Literate Zeal: Gender and the Making of a New Yorker Ethos

Two: “The Precision of Knives,” or More than Just Commas

73 two “the precision of knives,” or more than just commas Ross had done [Capote] a favor, an unintentional kindness, in firing him. Indeed, if the reverse had happened, if by some bureaucratic aberration he had been made a writer at The New Yorker, the result might well have been disastrous for both his writing and his career. He was only just beginning to find his true voice, his distinctive style as a writer, and if he had stayed and moved up, he might have been tempted, perhaps without even knowing it, to trim his increasingly luxuriant prose to a more muted, understated pattern favored by the magazine. Such a mutation , a kind of protective coloration, had been the fate of other spirited young talents, certainly, at The New Yorker and elsewhere. Gerald Clarke, Capote In 1925, when Ross started the magazine, Jane Grant delineated the New Yorker’s competition, stating its intentions to vie for market share with periodicals like Harper’s Weekly, Life, the Smart Set, and American Mercury.1 By the 1940s, that market, at least in terms of literary contributions, had expanded, with stiff competition from middlebrow magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Collier ’s, and from women’s magazines like Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. Harold Ross believed that careful editing, including new, heightened levels of fact checking, was one way for the New Yorker to distance itself from the pack. In his Genius in Disguise, Thomas Kunkel documents Ross’s obsession with discovering the perfect , efficient system to handle manuscripts, an impulse that resulted in the “magazine’s aggressive approach to grammar and “The Precision of Knives,” or More Than Just Commas 74 punctuation” (259). Editors at the New Yorker, Kunkel explains, “took their cues ... from a man who could hold forth for hours on the application of the serial comma” (259). While Ross’s affection for Fowler’s Modern English Usage is legendary, he was willing to depart from it when a rule seemed to defy fact or obscure a realistic portrait. It was a quirk James Thurber had some fun with. “A British professor once asked Thurber why New Yorker editors placed a comma in the sentence, ‘After dinner, the men went into the living room.’” Thurber was quick with an explanation, “this particular comma was Ross’s way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up” (qtd. in Kunkel 259). From the beginning—perhaps because of Ross’s background as a military journalist and his exacting temperament—the New Yorker promoted rigorous editorial standards, with factual accuracy occupying the top of the blue-pencil hierarchy. This commitment to journalistic and particular (some might say “fussy”) grammatical principles, rather than to literary license, both furthered and hindered the magazine’s reputation for belles-lettres. Fifteen years after the New Yorker’s founding, critics began to complain that the magazine’s editorial rigor discouraged promising writers from submitting their work and, more damning still, that the demanding journalistic standards resulted in inferior literature. Authors with real genius, the critics insisted, were taking their work to magazines that allowed creative license, even to the women’s magazines Mademoiselle and Harper’s Bazaar. New Yorker editors struggled with this criticism, as evidenced by this snippet from a six-page memo from Katharine White to Harold Ross: “[Diarmuid] Russell keeps saying that Harper’s Bazaar fiction is better than ours because there is more stylistic individuality allowed in it and more experiment. Harper’s Bazaar and Town and Country do not, I believe, edit at all. I do not agree with Russell and I don’t suggest no editing, for heaven’s sake—just more casualness and less fanaticism on it.”2 This counternarrative is one that surfaces with some consistency . It raises a provocative question: was the New Yorker, as a re- “The Precision of Knives,” or More Than Just Commas 75 sult of its aggressive editorial practices, being eclipsed by other magazines, by women’s magazines that attracted unrestrained genius and thus published higher quality fiction? This question became dramatically public in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. To fully appreciate this drama, we must remember that the New Yorker was not then the magazine we know it as today, a point underscored in the previous chapter and explored further here. In the early 1940s, the New Yorker had not ossified into a wellrecognized , literary powerhouse...