William
Shawn, editor of The New Yorker
magazine—well, he is a very, as they say, homey person. That is one
side of him. He is a small, quiet man, and he talks in this halting
whisper. He seems to wear layer upon layer of clothes, all sorts of
sweaters, vests, coats. He smiles, nods, nods, nods; he makes
courtly, sort of down home pleasantries. And
if—there may be an ashtray on his desk by now—but if there was no
ashtray, he would go out himself! Mr. Shawn of The
New Yorker!—and bring back a
Coca-Cola bottle for use as an ashtray. Easygoing!
“Why—hello—Mr.—Cage—um—yes—how—are—yon—here—let—me—how—is—Mrs.—Cage—um—take—your—coat—oh-oh—didn’t—mean—to—um—there—if—I—can—just—slip—it—off—unh—here—have—a—”
“Well, thank you very much, Mr.
Shawn—”
“—a—seat—right—over—here—well—it—uh—always—does—
that—ha-ha—well—now—oh—I—see—you’re—smoking—let—me—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Shawn, I
didn’t-”
“No, no, no, no, no, no,
please—perfectly—all—right—it’s—please—keep—your—seat—I’ll—be—right—back—”
Whereupon he goes out of the office,
smiling, and comes back in a moment with an empty Coca-Cola bottle
in his hand. He puts the Coca-Cola bottle on the desk for Cage to
use as an ashtray.
So one can imagine Cage saying
something like he has a great many viable
ideas about this story, but it is funny, he can hear his own voice
as he talks. The words are coming out all right—“several really
very viable approaches, I think, Mr.
Shawn”—but they sound hollow, as if in an
echo chamber, because inside his brain all he can focus on is the
cigarette and the Coca-Cola bottle. The thick glass in those
bottles, and Jeezus, that little hole in the top there—it
looks big enough, but if you try to knock
the ash off a cigarette here into the Coca-Cola bottle, you see
that the glass is thick and the hole
isn’t big enough. Cage is practically down
to the end of the cigarette—“Well, I’m not absolutely sure the
ethnocentric idea works in a case like this,
Mr. Shawn, but”—and then what is he going to do? There’s nothing to
put the cigarette out on. He’s going to have
to just drop the cigarette down the hole in the Coca-Cola bottle,
and then it is going to hit the bottom of the bottle, and then it
is going to hit the bottom of the bottle and just keep burning, you know? And there is going to be this little
smelly curl of smoke coming up out of the Coca-Cola bottle, like a
spirit lamp, and this filthy cigarette lying in the bottom, right
there on Shawn’s desk, and obviously Shawn is not crazy about
cigarettes in the first place, and old Cage hasn’t even sold him on
the idea of the story—
But! That is the beauty of the man! On the outside he is quiet and homey, easygoing. Underneath, however—William Shawn is not nodding for a moment. Like the time the people in the Checking Department started having these weekly skits, sort of spoofing some of the old hands—does one really wish to know about how long that kind of thing lasted? That is a … rhetorical question. Shawn is not nodding. William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross.
To preserve The New
Yorker just as Ross left it, exactly, in …
perpetuity.
Yes! And to do so, William Shawn has
done nothing halfway. He has devised an editing system that is in
some ways more completely group journalism,
or org-edit, as it is called at Novy Mir, than anything Time
magazine ever even contemplated.
To start with, one can believe, most
assuredly, that no little … comedians in the Checking Department
are going to schmarf around in there doing skits about the old
hands—the men who worked under Ross, many of them. Those men play
an important part in Shawn’s system. The physical part of the preservation—such as preserving the
Thurber Room—that was easy. Shawn’s hardest task was to preserve
the literary style of Ross’s New Yorker. The
thing to do, of course, was to adopt, as models, the styles of men
on the magazine who had been working under Ross—the so-called Tiny
Giants, viz., E. B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, James
Thurber, A. J. Liebling, people of that sort.
Well, Shawn’s first step was brilliantly simple. In effect, he has established lifetime tenure—purity!—for nearly everybody who served under Ross. Seniority! Columnists and so forth at The New Yorker have lifetime seniority, and if any ambitious kids there aspire, they wait it out, earn their first pair of hard-finished worsteds by working and waiting for them; one understands? This has led to a certain amount of awkwardness. The New Yorker’s movie, theater, and art sections have come to have an eccentric irrelevance about them. They have a kind of knitsweater, stoke-the-coal-grate charm, but … somehow they are full of Magooisms. Such as: “It was evidently intended to be a very funny account of a lower-middle-class London family jam-packed with lovable eccentrics, but when, after thirty minutes, I found that nothing funny had happened and that my accustomed high spirits were being reduced to audible low moans, I got up and made my way out of the theater, which, as far as laughter was concerned, had been, and I suspect remained, as silent as a tomb.” Evidently intended; audible low moans; as silent as a tomb: huckleberry preserves! Mom’s jowls are on the doily!
The “Letter from London” and “Letter
from Paris” features, written by two more seniors, have the same
trouble. They started off in the 1930s, when not too many Americans
were traveling to London or Paris, the idea being to introduce
readers to what was current in the way of Culture and modes in Europe. Today all sorts of people fly to London
and Paris all the time, and these “Letters” from abroad have taken
on the tone of random sights seen from the window of a secondbest
hotel.
Shawn, of course, is well aware of all
this. It is just that he has a more … specific mission. Museum
curator! He apparently wanted a permanent mold for The New Yorker’s essays, profiles, and so forth, and he
did it with unerring taste. Lillian Ross! The last really
impressive thing The New Yorker published
under Harold Ross was Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway in
1950. Lillian Ross is no kin to Harold Ross, by the way. This piece
of hers was terrific, and the technique influenced a lot of the
best journalists in the country. She gave up the usual historical
format of the profile entirely and, instead, wrote a running
account of a couple of days she spent following Hemingway around
New York. She put in all his little asides, everything, a lot of
terrific dialogue.
This story gave a wonderful picture of
this big egomaniac garruling around town and batting everybody over
the head with his ego as if it were a pig bladder. The piece
impressed Ross, and that gave Lillian Ross the right cachet around
The New Yorker, right off. A small, quiet,
inconspicuous, sympathetic girl from Syracuse, whose father had run
a filling station and kept a lot of animals, she had a great deal
of womanly concern for underdogs. Also, her prose style had a nice
flat-out quality about it, none of those confounded curlicues of
the man at the other extreme, Liebling. Liebling verged on Ross’s
Anglo-Saxon sin of “excess,” straining at the brain, as they say.
Anyway, Lillian Ross’s style became the model for the New Yorker essay.
That was all right, but most of the
boys never really caught on. All they picked
up were some of her throwaway mannerisms. She piles up details and
dialogue, dialogue mainly, but piles it all up very carefully,
building up toward a single point; such as, Ernest Hemingway is a
Big Boy and a fatuous ass. All that the vergers who have followed
her seem to think is that somehow if you get in enough details,
enough random fact—somehow this trenchant
portrait is going to rise up off the pages. They miss her
strong points—namely, her ear for dialogue and her point of
view—and just run certain sport devices of
hers into the ground. The fact-gorged sentence is one of them.
Lillian Ross wrote another essay that also had a lot of impact,
about the making of a moving picture, The Red Badge
of Courage, and the opening sentence of that story was the
ruination of at least fifty “Letters” and “Profiles” by the
New Yorker foot soldiers who followed in her
path. That sentence read:
The making of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
movie “The Red Badge of Courage,” based on the Stephen Crane novel
about the Civil War, was preceded by routine disclosures about its
production plans from the columnist Louella Parsons (“John Huston
is writing a screen treatment of Stephen Crane’s classic, ‘The Red
Badge of Courage,’ as a possibility for an M-G-M picture”), from
the columnist Hedda Hopper (“Metro has an option on ‘The Red Badge
of Courage’ and John Huston’s working up a budget for it. But
there’s no green light yet”), and from Variety (“Preproduction work on ‘Red Badge of Courage’
commenced at Metro with the thesp-tests for top roles in drama”),
and it was preceded, in the spring of 1950, by a routine visit by
John Huston, who is both a screen writer and a director, to New
York, the headquarters of Loew’s, Inc., the company that produces
and distributes M-G-M pictures.
Miss Ross was just funning around with that
one, but The New Yorker’s line troops
started writing whole stories that way.
Unbelievable! All those clauses, appositions, amplifications,
qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the
poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss.
They are still doing it. One of the latest is an essay in the March
13 issue. It began with what has become The New
Yorker formula lead:
One afternoon just after the spring
semester began at the University of California, I passed on my way
to the Berkeley campus to make a tour of the card tables that had
been set up that day by student political organizations on the
Bancroft strip—a wide brick sidewalk, outside the main entrance to
the campus, that had been the original battlefield of a free-speech
controversy that embroiled and threatened the university for the
entire fall semester.
That is just the warm-up, though. It
proceeds to a New Yorker style specialty
known as the “whichy thicket”:
But, unlike COFO workers,
who still can’t be sure their civilrights
campaign has made any significant change in Mississippi, F.S.M.
workers need only walk a block or two to witness unrestricted
campus political activity of the kind that was the goal of their
movement, and to anyone who has spent some
time listening to their reminiscences, the F.S.M. headquarters,
which is a relatively recent acquisition,
seems to be a make-work echo of the days when the F.S.M. had a series of command posts, with
names like Strike Central and Press Central—a system of
walkietalkies for communication among its scouts on the campus—and
an emergency telephone number, called Nexus, to be used
when the regular number was
busy.
Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoooaaaaaaugh!—piles of whichy whuh
words—which, when, where, who, whether,
whuggheeee, the living whichy thickets. All that was from a
story called “Letter from Berkeley” by Calvin Trillin, but it is
not a rare case or even Trillin’s fault. Trillin can write very
clearly, very directly, left to his own devices. But nobody is left
to his own devices at The New Yorker
today.
Shawn has … a System.
The system is Shawn’s refinement of
Harold Ross’s query theory and operates something like this: Once
an article is accepted, some girl retypes it on maize-yellow paper
and a couple of other colors, and Shawn sends the maize copy to a
chief editor. The other two copies go to the research department
(“Checking”) and the copy style department. The copy style
department’s task is seeing to it that the grammar, punctuation,
spelling, and word usage in the piece correspond to The New Yorker’s rules on the subject. Sentences phrased
in the form of a question, for example, must end in a question
mark, no matter how far they have roamed from the idea of asking a
question by the end of the sentence. An example, from “Talk of the
Town,” again of March 13, runs: “Leave it to the astonishing
Italians to bring off the reverse, however, for who should fly into
New York from Milan the other morning, for a five-day stay, but a
hundred and thirty-six of Italy’s most prominent—not to mention
liveliest and most talkative—painters and sculptors, each bringing
with him five or more works, to be sold here at a series of charity
auctions to benefit two New York hospitals: the Italian Hospital,
on West 110th Street, and the New York
Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, on West Fiftieth
Street?”
The chief editor can—and is expected to—rewrite the piece in any way he thinks will improve it. It is not unusual for the writer not to be consuited about it; the editor can change it without him, something that happens only rarely at Time, for example. At Time the writer always makes the changes himself, if possible. Practically every writer for The New Yorker, staff or freelance, goes through this routine, with the exception of a few people, like Lillian Ross, who are edited by Shawn himself. Meanwhile, the researchers down in the checking department are making changes. The researchers’ additions often take the form of filling in blanks some writer has left in the story. He may write something like: “Miss Hall appeared in Sean O’Casey’s ( t.k. ) in 19(00) …” and the researcher is supposed to fill in the blanks, t.k. standing for “words to come” and (00) for “digits to come.” This is precisely the way the news magazines operate. The researcher then comes up with “Miss Hall appeared in Drums Under the Window, a play by Paul Shyre based on Sean O’Casey’s autobiographical work of that name, in 1961.”
Next, the rewrite editor’s changes, the
copy stylist’s changes, and the researchers’ changes are collated
and the whole thing is set on a Vari-Typer machine. The Vari-Typer
machine sets the story up with even margins on each side of the
page, approximating the width of an actual columns in the magazine.
A lot of copies of this Vari-Typer version are made, and then the
paperwork really begins. Somehow, after this point, the sentences
in the story, well, they begin to … grow longer and
longer.
One Vari-Typer copy goes back to the
chief editor, two more go back to the researchers and the copy
stylists, another goes up to Shawn’s office, and one goes to a
“query” editor, and sometimes to two “query” editors. The query
editors play an intramural game. Ross devised it. The goal is to
punch a hole in every weak spot they can find in a story, really
give it a going-over. According to the rules, objections are to
take the form of questions—“queries.” The editors compete to see
how many biting, insulting, devastatingly ironic questions they can
pose about one piece. The New Yorker‘s
reigning champion at “querying” is a veteran of the Ross era,
Rogers Whitaker. Players may hit a story for artiness,
pretentiousness, overexuberance, overassertiveness, overanything,
or for plain wrong thinking, unintentional double meanings, or
other naïvetés. If it isn’t otherwise vulnerable, they can hit it
for vagueness. There are quite a lot of queries on that score. The
query takes some such form as “Are we really to assume that there
are more than eighteen living persons who remember a play by Paul
Shyre, based on a book by Sean O’Casey, entitled Drums Under the Window? Are we sure it was not
Drums Under the Milkweed or Weeds in the Milk Drums Under the Window? Where did it
play—at the Ciudad Trujillo World Fair of 1955?”
This query goes back to the chief
editor, who rockets it to the researcher. By now galleys are flying
all over The New Yorker, and the old boys,
the magazine’s senior-citizen messengers, are upping the shoopshoop
gait in the halls. The query will eventually end in a sentence that
reads, “Miss Hall appeared in Drums Under the
Window, which was a play by Paul Shyre, based on an
autobiographical book by Sean O’Casey, and which ran for (00)
performances at the ( t.k. ), an Off Broadway theater, in 1961.”
The writer may or may not be in on this editing and checking and
shuffling. So many galleys are going around so thickly that there
is only one hope for ever getting some version of the story into
the magazine: the … Transferring Room!
In this room a small group of people is hunched over tables, pulling all these sheets together, copying everybody’s scrawls and queries onto a set of master galleys. The old boys are trundling these things in, from the researchers, the copy stylists, the chief editors, the query editors, from all over, and master copies are sent back to the chief editor, to Shawn, and to the researchers. Everybody muses and puzzles over it one last time. The author then is given a glimpse of what an … interesting … mutation his story has undergone if somebody calls him in at that point to answer queries about facts and do the needed rewriting. And finally, as the culmination of this great … evolution, the homogenized production is disgorged to the printers—in Chicago, via electronic impulses—and the New Yorker Style is achieved.
One might think that sensitive young
writers would get upset about this, that they would take one look
at these thickets of perhapses, probablies,
I-should-says, at the long, tendrilly whichy clauses that have grown up in their prose—and
get, well … upset.
But! That is not so. A writer gets used
to it very quickly, as soon as he gives himself what one disparager
called the “auto-lobotomy.” Paradise! The System! We! Ambrosial org-lit!
Out of the org-maw, however, come some
unique and even important articles from time to time. John Hersey’s
“Hiroshima,” for example. That was Shawn’s inspiration. He
prevailed upon Harold Ross to devote practically an entire issue of
The New Yorker to Hersey’s account of the
bombing of Hiroshima. It may have been one of those memorable fat
documents of our times that nobody reads, such as the issues of
The New York Times that carry accounts of
the deaths of people like Stalin and Churchill or Presidential
State of the Union messages. Everybody goes out and buys these
nice, fat, full news bricks and never throws them away; or reads
them. One puts them in there on the shelf in the closet and
preserves them, as in a time capsule, through move after move, from
town to town, from urb to suburb, hanging on to these documents of
our times. But that is all right. “Hiroshima” was unique. Rachel
Carson’s book The Silent Spring was first
published in The New Yorker. So was James
Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” which was expanded
into the book The Fire Next Time. Articles
like these have had a tremendous impact nationally. Baldwin’s, for
example, became the favorite bogey-whip for white liberal
masochists all over the country. Flay us, flay us, James, us poor
guilty, whitey burghers, with elegant preacher rhetoric.
Terrific!
So The New
Yorker has the biggest literary reputation of any magazine
in the country, for both nonfiction and fiction. Yet, curiously
enough, it was not The New Yorker that
launched James Baldwin in slick magazines. It was Esquire. James Baldwin, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow,
Albert Camus, Joyce Carey, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley,
James Jones, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Ezra Pound, Philip Roth,
Joseph Heller, William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck, Nelson
Algren, Bruce Jay Friedman, Norman Mailer, Stanley Elkin, Terry
Southern, Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, J. D. Salinger—that is a
roster not of New Yorker writers but of
Esquire writers. Hemingway’s “Snows of
Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”
appeared first in Esquire. Fitzgerald’s
Crack-Up appeared first in Esquire. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Lewis,
Arthur Miller, Baldwin—all made frequent contributions to
Esquire at one time or another. Salinger was
published in Esquire long before he was
published in The New Yorker. Damon Runyon,
Stephen Vincent Benét, James Gould Cozzens, William Faulkner, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, John Marquand, Thomas Wolfe, Philip Wylie, Frank
O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, William Humphrey, James Jones, Thomas
Pynchon, Saul Bellow, William Saroyan, Louis Auchincloss, Bernard
Malamud, Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia, Herbert Gold, Nelson
Algren, Isaac Bashevis Singer—that is a list not of New Yorker writers but of Saturday
Evening Post writers. For the last fifteen years
The New Yorker has been practically out of
the literary competition altogether. Only Salinger, Mary McCarthy,
John O’Hara, and John Updike kept them in the game at all.
Recently, Updike’s stories have become more and more tabescent,
leaving The New Yorker with only one
promising young writer, Donald Barthelme.
The New Yorker comes out once a week, it has overwhelming cultural prestige, it pays top prices to writers—and for forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement. Esquire comes out only once a month, yet it has completely outclassed The New Yorker in literary contribution even during its cheesecake days. Every so often somebody sits down and writes an affectionate summary of The New Yorker’s history, expecting the magazine’s bibliography to read like some kind of honor roll of American letters. Instead, they come up with John O’Hara, John McNulty, Nancy Hale, Sally Benson, J. D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, John Collier, John Updike—good, but not exactly an Olympus for the mother tongue.
The short stories in The New Yorker have been the laughingstock of the New
York literary community for years, but only because so few literati
have really understood Shawn’s purpose. The New
Yorker has published an incredible streak of stories about
women in curious ruralbourgeois settings. Usually the stories are
by women, and they recall their childhoods or domestic animals they
have owned. Often they are by men, however, and they meditate over
their wives and their little children with what used to be called
“inchoate longings” for something else. The scene is some vague
exurb or country place or summer place, something of the sort, cast
in the mental atmosphere of tea cozies, fringe shawls, Morris
chairs, glowing coals, wooden porches, frost on the pump handle,
Papa out back in the wood bin, leaves falling, buds opening,
bird-watcher types of birds, tufted grackles and things, singing,
hearts rising and falling, but not far—in short, a great lily-of
the-valley vat full of what Lenin called “bourgeois
sentimentality.”
Ten years ago, in the St. Patrick’s Day
issue, there were two short stories, one by Sally Benson and the
other by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sally Benson’s was about an old
couple out in the bourgeois rural countryside somewhere, out by the
old highway in the “Cozy Nook” tourist home. There is a little
cracker-barrel philosophizing about how the times are passing them
by, there’s a new expressway over there, a-yuh, a-yuh. Sylvia
Townsend Warner’s is entitled “My Father, My Mother, the Bentleys,
the Poodle, Lord Kitchener, and a Mouse.” Lord Kitchener is a cat.
The story begins with a woman, the “I” of the story, describing in
detail the bed she was born in. It had a starched white valance
stenciled with dog paws. The story even goes back before that, to
her mother’s recollections of her childhood
in India.
Ten years later, in the St. Patrick’s
Day issue for 1965, there are two short stories, one by Linda Grace
Hoyer and the other by John Updike. Linda Grace Hoyer’s has a
grandmother reminiscing about her Hanseland-Gretel,
walk-in-the-gloaming childhood somewhere out in a rural bourgeois
big house and grounds. John Updike’s is about an unrequited
flirtation, over tea, between an American novelist and a Bulgarian
poetess, both of them possessed with … inchoate
longings.
But! Shawn knows exactly what these stories are like. He knows exactly what the literati think about them, and he doesn’t care what they think. Shawn has a more serious purpose. He is preserving Harold Ross’s concept of “the casual.” Ross always called the stories in the magazine “casuals,” because that was what they were supposed to be, casual. He didn’t want a lot of short stories full of literary striving, vessel-popping, hungry-breasty suffering, Freudian sex-mushed swooning—this kind of “serious” short-story writing did not fit his English concept of sophistication. Thurber’s farces—they were perfect. Mild reminiscences were fine, the kind somebody might tell you at the Players Club. Clarence Day’s reminiscences of Life with Father—they were first published in The New Yorker and were made into a hit play, and they were casual.
Unfortunately, since the war, very few
good writers have come along who are not in some kind of “arty”
tradition, as Ross would have seen it. And Shawn—ever perfect
custodian!—has remained faithful to the Ross formula. He has found
writers who can write casuals. Of course, there are not many
Thurbers around, so he has had to make Clarence Day his working
model. Many of the casual writers he has found are women, and so it
comes out Life with Mother, but that is all
right. Occasionally, and most happily, they are talented writers
like John Updike who somehow have a feeling
for the formula.
Furthermore, it may all be the wettest
bathful of bourgeois sentimentality in the world, but …
it works. Even Lenin would see that and
appreciate it. All these stories—Life with
Mother, sentimental grandma, inchoately longing Young
Homemakers, unrequited flirtation—they, after all, add up to the
perfect magazine fiction for suburban women. Not all women but
suburban women. The other women’s magazines, such as the
Ladies’ Home Journal and Redbook, and McCall’s and
Good Housekeeping place somewhat more …
elaborate demands upon fiction writers. The
stories they run tend to get the girls into bed, and the heroes are often considerably more revved
up than they are in The New Yorker. The New
Yorker’s stories are more like the stories the other women’s
magazines used to run thirty years ago. But—perfect!—since World
War II America has … developed … a kind of woman for whom
recent-antique women’s magazine stories are just right, especially
in The New Yorker. Suburban
women!
Since the war, the suburbs of America’s large cities have been filling up with educated women with large homes and solid hubbies and the taste to … buy expensive things. The New Yorker was the magazine—about the only general magazine—they heard their professors mention in a … good cultural way. And now here they are out in the good green world of Larchmont, Dedham, Grosse Point, Bryn Mawr, Chevy Chase, and they find that this magazine, this cultural magazine, is speaking right to them—their language—cultural and everything—but communicating—you know?—right to a suburban woman. Those wonderful stories!
Well, first of all, The
New Yorker is a totem for these women. Just having it in the
home is, well, it is a … symbol, a kind of
cachet. But more than that, it is not like
those other cachet magazines, like
Réalités or London Illustrated—people just only barely leaf through those
magazines—The New Yorker reaches a little
corner in the suburban-bourgeois woman’s heart. And in this little
corner are Mother, large rural-suburban homes with no mortgage,
white linen valances, and Love that comes with Henry Fonda, alone,
on a pure-white horse. Perfect short stories! After all, a girl is
not really sitting out here in Larchmont waiting for Stanley
Kowalski to come by in his ribbed undershirt and rip the Peck &
Peck cashmere off her mary poppins. That is not really what the
suburbs are like. A girl—well, a girl wants Culture and everything,
but she wants a magazine in the house that communicates, too, you know? And you don’t have to scour
your soul with Top Dirt afterward, either.
Not only that—glorious!—the ads. To
thousands of suburban women, The New Yorker
is a national shopping news. Every issue of The New
Yorker is a gorgeous picture gallery, edited not by Shawn
but by the most gifted advertising directors in New York. Here are
castles at Berchtesgaden, courtesy of Air France, balding biggies
with their arms around golden girls at the ship’s rail at sunset,
courtesy of Matson Line cruise ships, chauffeurs in leather boots
and jodhpurs carrying cases of liquor out to Rolls-Royces beneath
the glistening glass of Park Avenue at Fifty-third Street, courtesy
of Imperial Whiskey, women of expensive languor sitting up in bed
against a Louis XVI headboard with diamonds as big as a pig’s
knuckle on their fingers and white Persian cats and small
escritoires on their laps, courtesy of Crane writing paper—all of
this great, beautiful stuff. The New Yorker
grossed $20,087,952 in advertising income in 1964. New Yorker stock was selling at $132 to $139 in 1964. It
was only $20 to $29 ten years ago. The magazine averaged 115 pages
of advertising per issue last year. The entire magazine, editorial
and ads, ran only 96 to 112 pages thirty years ago. The New Yorker’s advertising department is in a position
to reject ads at will. In 1963 the magazine threw out all ads with
a picture of women’s underwear on the grounds that too many of the
ones the agencies presented struck a “sour” note and The New Yorker was tired of arguing each case
individually.
The New Yorker
has put out a booklet for advertisers—actually, The
New Yorker’s “Department of Market Research” put it out.
Marvelous! Very much like Good Housekeeping.
The booklet is entitled “The Primary Market for Quality
Merchandise.” On the face of it, the booklet is just a service to
companies to show them where the “quality” buyers are concentrated
in the country. The real idea apparently is to show advertisers
that The New Yorker’s circulation is
concentrated in the same places—these great beautiful postwar
American metropolitan areas. Exquisite! They show that the
New Yorker circulation runs along the same
curve as the purchase of Cadillacs and Lincolns, fine jewelry and
silverware in the wealthiest American suburbs. Exquisite! One may
watch The New Yorker in the curve of beauty
with Cadillacs, Lincolns, filigree bowls, Winslow table settings,
on through the zoning commission Elysiums of Stamford and Newton
Square.
The March 13 issue of The New Yorker ran 204 pages, and running between these
tropical forests of ads is a single thin gray column of type,
editorial matter. The pattern now, usually, is that there are full
pages of editorial matter, prints, and cartoons, only for the first
fourth of the magazine. After that, typically, practically to the
end of the magazine, will be a full-page ad on one page and two
columns of ads and one column of print on the page facing it. This
thin connective tissue—the column of print—seems to grow paler and
paler all the time, in actual physical appearance. And sure enough
it has. Yes! Several years ago The New
Yorker shifted its printing operation from the Condé Nast
Press in New York to the Donnelly Press in Chicago. At this
juncture they made the connective tissue, the print, paler. They
“leaded out” the lines a fraction of an inch, put more white space
between them. This made the ads—beautiful lush ads!—stand out more,
especially in cases where, for technical reasons, the blacks in the
ads could not be made as intense as the blacks the New Yorker presses were running. The palest possible
print! Like a modest silver-plated setting for …
jewels.
One of The New
Yorker’s former editors said—he couldn’t help it—he said,
“Every time I see those little skinny strips of type running on and
on through those big fat gorgeous ads—all I can think of is, well,
I sort of want to cry—all I can think of is all those little shabby
men slaving away every week over their little albino columns that
nobody is going to read.”
Shabby little
men? What is he talking about? It is impossible for the men,
these dedicated men who put out The New
Yorker, who—who—whuh—well, it is impossible, genetically impossible, for them to be … shabby, or anything close to shabby. Yes! It looks like
Shawn has a complete genetic program under
way to make certain that Harold Ross’s New
Yorker is preserved … in
perpetuity.
But! How can one possibly understand The New Yorker’s eugenics without actually seeing something like the magazine’s fortieth anniversary party in the St. Regis Hotel’s Roof ballroom. It is a closed affair. People who thought of inviting outsiders were gently, firmly warned not to. Our Thing! All these men and women from the editorial and the advertising departments are up there on the twentieth floor at the St. Regis, in the ballroom, amid so much … effervescence, amid a lot of cherub decorations and a lot of snug windows on the Fifty-fifth Street side, looking down upon the City Lights. A society band is on the bandstand, and they are playing a lot of this … current … as they say, pop music, twist music or frug music, or whatever one calls it. But—marvelous! —they have the society-band knack of reducing everything to the most wonderful woodwind toot-toot boopy sort of … well, swing, from out of the 1930s. There are tables with white tablecloths all around the edge of the dance floor, and everyone is having drinks or dancing or having some of the buffet, so much fine ham and turkey and aspic and these carapaced rolls. Some of the younger people are even doing some of these dances, such as the twist and the frug—but the main thing is that everyone is together up here—everybody—from both editorial and advertising, all these so-called shabby little men who turn out the so-called albino columns of print in the magazine and these dapper people who manage one of the great advertising empires in journalism, these very-well-turned-out people like Hoyt (Pete) Spelman, an advertising executive, all there in the St. Regis Roof ballroom—happy fox-trot!—for the fortieth anniversary of The New Yorker.
Yes! The music stops, the bandleader
stops his men, then turns around with the bandstand full-moon
smile, then turns to his men, and they start playing “Happy
Birthday,” that good reedy woodwind society-band way, the reedy
toot. And up from one side comes—indeed, it is him, Mr. Fleischmann, bringing in the
cake. Mr. Fleischmann, of the family with the bakery
fortune, founded The New Yorker with Harold
Ross. He sank the money into it, and Ross turned out the magazine.
Mr. Fleischmann is seventy-nine, and at his side, right at the
elbow, with that old cake moving along on the silent butler, is his
forty-threeyear-old son, Peter Francis Fleischmann. Peter is …
straight as an arrow. He wears a lighter blue suit, good worsted,
as he is now past forty, of the shade known as headmaster’s blue.
The woodwinds are toot-toot-booping “Happy Birthday,” and everyone
is standing up amid the stagy valances and white tables, and the
first emotion is very sentimental. But next
suddenly one feels … yes! confidence. The New
Yorker’s eugenics! There is Raoul
Fleischmann’s progeny, Peter, at his side, and Peter is not just
along to be with Dad; he is also treasurer
of The New Yorker. Of course, it used to be
even more solid. Stephen Botsford used to be president of
The New Yorker … “Happy Birthday.” Toot-toot
boopy and the band men may be aging 1930s musicians, woodwinds
toot-toot-boopy, but that … swing goes out
like a supersonic industrial tool bath, out upon not just the old
great tiny giants of American Culture but their sons and daughters
as well. Brendan Gill, Mollie Panter-Downes, Janet Flanner,
Winthrop Sargeant, Robert Coates; they worked under Ross himself,
and they are still here—Shawn has faith in them. And not just them,
however, but—heritage!—people like Susan Lardner, niece of Ring
Lardner and daughter of The New Yorker’s
former television columnist John Lardner. And—Donald Ogden Stewart,
Jr., son of Donald Ogden Stewart, an American humorist of the 1920s
and 1930s; Tony Hiss, son of Alger Hiss; Michael Arlen, Jr., son of
Michael Arlen, the author of The Green Hat
and one of the most sophisticated writers of the 1920s with one of
the most sophisticated styles of life—even in the brief, bad days
of the Depression, Michael Arlen had style. There was still such a
thing, such a mode for him as evening clothes time; he had style,
that was the—well, the atmosphere, the kind of tone that one can
preserve. Yes! The toot-toot-boopy supersonic industrial tool
cleaner bathes everyone—vibrating!—in the
eugenic heights of the St. Regis Roof, with the city lights
stretched out like an open box of Loft’s candy down below. But why
simple similes for such a night? The genetic convolutions build up,
build up, like Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of waves and wavelets
washing up, washing up, washing back off the beach, meeting,
convoluting, building up again, with weight, a … natural force.
John Updike is not actually here in the room, nor is Linda Grace
Hoyer. One remembers! They wrote the two short stories in that one
issue last month, March 13, and—too beautiful!—Linda Grace Hoyer is
John Updike’s mother, Mrs. Wesley A. Updike. Her maiden name was
Hoyer, and John’s middle name is Hoyer. They are modest, for if
they wished to, they could appear in The New
Yorker as Linda Hoyer Updike and John Hoyer Updike. That
could mean so much to
women who say to themselves if only they could be close to their sons—for here are mother and son
writing … together. Overpowering eugenic
advantage!
And all the while it keeps rolling up,
rolling up, the cake—well, the cake is shaped like The New Yorker magazine; it is a thick magazine, and in
bas-relief on the icing is the face of Eustace Tilley, the dandy
looking at a butterfly through a monocle, the New
Yorker symbol. One candle is on it. The band builds up to a
toot-toot-boopy-rat-tat climax on the woodwinds and the drums. An
old band member in dinner clothes rolls the drum, looking
inimitably cool. Peter Fleischmann says a few words, in the voice
of the genetic combination, nothing emotional, but That Voice. And
Raoul Fleischmann himself blows out the candle on the cake—and
everyone is standing and applauding, the applause piles up
like—genes!—clap clap clap clapat pat pat
pat pat pat pat. One can envision William Shawn patting the arm of
one of his beautifully stuffed chairs in his Fifth Avenue
apartment, pat pat pat pat pat pat pat. Pat, he can keep time with
one of these … so fine! … Dixieland records there on the hi-fi. He
could sink into the stuffing. He could get up and go over to the
piano and play along with the record, as he sometimes does—he does
it very well!—but tonight he will just relax. Forty years. William
Shawn does not go to these celebrations. Celebration, like good
blood, should be in the … heart. And the true focus of celebration
is that the future is certain. Bunny Berrigan is right in the
middle there, in the middle of “I Can’t Get Started,” that
wonderful light zinc plumbing sound of Berrigan blowing through a
trumpet. Those other trumpet players, like Harry James, they never
played the real “I Can’t Get Started.”
No—I’m—sorry—Mr.—James—but—I—am—afraid—you—are—not—Forty-third—Street—material—how—is—Mrs.—James—Chorus,
chorus, a bridge, and The New Yorker will
never be caught out, caught short. Shawn, it is said, has picked
his own successor, just as Ross would have wanted it. And—the final
brick in the indestructible structure!—one can afford an
exclamation point in the privacy of certitude!—his successor, it is
said, is Roger Angell. Heritage! Genes! Harmony! Ross! Roger Angell
is managing editor under Shawn just as Shawn was managing editor
under Ross. He has just passed forty and thereby earned his
worsteds, and he looks … comfortable, and—the Ross
cachet that man has! Angell is the son of Katharine Angell
and the stepson of E. B. White. Katharine Angell was one of the
original staff members of The New Yorker, starting right there in 1925 as
assistant to the literary editor. And the next year, 1926, she
hired one of the greatest of the tiny
giants, E. B. White, “Andy” White, he was called. They grew close
right there in the offices of The New
Yorker. Roger, her son by her first marriage, was very young
at that time, and he grew up in the household, the atmosphere, of
Katharine Angell and Andy White, both of whom were, you know, just
like this with Harold Ross, right from the
beginning. It all locks, assured, into
place, the future, and pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat patclap clap
clap clap clap clap clap, Raoul Fleischmann watches a single wisp
of smoke cuneycuneying up from the candle he blew out, up from the
silent butler, toot-toot-boopy-clap City Lights pat pat pat Bunny
Berrigan! Berrigan hits that incredible high one, the one he died
on, popping a vessel in his temporal fossa, bleeding into his
squash, drowning on the bandstand, like Caruso. That was the music of Harold Ross’s lifetime, the palmy
days, the motion of life. Don’t talk to one about heat, hot music,
the heat of the soul; it was Harold Ross’s lifetime, and here, on
that phonograph, those days are preserved.
Berrigan! Fats! Willie the Lion! Art! Satchmo! The Count! Harold
Ross! pat pat pat pat pat pat pat pat, four-four, we were all very
hippy along the Mississippi in naughty naughty naughty oughty
oughty oughty-eight. Done and done! Preserved! Shawn, God bless
you! Pat pat pat pat pat pat pat.