Kindle Notes & Highlights
I said I would like to review a recent book, by Seymour Hersh, about Henry Kissinger. "You didn’t like it," he said. I said that was true. He said, "It will be like your book, or your piece about Pauline Kael. I agreed with you. I hate journalists, but you would go for the jugular." I said that might be true. I would like to do a reporting piece, then, about Henry Kissinger— although there might be a problem, in that he had become a friend. Mr. Gottlieb said he hated Kissinger.
Robert Hughes, the art critic of Time, had "implored" him to call Barbara Epstein, and ask her, on Mr. Hughes's behalf, to publish the piece soon—so that Mr. Hughes could "refer to it in his speeches." Did I think he should call Ms. Epstein, or might it be misunderstood? Mr. Hughes might be coming as art critic to The New Yorker. If he did, Mr. Gopnik said, he was going to recommend Mr. Gopnik as his successor at Time.
It occurred to me that one virtue Mr. Gottlieb did seem to have in abundance, and to have preserved in his transition to the magazine, was lack of hypocrisy. This was not quite the same as that positive, dangerous virtue, sincerity. It may even have grown out of a fault: an apparently absolute lack of self-doubt or self- criticism.
Ms. Malcolm had already written Mr. Gottlieb a note, saying they could no longer discuss the magazine. She wondered whether she should write him another letter, saying they could no longer be friends.
I had learned over the course of conversations with Mr. Gopnik that his questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.
Avedon asked what had happened to the Fashion Institute of Technology piece. "Chip and Roger came to see me about it," Mr. Gopnik said. "They said it was too faggy."
One afternoon, not long afterwards, I went to see Rupert Murdoch. I said that if he were to start a magazine, I thought I would be able to abscond overnight with all the valuable members of the staff of The New Yorker—writers, editors, cartoonists, workers of every other kind—and that, on the following morning, neither the people at Conde Nast nor Mr. Gottlieb, who seemed to value other people entirely, would realize that they, and effectively the magazine, had gone.
We talked about what the new magazine might be, very like The New Yorker; in most respects, except that, politically, it would be a magazine a Republican could read, without being made to feel like an unenlightened and fundamentally second-rate citizen.
A pause came over only two questions: Who would edit the magazine, and what would it be called? I had somehow not thought of these....
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
In this period, the magazine began, for the first time in forty years, actually to lose money. Advertising fell twenty- five percent, the first precipitous phase in what became its long decline.
Gopnik, meanwhile, was becoming the editorial counterpart of Steven Florio, or perhaps a New York incarnation of Widmerpool, the character in Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time, who embodies certain lamentably ascendant qualities of his time.
Ms. Hayward, her husband, Peter Duchin, and I had once organized a Bible study group.
"Well, he feels used. Adam has this new thing. He's worried about the magazine, and how it would look if word now gets out that people are not coming to The New Yorker;"
Most recently, David Remnick was appointed editor of The New Yorker after submitting to Si Newhouse a memo of several thousand words about what he would do to improve the magazine. Mr. Gopnik let it be known that he, with the help of a friend, Henry Finder, had written the memo, and that Mr. Remnick owed his appointment to them.
had met Judge Bork when he was a professor at the Yale Law School. I had no courses with him. I had no reason to think less than highly of him. He was a friend of friends. Then I began to read his works. I became convinced that I was the only one who had ever read nearly all of them. They were beyond belief. They were not only unworthy of a candidate for the Supreme Court; they seemed to disqualify him as any sort of constitutional scholar, and to cast doubt on his qualifications to teach either at Yale or at the University of Chicago Law School, where he had also held a professorship. In a
...more
Wallace Shawn had written a wonderful play, Aunt Dan and Lemon, which made extensive, largely negative references to Henry Kissinger. Wallace initiated an exchange of letters. They agreed that I might arrange a lunch.
Several hundred linear feet of documents had been lost, in transit from the New Yorkers offices on Forty-third Street to the library on Forty-second.
to believe their claque and even quote it. Richard Locke, then Leo Lerman, and even Alex Liberman were always pulling out of their pockets letters of fulsome praise from writers, artists, critics (including, as it happened, Robert Hughes), without any apparent awareness that this was not what the same people were saying in the outside world.
It had generally been conceded that New Yorker pieces were too long. This was often true. But the explanations for an impatience with length— that readers were too busy, that there was too much to read, that a post-McLuhan, MTV generation had quite lost the linear habit—turned out not to explain much. A great piece, whatever its length, seems short, a dull piece, long.
On the whole, however, readers, at least since the days of great illuminated manuscripts, prefer just text.
In view of what came next, however, he was, as he had said he would be, not a radical but a conserver of the magazine.
Most people expressed their sympathy, and even affection, to Mr. Gottlieb when he left. He was surprised and hurt that Mr. Gopnik dropped him without a word.
In spite of a concerted and successful effort, by Ms. Brown and Conde Nast, over a period of five years, to persuade reporters from other publications that Vanity Fair was either in the black or about to be, the magazine had in fact been losing money on a scale unequalled since the days of a magazine published by Huntington Hartford, Show.
Ms. Brown brought, from Vanity Fair; in a position with no previous counterpart at The New Yorker: her own version of a second man, at an annual salary of four hundred thousand dollars.
Before Conde Nast began to tinker with the format, The New Yorker had the highest renewal rate in the history of publishing. When the format changed, and the magazine began to chase subscribers, those loyal readers who had always, almost automatically, renewed began to reconsider. When Ms. Brown began radically to change the content, the renewal rate sank like a stone.
Brown did make some changes that were for the better. She hired Bill Buford, from Granta, as fiction editor. She brought in pieces by Simon Schama.
It became a magazine like any other, only less clearly defined. There were pieces appropriate to The New York Times Magazine, New York, Hustler.
The notion that you cannot judge a book by its cover was always metaphorical, applied literally only to books. Almost all magazines, including The New Yorker,; had always sold at newsstands precisely on the basis of their covers.
There was a characteristic structure, it turned out, to a piece by Mr. Gopnik. It began, typically, with a flourish. (1) This is what everyone has always thought, on this topic, until this very moment. (2) What everyone has always thought, until this very moment, is incorrect. (3) Here is what I have discovered is, in fact, the case—and present to you here, at this very moment, for the first time, ever.
There were some variations, but that was the structure. Other writers have used it. The reason genuine essayists never use it is not just its built-in applause and self- congratulation. It insults the reader. This is what you thought, poor fool, along with that herd of like-minded fools to which you belonged until this minute, when you began to read this piece. No editor with any feeling for civil discourse will publish an argument that rests upon this structure. Once, perhaps. Mistakes will happen. Certainly not with any regularity.
Many scientists believe that we send, and respond to, signals to and from one another, for which we have as yet no name, and of which we may not be entirely aware. Children, especially, seem to have these somewhat unaccountable transmitters and receptors. Some analogous element of our individuality may be our fate.
"The boiler in the house she rented blew up," we say. "It’s the sort of thing that happens to her."
The place that, rightly or wrongly, had always declined awards of every sort—Mr. Shawn himself once declined, in a single month, honorary doctorates from Harvard and from Yale—was now intriguing and plotting to get prizes.
that this generation simply no longer reads. Only people who don’t read, and never did read, say that. It is just a cover and an excuse and a blaming of the audience, which is gone until something draws and creates it again.
If he had no talent for meetings or administration, he was incomparable one by one. If he had a kind of moral vanity, he had a genuine moral sense as well. It was Hannah Arendt, who wrote of Quixotic fools engaged in self- aggrandizing public performances, as opposed to "the calm good conscience of some limited achievement."
As I write, the magazine will presumably be sold, or merged, or limited to occasional issues on specific themes, or simply closed. There were, in recent months, three, perhaps penultimate, instances of the ironic echo and the cackling aftermath. In the first issue under David Remnick, Ms. Browns successor, all of Talk of the Town which had been devoted, by tradition, to a single subject only on matters of state or principle, was devoted to a sort of Festschrift for Tina Brown—making her, over a period of more than fifty years, by far the person most frequently mentioned in that section of the
...more
In the same week, I had sat, on the train, behind a passenger who read The New Yorker very carefully, page by page, until he got to my piece. He quickly rifled past it, and resumed reading page by page.)
Ms. Steinem was surprised. She had never been able to imagine herself in old age otherwise than alone. I remember as well believing, and consistently saying to friends who were about to resign from this job or that, that they should not underestimate the advantages of belonging to an institution—that the world would look quite different to them, and they to the world, on their own.
Books are different. They are read alone. But magazines are communal.
