Customer Reviews

Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Oh dear but I wish this book was written by the "other woman"---in this case, William Shawn's wife. The author, well known New Yorker writer Lillian Ross comes across as a probably horrid, self absorbed user, which is not, I'm sure, what she intended. While the book is very interesting when the subject is Mr. Shawn and the workings of the New Yorker, everytime she gushes about their enduring love (which she does, endlessly) her writing is banal beyond belief. One thinks, reading much of this book, that perhaps she was only a top writer once--when he was her editor. One of the truly fascinating characters in this book in Wallace Shawn. Perhaps someday he'll write his version of this story.

I looked forward to reading this book for some time but only recently had the chance but it was sad and disappointing. The disappointment came from the thin writing -- from a writer who has had such a rich a varied background. Endless repetitions of phrases (He said he was there and not there; he said I was his wife; I felt no guilt). Repetitions of situations, so on. This is a 20 page monologue carried on 20 times -- and with none of the details that one would like to hear from this very accomplished writer.

What was it like working at the New Yorker all those years? What was it like to interview and work with people like John Huston, Francois Truffaut, Charlie Chaplin, Oona O'Neil, Frederico Fellini, so on.

This book, this writer, needed an editor if anyone did.

But a sequel would be welcome by me -- one that tells the other Lillian Ross story/memoir. This 'wife's lament' is, well, not a very poetic one and not one that commends Lillian Ross as a raconteur.

My God, where is Shawn when we need him? Lillian Ross' paean to Bill and Tina needs Shawn's ball-pointed editor's pen like potholes need tar.

I make no moral remarks about the relationship described by Ross. I just found the book to be one of the worst I have ever tried to read. I finally stopped reading this dull, repetitive story by a woman who writes horribly, in my opinion.

Okay, let's start by saying that I'm a big fan of the New Yorker and its legendary staff from the last century. Also a big fan of Lillian Ross's PICTURE. But this book will drive you to drink, do drugs, sit in your closed garage with the car running, whatever it takes to alter your consciousness. When she sticks to briefly writing about other people - Bogart, Hemingway, Chaplin, John Huston - she's on solid ground as always - brief, effective, perceptive. When she goes back to the subject of her book - her decades-long affair with William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker - she rambles, she avoids, she loses focus, structure and sense. She keeps going on about what an animal he was in bed - you look at the pictures of him in the book and decide for yourself - while everything else she writes about him makes him sound like a whining forlorn child-man who gnashes many teeth and wrings his hands with alarming frequency. She is absolutely in denial about how carrying on this weird affair affected her emotionally - everything is always so perfect and he's so wonderful - and in denial, I think, about just who this man was and what bizarre mind games he played. I did appreciate the paragraph about how fond he was of lifting his hat (hence the name of this review, taken directly from that paragraph). This book would be stunning if it were as honest and objective as the author's other book. It's not and the fact that her talent is involved in this elaborate unformed and tortured justification makes it unbearable.

Disappointing. But why should we assume a great reporter can be a great observer of her own affair?

Ross truly believes that Shawn would "die" if she didn't become his mistress? What does that say about her ego? That their "love" defied "death?" What it defied was guilt, morals and public opinion.

Very charming. A writer can be very eloquent about other people's lives, but when it comes to their own, they use the same old tricks: denial. - I wasn't part of their problem. - I have no guilt because well, I'm not into self-analysis.

So indeed, this book is short of "self-analysis" other than reporting that it was a great affair: I got everything I wanted! Vengeful, no? A book-length tic-for-tac response. Mrs. Shawn to Ross: "He died in my arms." Ross's memoir: "Oh, yeah, he LIVED in my arms." Because, as the title says, "when he was with you, he wasn't really alive." Ouch!

It's also interesting to see that three educated, elite Americans settled their relationship not so different from the 'concubine' or 'polygamy' arrangement as in some traditional societies. Except that the binding force here is not convention but "love." Both women love the man who loves them both. Leaving either woman will kill the man: either by guilt (for the wife) or by deprivation of love (from the mistress).

Like a great opera. But unfortunately, there are kids involved here. Even an autistic child. (Read Allen Shawn's memoirs.)

Suppose one side of the triangle collapses, say Mrs. Shawn agreed to leave the marriage and let the lovers marry each other and have kids and yadiyadiyada... would the lovers remain madly in love for forty years? Would Mr Shawn again feel "closed in" by his new marriage, new wife, and children and compelled to walk a dozen blocks somewhere else for "love?" And would Mrs. Ross-Shawn feel so hampered by the conventions of husband and family and all that baggage and run away to reclaim her freedom as a reporter? While a mistress can tell her man to leave her alone for a few days (only to be blissfully reunited afterwards), when can a wife tell a husband to get lost? or simply take off for a little break? (God knows we try:>)

Perhaps what saved Mr. Shawn was that vigorous walk - ten or twelve blocks - between his two women and eventually two families. He didn't have to feel confined to either. And what kept Ms Ross alive was her winning position as the beloved "other woman." Her man was not coming to her bed because he had to as a husband on duty but by rule-bending will and by primal desire. Everyday, he chose Ms Ross over his wife. He called her to say "Good night and I love you" from his bedroom at home. So every night, Ms. Ross, a competitive tennis player, won her match point. If not a trophy wife, and considering her disdain for the word 'mistress,' she was certainly a "trophy lover."

Lillian Ross spent almost forty years as the mistress of William Shawn, the editor-in-chief of The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987. "Here But Not Here" is an attempt to show that relationship and, in turn, how it affected William Shawn and the magazine.

I don't think it's fair to slam this book for its bias; it's obviously meant to be a subjective view of her relationship with William Shawn, and as such a sensible reader would expect it to be biased. But she attempts an emotional distance that she as one of the subjects of the book cannot afford, and this hampers her ability to describe the relationship in a way her readers can empathize with. She is just too close to the action here to affect emotional distance; what works in her biography of Hemingway doesn't work here.

Other writers have alleged that Ms. Ross has taken liberties with the facts in writing her memoir. I don't know enough about the events to have an opinion on the matter, but I do believe that this book is in large part about what she wanted her relationship with William Shawn to be and not what it really was.

I'm not sure if I can recommend this book. To me it comes across as emotionally empty.

Poor Shawn! He seems to have had impeccable taste in everything save mistresses. The misbegotten issue of their liaison is this unique instance of a grotesque lapse in editorial judgement. I cannot imagine prose as wretched as this surviving his meticulous blue pencil from anyone sufficiently detached from him to be regarded as a writer worthy of regard on the basis solely of his work.

Lillian Ross was a talented even gifted writer. She comes across in this book as a intelligent charming and caring person. Yet the thrust of this book is a self conscious and self serving apologia for her life long 'relationship' with William Shawn.

Bluntly put, she was his mistress -'the other woman' (just as an aside, why do you never hear of 'the other man'?). Mr Shawn, in a controlling and manipulative way, suborned her life in a way that is both appalling and pathetic. And as much as she rationalized it - and she spends many many pages doing just that, she seemed (on some level) to be aware of the basic inequality of their 'special' relationship.

So, about the book? Mr Shawn comes across as a whining self centered egotist who somehow manages to always get his way. Ms. Ross' cavalier dismissal of his shabby treatment of his wife and children borders on the obscene. Who was Mr. Shawn? Brilliant, yes without a doubt. A gifted editor, the New Yorker magazine owes much to his dedication. But does a true genuis require such slavish devotion to his ever whim?

There are some insightful moments in the book, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, John Huston (and others) were personal friends, the writers and editors - the behind the scenes folks that really made the New Yorker great - are covered in a slanted and biased sort of way - somehow one doubts that Mr Shawn singled handedly made them all as good as they were. And his 'enabling' talents surely came at a terrible cost, at least for Lillian Ross.

Bottom line, this is a good book on some levels but one that I had some personal difficulty with. "Being a good little woman for her (married) man" doesn't appeal to me as a life choice regardless of the glowing personalities involved. In the end I felt no empathy for her, she was just a pathetic woman trying to justify her own self negation.

Not the greatest book, but learned about the New Yorker. Felt excluded from their true relationship. Wonder what her other books are like.