There’s a new New Yorker afoot, a non-bittersweet bundle of not-any-misery, and his name is Graham. Though not yet a day old, he seems destined to take the city by storm, and have excellent taste into the bargain. If his mentor and tutor have anything to say about it, he’ll be guest-blogging in no time. Kid, you’re hired!

“I had to be what movie people call the continuity girl; he expected me to read the text closely so that he could have someone to talk to as he worked on finishing it, to opine, query, schmooze, then query again,” writes Elisabeth Sifton in Slate about working with Saul Bellow at Viking, which sounds like a great time even for those who didn’t care for him personally. One editor who felt that way thrust a heavily bellowed proof at Sifton and gave up: “Look at this…. Just read that,” he repeated. “Read it! He took a perfect sentence, the bastard, and he made it even better.” I wonder what Miss Gould (who, by all accounts, did that more than once) thought of him? Sifton continues:

In the same way, he revised the shorter text of To Jerusalem and Back, his first nonfiction book and the occasion of his first publication in The New Yorker. Saul was still smarting about the magazine’s treatment of his books over the decades; they’d never taken any of his stories, either. He’d recite by heart passages from reviews whose faint praise suggested, he thought, anti-Semitic condescension: “They think it’s remarkable that I write as I do seeing as how it isn’t my native language. That’s the implication. Their idea of a Jewish writer is Isaac Singer—shtetls, exotic Polish ambience, magic, curious folkways. Believe me, I know whereof I speak. They never wanted stuff of mine.” He was being paranoid, I told him, but privately I thought he was right.

William Shawn’s having accepted this big piece on Bellow’s trip to Jerusalem was a big deal, therefore, and it pleased him. But he was on guard, especially whilst his text was submitted to The New Yorker‘s elaborate editorial and fact-checking procedures, and I remember the glee with which he trumped them. For example, he had written that his first publisher-editor at Viking—the much-loved, revered Romanian Jewish Pascal Covici—had started out life in America as a grapefruit salesman in Florida. The fact-checkers asked three different people to verify this implausible statement; all three said that the only living person who would know that detail was Saul Bellow. We talked about verifiability, about the meaning of factual truth, about trusting the writer, about seeing trees and not understanding forests, especially when the landscape was Israeli.

Sifton also awards Bellow a posthumous presidential fitness patch to add to his many other laurels. “We know that stamina and persistence are essential ingredients of great art, don’t we? Saul was in fighting trim. That gorgeous prose, with its sinewy elegant hilarity and syncopated rhythmic intensity—you don’t think it was composed by a slob with poor muscle tone, do you?” I’m sure the Observer could do a devastating chart to see if this ratio holds true. Poets, beware the calipers!

In Chiasmus in the New Yorker, part of Mardy Grothe’s fabulous project (which I’ve written about) devoted to the topsy-turvy rhetorical device, there’s an apt example from James Atlas’ “The Uses of Misery” (1998). It’s a fitting tribute now: “Bellow’s life trajectory is cyclical; out of misery, triumph; out of triumph, misery—an exhausting but exalted dialectic.” Not a bad description of editing, either.

Editing Saul Bellow [Slate]
A Silver Dish [Bellow, New Yorker archive: “What do you do about death—in this case, the death of an old father?”]
Rereading Saul Bellow [Philip Roth, New Yorker archive: “The transformation of the novelist who published ‘Dangling Man’ in 1944 and ‘The Victim’ in 1947 into the novelist who published ‘The Adventures of Augie March’ in ’53 is revolutionary.”]

A dishy note by San Francisco’s P.J. Corkery on the magazine’s excerpt from Sean Wilsey’s new memoir:

In the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, that lovely hostelry that’s sheltered many an editor and writer, I learn that apparently everyone in San Francisco is talking about the current issue of The New Yorker, which contains a memoir by Sean Wilsey, the son of Pat Montandon and the late Al Wilsey. Pat and her husband and son may have been somewhat witless (though Sean’s piece contains some brave reporting), but they have been the occasions of wit. … Sitting here at the Algonquin’s famous round table, I remember that Pat Montandon once gave a lunch for San Francisco ladies in which each woman was asked to describe the most awful moment she had ever lived through. Round the round table they went, discoursing on divorce, mayhem, humiliations great and puny. When they reached the last woman, she said, “The most awful moment I’ve ever lived through? Well, that would be this one right now.” And she got up and left. …

By the way, I just noticed that Todd Pruzan, this issue’s star reporter (not to be confused with Flash ace Brenda Starr—whose sassy creator, Dale Messick, is remembered in a hilarious Times obit today), contributed to those holy grails for McSweeney’s fans, issues #1 and #2. He also acted as deputy editor. Along with Wilsey, that makes for a notable eggersian presence in the current issue; this is bound to happen pretty often from now on. With results like these, I’m not complaining.

‘I happen to like New York’ [SF Examiner]
Dale Messick: A Comic Strip Life [Animation World]

Seymour Hersh, David Ignatius, Bernard Kalb, and John Burns went to Georgetown on Tuesday for their Weintal Prizes in diplomatic reporting:

The New York Times‘ respected John Burns opened the award ceremonies with optimism: “By early this year, many of us had come to gloomy conclusions about where it all was going,” he said, “but Jan. 30 and the elections changed our assumptions.

“We stayed off the streets for the first few hours. We sent out our Iraqi scouts, and they called us on mobile phones. Suddenly, they were saying, ‘There are people going to the polls!’ We went out and found something quite impossible, and we began to wonder whether we had pulled back too far in our reporting: They were right and we were wrong.

“In that day, we found increasingly that the people of Iraq turned out overwhelmingly—because on that day, they amounted to something. The fact is that something remarkable has happened—the Iraqis are talking in conclaves of issues that have not been addressed for 50 years.”

Seymour Hersh, another honoree who has done outstanding work in The New Yorker about the underside of the war, disagreed. “I think it’s going to be a disaster,” he told the audience brought together by the diplomacy and foreign service schools of the university. “Abu Ghraib was attacked twice last week. The people I talk to are very skeptical. Sure, the Shiites and the Kurds voted … But we’re still fighting the people we started fighting. And everything I know says we know little about the resistance.”

About halfway through the evening, the talk among the four awardees—the other two were David Ignatius of The Washington Post and Bernard Kalb, formerly of CBS News—turned to the media, in the context of the Iraqi experience. Here the attitudes reflected not only the difficulties of working with this administration, but also a kind of new atmosphere in the country.

“I have never seen a time when what we write has such little effect on what the government does,” Hersh said at one point. “This is not like Nixon and Johnson and Vietnam—this group in the White House has an agenda, and it won’t stop.”

Leading Journalists Share Perceptions About State of War [Yahoo! News]

Categories: Hersh

I couldn’t be more grateful not to have to attempt this myself, especially because it must have irritated so many people in the process. (I prefer to avoid conflict.) Leave it to the Observer to ace it. It’s so Spy-in-its-heydey (right down to the cutout heads), impish yet necessarily respectful, and I commend them. Here you go:

Officially, there is no such thing as the New Yorker masthead. The New Yorker is so averse to having a masthead that The New Yorker will not even comment about why it chooses not to have a masthead.
…
The New Yorker declined to supply the names of any of its staff, but a spokesperson agreed to confirm names and to provide missing titles. The result is almost certainly approximate and incomplete. Still, it exists.

Go here, pronto, for the full story and PDF.

A Friend Writes: ‘Who Is Running The New Yorker?’ [NY Observer]
The First Rule of ‘New Yorker’ Staff is “There Is No ‘New Yorker’ Staff” [Gawker]