Cover story, 75 years on

In many ways, the first issue of The New Yorker, with the cover date February 21, 1925, was but the seed of the things to come ... The cover had everything: the artist's assured elegance, a connection to the times, a barb aimed at high society and even self-mockery aimed at the magazine's own ambitions. The image so established the venture's look and spirit that it has been published, unchanged, every February for over 75 years. But it is the range of writing with special themes that has established the publication as a leader, says S. RANGARAJAN.

AS an answer to a question often asked - "what shall we do tonight" - a most elegant and entertaining magazine appeared to brighten the literary and cultural scene in New York. It was The New Yorker.

Founded in 1925 by Harold Ross, it highlighted the best grill and cabaret available, dance and music, drama, opera and ballet and movies and shows, that were an integral part of the city's night life.

An array of gifted fiction and short story writers, poets, essayists, cover page designers and cartoonists excelling in line drawing made The New Yorker unique reading material. Several of its contributors were either Nobel laureates or Pulitzer Prize winners. Rea Irwin drew the first cover - a mythical monocled Regency dandy, later dubbed Eustance Tilley - to become the mascot of the magazine. A year later, Peter Arno did the first of his 99 covers. His full-page dark-wash drawings of wealthy New Yorkers and ample showgirls became a trade-mark of sophistication. The wealth and variety of New York was represented by thin and debutante-looking women in shiny, flowing gowns and sparkling necklaces. Saul Steinberg, illustrated more than 80 covers, including the most famous design of a New York centred view of the world that helped to define the vision of the magazine.

The fascinating covers magnetically attracted readers to the inside pages which had poems by W. B. Yeats, Ogden Nash, W. H. Auden, stories by Dorothy Parker, John O'Hara, Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, J. D. Salinger, John Updike and Truman Capote, drawings and cartoons by James Thurber, interspersed by wit and humour, profiles and thought-provoking essays.

A reference to the achievements of poets and fiction writers will be most appropriate to highlight the publication's name and standing in the literary scene.

W. B. Yeats won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. T. S. Eliot, another Nobel laureate, declared Yeats "as the greatest poet of our time - certainly the greatest in this language, and so far as I am able to judge in any language" and "one of the few whose history is the history of their own time, who are a part of the consciousness of an age which cannot be understood without them". Yeats' verses, covering 14 volumes, ranged from a retelling of Irish myths and legends to the angry poems of life in a nation torn by war.

The New Yorker honoured itself by publishing one of his most moving poems. "Death".

It is said that W. H. Auden, between 1927 and his death in 1973, gave poetry in the English language, feature and face. His writings ranged from the "political to the religious, from the urbane to the pastoral and from the mandarin to the invigoratingly plainspoken". Among his many works were the obituary poems - "In Memory of Yeats", "In Memory of Sigmund Freud", "Tribute to Rimbaud" and a "Letter to Lord Byron".

Auden's poem in The New Yorker, "The Song", was a composition in three stanzas. The first stanza read as follows.

Song

Fish in the unruffled lakes, Their swarming colours wear, Swans in the winter air A white perfection have, And the great lion walks Through his innocent grove, Lion, fish and swan Act, and are gone Upon Time's toppling way.

* * *

While Harold Ross launched The New Yorker, Dorothy Parker, with her formidable reputation for her witty remarks and repartees, backed the publication. A number of poems in her three best- selling collection of poetry - "Enough of Rope" (1926), "Sunset Gun" (1928) and "Death and Taxes" (1931) first appeared in the magazine. But it was Parker's short fiction that made such an indelible mark.

Brenda Gill, a critic, said. "Dorothy Parker's short stories in the magazine, at first scarcely scraps of lacerative dialogue, led to the development of what was afterwards a recognisable genre ... The New Yorker short stories."

Regina Bareca, another perceptive reviewer and writer, expressed the opinion that Parker "depicted the effects of poverty, economic and spiritual, upon women, who remained chronically vulnerable because they received little or no education outside the fable of love and marriage; ravages of racial discrimination the effects of war on marriage, the tensions of urban life and the hollow space between love and fame".

If Parker's stories set a particular pattern for The New Yorker, John O'Hara, author of 400 stories and 14 novels, including Appointment In Samara, and Butterfield 8, gave to The New Yorker, over a 40-year tenure, dialogue-filled short fiction. In 1940, his Pal Joey series inspired the Rodgers and Hard smash musical on the Broadway. O'Hara claimed that in Pal Joey he had created Frank Sinatra before Frank Sinatra and in Glorio Wandrous in Butterfield 8, he had created Elizabeth Taylor before Elizabeth Taylor.

The magazine's reputation developed when F. Scott Fitzgerald (author of Tender Is The Night) published his first piece of fiction in the magazine, titled "A Short Autobiography".

Another breakthrough in the publication's innovative approach and successful experimentation came when it ran James Thurber's first drawings. Over the next 30 years, Thurber contributed more than 500 scrawly, wildly original and unimaginable drawings, as well as over 300 humorous casuals, essays and reporting pieces. His story "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" became an American classic.

The magazine published "Slight Rebellion Off Madison" by J. D. Salinger. The story was incorporated in Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye that sold 60 million copies.

When John Updike joined the ranks of The New Yorker with his poem, "Duet with a Muffled Brake Drum" and (the first short story in The New Yorker) "Friends From Philadelphia" in 1954, he was crowned the "Talk of the Town" reporter, writing hundreds of works of fiction, poetry and criticism.

Another feather in the magazine's cap was Truman Capote. His Annals of Crime piece "In Cold Blood," published in four fall issues of the magazine about a series of shocking multiple murders in a small Kansas town was acclaimed as triumph of literary journalism.

* * *

If The New Yorker entertained and amused its readers to a remarkable degree it was in the treatment of special and vital themes by renowned and expert contributors that it was ahead of others in the field and where it maintained the lead.

Among the early and novel section of profiles was Wolcott Gibbs's celebrated verbal portrait of Henry Luce, "Time ... Fortune ... Life ... Luce".

For first time the New Yorker devoted an entire issue (August 31, 1946) to one piece of writing - John Hersey's "Reporter at Large" article: "Hiroshima: The Aftermath." Hersey, had earlier won the Pulitzer Prize for "A Bell for Adano" in 1945. Another story to equal this was Hannah Arendt's 1963 landmark five-part series "Eichmann in Jerusalem."

Vladimir Nabokov needs no introduction to readers. The title of his books introduced a new word - Lolita, a pre-teen nymphette, who knows more about men and the working of their minds than her innocent face reveals. It was in how Lolita twists an obsessed and helpless victim, a middle-aged salesman that Nabokov set a new style in writing.

After A. Knopf's Stories of Vladimir Nabokov revealed the creativity of one of 20th Century's prose stylists, it was time for "Speak, Memory", a collection of memoirs that was published in 1966. Nabokov in "Speak, Memory" gave the reader an elegant evocation of his life and times. He presented insights into his major works, including Lolita. By having had the honour of publishing portions of the work first, The New Yorker demonstrated the esteem in which it was held.

Berton Roueche's first Annals of Medical column (1948) set the guidelines for medical journals. Similarly, Rachel Carson (author of The Sea Around Us) in a three-part expose - "Silent Spring" (1962) brought to light the hazards of pesticides.

Like Rachel Carson, John McPhee was an environmentalist, a lover of nature a geologist and a gardener. Most of all he was a prolific writer. The author of 25 books, most of whichich first appeared in The New Yorker, he wrote his first profile about Bill Bradley, a basketball star at Princeton in "A Sense Of Where You Are".

John McPhee won the Pulitzer Prize for his book on geology - Annals Of The Former World only after the contents of this compendium found their place first in the magazine. Staff writer David Remnick was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for his book - Lenin's Tomb. The same year, The New Yorker published Jeffrey Toobin's "An Incendiary Defense" on Mark Fuhrman, revealing for the first time that the O. J. Simpson defence team was planning on playing the "race card" in the trial.

With such a stellar combination, it is no wonder that The New Yorker walked away with numerous prizes.

In 1994, the magazine won the National Magazine Award in Reporting for Lawrence Wright's two-part Reporter at Large article, "Remembering Satan", bringing the magazine's number of National Magazine Awards to 16. The others were: the 1995 National Magazine. Award for General Excellence; the two 1996 Awards, one for reporting and one for essay and criticism; the 1997 National Magazine Awards (two), one for fiction, and one for essay and criticism. In 1998, it won the O'Henry Prize for Best fiction and the National Magazine Awards, for fiction and essays and criticism.

The New York University announced 100 examples of the best in American journalism in the 20th Century. Several works from The New Yorker were selected including John Hersey's "Hiroshima: The Aftermath", honoured as the number one work of journalism.

To synchronise with the 50th anniversary of India's independence in 1997, the magazine brought out a special special fiction issue dated June 23 and 30, 1997.

Bill Buford writing in the column, "Comment", asked "why there were suddenly so many Indian novelists.

The contents of the issue were really wide-ranging: G. V. Desani (Journals: India, for the Plain Hell of its - A legendary novelist returns home, against his better judgment); Salman Rushdie - (1. An introduction to Indian Fiction, 2. The Firebird's Nest); Kiran Desai's debut (Fiction - Hullabullo In The Guava Tree that posed the question "what is wrong with doing nothing? No work, no career, no ambition - just full-time luxuriant laziness); Vikram Chandra (Fiction - Eternal Don); Max Vadukul and John Updike (Showcase - R. K. Narayan in Madras) Ruth Prawar Jhabwala (Fiction: Husband And Son - An Older Women And Her Men); John Updike's review of Arundhati Roy's book, The God Of Small Things which Updike describes as a work of highly conscious art, is conscious not least, of its linguistic ambivalence, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni (Poems - "The Maimed Dancing Men.")

Bill Buford hit the nail on the head when he said: And to be an Indian novelist is to be something that has been changing since 1981. That was the year Salman Rushdie published Midnight's Children which showed Indian writers that great novels could be fashioned from Indian stories, with an Indian sensibility and a distinctly Indian use of the English language.

Jhumpa Lahiri, a contributor before An Interpreter Of Maladies won the Pulitzer has proved Buford's observation right.

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