THERE'S MORE THAN ONE WAY TO GET INTO THE NEW YORKER

Author: By Mameve Medwed

Date: SUNDAY, February 8, 1998

Page: G4

Section: Books

The cartoon showed a kindergarten class of little ghosts. The ghost teacher has just chalked 2 + 2 = 4 on the blackboard. ``OK, dears,'' she says, ``go home and haunt your houses.'' When the appropriate issue slid through our mail slot in Bangor, Maine, I tore through the pages. Where would my classroom of ghosts appear? Under ``Talk of the Town''? On top of one of the ``casuals''? Its omission stunned me.

When the letter of rejection came, my sorrow over the New Yorker's sorrow at refusing my cartoon was magnanimous. It would take a special kind of man to shift his red velvet chair to make room for the red velvet chair of a 9-year-old. Undaunted, I sent poems, more cartoons, stories. I forwarded newspaper clippings to ``Block That Metaphor.'' Soon the young girl from Bangor would be as much an institution as the old lady in Dubuque.

There was no gain without pain. The New Yorker fostered repetitive-motion syndrome, a weekly reminder that clever repartee and scintillating sophistication could not possibly be the plats du jour at our family's sadly rectangular dining table. Bringing The New Yorker to Bangor didn't exorcise the Bangor in me. That E. B. White lived in Maine offered no solace. He pounded his typewriter keys not in Bangor but in North Brooklin, a name that immediately brought to mind the bridge New Yorkers were always trying to sell to people from Bangor or Dubuque.

Still, I had my own bridge. My grandparents left Maine and moved to the Hotel Seymour at 50 West 45th St., as far away from the New Yorker's shabby digs as the length of the string on Eustace Tilley's monocle. I would have preferred their apartment to be around the corner at the Algonquin, where I could live an Eloise-at-the-Plaza kind of life. In Bangor, since we slept under Hotel Seymour sheets, dried ourselves on Hotel Seymour terrycloth, washed with complimentary slivers of Hotel Seymour soap (my grandmother shipped crates of pilfered goods), I was constantly tantalized. That my grandmother had unraveled the embroidered `otel' and `eymour' to leave the `HS' that formed my father's slightly off-center monogram on the ``guest'' towels only underscored my geographical and alphabetical disadvantages.

During visits to the Hotel Seymour, I struggled to compromise. I haunted 25 West 43rd St., identifying in every entrance and exit the penned caricatures of Harold Ross and Mr. Shawn. I was sure that their coins had preceded mine into the slots at Horn & Hardart, that those coffee cups cleared away from our booth at Child's bore their fingerprints, that the straw adorning the counter at Schraft's had just tunneled a strawberry ice cream soda to their lips.

I grew up but not away from The New Yorker. I continued to inflict on it everything I wrote. Then I started a novel. ``Tina'' replaced Mr. Shawn. The list of fiction writers shrank. Still, when you adore something, you can't stay mad long. The minute I read Brendan Gill's obituary, the instant I heard about the death of Joel White, the boat-building son of E. B. and Katharine, all those old New Yorker yearnings flooded back.

On my bookshelf, chockablock with Dorothy Parker, stand three volumes in closer harmony than their authors ever shared in real life. I pick them up, now dog-eared, yellowing, stained. The granddaddy, rubber-banded, is James Thurber's ``The Years with Ross,'' which is told not in chronological order but in New Yorker order: Tuesday afternoon art meetings, ``Talk of the Town'' get-togethers. Ross jumps off the page. ``Who he?'' he pencils in the margins of manuscripts. We eavesdrop on his yelling bouts with writers, his obsession with the comma, E. B. White's teaching him to drive a car, his secretary's embezzling skills. Included is Wolcott Gibbs's ``Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles.'' ``Writers always use too many damn adverbs,'' Gibbs complains. ``On the whole, we are hostile to puns.'' ``Drunkenness and adultery present problems.'' ``Make the pieces grammatical . . . but don't be precious about it.'' Thurber's is a memoir precious, but not ``precious.''

Brendan Gill's ``Here at the New Yorker'' casts a wider net and hauls in a larger catch. Having started at the magazine at 21, Gill catalogs a rogues' gallery of writers and editors ``in their bleak little ill-painted cells.'' Anecdotes abound about Ross, John O'Hara, Saul Steinberg, Janet Flanner, Peter Arno, William Shawn, Pauline Kael, and Thurber, whom Gill didn't like. Thurber's purpose, Gill says, ``is not truth telling but rather entertainment and self-aggrandizement.'' Gill makes it clear that every editor worth his Scotch stashed bottles of it. He quotes from White's unwritten Guide to Good Writing: ``Before I start to write, I always treat myself to a nice dry martini. Just one, to give me the courage to get started. After that, I am on my own.'' Here are goodies to sate the hungriest New Yorkerphile.

Written as a diary, E. J. Kahn Jr.'s ``About the New Yorker & Me'' overloads on calories, stuffing you with more than you want to know about its author, his lunches, dinners, trips. Nevertheless, it serves a feast richly layered with the usual suspects. Only here did I learn some arcane New Yorkeriana: that the MDK who for so many years signed my rejection slips (sometimes adding ``sorry'' in real ink) is Mary D. Kierstead, ``who reads unsolicited manuscripts from authors whose surnames begin L to Z.'' This tidbit alone is worth pages of cocktail party talk.

These days, instead of sending cartoons to the New Yorker, I cut them out. They decorate my refrigerator, my bulletin board. I photocopy them -- especially the writing-biz ones -- to illustrate notes to friends. (``My publisher loves my novel, but the art director says I can't be on the jacket,'' a disheveled author tells his mate. ``I got married once -- to avoid writing,'' a lady-who-lunches informs her friend.) Rereading my New Yorker books, I find the longing for inclusion on those shiny pages much less raw. The magazine's changed. Me too. I've made peace with The New Yorker. It's about time.