GONE: The Last Days of The New Yorker

by Renata Adler

Often, he would punctuate his rushed, already staccato delivery of words (sentences, apologies, disclaimers, reiterations of the name of the person he was talking to) with a little, nervous, mirthless, self-deprecating laugh, eh, eh, eh, eh, eh, always five beats, five ehs, like little dry intervals of machine gun fire, interruptions of himself. This laugh, which required only the slightest opening of the mouth and not even the semblance of a smile, seemed designed as a form of charm, boyishness, humility, with which he tried to moderate the impact of what he apparently regarded as the brilliance of his conversation, a strange alternating current of flattery and self-promotion, accompanied by rapid, in fact incessant, blinking, and the little upward puffs of air.