The Press: Lovable Old Volcano

"It's twenty-five years . . . since The New Yorker set up in business," said a small passage in The New. Yorker's Talk of the Town last week, "and things have changed either greatly or not at all . . ." Thus, with the elaborate casualness that is as much its trademark as the elegant Eustace Tilley who annually adorns its cover, did The New Yorkernote its 25th birthday.

Old New Yorker readers who scanned the anniversary issue might get a deceptive sense that things have changed not at all: with a sentimentality that he would loudly scorn, Editor Harold Ross had rounded up contributions from such time-honored New Yorker favorites as E. B. White, James Thurber, Ogden Nash, John McNulty, Peter Arno, Gluyas Williams and the late Helen Hokinson. Readers with a long memory could even pick up the fourth part of a "profile"* of the late Playwright Wilson Mizner where Alva Johnston left off eight years ago.

In its first issue, The New Yorker promised "to be gay, humorous, satirical, but to be more than a jester . . ." It also announced firmly that it was not intended "for the old lady in Dubuque." More than a jester, today's New Yorker eyes far wider horizons than Manhattan's skylines. It travels with its "farflung correspondents" all the way from Third Avenue's saloons to Hiroshima, considers life and letters, as well as laughter, its province. Two-thirds of its 325,000 circulation is outside New York; it has 69 subscribers in Dubuque. Harold Ross, founder, editor and principal curmudgeon, is still head man in what is far from a one-man show. Like the literate, civilized, incisive and frequently funny magazine he edits, Ross himself has changed greatly in some ways, in essence not at all.

Charmingly Churlish. At 32, Colorado-born Harold Ross was an ex-itinerant newspaperman and ex-editor of the A.E.F.'s Stars and Stripes, a rumpled, rawboned man with electric hair. (Dorothy Parker cracked that her life ambition was to walk barefoot through it.) At 57, Ross can afford a good tailor ("I'm a well-dressed man!" he indignantly insists) and curbs his hair, but he has somehow managed to retain the air of permanent dishevelment. Once ex-New Yorker Writer Margaret Case Harriman called Ross "that lovable old volcano," and the late Alexander Woollcott described him as "Dodsworth, with an overlay of violence." Ross is still personally noisy and professionally restrained, still charmingly churlish and intelligently ignorant, but his reputation for irascibility exceeds his performance.

Ross has denned editing as "quarreling with writers—same thing exactly." His cardinal literary virtue is clarity; he has a better eye for meaning and sense than an ear for sound. Confronted with the avantgarde, the experimental and the merely obscure, Ross remarks that if he doesn't understand something, he won't print it. To help the writer "say what he is trying to say," Ross reads almost every word that goes into The New Yorker (in manuscript or proof), then types querulous, sometimes foot-long footnotes.