Only in the New Yorker, kids, could anyone in the magazine biz get away with the sky-high idealism Mehta eloquently describes. Shawn presents special difficulties because he worked in mysterious ways and thwarted attempts to cast light on him as effectively as a black hole in outer space.Īnd only a guy like Mehta could describe the specifics of Shawn's invisible art of editing and the human maelstrom that swirled around him. But Mehta was a sort of surrogate son to Shawn, not only part of the innermost circle of the xenophobic publication but sometimes the sole non-family member invited to the Shawns' Thanksgiving feasts. Mehta takes us to the parties where the phenomenally repressed Shawn "cut loose" (who would've guessed this was one of his favorite phrases?), pounding out "Anything Goes" and "Don't Fence Me In" on the piano in a rocking stride style. The best stuff in the book is its portrait of Mr. Shawn's intriguing wife, Cecille, the comments of their movie-famous son Wallace (coauthor of My Dinner with Andre ), and the bilious dinner-table and office gossip that Mehta lets us overhear. VED CELEBRATED WRITER THE NEW YORKER FULLĭid you know that the talented writer Maeve Brennan went insane and lived in the New Yorker 's ladies' room until she started smashing the glass portion of the business manager's door? (For the full story, see William Maxwell's introduction to Brennan's brilliant Springs of Affection, posthumously released in 1997.) Mehta is also in some ways in a better position than Lillian Ross to explain her function in William Shawn's life: "desk-bound as he was, and hemmed in by his phobias, relied on Lillian as his special eyes and ears, to keep him abreast of things going on in the city and in the culture at large."Īlas, times in the publishing industry changed brutally, while Mr. Mehta gives good dirt about the bloody battle for succession to Shawn's throne-one of the plotters was dubbed "the Slasher." He never gives deeper insights than when he tells a story about the New Yorker 's troubles as only an insider could while entirely, sublimely missing the point as only a New Yorker insider can. He's so loyal to his editor that he seems unaware that sometimes the man and the magazine were simply wrong, particularly when facts were altered in small ways in essays not billed as fiction. Yet as countless New Yorker writers will tell you in person, but few have described in print, Mr. Shawn was also an editorial genius and a titanic soul. It is a privilege to be introduced to him by Mr. Mehta.Remembering Mr Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing By Ved Mehta Sinclair-Stevenson, st£19.99 The title says it all. Ved Mehta was so in awe of William Shawn, the legendary editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1952 to 1987, that throughout this memoir-cum-homage he can't bring himself to refer to him as anything other than "Mr Shawn". VED CELEBRATED WRITER THE NEW YORKER FULL.
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