The Talk of the Town

It is almost certainly true that more books have been written about the New Yorker than about any other magazine. In 1959, James Thurber wrote “My Years With Ross,” his bittersweet memoir about Harold Ross, the magazine’s co-founder and first editor. More recently, Thomas Kunkel wrote “Genius in Disguise,” a splendid biography of Ross. Brendan Gill and E.J. Kahn Jr. wrote reminiscences--”Here at The New Yorker” and “About The New Yorker & Me” respectively--that cover both the Ross era and the more recent era of William Shawn, his successor. And then there are “The Last Days of The New Yorker” by Gigi Mahon and “Newhouse” by Thomas Maier, books which deal with what happened after the magazine was sold in March 1985 to Samuel I. Newhouse’s Advance Publications.

The sale to Newhouse represented the end of an era in American letters. The New Yorker, which had nurtured writers as diverse as Vladimir Nabokov and J.D. Salinger, Rachel Carson and Truman Capote, and which seemed to be in every way, from its typeface to its stubborn refusal to use photography, completely original, was about to be absorbed into a corporate culture that included Vanity Fair and Vogue. The special kind of literary journalism that had flourished for decades at the New Yorker was under siege.

For 31 years, from 1962 to 1993, I was a staff writer for the magazine. Until the publication of the two new books under consideration here, I had not intended to comment publicly on the disappearance of Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker. But so much in these books by two longtime New Yorker contributors is at odds with what I so vividly remember--and so much is at stake for the larger literary and journalistic culture that provides the backdrop for the drama they each, in their own way, are at pains to tell--that I felt compelled to set down my own recollections.

I

I shall never forget the afternoon of Jan. 13, 1987. William Shawn, who had been the New Yorker’s editor since 1952, had been fired by S.I. Newhouse Jr. the day before. Soon after Newhouse’s Advance Publications purchased the magazine two years earlier, it drew up a document of intent entitled “Agreement and Plan of Merger.” This was an agreement that Advance essentially made with itself since it had now become the New Yorker Magazine Inc., the entity which was the other party to the document. The agreement stated, among other things, that any change of the magazine’s editor would be done after consulting and seeking the “advice and approval of a group of staff members to be selected and to function in a manner then deemed to be appropriate by the present editorial staff.” Newhouse had also publicly stated that the job of editor was Shawn’s as long as he wanted it. But now Shawn had been abruptly fired and, as we were to learn, told to leave the building no later than March 1.

When I first heard this news on the evening of Jan. 12, I had all the mixed emotions one has on learning of a death in the family: anger, grief, uncertainty about the future. For the New Yorker writers of my generation, William Shawn was the only editor we had known. Many of us--most I would guess--wrote with him in mind. It was not simply that he had the power to publish or not publish what we wrote, but we genuinely wanted to surprise and please him. For me, it went even beyond that. Before my first article was accepted by the New Yorker in 1961, I had never written a single word for publication except physics papers. But Mr. Shawn recognized, on the basis of that first submission, that I might have the ability to write about “science as a form of experience,” as he put it. He nurtured me through several false starts until I was finally able to do this. And now he was going to disappear, dropped summarily. I felt betrayed not only by Newhouse but also by the magazine itself for allowing things to come to this point.

On the morning of Jan. 13, I was working at home--never having had or wanted to have an office at the New Yorker--when the phone rang. It was someone from the magazine calling to say that there was going to be a meeting of the entire editorial staff that afternoon to see what response was possible to Mr. Shawn’s sacking. The staff consisted of both the editorial personnel one would find at any magazine as well as more than a hundred writers and artists who signed annual agreements and worked in a kind of limbo between salaried employees and freelance contributors. Some had offices at the magazine, but many, like myself, worked elsewhere--often not even in the city. The call had gone out to them as well, and as many as could come assembled that afternoon on the 18th floor of 25 W. 43rd St.--the floor where most of the writers and artists were located.

Mr. Shawn came down from the floor above where his office was located and explained to us that he had had no warning of his dismissal until Newhouse appeared the previous afternoon with a memo he had already sent to the press. It announced that Mr. Shawn had informed him that he was going to “retire” on March 1. Mr. Shawn told us that he had of course not told Newhouse that. In fact, he had been fired, pure and simple. The question we then raised among ourselves was what to do about it. One suggestion, which came from the writer Lawrence Weschler and perhaps others, was that we should go out on strike. We should simply keep the magazine from appearing until this matter was rectified. Mr. Shawn said that we should pay attention to Weschler because he had “just come back from Poland.” Weschler had been covering the strikes organized by Solidarity and thought a strike by us might be equally effective.

After the meeting, I described this notion to Gardner Botsford, who had edited my first article in the magazine. He was a stepson of Raoul Fleischmann, the magazine’s co-founder, and a half-brother to Peter Fleischmann, Raoul’s son, who, before the sale, was the magazine’s publisher and a principal stockholder. Botsford was close to people on both the business and editorial sides of the magazine for which he had worked since the late 1930s. He had retired but was still deeply interested in our fate. His wife, Janet Malcolm, was a very active writer. When I told Botsford about Weschler’s suggestion, he said it was one of the stupidest things he’d ever heard. All it would mean, he said, was that Newhouse would fire all of us and bring Tina Brown and her staff over from Vanity Fair, and that the magazine we loved would disappear. He was prescient, but it took six more years before that happened.

Weschler’s wasn’t the only idea that was discussed at that meeting. Lillian Ross, and some say Shawn himself, had a different one. Shawn’s successor had by then been announced; it was to be Robert Gottlieb, who since 1973 had been president of Alfred A. Knopf, a book publishing company owned by Newhouse since 1980, when he had purchased Random House. We would write a letter asking Gottlieb not to come. It was not that we had anything against Gottlieb personally, but we wanted Shawn to stay on at least until a successor the staff knew and was enthusiastic about could be put into place. Shawn was then 79--a vigorous 79--but the question of who would succeed him had become increasingly urgent even before the sale.

A committee was formed to draft such a letter on the spot; four hours later, it was presented to us for signature. The letter, which was addressed directly to Gottlieb, described the meeting that had produced it and went on to explain our feelings about choosing an editor from among our ranks. Then came the final paragraph:

“We wish to assure you--and we should have done so before--that none of these feelings or reservations were directed against you. Many of us know you personally [I was not among them] and professionally, and admire your splendid record at Knopf. We also know that you are a reasonable person. With this in mind, and cognizant of your expressed deep admiration and affection for this magazine, we urge that, after consultation with our owner Mr. Newhouse, you withdraw your acceptance of the post that has been offered to you.”

The letter was signed by 154 of us. A few people like Brendan Gill, who at the time of the sale had said, “People like the Newhouses are infinitely more sophisticated and culturally oriented than 90% of the staff of the New Yorker. Si [Newhouse] is an intellectual. He’s not the head of a shoe conglomerate,” refused to sign. Gill was nothing if not adaptable. For a great many people who did sign, it was an act of considerable courage. They had been with the New Yorker for much of their professional lives and were now in middle age. Considering Newhouse’s reputation for apparent vindictive capriciousness, they ran the risk of getting fired. If the letter failed and Gottlieb came anyway, where would they then be?

My own situation was somewhat different. I had another career to go back to. I was a university professor teaching and doing research in physics. While my writing had long since passed the stage where it was simply a hobby, I was not going to go hungry or become homeless if I lost my position at the New Yorker. Still, I signed with some reservation. Despite my contempt for what Newhouse had done and the way he had done it, I felt that Shawn (to say nothing of the executives at the New Yorker Magazine Inc. like Peter Fleischmann) had failed us and in a sense had ultimately betrayed us. Why I felt this way is best illustrated with a personal anecdote. It says just about everything.

After I had been writing for the magazine for a few years, I thought it might be nice to own some New Yorker stock. While the company was in theory public, in practice it was extremely difficult to buy any stock. (When Newhouse bought it in 1985, there were exactly 930 shareholders.) After a few unsuccessful attempts to find stock to buy, I happened to run into Geoffrey Hellman, a colleague who had been on the magazine for many years. I began to bemoan the fact that I could find no New Yorker stock for sale. Not to worry, Hellman said, he was about to meet a man named Daniel Silberberg, who had been a great friend and confidant of Harold Ross. He would introduce me, and if Silberberg liked me, he might sell me some stock. Silberberg liked me to the extent that he was willing to sell me 50 shares--no more--at $50 a share. Later, when I ran into him at parties, he always introduced me as the largest single stockholder in the magazine. The shares limped along. I could have done about as well in a savings bank, but the annual reports were marvelous. I still have the last one, which was issued for the year 1984. It reports that the magazine’s advertising revenues for that year had reached an all-time high and that it had made a net profit of $5,603,466--a sum which was a modest increase over the previous two years. (In the 12 years since Newhouse bought it, estimates of its losses are thought to total more than $100 million, although exact figures are not available because Advance Publications is privately held.)

In November 1981, the stock split five for one. Not long afterward, it began mysterimously to rise rapidly in price, suggesting, it appeared to me, that someone must have wanted the stock badly enough to cause such a rise. Someone, I thought, must be trying to take over the magazine.

About this time, I was walking along Fifth Avenue near the magazine when I ran into Milton Greenstein, the New Yorker’s lawyer and a vice president of the corporation. Milton, I asked, why is the New Yorker stock jumping? Is someone trying to take over the magazine? No, he assured me, that would be impossible since “we have 51% of the stock sitting on our board. If I were you,” he went on, “I would sell now, because I think it is a bubble.” It turned out that while the Fleischmann family owned 32% of the stock, two other stockholders, Philip Messinger, who was on the board, and William J. Reik, who was not, owned or managed between them 17%. The rest of the 51% was owned by other board members. Messinger was one of the board members Greenstein was sure would never sell out. When Newhouse offered $180 a share, however, he sold, and the story was essentially over. The final price was $200 a share for a total cost to Newhouse of about $168 million, and this for a magazine that did not even own its own building.

Fleischmann and the rest of the officers on the New Yorker Magazine Inc. had not lifted a finger, when they had the chance, to save the magazine. For example, they could have bought back enough stock when the price was low to ensure that it could never have been taken over. But by the time they woke up, it was too late. Incidentally, I did not follow Greenstein’s advice. I knew in my bones that it was no bubble.

II

Mr. Shawn reacted to the sale of the New Yorker in a manner that I can only describe as sleepwalking. He seemed not to have had any real understanding of what had happened; nor of what kind of people he was dealing with. He somehow felt that by exercising the power of his personality and the rightness of his convictions, he could educate Newhouse into seeing things his way. To this end, he wrote an impassioned comment about the sale and about what the magazine stood for, which was published--unsigned--in the April 22, 1985, issue. Today, it strikes me that if you took every sentence and replaced it by its negative you would have a perfect description of what the magazine has become. A short extract will serve:

“The business ownership of The New Yorker may change hands, but the idea of The New Yorker--the tradition of The New Yorker, the spirit of The New Yorker--has never been owned by anyone and never will be owned by anyone. It cannot be bought or sold. It exists in the minds of a group of writers, artists, editors, and editorial assistants who have been drawn together by literary, journalistic, aesthetic, and ethical principles they share, and by a shared outlook on the world. Whatever else may happen, it will endure.”

The final transformation of the magazine occurred in February of this year, when it was merged with the rest of the Conde Nast publications. It will be transferred bodily in 1999 into a new office tower in Times Square that Conde Nast is constructing. About the only thing that has endured is the magazine’s distinctive typeface.

We did not know all of this at the time of our meeting on that afternoon in 1987, although the portents were there. What we did know was that the New Yorker Magazine Inc. had betrayed us. Before the sale--no doubt anticipating a hostile takeover--the officers had concocted an arrangement by which they voted themselves and their colleagues in the business department (some of whom had been there for only a few years) large blocks of stock with the proviso that this arrangement would be triggered if such a takeover occurred. When it did, many of them reaped windfalls of several hundred thousand dollars each. The business people had secretly tried to persuade Mr. Shawn to designate key editorial personnel--no contract writers and artists were included--to feed at the trough. Mr. Shawn turned down this request because it singled out certain editorial people and also because it left the writers and artists out altogether. Some of the editorial people were unhappy about Mr. Shawn’s decision because when the sale occurred, they missed out on the windfall. Some of the writers and artists were unhappy because Mr. Shawn had made no attempt to get Newhouse to offer something to them--a contribution to our pension plan, for example. In the end, the people who had produced the only real asset that Newhouse had bought, the content of the magazine, got nothing.

I was unhappy chiefly because Mr. Shawn’s failure to prepare for his own succession was one of the weaknesses that had invited a takeover in the first place. To my mind, these lapses on Mr. Shawn’s part go a long way toward explaining why, to Mr. Shawn’s apparent surprise and disappointment, most of the staff did not follow him down the elevators when he left, which would have shut down the magazine.

The letter we signed was hand-delivered to Gottlieb with a copy to Newhouse. That evening, Newhouse and Mr. Shawn met to discuss the letter and, by accident, I was a witness. I was with a friend for dinner at the Hotel Algonquin, across from the magazine, and we were seated in the Rose Room, the dining room favored originally by Ross and later by Mr. Shawn. (They both sat in the same booth near the entrance. On the few occasions when I had lunch with Mr. Shawn, we sat there.) My friend and I had just ordered when I spotted Mr. Shawn and Newhouse about to enter the Rose Room. I felt inexplicably embarrassed, but it was too late to get up and leave and, in truth, I wanted to study their entrance. Mr. Shawn’s politeness, which at times verged on aggression, was notorious. You could not get through a door or into an elevator behind him. He would simply stand there until you went first. The entrance to the Rose Room was sufficiently constricted so that one of them had to enter first. They were both about the same height in the mid-5-foot range. Newhouse looked old for his years--the late 50s--and Mr. Shawn looked young for his. When they reached the entrance to the Rose Room, Newhouse put his arm firmly around Mr. Shawn’s shoulders and propelled him through first. If you knew what you were watching, everything you needed to know was in that gesture.

Later it became known that in their conversation, Newhouse was furious because Mr. Shawn had not prevented us from sending our letter to Gottlieb. Newhouse came from a corporate culture in which preventing unwanted outbursts from the help was second nature. There was no way Mr. Shawn could have prevented us from writing and sending the letter. Gottlieb was, to put it mildly, not pleased to get it. But he made it clear in his response that he was coming anyway. He told me one time that he had “always known” that someday he would be the editor of the New Yorker. To his very great credit, no one, as far as I know, was fired or in any way punished for signing the letter. The writers and artists, including myself, continued to be able to work pretty much as they had before. While I had some reservations about Gottlieb as an editor, I always felt that he was an extremely decent man who truly loved the magazine. One thing he did was to continue Mr. Shawn’s policy of renewing annual agreements of people who had made significant contributions in the past but who had become less productive. It didn’t cost the magazine much and it gave these people a sense of dignity. When Tina Brown succeeded Gottlieb after he was suddenly fired in the summer of 1992, she lost no time in “cleaning house.” Most of the older writers left over from Mr. Shawn’s tenure were fired. I was among them.

The reader will have noticed that in everything I have written, I have almost always referred to Mr. Shawn as Mr. Shawn. For writers of my generation, calling Mr. Shawn by his first name would have been inconceivable. He addressed all of us after years of acquaintance by our last names (Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Mehta), and we did likewise. When Gottlieb became editor, we were suddenly all on a first-name basis. It was a new style consistent with the fact that Gottlieb’s office door was generally open. Mr. Shawn was one of the most private people I have ever known and calling him Mr. Shawn was part of our respecting that privacy. But Ved Mehta is a writer of my own generation. He was one of the first New Yorker writers I got to know, and our friendship continues. We have disagreed over the years on our evaluation of Mr. Shawn’s character--and I disagree with his evaluation in his new book--but we have done so with mutual affection and respect. It would be absurd for me to refer to Ved Mehta in the rest of this essay as Mr. Mehta, or Mehta, so I will call him Ved. Lillian Ross is a different matter. I knew her also over the years, although not anything like as well as I know Ved. She will be Miss Ross or simply Ross.

III

Ved Mehta’s arrival at the New Yorker in 1959 was somewhat more plausible than my own two years later. He, at least, had written a book and a very good one, “Face to Face,” about what it meant to grow up as a blind person in India. This, incidentally, was the last thing Ved wrote about his blindness until his series of autobiographical memoirs, of which this book on Mr. Shawn is the latest. Ved had been at Oxford and had won a fellowship to do a doctorate in history at Harvard. Before coming to the United States, he had spent two months visiting his family in India. He was so struck by how the India he rediscovered differed from the India he had remembered that he wanted to write about it. He tried various magazines, but none seemed to be interested or, if any were, it was in something exceedingly brief, which is not what Ved had in mind. Among the people Ved talked to was Norman Cousins, the editor of the Saturday Review, who had given Ved’s “ Face to Face” a favorable review. Cousins’ magazine could not accommodate the proposed 13,000-word length Ved was considering; but while Ved was in Cousins’ office, Cousins suddenly got up and called William Shawn. The next thing Ved knew, he was talking to Mr. Shawn on the telephone and that very day had an appointment to meet him. What happened when Ved met Mr. Shawn was very similar to what happened to me and to the other writers who joined the staff in the next two decades. Mr. Shawn had a genius for drawing you out. He made you feel that what you were telling him was the most important thing he had heard all day or even all year. You poured out your heart and soul while, I am sure, he was evaluating whether you could translate what you were babbling on about into something eventually publishable in the New Yorker. Ved came out of this interview (as I would from my own) floating on air, although Mr. Shawn, as was his custom, had promised nothing except to read whatever he wrote.

Ved returned to India and wrote the first of his long articles for the New Yorker--”Indian Summer.” It was edited by Mr. Shawn. Indeed, Mr. Shawn edited nearly all of Ved’s articles, which was unusual. Mr. Shawn liked to edit one long article by each new writer--I suppose to see how you worked with an editor and to get a better sense of how you wrote. Then you were farmed out to one of the extremely gifted people at the magazine who did most of the editing. (Mr. Shawn, by the way, read these edited versions minutely and came up with comments and suggestions that no one had thought of.) During my tenure at the magazine, I must have worked with a dozen editors.

Beyond Shawn’s editing Ved’s articles, there developed a relationship between Ved and the Shawn family that was even more unusual. By this time, the early 1960s, Ved had become a full-fledged staff member of the New Yorker and had moved to New York. Once there, he quickly became almost an adopted member of the Shawn family. He shared holidays with the Shawns, went to their parties and became a close friend of their sons, Allen and Wallace, so close that at one point in his book, Ved writes, “I felt I had missed out by not having been brought up as a Shawn child.” Very few of the New Yorker writers I know--the exceptions are mostly the older writers who had known Mr. Shawn even before he became editor of the magazine--had ever set foot in his apartment, even once.

Ved writes about what appears to be a fairly typical family gathering at the Shawns: “I heard the turning of the lock on the front door [of the Shawns’ apartment]. ‘Father has come!’ Mrs. [Cecille] Shawn cried, rushing out into the entrance hall, with Wallace, Allen, Jonathan [Schell] and Eve [a friend of the boys] close behind. I followed.

“Mr. Shawn walked in, hat in hand, and dressed in his characteristic navy-blue suit and waistcoat--a kind of uniform that seemed to belie his artistic temperament. He was weighed down with a huge stack of familiar manuscript-size New Yorker envelopes and with a briefcase. Mrs. Shawn greeted him as if he were a returning war hero. He put his things in the hall closet, kissed her and their sons, and shook hands all around. The din in the living room continued unabated when he went in: people kept talking, as if they knew that he didn’t like his entrance to be noticed. He made the rounds, greeting each person quietly.”

Then, Ved goes on, “One of two facing sofas near the window, and at right angles to a fireplace that seemed never to have been used, had all along been left unoccupied. Mr. Shawn sat down in a corner seat of that one, with Mrs. Shawn next to him and holding his hand, as if they were newlyweds. Then she got up and busied herself passing around hors d’oeuvres--liver pa^te, melon balls with toothpicks, and cheese and crackers.”

In preparing his book, Ved had not only his own extensive experience of the Shawn family to look to, he also had the rather reluctant cooperation of Cecille Shawn, who is now 92. After making the somewhat delphic suggestion that Ved should write “only about your direct experience of him,” she did tell him about her husband’s childhood and antecedents. Mr. Shawn, whose family name was Chon before he changed it, was born in Chicago to a rather secular Jewish family. His father, “Jackknife Ben,” sold knives to the meatpackers. One of his brothers, Mike, wrote the Wrigley’s chewing gum jingle “Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun.” Mr. Shawn was the youngest child. He and Cecille met in Chicago in 1925 soon after the New Yorker was started. “He fell in love with the New Yorker and with me at the same time,” Mrs. Shawn told Ved. In 1933, Mr. Shawn was hired by the magazine as a Talk of the Town reporter. Mr. Shawn had come to New York to pursue a career, which didn’t work out, as a songwriter; he seems to have been an excellent jazz pianist, although I never heard him play. He was devoted to the music of Duke Ellington. When Ellington died in 1974, he visited the funeral parlor to view the body.

Harold Ross almost immediately recognized Mr. Shawn’s exceptional abilities and in 1935 asked Mr. Shawn to become an associate editor. About this time, Shawn wrote the only piece he ever wrote for The New Yorker that was signed--sort of. It was an odd fictional piece about a meteor that landed on Manhattan. It was signed “W.S.” Rereading it, I doubt that Mr. Shawn would have accepted it for publication in the magazine over which he would later come to preside. In 1939, Harold Ross appointed him the managing editor of what was known as the “fact department.” In this capacity, and with the approval and encouragement of Ross, he transformed the New Yorker. The issues of the 1930s, excepting a few really good articles, read like a superannuated college monthly. If someone had told you then that 10 years later, an entire issue would be devoted to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima--John Hersey’s masterpiece--or indeed, to any serious subject, you would have had a lot of trouble believing it. The world had changed and the New Yorker with it. When Harold Ross died in 1952, Mr. Shawn succeeded him.

All this is described in detail in Ved’s book. While some of the things he says strike me as strange, my main concern is what is left out. The loving picture of Mr. Shawn that emerges reminds me of those photographs you find on the Internet. The top part is wonderfully clear and you keep waiting for the image to scroll down and reveal the rest. When, for example, I read Ved’s description of the events that took place on Jan. 13, 1987, I felt that we had attended somewhat different meetings, even though he gets the basic facts right. There is, for instance, no mention of the idea of our going out on strike and Mr. Shawn’s comment about Weschler and Poland. I also think that Ved greatly underestimates the anger that there was, at least by some of the people, toward Mr. Shawn and the New Yorker Magazine Inc. Of the things I found strange, here are two. Both have to do with money.

Ved writes several times in the book that the New Yorker was stingy with expense money. In 1965, Ved went to Mr. Shawn with the idea of doing a further piece on India. He says that Mr. Shawn told him that the New Yorker would not be able to help “with any expenses for such a vast undertaking, since it was something the New Yorker in the normal course of things would not be interested in doing. There were a lot of stories closer to home.” I have no reason to doubt that Mr. Shawn said this, but it is completely contrary to my own experience. Two years later, I went to see Mr. Shawn about going to Nepal with a Chamonix mountain guide and his wife to write a profile of the country. I had written a series of articles about the invention and practice of climbing in the Alps and now wanted to broaden the venue. Mr. Shawn asked how much such a trip would cost. Thinking fast, I said, “About $10,000.” Two days later, I had a check. Mr. Shawn was sending people all over the world. I would guess Mr. Shawn’s comment to Ved was his way of telling him that he was not interested in the subject. (Similar things later happened to me and to others.) Then there is the matter of Mr. Shawn’s own compensation from the magazine. Ved claims, without giving a source, that in the 35 years that Mr. Shawn was the editor of the magazine, he never received a raise. This defies belief. Lillian Ross, who is even more determined than Ved to make Mr. Shawn into some sort of saint or perhaps martyr, claims only that he never asked for a raise, which is at least more believable. Asking for raises around the New Yorker was something that was generally not done.

IV

Lillian Ross subtitles her book “A Love Story,” and perhaps that is what she thinks she has written. It is something quite the opposite: a deeply hurtful, self-indulgent tasteless book that never should have been written at all and, having been written, never should have been published while the people involved were still alive. As it is, the book is almost an act of vengeance. If one believes what she has written, then the William Shawn of Ved’s book and, indeed, the Shawn that I knew, was a hollow sham, a fraud. (It is possible, I suppose, that the man Ross describes revealed his “true” self only to her, all the while presenting another visage to literally everyone else in his life. But it strains credulity.)

Ross came to the New Yorker in 1945, hired by Mr. Shawn as a reporter. She was one of four women hired at the time to replace male reporters who had gone off either to serve in or cover World War II. Harold Ross did not like women in the office-- he viewed them as “trouble”--and it took something like the war to get him to hire them as reporters. Ross was given her assignments by Mr. Shawn, and he edited and approved her material. He also fell in love with her. By the early 1950s, they had begun what Ved in his book, in his only glancing reference to the matter, calls an affair. If Ross is to be credited (and here I am at a loss), calling their relationship an “affair” would be like calling the sinking of the Titanic a “maritime incident.” Shawn’s relationship with her was, she informs us, his real marriage. She was his real wife. Cecille was some kind of fiction. She writes, “He said that his real self was not in his home. He said that his presence in his home was a deception, that he made efforts with his children but he felt like a failure.” Or, as she says he often put it in referring to his wife and children, “I am there but not there.” In short, everything that Ved thought was happening at the Shawns was a mirage. Ross describes her relationship using the kind of semen-stained--”After forty years, our love-making had the same passion, the same energies (alarming to me, at first, in our early weeks together), the same tenderness, the same inventiveness, the same humor, the same textures as it had at the beginning”--celebrity name-dropping--”At dinner one night at the Chaplins’ I met Truman Capote, visiting with his friend Jack Dunphy”--that her new friend Tina Brown, whom Newhouse appointed to replace Gottlieb, introduced to the New Yorker. In short, her book is everything that William Shawn despised.

But it goes deeper even than this. Again, if Ross is to be credited, Shawn’s life at the magazine was also a deception. It is her claim that he fundamentally hated his job. “Bill himself,” she writes, “desperately wanted to be relieved of his responsibility. [This describes the period just preceding his being fired.] More and more, he spoke to me about what he called his ‘mistake’ in having taken on the job in the first place, the ‘big mistake’ of what he had done with his life, the ‘ultimate cell’ he was in. And yet he felt he could not abandon all the writers and artists who depended on him. The entrapment he had feared as a child had years ago become a nightmarish reality for him, but the daily needs of the creative people he had worked with had always intruded and diffused the nightmare. Now Bill was feeling the urgency more keenly, and he was in a constant state of despair over his inability to find a solution to his problem.” In short, being fired was, apparently, a relief.

I have no knowledge that would enable me to cast any light on Mr. Shawn’s relationship with his family or with Ross, but I do have some knowledge of what occurred in the matter of the succession, which leads me to believe that if Mr. Shawn’s “problem” was to find a way of leaving a job he truly found “nightmarish,” the door was wide open. This is also discussed in some detail in Ved’s book, but here again, his understanding and mine are different. Before giving a few of the details, there are two general points to keep in mind. Mr. Shawn served at the pleasure of the New Yorker Magazine Inc., meaning basically Peter Fleischmann. If the magazine had had a normal history with some normal turn-over of editors--Harold Ross, its only previous editor, had died in office--then Mr. Shawn would have had (at most) only an advisory role in the choice of who succeeded him. As it was, Peter Fleischmann was in such awe of Shawn that it was somehow taken as a given by the New Yorker Magazine Inc. that Mr. Shawn had the right to designate his successor. When his designate--Jonathan Schell--was deemed unsuitable by a vast majority of the staff, Mr. Shawn seemed to feel that he had been deprived of a right and reacted accordingly. That aside, I do not think that a successor in place at the time of the takeover would have necessarily changed Newhouse’s intent to install Gottlieb and then Tina Brown. Playing musical chairs with his editors appears to be Newhouse’s modus operandi. Having a prospective successor might well have changed the eagerness of large stockholders such as Philip Messinger to bail out, however, which allowed the takeover. Indeed, Messinger was outspoken about his concern for the future of the magazine (that is, for his investment). He saw in Mr. Shawn an editor in his late 70s with no coherent plan for someone to succeed him. And he was right.

In the spring of 1977, Mr. Shawn informed Schell that he would now be the deputy editor of the magazine and that he would soon succeed him. Schell, who was then 33, had written his first piece for the New Yorker 10 years earlier--a searing account of the destruction of a South Vietnamese village by American troops. During the war in Vietnam, Schell wrote most of the political commentary in the magazine opposing the war. Like Ved, he was almost a part of the Shawn family, having been a classmate of Wallace’s at Putnam and Harvard. Mr. Shawn felt comfortable with Schell and indeed had begun grooming him as an editor before 1977. What he did not anticipate--and never really understood--was the reaction the attempted appointment caused among the writers and editors. The place nearly came apart.

There were some objections that were easy to state but did not get to the heart of the matter. For example, before the spring of 1977, Schell had never edited a long fact piece--the bread and butter of the magazine. Indeed, the first one he was given to edit was, ironically, one of Ved’s. Ved was so upset by the result, as he tells us in his book, that he vigorously complained to Mr. Shawn, who then seems to have edited it himself. One might argue, as Ved does in his book, that actual mechanical editing was not a strictly necessary skill for the New Yorker editor, who might function more like the acquiring editor of a publishing house. But this was contrary to the tradition of the magazine. Both Mr. Shawn and Harold Ross were editors of genius. In any case, the crux of the objections had partly to do with Schell himself and partly--perhaps mainly--with an inability to accept the idea that someone was going to replace Mr. Shawn.

I barely knew Schell, and he seemed like a charming, friendly man to me. I had an experience with him, however, that really worried me. A year or so earlier, he had asked me to see him in his office. I had just published a long profile of Albert Einstein in the magazine, and Schell told me that he wanted to understand relativity better. Could I explain it to him? I got through about three minutes, when he said cheerfully that he guessed physics was something that couldn’t really be explained to the layman. Since this is what I thought I had been doing at the magazine for the previous 25 years, I was rather taken aback. And now he was going to be my editor.

I learned about the proposed succession when I was having lunch with Ved and some of the senior New Yorker writers, including Geoffrey Hellman and Richard Rovere. One of them, probably Hellman since he enjoyed this sort of thing, asked if I knew that Schell was going to be the editor of the magazine, just to see how I would react. My response was reported to Mr. Shawn more or less verbatim. That night, I received a telephone message asking me to call him at home at any hour, no matter how late. When I did, I was asked to explain my feelings about Schell, which I did in terms considerably more temperate than those I had used at lunch. Mr. Shawn ended the conversation by saying that Schell had many wonderful qualities and that it was a pity I didn’t know him better, a sentiment I could readily agree with. But he must have discovered that my opinion was widespread because Schell did not become the deputy editor.

I am certain that Ved has got what happened next wrong. He doesn’t give his sources, but at the time, and afterward, I spoke to as many of the people who were in a position to know as I could. In writing this, I have once again spoken to several of the people who were there. Ved claims that in 1978, Peter Fleischmann asked for Mr. Shawn’s resignation. I do not think this ever happened. One of the people who was there at the time told me recently that for the business side to have done that would have been the same as shooting itself in the foot. There was no replacement in view for Mr. Shawn, and the magazine might well have collapsed. What the business staff did do was remind him that in his agreement with the New Yorker Magazine Inc., there was a stipulation that should he want to resign, he was required to give them a six-month notice. In mid-December 1978, Mr. Shawn wrote a very long letter to Fleischmann laying out the case for Schell as his only conceivable successor and going over the deficiencies of the other potential candidates one by one. Much of this filtered back to the editorial staff and caused so much turmoil that, on Dec. 27, Mr. Shawn posted a notice on the office bulletin board announcing that he was staying on. Having attempted to anoint Schell as his successor--three times as it happened--and having failed each time, he began a series of experiments with possible successors. When Newhouse took over the magazine, the successor designate was Charles McGrath, but Mr. Shawn was still firmly in charge. If, as Ross claims, Mr. Shawn wanted to be liberated from his job, he certainly went about it in a very peculiar way.

Schell and Ross were two people who did follow Mr. Shawn down the elevators. At the time, she seemed so angry with Newhouse that I was sure she would never write for a Newhouse publication, let alone the New Yorker, again. I was wrong. A few months after Mr. Shawn’s death--at age 85 on Dec. 6, 1992--she was back writing for the magazine. In her book, she is full of warm praise for Tina Brown. She even claims that if only Mr. Shawn had been able to convince his art director, the New Yorker would have been ablaze with photographs during his tenure--something I find about as plausible as much else in “Here But Not Here.” One thing she does not do is say a kind word about her many colleagues whose contributions to the magazine were surely as significant as hers and who were being summarily fired when she was being rehired. On this, she is silent. What she does tell us is that the night Mr. Shawn died, she called the private number Shawn had installed for her in his apartment. For the first time ever, Cecille answered and said, “He’s gone.” Ross and her adopted son, Erik, ran over to the Shawns’ apartment uninvited. When she knocked, Wallace Shawn was not sure whether or not to let her in. When Cecille saw her, she said, “He died in my arms.”