Mistah Shawn--He Dead!

photo: Janet Malcolm

Mistah Shawn, he dead. The old New Yorker offices on 43rd street are another country. Brendan Gill famously wrote Here At The New Yorker and there were Tina Brown, Bob Gottlieb and most famously William Shawn at the helm. Mystique is probably not an adequate word. For good or bad the current editor a man of multifarious talents and seemingly unfathomable energy, is an all hands on deck down to earth editor who himself has covered Russia and written portraits of pop icons like Paul McCartney (he's a lover of rock). He recently published a piece about Yahyah Sinwar and Hamas. Is Max Weber's concept of "disenchantment" a way to describe the evolution of the magazine? You can't produce a character like Shawn without a premises  inhabited by a tribe like the one that originally constituted the nearby Algonquin round table. The prestigious Century association, home to the city cultural elite, was right down the street. Shawn had a long affair with the legendary Lillian Ross. Good for him but he was no good-ole-boy. Harold Brodkey, V.S. Naipaul the Johns Updike and Cheever were all legends at this sometimes alcoholic clubhouse. Then there was Genet in Paris--definitely  not a John or Jean, but Janet Flanner, not a flaneur! Pauline Kael was the magazine's controversial film critic who compared Last Tango in Paris to Le Sacre du Printemps. John McPhee and Robert Caro are just two of the legion of non-fiction writers, including Janet Malcolm. She wrote about psychoanalysis and psychoanalyzed journalism.The famous fiction editor Roger Angell was New Yorker aristocracy being the son of the magazine's first fiction editor Katherine Angell and step son of the famed E.B. White.

read "Frankel" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn