Modern Mind

‘black gait’ and so forth, though he may have thought he was being ‘anthropological,’ he came across as condescending and embarrassing.
Nigger Heaven
was not at all ironic. 43
    The Harlem Renaissance barely survived the 1929 Wall Street debacle and the subsequent depression. Novels and poems continued to be put out, but the economic constraints caused a return to deeper segregation and a recrudescence of lynchings, and against such a background it was difficult to maintain the sense of optimism that had characterised the renaissance. Art, the arts, might have offered temporary respite from the realities of life, but as the 1930s matured, American blacks could no longer hide from the bleak truth: despite the renaissance, underneath it all nothing had changed.
    The wider significance of the Harlem Renaissance was twofold: in the first place, that it occurred at all, at the very time that the scientific racists were introducing the Immigration Restriction Act and trying to prove that blacks were simply not capable of producing the sort of work that characterised the renaissance; and second, that once it was over, it was so comprehensively forgotten. That too was a measure of racism. *
    In a sense, by the 1920s the great days of Greenwich Village were over. It was still a refuge for artists, and still home to scores of little literary magazines, some of which, like the
Masses
and the
Little Review,
enjoyed a period of success, and others, like the
New Republic
and the
Nation,
are still with us. The Provincetown Players and the Washington Square Players still performed there in season, including the early plays of O’Neill. But after the war the costume balls and more colourful excesses of bohemia now seemed far too frivolous. The spirit of the Village lived on, however, or perhaps it would be truer to say that it matured, in the 1920s, in a magazine that reflected the Village’s values by flying in the face of
Time, Reader’s Digest,
Middletown, and the rest. This was the
New Yorker.
    The fact that the
New Yorker
could follow this bold course owed everything to its editor, Harold Ross. In many respects Ross was an improbable editor – for a start, he wasn’t a New Yorker. Born in Colorado, he was a ‘poker-playing, hard-swearing’ reporter who had earlier edited the
Stars and Stripes,
the U.S. Army’s newspaper, published from Paris during the war years. That experience had given Ross a measure of sophistication and scepticism, and when he returned to New York he joined the circle of literary types who lunched at the famous Round Table at the Algonquin Hotel on Forty-Fourth Street. Ross became friendly with Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Marc Connelly, Franklin P. Adams, and Edna Ferber. Less famous but more important for Ross’s career was the poker game that some of the Round Table types took part in on Saturday evenings. It was over poker that Ross met Raoul Fleischmann, abaking millionaire, who agreed to bankroll his idea for a satirical weekly. 44
    Like all the other publishing ventures started in the 1920s, the
New Yorker
did not prosper at first. Initially, sales of around 70,000 copies were anticipated, so when the first issue, appearing in February 1925, sold only 15,000, and the second dropped to 8,000, the future did not look good. Success only came, according to another legend, when a curious package arrived in the office, unsolicited. This was a series of articles, written by hand but extravagantly and expensively bound in leather. The author, it turned out, was a debutante, Ellin Mackay, who belonged to one of New York’s society families. Making the most of this, Ross published one of the articles with the headline, ‘Why We Go to Cabarets.’ The thrust of the article, which was wittily written, was that New York nightlife was very different, and much more fun, than the stiff society affairs organised for her by Miss Mackay’s parents. The knowing tone was exactly what Ross had in mind, and appealed to other writers: E. B. White joined the
New Yorker
in 1926, James Thurber a year later, followed by John O’Hara, Ogden Nash, and S. J. Perelman. 45
    But a dry wit and a knowing sophistication were not the only qualities of the
New Yorker;
there was a serious side, too, as reflected in particular in its profiles.
Time
sought to tell the news through people, successful people. The
New Yorker,
on the other hand, elevated the profile to, if not an art form, a high form of craft. In the