In January 1958, reviewing “The Music Man” for the New Yorker, Wolcott Gibbs confessed himself utterly baffled as to how musical comedies are put together: “I have no idea how the damn things get there in the first place — by what weird midnight prodigies of collaboration — and I certainly have no coherent advice to offer anyone about fixing things up, being comparatively accomplished only in the construction of English sentences, a knack approximately as useful in these entertainments as the ability to knit.”
Maybe so, but in his time there was scarcely anyone more skilled than Gibbs in the construction of English sentences. He was a master. During the three decades he worked for the New Yorker — from the late 1920s until his death in September 1958, at the age of 56 — he ranked in the esteem of readers of the magazine as high as any of his colleagues, among whom were E.B. White, James Thurber, A.J. Liebling, Dorothy Parker and Jean Stafford. “In his prime,” Thomas Vinciguerra writes in his introduction to this collection of his work, Gibbs “contributed more words and more different kinds of pieces than any of them. . . . He embodied the magazine’s archetypal combination of blunt honesty, sly wit, exacting standards, and elegant condescension. He was uniquely productive and versatile; by his midthirties he had contributed, by his own estimation, more than a million words to the magazine.”
(Bloomsbury USA) - ’Backward Ran Sentences: The Best of Wolcott Gibbs from the New Yorker’ edited by Thomas Vinciguerra
What words they were! He wrote with grace, wit and punch, and he wrote about almost everything, from parodies to short stories to theater reviews, with innumerable side trips along the way. The editors of the New York Times regarded his death as important enough to rate a front-page obituary. Yet today he is almost completely forgotten. This to be sure is the journalist’s inevitable fate, but it is not always a just one. Exceptional prose is far more of a rarity in journalism than most of us in the trade like to believe, so when it occurs it should be treasured and preserved.
This is what has been done in “Backward Ran Sentences,” by Vinciguerra, whom his publisher describes as “a frequent contributor to the New York Times and former deputy editor of The Week.” It truly is an omnium gatherum, bringing together as it does eight profiles, 11 parodies, 16 “casuals” (the New Yorker’s term for brief, informal pieces), 15 short stories, 37 theater and movie reviews, 10 personal pieces and, by way of a coda, an amusing and informative essay entitled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.” It is considerably more encyclopedic than “More in Sorrow,” a collection published almost literally at the moment of Gibbs’s death, though to my regret it fails to include “The Education of Henry Apley,” Gibbs’s delicious parody of the novelist John P. Marquand. On the other hand its selection of theater reviews is far larger than that in the 1958 collection (which I have carried from pillar to post for more than half a century) so that alone is reason enough to welcome it.
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