Profile of a great editor: Harold Ross and The New Yorker

The Years with Ross: A Classic Memoir of The New Yorker's Unforgettable Founder and Golden Era by James Thurber

James Thurber's memoir of Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker, is fascinating for the author's evident affection for Ross despite his unreasonable, dictatorial, often ignorant and always infuriatingly detailed comments on his writers' work. Together with his inability to deal with what he considered awkward personal situations - such as the unexpected presence of a woman in his office - he seemed ill-suited for a role that required constant dealings with sensitive people.

Despite all that, Thurber paints a picture of Ross as a man who won the loyalty of his colleagues because his heart was in the right place - in his commitment to excellence in his magazine, his many untrumpeted kindnesses and even for his weaknesses, for gambling and in putting his trust in the wrong colleagues, sometimes with disastrous financial consequences.

Thurber was a relatively early contributor to the magazine and witnessed Ross nursing the business through multiple crises. In detailing them, he gives an insight into the economy of pre-war American journalism, a world in which, for instance, writers were paid by the word (leading to arcane disputes over whether they should refund money to the magazine if their copy was cut down between submission and publication). The writers could also sell to rival papers or magazines, sometimes after a 'first refusal' contract with The New Yorker. And the magazine itself would do its best to sign deals for reprinting of its work elsewhere, in The Reader's Digest, for instance.

While Ross was a stickler for detail, with a particular obsession with commas, he was also a no-nonsense newspaper man who had come from Colorado and learnt his skills, starting as a reporter, on a range of publications. He wanted The New Yorker to be a funny magazine and was always appealing for jokes and funny stories. The magazine's cartoons, especially those by Thurber, were one of its trademarks. But Ross was also willing to support more serious journalism, such as an influential report from Hiroshima after the dropping of the bomb, to which he devoted a whole issue, and was proud to have done so despite often complaining he was offered too many "grim" stories.

Thurber himself continued to work through various health problems and, eventually, blindness. His book is admirably free of any self-regard or self-pity, although, as others then and since would testify, he was himself as remarkable a figure as Ross. The book leaves a lasting impression of The New Yorker being an honourable enterprise which produced great work, and, more broadly, a life-affirming sense that true friendship among a group of creative people can be immune to any number of rows, insults and humiliations. But of course they are what makes Thurber’s tales interesting.

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It seems like a good time to think about appeasement

Munich by Robert Harris

'Munich' is a clever combination of historical novel and spy thriller. It has something worth saying in rehabilitating, to some extent, the reputation of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Criticised an appeaser, he was, in Harris' telling, simply a leader who had seen the suffering of the First World War (in which he was too old to fight) and was sincerely determined to do whatever he could to avoid another.

Harris overlays the tight timetable that preceded the Munich Agreement of 1938 with a parallel story of his own. Two student friends, one British and one German, get themselves into the negotiations between Hitler, Chamberlain, Mussolini and the French prime minister, in order to try to persuade Chamberlain that Hitler had much larger ambitions than the Sudenland - the immediate subject of the Agreement - and was not to be trusted.

In its early part, the book neatly alternates chapters between Britain and Germany - a triumph of structure and planning, building momentum and culminating in some spectacular set pieces at the end.

I am only giving it four stars instead of five because I wanted to leave a notional star that I almost certainly would have awarded Graham Greene if he had written it.

Incidentally, the film 'Munich: the Edge of War' (2022) more than does justice to the book, with outstanding performances from Jeremy Irons and George MacKay among a uniformly impressive cast delivering an excellent script. 

Celebrating human uniqueness

Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves by James Le Fanu

James Le Fanu’s book has the worthwhile intention of drawing his readers’ attention to the complexity and sheer unlikeliness of the world around us – and, especially, of our unique place in it.

Natural human amazement been ground out of us, he believes, by over-confidence in the ideas of Marx, Freud and Darwin, each of whom started with a legitimate but limited insight and expanded it to claim universal truths, about, respectively, economies, the human psyche and the natural world.

Le Fanu is a doctor, so when it comes to science, he knows what he’s talking about even if his views are decidedly unconventional. Most of the book is devoted to arguing that science’s claims have over-reached the evidence for them. We don’t understand how genes work or why there is such an overlap in the genetic makeup of species which have little in common, for instance, but the theory of evolution is an article of faith, not be questioned.

We certainly don’t understand how the brain works, however detailed the experiments in which parts of it are activated in different tasks. We don’t know how neurones record memories. We don’t even know how gravity works.

The assumption that materialism is ‘all there is’ and that evolution must, in the end, somehow or other, explain every tiny detail of every living organism, puts a huge weight of explanatory responsibility on the ideas of beneficial mutation, natural selection and the survival of the fittest.

Le Fanu’s doubts about all this are interesting and well-argued. His account of where they leave us is not quite as solid. He will occasionally drop the word “soul” in, as if it’s something everyone is comfortable and familiar with. But not all his readers will have been brought up at a Catholic monastic school, as he was at Ampleforth.

Less pointedly, he talks about “the possibility of there being a ‘dual’ nature of reality, with both a material and a non-material realm”. This is the “commonsense” view that has been held for millennia, he says, which has, in recent years been “censored, written out of the script as being of historical interest only, a relic of the superstitious ways of thinking of the distant past”.

The point of drawing attention to science’s failures is to give credence to the aim he gets to in his final chapter, which is called ‘Restoring Man to his Pedestal’. If science’s limitations were acknowledged, he says, that would have many benefits, including allowing us to see the world anew, “fresh-minted in glorious Technicolor as astounding and amazing, magical and mysterious”.

Free will would become intellectually respectable again, restoring the assumption that we exercise personal freedom and responsibility. Science itself would be liberated from its “degenerate” research programmes and allowed to investigate areas which are currently considered off limits. (Rupert Sheldrake would be pleased.)

As for religion, it would enjoy a “renewed sympathy” which would “heal that rupture in Western civilisation between its present and its overwhelmingly Christian past”, along with other religions, who have a common belief “of there being ‘more than can be known’.”

This is an underdeveloped part of the argument. Whilst it doesn’t seem right to dismiss all of religious thought and culture as superstition, as scientists may want, there’s no question that believers in most faiths are asked to sign up to some very specific and unproven claims. Is Le Fanu saying we shouldn’t worry about that – which would be odd since he’s dismissing the claims of science on the basis of a lack of evidence – or is he saying that there will be a new, less specific kind of religious belief – perhaps just a kind of nature-worshipping awe, combined with the admission that there’s a lot we don’t understand? He’s less forthcoming on a future vision for religion that on the current problems of science.

Marx and Freud no longer hold sway the way they once did, Le Fanu argues. It’s time we downgraded Darwin too. It’s a refreshingly independent-minded book. Even if Le Fanu hasn’t presented a solid alternative to science’s world view, it’s worthwhile – and eye-opening - to be reminded what an odd thing it is that we exist at all.

But whose idea was it to call it Why Us? That doesn’t do justice to the subject. And the subtitle How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves is even worse. The main point is that far from any ‘rediscovering’, science refuses to admit the mystery of our existence. The book is 16 years old, was well reviewed and is still worth reading, but it could have been so more influential with a better title. Science in Denial? Humans are Special? What Science Doesn’t Admit? Restoring Humanity’s Self-Esteem? The Unique Species?