to new ideas, eager for new things to do, new things to buy, new urbanities for living.”
Many longtime readers of the magazine, however, had begun to feel that the image of sophistication it peddled was as outmoded as the old black-and-white movies featuring chic café singers on nightclub sets the size of the roof of the Empire State Building. These critics believed that The New Yorker had fallen out of touch with the world to the point of ossification. And their target for blame was William Shawn.
The New Yorker was perhaps the supreme illustration of the principle that any good magazine is a reflection of its presiding editor’s tastes and ideas. Shawn had started his career at the magazine as a reporter for the front-of-book section “Talk of the Town” in 1933. In only a few years he had become managing editor for fact, and in 1952, he was promoted to the top job, succeeding the magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross. The New Yorker was Shawn’s passion; he devoted himself to it, with an attention to minutiae that might have astounded even the most workaholic editors in chief of the day. Shawn followed many of the precepts established by Ross: He did not believe that a magazine succeeded by sending out reader surveys and frantically chasing what it believed its readers’ strongest interests to be. He believed that a good editor compelled readers to become interested in what he was interested in by presenting the material in the clearest, best balanced, and most lucid way.
But as the 1960s became the most chaotic decade in American memory, Shawn’s chorus of critics grew steadily louder. They complained that the pulse of modern life simply was not present in the magazine; they believed there was a way for The New Yorker to retain its impeccable journalistic standards and still come closer to depicting life as it was really being lived.
There was no real indication that Shawn was displeased with the job that his writers had been doing with “The Current Cinema” over the years. “William Shawn respected, admired, and enjoyed the movie reviews of John McCarten and Brendan Gill, both of whom he regarded as talented writers who were funny, witty, sharp, and independent,” observed Lillian Ross, a New Yorker staff writer since the 1940s, and Shawn’s longtime companion. “He liked the way both writers took a light-hearted view of much Hollywood product, while—never grim or cranky—they prized the movies of unique artists like Bergman, Renoir, Kurosawa, Fellini, et cetera. Above all else, Shawn loved writers’ humor in their pieces.”
Shawn brought a number of new critical voices to the magazine during the mid-1960s. In 1966 he hired Michael Arlen to write “The Air,” a regular column on television. George Steiner began contributing his erudite, deeply informed book reviews. Harold Rosenberg, the esteemed proponent of modern American art, joined the staff as art critic. Shawn was an avid moviegoer who sensed that something new and exciting was happening in the world of film and decided that Pauline would be an excellent choice to cover it. Brendan Gill, whom Pauline regarded as something of a dinosaur, had desired a change of pace and was reassigned to review theater; it was decided that Pauline would cover film reviewing for the months of September through March. Penelope Gilliatt, a former critic for the London Observer who had successfully completed a kind of test run at the magazine during the summer of 1968, would take over from April to August.
In a business in which the relationship between writer and editor is often a prickly, contentious one, Shawn had the loyalty of the great majority of those who contributed to The New Yorker. It was unusual for any editor in chief to be as closely involved in line editing as Shawn was; every major article that appeared in the magazine bore his stamp. Shawn was, along with many of his subeditors, dedicated to the highly manicured style for which the magazine had long been famous. Those lapidary sentences and smoothly flowing paragraphs that appeared in the magazine each week had been worked over by many people before they made it into print, which led to criticism that there was a kind of sausage-grinder mentality at work in The New Yorker’s editorial process. Pauline, for one, thought that all the obsessively careful editing sometimes yielded a rather uniform, almost generic New Yorker tone.
There were certain oddities about the daily workings at The New Yorker. The magazine’s fact-checking department was considered