Whirlwind Gibbs

...The great love of his life was the novelist Nancy Hale, with whom he was involved in the early 1930s: “I am never going to be in love with anybody but you,” he told her, “and I suppose I might as well get used to the idea in spite of all the nervous breakdowns it gives me...

...Privately, a distraught Elinor suspected suicide...

...When Ross declared in his famous prospectus that the New Yorker “will hate bunk,” it was as if he had envisioned Gibbs as his chief debunker...

...if people are laughing, they must stop it with “Your slip is showing...

...Now imagine him almost completely forgotten...

...Behind owlish glasses, he would squint with one eye and superciliously cock the brow of the other, as if everything around him were beneath contempt...

...His eyes always seemed to be closed...

...Gibbs wrote all of these, and others...

...In Gibbs’s case, that was far from the whole truth...

...Frequently, he would cut a manuscript into paragraphs with scissors, reorder them, fashion the appropriate transitions, and then line-edit the thing from start to fi nish...

...Gibbs was probably the most versatile New Yorker staff member ever...

...Ross called Gibbs’s mastery of both fi ction and nonfi ction “bisexual...

...he once drove his good friend John O’Hara to explode, “You’re f—ing my story...

...Considering his upbringing, Gibbs’s sour outlook was, perhaps, inevitable...

...Mike Todd’s Peep Show, 1950) “God, he’s brilliant,” said one awestruck admirer...

...To his mind, though, he had only demonstrated “that damn near anybody can write anything...

...His director had told him, “I want you to be a little whirlwind...

...It inspired nine of his short stories in the New Yorker, which in turn provided the basis for Season in the Sun...

...In the end, even so idyllic a Valhalla couldn’t save him from his demons...

...But Ross relied on Gibbs so heavily that his infl uence came to be felt in almost every corner of the magazine, down to the Tuesday afternoon art meetings where hundreds of cartoons were discussed...

...Crowds made him nervous...

...They have perverted their rather infantile ambitions into destruction of others’ ambitions and happiness...

...White captured his memory in an obituary...

...And so, covered like a jester in jingling bells, Gibbs did as he was instructed—and proceeded to drown out most of the dialogue...

...White the apparently inimitable job of composing “Notes and Comment,” those gossamer-like, quasi-editorial jottings that led off the magazine...

...Thomas Vinciguerra, a deputy editor of The Week, is writing a biography of Wolcott Gibbs...

...When Benchley, his predecessor as theater critic, died, he wrote, “He was one of the most courteous men I ever knew, in the sense that whenever he was aware of a feeling of insecurity or inadequacy in anyone he met, he was automatically their genial, admiring ally against the world...

...Other staffers handled columns about the press, books, and nightlife...

...they want to destroy but be themselves saved...

...In 1950 he did score a hit with his Broadway comedy Season in the Sun, which ran for 10 months...

...BY THOMAS VINCIGUERRA Imagine a writer who, by his midthirties, had published more than a million words in the New Yorker...

...on Fire Island, he could recapture those lazy, sun-drenched days: I guess I really like it here better than any place in the world, he thought, and for the moment his delight in Fire Island, in this one place where life could be slowed to the almost forgotten tempo of childhood seemed as much as he could bear...

...Gibbs was only 56 when he died, and never got the recognition he deserved...

...1946) Moths fl y out of pocketbooks, hats fl y off heads, pants fl y loose from their moorings, and the ghost of comedy fl ies out the window, mewing like a gull...

...But he was convinced that alcohol helped defi ne his identity, and in one casual column, he wrote of an alter ego named Munson who swore off booze, only to fi nd it “a tiresome mistake” because “the gift of repartee left Munson the day he drank his last Martini...

...Rarely did he believe in either his work or himself...

...His profi les were sharp and fi ercely honest, imbued with a fi ne sense of the ridiculous...

...They are in a permanent prep school where they perpetually haze each other...

...Yet if anyone remembers him today, it’s mainly for a throwaway line from his 1936 parody of Time, which lampooned that magazine’s infamous topsy-turvy narrative structure: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind...

...Gibbs channeled his disillusion into his writing...

...We need you...

...At a party Gibbs was good for about two hours,” remembered David Cort, an editor at Life...

...They lived in the same house,” recalled a family friend, “but beyond that it wasn’t much...

...When Gibbs told the actress Patricia Collinge that he was going to retire, she was aghast...

...At one party, recalled Thurber’s wife Helen, Gibbs “took one look inside the room, shrugged his shoulder in that funny way of his, and ran...

...There was much more to Gibbs than that...

...Rare among writers, Gibbs was also a superb editor, able to massage the work of others into publishable shape...

...ever wrote, and he was the New Yorker’s premier parodist...

...In short, Gibbs was the New Yorker’s indispensable man...

...He had come from prestige and wealth...

...Gibbs honestly thought that writing was “a ludicrous pastime” and that “play criticism was a silly occupation for a grown man...

...He even looked the part of the all-knowing, sophisticated critic: An elegant dresser with a taste for tattersall vests, he sported a delicately trimmed mustache and an ever-present cigarette...

...In 1933, very much on the rebound, Gibbs married Elinor Mead Sherwin, a Wellesley dropout and former silent-fi lm actress and model...

...They destroy their own happiness by being ashamed of whatever brings it...

...They remained devoted to each other, but they settled down to a union that neither could quite endure or entirely escape...

...Periodically he would retreat to sanitariums to dry out...

...He once wrote of his friend Burgess Meredith, “At the moment it has seemed to him suitable to let his gingercolored hair grow long on top, so that in dimmer lights he looks rather like a chrysanthemum...

...I suppose he was the unhappiest man I’ve ever known,” said his good friend S.N...

...Often he would stagger to the theater, slump in his chair, and collapse...

...Once, upon handing a piece to fi ction editor Gus Lobrano, he hastened to add, “I wouldn’t have my name on it for anything in the world, and if I were an editor I would reject it quicker than the human eye...

...But they were both too strong-willed to make a completely successful marriage...

...Unfortunately Hale, still married to her fi rst husband and with a baby son, broke off the affair...

...Behrman...

...White and James Thurber...

...1941) Total imbecility is something rarely achieved, even on Broadway, but I think that Second Best Bed, a sort of rigadoon on Shakespeare’s grave, can modestly claim to have come very close to it...

...Gibbs “glided past like a ghost,” said Edmund Wilson...

...Meet Wolcott Gibbs, dead 50 years this year and the man who, perhaps more than anyone else, helped realize Harold Ross’s vision of the New Yorker as the epitome of smart metropolitan journalism...

...One of his colleagues, Frank Modell, said that he never saw Gibbs smile...

...Most of all, he loved Fire Island, the barrier beach off the South Shore of Long Island where he had a second home for more than 20 years...

...The posturing won him many enemies...

...Much of his childhood was spent in boarding schools...

...In an effort to be taken more seriously, he wrote several abortive plays and musicals...

...He was, in all truth, a whirlwind,” wrote White, “and in these offi ces can still be heard the pure and irreplaceable sound of his wild bells...

...He recalled one of Gibbs’s funniest and most touching casuals, about the time he played Puck in a prep-school version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream...

...Outraged producers complained that he was too drunk to appreciate their plays...

...Not everyone approved of Gibbs’s rough treatment...

...Imagine him doing all that despite a loveless childhood, desperate alcoholism, and terrible depression...

...During his 31 years at what he called “that nervous weekly,” Gibbs was regularly mentioned in the same breath as E.B...

...He sought love but rarely found it (“I wonder if there is something the matter with me that I can’t like anybody for long”) and married three times, more or less on impulse on each occasion...

...It was true...

...The distance from New York, by train and boat, was only fi fty terrestrial miles, but in spirit it was enormous...

...His casuals were as good as anything that Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, et al...

...His fi rst union lasted only briefl y; his second, to a New Yorker promotion writer, ended in her suicide and drove him into deep despair...

...Deprived of emotional sustenance, Gibbs grew up vulnerable, pessimistic, and suspicious...

...Some of his peers suspected, not without reason, that his fi rst impulse was to childishly trash anything that came his way...

...His ancestors included two governors, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a cabinet member, and Martin Van Buren...

...So insecure was he that simple human contact could be torture for him...

...I used to talk to him endlessly about his impressive gift...

...Weakened by years of drinking and smoking, as well as a 1947 operation for pleurisy he never quite got over, Gibbs died on August 16, 1958...

...For a while, he reviewed movies—90 percent of which, he declared, were “so vulgar, witless, and dull that it is preposterous to write about them in any publication not intended to be read while chewing gum...

...His devastating takedown of Thomas E. Dewey, which depicted him as a headline-grabbing, ambitious opportunist, was capped by this vivid description of Dewey’s eyes: “These are brown, with small irises surrounded by a relatively immense area of white, and Dewey has a habit of rotating them furiously to punctuate and emphasize his speech, expressing horror and surprise by shooting them upward, cunning by sliding them from side to side behind narrowed lids...

...He was also one of its saddest...

...sometimes he would briefl y manage to stay on the wagon...

...Clair McKelway thought them the most attractive couple in New York...

...Among the few happy memories of Gibbs’s childhood were the summers he spent with his aunt’s family in nearby Merrick...

...I should really be writing novels,” he would grouse, “not ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces...

...He doesn’t like anything...

...Gibbs’s unique voice was most apparent in the many years he spent as the fi rst-string drama critic, during which he routinely dispatched Broadway dross with pointed disdain: When the curtain goes up on William Saroyan’s play called The Beautiful People, it discloses a set that might have been executed by Salvador Dali, needing, in fact, only a rubbery watch and a couple of lamb chops...

...Imagine one who turned out trenchant fact pieces, cutting yet perceptive criticism, fi nely wrought short stories, and hilarious vignettes...

...Not surprisingly, like many a gloomy scribe before him, Gibbs sought refuge in the bottle...

...Elinor was pretty, smart, and urbane...

...Cursing, Gibbs got down and proceeded to carve it on the fl oor...

...Oh please, please don’t,” she pleaded...

...it made no impression on him...

...He was, in fact, the archetypal Algonquinesque New Yorker fi gure, always viewing the world through a sardonic lens, expressing what he saw in piercing prose...

...To which Ross replied, “Maybe he doesn’t like anything, but he can do everything...

...He would come to deploy his wit preemptively, wounding others before they could do the same to him, using words as both sword and shield...

...But his colleagues were jarred by the loss, and E.B...

...Once, while drunkenly slicing up a steak, the meat slipped off his plate...

...He could effortlessly ape Hemingway’s terse philosophizing (“It is a strange world, and if a man and a woman love each other, that is strange too, and what is more, it always turns out badly”) or No?l Coward’s sparkling self-indulgence (“To this day I haven’t the slightest idea why social upheaval should invariably be attended by extreme personal inconvenience to those whose interest in it is, to put the thing mildly, academic...

...You ate and slept in the dark, untidy little houses that lay along the dunes between the sea and the bay, but most of your life was spent on the loveliest beach in the East, a narrow, sunny shelf that ran thirty miles along the Atlantic, from Babylon to Quogue, and here you just lay in the sun, and all the staggering complexity of your relations with others, the endless, hopeless bookkeeping of your personal morality with too many people, could be put aside for a little while...

...Thus did he practice what he wryly preached: “Try to preserve an author’s style if he is an author and has a style...

...they want to be loved but are unloving...

...He was always happy to praise good work (he thought Harvey “a work of pure enchantment— touching, eloquent, and lit with a fresh, surprising humor”) and was devoted to such friends as Behrman, O’Hara, and Charles Addams...

...Lucius died when he was 39, leaving the sixyearold Gibbs and his infant sister in the care of their alcoholic mother and relatives who lavished little affection on them...

...After that he didn’t fi ght, he dissolved, and had to be carried...

...For all the New Yorker’s prestige, Gibbs couldn’t help but feel he was a mere comic paragapher...

...The family had made its fortune in shipping, but Gibbs’s paternal grandfather lost most of the money, and his engineer father, Lucius, failed too, never realizing his dream of developing a practical electric car...

...Gibbs, Dawn Powell concluded, represented the worst of a nihilistic literary movement she called “The Destroyers...

...If people are in love, they must mar it with laughter...

...He wrote innumerable “Talk of the Town” pieces and inherited from E.B...