Re: 30 page 1960 essay on harold ross: lost

On Thu, Nov 06, 2003 at 06:55:13PM -0000, Scottie Bowman wrote:
 
> Do I detect a certain sniffiness about Thurber & his book
> 'The Years with Ross'?

I don't think so -- certainly not in what I wrote. I said that the
various editions of letters have been strangely uneven, but The Years
with Ross is (for me) charming.

Now, it is a fact that E.B. White and his wife Katherine both disliked
the book -- they felt that it portrayed Ross as too much of a hayseed
and an accidental success, while simultaneously buffing Thurber's
image. And we now know from various biographies that the Thurber of
1950-51, when the Ross book appeared, was in his most miserable,
misogynistic, and vicious period.

I, not having been on the NYer staff in the mid-1920s (I worked for
Mencken at the time, until just before the war), don't have the
perspective the Whites had, so I can't say whether their view had
merit. Other NYer people who were there in those early days had
similar reactions to the Thurber book, so perhaps it struck a
nerve for some people.

But I feel that it's a memorable portrait of a complex man. In a
certain contrast, the big Ross bio from several years ago DOES show
that Ross was a bumpkin, albeit a shrewd and canny and BRILLIANT
bumpkin who had unerring instincts.

I have always been charmed by Ross's fixation with Fowler's MODERN
ENGLISH USAGE (and his idiosyncratic use of punctuation and of
finicky spelling), and can never touch my copy of Fowler's without
feeling that Ross is approvingly watching over my shoulder.

> My memory is of a most marvellous
> & affectionate tribute from an undoubted comic genius to one
> who did, indeed, sound like a 'good, quick, intuitive, child-like
> man.'

Yes, exactly. Mine too.

> And I hope Salinger's unpublished 30 page defence
> was in response to something other than the Thurber book.

It was: As I recall, it was written in response to a long piece by
Tom Wolfe (him of the white suits, not of Look Homeward, Angel) in
about 1965, in the New York Herald-Tribune's Sunday supplement. It
was a scathing, acidic portrait of the NYer magazine and culture and
of William Shawn. The first part was called "Tiny Mummies! The
True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!"
and it was followed by a second installation, called "Lost in the
Whichy Thicket" -- and it caused many people (Salinger, E.B. White,
many others) to rise up in indignation.

One of the ironies of the episode is that Shawn -- who we all know to
have been a militant supporter of the freedom to publish without prior
restraint from publishers, advertisers, politicians, or anyone else
apart from the editorial staff -- made a personal appeal to Jock
Whitney, owner of the newspaper that was to run it, asking him to
personally intercede and kill the thing. Shawn somehow felt that it was
distasteful to shine a harsh light on his magazine and his way of doing
business.

It's an amusing pair of articles. They were legendary but unavailable
anywhere except on microfilm, until early- to mid-2000, when Wolfe
allowed them to be reprinted in a paperback volume.

Keep in mind that the rejection of Salinger's essay was not so
remarkable then as it would have been if it happened any time after
1970. In 1965, he was still a "publishing" writer, so while a
submission from him would have presumably been of interest, it wouldn't
carry the weight such an essay would have today, when there would be a
media feeding frenzy.

> Otherwise, I shall be reminded of Ernie's threat - when promised
> that sprinkling the minced remains of Thomas Stearns Eliot over
> Conrad's grave would ensure the resurrection of the great Pole.
> 'I'm leaving for Cornish tonight,' I'd be inclined to say, in
> emulation of my Master, 'with my trusty grinder.'

Well, it all depends on who you want to resurrect.

If it's Conrad, I'd have a hard time agreeing with any sense of gusto;
if it's Hemingway, well, sure, I'd love to see the Hemingway of the
1920s back in action, but I don't think I could afford to pay the bar
tab of the 1950s Hemingway if that were part of the deal with the
devil....

--tim

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Received on Thu Nov 6 16:27:57 2003