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THE LOVE BUG
Two new entries in the already substantial canon of New Yorker memoirs—Ved Mehta's hagiography of legendary editor William Shawn and Lillian Ross's highly controversial account of her 40-year affair with the saintly, and married, Mr. Shawn—put JAMES WOLCOTT on the trail of a Shawn who was less the self-effacing literary Buddha than a mass of contradictions, the Richard Nixon of the magazine world
In late-20th-century New York, three men have enjoyed the unofficial honor of being identified as "Mr."—a verbal nod that is both a form of respect and a sign of affection. Each an exemplar in his own field, together they form a trinity of culture, achievement, and metropolitan style. The big three are George Balanchine, the chief choreographer and artistic director of the New York City Ballet; Geoffrey Beene, the pre-eminent American fashion designer; and William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker: Mr. B., Mr. Beene, and Mr. Shawn. The first two possessed and possess a seamless, flowing genius, and the last—the last remains an enigma. Mr. Shawn is a Zen koan that hasn't been solved. The more we read about him, the deeper his secret self retreats into its shell. "Elusive pimpernel!" Tom Wolfe cried in 1965, and it's still true, even as the testimonials about him begin to mount.
"Hello, may I speak to Miss Ross?"
"Whom should I say is calling?"
Whum, dramatic, grammatic pause—whisper—"Mr. Shawn." Zonk! Mr. Shawn! ... He slipped in under the tympanic membrane with the whisper. One of the four or five most prominent men in Communications! Unrecognized in his own office!
—Tom Wolfe, "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead!" (The Herald Tribune's New York magazine, April 11, 1965).
William Shawn outfoxed his contemporaries and outstripped his rivals. As the successor to Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker,Shawn was mocked by Tom Wolfe and others as a mere caretaker, a shuffling mortician. Where Henry Luce, the founder of Time, Life, and Fortune,preached anti-Communism and the triumphal arc of "the American century," Shawn seemed to draw the blinds at half-mast, consecrating himself and his magazine to the intricate craft of writing. He was less concerned with the influence words could have than with their inner music and structural integrity. His desk was an altar where the ideals of accuracy, clarity, and understated elegance were held sacrosanct. Every article, no matter how ephemeral, was groomed like a French poodle. This ultra-finesse often resulted in preciousness (sentences neatly buttoned, facts lined up like little gentlemen), and The New Yorker,inhabiting a parallel universe of scrubbed perfection, could look quaint. Yet during Shawn's tenure The New Yorkerpublished some of the most far-reaching and deep-rippling journalistic prose of the postwar era—Edmund Wilson's criticism and reporting, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring,James Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem,Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, and Dwight Macdonald's review of Michael Harrington's The Other America, which helped inspire the War on Poverty. (It was also Shawn who, as Harold Ross's second-in-command, succeeded in persuading Ross to devote an entire issue to John Hersey's Hiroshima—a. defining event in the magazine's history, and perhaps the most famous magazine article ever printed.) He didn't need feminism to push him into publishing a pride of lionesses—Mary McCarthy, Rebecca West, Arlene Croce, Pauline Kael, Lois Long, Andy Logan, Renata Adler, Elizabeth Drew, Muriel Spark. The editorials he ran about Vietnam and Watergate had a ferocity and sting that cost the magazine advertising but made The New Yorker the flagship of mainstream dissent.
To Shawn, such achievements were important and nice, but not really the point. When he was obliged to step down as editor in 1987 after 35 years, a Lou Gehrig streak in a revolving-door world, the farewell statement he drafted for the staff didn't recap old glories and pat the magazine on the back. Instead, he bared his heart. He heralded The New Yorker as a house of love. "Love has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word. We have done our work with honesty and love," he wrote. Unable to let the word go, he ended his letter, "I must speak of love once more. I love all of you, and will love you as long as I live." He faded into retirement and died almost six years later. An editor's legacy is usually buried with the back issues, but the legend of Mr. Shawn, like the legend of Harold Ross before him, has been magnified over time. A shrinking violet when he was alive, Shawn is now being regarded as the tree of life.
A posthumous revival is in full swing. Nineteen ninetyeight is the summer of Shawn, and the summer of love. Two attention-getting books have just been published about Mr. Shawn, part of a larger flood of Shawniana (the fashion writer Kennedy Fraser devoted a chapter of her 1996 collection, Ornament and Silence, to her experience of writing for Shawn, and Alison Rose, a current staff writer at The New Yorker, is completing a memoir tabulating the office affairs she has had there with married men—which should perhaps be called Carpets and Desktops I Have Known), and in both books, "love" is indeed the essential word. In Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker (Overlook Press), the author recalls "sitting anxiously by the phone waiting for Mr. Shawn's call, as if I were in love." When he and Mr. Shawn agree to meet for lunch, he quivers inside like a teenager on a first date, worrying that he might order the wrong sandwich and chew too loud. He decides to order whatever Mr. Shawn orders, just to be safe. "I am aware that I sound as if I had fallen in love with Mr. Shawn," Mehta admits, but insists it was a healthy, platonic puppy love, one of a nervous rookie for a generous, consoling mentor.
Lillian Ross's Here but Not Here: A Love Story (Random House) is a more intimate and frilly valentine. "'Love' isn't a word I take lightly or tire of today," Ross writes, and true enough, she uses the word or its variant seven times in her opening paragraph. Understandably, she feels entitled. The author of Picture, an account of the making of John Huston's adaptation of The Red Badge of Courage, and the classic New Yorker profile of Ernest Hemingway, Ross was long rumored to be Shawn's companion (Tom Wolfe drops hints in his piece). The revelation of her memoir is that for 40 years Ross was more than Shawn's companion, she was his faithful mistress, his wife in all but name, maintaining a separate household for him while he continued to live with his legal wife, Cecille, and his two sons, Wallace and Allen. The title Here but Not Here plays off the title of Brendan Gill's best-selling tour of the premises, Here at The New Yorker (Random House, 1975), and refers to Shawn's transmigration from his marital status. "I am there, but I am not there," he would say over and over again of his home life. According to Ross, Shawn, with his wife's knowledge, even had a bedroom phone put in to which only she had the number; they would ring each other on the Bat-phone and talk snookums late into the night. They took romantic trips together (she provides snapshots), and she assures us that as a lover Shawn was a veritable Bob Dole on Viagra—"After forty years, our love-making had the same passion, the same energies ... ," et cetera, "as it had in the beginning." Their glow followed them around. "When Bill and I sat together in his office to go over the editing of my stories, we worked seriously and professionally, but the atmosphere of love was not suspended; it enhanced the pleasure that we shared in our work." She adopted a son on whom Shawn doted (more snapshots), and who many thought was Shawn's biological son. That Lillian Ross would publish such kissy-face indiscretions while Shawn's widow is still alive, a book in which Ross postures as Shawn's real wife, his true joined spirit, only compounds the act of betrayal many feel she has committed.
Lillian Ross assures us that as a lover Shawn was a veritable Bob Dole on Viagra.
For decades, New Yorker writers regarded any intrusion into the internal workings of Mr. Shawn's magazine or his psychological makeup as impertinent. At the mention of Mr. Shawn's name, they would huddle under what was known on Get Smart as "the Cone of Silence." When Tom Wolfe published his infamous satire "Tiny Mummies!" in 1965, a giant spitball composed of a combination of wild X-ray vision and wicked speculation, the shock effect was immediate. It was as if, Mehta writes, the magazine had been mugged. Renata Adler flew to Chicago to check court documents (one of Wolfe's floated rumors was that Leopold and Loeb had targeted the young Shawn as their original victim), Dwight Macdonald drew up a rebuttal for The New York Review of Books, and even J. D. Salinger came out of hibernation to complain. Ten years later, Brendan Gill's Here at The New Yorker, published to coincide with the magazine's 50th anniversary, was also considered by many an act of gaucherie, the bon vivant Gill being constitutionally incapable of grasping Shawn's delicate wiring. But no outside detractor or breezy raconteur, no illiterate baboon, has violated Mr. Shawn's privacy and dignity with the snappy assurance of Lillian Ross in Here but Not Here. She has taken the Cone of Silence and turned it into a megaphone. "I'm sure he would be proud to read this story," she writes. If anything, he'd probably die all over again, this time of embarrassment. (After all, Shawn himself disapproved of memoirs about Harold Ross. Kennedy Fraser writes of Ross's exwife Jane Grant's book: "The publication of Ross, The New Yorker, and Me seemed painful to Mr. Shawn. ... 'It was a mistake,' he said, tersely.")
To understand why people feel she's violated such trust, it is necessary to understand that the preoccupation with Mr. Shawn is more than the product of a personality cult. It's part of the long-standing, ongoing (but eroding) fascination with and veneration of The New Yorker as an institution. Founded by Harold Ross in 1925, The New Yorker served as the house organ of the Algonquin Round Table, whose members—among them, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, and Alexander Woollcott—bannered their quips with theatrical flair. (Harold Ross himself was considered stagestruck.) With the Algonquin group, writers became show people—nearly all of them wrote, performed, or re-
viewed plays—and the bright lights of the period continue to cast a nostalgic shine out of all proportion to their actual achievement (the great writing of the period having been done by Faulkner, Hemingway, Eugene O'Neill, and other nonjoiners). No matter how many times the Algonquin group is debunked, there remains a longing for a time when parties were parties and not networking opportunities, and people were poured into taxis. After the Depression and the inducements of Hollywood dispersed most of the original gang, The New Yorker thrived as an openair bazaar for the omnivorous eyes of writers such as A. J. Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, and Emily Hahn. Humor writing didn't vanish from its pages, but after the Depression and the Second World War, no longer could The New Yorker raise a champagne glass in the name of frivolity. As E. B. White wrote in a New Yorker "Comment" in 1945, "We feel like a man who left his house to go to a Punch-and-Judy show and, by some error in direction, wandered into Hamlet."
After William Shawn succeeded Ross in 1952, The New Yorker became less of a flying fortress and even more of an anxious castle. The atomic jitters and the suburban boom left The New Yorker's audience well-off but wary. A spiritual malaise lurked behind the new-product shine. J. D. Salinger and John Cheever were the representative fiction writers of the period, nimble maneuverers across the hairline intimations of acedia among the prep-school set. Assured of itself if not of the world around it, The New Yorker formalized its editorial procedures and became a self-producing machine. Its multilayered editing (galleys upon galleys annotated with marginal comments), its factchecking department, its scrupulous attention to grammar and usage, its extreme courtesy to its contributors, its fastidious distaste for slang and coarse language, its refusal to chase fashion, pursue celebrity, or simplify complex subjects—all this made The New Yorker CONTINUED FROM PAGE 105 the weekly chalice of sweet reason. To some, this distillation tasted of formaldehyde. In the early 60s, Seymour Krim consigned the magazine to squaresville—"the diehard editorial neoclassicists, the punctuation castratos who have gone to bed with commas for a quarter of a century, are living in a world that no longer exists." Contributors, too, cracked under the incessant niggling. In Here but Not Here, Lillian Ross describes how Shawn left a meeting with the philosopher-historian Hannah Arendt shaking in his shoes. Arendt, incensed at The New Yorker's "Stupid" editing methods, demanded that the magazine stop torturing her with questions. "She called me names, horrible names," Shawn told Ross.
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"Is she demented?" I asked. "Maybe something pushed her over the edge. Call Susan Sontag." I didn't know Susan Sontag, but I figured there might be something mysterious that only another high-powered intellectual could account for.
It's pretty funny, the notion that intellectuals are transmitters that can communicate only with each other as the rest of us scratch our heads.
Outbursts such as Arendt's (Mary McCarthy also chafed) were a tribute to the magazine's unique character as an exclusive club and to the discipline imposed by its protocols. Talent alone wasn't sufficient. One didn't simply write for The New Yorker; one had to be worthy—chosen. Hence New Yorker memoirs have become a distinct genre, with their own ritualistic formula. First, there is The Initiation, in which a phone call from Mr. Shawn emanates like a faint tap from the Holy Ghost. (Bill McKibben, receiving a call on April 1, thought it was a practical joke.) Then follows The Induction, in which one meets Mr. Shawn in his office, basks in his beneficent rays, and is shown to one's own modest cell. ("It was Mr. Shawn himself who showed me, on my first day on the eighteenth floor, the eightby-twelve-foot room that was to be my 'office,'" recalled Kennedy Fraser. "He stood in the doorway smiling and picturing the Good Writing I might conceivably produce on the old Underwood with its chipped round keys.") As one begins to feel at home and form relationships with the other figments floating down the halls, comes the long honeymoon of Identification with the magazine and all that it represents. (Lillian Ross: "In the elevator, going up, I was afraid that other people could hear the din inside my body. The wonderful reporters and writers I met in the dimly-lighted corridors were now my colleagues. ") Then, for some, arrives the wrenching moment of Tribal Separation, when, for whatever reason (being let go, falling out of favor, feeling suffocated), one bids farewell to the old homestead and braces oneself for the outside. (Hello, cruel world.) One's belongings are boxed for removal and one experiences a sad sense of erasure, a petite mort. The last phase is the Brideshead Revisited stage of Bittersweet Reflection, in which the author muses on a grandeur that has fallen into desuetude but is thankful for the small kindnesses and treasured anecdotes. On the final page, the author puts his reluctant lips to the bugle, and blows.
Mehta and Ross stick to the script, studying The New Yorker solely through the opera glasses of their own experience. Even charting The New Yorker from within, however, they suffer from cramped perspective. They judge the magazine's health by how well they're doing. To Mehta, The New Yorker began to show signs of decline when it had the nerve to start cutting his copy. As a young man Mehta published voluminous profiles and articles in the magazine on topics ranging from English philosophers to the life of Gandhi; a new department called "Personal History" was created to accommodate his reminiscences of India and Oxford. Shawn personally oversaw most of Mehta's work, which spoiled him for others. Mehta survives the razor hands of Gardner Botsford ("He was known among the people in the makeup department, who saw his proofs regularly, as the Slasher"), and is perturbed years later when novice editor Jonathan Schell prunes his manuscript, "causing some of the deeper resonances in the piece to sound hollow." In both cases, he ran to Daddy ("I ran to Mr. Shawn") to have his resonances restored. When Robert Gottlieb becomes editor of the magazine in 1987, Mehta loses this higher court of appeal. One of Gottlieb's first acts is bumping yet another of Mehta's book-length serials to publish a piece by Doris Lessing, explaining, "I am the editor now, and I think Lessing is a very important writer." With a tsk, Mehta writes, "His use of the word 'important' reinforced my feeling that all of us writers and artists were now living in a different world—a world where the notoriety of the writer would, for the first time, be a factor in what was published, and even take precedence over the quality of the writing." (As if Doris Lessing were some sort of floozy.) Gottlieb not only reduced Mehta's series by two-thirds "but also cut out any intellectually demanding material, such as a favorite quotation of mine from the 'History of Philosophy' by the German philosopher W. Windelband." The unfeeling brute! Mehta even objects to Gottlieb's democratic gesture of installing a coffee machine in the office. "There was something inviting but also offputting about the smell ..." By the time Gottlieb has departed, The New Yorker, to Mehta, is already a lost cause.
There was a prim authoritarian streak in William Shawn, who was part %da and part yenta.
Like Mehta, Ross consigns the Gottlieb era to the memory hole, but for a different reason. To Mehta, Gottlieb's arrival is the beginning of the end—a fade to black. To Ross, Gottlieb's tenure was a bothersome interruption between the glacial grandeur of the Shawn administration and the sprightly cheek of the current editorship— a twilight period. She sees the magazine now as happy and thriving because she still participates. Indeed, Ross is under the enchantment that Mr. Shawn himself would be tickled by the drastic changes at the magazine and the flamenco dance being done on his grave, though it is highly dubious that Shawn, who recoiled from obscenity and any reference to bodily function, would applaud Richard Avedon's necrophiliac photos, or the use of the f-word five times in a single sentence in a slack-jawed appreciation of Robert Redford, or cartoon captions featuring references to "boners" and an adult man announcing "I just did a huge one in my diaper." Ross was encouraged to do her memoir by the current editor of The New Yorker, who is cited in the acknowledgments for "her cheerful understanding of love," a new one on me. (For the record, I wrote for the magazine from 1992 to 1996.) Articles in New York and Newsweek have speculated that this nudge was rooted in a desire to pollute and undercut the moral high ground of the Shawn era, which the present regime finds burdensome. Tarnishing Shawn's halo makes recent shenanigans look less whory, or so the theory goes. Whatever the validity of this Machiavellian scenario, Here but Not Here reveals that Shawn was slated to meet with the current editor, Tina Brown, to discuss a possible role as consultant. For the occasion, Ross and her adopted son, Erik, bought Shawn a new blue suit at Brooks Brothers. Later, at a restaurant, Shawn tried on the jacket, and all seemed well. But "when we walked outside with him to his car, I noticed that his eyes, strangely and frighteningly, were no longer blue. They had become black, deep black." Shawn died shortly after this sudden downturn and before the meeting could take place.
Enveloped in love-mist, Lillian Ross renders Shawn indistinct in Here but Not Here. She purrs of love and serves the reader slush. " 'We must arrest our love in midflight,' Bill once said. 'And we fix it forever as it is today, a point of pure light that will reach into eternity.'" Although they were together for more than 40 years, their relationship is never vivid, and most of Shawn's quotes are vague expressions of Prufrockian unease, such as "Why am I more ghost than man?" and "Who am I? Am I really here?" Despite such existential moans, Shawn exerted as much control over his personal relationship with Lillian Ross as he did over the magazine—and to much the same effect. He verbally massaged both into complete compliance. According to Ross, it was he who did the wooing, pursuing her with a persistence (cards, poems, phone calls, standing in front of her apartment building at night) that might be construed as sexual harassment today. He was so won'ttake-no-for-an-answer that when she went to Paris in 1953 to detach herself from him he not only dogged her with phone calls and cables but gave her an itinerary of sights she should see—the places he had visited in Paris with his wife in 1929. And she went! She can't explain why she obeyed, why she stayed with a man who wouldn't leave his wife for her (even after his children were grown), stressing again and again how unintrospective she is. Whatever her man wanted was good enough for Mama. "Bill disliked the odor of cigarettes. I immediately gave up smoking. He was afraid of 'drinking.' I gave up martinis." Over the years the verve of Ross's writing was slowly leeched away by their liaison, cuddled to sleep. What made her Hemingway profile a fabulous coup then and an exciting read today is that it was so untypical a New Yorker profile. It has a spontaneous, dialogue-driven, wideeyed wonder that eventually ebbed in New Yorker profiles as a genre, which became waxwork exhibits as bleached and starched as a eulogy by Dr. Johnson. Aside from Picture, Ross seldom wrote again with the same present-tense drive. Ross says she doesn't mind, she never wanted to write major works, but in their relationship the sacrifices made for love seem to have all been made on her side.
Even with its mealymouthed snobberies and false modesties ("Many of my New Yorker colleagues and I, in the manner of Mr. Shawn, always let our work speak for itself, and were satisfied as persons to fade into the woodwork"), Mehta's book does a better job of conveying Shawn's workhorse ethic and thoughtful consideration—his calm center amid orbiting writers. Where Shawn's wife, Cecille, is a mere name attached to marital duty in Lillian Ross's memoir, a blank looming outside their love bubble, she carries her own smack of personality in Mehta's. He describes a dinner at their house where the theater critic Edith Oliver rips into James Thurber's 1959 memoir of Harold Ross.
"The book is trash," Edith said. She had a smoker's hoarse voice, and her remarks came out sounding like little barks. "It's all untrue. He might as well be writing about his mother."
"Have a melon ball, Edith," Mrs. Shawn said.
Admired through a beauty lens of hero worship (Mehta), romantic love (Ross), and daughterly devotion (Fraser), Mr. Shawn emerges rounded and complete, a deskbound Buddha who is peaceful, humble, and wise. None of these tributes to Shawn do justice to the powerful contradictions of his seemingly passive manner and the psychological strain of this makeover. Like the narrator in the Philip Larkin poem "The Life with a Hole in It," it wasn't a matter of Shawn's always doing what he wanted as much as never doing what he didn't want. Here was a man who was afraid of heights and enclosed spaces (he had his own elevator in the New Yorker building and, according to Ross, wouldn't visit his sons' apartments, because they were too small), yet had no problem visiting the 15th-floor apartment he and Ross originally secured as a love nest. Here was a man who professed he couldn't travel, yet hopped into a Triumph sports car with his mistress and tooled off for the Catskills. Here was a man who played jazz to unwind, and removed every ounce of improvisation from his magazine. A man considered a moral beacon who lived the life of a bigamist. Within the limitations imposed on him by his various phobias, Shawn flexed enormous force. His psychic cage kept him in a constant state of concentration. In his own way, Shawn was as willful, poignant, and imprisoned a self-creation as Richard Nixon, with Nixon's bureaucratic mastery (and, blessedly, without Nixon's paranoia).
Born William Chon in 1907, the son of Chicago stockyard vendor known as Jackknife Ben, he changed his last name to Shawn because, according to Ross, Chon sounded too Chinese. He made himself inconspicuous around his father, of whom he was afraid. "Unlike my brothers and sister, who might do things to make my father angry, I just tried not to be noticed by him." (And he grew up afraid of expressing anger.) Jewish on both sides of his family, Shawn over time gentrified himself into a Henry James figure with warm milk for bloodindustrious, refined, cushioned against any extremity of word or deed by invisible cobwebs of implication and deflection. Like James, he was a comma addict, dimpling even the most casual remarks with carefully crafted hesitation. Although Shawn published Jewish authors of note (Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example), The New Yorker maintained an upscale Wasp persona, evoking Connecticut lawns, riding stables, prep schools, and Dad having a spiritual crisis over cocktails. The earthiness and pungency of Jewish expression—its mother-wit—offended him, unless it was couched in nostalgia, as in the dialect humor of Myron Cohen. In my presence, Shawn was visibly wounded at the mention of the comedian Alan King's name. Vulgarity to him wasn't crude vitality or loud manner, but a kind of violence against civilization—a hostile clowning. And one thing on which all those who came into contact with Shawn can agree is that he shrank from all forms of violence. ("She was so emotionally violent," he said after Hannah Arendt's tantrum.) Like most pacifists, he aspired to sainthood.
He eagerly read passages to me from Dr. Cohn's writings in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.... Bill was especially taken with the following: "Saintly people have submitted to a life of the dead, renouncing all possessions, and thus surrendering to a lifetime transfiguration. Their present must have seemed irrelevant to them, an existence suspended in time. We ordinary people of our time imagine ourselves to be well protected against such a philosophy. " —Lillian Ross, Here but Not Here.
The great paradox of Shawn's career is that he practiced the art of self-effacement while making himself central, dug-in, and indispensable. Channeling himself, he was most present when he was bodily absentover the telephone. Kennedy Fraser says that all other life froze when Mr. Shawn was on the line. Within the small theater in which he operated, his egolessness was all-conquering. Nowhere in the memoirs of Shawn appears the nickname I heard given to him: The Iron Mouse. Meek yet implacable, he carried the workings of The New Yorker in his head. Others had pieces; he alone knew the whole puzzle. He did the major assigning, chose which articles would run and when (some would sit in the "bank" for years until being summoned on deck—a John Updike piece was said to have waited for 11 years), determined how writers would be reimbursed, decided who would be hired and how long they would remain, deemed which words were "appropriate." Shawn resisted outside pressure and internal dissension, both to preserve the integrity of the magazine and to consolidate his tender choke hold on the decision-making process. Not only did he strenuously fight a union movement at The New Yorker (ironic, given the magazine's New Deal liberalism in all other regards), but, as Gigi Mahon reports in The Last Days of The New Yorker (McGraw-Hill, 1988), he shafted the top echelon in the editorial department by unilaterally denying "key" writers and editors access to stock grants, insisting that everyone at The New Yorker was equal. Shawn refused even to discuss stock options with his subordinates. He decided for them that they didn't deserve a bonus. The New Yorker was a patriarchy, and father knew best. So when the magazine's stock was later sold and the proceeds distributed, the business side enjoyed a windfall and the editorial side got nothing. Mahon writes, "Even some who wouldn't have benefited felt cheated by what they saw as Shawn's stinginess. Says one bitter staff member: 'Shawn kept [the writers and artists] deliberately poor. Shawn kept control by impoverishing' them." When more straightforward salaries were instituted under new management, some still clung to their begging bowls. "Getting a salary lowered our anxiety level but also had the effect of somewhat corrupting our austere ways," Ved Mehta writes. (Ved, have a melon ball.)
Paternalism breeds dependency, and dependency breeds pathologies. While Shawn kept a strict account of the word flow, he conducted a policy of benign neglect toward much of his staff. Writers often dangled for years without being published, wandering the ward like Ancient Mariners while younger writers were hired and left equally unattended. The result was an institutional outbreak of mental itch. Wilfrid Sheed wrote: "One had a picture of New Yorker writers (whom one seldom saw) vying with each other in feats of hypochondria and shyness: also of flinching and shrinking, jumping at small sounds, and holing up in the country. American writers will compete at just about anything." Others dropped out of the race entirely, their downfalls tragicomic. The evocative short-story and "Talk of the Town" writer Maeve Brennan (she was "the Long-Winded Lady" who covered the city as if writing home from home) became a sort of bag lady in the building. Another staff writer was a notorious kleptomaniac, stealing items off other writers' desks; still another set fires in the ladies' room. Perhaps the saddest case study in Mehta's book is Penelope Gilliatt, a fiction writer and film critic who had been married to the playwright John Osborne and became increasingly alcoholic and wobbly. Despite Gilliatt's obvious disarray, no concrete action was taken until she was caught plagiarizing, and she was put on medical leave. What's odd and noxious about Mehta's book is that he can see how nonintervention didn't improve Gilliatt's condition ("At another magazine, Penelope would have been put in the care of a doctor and not been allowed to continue her column until her condition improved"), yet he can't bring himself to blame Shawn, and takes swipes at those who do show some backbone. He says that Gilliatt's film colleague, Pauline Kael, perversely turned against "art and gentleness." Kael practiced critical kung fu, and, worse, had the gall to argue face-to-face with Mr. Shawn. The little sneak (Mehta, I mean) recounts waiting outside Shawn's office as he tried to reason with her—"Pauline's voice loud and strident, Mr. Shawn's calm and persuasive." Not only is this vignette sexist, but it makes anyone who resisted Shawn's namby-pamby control mechanisms and phony coddling seem like an ingrate. (In the preface to her greatest-hits collection, For Keeps, Kael relates how Shawn assumed the mantle of martyrdom as his guilt-trip device.) There's a prim authoritarian streak in Mehta, as there was in Shawn, who was part Yoda and part yenta. (Which is why Shawn resented Kael's comparing Gandhi to a Jewish mother.)
For all his mystic mildness ("Some people saw Bill as submissive, but I saw him as genuinely meek, in the beatitudinal, the biblical sense"—Ross), Shawn hardly practiced nonattachment when it came to his position at The New Yorker. As a former New Yorker editor, Dan Menaker, once said to me, "The hardest thing in the world is to walk away." Shawn couldn't face the plank. He wanted to stay forever at a job he loved, which is understandable, and choose a successor who would carry on his mandate, which was foolhardy. (No one controls their aftermath.) Shawn so identified himself with The New Yorker that he couldn't imagine one without the other. Having created a power vacuum which he alone filled, Shawn elaborately stalled forever on picking a successor, diddling with candidates and delaying the inevitable. He caught his staff off guard by anointing the humorless, idealistic Jonathan Schell as the heir apparent (a staff rebellion made Shawn withdraw); devised an unworkable co-managing editorship with Charles "Chip" McGrath and John Bennet, which (according to Mehta) left them both sitting awkwardly on the sofa in Shawn's office, auditing meetings; and urged William Whitworth to stay without offering him any monetary inducement or necessary assurance. Ad pages sank, articles seemed as long as tapeworms, the issue of successorship remained unresolved, and finally the dark day came when Shawn was told to pack up his pencils. Lillian Ross led a staff revolt in which a letter was drafted imploring Bob Gottlieb not to accept the job, to no avail. Although a few writers quit in sympathy when Shawn departed, he believed there would be more of a mass exit—in Mehta's words, "that, as soon as Gottlieb came over, all of us who signed the protest letter would go down in the elevator and never come back." He later recognized he was being romantic, but still, it must have hurt.
Mehta and Ross present quite different slants on Shawn's retirement years. Mehta claims that a disheartened Shawn couldn't bear to read The New Yorker he had left behind. "I had the impression that, except for separating himself from the office, giving up reading The New Yorker was the most painful thing he had ever done." Not so, Ross contends. "He had never fully stopped looking at The New Yorker, but now he was reading it with new interest." Mehta has Shawn plodding away on a novel about an old pianist living alone in a fleabag hotel—a maudlin exercise—while Ross relates how the two of them collaborated joyfully on a pair of screenplays, including a satire of the magazine biz called Info. Mehta, who continued to submit his works in progress to Shawn, insists Shawn wanted to be wanted by the writers he had once edited, whereas Ross has Shawn wishing they would go away. Finally, the hell that is old age wore him into infirmity. He became shrunken, frail. He died on December 8, 1992, at the age of 85—almost 41 years to the day after Harold Ross had died. God's way of saying the circle had been joined and The New Yorker they had created was truly gone.
On paper, William Shawn seems to have had a successful life. He was a man who got his way without being a bully. He had a wife and a mistress, children, grandchildren, the best editing job in magazines, the adoration of writers who dedicated books to him, good health, and longevity. Like Maxwell Perkins, he will be remembered as the last of the gentleman editors. Yet toward the end, stumped at writing fiction, Shawn complains to Ross, "I'm not writing what I wish to write," and "There's just too much I am not free to say." When the two of them see Cecil le on the street and Shawn neglects to go over to his wife (even after Ross urges him to do so),
Ross cries, "For God's sake, Bill, at this point along the line we all know what's happened. Why can't we live, just live?" Shawn nods in agreement even as he says no. "It's too complicated. There's just too much I can't say." Repressed all his life, Shawn was never able to unburden himself, to express everything he had stashed inside. In his 80s, he was still afraid of being anything but careful. For me, the mystery of William Shawn is: When he died, did he feel he had ever really lived? Was sainthood worth it? Those are Rosebud questions probably no one can answer. But when I look at photographs of Shawn, I don't see love, I see an unreachable loneliness.
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