Customer Reviews

Here At The New Yorker

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It was interesting to read about the writers and editors who helped make The New Yorker a magazine of such distinction. I bought this book during that whole rage of last year when "Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker" was all over the place. In the time since I read this book, I resubscribed to the magazine. Periodically, I read glimpses of the magazine's former glory in its pages. I don't think I could read "Gone," though. Even though I know The New Yorker is not as good as it once was, that doesn't mean I have to take a broom handle to it. That's why I found "Here at The New Yorker" great, pricisely because of its balance.

Brendan Gill worked for the 'New Yorker' for sixty years. He wasone of its major 'Talk of the Town' writers and an editor who seemed to be involved with every facet of the magazine. In this Memoir he tells the inside story of major relationships in the magazine. He goes on at great length about founding editor Harold Ross and his successor William Shawn, and he tells too of the owner Raoul Fleischmann and his relationship to editors and magazine. He tells us about many of the artists, writers, editors ,some of whom are well- known to the public, and others lesser so. He tells his own story, in which he has a great deal of praise and love for his father who widowed early gave unstinting support to his five children.
Gill can be small- minded as he is in the opening section in which he talks about writers who are 'losers'. But he was a tremendously sociable and intelligent person, who seemed to genuinely want to mix and mingle. He tells us his philosophy of living beyond one's means and indicates the way he did it.
To my mind the book was longer than it had to be, and without some overall statement of Gill's view of life and the magazine. But it has many interesting anecdotal parts. My favorite was the small section on arguably America's greatest poet of this century , Wallace Stevens. Stevens upon reaching retirement age did not want to retire, and so left behind complicated work which only he could do. His firm thus had to keep him on. Gill also describes Stevens morning walks to work in Hartford where the custom was for people to give rides to walkers. Stevens always refused the rides and composed poetry on the way to work. Gill shows an appreciation of those figures larger than himself like Stevens and Edmund Wilson. He appears as the consummately 'in' social person. A sense of fun, chic, elegance, sophistication radiate from the work. In his person he thus seems to epitomize much of what the 'New Yorker'was and is as a magazine.

I loved this book. It is superbly written. the times this book
is about was when there were really great writers in our country.
You will find, E. B. White, wife, Katherine(a powerhouse at
The New Yorker), Thurber (one of my favorite writers), Peter Arno
(those wonderful sometimes unexplainable cartoons, Charles Addams
(sound familiar?), Edmund Wilson (very interesting review) and so
many more; some forgotten and gladly brought back to life. And then
there,s the founder of the magazine, Harold Ross who breathed life
into it(it seems literally) and kept it going and then the great
Wallace Shawn who took over from Ross. Some books like this, I can
get easily bored but this one was kind of like a favorite mystery;
you can't put it down. It is indeed most likely the best book
written about an era.

Having just read the new "About Town The New Yorker and the World it Made" I felt compelled to go back and reread Brendan Gill's memoirs of his days working for Harold Ross and William Shawn.

Some critic called "Here at the New Yorker" "wonderful entertainment". That is wrong--this book does not entertain it probes. Granted there are some funny anecdotes and glances of writers like Scott Fitzgerald. But the book has a darker more serious side as well.

I imagine that Brendan Gill has made many enemies with his book. He talked about Editor Harold Ross's racism and William Shawn's phobias. Of many he writers he either praises them or he says they did not produce much legible writing at all.

But these dark character portraits are wonderfully written and penetrate deep. After reading Gill I think I can more carefully size up my peers. This one is a drunk never-do-well. That one works all day to keep away from his wife. Brendan Gill has the novelist's eye for detail.

Loved reading it the first time & only later discovered how HTNY glossed over what actually had been an anything-but-smooth relationship between Harold Ross & William Shawn (1st & 2nd TNY editors, whose chart comparison indicated an anything-but-harmonious working relationship).

In 1997, needing a replacement for my original disintegrated paperback copy, I took one look at the $16 price tag - for a paperback! - & in disgust, threw it back on the bookstore shelf. I'll get one for far less than that, eventually.

Post Note (04/09/10): And that's exactly what happened, when the opportunity presented itself recently to obtain a $6.00 edition from Amazon.

It amazed me during the re-reading that so many of the stories in HTNY - first read @ 30 years ago - still sounded very familiar; it was as if I had only read them for the first time a year or two earlier. But the book's impact - so tremendous decades earlier - had been defused.

If you are impressed by an author when your youthful idealism is still flourishing, the same writing decades later - after that idealism had been given the bum's rush (William Shawn's two wives, etc.) - doesn't stand a chance of having the same effect.

After re-reading HTNY, I felt a most uncomfortable ambivalence. The writing is fine, particularly in respect to Thurber's bizarre antics, but Gill's loquaciousness was off-putting (particularly after he complained that other writers went on interminably). In examining the facets of everything, he stuffed sentences like sausages. This is an editing failure that complimented other editing oversights that did not go unnoticed.

And his Jekyll and Hyde treatment of Ross was equally disconcerting, tantamount to dirty pool. In the beginning chapters, Gill's recollection of Ross was a portrait of an offensive Neanderthal that barely could walk in an erect position; the last forty pages or so is a too-glowing tribute to Ross's talents, vision, and dedication, with a brilliant analysis by William Shawn about Ross that concluded the book.

Six dollars turned out to be the perfect price for this flawed trip back into the past. Frankly, I was much more impressed with the recent work of the author's son, who about a year ago wrote a brilliant piece in a local New York newspaper about the drastic (and eventually beneficial) changes that ensued in his life after he had lost his high-paying advertising job and ended up as a Starbuck's employee. I would have paid ten dollars that morning, for the newspaper, had I known of its contents ahead of time.

The New Yorker magazine is an acquired taste. It does have plenty of advertisements but the founding and the development of this timeless magazine over the first 50 years since it's inception in February 1921 is an historical and amazing accomplishment. To know the New Yorker, you must learn to love the New Yorker. We look forward to those Letters from Paris, London, Rome, Warsaw, Cologne, Cracow, Naples, Milan whenever we can since many of us don't get to go there often enough. Contributors have become literary phenomenon's like J.D. Salinger, Charles Addams, Janet "Genet" Flanner, E.B. White, James Thurber, William Shawn, John Updike, Harold W. Ross, Robert Benchley, Truman Capote, Dorothy Parker, Brendan Gill, and many more to mention. Brenda Gill's book is a testament to his devotion and adoration of the New Yorker when magazines were major reading source of enlightenment, entertainment, and information all rolled into one.