New Yorker Midwife

ROSS, THE NEW YORKER AND ME by Jane Grant. 271 pages. Reynal. $5.95.

The mere thought of writing a book on a subject that the late James Thurber tackled should produce writer's block in any author now living. Thurber's The Years with Ross was an epitaph that the volatile and volubly profane founder and editor of The New Yorker would himself have pronounced definitive. Jane Grant has one advantage, and only one, that Thurber lacked: she was Ross's first wife (of three) and helped him start The New Yorker. In fact, she says openly what too many wives secretly believe about their husband's successes: "He would have given up, I am sure, if I hadn't encouraged him; fortunately I was able to influence him for he was in love with me." Not even Thurber could top that.

The former Mrs. Ross, even from her marital vantage point, says nothing significantly new about her husband. Ross is a curiously minor figure in this book. Mostly it is a slow, waltz-time reminiscence of the '20s. There is much name dropping, mostly involving that jolly but too frequently trotted-out Round Table bunch at the Algonquin Hotel. Tales about Miss Grant's frequent dancing dates and about boozing and gambling all tend to crowd her irascible husband right out of the book. Perhaps for a lady who helped found the Lucy Stone League* and is now 71. all this is quite natural.

When Ross is allowed to come on, the reader gets a wifely glimpse of the homely, ungainly and not too articulate Coloradan who proved that an itinerant hick reporter could come to the big city and give the blase natives the last thing one would have expected from him: a successful, sophisticated magazine. It was not, Ross proclaimed, "for the old lady in Dubuque"; it wasn't even for Ross's own mother. Her unreal ized ambition for him was to see something under his byline in the Saturday Evening Post. He was shy, so much so that he had a hard time rustling funds to start The New Yorker. Though he dealt with the best humorists of his time, he was no phrasemaker. This was about his speed: he once asked Alexander Woollcott to describe him, and Woollcott immediately replied: "Timid." Ross's reply was quick and typical: "You sneaky son of a bitch, you've been in touch with my mother."

*Lucy Stoners, named for a formidable suffragette, insist on the use of their maiden names, even though they are married.

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