William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust opens with the arrest of one of Faulkner’s great vibrant characters, the “intractable” mixed-race Lucas Beauchamp. We learn that “the whole town . . . had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man,” and Sheriff Hampton escorts Lucas to the jailhouse. Even in justice’s waiting room, however, he is not safe from the mob. There was no Twitter in those days, but word circulated and a crowd gathered in the street. “They seemed to fill it, block it, render it suddenly interdict as though not that nobody could pass them . . . but that nobody would dare . . . as people stay well away from a sign saying High Voltage.”
Ian Buruma felt the shock of that voltage about 10 days ago. It lifted him out of the editor’s chair at the New York Review of Books after only 16 months in the job. His predecessor, Robert Silvers, had sat there immovably from the magazine’s founding in 1963 till his death in 2017. Buruma’s misfortune was not to be accused of any crime. Nor has anyone tried to pin the scarlet letter of sexual harasser on him. Rather, his offense was to have commissioned a first-person essay by someone who had played nasty games on that field and to publish it without consulting the majority of his staff—a not uncommon event in most magazine offices.
The Canadian radio host and sometime musician Jian Ghomeshi was charged in 2014 with sexual assault and was the subject of many more allegations. He was acquitted of the charges in a court in Ontario in 2016, after the judge criticized the accusers’ behavior and testimony. Few people have vouched for Jian Ghomeshi’s character, and I have yet to meet anyone who admired the piece Buruma commissioned from him, “Reflections from a Hashtag,” in which the bleat of narcissism sounds regularly. It is advertised on the cover of the October 11 issue, along with related essays, under the now-mocking banner “The Fall of Men.” (Ghomeshi’s piece appeared online in early September.)
Buruma was the editor, the man who mattered, and in his opinion it was worth running. It is hard to imagine him relishing Ghomeshi’s tone, but he felt that the piece spoke, however clumsily, to the moment—the moment of #MeToo. Presumably, he imagined it would stimulate discussion. That’s what literary magazines exist to do, as well as to inform and entertain.
Rather, Buruma believed he was the man who mattered. He was wrong. On September 24, a statement was sent from the email address of Rea Hederman, the owner of the New York Review of Books. It said: “we acknowledge our failures in the presentation and editing” of Ghomeshi’s article—a “we” that did not include the editor. It also acknowledged “the validity of this criticism” the piece has attracted. “Most members of the editorial staff (including six female members of staff, four of whom worked with Bob and Barbara) were excluded from the substantive editorial process.” If he wasn’t already suffering maximum exclusion syndrome himself, Buruma must have done so on reading that “Bob and Barbara”—Barbara Epstein was Silvers’s co-editor for 43 years until her death in 2006. In response to Hederman’s message, a large number of distinguished contributors to the magazine signed a letter of protest against the sacking.
No one, not even Rea Hederman, is under any illusion about what brought down the curtain on Buruma’s brief show: the reaction on Twitter. Whatever his other accomplishments, he will go down in literary history as the editor who was forced out of office for publishing an article that a small but highly vocal number of people objected to. I would guess that the loudest among them have spent but a small portion of their lives reading the New York Review of Books. Had it not been for the public-shaming aspect, the disagreements between Buruma and his staff would have remained in-house, and perhaps led to a refinement of procedure; a good and civil outcome.
Editors are expected to take risks, and great magazines treat their readers to articles that are “unexpected” (William Shawn’s word for the ideal New Yorker piece). One person’s delight is another’s dismay. If you don’t like it, write a letter, publish an opposing essay, skip the next issue, or—the extreme reaction—cancel your subscription. Again, these are civilized reactions. In 1981, the New York Review published an unexpected set of “Two Notes” about prison life by the convicted killer Jack Henry Abbott, a protégé of Norman Mailer. They were brilliantly written. Nine days after his release from prison that summer, Abbott killed a young waiter in a trivial argument. Silvers and Epstein remained in place. It would be surprising to learn that at no other point in its history has the journal published pieces by convicts or ex-convicts (Mailer himself had an ugly spot in his past). Ghomeshi, of course, is not among them. Unsavory though he may be, he has not been convicted of anything. “Am I dreaming?” I wrote in an email to a friend who happens to have been in the running for the job before Buruma was appointed. “Did the proprietor of a left-liberal publication just sack his editor for printing an essay which was disapproved of by the unruly mob?”
From the perspective of anyone who holds freedom of expression and editorial independence dear, Buruma is a victim of rough justice. Twitter mobs, Faulknerian mobs, real mobs in real streets threatening real violence, all have this in common: The law by itself will not satisfy their demands. In the wake of successive Twitter storms, analogies are often drawn with McCarthyism. Not only in reference to those accused of actual offenses: It is enough just to be suspected of skepticism of #MeToo and the rush to judgment begins. We are getting used to craven apologies for causing “pain” to fellow citizens, which have sparked comparison to “Soviet-style reeducation.” Seventeenth-century Salem gets mentioned, too. But the best parallel is with the lynch mob—“Let’s get down to the jailhouse and string ’im up.” The surge of high-voltage power. The relegation of due process to an afterthought. The difference between this and real lynch mobs is only in degree.
Writing in the New York Times recently about the debacle over the decision first to invite Steve Bannon to be interviewed onstage by David Remnick at the New Yorker Festival, then to disinvite him, Bret Stephens noted: “What this really means is that Remnick is no longer the editor of The New Yorker. Twitter is. Social media doesn’t just get a voice. Now it wields a veto.”
It was a well-aimed jab, provoked by the news that not only had a clutch of celebrities threatened to withdraw from the festival, but that a member of the magazine’s staff drummed up opposition to her editor’s authority. “I love working for @NewYorker,” Kathryn Schulz tweeted on September 3, “but I’m beyond appalled by this.” She gave a link to a Times story about the planned Bannon event, then added: “I have already made that very clear to David Remnick. You can, too.” It was effectively a call to rouse the mob. Thereafter, the course of events was set (“they seemed to fill it, block it . . . nobody would dare . . . ”). Remnick proved himself to be no Sheriff Hampton—“I told you folks once to get out of here. I aint going to tell you again”—and the mob had its way. The New Yorker, onetime champion of the “unexpected,” joined that dubious band of organizations willing to no-platform controversial speakers.
What now for the New York Review of Books? The possibility of a bright new dawn cannot be discounted. Under Silvers and Epstein it was the finest periodical of its kind, which only makes the pusillanimity of owner and editorial staff appear all the more dismal. It might well raise itself back up to its customary height. Yet whoever is appointed as the magazine’s fourth editor will be condemned not only to wrestle with the shadow cast by Robert Silvers but also to accommodate the climate of purification (as distinct from Puritanism) in which we find ourselves living.
Another regular Review contributor I spoke to felt that Hederman would be thinking, “It’s time we appointed a woman,” overlooking Barbara Epstein’s 43 years. Epstein and the other cofounders—her husband Jason, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Silvers—would surely expect the owner to exercise independent judgment, not to make a politically correct appointment according to some right-thinking calendar. But the ironies pile up as this story continues to unfold. It would be a fine one if the Review were to be made into an intellectual safe space.
“The whole town had known since the night before that Lucas had killed a white man.” From the tenor of Faulkner’s opening declaration, it is obvious that Lucas had done no such thing. He was not guilty of any crime except being black and intractable in the face of a rotten system. His saviors were of a surprising sort: an elderly white woman and two teenaged boys, one black, the other white. The themes of moral debt and the inescapable bonds of blood course through this underrated novel—forces more powerful even than the High Voltage of mob justice. Nothing is simple in Yoknapatawpha County. Nor was it in the era of the McCarthy witch hunts, though true believers in the red menace tried to persuade the public that it was. Those of impeccable virtue always do. They are always “beyond appalled” at the presence of a dissenter in the room.
