A Surprisingly Witty Book

I've been very lucky in my reading recently. When I read Rob Bell's book "Love Wins," I remember saying "Every Christian should read this book." But when I read his new book "Everything is Spiritual" a week or two ago, I said, "Every human being should read this book." That was followed by adventures in Sophocles and Aeschylus (the Oedipus and Orestes cycles, respectively) and "Utopia for Realists" - another top notch book. I'm re-reading my friend John Mackie's "Conscious Leadership" now, which may be the best leadership book ever, as well as dipping back into his earlier tome, "Conscious Capitalism" which could help business save the world, believe it or not. But more on those later.

Last night, I wanted something at least slightly funny. There are few guffaws in Sophocles. So my muse made me get up off the bed where I'd been watching David Attenborough's magnificent hour-plus show "My life on the Planet" which may be the most powerful ecological film ever made, and the silent beckoning muse then led me into the family room where there's a bookcase containing lots of old 1940s and 50s books by the likes of James Thurber. I picked up one I'd never read: "The Years with Ross" which is about the start of The New Yorker Magazine in about 1925 and the years following when the formerly out of work and dirt poor Thurber finally got a job with its distinctive founding editor Harold Ross. Almost as soon as I started reading, I began laughing. Again and again, my tummy was bouncing in mirth, as my wife beside me was quietly reading a second recent Zola novel about terrible things, so I kept the mirth to myself.

Maybe I have a strange sense of humor, but reading about this tough yet secretly tender editor tickled me over and over. Thurber describes his heart of gold as disguised by a narling gruffness. When a top staff writer got hired by Hollywood and was having his going away party in the offices, Ross poked his head in and with total sincerity, and in a way that expressed all of his complex character at once, he said: "Well, God bless you, McNulty, goddam it." (Thurber's less offensive spellings maintain propriety throughout.)

And even in passages that aren't funny, the characters in the book are fascinating. The always put upon Ross had certain phrases he'd say over and over, like "God, how I pity me!" and "Done and done!" and "You have me there!" and "Get it on paper!" and, my favorite variation on a theme, from Thurber's initial interview for a job there: "Writers are a dime a dozen, Thurber. What I want is an editor. I can't find editors. Nobody grows up. Do you know English?" The first of the repeated rant was often followed by "Nobody has any self-discipline, nobody gets anything done. Nobody knows how to delegate anything."

As to how his job interview ended up, Thurber writes that he was hired as an editor, though he didn't want to be one, and we get this scene: <<"Done and done, Thurber, " said Ross. "I'll give you seventy dollars a week. If you write anything, goddam it, your salary will take care of it." Later that afternoon he phoned my apartment and said, "I've decided to make that ninety dollars a week, Thurber." When my first check came through it was for one hundred dollars.>>

Ross seems like the quintessential pessimist who nonetheless struggles with the universe daily to get things done. I love the insight of this sentence: <<He was in one of his worst God-how-I-pity-me moods, a state of mind often made up of monumentally magnified trivialities.>> And Ross the put upon is really well captured in this paragraph:

<<In his new position of his responsibility he soon developed the notion, as Marc Connelly has put it, that the world was designed to wear him down. A dozen years ago I found myself almost unconsciously making a Harold Ross out of one King Clode, a rugged pessimist in a fairy tale I was writing. At one point the palace astronomer rushed into the royal presence saying, "A huge pink comet, Sire, just barely missed the earth a little while ago. It made an awful hissing sound, like hot irons stuck in water." "They aim these things at me!" said Clode. "Everything is aimed at me.">> (10)

Ross reported hated what he considered the massively overused words 'little' and 'pretty' - and especially in phrases like 'a little tired' or 'a little irritated' or 'pretty exhausted' and 'pretty amazing." - "There's that goddam 'pretty' again," Ross would howl. So, somehow Thurber managed to put into a prominent spot in the magazine the magnificently wonderful send-up sentence to maximally irritate his boss:

"The building is pretty ugly and a little big for its surroundings."

The linguistic brilliance of "pretty ugly" and "a little big" just leaves me needing more air.

But even as I sing the praises of this book which I'm only 40 pages into at this point, I recall the low opinion Ross himself had of the advice and help of what he often called the "wits" around him: "The part-time help of wits is no better than the full-time help of half-wits." So I'll be quiet now and retire back into the pages.

For The Years with Ross, click HERE.