“I always look at the cartoons first,” everyone says. So do I, and I’ve had practice. When I say that I grew up looking at New Yorker cartoons, I do not speak in metaphorical terms. My mother, Katharine Angell—later Katharine White—became an editor for the newborn magazine in 1925, the year I turned five, and because she was involved in the art as well as the prose of Harold Ross’s little enterprise there were always photocopied drawings (with the captions typed on the back) and covers, along with fiction galleys and Talk of the Town pages, all over the house. I went for the cartoons right away. It’s odd to look back on this precocious diet and wonder what I made of Ralph Barton’s gin-raddled nineteen-twenties weekenders or the florid fake engravings by John Held, Jr., which spoofed everything Victorian. I passed them over, I suppose—storing them away in memory until my sophistication quotient caught up a little—and ate up the rest: the covers, which were so much brighter and livelier than my children’s-book jackets, and, inside, Rea Irvin’s plump paired cops tooling around in tiny roadsters; Peter Arno’s thin young men in tails crowding into speakeasies; and engrossing multipart strips, like O. Soglow’s Little King running away to join some gypsies; the dusty crosstown peregrinations of a restaurant hard roll, from bakery to diner’s plate, as delineated by Al Frueh; and Irvin’s boldly inked parson rushing over hill and dale, in full ecclesiasticals, to bless the fox after he has blessed the hounds. The first New Yorker cartoon to become famous may have been George V. Shanks’s circus mishap—the butterfingered trapeze artist apologizing, and his dropped partner glaring back up from the bottom of the page. I got that right away.

I can’t remember myself often asking for help with a caption or a situation. One exception was Helen Hokinson’s American lady in a Paris back street shyly asking, “Avez-vous ‘Ulysses’?” A book banned in this country, I was told, and, uh—well, it’s hard to explain. I was still only ten. I never said anything about an earlier, darkly brooding Reginald Marsh drawing of a bored, vulturous cleric, from a 1929 issue, which my mother had put up, matted and framed, in a corner of the hallway, but I kept stopping to look it over. “Let us pray,” he is intoning into a basketlike nineteen-twenties radio microphone just under his chin: a biting joke back then, when radio was so new—and still disturbing now. I don’t think Pat Robertson would put it up in his hallway, I mean.

Just lately, I’ve been looking at Gluyas Williams’s splendid full-page 1928 drawing captioned “A Little Bird Reveals the Facts of Life to the Editor of the New York Times,” and imagining the intense twenty minutes’ study I must have given to that situation: the Editor, an ancient gent in Dundreary whiskers, sitting stunned; the birdie flying out the window; the horrified editors and pressmen recoiling at the door. But what were “the facts of life,” and why didn’t the editor of the Times know them? Within a year or two, I must have spotted the scene again, in one of the early New Yorker albums, and understood it better. It doesn’t matter now, because the joke is still strong and alive. Art waits for us to catch up, and never goes out of date.

I had modern parents—my mother used to take me to lunch at speakeasies—and although they certainly didn’t agree about everything (they were divorced), there seems to have been no debate between them about the notion that kids should be left on their own when it comes to reading. I was a bookworm, and was terrifically lucky to be growing up in a place where funny drawings and brilliant, hardworking artists were taken seriously. When Arno and Hokinson and James Thurber and Mary Petty and Richard Taylor and William Steig and Saul Steinberg and Whitney Darrow and George Price and Charles Addams and the rest began to flourish, in the thirties, every other New Yorker reader got lucky, too.

Cultural historians who offer explanations for this sudden flowering of the New Yorker cartoon seem to share an owlish tone, and cite the same roster of names and sources in their accounting: the old Punch, Charles Dana Gibson, Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, Life (the old Life) and Judge, Prohibition, H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan, the Depression, the genius of Harold Ross and the genius of his art editor, Rea Irvin. I can’t disagree, but I have a different conclusion. I think it was a miracle. It was an accident of history: something in the drinking water; sunspots; the conjoining of Aquarius and Herbert Hoover in the third house. Nobody knows what happened; we only know that it hasn’t happened again. Something very much of the same order was going on with New Yorker writers at this same moment, when Robert Benchley, Frank Sullivan, Ogden Nash, James Thurber, E. B. White, Russell Maloney, Wolcott Gibbs, and S. J. Perelman were all writing for the magazine. Ah, New Yorker subscribers must have thought, what a funny bunch we Americans are. Just think—all these writers and artists, every week like this, from now on! Well, no. That coming together was a time too good to last, and somebody else will have to explain why. I’m just glad I was around.