GONE: The Last Days of The New Yorker

by Renata Adler

I wrote, again, to say that I was not a blonde, that I had not been in agony, and to thank him for his concern. That was that. He published a thriller, which I thought pretty good.

Suddenly, it was no longer scheduled. For the first and only time, I asked Mr. Shawn a question on this subject. Was it merely postponed, or would it never run? "This has never happened before," he said. "There was an uprising. I had to yield."

I had published a piece in the New York Times Book Review—a review of The Brethren, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s book on the Supreme Court. I had not cared for the book. I had also had one of those experiences with the Book Review that makes one determined never to write for them again. Mr. Shawn had liked the review. He sent me a check, for fifteen hundred dollars. A surprising man—to send one a check for a piece in another publication.

The next day, I called Bill Whitworth—Ms. Kael's editor and sometimes mine. "Tell me," I said, "why I shouldn't write a really negative review of Pauline Kael’s book." "Because you like her work," he said. "That's true," I said. It was true. I had always liked her work.

"Well," he said, "she's not a limousine liberal." That was true. There had been decades of limousine liberals. Pauline Kael was not one of them.

Ms. Kael, far from being powerless, was a dominant, even domineering presence in film reviewing, and even in university film departments. She seemed to take particular pleasure in ridiculing small filmmakers (the Maysles come to mind; Merchant and Ivory; Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah).

Now he said, "You've taken away her language. She'll tough it out. But you've taken away her language." I rather hoped I had. It seemed to me, looking back, that I had been pretty loyal to The New Yorker; defending—out of conviction, certainly, but all the same—the magazine and its writers (Hannah Arendt, John Updike, Donald Barthelme), attacking those whom it regarded as enemies (Herbert Gold, Tom Wolfe, and a group of hostile critics, in a long piece called "Polemic and the New Reviewers.") I

In 1981, Mr. Shawn suddenly scheduled the piece that once was dead: "G. Gordon Liddy in America." I went to see him. I said, It would have been one thing to run the piece when Jimmy Carter was president, there were hostages in Teheran, and the president was, rather embarrassingly, carrying his own suitcase at airports and speaking of national malaise. It was quite another to schedule it during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, when the hostages had long since returned, the president was speaking of a City on a Hill, and even Gordon Liddy had begun to play a different role. When I wrote the piece, it was in some degree contrarian, to balance what I thought was one political consensus. Now that consensus was overbalanced, tilting quite the other way. Mr. Shawn said a piece was good or not, regardless of the political situation. I did not agree.

Even if it were true, it would not just be philistine to reject fiction that is, in some sense, based on real characters. There wouldn't be any fiction.

Mr. Shawn, meanwhile, had suggested I write a column, about trials. "There are only two kinds of stories that are innately interesting," he said. "Games, and trials. Even if you know the outcome, they are always full of suspense."

Mr. Shawn had begun to invite to his office what he called "the Committee," a group of writers and other staff members, to discuss the takeover and its terms. The group, which I came to think of as the Committee of Loons, seemed to believe it had certain powers, of definition and of decision about what would happen next.

Mr. Florio had been brought in from Gentleman's Quarterly. He was young, blustering, cheerful, coarse, incompetent.

"This full minute of bird calls," an incredibly creepy voice, which might have belonged to an overbred child molester, said, "has been brought to you by The New Yorker. Yes. The New Yorker."

He had given Mr. Shawn a color television set. Ms. Ross said Mr. Shawn had always avoided color sets, believing the radiation might cause cancer.

In the early 1980s, there were two more New Yorker crises. One arose out of pieces by Janet Malcolm; the other from an article of my own.

I went out, I thought, to the newsstand, bought the papers, came back to the turnstile, and prepared to put my token in the slot. I dropped the token on the ground. A young lady, in jeans and a tee shirt, approached, picked up my token, and handed it to me. She looked as though she were about to ask me something. I smiled. She took my wrist and put handcuffs on it. I looked around.

I was released early—not in time for the court's morning session (there was no verdict), but in time for a lunch date with Bayard Rustin. He said he would be more meticulous, in view of my experience, with the use of his transit pass.

My apartment, too, had been expertly burgled; the only items removed had been my answering machine, a word processor (which I did not yet know how to use), a memory typewriter, and some files.

Ms. Malcolm had a harder time. She had written a piece about Jeffrey Masson, a complicated figure who had once been appointed head of the Freud Archive and then had turned on Freud—accusing him, among other things, of dismissing as fantasy what he knew to be widespread and genuine cases of child abuse, in order to maintain the popularity of his theories. Anyone who read the piece would know that Ms. Malcolm, whose own father was an analyst, disagreed with Masson. On the other hand, the fairness of her report was such that I, for example, was persuaded by Masson, as she represented his views.

seemed to me that reporters who did not behave in the way Ms. Malcolm was describing had only to realize that they were not included in her remarks, and that was that. Mr. Masson, however, was surely emboldened by the reception of Ms. Malcolm’s piece.

Photographers don’t like to be photographed. Surgeons require nearly twice the amount of anesthesia ordinary patients require to undergo surgery. Journalists are the least receptive to professional scrutiny by their colleagues. They react, sometimes unconsciously, sometimes with the utmost deliberation, to avenge themselves.

It was part of his nature to humor everyone. It was one of his strengths. But humoring everyone, on all sides of a question, while it may avoid unpleasant confrontation, is also certain to result in the strain of holding several sharply divergent, mutually incompatible views.

Not infrequently, yet another category, never as reliable as the other three, appears to supplant the office wife—the protégé. In Mr. Shawn’s case, Jonathan Schell, in Mr. Gottlieb’s, Adam Gopnik, were protégés. Protégés do not linger. Though they may rivet the boss's attention, they tend to act upon their agendas and move on.

In all the years of The New Yorkers existence, one sort of editing seems to have been lacking: editing, in the broadest sense, for meaning, for implications, for what, for one reason or another is implied by what you are saying, or what it is simply not all right to say. There was, in that sense, no governing intelligence.

A profile, by John Newhouse, of King Hussein of Jordan, described him, without question or reservation, as "a descendant of Mohammed." No one, from checking on up, seemed to remark that the magazine appeared thereby to endorse, and convey as factual, a belief held only by a tiny, isolated faction of Islam.

George Roy Hill, the film director, was a cousin of John Doar’s. They both came from a very small town, New Richmond, Wisconsin. One evening, in the late seventies, Mr. Hill, his wife, Mr. Doar, and I were having dinner. Mr. Hill said that he had gone to great lengths, and incurred high expenses for the studio, in using genuine outdoor sounds for his movie. Ms. Kael, who disliked all his films, had written, with bitter scorn, that he had not troubled with the authentic, but had used canned sounds. "Why that’s awful," I said. "You should have asked for a correction." "I did," he said. I asked what had happened. "Nothing," he said.

"What did you say?" I asked. "I don’t remember," he said. "It started out, 'You cunt.' " I saw there was nothing to be done.

A frail, diminutive man in his mid-thirties, he had dark hair in a little-boy haircut,

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.

The piece in question, about Krazy Kat, in The New Republic, was, I thought, unremarkable, but I had become accustomed to these calls, in which Mr. Gopnik would present, as criticism and in tones of concern, some extravagant compliment to himself.

Mr. Shawn called, several times, on Lawrence Weshler, recently returned from Warsaw, to compare the situation to the crisis in Poland, and ask "what Solidarity would do."

Janet Malcolm, one of the New Yorkers most distinguished writers, a person of undeniable rectitude, decency, and manners, and married, of course, to Gardner Botsford (who, it now seemed more obvious than ever, would have been the ideal successor), happened to be a friend of Mr. Gottlieb's. She was also his neighbor. Their houses were yards apart in Turtle Bay. Mr. Botsford had already told friends he thought the firing was brutal and cruel, and that Mr. Gottlieb was not the right man for the job. If Ms. Ross intended, as it appeared she had, a test of those she had long regarded as villains, Ms. Malcolm had risen to it.

Anthony Hiss said, "Since this is serious, and people's livelihoods are at stake, we shouldn't decide hastily. We need time to reflect on what they are doing and what we ought to do." No one took this up, or appeared to hear or understand it. Jeremy Bernstein began his remarks: "There is no question Newhouse had the right to do this." That was ignored as well.

On the way upstairs, I ran into Bud Trillin. "This is a disaster," I said. "I know," he said. “I’ll try to keep them from doing anything too wild."

Jervis Anderson, a fine reporter, who had written a recent profile of A. Philip Randolph. Mr. Anderson said that, as the magazine’s first and only black reporter since Charlayne Hunter, he could not sign a letter that appeared to consist of ganging up.

It was the only time in my life I have overheard something I was apparently not meant to hear.

Anyone who saw Mr. Shawn only in a group would not have reason to think highly of him. This was the language of high moral principle in the service of what?

In what order should the names be listed? "Alphabetically," a voice proposed. Ms. Ross nodded, vigorously. "Then the first name will be Roger Angell,” she said.

"I'm told," he went on, "that Mr. Shawn said, 'The only good thing about all this is that Gottlieb is bringing Adam Gopnik to The New Yorker." He paused again. I thought, Perhaps he realizes that this is going a bit far. I waited. "It’s always been my dream to go to The New Yorker,” he said. "You don’t think, do you, that the staff will think I'm Bob’s catamite?"

Most of the checkers, in those years, were gay. Ms. Dean would arrive, late, at her desk, in the large room the checkers occupied. She would begin with telephone calls to her friends. "I can't talk now," she would say, glaring at the checker nearest to her. "It is listening to me." After some years, she was fired—the first and only person, in Mr. Shawn's time, to be fired by the magazine.

I went to the ladies room. There were sheets on the bed there, striped brown, mauve, white, a bit disordered and unmade. I remembered when Edward Opie, the cartoonist, had moved his mother in there—also the more famous episode, when Maeve Brennan, a former wife of St. Clair McKelway's, and one of the most talented and prolific short story writers in the history of The New Yorker, had moved in.

I wished, not for the first and certainly not for the last time, that instead of saying, "He was one of the greatest editors in the history of American letters. If there had to be a successor, it should be Bob," I had said, in place of the second sentence, "And there can be no successor at all."

But the quality of being curious by nature—so that every subject, in every piece, in every issue, is an adventure—is a kind of courage of the spirit. In this respect, Mr. Shawn was very brave.

Mr. Gottlieb was almost comically incurious.

"What they don't realize over here is that Martha and Adam and I could do it by ourselves."

Mr. Shawn, meanwhile, had installed himself, across the street, in the Algonquin. From there, he was secretly and patiently editing those sections of the magazine which the staff members whose competence Mr. Gottlieb esteemed so highly had no idea how to edit.

At the same time, the place has the air of a shabby boarding school—sans headmaster, sans faculty or curriculum. There is just the dormitory, run by prefects— complete with hazing, and a kind of undeclared, bullying homosexuality.

Adult conversation, any real conversation, takes place behind closed doors.

In fact, Walter Pincus, some years before, had proposed to Mr. Shawn the publication of a new magazine, which Mr. Pincus would edit, that would consist almost solely of work The New Yorker had bought but would never run. Mr. Shawn had said no, that he was planning to run it all.

"I don't know about brilliant. Fifty-two issues a year can't be brilliant. If it's ordinary or acceptable, that's good enough."