The Years Without Ross

Someone once asked Harold Ross, founder, editor, and professionally terrible-tempered boss of The New Yorker, what would become of the magazine after his death. "It will go its own goddam way, I guess," he replied. Ross was not quite right. Last week, nine years after his death from cancer, The New Yorker was still trying to go Ross's way. But one vital element was missing: the quality of editorial goddamishness that Ross himself gave the magazine.

From the figure it cuts in the accounting department, things could hardly be better: circulation is up 81,500, to 427,000, since Ross died. The sophistication that used to be found in the wit of contributors has been successfully transferred to the advertising pages, which are the glittering showcase of the Madison Avenue specialty shop, inhabited by more Virginia hams and truffled pate, glittering gems and vintage brandies than any other major magazine. Last year's $17,751,924 gross and $1,985,785 profit set alltime records, and one share of New Yorker stock, valued at $30 in 1925, is worth $1,440 in 1960, figuring stock splits. But has success spoiled The New Yorker?

Middle-Aged Spread. In the old days, The New Yorker gibed at success and played to an intellectual--not a financial --snobbery. The tone was waspish and metropolitan. Ross scorned the opinions of "the old lady in Dubuque,"* but the present magazine, like many of its ads, seems aimed directly at suburban ladies from coast to coast. Last month, after 31 years, The New Yorker finally abolished its New York regional edition.

Many of its demanding fans, and even some of its own writers, sigh that the magazine has become afflicted with middle-aged spread. Profiles that once ran in two parts now run in three, and in the case of S. N. Behrman's recent seven-part profile on Max Beerbohm, a good-sized short story might have been told in the space it took Behrman just to arrive at his first meeting with Beerbohm, outside Rapallo. William Shawn, Ross's successor as editor, once told a friend over a drink: "The stories just seem to get longer--I don't know why.''

A slight, polite, shy man of 52, Shawn was groomed for years to take over. An old New Yorker hand recalls Shawn's arrival on the staff in 1933: "To him, it was like entering the priesthood." Says James Thurber, the peerless humorist, now 65, who chronicled the earlier era in The Years with Ross: "There was no question that Ross wanted Shawn to succeed him, and the whole staff was pulling for him, too." It still is. Shawn is a gentle boss, and so sensitive to writers' feelings that he once called Drama Critic Kenneth Tynan in Havana to ask permission to change a comma. But this punctilious deference to writers' words may explain the magazine's increased windiness. Both fact and fiction pieces tend to run on interminably. As one writer puts it, "Everybody's pieces but mine are too long."

On a Lonely Island. A more serious complaint is that the tried and true New Yorker formulas of the 1920s and '30s are out of place in the 1960s. The shapeless, plotless New Yorker short-story form tends more and more to pedestrian tales of the Irish moors and "When-I-was-a-child-in-Afghanistan-my-grandmother-used-to-tell-me" reminiscences. The New Yorker's cartoons still run faithfully to prisoners or to strandees on lonely islands. "I get awfully sick of prison pictures," admits Art Director James Geraghty, "but they keep coming in, and sometimes they're funny." Profilers who once chronicled the great, the powerful and the eccentric now lean heavily to such personalities as winetasters and Hebrew-language scholars, generally avoid politics.

Under Shawn, few deliberate changes have been made in The New Yorker (exception: a jazz buff himself, Shawn has added an excellent jazz column written by Whitney Balliett). Says one New Yorkerite: "Ross was the innovator. Shawn is the curator." Another puts it more harshly: "It's the difference between genius and talent."

Yet it was Shawn who persuaded a skeptical Ross to introduce the magazine's excellent World War II coverage, and to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's report on Hiroshima. Shawn is now handicapped by the fact that most of the writers (Thurber, E. B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, Clifton Fadiman, Joel Sayre, Alva Johnston, et al.) and cartoonists (Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, O. Soglow, Gardner Rea, et al.) who made The New Yorker famous have either died, wandered off to the exurbs, or become infrequent contributors. E. B. White's civilized despair and gentle celebration of nature is now rarely to be found in "The Talk of the Town," while he hibernates in Maine. No bright new crop of writers or artists seems to have come along since Ross's day. Best of the new crop: Short-Story Writer John Updike. The magazine still has a first-rate music critic in Winthrop Sargeant, but most of its critical departments have lost their edge. The magazine has been unable to develop a book critic to rival Clifton Fadiman at his best, or of the stature of Edmund Wilson, whose occasional New Yorker reviews, however, run more often to the heavy than to the brilliant.

It is a fact of the super-sleek 1960 New Yorker that those who love it best worry about it the most. Contributor Phyllis McGinley thinks of The New Yorker as the place where she was "first published, weaned, pruned and loved." Says she: "Whereas I once read it cover to cover, now I read it like a tired businessman. It's no longer a funny magazine; yet it isn't a literary magazine either. They still seem to think they're witty and sophisticated, but they're not. They're afraid of originality."

Humorist Thurber tends to blame The New Yorker's drawbacks on the changing tastes of the times: "The New Yorker has represented every damn decade in which it's been published. In the '20s, humorists were a dime a dozen; everyone was drinking champagne and cutting up neckties. In 1960, everyone's talking too much, reminiscing about his childhood. You can't get humor into the magazine if people aren't writing it."

*The New Yorker now has 97 subscribers in Dubuque, including several old ladies.

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