Lovable Old Volcano

"It's twenty-five years . . . since The New Yorker set up in business," said a small passage in The New. Yorker's Talk of the Town last week, "and things have changed either greatly or not at all . . ." Thus, with the elaborate casualness that is as much its trademark as the elegant Eustace Tilley who annually adorns its cover, did The New Yorkernote its 25th birthday.

Old New Yorker readers who scanned the anniversary issue might get a deceptive sense that things have changed not at all: with a sentimentality that he would loudly scorn, Editor Harold Ross had rounded up contributions from such time-honored New Yorker favorites as E. B. White, James Thurber, Ogden Nash, John McNulty, Peter Arno, Gluyas Williams and the late Helen Hokinson. Readers with a long memory could even pick up the fourth part of a "profile"* of the late Playwright Wilson Mizner where Alva Johnston left off eight years ago.

In its first issue, The New Yorker promised "to be gay, humorous, satirical, but to be more than a jester . . ." It also announced firmly that it was not intended "for the old lady in Dubuque." More than a jester, today's New Yorker eyes far wider horizons than Manhattan's skylines. It travels with its "farflung correspondents" all the way from Third Avenue's saloons to Hiroshima, considers life and letters, as well as laughter, its province. Two-thirds of its 325,000 circulation is outside New York; it has 69 subscribers in Dubuque. Harold Ross, founder, editor and principal curmudgeon, is still head man in what is far from a one-man show. Like the literate, civilized, incisive and frequently funny magazine he edits, Ross himself has changed greatly in some ways, in essence not at all.

Charmingly Churlish. At 32, Colorado-born Harold Ross was an ex-itinerant newspaperman and ex-editor of the A.E.F.'s Stars and Stripes, a rumpled, rawboned man with electric hair. (Dorothy Parker cracked that her life ambition was to walk barefoot through it.) At 57, Ross can afford a good tailor ("I'm a well-dressed man!" he indignantly insists) and curbs his hair, but he has somehow managed to retain the air of permanent dishevelment. Once ex-New Yorker Writer Margaret Case Harriman called Ross "that lovable old volcano," and the late Alexander Woollcott described him as "Dodsworth, with an overlay of violence." Ross is still personally noisy and professionally restrained, still charmingly churlish and intelligently ignorant, but his reputation for irascibility exceeds his performance.

Ross has denned editing as "quarreling with writers--same thing exactly." His cardinal literary virtue is clarity; he has a better eye for meaning and sense than an ear for sound. Confronted with the avantgarde, the experimental and the merely obscure, Ross remarks that if he doesn't understand something, he won't print it. To help the writer "say what he is trying to say," Ross reads almost every word that goes into The New Yorker (in manuscript or proof), then types querulous, sometimes foot-long footnotes.

Often the Ross notes involve minute points of grammar, punctuation and style; a self-taught precisionist who abandoned high school, he keeps his Fowler's Modern English Usage well thumbed. (Of one syntactical sin, Ross noted: "White writes as if he has two or more gall bladders. I suspect only one.") Frequently the notes display a real or feigned ignorance ("Who he?", "What's that?"); they also dip into an astonishing fund of information ranging from eunuchs to eels, from trout-fishing to poker.

Spit in the Ocean. Ross banged out one such memorandum after reading a short-story manuscript about a World War II poker game. Wrote ex-Private (World War I) Ross: "I was amazed and alarmed . . . These men, these officers . . . these leaders of our soldier boys, are not playing poker at all. They are playing a bastard form of poker invented for women and children and defectives. It is a horror called Spit in the Ocean, I believe, and other things, some of them vile. It is impossible for me to believe that any officers of our army . . . would be seen dead in any such game ... As for me, I begin to see a great light on the question of why it is taking so long to win this war ..." But after three pages and 15 numbered objections to the author's imprecise descriptions of "this monstrous, one-pack, chipless, tinhorn game," Editor Ross concluded: "This is a very good story . . ."

The Ross notes are quick challenges to his editors,* to be acted on or not as they see fit; most New Yorker writers do not get the charge of Ross birdshot full in the face. Ross's unflagging concern for the right word, the apt phrase and the exact image has long been a stimulating and sometimes maddening goad to New Yorker writers. It has also given The New Yorker its reputation as one of the most ably edited magazines in U.S. journalism. Explains E. B. White: "Ross understands, but does not overestimate, the artistic temperament and the creative mind. A writer (if he is any good) feels . . . that he has just passed a miracle or masterpiece. Ross, on the other hand, when he receives this opus suspects that what he holds in his hand is just another bundle of ambiguities. Both are right."

*The New Yorker has a copyright on this name for its exhaustive and occasionally exhausting biographies. The latest Webster's includes the usage without paying tribute. -The top brass: William Shawn, 42, editor of "fact" (profiles, foreign correspondence, books, Talk of the Town, etc.); Gus Lobrano, 47, editor of fiction; James Geraghty, 44, art editor. Katharine S. White, E. B.'s wife and a 24-year veteran, still helps edit fiction, is still an arbiter of taste.

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