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Although I don’t buy it often, I’ve always liked the New Yorker magazine, not only for its good writing but also for the humour. The cartoons are consistently sharp and amusing and the owners have cleverly marketed them as greeting cards, as The Spectator did recently.
The magazine has somehow survived for 81 years, and, as Naomi Gryn, the presenter of Inside The New Yorker on Radio Four (Saturday), told us, it now sells a million copies a week. She spent a week at its offices at 4 Times Square talking to staff and contributors.
I suspect it takes itself a little too seriously, but most American quality journalism does and it doesn’t seem pompous like the New York Times, for example. It’s had only five editors since 1925, when it was launched by a brilliant and inspired editor, Harold Ross, part of the Round Table of writers and wits who lunched at the Algonquin Hotel on West 44th Street, among them the wonderful Dorothy Parker. The magazine, it seems, grew out of a game of poker at the same table. Gryn summed it up when she described it as satirical and witty, a sophisticated reflection of metropolitan life in the jazz age. In the Round Table Room on the ground floor there’s a painting of the group which was also known as the ‘vicious circle’. Some years ago, when I wandered in to have a look, the Algonquin seemed a rather gloomy place that had seen better days but no doubt it’s been smartened up since.
When Ross died in 1951, a former New Yorker writer, A.J. Liebling, wrote of him, ‘Ross had some raffish friends, I envied him.
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