Mr. Shawn's Neighborhood

The New Yorker looms large among American magazines in its role as cultural, artistic, and journalistic institution. As such, it has inspired reams of published material-from the arcane and anecdotal to serious critical inquiry. Most appealing to the reading public, however, are the informal histories that seem to appear every quarter century or so. The best of these, Thurber's My Years With Ross and Brendan Gill's Here at the New Yorker are still in print and read today. Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, by Ved Mehta, is a welcome and worthy addition to the library that has accrued around the magazine...and, given the recent history of The New Yorker and the direction it has taken, perhaps the last word on an icon in decline.

Mehta, born in India, educated in Oxford, and, not incidentally, blind since childhood, successfully employs a threefold strategy in his story; he narrates memoir, history, and , most importantly, elegy, in a seamless tapestry. What emerges is a fascinating picture of a very daunting enterprise. The triumph of the book is that, within the structured memoir of Mehta's years at The New Yorker, it quietly spins the subversive tale of how one publication escaped the disastrous (for journalism) wedding of financial and editorial concerns.

Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker is the eighth title in Mehta's epic autobiographical The Continents of Exile series. Ironically, it was an early autobiographical piece, "Indian Summer", that launched Mehta's writing career with The New Yorker. The story of how that submission came about, and what followed, immediately introduces the book's quiet hero-not Mehta himself but the extraordinary editor William Shawn. Shawn's courteous treatment of the young writer at their very first meeting is perhaps more shocking to a reader today than it was to Mehta. The legendary editor personally calls on the 25 year old Harvard graduate student and invites him up to The New Yorker office for a cup of tea. That Shawn is not an average editor is apparent at once: when Mehta asks him how long the piece under discussion should be, Shawn responds, "'You should not worry about that. You should simply write it to its natural length-whatever that is...'"

On the strength of "Indian Summer" and another piece on philosophy, Shawn invited Mehta into the stable. It is hard to imagine today, but Shawn seemed to have unerring instincts when it came to the printed word. He was, essentially, house mother to a three-ring circus of very talented writers, writers who often had great difficulties managing their lives outside the office. Perhaps this explains Shawn's efforts for Mehta: Not only did the editor himself find an apartment for the young man but pushed aside his concern about rent, saying "'If you couldn't pay the rent at any time, The New Yorker would take over the lease.'" It is very easy to see why Mehta was astounded and full of gratitude toward this man, so important in his realm, who had almost literally plucked him out of school and promised to take care of him.

Indeed, if Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker has any fault, it may be in the unswerving admiration that Mehta expresses. To his credit, he anticipates this criticism, noting in the forward his reasons for always referring to Shawn as "Mr." and in passages such as this: "I am aware that I sound as if I had fallen in love with Mr. Shawn. And, indeed, I had had such fantasies when I was in love-when I had lost my sense of self...Such love is considered a form of sickness, and certainly not associated with a writer and his editor. Ironically, however, I considered my love for Mr. Shawn a sign of health...his publication of my writing as if I were a typical writer rather than a blind or an Indian writer made me believe that I was not losing myself to him but, rather, discovering my true self..." What saves the book is that Mehta's admiration is so clearly sincere. If you want real dirt on William Shawn, you'll have to find it elsewhere--most likely (and the publication dates simply can't be a coincidence) in Here But Not Here, by Lillian Ross.

During the course of Mehta's memoir we get a fairly objective history of the magazine during this period. Not surprisingly, Mehta's heaven was hell for others. And, although he himself is loathe to say a disparaging word about Shawn, Mehta does quote others, sometime anonymously, who feel no such restraint. "Not all writers subscribed to the general view that Mr. Shawn had created ideal conditions for writing and drawing. Under the pressureless pressures of being left alone to do whatever they liked, and meet no demands of any kind, people fell apart: they had nervous breakdowns, or developed writer's block, which sometimes lasted for years." This last, of course, is a reference to Joseph Mitchell, that marathon man of writer's block, but others as well expressed dissatisfaction with Shawn's methods. There were, on the other hand, many flourishing. Even a partial list is impressive: John Cheever, Donald Barthelme, Rachel Carson, John Updike, Ann Beattie, Jamaica Kincaid, Edmund Wilson, Roger Angell, and J.D. Salinger. Whatever Shawn's idiosyncrasies, The New Yorker was his magazine--from the day he took over from Harold Ross to the day he left more than 30 years later--and the talent that he assembled and nurtured is indeed astonishing.

Compelling as Mehta's story is, what is perhaps most memorable about Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker is the elegy it becomes, for it is quite clear that Mehta considers the old magazine dead. The painful and mishandled issue of editorial succession is mapped out in sad detail; few come out looking good--perhaps only Shawn and Jonathan Schell--and, unlike earlier pages in the book, these last are full of recriminations. To his credit, Robert Gottlieb appears merely trapped in a job no one could possibly accomplish. Tina Brown, however, is portrayed in less than flattering terms: opportunistic, superficial, and unfeeling are three of the nicer adjectives that come to mind. Some of the writers don't fare much better--but I'll rightly leave that gossip to the reader.

Perhaps The New Yorker, as many feel, simply could not continue in it's traditional style--the world, and publishing, has changed too much. Yet Mehta's book makes one wish that, in this particular case, things didn't always have to change. Individuals like William Shawn are rare, and what happened at The New Yorker will make them rarer still. Another way to look at it: Shawn, an aesthetic perfectionist and master of artistic diplomacy, probably couldn't buy an editorial position today. And that, indeed, is the real tragedy of this fascinating story.