“Hello—Mrs.—Taylor”—he is nodding and smiling—“is—your—husband—in?”—nodding, smiling, rolling his eyeballs up and down his forehead, edging in—“uh—I’m afraid—I’m—going—to—have—to”—
“Good evening, Mr. Shawn,” or something, she says. “I mean, he’s in the bedroom, he’s working—”
“—take—a—manuscript—from—your—husband—how—have—you—been—Mrs.—Taylor?”—edging, nodding, sliding the old booty feet, ever nodding back, nod, smile—“your—lovely—daughters?”—
edge, edge, eye-roll, right over to the bedroom, and he opens the door and walks in, nod, smile, peeking eye: “Oh—good—evening—Mr.—Taylor—yes—I’ll—have—to—take—this—now—thank—yon—very—much—how—is”—he pulls the story up out of the typewriter and off the desk, with Taylor falling back in his wooden chair like a burntout cigarette filter—“Mrs. Taylor?—you-are-very-kind—yes—thank—you—very—much”—he edges back toward the door, nods his head down, down, down, smiles, rolls his eyes up from under his forehead, edges back, the booty buckles clackle—“goodbye—Mrs.—Taylor—thank—you—how—is—”
Floonk, the door closes. Quiet! Shawn wins.
Yes! And suddenly, after forty years, it all adds up. Whispering, inconspicuous—but courtly—formal, efficient—but sympathetic—perfection! —what are those but, precisely! the perfect qualifications for a museum custodian, an undertaker, a mortuary scientist. But of course! Thirteen years ago, upon the death of Harold Ross, precisely, that difficult task befell William Shawn: to be the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserve-in-amber, the smiling embalmer … for Harold Ross’s
New Yorker
magazine.
Harold Ross! Practically nobody, except at
The New Yorker
, remembers what a …
charismatic
figure Ross was as
The New Yorker’
s founder and editor. James Thurber told a story in his book
The Years with Ross
that shows it, however. About a year after Ross died,
The New Yorker
entertained the editors of
Punch,
and a couple of weeks later Thurber was talking about the party with Rowland Emmett of
Punch
and told him it was too bad he never met Ross. “Oh, but I did,” said Emmett. “He was all over the place. Nobody talked about anything else.” Ross was from Aspen, Colorado, got mixed up with literati in Paris after World War I, and came to New York and entered the literary world with a kind of Rocky Mountain reverse-spin mucker stance, “anti-intellectual.” Ross was moody, explosive, naive about many things, and had many blind
spots when it came to literature and the arts—and all of this partially disguised the real nature of his sophistication. Ross’s sophistication actually had a rather refined
English—
Anglo-Saxon
—
cast to it. To Ross, sophistication involved not merely understanding culture and fashion but avoidance of excesses, including literary and artistic excesses. He didn’t want anything in the magazine that was too cerebral, Kantian, or too exuberant, angry, gushing, too “arty,” “pretentious,” or “serious.” He used those three words, “arty,” “pretentious,” and “serious,” quite a lot. He didn’t want it to seem as if anybody were straining his brain and showing off or wringing his heart out and pouring soul all over you. This idea was very special, very English.
Great stuff! Ross started
The New Yorker
in 1925, and despite the depression, it was a terrific success. Sophistication in America! The thing was, in the twenties the New York intelligentsia still felt . . very
colonial.
They were like those poor Russian timber magnates who used to sit in their Bourbon Louis salons in St. Petersburg and make their daughters speak only French on Thursdays and talk to guests about
“l’Opéra,”
as though that great piece of angel’s-food cake were just around the corner on the Nevsky Prospect. They were terribly hung up on French Culture. In New York the model was English Culture. Ross may have had plenty of those lithoid Colorado eccentricities, but
The New Yorker
was never anything more than a rather slavish copy of
Punch.
Nevertheless, literati in America took to it as if they were dying of thirst. The need was so great that
The New Yorker
was first praised and then practically canonized. By the 1950s, funny things were happening. Some of
The New Yorker’
s host of staff writers, such as E. B. White, were receiving very solemn honors, such as honorary degrees at Yale.
No magazine in America ever received such
literary
acclaim before. Of course, it was hard to review the work of these
New Yorker
writers—e.g., Thurber, E. B. White, Robert Benchley, Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, A. J. Liebling—and put one’s finger on any … major work. What had any of them done that would measure up to, say, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, or Steinbeck or Nathanael West? People
who don’t
really understand
just see
New Yorker
writers pistling away their talents within the old Ross mold year after year, decade after decade, until finally somebody writes an affectionate obituary. But what is all this about
major work
? Never mind! Ross himself never minded it. They had achieved the perhaps small-scale but still special goal he had set for them—Anglo-Saxon sophistication—very well.
Ecce homines!
Tiny giants!
The atmosphere at
The New Yorker
itself, however, was something else. William Shawn came to New York in 1933, at the age of twentysix, with the idea of writing a book about
The New Yorker.
Instead, he joined the staff as a reporter for the “Talk of the Town” section. The “Talk of the Town” was nothing more than
The New Yorker’
s version of
Punch’
s “Charivari” section, but—all right!—in the United States, at any rate,
The New Yorker
was in a class by itself. One went to work there, and one—how does one explain it?—began to get a kind of …
religious
feeling about the place. There were already a lot of …
tradi
tions. From the first, according to his old friends there, Shawn felt as if he were entering a priesthood. Hierophants! Tiny giants—all over the place—Shawn could look out of his cubicle and there they were, those men out there padding along in the hall were James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, and Robert Benchley
themselves.
That gangling man out there with the mustache, that is
James Thurber—
one is not
reading about
James Thurber,
that is he
, and one is now, actually, physically, a part of his universe; one can study the most minute details about the man, the weave of his yellow-ocher button-up sweater, the actual
knit
of it, the way the loops of yarn intertwist, the sweater James Thurber has on—not a photograph of it—but the sweater he
has on,
has on
his own body
. Actually!
Grace!
Harold Ross was forever looking for a managing editor who could somehow convert his conception of
The New Yorker
into a systematic, ongoing operation, and Shawn—faithful hierophant!—was the most successful managing editor he ever appointed. He was …
totally committed.
There was a lot of speculation about what would happen to The
New Yorker
“after Ross”! One of the
New Yorker
writers, A. J. Liebling, said, “The same thing that happened to analysis after Freud.” He was righter than he knew. There was never any question of Shawn’s setting a new policy. The old Museum Curator just set to work with his whole heart. Tiny Mummies!
Part of Shawn’s job as embalmer is actual physical preservation. For example, there is the Thurber Room, the cubicle James Thurber had up there in his last days at
The New Yorker.
Thurber’s eyesight was failing, and he tried out some of his ideas for drawings with a big crayon on the wall; nutty
foot
ball players, or something, and a bunch of nuns, some weird woodland animals on the order of the Barefaced Lie and the White Lie. James Thurber! The room is right next to the men’s room, because it was hard for Thurber to navigate the halls. The room is kept like the Poe Shrine in Richmond, Virginia;
pure
Poe,
pure
Thurber. The new man, the writer in the cubicle now, understands. Nobody touches those walls, no other pictures
of any
sort go up on those walls. The custodians stand around late in the day trying to decide how best to preserve these … well, one means, these things are not scrawls, I don’t care what Thurber would have said. These things are bona fide …
murals
we have here. Museum! Shrine! Maybe someday, all these offices of all these giants, like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, everybody, can be restored, like Colonial Williamsburg, all the original objects and curios, Benchley’s little porcelain hussar figures, Gibbs’s amber walrus, animals, and things, but for now—well, only the people who were working here when Ross was alive may keep offices in the old
donnish
clutter, all these things on the
walls
and so forth. The Mr. Old-Timers, like Brendan Gill, the movie critic, who has been here twenty-five years, or something like that, may keep all these
vines
growing all over his office—picturesque!—donnish clutter!—but we keep all these men on one floor, and as they retire or … pass on … the rule is, nobody else may do up rooms like that. Nobody else may put all those
curios
up on their walls, all those maps of Hartford,
before the
Turnpike,
all that strange stuff—nothing on the walls but
New Yorker
covers. That is, of course, understood? One means, well, it is not a
written
rule or anything like that, but one soon gets the idea, by example, as it were, like this business of everybody wearing white shirts at the IBM offices. Nobody comes in and beats one over the skull with a rule book or anything, but the day may come when some unplugged bastard comes in with a light, practically
thin ice
blue shirt on, and about 3 p.m. a superior calls him into an office where the fluorescent ice tray on the ceiling hums, and he says, “Let me ask you, tell me, have you ever noticed any of our executives wearing a …
pastel
shirt like yours?” One means, well, of course, everyone was genuinely sorry, even stricken, over the death of A. J. Liebling, “Joe,” in 1963, but, well, the man did have the most unbelievable clutter in his cubicle, pictures right up on the walls of fifth-ranking bantamweight boxers with their hair pomaded, photographed against dark backgrounds on
glossy
paper with
white ink
inscriptions, “Best of Luck,” cretinish handwriting, circles over the
i’
s. The man went really rather
beyond
the orthodox donnish clutter. That was quite bad enough, but his style, his
writing
style, yes, he
did
write under Ross, and he quite belonged here—no one will deny that for a minute—but doesn’t one think that Liebling was …
baroque,
and hearty at times, and did he really
fit
in around here?
Tenor! Yes! Shawn’s greatest task, of course, was not preserving these shrine rooms but preserving the
style,
the
tenor
of the magazine. The tenor, the atmosphere, is important. Newcomers are schooled in it immediately. To begin with, getting hired at
The New Yorker
is nothing merely
personnel-office-like
or
technical.
It is more like fraternity rushing. A person’s attitude is important. Everybody wants to know if the candidate will fit in, if he has the makings of a genuine … hierophant; not a lot of bogus enthusiasm and so forth, but more an attitude of—well, humility, about
The New Yorker
and its history. Humility has come to be a very important thing here, and lately
The New Yorker
has settled upon small people, small physically, that is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy, thatchy, humble style of dress they
had in college. After the age of forty-one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to hard-finished worsteds.
Earn one’s worsteds!
A lot of traditions are kept up very well. One is that the cocktail lounge in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel and the Rose Room are actually a private club
practically owned by The New Yorker.
The Algonquin Hotel is across the street and down toward Sixth Avenue a little from the Forty-fourth Street entrance of
The New Yorker
building. The other cocktail lounge in there, the Blue Room, or whatever it is, and the other dining room—not the Rose Room but the other kind of
hearty
oak-woody dining room off the lobby—are not part of
The New
Yorker, and all kinds of hearty beef-trust people turn up in there, businessmen and one thing and another. But the cocktail lounge in the lobby—well, it is not
actually,
but it is
practically
a
New Yorker
club; you know? Or at least it seems so if one works for
The New Yorker.
It even looks like a club, a fine club like the Century Club. One sits in leather chairs at lamp tables and coffee tables and things, not at ordinary Formica cocktail-lounge tables, and there is a great deal of dark wood all around, and one summons the waiter by banging a little clerk’s bell on the table—just like in a club, one understands? Well, one means, it is a public place, but if one works for
The New Yorker,
he does not simply
show
up in there—the thing is, this is the place where Ross used to come, and Thurber, and everybody, and now Shawn sometimes comes there around six, but even Shawn watches himself. A lot of times he doesn’t even eat lunch in the Rose Room; for example, he and Lillian Ross will drift off up to this delicatessen near Rockefeller Plaza for a very quiet, unpretentious couple of corned-beef sandwiches. So one waits until he is invited to the Algonquin by some senior member of the staff. It is like the second round of initiation, like being really accepted. Months go by, but finally the day comes when Brendan Gill or another top member says, in this most offhand casual way, as if it really didn’t mean a thing, “Mr. Toddy, would you care to join me for lunch at the Algonquin?” Zoom! Grace!