The New Yorker Turns Fifty

By Stefan Kanfer

It was a supercilious, Oscar Wilde face, with a nose that richly deserved tweaking. It adorned a new publication called The New Yorker, and the smart money said of face and magazine, as Dorothy Parker had once said of a pair of amorous gorillas: "I give them six months."

Half a century later, the smart money has vanished into depressed stocks and inflated currency. And The New Yorker has survived--no, flourished. The upstart has become an establishment, the iconoclast an institution. In his anniversary thesaurus of anecdotes, Here at The New Yorker (TIME, Feb. 24), Brendan Gill describes his 40-year career at the magazine as "playing the clown when the spirit of darkness has moved me and colliding with good times at every turn." It is a deceptive portrait of The New Yorker; like a shaving mirror, it gives only part of the picture. Once upon a magazine, The New Yorker gave its readers a passport to a world in which everyone was witty and/or attractive, in which sophistication and style--above all, style--mattered more than life itself. In one sense it was a constricted world; the old New Yorker never boasted more than 330,000 subscribers. In another sense, that world seemed to have no boundaries. It played host to Alexander Woollcott, Parker and Robert Benchley, and published the poems and short stories of almost every writer worth a second look. Such diversity should imply a 50-year-old scrapbook, an omnium-gatherum without standards or values. The literate world knows better. The very term "New Yorker piece" connotes scruple and concern.

Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams." -

Under Ross, the magazine was a unique, unstable amalgam of laughter, arrogance, politesse and information. "If you can't be funny, be interesting," he instructed his staff. To that end The New Yorker set a tone that Critic Malcolm Cowley described as nostalgia mixed with condescension. It acted as if the weekly party--to which the reader was always extended an invitation--would never end.

Ah, but the storytellers knew better. From the beginning, they had spotted the worm in the big apple, the skull beneath the skin of American life. John O'Hara told 80-proof stories of disappointed careers. John Cheever imagined an enormous radio that eavesdropped on people's conversations; eventually the radio's owner cried emptily: "Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we've never been like that, have we, darling?" Shirley Jackson wrote of a modern lottery where each year there was a sacrifice to the harvest: " 'It isn't fair, it isn't right,' Mrs. Hutchison screamed, and then they were upon her." J.D. Salinger inaugurated his chronicle of the Glass family by introducing Seymour, who stood over his sleeping bride, "looked at the girl, aimed the pistol, and fired a bullet through his right temple." Irwin Shaw, John Collier, E.B. White, Thurber, Vladimir Nabokov and dozens of other contributors made the same points, sometimes subtly, sometimes with hammer and anvil.

Yet the personality of the magazine remained rather close to that of Eustace Tilley, the Regency snob with the top hat and the lorgnette. Had The New Yorker folded in the '50s, it would have been fondly commemorated, partly for its hospitality to American fiction --but mainly as the font of American humor. Peter Arno, Charles Addams, George Price, Saul Steinberg and their colleagues had altered the attitude and latitude of cartoons; parody had become an art form in Wolcott Gibbs' send-up of TIME, S. J. Perelman's of Raymond Chandler, Peter De Vries' of practically everybody. The New Yorker contributors had kept wit alive in a time of holocaust. Still, as even its least critical admirers conceded, something was missing. That something surfaced in the early '50s, when William Shawn assumed the editorship after Ross's death.

In 42 years on the magazine, Shawn has contributed one signed piece. Catastrophe, printed in 1936, acerbically foresees the time when New York, struck by a meteorite, disappears from public view and then from national memory. One can never tell about meteors--or about New York. As for The New Yorker, if it never vanishes from memory it will be largely because of the author of Catastrophe. Brendan Gill, that latter-day John Aubrey, relates a singular exchange with his editor. "I once told Shawn that my impression of the unconscious was of some immense, well-armored bank vault, which I was struggling to enter and ransack, and Shawn said, 'That's strange. I think of it as a place that I struggle to get out of, always in vain.'" It is difficult to imagine the ebullient Ross even having an unconscious, much less getting trapped in one. Shawn's odd phosphorescence soon proved to be the glow that the magazine had lacked.

Backstage, some of his staffers called their new editor "the Iron Mouse" because of his self-deprecating manner and his irresistible whim. Slowly, meticulously, that whim widened The New Yorker's concerns and investigations. The world that the reader now entered became far more real and gritty, far less trivial and debonair. To the untutored eye, The New Yorker was the fixture as before; the magazine's makeup remained unaltered. The glittering Van-Cleef & Arpels brooches, the Boehm porcelains, the Rolls-Royces and Mercedes still whispered their seductions from the sidelines. But, incongruously, in the columns that threaded between these celebrations of richesse were books that would permanently alter their audience: Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Carson's Silent Spring, Commoner's The Closing Circle, Arendt's Eichmann in

Jerusalem and scores of others. The weekly invitation was no longer to a par ty but to a symposium. The change was not without its dangers.

If Ross's liability was a firmly shut mind, Shawn's has been one that some times remains too charitably open. The Greening of America, with its pot-scent ed praise of youth (who in turn greeted the book with the immortal tribute "Oh, wow!"), made many readers wonder if the magazine had suffered a touch of sclerosis. The frontispiece, "Talk of the Town," turned suddenly from boutique prattle to sometimes perceptive, some times ponderous essays about Nixon, Watergate, Cambodia, Agnew or poli tics in general. The New Yorker's sol emn discovery of causes was often over bearing and relentless. Indeed, Critic Philip Nobile, in his journalistic study Intellectual Skywriting, found the mag azine a prime exemplar of radical chic.

Still, these are relatively minor blemishes -- perhaps the result of any enterprise that seeks, as Shawn has put it, "to create 52 works of art per year." It is unsurprising that errors are commit ted; it is astonishing that so many of those issues were -- and are -- art works.

In the late '60s, in the midst of sup posedly affluent times, The New Yorker fell upon bitter days: tumbling circula tion, reduced advertising. Reluctantly, Eustace Tilley wiped off his smirk and rolled up his sleeves. For the first time in its history, the magazine printed a table of contents. Soon afterward, a bold pro motional campaign was launched, an nouncing that The New Yorker, yes, The New Yorker -- which in palmier days had had a waiting list of advertisers -- was actually soliciting business. Fortunately, the enterprise had accumulated enough wealth -- and enough loyal writers, art ists and subscribers -- to weather hard times. Today, in a recession period, The New Yorker enjoys much, if not all, of its old stature. Circulation (487,000) has never been larger. Yet full restoration of the old magazine is, happily, impossible.

The cartoons are no longer classics -- but oddly enough, they are funnier. The younger contributors, from John Updike to Woody Allen, have tended to displace rather than replace their predecessors.

And the new New Yorker itself? Well, as George Orwell aptly observed: "At 50 one has the face one deserves." The cur rent golden-anniversary issue once again exhibits the profile of Eustace Tilley. But it is no longer the true face of the magazine. Another visage somehow hovers behind the columns, a face no longer young but not old, a wise, ironic face that has learned to tell a joke as well as take one; a face that can turn grim, be cause contemporary distress can no longer be answered with a riposte; a face that has resolved its youthful conflict. "If you can't be funny, be interesting." The advice no longer applies. The face at long last manages to be both -- and a little more.

. Stefan Kanfer

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