The Years with Ross by James Thurber

Author:James Thurber
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-10-14T00:00:00+00:00

8

Onward and Upward and Outward

By 1933 the first decade of the magazine was running out, and the period might have been called, in Sir Winston’s phrase, the end of the beginning. It was also the beginning of the end of the New Yorker as I had first known it—an irreverent, understaffed, comic weekly, with little on its mind, going nowhere in particular.

The 1933 scroll was charged with all kinds of things for H. W. Ross. The Depression, which had been aimed directly at him, was still holding on, though getting better (1934 was to be one of the New Yorker’s best financial years). Hitler had risen to power, the banks had closed, Prohibition was soon to become a sorry memory, and the Roosevelt family had come to Washington, thus supplying “Talk of the Town” with dozens of anecdotes and the art department with dozens of idea drawings. In 1933 Ring Lardner died, and the morning World came to an end—major sorrows that saddened Ross and all of us.

Then there was the bright side of the year. A young man named William Shawn came to work for the magazine as a Talk reporter, and St. Clair McKelway, a former Herald Tribune reporter, back from a long trip to the Far East where he had edited a paper in Bangkok, Siam, began writing Reporter pieces and profiles; Clifton Fadiman set to work on his ten years of reviewing books, and book publishers’ ads flowed in as never before. The drawing pen of Charles Addams began haunting houses, and Clarence Day’s reminiscences of his New York boyhood appeared. The Day stories were about New York and, after all, Ross’s magazine was called the New Yorker. He gave up slowly and reluctantly his old original belief that the weekly ought to be confined to the scenes and people and goings on in that city. My own reminiscences of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, also appeared in 1933, but they were about a foreign country, a million literary miles from New York, and that bothered Ross at first. He had begun with a fixed idea that the New Yorker should have an exclusive metropolitan circulation and appeal, and carry only advertisements of the smartest local shops and products, but he adapted himself to the changing scope and the widening scene. He gladly printed Sally Benson’s memories of her childhood in St. Louis.

Ross, true to his stature as an editor, learned to change his mind and his magazine with the changing of the world and the temper of the times. At first he had called anything that was serious “grim,” but then he convinced himself that most of it was important, and he wanted his magazine to be important. In the first two years of his weekly, he had gleefully hung a total of twenty-one Talk anecdotes on David Wallace, a man known only to Broadway, the Round Table, and the Thanatopsis Literary and Inside Straight Club, but in 1933 Ross did not like to be reminded of these little old intramural gags, printed to amuse a comparative handful of people.

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