THE NEW YORKER AS CULTURAL IDEAL
Hendin, Josephine
The New Yorker reigns among us as an arbiter of taste. Since the intellectual monthlies and quarterlies lost authority, and the youth culture faded as a trend-setting force, the New Yorker has...
...Knowing that Mrs...
...She uses analytic language colloquially, assimilating it into her own interest in the social interplay of vulnerability and power, intimacy and detachment, as they converge in the psychoanalytic "situation...
...Hiroshima— John Hersey...
...To love is to love primarily one's own eyes...
...It is not politics...
...The controlled surface of the magazine feeds our hunger for order, and assures us of our membership in an elite of the self-possessed...
...and so did domestic crises, no matter how small...
...Knowing that Mrs...
...But surely even the poorest among us know the sting of disappointment...
...His first essay offers a powerful "documentary" of the possible impact of nuclear war: the end of the world...
...Sheehan's prose...
...Since the intellectual monthlies and quarterlies lost authority, and the youth culture faded as a trend-setting force, the New Yorker has emerged as a model of what is "best...
...Miss Malcolm rests her book on the concept of transference...
...Its style is enshrined in freshman writing classes throughout the country, its fiction is emulated by aspiring writers, its impact is evident on recent books...
...In his third essay, Schell yields his subject to an illusion of harmony...
...Negroes—James Baldwin...
...A few days earlier, [Sylvia Frumkinj had had her hair cut and shaped in a bowl style, which she found especially becoming, and her spirits were high...
...Veteran staff writer Brendan Gill writes in Here at The New Yorker that the tone of the magazine was set by James Thurber and E. B. White, who were "enemies of complexity, wherever it might be found, whether in civil bureaucracy or in the bureaucracy of corporations...
...In style, its fiction usually eschews sharp climax or tight denouement for "atmosphere...
...If the analyst yields to this desire, he gratifies the patient's need to be loved and to prevail over the ethical standards of his profession, which forbid involvement...
...As far as the New Yorker is concerned, Miss Arendt has the first, last and only word...
...To so dismiss such feelings brings us close to exploitation...
...How explain this disabling mixture of reflectiveness and naivete, pretentiousness and simplemindedness...
...How can there be anything pernicious in that...
...Such depersonalization calls into question more than the gap between visibility and intelligibility...
...What arrests Miss Malcolm's attention is where the power balance tips...
...Its soft liberalism and autocracy of voice lend a glow of good taste to our disabling confusions...
...The New Yorker forces us to measure the distance between its style of elegance and the seriousness and passion of reality...
...But "transference" is a technical term, strictly limited to the unique relationship between a patient and a psychoanalyst who deliberately eschews the right to "be himself' so as to permit the patient to make of him what the patient will...
...It sustains the illusion that sophistication and detachment can be shelters against the storminess of urban life...
...Such paradoxes may flow from the extent to which the New Yorker's approach to political and social issues derives less from a serious engagement with the world than from a narrow esthetic valuing neatness above all...
...Santana" not as an experience of poverty and its afflictions, but as a spectacle...
...The analyst and the patient, in Miss Malcolm's view, inevitably desire each other...
...Mrs...
...This image and my fear entered into a species of combination with each other...
...McPhee turns from this large success to a small anecdote: a Barrens man found an abandoned army jeep, then rebuilt it only to find that, when he got it running, the army reclaimed it...
...Minute observation, far from bringing us closer, reminds us how remote from her we are...
...Taking an activist issue—the need for nuclear disarmament —Schell treats it in apolitical terms...
...The issue of fair representation seems not to have come up...
...She describes Mrs...
...Nothing that I possess can defend me against that fate, if the hour for it should strike for me as it struck for him...
...Begin, Schell tells us, by calling up a friend...
...William James found connection to patients met in his asylum, recalling once . a black-haired youth with greenish skin, entirely idiotic...
...What is the attitude toward people in the New Yorker's biographies...
...The New Yorker mode of biographical sketching enables distortions of the meaning, density and scale of human behavior...
...Jonathan Schell's portentous The Fate of the Earth illustrates how disabling the New Yorker approach can be...
...Elegiac about a world doomed by everencroaching builders and army bases, McPhee celebrates its quaintness but discloses little of its will or struggle to survive...
...The New Yorker has emerged as an ideal of what it means to be "civilized...
...she becomes a curio of Mrs...
...Santana made were ever carried out that she would scarcely expect me to write something simply because I had set out to write it...
...The phenomenon of transference —how we all invent each other according to early blueprints—was Freud's most original and radical discovery," she declares in the authoritative tone so favored in the New Yorker...
...For example, Elizabeth Drew's Portrait of an Election: The 1980 Presidential Campaign, originally published in the New Yorker, is a massive accumulation of detail that produces a valuable record...
...Mrs...
...It denies, even as it appears to confirm, how vulnerable we are...
...Sheehan to her friends as "the writer who is writing the story of my life...
...She imagined that the red mouthwash would somehow be absorbed into her scalp and make her hair red permanently...
...Machinery of any size above the pencil sharpener baffled them...
...A long meditation on the meaning of extinction, Schell's second essay uses an accretion of minute points as a barricade against the volatility of his own subject...
...The detachment, simplification, and reductiveness that characterize its political and biographical discourse surface in its fiction as a collapse of anger and anxiety in a saving monotony...
...The exploitative quality of relationships in such accounts serves to misrepresent human encounters as efforts to skim whatever serves one's purpose from another's life and work...
...In cultivating refinement of observation, the New Yorker has tended to treat all social issues as "documentaries...
...For we are not asked to think about those vulgar economic and political issues that play a role in the nuclear industry, nor must we consider solutions to a problem that can be resolved only through political and economic processes...
...If this is environmentalism at all, it is of an extremely soft sort, one more at home with nostalgia than reform...
...How we imagine our lives is as important as how we think about them and get on with each other...
...Santana of Mr...
...Yet Mrs...
...The New Yorker will not accept in its columns the refutations of highly responsible and scholarly opponents of Miss Arendt . . . scholars who have worked their way through—as it is not clear that Miss Arendt has—the primary sources in Yiddish, Polish, and Hebrew...
...Anything one finds there can be reduced to a fastidious anecdote...
...Of the value of her prolonged contact, Mrs...
...Yet its sequels show how the New Yorker mystique weakens even so fine an effort...
...Santana wouldn't read the Profile gave me the freedom to write about her exactly as I wanted to, without having to worry about causing her pain...
...If its mystique permits us to believe we are being "educated" when we are only being entertained or reassured, it nevertheless soothes the fear that much of urban experience has become too frightening to face...
...Miss Malcolm elaborates on transference and counter-transference as the play of eroticized feelings of vulnerability and power between male analysts and their female patients...
...Until she met Green, she had tried and failed to penetrate the social veneer of psychoanalysts she interviewed...
...Sheehan clearly never intended to show her the results of her long hospitality...
...Green, a troubled young man filled with nonspecific anger toward himself and his colleagues, is eager to talk...
...The New Yorker mystique calls us to the salvations of superiority...
...and there it stops...
...Praised for its treatment of ecology, the New Yorker has come to endangered environments as a cameraman selecting visually lovely surfaces...
...Her book introduces us to vanities of self-control, to the assumption of infinite right of entry to the bedroom and bathroom of others...
...Its refined enervation of voice is a literary Valium for our anxiety...
...Miss Malcolm believes "transference" means that no human relation is based on people as they are, since all our relations are only products of distorted perceptions from the past...
...Finding in apocalypse/utopia an escape to the tragic and comic poles of simplicity, Schell leaves us with a nostalgic flaccidity, our hearts aglow with rectitude, at once disarmed and dismayed...
...One searches for a deeper humanity in the New Yorker's approach to people, hoping that in its biographical discourse, accumulating the details of individual life will narrow the distance between observer and observed...
...To which the only honest answer is: nobody...
...They only become so when they falsify reality...
...Jews —Hannah Arendt...
...The New Yorker mystique draws us to a sophistication that would surpass disorder...
...The analyst's only way out is presumably romantic frustration: he must confess both his love and his determination to love honor more...
...Muted emotional states, genteel confrontation, soft discontents in a framework of a savored and almost celebratory sadness distinguish most New Yorker stories...
...So few of the plans Mrs...
...Santana, Mrs...
...The magazine secures what it takes to be the leading authority or the most interesting writer (but alas, the two are not always the same) to work up a subject...
...The New Yorker mystique shows us the harshest truth, yet evades it...
...Its noblesse oblige is mostly noblesse...
...But it also reveals the disproportions that can be produced by facts without an authorial intelligence to distinguish the trivial from the significant...
...Santana as warm, trusting, simple—the cliches common to descriptions of the poor...
...When Green, having confessed his vulnerabilities, confesses his fantasy of having a beautiful female body, she needles him with his fear: "Somehow," she coolly remarks, "that doesn't surprise me about you...
...Ultimately the richness of character is narrowed to the question of who has greater "valence," and the outcomes of life are misrepresented by the triumph of an invulnerable voice over the vulnerability of human nature...
...She simply tells us she chose Green because he permitted her "valence" to prevail over his...
...He calls for total nuclear and conventional disarmament, global religious tolerance, the abandonment of the nation-state, claiming "love, a spiritual energy that the human heart can pit against the physical energy released from the heart of matter, can create, cherish, and safeguard what extinction would destroy and shut up in nothingness...
...Misuse of 453 the magisterial voice sustains the illusion that complexities of character and theory can be flattened by fiat...
...To protest is grubby...
...Santana stands flat as a stereotype amid her beautifully described worn upholstery...
...He subtly deferred to me, he tried to impress me...
...But one has only to see the far greater depth of Updike's novels to realize how little his abilities have been challenged by the New Yorker format...
...Aaron Green...
...Biographical discourse can, less harrowingly, bring us toward a recognition of kinship, 452 even as it clarifies our individuality...
...Is man worth saving...
...Unlike Oscar Lewis in La Vida, Mrs...
...Social truth must inevitably become only "factual" and "scenic...
...But its "Profiles" also reflect a disabling detachment...
...The emphasis on scene and spectacle are disabling factors when more is attempted than simply telling us "what it's like" to be someone else...
...To put it in psychoanalytic language, the transference valence of the journalist was here greater than that of the analyst...
...Santana could not read Mrs...
...It declares its view of disagreement by eliminating it from its pages...
...Argument, controversy, social analysis—the loose ends that make up intellectual life are ruled out by a mystique that prompts us to confront large issues as spectators and not participants...
...For example, John McPhee's The Pine Barrens, reissued recently, beautifully evokes that wilderness in New Jersey where backwoodsmen lead 19th-century lives...
...it jumps in no particular order from Green to Freud to snippets of Freudian theory, all clearly meant as an evaluation of a theory and its practitioners...
...Sheehan expresses her affection by introducing us to Miss Frumkin in the sort of scene we encounter in pornography: a woman taking a midnight bath...
...Sheehan (who had difficulty finding a cooperative subject) was grateful for Mrs...
...Miss Malcolm is clearly less interested in theory than in psychoanalysis as a social scene...
...It comes as a surprise when he notes in an afterword that these "simple" people have won preserve status and governmental protection for their land...
...From the symbolism of apocalypse, Schell glides to the symbolism of utopia...
...With Aaron Green, however, things were different from the start...
...Sheehan behaved as though the story had never been written...
...What is the relation between reporter and subject...
...And this elegance of surface, suppressing discord, is more than a style...
...This practice has produced mixed results...
...The New Yorker's superiority to disorder helps distance us from this woman...
...When the New Yorker printed essays by Hannah Arendt about the Eichmann case that contained highly controversial charges against European Jewish institutions, the magazine refused the discomforts of controversy...
...Some years earlier, she had tinted her hair red and had liked the way it looked...
...Santana, whose trust was "not so much won as freely given," and who was grateful for her attention...
...As she plays doctor to Green, Miss Malcolm gives herself another choice...
...She has interviewed "Mrs...
...In this esthetic, an issue is something that can be defined frontally, visually, without turbulence or depth...
...Miss Malcolm has attempted an evaluation of a profession apparently equipped with the conviction, as evident in the title, that its task is "impossible...
...It exploits the lives of those "in charge" to find the "secret" of their influence, and it exploits the damaged, the poor, the insane for their grotesquerie...
...The New Yorker mystique has excised large patches of reality as a subject of fiction...
...Humankind divides into two simple camps: the elect of sophisticated observers and the damned who do the work of living for them...
...But for Mrs...
...If he silently resists his desire, he may be professionally correct but is, Miss Malcolm implies, a coward...
...Santana proudly introduced Mrs...
...With its elegance of observation and voice, it has set a standard of what it means to be "civilized...
...Have we the right, he asks, to prevent fetuses as yet unconceived from being born...
...To be civilized—such is the New Yorker view—is to be wry and unruffled in a world requiring little more than an ability to find the best possible vantage point from which to look down upon the panorama of life...
...But it is generally agreed that opening up unconscious processes, recognizing their impact on behavior and their expression in a variety of ways—of which dreams and not transference are the most radical—were Freud's major discoveries...
...Santana" for two and a-half years and seen enough to know when her husband goes to bed clothed, yet she never offers more than a shallow description of her feelings...
...Santana's marital infidelities in late 1974 was far more entertaining and bawdy than the account I got from her in the spring of 1973...
...Wry and charming as it may be, this attitude, if permitted to affect the treatment of serious issues, can only result in an evasion of volatile social problems through a stance of wistful comedy...
...To give no more than passing reference to how we negotiate the distance between the two, to acknowledge so scantily the vast world in between, where we must continue to live, is to spin us between the unthinkable and the unreal...
...More frequently, the New Yorker simplifies life by eliminating tragedy, violence, or raw conflict...
...It sets fiction against the deeply complex or urgently problematic...
...In its ability to reveal even ugly social facts with an unruffled neatness, the New Yorker has demonstrated that it is possible to face anything with style...
...She washed her brown hair with shampoo and also with red mouthwash...
...The New Yorker mystique permits us to believe we are concerned with others while treating their lives from a position of detachment, voyeurism, or even hostility...
...Santana had clearly expected to be written about and to see the results...
...Other magazines may print rebuttals or protesting letters...
...She blew bubbles into the water...
...It offers the illusion that there is a vantage point, Olympian and pristine, that permits us to see difficulties while 451 keeping a cool distance...
...If it feels obliged to acknowledge "big" subjects, it resists the challenge they represent...
...Santana, hardly a New Yorker reader, would never find the Profile on her own, Mrs...
...The New Yorker approach has produced memorable panoramas, but not a politics to be taken seriously...
...Who would miss human life if they extinguished it...
...A terrific piece, a great story: you don't argue with literature...
...454...
...As Saul Bellow has suggested many years ago, its illusory clarity speaks to our need for security and our inability to locate or to prize a deeper coherence...
...Within this spectrum, they sometimes achieve excellence, most notably in the fiction of John Cheever and John Updike...
...When challenged whether this did not upset Mrs...
...Sheehan's notes...
...Sheehan, disorder is the province of others...
...One would surmise that its editors regard Miss Arendt's articles as Literature, quite as they might regard Baldwin's...
...gets "involved" yet remains detached...
...Has the New Yorker read us, even as we have read it...
...Such bits of local color are dressed up and offered as if they must have large meanings...
...Susan Sheehan's Welfare Mother renders the life of "Mrs...
...The logic of his response is tortuous: 450 We cannot . . . say in any simple or unqualified sense that the end of the world is bad and its continuation good, because mankind is not in itself good or evil but is the source of both...
...But is this the best our culture can do...
...In politics the New Yorker is liberal but not democratic...
...Sheehan does not permit her subject to speak for herself, but shapes the scenes of her life into a vision of poverty as a supple surface from which anguish and despair have been rubbed away...
...To be "saved" is to be of the elect who know how to be amused even as they wink their acknowledgment that troubles exist...
...Any reasonable standard of intellectual fairness compels the question of why Green, a loner among his colleagues at a small, highly orthodox institute, should be considered typical of an entire profession...
...Sheehan tells us: " 'No,' I said with conviction...
...I'm the only person I know who hasn't seen a therapist or psychiatrist," she told a New York Times interviewer...
...Donald Barthelme's stories often ridicule complexity, leveling an armory of stylistic devices against that burdensome intellectual baggage often seen as mere junk...
...In avoiding the problematic while seeming to deal with it, the New Yorker mystique does us a disservice...
...He was the patient and I was the doctor...
...Has its mystique blossomed on our superficiality...
...Professing concern for a more recent subject, "Sylvia Frumkin," who is insane, Mrs...
...he was the student and I was the teacher...
...Miss Frumkin felt so cheerful about her new haircut that she suddenly thought she was Lori Lemaris, the mermaid whom Clark Kent had met in college and had fallen in love with in the old "Superman" comics...
...Sheehan writes: "The account I got from Mrs...
...the New Yorker prints the linguistic gaffes of other magazines...
...How bring about these amazing results...
...Its high elegance and magisterial voice coerce belief...
...Do its moral evasions call attention to our own...
...As Irving Howe wrote: The New Yorker speaks out ex cathedra upon occasion: it recognizes the presence of History: and that, one gathers, is that...
...That shape am I, I felt, potentially...
...It is inclusive, or tries to be, in acknowledging social issues, but it remains exclusive in its response, usually limiting its treatment to dense description of a problem...
...Miss Malcolm's book grew out of a New Yorker series on a young Freudian analyst, "Dr...
...Refinements of wit and observation have an obvious appeal and are not inherently blameworthy...
...After a few minutes of contented frolicking, Miss Frumkin stepped out of the tub...
...Janet Malcolm's Psychoanalysis: The Impossible Profession, proclaims itself as "magisterial . . . an exploration of the paths of psychoanalytic theory, practice and influence since Freud...
...Oracular in style but brilliant in detailing a landscape of devastation, this essay is a valuable addition to the literature of apocalypse...
Vol. 29 • September 1982 • No. 4
