W
illiam Shawn, editor of
The New Yorker
magazine—well, he is a very, as they say, homey person. That is one side of him. He is a small, quiet man, and he talks in this halting whisper. He seems to wear layer upon layer of clothes, all sorts of sweaters, vests, coats. He smiles, nods, nods, nods; he makes courtly, sort of
down home
pleasantries. And if—there may be an ashtray on his desk by now—but if there was no ashtray, he would go out himself! Mr. Shawn of
The New Yorker
!
—
and bring back a Coca-Cola bottle for use as an ashtray. Easygoing!
“Why—hello—Mr.—Cage—um—yes—how—are—yon—here—let—me—how—is—Mrs.—Cage—um—take—your—coat—oh-oh—didn’t—mean—to—um—there—if—I—can—just—slip—it—off—unh—here—have—a—”
“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Shawn—”
“—a—seat—right—over—here—well—it—uh—always—does—
that—ha-ha—well—now—oh—I—see—you’re—smoking—let—me—”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Shawn, I didn’t-”
“No, no, no, no, no, no, please—perfectly—all—right—it’s—please—keep—your—seat—I’ll—be—right—back—”
Whereupon he goes out of the office, smiling, and comes back in a moment with an empty Coca-Cola bottle in his hand. He puts the Coca-Cola bottle on the desk for Cage to use as an ashtray.
So one can imagine Cage saying something like he has a great many
viable
ideas about this story, but it is funny, he can hear his own voice as he talks. The words are coming out all right—“several really very
viable
approaches, I think, Mr. Shawn”—but they sound
hollow
, as if in an echo chamber, because inside his brain all he can focus on is the cigarette and the Coca-Cola bottle. The thick glass in those bottles, and Jeezus, that little hole in the top there—it
looks
big enough, but if you try to knock the ash off a cigarette here into the Coca-Cola bottle, you see that the glass is
thick
and the hole
isn’t
big enough. Cage is practically down to the end of the cigarette—“Well, I’m not absolutely sure the ethnocentric idea
works
in a case like this, Mr. Shawn, but”—and then what is he going to do? There’s nothing to put the cigarette out
on
. He’s going to have to just drop the cigarette down the hole in the Coca-Cola bottle, and then it is going to hit the bottom of the bottle, and then it is going to hit the bottom of the bottle and just keep
burning
, you know? And there is going to be this little smelly curl of smoke coming up out of the Coca-Cola bottle, like a spirit lamp, and this filthy cigarette lying in the bottom, right there on Shawn’s desk, and obviously Shawn is not crazy about cigarettes in the first place, and old Cage hasn’t even sold him on the idea of the story—
But! That is the beauty of the man! On the
outside
he is quiet and homey, easygoing. Underneath, however—William Shawn is not nodding for a moment. Like the time the people in the Checking Department
started having these weekly
skits
, sort of spoofing some of the old hands—does one really wish to know about how long that kind of thing lasted? That is a …
rhetorical question
. Shawn is not nodding. William Shawn has not lapsed for a moment from the labor to which he dedicated himself upon the death of Harold Ross.
To preserve
The New Yorker
just as Ross left it, exactly, in … perpetuity.
Yes! And to do so, William Shawn has done nothing halfway. He has devised an editing system that is in some ways more completely
group journalism
, or
org-edit
, as it is called at
Novy Mir
, than anything
Time
magazine ever even contemplated.
To start with, one can believe, most assuredly, that no little … comedians in the Checking Department are going to schmarf around in there doing skits about the old hands—the men who worked under Ross, many of them. Those men play an important part in Shawn’s system. The
physical
part of the preservation—such as preserving the Thurber Room—that was easy. Shawn’s hardest task was to preserve the literary style of Ross’s
New Yorker
. The thing to do, of course, was to adopt, as models, the styles of men on the magazine who had been working under Ross—the so-called Tiny Giants, viz., E. B. White, Joseph Mitchell, Wolcott Gibbs, James Thurber, A. J. Liebling, people of that sort.
Well, Shawn’s first step was brilliantly simple. In effect, he has established lifetime tenure—purity!—for nearly everybody who served under Ross. Seniority! Columnists and so forth at
The New Yorker
have lifetime seniority, and if any ambitious kids there
aspire,
they wait it out, earn their first pair of hard-finished worsteds by working and waiting for them; one understands? This has led to a certain amount of awkwardness.
The New Yorker’s
movie, theater, and art sections have come to have an eccentric
irrelevance
about them. They have a kind of knitsweater, stoke-the-coal-grate charm, but … somehow they are full of
Magooisms. Such as: “It was evidently intended to be a very funny account of a lower-middle-class London family jam-packed with lovable eccentrics, but when, after thirty minutes, I found that nothing funny had happened and that my accustomed high spirits were being reduced to audible low moans, I got up and made my way out of the theater, which, as far as laughter was concerned, had been, and I suspect remained, as silent as a tomb.” Evidently intended; audible low moans; as silent as a tomb: huckleberry preserves! Mom’s jowls are on the doily!
The “Letter from London” and “Letter from Paris” features, written by two more seniors, have the same trouble. They started off in the 1930s, when not too many Americans were traveling to London or Paris, the idea being to introduce readers to what was current in the way of Culture and
modes
in Europe. Today all sorts of people fly to London and Paris all the time, and these “Letters” from abroad have taken on the tone of random sights seen from the window of a secondbest hotel.
Shawn, of course, is well aware of all this. It is just that he has a more … specific mission. Museum curator! He apparently wanted a permanent mold for
The New Yorker’
s essays, profiles, and so forth, and he did it with unerring taste. Lillian Ross! The last really impressive thing
The New Yorker
published under Harold Ross was Lillian Ross’s profile of Ernest Hemingway in 1950. Lillian Ross is no kin to Harold Ross, by the way. This piece of hers was terrific, and the technique influenced a lot of the best journalists in the country. She gave up the usual historical format of the profile entirely and, instead, wrote a running account of a couple of days she spent following Hemingway around New York. She put in all his little asides, everything, a lot of terrific dialogue.
This story gave a wonderful picture of this big egomaniac garruling around town and batting everybody over the head with his ego as if it were a pig bladder. The piece impressed Ross, and that gave Lillian Ross the right cachet around
The New Yorker
, right off. A small, quiet,
inconspicuous, sympathetic girl from Syracuse, whose father had run a filling station and kept a lot of animals, she had a great deal of womanly concern for underdogs. Also, her prose style had a nice flat-out quality about it, none of those confounded curlicues of the man at the other extreme, Liebling. Liebling verged on Ross’s Anglo-Saxon sin of “excess,” straining at the brain, as they say. Anyway, Lillian Ross’s style became the model for the
New Yorker
essay.
That was all right, but most of the boys never really
caught
on. All they picked up were some of her throwaway mannerisms. She piles up details and dialogue, dialogue mainly, but piles it all up very carefully, building up toward a single point; such as, Ernest Hemingway is a Big Boy and a fatuous ass. All that the vergers who have followed her seem to think is that somehow if you get in enough details, enough random fact—somehow this
trenchant portrait
is going to rise up off the pages. They miss her strong points—namely, her ear for dialogue and her point of view—and just run certain
sport
devices of hers into the ground. The fact-gorged sentence is one of them. Lillian Ross wrote another essay that also had a lot of impact, about the making of a moving picture,
The Red Badge of Courage
, and the opening sentence of that story was the ruination of at least fifty “Letters” and “Profiles” by the
New Yorker
foot soldiers who followed in her path. That sentence read:
The making of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie “The Red Badge of Courage,” based on the Stephen Crane novel about the Civil War, was preceded by routine disclosures about its production plans from the columnist Louella Parsons (“John Huston is writing a screen treatment of Stephen Crane’s classic, ‘The Red Badge of Courage,’ as a possibility for an M-G-M picture”), from the columnist Hedda Hopper (“Metro has an option on ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ and John Huston’s working up a budget for it. But there’s no green light yet”), and from
Variety
(“Preproduction work on ‘Red Badge of Courage’ commenced at Metro with the thesp-tests for top roles in drama”), and it was
preceded, in the spring of 1950, by a routine visit by John Huston, who is both a screen writer and a director, to New York, the headquarters of Loew’s, Inc., the company that produces and distributes M-G-M pictures.
Miss Ross was just funning around with that one, but
The New Yorker’s
line troops started writing
whole stories
that way. Unbelievable! All those clauses, appositions, amplifications, qualifications, asides, God knows what else, hanging inside the poor old skeleton of one sentence like some kind of Spanish moss. They are still doing it. One of the latest is an essay in the March 13 issue. It began with what has become
The New Yorker
formula lead:
One afternoon just after the spring semester began at the University of California, I passed on my way to the Berkeley campus to make a tour of the card tables that had been set up that day by student political organizations on the Bancroft strip—a wide brick sidewalk, outside the main entrance to the campus, that had been the original battlefield of a free-speech controversy that embroiled and threatened the university for the entire fall semester.
That is just the warm-up, though. It proceeds to a
New Yorker
style specialty known as the “whichy thicket”:
But, unlike COFO workers,
who
still can’t be sure their civilrights campaign has made any significant change in Mississippi, F.S.M. workers need only walk a block or two to witness unrestricted campus political activity of the kind that was the goal of their movement, and to anyone
who
has spent some time listening to their reminiscences, the F.S.M. headquarters,
which
is a relatively recent acquisition, seems to be a make-work echo of the days
when
the F.S.M. had a series of command posts, with names like Strike Central and Press Central—a system of walkietalkies
for communication among its scouts on the campus—and an emergency telephone number, called Nexus, to be used
when
the regular number was busy.
Wh-wh-wh-wh-wh-whoooaaaaaaugh!—
piles of whichy whuh words—
which, when, where, who, whether, whuggheeee
, the living whichy thickets. All that was from a story called “Letter from Berkeley” by Calvin Trillin, but it is not a rare case or even Trillin’s fault. Trillin can write very clearly, very directly, left to his own devices. But nobody is left to his own devices at
The New Yorker
today.
Shawn has … a System.
The system is Shawn’s refinement of Harold Ross’s query theory and operates something like this: Once an article is accepted, some girl retypes it on maize-yellow paper and a couple of other colors, and Shawn sends the maize copy to a chief editor. The other two copies go to the research department (“Checking”) and the copy style department. The copy style department’s task is seeing to it that the grammar, punctuation, spelling, and word usage in the piece correspond to
The New Yorker’
s rules on the subject. Sentences phrased in the form of a question, for example, must end in a question mark, no matter how far they have roamed from the idea of asking a question by the end of the sentence. An example, from “Talk of the Town,” again of March 13, runs: “Leave it to the astonishing Italians to bring off the reverse, however, for who should fly into New York from Milan the other morning, for a five-day stay, but a hundred and thirty-six of Italy’s most prominent—not to mention liveliest and most talkative—painters and sculptors, each bringing with him five or more works, to be sold here at a series of charity auctions to benefit two New York hospitals: the Italian Hospital, on West 110
th
Street, and the New York Polyclinic Medical School and Hospital, on West Fiftieth Street?”
The chief editor can—and is expected to—rewrite the piece in any way he thinks will improve it. It is not unusual for the writer not to be consuited
about it; the editor can change it without him, something that happens only rarely at
Time
, for example. At
Time
the writer always makes the changes himself, if possible. Practically every writer for
The New Yorker
, staff or freelance, goes through this routine, with the exception of a few people, like Lillian Ross, who are edited by Shawn himself. Meanwhile, the researchers down in the checking department are making changes. The researchers’ additions often take the form of filling in blanks some writer has left in the story. He may write something like: “Miss Hall appeared in Sean O’Casey’s ( t.k. ) in 19(00) …” and the researcher is supposed to fill in the blanks, t.k. standing for “words to come” and (00) for “digits to come.” This is precisely the way the news magazines operate. The researcher then comes up with “Miss Hall appeared in
Drums Under the Window
, a play by Paul Shyre based on Sean O’Casey’s autobiographical work of that name, in 1961.”