(Filed: 27/04/2006)
A once dry, literary institution, The New Yorker's scoops
are now making global headlines, says Naomi Gryn
"A weekly variety bill of the printed word and the graphic gag." That's how A J Liebling once described The New Yorker magazine, where he dazzled readers with masterful prose from the mid-1930s to the 1960s.
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With its reputation for quality writing and editorial integrity, this venerable institution inspires devotion in readers and
makes most writers yearn to be published in it.
In recent years, The New Yorker has also created waves internationally with its ground-breaking scoops about abuse of Iraqi prisoners in Abu Ghraib, and revelations this month by Seymour Hersh about the Pentagon's plans to strike Iran's nuclear sites.
So when the editor David Remnick agreed to let me loose in its offices to make a programme for BBC Radio 4 I felt like Dorothy in the Land of Oz reaching the gates of a journalistic Emerald City.
Remnick is charming and awkward in equal measure and, like the magazine he captains, a relaxed humour underpins his considerable intellect. He joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 1992, and two years later won a Pulitzer prize for Lenin's Tomb, his book on the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In
1998, when flamboyant Brit Tina Brown - formerly of Tatler and Vanity Fair - stepped down as editor, Remnick took over. He is only the fifth editor in the magazine's history and clearly enjoys being part of its fabled literary tradition. The walls of the offices are lined with framed covers and cartoons from previous issues, but Remnick is clear that the magazine is no museum.
The New Yorker could have become as anachronistic as Eustace Tilley, the Regency dandy who peered through his monocle at a butterfly on the first cover more than 80 years ago, and who still appears on the masthead.
Certainly, its distinctive covers - Art Deco title font above a seasonal drawing of Manhattan or an ironic illustration of current events - evoke a bygone era.
And as a magazine, it appears densely written and might seem drab in comparison with the
celebrity glossies it sits alongside on the news stands. Yet it wields authority and credibility with movers and shakers worldwide and, while so many other publications are sinking, its circulation has grown to over a million.
Every week, The New Yorker offers a quirky concoction of essays, profiles, political comment, world news, fiction, poetry, reviews, listings and the irreverent gag cartoons that have been a feature of the magazine since its earliest days.
The tone is urbane, considered and unapologetically liberal. However, Remnick has taken a lot of flack for initially appearing to support Bush's invasion of Iraq. He now regrets what he sees as a failure, not just on the part of The New Yorker, but all the American press, to question more closely the the White House's "pseudo debate" about WMDs.
Certainly, since 9/11 the political
volume of the magazine has increased, and it devotes more resources to reporting world events.
Now owned by Condé Nast, The New Yorker is housed at Number 4 Times Square, a dignified refuge from the Broadway frenzy outside. At 48 storeys, the building is the tenth tallest in New York City. Eastern views of Manhattan's skyline will soon disappear behind the skyscraper under construction next door, but until then, from its windows, you can see Reuters, the New York Public Library, and The New York Times - three other temples to the printed word.
The elevators are crowded with well-groomed men and women working for the group's other titles, including Gourmet, Vogue and GQ. They meet, like bees in a hive, in the lunchtime queue for sushi or salad at the café with its curved glass screens and tan leather seats.
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Light years away from the Condé Café - though only two blocks' away - is the dark wood-panelled elegance of the Algonquin Hotel on W44th Street. It was here, over a poker game, that The New Yorker was conceived by Harold Ross, a Runyonesque impresario who edited the magazine from its launch in 1925 until his death in 1951.
It was Ross who recruited Dorothy Parker and other members of the "vicious circle" that used to meet for lunch at the Algonquin Round Table to create a magazine that was a witty and satirical reflection of metropolitan life and would
"present the truth and the whole truth without fear and without favor, but will not be iconoclastic".
It soon became one of the most influential publications in America, attracting the heaviest calibre of writers: James Thurber, Ogden Nash, Isaac Bashevis Singer, S.J. Perlman, Susan Sontag and Philip Roth are all on its list of luminaries. It was the birthplace of the Addams Family cartoons; extracts from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood were first published in the magazine in 1965.
I had imagined the magazine's offices as a cross between The Front Page and All The President's Men, with Jack Lemmon pulling a chewed pencil stub from behind his ear as maverick reporters tear scoops out of manual typewriters and rush them to the typesetter. In fact, ever since electronic mail replaced ringing telephones, turmoil has become an inner condition, conducted behind closed doors.
Apart from the gentle tapping on keyboards, the tension of writing to deadline is masked by a hushed quiet, with occasional bursts of laughter - mostly from the offices of cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.
Tuesday mornings verge on the raucous, when a dozen or more of America's top cartoonists collect outside Mankoff's office to pitch their latest cartoons. He calls them into his room one by one: old-timers like Jack Ziegler or Mort Gerberg, talented newcomers like Carolita Johnson. There is a playful banter even though they are competing for the same slots.
The New Yorker is a magazine driven by the passions of its writers - and their passion for the job. Hendrik Hertzberg, the chief political commentator, keeps an inflatable mattress stashed under his desk for grabbing naps on Thursday nights when he's finishing his "Comment"
column before the magazine goes to press on Friday.
Bill Buford was editor of Granta magazine in England before becoming The New Yorker's fiction editor and was responsible for first publishing Annie Proulx's short story Brokeback Mountain in 1997. Then he become the magazine's European correspondent, but has just returned from "book leave" (a condition as ubiquitous at The New Yorker as maternity leave elsewhere) as a staff writer.
Another staff writer is Michael Specter, who writes mainly on international public health and science, with an incongruous sideline profiling fashion designers. He can spend several months on a piece and is never harassed about deadlines.
The New Yorker's attention to detail is notorious. Sixteen eagle-eyed fact-checkers unravel every sentence of every article and test
meticulously for accuracy - even memoirs and short stories.
Specter recently wrote an article about the difficult relationship between the Bush Administration and science. It was accompanied by a drawing of George Bush erasing scientific equations from a blackboard.
On the day before it went to print, Specter asked his fact checker what she was working on. She told him that she was done with his piece and was working on the illustration. "What do you have to do with the illustration?" he asked. She was making sure that each equation stood up to scientific scrutiny.
Clarity, above all, is paramount. Writers, copy editors and editors collaborate in the belief that there's always a simpler way to say something. But individuality is not squashed into uniform ''house style'': it is venerated. In a culture infested with clichés and platitudes,
a culture that has become monolithic yet ever more fragmented, the magazine resists bland conformity. That's what gives it an authenticity that elsewhere is disappearing as fast as the view from the windows of The New Yorker.