Mr. Shawn's New Yorker

People used to ask me what he was like, and I'd say, "Imagine the most phobic man in the world. He lives in a city surrounded on all sides by water, and he is afraid of everything -- of bridges, of tunnels, of trains, of buses, of limousines, of helicopters, of planes, of ferries. . . . He cannot bring himself to get off that island. But this man is also the most curious man in the world: he wants to know about everything and everyone and every place. And now imagine that by some fluke this man has come into what amounts to limitless wealth: he can take people and train them as his surrogates and then send them forth. 'Go there,' he tells them, 'Go --' to Japan, say, or Africa, to Alaska, to the Great Plains, to Three Mile Island, to Vietnam, to Montevideo or Monte Carlo or Montserrat or Mozambique, to Cape Canaveral or Capetown or Cape Horn, to New Guinea or New Zealand or New Jersey or Newfoundland. . . . 'Go,' he tells them, 'take however long you need but then write me back what is is like there,hat the people are saying and feeling, how they spend their lives, what they worry about -- write me all that, make it complete, and make it vivid, as vivid as if I'd been able to go there myself.' And they go, and they write him back, and each week he puts together a folio of their letters, of their reports -- and sometimes those reports take the form of reports, and sometimes they take the form of stories or poems, and sometimes they come in disguised as film or music or book reviews -- and he produces a little private magazine, just for himself. And everybody else gets to read over his shoulder -- he doesn't mind but he hardly notices. That's what it's like to work for him," I'd say. "He really is The New Yorker."

And that is what it was like. But the strange thing is that for all his legendary agoraphobia, William Shawn was at the same time a profound agoraphiliac. For all his fear of public spaces, he continually displayed the utmost concern, and even reverence, for the Public Space, a forum he felt to be in deepest jeopardy (a jeopardy which, in turn, he often seemed to liken to the magazine's own).

I remember how, from my earliest days at the magazine -- this was back in 1981 or so -- he was already saying that the gravest threat to The New Yorker would not come from some other magazine but from television. "And this will be, not because people will spend their time watching television instead of reading the magazine," he would say, "but because television will inexorably destroy people's attention spans." People would lose the ability to concentrate over wide expanses -- of text, of theme. And, of course, it seems to me that this anxious premonition of his has been borne out.

But there's something else as well, for the world itself has changed. It seems to me -- to cite just one manifestation of that change -- that another grave threat to the magazine may have come from the decline of the one-income family, by which of course I mean the practical feasibility of most families' being able to make ends meet on just one income. Say what one will about the desperation (particularly for women) inherent in the 1950s-style household -- desperations which were themselves superbly delineated in countless New Yorker short stories -- but come Friday afternoon, back in the old days, the housework has been done, the shopping accomplished, and both the husband and the wife could look forward to a weekend during which they could easily imagine getting lost in a piece of long reporting or reflection. (And that, above all, was what the magazine at its best used to be for -- this business of getting-lost-in, of finding oneself suddenly, unaccountably, immersed in some new place or person or perpx one had no idea one was even going to be considering as the week began.) Nowadays, such weekends rarely present themselves to most of the magazine's readers, particularly its younger readers.

If people were increasingly complaining that they couldn't keep up with The New Yorker, this said as much about them, and the pressures on their time, as it did about the magazine. And, in fact, it said something quite unsettling. People were increasingly coming home exhausted -- too exhausted, often, for anything but television, a medium that answered their needs (perhaps "pandered to" is too strong a phrase) through ever tighter and snappier forms of address, forms which themselves were quickly imitated by almost all of the other media. And, indeed, what was being lost was the ability to read, or even more to the point, to think, to think at the sort of scale, across the kind of expanse, at the sort of pace that proper stewardship of the public realm requires: a pace of consideration that had been the very hallmark of William Shawn's New Yorker.

William Shawn is gone now, and, to an extent, so is his audience. But the need for the kind of attention he lavished upon the world is perhaps more pronounced than ever -- surely the world's problems today are more and not less complex than before -- and the challenge facing his heirs will be to find a (perhaps new) way of attending like that, and of enticing others to do so, as well.

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