A hymn to The New Yorker

Down a rabbit hole with the world's greatest magazine

For much of this year I have been down a New Yorker rabbit hole. And I mean deep down. Pretty much all I have read is The New Yorker, books about The New Yorker or books by New Yorker writers.

This rabbit hole is an endless warren with tunnels heading off in all directions. It would be easy to get lost. Possibly forever.

Maybe I should surrender all hope of ever getting out. Stop trying to remember which turnings I took to get where I am. Forget the trail of breadcrumbs or the unravelled woollen jumper. Embrace my fate.

Because there are compensations in being lost down a New Yorker rabbit hole. It can lead to the discovery of unexpected wonders.

Every week the magazine comes through my letter box in Edinburgh. I never pick it up without a sense of anticipation. Sometimes it arrives a few days after publication in the States. At other times it is weeks in arrears. Usually this doesn’t natter. This is timeless writing, written for the ages, made to last.

Perhaps this is the biggest difference between magazine journalism and daily newspaper journalism. Writing for a daily newspaper you must, above all, be at the service of the moment. At the end of a year when I look back at the 44 columns I have written for The Times, the ones I am most proud of are not necessarily the best written, or those with the most elegant argument. Standing the test of time is not a journalistic virtue. Instead I value the words necessary that day, that hour even.

Alan Barth, the celebrated journalist who wrote editorials for The Washington Post in the mid 20th century, is credited with the insight that journalism is “the first rough draft of history”. It becomes less of a draft the further you move away from the unforgiving grind of multi-edition daily newspaper publication or rolling TV news. I used to work on a Sunday newspaper where the diplomatic editor was a man called Trevor Royle. As a side hustle he was a war historian, and he talked in a clipped military style. “The thing you have to remember, Kenny,” he once said to me, “is that daily papers are the infantry of journalism, caught up in hand-to-hand combat. We in the Sunday papers are the cavalry, cutting across the field of combat, clarifying the battle lines.”

These days writing for a daily newspaper is becoming more like writing for a Sunday. Reporters on The Times receive regular emails from the editor reminding them they have a duty to explain, to recap, to contextualise, to analyse, to humanise, to personalise. This is what British quality Sunday papers have been doing for generations, at least since 1967 when Harry Evans became editor of The Sunday Times. These days the infantry has called in the cavalry.

Back to the rabbit hole. How did I get here? I blame Wes Anderson, the film director.

Last Christmas one of my presents was a book about the Anderson film The French Dispatch. Each Anderson release is followed by a coffee table book about the making of the movie, lavishly illustrated and lovingly detailed. The one about The French Dispatch describes Anderson’s twin obsessions with The New Yorker and mid 20th century French arthouse cinema, and his typically idiosyncratic idea of merging the two in one film.

Anderson starting reading the magazine as a child in 1987 in his high school library in Houston, Texas.

“I read it, even though I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time. One of the first pieces I remember reading in it was about Oxford dons, and I had absolutely no idea what I was reading about. But I was interested because I knew that it wasn’t anything you were going to come across anywhere else.”

This is a core appeal of The New Yorker. You are as likely to get a lengthy analysis of power dynamics within the Iranian state as a review of a book about breasts as a profile of the glamorous woman in charge of New York’s garbage disposal as an assessment of whether artifical intelligence will indeed destroy the world. Recently I learned from the magazine that there is an Atlanta-based non-meat burger chain called Slutty Vegan that uses the slogan “EAT PLANTS YA SLUT”. This is good information. It does not matter what usually interests you. What matters is trust. You trust the writers to deliver, regardless of the subject matter.

Only occasionally is it a struggle. I once came across this paragraph in a review by the magazine’s art critic, Peter Schjeldahl, of an exhibition by Kandinsky.

Kandinsky hit on a symbiosis of mysticism and geometry that had affected religious traditions (the European Gothic, the Indian tantra) since well before its ancient Greek codification, notably by Pythagoras: a force field in which the least rational of entities, the soul, meshes with the utter rationality of mathematical design—the latter subliminal but still present in Kandinsky’s brushy manner.

That was in 2021 and I am still a bit baffled, albeit beginning to get the drift.

Anderson became so obsessed with the magazine that when he started making money in movies he approached The New Yorker and asked if they would be willing to sell him their entire archive of back issues, going back to 1925, from their own library. Unsurprisingly they said no. Anderson eventually bought a full set from the University of California, Berkeley.

The French Dispatch is about a fictional magazine published with the fictional Liberty, Kansas, Evening Sun. Despite this ostensibly American setting the film takes place entirely in France. Or to be more precise, the version of France we see through the lenses of directors such as Godard, Malle, Truffaut, Tati, Renoir and Demy.

The French Dispatch is one of my favourite films, largely because I identify with the the magazine’s editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr, as played by Bill Murray

Bill Murray as editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. Credit: Indian Paintbrush

I have no idea if I was as attentive and accommodating an editor as Howitzer. What I certainly recall from my time editing newspapers is the careworn feeling I see etched in Howitzer’s face. And what editor does not empathise with Howitzer’s instruction to his staff: “Just make it sound like you wrote it that way on purpose.”

The book lists the New Yorker writers who were the inspiration for the movie, and my next step down the rabbit hole was to buy An Editor’s Burial: Journals and Journalism from The New Yorker and Other Magazines, a collection of pieces that informed Anderson’s script.

Many of the pieces are pen portraits of the magazine’s two legendary editors, Harold Ross (editor, 1925-51) and William Shawn (editor, 1951-87), who were the combined inspiration for the movie’s Arthur Howitzer Jr.

Ross founded The New Yorker with his wife Jean Grant, a pioneering journalist with The New York Times. They corralled an extraordinary stable of writers largely drawn from their dining companions at a round table in the Alonquin Hotel, on West 44th St.

If you fancy dining with the ghosts of Dorothy Parker and James Thurber don’t bother visiting the Alonquin today. It has undergone an unfortunate luxury makeover. I was lucky to visit in the 1990s when it still had a patina of foxed bohemianism, and felt like the kind of place that welcomed a writer with a thirst. Which was good, because in the 1990s I was just such a writer.

Harold Ross. Credit: Shutterstock

James Thurber recalled Ross’s distinctive appearance. “Even in a dinner jacket he looked loosely informal, like a carelessly carried umbrella”.

Thurber went on:

“I had caught glimpses of him at the theatre and at the Alonquin and, like everybody else, was familiar with the mobile face that constantly changed expression, the carrying voice, the eloquent large-fingered hands that were never in repose, but which darted this way and that to emphasise his points or running through the thatch of hair that stood straight up until Ina Claire said she would like to take her shoes off and walk through it. That got into the gossip columns and Ross promptly had his barber flatten down the pompadour.”

Thurber signs off his reminiscences of Ross with: “I can still hear him, over the years, loud and snarling, fond and comforting.”

Shawn was a less robust character. He was scared of heights, crowds, bridges, elevators, open spaces, fast driving, aeroplanes and air conditioning. A colleague once wrote of him: “He was squeamish, a little shy about gore in any form. He liked his cornflakes well done.” Shawn’s voice, recalled by his son Allen, was “rather high-pitched, with an almost feathery tunefulness, though also unmistakably male”.

William Shawn. Credit: Janet Malcolm

In a 1975 memoir Here At The New Yorker, Brendan Gill describes the devotion Shawn ladled over his star writers.

“Shawn’s method in dealing with a writer is to convey such a high regard for a given piece of work that once it has been put in type and the moment comes for the editor to challenge certain phrases and seek necessary changes, the writer is pretty well convinced the corrections will cost Shawn as much pain as they do him - indeed, that the corrections are being made, at no matter what expense of spirit, only in order to bring a a masterpiece from near-perfection to perfection. No author can fail to recognise the attractive logic of this proposition. Because most writers would do anything rather than hurt Shawn’s feelings, they begin to babble premature agreements; they hear themselves apologising for the gaucherie of a phrase that had seemed, up to a few minutes before, a stroke of genius.”

More remarkable than Shawn’s editorship was his private life, as detailed in another book I read while down my rabbit hole. Lillian Ross was one of Shawn’s reporters. After Shawn’s death in 1992 she published Here But Not Here: My Life With William Shawn and The New Yorker. This detailed their 50-year love affair, much of it spent with Shawn living a double life between two Manhattan apartments 12 blocks apart, one containing his mistress and the other his wife. He had three children with his wife and adopted a son with his mistress.

Allen Shawn, one of his sons, would later write: “It wasn’t uncommon for him to eat, or at least, attend four or even five meals a day to accommodate all the important people in his life.”

Here But Not Here scandalised New York. The judgment seemed to be that it was one thing to have such an unconventional domestic arrangement but quite another to write a book about it. It was bad form. Lillian Ross is a tremendous reporter famed for her New Yorker profiles of Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplain and JD Salinger. And yet I confess I was irritated by her memoir, which felt self-serving and lacking in candour: a post-justification rather than an honest reckoning. Was their life together really so perfect? Was Shawn really such a saint? As a journalist I often find myself looking hard for flaws, especially in situations that seem well-ordered. I do this out of self-respect more than anything else. Lillian Ross seems not to have had the same instinct when it came to the story of her own life.

The New Yorker’s most celebrated editors may have been accommodating to their star turns but further down the chain of command the editing process was brutal. According to current staff it still is. To be edited by The New Yorker is to stand naked in an x-ray machine while someone circles your knobbly bits with a blue pencil. Nick Paumgarten, in a recent obit of a New Yorker copy editor called John Bennet, recalls one example of such trauma. Bennet once deleted three whole pages of a profile Paumgarten had filed. “Scrawled in a margin was: “Blah, blah, blah.”’

That obit, incidentally, is a wonderful insight into the editing process. Bennet once described his job thus: “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back. An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”

Another excellent Bennetism is: “Only shitty writers need transitions.” On being reminded of this truth I went back through this piece you are reading and removed a couple of egregious examples.

When Bennet thought a young writer had promise he would say: “There’s film in the camera.” I fucking love that.

The photograph I have used above of Shawn was taken by Janet Malcolm, a celebrated arts writer on The New Yorker who died in 2021 aged 86. Malcolm is famous mostly for two things. One is the opening line of her 1990 book The Journalist and the Murderer: "Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible."

Janet Malcolm. Credit: Nancy Crampton

I blow hot and cold on this quote. I can see where it comes from. I can recognise times where it could be said to be justified. Mostly I acknowledge its insight while at the same time adding copious footnotes: depends on the story; depends on the intervieweee; depends on the circumstances; depends on how you do it.

The other thing Malcolm is famous for is a long essay called Forty-one False Starts, about the artist David Salle. It takes the form of 41 “intros”. The intro is the opening paragraph of a story, known in American journalism as “the lede”. I had never read this essay until I chanced on a book of Malcolm’s essays in Agitate, an excellent independent gallery of photography in Edinburgh’s West End. Yet another dive down the rabbit hole.

Forty-one False Starts is a masterpiece. At the most basic level it tells the reader more about Salle than a conventional piece could ever hope to do. From a writer’s perspective it allows Malcolm to approach her subject from a multiplicity of angles and with a variety of tones: chummy; cold; sceptical; indulgent; academic; blunt; oblique; empathetic; forensic. At the same time it slowly reveals the writer’s relationship with her subject - the dinners, the parties, the lunches, the conversations when just hanging out. And it reveals her changing view of him as a person and as an artist. Each of the starts is informed by what we already know from reading the other starts. We feel we are in posession of privileged information. “Ah,” we say to ourselves, “but he would say that, wouldn’t he?

One subscribes to The New Yorker for a range of reasons. Some people leave a neat pile of recent issues on a living room coffee table, like intellectual soft furnishings. I confess my reason is fantasy: I want to be the kind of person who has a subscription to The New Yorker. More than this, I want to be an actual New Yorker for whom the magazine is simply an adjunct to a culturally varied, intellectually stimulating and spiritually satisfying urban life in, say, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I want to be that regular in the Bedford Avenue coffee shop with The New York Times on the table and a slim paperback in the pocket of his slightly battered jacket. I am actually going to New York for a short holiday in the autumn. I see this as an audition for a whole new me.

Where next? Where shall the rabbit hole take me? I have many options. More Janet Malcolm, certainly. My friend and fellow writer Peter Ross once gave me a book of pieces by New Yorker legend Joseph Mitchell, which is due a revisit. In The French Dispatch, Mitchell is the writer who just stands around reading a book, never writing a word. Famously, he never published a single piece in the last 30 years of his career. Before this long paragraph break his writing is some of the best reportage in print.

What else? As always, I have a pile of actual New Yorker magazines I have not yet got round to reading. No, they are not on a coffee table. I don’t have a coffee table. I would like to have a coffee table.

I also have the magazine’s online archive to fall back on. This morning I was seeking out New Yorker mentions of JD Vance, Donald Trump’s vice-presidential pick. I turned up the insightful observation that Vance’s populist white nationalism is a repudiation of the flimsy, shallow, suburban antiwokery of Ron DeSantis.

I may have to buy Wish I Could Be There, a memoir written by William Shawn’s son, Allen, who inherited many of his father’s phobias and whose adult life has been spent unpicking what was said and unsaid in his childhood, not least about his twin sister Mary, who was autistic and sent to live in an institution from the age of eight.

Janet Malcolm once said of Allen Shawn’s writing that it “puts in a kind of good word for us all”. That strikes me as an admirable goal for serious, humane, long-form narrative non-fiction.

Unsparing but generous. Serious but light-hearted. Intellectual but emotionally available.

Everything The New Yorker is on a good day. Everything a good journalist is every day.

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