Gossamer Good Times

THE NEW YORKER magazine will celebrate the 90th anniversary of its founding this month, and the occasion will be suitably honored by Brendan Gill's amiable in-house chronicle. Here At The New Yorker. Gill has been there during most of the magazine's lifetime, having been taken on as a staff writer straight from Yale in the late 30's and has enjoyed the company and the friendship of many of the literary figures that history and their New York Times obituaries will inevitably associate with the magazine.

Gill offers his life at The New Yorker as an example of what can be done with some talent and some money, if one knows how. He wants, in particular, to encourage "the young, who even in these easy going seventies hear far too much about what a serious matter life is." And certainly, his portraits of the times with Thurber and Ross, John O'Hara, Edmund Wilson, and so on, are pleasant evidence for his thesis. Some of his contemporaries may have had trouble learning the first rule of life--always to have a good time--but Gill, says Gill, was "one of the lucky ones with a knack."

Gill's took doesn't pretend to be anything more than a collection of enjoyable anecdotes and the sort of behind-the-scenes glimpses that curious New Yorker readers hunger for. As a history of what, after all, began as a humor magazine. Here at The New Yorker can't be faulted. Gill and The New Yorker have come a long way since Gill was a writer of casuals for a new magazine whose first rule was never to write for "the old lady in Dubuque, but through it all a characteristic "New Yorker style" has been preserved.

THE NEW YORKER is distinguished above all by plain good writing; but, more than that, especially in the "casuals" and "Talk pieces" that appear in the front of the magazine, the writing shows a distinctive humor, low-key and urbane, that seems to float effortlessly above all that is encumbered and earth-bound. "How easy I have found it," Gill writes, "to rush pell-mell through the world, playing the clown when the spirit of darkness has moved me, and colliding with good times at every turn." It's as if he has lived his life in New Yorker style, a life with a few muted sorrows but on the whole transparent and unruffled.

Gill sometimes strays from his chronicler's path to give us more autobiography than he should. The gossarrier good times at the magazine, the lunches at the Algonquin, the practical jokes and graffiti don't need any more depth than Gill provides, but his life can't have been as shallow as he gives us to believe.

Gill's narrative is broken (at no stylistic loss, in what is a string of vignettes anyway) by some memories of his prep school years, and some from the years at Yale, where the teachers had twinkles in their eyes. A chapter begins with "The reason I waited to marry..."and sidles into a glib and superficial commentary on sexual attitudes in the thirties, a commentary that is all the more awkward for being offered as revelation ("I perceive now that my unmarried teachers at Yale were probably less chaste than the rest of us.") And there are hints at what must be buried wells of real and sincere pain, but inevitably appear as trite, heart-on-sleeve banalities ("How many friends, drunk and sober, I must have failed in those days by being in the presence of their anguish and yet deaf and blind to it!")

IT'S'A RELIEF when Gill returns to the perfunctories of who he married and where they lived and how much they made when they resold the place; and then back to the interesting idiosyncrasies of New Yorker writers and artists. Gill is comfortable with a voice that he has smoothed and polished for 40 years, and there are things that can't be said without a rough edge that he has lost. (It is a tribute to Gill's mastery of New Yorker style that the seams don't show when part of an obituary published in the magazine is sewn into the text.)

When he quotes Edmund Wilson's definition of the man of letters--"one who can accomplish any literary task that happens to come his way"--Gill describes himself as well. He is our best drama critic, and he arrived at that position only lately, having proved himself at profiles and obituaries, fiction and all manner of criticism. When he writes the autobiography that shines through the cracks in this book, he will need to put The New Yorker aside for a time.