WHAT TO WRITE, AND WHY

THE NEW YORKER, FOR GOOD OR ILL

        In the spirit of the rat which, disenchanted with dry land, tentatively sets paw once again on the inundated deck of the recently-deserted ship, I just renewed my subscription to The New Yorker.

      I'm surprised now that I ever let it lapse, since the role played by the magazine's writing, humour and even editorial policy in my intellectual life and that of my generation was profound.

           However I don't feel entirely to blame.

           For the year before I opted out, my enthusiasm had declined.  As each copy landed on the mat, my heart fell at the promise - I almost said "threat" - of the worthy but often exhausting long-form journalism for which the magazine is a by-word.

           I often took refuge in the treasury of its archive, access to which is included with each subscription, but this offered only a brief respite. Emerging from the company of John O'Hara, Pauline Kael, Peter Arno, J.D. Salinger, James Thurber and S.J. Perelman, I was confronted afresh by Seymour Hersh's latest gleeful unmasking of some foreign policy boondoggle or the boil-by-boil account of an appalling new disease.

           It hadn't always been so. Before the decision in August 1946 to devote an entire issue to John Hershey's Hiroshima, the magazine was a by-word for brevity, wit and....well, triviality.  It reviewed Hemingway and Fitzgerald but published neither; in any event, Hem preferred the slick pages of Esquire or Vanity Fair and Fitzgerald the deeper pockets of The Saturday Evening Post.  

           Whatever one's reasons for courting acceptance from The New Yorker, money and mass readership were seldom among them. Publishing conferred more than approval. With it, one entered the pantheon - or at least earned the right to mingle with the immortals and eavesdrop on their conversation.

           So what makes it so great? I could cite numerous examples of fine writing, stylish covers and amusing cartoons, but plenty of periodicals have these. Its real merit rests in what I suppose one would call editorial policy.

           Only one rule about writing has ever stood up to the battering of experience. It is "Write what gives you pleasure."  Pleasing the public must have played some part in the editors' decisions, but from the moment its founder Harold Ross announced it would be "not edited for the old lady in Dubuque,” The New Yorker put its own pleasure over that of others, in the hope that enough people would share that pleasure to keep it in business.

          I may not care for its accounts of American political shenanigans nor its reports on new and excruciating afflictions, and one can only blink at some of its cartoons, but publishing what it likes has provided me with enough delight over the years to make such deficiencies irrelevant.

E.B. White and the house in Maine where he wrote ONE MAN’S MEAT.

          Take a book by one of the chief architects of that policy, E.B. "Andy" White. He wrote the childrens' classics Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web, and co-authored an unrivalled guide to the intricacies of the language, The Elements of Style. Too old to fight in World War II, White and his wife, a fellow New Yorker editor, retired to a farm in Maine, an experience documented in the essays collected as One Man's Meat. Their oblique, deceptively tranquil view of the war at home uniquely captures the cultural price exacted by such a conflict. All bear the stamp of someone writing for himself, not to please others. This book merits the greatest compliment a writer can pay: I wish I had written it. I hope a passage like the following suggests why.

           It has been an early spring and an eerie one. Already we have had evenings which have seemed more like July than April, as though summer were born prematurely and needed special care. Tonight is such a night. The warmth of afternoon held over through suppertime, and now the air has grown still. In the barnyard, among the wisps of dry straw which make a pattern on the brown earth, the sheep lie motionless and as yet unshorn, their great ruffs giving them a regal appearance, their placidity seemingly induced by the steady crying of the frogs.  The unseasonable warmth invests the night with a quality of mystery and magnitude. And in the east beyond the lilac and beyond the barn and beyond the bay and behind the deepening hills, in slow and splendid surprise, rises the bomber's moon.