Nah ... Nah ... Nah

Harold Ross has a highly combustible disposition, a scornful disdain of public relations, an unfailing nose for what he dislikes and a sure eye for what he wants: the easy, lounging air that the New Yorker affects. Last week, a former employee named Russell Maloney tried to reconcile the shock-haired man with his brilliantined product. Maloney worked for Ross for eleven years and resigned at last because he "felt rather middle-aged and pooped."

"Unfortunately," Maloney lamented in his Saturday Review of Literature profile of the New Yorker, "it is a story which nobody is able to tell. No man . . . has been the subject of so much analysis, interpretation, and explanation, with so little concrete result. For more than 21 years he has belched and wrangled and improvised and compromised and given his subscribers a magazine every seven days. He still works hard; except for a few sports columns and foreign newsletters which come in over the weekend, he works on every bit of copy that goes into the magazine.

"He stalks through the dirty corridors of his editorial domain, gaunt, gap-toothed, his black hair tousled and his mouth agape like that of a man who has just established contact with a bad oyster, watching the next issue grow and arguing minute points of fact, taste, punctuation, or policy.

"It is not unusual for a writer to work in the New Yorker offices for several years without once meeting his editor. The elevator men have strict instructions not to greet him by name, lest he be accosted by some tactless writer or artist in the same car. ... He has relatively few friends and a number of enemies of whom he is, on the whole, rather proud. 'A journalist can't afford to have friends,' he is fond of saying."

What makes an editorial job on the weekly so desperate, said Maloney, is "the glum fact of the New Yorker's perfection; because perfection, in the mind of Harold Ross, is not a goal or an ideal, but something that belongs to him, like his watch or his hat." In 22 years, this has enormously complicated the once casual synthesis of the magazine: "Ross is no longer content with a profile; he requests also a family history, bank reference, social security number, urinalysis, catalogue of household possessions, names of all living relatives, business connections, political affiliations, as well as a profile."

Along the way, Maloney sketches a few remembered glimpses of Ross at work. At the "art meeting" where the New Yorker's famed cartoons are bought, there is a pad, pencil, ashtray and knitting needle at each place--the last "for pointing at faulty details in pictures. Ross rejects pictures firmly and rapidly, perhaps one every ten seconds. 'Nah . . . nah . . . nah.' . . . Now and then Ross gets lost in the intricacies of perspective. 'Where am / supposed to be?' he will unhappily inquire. ... If nobody can say exactly where Ross is supposed to be, out the picture goes."

Maloney's , "most significant single fact": at the present time, "none of the New Yorker people except Ross has an ulcer."

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