New York, 10036

The appointment of an Englishwoman as editor of The New Yorker in 1992 provoked not only screams from readers and writers but amusement among connoisseurs of irony. When The New Yorker was created in 1925 as a magazine of wit and sophistication, it owed a great deal to the English tradition of learning worn lightly and tailored to a thoroughbred frame. Self-deprecation, understatement, wit--all the qualities the British upper classes publicly applaud to protect themselves from the other classes’ resentment and ambition--were encouraged in its writers and appreciated by its readers, who bought the magazine for social guidance as well as jokes.

But, though it never abandoned charm and a taste for the high life, The New Yorker added to them a serious, confident engagement with morality, politics and culture, a diet on which it grew shiny and fat. To most writers the magazine was, as Woody Allen said, “hallowed ground”; to the readers, it was, as the subtitle of Ben Yagoda’s “About Town” points out, a smaller, better world, one whose inhabitants, though more learned and clever than you, would always treat you as an equal.

David Remnick, the current New Yorker editor, has produced two anthologies that suggest something of that time, though “Wonderful Town” is a strange title for stories of poverty, derangement, suicide, loneliness, drunkenness, thuggery and faulty artificial insemination. The enchantment of New York is better conveyed in “Life Stories,” in which Alva Johnston follows the epic career of a bogus Russian prince, Lillian Ross watches Hemingway and his friends trade absurdities over champagne, A.J. Liebling sees Floyd Patterson fight and Joseph Mitchell takes a walk with the keeper of the African Methodist cemetery, who tells him, “Stones rot the same as bones rot, and nothing endures but the spirit.”

Though The New Yorker’s spirit endured, in various states of health, for more than 60 years, it was not eternal. Magazines, like all organisms, have a life span, and well before Tina Brown strode in, The New Yorker was in a period of senile decay. As Yagoda’s and Renata Adler’s “Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker” show (the latter not entirely intentionally), the magazine had developed an atmosphere, both in its office and in its pages, of creepiness and preciosity.

Decadence within the magazine’s walls was abetted by barbarism without. The New Yorker’s world could not remain forever intact amid the philistinism and coarseness of the last few decades, their excess of ego and want of shame. After Brown took over, The New Yorker, like most publications, began to swing with the monkeys or explain patiently why they should not throw bananas. I cannot say which of two typical Brown-period stories I found more dispiriting: an item on an actor who, in a theatrical nude scene, displayed a remarkably large penis or an essay of several thousand words asserting that people really ought to know something about a topic before expressing an opinion.

When Remnick became editor, the smut was dropped but the narcissism remained. For example, this year’s 75th anniversary issue ran an account by Wendy Wasserstein of maternity at 50, a piece so gurgly and gooey with self-approbation that having a baby seemed redundant. Brown, who had edited two magazines of wealth-worship, also demolished The New Yorker’s famous barrier between the editorial and business departments. From the beginning, the advertising staff had been forbidden to even speak with the editors and writers lest, its first editor said, they “lose their spontaneity and verve and we will be just like all other magazines . . . timid, self-conscious and afraid.”

Articles might be of little relevance (or even interest) to most readers, but no one could accuse them of being opportunistic; the magazine’s self-effacing first two editors considered publicity even more despicable than advertising. Brown, though capitalism in her native country was noted for its diffidence, not to say incompetence, was known at her former job, Yagoda says, for “paying a great deal of attention to commercial concerns--entertaining suggestions from the advertising department, . . . tying articles to movie and book releases and other events that could bring ads in.” This did not keep her from announcing that she wished to revive the spirit of The New Yorker’s early days--a claim she broadcast through her full-time press agent.

“I started to get out a light magazine that wouldn’t concern itself with the weighty problems of the universe,” its founder wrote in 1951, the year he died, “and now look at me.” Harold Ross might have pretended to be one of the hapless men in a Thurber cartoon, but, as his collected letters show, he was the victim only of his immensely high standards. “Jesus Christ,” he told a contributor who submitted an article attacking the postwar anti-Communist hysteria, “why did you have to write this goddamned piece? Now I have to run it.”

Ross, who founded The New Yorker and edited it for 26 years, was born in 1892 in Aspen, Colo., then a mining town of three streets--one for homes, one for stores, one for whorehouses. (When he visited in the ‘30s, some of the same whores were still doing business, for much lower prices.) Ross went to high school for two years, tramped around the West as a reporter in one town after another, helped dig the Panama Canal, fought in World War I and never doubted that he was the best person in the world to edit a magazine synonymous with urban sophistication. Nor was he intimidated by New Yorkers with more education, power or money.

Ross’ reply to Henry Luce, indignant at the way he and Time Inc. had been portrayed in the magazine by Wolcott Gibbs, is as much a classic as the profile itself. Beginning with a nicely judged “Dear Luce,” Ross never shouts or sneers but speaks in a tone rarely heard by those in Luce’s position. “I was astonished to realize the other night that you are apparently unconscious of the notorious reputation Time and Fortune have for crassness in description, for cruelty and scandal-monging [sic] and insult . . . You are generally regarded as being mean as hell and frequently scurrilous.” Ross was just as tough with his own publisher, Raoul Fleischmann, scolding his boss, “You violated a very important rule of this office,” when he tried to scrounge a free movie ticket.

In “The World Through a Monocle,” Mary F. Corey ignores personalities to look at what The New Yorker of the 1950s said, both explicitly and by implication, about politics, money, class, sex and race. But this decade has been plowed, seeded and harvested so many times that there is probably nothing new to say about its condescension to women and nonwhite people, its mindless materialism and its cozy hypocrisy (typically, in a New Yorker piece of this period, none of the troublesome drunks at a suburban party does anything worse than the Mexican hat dance).

Not that one expects revelations from an author who writes about “paradigm shifts” and “an amanuensic function” and who can say, in a rather comprehensive parody of academic prose, “If the postwar New Yorker is a mirror of its readership, it may, in fact, be a distorted [sic] fun-house mirror--a Zerrspiegel--its surfaces peculiarly designed to enhance certain images, distort others, and erase [sic] still others.”

Having studied several tons of letters, memos and manuscripts, Yagoda has produced, in “About Town,” an extraordinarily concise, thorough and evenhanded history of the magazine under Ross and his successor, William Shawn, who ran The New Yorker from Ross’ death to 1987.

Occasionally there are a few tired phrases or vacuous adjectives (“inimitable,” “indispensable,” “perceived”--as in the “perceived humorlessness” of Jonathan Schell). But Yagoda ably covers the whole waterfront--fiction, facts, cartoons, poetry, advertisements, office politics--and, though making dozens of judgments on literary, business and personal matters, bolsters them with so much deftly chosen evidence that it’s hard to disagree with any.

Without dragging us into the swamp of who changed which word why, Yagoda points out that the famed meticulous editing could be deadly to sound and sense (“If they understand anything, writers know that the world is not characterized by absolute clarity”).

He also points out that The New Yorker, while attacking McCarthyism, cut adrift some of its most vulnerable contributors, that after many years of “the bland leading the bland,” the anti-Vietnam War pieces of the ‘60s were so shocking to many subscribers because “a sizable proportion . . . did not read the magazine” and that The New Yorker was not as hospitable as it might have been to Jews (Katharine White, its fiction editor for many years, judged a short story by how closely it resembled Jane Austen).

With unacademic sharpness, he notes that The New Yorker office, like the magazine, resembled a family and that in Shawn’s later years this family--with contributors taking on the roles of good son, naughty son, serious and sassy daughters-- became increasingly fractious and neurotic.

In the week William Shawn was fired, Adler writes in “Gone,” she had lunch with another New Yorker writer, Tony Hiss, and “talked about what it might have meant to grow up at some other place.”

The implication that they are grown-up now is one the reader may not share. Like the world, The New Yorker has suffered in recent decades from people who think adulthood is rather nervous-making and a bit, well, common. (The typical humor piece in the ‘80s was a cloud of epicene giggles.)

In the magazine-as-family scenario, Adler plays the part of daddy’s little princess. Adjusting her tiara, she tells us she was quite distressed, actually sick, in 1963, when another magazine dared to rewrite one of her pieces and that in 1981 she simply had to write an essay for The New York Review of Books showing that The New Yorker’s film critic, Pauline Kael, was a horrid, nasty person, and it was a very, very good article, she knows, because her friend Donald Barthelme said so. (Actually, what most of us remember from that piece was Adler’s assertion that it was impossible, when one wrote as quickly as Kael did, to write well. She knew this, because she had tried.)

In her fragmented, mannered memoir of Shawn’s last two decades at the magazine, Adler (who does not deign to identify some people or check how others spell their names) pushes her words about like a picky eater, at times too disgusted to part her lips. Shuddering at the Washington coverage after writer Richard Rovere left, all Adler says is, “One has only to look at the work of his successors . . . Elizabeth Drew, for example.” (Pauline Kael, I am told, expressed her opinion of Drew more forcefully, calling out once to Shawn: “Hey, Bill, where does she write that stuff--on your lap?”)

Adler’s weary hauteur lifts only when she considers her be^te noir, Adam Gopnik: “His questions were not questions, or even quite soundings. Their purpose was to maneuver you into advising him to do what he would, in any case, walk over corpses to do.” If Adler could be induced to climb off her rocking horse, she might yet develop a good line in screeds.

John Seabrook begins “Nobrow,” part of which appeared in The New Yorker, with an explanation of how, under Shawn, the magazine failed its readers. Because the magazine did not write about, for instance, rap music, “as rap entered the mainstream,” it wasn’t “able to comment knowledgeably about it.” Though he writes about MTV, Star Wars and other “groovy and exciting and fresh” subjects, Seabrook, another ostensible grown-up, is really writing a defense of his preference for funny T-shirts over his father’s pinstriped suits.

Indeed, most of his book would not exist if Seabrook had heeded Ross’ fiat: “Nobody gives a damn about a writer and his problems except another writer.” We (that is, I) would have been spared, inter alia, Seabrook’s difficulty in buying good tomatoes and his three-page story about something someone said to make him feel bad in 1983.

Perhaps the most offensive aspect of this narcissistic ramble is that Seabrook never linguistically cuts the golden umbilicus between him and his wealthy, educated parents. Every few dozen pages, he slips into his praise of pop stars a reference to Henry James or Laotzu. It’s a bit like being groped in the subway by a stranger who then gives you a Masonic handshake.

Seabrook has only one anecdote worth repeating--that, when Steven Spielberg visited the magazine’s office and asked to see the library, Brown whispered to an employee, “Where’s the library?” This wonderful line could have been invented by the author of a play, movie or musical about a Brown-type editor, and that is where we will probably see it in years to come.

Though Alexander Chancellor was not, he says, familiar with The New Yorker before Tina Brown hired him to edit “The Talk of the Town,” he in many ways embodies the Englishness to which many of its former contributors aspired--a persona of affable ineffectuality, a cross between Mr. Pooter and Bertie Wooster after a rough night.

As one might guess of someone who has been the respected editor of the Spectator and other English magazines, there is a good deal more to him than readers will find in “Some Times in America.” But Chancellor has nothing to say--or at least nothing he wishes to say. Brown’s New Yorker, on which he offers only tepid minutiae, occupies only a part of his book; the rest is filled with bread-and-butter notes to the rich wid- ows he walked; descriptions of arcane occupations, such as that of a hat-check “taking coats from people behind a door at the back where they would stay until the customers were ready to leave”; and assurances of his harmlessness (“a cafe called Eat Here Now! in which I had often eaten in mindless obedience to its name”); and misquotations of his favorite Irving Berlin songs.

When, on Page 306, he confesses that he “didn’t feel capable” of writing this book, that his “observations of New York were poignantly unoriginal” but that he had to write it “unless I was prepared--which I wasn’t--to repay the advances I had received,” the reader may well be moved to remarks that would not have appeared in The New Yorker before the editorship of Tina Brown.

The problem for journalists who don’t want to sell sex or celebrity or other products is not simply unprincipled editors and greedy publishers but also the recent frightening concentrations of media power. One of the few serious points Chancellor makes is that in London, he worked for four newspapers, all with different owners, but in New York, “if a journalist were to fall foul of both Conde Nast and the New York Times, he would be in serious professional difficulty.” Not only are there more national newspapers in England, the journalistic air there is not sulfurous with fear and pomposity as it is in New York.

Brown was taken aback to discover this when a book reviewer expressed his contempt not only of the author but the subject of a Rupert Murdoch biography. Media critics, some of whom had till then held their fire, vilified her for “misusing” The New Yorker for alleged vindictiveness (Murdoch had, several years before, fired her husband).

Their outrage, however, was more likely provoked by Brown’s rupturing of the silent gentlemen’s agreement in big-money publishing. Without being able to read her mind any more than her attackers could, I would bet that Brown assumed journalistic pugilism in a rich and supposedly robust country could not be so different from the English idea of sport.

The editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, for instance, regularly ridicules the pretensions of the owner of the Sunday Telegraph, the vulgarity of his wife, the unpleasantness of his editor and the stupidity of his columnists. One of those columnists is the editor of Private Eye.

How very different from the ways of, for instance, The New York Times, where a former managing editor once told a new writer, “I’ve been watching your career for a long time, and I was happy to see how right you are for us--you’ve never once criticized the Times.”

Is it surprising that, in this atmosphere, the literary journalist--how quaint that phrase sounds!--feels icy fingers on his writing arm? Many, of course, decide that it makes more sense to write screenplays or teach college students basic sentence structure. The rest, scribbling away for fewer, scrawnier journals, may remind the reader of Harold Ross’ poor old whores.