Ben Yagoda’s "About Town : The New Yorker and The World It Made"

Since the 1920's The New Yorker magazine has ebbed and flowed in and out of the nation's conscience. On occasion The New Yorker itself is splashed across the front page of major newspapers with stories either by or about the magazine. What other periodical is there whose change in editorship is chronicled with unfleeting attention as was recently the case when Editor Tina Brown was deposed.

The supposed demise of The New Yorker magazine has been chronicled many times and the subject is old hat. It interestingly parallels the decline of our culture brought on by the decline of reading lamented by Alan Bloom, Harold Bloom and other cultural critics. But The New Yorker still survives some 80 years after it was founded by Harold Ross. To appreciate it's place in the American psyche it is worth revisiting it's decades long history as Ben Yagoda has done in "About Town: The New Yorker and The World It Made".

Mr. Yagoda had free reign of the internal papers and correspondence of The New Yorker and willing participation from many of her former writers and editors. His meticulously researched book is replete with facts and anecdotes that makes for a wonderful read. Further he casts a critical eye at the magazine on it's literary merits and offers a well-read analysis of it's fiction in the manner of The New Yorker's own great literary critic Edmund Wilson.

It is difficult today to appreciate the impact that The New Yorker had on American culture in it's heydays of the 1930s through the 1950s. That a humor magazine lacking a table of contents or photographs and whose articles were often without byline could sweep past such stalwarts as "Life" and "The Saturday Evening Post" is prima facie difficult to understand. In recent years the magazine lost it's poignancy and fell apart with spiraling financial losses (which continue today) and a dull demeanor that was famously mocked by recent editor Tina Brown when she criticized the "50,000 word article on sapphires".

Some of us like to read 50,000 word magazine articles and The New Yorker appears to be the only mass circulation forum to find such lengthy works. Some of The New Yorker's long fact pieces-the distinction between "fact" and "fiction" is made clear in The New Yorker with an editor being assigned to head up each department-have been reprinted as famous books. My personal favorite is the spine tingling murder tale "In Cold Blood" related by Truman Capote. More famous is John Hershey's account of the atomic bomb dropped on Japan in "Hirsohima". These articles read with a breathless pace that is steady and lends itself to reading in a single setting. There is neither wasted adjective nor adverb. These were heavily edited by William Shawn and others and retold in the famous New Yorker voice which reads as if many of the works in the magazine had been written by one person. Some writers, such as Thomas Wolfe, have mocked that aspect of the magazine.

Some New Yorker writers did not appreciate such heavy-handed editing. Vladimir Nabokov, author of the novel of illicit love "Lolita", complained to the editor and founder Harold Ross about Katherine White who wanted to alter his fiction. Mrs. White was the patrician beauty and wife of the New Yorker writer E.B. White. She, James Thurber, Harold Ross, and E.B. White set the pace for the magazine in it's early years. White wrote the famous books "Charlotte's Web", "The Elements of Style", and "Stuart Little".

Brendan Gill in his 1975 book "Here at The New Yorker" openly disparages the fact side of the magazine while praising the fiction. This is quite odd and overboard since Gill as a writer of fiction, Talk of the Town reporter, and the magazine's theater critic no doubt would have appreciated such newsworthy, well-written articles as "The Massacre at El Mozote". This chronicled the massacre of hundreds of civilizians in El Salvador by the American-backed government. This article is not ordinary journalism but is literary journalism such as was written by Truman Capote. The article does not relate the facts in newspaper pyramid style fashion with short column inch paragraphs. Rather the prose is written like a novel and makes a more interesting read albeit a much longer one than would fit into the conventional daily press. Another great work of literary journalism described by Ben Yagoda is Lillian Ross's description of the making of the John Huston movie "The Red Badge of Courage". And it is quite amazing that Edmund Wilson, author of the Marxist History "To the Finland Station" and the book of Civil War literature "Patriotic Gore", learned Hebrew so that he could document the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The import of fiction to the New Yorker seems to have waned. Currently issues contain only one fiction piece while other works are relegated to-or perhaps made prominent in--a fiction-dominated version of the magazine which appears every few months. Gone are the days when eager readers poured over each new issue looking for a story by John O'Hara or J.D. Salinger. Not unfallable, The New Yorker has made some obvious gaffes when it turned down short stories by Flanner O'Connor and rejected a work by J.D. Salinger that would eventually become "The Catcher in the Rye".

Harold Ross was the magazine's founder and served as it's editor until 1951. He is by far a more colorful figure than William Shawn and his legacy is greater. Ross was something of a country redneck, sporting a crew cut, who hailed from what at that time was a rural village: Aspen, Colorado. His dislike of Black people is describe by Yagoda. Ross's gift was surrounding himself with talented writers and editors and giving then somewhat free reign to innovate. Yet even he engaged in wholesale editing. Brendan Gill recalls being called to the mat for using the word "indescribable". "Nothing is indescribable" Harold Ross roared.