Gotham Diary:
An Acquired Taste
19 June 2015
Looking at the Times this morning, it occurred to me that, if you want to pin the blame for the massacre at Charleston’s Emmanuel Church on some one person, if you want to name a figure without whom the National Rifle Association and the various white supremacist organizations and the proliferation of gated communities and a reflorescence of the Confederate Flag would be inexplicable, that man is Richard Nixon.
It has become something of a journalistic trope to regard Nixon as a troubled man who never had two happy moments together — and then to feel somewhat sorry for him. This is like feeling sorry for Hitler.
Like Hitler, Nixon has a lot to tell us about what’s wrong with us, because he was powered by our darkness. He repurposed the paranoid energies that were flagging with the slow, inevitable fading of the Cold War, in the concoction of which he had been an eager participant. He got Americans to stop fearing and hating Communists and to start fearing and hating other Americans.
I’m not going to belabor this point. Just give it a thought.
***
Thomas Kunkel’s biography of New Yorker founder Harold Ross is a very good read. I overlooked Genius in Disguise when it came out, twenty years ago; for a long time, reading The New Yorker was enough — reading about it was too much. Kunkel’s biography of Joseph Mitchell, Man in Profile, which came out earlier this year, provoked me to give the earlier book a try. I’m about halfway through it, and I can’t say that I have learned a single thing about the legendary Ross. What I have learned is what it took to create the magazine, or at least a version of it that, with ninety years of care and cultivation, became that most remarkable kind of cultural institution, something that, while changes with the times, always remains recognizably itself. Ross created a magazine that could grow. Kunkel shows how hard this was to do. It didn’t take very long, two years at the most. But it was frighteningly hit-or-miss, and The New Yorker nearly folded six months after its inauguration. Cycling madly through talented writers and editors, Ross continued to keep the magazine afloat by splashing until 1927, during which he assembled a corps of four wingmen: Katharine Angell, EB White, James Thurber, and Wolcott Gibbs. This quartet understood what Ross was looking for, and it knew how to give it to him. But it was all Ross’s idea (however inarticulate at first), and a very successful idea it turned out to be.
It was like the one about having to have a job in order to get a job. From the start, The New Yorker was always going to be an acquired taste. How do you create an acquired taste? And how can Harold Ross, a man’s man if there ever was one, have envisioned something so sophisticated and peculiar? Kunkel reprints two memos, the only ones of their kind to survive, in which Ross reviews the current issue of the magazine, finding much of it wanting. Now, you have to bear in mind that he would have read and approved the entirety of each issue’s contents before publication. So the memos are essentially a form of self-criticism, however annoyingly projected outward at the staff. They show us that Ross was astonishingly well-informed. (Even if he didn’t know what the Blue Hill Troupe was — whether it was amateur or pro.) They also remind us that The New Yorker started out as a news magazine.
This is a role that the magazine has been discarding for years. At the back of each issue, you will find some combination of columns about books, classical music, television, the theatre, and what has always been called “The Current Cinema.” Every now and then, there’s something about music that is serious without being “classical.” But you will not find regular columns on jazz (Whitney Balliett), horse racing (Audax Minor), golf (Herbert Warren Wind), or women’s clothes (Lois Long, Kennedy Fraser). Coverage of the New York newspapers did not survive Robert Benchley. (Or did it? My point here is that I can remember all of the other extinct departments.) Even “The Talk of the Town” was supposed to be news. News of an odd kind, but still, news about New York City and the crazy people who live here. In Maeve Brennan’s Long-Winded Lady pieces, we see the transformation (under Ross’s successor, the very very very different William Shawn) of throwaway news into durable art. These vignettes may have read as news when they first appeared, but they have survived to form an ensemble portrait of the city at mid-century, not its finest moment. (From the Kennedy Administration at the latest to the near-death brush with bankruptcy in 1975, the sprites of novelty abandoned Gotham for other locales, and the city became, of all things, vieux jeu. The Twin Towers were monuments to this confused epoch.)
It appears to be generally acknowledged that The New Yorker “grew up” during World War II. It had ignored the Depression, which Ross, probably correctly, regarded as bad for business. If the magazine responded differently — actively — to the war, that must have been in part a reflection of Ross’s career in World War I. Originally a grunt, he was soon taken up by the new, government-sponsored publication, The Stars and Stripes. Kunkel conveys the genesis of the germ of The New Yorker in the Stars and Stripe’s blend of soldier-to-soldier coverage of trench-life news, humor, and good old Parisian ooh-la-la, all presented in a casual tone. Something altogether new happened to American letters when a troop (or troupe) of smart guys from nowhere, unpolished enough to regard France as no less exotic than Tahiti, were exposed to an old Europe that, but for the war, they would probably never have encountered. Actually, it was a Europe that had never been encountered as such. From the sizzle of the melancholic Ross on the hot pan of mademoiselles from Armentières wafts the cologne of Eustace Tilley.
In 1926, The New Yorker produced a parody of itself, with a silhouette of Harold Ross in the Eustace Tilley pose on the cover. This image might well be taken as the badge of the Ross years at The New Yorker. It captures the dissonance between the mock-foppish presentation of the magazine and the deadpan curiosity of the man behind it. There was nothing fancy about Ross but just one thing: he was a newspaperman with aspirations for the stars. He wanted to be a constellation in the literary firmament. He created the constellation, all right, but he did such a good job of it that the constellation could swirl about perfectly well without him at its center. Diligent and determined readers of The New Yorker may comb it for traces of Ross, and even find a few. But they wouldn’t know what they were looking for if they had only the past dozen years’ issues to go by. And that probably explains why there is still a New Yorker that looks like the one Ross made — although less and less with every passing year.
This entry was undertaken to lead to some navel-gazing on the subject of journalism, and why it never appealed to me as a possible profession, quite aside from issues of compensation and job stability. That will have to wait. Clues may be found in Kunkel’s book, in the principal paragraph on page 26 and in the paragraph that begins at the bottom of page 50. Ross often claimed that, much as he liked women, he never understood them. My own problem is that I’d be much more optimistic about the future of our human experiment if I didn’t understand men.