Page:The New Yorker 0003, 1925-03-07.pdf/9

V. A.

Name on the greater the SO Stay late. TOW for the first time in many years it might ago and are themselves to-day as anonymous as the be interesting to debate the question as to who Neanderthal man--that sight must keep a certain amused disdain of publicity animate in the back of young reporters could argue thus and thus in the casual his thoughts. And finally his anteroom, with its confabs which sometimes arise at two in the morning daily spectacle of men offering up their immortal across the stacks of wheats in eating places off Park souls and women offering up their beautiful white Row and Times Square. A month ago and such a bodies in their white-hot yearning for the front page, debate would have been spiritless for there was only must make any managing editor a little sick of the one answer. But now Van Anda of the Times is not whole inglorious scuffle and drive him further within a newspaperman in New York. He is not in New the shell of his own fastidious privacy. York at all. He has gone West Of course one excellent reason on a long, lazy vacation and left why the initials V.A. have no no certain word as to when he magic outside the walls of the will come back. Times Annex is because the Probably he is the most illus- owner of them has himself spent trious' unknown man in America little time outside those Carr Vatell Van Anda who walls. For he is one of those was born in Georgetown, Ohio, executives who come early and 60 years ago. In 1904, he emerged No one in our day from the musty tinder-box where has had more of that passion Mr. Dana had been content to which Shaw, in his paper on edit the Sun and came across the Cæsar, describes as "the power of way to become managing editor killing a dozen secretaries under of the Times, which was still you as a life or death courier kills published downtown and which horses." Sagacity has taught him the ascendant Adolph Ochs, as how to delegate work. But it publisher, was just beginning to must have been a difficult lesson. put on its feet. For obviously he has burned with In the twenty-one years since an inner impulse to do it all him- then, the Times, for all its stub- self, to go out on every murder, born orthodoxy and for all the to meet every ship, to write every perils of its rich complacency, has story and every headline and to gradually become and still indis- read all the proof. putably remains the finest speci- Any Times reporter knows men of its craft in the world. that, who, at edition time while And whereas that achievement is the presses panted, has pounded of course the resultant of several Carr Vatell Van Anda furiously away only to have each indispensable forces, no one of paragraph torn from his type- them was greater than the nervous force known within writer not by some indifferent copy boy but by V.A., the four walls of the Times Annex as V.A.- and out- who would himself carry it to the composing room, side those four walls not known at all. reading the sentences and perhaps chuckling over them The fierce anonymity of Mr. Van Anda—it has as he trotted happily from desk to linotype. had at times almost the note of a bridling virginity- But perhaps those Times men know it best who has been preserved by a very network of disinclina- were loitering in the bleak, shining, unlittered city tions. Through the use of that instrument which he room of the Annex on that first Sunday afternoon a himself largely helped to forge, it has so long been dozen years ago when the editorial staff moved over given to him to say on whom a fleeting fame should bag and baggage from the long outgrown tower of the be bestowed and from whom it should be withheld- Times Building proper. The room was an unshipshape a kind of professional noblesse oblige—he has made it litter of desks dumped any way by the unionized mov- a rule of his life that none of that fame should be ing men who had departed on the stroke of their legal apportioned to himself. Then, too, the sight of his hour, leaving the mess to be straightened out next day. "morgue" stuffed to choking with bulged envelopes But in the meantime a newspaper was to be written, of clippings about men who strutted mightily a year edited and printed. Among the reporters and the COVARRUBIAS