Longing for the Old New Yorker

A friend, rendered misanthropic from a recent visit to The Coop and still reeling from the new color in The New York Times Book Review, writes:

Last year's anointment of Tina Brown as editor of the New Yorker magazine reflected an attempt at repositioning meant to regain the confidence of straying advertisers. The appointment was also meant to reinvigorate a magazine which had grown indulgent and uncertain of its constituency and its style, preserved in the cultural amber of the '50s.

All of the literary world was aghast at what the changed leadership would portend for the New Yorker. Brown was known primarily for rescuing tottering magazines; she was the chief architect of Vanity Fair's transformation into the hot book of the '80s. VF reflected that decade's zeitgeist, a dubious mix of camp and celebrity worship underlaid with thinly disguised cynicism. Tina Brown transformed it into the kind of magazine which would reside illicitly in the sock drawer of serious reader: titillating but not substantial.

The potent aura of success that subsequently surrounded her was regarded a vital ingredient in the quest to retool the New Yorker, a necessary precondition for change. Brown's appointment by publisher Si Newhouse was a determined attempt to bring the publication back into the black. Billionaire publishers are not unaffected by precipitous dips in circulation.

Brown's tenure at the New Yorker has been marked, not unexpectedly, by dramatic personnel changes. She brought a number of writers from the Vanity Fair stable. She also managed to lure prodigals from The New Republic: a former senior editor, Sidney Blumenthal, and the former editor Hendrik Hertzberg. Hertzberg, it is widely acknowledged, writes the unsigned Comment and is credited with keeping the magazine firmly on its liberal course.

In an admirable attempt to globalize theater coverage, Brown secured the services of John Lahr. She also added television commentary by James Wolcott, made Richard Avedon the official photographer and inserted Anthony Lake as the primary movie critic. These appointments have certainly brought interesting voices to the New Yorker. But they cannot compensate for what has been lost.

Purists claim that the magazine lost its distinctive character in 1987 when Robert Gottlieb replaced the legendary William Shawn as editor. Yet Gottlieb's changes were incremental. And, in true disciple mode, the new editor remained faithful to the magazine's style and ethos.

The Brown New Yorker is everything that the Shawn-Gottlieb New Yorker was not. It is loud, bustling and blighted with that bane of modern life: relevance. Its articles are closely linked to current events, with the occasional bit of controversy thrown in for good measure. Its bright, wearyingly busy covers are increasingly and (for this writer, who misses the sedate Cape Cod cottage exteriors) inexplicably monopolized by Art Spiegelman's relentlessly contemporary artwork. The screaming covers are a tacit capitulation to the dictates of commerce, increasingly reflective of the need to compete in that bustling souk known as Out Of Town News.

The measured calculation of the New Yorker's controversies, while unsettling, is not surprising. The bare-breasted photos of English actress Tilda Swinton, run earlier this spring, were perhaps meant to set Manhattan salons abuzz at the magazine's sheer audacity and nerve. The plan misfired. Someone should have made that unfortunate creature cover up.

There was the infamous Valentine's Day cover of a Hasidic Jewish man and a West Indian woman locked in mortal embrace. In some quarters, the cover was denounced as obscene. In truth, the only obscenity was to be found inside the issue, where the cover artist used several unnecessary lines to explain his work.

The New Yorker has seen a predictable shift in content during this past year, an expected nod to demographics reflected in a pandering to baby-boomer interests. The cartoons, still penned by the old favorites, seem out of place in this new hybrid.

The new mix is testimony to the increasingly schizophrenic character of the Brown New Yorker. Literary gems like Francine du Plessix Gray's review of the Flaubert-Sand epistolary relationship as documented by assorted biographers share pages with tawdry baubles such as John Seabrook's near-hagiographic piece on an obscure art director (whose 15 minutes are ticking rapidly away). And why, oh why do we need to learn anything more about Kate Moss, the waifish model with the look of utter imbecility?

The mystique of the New Yorker has dissipated. The magazine is now indistinguishable from any of the other weeklies on the newsstands. It has metamorphosed into near-banality with its increased focus on Hollywood's denizens, whose passions are largely divorced from any kind of informed analysis. This New Yorker shows every sign of lying supine before the Philistine hordes. Brown is not solely responsible for this transformation. She merely midwifed the process.

Brown is far too intelligent to import wholesale the Vanity Fair formula, or to attempt a baldfaced reprise of her resuscitating strategies at that publication. Her New Yorker contains vestigial remains of her predecessors' magazine.

Some fundamentals have not been abandoned. While targeted to a broader but still affluent readership, much of the advertising remains the same. One can still indulge in checkbook liberalism, save indigenous peoples on the brink of extinction, help educate innercity children, purchase personalized cartouches and locate points of departure for global heroics, even while deciding which luxury car to purchase. The Tilley hat is still available.

Some of the magazine's writing is enjoyable, although much of its fiction is unreadable. But the traditional New Yorker tone, which is largely determined by the magazine's editorial sensibilities, has been irretrievably lost. The magazine that Brown now edits, while of occasional interest, is no longer the New Yorker. Its cachet has been diminished, its imprimatur subtly devalued.

Perhaps no one can do the job with which Brown has been charged. Perhaps at this cultural moment, there exists no place for the old New Yorker. Perhaps there is no need for the place once occupied by the New Yorker. Its role of imparting gentility, as if by osmosis, to receptive readers who might need it, has been eradicated. Mercifully, into the breach has stepped the triumvirate of The Atlantic, The Spectator and The New York Review of Books. Perhaps, too, Brown's new magazine may at some point become an indispensable part of American literary life.

On September 27, Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House Trade Publishing Group, hosted a party at the New York Public Library to celebrate the publication of Richard Avedon's newest book. The usual suspects, leftovers from the '80s, were present in their sequined splendor, glorying in their celebrity.

For many Americans the '80s ended when, on a freeway in Los Angeles, the beating of a black motorist by white police officers was videotaped.

On West 43rd Street, the '90s have not yet begun.

Lorraine A. Lezama misses particularly the five-part series on soybeans.