Talk of the Town

The “Talk of the Town” section of The New Yorker has become a cross between an institution independent of the magazine where it appears and a journalistic genre unto itself. Composed of brief vignettes that touch on a variety of subjects, the section for a long time breathed the air of sophistication so sure of itself that it could abandon any appearance of sophistication. The contributors affected a manner of unflappable insouciance, a confidence so powerful that it could display the most complete openness and tolerance and curiosity. There was something of the English lord on tour about the tone, and maybe that’s why for decades the writers famously used “we” instead of the first person, as a kind of democratic pretense.

Nowadays, “Talk of the Town’s” turf has mostly shifted from the superior sensibility surveying the ordinary circumstance to the ordinary journalist infiltrating the celebrity-occasion, but the presumption is the same: The writer’s ego serves as midwife to the Principle of Urbanity.

Lillian Ross, the legendary master of the “Talk of the Town” genre, who has been writing for The New Yorker since 1945, intends her new collection of Talk pieces and New Yorker profiles, interspersed with instructing commentary, to be a kind of master class for aspiring journalists, as well as a sequel to her book “Reporting.” In terms of formal near-perfection, Ross’ style is indeed enviable. You can no more resist plunging from one of her finely chiseled sentences to the next any more than you can keep your eyes from following the camera as it leads you from frame to frame during a film. Ross wouldn’t mind the analogy; she herself compares her technique to creating a movie frame by frame. She wants to be supremely diverting, no more, no less; and she almost always succeeds in being supremely diverting, no more, no less.

But something unsettling creeps underneath the formal polish of Ross’ style. In nearly everything she writes, and couched in the atmosphere of cosmopolitan openness and tolerance, you encounter a deflation of her subjects. She lets the air out in her memoir, “Here but Not Here,” in which she punctures the public image of William Shawn, The New Yorker’s near-mythic former editor, under the guise of paying homage to him. As Ross herself puts it: “There is no avoiding the fact that the very nature of a reporter, of every writer, is revealed in his writing.”

“I trust my response to a person in the first few minutes of meeting him,” Ross declares in her introduction. Elsewhere she writes: “I immediately knew on the spot what I was going to write and how I would write it.” And again: “After talking with Bianca [a child actor] I knew immediately what my story should be.” If, according to Ross, her instincts are infallible, her personality is magnetic. Even as a young New Yorker staffer, just starting out, she apparently had no trouble meeting anyone she wanted to. In Hollywood for the first time, “heady stuff immediately came my way. Everybody in the business, I learned, was eager to talk to me. Movie stars. Directors. Producers. I was invited to big, lavish parties.” And in the midst of such dizzying glamour and glitter, Ross’ Delphic-like viscera rose to the occasion: “Almost immediately, wherever I turned, I sensed what my story would be. Nervousness and uncertainty were all around me.”

The “almost” is a rare bit of modesty, but the portrait of powerful movie stars and directors and producers unable to hide their nervousness and uncertainty around the confident young reporter is all of a piece with Ross’ tone throughout the book, except that she usually reserves her deflations for ordinary people, not for the powerful and the famous. With ordinary people, she is Eustace Tilley with a switchblade. In the presence of the latter group, with Norman Mailer and John Huston and Charlie Chaplin and Harold Pinter, she is the journalist as congenial mistress.

In fact, throughout 40 years, as she revealed in her memoir, Ross was the mistress of Shawn, who returned every night to his wife and family, a few blocks away. “With Bill Shawn,” she writes in the introduction to this book, “I developed tolerance, judgment, and taste.... William Shawn encouraged me to distill my own sense of humor in my work. I loved making him laugh.” Ross is obsessed with laughter and humor. She writes, she tells us, “in the service of laughter and truth.” She refers to “those most precious attributes--laughter and humor.” Her valuation of humor is strangely emphatic: “It’s humor that drives a story. It’s the key to originality and power in reporting. This reporter couldn’t live, let alone work, without laughing.”

But Ross’ laughter is the dark kind, a cruel Nabokovian laughter minus the redemptive Nabokovian imagination. In her 1960 article “The Yellow Bus,” Ross describes the experience of a group of high school kids from the Midwest who take a trip to New York with their teacher. Ross introduces the article with characteristic self-deprecation: “Permission to replicate copies of the piece, in the intervening decades, is still requested several times a year by journalism teachers. Apparently, I’m pleased to hear, it’s called a ‘cult’ piece.” But what’s special about “The Yellow Bus” isn’t the way it’s put together, expertly assembled as it is with Ross’--and The New Yorker’s--distinctive blend of fanatical details and shaping sensibility. What’s special is Ross’ use of “humor.”

Ross concludes the article with a dialogue among the students, who express their various attitudes toward New York. Like most people, especially young people, who visit New York from other places, especially rural places, the high school seniors from Indiana are daunted by the experience, and so they defy their intimidation by flaunting dislike of the city. Ross’ transcription--and orchestration--of their conversation concludes like this: “ ‘I hate New York,’ Connie said.” Ross then inserts this commentary:

” ... the characterization of individuals in ‘The Yellow Bus’ was very light, just enough to support the characterization of the group as a whole in their limited capacity to respond, or pitiful inability to respond, to what was being offered to them.... Still, there is humor in the way these high school kids resisted being touched by New York. To me, it’s funny to hear Connie say, ‘I hate New York.’ ”

Very funny, that pitiful inability to respond. And if Ross can’t contrive the mortification of other people to demonstrate her good humor, which Shawn taught to his patient mistress, she reshapes her subjects into something ridiculous. She goes on: “In 1945, I wrote my first “Talk of the Town” story, about another kind of visitor who made me laugh. It was called ‘One Man’s Family,’ about 24-year-old Ahmad-Abdul Jabbar, who was staying at the Waldorf with his Saudi United Nations delegation .... I came to this one without any preconceptions. My ignorance made it possible for me to start laughing immediately.”

So exquisitely choreographed is Ross’ style--choreographed is the wrong word; she uses pacing and repetition the way a pianist uses pedals--that the obtuseness which accompanies her blithe cruelty often slips past the reader. Amid all those Salinger-like lists of brand names and fashion styles and designer names in which someone always seems to be wearing an Hermes tie--is it because that is the most easily identifiable tie?--you can miss the way her vanity clouds her perceptions. Chronicling a day in the life of Manhattan’s privileged adolescents, about whom she is in the end as passively vicious as she was to the unsuspecting Hoosiers, she writes at one point: “I was deeply touched by the way they accepted me, strangely enough, as one of them. I told them I was doing some reporting for The New Yorker, but they didn’t seem impressed, just mildly interested.... They were respecting and accepting and curious.” But a 15-year-old at Manhattan’s Spence School lives or dies on the ability to seem not impressed, just mildly interested. And being respecting, accepting and curious is one way to win a journalist’s heart.

It’s not surprising that the kids recognized Ross as one of them. She was the boss’ girlfriend, the spoiled brat of The New Yorker, who could indulge her childlike spite behind the mask of her woman-about-town refinement, who won her fame from the fact that, as the boss’ girlfriend, she had entree to the famous. That Ross has talent is undeniable, but one would have to be an idiot not to make riveting the transcription of intimate conversation by Robert F. Kennedy or Huston or Chaplin.

And yet for all her opportunities, Ross’ subjects never appear much different from the way we had always thought of them. Hemingway is always talking about sports, Mailer is feistily ambitious, Huston is outsized and blunt. Ross doomed her famous subjects to their appearances. It might have been her revenge for serving as second fiddle for a man excessively devoted to appearances. But in the end, her famous subjects prized their appearances and, like her double-edged compliments, Ross’ unempathetic caricatures ensured her success. They also, as this vain, empty book makes clear, guarantee her evanescence.