Memories of The Great and The Good by Alistair Cooke

sophisticated, ironic metropolitan weekly. He was a gawky outlander, a runaway from a small town high in the Rockies, an itinerant newspaperman who had bummed his way to San Francisco, a doughboy who had gone AWOL to run an American army magazine from Paris, a cantankerous, poker-crazy, all-swearing, all-drinking westerner—Huck Finn in a slept-in business suit and cracked yellow shoes. He was, however, the H. Ross of “F. P.’s” little item. He looked for a wealthy backer and found one in the socialite heir to a yeast fortune.
    In February 1925 he put out a thin, unlikely-looking firstborn. It combined
Punch’s
Charivari with
Judge’s
two-line jokes. It had some comic strips barely dignified as “panels.” There were a few local advertisements, some caricatures of actors, and art notes by “Froid.” Its only note of superiority was a derisive promise that it would not be edited for “the Old Lady in Dubuque.” Ross called it
The New Yorker
.
    From that start, it lost two thousand dollars a week. It took three years and the outpouring of seven hundred thousand unrequited dollars to turn the red ink into black. Today, we are told, it may be bought by almost anybody with several million dollars to spare.
    In 1950, a book appeared to celebrate that twenty-fifth anniversary, a miracle of longevity nobody knowledgeable about journalism, least of all H. Ross, could have imagined in the early days of its penury and of H. Ross’s groping all over town to find a writing style that would fit the model magazine he held in his imagination. He never did find it, which only proved something terrifying about Harold Ross that no contributors, early or late, ever guessed at when they first encountered this naive lunkhead. It was the totally unsuspected perfectionism of his mind and the unanswered question of where he got it from. He had quit high school and, with precious little education, wanted to be and became a newspaperman. He had read one whole book through and never pretended otherwise. What nobody anticipated before they turned in their copy was his probing, unsleeping, fussy, appallingly unforgiving intelligence. He kept on his desk what he called his two “bibles”: Fowler’s
Modern English Usage
and Mark Twain’s devastating diagnosis of the flatulence and related prose disorders of Fenimore Cooper. But he by no means regarded Fowler as gospel—he liked his precision and wit but when Fowler moved over the line from clarity to pedantry, Ross moved in on him as brutally as he did on any and every contributor, except two writers whose styles most nearly approximated to the impossible ideal: E. B. White and James Thurber.
    Ross’s literary ignorance made him no respecter of persons, however eminent. A writer who quoted Tennyson’s “Nature red in tooth and claw” was immediately corrected. Ross’s amendment read “Nature red in claw and tooth” with a note to the effect that a bloodthirsty animal would grab its prey by the claws before lifting it onto the teeth.
    By the time the magazine’s final proofs were passed on to the printer, Ross had read every line, much of the copy two or three times over. Before that longed-for Tuesday twilight, every contributor to the current issue had received, with his galley proofs, a typed page of numbered notes. They could run to ten or fifteen comments, varying from an abrupt single word (“Bush-wah!”) to a brief note of advice (“Could trim here” and “too detailed”) to exasperated comments on the writer’s dumbness (“Outside of what? And sheriff who? Who’s he?”) or verbosity (“For God’s sake, there’s no point in enumerating all these subsidiaries.”)
    Also unaccounted for was his exquisitely neurotic feel for syntax, a gift or a tyranny passed on to his deputy and nonfiction editor, William Shawn, who shared a similar sensitivity.