Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker by Thomas Vinciguerra

Author:Thomas Vinciguerra [Vinciguerra, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
Published: 2015-09-15T07:00:00+00:00

* The actor Sam Waterston currently lives in Thurber’s West Cornwall house.

CHAPTER 10

“ALWAYS POISON”

Gibbs’s bizarre fish episode was shorthand for a whole catalog of alcohol-related misbehavior by New Yorker types. Alec Waugh might have put it most succinctly when he wrote, of the crew’s bibulous habits, “Every drink was an adventure; every drink was a protest against an outrageous imposition of authority.”

The New Yorker had been forged during the Noble Experiment of Prohibition, and befitting its stated purpose as a conveyer of metropolitan wit and gaiety, the magazine devoted no small portion of its early contents to the nightlife that surrounded the flourishing and surreptitious trade in illegally manufactured potables. In those days, it was officially estimated that there were as many as one hundred thousand speakeasies in the five boroughs. In his 1927 story “Speakeasy Nights,” Niven Busch painted a memorable portrait of one such establishment that came equipped with a side entrance, a tinny piano playing “Baby Face,” and an electric dumbwaiter that would, at the touch of a button, dump liquor bottles into the cellar in case of a raid. Even before he began at The New Yorker, Gibbs drove from Long Island to Manhattan “to spend the afternoon at a resort known as 40 East 60th Street, where tired young men gather to drink tea and jerk bored damsels through the Charleston and Black Bottom.” And after he arrived at the magazine, he wrote of a hangout that was ostensibly located in the basement of the Argonaut National Bank. “The liquor,” he said sourly, “is not very good—you’re apt to find bits of paper—torn bonds or currency—floating around in your glass.”

Lois Long’s “Tables for Two” column typified the coverage of this decadence, as she recalled long after the Eighteenth Amendment had been repealed:

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