Of the many stories about William Shawn in his last years as editor of the New Yorker, my favorite concerns Henry Fairlie. A highly regarded journalist in London for many years (and generally credited with having coined the term “Establishment”), Fairlie was living in Washington when he came to Shawn’s attention.
Summoned to New York for an audience with the legendary Shawn, Fairlie was asked what he would like to write, and he responded by suggesting a series of profiles of major American institutions. This wasn’t as much of an innovation at the New Yorker as he may have supposed, but Shawn was far too courteous to point this out. Instead, he asked what the first subject would be, to which Fairlie replied: “I think it would be interesting to write a profile of the United States Marine Corps.” He scarcely had time to register the look of utter horror on Shawn’s face before the editor rose to indicate that the interview was over. Shawn walked down the hall in silence, and it wasn’t until the elevator arrived that he sent the writer on his way with the words: “Mr. Fairlie, here at the New Yorker we are opposed to war.”
I was reminded of this example of the higher fatuousness that often prevailed during the last decades of Shawn’s editorship of the New Yorker — particularly where politics was concerned — when in a recent editorial written by Jonathan Schell for the Nation I came upon the sentence: “Which is more important: Clinton’s relations with Monica or human survival?”
Schell was the writer Shawn was grooming to succeed him as editor of the New Yorker. He seems also to have been Shawn’s principal political counselor from the moment he contributed his first piece to the New Yorker in 1967, two years after graduating from Harvard. (Need I add that it was a report on the war in Vietnam?) Lillian Ross describes their relationship in her new memoir, Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker:
It was with Jonathan Schell that Bill collaborated over a period of about twenty years in writing, week after week, about important political matters at the time — the Vietnam War, the Nixon years and Watergate, and the menace — the imminent menace, they felt — of nuclear war. They would do considerable talking about the content, then Schell would write a draft, and together they would revise and finish it. They took the work with the utmost seriousness.
In the second new book to appear on the topic, Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker, Ved Mehta confirms Ross’s account:
Jonathan’s having gone on to become the primary Comment writer meant that he had spent more time than anyone else with Mr. Shawn, for Mr. Shawn lavished a great deal of attention on each Comment piece. Since Comment was the closest thing to an editorial in the magazine, it had to correspond to his judgment and opinion. . . . For some years, therefore, Mr. Shawn had been seen going into Jonathan’s office most afternoons and spending an hour or more there. No one else, it seemed, had that kind of access to him since he became the editor.
Exactly what qualified Schell to succeed Shawn as editor of the New Yorker — besides the fact that he, too, was opposed to war — remained a mystery to everyone at the magazine but Shawn. Nor were Schell’s qualifications as an expert on nuclear warfare any less murky. Reviewing both these new books on the New Yorker for the Los Angeles Times, Jeremy Bernstein — the New Yorker’s principal writer on science from 1962 to 1993 and himself a physicist — cast an interesting light on the question of Schell’s intellectual competence in this regard:
I barely knew Schell, and he seemed like a charming, friendly man to me. I had an experience with him, however, that really worried me. A year or so earlier [in 1976], he had asked me to see him in his office. I had just published a long profile of Albert Einstein in the magazine, and Schell told me that he wanted to understand relativity better. Could I explain it to him? I got through about three minutes, when he said cheerfully that he guessed physics was something that couldn’t really be explained to the layman. Since this is what I thought I had been doing at the magazine for the previous 25 years, I was rather taken aback. And now he was going to be my editor.
Despite Shawn’s machinations on his behalf, Schell never did succeed to the editorship. Those machinations caused a good deal of strife at the New Yorker, yet Shawn persisted in his efforts to make Schell his successor in the face of considerable opposition.
It certainly had nothing to do with any demonstrated editorial skill on Schell’s part. On one of the rare occasions when he was entrusted to deal with another writer’s manuscript, the result — according to Ved Mehta, anyway — was so disastrous that Shawn himself was obliged to intervene to repair the damage. And yet, an incapacity to perform such an essential editorial task hardly mattered. What counted for Shawn above all else was Schell’s political zeal. That was what drove Shawn to such lengths in his campaign to secure the editorship for Schell.
Shawn was clearly convinced that no one but Schell could be depended upon to uphold what he saw as the New Yorker’s political mission. Under his own editorship, that mission amounted to little more than a facile, holier-than-thou codification of the left-liberal and pacifist political agenda of George McGovern in the 1972 presidential election. It tells us everything we need to know about Shawn’s politics — and therefore the New Yorker’s under his command — to discover in Mehta’s memoir that Schell, obviously with Shawn’s blessing, took leave from the magazine to write campaign speeches for McGovern.
Thus the politics that crippled the Democratic party for a generation also had the effect of sealing the fate of the New Yorker. Once Shawn had irreversibly failed in his attempt to make Schell his successor, he effectively left it to others to determine the future of the magazine — the future that gave us the magazine’s current editor, Tina Brown.
The odd thing about Ved Mehta’s Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker is that the pieties it lavishes on every aspect of Shawn’s life and work are so frequently at odds with his own account of the demoralization and disarray that overtook the New Yorker in the last days of his hero’s editorial tenure. Owing to Shawn’s ill-judged exertions on Schell’s behalf, the top senior editors of the magazine — Gardner Botsford, Robert Bingham, and Roger Angell — nearly succeeded in staging what Mehta describes as a “coup” to take control of the succession process. Earlier in the 1970s, an attempt to unionize the magazine’s staff plunged the New Yorker into what even Mehta does not hesitate to call “turmoil.” According to Mehta, “we were having a belated version of the sixties rebellion” — a rebellion that Shawn’s New Yorker loudly recommended for the rest of the country but which he wanted no part of when it posed a threat to his own authority at the magazine.
Mehta sets out to give us a portrait of the editor as a saint and a sage, yet the net effect of his book is to leave us with the impression of a man so isolated from the world around him that he was no longer capable of dealing with the realities of either his own situation or that of the magazine. In the end, writes Mehta, Shawn’s only confidants were Schell and Lillian Ross, his mistress. “Mr. Shawn, deskbound as he was, and hemmed in by his phobias,” Mehta continues, “had long relied on Lillian as his special eyes and ears, to keep him abreast of things going on in the city and in the culture at large.” With such confidants, alas, Shawn was scarcely in need of enemies — of which, it turns out, he had a great many at the New Yorker.
It should come as no surprise to find that the life of William Shawn — a life so largely spent at the New Yorker — would itself in the end come to resemble a New Yorker short story by John Cheever or even Donald Barthelme. But the problem with her Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and the New Yorker is that Lillian Ross is not a talent of the order of Cheever or Barthelme. Morally obtuse, intellectually shallow, and psychologically tone-deaf to the anomaly of her attachment to a lover who went home every night for forty years to his wife’s bed, Ross insists at every turn on proclaiming the “normalcy” of her relation to Shawn without ever persuading us that she really believes it. Whatever may have been her merits as a journalist, moreover, Ross doesn’t have the sensibility — never mind the prose — to recount the story of her forty-year affair with Shawn as anything but soap opera.
Like Ved Mehta in this respect, Ross is so intent upon aggrandizing her subject that she is totally unaware of the discredit she has brought upon the man she set out to idolize. In another respect, however, both of these books do inadvertently pay homage to Shawn’s celebrated gifts as an editor, for both give us dispiriting proof of what their manuscripts must have looked like before Shawn applied his magical powers to their improvement.
Hilton Kramer is editor of the New Criterion.
