Humor tempers an editor’s ‘Life’

There’s the kind of privilege that affords a life of relative ease, a protective shield from suffering and deprivation -- and then there’s privilege as palimpsest, not quite concealing other layers too messy and painful to be fully erased, even by wealth and power. Gardner Botsford, a retired New Yorker editor, has experienced the latter kind, and in his aptly titled memoir, which is full of entertaining stories, he reveals the good, the bad and the absurd aspects of his upbringing, war service and career.

On the surface, Botsford (born in 1917 in New York City) has had an enviable life, growing up in Manhattan’s golden era. His was a world of household servants, exclusive private schools, debutante parties, college at Yale and of course a career at the nation’s most venerable magazine. But the adverbial qualifier -- “mostly” -- tagged onto the title of his book is there for a reason, hinting at the cracks in a seemingly perfect life.

When he was a boy, Botsford’s home life was not exactly stable. His beautiful, charming mother, Ruth, “had a magnetic field that picked up men ... as though they were iron filings.” She divorced Botsford’s heartbroken father after only five years, married his college classmate and best friend and divorced 14 years later, only to land in a disastrous third marriage to a domineering Nazi sympathizer.

After college, Botsford started his own family but was separated from his wife and young daughter when he served in World War II. Although he’d expected that his Yale education and fluency in French would grant him a cushy position with the Army magazine, he instead was an officer in the First Infantry Division, taking part in the landing at Omaha Beach. In later years, he suffered more hardship: losing friends to suicide and his first wife to cancer, and enduring a tumultuous relationship with legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn.

The word that perhaps best describes Botsford’s memoir is “graceful,” which characterizes not only the author’s prose -- elegant and understated -- but also his treatment of difficult subjects. Botsford tends to be harder on himself than on others, and in situations in which he has been wronged, he refrains from being vitriolic or petty.

Although Botsford reveals some bizarre goings-on at the New Yorker, he doesn’t stoop to lurid gossip, self-aggrandizement or revenge. For someone surrounded by so much wealth and glamour, Botsford isn’t a big name-dropper and seems to lack a sense of entitlement.

What Botsford does not lack is a sense of humor, wonderfully evident in his descriptions of how well provided for he was as a youth. Botsford grew up with a cook, a parlor maid, a personal maid for his mother, a laundress and a string of butlers. Also on staff were his stepfather’s valet, his mother’s secretary and the family chauffeur.

“Today, it is almost impossible to imagine how many duties the servants had, and how hard they worked,” Botsford writes. His was a family of five with a staff of eight servants, but he writes that it was “an imbalance of numbers that was never brought into question.” The author’s wry biographical note mentions that he resides in New York with the writer Janet Malcolm, his second wife, and that they have no live-in servants.

Botsford is a terrific storyteller, moving back and forth from traumatic recollections to casual anecdotes. He recalls how Harpo Marx, a frequent house guest at the family’s Long Island home when Botsford was growing up, would join them for meals with “pansies and cornflowers tucked between his toes,” openly defying Botsford’s mother’s ban on dining barefoot.

The book’s vivid first section, detailing Botsford’s war experiences, is full of harrowing passages: “When daylight came, I saw that my feet were paddling about in the entrails of a German soldier, disemboweled by an artillery shell,” he writes. “I felt no revulsion; I felt nothing. I simply pulled up some grass and wiped off my boots. Then I searched the poor [fellow’s] remaining pockets for useful information, as I had been taught.” The author’s reminiscences of his decades at the New Yorker provide some of the most compelling stories, as he recalls working with such greats as Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, Janet Flanner and Wolcott Gibbs. Botsford offers insight into the magazine’s fussy editorial process (including excerpts from some amusing internal memos) and shares his own rules of thumb about editing and writing. His treatment of Shawn is balanced: expressing gratitude but revealing him as petty, unreliable and determined at all costs to preserve his power. (Shawn was fired by S.I. New- house, the magazine’s then-new owner, in 1987.) The book concludes as the Shawn era comes to a rueful close, as do the magazine’s glory days. It’s hard to resist feeling nostalgic for that time, when New Yorker editors and writers seemed larger than life and the magazine was truly extraordinary.