Kissing And Telling

By R.Z. Sheppard

Lillian Ross, who has written for the New Yorker since 1945 and should be in The Guinness Book of World Records for conducting the longest office romance, was in town last week, seated at her regular table in her favorite Manhattan restaurant, La Caravelle, where she wore a dark green Armani pantsuit, drank San Pellegrino water and filled us in on reaction to her new book, Here but Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker (Random House; 240 pages; $25), which has had most of the New York literary world buzzing for the past several weeks.

Still trim and vigorous in what she allows only as her seventh decade, Ross quickly took charge of the discussion about her years working and living with William Shawn, the New Yorker's editor from 1952 until 1987. Shawn died in 1992 at the age of 85, leaving sons Allen, a composer married to former New Yorker writer Jamaica Kincaid, and Wallace, an actor and playwright. Shawn's wife of 64 years, Cecille, is now 93.

"I think it's irrelevant," Ross replies to the question people are asking: Why publish a memoir about your 40-year relationship with a married man while his wife, whom you say you are fond of, is still alive? "There were no secrets, really, that were divulged," Ross says firmly. "We never went underground, and he [Shawn] talked with her [Cecille] about what was happening with him and with me immediately."

What was happening was that the editor and the writer had set up house in a building 11 blocks from the apartment where Shawn's wife and boys lived. Cecille would not give her husband a divorce, Ross says, and he would not unilaterally leave the marriage. So Shawn shuttled between residences, eating nearly all his meals with Ross, checking in at home, rejoining Ross in time to watch the late news together, and then returning home to sleep next to a private phone on which he and Ross conversed.

The arrangement seems daring even by today's forgiving standards. Perhaps more distressing is that Ross explodes Shawn's beatific public reputation, one protected by many who worked with him. "Mr. Shawn," as he was addressed at the New Yorker, was beloved by his staff. His decency, skill, editorial patience and generosity are legendary. He was shy, courtly and neurotically self-effacing. Ross, however, reveals a side of the man that resembles a Walter Mitty fantasy: a denizen of jazz joints, racetracks and classy restaurants. He was also an ardent mate. "After 40 years, our love-making had the same passion, the same energies," Ross writes. "It never deteriorated, our later wrinkles, blotches, and scars of age notwithstanding."

Ross is such a good reporter that at times she even tells us what we don't want to know. On the other hand, Here but Not Here reveals more about its author than she may intend. Her love life with Shawn eventually pales beside her romance with herself as a power journalist. She instinctively understood that the best way to become successful and well known was to write about the famous. Her flattering profiles of movie and literary celebrities like John Huston and Ernest Hemingway were brilliantly entertaining--and appreciated by her subjects. Ross had no qualms about becoming close friends with some of them and even defends the practice. "I don't want to write about people I don't like," she says. "If I like them, I like them with my being, and I'm not going to stop liking them after they have become useful to me."

To this self-justifying and socially rewarding definition of journalism Ross adds that she pioneered the use of fictional techniques in nonfiction. It is true that early long pieces like Picture, about making a film of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, were fresh and novel-like. But can Ross claim the innovation as her own? It could be argued that she merely applied to celebrity journalism the storytelling methods already refined by her betters, the New Yorker's Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling, whom she indeed credits in her book as "the staff writers who originally influenced and inspired me."

Ironically, Here but Not Here could have used a good editing. The first half of the book is full of energy and passion. Then it grows listless and repetitious, even while Ross reminds us of Shawn's lofty standards and insistence on concision. Yet her spiky self-confidence is undiminished. Her response to those who call her a chameleon for returning to write for the New Yorker under editor Tina Brown, after criticizing those writers who failed to leave, as she did, when Shawn was fired: "I'm able to have empathy and sympathy and so on, so maybe that makes me a chameleon."

So maybe that kind of empathy and sympathy makes Cecille Shawn chopped liver.

--With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York

With reporting by Andrea Sachs/New York