GONE: The Last Days of The New Yorker

by Renata Adler

Twice, I tried to read it, and failed at around page one hundred fifty.

Diana herself would have been surprised that she was acting in a sequence set in motion by Donald Barthelme.

her argument that evil is essentially banal seemed to me to reflect rather an aesthetic taste than a moral judgment.

Mr. Shawn came once more. Ms. Arendt, he said, would like to invite me to tea. Thus began my friendship with Hannah Arendt and her husband, Heinrich Blucher. If anyone was, in Lillian Ross’s phrase, sitting adoringly at their feet, it was I. Nobody sat at their feet. I admired them beyond measure.

frequently incurred her and her husband's disapproval. For not completing a doctorate; for going to the Times, where I spent fourteen months as movie critic, for work they considered foolish.

In the fall of 1965, when Truman Capotes In Cold Blood began to run in The New Yorker, I thought Mr. Shawn had completely lost his bearings. I made an appointment and went to see him. I said I thought that the pieces violated certain fundamental principles of the magazine. They were lurid, I thought, and sensationalistic. Their structure was of only prurient interest.

In my nearly thirty years at The New Yorker, it seems to me there were approximately seven crises. The first was the reception of the Eichmann pieces. The second was a two- part piece, in the New York Magazine section of the Herald Tribune, by Tom Wolfe. Lillian Ross, who admired Tom Wolfe’s work, had written a piece for Talk of the Town. The piece, in a parody of Mr. Wolfe's style, was about a playground in Central Park; the main character was a young mother called Pam Muffin.

Weeks later, Mr. Wolfe's piece "Tiny Mummies: The Land of The New Yorkers Walking Dead" appeared in the Tribune. Many members of The New Yorker staff, Mr. Shawn in particular, acted, for the first time in my experience, but certainly not for the last, so foolishly as virtually to foreclose any outcome but the one they were trying to ward off.

One anecdote, however, was something that had been rumored for years, and that some gossips within The New Yorker had believed. The anecdote, which Wolfe repeated several times, was a cornerstone of his story: that Leopold and Loeb, the murderers, in the twenties in Chicago, of a boy named Bobby Franks, had actually intended to kill another schoolboy, William Shawn.

He already knew the court record well, but we confirmed it. No intended victim other than Bobby Franks.

The Journalism Review (not, it must be said, in its finest or most professional hour) published the piece in its next issue, four months later. By then, not even we cared.

McCall’s would send me to Vietnam—as long as I wrote a piece that was neither military nor political. That sounded ideal to me. They suggested I interview pilots who had bombed a village, and then the villagers who had been bombed. I said that didn't sound so good, that it had the drawback of being both military and political.

Among jobs, in those days, there was no qualification for meeting people that seemed, everywhere, less subject to question than working for a respected newspaper or magazine.

I happened upon the Six Day War, and wrote a New Yorker piece about it.

He said that, if I was really going only for a while I could keep my office at The New Yorker. I had acquired a drawing account, at the time, $150 a month. He said I could keep that, too.

One advantage of being published almost every day is this: The only way to overcome the mortifications of yesterday’s piece is to write a better piece for tomorrow.

I had grown uncomfortable at the magazine. Wallace Shawn was now one of my closest friends. Although I knew Wallace would in no sense agree with me, I was becoming offended on his behalf. I had in my mind, by now, what I thought of as an iconography or theology of The New Yorker. Mr. Shawn was the father; Lillian Ross, the mother. The son was Jonathan Schell; the spirit was J. D. Salinger.

The sign of Salinger's moral stature was held to be his silence.

Salinger had invited me for a short visit to his house in the country. He said that the reason he chose not to publish the material he had been working on was to spare Mr. Shawn the burden of having to read, and to decide whether to publish, Salinger writing about sex. This went too far. The writer who originated, and was the most extreme example of, a recoil from publication and publicity had become something of a prisoner of his sympathy for the editor who had become, yet again, a source of disinclination to publish.

Mr. Shawn, meanwhile, had hired Wally’s friend Jacob Brackman, and Wally’s girlfriend, Kennedy Fraser. These writers were talented. There was every reason to hire them. There simply seemed to me no justification for leaving Wally out. It also seemed to me an act of nearly filicidal aggression, to hire, and then choose as his successor, Wallace’s best friend (and school, high school, and college roommate), Jonathan Schell.

Jonathan Schell. "They have fired Mr. Shawn," he said. I said I didn't quite believe it. Mr. Schell said that it was so. "As surely as Ford fired Lee Iacocca," he said, "they have fired Mr. Shawn."

I said, "Jonathan, can you not separate the question of your succession from the question of whether or not Mr. Shawn has been fired?" "Can you separate Hitler," Jonathan asked, "from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia?"

From then on, Mr. Schell and Lillian Ross began to refer to Gardner Botsford (of all people) as Hitler, and to Gardner's wife, Janet Malcolm (again, of all people) as Lady Macbeth.

My respect for Mr. Shawn was so deep that I thought, for a time, I must have misunderstood what was said, or that my memory had completely failed me—so radically at odds were some of our conversations with what I thought had been said, or agreed, a few days, or even one day, before. I began to write scripts for myself, on the nights before I went to his office. When I got home from a visit, I would write down what I thought he and I had just said. There was no doubt about it. Sometimes the differences were just shadings. Often they went well beyond distortion to an almost comic contradiction of what actually occurred.

It occurred to me that it might be inevitable, over time, for the leader of any large enterprise— particularly a leader as acutely sensitive as Mr. Shawn to what people needed or wanted to hear—to acquire a habit of saying, or promising, something, and promptly forgetting it. You cannot, I think, have too good a memory and run a weekly. I came to believe that these inconsistencies, this duplicity, these lapses of memory, were an essential element of Mr. Shawn’s way of running the magazine.

Mr. Shawn, in the aftermath of his own efforts, which he sometimes fiercely defended, sometimes denied, to appoint Jonathan Schell, had told Mr. Botsford that he was tired of these struggles, that it would relieve him of some of his burden if Mr. Botsford would consent to an interim appointment as his successor. Gardner, touched, and against his better judgment, agreed. Whereupon Mr. Shawn rounded upon him, denounced him in a letter to the publisher, Peter Fleischmann, and began, with Lillian Ross and Jonathan Schell, his embittered campaign.

But what can have been the point? Why maneuver someone into an agreement, which he himself was not going to honor, and by which he was to become, apparently genuinely, enraged?

Some people trace it to the publication, in 1970, of "The Greening of America," a piece by Charles Reich, which had a kind of absurd, Forrest Gump sunniness and optimism.

I believe the decline really set in when The New Yorker began to move, consistently, predictably, piously, and joylessly, to the Left.

E. B. White and his fervent support of World Federalism. I am a fan of Charlottes Web and Stuart Little. I have never cared for White's political or moral instincts, as expressed in Talk of the Town.

Also, contrary to widely held belief, the New Yorker pay scale was not particularly high. Mr. Shawn paid any writer, for any given piece, what he felt like paying. Unless he chose to pay a sum many times what was stipulated in the contract, or unless a writer published an unusually high number of pieces in a single year, this was not a living wage.

A writer of very frequent Notes & Comment was certain to be, in comparison with most other staff writers, very well paid indeed. For this reason, among others—including his high moral, some would say moralistic tone; his time spent with Mr. Shawn and clear status as the favorite; his imitation of Mr. Shawn, in personal style and even in the inflections of his speech; and finally, the impression that things said among the writers themselves were reported by him to Mr. Shawn—led to reservations, with ingredients of envy and fear, about Mr. Schell.

Some members of the staff, mostly young, invited the Guild to unionize the office. The Guild was a mean, bumbling union, which had already incurred a number of failures for its membership in long, nasty, costly, and ineffective strikes at newspapers, including The New York Times. While many on The New Yorker staff—the men in makeup, for example, and the secretaries—were underpaid in comparison with their counterparts at other magazines, these were not the people who had invited the union to come in. The invitation came from people whose jobs were amorphous and undefined

Bill Whitworth stepped in. With great tact and sensitivity, and with enormous patience, he produced a miracle. At his urging, and before any vote was taken, those who had invited the union withdrew their request. In the annals of labor relations, this is almost unheard of. The inviters asked in return only that Mr. Shawn agree to meet, from time to time, with a staff committee, to discuss grievances. Mr. Schell expressed his view that this was a capitulation and a betrayal. Mr. Shawn and Ms. Ross appeared to share that view. It became clear that, if Mr. Whitworth had ever been a candidate for the succession, he no longer was.

In 1982, The New Yorker published "The Fate of the Earth," by Jonathan Schell, a five-part meditation on nuclear war. When the pieces were published in book form, by Knopf, the jacket copy, unsigned, was written in fact by Mr. Shawn. He described the book as "possibly one of the great events in the history of human thought." Even given the occasionally effusive nature of jacket copy, this seemed excessive. But Mr. Shawn, whose last published piece (apart from some very concise and moving obituaries of New Yorker writers) was thought to have been a little fantasy about a meteors hitting New York, in 1945, had actually been writing several Notes &c Comments himself since Mr. Schell came to the magazine. His views often echoed Mr. Schells. When The Fate of the Earth was published in Germany, a reviewer raised a question of plagiarism. Certain points and passages in the book, particularly a chapter called "The Second Death," closely resembled parts of a book originally published in Germany—written, in fact, by a former husband of Hannah Arendt.

The notion that it is all right to make stories up and present them as non- fiction was, of course, indefensible. That Mr. Shawn should try to defend it was damaging to The New Yorker—which, until that incident, was trusted, almost above all, for the accuracy of its reporting.

Quotations that appear in print, for example, are hardly ever verbatim. The rhythms of actual speech transcribed would make most stories endless.

Within days, he received a letter from Mr. Greene. A lot of the piece, Mr. Greene said, was pure, even mad, invention. He gave three examples. Ms. Gilliatt wrote that, as she interviewed Mr. Greene in Monte Carlo, vultures were flying overhead. There were, Mr. Greene said, no vultures in Monte Carlo.

Mr. Shawn initially justified his publication of the piece by saying that The New Yorker agreed to conceal the name of the chef, and of his restaurant, because the magazine never published pieces about people who did not want to be written about.

Especially in the Talk of the Town, The New Yorker routinely used stories from the Times, without any sort of credit or attribution.

A few New Yorker writers were especially proficient at the analysis, and demolition, of news stories, as well as any form of conventional wisdom or received ideas. In 1971, in an article called "The Panther and the Police: A Pattern of Genocide?" Edward Jay Epstein examined the notion, almost universally believed, that police, across the United States, had killed thirteen Black Panthers. Charles Garry, lawyer for the Panthers had said so. Journalists took it up. Everyone believed it. Mr. Epstein looked at the matter case by case, and discovered that, of the alleged thirteen, some were not dead and most of the rest were not Panthers. One was an apple vendor who died, of natural causes, beside his apple cart. The piece was valuable and important. It probably saved lives.

In time, after the second unsuccessful attempt to install Mr. Schell, and the demonization of Ms. Malcolm and Mr. Botsford, Ms. Ross found William McKibben, a writer for The Harvard Crimson. Mr. Shawn hired him as a writer, and he became the next candidate for the succession.

"Now, you're a Republican," Mr. Doar said, in his phone call on Christmas Eve. That was true. I had registered as a Republican because I wanted to vote against Barry Goldwater, and for Nelson Rockefeller, in the primary of 1964. In the early days of political correctness, I liked to imagine as well that I was the only Republican reporter, not just on the staff of The New Yorker, but in New York.

Anyone who was not, by late 1973, tilting one way or the other on the question of impeachment was likely to have been living in considerable isolation. The lawyers he would hire, I assumed, would be savvy enough to conceal their views. Hillary Rodham was, of course, one lawyer Doar hired. Bernard Nussbaum was another. Bill Clinton, who was running at the time for attorney general of Arkansas, came to visit.

My job, at the outset, was to write the speeches of Chairman Peter Rodino. He was not to know who was writing them. Nor was anyone else. Mr. Doar did not believe that speechwriters, like Theodore Sorenson, Emmett Hughes, or Richard Goodwin, served anyone's interests by going public. The chairman, however, must have the Quotation of the Day in the Times every time he spoke. This was no small thing. It would be hard to produce words worth quoting, over a period of some months, when the rule for the substance was that it could not tilt.

Back in New York, I called Martin Duberman, a writer and a respected historian at Columbia. I asked him for those instances of fine conduct by Congress in the past. He thought about it. It seemed there were not any. The chairman, in that first speech, quoted Edmund Burke.

The piece argued, and to a degree demonstrated, that there was, indeed, in Watergate a form of "treason," as contemplated in the constitutional phrase "Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors"—that it had to do with the China Lobby, the war in Vietnam, and foreign campaign contributions. By the time the piece appeared, in The Atlantic Monthly (then still under the editorship of Robert Manning and Michael Janeway), I was in law school.

The reporting convention, at newspapers and magazines, was, and is—those were the days of Woodward and Bernstein, and Sy Hersh—to interview two people, two "sources," and if they bear each other out, to run the story. When a government institution—the Church Committee on Intelligence, for example—issues a report, which commonly runs to several volumes and to many thousands of pages, the convention is to run with the accompanying press release. No reporter has the time or patience or temperament to wade through those documents. So the conventions exist: either the press release, or the word of two living sources.

In the course of research, I had found that, contrary to what he wrote, and contrary to his reputation as a hero, Sirica was in fact a corrupt, incompetent, and dishonest figure, with a close connection to Senator Joseph McCarthy and clear ties to organized crime.

There seemed nothing left for me to do, except to bake him a pie with a file in it.