№ 5
The Making of a Monument
What began as the voice of radical chic has
mellowed. But the New York Review of Books is still the place for intellectuals 40 years later
—the globe and mail, march 22, 2003
After 40 years in charge of the New York Review of Books, you’d think that editor Robert Silvers might yield to a brief anniversary cheer, that just for a moment he might romanticize the biweekly’s early days, that after building one of the world’s most esteemed intellectual journals he might even want to talk about its legacy.
But when I reached Silvers at his Manhattan office, the Review’s 40th anniversary was quickly pushed off into a corner of our conversation. What really animated him were his newest projects, the work he and co-editor Barbara Epstein had recently assigned: John Updike’s piece on an obscure art exhibit in Hartford, Connecticut, Steven Weinberg’s articles on science, the debate surrounding war in Iraq. Identifying the Review’s legacy wasn’t something he was willing to do.
“I don’t know, I really don’t,” he says, and begins to laugh.
“I think we have to take our stand on the accumulated work we’ve done. There are many thousands of reviews and millions of words, and who could possibly make much of a judgment about it? It’s so various: so many different issues, so many different books, so many different writers. And if you’re someone like myself, you’re obsessed by the next couple of issues. They’re absolutely big, big challenges. What will be in them, how they’re going to work out, whether some of these articles will come in, and so on. That kind of retrospective view, I don’t have.”
Others, however, most certainly do.
“I don’t think it’s too much to say that getting my byline in the New York Review of Books was like dying and going to heaven,” the Toronto-born contributor Michael Ignatieff told me recently.
Indeed, Ignatieff couldn’t think of another journal — in any language — that had the same ability to “unashamedly walk between the high academic theoretical world and the world of politics and journalism.”
That balancing act, according to Susan Sontag, is its greatest strength. “American intellectual life,” she told the New York Times, “would be vastly poorer had it not been for the Review and the model it gives for how to write for a generally educated audience.”
Since its inaugural issue in February 1963, that model really hasn’t changed. Silvers and Epstein have targeted an audience with the same kind of broad, oddly inquisitive tastes as their own. Why, they wondered, couldn’t there be a magazine that was serious, readable, and directly engaged with the important matters of the day?
“It’s simply our own interests. We really don’t claim too much more than that,” Silvers says. “What we started out doing, and have continued to try to do, is to get writers we admire to deal with the books and issues that interest us.”
It was actually Epstein’s former husband, Jason, an editor at Random House, who came up with the idea during the winter of 1962–63, when New York’s newspapers had been shut down by a prolonged printers’ strike.
“He had the inspiration that this was the only time one could start a new book review without any capital because if you had a plausible plan the publishers would take an ad,” Silvers recalls.
So, the Epsteins and their friends, poet Robert Lowell and his wife, writer Elizabeth Hardwick, asked Silvers, then an editor at Harper’s, to join them.
The first contributors were an impressive group, to be sure, including Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Norman Mailer and William Styron. They wrote quickly (a three-week deadline) and for free.
By the fall, after more than a thousand letters urging them on, and a second, summer edition, the Review began in earnest. Money was raised and, according to Silvers, by the fourth year “the paper” was turning a modest profit.
(In 1984, Rea Hederman, a former Mississippi newsman, bought the Review for $5 million. Today, its paid circulation is more than 115,000.)
Certainly the Review’s early formula stuck: the large, brick-like logo; the newsprint with long, footnote-laden columns; David Levine’s extraordinary drawings; the Personals straight out of a Woody Allen sketch (“Divorced, nonreligious, Jewish-flavored math professor, 70, bookish, NYC, Ivy League, two children, riding wave of exuberance, seeking surfing companion, 60–75, to share the life of the mind and the body”).
Then there’s the subject matter, where you’ll find everything from discussions on cosmology and Freudian psychology to pieces on Rohinton Mistry and Barnett Newman. In every issue, according to Silvers, there will also be a commentary on “some central public event or challenge or crisis.”
Indeed, the Review’s early days were bound up in the turmoil of the ’60s: the assassination of John Kennedy and, above all, the war in Vietnam. In 1967, a cover featured the recipe for a Molotov cocktail. Noam Chomsky was a regular contributor. It was a feisty, aggressive voice on the left. Tom Wolfe even called it “the chief theoretical organ of radical chic.”
While the journal may have mellowed — one observer has called it a “middle-aged, rather Establishment voice” — it still tugs to the left of centre, whether one thinks of its pieces on Yugoslavia in the early ’90s, or those more recently on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
But the Review has, undoubtedly, had its critics. Ever since the ’60s, conservatives have often found its point of view particularly unappealing. Roger Kimball called it “a journal of blithe political opportunism, ready at the first hint of a change in the public mood to embrace extreme, even revolutionary, ideas that were totally at odds with its ambition to be ‘a responsible literary journal.’ ”
Others have accused it of being Anglocentric, deaf to newer intellectual trends and overly reliant on a tired and exclusive roster of writers. As James Wolcott pointed out, the only book-length study of the Review, Philip Nobile’s Intellectual Skywriting, “probed the inner sanctum of the magazine as if it were a rattlesnake nest.”
Still, among those who’ve worked for Robert Silvers, detractors aren’t easy to find. Susan Sontag, for one, has called him a “fantastic, fanatical, brilliant” editor. Joan Didion dedicated her last book to him.
“I know this is going to sound like Ceausescu’s Romania, but all praise to the leader. It’s going to sound like Kim Jong Il’s Pyongyang Review of Books. It’s going to sound phony as hell, because I know you’re going to speak to him, but it is the case,” Michael Ignatieff said, in a telephone interview from Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“I’ve worked for a lot of people and a lot of editors but until you’ve been edited by Silvers you don’t know what magazine editing is.
“You get a call on Sunday night, if you’re in London, and it’s Sunday afternoon in New York and he’s in the office going over your commas. He is saying, ‘I’m sorry we’ve checked out Fact X and it just doesn’t wash.’ ”
It is a story, Ignatieff says, about good editing.
Once a review project is agreed upon, writers tell stories of “mysterious FedEx packages” arriving at the door, as Silvers’s assistants start sending out additional books, notes and supporting material on the topic.
“We’re surrounded by all of these books,” Silvers explains. “So our thought is this: Suppose there are other books on the subject that have come in, whether on, say, D. H. Lawrence on the one hand, or the American military on the other. We have our review project, and now here are some other books that you [the writer] might want to look at. Don’t feel that you have to review them, but look at them, see if they’re interesting to you. We have this great admiration for, and confidence in, writers and their minds and we’re very willing to leave a lot decisions to them.”
Silvers, Ignatieff points out, is also an extraordinary networker, always on the lookout for who’s new and up-and-coming. And he’s often courting older, established writers, as well.
A recent addition, Silvers offers, is Margaret Atwood.
“I had read something by her that made me think she might be interested in a particular book that was about to be published. So I sent it to her.”
Atwood, who Silvers calls “a marvellous critic, very, very incisive,” has contributed four pieces over the past year.
Although he’s now in his early 70s, clearly Silvers’s appetite for renewal isn’t on the wane — even if most of his contemporaries have now retired.
“That, I suppose, may be true. But I don’t have the faintest idea of that,” he says.
“I think the Review at the moment is in a period where we are very engaged in a series of important issues. There’s no end to it. That’s all we’re interested in: in what lies ahead.”
And with that, Silvers spoke about the “marvellous reviews” he soon hoped to run, including a piece on, of all things, “the whole industry and culture of computer games.
“From time to time, they give us the most enchanting satisfaction. To have a beautiful article: that is what we feel is at the centre of it all.”