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By Root 1070 0

“a New Yorker writer,” which would be confusing if such a definite term could be used about his categories. Examining his lists by his own criteria, and bearing in mind it is at best a parlor game—though even games, and especially games, have their rules—we find that almost a third of the “Esquire writers” first appeared in The New Yorker and four have published more than twice as many stories or articles there: Joyce Cary (6 to 3), Sherwood Anderson (6 to 2), Salinger (12 to 2), and, bewildering even by Wolfeian standards, Irwin Shaw (43 to 12). (Another of his “Esquire writers,” Jack Gelber has never been printed there, nor is there any basis for Wolfe’s assertion that Hemingway’s “Francis Macomber” was printed in Esquire.) Of his twenty-two “Post writers,” half first appeared in The New Yorker, and a third have published as much in The New Yorker as in the Post or more. Two are as puzzling as the Shaw case: Frank O’Connor with 47 stories in The New Yorker, the first in 1945, as against three in the Post, the first in 1957; and Philip Wylie, who was a New Yorker editor for a time during which he published nearly one hundred contributions there. Again, my point is not to assert the superiority of The New Yorker, which would be to play the mug’s game proposed by Wolfe—I don’t, personally, consider the feast of Irwin Shaw’s fiction a credit to the magazine, and, even less, those almost a hundred items by Mr. Wylie—but simply to insist on the deficiencies of his research by his own standards.[6]

“For the last 15 years,” Wolfe concludes from these marshy statistics, like a near-sighted augur peering at some rather scrambled entrails, “The New Yorker has been practically out of the literary competition altogether. Only Salinger, Mary McCarthy, John O’Hara and John Updike kept them in the game at all.” He adds, for the forty-year record, John McNulty, Nancy Hale, Sally Benson, S. J. Perelman, James Thurber, Dorothy Parker, John Cheever, and John Collier, and concludes that future literary historians will pronounce the record “good, but not exactly an Olympus for the muvva tongue.” No mention here, or elsewhere, of Vladimir Nabokov, who at the time of Wolfe’s article had contributed 24 stories to The New Yorker, the first in 1942, or V.S. Pritchett (13 stories, 8 reviews), or W.H. Auden (13 poems, 16 reviews). Or Edmund Wilson, who reviewed books weekly in 1944 and bi-weekly for the next three years and who had since contributed, at the time Wolfe was writing, 24 articles and 65 book reviews. Asked by an interviewer about this last omission, Wolfe explained that Wilson “does his best work not for The New Yorker but in books,” apparently unaware that, for twenty years, the books have been mostly collections of material first published in The New Yorker. Innocent ignorance.

“I think, by my lights anyway, a rather prodigious amount of research went into this piece,” Wolfe told a radio interviewer last spring. “I think the pieces are a great—I won’t say tour de force of research, research is not a tour de force it’s just drudgery—but there is a certain depth of research, I think....It’s not an easy job to write about The New Yorker, because there’s nobody that’s going to talk to you.” He forgets his triumphant “people talked!,” but it’s true they didn’t talk very accurately, also that Shawn refused to be interviewed: “I wanted very much to talk to Mr. Shawn face to face and really, it would have made my work much, much easier.” No doubt. It would also have helped if Shawn had been willing to read the manuscript and correct errors: “I also tried to set up some kind of system with him whereby The New Yorker could give responses to statements...He also declined to do that.” Given Wolfe’s scholastic habit of deducing his facts from his assumptions, a cultural throwback which illustrates with textbook neatness Hegel’s warning that those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat its mistakes—given this method, the practical result of any cooperation by Shawn would have been to strengthen the articles by eliminating the more glaring