‘Here But Not Here’: A Reluctant Editor But Ardent Lover

Michiko Kakutani

Friday, May 29, 1998 | 10:39 a.m.

Under its legendary editor William Shawn, The New Yorker magazine not only gained a reputation for its fiction and political reportage, but it also developed an anomalous mystique. Staff members spoke of the hushed, Victorian atmosphere of its offices, the perfectionism of its fact checkers, and Shawn's own courtesy and tact.

Although Shawn had carried on a long extramarital affair with Lillian Ross, one of the magazine's reporters, any mention of the liaison to the famously private editor would have been considered an unthinkable social breach. By most accounts, this was a man so formal, so discrete that most writers - even writers who had known him for years - invariably referred to him as "Mr. Shawn."

Ms. Ross herself writes in her new memoir: "Over the years, all the turmoil in Bill's personal life hardly surfaced in the office of The New Yorker. Both of us kept it where it belonged." Most people, she observes, "seemed to honor our privacy."

Today, in keeping with the tell-all, confessional climate of the '90s, Ms. Ross has decided to explode that carefully guarded privacy. In "Here but Not Here," she chronicles her 40-year relationship with Shawn, describing the flowering of their romance, the complicated logistics of their affair, even the quality of their sex life.

The resulting book is a tasteless, self-dramatizing memoir that presents itself as a valentine (canonizing its subject as a martyr and secular saint), even as it undermines the very qualities of discretion and taste its subject championed in life.

What's more, the book evinces few of the qualities that earned Ms. Ross her reputation as a reporter in the past. Renowned for her fly-on-the-wall skills as an observer, she lacks the expansive, introspective bent of a natural memoirist, and her reminiscences in this volume tend to vacillate between the perfunctory and the defensive, the cloying and the cliched.

The book, consequently, appeals only to the reader's baser instincts: to a voyeuristic impulse to read about an eminent man's adulterous affair.

The Shawn depicted in "Here but Not Here" is a tortured, conflicted man, a would-be poet and songwriter who found himself unhappily cast in the anonymous role of editor. Although Ms. Ross, like so many writers before her, sings the praises of Shawn's work as an editor - noting his finesse, his grace, his ability to give writers "the freedom to find ourselves and be ourselves" - she repeatedly asserts that he felt suffocated in the job. She says he called it the "ultimate cell," a cell he felt he could not escape without reneging on the responsibility he felt for his staff. Of his longtime marriage, she reports that he said, "I am there, but I am not there."

Indeed there is something Kafkaesque about Ms. Ross' portrait of Shawn. In addition to recounting his well-known phobias - "his lifelong claustrophobia, his fear of heights and his terror in most elevators" - she repeatedly quotes him asking questions like "Who has blotted me out?" and "Do you know who I am?"

"To me," Ms. Ross writes, "he was a man who grieved over all living creatures but did not know how to grieve over himself, who seemed to know how to fight in behalf of others for the things they wanted or deserved but was baffled, and at times, wistful, about his inability to fight for himself."

In the course of this messy, discursive book, Ms. Ross does nothing to reconcile this image of Shawn as a meek, hesitant man with her simultaneous depiction of him as an insistent, controlling lover who avidly pursued her, despite what she portrays as her initial reluctance to become involved with a married man.

Although Ms. Ross says she tried to run away from her growing involvement with Shawn, she eventually realized she "could no longer avoid the responsibility" she felt for him.

Once she and Shawn were committed to each other, Ms. Ross adds, they had only two arguments: one over "some skeptical remarks I had made about President John Kennedy's press secretary, Pierre Salinger," and another over the Broadway musical "West Side Story."

As Ms. Ross tells it, she and Shawn found an apartment some 10 blocks from the home he shared with his wife, Cecille. "With Cecille's knowledge," she goes on, "Bill installed a private telephone in his bedroom, with a number he gave solely to me. We could reach each other at any hour. We began and ended our waking hours on the telephone with each other."

The two of them, she recalls, spent Saturdays together, and frequently spent evenings going to the theater, movies and clubs. In 1966, Ms. Ross adopted a baby boy named Erik, whom Shawn helped her raise.

Ms. Ross never explains exactly why Shawn refused to end his marriage, or why his wife acceded to his unorthodox living arrangements. As for her own feelings about being a "mistress," she gives us little but platitudes. "Eventually, in my life with Bill Shawn," she writes, "I felt no deprivation, no frustration, no absences, no holes, no misshapenness, no unanswered needs." And in another passage, "He told me over and over again that I was, in fact, his wife, and that's what it always felt like to me."

The remainder of Ms. Ross' book, dealing mainly with life at The New Yorker, remains similarly fuzzy - far less vivid than the portrait Brendan Gill provided in his 1975 book "Here at The New Yorker."

The other writers and editors at the magazine appear in numbing laundry lists, or in cursory, generic cameos. Of Katharine White, the magazine's fiction editor, Ms. Ross writes that she "was completely dedicated to her fiction writers, and gave them her all." And of Gill, "We had endless admiration for Gill's facile, exemplary, elegant, instructive prose."

After Robert Gottlieb was appointed by S.I. Newhouse Jr. to take over The New Yorker in 1987, Ms. Ross writes, Shawn decided he "wanted time for himself." "Writers who wanted to continue working with him now seemed a burden to him," she recalls. "He made luncheon appointments with them and then canceled, feeling that he could not take them on anymore."

And what would Shawn, who died in 1992 at home with his wife, make of this book? "I'm sure he would be proud to read this story," Ms. Ross writes.

"Making Bill laugh was the entire bag of tricks for me," she adds. "It remains so to this day." Somehow the reader has a hard time imagining the decorous Shawn laughing at this unseemly, tell-all book - except, perhaps, with rue.

Publication notes:

HERE BUT NOT HERE

A Love Story

By Lillian Ross

240 pages. Random House. $25.