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Life of Privilege, Mostly

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As the split screen cover photos suggest, Gardner Botsford (`is this a real name?' asks my wife) chronicles two sides of his extraordinary life. First, "the feel of fear" as an infantryman entering World War II at Omaha Beach on D-Day and his surviving countless adventures as the Allies drive to Berlin. Liberation of Paris, the surrender of an entire town to him personally, meeting Patton...one begins to think he is an erudite Forrest Gump - he is simply everywhere at the important moment. Second, his colorful career in journalism, from covering death-row executions in Florida as a young beat reporter through his long career at the center of the literary world as editor of The New Yorker.

"`Before I blow out your brains' - what a way to talk! What melodrama! What had happened to me?" As a GI, Botsford wrestles in Europe with the demons of war...perhaps solid preparation for future traumas he would witness at home in New York. Booze, mental depression and suicide were to elite wordsmiths what heroin became to jazz musicians, and Botsford's life is touched repeatedly by the loss of his colleagues.

One expects chapters upon chapter of WASPy high society lifestyles, but Botsford indulges the reader only with a taste of his pre-war jaunts through Hotchkiss, Yale and the Ubangi Club. Neysa McMein, famous socialite and illustrator, (but not Botsford's mother as indicated in the PW review posted here) is featured: a fellow native of Quincy, Illinois, Neysa introduces the author's parents to New York. Alexander Wolcott, Genet (Janet Flanner), Wolcott Gibbs, AJ Leibling, and scores of famous New Yorker writers and editors are recounted. Naturally, Ross and Shawn, the great legends of the magazine serve as bookends to the Botsford career. But you don't have to be a great student of The New Yorker to appreciate this memoir.

Maeve Brennan's insouciant letter detailing a Christmas in the Hamptons ("It will be a long day before I have `house guests' again.") is a scream, and worth the price of the book alone. You'll also enjoy Wolcott Gibbs' 10 general rules for editing New Yorker writers. Equally amusing is Gibbs' editorial answer to a book publisher in Chicago with six accompanying notes ("#4. `For it was apple-blossom time in Normandy' is, I'm afraid, arch at best, and the ragtime beat is not appealing to the ear.")

Mr. Botsford's keen sense of humor echoes throughout the memoir. He constantly watches for those taking themselves too seriously, and finds a treasure trove of these unfortunates in the US Army, in American politics, and in the editorial corridors of New York City. Even his best friend before the war, Bill Verity, (aka, Monsieur Calvini) does not escape his wit...alas "he took up the corporate ladder, became more stone-minded, was appointed as Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Commerce - he was lost forever." Those who are too officious find little room in the privileged life of Gardner Botsford. Thank you, Robert, this was a treat.

This glimpse into the life of a gentleman is riveting. Mr. Botsford relinquishes a life to the reader of a time gone by, when a gentleman was something people aspired to be. From true gentility to personal heroism and adventure during the war, each page brings you deeper into the life of a fascinating man. This is the kind of tale that people used to sit around a cozy fire to share, when television was science fiction and storytelling was not a lost art. Mr. Botsford makes you nostalgic for that kind of entertainment, and glad that you can still find it if you know where to look. So turn off the TV and pick up "A Life of Privilege, Mostly", you'll be glad you did!

The two photographs on the cover of Gardner Botsford's extraordinary memoir explain the "Mostly" in the title: While the book gives a funny, detailed description of life in the top tier of New York society, it also takes the reader into the not-so-funny life of a young soldier who fought in the bloodiest battles of World War II. The war parts are without self-pity. The privilege parts are similarly cheerful and accepting. The author, a former top editor at the New Yorker Magazine, also gives a backstage view of some of the power struggles he witnessed there. And some of his delicious anecdotes about famous New Yorker writers leave the reader weak with laughter. This is a book to relish and buy many copies of for all your friends and relatives.

This book provides a wonderful and witty look at well-to-do society in New York City around the time of World War II. It also gives an intimate view of Army life in the big war. Near the end of the book, the author spends too many pages describing office politics at the NEW YORKER magazine. But I recommend it for its fine writing and good humor.

I was drawn to this book after reading Roger Angell's witty memoir, LET ME FINISH. Botsford's book doesn't quite measure up to Angell's, but that's mostly because, unlike Angell, his stepfather wasn't E.B. White. But he did have a couple of other stepfathers, one of which was Raoul Fleischman (of the yeast fortune). While Botsford grew up very well-to-do, by the age of 11 he was shunted off to boarding schools and camps. He attended Hotchkiss prep and then Yale, where he was on a pretty tight budget, considering the family fortune. The best parts of this memoir are his stories from the military, as a young infantry lieutenant who survived Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. The later anecdotes about his life at The New Yorker are a little less interesting, with stories about a drunken Jean Stafford and a temperamental A.J. Liebling. Central to Botsford's tale is his long-time relationship to the magazine's managing editor, William Shawn, which ended, sadly, not on the best of terms. Botsford died in 2004, the year after A LIFE OF PRIVILEGE, MOSTLY was published. If you are a reader of The New Yorker (I am), you will like this often overlooked memoir. (I did.) - Tim Bazzett, author of LOVE, WAR & POLIO

For those of us who grew up with the New Yorker Magazine, who have loved getting to know the brilliant and creative minds behind this qenius of a publication, Botsford's memoir enriches its background. It is a delight to read, transporting in its reflections on a "Life of Privilege, Mostly".

Not much research value, but what an excellent memoir of his wartime experiences & later, as an editor at The New Yorker (back when the magazine at least gave you the impression that it was run by adults).

After reading it once, I later went back to check on one thing (the details @ Lillian Ross's dishonorable conduct) & ended up re-reading the entire book! I still love it. But it was disheartening to notice some slapdash editing & fact-checking, which I missed on the first go-round.

He stated that "Good editing has saved bad writing more often than bad editing has harmed good writing." But his own editor's foremost intent seems to have been, "good editing should not be rigorously applied to isolated instances of bad writing & numerical mistakes."

The obese paragraphs! Chapter Three opens on page 160 & indefatigably hums along until it finally runs out of gas somewhere on page 162 - all ONE paragraph.

(In fairness, those endless TNY paragraphs were already in vogue when 2nd Lt. Botsford was 3,000 miles away in England, waiting for D-Day; see the May 1942 TNY Wolcott Gibbs profile of Ralph Ingersoll.)

And William Shawn's almost ghoulish mortification, after the Tribune printed Wolfe's scathing satire of TNY, did not happen in "the fall of 1963" (p. 228). The two installments ran on April 11th & 18th, 1965. If Shawn's progressively worsening paranoia was that significant - & it was - all of the facts @ this traumatic episode must be accurate.

TNY stories & profiles mentioned by Botsford are undated - & as such, went right past the editor's eye, unnoticed. Not even the year in which they appeared is stated; so much for being able to easily look them up on the TNY DVD set.

APM's missing index is truly an inexplicable oversight, so unless you have a photographic memory, it's value as a research source is scant (it took forever, for example, to re-locate Botsford & Gibb's editing suggestions).

And I'm still searching for the page on which my margin notes are located, concerning some suspect chronology. So, the following can only be recited from treacherous memory.

He had stated that Ross's pre-WWII TNY (humorous & irreverent) had irrevocably changed into Shawn's post-war TNY (more serious & genteel; verging on self-importance).

This is true - but Botsford's before-&-after Mason-Serious Line makes too neat a distinction. Ross did edit the magazine for @ five years after WWII had ended - until the spring of 1951 (after which, his health went south). And from what I've seen of the war-era magazine on the DVD, a good deal of it was - not surprisingly - quite serious in content & tone.

And Botsford's own personal editing can seem unfathomable. He described his mother, Ruth, as a remarkably charismatic woman (who - single or married - spent years fending off all sorts of brazen suitors). But he also selected, for display, what had to have been the worst photo of an attractive lady ever developed in a darkroom.

Editors - & Botsford was right up there in the ranks of the best - are supposed to immediately notice & fix these sort of miscues - not create them. So all of the above are the usual things that compel readers to make room on the shelves for more worthy books. But Privilege is so remarkably good, incredibly, none of these oversights really matter.

*****

Wolcott Gibbs, "on how fiction should be handled" (edited for space, etc. The complete list of Gibbs's Do's & Don'ts can be found in Tom Kunkel's excellent biography of the first TNY editor, Harold Ross: Genius In Disguise):

1."Writers always use too damn many adverbs ..."morosely...eloquently'...a writer [fails when he] can't make his context indicate the way his characters are talking..."

In a related matter of context, using cliches (see #3, below) is always a bad idea, like mixing 40-year-old bourbon or scotch with New Jersey tap water.

But one such indulgence in APM not only results in watered-down prose; it also creates a ridiculous redundancy.

What is "on the one hand," & "on the other hand" doing in the same sentence where the context - that the mid-level editor is always between a rock & a hard place - is already established by "between the Scylla of the demands & suggestions from Shawn [&] Ross...& the Charybdis of preserving the... writer's prose."?

(This was preceded only two pages earlier by Gibbs' suggestion, endorsed by Botsford, that "anything you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one, & had better be removed." And "writer's prose" was the perfect place to end the paragraph & then start a new one detailing the step-by-step editing process of newly submitted stories. But Botsford ran the red light & kept on going.)

2. Conversely, the repetitive use of the word "said...is OK...efforts to avoid repetition by using 'grunted,' 'snorted' are waste motion."

Sic: "Efforts" is plural, so "motions" has to be plural; & "waste" should be "wasted." What can be more maladroit than making mistakes in the editing of a list of "do's & don'ts" @ editing?

3. "Anything you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one, & had better be removed."

Use the Heinlich maneuver for "Where's The Beef?!"

4. "Funny names belong in the past."

Come to think of it, "Gardner Botsford..."

5. "The average New Yorker writer, unfortunately influenced by Mr. Thurber," overuses "words & phrases [such] as 'little,' 'vague,' 'confused,' 'faintly,' & 'all mixed up.'"

See 1990's, on out to ad infinitum, the influence of television as a primary educational tool, resulting in the word "like" being used, like, twenty times, in, like, one sentence.

6. "The repetition of exposition in quotes...

Exposition is the "setting forth of meaning or intent."

Gibbs's example of this sort of doofus writing: 'Marion gave me a pain in the neck. 'You give me a pain in the neck, Marion,' I said."

Fast forward to 2008: Peroxide Peri, Perky TV Reporter, breathlessly introducing her story: "Joe fell off the train!" Three seconds later, poor Joe - laid out in a hospital bed, on videotape: "I fell off the train."

***

And Botsford's own editing rules of thumb (as with Gibbs, not all are equally important, but all merit inclusion - including rule No. 5, which no one at St. Martin's Press seems to have noticed was entirely missing from the list):

1. "To be any good at all...writing requires the investment of a specific amount of time..."

2. "The less competent the writer, the louder his protests over the editing."

3. "A bad writer...uses the expression, 'we writers.' "

4. "The first reading of a manuscript is the all-important one...on the 4th or 5th reading...you are now attuned to the writer, not the reader. But the reader...will find it just as swampy & boring as you did the first time around."

5. There's no specific indication that there should be six conclusions.

But "Rule of Thumb No. 4" is followed by "Rule of Thumb No. 6."

Is there an accidentally amputated digit somewhere around here that no one can find, "Rule No. 5"? (If not, "Rule of Thumb No. 6" should be "No. 5").

6. "Good editing has saved bad writing more often than bad editing has harmed good writing."

When in doubt as to which alternative is best for you, refer to Rule No. 5.