Sometimes a Magazine is Just a Magazine

...Adler writes that in private and in person, along the hushed corridors of the New Yorker's offices, and among the assembled neurotics who staffed the magazine, Shawn was even stranger still...

...At such moments he sounds less like the world's greatest magazine editor than the night clerk at the Bates Motel...

...This explains the large number of books that have been produced over the years about the New Yorker magazine, most of them by former contributors who have pretty much played out their string...

...My most recent copy shows a couple of horizontal ads...

...The writer's name would appear only at the end of the piece...

...Shawn...

...The stories were often so tediously detailed that a word was coined to describe Shawn's editorial personality: "unboreable...

...Many magazines try to prevent an undue influence by advertisers on editorial content, for example...

...and the sum of its contributions to American fiction isn't any more significant than those of, say, the American Mercury or Collier's or the Saturday Evening Post...

...Far from enriching the world of American letters, in other words, the editor drained it of promising talent...

...Simply by being such a gifted and discerning editor, Shawn and his New Yorker killed off the "little magazines" in which young writers develop their talents...

...The magazine declined to print letters to the editor, or a masthead, or headlines on the cover that might entice a reader to look inside...

...Graphically its format remained essentially unchanged from its founding in 1925 to the early 1990s: It printed no photographs, and advertisements could run only in vertical columns, since a horizontal layout across the page would interfere with the flow of copy and might thereby, through some mystical process, corrupt the prose...

...We don't want scoops," the editor William Shawn would tell his reporters...

...Its table of contents was hermetically uninfor-mative, omitting even the name of the writer of an article...

...And it is then that the reader begins to see that Adler's harsh attack on Lillian Ross's book is in fact an almost clinical example of what the headshrinkers call "transference," and that her ostensible tribute to this large figure, William Shawn, is an almost hysterical repudiation of him, which suggests . . . and it is then that the reader realizes he is caught in a psychodrama that reveals much, much more about these people than he ever, under any circumstances, wanted to know...

...It is impossible to know how much promising work the magazine obliterated in this way...

...Gone is a hard book to finish...

...Renata Adler states the credo in its pure form: "For more than thirty years, the New Yorker was not only the finest magazine of its time but probably the finest English-language magazine of all time...

...And yet—surely—he must have been a kind of genius, given his magazine's contributions to American journalism...

...That we should care—about the New Yorker magazine above all, and about the memoirists themselves, by virtue of their association with it— is an assumption grounded in what might be called "New Yorker ex-ceptionalism," a dogma shared widely throughout entire neighborhoods of Manhattan and extending into parts of Brooklyn Heights...

...It maintained a scrupulous indifference to the topical...

...Shawn, his magazine, and virtually everything he stood for and believed...

...In fact, Adler says, Ross's book was "an astonishing and fierce, unremitting, though apparently inadvertent, attack on Mr...

...Right...

...The stable of writers who chose to publish there almost exclusively—Thurber, A.J...

...She now hopes to set the record straight, but it must be said that even by Adler's own account, Shawn comes off as worse than an eccentric: This is one sick little copy jockey...

...That, and only that...

...Probably a lot...

...The New Yorker, in any case, was never quite as exceptional as the exceptionalists believed...

...There are magazines, according to New Yorker exceptionalism, and there are magazines—and then there's the New Yorker, off to one side, sui generis, towering above all others...

...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...The authors of such books, as a rule, are writers who contributed their best stuff to the magazine many years before they got around to writing about it, and so their memoirs serve merely as receptacles for ferocious resentments, remembered slights, bitter score-settling, and vigorously expressed nostalgia for the old days, back when, perforce, the New Yorker was a great magazine and they, the authors, were still writing stories worth reading...

...Why, she notes in horror, it even runs horizontal ads these days, interfering with the flow of prose...

...BY ANDREW FERGUSON When a writer's imagination fails him, and he runs out of things to write about, he often turns to writing about writing...

...These conventions were the New Yorker's alone, giving it over the years the musty odor of an ancient sanctuary, unsullied by commerce, sealed off from the vulgarities of fashion and celebrity...

...And so it does...

...Liebling, Joseph Mitchell, E.B...

...This is a strange argument, to say the least, as though Adler were straining to conjure up the most damning criticism she can make of her former mentor, regardless of its plausibility...

...at the New Yorker the rule was fetishized to the point where writers and editors were forbidden from even speaking with members of the business staff...

...Thanks for nothing, Mr...

...If the New Yorker wasn't the "finest" magazine of all time, it was certainly the most eccentric, at least among publications intended to turn a profit...

...She opens her book with an attack on Lillian Ross's Here But Not Here, which purported to be a tribute to Shawn...

...Quite beyond his personal idiosyncrasies— he never owned a color television, for instance, on the suspicion that the color in the tube would give him can-cer—Adler's version of William Shawn shows him to be untruthful, narcissistic, ruthless, delusional...

...In some senses this is true: The New Yorker was a uniquely interesting magazine—a thing worth thinking about, as few things are in American journalism...

...Shawn's New Yorker, by Ved Mehta...

...But still: As a journalistic enterprise—especially in the time Adler writes about, the 1960s and the 1970s—its best never surpassed the best of Esquire, for example...

...Re-nata Adler's Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker is the latest in a line stretching back at least to James Thur-ber's The Years with Ross, and including more recently the exquisitely bad Here but Not Here, by Lillian Ross, and Remembering Mr...

...And guess what...

...Renata Adler isn't so sure...

...White, Janet Flanner—is very impressive, and probably without parallel, and certainly a testament to some great gift of William Shawn's...

...It's still a good maga-zine—which is what it always was...

...Adler, though, wants us not only to accept the exceptionalist premise but also to believe that the magazine, since Shawn's departure, has become irredeemably debased...

...These nonfiction articles—did I mention they were long?— became, fairly or unfairly, the New Yorker's signature during the years when Adler supposes it was the finest magazine ever...

...Renata Adler worked for the magazine, starting in the early 1960s and staying there for thirty years...

...There are so many of these books, and their quality is generally so low, that the appearance of yet another one raises an obvious question: Who cares...

...When he did buy material from young or unknown writers," Adler writes, "then delayed publication for months, even years, the morale and then the work of those writers declined...

...In the many conversations she recounts verbatim, he refers bizarrely to a mysterious and nameless "they" who prevent him from pursuing one or another course of action...

...In her book she demonstrates that the New Yorker's eccentricities were a personal reflection of Shawn, who served as its editor from 1952 to 1987...

...Founded as a light and frothy "comic weekly" by Harold Ross, the New Yorker under Shawn enlarged its scope to include modernist fiction, experimental poetry, and long, definitive, gracefully written, exhaustive, long, long reporting pieces on every conceivable subject, from pesticide use to nuclear disarmament to horse racing...