Wolcott Gibbs is most frequently remembered today as the author of “Time … Fortune … Life … Luce,” The New Yorker’s__ 1936 Profile of Time Inc. co-founder Henry Luce, which was written in a parody of Timestyle and contained this memorable passage: “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind.” (Both Hendrik Hertzberg and Jill Lepore have written about the feud between Luce and Harold Ross.) That Profile’s fame, while keeping Gibbs’s name alive, has also obscured his many, many other contributions as an editor and writer at The New Yorker, where he was employed from 1927 until his death in 1958.
This week, Bloomsbury publishes “Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from The New Yorker,” edited by Thomas Vinciguerra. The book aims to revive interest in this unjustly neglected figure from the magazine’s past in the same way that “Up in the Old Hotel” introduced a new generation of readers to the work of Joseph Mitchell. Vinciguerra kindly agreed to answer a few questions about Gibbs’s life and career.
How did you first come to read the work of Wolcott Gibbs?
I first heard of him at age twelve, when I came across him in “The Guinness Book of World Records.” The editors said that the world’s shortest piece of criticism had been “attributed” to him. Supposedly, in reviewing a farce called “Wham!” Gibbs wrote the single-word response “Ouch!” I thought the comment was hilarious, and that Gibbs’s name sounded owlish and prickly—both of which, I later discovered, he was. It didn’t even matter that the review turned out to be apocryphal.
Fast-forward a decade, to a class in newsweekly writing that I was taking at the Columbia Journalism School. My instructor mentioned the now-famous Gibbs quote “Backward ran sentences until reeled the mind,” referring to the inverted syntax of Time. He didn’t mention Gibbs specifically, but I was fascinated by the history of Time and The New Yorker alike in those days, so it didn’t take me long to find out who had coined that phrase. From there I read the Time parody in its entirety and was hooked on Gibbs.
How did the idea for this book come about?
I was astonished to find how little was known about Gibbs, given how funny, productive, versatile, and terribly complicated he was. I was also upset that so few people continued to read his work. I flirted for a long time with the notion of writing a biography, and in 2005 a colleague of mine at The Week strongly encouraged me. So I contacted Gibbs’s son, Tony, for his cooperation; after he read some of my clips, he gave me his blessing. I ended up writing a proposal and a few chapters, but no publisher wanted them; they liked Gibbs as a subject but didn’t think he would sell. Bloomsbury USA, though, thought an anthology would work, based on the response they’d received to “Reporting at Wit’s End,” their recent collection by Gibbs’s colleague St. Clair McKelway. In any event, my agent had hoped for an anthology in addition to the biography. I just cross my fingers that someone may yet be interested in the latter.
Why do you think Gibbs is not as well known today as some of his colleagues—E. B. White and S. J. Perelman, for instance?
That’s a very good question, but I can only take an educated guess at the answer. Part of the reason, I think, is that Gibbs is not always an easy dose to take. A lot of the time his wit is genuinely acid and filled with disdain and contempt. So, much like Evelyn Waugh, he’s an acquired taste. Then, too, some of his best works—particularly his profiles and his parodies—were very much “of their time” and don’t translate well into the twenty-first century. I had to leave any number of pieces out of the anthology simply because they would have required too much explanation and readers probably wouldn’t enjoy them anyway. Finally, Gibbs was an intensely private person who, as far as I can tell, really didn’t care if he was remembered. Given his enormous output, he only published a few books, mainly because he honestly didn’t like most of what he wrote. So, by design, he didn’t leave much of a literary legacy—at least one that was easily accessible.
Like many funny writers, Gibbs had an unhappy personal life. Was this a hindrance or a source of inspiration to him?
It’s hard to say. Both, I think, would be my answer. Gibbs knew despair on so many levels. His father died when he was six, and he was shunted off to boarding schools by aunts and uncles. He got divorced from his first wife, his second committed suicide, and although he really loved Elinor, his third, they had more than their usual share of problems. In an era that was legendary for alcoholic wits, he ranked near the top—or, rather, the bottom. He was physically frail, and there’s strong evidence that he committed suicide.
Point being that out of all this pain came reams of incredibly wry, wacky, twisted stuff. If Gibbs hadn’t had that embittered edge, and hadn’t been driven to prove himself, there’s a good chance he wouldn’t have produced nearly the volume of high-quality material that he did. By the same token, I can’t help thinking that if he hadn’t had so much unhappiness in his life, he might have been even more productive. Certainly you don’t have to be depressed to be funny. The one thing I’m reasonably sure about is that if he’d been happier, he would have lived longer. That he didn’t is a loss.
Harold Ross once said of Gibbs, “He can do everything.” Could you discuss Gibbs’ many contributions to The New Yorker?
Where do I begin? Starting in the thirties he reviewed plays as Robert Benchley’s understudy. Then, around 1940, he succeeded him as the magazine’s first-string theatre critic and held that job for eighteen years. In any given issue, he might have a serious short story, a comic casual, or a parody. For a long time he was the resident editorial figure who weighed in at the regular Tuesday afternoon art meetings and dealt directly with cartoonists. He wrote profiles that were absolute archetypes of the form. When E. B. White gave up writing Notes and Comment, it was Gibbs who assumed the magazine’s collective voice, commenting on everything from the World’s Fair to the start of the Second World War. From time to time he would contribute a Speakeasy Nights or a Wayward Press or some other regular column. To top things off, for years he was a thorough and exacting editor of both fiction and nonfiction.
Is John O’Hara’s Gibbsville named after Gibbs?
Indeed it is. Gibbs was not only O’Hara’s frequent editor, he was his friend as well and genuinely admired his work. He wrote the introduction for O’Hara’s collection “Pipe Night” and chose O’Hara’s story “Over the River and Through the Wood” for an anthology called “I Wish I’d Written That.” Gibbs thought so much of him that he hoped O’Hara would contribute the lyrics to an unproduced musical he once wrote; he even compared O’Hara’s first novel, “Appointment in Samarra,” to “The Great Gatsby.” Which isn’t to say they didn’t have a difficult relationship. Once, when Gibbs was editing O’Hara in his usual ruthless way, O’Hara shouted, “You’re fucking my story!” Another time, O’Hara was in a snit about something and threw a glass of brandy in Gibbs’s face. When someone asked why he did that, O’Hara protested, “It was the best brandy.” By the same token, Gibbs once got so tired of O’Hara obsessing over the fact that he didn’t go to Yale that he suggested taking up a collection to send him there, just to shut him up.
For newcomers, what piece other than the Luce profile would you suggest as a starting point in reading Gibbs?
If you want a pungent dose of Gibbs at his best, try his review of William Saroyan’s “The Beautiful People.” It’s supremely elegant, supremely derisive, and supremely creative. Gibbs opens by describing “a set that might have been executed by Salvador Dali, needing, in fact, only a rubbery watch and a couple of lamb chops.” He continues, “It is relentlessly playful, rather pretty, and after a while I got awfully sick of looking at it. As far as I am concerned, this comment also applies to the play.” And that’s just in the first paragraph. After snarkily describing some of the preposterous action, he acknowledges, “Right now I can see that we are never going to get through at this rate, so I’ll have to condense Mr. Saroyan’s plot rather drastically.” And he does. He concludes, “It was here, I think, that Mr. Gibbs turned to Mrs. Gibbs and mentioned God. All this and more, my friends, went into the play called ‘The Beautiful People,’ which I strongly suggest of being the bunk.” It doesn’t get any more honest, funny, or trenchant than that.
What would Gibbs have thought of this collection?
I think he would have been appalled. Honestly. He’d probably wish I hadn’t included most of the pieces, including his very first one in the magazine, from 1926, which rendered Biblical stories in tabloid headline form, e.g. “FLOOD: World Inundated Last Night, Says Wireless From Noah’s Ark.” And I’m certain he’d hate my introduction, which touches on sensitive matters like his affair with the author Nancy Hale. Just the same, I secretly hope he’d want to know why I made some of my selections. I’m thinking specifically of an amusing, obscure essay I discovered that he wrote about tanning for Cosmopolitan called “In Defense of Dermathermy.” And I was captivated by a haunting, very short story called “Some of the Nicest Guys You Ever Saw,” published just a couple of weeks after Pearl Harbor. The last lines are, “The clear sky pricked with a million stars reminded him of the Germans. It was just the night for them. He looked up at the thin, silver spire of the Chrysler Building towering on his left, a block or so ahead. That would probably be the way the bastards would come, if they did—over from Long Island, flying high and fast, in strict and orderly formation.” I wish he could tell me why he never reprinted a story as powerful as that.
