[.ca] Letters from the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross (ISBN 0375756949)

From Amazon.com:
"Don't waste your time and words on letters," Harold Ross cautioned more than one writer. "You don't get paid for them." Happily, The New Yorker's founding editor and dreamer didn't follow his own advice, and now--thanks to his biographer, Thomas Kunkel--we can share in Ross's revealing, inspiring, and hilarious correspondence. The fizzing communiqués collected in Letters from the Editor begin when he was a serviceman in France during World War I, and from the start his impulses were comedic. In April 1918, for example, a shell came a little too close for comfort: "My morale was shattered. I immediately retreated to a subway station and remained there for two hours. I then came up and consumed a whole bottle of 'morale.'" Ross liked to present himself as an unadorned, uneducated type, but from the moment he magicked up The New Yorker in 1924, it's clear that he was far more. Nonetheless, as late as 1949 he declared, "I don't know anything I've done for the human race, except possibly entertain a minute segment of it from time to time, and I can't compare myself with Goethe, because I don't know what he did for the race, either." The above quotes should give readers some notion of Ross's zinging mode, his sentences gathering into an absurd or satirical finale. Here's another: In 1937, he told E.B. White: "A gentleman from Montreal wrote in suggesting that your last piece be set to music. I suppose you got that letter. There was some talk that I ought to write you a letter upon completion of ten years service and I started a couple of times on it, my idea being to have that set to music and sing it to you." And the paragraph only gets better from there--just take a look at page 120. In fact, Ross's dispatches to White and White's wife, New Yorker editor Katharine White, are among the book's most tantalizing as he wheedles, exclaims, scolds, and invigorates. Ross lived for his job, and gave endless support to his writers, artists, and editors. His letters to the likes of Fitzgerald, Thurber, Rebecca West--not to mention the various Marx brothers--are graceful and unsycophantic. Yet he was no less solicitous to the obscure. In 1949 he complimented one Sally Benson on her "very good and trim story" before admonishing her: "Twenty-six stories in the next twenty-six weeks is what I expect from you, young lady, and come to think of it no more suicides during that period. Our characters have been bumping themselves off so often lately that our readers think they're reading Official Detective half the time." Of course Letters from the Editor lets us in on far more than The New Yorker, but it is Ross's missives and memos to his staff and contributors--and several more than acrimonious shots at his publisher and advertising department--that are most intriguing. Here was an editor who was concerned with every level of the magazine: he kept a card catalog with story ideas but was equally obsessed with language, commas, typos, and even the vexed question of large or small capital letters. In this sense, Kunkel's collection is a sublime record of a lost era. Ross was a lucky visionary, after all, who never concerned himself with target audiences, focus groups, or user testing. By his own lights, he and his colleagues were not "'aware' of our readers. It's the other way around with me. All I know about getting out a magazine is to print what you think is good ... and let nature take its course: if enough readers think as you do, you're a success, if not you're a failure. I don't think it's possible to edit a magazine by 'doping out' your audience, and would never try to do that." Hmmm, could Harold Ross have something there? --Kerry Fried

Worth reading--because Ross is worth reading:
Most of the text is Ross's; this is what makes the book worth 4 stars. Some of the explanatory comments are pretty clumsy: "Married to Fleischmann's ex-wife, Ruth, a major New Yorker stockholder, Vischer played a strong behind-the-scenes role at the magazine and was trying to keep Ross from quitting." (p. 271) Would a sentence like that have ever made the pages of the New Yorker? I can't comment on the selection of letters with any authority, but it's at least adequate: Truman Capote progresses from someone who, in September 1944, "wouldn't have been employed here \oeven\c as \oan office boy\c probably, if it hadn't been for the man- and boy-power shortage" (Capote had insulted Robert Frost by walking out on poetry reading) to somone whose stories Ross would like to see more of, if they "aren't too psychopathic" in July 1949.

Here's to literacy:
Ross's legendary gruffness and expansive curiosity are revealed in this wonderful book. Kunkel's superb biography of Ross, "Genius in disguise," deserved this follow-up, in which the subject speaks for himself. He is as lively a letter-writer as ever lived, making one wish that email weren't the washed out modern excuse for correspondence that it so often is. Read it; then go and read the old New Yorkers on microfilm at the university library. Sensational.

An Entertaining Literary Anthology, Laugh Out Loud Funny:
Even more than Kunkel's brilliant biography "Genius in Disguise," this book offers special insights into "New Yorker" founder and editor Harold Ross, not only a seminal figure in American letters but a sardonic wit reminiscent of H.L. Mencken, one of the people with whom he frequently exchanged letters. (Indeed, the sweep of his correspondence, from "New Yorker" stalwarts like E.B. White and his wife Katherine to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber all the way to John O'Hara, Harpo Marx, various state governors and other polticos, President Truman, and Premier Nehru, is impressive in itself.) While in many of these letters, Ross comes across as that curmudgeon one might expect, there is a touch of tender concern in others that shows you that some of the gruffness was merely a pose--as is his stance as the long-suffering, embattled editor who says he would rather be doing anything else, but who clearly shows he is having the time of his life. The book may be a bit abstruse in places for those who do not know the history of the "New Yorker" during the Ross editorship, but there seems to be enough comedy throughout to maintain even a casual reader's interest. Anyone who has enjoyed "Genius in Disguise" will surely love this book. I guess the greatest complement I can offer is now that I've read Kunkel's two Ross portrayals, I can't wait for his next book.

Am loving every page of this book:
I've long been a fan of The New Yorker altho the drawings and not the too lengthy articles are my favorites now. Have read most of the books about working at the magazine, but this is the best. Harold Ross had such a way with words. I particularly liked the letter of sympathy to E.B. White (page 97) upon death of White's father: "...after you get to be thirty people you know keep dropping off all the time and it's a hell of a note." And about Christmas: "...it always comes at the very worse moment in the year for me." Here is truly a genius at work. I thought it was ironic also that although he said don't waste time writing letters as you don't get paid for them, he wrote them so well. It is also interesting that the editor of this book finally found some recordings that Ross made and he was dictating letters! I recommend this book for anyone who enjoys The New Yorker and would like to know how it developed over the years.

Alive in His Letters:
These letters were my companion as I read "Genius in Disguise", Kunkel's wonderful biography of Harold Ross. The biography tells the story of Ross and his founding and development of The New Yorker. These letters bring Ross to life and convey the personality that spotted and nurtured the talent that made the magazine great. Here's a quick letter to John Cheever in 1947, which gives a little flavor of the man: "Dear Cheever: I've just read "The Enormous Radio," having gone away for a spell and got behind, and I send my respects and admiration. The piece is worth coming back to work for. It will turn out to be a memorable one, or I am a fish. Very wonderful, indeed." As ever, Ross