Asks what's new about the New Yorker

...The New Yorker of the twenties is a number of rather startling things all at once: a scrappy town newspaper, a sophisticate's gossip or tipster's sheet...

...Gottlieb's enthusiasm for pop culture—he was said to own an extensive collection of Elvis Presley dolls, one of which he kept prominently displayed on his desk—made for another change in direction...

...Hilton Kramer, in the National Review, and Joseph Epstein, in the Times Literary Supplement, have bemoaned and decried Tina Brown's advent, attacking her with their customary blunt instruments...

...None of this is available today—American life has simply changed too much...

...In statements made around the time she took over, Brown let it be known that she wanted to restore the magazine to the luster of its earliest incarnation under Harold Ross...

...in it he prepares the ground for his accusation that the New Yorker is a mass of corruption by writing darkly of the "cultural revolution" taking place in America's better publications, of the universal "politicization of reviewing," of the substitution of the tenets of "political correctness and multiculturalism" for "aesthetic judgment...

...His austere frontal black and white portraits, mostly of celebrities, spill over the magazine's pages—a recent "Portfolio" of his work took up forty pages—and compete with Annie Liebowitz's Gap ads, also austerely frontal, also in black and white, also 128 • DISSENT Magazines of celebrities...

...Comment," a new department that appears every week at the front of the magazine, has become a place for liberal-to-radical editorializing about (to choose a few examples at random) systemic obstacles to democracy in Haiti, the plebiscitarian fantasies of Ross Perot, Clinton's crime bill, civil broils in Nicaragua, the deceptive benefits and real cost of hate-crime laws, and the Wall Street Journal's belief that the murder of Dr...

...it's amazing to think that the New Yorker once blithely ignored all these commercial inducements, that just as one could never imagine Shawn or Ross speaking of books as "product" the very word "feature" for one of their articles would have seemed a vulgar impertinence...

...it displayed a new hospitality toward not just the ephemera of pop culture, but low-down ephemera, like those Presley dolls...

...The magazine and whatever they thought it stood for—its pose, which was also a promise of a certain kind of spiritual superiority to the governing context of American life—was evidently in accord with some aspect of their basic sense of themselves...

...Brown took Gottlieb's innovations and ran with them...

...Acting as a sort of artistic curator, Brown has run marvelous old covers and cartoons: an elegant Rea Irvin cover from 1925, "Pipes of Pan" (Irvin was the originator of the magazine's famous "Eustace Tilley," the dandy who every year gazes gravely at a butterfly through his monocle...

...Is the magazine Brown is currently editing—has been editing ever since October 5, 1992—old or new, and in what sense...

...Sempe, have used the opportunity to advantage...

...But it doesn't quite work—that phrase "successful people" has lead in it...

...His casual manner, youthful interests, and informal dress, contrasting so markedly with the notoriously formal and reserved Shawn, eventually were reflected in the magazine's pages...

...That hasn't happened...

...Denby's piece consists largely in recounting his struggle to come to terms with the Iliad, long portions of which he quotes, with the (so far as I can see) uninvidious intent of demonstrating the poem's unique force...

...David Denby's charming essay "Does Homer Have Legs...

...Polemicists of Kramer's ilk usually have very little interest in any correspondence between their rhetoric about a thing and any of the thing's actual qualities, so it would be too much to expect him to supply specific examples of these deleterious practices in the New Yorker...

...In practice this has meant Manhattan doings, but there are also frequent reports from Washington and London— Tina Brown's home base and a source for a good many writers...

...Did the Newhouse purchase and hirings make the magazine new...

...And the New Yorker is still a place to turn to for both serious and quirky journalism of a sort that would not appear anywhere else: Andy Logan's column, "Around City Hall," the profile of Murray Kempton by David Remnick, the effusions of Harold Brodkey, Janet Malcolm's remarkable three-part article on the Sylvia Plath cult...

...For his part Kramer is sure that "everything about the magazine is now corrupt: its graphics, its language, its politics . . . Tina Brown has performed the remarkable feat of combining in a single magazine the worst features of Vanity Fair, the Nation, the Village Voice and Rolling Stone, while extinguishing the last traces of civility from its editorial columns...

...Martin Amis on heresy-sniffing in a biography of Philip Larkin...

...but she also ended the brief period during which the magazine was the subject of conversation among people who don't ordinarily read fashion magazines, which after all may well turn out to have been its sole distinction...

...A glance through the files of those first issues reveals such a different world...

...For the first time in its history the magazine had published a letter from a reader objecting to something in its pages...

...But perhaps we're better off without that sense—perhaps the task of soulmaking, in Keats's phrase, can be carried on just fine without it...

...There's lots of color, including color photography...

...It may still, of course, but, going on the evidence of the first year's issues, by and large Brown has steered clear of the kind of article that, according to Epstein, when he read them in Vanity Fair, used to give him "the intellectual equivalent of a hang-over," leaving him to wonder why ever he had "read eight thousand words last night on William Kennedy Smith or Count von Bulow or Camille Paglia...

...When I was an infant my parents papered the walls around my crib with New Yorker covers...

...about the author's return to Columbia College thirty years after his arrival as a freshman, to re-enroll in the classes that make up the famous core curriculum and actually read the books denounced and upheld by ideologues on the left and the right...

...Both were installed by Si Newhouse, the media tycoon who bought the magazine in the 1980s...

...a vehicle for a kind of Menckenian satire aimed at the "booboisie" of the hinterland, all the old ladies in all the Dubuques that it was not edited for...

...By all accounts Brown "rescued" Vanity Fair, meaning she increased its circulation...

...My resistance stemmed largely from my sense of my parents' relation to the New Yorker, and how it differed from my own...

...His combative debut appearance in the magazine was a piece on William F. Buckley's reluctant acknowledgment, in the wake of the Buchanan campaign, of antiSemitic sentiment among his (Buckley's) colleagues...

...The "Goings on About Town" section was spruced up, with little boxed reviews and drawings...

...Brown is herself of course a veteran of celebrity journalism: she once edited Tattler, the British gossip journal, and went on to become editor of the ailing Vanity Fair before taking on her current assignment...

...The reporter who provided the WINTER • 1994 • 127 Magazines "you are there" for the Hewitt party steps back at the end of the piece and tries for the old, light, New Yorkerish tone of detached amusement, observing, "It's a pleasure to find that some successful people are still willing to make fools of themselves...

...a splendid, poignant cover from the fifties, showing two well-dressed couples in a small open boat far out on a big lake at dusk, the men bent over a clearly malfunctioning outboard motor, the women looking despairingly toward the lights of the boathouse and the party twinkling far away on the shore...

...Epstein, writing in early September of 1992, when he had only one issue to go on, confidently predicted that Brown's New Yorker would soon descend to the level of Vanity Fair...

...No longer was the New Yorker to be, as Dwight Macdonald once put it, a "plot of artificial grass, fenced off from American mass culture...

...130 • DISSENT...

...Richard Avedon is now the staff photographer...

...In the same consumerfriendly spirit, Gottlieb expanded the minimalist table of contents...

...But not the comfortable automatic identification, the proximity that prompted the editors of the old New Yorker to lead off their "Talk" pieces with OVERHEARD . . . in capital letters...

...The graphics, which Kramer mysteriously finds so corrupt, offer compensation of another kind—although whether they make up for the visual assault of some of the ads, the sock-in-the-eye vulgarity of the Versace ads in particular, is another matter...

...but I doubt that most people have a spiritually proprietary sense about the New Yorker—or any magazine...

...Both academics, they may have been trying to save a little money, but I don't think the savings on nursery wallpaper was what led them to decorate my room in this way...

...Written by Hendrik Hertzberg, late of the New Republic, by our own Paul Berman, and a few others, these pieces are refreshingly free of the atmosphere of unargued assumption and piety that used to envelope the New Yorker's liberalism...

...If one took care to omit some of the grimmer and stranger covers that Brown, in a bid for provocative social relevance, has lately ordered—the robotic Art Spiegelman schoolchildren piling out of a schoolbus bearing automatic weapons, Edward Sorel's dinosaur-headed Hollywood executives, the ominous streetsweeper with an AIDS ribbon by Sue Coe, behind him a darkly looming St...

...Henry Louis Gates on Robert Hughes's anti-PC polemic Culture of Complaint...

...In the piece Berman approvingly cited Buckley's characterization of Gore Vidal's notorious 1986 Nation article on Jewish neoconservatives as an instance of "classic bigotry...

...it actually became a reliable quick guide to the magazine's contents, as tables of contents are in most other magazines...

...the attitudes and style of the New Yorker of the twenties, when the magazine was in its fey youth, are surely unrecoverable...

...James Traub's "The Hearts and Minds of City College," which reports on what it is like to be subjected to the demagogic lunacies of Leonard Jeffries...

...These were treated with a kind of blandly genial advocacy, as in the travelogues of Calvin Trillin or the columns extolling the delights of roadside eateries by Jane and Michael Stern...

...He goes on to charge that "many publications have now succumbed to the belief that thoughtful allusions to the classic achievements of Western culture are in themselves somehow invidious...

...A love-hate relationship, yes...

...I remember I smiled and said nothing, but that it was clear to her that I did not want to use New Yorker covers...

...a full-page cartoon from the thirties, heavily redolent of the era, showing two plutocrats at their cigars in what looks like a boudoir, a flamboyant looking woman sprawled out drunkenly on a couch behind them, with the caption: "I never told her about the depression...

...On the newsstands, the magazine now comes half-wrapped in some sort of translucent material that advertises its most alluring "features...

...I've noticed that progressive schoolteachers are still in the habit of decorating their classrooms with New Yorker covers, so something of this sentiment lives on...

...Brown has eschewed encounters with folksily outre corners of American life, returning the focus of the magazine to urban matters and cosmopolitan concerns...

...The sense of a magazine's being in such close accord with one's own sense of self seems less available in these noisier times...

...Photography was introduced for the first time, along with color drawings...

...Celebrity worship is so much a part of American culture now that it may seem unfair to blame Brown for the action of this powerful force on her magazine...

...Fiction writers have cause for complaint—the number of stories has been cut to one per issue, effectively halving the market for serious short fiction—but the New Yorker's artists have never been given so much space, and some of them, notably the Dufyesque J.J...

...Certainly Gottlieb made a number of appreciable changes...

...She would have worried...

...Berman, indeed, was the occasion for another, perhaps not unrelated, departure for the New Yorker...

...a "humor" magazine in the antique, anarchic mode of Judge and the early Life...

...Kramer's piece appeared in a special section of the National Review grandly titled "The Decline of American Journalism...

...Part of the large difference of that world, surely, is that it had not yet undergone the conditioning of having a New Yorker long in its midst...

...Even at the height of the controversy surrounding Hannah Arendt's series "Eichmann in Jerusalem," which originally appeared in the New Yorker, the magazine maintained its ban on reader mail...

...David Gunn by a right-to-life fanatic can be blamed on sixties radicalism...

...Vidal's reply, with Berman's response, appeared in a following issue...

...The "doings" in question— whether in New York, Washington, or London—very often are those of people in the public eye...

...The table of contents has been revamped beyond Gottlieb's modest modernization— now, for the busy page turner, the pieces are provided with punchy little summaries: "Rabin and Arafat had to do it, Washington figured out how" reads one for a "Letter from Washington...

...A year's worth of New Yorker covers is undeniably a cheery sight...

...There can be little doubt, however, that the rising level of glitz is the single most significant change brought about by her editorship...

...A more salutary change is a new sharpness in the New Yorker's political outlook...

...Patrick's Cathedral—even this year's covers would look nice around a crib...

...The issues I have read contain a number of pieces hardly comformable either to PC or multiculturalism: Adam Gopnik on the Whitney Biennial, which he called "a nadir of sanctimonious, self-congratulatory sloganeering...

...This strikes me as wishful thinking...

...Reading pieces like these has compensated somewhat for the magazine's tiresome penWINTER • 1994 • 129 Magazines chant for gossip about the rich and famous...

...This was in the mid-fifties...

...Whether it's Julian Barnes on the latest ministerial sex scandals and the squabblings of the Royal Family or a "Talk" piece on the shenanigans at the seventieth birthday party celebration for the CBS producer Don Hewitt, "creator of '60 Minutes,' " celebrityhood and the worship of celebrities has crept increasingly into the New Yorker's coverage...

...The cover of that first issue, which shows a purple-haired, London-style punk, lolling in a horse carriage driven by a formally attired coachman with a slightly surprised expression, seems to propose that something new is in town—but has her first year made good on the promise...

...This comes at a cost to the magazine's tone and even to the independent curiosity of its writers: celebrity as its own rationale appears to have already discouraged writers from turning in the sort of piece on eccentric unknown New Yorkers—New Yorkers who despite their obscurity were in some way interesting—that used to be a staple of the "Talk" pages...

...Decorating a nursery with the weekly face of a magazine spoke a degree of connection between it and their intimate, daily lives that I could not share...

...All this is industry standard, of course...

...But if the New Yorker is now not the genteel creation it once was, it's still not quite as ghastly as certain of our neoconservative friends have lately made it out to be...

...Recently, when the time came for my wife and me to worry about decorating our newborn son's room, my mother half jokingly suggested that I also might want to use New Yorker covers—they were so colorful, so cheerful...

...Kramer, who is of course best known for his own editorial civility, refers to the new New Yorker's reportage and criticism as "malign rubbish...