About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. - Review - book review

National Review, March 6, 2000 by Benjamin Cheever

About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda (Scribner, 480 pp., $27.50)

SINCE the 79-year-old William Shawn was forcibly retired in 1987 and The New Yorker magazine began to hemorrhage prestige and then cash (more than $150 million to date), there has been a furious debate among the New York cognoscenti about what went wrong. It's the same bitter disappointment we faced with poverty in this country and guerrilla insurgencies abroad: We don't understand what money can't buy.

And yet Ben Yagoda and Renata Adler--two writers as different as it is possible for one culture to produce--both seem to know the secret. Reading their books back to back reminds me of the joke about why there's no ice in Poland: The woman who knew the recipe died.

Yagoda is the perfect outsider. His mother, coming to the city in the 1940s, "seized on The New Yorker kind a of talisman for Manhattan sophistication." She passed this infatuation on to her son and for his birthday presented him with two shares of stock in the company. "But being a part-owner did not help me crack the magazine," he ruefully reports, having collected a "sheaf of New Yorker rejection notes ..." Unlike many of his contemporaries, who write to get even, Yagoda writes to understand and celebrate the club that wouldn't have him for a member. If his book has a weakness, it is an excess of awe. The introduction, for instance, features a letter written by a woman who while in the Red Cross during World War II met a wounded soldier who said that his one wish in extremity was for "an issue of The New Yorker magazine." They had a diverting conversation; then he died.

One can't help admiring Yagoda's willingness to put his own prejudices, even his own prose, aside; writing, as all the best historians do, only when there is no original text. And there's a lot of text to work with, much of it choice. Yagoda bases his book firmly on the 2,500 archival boxes that the magazine contributed to the New York Public Library in 1994. Among the treasures thus unearthed, we stumble immediately upon the irascible founder, Harold Ross, a man known to say often: "God, how I pity me."

"I started this magazine because I thought it would be so much fun to run a humorous magazine, you'd just sit and laugh at funny contributions all the time," he wrote to Frank Sullivan in 1931. But if you think he meant that, you've mistaken the man. Ross had edited humor before. He knew better. He meant to make Sullivan laugh.

Still, putting out a good magazine, even a good humor magazine, doesn't mean that everybody's having fun. "I was so goddamn bloody mad about the cutting and changing which was done in the first galley, and so discouraged by the attitude of the magazine editors in general, that I have been unable to write anything since. I decided that I didn't want all the sorrow and heart boiling that editors cause, not any more any way, and I decided that I would give up whole time writing for the time being and earn my living as a bookmaker instead." So fussed a contributor in July of 1949. One assumes that such a sourpuss must have taken up another trade, but the writer was Roald Dahl.

Yagoda ends his narrative in 1987 with Shawn's retirement; the years since are covered in a brief epilogue, effectively dodging the question of the magazine's fate after Shawn. "This is not to imply that the magazine as it exists today doesn't have loyal readers or publish outstanding work," he writes, hedging noisily. In contrast, longtime New Yorker contributor Renata Adler begins her book by leaping Yagoda's hedge. Gone is her title. "The audience, like filings when the magnet has been removed, has scattered."

Adler is Yagoda's exact opposite: the ultimate insider. A "strikingly intelligent" (Yagoda's words) young woman who came on board in 1963, her first assignment was to critique twelve unsigned stories. She wrote at length why each should be rejected. She was hired, and then saw every story she had turned down subsequently run in the magazine, "virtually unchanged."

If Yagoda's book is an education, Adler's is a treat. She seems never to have learned how to prevaricate. Lillian Ross's and Ved Mehta's New Yorker memoirs are filleted, their weaknesses extracted and admired. She describes Stephen Florio, the publisher after the Fleischmanns sold the magazine in 1985, as "young, blustering, cheerful, coarse, incompetent." Writer Adam Gopnik is Florio's "editorial counterpart." We hear about his laugh, and that his style as an essayist "actively insults the reader." There's even a scene where he appears in the editor's office "rubbing his hands together and blinking against the light.... If there had been music, it might have been a moment in a horror film."

Adler gives a good deal of space to the publication's decline, running us through the annals of succession. Shawn was replaced by Robert Gottlieb in 1987. Gottlieb was replaced by Tina Brown in 1992. "Ms. Brown (Tina to the rest of us) liked to say that the magazine, during her tenure, had won 'more than 15 prizes.' The magazine.., had become, in many respects, a public-relations firm, generating buzz about itself and its editors, in hopes of generating advertisers and gossip--a redundant and circular mechanism, in other words, for generating ads for ads and gossip about gossip. None of these breaks with the magazine's tradition, it might be said, slowed the financial disintegration of the magazine."