Letters from the Editor (Modern Library) Book

"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 FriedRead More