People at the old
New Yorker
always tended to dismiss the suggestion that there was such a thing as a
New Yorker
style. The requirement for a story, they said, was that it be well written; the requirement for a drawing was that it be funny. No test for house sensibility was applied. This was undoubtedly true, but it doesn’t mean that there was no
New Yorker
style. For the
New Yorker
was always
a thoroughly—a famously thoroughly—edited magazine, and for sixty-two years under Ross and Shawn, its editorial principles were consistent. Whatever was knowing, allusive, or elliptical was amplified and clarified in the direction of perfect accessibility; whatever was suggestive, sensational, or offensive was carefully pruned of those excrescences. This seems—as it was meant to seem—like an entirely negative editorial policy. Nothing, after all, got added to the product. There was nothing that
must
be said; the ambition was merely to cure writing of the impurities that prevented it from saying whatever it was it wanted to be saying. No decent editor would reject this as a basic principle of good editing. What was distinctive about the
New Yorker
was that this basic principle became, by virtue of the single-mindedness of the magazine’s commitment to it, the overriding principle as well. It took on content. How the
New Yorker
was edited came to be what the
New Yorker
was all about.
Every reader of the old magazine is familiar with the many ways in which this editorial policy made itself known. There was, to begin with, the
New Yorker’
s punctilio about correct punctuation and usage. The compulsion derived from Ross himself, who, while serving on the editorial staff of
Stars and Stripes
during the First World War, was once placed under house arrest for arguing too vehemently with a superior officer over the proper placement of a comma. The interesting thing about correct usage is that it manages to be democratic and elitist at the same time. Famous writers can’t get away with eccentricities just because they are famous. The rules apply to everybody. On the other hand, knowing what’s correct is one of the signs of a superior education. The newsbreaks—the examples of other people’s solecisms that used to fill out the columns at the end of stories—highlighted the purity of the
New Yorker’
s text; and they were the magazine’s tribute to the grammatical standards of its readers. A person might be excused for being unable to fix a toaster or to drive an automobile, they quietly suggested, but never for writing a sentence with a dangling participle. (“We’d use a pen.”)
Then there was the
New Yorker’
s long-standing resistance to vulgarity. In the first theater review he submitted to the magazine, Tynan
used the term
“pissoir,”
a word Shawn could not bring himself to put into print. After a long and amiable discussion, it was agreed that
“pissoir”
would be changed to read “a circular curbside construction.” For most of the magazine’s history this habit of mind was probably less inhibiting than it has been made out to be. There was plenty of frankness in the magazine’s art and in its writing, and if prudish circumspection was exercised at the editor’s desk, it rarely showed up on the page. But it is also true that the kind of work the
New Yorker
could attract was limited by the magazine’s distaste for subject matter and vocabulary that eventually became utterly commonplace in virtually every other literary forum. Katharine White once wrote to Norman Mailer asking if he would care to contribute a story to the magazine. He would not, Mailer replied, because he did not have the freedom to say “shit” in the
New Yorker.
White wrote back to suggest that perhaps Mr. Mailer did not understand the true meaning of freedom. Mailer answered that he did indeed understand the meaning of freedom: freedom meant being able to say “shit” in the
New Yorker.
3
Well, “The Time of Her Time” is a story probably no one at the
New Yorker
was sorry to have missed the chance to publish. It’s hardly a
New Yorker
story. On the other hand, one of the great deficiencies in the magazine’s reporting was its coverage of the events of the 1960s, and Mailer’s early political journalism, which did a lot to make
Harper’s
and
Esquire
exciting magazines in those days, was just the kind of perfectly serious writing that lay outside the
New Yorker’
s bounds. And some fiction the magazine probably
was
sorry to have missed. “Goodbye, Columbus” is reported to have been turned down because the story involves an item Shawn considered unprintable, a diaphragm. (“A circular cervical construction” was evidently not proposed as a substitute.)
For many people, the quintessence of
New Yorker
style was the style of “Talk of the Town”—the style of “We enjoy a parade as much as the next fellow, so when an invitation to the first annual Lite Beer Drinkers of America parade crossed our desk the other day,” etc. The much-parodied first-person-plural voice was a consequence of the circumstance that for many years all “Talk” items were written
by one person, relying on the notes of individual reporters. This was Thurber’s job in the early days, and later it was Gill’s. With the arrival of reporters like Mark Singer and Ian Frazier in the early 1970s, “Talk” became more of a competition of stylistic virtuosity; but the vestigial “we” tended to hang on.
“Talk” reflects Ross’s hatred of knowingness, which is indeed the bane of much of the higher journalism in America. The tales of Ross’s ignorance have been told often enough—that he once queried “William Blake” in a manuscript; that he asked a fact checker whether Moby Dick was the captain or the whale. The stories get repeated in part because a kind of virtue is understood to attach to such ignorance: it is, after all, superior to pretension. This is the virtue expressed in the ordinary-man style of “Talk of the Town.” Thurber once submitted a “Talk” item to Ross for editing and got it back in this form (Ross’s emendations are italicized):
For those who exclaim over armor,
a thing pretty rare with us
, the three new suits the museum has just come by will prove enthralling. One of them, a richly ornamented Spanish war harness, has more pieces of réchange,
or you might say accessories,
than any other battle suit in the world … . Among other prizes of the New Accession Room is the lid of an amphora,
but we never did find out what an amphora is.
4
This is a style that has things all ways at once: the trendy or pretentious event (such as it is) is reported; any filaments of the experience that might be suspected of trendiness or pretension are mocked; and the mockery is ostensibly at the writer’s expense, so no one need feel offended. The writer has found his way to the party, but he chooses to stay on the fringe. He’d
like
to be on the inside, maybe, but, oh dear, just finding a taxi was quite enough excitement for one afternoon. The attitude can be read as modesty, or as the politest possible put-down.
Thurber and White were masters of this persona, and S. J. Perelman produced a brilliantly rococo version of it. It showed a different face in the magazine’s serious fiction, where the technological and epistemological befuddlement of the “Talk” and humor pieces
was exchanged for the moral befuddlement that comes with life in the upper-middle-class bubble.
New Yorker
short-story writers succeeded in generating an extraordinary pathos from this befuddlement; and although it has long since been imitated to the point of cliché, the pathos was not a false one. The
New Yorker
story expressed with great precision the inner life of a certain kind of midcentury American: well off but insecure, well educated but without culture, enlightened enough to know how morally dark the world is in which he moves, but without a clue about how to live beyond it.
In its classic form, the story came in a lighter and a darker version. In the lighter—White’s “The Second Tree from the Corner,” John Cheever’s “The Country Husband,” John Updike’s “The Happiest I’ve Been”—the ache is part of ordinary experience; it is first built up by the accumulation of trivial failures and humiliations, then soothed by the machinery of a momentary epiphany whose materials are taken from the world as it is. In the darker version—in Jean Stafford’s “Children Are Bored on Sunday,” Harold Brodkey’s “Sentimental Education,” J. D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”—the ache does not belong to the world; it comes from some demon outside, so that the world is unequipped to console it, and the life breaks apart. The essential psychological condition in both versions, the condition that is the source both of the pathos and, when it happens, of the consolation, is powerlessness.
Something of the same spirit of self-effacement informs the most successful and inimitable of the magazine’s genres, the
New Yorker
cartoon. Many longtime
New Yorker
subscribers liked to confess, in a typically
New Yorker
denial of cultural pretension, that they never
read
the thing, they only looked at the cartoons. (They rarely confessed to the obvious corollary to this, which is that they also looked at the ads. Subscribers may not have read anything in the
New Yorker
, but they turned every page. That’s the behavior the cartoons were designed to stimulate.) The distinctive feature of the
New Yorker
cartoon, as Michael Wood pointed out many years ago, is that the comic situation is not visual but verbal.
5
In the beginning, in fact,
New Yorker
artists supplied only the drawings; the captions were considered too important to trust to them, and were provided by the writers. Helen Hokinson, for instance, the creator
of a staple
New Yorker
caricature of the 1930s and ’40s, the Ladies’ Club president with the imperious bust, never wrote a single caption. The dialogue in the famous Carl Rose cartoon of a mother and child at the dinner table—“It’s broccoli, dear.” “I say it’s spinach, and I say the hell with it”—was written by E. B. White.
Of course, there were
New Yorker
artists whose drawings didn’t require captions (Saul Steinberg and William Steig, for example) or for whom the caption was often secondary to the image (Charles Addams and Gahan Wilson). But in the typical
New Yorker
cartoon, the drawing was the excuse for the caption, so that the same topoi tended to turn up again and again: two men at a bar, a man and a woman on a desert island, a pollster conducting an interview, a husband and wife in their living room, a man at his desk, people at a cocktail party, two animals talking. (Gill reported that once, in an effort to reduce the backlog of talking animal drawings, the magazine printed an issue that ran
only
talking animal drawings; he said that nobody noticed.)
The humor in these cartoons was always in the language. What was funny was not what was said—it was rarely a double entendre (as in, say, a
Playboy
cartoon) or topical satire (as in an editorial cartoon in a newspaper). What was funny was the language used to say it. If the scene was a cocktail party, the language was fatuous; if it was a man in a bathtub talking to his cats, it was grandiose; if it was a middle-aged couple in their living room, it was melodramatic. Children spoke with adult cynicism; barflies uttered solemn pedantries; animals talked in psychobabble. These captions were comic imitations of the speech of
New Yorker
readers, displaced onto harmless caricatures. It was a highly cultivated form of wit, one that flattered and teased at the same time. And as the history of the magazine proves, it was eternally reusable.
After the 1920s, the
New Yorker
began running cartoons on most of its covers. During the thirties the drawings tended to be composed of stock elements of upper-class life: doormen, butlers, chauffeurs, mink-stoled Park Avenue matrons, top-hatted clubmen—occasionally
thrown into discomfiting contact with the lower orders. When the war began, the magazine executed one of its canny repositionings. Domestic circulation fell off, so a scaled-down edition of the magazine without advertising—called a “pony” edition—was made available to troops overseas. Serious reporters like Kahn, Robert Shaplen, and A. J. Liebling were dispatched to the front; cartoons of life in the armed forces began appearing on the covers and inside; and there were two powerful and uncharacteristic
New Yorker
covers, both by Christina Malman, that referred directly to the war: a 1940 charcoal of soldiers herding a crowd of civilians whose faces are turned away, and a 1945 drawing celebrating the human dimension of the Allied victory. By the end of the war, the pony edition was outselling the parent magazine; and when the soldiers returned and the great middle-class boom of the postwar era started up, the
New Yorker
had already won its slice of the new audience.
But the magazine was careful to continue to insist on just a slice. In the 1930s, Fleischmann had taken the trouble to keep the magazine’s phone number unlisted in order to discourage new subscribers, and this policy of limiting readership was continued. By the mid-1950s the
New Yorker
ranked seventy-second in circulation among American magazines, but it ranked third in ad pages. Between 1957 and 1964, it sold more ad pages than any other magazine in the country; by 1963, it was realizing a 10 percent profit on a $21 million gross. In 1965, it sold 6,092 ad pages, beating its closest competitor,
Business Week
, by almost thirteen hundred pages.
And the magazine was turning down three-quarters of a million dollars in business a year. Ads for goods that were considered too down-market for
New Yorker
readers, such as ads for Sears, Roebuck, or that were deemed distasteful by Shawn, such as ads for lingerie, were routinely rejected. In 1966, the year after Tom Wolfe’s “murderous” article, the
New Yorker
reached its sales peak with 6,143 ad pages. And then, very suddenly, the roller coaster began to run the other way. In 1967, the magazine lost five hundred ad pages; it lost another four hundred in 1968, five hundred more in 1969, seven hundred in 1970. Circulation began to slip. People who worked in the magazine’s ad department started returning calls.
You can read what was happening on the covers. The human figure began to disappear from the
New Yorker
cover around the time of the Cuban missile crisis; by the mid-1960s a steady annual proportion of landscape covers has been established. By the seventies, the cartoon cover with a human subject was a rarity. There were Cape Cod cottage exteriors, cityscapes framed by apartment windows, flowers and teapots, Steigs and Steinbergs and Korens. But apart from the occasional appearance of one of Charles Saxon’s overweight suburban dignitaries, the human caricature had mostly vanished. The
New Yorker
had obviously lost its sense of its audience as a recognizable social type. It knew what its readers’
taste
was, or ought to be. But it didn’t have a very secure sense any longer of what its readers looked like. By 1970, the
New Yorker
audience, once a homogeneous, discrete social entity, had started to splinter. It was holding together only through a common sensibility, a shared bundle of tastes; and those tastes had begun to seem more and more ephemeral, less and less worth preserving, every year.
In his introduction to a collection of
New Yorker
covers, published in 1989, John Updike suggested that one way you could entertain yourself with the book was to pick a year that was eventful for you and see what was on the covers. If you were born after 1945, this is likely to be a fruitless exercise. These are some covers from the summer of 1968: June 29, students studying quietly in a library; July 6, dog sleeping on porch, American flag hanging from the railing; July 13, distant figures on a beach; August 10, middle-aged man in a rowboat confronted by giant inflatable beach toy; August 17, generic politician addressing half a dozen microphones; August 24, sunflowers; August 31, middle-aged vacationer in jacket and bow-tie preparing for a cocktail party at a beach house. In short, nothing to suggest that the inner and outer life of the summer of 1968 was not exactly like the inner and outer life of the summer of 1958.
If you look inside these issues at the “Notes and Comment” section—which serves, as, in effect, the
New Yorker’
s lead editorial—you find, along with observations on the effects of the drought on home gardening and a piece on jogging (“Joggers surround us these days …”), two items of symptomatic importance. One is a reflection on current events:
We grow increasingly disturbed these days, not just by the news but by its inexplicable lack of continuity … . In wartime, we formerly kept a map of the world with colored pins, and were globally anxious, for there was never any question of the whole not being the sum of all the parts … . We have been thinking of getting out our map again, except that now it must be hopelessly out of date. Perhaps what we need is some sort of situation map of the world on our front pages.
6
It is the return of the Thurberite nebbish, fretful that making sense of the world is much too big a task, but not quite sure whether people who pretend to make sense of it are not being a little pompous. Excuse us for being so unsophisticated, but maybe it’s all really much simpler than everybody seems to think; maybe we could put a sort of situation map on the front page … It is a politics of whimsy, and it is therefore a politics nobody in 1968 was likely to be paying much attention to.
The second item of interest is a comment on an announcement by the
Saturday Evening Post
of its plan to reduce circulation from nearly seven million readers to three million: “The
Post
will focus on the prime markets, forget the rest,” the announcement said. The “Notes and Comment” writer has great, derisory fun with this concept of limiting circulation to the desirable zip codes (“We found all this hypnotic, and immediately began to wonder about our personal zip code,” and so forth), and finishes up with a parodic acceptance of this crass new way of running a magazine: “There will be (as there always are) some people who will carp at these developments, and whine about the Media’s Responsibility to the Demographically Undesirable … .”
7
The point isn’t simply that the editorial side of the
New Yorker
had completely lost touch with the commercial reality of its own enterprise. It’s that the rest of the magazine world had finally caught on to the
New Yorker’
s commercial secret, and the editors of the
New Yorker
seem to have had no idea what was happening.
But the magazine found a response. In January 1969, Shawn made a move to solve the problem with the magazine’s politics by assigning political “Notes and Comment” pieces to Jonathan Schell,
who went on to produce over one hundred between 1969 and 1975. The magazine began providing serious, critical coverage of the Vietnam War, and it published the serial version of Charles Reich’s
The Greening of America
—the counterculture for Ivy Leaguers. It had been compelled, against every instinct, to choose sides. The
New Yorker’
s choices were limited by its own tradition. It had never sponsored much more than a genteel (though global) antipolitics. White’s “Notes and Comment” pieces of the early forties were primarily devoted to promoting the idea of world government. And the magazine’s great reportorial coups “Hiroshima” and “Silent Spring,” as politically influential as they proved to be, were the sort of pieces that appeal most to people whose distrust of—or indifference to—everyday politics is already fairly complete. The persona that pretended to regard getting a taxi as a trial of sensibility naturally tended to view greater issues in an apocalyptic light. “They never dreamed that the world’s inelegance could become so dangerous,”
8
is the way Robert Warshow characterized the magazine’s politics in 1947.
With Schell and Reich, the out-of-ordinary-politics tone became an above-ordinary-politics tone. The tone worked well for many readers when the issues of the day—Vietnam and Watergate—could be addressed by moral fervency alone. When the issues became politically more complex later in the decade, the fervency, in pieces by Schell and others, began to seem like stridency—and the writing even acquired, most uncharacteristically, a partisan political rhetoric. But the real problem was that simply to choose any side was, from the point of view of the demographic position the magazine commanded, to give up ground. “There was a change in the character of the readers” after 1969, J. Kenneth Bosee, the magazine’s treasurer, told Gigi Mahon. “The numbers didn’t change, but where there were top executives at Fortune 500 companies, now they were replaced by a bunch of kids. The thrust was to a lower audience. The demographics never went up again.”
9
Still, the roller-coaster ride bottomed out. The contents, after all, had remained strong. In that same summer of 1968, the magazine ran (looking at July and August alone): Jane Kramer’s memorable
two-part profile of Allen Ginsberg; long pieces on the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist Jim Garrison, by Edward Jay Epstein, and
The Graduate,
by Jacob Brackman; a joint profile of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, by William Whitworth; a “European Diary,” by Lewis Mumford; stories by Saul Bellow (“Mosby’s Memoirs”), Donald Barthelme, Woody Allen, Larry Woiwode, Isaac Babel. These are not only things you would have been happy to read in 1968; these are things you would be happy to read in any magazine today.
In the 1970s, thanks to some uncharacteristically aggressive leadership on the business side, circulation did pick up slightly, the magazine sold more ad pages each year, and, most significantly, overall revenues increased substantially. But all the time other general-interest magazines were trying and succeeding where the
Saturday Evening Post
had failed—in targeting the same slice of the demographic pie the
New Yorker
had largely had to itself for fifty years. The mass-circulation magazine was being replaced by the magazine edited with an upper-quintile household income firmly in mind.
Life
and
Look
were giving way to
HG
. As the prestige of the
New Yorker
began to suffer from competition and from the critical sniping competition generated, Shawn seems to have fallen back on the belief that since it was the disinterested pursuit of editorial perfection that had made the
New Yorker
a success in the first place, an even more fiercely disinterested pursuit of perfection was the only remedy for whatever ailed it now. So that at times during Shawn’s last years as editor, the magazine seemed like a parody of itself—running things like E. J. Kahn’s enormous multipart series on corn, soybeans, potatoes, and rice; publishing reviews of unnoticed books months or years after they had come out; letting topical reports from Washington and reviews of Hollywood movies of no special moment run to many thousands of words; serializing memoirs of the childhoods of
New Yorker
writers.
In the eighties the great upper-middle-class economic boom inspired dozens of magazines to reposition themselves at the top of the market in order to attract luxury advertising, effectively finishing off the trend that had begun in the late 1960s. When the
New Yorker
failed to respond to these pressures from the rest of the industry, some major stockholders on the magazine’s board of directors grew uneasy. When one of them decided to unload a sizable block of shares, Newhouse had his opportunity.