IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS ROSS. . . .:

...There are less dramatic but equally striking ways in which, remaining firmly rooted in its local soil, The New Yorker laid its mark not merely on North American journalism, but also on the whole North American middlebrow way of thinking (and here I am including Canada as well as the United States...

...Yet this magazine in which Hazlitt and Lamb might have found a congenial place has still remained a useful weekly journal of events and affairs for culturally-minded Americans of New York and the seaboard states...

...Most of the work, even by writers we consider figures in their own right, has been done in the shabby little cubicles on the spot, and the journal has been sustained- despite internal feuds and jealousies- by the kind of esprit de corps that comes from habitual association in the same place...

...One can question whether a biography by another hand is necessary in view of the fanciful biography Thurber provided for himself, which was a great deal more interesting than his real life...

...Bernstein also was a staff writer at The New Yorker, but his prose suggests that little rubbed off...

...In the far away days of the Twenties, when Harold Ross emerged as a bear of letters out of rustic fastnesses to found-almost out of a hatred of sophistication-one of the age's most sophisticated periodicals, New York was still a relatively humble third in comparison with Paris and London...

...With the one exception of Twain (and even he grew shaky towards the end), the great humorists have been those, like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, whose output has been small but choice...

...One might amend this upwards, for the whole of Thurber's work, to second-rater...

...But one can also exclaim over the bitter chance that provides a humorist, even of the second class, with a biographer who writes as if he had never laughed...

...BOOKS IN THE BEGINNING THERE WAS ROSS GEORGE WOODCOCK Here at the New Yorker BRENDAN GILL Random House, $12.95 Thurber: A Biography BURTON BERNSTEIN Dodd Mead, $15 It is hard to think of an internationally read and celebrated magazine that, in many of its aspects, is more localized than The New Yorker...

...There is much of Thurber that today seems prefabricated and given a little cosmetic treatment to make it seem individual...

...For it becomes clear that, under both Ross and the more literarily inclined Shawn, The New Yorker was always run like a modified newspaper office...

...Bernstein has little idea of the biographer's craft and pads his book tediously by letting his subject ramble for page after page of uninteresting and self-pitying letters...

...From the beginning it has been an intimate voice- though not of course the only one-of a great city...

...then the most dazzling work in literature, in painting, in the theater, seemed to radiate from a New York that had gathered to itself an astonishing number of the surviving talents of the shattered Old World...

...In this direction, with its in-depth investigations and its many-parted profiles as well as with its fiction and poetry, The New Yorker has carried on admirably the tradition of journalism for more than the passing day that began with the great English and Scottish quarterlies more than a century and a half ago...

...What Brendan Gill reveals in Here at The New Yorker is likely to tell writers on the outside much about why they have never been on the inside...

...perhaps that is the true model not only for good journalism (to which The New Yorker has always remained dedicated) but also for those excursions into fields of wider interest (so notably exemplified in, say, Edmund Wilson's essays and Shirley Jackson's stories and Theodore Roethke's poems) that have brought The New Yorker a sustained readership not only outside the metropolis but even outside the country...

...How has it all been done...

...One realizes, reading this often appealing account of people whose names have become familiar over the years, how deeply The New Yorker is set in the physical landscape of hotels and bars and streets where its writers have lived and drunk and worked together...

...At the same time, it is surprising how few New Yorker stars have turned out good book writers...

...By no means all American writers then recognized it as their cultural center, and the great postwar trek to Europe (which Wilde had anticipated years before with his quip that all good Americans go to Paris when they die) had emphasized its unattrac-tiveness at that time in comparison with the major European capitals...

...Maybe he was just starting to wise up...

...The two books I am reviewing, both written by men who have spent years in The New Yorker office as staff writers, are interesting principally for the insight they give into the actual creative mechanisms that have sustained The New Yorker...

...Thurber had just simply forgot about it...

...Indeed it was an important role of The New Yorker to sustain American writers-like Edmund Wilson and James Thurber, John Updike and John Cheever, Truman Capote and E. B. White, Dorothy Parker and John O'Hara-who became respected figures in world literary estimation...

...Even Wilde was completely successful in only one of his plays, and Thurber was no Wilde...

...But by the peak age of The New Yorker-Ross's last decade and Shawn's first-the situation had changed...

...The final effect of Bernstein's book is not to enhance one's esteem of Thurber, but to deepen one's doubts of his ultimate significance...

...Like the spiritualist medium who has to fake when the psychic gift fails to work, the professional humorist has to make bogus jokes when the real ones will not come, and for this reason writers who try to sustain a reputation for being funny over a long period usually produce work of declining quality...

...His was the fate of the humorist who pushes his special faculty too far...

...And a month before that, when one of my books received a favorable short notice in The New Yorker, I was astonished, by the number of phone calls I received, to realize that even among Canadian academics such an accolade was worth more than-for example- the two-page review in the London Times Educational Supplement, which aroused perhaps one-tenth of the attention of three column inches in The New Yorker...

...There is the same kind of limpness about Brendan Gill's book, which is really a series of anecdotes and personal sketches loosely connected by a running account of the two editors, Ross and Shawn...

...Typical sentences, these, in a book that is never more than plodding and trivial...

...When a rival artist once complained to Ross that his work had been put aside for drawings by that "fifth-rater" Thurber, Ross replied judiciously, "No, third-rater...

...Perhaps he can best be compared with Stephen Leacock, who filled the gaps between his genuinely inspired passages of wit with a complacent facetiousness which he standardized and could fit in like prefabricated units...

...Better, then, to imagine one was starving in the Quartier Latin than to know one was prospering in Manhattan...

...In such a setting The New Yorker burnt with a brilliant if not exactly a gem-like flame, and it became one of the vehicles by which native-born Americans demonstrated that the great war renaissance on the western shore of the Atlantic was not merely a matter of acquired emigre talent, for surprisingly few of the important writers and artists who created and sustained the journal were born beyond American boundaries...

...Thurber's persona, as projected by Gill, is unpleasant, and it is hardly more attractive in Burton Bernstein's biography, Thurber...

...How has this journal of conservative appearance, whose outdated and obstructive layout often exasperate one to the point of almost-but never finally-canceling one's subscription, carried on so well for so long...

...In some ways it reminds one of the small, physically tight literary worlds of Johnson's London and Baudelaire's Paris, and certainly it has resulted in a magazine cohesive in form, idiosyncratic in character and unexpectedly sustained in its level of journalism...

...It was all a barrel of laughs for a. while...

...The New Yorker profile tends to take on a relaxed, unstructured form which rambles sympathetically through the advertisement-broken pages of the magazine, but which seems limp and unurgent within the covers of a book...

...between the end of World War II and the mid-sixties, the lights of La Ville Lumiere had notably dimmed and London was finding that Angry Young Men were also Dull Young Men...

...Two months ago, when a staff writer from a Toronto magazine proposed to write a kind of long critical-personal piece on me, he called it "a Profile," and I remembered that Ross at The New Yorker was the originator of that special kind of interim biography which fills the space between the interview article and the book-length life...

...Thurber had to endure many blows of fate, and, posthumously, not the least will be Bernstein's Thurber...

...Anyone wanting to mine it for a history of American literary manners or New York journalism will find it useful, but in general it is marred not only by prolixity but also by the irritatingly self-complacent persona that Brendan Gill projects...

...The balance of the local and the universal, the evanescent and the timeless...

...The real fact is that Thurber, as pathetic as he was unattractive, was one of those artists who were interesting mainly for their work and whose lives make poor reading even in the best circumstances...

...But that great city happened, during the most important years of the magazine that bore its name, to become for a while the leading center of world culture...