Atlantic and Harper’s and the twentieth-century Dial and Little Review—all those back issues!—but it’s hard to see where he got the notion that the model was English culture as reflected in Punch. Ross and the other founding fathers at the Algonquin Round Table were all very American, urban, wiseguy types, Menckenian scoffers at the provincial booboisie—the early issues are obsessed with the Scopes “monkey trial” in Tennessee, making tireless fun of Bryan’s attempt to refute Darwin and Darrow with Bible texts—and it’s impossible to imagine them being impressed by Punch, the resolutely philistine organ of the county gentry, who are the British equivalent, culturally, of our own Bible Belt.[5] Indeed, the imitation went the other way: when Malcolm Muggeridge was editor of Punch, he tried to revamp it along New Yorker lines.

(2) To demonstrate The New Yorker’s “strikingly low level of literary achievement,” Wolfe compares it with Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post. His method is simple: any eminent writer who has ever been published in Esquire or the Post becomes “an Esquire (or Post) writer” while “a New Yorker writer” means only one who has been chiefly identified with that magazine. He lists twenty-eight names, including Pound, Camus and Thomas Mann, and adds: “...that is not a list of New Yorker writers but of Esquire writers.” Another twenty-two, including Saul Bellow and Isaac Bashevis Singer, are “...a list not of New Yorker writers but of Saturday Evening Post writers.” To call Pound “an Esquire writer” is like describing Nabokov as “a Playboy writer” because a novel of his is now being serialized there, or Edgar Allan Poe as “a Godey’s Lady’s Book writer” because he wrote “The Literati of New York” for it together with numerous reviews and “Marginalia.” That Wolfe refrained from listing “the Playboy writers”—a weighty roster that includes, in the current issue, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, and Mortimer J. Adler—suggests he may have suspected the fallacy, if not the vulgarity, of this method of comparative criticism. It would have proved and indeed over-proved his case. No serious writer can be described in terms of the magazines he writes for since his virtue is that he is precisely not reducible to an editorial formula. It would be more accurate to say that Ross’s New Yorker was “a Benchley (or a Thurber) magazine” than that they were “New Yorker writers,” nor does the fact that Edmund Wilson’s literary criticism has for the last twenty-five years been largely confined to that magazine make him “a New Yorker writer.”

Wolfe gives no criteria for his postal-clerk pigeon-holing of writers. One must be priority of publication since he classifies J. D. Salinger as “an Esquire writer” because two early stories were published there. By this standard, Bellow would be a Partisan Review writer, Singer a Commentary writer, Pound a New Age writer, and most of the more distinguished names on his lists would have to be assigned to the “little magazines” that first welcomed and encouraged them. A more significant criterion is frequency of publication, one he also uses with Salinger, whom he later calls