Next, the rewrite editor’s changes, the copy stylist’s changes, and the researchers’ changes are collated and the whole thing is set on a Vari-Typer machine. The Vari-Typer machine sets the story up with even margins on each side of the page, approximating the width of an actual columns in the magazine. A lot of copies of this Vari-Typer version are made, and then the paperwork really begins. Somehow, after this point, the sentences in the story, well, they begin to … grow
longer and longer
.
One Vari-Typer copy goes back to the chief editor, two more go back to the researchers and the copy stylists, another goes up to Shawn’s office, and one goes to a “query” editor, and sometimes to two “query” editors. The query editors play an intramural game. Ross devised it. The goal is to punch a hole in every weak spot they can find in a story, really give it a going-over. According to the rules, objections are to take the form of questions—“queries.” The editors compete to see how many biting, insulting, devastatingly ironic questions they can pose about one piece.
The New Yorker‘
s reigning champion at “querying” is a veteran of the Ross era, Rogers Whitaker. Players may hit a story for artiness, pretentiousness, overexuberance, overassertiveness, overanything, or for plain wrong thinking, unintentional double meanings, or other
naïvetés. If it isn’t otherwise vulnerable, they can hit it for vagueness. There are quite a lot of queries on that score. The query takes some such form as “Are we really to assume that there are more than eighteen living persons who remember a play by Paul Shyre, based on a book by Sean O’Casey, entitled
Drums Under the Window?
Are we sure it was not
Drums Under the Milkweed
or
Weeds in the Milk Drums Under the Window?
Where did it play—at the Ciudad Trujillo World Fair of 1955?”
This query goes back to the chief editor, who rockets it to the researcher. By now galleys are flying all over
The New Yorker
, and the old boys, the magazine’s senior-citizen messengers, are upping the shoopshoop gait in the halls. The query will eventually end in a sentence that reads, “Miss Hall appeared in
Drums Under the Window
, which was a play by Paul Shyre, based on an autobiographical book by Sean O’Casey, and which ran for (00) performances at the ( t.k. ), an Off Broadway theater, in 1961.” The writer may or may not be in on this editing and checking and shuffling. So many galleys are going around so thickly that there is only one hope for ever getting some version of the story into the magazine: the … Transferring Room!
In this room a small group of people is hunched over tables, pulling all these sheets together, copying everybody’s scrawls and queries onto a set of master galleys. The old boys are trundling these things in, from the researchers, the copy stylists, the chief editors, the query editors, from all over, and master copies are sent back to the chief editor, to Shawn, and to the researchers. Everybody muses and puzzles over it one last time. The author then is given a glimpse of what an … interesting … mutation his story has undergone if somebody calls him in at that point to answer queries about facts and do the needed rewriting. And finally, as the culmination of this great … evolution, the homogenized production is disgorged to the printers—in Chicago, via electronic impulses—and the
New Yorker
Style is achieved.
One might think that sensitive young writers would get upset about
this, that they would take one look at these thickets of
perhapses, probablies, I-should-says,
at the long, tendrilly
whichy
clauses that have grown up in their prose—and get, well … upset.
But! That is not so. A writer gets used to it very quickly, as soon as he gives himself what one disparager called the “auto-lobotomy.” Paradise! The System!
We!
Ambrosial org-lit!
Out of the org-maw, however, come some unique and even important articles from time to time. John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” for example. That was Shawn’s inspiration. He prevailed upon Harold Ross to devote practically an entire issue of
The New Yorker
to Hersey’s account of the bombing of Hiroshima. It may have been one of those memorable fat documents of our times that nobody reads, such as the issues of
The New York Times
that carry accounts of the deaths of people like Stalin and Churchill or Presidential State of the Union messages. Everybody goes out and buys these nice, fat, full news bricks and never throws them away; or reads them. One puts them in there on the shelf in the closet and preserves them, as in a time capsule, through move after move, from town to town, from urb to suburb, hanging on to these documents of our times. But that is all right. “Hiroshima” was unique. Rachel Carson’s book
The Silent Spring
was first published in
The New Yorker
. So was James Baldwin’s “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” which was expanded into the book
The Fire Next Time
. Articles like these have had a tremendous impact nationally. Baldwin’s, for example, became the favorite bogey-whip for white liberal masochists all over the country. Flay us, flay us, James, us poor guilty, whitey burghers, with elegant preacher rhetoric. Terrific!
So
The New Yorker
has the biggest literary reputation of any magazine in the country, for both nonfiction and fiction. Yet, curiously enough, it was not
The New Yorker
that launched James Baldwin in slick magazines. It was
Esquire
. James Baldwin, Sherwood Anderson, Saul Bellow, Albert Camus, Joyce Carey, John Dos Passos, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Aldous Huxley, James Jones, Thomas Mann, Arthur Miller, Ezra Pound, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, John Steinbeck,
Nelson Algren, Bruce Jay Friedman, Norman Mailer, Stanley Elkin, Terry Southern, Edward Albee, Jack Gelber, J. D. Salinger—that is a roster not of
New Yorker
writers but of
Esquire
writers. Hemingway’s “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” appeared first in
Esquire
. Fitzgerald’s
Crack-Up
appeared first in
Esquire
. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Lewis, Arthur Miller, Baldwin—all made frequent contributions to
Esquire
at one time or another. Salinger was published in
Esquire
long before he was published in
The New Yorker
. Damon Runyon, Stephen Vincent Benét, James Gould Cozzens, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Marquand, Thomas Wolfe, Philip Wylie, Frank O’Connor, Robert Penn Warren, William Humphrey, James Jones, Thomas Pynchon, Saul Bellow, William Saroyan, Louis Auchincloss, Bernard Malamud, Graham Greene, Alberto Moravia, Herbert Gold, Nelson Algren, Isaac Bashevis Singer—that is a list not of
New Yorker
writers but of
Saturday Evening Post
writers. For the last fifteen years
The New Yorker
has been practically out of the literary competition altogether. Only Salinger, Mary McCarthy, John O’Hara, and John Updike kept them in the game at all. Recently, Updike’s stories have become more and more tabescent, leaving
The New Yorker
with only one promising young writer, Donald Barthelme.
The New Yorker
comes out once a week, it has overwhelming cultural prestige, it pays top prices to writers—and for forty years it has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement.
Esquire
comes out only once a month, yet it has completely outclassed
The New Yorker
in literary contribution even during its cheesecake days. Every so often somebody sits down and writes an affectionate summary of
The New Yorker’
s history, expecting the magazine’s bibliography to read like some kind of honor roll of American letters. Instead, they come up with John O’Hara, John McNulty, Nancy Hale, Sally Benson, J. D. Salinger, Mary McCarthy, S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John
Cheever, John Collier, John Updike—good, but not exactly an Olympus for the mother tongue.
The short stories in
The New Yorker
have been the laughingstock of the New York literary community for years, but only because so few literati have really understood Shawn’s purpose.
The New Yorker
has published an incredible streak of stories about women in curious ruralbourgeois settings. Usually the stories are by women, and they recall their childhoods or domestic animals they have owned. Often they are by men, however, and they meditate over their wives and their little children with what used to be called “inchoate longings” for something else. The scene is some vague exurb or country place or summer place, something of the sort, cast in the mental atmosphere of tea cozies, fringe shawls, Morris chairs, glowing coals, wooden porches, frost on the pump handle, Papa out back in the wood bin, leaves falling, buds opening, bird-watcher types of birds, tufted grackles and things, singing, hearts rising and falling, but not far—in short, a great lily-of the-valley vat full of what Lenin called “bourgeois sentimentality.”
Ten years ago, in the St. Patrick’s Day issue, there were two short stories, one by Sally Benson and the other by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Sally Benson’s was about an old couple out in the bourgeois rural countryside somewhere, out by the old highway in the “Cozy Nook” tourist home. There is a little cracker-barrel philosophizing about how the times are passing them by, there’s a new expressway over there, a-yuh, a-yuh. Sylvia Townsend Warner’s is entitled “My Father, My Mother, the Bentleys, the Poodle, Lord Kitchener, and a Mouse.” Lord Kitchener is a cat. The story begins with a woman, the “I” of the story, describing in detail the bed she was born in. It had a starched white valance stenciled with dog paws. The story even goes back before that, to her mother’s recollections of
her
childhood in India.
Ten years later, in the St. Patrick’s Day issue for 1965, there are two short stories, one by Linda Grace Hoyer and the other by John Updike. Linda Grace Hoyer’s has a grandmother reminiscing about her Hanseland-Gretel, walk-in-the-gloaming childhood somewhere out in a rural
bourgeois big house and grounds. John Updike’s is about an unrequited flirtation, over tea, between an American novelist and a Bulgarian poetess, both of them possessed with … inchoate longings.
But! Shawn knows exactly what these stories are like. He knows exactly what the literati think about them, and he doesn’t care what they think. Shawn has a more serious purpose. He is preserving Harold Ross’s concept of “the casual.” Ross always called the stories in the magazine “casuals,” because that was what they were supposed to be, casual. He didn’t want a lot of short stories full of literary striving, vessel-popping, hungry-breasty suffering, Freudian sex-mushed swooning—this kind of “serious” short-story writing did not fit his English concept of sophistication. Thurber’s farces—they were perfect. Mild reminiscences were fine, the kind somebody might tell you at the Players Club. Clarence Day’s reminiscences of
Life with Father—
they were first published in
The New Yorker
and were made into a hit play, and they were casual.
Unfortunately, since the war, very few good writers have come along who are not in some kind of “arty” tradition, as Ross would have seen it. And Shawn—ever perfect custodian!—has remained faithful to the Ross formula. He has found writers who can write casuals. Of course, there are not many Thurbers around, so he has had to make Clarence Day his working model. Many of the casual writers he has found are women, and so it comes out
Life with Mother
, but that is all right. Occasionally, and most happily, they are talented writers like John Updike who somehow have a
feeling
for the formula.
Furthermore, it may all be the wettest bathful of bourgeois sentimentality in the world, but …
it works
. Even Lenin would see that and appreciate it. All these stories—
Life with Mother
, sentimental grandma, inchoately longing Young Homemakers, unrequited flirtation—they, after all, add up to the perfect magazine fiction for suburban women. Not all women but suburban women. The other women’s magazines, such as the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and
Redbook
, and
McCall’s
and
Good Housekeeping
place somewhat more …
elaborate
demands upon fiction
writers. The stories they run tend to get the girls into
bed
, and the heroes are often considerably more revved up than they are in
The New Yorker. The New Yorker’s
stories are more like the stories the other women’s magazines used to run thirty years ago. But—perfect!—since World War II America has … developed … a kind of woman for whom recent-antique women’s magazine stories are just right, especially in
The New Yorker
. Suburban women!
Since the war, the suburbs of America’s large cities have been filling up with educated women with large homes and solid hubbies and the taste to …
buy expensive things. The New Yorker
was the magazine—about the only general magazine—they heard their professors mention in a … good cultural way. And now here they are out in the good green world of Larchmont, Dedham, Grosse Point, Bryn Mawr, Chevy Chase, and they find that this magazine, this cultural magazine, is speaking right to them—
their language—
cultural and everything—but
communicating—
you know?—right to a suburban woman. Those wonderful stories!
Well, first of all,
The New Yorker
is a totem for these women. Just having it in the home is, well, it is a …
symbol
, a kind of
cachet.
But more than that, it is not like those other
cachet
magazines, like
Réalités
or London
Illustrated—
people just only barely leaf through those magazines—
The New Yorker
reaches a little corner in the suburban-bourgeois woman’s heart. And in this little corner are Mother, large rural-suburban homes with no mortgage, white linen valances, and Love that comes with Henry Fonda, alone, on a pure-white horse. Perfect short stories! After all, a girl is not really sitting out here in Larchmont waiting for Stanley Kowalski to come by in his ribbed undershirt and rip the Peck & Peck cashmere off her mary poppins. That is not really what the suburbs are like. A girl—well, a girl wants Culture and everything, but she wants a magazine in the house that
communicates,
too, you know? And you don’t have to scour your soul with Top Dirt afterward, either.