Let Me Finish (25 page)

Ross wrote letters all the time, frequently logging several hours at it in a single day. Some were handed over to secretaries for correction and retyping, but surviving
New Yorker
editors and writers who recall the steady thrash of Ross's old Underwood upright emanating from his
nineteenth-floor, West Forty-third Street office have told me that they looked forward to perhaps receiving something from the daily outpouring of inquiries and encouragements or afterthoughts. The messages, pristine in type in the book, actually arrived in an imperfect rush of grimy black lines on yellow copy paper, with hurried X-ings out and penciled-in corrections; sometimes Ross would produce an opening three or four lines of gibberish—it looked like code—before noticing that in his hurry he had placed his fingers on the wrong deck of keys. Ross often stalked the halls, hunched and scowling with the burden of his latest idea or question, but these in-house letters, conveying the same urgent and disheveled impression, also appeared to bring him into your office, so to speak, and nearly in person. When Brendan Gill took exception to the sense of intimidation his boss sometimes conveyed, Ross wrote back, "I don't try to scare anyone, although occasionally I don't give a damn if I do probably."

The notes, in any case, got passed around, and, as Kunkel has observed, were often tucked away for posterity, in spite of their dashed-off informality. Salutations are curt and pauses for throat-clearing or attitude-seizing absent. The man was too busy for bonhomie or style. He hid very little and knew what was on his mind—an ever-increasing burden that he groaned and complained about even in the act of dealing with it—and amazingly shortened the distance between his thoughts and their departure. He always sounded like himself, which is the whole trick.

Ross had a full-scale life away from the magazine as well, and one finds him making a backgammon date with
Bennett Cerf, firing off a reminder to Noël Coward that he has tickets to take him to the circus, offering to sell Jimmy Cagney a used tractor for four hundred and ninety-nine dollars and twenty-five cents, and imploring Ambassador (and former bootlegger) Joseph P. Kennedy to help with a wartime shipment of Haig & Haig to Chasen's restaurant, in Hollywood, of which he was a backer. His divorce from his first wife, Jane Grant, and the arrangements for her support become a clenched-teeth obbligato running through the book, once producing a letter to her lawyers which he famously signed, "Very truly yours, Ross, Ross, Ross, Ross & Ross, sgd/H. W. Ross, By H. W. Ross." But there is no levity within the position papers, ultimatums, and near-resignations that follow the trail of his lurid struggles with Raoul Fleischmann, the publisher and co-founder of the magazine, whom he mistrusted (with some reason) and in the end despised.

Kunkel calls Ross an "organic complainer," which is another way of saying that he was victimized by his insistence on quality and clarity in his magazine, and by the natural scarcity of editors and writers who could produce it. When the irreplaceable Whites moved to Maine, Ross somehow suppresses outrage. "If you will do a very little bit of timely Comment it will help out," he says to White (who had begun writing his longer "One Man's Meat" columns in
Harper's).
To Mrs. White (as he invariably addressed her), who continued editing from long distance, he writes, "As to your sharp-shooting of the issues, and your recent memo about this, I say do it your way. I deplore your way, but since you can't do it another way, I'll settle on it."

The loudest outcries went to writers of humor, on whom he was almost pathetically dependent. "I have come to expect little from writers, including writings," he grumbles to Frank Sullivan, a friend and funny man, whom he often addressed more directly. "I cannot refrain from urging you to write a piece. If you don't do one, you are a little bastard" comes at the conclusion of a 1941 note that began, "Dear Frank, old fellow." He is still at it in 1946: "GOD DAMN IT, WRITE SOMETHING! As ever, Ross." He would not have used the capitals to a writer of less ability.

His health and his teeth weren't good ("Honest to Christ, I am more dilapidated at the moment than Yugoslavia," he writes to White), and office troubles had begun to compound themselves in wartime, when so many editors and artists and staff writers went off to the service that he found himself at his desk seven days a week, and seriously considered scaling down to two issues per month. But Ross loved the work, there's no getting away from it, and a tinge of enjoyment sifts into a summary whine of his, to Alexander Woollcott: "I am up to my nipples in hot water, what with half of the staff going off to war, a limitation of fifty-seven gallons of gasoline for six weeks, the Holy Name [Society] demanding that we stop printing 'son of a bitch,' and so on. This war is much harder on me than the last one."

Ross was never sunny, but his powers of attention lighted him up, particularly when he was dealing with writers and their copy. One of his notorious query sheets turns up here in a 1948 letter to Thurber about a casual of his, "Six for the Road"—a routine (for the magazine) sort of
notation in which Ross lists fourteen items worthy of the author's immediate attention. No. 11 is typical—"Very unexpected to learn at this late date that there's a bar in this place. Not mentioned before, and the definite pronoun has no antecedent"—but No. 3 brings Ross to near-frenzy: "This mixing up of a dinner party and an evening party that begins in the afternoon baffled me for quite a while, and I have come up with the suggestion that the party be made a cocktail party with buffet dinner. I think this is a brilliant suggestion. You never later have the people sitting down to dinner, nor do you take any notice whatever of dinner," etc. etc. One can almost hear Thurber's cries of irritation, even from this distance, but he has been poked or maddened into a tiny but perhaps useful fix, which was the main idea.

Ross's query list for the Thurber casual brings up his celebrated question to Vladimir Nabokov, on the galleys of the eighth chapter of his "Speak, Memory" series, which was electrifying the magazine in the late 1940s. Nabokov, describing a garden party at Vyra, a family country estate at the time of his boyhood in pre-revolutionary Russia, is at full tilt with "A torrent of sounds comes to life: voices speaking all together, a walnut cracked, the click of the nutcracker carelessly passed, thirty human hearts drowning mine with their regular beats—" when Ross steps in marginally to ask, "Weren't the Nabokovs a more-than-one-nutcracker family?" Well, uh, yes—and, taking the infinitesimal point, the grand master Nabokov, surely the most abundantly gifted artist ever to appear in the pages of the comic weekly, steps back into the flow, bends over, and turns
the
nutcracker into
a
nutcracker.

It's surprising that Ross never saw himself as a writer, or succumbed to the notion that he was growing into one. I think he sensed instead that he was a genius appreciator of clear writing and strong reporting, and understood that the care and comfort of those who were good at it required full-time attention. When the first-rate Profiles reporter Geoffrey Hellmann decided to go to work for the betterpaying
Life
(it was a temporary aberration), Ross goaded him with "What is the temperature over there? Do you need any pencils?"

He is almost fatherly in a mini-crisis with the touchy Whites that blew up when a one-letter typo slipped into an E. B. W. proof—"hen" had become "her"—and he could always sound unfeigned appreciation for a writer's best, even in a rival magazine. In 1940, after White had published a piece in
Harper's
on the meaning of freedom, Ross wrote to him, "I think it is a beautiful and elegant thing, probably the most moving item I've read in years and worthy of Lincoln and some of the other fellows that really went to town." And he concludes, "Knock me down anytime you want."

Ross's
New Yorker
got better and deeper near the end of his tenure (he died in 1951), and the editor who had once expected so little of his contributors must have been startled by what was happening. Writing to John Hersey, whose account of the atomic-bomb destruction of Hiroshima had been given an entire issue, in 1946, he says, "Those fellows who said 'Hiroshima' was the story of the year, etc., underestimated it. It is unquestionably the best journalistic story of my time, if not of all time. Nor have I
heard of anything like it." And when Rebecca West, who had written some notable pieces for the magazine, dedicated her book "The Meaning of Treason" to him, he was astounded—"just overflowing with gratitude and goodwill to you.... I consider that I have now crashed American letters, which gives me much amusement."

Ross knew his own value, but his tenure at the magazine, to hear him tell it, was all about process. He didn't give a damn what people thought about him or how he would be weighed; he just wanted to get the stuff right on the page. "It's all right for people to say that we are too fussy, that ten or twenty slightly ungrammatical sentences don't matter," he writes, "but if (from where I sit) I break down on that the magazine would break down all along the line." Similarly comes the confession "I still find journalism glamorous," in a long and uncharacteristically personal letter to the editor of
Current Biography,
in which he recounts, among other things, his departure from high school after two years, in favor of full-time newspaper work on the Salt Lake City
Tribune.
And, writing to the artist Gluyas Williams in 1934, Ross says, "I'm employed by
The New Yorker
...largely as an idea man. That's what I regard myself as, at any rate, and what I think my chief value to the magazine is." This city-room angle on the world elates the old sourpuss again and again in this refreshing and uncynical anthology. Who gets the royalties to "Happy Birthday to You"? he suddenly asks a Talk editor. To the actor Fredric March, he declares, "The belief that 'none' is a singular pronoun is an old American legend which grew out of an error made in a common-school grammar many years ago." To
E. B. White, an accomplished countryman by now, he takes up a dictionary exploration of "compost," both verb and noun, which must have required three or four pages out of his Underwood. And in a memo to Shawn, his most valuable discovery, he wants additions to a coming June Talk piece that will explore more fully the story behind the home-plate umpire's little hand brush, and the ball capacity of his pockets. "Are these brand-new balls, or are they balls that have been played with some, and been knocked foul?"

For Ross, the invention of his magazine was just another good story. "
The New Yorker
is pure accident from start to finish," he wrote to George Jean Nathan. "I was the luckiest son of a bitch alive when I started it. Within a year White, Thurber, Arno and Hokinson had shown up out of nowhere....And Gibbs came along very soon, and Clarence Day, and a number of other pathfinders I could name if I spent a little time in review....And Benchley was alive, for instance." They were lucky, too.

"Nobody said not to go," begins Emily Hahn's 1937 Reporter at Large piece "Round Trip to Nanking," and so, at the outset of the singularly bloody and dangerous Sino-Japanese War, she gets on a train in Shanghai and goes, carrying an evening dress tucked inside a hatbox. "There were young men, dinner parties, and dancing in Nanking," she offers by way of explanation. In 1932, after spending a year in the Belgian Congo, she determined, "with my usual sublime self-confidence," to walk out, via elephant trail, to Lake
Kivu and thence all the way to the East African coast, accompanied by a baby baboon named Angélique and a pygmy guide. "Like all pygmies," she wrote, "he was incapable of getting lost." Her surprising first-person piece "The Big Smoke," about opium (her own opium smoking, I mean), begins, "Though I'd always wanted to be an opium addict, I can't claim that as the reason I went to China." Actually, she went for the weekend, to drop in on an old friend, and stayed for nine years—a reasonable turn of events, to hear her tell it.

Hahn, who died in 1997 at the age of ninety-two, was the magazine's roving heroine, our Belle Geste: a reporter inveterately at large, whose work, arriving from all continents, encompassed a hundred and eighty-one pieces and eight decades. Her datelines, taken together with her smashing good looks—enormous, green-flecked dark eyes; an oval face; a plungingly intelligent gaze; and a generous mouth always on the edge of an arriving smile or giggle are misleading, suggesting another trenchcoated, news-hungry gal reporter among the guys, a Jean Arthur, or perhaps a beautiful, thrill-seeking flibbertigibbet, a Carole Lombard. She was something more rare: a woman deeply, almost domestically, at home in the world. Driven by curiosity and energy, she went there and did that, and then wrote about it without fuss. Her pieces from the thirties and forties switch effortlessly between the Reporter at Large configuration and the offhand, first-person casual—a form famous for its lack of exclamation points. "She spoke of extraordinary things as if they were everyday," a former colleague of hers said; and I remembered that once, when she and I
were talking idly in the hall, she murmured that she used to dream in Chinese.

What is disconcerting about her now that she has gone is how few of us, even among the old-timers, can claim a close friendship with her, much as we admired her. "She was a sweet-tempered feminist, who didn't dislike men," William Maxwell said. "She didn't see why she shouldn't do whatever they did, including sexually." Philip Hamburger recalled first meeting her in the Oak Room of the Plaza, where Harold Ross introduced them. "A beautiful woman," he said, "and smoking the biggest cigar you ever saw. I always liked her but I can't say I really knew her."

Hahn had no end of friends, but she didn't hang out, she was always busy writing, or moving on—to Brasilia or Nairobi or the British Museum, to a zoo conference somewhere, or perhaps back to her home at Little Gaddesden, in Hertfordshire, where she had a house, Ringshall End, and a happy long-term marriage to a University of London historian, Charles Boxer, whom she saw there for ninety days a year, thanks to the tax laws and to their shared preference for an intimacy built around absence. For years, she didn't have an office at the magazine, and we all counted ourselves lucky to catch a glimpse of such a staff celebrity, on the run between her books and her pieces, her departures and her children.