Harold Wallace Ross, who founded The New Yorker a century ago, had a rule that no one should ever write about writers, because writers are boring, except to other writers, and he figured the same was true about editors—only it was more true, because no one should even know an editor’s name. That didn’t stop William Shawn, who became the editor of the magazine after Ross’s death, in 1951, from naming one of his kids Wallace, for Ross. It didn’t stop Ann Beattie from naming her car Roger, for her New Yorker editor, Roger Angell. And for all I know there are Chihuahuas and nieces and motorcycles at large named Bob Gottlieb, the magazine’s editor from 1987 to 1992; Lady Evans, the titled name of Tina Brown, its editor from 1992 to 1998; and D.R., for David Remnick, its editor since then. (I once had a tuxedo cat named Shaun, with a “u,” but that came from “Finnegans Wake” and doesn’t count.)
Most editors remain unsung. To be unknown is, ordinarily, to be underestimated. “The only great argument I have against writers, generally speaking, is that many of them deny the function of an editor, and I claim editors are important,” Ross once wrote. For him, editors were worth more than writers in the way that a great batting coach was worth more than a great batter. “Writers are a dime a dozen,” Ross told James Thurber. “What I want is an editor.” Writers were children; editors were adults. “I can’t find editors,” Ross fumed. “Nobody grows up.” (The magazine’s editorial director, Henry Finder, once said of Remnick, “I think he regards the editor’s job as being not crazy,” while, on the other hand, “the writer’s prerogative is to be, perhaps, a little crazy.”) Ross also found it useful—and this was a pretty clever trick—to tell writers who balked at being edited that the more they argued with an editor, the less worthy they were of being published. “The worse the writer is, the more argument; that is the rule,” he informed one very quarrelsome contributor. Stating this rule was an exceptionally effective way of getting a writer to pipe down. Then, too: it happens to be true. (I promise that my editor did not write that last sentence—he doesn’t even agree with it.)
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The relationship between an editor and a writer can be as intimate as an affair and as ineffable as a marriage, but it is also likely to involve two perfect strangers warily guarding a precise measure of distance: N95-masked and six feet apart, like pandemic shoppers, or flintlockarmed at ten paces, like eighteenth-century duellists. “As to your query about coming to the office, we should be delighted to have you, though I should tell you that we aren’t very impressive to look at,” one editor gently warned one of her writers in 1967. S. N. Behrman and his editor, Katharine White, worked together for twenty years before daring to use each other’s first names, and that only happened because they were thrown together in grief after Ross’s death. That’s not to say that the relationship is symmetrical. It’s not. It’s as lopsided as unrequited love. Writers are dizzy about their editors, as twitchy as teen-agers. I write only for you, Shawn’s writers used to tell him. “In the wildly unlikely event that this Fragment does not meet your publication needs at this time, I would ask that you dispose of it thoroughly and irremediably—some combination of shredder and flame is usually sufficient,” David Foster Wallace wrote to his editor, Deborah Treisman, in 1999. Steven Millhauser wrote her a limerick (“There once was a woman named Treisman; / Of grammar she was a policeman . . .”). Beattie kept a picture of Angell on her typewriter. Claudia Roth Pierpont once told Dorothy Wickenden, then the magazine’s executive editor, that writing involved “trying to acquire my own ‘internal Dorothy.’ ” Early in Adam Gopnik’s stint as a New Yorker editor, he got a draft of a piece from John Updike. It was perfect, so he set it aside. Soon, he got a typewritten postcard from Updike:
Updike—even Updike!—had been feverishly awaiting a reply, Gopnik realized. “Was anything wrong with the Auden review?” Updike once queried Shawn, scratching at the editorial door like a cat left outside for the night. “There has been an ominous gap since I turned it in.” He wrote constantly, and brilliantly, submitting fiction, poetry, and criticism to the magazine over six decades. He got plenty of rejections, and sometimes, like every other self-loathing writer, he all but asked for them. “I enclose a disk,” Updike once wrote to Finder, “but if you and Remnick are too let down, I will certainly understand.”
Writers are needier, every which way—John O’Hara once sent Ross a letter that read, “I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money I want more money”—but editors are desperate for good copy, delivered on deadline. At a weekly magazine, and even more so for its clock-tickingly digital version, this desperation can get awfully keen. The editor Wolcott Gibbs once sent Dorothy Parker a telegram that read, “SWELL JAM I’M IN STOP COMMITTING SUICIDE IF NO COPY FROM YOU TODAY.” Nearly a century later, forwarding to Wickenden an e-mail in which a writer all but admitted that he was never going to finish a long-awaited Profile of Noam Chomsky, Remnick asked, “Does someone have any Advil? Or a pistol?”
The hundredth anniversary of The New Yorker is a lousy excuse for violating three of Harold Ross’s century-old rules: never write about writers, never name editors, and never write about the magazine. From the start, The New Yorker avoided exactly this kind of palaver by making fun of it, at first by inventing a history and a pedigree that the publication never had. “When the magazine was founded in 1867 there were only two subscribers, both of them the Editor,” Corey Ford wrote in The New Yorker’s first year—not 1867 but 1925—in a series called “The Making of a Magazine: A Tour Through the Vast Organization of The New Yorker,” a parody of the self-puffery that was an everlastingly irritating feature of The New Yorker’s rival Time. It was Ford who gave a name to the monocled toff who became the publication’s mascot, Eustace Tilley, and he gave him an even dandier grandfather, Terwilliger Tilley, a fictional founder, who oversaw the delivery of the magazine to ex-President James Buchanan (“an early supporter of the New Yorker”), by penny-farthing. Ford’s Time-ese “Making of a Magazine” included a behind-the-scenes look at the editorial work undertaken at “The Magazine’s Punctuation Farm”: “The periods are set out in shallow pans under glass in the early Spring, and carefully watered; and after six weeks of sunshine each sends down a tiny root no bigger than a bean (,) which is called a comma.” (To be fair, the commas really were a problem. “Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim,” E. B. White once remarked. “You have sprinkled commas about all over the pages as though you were putting raisins in a plum-pudding,” Roald Dahl complained, culinarily.)
Ross, a lover of rules, had been much influenced as a cub reporter by Mark Twain’s essay on the literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper. (“There are nineteen rules governing literary art in the domain of romantic fiction—some say twenty-two,” Twain wrote. “In ‘Deerslayer,’ Cooper violated eighteen of them.”) Ross brought Twain’s punishing standards to the swank but slipshod literary scene of nineteen-twenties New York City. Notwithstanding Ross’s aversion to making a fetish of the magazine, New Yorker editors soon acquired a well-earned reputation for fussiness, not only about commas but about everything. Ross, who was born in Colorado and had hair like a shaving brush and liked to pass himself off as a rube from the Great American West, as if he ran not a magazine but a chuck wagon, typed out page after page of queries about the pieces he read. “Is cheese not a dessert,” he’d ask. Or: “Don’t think one wonders at. Think you marvel at and wonder why.” The Profile writer Margaret Case Harriman, whose father owned the Algonquin Hotel (she was born in Room 1206), could not abide the fussing. Ross objected to her use of the word “brood,” complaining that it had become “almost a New Yorker word.” “Thurber broods,” he wrote. “People brood up and down 52nd Street. But does Mr. G. brood? I doubt it.” Harriman thwacked back: “Think A. Lincoln brooded before New Yorker coined word.”
Given the chance of such tussles, editors generally try to protect their writers, recasting tempestuous in-house queries in teapottier terms. “Dear Miss Manning,” Katharine White wrote to a poet. “The verse ‘Oysterette’ is amusing enough except that we fear an oyster is not a crustacean. Is he? Perhaps you can make us a little clearer on this point.” A writer who was paying attention could often spot which notes came from whom. “I do not think that the remarks jotted down in pencil came from you,” Vladimir Nabokov wrote to White. “They are not in your style.” In such cases, White, sending out a proof, disarmed her authors: “Please don’t be alarmed by all the marks on it, as these are very few compared to many of our manuscripts and Mr. Ross always works particularly hard on things he likes.” Flattery gets you everywhere.
Editors suggest stories. “You might keep an eye on the Duke of Gloucester’s wedding in Westminster Abbey,” Conrad Aiken’s editor wrote to him in 1935. “It is being broadcast over the big networks here and something interesting about it might turn up.” (Aiken wrote the magazine’s London Letter, though he appears to have been in it, at least at first, for the free tickets to Wimbledon.) Editors also shape stories. Reporting, Patrick Radden Keefe says, is like being in a foxhole for months, and then, thrillingly, suddenly, your editor jumps down in there with you. In the midst of the Depression, St. Clair McKelway judged a Profile submitted by a staff writer promising but encouraged him to find out more about “rich recluses in general”: “You know how they are always popping up, or rather dropping off, and leaving fortunes. There must be somebody at Police Headquarters who, if he couldn’t give you the whole list, could tell you about a few of the more sensational ones.”
“It’s going to be great!” editors tell their writers when a piece comes in. Never that it is great. “This piece is going to be sensational,” Dorothy Wickenden e-mailed in 2006 about a piece by Steve Coll. “But it still reads a little too much like a series of scary exchanges between India and Pakistan, rather than a story about what these crises tell us about some of the weaknesses in the war on terror.” (She asked, among other things, that Coll address Pervez Musharraf’s support for jihadi groups in Kashmir and India, investigate the Bush Administration’s knowledge of the renegade actions of A. Q. Khan, and explore possible terrorist plans to acquire nuclear weapons as a means of fomenting war between India and Pakistan.) Jane Mayer once spent months working on a piece, and when her editor, Daniel Zalewski, dived down into the foxhole with her, he asked her ninety-nine questions, extending to the minutest details of an incident in her subject’s previous, unrelated career: “Can you get the clips? Have you looked into the British coverage? I understand there’s a book about it: have you read it?”
Keefe, working on a profile of the elusive Israeli tycoon Beny Steinmetz—“He had certain Bond villain-like qualities,” Keefe says—would have given up on nailing an interview, but Zalewski kept pressing. For months, Keefe chased Steinmetz across Europe. Finally, he heard that Steinmetz was going to be on his yacht off the South of France—very Le Chiffre—so he flew to Nice and managed to arrange to meet Steinmetz in a hotel. The yacht was bobbing in the harbor, Keefe texted Zalewski, triumphantly. Zalewski texted back, “All I wanted was a bob.” In the piece, the yacht appears: “A sleek white multistory vessel, it floated regally in the distance.” David Grann once investigated the death of the Sherlock Holmes expert Richard Lancelyn Green, who was found mysteriously garroted in his house. It looked like murder, but was it? Grann told me that he conferred with Zalewski, who suggested he read Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories “to see if there was a rare case in which a suicide had been staged to look like a murder. And, sure enough, there was an instance in the vast canon of Sherlock Holmes. It was called ‘The Problem of Thor Bridge,’ and it was a story that Green had read and once mentioned in his own writings.” Elementary!
Some writers conspire with their editors. When Jeffrey Toobin was covering the O. J. Simpson trial, during the Tina Brown era, he sent a draft to Dorothy Wickenden and added: “I really do hope that we can keep this out of Tina’s clutches until we have a reasonably satisfactory product.” (A lot of editors play a formidable game of good cop, bad cop: I loved this piece, but I couldn’t sell it to Gottlieb!) Ross, for one, did not tolerate being either overruled or undermined. After Gus Lobrano tried to shield one of his short-story writers from Ross’s fury, Ross wrote to the author directly: “Lobrano says that my query No. 9 is nonsense, that a person can mumble prayers while biting on a bullet. I bit on my lead pencil just now and mumbled a prayer, but I didn’t do it between bites. I exerted a constant pressure.” This sort of empiricism long outlasted Ross. More than thirty years after that business with the pencil, the fiction editor Charles McGrath sent galleys to Gabriel García Márquez’s translator with this query: “At A, on galley 1, the proofreader has questioned whether it’s really possible to balance on one chair leg. Well, I’ve just tried it, and it’s not hard at all.” (In the published version, “Eyes of a Blue Dog,” the original sentence remains intact: “I took a drag of the harsh, strong smoke before spinning in my chair, balancing on one of the rear legs.” Honestly, it still seems implausible to me, but, then again, I haven’t had the nerve to try it.)
The New Yorker’s distinctive style became the subject of such fascination—and Ross’s fanatical queries so famed—that, by the nineteen-forties, reporters from outside the magazine were begging for copies of office arcana, and Ross briefly lifted his rule about editorial anonymity. “A writer named Allen Churchill, heretofore unknown to me, is doing a piece on The New Yorker for Cosmopolitan and has the idea that he wants to quote some interoffice memos in it, being under the impression that these are interesting as hell,” Ross wrote to Gibbs, Thurber, and E. B. White in 1947. “The fact is that certain notes written at various times by you gentlemen, among others, would be interesting, I believe, and also entertaining, and doubtless many of them are around. How do you stand up about letting him have some of yours?”
Someone ponied up the goods. “Writers and editors who work for Ross insist that he has no particular stylistic pattern,” Churchill reported. “What passes for The New Yorker’s ultra-simple style, they say, is merely what happens to an article after it is queried in minute detail, checked, rechecked, expanded with additional facts, and rearranged for clarity.” Fact writers were, generally, staff writers, Churchill explained, but fiction writers, who submitted their stuff rather than fielding assignments, had a harder time, especially with Ross. “Fiction writers complain that he never lets a character leave the room without having the door slam,” Churchill wrote, and recounted an act of resistance:
That was always the trick of it, holding the line: my cabin, your comma.
“I know Mr. Ross’s little ways, and by this time he knows mine, I should think,” Emily Hahn wrote to her editor after he forwarded queries from Ross. Many of the best English-language writers of the past century served apprenticeships under New Yorker editors. The magazine altered American letters forever, and breathtakingly. And some of its writers and editors became, ever so cautiously, friends. “No woman should be allowed out while pregnant, or anywhere near a typewriter, I see it now,” Hahn wrote to Lobrano from war-depleted England. The magazine sent her roast beef, and ham, and a leg of lamb.
Still, not every writer stands at the ready, like Hahn, fingertips hovering over the keyboard, awaiting notes, keen to revise, iteratively. “Dear Editor—‘stet’ everything,” Denis Johnson e-mailed Deborah Treisman when she proposed changes in punctuation after he thought they’d already finished poking at his story. (“If you think I’m crazy now, come see me after just a little more poking,” Johnson wrote. “Follow the sound of the whimpering up the stairs, to the farthest closet. I’m in there curled up like an abortion.”) Many have balked at The New Yorker’s bruising editing, never mind Ross’s rule that the more they kvetched, the less he thought of them. “Can’t we have some signed agreement about my copy not being changed by other people?” Edmund Wilson asked Ross. (The answer was no. “He is by far the biggest problem we ever had around here,” Ross wrote, greatly regretting having hired Wilson not only as a writer but as an editor. “Fights like a tiger, or holds the line like an elephant, rather. Only course is to let him peter out, I guess.”) The idea has always been that the author gets the last word on style—“if he is an author and has a style,” as Wolcott Gibbs darkly put it, in an in-house memo titled “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles”—but a number of sneakier editors contrived to find it quite difficult to hear back from an author before a heavily edited piece went to press. “I took it that your telegram meant you gave us carte blanche to edit and change as we saw fit,” Katharine White wrote to Brendan Gill in 1936. And, especially early on, a lot of copy went to rewrite men, especially Thurber, who hated it. “I have put wheels under, and given wings to, a hell of a lot of heavy, dull stories,” Thurber complained. “It’s like going to war and digging latrines.”
The best thing about The New Yorker was that it had a distinctive voice, which was also the worst thing about it, at least in the early nineteen-forties. “A Comment paragraph seems about 90 percent me, and 10 percent Santa Claus or something,” an anguished E. B. White told Ross in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor. “I feel like an overcoat with a velvet collar.” Ross, who had long thought of The New Yorker as essentially a humor magazine, didn’t know what to do. “I am up to my nipples in hot water, what with half of the staff going off to war,” Ross wrote, the following year, to Alexander Woollcott, probably the magazine’s most ill-tempered and pampered contributor. (Woollcott wrote Shouts and Murmurs, which was hard to pull off in wartime, and, as Ross put it, “he was harder to deal with than a Gila monster, which he sometimes resembled.”) In 1944, the twenty-five-year-old J. D. Salinger, then a soldier, wrote to Gibbs (who was pinch-hitting for Lobrano), “Your notes in the past about my work have been kind and accurate, and I appreciated them (like hell I did). You’ll be pleased to know, or indifferent, that a certain cocky manipulation of character is finally beginning to leave my work.” In 1941, he’d written an early draft of “Slight Rebellion Off Madison”—the germ of “Catcher in the Rye”—but, despite promising that the story would appear in 1943, the magazine held on to it until the war ended. “ ‘Bananafish’ looks like better nonsense when it’s one word, don’t you think?” Salinger wrote Lobrano in 1948. Lobrano agreed. But he rejected another Salinger story about Holden Caulfield. “We can’t help feeling that this story is too ingenious and ingrown,” Lobrano explained delicately.
Ross resolved to change the course of the magazine, writing, in March of 1945, to one of the magazine’s foreign correspondents, Janet Flanner, in France, “The war is going to be over and forgotten before any number of real atrocity stories are printed, I’m afraid, unless the New Yorker gets around to doing something.” Meanwhile, the magazine kept on churning out much lighter fare. “The impression the magazine now gives anyone turning stuff in, is that material will first be completely dismantled, then assembled again in the assembling plant,” E. B. White complained to Ross later that year, as if the Punctuation Farm had become an actual place, somewhere north of Queens.
It was Shawn, though, who proposed printing the entirety of John Hersey’s account of Hiroshima after the bomb in a single issue of the magazine, one of the best things The New Yorker ever did, aside from publishing the entirety of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” in 1962. When Shawn first read Carson’s piece, he called to tell her that it might change the course of history. Carson hung up the phone, collapsed, and wept.
Ross ran a humor magazine; Shawn ran a literary magazine that elevated reporting. In the years of American prosperity that followed the Second World War, the cachet of The New Yorker meant that it was flooded with advertisers. Shawn, needing to fill a swelling magazine’s pages, ran it like a book club, publishing some astonishingly important journalism, from Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” to Richard Rovere’s letters from Washington. But he also, especially as time wore on, ran no small number of staggeringly long and often mind-numbingly boring articles about little of consequence, or what Tina Brown took to calling the fifty-thousand-word piece about zinc—articles that, by the end of Shawn’s tenure, were no longer wending through pages of towering ads, avenues through a city of skyscrapers.
Shawn referred to his own way of editing as The Tradition. It worked best in person. He would sit behind his big oak desk, and the writer would sit on a leather couch alongside it, both the desk and the couch covered with stacks of manuscripts, the New Yorker veteran Michael J. Arlen told me. Arlen, now ninety-four, started at the magazine in 1956. He and Shawn would go through proofs together, Arlen recounted, “and when something in the writing wasn’t good enough, invariably a soft patch in the middle where some line of reasoning or observation or whatever had gone off the rails (and which one was all too aware of oneself but hoped wouldn’t be noticed), just when we were about to conclude, Shawn would say in his whispery consigliere voice, ‘Why don’t you take these paragraphs downstairs (handing me a page of the proofs) and run it through your typewriter again and see if you don’t like it better?’ ”
For out-of-town writers, The Tradition usually required the telephone. Ross typed queries, but Shawn, who had been known to follow the Ross method, once typing up a list of a hundred and seventy-eight queries about a profile of an automaker, preferred to meet face to face or, failing that, to make phone calls or, failing that, to send telegrams. Shawn started working at the magazine in 1933, and became the managing editor six years later. He was savvy enough to know what future researchers might do with his archive, and therefore made a point of never writing much down. “PLEASE PHONE ME IF POSSIBLE,” he telegrammed Rovere, The New Yorker’s Washington correspondent, who had been in the habit of mailing him three-page, single-spaced typewritten letters. In 1953, Shawn telegrammed Lillian Ross: “EXCITED TODAY TO RECEIVE PIECE AT LAST MORE EXCITED WHEN EYE READ IT PERIOD YOU ARE WRITING BETTER AND WITH MORE AUTHORITY THAN EVER PERIOD IMPATIENT TO SEE SECOND PART BOTH AS EDITOR AND BECAUSE OF SUSPENSE IN STORY AS READER LOVE BILL.” By then, she was both his writer and his lover. (Their affair lasted until his death, more than three decades later.)
Shawn, walking backward on a snowy path in the woods, swept away his footprints with a pine-tree branch. He refused to be interviewed, even after he was attacked in the press. Instead, J. D. Salinger, helped by Lillian Ross, drafted a heated, twenty-three-page defense: “Shawn single-handed actually invented various forms of reporting; found writers who could develop these forms; and encouraged each contributor to create individual expressions of reporting,” Salinger wrote. “Would-be imitators have never been able to catch on to how the New Yorker does it. (A good, fat part of that ‘how’ is Shawn.)” Shawn, Salinger insisted, had “kept his staggering virtues quiet, or hidden them here, there and everywhere in dozens of writers, artists and editors, or even mysteriously made it seem, to some writers, that their special accomplishments were one hundred percent achieved on their very own.”
For later editors, little effort was required to leave no trace behind. Phone calls were faster than telegrams, and, especially after the magazine stopped hiring secretaries, they were a lot easier than letters. (Remnick likes to text.) During the Shawn years, the pace of publishing changed, and so did the machinery: phototypesetting, word processors, desktop computers. “Here, at last, are those TURKEY SEASON galleys,” McGrath wrote in 1980 to Alice Munro, who preferred doing business by mail.
In the nineteen-nineties, The New Yorker’s corporate owner set up a system that, while it lasted, automatically deleted e-mail after a few months. Texts vanish. The editorial trail goes cold.
Every editor brings in new editors and new writers, new sailcloth and planking for Theseus’ ship. “There is about them all the air of a man who has lost his wife and four children in an outboard motorboat accident,” Thurber complained about an aging staff. Under Shawn, the magazine grew more serious. He brought on some of the magazine’s most distinctive and important writers, from Dwight Macdonald and James Baldwin and John McPhee to Calvin Trillin and Jane Kramer and Jamaica Kincaid. He gave Baldwin an advance to write a series of pieces on Africa. Baldwin went there but never wrote those pieces; he gave Shawn something else instead. The New Yorker published “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” the heart of “The Fire Next Time,” in 1962.
The battles between editors and writers raged on. “This paragraph has been recast and is no longer recognizable as my style,” Nadine Gordimer complained to William Maxwell. Charles McGrath once hung up on Alec Wilkinson (the only time he ever hung up on a writer), and let me tell you this: they don’t even agree on what the fight was about. Harold Brodkey railed at Tina Brown for publishing a Critics piece that indicted Bill T. Jones’s dance “Still / Here,” which the dance critic had refused to see, as “victim art.” Brodkey, dying of AIDS, faxed Brown, “Want some more victim art? See you at my funeral.”
Some editors are bullies. “Shawn believed that all writers were children who should be indulged,” Mark Singer, who started at the magazine in 1974, told me, “and Gottlieb believed all writers were children who should not be indulged.” Others are merely unmovable. “This purchase is conditional on your acceptance of a considerable amount of editing,” Roger Angell warned Don DeLillo, about the story that became the novel “End Zone.” Then, too, some writers are mulish. “I (literally) spent more time and effort restoring what I’d written than writing it,” the film critic Pauline Kael wrote. “The editors tried to turn me into just what I’d been struggling not to be: a genteel, fuddy-duddy stylist.” Martin Amis once replied to editorial notes sent to him by Deborah Treisman by notifying her that she appeared to be under the mistaken impression that what he had sent her was a draft.
The worst writers can’t stand being edited; the worst editors write for their writers. (For the record, my editor disagrees with this wild assertion of mine, too.) There’s also a certain kind of editor who wants to take credit for a writer’s work—“This was garbage until I fixed it up”—even when that’s not even a little bit true. Sometimes, stuck with a handsy editor, you can get your way if you’ve got enough clout. “I am willing and eager to consider fairly and respectfully all suggested cuts and changes and omissions you may want to make, but this series is not subject to any editing whatever without my knowledge and consent,” Thurber wrote to Shawn, as if filing a legal notice. In a letter to Katharine White, Nabokov drew a line not so much in the proverbial sand as with the underline key on his typewriter: “I shall be very grateful to you if you help me to weed out bad grammar but I do not think I would like my longish sentences clipped too close, or those drawbridges lowered which I have taken such pains to lift.” White later wrote to Updike, “Nabokov’s the best writer in English but sometimes he’s maddening and I do not like what his ego has done to make him so very complex.” Updike once expressed the same kind of exasperation about a Nabokov novel: “There seem to be a lot of hostile parentheses.”
Worse than being over-edited is being unpublished, and a depressing percentage of The New Yorker’s archives—more than twenty-five hundred manuscript boxes at the New York Public Library (welcome to my foxhole!)—consists of letters of rejection, not only to unknown writers but also to well-known writers and to longtime contributors, an archive of agony. Following the magazine’s guidelines for over-the-transom submissions, Johnny Carson once sent in a proposed Shouts and Murmurs with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Over the years, New Yorker editors rejected submissions from W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, from Allen Ginsberg (“There are bad sections which detract from quite marvelous ones”) and Ian McEwan (“It’s a shame, as I am a great fan of his, and have hoped for a while that something would come along from him that wasn’t too sexy and / or violent for us”). The New Yorker paid its writers terribly—possibly one reason that, early on, it published so many women writers was that it could get away with paying them peanuts—and it did not reliably accept writers’ submissions. There’s a reason that Updike fretted so much. Other magazines print most of what their established contributors submit; from the start, The New Yorker refused to do that, rejecting submissions even from its star writers—sometimes for years—leaving many of them, especially fiction writers, in precarious financial straits. “I would submit a casual of 1800 words and get a 4000-word letter back telling me why it ‘wasn’t quite for us,’ ” Michael J. Arlen told me. “Drove me crazy.” From 1961: “Dear Miss Plath, I’m really sorry to return these poems.” To Maxine Kumin, in 1967: “POST_OP is a poem we admire, but we’ve published so many poems about hospitals, recoveries, and so on, that we decided against it, finally, in spite of its unquestionable quality.” In 1957, the editor Rachel MacKenzie rejected four poems by Adrienne Rich: “Except when I have to write this kind of a letter to a friend, I enjoy everything about working for the New Yorker.” A literary agent was told, in 1961, “We love this first section of Philip Roth’s novel but don’t see it as sufficiently self-contained to make a piece for us.” Roger Angell rejected a story by Shirley Jackson, after her death, explaining to her agent, “The writing is admirable, of course, and the setting unusually interesting, but the conclusion, for some reason, lacks the surprise and chilly sense of semi-reality that is so necessary to this kind of story.” And here’s Angell’s reaction—in a memo circulated within the fiction department—to a late story from Hemingway: “Then you have the great leftover fish the redolent ancient dead fish who are always with us trailing their scaly manuscripts and spoiling our midwinters and our childlike trust of them with their expectations that whatever is left of them will find its way surely into the pages of the good magazine no matter how stinky and tired their trail . . . the same old tiresome later Papa stuff to me . . . please, please, please let’s not put this in the magazine.”
Bill McKibben was a senior at Harvard when he got a call at the Crimson offices. It was Shawn, offering him a job. McKibben was sure it was a Lampoon prank, so he said, “Fuck off,” and hung up the phone. Six months later, Shawn called back, and McKibben took the job. (“The mark of our relationship is that neither of us ever felt the need to bring up that first phone call,” McKibben says.) Writers bring in new writers, too. In 1973, it was Updike who recommended that the magazine solicit a story from Chinua Achebe. Still, if you’re a piece of well-worn planking, you are keenly aware that your days as part of the ship are numbered. A good editor can put that fear to use, as Angell did with Updike. McGrath puts it this way: “Roger had a trick, when John hadn’t submitted anything in a while, of dropping a line to Updike mentioning that the magazine had just discovered a promising young writer, and as often as not, an Updike story would turn up in the mail a week or two later.”
Being adored by the editorial staff of The New Yorker does not mean that love will last. Very little protects writers, and even less—until the forming of the New Yorker Union, in 2018—protected others at the magazine. (Certain writers have also been notoriously hostile to collective action. “Dostoyevsky didn’t have a dental plan,” a writer whom no one can definitively name complained, in the nineteen-seventies, when magazine employees tried to improve their lot.) You lose your talent, or you lose favor, or you lose both. In 1927, Harold Ross wrote to Dorothy Parker, “The verses came and God Bless Me! if I never do anything else I can say I ran a magazine that printed some of your stuff. Tearful thanks.” Thirty years later, William Maxwell sent Parker a rejection: “I cannot bear this kind of disappointment to writers whose work means as much to me as yours does. We all felt that, in spite of wonderful things which no one but you could have written, the people do not quite come alive.”
“You are fast getting to be our favorite poet,” Katharine White had written to Ogden Nash in 1930, when he started submitting whimsical verse to the magazine. But the magazine changed and Nash’s powers waned, and by the nineteen-sixties, when Roger Angell—White’s son—was Nash’s editor, the situation was different. “It is a dark day here when we have to turn down an Ogden Nash poem,” Angell wrote Nash, in 1961. There followed many more dark days. Nash wrote back, “In my 32 years of writing I have never protested an editor’s decision. Disagreed with, yes; protested, no. This letter is proof that I am heart-sick, bewildered, frustrated.” He closed, “The New Yorker has always been my parent and my nurse.” Updike later wrote to Angell with his own worries about being put out to pasture, citing the sorry rejections sent to Nash: “One of the less happy tasks of an editor must be holding the hand of a coddled old contributor as he loses his fast ball, curve, and sinker.”
Updike never saw that pasture. “I wanted to get this down to you before anything more befuddling befell me,” he wrote to Finder from his sickbed, sending in what would be his last piece. “They must begin, surely, with chemo soon.” He died the next month. He never lost so much as his fastball.
Shawn was ushered out the door, in 1987, by the magazine’s new owner, the magnate S. I. Newhouse, and replaced by the longtime Knopf editor-in-chief Bob Gottlieb. Loyalists were furious. Shawn and Lillian Ross wrote a screenplay for a black comedy about Newhouse running the publication. (The editor Susan Morrison has one of the few surviving copies, bound in a brown cardboard cover, in her desk at One World Trade Center.) “The New Yorker, as a reader once said, has been the gentlest of magazines,” Shawn wrote to the staff at his departure. “Perhaps it has also been the greatest, but that matters far less.”
Another exodus followed when the Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown replaced Gottlieb, in 1992, pledging to end the era of the proverbial fifty-thousand-word treatise on a brittle metal whose position on the periodic table is to the right of copper and catty-corner from aluminum. Jamaica Kincaid, who had married one of Shawn’s sons, was among those who left. (She later returned.) Ian Frazier quit when Brown had the idea of naming Roseanne Barr as a guest editor, though it never came to pass. But Brown, hand over hand, hauled the magazine back from where it had been teetering, just over the edge of the cliff of irrelevance. If she lost some writers, she brought on many more, including a forty-three-year-old professor of English and African American studies named Henry Louis Gates, Jr. For three-quarters of a century, the magazine had been overwhelmingly white. Gates’s first profile was of the directors of “Menace II Society.” He was terrified. He had a blast. The stock criticism of Brown is that she made everything about celebrity; the stock criticism of Remnick is that he made everything about politics. The same could be said of America itself, across those years.
Brown was a faxxer. “Love it, love it, love it,” she’d fax. Or, sometimes, “Love it, love it, love it, but wondered about . . .” She slew dragons. Here she is on a Profile of a poet: “It needs squirts of irony throughout and excision of words like ‘masterpiece’ and ‘genius.’ ” When Gates turned in a profile of Harry Belafonte, Brown asked, “Is he a quicksilver asshole, at heart, and explorer of causes to give himself an aura? I feel unsure at the end.” She sometimes queried à la Ross: “What is a slinky?” she asked of a Louis Menand essay. And, from the parapet, she kept her eye on the horizon. “Why do I think Cynthia Ozick might be a gardener?” she wrote in another fax. “I really want to snag her.”
Brown once enlisted the reporter Amy Wilentz to cover Israel, as The New Yorker’s Jerusalem correspondent. (The New Yorker doesn’t have bureaus, or bureau chiefs. “I was the bureau,” Wilentz says.) When Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, Brown called Wilentz and told her to attend the funeral. Wilentz had a two-week-old baby; Brown had young children of her own. Israel was on a security lockdown. Journalists were to be corralled in a bus for hours before reaching the funeral—not a situation a nursing mother can endure. “I just knew that this was going to be a shit show and an impossible story to cover in any interesting way,” Wilentz told me. She told Brown she would not go.
“I don’t understand,” Brown said.
“I have a new baby,” Wilentz said. “I have to be with him all the time. I’m not taking him to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral.”
“You can just pump and go,” Brown said.
Wilentz did not pump, and she did not go. (She still jokes with her kid, who’s long since grown up, “It’s your fault that I’m not at The New Yorker still.”) Instead, she wandered the city, and turned in a piece about the pall that fell over Jerusalem when Rabin was put to rest, the blare of sirens, the salutes of soldiers, and the flickering of yahrzeit candles amid signs that read “There Is No Peace”: “And here and there, in the city where he was born, fluttering banners still remonstrated with a dead man.”
John Bennet, who was raised in East Texas and drove a pickup truck, got his first job at The New Yorker in 1975. “An editor is like a shrink,” Bennet liked to say. “If the writer doesn’t think his editor is great, he’s totally fucked up.” There is no transference like this transference. “A writer is a guy in the hospital wearing one of those gowns that’s open in the back” was another of Bennet’s aphorisms. “An editor is walking behind, making sure that nobody can see his ass.”
Editing, though, is a dying art. And it’s this decline that justifies breaking Harold Wallace Ross’s rule about never writing about writers and never naming editors. If you were to look back to the year 1925 and read or listen to everything published on any given day—in books and magazines, in newspapers and newsletters and radio broadcasts—nearly all of it, with the heart-thumping exception of live sports broadcasts, would have gone through an editorial process. Editors, the good ones, anyway, would have considered whether what was being said was said clearly and stated fairly. A century on, in an age of tweets and TikToks and Substack posts and chatty podcasts, a vanishingly small percentage of the crushingly vast amount that is published on any given day has been edited, by anyone. A whole lot of people are wandering around in hospital gowns with their butts out, patootie to the wind.
As for the Punctuation Farm, it turns out that they’ve got livestock there, in the fields beyond the greenhouses where the periods, set in shallow pans, sprout into commas. “Readers are like cows—they just want to keep chewing what you feed them,” Bennet used to say. But writers are like sheep, woolly and steadfast and bleating. And the best editor, high in the hills, is like a shepherd, warding off the wolves, moving the flock to better pasture, rescuing lost lambs. ♦
