Thoughts About the 'New Yorker'
HAMBURGER, PHILIP
Culture Watching THOUGHTS ABOUT THE 'NEW YORKER' by PHILIP HAMBURGER Writers have memories, not crystal balls. Moreover, it is extremely dangerous to speculate about the future; matters rarely...
...A few years ago, in the Introduction to Curious World, a collection of some of my New Yorker pieces, I put down a few recollections of sessions with Ross in his office, and I think they are relevant here: "His questions were deeply penetrating...
...I received only one editorial directive: All the pieces were to be written in the third person...
...What are you going to do about it...
...I invented some characters who might pose there for a group photograph, mixing real people like Henry Francis du Pont with Orion M.B...
...Gottlieb was a completely hands-on editor who bustled about from office to office at all hours...
...His delight in this gift was touching...
...You have one child already, where in hell you going to put the next one...
...he would say...
...I'll read it when it comes out...
...The word "profile" as a form of biography seems to have gone into the language...
...There was a familial sense to the place...
...I was 25...
...Facts,' he would say, 'give me the facts.' Detail fascinated him...
...During World War II, the "Letter from London" was written by MolliePanter-Downes, who became in the minds of many of the staff a sort of Mrs...
...He stationed Clifford Orr, a brilliant, waspish writer (now, like so many others, lost to the past) on the roof of the office at 25 West 43rd Street to keep a lookout down the Hudson for the first glimpse of her steamer, heading upriver...
...I did, and the Secretary said, "Certainly not...
...Ross and Shawn worked closely together for many years...
...Hepromptly framed the card and hung it on the wall in his office...
...He had respect for the traditions of the magazine...
...he said, tossing it in his waste basket...
...Even if the sketch of a personality consists of one paragraph, practically every publication calls it a profile...
...I went to work at the magazine in 1939, the 15th year of its existence...
...Ross cast a spell, a compound of Fierce candor, bubbling humor and an almost messianic quest for clear, truthful writing...
...He didn't shrink from the dreaded L word...
...I also appreciated his response when presented with an editorial idea that pleased him...
...Not a bad idea...
...One of my chance travels took me to Wilmington, Delaware (Alt...
...No idea seemed alien to this man, and a writer presenting one for a possible piece would find that Shawn not only grasped it with the speed of light, he had already formed in his mind the editorial shape it would take...
...Gazetteers bring me to Raoul Fleischmann, the publisher of the magazine at the time, and a man who passionately believed in the separation of church and state: i.e...
...Shortly after the piece appeared Fleischmann asked me to stop by his office, one floor above and several hundred miles from Editorial...
...Ross, in his wisdom, would have been delighted to have the Iowa lady subscribe, and today there are 127 New Yorker subscribers in that lovely Mississippi River town...
...Ross was quixotic, but he knew what he wanted...
...No "I" was to appear anywhere in the text...
...After Shawn took over, in 1952, he broadened and deepened the magazine...
...One night in 1949, as a Profile by me of Dean Acheson, then Secretary of State, was about to go to press there was a sudden knock on the door of my office, followed by a blast of air as a disturbed Ross burst in...
...He handled himself with awesome grace...
...Like so many other would-be writers, I was drawn by its magical mix of fact, fiction, wit, art and comment, but mostly by its intellectual honesty, civilized skepticism and gentle irreverence...
...Soon after the War she announced that she would visit New York...
...Philip Hamburger, a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker, has contributed to most if not all of its departments...
...I scooped it up...
...These days, the press continually refers to him as "legendary...
...He never suggested a city, and never turned one down...
...He made the wise decision to transfer many of the New Yorker archives to the New York Public Library, and supervised the move...
...Go for it...
...Shawn was an inspiring editor...
...du Pont, and Lammot du Pont Copeland with Teflon du Pont...
...The New Yorker became their lives...
...I asked Fleischmann...
...255 ft., Pop...
...The collection will be available in perpetuity to scholars and others studying the literature of the 20th century...
...Although he, too, reached out to new writers, no cataclysmic changes occurred...
...When I walked in, he handed me a letter, and with his usual Old World courtesy said, "Mon Vieux, read this...
...For Christ sake, she's pregnant...
...And then came Gottlieb...
...I find it hard to write about Shawn, for in addition to being my editor for many years, he has been a close friend...
...So when I heard (an overwhelming din) and read (much of it misleading and superficial) that a new editor was to replace the gifted Robert Gottlieb at the New Yorker, the best I could do was sit down, keep calm and think about the past...
...You'll find the form yourself," he said quietly...
...His magazine powerfully defended the environment, eloquently condemned bias and hatred, and made clear to readers that the proliferation of atomic weapons was suicidal...
...I'm told you haven't showed proofs to Acheson," he said...
...I was to be an objective, outside visitor...
...This brought me face to face with the volcanic founding editor, Harold W. Ross, since he had a habit of sitting down with a young reporter and going over his piece line by line...
...editorial and business...
...Or similarity in the art of Peter Arno, Helen Hokinson, Charles Addams, Roz Chast, George Price, Gretchen Dow Simpson, and George Booth...
...One of the many cliches that make up the so-called "mystique of the New Yorker" is the old saw that Ross was not putting out a magazine for the old lady from Dubuque...
...Above all, truthful...
...But when it came to editorial integrity and vision and a passion to honestly reflect the world in which they lived, these men were spiritual twins...
...He reached out to writers everywhere...
...I'm a sucker for river towns, having been born on the Ohio...
...And the past, in my case, goes back a long way...
...I recall that when I visited the rubble of the Third Reich, at Berchtesgaden (having been sent overseas by Ross and Shawn), I spied on the floor of Hitler's massive, picture-windowed meeting room a heavily engraved calling card, just lying there in the midst of the debris...
...Orr shouted down to those who knew her, and off went the group, pell-mell, to greet the inncoming heroine at the pier...
...Good God...
...He gave me a free hand to travel the United States, and I turned out some 58 pieces for him under the rubric "Notes for a Gazetteer," visits to middle-sized American cities, picked at random...
...110,356), and in the course of the piece I dreamed up an imaginary gathering of high-powered Du Pont executives, whooping it up at the Du Pont Country Club, which flies a nylon flag...
...you might have thought I had given him a complete set of Lionel trains...
...The magazine, he said, should "be good, be funny and be fair," a healthy prescription for a general state of well-being...
...Ross had a naive, almost child-like quality...
...And by no means incidentally, they worked harder than any two I have ever known...
...Just try to find the common denominator in the work of, say, E. B. White, Roger Angell, Rachel Carson, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin, Janet Flanner, Andy Logan, William Maxwell, A. J. Liebling, Adam Gopnik, and Joseph Mitchell...
...He always kept his door open, and the sight of him banging away at his Olympia upright typewriter was comforting to staff members passing by...
...I brought it back to Ross...
...It was the calling card of Herr Hermann Wolfgang Goering...
...I trust the New Yorker...
...I called your landlord, and I think he'll give you a larger apartment.'" The next day my landlord, Vincent Astor, did call, offering larger space...
...Ross felt this called for high ceremony...
...I liked Gottlieb's easy, informal, accessible way, his humor, and the swiftness with which he would read a piece and get back to the writer...
...She's coming...
...The human comedy fascinated him...
...I started out as a reporter for the "Talk of the Town" section...
...I saw your wife on the street today...
...The contrast in personalities was dramatic: Ross always audible, direct to the point of bluntness, Shawn shy, soft spoken, exceedingly polite...
...Ross paid special attention, not meeting these writers face to face but flooding them with myriad queries...
...Suppose we're saying something...
...I interrupted to say that I never showed proofs, didn't think we needed to, but if it would put his mind at rest I would call Acheson at home and put the question to him...
...F?it...
...That is true enough, yet sad, since it implies an artifact in a glass case...
...Miniver, a symbol of indomitable Great Britain...
...She's coming...
...He kept "Notes and Comment" on a high plane, paying close note to human rights and the rule of law, and commenting forcefully on political sleaze and hypocrisy in high places...
...There's a Cold War...
...From time to time, looking up from the copy on his desk, he would say, 'Never go cosmic on me, Hamburger,' or 'Circulation is rising too fast—a very dangerous business,' or 'Don't expect literary fame—it's like lightning, either it'll strike or it won't...
...Another hapless notion has it that there is "a New Yorker style"—everybody writing in the same predictable tone...
...He arrived under dauntingly difficult conditions: There were protests, petitions, much hubbub...
...It was a communication from a mighty vice president of Du Pont, that began, "Dear Raoul, You will recall, old chap, the days we played golf together on the Island," and called for the summary dismissal of the rude correspondent who had so defiled the Du Pont name...
...matters rarely turn out the way one expects...
...The New Yorker spells it with a capital P. Profiles are a special form, initiated under Ross, and many a current biographer addicted to thousand-page, hernia-inducing tomes, could do worse than examine the succinctness, cutting edge and character-revealing aspects of most of them...
...Neither Ross nor William Shawn, his de facto managing editor (titles were frowned upon), had ever met her, but a number of us, traveling either during or just after the War, had the pleasure of knowing her in London or Haslemere, Surrey, where she lives...
Vol. 75 • July 1992 • No. 9
