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the New Yorker and other magazines
[Under Development]
Writing about The New Yorker's
as entertaining (or as boring) as writing about other cult objects such
as the Bloomsbury Group and Bill Gates.
This profile highlights accounts of the
famous magazine, along with points of reference in the UK and US
studies
Renata Adler's Gone: The Last Days
of the New Yorker (Simon & Schuster, New York 00) has all the
charm of being chewed up by the business end of a fast speedboat. Burnrate's
Michael Wolff described her earlier novel - Speedboat - as a
masterpiece of "urban chic minimalist angst" and Ms Adler
seems determined to leave no turn unstoned in her deconstruction of the
US equivalent of the Bloomsbury cult. Her Reckless Disregard:
Westmoreland v CBS et al; Sharon v Time (Knopf, New York 1987)
carried less personal baggage.
She's joined by John Seabrook's
onanistic Nowbrow: The Culture of Marketing, the Marketing of Culture
(Knopf, New York 00) which blames the decline & fall on Tina Brown -
wife of exMurdoch editor Harold Evans - and publisher Si Newhouse
and of course the Internet. Newhouse is defended in Carol Felsenthal's Citizen
Newhouse: Portrait of a Media Merchant (Seven Stories, New York
1998).
Adler's model is arguably the hatchet
job by Tom Wolfe, now reprinted in Hooking Up (New York, FSG 00),
more spleen from the little boy in the ice-cream coloured suit.
For those in search of kinder, gentler
times we recommend Brendan Gill's slight but charming Here At The New
Yorker (Michael Joseph, London 1975) and the more recent About
Town: The New Yorker & the World It Made (New York, Scribners
00) by Ben Yagoda. The World Through A Monocle: The New Yorker At Mid
Century (Harvard Uni Press, Cambridge 1999) by Mary Corey is more
scholarly.
Shawn
Prior to Adler's attack the chattering
classes were chattering, but of course, about Here But Not Here: A
Love Story (Random, New York 1998) by Lillian Ross, author of the
brilliant Picture (New York, Modern Library reprint 97) and
partner of fabled editor William Shawn, who gave her his love but went
home each night to his slippers and Mrs Shawn. C'est la vie. Towards the
end of his regime he was described as running the magazine "the way
Algerian terrorist cells were organised in the Battle of Algiers - no
one knew who anybody else was or what anybody else was doing",
though our recollection of Algiers features bombs, shouting, bloodshed
and goats with cut throats - not, we suggest, quite the New Yorker
style.
Shawn was immortalised, or perhaps
merely embalmed, by Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr Shawn's New Yorker:
The Invisible Art of Editing (Overlook, New York 1999) and deserves
credit for much of the fiction and other writing featured in Friends
Talking In The Night: 60 Years of Writing for the New Yorker (Knopf,
New York 1999) edited by Philip Hamburger and Life Stories: Profiles
From The New Yorker (Random, New York 00) edited by David Remnick.
Alexander Chancellor's Some Times In America (Carroll & Graf,
New York 00) is a thin account of the New Yorker under La Brown.
Ross
While the literati squabble and spit
over the corpse, New Yorker founder Harold Ross, portrayed by James
Thurber in The Years With Ross as a dyslexic curmudgeon, is
achieving a sort of literary sainthood.
Reviewers of Letters From The
Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross (Modern Library, New York 00)
edited by Thomas Kunkel describe them as equal to work by Faulkner and
Dreiser. Kunkel's Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of the New Yorker
(Carroll & Graff, New York 1996) set the tone.
and the rest
For perspective we suggest Philip
Nobile's Intellectual Skywriting: Literary Politics & the New
York Review of Books (Charterhouse, New York 1974) and The
Smart Magazines: 50 Years of Literary Revelry & High Jinks at Vanity
Fair, the New Yorker, Life, Esquire & the Smart Set (Archon, New
York 1991) by George Douglas.
Douglas is a tad too panoramic and
preoccupied with office hankypanky for our tastes. Greater sustenance is
provided by The Smart Set: A History & Anthology (Dial, New
York 1966) by Carl Dolmetsch. Any magazine with the subtitle 'A Magazine
of Cleverness' is asking for trouble, but while the going was good, it
went ... with contributions by Dorothy Parker, DH Lawrence, Ezra Pound,
F Scott Fitzgerald, H L Mencken and others.
Infidel In the Temple (Knopf,
New York 1967) by Matthew Josephson - subject of the biography Bourgeois
Bohemian (Yale Uni Press, New Haven 1991) by David Shi - and the
outstanding Walter Lippmann & the American Century (Bodley
Head, London 1980) by Ronald Steel provide glimpses of The New
Republic at its height.
The very serious Partisan Review
crowd - more a sect than a journal - have yet to receive adequate
treatment. The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review
& Its Circle (Uni of Wisconsin Press, Bismark 1986) is one of
the few studies.
The flakier UK New Statesman was
described in Edward Hyams' solid The New Statesman: The History of
the First Fifty Years (Hutchinson, London 1963) and Adrian Smith's The
New Statesman: Portrait of a Political Weekly (Cass, London 1996);
we have yet to read the new official history. Kingsley Martin's two
volumes of autobiography - Father Figures and Editor
(Hutchinson, London 1965 and 1968) - are an entirely self-serving record
of his time at its helm. Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm
Muggeridge (Collins, London 1981) edited by John Bright-Holmes
almost persuaded us that the Mugg was a human being.
Across the ocean master of failure
Cyril Connolly and his magazine Horizon continue to receive
critical attention, most notably in Friends of Promise: Cyril
Connolly & the World of Horizon (Hamish Hamilton, London 1989)
by Michael Shelden, authorised biographer of George Orwell, and in
Jeremy Lewis' longer Cyril Connolly: A Life (Cape, London 1997).
Both are preferable to Clive Fisher's disappointing Cyril Connolly: A
Romantic Life (Macmillan, London 1995).
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