feared, a decade or more ago, that to escape that fate (an incurably pallid
New Yorker)
, the magazine might consciously try to change its prose style, to stiffen its character. In 1938, there appeared a cover drawing that belonged to no artist we knew. It was, though, by the ribald Peter Arno. It was of a herd of bowed heads: the Nuremberg victims. It showed at a shocking glance how alien to the oncoming world of violence was
The New Yorker
we cherished. For Hitler was outraging urbanity everywhere, like a Dostoevsky lunatic let loose in a country club.
We were wrong. E. B. White had set the tone of the âTalk of the Townâ comments, indeed of the magazineâs persona, and he had developed a modern vernacular style as original and influential as any since Sir Richard Steeleâs. But suddenly, he applied it to the great and grave issues of the day.
The New Yorker was
led into battle by a man who wrote like an angel and now felt like a man. And, to the honor of the unlettered grouchy Ross himself, the effect of his fussy and exacting standards over fifteen years was to produce suddenly a small team of war correspondents as gifted and memorable as any who covered the Second World War. And, after the war, the magazine melded, without strain or affectation, its new seriousness and its old irony and grace. Unfortunately, Ross never lived to see how completely he had transformed the civil face of English-American journalism, more than any editor this century. He died suddenly, in December 1951, just as he was fearing the magazine was about to decline into a pale imitation of the original, a âsophisticatedâ magazine as the word is understood by what he called âthose fancy readersâ of the fashion magazines.
11
The Legend of Gary Cooper
(1961)
W hen the word got out that Gary Cooper (who died aged sixty) was mortally ill, a spontaneous process arose in high places not unlike the first moves to sanctify a remote peasant. The Queen of England dispatched a sympathetic cable. The president of the United States called him on the telephone. A cardinal ordered public prayers. Messages came to his house in Beverly Hills from the unlikeliest fans, from foreign ministers and retired soldiers who never knew him, and from Ernest Hemingway, his old Pygmalion, who had kept him in mind, through at least two novels, as the archetype of the Hemingway hero: the self-sufficient male animal, the best kind of hunter, the silent infantryman padding dutifully forward to perform the soldierâs most poignant ritual in âthe ultimate loneliness of contact.â
It did not happen to Ronald Colman, or Clark Gable, orâheaven knowsâJohn Barrymore. Why, we may well ask, should it have happened to Frank James Cooper, the rather untypical American type of the son of a Bedfordshire lawyer, a boy brought up in the Rockies among horses and cattle to be sure, but only as they compose the unavoidable backdrop of life in those parts; a schoolboy in Dunstable, England, a college boy in Iowa, a middling student, then a failing cartoonist, failed salesman, an âextraâ in Hollywood who in time had his break and mooned in a lanky, handsome way through a score or more of âhorse operasâ? Well, his friends most certainly mourn the gentle, shambling âCoop,â but what the world mourns is the death of Mr. Longfellow Deeds, who resisted and defeated the corruption of the big city; the snuffing out of the sheriff, in
High Noon
, heading back to duty along the railroad tracks with that precise mince of the cowboyâs tread and that rancherâs squint that sniffs mischief in a creosote bush, sees through suns, and is never fooled. What the world mourns is its lost innocence, or a favorite fantasy of it fleshed out in the most durable and heroic of American myths: that of the taut but merciful plainsman, who dispenses justice with a worried conscience, a single syllable, a blurred reflex action to
New Yorker)
, the magazine might consciously try to change its prose style, to stiffen its character. In 1938, there appeared a cover drawing that belonged to no artist we knew. It was, though, by the ribald Peter Arno. It was of a herd of bowed heads: the Nuremberg victims. It showed at a shocking glance how alien to the oncoming world of violence was
The New Yorker
we cherished. For Hitler was outraging urbanity everywhere, like a Dostoevsky lunatic let loose in a country club.
We were wrong. E. B. White had set the tone of the âTalk of the Townâ comments, indeed of the magazineâs persona, and he had developed a modern vernacular style as original and influential as any since Sir Richard Steeleâs. But suddenly, he applied it to the great and grave issues of the day.
The New Yorker was
led into battle by a man who wrote like an angel and now felt like a man. And, to the honor of the unlettered grouchy Ross himself, the effect of his fussy and exacting standards over fifteen years was to produce suddenly a small team of war correspondents as gifted and memorable as any who covered the Second World War. And, after the war, the magazine melded, without strain or affectation, its new seriousness and its old irony and grace. Unfortunately, Ross never lived to see how completely he had transformed the civil face of English-American journalism, more than any editor this century. He died suddenly, in December 1951, just as he was fearing the magazine was about to decline into a pale imitation of the original, a âsophisticatedâ magazine as the word is understood by what he called âthose fancy readersâ of the fashion magazines.
11
The Legend of Gary Cooper
(1961)
W hen the word got out that Gary Cooper (who died aged sixty) was mortally ill, a spontaneous process arose in high places not unlike the first moves to sanctify a remote peasant. The Queen of England dispatched a sympathetic cable. The president of the United States called him on the telephone. A cardinal ordered public prayers. Messages came to his house in Beverly Hills from the unlikeliest fans, from foreign ministers and retired soldiers who never knew him, and from Ernest Hemingway, his old Pygmalion, who had kept him in mind, through at least two novels, as the archetype of the Hemingway hero: the self-sufficient male animal, the best kind of hunter, the silent infantryman padding dutifully forward to perform the soldierâs most poignant ritual in âthe ultimate loneliness of contact.â
It did not happen to Ronald Colman, or Clark Gable, orâheaven knowsâJohn Barrymore. Why, we may well ask, should it have happened to Frank James Cooper, the rather untypical American type of the son of a Bedfordshire lawyer, a boy brought up in the Rockies among horses and cattle to be sure, but only as they compose the unavoidable backdrop of life in those parts; a schoolboy in Dunstable, England, a college boy in Iowa, a middling student, then a failing cartoonist, failed salesman, an âextraâ in Hollywood who in time had his break and mooned in a lanky, handsome way through a score or more of âhorse operasâ? Well, his friends most certainly mourn the gentle, shambling âCoop,â but what the world mourns is the death of Mr. Longfellow Deeds, who resisted and defeated the corruption of the big city; the snuffing out of the sheriff, in
High Noon
, heading back to duty along the railroad tracks with that precise mince of the cowboyâs tread and that rancherâs squint that sniffs mischief in a creosote bush, sees through suns, and is never fooled. What the world mourns is its lost innocence, or a favorite fantasy of it fleshed out in the most durable and heroic of American myths: that of the taut but merciful plainsman, who dispenses justice with a worried conscience, a single syllable, a blurred reflex action to
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