Trouble in Paradise. Yes, Trouble

By Thomas Griffith

Newswatch

To say that The New Yorker isn't as good as it used to be, and is developing some perilous habits, requires arguing with success. The magazine's guaranteed circulation, now 480,000 copies a week, is the highest in its 55-year history. Securely fat and prosperous, The New Yorker is gaining advertising pages while many other major weeklies are not. In its lordly way, the magazine offers no special rates or short-term subscriptions, never invites the reader to "bill me later." Editorially, too, The New Yorker courts writers, not readers. Even the word reader--as in "Would the reader understand this?"--is not heard around the office. The only reader who counts is the elusive and gifted editor, the famously unfamous William Shawn, whose name does not even appear in the magazine. Shawn is 73.

A magazine in which the reader is only an onlooker has to be pretty special, and The New Yorker is. Too special for many, who dislike its cozy affectations and mannerisms. But those who do admire it, or who once did, regard it as the gathering place of the best writing and cartooning in America, a final arbiter of sophistication. With such feelings, the current magazine generates two kinds of strong responses: an admiration that comes close to uncritical leniency, or an angry sense of betrayal that it has become windier, more boring, less inspired and more complacent than it once was. Disdaining as it does mere commercial success, The New Yorker deserves to be measured by its own highest standards. This is where the problem is.

For a magazine so bedazzled by its own tradition--repeating every February its original cover of a dandy, Eustace Tilley, eyeing a butterfly through a monocle--The New Yorker has changed a lot. There have been two New Yorkers. The original reflected its founding genius, Harold Ross. ("Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire," the prospectus said. "It will hate bunk," and would not be "edited for the old lady in Dubuque.") Its clever, brittle style survived the Depression but seemed frivolously out of sync when World War II began. So, war coverage was introduced, culminating in an unsparing report on Hiroshima by John Hersey, to which Shawn persuaded Ross to devote an entire issue.

That was only the beginning. When Ross died and was succeeded by Shawn in 1952, other lengthy reports, some of them prescient, began to appear: Rachel Carson documenting environmental destruction, James Baldwin warning whites of The Fire Next Time. No longer resounding with gaiety and wit, The New Yorker had become a serious magazine with cartoons. For a time, in its outrage over Viet Nam and Nixon, The New Yorker abandoned ironical urbanity and bared its anger. Older readers protested not only the opinions but the shrillness, and for the first time the magazine's circulation fell off. To this day Shawn does not think those editorial stands caused the temporary drop, even though someone on the publishing side--"a man no longer here," as Shawn puts it--"got all worked up."

Shawn is a short, almost bald man who dresses neatly. His black knit tie does nothing to mitigate the sobriety of his pin-stripe suit. He gives the impression of never raising his voice, or ever having been subjected to those who do. He rarely lets himself be interviewed, but when he does is courtly, considerate, precise and articulate. He has been called, in a phrase that stings in its unfairness, the Iron Mouse. He is a decided man. Ask him how an issue of The New Yorker comes together--how, for example, some article with no apparent topicality takes up half an issue--and Shawn answers, "I just make a decision as to what appears."

Shawn's word goes. There are no staff meetings, no hierarchies, no dauphin. He insists that it is not an editor's magazine. It is clearly not a reader's: "We don't edit for readers. We never think, 'Is this going to please anyone, or will this be read by a few people or a lot of people?' We try to publish what interests us, what we want to learn about, what will be entertaining. I don't know who the readers are, don't want to know who they are." But just as Shawn seems to be giving voice to the arrogance that the magazine's detractors complain about, he completes the thought: "We think we are showing the readers the greatest respect by not trying to differentiate them from us."

That philosophy makes The New Yorker a paradise for writers. They feel themselves an elite there; nowhere else are they so cosseted. Plain, linoleum-floored warrens in a midtown Manhattan building may look like debt-collection offices, but the writers who inhabit them find their own sensibilities and eccentricities gravely honored. They choose the subjects that interest them. A writer may take several years on a long article. In the twelve-odd readings--editing, changing, checking--each article undergoes before it reaches print, the writer's reaction is constantly solicited. In this way the magazine has held the loyalty of its best contributors. Nothing by the reclusive J.D. Salinger has appeared since his memorable Franny and Zooey stories 20 years ago, but, says Shawn, "he's still writing; I'm still in touch with him." Peter De Vries is a successful comic novelist now, but still shows up weekly to polish and tone the cartoon captions. E.B. White, the most graceful stylist of them all, is retired at 81, but "the newsbreaks," those odd cuttings that appear at the foot of a column, are still mailed to his farm in Maine so he can write the sharp, wry comments beneath them.

The New Yorker's guilty little secret is that not all its staff is half so talented. Of course, another James Thurber cannot be created on demand. Book reviews miss the irascible authority of Edmund Wilson, though on occasion the scamped book section is rescued by John Updike or V.S. Pritchett. Arlene Croce on dance and Whitney Balliett on jazz are experts who write well, but Brendan Gill's theater criticism is frequently weary and precious. The movie reviews by Pauline Kael often seem longer than the films themselves.

Shawn laments the magazine's current scarcity of humor and fiction, which he sees as symptomatic of the times: "The problem is to find enough that fits our standards." Fiction can range widely from I.B. Singer's shtetl in Poland to the adulterous suburbia of John Cheever. But there is a recognizable New Yorker kind of story. It usually involves a middle-class woman who registers a sad little recognition after some incident in which not very much happened.

Nearly every issue contains a major article or two of "fact," as the staff calls anything that is not fiction or humor. "Fact" pieces increasingly run on longer, are more pedestrian in the telling, and are heavily weighted toward the scientific. Shawn acknowledges that some articles can be hard going. "We don't want them to be any more accessible than a piece is that does not distort the science that is being written about." (On that ground, why not staves of music in the music reviews? Shawn smiles: "If it did come up, I'm afraid we'd do it.") He recognizes that some pieces are "so special, so idiosyncratic" that few will read them, but sighs: "If I think it's good, I have no right not to offer it to the reader." Other readers, turning page after page, can feel like trapped eavesdroppers to a long and abstruse private conversation. It is no longer a browsing magazine for the casual reader. Those long pieces demand a reader's application, and he is sometimes rewarded, as in a two-part series by Janet Malcolm about a psychoanalyst, "Aaron Green (as I shall call him)," that did not require a Ph.D. to keep up with.

As articles lengthen--profiles that would be long in two parts now run for three--there is frustration in the writers' paradise. No one can be as savage a critic of the prolixity, or the lack of merit, of what does get published than a writer whose own work has been waiting months to appear. Shawn acknowledges that "we are tempted to hold for two, three or four years'' articles that have no topicality, "but we don't want to make writers unhappy." The backlog of unprinted articles "always seems a little longer every year." Some writers who esteem brevity are convinced that others are paid more for writing longer, and have no inducement to write shorter. Shawn, after studying his private list of who is paid what (he alone knows), disputes this.

When abuse by length comes up, the name of Elizabeth Drew quickly surfaces. In two issues last fall, her coverage of the presidential campaign ran on each time through more than 25 New Yorker pages. Another article, threading its way through the usual glossy ads (as exemplified by the fox jacket for $6,795 at Bloomingdale's, the eight-day chronometer for $17,350 at Tiffany), stretched for 59 interminable New Yorker pages. Drew was allowed to indulge in that slackest kind of writing, the day-by-day journal. Anyone not intensely interested in politics could hardly be expected to go the distance.

Drew, like many of the present generation of New Yorker reporters, writes pile-on sentences that mock the magazine's pride in being well written:

Niagara Falls, New York. A few days ago, it was decided that the President would do a favor for Jerry Wurf, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, who has been helpful to the Carter campaign, by coming here to address the annual convention of one of the union's New York State employees' locals--a large one, numbering some two hundred and twenty-five thousand members.

A colleague dismisses this kind of writing as "selling your notes." Another device turning up in the magazine these days to enliven lumpish reporting is the injection of a writer's "I" with no discernible personality to create a pseudo intimacy. Hear a freelance writer, Emily Hahn, nattering last fall:

During a coffee break, I came to a decision. All the people at the conference, I realized, were interested in a particular subject... I, too, I felt, should fasten on to a specialized subject, but what was it to be? I glanced over the titles of the talks we were to hear...

Thank heavens, then, for the cartoons. The great Saul Steinberg is still to be found in The New Yorker, as are Charles Addams and George Price. A new trend, alas, is the cartoon with no visual interest, merely an illustrated gag--a roadside sign, for example, on which something funny is lettered. But the magazine is developing a new generation of originals who rank with the best of the elders, among them Ed Koren, with his furry animals who look like people and furry people who look like animals; George Booth, whose tacky characters are surrounded by cats, kitchen sinks and naked light bulbs dangling from the ceiling; and William Hamilton chronicling the confusions of trendy young couples on the rise.

Every cartoon, like every printed word, must satisfy "Mr. Shawn," as the editor is respectfully called. His is an arbitrary rule, a considerate dictatorship. He aims to create an atmosphere of tact, sympathy and deference in which artists and writers will develop and flourish. Unfortunately the latitude that brings out the best in the best is also granted to writers (many of them old hands) whose best is not good enough, but gets published anyway. Shawn himself seems to find renewal in the younger writers, with their curiosity about matters new to him: "I try to be open to whatever writers are occupied with." With a rare note of asperity he speaks of "people in this office who resist certain changes, who think that writing should have stopped with what they are doing." Such are the signs of a long reign.

That reign is nearly over. Despite the cushion of the magazine's success, a certain nervousness hovers in the air in this very inbred, cloistered place. Several years ago, the staff was unsettled by reports that Shawn wanted to turn over some authority to a young man more admired by Shawn than by others around the premises. Shawn ended the uncertainty by posting a two-line notice on the board saying he intended to stay on a while. The editorship is his "as long as he feels he can do the job," says George J. Green, The New Yorker's president. (Management so defers to Shawn that he doesn't even have an editorial budget, but spends what he wants.) How long does Shawn intend to stay on? Delicate ground. When asked, Shawn replies, "I just haven't made any decision. I'm still here today. I just don't know." End of subject; Shawn rations his confidences.

The choice of successor will be entirely up to Peter Fleischmann, 58, board chairman and son of the founding owner, Raoul Fleischmann. Nobody is trying to drive Shawn away, yet there is uneasy anticipation among the staff of a transition that will have to come. After 28 years of Shawn's dominance, a new editor will undoubtedly favor different writers, show less interest in some of Shawn's pet subjects, introduce other tastes. Might he even decide that the general reader can be taken into account, just a teeny bit, without jeopardizing the integrity of the writer? Might he change the magazine drastically? Discussions usually end with writers reassuring one another that the magazine's habits and attitudes are now safely institutionalized. At heart, The New Yorker is very pleased with itself.

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