GONE: The Last Days of The New Yorker

by Renata Adler

The New Yorker used, from time to time, to publish the definitive piece on a subject. Readers knew it. Everyone knew it.

An audience, for anything in the arts, does not pre-exist. It is part of what is created.

a story by Eudora Welty, say, based on a recent assassination in Mississippi; or a book review by Dwight Macdonald of a study of poverty in America; or a tirade by James Baldwin about racial relations; or a series on urban development by Rachel Carson, will all actually acquire not just influence but a crucial element of their meaning from having appeared in a single publication.

The kind of job I appeared to be qualified for had just been given to somebody else. There was still a place in the checking department, but The New Yorker did not, at that time, hire women in checking. Just so that they would have my name on file for something, however, Mr. Hofeller handed me a package of twelve stories, unsigned, and asked me to take a few days to write down my opinions of them. I took the stories home. I loathed them all.

In those three months, all twelve stories ran, virtually unchanged.

been assigned, temporarily, of course, but nonetheless astonishingly, first E. B. White's empty office

Mr. Shawn said he was sending me books, and my job was to see whether "there is anything for us in them." Since the books were already published, there could not possibly be anything for us in them. But I read them, and wrote out little reports.

The two first readers of unsolicited manuscripts in fiction were about to be married. It was the magazines policy to have every unsolicited manuscript in fiction read by at least two people. It would be unfair, Mr. Shawn said, to have the two readers be husband and wife. Would I, ...

In those days, it was the custom at The New Yorker to attach a little form letter to rejected stories, but, if they were better than most, to write in, by hand, "Sorry"; if they were better still, "Sorry, thanks"; and if they were better even than that, "Sorry, thanks, try us again."

I asked Mr. Shawn whether I might take the stories to Berkeley, California, where I was about to become engaged. "You only become engaged once in your life," Mr. Shawn said. He suggested I take time off, go to California without the stories, and come back at any time.

as it also turned out, I did not get married. But I was so touched by Mr. Shawn’s generosity that I actually sat down and wrote a piece, about WABC, which was then a pop music station, and continued reading the incoming stories.

the ads, which were clearly separated along clean, vertical lines— not, as they often are today, slapped horizontally across the page, where they interrupt, in fact literally block, the text.

Both the founding editor, Harold Ross, and his successor, William Shawn, were, for example, incorruptible. It was not only that they yielded nothing to advertisers. They were indifferent as well to fame, and to fashions, trends, prizes and even the preferences of readers.

Mr. Shawn, it seemed obvious to some of us, never had the slightest intention of naming or making way for a successor. The three editors who were plausible and beloved, Gardner Botsford, William Whitworth, to a lesser degree John Bennet (none of whom took part in plots for the succession) were driven out, cast as villains, or simply passed over

There began to be feeling that it was vulgar, perhaps morally wrong to write. Turning in a piece, of course, put Mr. Shawn in the predicament of having to decide whether to publish it. If he rejected it, there had to be one kind of painful conversation.

A common pattern for writers was to come to the magazine after working for years at newspapers, and to be relieved not to have to write for deadlines every day any more, or every few days, or even every few weeks. There was time and space to work on a piece, and get it right. The work would get longer, and the pieces fewer, until there were none, or almost none.

Several things contributed to this pattern: "drawing accounts," for example. The ostensible purpose of the drawing account was to free writers from the cycles of being rich, when a piece was completed and paid for, and being poor, in the intervening times. There would be a steady flow of cash to draw upon, as a loan against future work.

Among older writers like Dwight Macdonald, there was a jocular competition to see who might die most in debt to The New Yorker.

In retrospect, the answer seems purely practical. Mr. Shawn had to run the pieces, in order to get the debt off the books. This may not have been the real reason. It does seem the most likely.

The other three anecdotes in which my name occurs, equally untrue, are equally friendly and innocuous,

Now, it happens that I knew Hannah Arendt’s and Heinrich Bluchers apartment very well. For years, I spent, among other occasions, nearly every New Year's Eve there. It was bright, friendly, and comfortable, and did not appear to reek, in decor or in spirit, of angst of any kind.

Ms. Arendt did not care for Ms. Sontag. Mary McCarthy was in Paris. And Ms. Arendt did not even meet Jonathan Schell until years after "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appeared.

She says, for example, that Mr. Shawn and J. D. Salinger were the godfathers, at the christening of her son Erik. In fact there was a single godfather, the film producer Ismail Merchant.

It is risky to generalize about "what writers do." The notion that they do not consider the consequences of what they write is bizarre.

To publish a weekly magazine, perhaps to preside for long over any successful enterprise, inescapably requires, from time to time, capacities for deceit, treachery, cruelty, betrayal, deviousness, convenient lapses of memory, acts of self-justification, faults of every kind.

For more than thirty years, The New Yorker was not only the finest magazine of its time but probably the finest English-language magazine of all time.

There was also the advertising. Critics of the magazine used to say that it was impossible to take seriously even the most serious articles when they were surrounded by so much materialistic text.

Trying to create or adapt a product to a market, in other words, makes sense if the product is dishwashers or military hardware. In cultural matters it does not make sense.

Occasionally, an editor—in recent times, one editor, Shelley Wanger, at House & Garden—would try to elicit and put through a genuine piece of writing. Leo Lerman, many years ago at Vogue, had done the same. What became clear, however, was that these magazines were not magazines in the ordinary sense. They were thick advertising pamphlets or brochures,

A magazine in its prime forms an understanding with its readers. The New Yorker; at its best, was known to be better than other publications. Even at worst, the understanding was that the magazine would never deceive its readers or appeal to tastes of which they ought to be ashamed. This was certainly not a matter of high intellectual aspiration.

Not a physical assault, certainly, any more than a flasher in a concert hall can be said physically to have attacked his audience. But not just aesthetic, or metaphorical, either. The first time you go to a concert, and there is a flasher, that is one sort of event. If, on subsequent occasions, there are variants of the flasher, and you become aware that the flasher is part of the program, then it is the notion not just of the concert, but of you as the concertgoer that has changed. You either annul your subscription, or you consent to be described in a new way.

The magazine indirectly subsidized book publishing. It paid, for example, Truman Capote, throughout the time he was writing In Cold Blood. When the book became a best-seller for Random House, and subsequently a movie, The New Yorker had no share in those profits.

The magazine had often run the definitive piece on any given subject, sometimes long after that subject had appeared to be timely or topical. "We don't want a scoop," Mr. Shawn used to say.

When he did buy material from young or unknown writers, then delayed publication for months, even years, the morale and then the work of those writers declined. It is impossible to know how much promising work the magazine obliterated in this way. Probably a lot.

What was strange was that it would not have been nearly as surprising, or as funny, in any other publication.

With astonishing frequency, the magazine did publish minor masterpieces—John Cheever's "The Swimmer," Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Thomas Wolfe's "Only the Dead Know Brooklyn," Irwin Shaw's "Girls in their Summer Dresses," works by John Updike, J. D. Salinger, Vladimir Nabokov, John O'Hara, others—which were, in their own way, generation-defining stories.

long. It could be argued that the period of The New Yorkers high distinction was a period, culturally, of the somewhat second-rate.

At lunch, in my first year in New York, the political scientist Daniel Bell once drew for me, on a paper tablecloth, a family tree of what was then, in the world of letters, the New York political-intellectual community: from the academy (City University of New York, University of Chicago, Hunter, Barnard, Yale, Columbia, The New School) through the publications (Partisan Review, The Nation, Commentary, The New Leader; Encounter; The New Republic) and personalities (teachers, writers, editors, political figures; Trotsky through Marcuse, Rahv through Kopkind) to their ideological forebears and descendants.

Most writers and editors did not arrive at the office until noon. Young writers, and very old writers, as they do at most publications, tended to come in early and work late.

The next morning, standing beside the cubicle, was Edmund Wilson. "Have you seen The Daily News” he said, with consternation. "I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve been following Dick Tracy. Wonderful story about Moon Maid. Now Ican’t find it."

Because the world is in some ways so small and life is so complicated, I even had the wedding ring (inscribed MM EW) with which he married Mary McCarthy,

When Mr. Shawn changed every instance of "exclaimed," "argued"—not to speak of "averred," or "complained," or "snorted," or even "said, sneeringly"—simply to "said," that too seemed right.

Twice, at publications other than The New Yorker; I actually thought of going to the printer, armed with a rifle perhaps, and lying down, rather as political demonstrators used to do, and saying, They shall not print, in my name, this version of a piece.

There were not only two cultures, there was an old and growing antagonism between the fiction and non-fiction departments of The New Yorker, dating back to the days when the fiction editor, Gus Lobrano, and perhaps another fiction editor, Katherine White, were passed over for the editorship of the magazine in favor of Harold Ross’s managing editor, and chosen successor, William Shawn.

While they cultivated the air of an entirely other order of bland white-collar types, their hierarchy, as described to me by Daniel Menaker, was as follows: "You have to understand, we’re a tribe of baboons. The head baboon fucks the next baboon, who fucks the most lowly baboon. The lowest baboon gets to write letters that begin, 'Roger Angell is off covering spring training/ "

In other cases, give the slightest sign of having relented, even in something that does not matter to you, and bureaucrats will be so heartened they will break the back of every sentence and destroy the whole.

Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, asked me to review a book of pieces by John Hersey. It included the famous Hiroshima piece, which had taken up an entire issue of The New Yorker. I had never read these pieces. They did not seem to me to hold up very well.

I later learned from Lillian Hellman that she herself had twice chosen the reviewer, Mark Schorer, for her own books in the Sunday section. Later still, Ms. Hellman actually asked Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, the chief critic for the daily paper, whether he and his wife Natalie would appoint her godmother to their only child, which they did.

I became, among other things, and with just two exceptions, something of the magazine's unlikely hired gun. The two exceptions were that early piece, in Commentary, about John Hersey's book, and a piece, in 1981, in The New York Review of Books, about the work of Pauline Kael.

I did not get another chance at speechwriting until 1976, when I, perhaps even less probably, wrote the speeches of Peter Rodino, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, during the impeachment inquiry.