ROSS, THE NEW YORKER AND ME

Wolcott Gibbs once said to, James Thurber, ""If you get Ross down on paper, nobody will believe it."" Well, he did--and Thurber's incomparable portrait of that somewhat truculent genius, ""loud and snarling, fond and comforting"" would be difficult to match (The Years With Ross). Jane Grant hasn't even come close to it.... for one thing there's not really too much about Ross whom she married in 1920 (met in Paris during the War) except in the closing chapter.... more about The New Yorker since she shared in its difficult, initial years.... not too much about me either... she was a New York Times correspondent. Along with a good deal about the Algonquin Round Table and their own celebrity casbah on 47th Street and some add-a-pearl anecdotage about the not only beautiful but bright people of that antic heyday.... Personal to a degree, never intimate, quite pleasant, but somehow that brooding, bedeviled perfectionist isn't really there, as he was in the earlier book.