16

William Shawn, R.I.P.

JANUARY 18, 1993

 

MR. JOHN O’SULLIVAN
National Review

 

Dear John:

You asked me to do an obit on William Shawn, and I replied that I could not write a formal piece about him because of the odd intimacy of my experiences with him. I speak of a man on whom I laid eyes twice in my life.

The day the newspapers carried the news of his death a letter from him arrived at the office. It was handwritten and had been mailed the day before he died. I quote it in full:

 

Dear Mr. Buckley:

Thank you for sending me copies of WindFall and In Search of Anti-Semitism. Since you are the author of both books, I am confident that I will not be disappointed. I have not yet read Anti-Semitism, but I’ve read enough of WindFall to see that I can read the rest with confidence. The Buckley style, thank goodness, is intact, and the humor is undiminished. I’ll go on reading. Meanwhile, I send you warmest regards,

William Shawn

 

Obviously, he was “Mr. Shawn” to me, as he was Mr. Shawn even to authors older than I, who had much closer experiences with him than I. But from the beginning he was in his own way so very courteous to me that I took extravagant pains never to suggest that I was urging on him a familiarity he might have found uncomfortable. With almost anyone else with whom I have fairly extensive personal dealings, as you know, I’d have got around pretty early on, never mind how I addressed him/her, to signing off as “Bill.” Never with Mr. Shawn. Always, “Wm. F. Buckley, Jr.” I can’t help believing that he knew what I was up to, and liked it.

I don’t recall what it was that prompted me to send my manuscript Cruising Speed to him in 1970. The chances against The New Yorker’s running an intensely personal journal of a single week in the life of a youngish (I was forty-five) right-wing journalist were overwhelming. We all remember the usual things, the day Kennedy was killed, V-J Day; I remember the afternoon I reached Camden, South Carolina, to visit with my mother. Frances Bronson had left word to call her at the office. I did, of course, and she told me breathlessly that Mr. Shawn had called her up and told her that he very definitely wished to publish “Mr. Buckley’s” book, which, he told her, was “beautifully written and witty” and that he would himself be editing the excerpts run by The New Yorker. No other professional experience in my lifetime has so buoyant a place in my memory.

He had assigned himself, I gather from reading about him and talking with a few New Yorker professionals, the job of personally editing one book manuscript every year, I think it was, and whether he selected me because, by lot, my manuscript came up at the time his turn had come to serve, or whether, for whatever reason, he selected mine as the book he wished to edit I don’t know. But the experience was unique, a word he would frown upon unless it was used with great precision.

I use it with great precision. Others have written about it, but it is ever so hard to believe, even having lived through the experience, that the part of your book Mr. Shawn has elected to reproduce arrives one day in galley form. A single column, two inches wide, running down the middle of a long sheet of paper, clipped to the next galley. The appearance is identical to cutting out a column from The New York Times and pasting it on a long sheet of paper eight inches wide. There was no apparent reason at all for the extraordinary extravagance of the procedure: Why did it not come to you typewritten and double-spaced, cheaper to execute (these were the days of Linotype, when any alteration meant replacing an entire line of metal type), and easier to edit? One did not ask.

In the roomy spaces to the right and to the left appeared Mr. Shawn’s handwritten “queries.” He wondered whether this was the correct spelling of a name, whether, on reflection, one wished to say exactly this, worded exactly so, about that phenomenon, or that statement, by that man or woman. He questioned the use of a comma there, of a paragraph marking somewhere else. The author confronted also the queries of the “fact checker.” No “fact” was ever taken for granted, if it could be independently verified. I remember that in one passage in my book I made a reference to the speech given by Tom Clark, with whom I was debating before the annual conference of the Chamber of Commerce. I had written that Clark’s opening speech was “a half hour” long. On the side, a tiny note from the fact checker. “Listened to tape. He spoke for 22 minutes.”

But this was the first of three drafts of the 30,000 words The New Yorker published in two installments. The second and the third drafts were completely reset at the printer, assimilating edited alterations; and they arrived with fresh queries and suggestions. But the great moment came when Frances told me that Mr. Shawn had called her to ask if I would lunch with him at the Plaza’s Oak Room. He liked to talk to your secretary, much preferred doing this to talking to you; or in any event, that was so in my own case. For every conversation I had with him over the telephone, Frances had a half dozen. I acknowledge that this probably says something about Mr. Shawn, but conceivably says something about the relative advantages of talking to Frances Bronson instead of to me.

I went to the Plaza, of course, and we sat behind a small screen. I don’t remember what he ate, but do remember that the waiter knew what to bring him, and I think I read somewhere that he pretty much always ate the same thing. He was genial only in the sense that his courtesy was absolute. There was only the barest amount of small talk. He wished to talk about the book he was editing, and to ask me a question or two concerning this point or the other. In particular I remember his telling me, in the most mild-mannered tones, that on reading the proofs I had returned—in most cases I had stuck by the punctuation I had originally used, rejecting the proffered alternatives—he had concluded that I was given to rather ... eccentric uses of the comma. He said this by way of imparting information. It was not a reproach, or, rather, not exactly a reproach, but I could feel the tug of his great prestige, and so told him I would go back and look again at my foot-loose commas. The lunch ended fairly quickly and most agreeably, and a week or two later he called me, as he did four or five times before the manuscript finally appeared in print, to tell me, “Mr. Buckley, I really do not think that you know the correct use of the comma.” I can’t remember what it was that I replied, but do recall that I resolved not to fight à outrance over the remaining commas in the essay.

It is not everywhere known that, under Mr. Shawn, the author was given the final say as to what parts of his book would run, subject to the limitations of the space designated for that book. On some points Mr. Shawn would not give way—animadversions, for instance, which he thought for whatever reason unfair or unjustified. “Mr. Buckley, I do wish you would eliminate that paragraph about Mr. [Jones]. You see, we do not run a letters page and it isn’t quite fair to leave him without an opportunity to defend himself....” I don’t know how other authors handled him, but in almost every case I yielded. His style was to cause the author to acquiesce in the change, rather than to dictate the change. With me this worked, though I remember a few cases in which, through an intermediary editor, I pleaded my case, and in all but one of these Mr. Shawn yielded.

Two years later, I sent him the first of my sailing books, Airborne, once again thinking the possibility remote that he would himself read it, let alone publish it. But he did, passing along, through Frances some nice words about my prose. A year or two later I wrote him to say that I had completed a book about the United Nations, but doubted he would wish to read it because United Nations life was intolerably boring. He replied instantly by mail asking to see it and one week later wrote to say he wished to publish my United Nations book. I made the dreadful mistake of declining, finally, to release it to The New Yorker because of its ruling that no book published in the magazine could appear in the trade press until six months had gone by. My publisher didn’t want to let six months go by, and so I hurried out with it, only to discover that not more than sixteen people in the entire world are willing to read any book about the United Nations. I was pleased to hear from Mr. Shawn that I had written the only book about the United Nations that was both “literate and readable.” I appreciated the compliment even though it was not hard to make, inasmuch as at the time there were no books about the United Nations, literate or illiterate, except an odd Brazilian memoir and a kind of coffee-table book by Conor Cruise O’Brien, designed to promote some artist.

A year or two later I wrote him to say that I had cruised again across the Atlantic, and did not suppose that he would wish to consider yet another book on yet another trans-Atlantic sail. Oh but he would; and he proceeded to publish Atlantic High. Five years later I told him that only out of courtesy was I mentioning to him my manuscript Racing Through Paradise, as it was inconceivable that The New Yorker would wish a third book by me with an ocean cruise as background. Inside of one week he advised me he wished to publish it. The last book of mine that he published was Overdrive, a sequel of sorts to Cruising Speed, in that it too was the journal of one week in my life. It was greeted as a most provocative, outrageous book, and was bitterly criticized by many reviewers. I winced at one reviewer, who wrote that perhaps Mr. Shawn’s imminent departure from The New Yorker had something to do with the manifest deterioration of his literary judgment, as witness his publication of Overdrive. When a few months later I wrote the introduction to the soft-cover edition of the book, a long (glorious!) essay examining the criticisms of the book, I sent him a copy. He called me to say, in gentle accents but without running any risk of my misunderstanding him on the subject, that the critics of my book had had other things in mind than the quality of the book, which he was pleased to have sponsored.

I mentioned that he liked to speak to Frances. When a New Yorker check arrived for Overdrive, she called me in San Francisco to report jubilantly that the check was for $40,000. But later in the afternoon she called and said with some dismay that Mr. Shawn had telephoned her. “What he said was, ‘Oh, Miss Bronson, our bookkeepers have made a most embarrassing mistake on the check for Mr. Buckley, and I would be grateful if you would simply mail it back to us, and we will mail the correct check tomorrow.’ ”

That could only mean, we both reasoned, that I had been overpaid. The following day a check arrived for $55,000. Mr. Shawn had his own way of twinkling at the world he treated so formally.

An interesting postscript. When he retired from The New Yorker, as you know there were great protests from his adamantly loyal staff. About nine months later I said to myself: Should I write and invite him to lunch with me? I’d never have done any such thing while he was still the editor of his magazine, with powers of life and death over you. Such an overture might have been thought a venture in self-ingratiation. So I put it very carefully in my little note to him, saying merely that it would give me great pleasure to lunch with him but I recognized that he didn’t go out very much and that when he did he almost certainly had on his mind a professional objective. He called Frances a day or so later and said he would be most pleased to lunch, and a week or so later we met at the Carlyle, and talked together animatedly. He had read that week’s issue of National Review. I can’t believe that he (a hardy political liberal) read NR as a matter of habit, but could easily persuade myself that he had made it a point to read the current issue in order to prepare for our lunch. (He read, by the way, with the speed of light. Everything that appeared in The New Yorker he had himself read, some of it two and, as with my books, three or even four times.) The hour went quickly and pleasantly and there was a total absence of ambient pressure, I thought.

The difficult decision came one year later. What went through my mind was this, that if I did not invite him one more time to lunch, he might think that the first invitation was done out of a sense of duty to a retired editor who had acted generously to me, and that now that he was so far away from the scene, I had no further interest in him. I decided to invite him again to lunch. He replied to Frances that he would like very much to have lunch, and suggested that perhaps some time in the fall would be good. That was in 1991. In the fall, he called Frances to say that he still looked forward to our lunch but would rather not set a date for it right away; would this be agreeable? I wrote back that of course that would be agreeable; any time would do. I did not hear again from him until the letter I received the day he died.

He was a mythogenic character, a man totally taken by his muse and by his determination to hold to the standards he respected. I hope someone, perhaps one of his talented sons, will one day produce if not exactly a “life” of William Shawn, a book about his priorities, his literary manners, his immense effect on our culture, and his enormous impact on his devoted admirers. —Bill