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Ah, but the storytellers knew better. From the beginning, they had spotted the worm in the big apple, the skull beneath the skin of American life. John O'Hara told 80-proof stories of disappointed careers. John Cheever imagined an enormous radio that eavesdropped on people's conversations; eventually the radio's owner cried emptily: "Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we've never been like that, have we, darling?" Shirley Jackson wrote of a modern lottery where each year there was a sacrifice to the harvest: " 'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchison screamed, and then they were upon her." J.D. Salinger inaugurated his chronicle of the Glass family by introducing Seymour, who stood over his sleeping bride, "looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple." Irwin Shaw, John Collier, E.B. White, Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov and dozens of other contributors made the same points, sometimes subtly, sometimes with hammer and anvil.
Yet the personality of the magazine remained rather close to that of Eustace Tilley, the Regency snob with the top hat and the lorgnette. Had The New Yorker folded in the '50s, it would have been fondly commemorated, partly for its hospitality to American fiction —but mainly as the font of American humor. Peter Arno, Charles Addams, George Price, Saul Steinberg and their colleagues had altered the attitude and latitude of cartoons; parody had become an art form in Wolcott Gibbs' send-up of TIME, S. J. Perelman's of Raymond Chandler, Peter De Vries' of practically everybody. The New Yorker contributors had kept wit alive in a time of holocaust. Still, as even its least critical admirers conceded, something was missing. That something surfaced in the early '50s, when William Shawn assumed the editorship after Ross's death.
In 42 years on the magazine, Shawn has contributed one signed piece. Catastrophe, printed in 1936, acerbically foresees the time when New York, struck by a meteorite, disappears from public view and then from national memory. One can never tell about meteors—or about New York. As for The New Yorker, if it never vanishes from memory it will be largely because of the author of Catastrophe. Brendan Gill, that latter-day John Aubrey, relates a singular exchange with his editor. "I once told Shawn that my impression of the unconscious was of some immense, well-armored bank vault, which I was struggling to enter and ransack, and Shawn said, 'That's strange. I think of it as a place that I struggle to get out of, always in vain.'" It is difficult to imagine the ebullient Ross even having an unconscious, much less getting trapped in one. Shawn's odd phosphorescence soon proved to be the glow that the magazine had lacked.