It was a supercilious, Oscar Wilde face, with a nose that richly deserved tweaking. It adorned a new publication called The New Yorker, and the smart money said of face and magazine, as Dorothy Parker had once said of a pair of amorous gorillas: "I give them six months."
Half a century later, the smart money has vanished into depressed stocks and inflated currency. And The New Yorker has survived—no, flourished. The upstart has become an establishment, the iconoclast an institution. In his anniversary thesaurus of anecdotes, Here at The New Yorker (TIME, Feb. 24), Brendan Gill describes his 40-year career at the magazine as "playing the clown when the spirit of darkness has moved me and colliding with good times at every turn." It is a deceptive portrait of The New Yorker; like a shaving mirror, it gives only part of the picture. Once upon a magazine, The New Yorker gave its readers a passport to a world in which everyone was witty and/or attractive, in which sophistication and style—above all, style—mattered more than life itself. In one sense it was a constricted world; the old New Yorker never boasted more than 330,000 subscribers. In another sense, that world seemed to have no boundaries. It played host to Alexander Woollcott, Parker and Robert Benchley, and published the poems and short stories of almost every writer worth a second look. Such diversity should imply a 50-year-old scrapbook, an omnium-gatherum without standards or values. The literate world knows better. The very term "New Yorker piece" connotes scruple and concern.
Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams." -
Under Ross, the magazine was a unique, unstable amalgam of laughter, arrogance, politesse and information. "If you can't be funny, be interesting," he instructed his staff. To that end The New Yorker set a tone that Critic Malcolm Cowley described as nostalgia mixed with condescension. It acted as if the weekly party—to which the reader was always extended an invitation—would never end.