Word: gilles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...magazine, and so has his successor William Shawn. Yet neither editor could stem the tide of moonlight memoirs by New Yorker staffers. James Thurber gave Ross himself a full-dress treatment in The Years with Ross (1959). Now, on the magazine's 50th birthday this week, comes Brendan Gill's account of his nearly 40 years with everybody at The New Yorker...
Molelike Creatures. On the opening page Gill seems to side with Ross. New Yorker writers, he claims, "tend to be lonely, molelike creatures, who work in their own portable darkness and who seldom utter a sound above a groan." In theory, no one who was not there gives a damn about this loving reliquary -anecdotes, old cartoons, floor plans and interoffice memos. Might it not be more fun to curl up with a rollicking treatise on varieties of corn blight or infrastructure at the Bank of America...
...make even New Yorker writers interesting. Besides, from the beginning, Ross's humor magazine attracted remarkable talents: Alexander Woollcott, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, E.B. White, Wolcott Gibbs, S.J. Perelman, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, Saul Steinberg, George Price. The list can (and in Gill's telling does...
Inevitably, the book is more concerned with The New Yorker then than now. Gill's memories are mostly ebullient. They include, of course, Ross, that "aggressively ignorant" Midwesterner who bullied The New Yorker into shape. Thurber's portrait remains definitive, but Gill adds amusing embellishments. Once Gill included the Tennysonian phrase "nature, red in tooth and claw" in a "Talk of the Town" item. Ross's notorious innocence in literary matters ("Is Moby Dick the man or the whale?") prompted him to change the reference to "nature, red in claw and tooth." Gill explains as best...
...Gill's account is laced with some acid. John O'Hara is drubbed for his vanity and status seeking. Thurber is recalled as a man "never so happy as when he could cause two old friends to have a falling out." Gill justifiably twits Movie Critic Pauline Kael for long-windedness and openly recounts the depressions, breakdowns, bouts of alcoholism and premature deaths that struck a number of his colleagues. He resurrects no quips that set the fabled Algonquin Round Table on a roar. Most drinking staffers, he reports, preferred dark saloons "suitable for people with a glum...