Word: gills
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...magazine quickly sold out at all three Harvard Square newsstands last week, proof that sophisticated aesthetes saw the February 24 issue for what it was: a silent collector's item. It was fat with the work of such New Yorker deities as E.B. White, S.J. Perelman, Brendan Gill, John Updike and Pauline Kael--some of them dragged from retirement for this circumspect celebration. That was a clue, of course all of those whimsical hot shots, together in one issue, meant something special was up. There were other clues: the cover was the annual portrait of Eustace Tilley, The New Yorker...
...course, the 50th anniversary issue didn't exactly take readers by surprise. For weeks there had been rumblings that it was coming, that this was the big year. In early February, veteran New Yorker writer Brendan Gill published a thick volume called Here at The New Yorker, a sort of semi-official biography of the magazine. Every review carefully noted that it was a 50th birthday, ode to The New Yorker, and in the reviews, the magazine enjoyed an almost embarrassing free ride. Critics tripped over each other to salute The New Yorker's prestige, to rhapsodize about its cerebral...
...nowhere in this avalanche of praise, and nowhere in Gill's book, is there mention of an unpleasant reality, something that those lucky enough to buy the 50th anniversary issue discovered as they turned its elegant, ad-riddled pages. The New Yorker has become--maybe it's always been-boring. The "Talk of the Town" section with its plural-voiced inanities, the epic profiles of dull people, the humor pieces heavier with syrup than satire--this is what fills The New Yorker. Get rid of the cartoons--the work of Lorenz, Geo. Price, Charles Addams--and there is not much...
Truth and Beauty. A glum view of life at The New Yorker! Gill does not dwell on this paradox, but it is not hard to explain. Ross, Shawn and the rest have successfully set up as taste makers over a 50-year period when cultural presumptions have changed horrendously. The New Yorker remains a throwback to Matthew Arnold's Victorian faith in a secular religion of truth and beauty. Eustace Tilley, the magazine's monocled symbol, is clearly an Arnold disciple turned dandy. To be impeccable, graceful and hard-hitting all at the same time is demanding work...
These are dangers that Gill's book does not always sidestep. In truth, he sometimes rushes to embrace them: "It is obvious that the New Testament would make far more satisfactory reading if it had been the handiwork of Matthew, Mark, Luke and Shawn...