Omertà! Sealed lips! Sealed lips, ladies and gentlemen! Our Thing! We are
editing The New Yorker magazine, Harold
Ross’s New Yorker. We are not running a
panopticon. Not exactly! For weeks the editors of The New Yorker have been circulating a warning among
their employees saying that someone is out to write an article
about The New Yorker. This warning tells
them, remember: Omertà. Your vow of
silence—but New Yorker employees are not the
only people in the world who have to take this vow. White House
employees have to take it—none of this gratuitous libel, my G-6
lovelies, about how “I Saw What Lyndon Drinks for
Dinner”—Buckingham Palace employees have to take it—those graceless
alum-mouthed butlers and everything—everybody in the Mafia and at
the G. & C. Merriam Co. of Springfield, Mass.—a lot of people.
The G. & C. Merriam Co. puts out Webster’s
Dictionary, and they don’t want a lot of flip anecdotes
published about how, for example, they sit down to decide whether
certain popular but … dusky words are going to get in the book this
time around. Right?
One wouldn’t even have known about the
warning going around the New Yorker except
that they put it in writing, in memos. They have a compulsion in
the New Yorker offices, at 25 West
Forty-third Street, to put everything in writing. They have
boys over there on the nineteenth and
twentieth floors, the editorial offices, practically caroming off
each other—bonk old bison heads!—at the blind turns in the hallways
because of the fantastic traffic in memos. They just call them boys. “Boy, will you take this, please …”
Actually, a lot of them are old men with starched white collars
with the points curling up a little, “big lunch” ties, button-up
sweaters, and black basket-weave sack coats, and they are all over
the place transporting these thousands of messages with their
kindly old elder bison shuffles shoop-shooping along. They were
boys when they started the job, but the thing is, The New Yorker is forty years old—four decades, even, of
The New Yorker!—and they all have
seniority, like Pennsylvania Railroad
conductors.
The paper the thousands of messages are
on is terrific rag-fiber paper. It comes in pads gum-bound up at
the top, but it is the best possible paper. It is like the problem
with dollar bills wearing out with use. If there is this fantastic
traffic in memos and things all day long, one has to have paper
that will hold up. There are different
colors for different “unit tasks.” Manuscripts are typed on
maize-yellow bond, bud-green is for blah-blah-blah, fuchsia demure
is for blah-blah-blah, Newsboy blue is for blah-blah-blah, and this
great cerise, a kind of mild cherry red, is
for urgent messages, immediate attention and everything. So here
are these old elder bison messengers batting off each other in the
halls, hustling cerise memos around about some story somebody is
doing.
Well—all I can say is that it is a
great system they have going up there—but—nevertheless—people
talked. These … people
talked! They talked about things like William Shawn and the
Leopold and Loeb case, Shawn being editor of The
New Yorker, and about auto-lobotomy, many fascinating
things.
But! These people were … thinking out loud. People do that a lot at The New Yorker and wonder what is going on. They get
that way, for example, because a guy gets hired one day and some
whispery guy in old worsteds shows him to a cubicle and he sits
down at his desk in there and for the next two months he never
meets anybody. Everybody is in other cubicles with the doors shut. Whole days go by. He
just sits there, and every now and then Old Messenger comes in and
hands him a communique, in maize-yellow, fuchsia demure, bud-green,
hello-outthere beige, hello-help-help canary, kiss-me-somebody
cerise, please-I-love-you-anybody cerise—until he goes stir crazy
and starts prowling the halls and opens a door, and he sees these …
women with their backs arched over desks in this … unusual place, the Transferring Room; or he hits this
weird zone in the back corner of the
nineteenth floor, the Whisper Zone, all this
sibilance up there.
Eventually he finds that all these
things, the Whisper Zone, the Transferring Room, the memos, the
System, omertà, everything, leads back to
one man—Shawn. William Shawn—editor of one of the most powerful
magazines in America. The Man. Nobody Knows.
That is why they bring up things like this business of Shawn and the Leopold-Loeb case. They, themselves, want an … explanation. In this story, one of the stories told repeatedly, it is May 21, 1924, and Richard Loeb is crouching in the weeds with Nathan Leopold, and he says, “Nathan, look! How about William Shawn—” William Shawn is such a quiet, bright little kid, neat—you know?—no trouble, secretary of his class at the Harvard School for Boys, you know the class-secretary kind. His father is “Jackknife Ben.” They live in a big place at 4355 Vincennes. Easy ransom!
Only they don’t tell it too well. In
the first place, Loeb didn’t call Leopold “Nathan.” He called him
“Babe,” or something like that. And they would have never squatted
in the grass. They had these great clothes on, they were
social, one understands?
What the records show, actually, in the
Cook County (Chicago) Criminal Court and at the Harvard School, now
the Harvard—St. George School, is the following: Shawn—then called
Chon—and Bobby Franks were classmates at the Harvard School for
Boys that year. Shawn was a junior, sixteen years old, one of the
brightest students in the school, and Bobby Franks was fourteen
years old, a couple of years behind him. Leopold and Loeb were very
methodical. They had a whole set of specifications. They wanted a
small and therefore manageable teenage boy, from the Harvard
School, with wealthy parents who would pay up fast on the ransom.
They went over six names, the first one of which was “William.” The
court records do not give the last name. Shawn’s father, Benjamin
W. “Jackknife Ben” Chon, had made a lot of money by opening a shop,
The Jack Knife Shop, at 838 Exchange Avenue in the aromatic,
full-bodied Union Stock Yards on Chicago’s South Side, in 1889, and
selling 150 different kinds of jackknives. Great jackknife country!
Wealthy parents! And judging by the Harvard School yearbook for
1924, William Chon was a small, quiet teenage boy. In fact, even in
1940, the year of the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary, everybody
from the Harvard School still remembered him that way. Billy Chon
was senior class president, and the 1925 yearbook, The Review, had said, “‘Bill’ is certain to succeed in
life, and will always remain the pride of the Class of 1925”—but
still, the way they remembered him in the
seventy-fifth anniversary book was “Who would have ever thought
that little Billy Chon would have become one of the big shots on
the editorial staff of The New Yorker
magazine?” But so what? Not just Billy Chon but every small quiet
boy in the Harvard School that year—who blames them!—must have felt
as if the intellectual murderers, Leopold and Loeb, had fixed their
clinical eyes upon him at some point. They dropped the idea of
“William” only because they had a personal grudge against him and
somebody might remember that. They gave up on three or four others
because they knew them too well or because their fathers were too
tight with the money and might refuse to pay a good ransom.
Intellectual crime! How could anybody in God’s world be safe if
there were people like Leopold and Loeb going around killing people
just for the … aesthetics of the perfect
crime.
The whole story, and others about
Shawn, supposedly help explain why Shawn is so … retiring, why he won’t allow interviews, why he won’t
let his picture be taken, why it pains him
to ride elevators, go through tunnels, get cooped up—why he
remains anonymous, as they say, and slips
The New Yorker out each week from behind a
barricade of … pure fin de siècle back-parlor horsehair
stuffing.
Incredible! Shawn attended the
University of Michigan, 1925-’27, married Cecille Lyon in 1928,
worked on two newspapers, then in 1933 joined The
New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” department as a reporter. At
some point he dropped Chon for Shawn. Shawn took over as editor
when Harold Ross died in 1951. Thereby he became one of the most
prominent and powerful editors in the country. By World War II,
The New Yorker was already the most
prestigeful “quality lit” magazine in America. And since World War
II, largely under Shawn’s stewardship, it has become—new
honors!—the most successful suburban women’s magazine in the
country. Mountains of prestige. Yet from that day to this, the
outside world has learned practically nothing of William Shawn.
Nobody seems to know him except for a few “inties”—intimates—at
The New Yorker, like Lillian
Ross.
Elusive pimpernel! The Shawn legends!
The one of how he tries to time it in the morning so he can go
straight up to his office on the nineteenth floor, by himself on
the elevator, and carries a hatchet in his attaché case so he can
chop his way out if it gets stuck between floors—crazy stories like
that!
Shawn is a very quiet man. He has a
soft, somewhat high voice. He seems to whisper all the time. The
whole … zone around his office, a kind of
horsehair-stuffing atmosphere of old carpeting, framed New Yorker covers, quiet cubicles, and happy-shabby,
baked-apple gentility, is a Whisper Zone.
One gets within forty feet of it and everybody … is whispering, all
the secretaries and everybody. The Shawn
whisper; the whisper zone radiates out from Shawn himself.
Shawn in the hallway slips along as soundlessly as humanly possible
and—chooooo—he meets somebody right there in the hall. The nodding!
The whispering! Shawn is fifty-seven years old but still has a
boyish face. He is a small, plump man, round in the cheeks. He
always seems to have on about twenty layers of clothes, about three
button-up sweaters, four vests, a couple of shirts, two ties, it
looks that way, a dark shapeless suit over the whole ensemble, and
white cotton socks. Here he is in the hall, and he lowers his head
and puts out his hand.
“Hello—Mr.”—he begins
nodding—“Taylor—how—are—you,” with his head down, nodding down,
down, down, down, “—it’s—nice”—his head is down and he rolls his
eyes up and looks out from under his own forehead—“to—see—you”—and
then edges back with his hand out, his head nodding, eyes rolled
up, back foot edging back, back, back,
back—“very—good—to—see—you”—nodding, smiling—infectious!
Good for one! One does the same, whispering,
nodding, getting the old head down, nodding down, down, smiling,
edging back, rolling the eyeballs up the precipice of the forehead.
One becomes quiet, gentle, genteelly, magnificently, numbly,
so—
All right. Let’s deal by note, memo, or
telephone at The New Yorker.
But—embarrassment! Shawn calls up—and even the secretary down where
Lillian Ross is—and he calls up Lillian Ross all the time—and even
this secretary does it again:
“Hello, may I speak to Miss
Ross?”
“Whom should I say is
calling?”
Whum, dramatic, grammatic
pause—whisper—“Mr. Shawn.”
Zonk! Mr. Shawn! She has flaked it
again. He slipped in under the tympanic membrane with the whisper.
One of the four or five most prominent men in Communications!
Unrecognized in his own office. But does Shawn himself care? Shawn
doesn’t care; he has a passion for anonymity. Always he has this
passion. Except—well, such as the times some writer or somebody, a
young novelist, goes to a party in Shawn’s apartment on Fifth
Avenue. It is on the first floor and looks out on Central Park. It
is a very full view. One can see who is coming from all directions.
Nothing but trees across the street, no peering windows, no
elevators, nothing like that. Philip Hamburger is at the party.
Philip Hamburger has written a feature in The New
Yorker called “Notes for a Gazetteer” fifty-two times.
Hamburger and a lot of people from The New
Yorker are there. It is a “very nice” party. Shawn puts on
some records from his jazz collection: Jelly Roll, Bix, Bunny
Berrigan, Willie the Lion, Fats, Art. We were all very hippie along
the Mississippi in naughty naughty oughty-eight. And Young Novelist
writes a note the next day thanking him, addressing it to “Mr. Ted
Shawn.” One means, well, everybody knows Shawn is editor of
The New Yorker and everything, but he is …
so quiet, so passionately anonymous, so
these names get mixed up. Ted Shawn is a famous dancer. And the
next day a call comes and it is Mrs. Shawn
saying, “Thank you so much for your nice note, and by the
way—
“Mr. Shawn’s name is William, not …
Ted. Mr. Shawn prefers to be anonymous but not … quite that anonymous.”
All the same! He is Shawn of The New Yorker. Many New
Yorker writers are devoted to him. They have dedicated at
least six books to him. He is self-effacing, kind, quiet, diligent,
an efficient man, courtly, refined, considerate, humble, and—Shawn
uses this quiet business like a maestro. He has the quiet moxie to
walk through the snow at 3 a.m. to the apartment of somebody who
owes him a story—the magazine is at the absolute deadline, and this
writer is revising and revising and won’t turn loose of the story,
so Shawn just turns up at the door with snow caked all over his
boots, boots with clackety buckles, and layers of clothes, and he
knocks on the door, and the poor guy’s wife, who is asleep on the
couch in the living room, gets up and answers the door, and Shawn
says:
“Hello—Mrs.—Taylor”—he is nodding and
smiling—“is—your—husband—in?”—nodding, smiling, rolling his
eyeballs up and down his forehead, edging in—“uh—I’m
afraid—I’m—going—to—have—to”—
“Good evening, Mr. Shawn,” or
something, she says. “I mean, he’s in the bedroom, he’s
working—”
“—take—a—manuscript—from—your—husband—how—have—you—been—Mrs.—Taylor?”—edging,
nodding, sliding the old booty feet, ever nodding back, nod,
smile—“your—lovely—daughters?”— edge, edge, eye-roll, right over to
the bedroom, and he opens the door and walks in, nod, smile,
peeking eye:
“Oh—good—evening—Mr.—Taylor—yes—I’ll—have—to—take—this—now—thank—yon—very—much—how—is”—he
pulls the story up out of the typewriter and off the desk, with
Taylor falling back in his wooden chair like a burntout cigarette
filter—“Mrs. Taylor?—you-are-very-kind—yes—thank—you—very—much”—he
edges back toward the door, nods his head down, down, down, smiles,
rolls his eyes up from under his forehead, edges back, the booty
buckles
clackle—“goodbye—Mrs.—Taylor—thank—you—how—is—”
Floonk, the door closes. Quiet! Shawn
wins.
Yes! And suddenly, after forty years,
it all adds up. Whispering, inconspicuous—but courtly—formal,
efficient—but sympathetic—perfection! —what are those but,
precisely! the perfect qualifications for a museum custodian, an
undertaker, a mortuary scientist. But of course! Thirteen years
ago, upon the death of Harold Ross, precisely, that difficult task
befell William Shawn: to be the museum curator, the mummifier, the
preserve-in-amber, the smiling embalmer … for Harold Ross’s
New Yorker magazine.
Harold Ross! Practically nobody, except at The New Yorker, remembers what a … charismatic figure Ross was as The New Yorker’s founder and editor. James Thurber told a story in his book The Years with Ross that shows it, however. About a year after Ross died, The New Yorker entertained the editors of Punch, and a couple of weeks later Thurber was talking about the party with Rowland Emmett of Punch and told him it was too bad he never met Ross. “Oh, but I did,” said Emmett. “He was all over the place. Nobody talked about anything else.” Ross was from Aspen, Colorado, got mixed up with literati in Paris after World War I, and came to New York and entered the literary world with a kind of Rocky Mountain reverse-spin mucker stance, “anti-intellectual.” Ross was moody, explosive, naive about many things, and had many blind spots when it came to literature and the arts—and all of this partially disguised the real nature of his sophistication. Ross’s sophistication actually had a rather refined English—Anglo-Saxon—cast to it. To Ross, sophistication involved not merely understanding culture and fashion but avoidance of excesses, including literary and artistic excesses. He didn’t want anything in the magazine that was too cerebral, Kantian, or too exuberant, angry, gushing, too “arty,” “pretentious,” or “serious.” He used those three words, “arty,” “pretentious,” and “serious,” quite a lot. He didn’t want it to seem as if anybody were straining his brain and showing off or wringing his heart out and pouring soul all over you. This idea was very special, very English.
Great stuff! Ross started The New Yorker in 1925, and despite the depression, it
was a terrific success. Sophistication in America! The thing was,
in the twenties the New York intelligentsia still felt . . very
colonial. They were like those poor Russian
timber magnates who used to sit in their Bourbon Louis salons in
St. Petersburg and make their daughters speak only French on
Thursdays and talk to guests about “l’Opéra,” as though that great piece of angel’s-food
cake were just around the corner on the Nevsky Prospect. They were
terribly hung up on French Culture. In New York the model was
English Culture. Ross may have had plenty of those lithoid Colorado
eccentricities, but The New Yorker was never
anything more than a rather slavish copy of Punch. Nevertheless, literati in America took to it as
if they were dying of thirst. The need was so great that
The New Yorker was first praised and then
practically canonized. By the 1950s, funny things were happening.
Some of The New Yorker’s host of staff
writers, such as E. B. White, were receiving very solemn honors,
such as honorary degrees at Yale.
No magazine in America ever received
such literary acclaim before. Of course, it
was hard to review the work of these New
Yorker writers—e.g., Thurber, E. B. White, Robert Benchley,
Wolcott Gibbs, Dorothy Parker, A. J. Liebling—and put one’s finger
on any … major work. What had any of them done that would measure
up to, say, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, or Steinbeck or
Nathanael West? People who don’t really
understand just see New Yorker
writers pistling away their talents within the old Ross mold year
after year, decade after decade, until finally somebody writes an
affectionate obituary. But what is all this about major work? Never mind! Ross himself never minded it.
They had achieved the perhaps small-scale but still special goal he
had set for them—Anglo-Saxon sophistication—very well. Ecce homines! Tiny giants!
The atmosphere at The
New Yorker itself, however, was something else. William
Shawn came to New York in 1933, at the age of twentysix, with the
idea of writing a book about The New Yorker.
Instead, he joined the staff as a reporter for the “Talk of the
Town” section. The “Talk of the Town” was nothing more than
The New Yorker’s version of Punch’s “Charivari” section, but—all right!—in the
United States, at any rate, The New Yorker
was in a class by itself. One went to work there, and one—how does
one explain it?—began to get a kind of … religious feeling about the place. There were already a
lot of … traditions. From the first,
according to his old friends there, Shawn felt as if he were
entering a priesthood. Hierophants! Tiny giants—all over the
place—Shawn could look out of his cubicle and there they were,
those men out there padding along in the hall were James Thurber,
Wolcott Gibbs, and Robert Benchley themselves. That gangling man out there with the
mustache, that is James Thurber—one is not
reading about James Thurber, that is he, and one is now, actually, physically, a part
of his universe; one can study the most minute details about the
man, the weave of his yellow-ocher button-up sweater, the actual
knit of it, the way the loops of yarn
intertwist, the sweater James Thurber has on—not a photograph of
it—but the sweater he has on, has on
his own body. Actually! Grace!
Harold Ross was forever looking for a
managing editor who could somehow convert his conception of
The New Yorker into a systematic, ongoing
operation, and Shawn—faithful hierophant!—was the most successful
managing editor he ever appointed. He was … totally
committed.
There was a lot of speculation about
what would happen to The New Yorker “after
Ross”! One of the New Yorker writers, A. J.
Liebling, said, “The same thing that happened to analysis after
Freud.” He was righter than he knew. There was never any question
of Shawn’s setting a new policy. The old Museum Curator just set to
work with his whole heart. Tiny Mummies!
Part of Shawn’s job as embalmer is actual physical preservation. For example, there is the Thurber Room, the cubicle James Thurber had up there in his last days at The New Yorker. Thurber’s eyesight was failing, and he tried out some of his ideas for drawings with a big crayon on the wall; nutty football players, or something, and a bunch of nuns, some weird woodland animals on the order of the Barefaced Lie and the White Lie. James Thurber! The room is right next to the men’s room, because it was hard for Thurber to navigate the halls. The room is kept like the Poe Shrine in Richmond, Virginia; pure Poe, pure Thurber. The new man, the writer in the cubicle now, understands. Nobody touches those walls, no other pictures of any sort go up on those walls. The custodians stand around late in the day trying to decide how best to preserve these … well, one means, these things are not scrawls, I don’t care what Thurber would have said. These things are bona fide … murals we have here. Museum! Shrine! Maybe someday, all these offices of all these giants, like Robert Benchley, James Thurber, Wolcott Gibbs, everybody, can be restored, like Colonial Williamsburg, all the original objects and curios, Benchley’s little porcelain hussar figures, Gibbs’s amber walrus, animals, and things, but for now—well, only the people who were working here when Ross was alive may keep offices in the old donnish clutter, all these things on the walls and so forth. The Mr. Old-Timers, like Brendan Gill, the movie critic, who has been here twenty-five years, or something like that, may keep all these vines growing all over his office—picturesque!—donnish clutter!—but we keep all these men on one floor, and as they retire or … pass on … the rule is, nobody else may do up rooms like that. Nobody else may put all those curios up on their walls, all those maps of Hartford, before the Turnpike, all that strange stuff—nothing on the walls but New Yorker covers. That is, of course, understood? One means, well, it is not a written rule or anything like that, but one soon gets the idea, by example, as it were, like this business of everybody wearing white shirts at the IBM offices. Nobody comes in and beats one over the skull with a rule book or anything, but the day may come when some unplugged bastard comes in with a light, practically thin ice blue shirt on, and about 3 p.m. a superior calls him into an office where the fluorescent ice tray on the ceiling hums, and he says, “Let me ask you, tell me, have you ever noticed any of our executives wearing a … pastel shirt like yours?” One means, well, of course, everyone was genuinely sorry, even stricken, over the death of A. J. Liebling, “Joe,” in 1963, but, well, the man did have the most unbelievable clutter in his cubicle, pictures right up on the walls of fifth-ranking bantamweight boxers with their hair pomaded, photographed against dark backgrounds on glossy paper with white ink inscriptions, “Best of Luck,” cretinish handwriting, circles over the i’s. The man went really rather beyond the orthodox donnish clutter. That was quite bad enough, but his style, his writing style, yes, he did write under Ross, and he quite belonged here—no one will deny that for a minute—but doesn’t one think that Liebling was … baroque, and hearty at times, and did he really fit in around here?
Tenor! Yes! Shawn’s greatest task, of
course, was not preserving these shrine rooms but preserving the
style, the tenor of
the magazine. The tenor, the atmosphere, is important. Newcomers
are schooled in it immediately. To begin with, getting hired at
The New Yorker is nothing merely
personnel-office-like or technical. It is more like fraternity rushing. A
person’s attitude is important. Everybody wants to know if the
candidate will fit in, if he has the makings of a genuine …
hierophant; not a lot of bogus enthusiasm and so forth, but more an
attitude of—well, humility, about The New
Yorker and its history. Humility has come to be a very
important thing here, and lately The New
Yorker has settled upon small people, small physically, that
is, who can preserve through quite a number of years the tweedy,
thatchy, humble style of dress they had in college. After the age
of forty-one is encouraged, by tacit example, to switch to
hard-finished worsteds.
Earn one’s worsteds!
A lot of traditions are kept up very
well. One is that the cocktail lounge in the lobby of the Algonquin
Hotel and the Rose Room are actually a private club practically owned by The New Yorker. The Algonquin Hotel
is across the street and down toward Sixth Avenue a little from the
Forty-fourth Street entrance of The New
Yorker building. The other cocktail lounge in there, the
Blue Room, or whatever it is, and the other dining room—not the
Rose Room but the other kind of hearty
oak-woody dining room off the lobby—are not part of The New Yorker, and all kinds of hearty beef-trust
people turn up in there, businessmen and one thing and another. But
the cocktail lounge in the lobby—well, it is not actually, but it is practically a
New Yorker club; you know? Or at least it
seems so if one works for The New Yorker. It
even looks like a club, a fine club like the Century Club. One sits
in leather chairs at lamp tables and coffee tables and things, not
at ordinary Formica cocktail-lounge tables, and there is a great
deal of dark wood all around, and one summons the waiter by banging
a little clerk’s bell on the table—just like in a club, one
understands? Well, one means, it is a public place, but if one
works for The New Yorker, he does not simply
show up in there—the thing is, this is the
place where Ross used to come, and Thurber, and everybody, and now
Shawn sometimes comes there around six, but even Shawn watches
himself. A lot of times he doesn’t even eat lunch in the Rose Room;
for example, he and Lillian Ross will drift off up to this
delicatessen near Rockefeller Plaza for a very quiet, unpretentious
couple of corned-beef sandwiches. So one waits until he is invited
to the Algonquin by some senior member of the staff. It is like the
second round of initiation, like being really accepted. Months go
by, but finally the day comes when Brendan Gill or another top
member says, in this most offhand casual way, as if it really
didn’t mean a thing, “Mr. Toddy, would you care to join me for
lunch at the Algonquin?” Zoom! Grace!