{"id":80165,"date":"2006-06-01T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2006-06-01T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/tales-from-the-crypt\/"},"modified":"2024-03-26T14:10:40","modified_gmt":"2024-03-26T18:10:40","slug":"tales-from-the-crypt","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/newcriterion.com\/article\/tales-from-the-crypt\/","title":{"rendered":"Tales from the crypt"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><font size=\"+2\">W<\/font>hen word arrived last autumn that <i>The New Yorker<\/i> was releasing a deluxe boxed <font size=\"-1\">CD<\/font> set of every issue of the magazine published since its monocled dandy espied a butterfly on the cover of the February 21, 1925 debut, my first thought was: \u201cHappy-doodle-day!\u201d<a name=\"back1\"><\/a><a href=\"#fn1\">[1]<\/a> That may speak to a certain lack of excitement in my life, but for a magazine junkie, this was the mother lode, the treasure of the Sierra Madre. Never again would I haunt the flea markets for back issues from the 1930s and 1940s, hoping to luck into a John O\u2019Hara story I hadn\u2019t read before, or a sporty Peter Arno cover. Professiona<\/p>\n<p><title><\/title><br \/>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\" by \"><\/p>\n<p>lly, it was also a must-have. For journalists, researchers, historians, educators, and average buffs, the technological breakthrough in the digitalization of magazine archives is a boon to cultural preservation, putting the past\u2014history as it happened\u2014within fingertip reach. Other weeklies, such as <i>The Nation<\/i> and <i>The New Republic<\/i>, have digitized their archives, but those virtual libraries are maintained online, requiring subscription fees or single payments to access articles. (I\u2019ve used both services to excavate art and movie reviews by Manny Farber, one of my critical idols, that otherwise would have remained orphaned within bound volumes.) <i>The New Yorker<\/i> was doing <i>The Nation<\/i> and <i>The New Republic<\/i> one better by bypassing the entire online rigamarole and giving readers the complete works in a handsome, handy, illustrated multi-disk set.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">It was fitting for <i>The New Yorker<\/i> to lavish such love on itself, given its status as a cult object and coffee-table signifier of taste and breeding. <i>The New Yorker<\/i> is the only magazine in America, probably in the world, to inspire reverence and druidical devotion. In the 1960s and 1970s, it was not uncommon for college and public libraries to keep specific bound volumes of the magazine secured behind the desk to prevent J. D. Salinger zealots from razoring out the pages of his <i>New Yorker<\/i> appearances, the most coveted item of Salingeriana being the uncollected novella (and final broadcast from the Glass family) \u201cHapworth 16, 1924.\u201d With the arrival of <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i>, bearing an introduction by the magazine\u2019s current editor, David Remnick, there was no longer any call to skulk the library stacks like Jack the Ripper. Salinger, James Thurber, Joseph Mitchell, E. B. White, Harold Rosenberg, Wolcott Gibbs, Janet Flanner, Lillian Ross, and the musings of \u201cThe Long-Winded Lady\u201d could now be summoned from the ghostly halls of West 43rd Street with a click of the mouse. I pre-ordered <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> as if giving myself an early Christmas present.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">An odd thing happened. It arrived, wrapped in plastic, and there it sat, wrapped in plastic. For weeks, months. I had read a few raised-nostril reviews of <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> that lauded its scope, refinement, and handsome presentation, but criticized its search engine, the awkwardness of inserting a different disk for each decade, the misspellings in the synopses (dismaying, given the magazine\u2019s reputation for meticulousness), and the inability to cut-and-paste. But it wasn\u2019t underwhelmed reviews that deterred me from cracking open the package, and I discovered through comparing notes that others shared my paralysis. Wherever literati types gathered to namedrop and glance over each other\u2019s shoulders, unopened sets of <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> seemed to loom in the background, like the slab from <i>2001<\/i>. Editors, agents, and fellow writers admitted that they too had bought the set or received it as a gift, but somehow \u201chadn\u2019t gotten around\u201d to opening it yet\u2014or hadn\u2019t been able to bring themselves to. They sounded vaguely sheepish and guilty, as if shirking their duty, or shying away from what lay within. You would have thought that to pry open the gatefold to <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> was to enter the forbidden tomb from which no man or woman returns. And in truth, there\u2019s something to those wimpy apprehensions. After I finally broke down, sliced through the plastic, split open the accursed thing, and inserted the installation disk into the laptop, I found myself lured into a Borgesian labyrinth of interlocking chambers, spiral stairs, and odd detours that unearthed archeological finds wherever the links led. Daylight disappeared as I descended into permanent dusk, the thumbnail covers of <i>The New Yorker<\/i> instilling a nostalgia for a time I had never known.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"+2\">F<\/font>irst off, I made tracks to Salinger\u2019s first emergence in the magazine, \u201cSlight Rebellion Off Madison\u201d (December 12, 1946), which introduced the pre-<i>Catcher<\/i> Holden Caulfield, and on the facing page of its final sentences I spotted John McCarten\u2019s Current Cinema review of the latest Frank Capra: \u201cEvery now and then, James Stewart, who heads the cast, manages to escape the sticky confines of the script with a bit of honest acting, but he breaks loose too seldom to pull the picture out of its doldrums.\u201d That was the brush-off given <i>It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>, now considered a holiday classic and a Beloved American Institution. This led me to check how <i>The New Yorker<\/i> had handled other 1940s classics, such as <i>Casablanca<\/i>. \u201cPretty tolerable,\u201d David Lardner conceded, \u201calthough not quite up to <i>Across the Pacific<\/i>, Bogart\u2019s last spyfest.\u201d Hmm, what about <i>The Maltese Falcon<\/i>? \u201cNicely refreshing,\u201d John C. Mosher judged it, as if describing a dip in the pool. He didn\u2019t even cite the name of its director, John Huston, rather a large omission, in retrospect. After poking around a bit longer in the pre-Pauline Kael pre-natal limbo of <i>The New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s musical-chairs movie coverage, I became curious if the magazine had ever covered Buckminster Fuller (I\u2019m a big Bucky fan). Up popped a profile of Fuller from 1966 by Calvin Tompkins, the sort of classic, non-celebrity profile <i>The New Yorker<\/i> no longer publishes by Tompkins or anybody else. Recounting a visit to Fuller\u2019s family spread on Bear Island, Maine, Tompkins recorded Fuller\u2019s cosmic-sensible ruminations which, forty years later, have the ominous ring of prophecy: \u201c[F]or the first time in the history of the world, man is just beginning to take conscious participation in some of his evolutionary formulations. And from this point on we\u2019re not going to be allowed to be innocent anymore. From now on, we\u2019re going to have to be very responsible, or the show is not going to work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">How far <i>The New Yorker<\/i> traveled from the whoopee and speakeasy charms of the magazine\u2019s splashy entrance to reach such a precipice. A product of the George Jean Nathan-H. L. Mencken 1920s with a dash of <i>Punch<\/i>, Harold Ross\u2019s <i>New Yorker<\/i> flashed its grin like a marquee, its jibes and quips syncopated to the staccato rhythms of newsrooms typewriters and the tap-happy Broadway stage. (Many of its early contributors were regulars at the Algonquin Roundtable, whose ensemble cast of columnists, playwrights, critics, and other notable quotables competed like performing seals for the cleverest comeback.) In its toddling days, <i>The New Yorker<\/i> leaned heavily on pseudonyms, arch locutions, and cute anecdotes, running chatty columns titled \u201cJottings about Town\u201d by \u201cBusybody\u201d and \u201cWall Street Notes\u201d by \u201cWell Known Broker\u201d that were accompanied by capsule reviews of plays and books that conjured the fizz and clink of cocktail hour. (For years, the back-of-the-book remained a club car for gentleman hacks, its garrulous Nero being Alexander Woolcott, whose baroque, indecipherable whimsicalities sit on the page for modern readers like a mound of heavy carbs.) The secret of <i>The New Yorker<\/i> in its frisky youth was that beneath its brisk polish and dashes of gin wit (courtesy of Dorothy Parker), its nerves were always on edge, the morale of its officers shaky. Behind its mask, the magazine was prematurely middle-aged, due in part to Ross\u2019s chronic worrywart nature, but most of all to the enduring qualms of its most valuable player, E. B. White, whose folksiness, wry humor, and Yankee pith rested, like Robert Frost\u2019s, on a bed of thorns. A prodigious miniaturist who composed hundreds of cartoon captions, newsbreaks, short stories, essays, and Talk of the Town notes and comments (scroll through his credits on the archive search and it\u2019s like watching an endless armada enter the harbor), White taxed his feathery touch of concentration to the breaking point. As Wilfrid Sheed wrote in a review of White\u2019s letters, \u201cWhere Thurber had used edginess as a purely comic device (the edge of a tantrum as often as not) with White it was a simple statement of fact. He is, it seems, so finely strung that keeping his sanity has been a struggle at times and writing brightly for <i>The New Yorker<\/i> a potential torture. No wonder his stuff seemed almost preternaturally sane and well-balanced. It had to.\u201d White wasn\u2019t the only writer hinting at darkness and ennui beneath the polished tiles of <i>New Yorker<\/i> prose\u2014the early vignettes of John O\u2019Hara let in glimpses of the bitter raw\u2014but his style set the impossible standard for all of the nervous wrecks, hypochondriacs, shipwrecked alcoholics, eccentrics, obsessive-compulsive cases, and cryptic enigmas (Salinger, Joseph Mitchell) who would follow in White\u2019s cobbled path of patron sainthood. Under White\u2019s tutelage, <i>The New Yorker<\/i> didn\u2019t lose its sense of humor; its humor gained a shadow of implication. The wisecrack as American art form may have been product-tested at the Algonquin Roundtable in the 1920s but, to quote Sheed again, it was the 1930s that became \u201cThe Golden Age for American humor, mainly because everything else was going so badly. The wisecrack was the basic American sentence because there were so many things that could not be said any other way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"+2\">E<\/font>ven more than the Depression, World War <font size=\"-1\">II<\/font> was the mature making of <i>The New Yorker<\/i>. For the duration of the war its offices were understaffed, and paper rationing reduced the magazine to a flimsy likeness of itself, provoking Ross to grumble to the gods, \u201cI have been Christ-like in my patience.\u201d My hazy notion of the <i>The New Yorker<\/i> in the war years was that the indefatigable A. J. Liebling was practically a one-man band, barreling across Europe and reporting the Allied effort with his customary gusto as Janet Flanner (Gen\u00eat) recorded the plight of occupied France and the refugee situation. Liebling\u2019s dispatches were certainly rich, ornate, and plentiful, but until I plunged into disk seven (covering 1937\u20131947) I hadn\u2019t realized the full range of <i>The New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s war correspondents, whose ranks included Brendan Gill (the versatile bon vivant who served at various times as theater critic, film critic, book reviewer, and architectural observer), Daniel Lang (later the author of <i>Casualties of War<\/i>, the tragic account of the rape-murder of a Vietnamese girl by American soldiers that would become the basis for Brian De Palma\u2019s most uncharacteristic film), E. J. Kahn, Jr. (of whom we will hear more), and a kid named Roger Angell, who has been publishing in <i>The New Yorker<\/i> for an astonishing sixty-two years with no evidence of flagging. The young men who returned to New York and <i>The New Yorker<\/i> and reentered civilian life had seen and experienced things during military service that didn\u2019t dispose them to carrying on as before and narrowing their perspective to a strip of midtown Manhattan. They were more serious and subdued than their predecessors; the world was more serious. It was the genius of <i>The New Yorker<\/i> that it recognized this evolutionary shift and, instead of making incremental adjustments at a stately pace, launched a preemptive strike on its readers\u2019 expectations.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">In a letter to Rebecca West, dated August 27, 1946, Ross describes this helluva reporting job John Hersey\u2019s done about the bombing of a Japanese city. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t a series of pieces, as our series go, and it couldn\u2019t be, by its nature, and finally we decided that it wouldn\u2019t work as a serial, so we decided to use it all at one time, although it would take up most of an issue. After a couple of days more of reflection, we got into an evangelical mood and decided to throw out all the other text in the issue, and make a gesture that might impress people. We couldn\u2019t have used humorous drawings or anything frivolous with the story, anyhow and all the problems were solved at once in one sweeping decision. So next week\u2019s issue will be a very peculiar one. I don\u2019t know what people will think, but a lot of readers are going to be startled \u2026\u201d The publication of Hersey\u2019s \u201cHiroshima\u201d in the issue of August 31, 1946 did more than startle a lot of readers and peeve a few intellectuals, who mocked the incongruity of Hersey\u2019s exhaustive account of horrific destruction slotted alongside peppy ads for nail polish and Lux toilet soap. It augured a tectonic shift in the magazine\u2019s history, a declaration of intent. And the idea to showcase \u201cHiroshima\u201d as a prose documentary unto itself wasn\u2019t originally Ross\u2019s. It was William Shawn\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"+2\">H<\/font>ired in 1932 and elevated to managing editor of the fact department, Shawn succeeded Ross as editor after Ross\u2019s death in 1951. For years he was perceived by detractors as sort of an undertaker caretaker for the magazine, ensuring that each issue arrived at newsstands and mailboxes exquisitely embalmed. Its enamel slumbers were interrupted when one of Shawn\u2019s evangelical moods produced earth tremors such as Rachel Carson\u2019s \u201cSilent Spring\u201d or James Baldwin\u2019s \u201cLetter from a Region in My Mind,\u201d or cleared the decks for Hannah Arendt\u2019s \u201cEichmann in Jerusalem,\u201d but Seymour Krim spoke for the disgruntlement of many in 1962 when he decried the zombie cult of genteel castrati <i>The New Yorker<\/i> had become in its plush middle-age. \u201cNever had a magazine in this country devoted such theatrical care to the subtleties of communication, carefulness, tact, finally draining the spirit of the staff down to the microscopic beauty of a properly placed comma and ultimately paralyzing them in static detail and self-conscious prose, the original ideal of perfection having become in the late 50s and now 60s a perversion \u2026\u201d This blast from one of the original New Journalists set the stage for Tom Wolfe\u2019s jeering jamboree \u201cTiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street\u2019s Land of the Walking Dead!\u201d which turned the magazine\u2019s fortieth anniversary into Carrie\u2019s prom. Although many of the details were off by a mile, Wolfe got the musty, cloistral atmosphere eerily right: the tremulous Whisper Zone along Shawn\u2019s corridor and the code of secrecy practiced by the sect-like staff, the joyless digs of the editorial offices (which Wolfe compares to the faculty warren of a small agricultural college\u2014I say it should have been preserved at the Smithsonian as the original temple of shabby chic), the grammatical fussiness and fact-checking queries that turned innocent galleys into \u201cwhichy thickets,\u201d the blinkered obliviousness to the social convulsions rocking the country. So hilarious and vivid was Wolfe\u2019s caricature of Shawn as a Jamesian hobbit that its Hogarthian exaggerations still persist in the perception of Shawn, his phobias and formalities inseparable from the magazine\u2019s institutional lore. When Wolfe\u2019s satire hit, the lore was at its height. The magazine\u2019s quaint foibles, quirks, and coy conceits\u2014its lack of a proper table of contents and letters section, its chaste absence of photography, its bite-sized serialization of <i>Ulysses<\/i> in the Goings On listing for the long-running musical <i>The Fantastiks<\/i>, its modest placement of the author\u2019s byline at the bottom of the article rather than at the conspicuous top (a practice John Updike considered admirably democratic)\u2014had become so ingrained that they irritated the uninitiated, who found the real action elsewhere. Compared to <i>Esquire<\/i> and other desperado outlets, <i>The New Yorker<\/i> resembled a stuffed owl, something stuck on the mantelpiece.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\"><i>The New Yorker<\/i> had its owlish aspect, as did Shawn. But it beat with the wings of a dove. No magazine was as passionately and adheringly committed to nonviolence than Shawn\u2019s <i>New Yorker<\/i>, and I suspect the magazine\u2019s early acceptance of military action against Iraq would have saddened, perhaps even horrified him. In the second half of the 1960s, the Vietnam war both demoralized and revitalized <i>The New Yorker<\/i>, whose reporting and commentary were so ardent in their opposition to the policy and conduct of the war that Eustace Tilley\u2019s monocle threatened to shatter. The opposition wasn\u2019t just political and moral; it emanated from the imaginative core of Shawn\u2019s being. Although Shawn composed scads of Talk items and aria-like memorial tributes during his more than half-century at <i>The New Yorker<\/i> (insiders referred to Shawn\u2019s obituary notices as \u201cViking funerals\u201d), only once did he assert himself with an actual byline, and not even his full name at that, only his demure initials, \u201cW. S.\u201d But his singular offering was a doozy: \u201cCatastrophe,\u201d published in November 1936, is a matter-of-fact reverie about a meteor wiping out the metropolis. \u201cIt landed, nice and tidy, on all five boroughs of New York.\u201d Splat. Mayors and other dignitaries send their condolences to New York, but there\u2019s no one to receive them. \u201cIt was not until the newspapers, in simultaneous spurts of fancy, decided to reprint the New York telephone directories as an obituary notice that the country began to grasp the scope and connotations of what had happened. New York City, like Pompeii, was through.\u201d Morbid humor chilled on ice seldom strays this close to the abyss, and Shawn\u2019s single venture into speculative fiction is an invaluable <font size=\"-1\">X<\/font>-ray of his foreboding nature. He was dogged by the specter of mass extinction. From \u201cCatastrophe\u201d to his championing of Hersey\u2019s \u201cHiroshima\u201d to his unsigned comments about the bombing campaign against North Vietnam (\u201cDay by day, we are turning into monsters\u201d) to the publication of his prot\u00e9g\u00e9 Jonathan Schell\u2019s apocalyptic three-parter \u201cThe Fate of the Earth\u201d (\u201cAccording to Lillian Ross, when the first installment was about to appear, Shawn said to her, \u2018When the magazine comes out, I fear that people are going to be running hysterically through the streets\u2019\u201d\u2014Ben Yagoda\u2019s history of <i>The New Yorker<\/i>, <i>About Town<\/i>), he insisted on addressing the possibility of civilization being obliterated in a blink. It wasn\u2019t a meteor he feared, but man\u2019s aggression run fatally amok. This may explain why he succumbed to the belated flower-power peace-love anthem of Charles Reich\u2019s <i>Greening of America<\/i>, in which, for a brief, embarrassing moment, <i>The New Yorker<\/i> embraced the Age of Aquarius, which didn\u2019t embrace it back. Some of those who once chastised <i>The New Yorker<\/i> for not taking a stand now wished it would stop taking preachy stands and climb back into the hammock.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"+2\">I<\/font>t did, halfway. Its nerves plumb wore out by the tightrope tensions of Watergate, <i>The New Yorker<\/i> seemed to subside into a self-induced coma in the late 1970s and 1980s. Punk, disco, gay liberation\u2014these didn\u2019t disturb its registry. The covers became studiously blander and blander\u2014a pretty parade of Easter-egg pastels no matter what the season, or outdoor still lives of pristine porches and barns by Gretchen Dow Simpson that were so tastefully understated they seemed to have a recessive gene. Editorially, the magazine developed elephantiasis. The articles got more impersonal and encyclopedic, as if the writers were paid by the word and decided to break the bank at Monte Carlo. Ved Mehta\u2019s voluminous personal histories (many a reader was heard to mutter, <i>If he mentions that damned Daddyji one more time<\/i>\u2014) \u2026 Elizabeth Drew\u2019s interminable Washington journals \u2026 Richard Reeves\u2019s two-part \u201cAmerican Journey,\u201d where he retraced Alexis de Tocqueville\u2019s route in <i>Democracy in America<\/i> to pick up any loose platitudes lying around. Even John McPhee fans groaned at the prospect of trailing behind him in his geological studies in his \u201cAnnals of the Former World\u201d series. But those were foothills compared to the Everest of ennui known as \u201cThe Staffs of Life\u201d series by the venerable E. J. Kahn Jr. (a <i>New Yorker<\/i> contributor since 1937, who died in 1994), in which he devoted epic study to the potato, rice, soybeans, and wheat. That <i>The New Yorker<\/i> ran these articles under the heading of profiles (\u201cProfile of the Potato\u201d), anthropomorphizing basic foodstuffs with such deadpan ponderousness\u2014\u201cAlong with other tubers and roots, potatoes have had to contend with the aspersions cast upon them\u201d\u2014that suspicion floated that it was all some great Zen put-on on Shawn\u2019s part. It wasn\u2019t. The laughter the series received was unintentional, a snickering that grew louder with each installment. This time Tom Wolfe couldn\u2019t be blamed for making the magazine an object of ridicule. <i>The New Yorker<\/i> had done this to itself. The \u201cStaffs of Life\u201d series came to typify and symbolize the monumental tombstone tedium of the <i>New Yorker<\/i> fact piece at its most didactic-pedantic, and even now, decades later, I still hear the occasional chortle, \u201cRemember when <i>The New Yorker<\/i> ran 50,000 words on <i>grain<\/i>?\u201d I inserted disk two into the laptop to see if Kahn\u2019s articles were as boring as I remembered, and, as I began to read, I realized that I never <i>had<\/i> read them, only given them a skim when they were originally published, having taken everybody\u2019s word for how boring they were. I can\u2019t say I was riveted, but the pieces were, I have to confess\u2014interesting. Reams of research braided into elegant histories, and nothing to belittle. When I poked into Kahn\u2019s \u201cProfile of Wheat,\u201d a phrase admittedly difficult to type with a straight face, I noticed that the same issue also carried a \u201ccasual\u201d by Veronica Geng.<\/p>\n<p><font size=\"+2\">H<\/font>er byline triggered a bifocal response in the memory banks. It was a reminder that <i>The New Yorker<\/i> was never as monolithic as its reputation. Amidst the ponderous, encrusted bulk of the magazine in the later Shawn years, it hosted and launched an insurgent spike of humor writing as a young mod squad of talents exploded like popcorn kernels. Geng was one of the most unpigeonholeable talents <i>The New Yorker<\/i> ever harbored, her dizzy-dame parodies of <i>The New York Times<\/i> wedding announcements (with its classic line, \u201cHer previous marriage ended in pharmaceuticals\u201d), Louise Brooks\u2019s memoirs, Watergate tapes, and poetry workshops setting a new style of screwball comedy. She, along with Ian Frazier, W. S. Trow, Mark Singer, Roy Blount, Jr., and Donald Barthelme (not strictly a humorist but an ironic constructivist\u2014the Rauschenberg of the short story\u2014whose pastiches cast a spell on the others), pioneered <i>The New Yorker<\/i> as a clubhouse of postmodernism. (In his new just-published memoir <i>Let Me Finish<\/i>, Roger Angell describes Shawn\u2019s excitement upon receiving the latest literary <font size=\"-1\">UFO<\/font> from Barthelme or one of the other instigators: \u201cI don\u2019t know what this is,\u201d he sometimes said, pink with pleasure, \u201cbut it\u2019s wonderful.\u201d) Trow\u2019s two-part essay \u201cIn the Context of No-Context\u201d provided the first cartography of the postmodern sensibility in all its bizarre juxtapositions and non sequiturs, and his inside-peek article on the publicity-stunt wedding of funk rocker Sly Stone at Madison Square Garden is one of the unsung crown jewels of New Journalism. As the fact pieces became supersized at <i>The New Yorker<\/i>, its fiction followed the lead of the casuals and migrated in the opposite direction, dieting on eyedropper dribblets of pale scenery and sparse dialogue as the minimalism of Ann Beattie, Mary Robison, Susan Minot, and other maidens of sorrow helped define a decade\u2019s slacker pose. Today, Beattie\u2019s low-cal prose is as out of fashion as Barthelme\u2019s Cornell-box word collages (\u201cIn the room, hanging on hooks, gleaming in decay and wearing Coco Chanel gowns, seven zebras\u201d), but future surveyors and prospectors may have a different reaction, and the indispensable worth of <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> is that it resupplies the stage on which a Veronica Geng and a vested man of letters such as V. S. Pritchett could share editorial floor space without either seeming out of place. Excellence established its own gestalt.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Seeing Geng\u2019s byline also tugged a personal string. I was friends with Veronica, whom I met through our friend Pauline Kael. Upon her leaving <i>The New Yorker<\/i> after a baffling snit that left her colleagues flummoxed, I briefly inherited her old office. I was one of the lucky few Veronica didn\u2019t excommunicate after her fuming exit\u2014some of her former comrades who profaned <i>The New Yorker<\/i> with their continuing presence, she forever cut dead. Forever didn\u2019t turn out to be very long. Diagnosed with a brain tumor, Veronica died at the age of fifty-five on Christmas Eve, 1997, a death that dims and discolors my interest in the later years of <i>The New Yorker<\/i>, a malaise assisted by my own memories of the magazine from my stay there from 1992 to 1997. I don\u2019t need to scan the archives from the early-to-late 1990s, I can simply close my eyes and picture anew the bloody handprints on the white walls, the lovely specter of Harold Brodkey glaring at me on the staircase, hear the cries of the <i>Guernica<\/i> horses and the crying laments of longtime contributors being dragged from the offices where some of them spent so little time (one writer\u2019s office was discovered to be jammed with fishing rods and tackle). I exaggerate, of course, because, well, that\u2019s what I do. But it\u2019s true that when I look up articles from Tina Brown\u2019s tenure, I\u2019m too aware of the tense backstage dramas that were unfolding then and can\u2019t detach what I\u2019m trying to read from so much of what I\u2019d rather not remember, given my blood pressure. My lack of investigative zeal extends to the David Remnick era (1998 to present), which represents an editorial (and financial) triumph in the face of the steep incline any general-interest magazine confronts in a country that reads less and less, and has the attention span of a moth. The Remnick presidency is too upclose and familiar to supply the scavenger-hunt serendipity of (say) diving into a June 1944 issue to see how <i>The New Yorker<\/i> covered the <font size=\"-1\">D<\/font>-Day landing and finding John Hersey\u2019s account of the sinking of <font size=\"-1\">PT<\/font>-109 and the rescue of its remaining crewmembers thanks to the cool head and lean resolve of its skipper, Lt. John F. Kennedy. I didn\u2019t go seeking the birth of the Kennedy mystique. It was simply there lying in wait, tucked between ads for Elizabeth Arden leg makeup and Ballantine Ale. Unwieldy as it is, <i>The Complete New Yorker<\/i> enables you to go wherever the whims take you, and my whims still have a lot of fuel left in them, and further room to roam.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Future topics for inquiry.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Why does A. J. Liebling remain a vibrant role model for writers while the superb, prolific St. Clair McKelway has been sorely forgotten?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Why does <i>The New Yorker<\/i>\u2019s current slate of female byliners (Susan Orlean, Joan Acocella, Nancy Franklin, Caitlan Flanagan, et al.) seem so much <i>girlier<\/i> than its former greats (Flanner, Kael, Lois Long, Andy Logan, Maeve Brennan, Emily Hahn)?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Bob Gottlieb\u2019s editorial era\u2014victim of a bad rap?<\/p>\n<p class=\"ind\">Shawn\u2019s unsigned obituary notices, the art of. <!-- Notes start here --><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p><b>Notes<\/b><br \/>\n<a href=\"#top\"><font size=\"-1\">Go to the top of the document.<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n<ol><!-- First footnote goes here --><!-- Start footnote 1 --><\/p>\n<li><a name=\"fn1\"><\/a><font size=\"-1\"> <i>The Complete New Yorker: Eighty Years of the Nation\u2019s Greatest Magazine<\/i>, by David Remnick (Introduction); Random House, 8 <\/font><font size=\"-1\">DVD<\/font>s, $100. <a href=\"#back1\">Go back to the text.<\/a> <!-- End footnote 1 --><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><!-- Footnotes End Here --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe New Yorker,\u201d page by 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