He cared deeply about The New Yorker and about its writers and artists, and he believed that he could not abandon them at that crucial turning point in the magazine’s life. But Shawn, who had been managing editor since 1939, felt he had no choice. In 1952, when Raoul Fleischmann, owner of The New Yorker, chose Shawn to succeed Harold Ross as editor, Ross (no relation to Lillian) begged Shawn not to accept the offer, warning that the job would literally kill him.
Miss Ross, by contrast, shows us that as the editor in chief of one of the most influential and insular institutions in American literature and journalism, Shawn was both more alive to his work and more depressed by it than we have been led to believe. On these terms, it is no wonder that the living Shawn was so often understood in a biblical sense. Mehta begins a lifelong habit of writing as if he were sighted. Mehta cannot see except through the eyes of another, but, with Shawn’s approval, Mr. Mehta about the work of visual artists whom Mr.
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At Shawn’s magazine, he is allowed to be free of those strictures. As a nonsighted person in India, he explains, he was treated as if he were handicapped. Mehta has traded not just the worlds of India and Oxford for America, but the world of blindness for the world of sight. Mehta’s every word with deep respect, submitting his writing to “no fewer than 16 readings,” it suddenly becomes clear that Mr. In addition, a charge account is established for him at an East Side grocer’s. Under the jurisdiction of the “saintly and quiet” Shawn, the awestruck young writer is initiated into a “sacred editing process” in which he learns that “a writer and an editor had a higher calling than self-glorification-that they were partners in a search for truth.” The great and powerful Shawn finds the magazine’s “latest inductee” an apartment to live in, meanwhile supplying an office at the magazine and a drawing account from which to pay his rent. Mehta’s Shawn is mysterious, secretive, omnipotent, even “otherworldly.” A mind reader, a master of concealment, he is to this memoir as Frank Morgan is to the 1939 M-G-M Wizard of Oz, appearing to our dependent, yellow-brick-road travelers in one guise of authority after another. From the moment of his arrival at The New Yorker in 1959 to his departure 30 years later, the author attributed magical powers to the wonderful Mr.
Mehta’s memoir, meanwhile, may need reminding that William Shawn was a magazine editor. Hers is the first sighting of the Shawn who will claim attention in the future. Miss Ross’ man is flesh and blood, a whole being. 8, 1992, Lillian Ross is finally taking the story in a new direction. Six years after William Shawn’s death from a heart attack on Dec. Saintliness was only one aspect of the man. Mehta’s colleague Janet Flanner declared, “It’s as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception.”īut the reader has long since grown weary of that Mr. Even in death, Shawn remains in service to the needs of his writers. Mehta’s memoir will claim fresh space beside James Thurber’s and Brendan Gill’s yellowing best sellers, The Years with Ross and Here at “The New Yorker.” However, it ultimately fails to go beyond its own boyish hero-worship.
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