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.

View all my reviews

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.