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By Root 2236 0

New Yorker. The magazine’s fact-checking department was considered the finest in the industry. Accuracy had been a priority since 1927, when the magazine had published a profile of Edna St. Vincent Millay so filled with inaccuracies that a lawsuit had been threatened. Sometimes, however, the clinging to factual accuracy crossed over from obsessive to irrational. John Simon recalled that he once submitted a piece of light verse to The New Yorker called “A Short Social History of the Condor.” “It was totally fictitious,” he remembered, “a fantasy about the history of the condor through the ages, including Europe, where there never was any condor.” He sent it in to the magazine and soon received an enthusiastic letter from Katharine White, the poetry editor, praising it and telling him how wonderful it was to discover a new light-verse writer, something the magazine had been searching for for some time. “The only thing she wanted me to do,” remembered Simon, “was to give her the factual basis for the poem. I said, ‘That’s like asking the Brothers Grimm to give the factual basis for fairy tales.’ I was told by one of the editors that there was a big editorial meeting at which they took up this matter. And the decision finally was that they couldn’t do it.”

As she began her first stint of movie reviewing for the magazine, Pauline was shocked when she saw what had been done to her copy. It seemed that there was scarcely a sentence that hadn’t been rearranged and turned upside down, emerging with an entirely different accent and rhythm from what she had initially written. She had worked hard to develop a spontaneous, intimate, conversational tone in her writing, but after it had been through The New Yorker’s cleansing process, it didn’t sound so very different from many other articles. “I think a certain Anglophilia crept into it very early on—when it was founded, really,” Pauline once told an interviewer. “It started out with a sort of English tone and a kind of elite sophisticated Manhattan tone which was fake English.” Each week, when the first galley proof arrived, she went through it and carefully restored her original meaning and rhythm, writing very precisely in the margins in order to minimize editorial confusion in the second stage of galleys. Then she went to Shawn’s office to discuss the matter.

When she was hired, Shawn had given Pauline a handshake agreement that her copy would not be changed without her permission. As a courtesy to his writers, he made clear to them that if they felt that the magazine’s editing had violated their intentions, they were free to withdraw their articles and still receive payment. Shawn didn’t go back on his word with Pauline, but he didn’t give up without a fight, either. While many of his writers gratefully accepted his editorial handiwork, Pauline’s highly theatrical negotiating sessions with Shawn soon became the stuff of New Yorker legend. She often compared him with a pit bull, but she proved to be more than his equal in their arguments. She appreciated his urging her toward greater clarification of her thoughts on the page, but she reminded him over and over that she had to sound the way she sounded—otherwise there was no point.

Certainly, Pauline and Shawn were never likely to be truly compatible. He was an old-style gentleman through and through, who behaved with an imperturbable politeness. No matter how abusively someone might treat him, he seemed almost incapable of responding with anything but patient kindness. Jane Beirn, who served as his secretary for three years in the early 1970s, remembered, “Mr. Shawn was always polite and courteous to everyone he dealt with. Even if he wound up rejecting the work of people who came to see him, he would sit and talk with them, and they would walk out on air. I think he was so lovely and charming and complimentary that some of them may have gotten down to the lobby before they realized that the answer was ‘no.’ ”

Pauline was amused by Shawn’s courtly manners, but it appears that she never believed them to be entirely sincere, either;