That The New Yorker has become a sacred cow for the American mainstream as well as for the cultural elite has just been demonstrated by the top-priority treatment given by the press to Tina Brown’s departure from the magazine and S. I. Newhouse’s subsequent choice of David Remnick as editor. The changeover was awarded a front-page spread in the Times and a Page Six cartoon in the Post, among other choice spots; it’s hard to imagine any other periodical in this country arousing such curiosity about its behind-the-scenes doings. The whole fuss is nothing, though, compared with an even more seismic event in the magazine’s life: its 1985 takeover by Newhouse, and his ousting of longtime editor William Shawn, the man who for many years personified and defined The New Yorker.

The avid interest taken in two new chronicles of Shawn’s tenure, published a decade after its actual end, testifies to the fact that the aftershocks of the 1985 coup are still being felt. Since these books were written by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta—two of Shawn’s authors and closest colleagues--unwary readers might well pick them up under the impression that they ought to deliver original or insightful views of the magazine and its famously fastidious, widely revered editor. They will be disappointed, however.

Ved Mehta, who came to the magazine as a young writer in 1960 and stayed on until Tina Brown slammed the door on him some thirty years later, has written a chronicle of Shawn’s New Yorker as he experienced it.[1] Mehta openly idolizes Shawn, for all the right reasons—and for all the wrong ones, too.

“Like editors from an earlier period,” Mehta writes of Shawn, “he thought that his job was to educate readers by exposing them to thought-provoking material, irrespective of how many of them would actually read it.” This is true, and it was Shawn’s great strength. But Mehta is constitutionally incapable of disinterest: he tells his tale obtusely, from the narrow point of view of a needy and selfish author seeking approbation from the editor he has cast as both father-figure and psychoanalyst. In the process, he bestows on that editor unconditional, and frequently irrational, love.

In fact Shawn was a fine editor without being a perfect one, and his detractors were no philistines, although Mehta obviously believes, and wishes, that to be the case. Shawn’s finicky and overly discriminating editorial policies annoyed any number of readers, making many who were essentially in step with the magazine, natural New Yorker readers as it were, neither entirely surprised nor entirely sorry at his firing. One of the cleverest of Shawn’s critics was Tom Wolfe, who memorably attacked the editor in a 1965 article in the soon-to- be-defunct Herald Tribune. Entitled “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead!,” Wolfe’s piece presented the magazine as a morgue and Shawn as its reigning mortician.

Shawn and his writers did not laugh off the attack, for it was recognized that while Wolfe had gone over the top, he had also hit on a certain truth. The New Yorker’s articles were indeed too long, too boring, too polite, too genteel. Shawn’s ruthlessly thorough editing took the juice out of pieces; even great literature, it was said, would not have survived his nitpicking. (I was once told of an in-office joke at The New Yorker, which proposed twenty immortal lines as they might be edited and improved by the magazine: it led off, I remember, with “It was the best of times, and, ironically, it was the worst of times.”)

“Notes and Comments” as conceived and executed for many years by the inimitable E. B. White was a marvelous invention, but as White was inimitable, why keep trying to duplicate his distinctive voice, bemused and slightly supercilious, for decades after his departure from the magazine, as though his successors were attempting to channel him from beyond the grave? And what about the magazine’s quixotic stand against four-letter words? It was one thing during the prudish Harold Ross’s day, but as the Shawn era progressed into the Sixties and beyond, the circumlocutions and euphemisms became downright silly: Pauline Kael’s rage when Shawn attempted to replace “ass” with “derrière” in her work, or “crap” with the ridiculous “ordure,” was more than understandable.

It is worth quoting Mehta at some length on his first meeting with Shawn, during which they discussed the possibility of the young man’s doing a piece about his recent return to India:  

After a moment, [Shawn] said, “I don’t think that your article sounds like a New Yorker piece—although I don’t know what that is. But if you write it, and want to send it to me, I would be glad to read it and help you revise it. I would also think of a magazine that might be interested in publishing it.”

I felt a little disheartened. In some part of my mind, I had thought that his listening to me with complete attention meant that he would accept the article. I wanted to ask how I could go about writing an article for The New Yorker—for him. But I realized that if I did I would come off sounding like a child who was asking his father to do his homework.

Instead, I said, “How long do you think the piece should be?” …

“You should not worry about that. You should simply write it to its natural length— whatever that is,” he said.

The simplicity of his answer dazzled me. I came away feeling that everything about Mr. Shawn and The New Yorker’s offices was magical.

It is easy enough for a third party to read between the lines of this exchange, although Mehta does not. First of all, he doesn’t seem to realize, even these many years later, that Shawn’s prevarication was simply a polite way of being noncommittal. With later pieces Mehta would be puzzled when Shawn would claim to be interested in a piece but would nevertheless decline to give the writer an expense account or an advance: for example, “He had adroitly ducked my question about expenses. Perhaps he thought that being concerned with money was corrupting to the sanctity of a writing project, and that the matter should be left out until the project was brought to fruition.” On the other hand, the reader suspects, maybe he just wasn’t very interested in the piece!

Second, Shawn’s “You should not worry about that. You should simply write it to its natural length,” while no doubt being music to Mehta’s ears, typified an editorial policy that resulted in countless pieces of lengthy and undisciplined nonfiction and alienated a great many readers. The work of writers like Kael, and Mehta himself, would have been vastly improved if the authors had been held firmly to a maximum word-count. It is certainly possible that each piece has a natural length; but the author is not always the fit person to decide what that length might be. The editor is.

But giving writers their heads was a part of the soothing, sanatoriumlike environment Shawn fostered for his creative staff. Last spring, Charles McGrath, Shawn’s onetime deputy and designated successor at the time of his firing, wrote in an amusing article for The New York Times Book Review that Shawn’s self-effacing persona encouraged writers to project all their hopes and needs upon him. “Not a few,” he noted, “compared the process to psychoanalytic transference.” The New Yorker’s writers have over the decades been a notoriously neurotic lot, with a disproportionate number of alcoholics, schizophrenics, manic- and unipolar depressives, and just plain eccentrics. For his own reasons Shawn took on the role of father, and like greedy children his writers took and took and took: “Of all the scores of writers Bill dealt with over the years,” Lillian Ross writes, “including some who were old friends, only [J. D.] Salinger would go out of his way to be helpful to Bill without asking for anything in return.”

Mehta sees Shawn as a model of almost saintly self-denial. But Mehta is a shockingly poor interpreter of the people and events he describes. Reading, again, between the lines of Mehta’s book, and of the many other accounts that have been written of Shawn’s editorship, it is not difficult to discern that while Shawn was no doubt a man of great moral rectitude, personal kindness, and generosity, he was also a control freak of the deepest dye. In his light and timeless memoir Here at “The New Yorker,” Brendan Gill wrote that “Shawn’s delicacy is a negative brute force that gets greater results than [Harold] Ross’s positive one”; Charles McGrath, in the article quoted above, noted that Shawn “had an iron will, and he was not without a subtle appreciation of his own power.” The recollections of Jeremy Bernstein, who wrote many essays on scientific subjects during the Shawn administration, were recently published in the Los Angeles Times Book Review and are of great interest: he gets more real insight about his subject into his three pages than Ved Mehta does in his 414. Especially telling is Bernstein’s description of Newhouse and Shawn entering the Rose Room at the Algonquin together, just after Shawn’s dismissal.

I wanted to study their entrance. Mr. Shawn’s politeness, which at times verged on aggression, was notorious. You could not get through a door or into an elevator behind him. He would simply stand there until you went first. The entrance to the Rose Room was sufficiently constricted so that one of them had to enter first… . When they reached the entrance to the Rose Room, Newhouse put his arm firmly around Mr. Shawn’s shoulders and propelled him through first. If you knew what you were watching, everything you needed to know was in that gesture.

It is certainly a good thing for a magazine editor to be detail-oriented, but Shawn carried micromanagement to an extreme that was in the end to spell doom for his own tenure and for the magazine he had recreated in his image. For one thing, he lacked the easy ability of his predecessor, Harold Ross, to delegate; he eventually took so much upon himself that his presence in nearly every step of the editorial process became dangerously essential. As a result of, and growing out of, this inability to delegate came Shawn’s fatal inability to settle upon a successor. In his mid-seventies, long past the mandatory retirement age of sixty-five which had been waived in his case, he dithered over first this candidate and then that: by the time he finally found (in McGrath) one whom his staff was willing to accept, it was too late: Shawn’s goose was already cooked.

It was perhaps in his obsessive concentration upon editorial matter that Shawn made his greatest blunder. He was so worried about his own successor, the future editor, that he entirely neglected to worry about an equally or perhaps even more important successor: that of the publisher, Peter Fleischmann. Fleischmann and his father, Raoul, The New Yorker’s founding publisher, had always directed the business end of the magazine in a highly eccentric fashion, letting the editors run the show entirely in their own way. This was not out of carelessness or lack of interest, but the result of a calculated bet on the editors’ gifts, and it was a bet that had paid off handsomely.

By the early 1980s, however, Peter Fleischmann was showing signs of running down. His health had been failing for years, and he lacked a capable and interested heir. In retrospect it seems obvious that Fleischmann would simply be compelled, then or very soon, to sell his controlling interest. It would have been something of a miracle if he had sold it to any publisher who would have continued to let the editorial department call each and every shot in the tradition the Fleischmann family had upheld. Why didn’t Shawn admit to himself that such a sale must be imminent? He didn’t; and when Fleischmann sold to the highest bidder, rather than, for example, to Warren Buffett, who had at one time wished to buy the magazine and would almost certainly have proved a less meddlesome publisher, Shawn was entirely unprepared.

The New Yorker staffer who can claim a more intimate knowledge of William Shawn than any other is Lillian Ross, who arrived at the magazine over fifty years ago, hired, along with three other young ladies, because of the dearth of male civilian talent towards the end of the Second World War. Shawn himself—at that time the managing editor—took them on in defiance of his boss’s wishes: Harold Ross “took a dim view of working with women, who were— he was quoted to us as saying crossly—‘trouble,’” Lillian Ross writes in her recent memoir.[2] Trouble—and how! For as she recounts in this stupefyingly trashy book, she and Shawn would soon embark on a forty-year love affair that infinitely transcended, she claims, any residual joy he derived from his marriage. “He said that his real self was not in his home. He said that his presence in his home was a deception, that he made efforts to be with his children, but that he felt like a failure with them… . If I left him, he said, it would change nothing in his home. If I left him, he literally could not live.”

Now to me this sounds not like some extraordinary and unconventional declaration of love but like very much the sort of thing that a married man, who intends to stay married, only too often says to his mistress. Whatever his reasons, Shawn, who one would have thought—between Cecille, their three children, and The New Yorker, his true wife—already had more than enough on his plate, decided that keeping up with a full-time mistress and a second establishment, including a child (a Norwegian boy adopted by Ms. Ross) was a worthwhile expenditure of energy.

Lillian Ross’s Shawn, sadly, is as one-dimensional as Ved Mehta’s, although this time the dimension is a different one. Ross’s Shawn is not the happy family man described by Mehta (and many others) but a lonely, hungering soul. He is not the avid editor taking a visceral joy in his work as described by Mehta (and again, by many others), but a frustrated poet who sees his job as “the ultimate cell,” “a man whose individual, creative gifts were obscured and thwarted by his success. He was a tormented man, a man who had the desires of a poet but the duties of a caretaker, and of a muse, of poetics.” “I am there, but not there,” he would say about his marriage.

I’m not suggesting that Ross is inventing any of this. It is probably all true. But the fact is that in her very different way she is as obtuse, because as self-absorbed, as Mehta. Shawn was simply too wily a customer for either writer to capture. He could live out one side of his personality—the artist, the adventurer—with Ross, and he did so. His marriage, and his work, obviously fulfilled different needs, and were compartmentalized accordingly.

“After forty years,” gushes Ross, “our love-making had the same passion, the same energies (alarming to me, at first, in our early weeks together), the same tenderness, the same inventiveness, the same humor, the same textures as it had in the beginning.” Much of the memoir is in this vein— Ross, like Mehta, could certainly benefit from some of Shawn’s editing these days— and in publishing it while Cecille Shawn (aged ninety-two) is still alive is either extremely tasteless or pointedly vindictive, despite Ross’s many protestations of sympathy for Cecille, and her claims that she, as the “other woman,” never envied the official wife for a moment.

Ross left The New Yorker with Shawn; she returned, after his death, to work for Tina Brown, and in her acknowledgements she openly admits that she began her memoir at the behest of a New Yorker editor, Katrina Heron, and that she is “indebted to Tina Brown for her unwavering encouragement, her moral support, her creative participation, and, most of all, for her cheerful understanding of love.” If the schlockfest that follows was truly written with the advice and encouragement of New Yorker editors, that fact alone is proof that Brown’s New Yorker was not what Shawn’s was. William Shawn, whatever his faults, would never have let it get by an initial edit.

Notes
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Remembering Mr. Shawn’s “New Yorker”: The Invisible Art of Editing, by Ved Mehta; The Overlook Press, 414 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text. Here But Not Here: A Love Story, by Lillian Ross; Random House, 240 pages, $25. Go back to the text.