I recently came upon a sentence in The New Yorker that made me appreciate how much the magazine really has changed in the years since it was purchased by S.I. Newhouse and has been edited by Tina Brown. The sentence didn’t contain a four-letter word or an explicit description of a bodily function. It didn’t stand in smarmy awe of some celebrity or other. On the contrary, it was, at least on the surface, absolutely innocuous.
Before I say what the sentence was, let me sketch in a little background. The editor of The New Yorker from its start in 1925 until his death in 1951 was Harold Ross. Ross was seriously into commas. If the sentence before last had appeared in The New Yorker under Ross, it would have been punctuated this way: “The editor of The New Yorker from its start, in 1925, until his death, in 1951, was Harold Ross.” A sentence that did appear in Ross’s New Yorker was: “When I read, the other day, in the suburban-news section of a Boston newspaper, of the death of Mrs. Abigail Richardson Sawyer (as I shall call her), I was, for the moment, incredulous, for I had always thought of her as one of nature’s indestructibles.” That’s seven commas in 46 words, surely a single-season record.
Someone once commented to James Thurber, a long-time New Yorker contributor, that Ross’s biography should be called The Century of the Comma Man. Thurber resisted this temptation when he wrote his own book about the editor, titling it The Years with Ross. In it he says he once typed out and sent to Ross a few lines from one of Wordsworth’s Lucy poems, “repunctuated after his exasperating fashion":
She lived, alone, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be,
But, she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference, to me.
Ross’s comma fixation was not an isolated obsession. Rather, it was a corollary of what he regarded as the two most important principles of writing: clarity and directness. The worst sin a writer could commit, conversely, was what he called “indirection.” What this meant, to Ross, was slipping the reader information in a kind of underhanded, sleight-of-hand way.
If, for example, a short story began, “Mr. Brown picked up the umbrella,” Ross would edit it to read, “Mr. Brown picked up an umbrella,” reasoning that “the” implied a previous familiarity with the object. If the next sentence read, “He went outside his three-story house and walked down the street,” Ross would edit it to read, “He went outside his house, which was three stories high, and walked down the street.” You can see how this approach would lead to a more direct style of writing. You can also see how it would lead to a lot more commas.
Also shedding light on the issue of commas in The New Yorker is a book called A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. A charmingly cranky collection of prescriptions and opinions written by H.W. Fowler and published in 1926, just as The New Yorker was getting under way, it was usually referred to, in honor of its author, as “Fowler.” (A new edition of the book, the third, was issued this year by Oxford University Press, causing consternation among Fowler devotees who found it insufficiently prescriptive.) Although Ross was an editor of genius and a brilliant writer (an edition of his letters is scheduled to be published next year), he never went to college, and he clung to Fowler the way someone with more formal education would probably not have.
The devotion to and reliance on this compact book continued after Ross was succeeded by William Shawn as The New Yorker’s editor. The English writer Kenneth Tynan was hired as the magazine’s theater critic in 1958. Soon afterwards he wrote to a friend, “The New Yorker is madly hospitable but has a kind of Fowler fixation that makes it jump on the tiniest vagaries of grammar, syntax and punctuation.” Saul Bellow once remarked in an interview, “I used to say about Shawn and The New Yorker that he had traded the Bible for Fowler’s Modern English Usage.”
The Fowler rule most directly bearing on The New Yorker’s use of commas concerns the difference between restrictive and non-restrictive (sometimes also called defining and non-defining) words, phrases, or clauses. An easy way to illustrate the difference is to consider the sentence, “Frank waved to his son John.” By Fowler’s and The New Yorker’s standards, it is correct as written if Frank has two or more sons, in which case “John” is restrictive or defining and does not take a comma. But if John has no brothers, the correct usage is “his son, John” -- not restrictive, but rather descriptive and in need of a comma.
The restrictive/non-restrictive distinction relates to one of any copy editor’s most notorious headaches -- when to use “that” and when to use “which.” Fowler meditates for several toothsome pages on the question. Contrary to his reputation as a purist, he writes, “The relations between that, who, and which have come to us from our forefathers as an odd jumble, and plainly show that the language has not been neatly constructed by a master builder who could create each part to do the exact work required of it, neither overlapped nor overlapping; far from that, its parts have had to grow as they could.” But, he goes on, “if writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, and which as the non-defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity and in ease.”
Then he gives examples: “Each made a list of books that had influenced him; not books generally, but books as defined by the that-clause. Contrast with this: I always buy his books, which have influenced me greatly; the clause does not limit his books, which needs no limitation; it gives a reason (= for they have), or adds a new fact (= and they have).”
The non-restrictive “which” clauses, of course, lead to commas.
To say that New Yorker editors have been highly attuned to the use and misuses of “whiches” and “thats” would be a large understatement. The short-story writer Nancy Hale once used “which” instead of “that” (the reverse mistake is rarely if ever made), and the magazine’s fiction editor, William Maxwell, mailed her a photocopy of Fowler’s essay on the distinction, describing it as “something that Ross dearly loved, and not quite daring to make it mandatory, he nevertheless instituted the system of querying all whiches and thats, and so we go on doing it.” (Theoretically, at least, New Yorker editors never unilaterally changed a word of a writer’s copy, instead “querying” him or her on galleys or page proofs. In reality, besieged by a couple of hundred queries on one short story, most writers quickly cried uncle and let the editors have their way.)
“Whiches” and “thats” aside, the single most distinctive and identifiable quality of The New Yorker’s style over the years has been a refusal to present a non-restrictive clause as restrictive by withholding the comma. Strong magazines, like strong writers or strong composers, have an unmistakable sound. I would recognize The New Yorker’s fussy, stately music in the following words if I came upon them on a cave wall somewhere:
“When Uncle Ruka died, in 1916, he left me what would amount nowadays to a couple of million dollars and his country estate.” (Vladimir Nabokov, 1948)
“After being graduated from Harvard, [Maxwell] Perkins worked for three months, in Boston, in a settlement house on Salem Street. ...” (Malcolm Cowley, 1944)
“Toward the end of her life, Billie Holiday, who died last summer, at the age of forty-four. ...” (Whitney Balliett, 1960)
“Translated, from the Yiddish, by the author and Elaine Gottlieb.” (1970, note following a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer)
In the years since Ross’s death, the non-restrictive, anti-indirection, comma-prone banner has been taken up by a remarkable woman named Eleanor Gould Packard, who has worked at the magazine since the 1940s and for years was the “okayer” (that is, final copy checker) of every word that went into every issue. “Miss Gould” (as she is known at The New Yorker) has witnessed the momentous changes in recent years: the sale of the magazine to S.I. Newhouse and his Advance Corporation in 1985, the forced resignation of William Shawn in 1987, the caretaker regime of Robert Gottlieb, and, in 1993, the coming of Tina Brown, with her Art Spiegelman covers and Richard Avedon fashion layouts, her four-letter words and exhaustive O.J. coverage.
The remarkable thing, given all those changes, is that Miss Gould is still there, and that the magazine’s style rules are, too. Theoretically, that is. For a variety of reasons, Tina Brown has decided that a primary -- maybe the primary -- focus of The New Yorker will be breaking major news stories. As a result, it is frequently the case that most of the content of the magazine is changed or rearranged once, twice, or even three times in the course of the week before it goes to press. This has indeed allowed the magazine to publish major scoops. But it has also meant compromising the traditional copy-processing protocol -- a highly involved and time-intensive enterprise that bears some similarity to a group of Talmudic scholars’ hashing and rehashing some particularly thorny piece of rabbinical law. As a result, there have been more and more lapses.
And so I return to the sentence that set me back. It appeared in a recent article about a Microsoft executive, and it started like this:
“Since joining Microsoft 11 years ago, Myrhvold has held a variety of positions. ...”
There is nothing ungrammatical or “wrong” about it. If you read it in any newspaper or magazine in the country, you would not give it a second look. Any newspaper or magazine except The New Yorker, that is. In its pages, the absence of a comma after “Microsoft,” and the resulting suggestion -- however remote -- that Myrhvold had joined the company on other occasions as well, resonates with the news that a distinctive voice has lost its peculiar modulation.
Ben Yagoda, an associate professor of English at the University of Delaware, is co-editor, with Kevin Kerrane, of The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism (Scribner, 1997). He is writing a history of The New Yorker.