His Fate Was Sealed

I was Jack the Lad in 1962. I had just left school with a scholarship that would take me to university in the autumn, but I spent the summer months in Ottawa with my father and his second wife. I smoked a pipe, an expensive Dunhill with an ivory dot on the stem. And I was working as an intern for the Canadian government’s Department of Northern Affairs. Every evening I would return from town on the commuter bus in time for an air-conditioned cocktail hour. At the age of 19 I was an avid imbiber of Manhattans, Daiquiris and Whisky Sours. I wore button-down collars and loafers, and like all the young in North America at the time I basked in the glow of the Kennedy presidency.

At the weekend, glass in hand, pipe in mouth, I would open the latest edition of the New Yorker, to which my father subscribed. Callow and jaunty as I was, I was not particularly concerned with the articles in the magazine, although, as now, they were by the leading writers of the day; my interest was in its overall design and style. I would admire the artist-illustrated cover. In the very week I arrived in North America there was a cover image that set me planning my own end-of-summer journey south of the Canadian border to a fabled city: it showed an opal sky, a golden mist on the Hudson River, and evening shadow halfway up the Empire State Building. Then, as now, the magazine contained stylish advertisements. I remember those for Hathaway shirts (‘sea-island cotton’) featuring a pipe-smoking man with a trim moustache and a black eyepatch. There was the miscellany column, ‘Talk of the Town’, surmounted by a drawing of a haughty nineteenth-century dandy inspecting a butterfly through an eyepiece. This has been the New Yorker’s house emblem ever since it was founded a hundred years ago. Above all, I sought out the cartoons, which were carefully placed at intervals throughout the magazine, so that, by discovering each in turn – like a chicken pecking its way across a farmyard – the reader encountered the entirety of each edition. I still keep my dog-eared copy of The Years with Ross (1959) as a talisman from those carefree months. This memoir by the American humorist James Thurber is funny and wise, dealing as it does with the earliest phase of the New Yorker’s century-long existence, under the editorship of its founder Harold Ross. The book was written just before Thurber’s death in 1961 and has a valedictory quality. Thurber was blind by then, no longer able to draw the cartoons for which, along with his writings, he had become famous. But he was able to record his own memories of Ross, ‘this exhilarating and exasperating man’, and garner anecdotes from colleagues who worked with them both in the early years. Thurber attributes the heady, fraught atmosphere at the magazine during this time to a polarity between ‘Ross Positive’ and ‘Ross Negative’. The exhilarating positive derived from Ross’s experience as a journalist. Born in Colorado in 1892, he had worked his way eastwards across America on half a dozen newspapers by his mid-twenties, when he became editor of the US Army magazine Stars and Stripes, based in Paris when America entered the First World War. He returned to New York as a hard-bitten wanderer, a ‘journalistic hobo’ as one of the wits of the Algonquin Round Table called him. Ross was an early member of this waspish circle, a drinking-lunching-dining club which convened at the Algonquin Hotel near Times Square. With a fellow investor, Ross started the New Yorker as a weekly magazine in 1925. In this frenzied year the Roar of the Twenties rose to a crescendo; a new Madison Square Garden opened; the song ‘Manhattan’ was written, The Great Gatsby published. But the weekly deadlines were unremitting, the staff were inexperienced, mistakes were made and the magazine lost money. The Algonquin luminary Dorothy Parker was asked by Ross in the early days why she had not submitted the piece she had promised. ‘Because someone was using the pencil,’ she replied. The New Yorker kept going, but the experience of frequent near-disasters left its editor with an anxious commitment to order and precision. After all, as joint proprietor he was losing his own money, a different circumstance from the days of Stars and Stripes, when Uncle Sam had footed the bill. This led to the exasperating ‘Ross Negative’, as the editor, with a ‘God, how I pity me’ expression, insisted on setting up systems for fact-checking, date-referencing, cartoon-caption-clearing and so on. At this point, James Thurber joined the magazine. He was himself back from Europe, where he had been trying to freelance for the Paris editions of American newspapers. Initially he worked as an editorial manager on the New Yorker’s central desk, supposedly the Miracle Man of Ross’s anxious imagining, the reliable pivot of a smooth-running operation. But Thurber was at heart a writer, not a manager, and after a blazing row with Ross he insisted on submitting his own material for the Talk of the Town column. ‘All right then, if you’re a writer, write. Maybe you’ve got something to say . . .’ With that lowkey permission from ‘Ross Positive’, Thurber’s career as one of the great comic observers of twentieth-century manners began. The complexity of the editorial system that Ross set up was legendary. At times the fact-checking department was rigorous to the point where reality itself seemed to be questioned. One writer commented that if the Statue of Liberty were to be mentioned in an article, a researcher would be dispatched to check it was still there. And the weekly art meeting, which went on for hours, provides the basis of Thurber’s amusing chapter ‘Every Tuesday Afternoon’. It was an arcane, ritual-driven meeting. Ross did not like to be distracted by small talk. Fingering a knitting needle which he used as a pointer so as not to smudge the drawings pinned up on a noticeboard, he brooded through the discussions. First they considered submissions for the artist-drawn covers, which had to make subtle visual reference to dates and seasons in the New York calendar. The art editor frequently had to explain to the man he called ‘the corny-gag editor-hobo’ the point of a design. Then they moved on to cartoons and debated at length the suitability of captions. The New Yorker soon rejected the convention of having more than one voice represented in a caption, so that the one-liner became standard, resulting in the laconic humour for which the magazine became famous. There was very little laughter in the Tuesday meetings – Ross was ‘as finickity about captions as a woman trying on Easter bonnets’. His colleagues called it his ‘sharpshooting’. But even he chuckled at the cartoon that showed an attentive mother at the dinner-table saying to a truculent child, ‘It’s broccoli, dear’, and receiving the reply, ‘I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.’ When it appeared just before Christmas in 1928, it became known in New York as the ‘spinach cartoon’. Admiring editorials appeared in rival newspapers, and Irving Berlin wrote a song with the refrain ‘I say it’s spinach’. A year or two later ‘Ross Positive’ helped launch Thurber’s career as a cartoonist as well as a writer. Thurber had always doodled obsessively, often depicting dogs: woebegone Bloodhounds and ill-humoured Airedales remembered from his childhood. One Tuesday afternoon, as the art meeting dragged on, Thurber was absentmindedly drawing one of his memory-animals on a notepad. It began to look more like a seal than a dog, so he added whiskers to the muzzle and flippers to the body and placed the creature on a rock, looking intently towards a couple of dots at the edge of the page. Underneath he wrote a caption: ‘H’m. Explorers.’ Nothing came of it at the time, and eventually Thurber threw the drawing away. But later the editor got to hear of it – ‘Where’s that goddam seal drawing, Thurber?’ – and pestered him to submit it to the art meeting. As Thurber re-drew the image, the rock on which the seal was sprawled began to resemble the headboard of a double bed. His mind, always drawn to the surreal, ran with this idea. Below the headboard, from which the seal looked cheerfully about, he depicted a couple in bed, with the sleepy woman saying grumpily to the anxious man, ‘All right, have it your own way. You heard a seal bark.’ Twiddling his knitting needle, Ross gave his sharp-shooter’s assent. ‘The Seal in the Bedroom’ joined ‘I say it’s spinach’ as one of the memorable cartoons of the New Yorker’s early years. By the early 1930s, most readers of the latest edition of the magazine, whether weary commuters heading home through Grand Central Station or members of the select group of wise-cracking wits gathered at the Algonquin, would turn first to the cartoons – just as I always did thirty years later, a pipe-smoking, cocktail-imbibing Jack the Lad, back from town on a Friday evening in an air-conditioned apartment on Riverside Drive, Ottawa. At the end of my Canadian summer I caught the Greyhound bus to New York at the Niagara Falls border crossing and visited the fabled sights of my weekend imagining. I ate soft-shell crabs at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. I caught the Staten Island ferry past the Statue of Liberty. I went to the top of the Empire State Building at sunset. I tried to have a Manhattan at the Algonquin Hotel but was refused by a kindly bartender who said I did not look old enough to drink. A few weeks later, back in England at university, I made friends with an American Rhodes Scholar who was himself a subscriber to the New Yorker and persuaded him to leave his copy each week in the Junior Common Room. On a November night the following year I met him coming across the college quad, his face glistening with tears at news of the President’s death in Dallas. Years later, I worked for a much-loved BBC editor who would often send his radio producers to New York to make feature programmes and who would refuse to sign their expense claims unless they included a bill from the Algonquin. I always submitted my expenses inside the latest copy of the New Yorker. And he always turned to the cartoons before signing them.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 85 © Andrew Joynes 2025