Forty years on
Karl Miller
The New York Review of Books has been celebrating the paper's 40th anniversary, and it's only fair to join in, with a show of hands across the sea. The first few numbers, spread out over the months of eventful 1963, were among the important events of that year. Reproached for its radical chic, it looked at first a little like the old leftist Partisan Review, with several of the same stars and something of the same Anglophile tendency. It was soon to be a haven for Americanophile Brits.
I became sharply aware of its coming when, as literary editor of the New Statesman, I noticed a sheaf of letters which had arrived in the office for forwarding. My eyes narrowed. They proved to be letters which invited NS writers to share their favours with the NYRB. Those approached were keen to write for Barbara Epstein and Robert Silvers, and were rewarded with a stable and creditable outlet for their efforts. Their grey heads were the other evening bowed in tribute, with evident sincerity, in a room off Piccadilly. Back then, as people say now, America was a land of promise for many of the British. This is not the case at present. Christopher Hitchens must be the last Englishman on earth who can still give the impression of responding to its charm in the manner of the Fifties and after. But the appeal of the New York Review has survived.
The aid received by the paper from British writers was, you might say, repaid when, in 1979, it generously assisted the launch of the London Review of Books. Both journals began at a time of newspaper strikes. The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky, a prominent contributor to the New York Review, once spoke coldly of the strike-breaking London Review of Books, which had reviewed him in a distasteful fashion. Neither debut was that of an enemy of the people
The paper has long been a mine of information and instruction, long been an institution, national and international. Its strength seems to me to lie in its attention to the sciences and to politics, to history, prehistory, heredity, antiquity. Its foundational interest in Old Europe's royal families, spies and Bloomsberries has not been cravenly abandoned. Partisan Review's concern with the European avant-garde at the
expense of heartland American talent, such as Robert Frost's, was bequeathed, some used to think, to the New York Review, which was at one time deemed slow to introduce young American writers to print. In the inaugural issue, Europe spoke severely of a novel by John Updike, who was to be numbered among the paper's icons, up there with Lowell, Mailer, Vidal. The review was by a young man from London, Jonathan Miller.
The paper's performance over its 40 years has been both metropolitan and cosmopolitan, at once radical, patrician, modernist. philosophically engaged, inhospitable to literary theory. It said recently that most of John O'Hara's later fictions would be 'twice as good if they were half as long'. Anyone who is accustomed to the skimpiness, snap judgments and ill will of some London literary outlets might hesitate to say the same of the paper itself, where length has often come as a relief from the 'reviewer bitterness', in 19th-century parlance, which sexes up this country's shorter notices. But the pieces in the New York Review do sometimes seem too long — in the field of fiction coverage, for instance, where the plots of novels can get retold for three or four thousand words at a time. This can be mildly reminiscent of the Regency journals in Britain which went in for preview reviews where extracts and plot summary absolved the dandies from reading the novel.
Recent numbers make clear that the paper is as good as ever, in taxing circumstances. It has portrayed an American administration deeply at fault, and, in particular, subversive of the rule of law. The Iraq war did not 'break out', It was hatched. A crushing military superiority was exerted, and the American Protectorate' designed by schemers in that country, several months before the war began, for the imposition of democracy on the Middle East among other aims, is now up and stumbling. This is not the only thing that might be said about the intervention in Iraq, but it's worth having in mind that the New York Review belongs to a country in which a journalist of influence was ready to say elsewhere, in 2002, that the list of Middle Eastern regimes 'that richly deserve to be overthrown and replaced' should include Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The British presence in the paper has been maintained, In the anniversary number Andrew O'Hagan offers an explosive homage to Eminem which might just possibly cause the shock that followed the paper's 'revolutionary' Molotov-cocktail cover of its early days:
Eminem did not invent pill-popping, hookyplaying, misogynistic, gun-toting, gay-bashing, dope-smoking, incarceration-friendly, pottymouthing, gangland America, he merely makes music about it, songs that appear to connect with millions of people's sense of truth.
Hey there, O'Hagan, with your 'Imitation of Life'. But could he be right? The phantasmagoria Vernon God Little, with its note of Eminem-admiring adolescent outrage, also mentions 'imitating life', I see. Eminem and D.B,C, Pierre may both be doing that (despite their names).
The American presence has been fortified by the accession of Daniel Mendelsohn — youngish, I take it, a classicist with other strings to his bow. In the 14 August issue he wrote at pleasurable length about the meaning of Sappho's fragmentary verse, its appearing to hover between the personal and the communal, or choral, and about the ancient world of the lyrical island of Lesbos. He refers to the opinions and beautiful translations of the Canadian poet Anne Carson, in appraising the modern cult of the fragment, of textual 'injury', and thereby trenching on ground occupied by the row in the paper over James Fenton's examination there of the new annotated edition of Lowell's collected poetry. Mendelsohn discovers a 'strange waffling' in Carson's book of Sapphic translations and commentary, and her prose can certainly be cryptic. But he is fully alive to the high quality of her own poems, with their 'reconfiguration' of classical models. There must be few places in English-speaking literary journalism where you could hope to meet with a balanced view of such distinction.
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