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Contradictory feelings well up as you read Ved Mehta’s new
memoir, Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible
Art of Editing. On one side you feel a nostalgia tinged
with envy for the old New Yorker magazine and its system of editing
that, thanks to William Shawn (1907-1992), saw the nurturing of
writers as its ultimate mission. On the other side, with the advantage
of hindsight you feel an edge of irritation at Mr. Mehta for failing
to anticipate the forces that would inevitably obliterate this
world.
Mr. Mehta’s narrative serves to intensify both reactions.
To show what a supportive environment The New Yorker once was,
he uses himself as a test case, and a more fragile canary would
be hard to imagine. Twice removed from his native India by way
of Oxford and Harvard, an academic aspiring to practice popular
journalism, blind since the age of 4, he would seem to have been
an odd fit even among an assortment of people like A. J. Liebling,
Joseph Mitchell and Lillian Ross, all of whom became his good
friends.
Still, he was welcomed by the editor in chief, “Mr. Shawn”—to
people at The New Yorker, the Mr. was like the Lord in Lord Jim,
the author writes—who seems to have made Mr. Mehta feel as
if he were the first and only writer ever to work for the magazine.
“His kindness and generosity,” Mr. Mehta writes, “made
me believe that I was not losing myself to him but, rather, discovering
my true self—that, for once, I was, as it were, speaking
not in an Indian-American voice or an English voice but in my
own.”
Yet for all the sensitivity of their relations, Mr. Mehta recounts
them with humor, tough-mindedness and a willingness to make light
of himself. He portrays many of the vivid characters at The New
Yorker, which he calls “in some respects a happy place”
but “such a caldron of neurosis and frustration that even
when people agitated for change they didn’t like it when
it came.” If he is not as comprehensive as Brendan Gill was
in Here at The New Yorker, he sheds far more light on what the
magazine was like to work at.
He even explains why in his prose he has always tried to create
the illusion of being sighted, admitting now and then his dependence
on readers and an amanuensis. “There are so many visual details
about how things look that I just pick up by diligent use of my
four senses,” he quotes himself telling a friend. “How
could it be otherwise, when people are constantly talking in images—‘It’s
a bright day,’ ‘What a pretty blue dress she has on.’
...” But one still finds it jarring to come across a sentence
like the following: “I went down to my office and tried to
read, but I had trouble concentrating.”
…. [In]…describing the demise of the old New Yorker…
[Mr. Mehta] succeeds in isolating the main causes clearly enough:
first, the aging of Peter Fleischmann, who had succeeded his father,
Raoul, as publisher in 1969, at the age of 47, when his father
died, and who owned the controlling shares of the magazine; and
second, the need for Shawn to find his successor as the leader
of an operation that had come to depend too overwhelmingly on
him alone. It was Fleischmann’s aging that led to the magazine’s
eventually being sold to. S.I. Newhouse, Jr., in 1985, and it
was Shawn’s failure to appoint his successor that led Mr.
Newhouse to replace him with Robert Gottlieb two years later.
But Mr. Mehta fails to identify the larger forces that were
bound to wipe out the magazine’s delicate culture….
Only at the end of his book does he concede that “behind
what some of us perceived as the tremors and shocks that brought
down the old New Yorker" were “large economic and social
forces at work, beyond anyone’s control, such as the eclipsing
of the print medium by new technology, which ultimately made the
continuation of our protected life at the magazine merely a dream.”
All the same, the story he tells is poignant and affecting.
In the end, nothing was left for him except the dream. In 1994,
a year or so after Tina Brown replaced Mr. Gottlieb as editor,
Mr. Mehta was “terminated” and “subsequently, when
I got a letter from Brown’s New Yorker rejecting a pending
project, my name was misspelled.”
He had met her only once before he left. Curious, he had made
an appointment with her by calling her secretary and stopped by
her office at the arranged time. “We exchanged one or two
amenities,” he reports, “then neither of us could think
of anything more to say. Actually, most of our meeting, which
couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, was taken up
with an embarrassing confusion over which chair she should sit
in and which chair I should sit in. Oddly, I ended up sitting
in her chair.”
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Ved Mehta takes
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