This is the best and the worst book about Harold Ross, the country bumpkin who founded The New Yorker just seventy years ago. It's the best in an academic sense: Thomas Kunkel, himself an itinerant journalist, is the first biographer to take the full measure of his subject, studying the literature, exploring the archives, quizzing witnesses. It's the worst in that Kunkel's text cries out for an editor like Ross, who would have spattered it with marginalia such as "What mean?" "Fix," and even "ga," a frantic squiggle signifying incoherent disgust. Equally flawed is Kunkel's interpretation. He answers the fundamental question about Ross -- how did this uncouth provincial create a magazine that became the acme of metropolitan sophistication? -- by claiming that he was a genius in disguise.

Certainly Ross, for all his droll eccentricities, was touched by brilliance. Born in Aspen, Colorado, in 1892, he spent a knockabout childhood neglecting his studies and a raffish youth as a tramp reporter. Yet by 1918 Ross had become, as editor of The Stars and Stripes (the American forces' newspaper in France), the most famous private in the army. On returning home he set up the chaotic Manhattan mŽnage known as Wit's End with Jane Grant (his first wife) and Alexander Woollcott, and joined the vicious circle at the Algonquin Round Table. In 1925, after several false starts, Ross launched The New Yorker. It was a good moment, since radio and television had yet to establish themselves, while new technology and low postage rates enabled magazines to make fortunes.

Ross edited with roars, snarls, and self-pitying whimpers: "I live the life of a hunted animal." He paid obsessive attention to detail: after long considering a sketch of a Model T driving along a dirt road he barked, "Better dust." He exhorted his staff with eloquent profanity: "God bless you, McNulty, goddamn it." "You can't quit," he told E.B. White, "this isn't a magazine -- it's a Movement!" Soon Ross had attracted a galaxy of talent including James Thurber, Ring Lardner, Janet Flanner, Clifton Fadiman, A.J. Liebling, Meyer Berger, Peter Arno, and Charles Addams. All were driven to distraction by the editor's manic perfectionism: when the revolution came, Dorothy Parker opined, it would be "everybody against Ross." But few denied that his methods worked. The magazine set glossy new standards of literary journalism. It pioneered innovations in comedy and art. It created a distinctive culture of urbanity.

Yet to all appearances Ross remained a shambling backwoodsman. Ben Hecht said that he "looked like a resident of the Ozarks and talked like a saloon brawler." Ross was dirty-fingernailed and "burglar-faced." A cigarette hung from his lips and his hair stood up like a lavatory brush. He sucked cold drinks through a napkin to keep them from hurting his gappy teeth. He was the despair of Brooks Brothers,
 whose salesman invited him to take his custom elsewhere
 -- "Jeesus! You'd 'a thought I was some kind of oorang-ootan." At times he did seem more primate than articulate. "I don't want you to think I'm not incoherent," he told Robert Benchley. The poet Samuel Hoffenstein said that talking to Ross was like drinking a glass of water without the glass.

If this was genius it was extremely well disguised. Kunkel maintains that it had to be. Ross played the part of the hayseed for his own deft purposes and used his "rusticity to great advantage." He pretended ignorance in order to spur his writers on to greater clarity. Even his celebrated query -- "Is Moby Dick the whale or the man?" -- was part of an unflagging quest for precision. Ross feigned philistinism so that he did not have to "engage in philosophical arguments over every disputed comma or brushstroke."

Behind the bucolic mummery, says Kunkel, Ross was a "voracious reader" who could even be regarded as a "closet intellectual." Ross had "a near-perfect ear for language" and wrote in what Rebecca West called a "clear, hard, classical American style." He was largely free of the vulgar prejudices and gauche pruderies of his western adolescence. He had a well-developed aesthetic sense and an abiding respect for creativity.

Kunkel's argument is similar to that of recent historians who claim that President Eisenhower hid his political adroitness behind a mask of geniality and ineptitude. But neither case holds water and Kunkel's is a sieve, not least because Ross liked arguing about commas -- one journalist suggested that his biography should be entitled "The Century of the Comma Man."

The fact is that Ross's general reading hardly extended beyond Fowler's Modern English Usage, a book about eels, and True Detective magazine. Not knowing it was a quotation, he improved Tennyson's famous phrase to "nature red in claw and tooth." Ross had a tenuous grasp of the English language: he always spelled the word prodigal "progidal" and he thought that homosexuals were called "amorphodites." He himself did not write well enough for The New Yorker. As one staff member said, Ross strove for prose that was "both plain and baroque" and his sentences resembled "the handiwork of a Henry James with a tin ear."

Pace Kunkel, Ross nursed primitive notions about race, sex, and art. He disparaged blacks and did not employ them even as messengers. During World War II he started a harangue, "The trouble with you Jews, Hellman . . . ." One of his three wives confessed that she had never seen him naked and he was apt to complain, "Goddamn it, I hate the idea of going around with female hormones in me." He spent much of his time trying to excise double entendres from The New Yorker and the closest he came to formulating an editorial policy (said Wolcott Gibbs) was this admonition to his staff: "Don't fuck the contributors." Ross denounced painting and music as "phony arts." William Shawn, who succeeded as editor on Ross's death in 1951, admitted that the term "literary" was for years "a house pejorative." Ross told his secretary never to leave him alone with poets, whom he proposed to pay by the length of their lines.

All this emerges from previous books about Ross. Incomparably the best of them is James Thurber's magical evocation of the man, The Years with Ross (1959). It's penetrating as well as hilarious, though it does tend to present Ross as yet another character in the Thurber carnival. Brendan Gill's portrait, in Here at The New Yorker (1975), is also larger than life but it is etched in acid. Similarly exuberant, though less distinguished, are Jane Grant's Ross, The New Yorker and Me (1968) and Dale Kramer's Ross and The New Yorker (1951), which its subject refused to read on the ground that it began with the word "It."

Apart from the last, these authors were close to Ross and their testimony carries conviction. They regarded him as a fascinating bundle of contradictions, not a homogeneous genius whose inconsistencies could be explained away as part of an elaborate pose. Such reductionism is facile. The truth is that despite Ross's boorishness, and because of it, he was just the man to make The New Yorker a model of journalistic elegance.

One who knew them both said that Ross had the same kind of charismatic force as James Joyce. He charmed outstanding contributors onto his magazine although, as Liebling joked, Ross would no more have thought of offering them money than of offering a horse an ice-cream soda. Ross goaded and bullied the best out of them. He had an instinctive sense of what was wrong with a piece of writing or a cartoon. He used gurus like Katharine White to supply the sensibility he lacked. Thus, as Shawn said, he fashioned the "literate, observant, very particularized, light-handed, timely writing that was to revolutionize the American magazine article."

Ross's other achievements, such as refining the one-line cartoon caption, turning fact-checking into a science, devoting an entire issue to John Hersey's account of bombed Hiroshima, and steering The New Yorker through isolationist and McCarthyite shoals, are well covered by Kunkel, who pays his subject the compliment of taking him seriously. Nevertheless, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Ross's life was essentially the stuff of comedy. Everything contributed to it, from
 his Runyonesque poker-playing ("I'm cursed! Something I did to God!") to his slapstick feuds with the likes of Woollcott, Raoul Fleischmann (his publisher), and Walter Winchell, who scorned the "gintelligentsia" and accused Ross of not wearing underclothes -- Ross mailed Winchell his current underdrawers.

Maybe the humor is dated. As Kunkel reminds us, Ross was a man of his time -- he bore the scars of a childhood stagecoach accident and never travelled by air. Yet he remains a comic curmudgeon for the ages. And he was often amusing when he meant to be, as happened during his memorable spat with Time magazine. In a letter to Henry Luce justifying Gibbs's parody of its style, he signed himself, "Harold Wallace Ross -- small man . . . furious . . . mad . . . without taste."

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