Thurber & Ross

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Here is the tale of a unique author-editor relationship fructifying into admiration, fondness and  respect:


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Reporter James Thurber quit his $40-a-week job on the New York Evening Post to start work as a $100-a-week deskman on Harold Wallace Ross's The New Yorker. Thurber was then 32; The New Yorker had just turned two; and Editor Ross, at 34, was already the whip-wielding crank who was to inspire and bedevil staffers until his death in 1951. In the November Atlantic, Humorist Thurber started a serialized memoir of Ross by recalling their early days together.

The two were destined to fit together like 4th and July, but they got off to a strange start when Ross hired Thurber as his managing editor. ("In those days," explained Thurber last week, "you started at the top and worked your way down.") Ross affected to despise writers; Thurber wanted only to write. "He wanted, first of all, to know how old I was, and when I told him it set him off on a lecture. 'Men don't mature in this country, Thurber,' he said. 'They're children. I was editor of the Stars and Stripes when I was twenty-five. Most men in their twenties don't know their way around yet. I think it's the goddam system of women schoolteachers.' I told him that I wanted to write, and he snarled, 'Writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber. What I want is an editor. I can't find editors. Nobody grows up. Do you know English?' I said I thought I knew English. 'Everybody thinks he knows English,' he said, 'but nobody does. I think it's because of the goddam women shoolteachers.' " 

"From the beginning," says Thurber, "Ross cherished his dream of a Central Desk at which an infallible omniscience would sit, a dedicated genius, out of Technology by Mysticism, effortlessly controlling and coordinating editorial personnel, contributors, office boys, cranks and other visitors, manuscripts, proofs, cartoons, captions, covers, fiction, poetry and facts, and bringing forth each Thursday a magazine at once funny, journalistically sound, and flawless. He had persuaded himself that I might be just the wonder man he was looking for."

Ross began life as a newspaperman. His first job, at 14, was that of a reporter for the Salt Lake City Tribune, and one of his early assignments was to interview the madam of a house of prostitution. "Always self-conscious and usually uncomfortable in the presence of all but his closest women friends," writes Thurber, "the young reporter began by saying to the bad woman (he divided the other sex into good and bad), 'How many fallen women do you have?'"

Ross distrusted most of those who wrote for The New Yorker, says Thurber. "He nursed an editorial phobia about what he called the functional: 'bathroom and bedroom stuff.' Years later he deleted from a Janet Planner 'London Letter' a forthright explanation of the nonliquid diet imposed upon the royal family and dignitaries during the coronation of George VI. 'So-and-so can't write a story without a man in it carrying a woman to bed,' he wailed. And again, 'I'll never print another [John] O'Hara story I don't understand. I want to know what his people are doing.' "

It was really only an accident of Ross's naiveté that allowed one of the most famous of New Yorker cartoons to get into the magazine. Reports Thurber: "He was depressed for weeks after the appearance of a full-page Arno depicting a man and a girl on a road in the moonlight, the man carrying the back seat of an automobile. [Caption: 'We want to report a stolen car.'] 'Why didn't somebody tell me what it meant?' he asked."

While Ross persisted in expecting precise, orderly, machinelike efficiency from Thurber, Thurber persisted in trying to write New Yorker prose. One day Ross stormed in on him. "You've been writing," he exploded in accusation, "I don't know how in hell you found time ... I admit I didn't want you to." Thereupon he wrote Thurber out of the imagined society of efficient journalists and treated him as a sort of basket case. "I was a completely different man," writes Thurber ". . . one of the trio about whom he fretted and fussed continually—the others were Andy [E.B.] White and Wolcott Gibbs. Our illnesses, or moods, or periods of unproductivity were a constant source of worry to him. When I was . . . undergoing a series of eye operations ... he came over [and] snarled, 'Goddam it, Thurber, I worry about you and England.' England at that time was going through the German blitz."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,867889-1,00.html

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