Wolcott Gibbs is practically unknown today, except to that small and no doubt dwindling band who know a great deal about the early days of the New Yorker. Founder/editor Harold Ross once told James Thurber “There wasn’t anything the three of you [Gibbs, Thurber, and E.B. White] couldn’t do. You could have got the magazine out without any other help if your private lives weren’t so damn tangled up.” Unfortunately for Gibbs, he wasn’t a comic genius like Thurber, nor did he write cute little stories about talking mice, pigs, and spiders like E.B. White.
Gibbs was a phenomenal editor and rewrite man—virtually a second self for Ross in these areas—but he also wrote parodies, short stories, film and theatre reviews, profiles, and just about anything else that Ross threw at him.[1] In his fascinating memoir, The Years With Ross, James Thurber reprints a list of rules that Gibbs wrote, very tongue in cheek, but very funny and also very good advice, for anyone so temerarious as to place a piece of prose before that logomachistic maniac known as Harold Ross. (I’m going to go way out on a limb and reprint them all here. Good luck with those submissions!)
I recently rediscovered Gibbs in a very fat book called This Is My Best, published in 1945, which contains poetry and prose from 93 prominent writers of the time—everyone from William Faulkner and Robert Frost to Irwin Edman.[2] Gibbs is represented by “The Customer Is Always Wrong,” a profile he wrote sometime in the late thirties of once-legendary, now-forgotten Broadway press agent Dick Maney, a piece that bewildered me when I first read more than fifty years ago, in another fat book, The Subtreasury of American Humor.[3] What intrigues me now is that “The Customer Is Always Wrong” violates virtually every rule Gibbs sets forth in the list that Thurber reprinted. (To prove it, I’m reprinting it in full as well, here.)
First of all, the piece is far too long. Second, it’s cloyingly overwritten. Third, and worst of all, it’s not even journalism, but rather a favor written for a friend, a puff piece on an influential Broadway player who was in a position to do an influential drama critic like Gibbs any number of favors and undoubtedly did do them—free drinks, free meals, free tickets,[4] introductions to young actresses[5]—all the grist of Broadway’s scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours mill—all the things the New Yorker was supposed to be against and above.
Both E. B. White and Wolcott Gibbs were highly principled men, men who believed, passionately, that honest writing led to honest thinking, which, one could at least hope, would lead to honest actions. It’s remarkable that these two men together helped create a writing style that was both patronizing and manipulative, one that was remarkably given to fastidious rococo excess and yet always retained a whiff of baby talk.[6]
In part, the problem was Ross’s own obsession with casualness—the “casuals” in the front of the book that set the tone for the magazine had to be like “dinner conversation.” But it was also an obsession with writing itself, that White and Gibbs shared, and probably believed in even more than Ross, that good writing on its own led to truth, that if you wrote well enough the truth would emerge of its own accord, a sort of virgin birth.
This emphasis on writing apart from any actual subject—strongly encouraged by Ross’s dislike of anything controversial, “intellectual,” or preachy—quickly led to an obsession with style as an end in itself, and the development of a style that could be applied to any subject, like icing to a cake, with no alteration in tone. And thus two very serious men—White’s idol was clearly Henry David Thoreau—came to have a devotion to style that had a flavor of “Yellow Book” decadence, though they were decadent in style only, and not in substance.[7]
It’s interesting to compare “The Customer Is Always Wrong” with James Thurber’s own “best,” “The Night the Ghost Got In.”[8] While Gibbs’ puff piece on a marginally interesting Broadway playa rambles and stumbles for sixteen pages, Thurber is in and out in five, and really less, because two good-sized illustrations claim at least half a page.[9]
Gibbs make no attempt at all to tell us what a press agent really does, or why Maney is able to snag the best shows and get the best clients. Despite all his pretended cynicism—and, in fact, some of Gibbs’ cynicism was real—he has no desire to pop the great balloon of Broadway. Sure, it’s all nonsense—it doesn’t mean anything and it doesn’t do anything—but it is exciting. The girls are young and pretty, the limos are long and gleaming, and the champagne is cold. Maybe you’ve seen it all before but, hey, you don’t want to go back to Paducah, do you? Because if Broadway isn’t the center of the world, well, what is?
But there’s yet another layer to Gibb’s profile about Maney, which probably explains why Gibbs chose it as his “best.” In writing about Maney, Gibbs was writing about himself, about a confused young man who came to New York and found it a place like nowhere else, a place where all those tedious, nagging quotidian details of life—housing, clothing, food, transportation, and the like—could be taken care of by someone else, where a man could be free to focus on doing what he liked and nothing else, if only he had the cash.[10]
That was the rub, of course. A man could not simply write, not unless he was willing, for a time at least, to cook his own meals and wash his own dishes, and perhaps even live in New Jersey, which was scarcely the point. To live in Manhattan, a man had to write for a purpose, frequently a very mundane purpose, determined for him by someone else. It was all a game, and not as special as it looked to outsiders, but if you knew it was only a game, then you could hold onto some dignity. You might not be an author—a real author— but you weren’t a schnook either.
Afterwords
It may or may not be surprising to learn that the New Yorker is still running profiles about charming, talented folks who make a great deal of money—far more than you—and yet don’t take their success all that seriously. A recent profile of Alec Baldwin put it this way: “His performance [in “30 Rock”] has been widely recognized: last year, he won a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild Award, and was nominated for an Emmy. This year, he received the same three nominations: he won the SAG Award, and on September 21st he will learn if he has won an Emmy. Although ratings for “30 Rock” have been modest, the show has been celebrated by critics. To all of this, Baldwin’s response has largely been: Where did everything go wrong?”
If you search hard you can probably find More in Sorrow, a collection of Gibbs’ pieces that was published in the late Fifties. Most of what is inside is only of antiquarian interest—Gibbs’ once-famous parody of Time Magazine from the late Thirties, for example—for who reads Time, and, even more, who remembers the once-famously irritating “Timestyle” that Gibbs’ parody single-handedly destroyed? Gibbs’ few film reviews show an almost adolescent sarcasm that is not at all impressive, but two drama reviews, of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger and a dramatic adaptation of Long Homeward Angel, aren’t bad at all.
The BBC website, apparently intended to be the thinking man’s Wikipedia, or some such, has a nice little bio on Gibbs here. Surprisingly (at least I was surprised), Thomas Vinciguerra has a bio of Gibbs in the works, and a preview recently appeared in the Weekly Standard here.
[1]Gibbs composed in the most New Yorkerish of manners, pacing up and down a hallway with a cigarette burning in an ashtray at either end.
[2] Edman was a professor of philosophy at Columbia who wrote popular articles for the New Yorker, Harpers, and similar magazines. He is represented by “M. Platon,” a smug, New Yorkerish piece describing an encounter with a rural French doctor, who condescends endlessly to Edman for suffering the greatest of all infirmities—the burden of not having been born French. Alas, M. Platon! You condescended to the wrong man!
[3] The Subtreasury, edited by E.B. and Katherine White, was a compendium of American humor from about 1880 through 1940. I think I read the whole damn thing, even though large chunks of it were completely unfunny.
[4] Tickets, please? In Letters from the Editor, a collection of Harold Ross’s letters, there’s a steaming letter from Ross to Raoul Fleischmann, who financed the New Yorker, telling him in no uncertain terms not to use New Yorker staff in attempts to score free tickets. According to Ross, New Yorker staff never take free tickets. Which is interesting when you look at another letter written by Ross, asking Howard Dietz for a season ticket for his mother to the Paradise Theatre in the Bronx: “I am willing to pay for it.” Big of you, Harold! In another letter, to playwright Charles MacArthur, Ross compliments him on the success of his new play The Twentieth Century, saying that he’s seen it twice, once with a ticket that he paid for himself and once on a freebie from, that’s right, Dick Maney. As a further twist, MacArthur’s play contains a character based on Maney. (In the film version, which stars John Barrymore and Carol Lombard, Maney’s character is played by Roscoe Kearns. Sadly, despite the high-powered cast, the film, which takes place on the once-legendary Twentieth-Century Limited, a luxury train that ran from New York to Chicago, rather than a bus, won’t make you forget It Happened One Night).
[5] The company of young actresses, in Sardi’s and Twenty-One if not in bed, was one of the perks of success in New York back in the day. Thurber says that Ross knew every actress of his generation and tells that Ross, at 58, was horrified when he inadvertently discovered that twenty-something women considered fifty-something men to be, you know, yucky. Thurber, at 56, wasn’t too happy with the news either. Chicks! They can be so cruel!
[6] Ross himself, the endlessly profane, tough-talking newspaperman, had a curious affinity for the coy and precious. Thurber records an instance when he and White and Ross were agonizing over a wonderful anecdote that was most unfortunately set in Philadelphia. Thurber (as Thurber tells it) brilliantly resolved matters by coming up with the line “A rider recently arrived from Philadelphia informs us ….” Apparently, “Just south of us, in Philadelphia …” wouldn’t work.
[7] Thurber at least was a great admirer of Henry James. I don’t know if White or Gibbs read him, while Ross never got through Tom Sawyer. The great high-brow triumvirate of the Twenties—Eliot, Pound, and Joyce—surely had no direct impact, though Katherine White, the New Yorker’s fiction editor, to whom Ross would defer, particularly on poetry, must have read them, if only to keep up.
[8] White is represented by “Quo Vadimus?”, a very cutesy, self-referential tale that was surely not his best.
[9] The first, illustrating a line about Thurber’s brother Herman—“he was always half afraid that something would ‘get him’ in the night”—and showing a gleefully malicious something “getting” poor Herman, is particularly fine.
[10] When Thurber divorced his first wife, he lived in a hotel. Every morning he would put on a white shirt, and every evening he would throw it on the floor of his closet. When he ran out of white shirts, he would have a bell boy buy him a dozen more. When there were so many white shirts on the floor of his closet that he could no longer close the door, he would move to another room.
