Here at the New Yorker. Brendan Gill.

Here at the New Yorker
Brendan Gill
New York: Random House. 1975.

The joy and hard work in producing interesting stories and nonfiction at The New Yorker. Brendan Gill, the author of this book, fills his pages with gossip about the editors and the writers.

The awesome number of corrections writers for The New Yorker undergo.

Faced with a "buried" dangling modifier, Brendan Gill, the author of this book, couldn't find it, said that the sentence would be worse if corrected and the editor let it stand.

Classic line from Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker: "Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?"

Once, Gill and a fellow writer competed to write the longest sentence to see how Ross would take it; Gill won with 26 lines; Ross added two lines to the 26 lines in the original; saw nothing ungainly about it.

Editor William Shawn made it a rule to read every word published in the magazine, often not once but several times, in typescript, galleys and page proofs.

When Ross was reading a manuscript while in the toilet, he discovered that there was no toilet paper; he was obliged to explain to the author that his manuscript had been lost under mysterious circumstances and he mandated that every toilet have two toilet paper holders. They still do.

Talent you're born with; craft must be learned.

Over the years, Whitaker, edited a great number of Gill's "Talk" pieces, profiles and book reviews, and their debates over certain sentences and even over certain words in certain sentences sometimes lasted for days.

Most writers are hard drinkers. Edmund Wilson had an enviable gift for seeming to remain sober, or, at any rate, for remaining coherent.

John O'Hara was the master of the fancied slight.

Another phrase that would set Uncle Arthur off was "by and large." If anyone was unlucky enough to use the phrase in his presence, Uncle Arthur would beg him with a withering solicitude to reveal precisely what it meant. Of course, nobody could do so, since it long ago became merely an easy means of making a transition from one sentence to the next. So intimidating on the subject was Uncle Arthur that not once in over thirty years did Gill ever use "by and large" in The New Yorker.

In White's and Thurber's common view of the desperate and yet somehow joyous difficulties of ordinary daily New York life, Ross found an attitude around which to construct a magazine...summed up at the time of the Second World War in what came to be called "Murphy's Law," which held that if anything could possibly go wrong it would.

There was a sharp contrast between Ross in person, the hearty and sometimes boorish rough neck, and the sophisticated prose of the magazine he edited.

Ross saw his job as encouraging people more talented than he to do their work better than they had hitherto known how to do it, largely by being harder on themselves than they had been accustomed to be.

I will finish this celebration of language with a story about a "palindrome," a word or sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Several years ago, Roger Angell and the Scots poet Alastair Reid waged a fierce battle of palindromes. Not for them such short-winded trifles as "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama." or "Rats live on no evil star." Reid eventually achieved a palindrome of truly stunning length and elegance: "T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat-dirt upset on drab pot toilet."

That's some palindrome.

All the best. RayS.