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Turning out the lights on the old New Yorker | page 1, 2
What haunt Adler's, Kunkel's and Yagoda's books are, in part, the same qualities of suspension and lack of closure that haunted the New Yorker itself during the later Shawn years. The magazine had become so stubbornly reserved and self-silencing toward the end, so limpidly opaque and changeless, that in a way its dissolution under the Newhouse empire was like business as usual, only more so. Adler writes of the ever wraithlike Shawn hiding out in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel shortly after his removal from power in 1987. He was 80 years old and still editing the magazine sub rosa, sending copy back and forth to the writers by secret courier. He was there but not there -- fading into his retirement and, eventually, his death without firm transition. Gone: The Last Days of the New Yorker By Renata Adler
About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made By Ben Yagoda Scribner, 430 pages
Letters From the Editor: The New Yorker's Harold Ross Edited by Thomas Kunkel Modern Library, 418 pages
Some Times in America: And a Life in a Year at the New Yorker By Alexander Chancellor Carroll & Graf, 309 pages
Life Stories: Profiles From the New Yorker Edited by David Remnick Random House, 530 pages
Wonderful Town: New York Stories From the New Yorker Edited by David Remnick Random House, 480 pages
Adler and Yagoda both mention the ethic of ironic silence that permeated the magazine during the later Shawn period, which in Yagoda's account caused writers such as Joseph Mitchell to fade into a weird half-realm of presence and absence, writing and not writing. The once prolific Mitchell (whose stunning "Mr. Hunter's Grave" Remnick includes in his "Life Stories" anthology) came regularly to the office until the eve of his death, in 1996. His typewriter could be heard clicking away every day behind his door. But for the last 32 years of his tenure as a staff writer, not a single word of Mitchell's appeared in the magazine. Rounding out his introduction, Kunkel recalls stumbling across a cache of Ross' old office Dictaphone recordings and finishes with an odd minor-key cadence: "I sat back, turned on my tape recorder, and listened to a man dead four decades talk to me. He was dictating letters." Ross still speaks; Shawn is even more elusive now than before; and Mitchell is still absent from every new issue, right on schedule. How do you draw a firm line between "here" and "gone" when there's all this blurring at the edges? If the New Yorker was something of an imponderable institution in its own right, it's also a symbol of the vanished world over which it presided. In "The Designated Mourner," a play by Wallace Shawn (the late editor's son), the last remaining intellectual finds himself alone in a world of consumerism and pop culture, deputized to say kaddish for his vanished comrades and, essentially, to turn off the lights when he leaves. Adler's controversial memoir has been criticized as both an instrument of revenge against the enemies she collected during her nearly 30 years at the magazine and a collection of heedless calumnies against the friends who blundered into her line of fire. In fact, it's more like "The Designated Mourner" written in acid: a jeremiad against the shallow, heedless new order that displaced the old one, both at the New Yorker and in the culture at large. Adler paints Gottlieb as a narcissistic prat saved from ruin by a group of Shawn loyalists who "worked in obscurity to preserve the magazine" while the new editor's favorites, content to let everything fall to hell, played politics. Lillian Ross, whose own controversial book "Here but Not Here: A Love Story" detailed her 40-year affair with Shawn, comes off in Adler's account as a bullying harridan -- the bearer of the kind of "unhesitant personality" that enabled her and certain other figures to maneuver their way to prominence at the magazine whatever their real talents. These are Adler's friends. Her enemies get roughed up even harder. Adam Gopnik, Gottlieb's unofficial deputy and the magazine's current Paris correspondent, pops up frequently as a tragicomic symbol of everything nervous, grasping and ignoble about the modern literary scene. Adler's Gopnik is a cackling sycophant, a cartoon apparatchik. She describes him blundering into a private editorial meeting: He was stooped, literally rubbing his hands together, and blinking against the light from the window behind Mr. Gottlieb's desk. He had a few days' growth of beard. As his vision adjusted, he was astounded and clearly appalled that Mr. Gottlieb already had a visitor. If there had been music, it might have been a moment in a horror film. The real Gopnik, it seems, is no stranger to horror tableaux. Consider this passage from a piece of his in Remnick's "Life Stories" anthology: John Updike once wrote that, though the newcomer imagines that literary New York will be like a choir of angels, in fact it is like the Raft of the Medusa ... In New York the raft has been adrift now for years, centuries, and there's still no rescue boat in sight. The only thing left is to size up the others and wait until someone becomes weak enough to eat. It's not a passage to arouse one's sympathies. Adler has tried to eat her colleagues as well, most notably in 1980, with a fulminating attack piece in the New York Review of Books on Pauline Kael. But she doesn't seem to be a bully or an opportunist; she just seems to care for ideas more sincerely than she does for people and to hew to a rather Teutonic notion of principle for principle's sake. And there's a nice sense of decrescendo to "Gone." Adler closes the memoir with a passage whose melancholy suggests that this time, once the tumult over the book has died down, she expects to be left more or less broken and alone, avoided by friends and enemies alike -- left to turn out the lights when she leaves. With all the hagiography, the caviling, the conflicting recollections and the toting up of accomplishments and transgressions in these volumes -- from Kramer's 1951 study on through to Yagoda's masterly history -- one thing is clearer now than it ever was: In the end, it's only a magazine. And if rites are still required to dismiss its ghosts, there are enough designated mourners wailing in the chapels at this point to supply a spate of future memoirists with ghosts of their own -- if only they'd turn the lights out already and go back into the world of unsexy topics and fascinating details that the New Yorker, at its best, once provided.
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