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Gospel of Urbanity
by Piers Brendon
Piers Brendon is a Cambridge (England) historian who has written
much for and about the press. His book on the 1930s, The Dark Valley,
will be published later this year.
Aged
seventy-five and still recovering from a tempestuous relationship with a much
younger editor, The New Yorker today looks rather exhausted; but in dandified
youth and dignified prime it was probably the best magazine in the world. It
won plaudits from the start, notably for its brilliant artwork, which so eclipsed
the text that in 1925 The New Yorker was hailed as "the best magazine in
the world for a person who can not read." This annoyed the first editor,
Harold Ross, who was addicted to words. But within a few years critics acknowledged
that his so-called "comic weekly" was publishing some of the greatest
American writing. Its quality is well displayed in the superb collections of
short stories (Wonderful Town) and profiles (Life Stories) compiled by the current
editor, David Remnick, two of a clutch of books celebrating The New Yorker’s
seventy-fifth birthday. Remnick’s volumes also convey the magazine’s tone —
witty, sophisticated, civilized, and authoritative. For much of the twentieth
century The New Yorker was no mere organ of the fourth estate; it was the glossy
gospel of urbanity, the New York Testament.
Appropriately, therefore, Ben Yagoda’s splendid anniversary history of The New Yorker, About Town (the main focus of this review), not only scrutinizes the magazine’s contents but also assesses its cultural impact. It does so with the kind of verve, insight, and elegance that would have had Ross dancing a jig of delight. It is, furthermore, the most comprehensive and authoritative history of The New Yorker yet to appear. For it is soundly based on the magazine’s rich archive, which was deposited at the New York Public Library in 1994. That consists of 2,500 boxes of manuscripts, memorandums, and correspondence, though the files of the elusive second editor, William Shawn, are conspicuous by their absence. Taken together, Yagoda shows, these documents tell the story of how a little magazine became "a paragon of English prose, critical acumen, and political judgment."
However, Yagoda is not so star-struck by The New Yorker that he fails to recognize its shortcomings. It was, he says, intellectually snobbish and aesthetically conservative. It fought shy of raw emotion, preferring sentimentality and "urbanality" (James Thurber’s term). And it often provided a home for "writing that was precious, smug, tiresomely literal, too long, or just plain dull." Nor is Yagoda under any illusions about Ross himself, a journalistic roughneck who never had the slightest "appreciation of music, fine art, or literature." How then did The New Yorker form the taste, inform the mind, and transform the wit of upper-middle-class America?
Part of the answer is that it began at the right time. It was a humorous magazine during the golden age of American comic writing. It was a glittering shop window during a consumer boom. It was a guide to fast-changing metropolitan mores that gave smart new New Yorkers a sense of identity — and superiority. The New Yorker itself benefited from low postage rates and new printing technology and from lack of broadcasting competition. But none of this would have mattered if Ross had not transcended his limitations and invested his "cosmic rage" in trying to perfect the magazine. As staff writer E.B. White said: "I am beginning to think of him as an Atlas who lacked muscle tone but who God damn well decided he was going to hold up the world anyway."
Ross first mesmerized, then galvanized contributors. S.J. Perelman recorded that his first meeting with the editor was satisfactory except that Ross "kept tugging at a rubber nipple and murmuring ‘Gloo, gloo,’ which I ascribed either to teething or heat rash." Ross nagged his cartoonists mercilessly: a frequent instruction simply read, "Make funnier." From his reporters he demanded facts, facts, facts — about skyscraper mail chutes, the fake-fur racket, "kosher Coca Cola." He employed the kind of fact-checker said to have "a mind like a steel mousetrap and a heart like a twelve-minute egg." He lavished endless care on his fiction writers, fussing particularly about commas and semicolons. Yet, as indicated in one of the bizarre missives quoted in Thomas Kunkel’s entertaining edition of Letters from the Editor, Ross considered such a limp-wristed occupation unworthy of a person of his virility — "All editors ought to be fairies."
Such remarks make it hard to take Ross seriously. And they add substance to the charges enumerated in Mary Corey’s painstaking study of The New Yorker at mid-century, The World through a Monocle, to the effect that the magazine was mired in the sexual, social, and racial prejudices of the day. Of course, this is not entirely surprising. Nor is it entirely true, as Corey herself has to admit. For example, Peter Arno amusingly reversed the stereotype of female as male sex object in a 1947 cartoon featuring a rich old woman gazing lustfully at two handsome baseball players in Yankee Stadium while their manager says to her: "Sometimes we sell them, lady, but only to other teams."
However, The New Yorker under Ross certainly failed to examine the social cost of privilege; for privilege was, as Corey says, "the still water in which the magazine floated." It virtually ignored the Depression. Its political interests did not extend much further than the re-positioning of the information booth in Grand Central Station and the color of the lights on the Empire State Building (Al Smith obligingly had them changed to white). Peering through the monocle of its foppish alter ego, Mr Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker viewed the world, one critic rightly said, "as a vast cocktail party."
Nevertheless, Ross possessed the essential quality of a great editor — independence. He believed that nothing should interfere with the pursuit of literary excellence and that journalists were not "entitled to friends." He fought strenuously to keep his "writers aloof from the press-agent, bally-hoo, special-favor gang." Advertisers he treated as a potential threat to the magazine’s integrity. Thus he opposed accepting ads for a "distasteful product" called "Zip," which pulled hair from women’s legs, although he thought its manufacturers were "benefactors to women, who are probably better without the hair on their legs." Businessmen he regarded with suspicion, though he did conduct a ceaseless quest for a so-called "Jesus" to manage the office; he even gave the job to Thurber, who devised an ingenious administrative system which involved throwing memorandums into a speakeasy wastepaper basket. During the McCarthyite period Ross published liberal articles, even when he didn’t much like their contents, simply in order to assert the freedom of the press.
By contrast, William Shawn, who succeeded to the editorship after Ross’s death in 1951, was a pussy-footer. He censored supposedly unpatriotic reports and failed to help one long-standing contributor, Kay Boyle, when she became the victim of a political witch-hunt. In fact Shawn was altogether an equivocal character: he changed his name from Chon, which sounded Chinese, to Shawn, which sounded Irish, although he was Jewish. He lived in a web of intrigue and ran The New Yorker, it was said, like a "one-man cabal." Shy, emotional, and phobic, Shawn hired staff in secret; or, rather, he inducted them into an esoteric cult. He kept them in separate cells, less like monks than like terrorists. He paid them erratically and did not always make it clear when they were fired, let alone when a piece they had written was rejected. As Renata Adler records in Gone, an odd, score-settling account of her time at The New Yorker, Shawn would say that "they" objected to it, which was a veil for "‘we,’ which was really ‘I.’"
Yet for all his eccentricities Shawn proved (after a cautious start) to be a heaven-born editor. He was far better educated than Ross. His taste was more refined and his sense of humor subtler. He had a rare ability to radically improve prose without substituting his own style for the author’s. And his passion for facts, details, and punctuation was no less urgent than Ross’s — he once kept a writer up until 2.30 a.m. in a dispute over a hyphen. He abhorred vulgarity. Staff invented a mnemonic to remind them of words Shawn banned (not a bad list): "Intrigued by the massive smarts of the balding, feisty, prestigious, workaholic tycoon, Tom Wolfe promptly spat on the quality photo above the urinal and tried to locate his gadget."
Shawn encouraged writers such as Rachel Carson, John Updike, J.D. Salinger, Truman Capote, Hannah Arendt, and Donald Barthelme. By the 1970s The New Yorker was as good as it had ever been. It not only espoused the highest literary standards but also developed a keen radical edge, pricking the conscience of America over matters such as ecological blight, civil rights abuses, and the Vietnam war. Emulating Ross, Shawn preserved the magazine’s moral authority by printing what he believed in, irrespective of critics, advertisers, and even readers. As Shawn wrote in a fastidious (if also somewhat disingenuous) credo when S.I. Newhouse bought The New Yorker, for $170 million, in 1985: "We have never published anything in order to sell magazines, to cause a sensation, to be controversial, to be popular or fashionable, to be ‘successful.’"
This was hardly the kind of language to appeal to the Condé Nast chief. Moreover, Shawn’s foibles were becoming incapacitating, The New Yorker’s readers were growing old, and the cultural landscape was disintegrating. As John Seabrook shows in his sharp, fizzy analysis of the commercialization of American culture, Nobrow, the magazine was by now less likely to be praised for its literary virtues than condemned for purveying the "elitist taste of a few privileged white males." So in 1987 Newhouse replaced Shawn with the book publisher Robert Gottlieb. He improved matters and raised circulation, but the advertisers were not impressed and profits turned into losses. These were not decreased by Gottlieb’s attempt to bridge the gap between highbrow and lowbrow with camp articles about, say, collectors of Scottie-dog memorabilia.
Newhouse therefore recruited Tina Brown, the British editor of Vanity Fair, to stand the Ross-Shawn formula on its head. She aimed to "market" the magazine, treating The New Yorker’s readers as consumers. She was impatient with its prissy, old-fashioned notions of good taste, preferring "hotter" items. According to Some Times in America, Alexander Chancellor’s lazy but engaging account of his hapless year editing "The Talk of the Town," Brown wanted "scoops, gossip, whatever would get people talking." She favored provocative pieces on "fashion, money, power, sex, and celebrity," here printing a story about satanism, there a photograph of a model apparently copulating with a skeleton. To quote Seabrook’s characteristic antithesis, she banished cant from the magazine’s pages "and printed cunt in them for the first time."
In many ways, it must be said, Brown revitalized The New Yorker. But she did so by the journalistic equivalent of injecting it with monkey gland. Since her surprise resignation in 1998 David Remnick has apparently been nursing the magazine back to gravitas. Whether he can restore its former glory and re-establish it as a major cultural arbiter in an increasingly fragmented marketplace only time will tell. But it is not a good sign that this sometime icon of journalistic independence is now housed in Condé Nast’s soulless skyscraper in Times Square, where the staff occupy identical cubicles and there are few bookshelves because books cause such a clutter.
