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By Root 1138 0

Quiet! Shawn wins.” The other is a seven-inch free-form cadenza about an aspiring contributor, also anonymous, who thoughtlessly lit a cigarette during an interview, was embarrassed to find no ashtray (Shawn is a non-smoker) and was reduced to a jelly of malaise when the great editor ducked out with two inches of apologies—this time in the ’umble style of Uriah Heep, an ecstasy of sly servility—and brought back an empty Coca Cola bottle which for minutely described reasons proved to be unsuitable as an ashtray. The first story is out of character—Shawn is if anything too permissive a boss—and the second is improbable since I know, as a smoker, that there is always an ashtray on his desk. But they are amusingly told and certainly expose that maestro-of-humility bit. That is, they would expose it, if only...

In Part Two, Wolfe moves from reportage into literary criticism. Maybe I’ve been too hard on him as a reporter. A sensible critique of The New Yorker would be useful for there is much to criticize. Many of the complaints I made in Partisan Review still seem to me valid: the fiction, with exceptions, tends to be superficial, smoothly genteel, and is often vitiated by “what Lenin called ‘bourgeois sentimentality,’” to quote our author at his most chic-scholarly—I wonder if he knows Lenin was referring to Beethoven; that the critical departments are still weak; and that the magazine in general, again with notable exceptions, continues to be formularized and predictable. “Quite deliberately, they prune their talents into a certain shape, and if this means extensive intellectual amputations, so much the worse for the intellect. The magazine has its ‘tone,’ to which contributors keep with a faithful ear. It is the tone of a cocktail party at which the guests are intelligent but well-bred. No subjects are taboo so long as they are ‘amusing.’ But as any experienced hostess knows, too earnest handling rubs off the bloom. Moderation in all things, including humor....Its editors would have considered Mark Twain too crude and Heine too highbrow for their purposes. Between reality and its readers The New Yorker interposes a decent veil which would be rent by any immoderate inspiration on its writers’ part.” Shawn’s changes since he took over from Ross have made the magazine weightier and more thoughtful, but I think this impression of its general tone, from my 1937 article, is still accurate.

Wolfe’s attack is more in the kamikaze style—after all he was thirty-three when he wrote it while I was thirty-one when I wrote mine. His central propositions are: (1) Shawn is “the museum curator, the mummifier, the preserver-in-amber, the smiling embalmer....for Harold Ross’s New Yorker magazine.” And (2) the Ross tradition wasn’t much anyway: “...For 40 years [The New Yorker] has maintained a strikingly low level of literary achievement.”

(1) “Do we have to run that in our funny little magazine?” Ross used to object when his managing editor pressed on him some manuscript he considered “heavy.” For Shawn began to change the Ross formula long before he became editor. The celebrated war reportage by the late A.J. Liebling and others was his doing, as was the famous issue devoted wholly to John Hersey’s Hiroshima. (Even Wolfe has heard about that one.) Ross’s “funny little magazine” of humor, satire, parody, and short, “light” pieces—the early profiles were actually profiles, quick sketches of a personality in two or three thousand words as against the present full-length portraits with the background landscape often obscuring the sitter—has shifted its emphasis to elaborately researched reportage and to what Ross would have grumbled at as “intellectual stuff.” The different temperaments of the two editors were responsible, also the difference between the pre-war and the post-war periods. By 1940 Ross, Benchley, Thurber, White, Dorothy Parker and the other original “New Yorker wits” found themselves in a less clement atmosphere. Shawn’s new formula did for the magazine what the New Deal did for capitalism—made enough changes to keep it going;