Thomas Vinciguerra - Cast of Characters: Wolcott Gibbs, E. B. White, James Thurber, and the Golden Age of the New Yorker

Copyright 2016 by Thomas Vinciguerra

All rights reserved

First Edition

Since this page cannot legibly accommodate all the copyright notices, pages
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J ACKET A RT C REDITS

Clockwise from top left: (E. B. White) Drawing by A. Birnbaum / Granger,
NYCAll rights reserved; (Wolcott Gibbs) Photo by Leonard Mccombe /
The LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images; (James Thurber) Illustration by
Ronald Searle / Time Life Pictures / Mansell / The LIFE Picture Collection /
Getty Images; (Katharine Sergeant Angell White) White Literary LLC; (Robert
Charles Benchley) William Auerbach-Levy / National Portrait Gallery,
Smithsonian Institution / Art Resource, NY; (Harold Ross) Photo by Cornell
Capa / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images.

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EDITED BY THOMAS VINCIGUERRA

Conversations with Elie Wiesel

Backward Ran Sentences:
The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker

For Robert Collins Christopher and Judith Crist

CONTENTS

A cat may look at a king, I m told,

So perhaps a poet may make so bold

As to send a greeting, on Evergreen,

To the staff of her favorite magazine

And hearty as bells in a country steeple

Say Glad Noel to the following people:

To Mr. Ross whom of course I m able

To feature only as myth, as fable,

As an awesome figure I ll never see,

An editorial deity;

To Mr. Gibbs who with consternation

Surveys my various punctuation;

To Mr. Mosher whom I have yet to

Pay a cherished and certain debt to,

Since he was the first to assure me, sighing,

I might write verse if I kept on trying;

To E. B. White who was one time haughty

Because I envied the Literati,

And would have kept me, I greatly fear,

With Ivanhoe and the Young Idear;

To Mr. Thurber, another myth

But one I m better acquainted with;

And of course to the Lady of my Delight,

The small, superlative Mrs. White.

To them and anyone else I ve missed

From a somewhat extemporaneous list,

I send my greetings (as note above)

And my ardent, but perfectly proper, love.

May the New Year bring you a lot of things,

Like pictures funny as Little Kings,

And writers writing hilarious stories

And scribes acquainted with Gotham mores,

For Talk of the Town a thousand thoughts

And never a one about Clever Tots,

(And not too many about their mammas);

Light verse poets who know their commas,

Millions and millions of new subscribers,

A host a fans and a dearth of gibers,

No libel actions with which to cope,

Printers infallible as the Pope;

And for Shouts and Murmurs (oh precious store)

One joke that s never been heard before.

Ladies, gentlemen, all the staff,

Of my Christmas wishes that s only half.

For you all blessings and none sent thinly

Is the holiday hope of

PHYLLIS McGINLEY (SIGNED)
(1934)

CAST OF CHARACTERS

EITHER COMPETENT
OR HORRIBLE

T he tensions of the summer of 1958 were in many ways typical of the ostensible peace that had followed the worst war in human history. In July a bloody coup killed the king, crown prince, and premier of Iraqs pro-Western government, prompting the United States to send troops to Lebanon and Great Britain to do the same in Jordan. Hungary executed its former premier, Imre Nagy, two years after he had been kidnapped during the 1956 revolution. In Cuba, Fidel Castro continued to make inroads against the military government of Fulgencio Batista; within a few months, he would triumph completely and establish the first Communist foothold in the Americas. The space race was well under way, with Sputnik 3 and Explorer 1 whirling about just beyond the atmosphere, raising the terrifying specter of orbiting H-bombs.

If there was refuge from these and myriad other concerns, foreign and domestic, it could be found on Fire Island. Local vacationers had tentatively established the first permanent communities on this narrow, fragile barrier beach just south of Long Island in the late 1800s. Now the rhythms of the place were as reliable as the calendar. For nine months of the year, Fire Island was home to a mere handful of hardy souls. During the winter, they might subsist only on fish and potatoes; periodically they were cut off from the rest of the world by the ice that would choke the waters of the Great South Bay. But from Memorial Day to Labor Day, the population swelled to thousands of summer people in search of respite from hot apartments, torpor, and for the men anyway, their workaday routine. For those with money and inclination, it was a temporary semblance of heaven on earth. One writer would rhapsodize,

I guess I really like it here better than any place in the world, he thought, and for the moment his delight in Fire Island, in this one place where life could be slowed to the almost forgotten tempo of childhood, seemed as much as he could bear. The distance from New York, by train and boat, was only fifty terrestrial miles, but in spirit it was enormous. You ate and slept in the dark, untidy little houses that lay along the dunes between the sea and the bay, but most of your life was spent on the loveliest beach in the East, a narrow, sunny shelf that ran thirty miles along the Atlantic, from Babylon to Quogue, and here you just lay in the sun, and all the staggering complexity of your relations with others, the endless, hopeless bookkeeping of your personal morality with too many people, could be put aside for a little while. It was a state of wonderful irresponsibility, a time in which you belonged to nobody but yourself, on which there were no immediate claims from the world.

The author of this deeply felt passage, Oliver Wolcott Gibbs, was at first glance hardly the rusticating type. Most of his professional life had been spent on the staff of The New Yorker, which for much of the literate reading public was the last word in smart, urbane journalism. Founded by Harold Ross thirty-three years before, the weekly magazine, filled with rollicking prose and humorous drawings, quickly came to epitomize cynical, bustling Manhattan. Its writers, artists, and editors had thumbed their noses at Prohibition and roared their way through the last half of the 1920s. Then the existential challenges of the Depression, World War II, and ultimately the Cold War deepened and broadened the magazines outlook. As worldly as Fire Island was sleepy, The New Yorker was now a national and international forum for masterful fiction, factual reporting, penetrating poetry, and astute criticism. Its contributors were university professors and Pulitzer Prize winners, their work setting ever-higher standards for American letters.