Books & Culture: A Christian Review
The Editor and the Exile
1.
Insofar as Ved Mehta’s latest memoir has been noticed at all, it has been as an insider’s story of the most tumultuous period in the history of The New Yorker —the magazine that may well be the most important and influential venture in the history of American periodical publishing. It has also been recognized as a tribute to the editorial genius of William Shawn, The New Yorker’s second editor, whose firing in 1987 seemed to many to mark the end of a brilliant era of American writing. Indeed, Mehta’s detailed account of what it was like to work with “Mr. Shawn”—which he did for more than 30 years—seems more honestly loving than Lillian Ross’s recent memoir of Shawn, Here but Not Here, in which she announces that she conducted a decades-long affair with him and claims to have provoked in this famously shy man paroxysms of wildness and prodigies of animal sensuality. Ross’s is a truly repellent book, in the worst tell-all style, self-dramatizing and self-congratulatory: “The True Story of Tristan and Isolde, Told by Herself,” one is tempted to call it.
Mehta’s less florid and more informative chronicle is, to my taste, far more interesting than Ross’s. But I am clearly in the minority on this point: unlike most Americans, I have always found chronicles of illicit sexual escapades less enticing than descriptions of people doing work that they love. Lillian Ross has her finger on the people’s pulse: though she worked as a writer and editor on The New Yorker for many years, she can scarcely be bothered to note that in her eagerness to describe yet another moment of ecstasy she and Shawn experienced: the work that Shawn did so well appears only as a torment from which Ross’s love alone could rescue him. Mehta, on the other hand, retains some sense of dignity, and of the difference between the public and private realms.
But the story of William Shawn’s New Yorker is neither the only not the most important story here. Though far too few people know it, Ved Mehta has been engaged since the early seventies on an immense and fascinating project: a multivolume autobiography under the general title Continents of Exile. The real importance of Remembering Mr. Shawn’s New Yorker lies not in its appreciative but excessively reverent portrait of that great editor, but rather in its place as the eighth volume in Mehta’s series, one of the truly remarkable literary enterprises of our time. (Though Mehta clearly explains that the book is the latest installment in his autobiographical series, some reviewers seem not to have noticed this, and at least one of them has chastised Mr. Mehta for “talking too much about himself”!) By one of those happy accidents of timing in the publishing world, Yale University Press has just released A Ved Mehta Reader, offering selections both from his autobiographical writings and from other books. With the Yale volume and this latest memoir in hand, readers who are new to Mehta will possess a splendid introduction to his work.
2.
Ved Mehta came to write for The New Yorker in 1959, some seven years after William Shawn assumed the duties of editing the magazine, which he had done up until the death of its founder, that capricious and imaginative figure Harold Ross. Mehta continued to work for The New Yorkeras a staff writer even after Shawn was dismissed, producing a handful of pieces for Shawn’s successor, Robert Gottlieb (though Gottlieb rejected more of Mehta’s work than he accepted). But soon after Tina Brown of Vanity Fair replaced Gottlieb in 1992, she officially terminated several of the long-time staff writers, including Mehta.
Mehta, like many others, clearly thinks of Shawn’s departure as the end of The New Yorker he had known. And after all, Shawn had worked for the magazine for 54 years: it is no wonder that his firing seemed so momentous. But for Mehta the departure of Shawn also marked the loss of his own literary “home”—a loss very important, as we shall see, for this exile from his native India.
Mehta was an integral part of The New Yorker during the most eventful years of its history—and by that I mean not just the end of the Shawn era, but also the sixties and seventies, when Shawn changed the magazine, or allowed it to change, in crucial ways. The most significant alterations involved the magazine’s attitude towards politics. As Mehta points out (and as Thurber, Brendan Gill, and others had pointed out before him), Harold Ross had a terrific aversion to politics and refused to allow his magazine to be contaminated by the stuff: Ross’s New Yorker was a magazine of wit and culture, and that was enough for him.
Little had changed when Mehta arrived on the scene, but then, in 1959 there were no American troops in Vietnam. It was Shawn’s resolute disapproval of America’s involvement in the war, more than any other single factor, that led to the change, and therefore it should not be surprising that one of the key articles marking the magazine’s metamorphosis was a sympathetic account of support for the Viet Cong in a Vietnamese village. It appeared in 1967 under the title “The Village of Ben Suc,” and, as Mehta says, “it created a sensation.”
The author of the piece was a recent Harvard graduate named Jonathan Schell, who, as a close friend and prep-school and college roommate of Shawn’s son Wallace (himself now well-known as an actor), had enjoyed an “in” at The New Yorker since childhood. It appears that Shawn thought of Schell almost as another son: he sponsored Schell’s career from “The Village of Ben Suc” on, and when it became clear a decade later that he had to begin thinking of a successor, it was Schell whom he designated as heir apparent.
That particular plan didn’t work out—it soon became obvious that the young man wasn’t cut out to be an editor, or the editor of The New Yorker anyway—but nevertheless, Schell did more than anyone else to establish the political tone that the magazine would achieve in the seventies: earnestly and immovably liberal, occasionally satirical toward the Right but never toward the Left, and fond of publishing long and sometimes excruciatingly boring articles in support of its political views.
Schell’s book on the imminent danger of nuclear holocaust, The Fate of the Earth, remains the best example of these tendencies, though to be sure it was considerably more lively than his subsequent work for the magazine and elsewhere. There are many who feel that Shawn’s inability to see that the magazine as it grew more political was also growing dull made it inevitable that, at some point, he be replaced.
Mehta notes some of these changes, but he clearly finds them unimportant in comparison with what remained constant, which, in his view, was the magazine’s commitment to literary excellence, whatever the subject of a given piece happened to be. Early in his career with the magazine, after he discovered that Shawn and his staff were carefully comparing a new autobiographical essay of his with an earlier one to see if there were any inconsistencies between them, Mehta thought, “To lavish such attention on ephemera—and that in a magazine that most people browsed for its cartoons and advertisements—seemed like a kind of fanaticism.” But it was a fanaticism that he soon came to love, for he learned that the magazine would spare no expense to ensure that any given article or story or poem in its pages was as perfect as it could possibly be—and would do anything in its power to encourage and support a writer who thought the same way.
This was for Mehta the real legacy of “Mr. Shawn’s”: an unswerving commitment to literary quality, to standards that served as their own reward, whatever American society beyond the magazine’s Forty-third Street offices might think: in that one place at least, “nothing was done for any reason other than that of striving for excellence.”
In Mehta’s view, this commitment evaporated almost instantaneously after the firing of Mr. Shawn. Of a brief and hurried note that Gottlieb sent his staff at the outset of his tenure as an editor, Mehta (speaking for unnamed others) writes, “As we saw it, Gottlieb’s note, lacking the elegance of feeling and language which was the mark of even the most fugitive sentence from Mr. Shawn’s hand, was a harbinger of the new New Yorker.”
After this great book came others almost equally fascinating. Sound-Shadows of the New World describes Mehta’s high-school years in Arkansas, where as a dark-skinned but Aryan person in the Deep South in the period just preceding the civil-rights movement he found himself in another historically complex and potentially explosive environment. That the key issue was skin color, while Ved and all his (white) classmates were blind, adds a piercing irony to the situation. Then the years at Pomona (The Stolen Light) and the time Up at Oxford—in the land that ruled India for three centuries and whose abrupt departure from the subcontinent precipitated Partition—before this new book about Shawn and The New Yorker.
I said earlier that Mehta abandoned graduate study in history at Harvard in order to write for William Shawn’s magazine, but I did not say that he abandoned the study of history itself. Though Mehta himself does not put it in these terms, it seems clear to me that what Shawn gave him above all—granting that he gave him much—was the ability to become a different kind of historian. When Mehta began to write the autobiographical essays which grew into books and then into the comprehensive architecture of Continents of Exile, Shawn felt the need to find a rubric to describe what Mehta was doing. Clearly, none of the old categories that the magazine used to describe its pieces—Notes & Comment, Talk of the Town, Profile—would do. So, Mr. Mehta relates,
After he published the Profile of my mother, he’d O.K.’d my writing a few pages about my experiences in an orphanage in Bombay, where I had spent three years, between the ages of five and eight. In the writing, the few pages grew into a whole book [Vedi]. He liked it so much that he wanted it to have its debut in The New Yorker, but there was no existing heading under which it could be accommodated. I finally suggested Personal History, and he inaugurated that as a new department and published my piece. For years thereafter, Personal History was used only for my autobiographical pieces, since he thought of personal history as an exception—not something thatThe New Yorker should publish as a matter of course.
Somewhat later the brilliant autobiographical essays of John Updike, collected in book form as Self-Consciousness, would appear under the same rubric.
Mehta’s suggestion was a brilliant stroke, as was Shawn’s decision to accept it, for this is precisely what Mehta has been accomplishing in Continents of Exile: the writing of history in the genre of personal narrative. Having lived through an extraordinary set of events, and having met an extraordinary number of fascinating people—from Pandit Nehru to Karl Barth, and from Robert Lowell to Bertrand Russell, though he just missed meeting Greta Garbo—Mehta is in a peculiarly advantageous position to present us with history as something that people live in, not just live through.
But, of course, he has paid a price for the range of his experiences. In addition to the partial isolation, the always being marked as different that inevitably accompanies blindness, his peregrinations have insured that he can never have a cultural home in any familiar sense: neither the India that could find no place for him, nor the England that he idealized despite its notorious insularity and mistrust of outsiders, nor the America that strives so successfully to ignore the history in which Mr. Mehta’s life has been steeped, could be such a home.
Similarly, he has found no religion to ground him, neither the vague and nominal Hinduism of his youth nor the Christianity in which, later, he became professionally interested as a writer: Mehta notes that he is a man simply without religious belief or inclination, which means that the variety of habitation was unavailable to him as well. That is why The New Yorker was so important to him: as long as Shawn was there to support him—to provide him with an office, with readers for the many books he needed that were unavailable in Braille, with amanuenses, and with regular words of encouragement—it was the closest thing to a home that he was ever likely to find.
If a note of pity has been struck in the preceding paragraph, let it be known that I struck it and not Mehta: never was there a person less inclined to self-pity than he. But for us readers pity may be appropriate, as well as admiration: certainly, admiration for one who has never denied or hidden his blindness, but has never leaned on either, who can narrate his development of “facial vision” as lucidly as he can explain ordinary language philosophy or describe the political heirs of Mohandas Gandhi. But also some pity for one who will always be in exile, who can imagine no homecoming, either in this world of the (to him unbelievable) next: all continents for Mehta are continents of exile….
But this exiled condition is not peculiar to Mehta. Increasingly the world is full of what, in the aftermath of World War II, were called Displaced Persons: refugees, suspended among various cultures and faiths, unable to return to their former worlds and uncomfortable with any visible alternatives. The problem takes different forms today, but has expanded its scope and receives its best description in Walker Percy’s metaphor: displacement means being trapped in a deteriorating orbit with no clear way of achieving reentry. Ved Mehta is one of the most vibrant and comprehensive chroniclers of this increasingly prevalent condition, which is why there are few literary projects of our time more important and edifying than Continents of Exile. The decline of The New Yorker, however sad, is trivial in comparison.
