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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 nor 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 Yorkerlies 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.1 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 upon the death of its founder, that capricious and imaginative figure Harold Ross. Mehta continued to work for the New Yorker as 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.
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