No record that he ever made a speech in public can be found. Harold Ross sometimes gave away studio head shots of himself on which he had scrawled personalized epigrams. Shawn would not have done that in a million years. His style was a pervasive anonymity, and negative capability in the extreme. Probably he would have preferred that nobody write anything about him after he was gone.
Probably, but not certainly -- he lived surrounded by rules, but kept a wary eye on them, and recklessly broke them himself once in a while if he felt the urge. In the article that follows, Ved Mehta, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for thirty-three years, describes the romantically American background from which Shawn came.
When a character is credited, during a television interview, with having a photographic memory, he is quick to correct the record. He has always drawn inspiration from writers: J. Beyond such tributes, Anderson uses the tools of cinema to approximate the experience of reading. Watching one of his movies, you are always aware of the presence of his style, and of the dense weave of references, rhetorical curlicues and half-hidden meanings through which a story takes shape.
The exasperation, too, maybe. Its editor, Arthur Howitzer Jr. Some of the staff will be recognizable to collectors of New Yorker lore — is that supposed to be Ved Mehta?
It is dated May —three months after the debut issue. There were many such moments of despair and rescue. But the magazine found its financial footing, and, by the early s, it was in happy synch with the postwar consumer boom. Educated middle- and upper-middle-class readers seemed to want what The New Yorker was providing, and advertisers identified the magazine as uniquely suited to reaching those freespending readers.
With that kind of security, and with so many editorial columns to fill, Shawn could think expansively about the magazine. He could build on the deepening ambitions of the 40s with the plump resources of the 50s. If he wanted reporting from the newly independent country of Ghana, the big East-West summit in Geneva, or the Bandung Conference, in Indonesia, he did not consult the ledger books; he sent a writer. In fact, the sheer proliferation of advertising demanded that Shawn scramble in search of more and more editorial matter.
This, he found, had an inevitable drag on quality. There is, in this world, after all, only so much talent at a given time—only so much good writing. At a certain point, he found it necessary to limit the pages in a weekly issue to —as fat as a phone book in some towns. In his tenure as editor, Shawn made innumerable hires, tried out countless freelancers, and ran long, multipart series—some forgettable, some central to the literary and journalistic history of mid-century America.
His relationship to advertising was distinguished mainly by the ads he found too distasteful to accept. Decorum was important to Shawn, even though the world was changing. Shawn was also wary of the Beats, perhaps the most lasting school of literary outrage in the 50s. We hope that Mr. Kerouac will try something for us that is not about this particular group of wild kids. Critics like Seymour Krim worried that The New Yorker , which had exhibited so much bite in its first few decades, was now getting complacent and reserved in middle age.
But no magazine can be a completist omnibus of the cultural or political moment, and this one never aspired to be one. But he replied that he did not care: the writing would be good for them. One of his strengths was his sternly logical mind, which never seemed to rest -- with the result, another story had it, that once, when he was learning to drive a car, he complained to the instructor: "If one is disengaging the gears, one ought to have to let the clutch out, instead of pushing it in.
To me, 'in' represents engagement and 'out' represents disengagement. But there was criticism, too. The writer Dorothy Parker complained in the 's that much of the writing appearing then seemed "to be about somebody's childhood in Pakistan. The personality pieces were sometimes called too long and lacking in irreverence; its fiction was belittled by some as favoring fragile stylists. Shawn had made The New Yorker "the most successful suburban women's magazine in the country. As an editorial administrator, Mr.
Shawn played his cards close to his chest: for years he avoided holding meetings, preferring to deal with his assistants and writers one by one. He was so secretive that Mr. Fleischmann, when asked at the New Yorker stockholders' meeting whether Mr.
Shawn had a deputy, had to reply cautiously: "I don't believe so. Shawn did not, but when he was absent from the magazine, his place was taken by Gardner Botsford, another editor.
Shawn also had a strong sense of propriety. Gill reported in his memoirs that once Mr. Shawn, finding himself in an elevator with a tipsy writer who was talking loutishly in front of a woman, told the elevator operator, "Please stop. I must get off at once. Some New Yorker people have suggested that Mr. Shawn's notions of decorum might stem partly from his bourgeois upbringing in Chicago, where he was born on Aug. Shawn changed his name early in his career.
After schooling in Chicago, he spent two years at the University of Michigan, then dropped out and set off for New Mexico because, he later said, "I thought I'd like the climate. After several months, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an editor for a news service and married a news paperwoman, Cecille Lyon. The young couple spent a year or so in Europe; in Paris, by some accounts, Mr. Shawn worked as a piano player. He tried his hand as a writer and as a composer of music, largely for ballet.
Once there, he began doing reporting assignments for the magazine's Talk of the Town section. After a while they let me come into the office and work. As time passed, the boyish-looking reporter became known as a prodigy of conscientiousness and organization. In , he turned his hand to editing, although he still wanted to write. Shawn worked extremely hard in those days, but he also enjoyed relaxing.
Kahn Jr. He'd be our piano player. Shawn really came to the fore. By Mr. Thurber's account, St. Clair McKelway, who had had the title of managing editor and edited nonfiction, left to join the armed forces, and another New Yorker executive, Ik Shuman, suggested that Mr.
Shawn replace him. Ross spluttered, according to Mr. Shawn got the job, and he and Mr. Ross got on famously, although, as the New Yorker writer E. White once put it, Mr. Ross "was a creature of the 20's, when everyone was kicking up his heels. The Ross-Shawn collaboration proved highly fruitful: Mr. Thurber's appraisal was that "without Shawn's hard work and constant counsel, Ross would never have made the distinguished record he did as editor during the war.
As the war went on, Mr.
0コメント