A mash-up of an early employer and a magazine I've been reading since the mid-70s, which has been celebrating its centenary for the past year--what took me so long to get my ass to the New York Public Library?
New Yorker covers featuring the library, which now house its archives, comprise one display, my favorite perhaps because I began saving them with my first issue. I particularly treasure those drawn by Art Spiegelman. One hangs in my bathroom at 47 Pianos; others are collaged on a large aluminum container where I store rolled posters and wrapping paper. Alas, Spiegelman's work is not included in the exhibit, although his wife, Françoise Mouly, has been the art editor since 1993.
Like many readers, I subscribed to The New Yorker at least in part because of its cartoons, like this one by Charles Addams from 1938 featuring Morticia Addams ("Oh, I couldn't make it Friday-I've so many things to do. It's the thirteenth, you know"). Little did I know that I would soon overhear Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis introduce Addams to the 20th-century's most esteemed Yiddish writer--a man I had been assigned to read at Columbia--during cocktail hour at one of the library's early Literary Lions benefits.
Roz Chast has been cartooning ever since I became a subscriber and I've clipped nearly all of her off-kilter peans to the surrealism of life in America's largest city. Yep, I'm a total New Yorker nerd.
That nerdiness even extends to the "spot" art used throughout every issue to fill blank space.
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| Dorothy Rea (1930) |
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| Barbara Shermund (1925-35) |
Pet drawings were my earliest source of collage material. I used them to cover a container for storing miscellaneous items.
Here's Harold Ross, the Coloradan who first conceived of The New Yorker with Janet Grant, his co-founder and wife. Needless to say, he's much more famous. He got custody of the magazine after they divorced.
There have been imitators, mostly forgotten despite the 21st-century ascendancy of this borough among hipsters.
A visit to the Villa Necchi Campiglo reminded me that the magazine has achieved a kind of visual shorthand for urbane sophistication. This affectionate, instantly recognizable parody was on sale in the gift shop.
But social commentary and in-depth reporting from all over the world were integral to magazine's success. This early version of a cartoon by Reginald Marsh that ran in a 1934--"It's his first lynching" whispers the woman, explaining why the child is being lifted above the crowd of white onlookers--is almost as shocking as a visit to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.
Not even the New Yorker was above jingoism during World War II. For the 1942 Halloween issue, Rea Irvin, who also created the magazine's iconic Eustace Tilley, used Hitler for the face of the witch and gave the three jack o'lanterns stereotypical Asian features.
But just a few years later, a youngish editor named William Shawn, Ross's second-in-command, shepherded publication of what very well may be the magazine's finest moment: a book-length account what happened after America's first use of the atomic bomb to end the war, depicted through the stories of six survivors told by John Hersey, an early practitioner of what came to be called the "New Journalism."
The library supplements the exhibit with relevant items from its own collections, including this 19th century woodcut of Nagasaki harbor, obliterated when America dropped its second atomic bomb the day after its first. In 1947, the year after Hersey's article appeared, my parents lived within a hundred miles of Nagasaki. I don't know if either of them ever read it but in 1982 the magazine educated me about the nuclear arms race in a series of articles by Jonathan Schell that became The Fate of the Earth, one of the most influential books of my generation. I gave them to my father and stepmother to read when I flew back to El Paso and I'll never forget Lois's response: "God would never let that [the destruction of mankind in a nuclear holocaust] happen." When Ken had a more sophisticated take, I gave him a subscription to The New Yorker at Christmas. For many years it provided fodder for a lot of conversation that kept any allusion to my sexual orientation at bay. I still recall a long drive to eastern Long Island when they visited the following year. He and I discussed the heartbreaking account of Sylvia Frumkin,a schizophrenic who had been institutionalized in Creedmoor, a notorious mental institution which we passed on the way. It won Susan Sheehan the Pulitzer Prize for General Non Fiction in 1983 and helped keep me in the closet, at least to my father who called her a "fruitcake" instead!
Shawn became the second editor-in-chief not long after Hiroshima cemented the magazine's status in the firmament of elite liberal media. Despite his reputation for probity, at least when it came to the English language and his magazine, Shawn, married with three children, had an affair with Lillian Ross, who was employed as a staff writer for nearly seven decades. Her profile of Ernest Hemingway was perceived by many to be a hatchet job, although not the author himself.
Clearly, Mr. Shawn, as he was known, exerted profound influence as an editor. Truman Capote could not have been happy with his emendations, although they did contribute to the success of In Cold Blood, his most acclaimed work. When I read it as a teenager, poolside at Ft. Bliss, I had no idea that it had been serialized in The New Yorker, or that such a magazine even existed.
The New Yorker staked its first real claim on my consciousness with what today would be called "merch": a poster of this cover by Saul Steinberg, which conveyed that no other place in America mattered as much. I couldn't have agreed more. As a thank-you for officiating at their 2014 wedding, Magda & Joe gave me some merch of my own: three enormous beach towels printed with New Yorker covers from the 21st century.
By the time I joined the library staff in 1980, I had become a subscriber, primarily for Pauline Kael's movie reviewing which, much to my disappointment, doesn't even rate a mention in the centenary exhibit given her incalculable influence. I was assigned to obtain multiple copies of books by writers who were being feted as "Literary Lions" to give to other honorees. These included Renata Adler who had reviewed films for The New Yorker prior to Kael; they had since become bitter rivals. I'd even read Adler's latest novel, Speedboat. Although I didn't entirely get it, a particular description, often repeated in the fragmented, autobiographical narrative about her affair with a married man, struck a chord: "the nearest thing to a real story to happen in my life." "That's exactly what I'm looking for," I confided when I eventually got her on the phone to request copies of the book, already out of print. She treated this gushing fanboy with kindness and respect. When I bragged to Barnet about the only conversation I've ever had with an actual writer for The New Yorker, he recalled that she had alluded to Barbra Streisand as "a gilded broccoli" in her New York Times pan of Funny Girl despite her admiration for the performance. I must confess I found Adler's author photo--by Richard Avedon, no less--as bewitching as her writing. I think I wanted to be her even more than Pauline Kael because of her slightly androgynous, definitely more attractive look.
Speaking of Avedon, Tina Brown brought him on staff during her brief but thoroughly memorable tenure, which included publishing photographs--god forbid!--for the first time. While reading New Yorker articles had sometimes felt obligatory, she brought real excitement--both literary and visual--to its pages. Her shoulder pads in this caricature by Steinberg indelibly mark the decade.
Take, for example, this portfolio of the magazine's short story writers, who have included John Updike and Ann Beattie, by Avedon which recalled his unforgettable group portraits of the Factory crowd, the Chicago Seven and Alan Ginsberg's family.
But it was Brown's successor, David Remnick, who published a short story by Annie Proulx that had me weeping, with sorrow and gratitude, in 1998. "Brokeback Mountain" will always be The New Yorker's high water mark IMHO. There may have been a gay character in other stories--I've rarely missed reading the magazine's fiction in almost half a century of subscribing--and there were certainly stories written by gay authors--but none had had this visceral impact. "I wish I knew how to quit you" truly said it all in an esteemed publication that previously had paid little attention to devoted readers like me. To invoke what has become a cliche more than 25 years later, I finally felt seen by a magazine I truly have loved for most of my adult life.
Proulx's manuscript and a 1996 watercolor sketch of Ten Sheep Preserve in Wyoming are included in the Berg Collection. She's still going strong at 90.
ln 2013, Roz Chast celebrated Remnick's 15th anniversary at the top of the masthead with her trademark wit. He brought The New Yorker into the digital age--yes, I listen to his podcast--and if he hangs on until 2033, his will be the longest tenure of only five editors to date.
Since retirement, I finally have had enough time to read his still wonderful magazine from cover to cover, although the humor of some cartoons, representative of a generation who wasn't yet born when I became a subscriber, sometimes eludes me.
As for the captioning contest photo that introduced this post, I really can't decide. They're all great.
#1: "I wish the library would just go back to charging late fees."
#2: "Normally, I like when books come to life."
#3: "The classics can be so intimidating."
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