Looking Backward

...Adler conveys the happiness she felt at joining the magazine and the loyalty she quickly developed toward Mr...

...In addition, the magazine hired fact checkers to comb through the same manuscripts, looking to jettison all details that could not be positively verified...

...what it damned well pleased, for half a century...

...These inquisitions were applied not only to pieces of factual reporting but to short stories and poems as well, often with comic or absurd results...

...When editors retired or moved elsewhere, he did not replace them but assumed their duties himself...

...Perhaps the magazine could have remained out of Newhouse's hands, and perhaps Shawn, who died in 1992, could have ended his days at the helm of, as he once described it, "what may be the noblest publication that has ever existed...

...When he mentions, quite late, the names Philip Messinger and William Reik and their readiness to sell to Newhouse, the impulse is to emulate Ross and query "Who they...

...His research was aided immensely by the roughly 2,500 boxes of archives, including internal memos, copies of letters of acceptance or rejection to contributors, etc., that the New Yorker, in the course of moving its offices, donated to the New York Public Library in 1991...

...Experiments mutated almost overnight into hallowed and tamper-resistant traditions...

...But even when Shawn told a writer that he had accepted a piece, anxieties exfoliated: "It was unthinkable, in one of these conversations, or ever, to ask how much he was going to pay for it, or when it would run...

...Encountering a story that included a man who lived in a mountainside cabin, Ross appended the query, "How he come to be living on mountainside...

...Urged to change the language to reflect this uncertainty, Wilbur refused...

...Those who do not believe that Shawn's departure and the subsequent changes at and to the New Yorker amounted to a passing away of glory from the earth probably will not bother reading either book...

...White and James ThurberjoinedRoss' new venture and struck precisely the urbane, understated tone he wanted for the opening sections, "Notes & Comment" and "The Talk of the Town," the magazine's signature voice was set in type and in stone...

...Although the New Yorker steadily added new sections and broadened its interests, Yagoda astutely points out that its essential look and structure, its distinctive typeface and its mixture of cartoons and columns of text, were firmly established within the first year of its existence...

...Adler, who joined the magazine's staff in 1963 and, with some interruptions, remained for 30 years, mentions the public availability of these very boxes with distaste ("what violations of privacy are implicit in making accessible, of all things, rejections...

...Because he disliked committing himself to letters or memos, he ran the magazine by word of mouth...

...This formula should not have succeeded and nevertheless did, after a bumpy takeoff, spectacularly...

...The famously profane Ross was an extrovert, a shouter, and his more courageous editors and contributors could at least argue with him, usually to no avail...

...Neither Yagoda nor Adler say outright that Shawn wound up killing the thing he loved, although Adler comes close: "Mr...

...Shawn's strongest virtues— his awareness of the power of writing and the harm publication can do—led, of all things, to a mystique and an ethic, unconscious but profound: the ethic of silence...

...Ross himself professed bafflement at the process he had set in motion...

...the New Yorker would not run stuff that might do for other magazines...

...Uncertainties about the magazine's financial future and Shawn's willingness someday to name a successor help explain why the Newhouse buyout encountered so little resistance...

...That, at least, is the impression given by two new books about the magazine timed to coincide with its latest milestone...

...Shawn, it seemed obvious to some of us, never had the slightest intention of naming or making way for a successor...

...The New Yorker was bought in 1985 by S. I. Newhouse's Advance Communications...

...That changed under Shawn, or Mr...

...Yagoda quotes from a rejection letter that fiction editor Katharine Angeli White sent to Morley Callaghan in 1929: "We want fiction and we want short stories, and yet when it comes right down to it Mr...

...So, when E.B...

...She also noticed things that troubled her: "The kind of scruple, conscientiousness and inhibition that were among Mr...

...The second part proved fairly easy...

...In 1948 he wrote H.L...

...The story's author, Sally Benson, patiently wrote back, "I don't know how he came to be living on a mountainside...

...Ben Yagoda' About Town comes with a subtitle that is cast rather ominously in the past tense: The New Yorker and the World It Made...

...Shawn...

...But trying to explain what the New Yorker was looking for to fill its weekly columns led to confusing circularities...

...Shawn believed the New Yorker should never stoop to the journalistic penchant for breaking news stories...

...Consequently, Shawn could do whatever he wanted without even the prospect of token resistance...

...In came Robert Gottlieb from Alfred A. Knopf and then Tina Brown, an anti-Shawn if there ever was one, from Vanity Fair...

...The New Yorker under David Remnick is still, in many respects, an estimable magazine, although certainly not the one that Shawn, and probably Ross as well...

...Such editorial dedication to an ineffable ideal led to a conservatism that would typify the magazine during its decades of glory...

...Shawn's magazine, as wonderful and as tedious as it regularly seemed under his guidance, survive economically now...

...Now under the leadership of former staff writer David Remnick, its third editor in the past 13 years, the considerably revamped New Yorker faces its 75th anniversary this February...

...If he rejected it, there had to be one kind of painful conversation...

...But the magazine was drifting toward red ink under Shawn...

...Could Mr...

...As Adler writes, "The New Yorker created a readership for a new sort of literary magazine, supported not by subscriptions but by advertisers, whom the editors ignored...

...But then what...

...It is possible to respect Adler's feelings as an insider on this matter, while also silently thanking Yagoda for wading through all that material and producing, as a result, the most fully-documented history of the New Yorker yet to appear...

...There was, for example, the utter confidence displayed by Harold Ross, the magazine's founding editor, and then by Shawn, his chosen successor, that whatever caught their fancies would also interest enough readers to attract advertisers...

...Words he found offensive, including "balding," "pimples" and "dandruff," were summarily banned from the magazine...

...Adler thinks so, at least tacitly, and points out that the New Yorker did not start losing money until the Newhouse takeover...

...As advertisers started lining up to be ignored, Ross and his colleagues were increasingly asked what they would and would not print...

...Yagoda, the author of a biography of Will Rogers and a member of the English faculty at the University of Delaware, approaches his subject as a well-informed outsider...

...When the piece was finally scheduled, it was often rescheduled several times, advanced or postponed, or even dropped off the schedule for a time...

...This is just a story that I made up, and I didn't make up that part...

...Shawn or to some other writer whose piece had been scheduled in its place...

...Perhaps only readers over 40 can share this nostalgia, but they are certainly entitled to it...

...So quirky and cumbersome did the editorial gauntlet at the New Yorker become that even White, the magazine's most cossetted writer, complained about it in a memo to Ross: "I don't know about editing, but my guess is that if the NYer ever reaches the degree of perfection toward which it is tending, when each word will have been taken aside and replated with silver, there won't be much left...

...Reviewed by Paul Gray Senior writer, "Time" magazine In 1975, the 50th anniversary of the New Yorker provoked a parade of tributes, some more bemused than others, to the magazine's long and profitable indifference to changing fashions in journalism...

...Shawn in the predicament of having to decide whether to publish it...

...If he accepted it, he was put under the pressure of publishing it...

...They also argue that the New Yorker's later lapses toward self-parody, its hermetic aloofness and indefatigable longwindedness, arose from the same conditions that created its early success...

...No one wanted to upset or otherwise trouble so refined and vulnerable a sensibility...

...Yagoda and Adler make persuasive cases for the magazine's long-running esthetic and cultural importance, its enduring accomplishments in a genre, weekly journalism, usually tied to the transient and perishable...

...I don't know how to get it under control...

...25.00...

...This stricture meant that manuscripts wending their way toward publication would, at some point, be festooned with lists of Ross' queries, such as "Who he...

...two years later, William Shawn, only the second editor in the magazine's history, was kicked out...

...In other words, the enterprise pegged its appeal solely on the subjective sands of editorial taste...

...Despite his unquestioned editorial genius, Shawn's peculiarities grew ever more taxing on his beleaguered colleagues...

...Practically no one, including Brendan Gill in his genial history/memoir Here at the New Yorker, ruined the celebratory mood by wondering aloud how much longer the weekly publication could go on doing pretty much exactly what it had been doing, i.e...

...That is certainly the impression conveyed by Adler's Gone, aportrait of Shawn at work that manages to be both devastating and affectionate ("I loved him") at the same time...

...If that is so, then an alternative to the changes at the New Yorker that Yagoda and especially Adler lament seems hard to imagine...

...It was simply a creepy place," Yagoda writes of the magazine during the later years of the Shawn regime...

...Having found a format that suited him, Ross beat back all attempts to change ormodify it...

...The cheering this time promises to be muted...

...Notable, and notorious, among the latter was Ross' determination, as a former newspaperman, to have the facts appearing in his magazine—and he wanted a lot of facts to appear there—unambiguously clear and correct...

...Actually writing and submitting a piece, Adler notes, "put Mr...

...Ross feels that the short stories we use have to be quite special in type—New Yorker-ish—if that word means anything to you, and he fears that this is not just the short story we could publish, perhaps because it is not this way...

...Shawn, as the magazine's staffers invariably referred to him...

...envisioned...

...The New Yorker seems, under Ross, to have been a noisy place to work...

...whenever the editor encountered a name that struck him as insufficiently identified...

...annual advertising pages, which had peaked at 6,144 in 1966, fell steadily thereafter...

...In fact, the only fault to be found with Yagoda's history is the scant attention he pays to the New Yorker's shareholders...

...The answer turned out to be not very long...

...The interesting thing is that no one at the magazine ever seems to have understood exactly why...

...It was unthinkable to inquire about this—either to Mr...

...Renata Adler's Gone does not really require an elaborative subtitle but offers one anyway: The Last Days of the New Yorker...

...We don't want a scoop," Adler quotes him as telling her...

...Unfailingly polite, self-effacing, softspoken, and shy, Shawn elicited the tender, protective proclivities of his colleagues and subordinates...

...Mencken: "We have carried editing to a very high degree of fussiness here, probably to a point approaching the ultimate...

...The poem was rejected...

...But perhaps they should...

...Once, a Richard Wilbur poem submitted to the New Yorker was accepted, with one small reservation...

...It had an anecdote about Degas that the fact checkers could not confirm...

...To wish that the publication had not changed, as both of these fine books do, is to wish that the culture it served and in which it thrived had not also changed...