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A P R I L 1 9 9 8
Introduction by Ian Frazier
ILLIAM Shawn worked at The
New Yorker magazine for fifty-four years. He began there in 1933, became
the editor in 1952, and left in 1987, when a company that had bought the
magazine forced him to resign. His tenure as editor coincided, roughly, with
the years of the Cold War. It is safe to say that he was the pre-eminent
magazine editor in the world during that time. Among his gifts was a faultless
ear for Cold War-era apocalyptic, audible in the titles of famous works he
edited, such as Hiroshimaand Silent Spring and The Fate of the
Earth and The Fire Next Time. Mostly, though, his tastes in writing
were hard to categorize. He published the stories and novels of J. D. Salinger,
and Truman Capote's true-crime classic, In Cold Blood, and movie reviews
by Pauline Kael that changed not just movie reviewing but reviewing in general.
And E. B. White and Hannah Arendt and Edmund Wilson and Milan Kundera and
Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky and Harold Brodkey and Donald Barthelme and
Janet Flanner and S. J. Perelman, George Steiner and Peter Handke and Philip
Roth and Jamaica Kincaid and John McPhee and Joseph Mitchell -- the list of
distinguished writers he published could go on and on. He loved new writing,
read quickly, and almost always knew what to do to a piece to make it better.
Often his editing amounted to an inspired sort of doing nothing, of just
letting a piece run.
Harold Ross, The New Yorker's founder and first editor, always referred
to himself simply as "Ross,"and so did everybody else. Perhaps following that
tradition, his successor called himself and signed himself "Shawn."A
contributor might pick up his telephone and hear the small voice at the other
end say, "Shawn here."But the contributor always replied, "Hello, Mr.
Shawn." The honorific "Mr." seems to have been awarded him by popular acclaim
among his colleagues out of respect, and in deference to his own politeness. He
was a shy, formal man, and he took self-effacement so far that he met
megalomania coming back the other way. He seldom talked about himself -- people
who worked with him for decades knew little more of his biography than the few
facts anyone could read about him in Who's Who. He gave almost no
interviews, and almost never let himself be photographed. No record that he
ever made a speech in public can be found. Harold Ross sometimes gave away
studio head shots of himself on which he had scrawled personalized epigrams.
Shawn would not have done that in a million years. His style was a pervasive
anonymity, and negative capability in the extreme. Probably he would have preferred that nobody write anything about him after he was gone. Probably, but not certainly -- he lived surrounded by rules, but kept a wary eye on them, and recklessly broke them himself once in a while if he felt the urge. In the article that follows, Ved Mehta, who was a staff writer at The New Yorker for thirty-three years, describes the romantically American background from which Shawn came. -- I. F.
Ian Frazier is the author of Family (1994) and Coyote v. Acme (1996).
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; April 1998; Introduction to "The New Yorker's Mr. Shawn"; Volume 281, No. 4; page71.
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