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| Robert B. Silvers in his office at The New York Review of Books in 2012. |
William Grimes
He
arrived at the office early and left late, if at all, to the kind of
heavyweight cocktail party that was, for him, a happy hunting ground for
writers and ideas. For many years, his companion was Grace, the
Countess of Dudley, with whom he shared a passion for opera and a
vacation home in Lausanne, Switzerland. She died in December. Mr. Silvers is survived by nieces and nephews.
His
myriad enthusiasms found their way into a publication that was edited
for an audience of one. When asked to describe readers, he once said, “I
really don’t know too much about them.”
He
was happiest surrounded by stacks of manuscripts by the writers he
pursued with flattery and guile; in one typical instance, he drafted
Jonathan Miller to write about John Updike’s novel “The Centaur” for the
first issue of The Review by waylaying him after a performance of
“Beyond the Fringe” on Broadway. He would inundate them with newspaper
clippings, afterthoughts, helpful notes and suggestions for further
reading as they toiled over their assignments.
It was routine for him to hunt down contributors on their vacations. The Christmas-morning phone call was not unknown.
Most writers regarded him with admiration verging on awe.
“He
was one of those rare editors who is also one’s ideal reader,” Ian
Buruma, a marquee writer for The Review since 1985, said in a phone
interview for this obituary in 2011. “He was not only sympathetic, but
you knew that he would get it, and not try to rewrite because he really
wanted to be a writer. He was unusual in being interested in so many
things, in a profound way — a polymath who knew a tremendous amount
about many subjects.”
Robert
Benjamin Silvers was born on Dec. 31, 1929, in Mineola, N.Y., a village
on Long Island. His father, James, was a businessman who left Manhattan
to live the rural life. His mother, the former Rose Roden, was the
music critic for the The New York Globe, long since disappeared. A
precocious student, he left high school in Rockville Centre at 15 and
enrolled in the University of Chicago. He pursued an accelerated
two-year program, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1947.
Mr.
Silvers spent three semesters studying law, without enthusiasm, at
Yale. In 1950, he entered the Army and was assigned to the intelligence
library of NATO military headquarters in Paris. He studied at the
Sorbonne and Sciences Po.
After
completing his military service, he remained in Paris, living on a
houseboat on the Seine with the future bandleader Peter Duchin. He
patched together a living as a representative of the publisher Noonday
Press and an editor of a quarterly magazine published by the World
Assembly of Youth; the magazine, probably unknown to him, was financed
by the C.I.A.
An
introduction to George Plimpton led to a post as managing editor of the
newly created Paris Review, a journal in some disarray and badly in
need of an editorial guiding hand. “It seemed to me quite a natural
thing,” Mr. Silvers told The Guardian of his decision to take up editing
as a vocation. “It was something I could do without even making a
choice.”
Interviewed
by Mr. Nobile for his book, Mr. Plimpton said of Mr. Silvers: “He was
rather shy but formidable, and a strong voice amidst all this sturm und
drang. He made The Paris Review what it was.”
John
Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, hired Mr. Silvers at the
recommendation of Mr. Plimpton’s father, Francis, a corporate lawyer, to
oversee literary articles and book reviews at the magazine in 1958.
In that job, Mr. Silvers became known for bringing in new writers like Elizabeth Hardwick,
Mary McCarthy, Kingsley Amis and Alfred Kazin, and for orchestrating
theme issues. Most notable was one titled “Writing in America,”
published in October 1959 and later issued as a book, with an essay by
Mr. Silvers from which he removed his byline.
For
that issue, he commissioned Ms. Hardwick, a literary critic, to write
an extended essay on the state of book reviewing in the United States.
She dismissed the reviewing in American newspapers and magazines as
tepid, perfunctory, shallow and, in a word, noncritical. Her main target
was The New York Times Book Review.
Three years later, a typographers’ strike shut down nine major newspapers in New York.
The timing was perfect.
Jason
Epstein, an editor at Random House, and his wife, Ms. Epstein, a
freelance editor, had proposed the idea of a new publication in
discussions with Ms. Hardwick and her husband, the poet Robert Lowell.
They had in mind a literary review on the model of The Times Literary
Supplement in London, or the literary section of the British magazine
The New Statesman under V. S. Pritchett: a forum for writers to discuss
ideas, books, ideas and politics at length, provocatively.
When
the newspaper strike deprived book publishers of their main advertising
outlets, the pipe dream took on solid form, and Mr. Epstein immediately
called Mr. Silvers, who had been thinking along similar lines, to
engage him as an editor.
Gathering
in the offices of Harper’s at night, Mr. Silvers and his
co-conspirators worked their way through stacks of review books and
compiled a list of ideal reviewers.
When
a trial issue of The Review was published in Feb. 1, 1963, many of
those names were in its pages, writing free of charge: Mr. Kazin, Ms.
McCarthy, Mr. Miller, Norman Mailer, Dwight Macdonald, Irving Howe, Gore
Vidal, Susan Sontag, William Styron. The print run of 100,000 sold out.
In
an astonishingly short time, The Review had not only turned a profit,
but also established itself as a rival to two other magazines, Partisan
Review and Commentary, an American counterpart founded in 1945. But
unlike them, it made its starting point the world of books and
publishing.
Mr.
Silvers liked essays that both made an argument and settled it. “We
like important questions to be dealt with by experts with strong views,”
he told Time magazine in 1967.
He also liked to let writers roam, figuratively and literally, freed from the constraints imposed by most American publications.
“What
we saw was that the book review is a form that is capable of being used
to address nearly any kind of issue, and any kind of question, because
there’s always a book,” Mr. Silvers said in an interview at the
University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Journalism in
1999. “Book reviewing can be a way of bringing critical perspectives to
bear on the most intense political issues.”
Over
the years, The Review became famous for wide-ranging essays that often
dealt only glancingly with the multiple book titles, sometimes as many
as a dozen, nominally under consideration.
Mr.
Silvers liked to match writers with unexpected subjects. After noticing
that Mr. Mailer had left Ms. McCarthy out of the discussion when he
assessed “the talent in the room” in “Advertisements for Myself,” he
assigned Mr. Mailer to review Ms. McCarthy’s novel “The Group.” Applying
the same logic to political writing, he sent Ms. McCarthy to Hanoi,
Vietnam, and a reluctant V. S. Naipaul to the 1984 Republican National
Convention in Dallas.
When
Joan Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, traveled to El
Salvador in 1982, Mr. Silvers coaxed a series of long dispatches from
her on the difficult situation of a country in the grip of a right-wing
dictatorship. It later became a best-selling book, “Salvador.”
The editing process was a characteristic performance by Mr. Silvers.
“How
Bob edited ‘Salvador’ was by constantly nudging me toward updates on
the situation and by pointing out weaker material,” Ms. Didion told The
Paris Review in 2006. “When I gave him the text, for example, it had a
very weak ending, which was about meeting an American evangelical
student on the flight home. In other words, it was the travel piece
carried to its logical and not very interesting conclusion.
“The
way Bob led me away from this was to suggest not that I cut it (it’s
still there), but that I follow it — and so ground it — with a return to
the political situation.”
With
Ms. Epstein as his co-editor, and A. Whitney Ellsworth as publisher,
Mr. Silvers kept The Review in the thick of literary and political
debate in the 1960s. He published searching critiques of American policy
in Southeast Asia throughout the 1960s, featuring the work of I. F.
Stone and Noam Chomsky prominently.
The
journal flirted with the New Left and became a byword for radical chic.
The issue of Aug. 24, 1967, epitomized its political stance. The
left-wing journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote a scathing review of the Rev.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s book “Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or
Community?,” dismissing its author as hopelessly out of touch and
accommodationist, while Tom Hayden contributed an analysis of the race
riots in Newark that was accompanied by a diagram on how to make a
Molotov cocktail.
With
the windup of the Vietnam War, Mr. Silvers opened up the pages of The
Review to a host of British writers like Frank Kermode, A. Alvarez,
Isaiah Berlin, A.J.P. Taylor and Christopher Ricks, who lent the
magazine a more sedate literary tone, which made it seem less a
successor to the brawling political journals that dominated New York
intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s than to majestic Victorian
flagships like The Edinburgh Review.
Politics
never faded entirely from the picture. From the outset, Mr. Silvers
made human rights and the need to check excessive state power his
preoccupations, rising at times to the level of a crusade. Petitions and
essays on behalf of political prisoners and victims of human rights
violations were a constant feature.
“I don’t like accepting anything as having its own necessary authority,” he told The Guardian in 2004. “That includes skepticism about government, which is a crucial point of view we have had from the first.”
Mr.
Silvers, despite the magician’s aura and the seemingly sacred status of
The Review, came in for his share of criticism. He seemed to have
little interest in younger writers and, particularly in the 1970s, The
Review seemed to suffer from an advanced case of Anglophilia.
Despite
its self-image as an arena of intellectual combat, it could be staid,
even boring. The same writers showed up in issue after issue, and for a
time, The Review was jokingly called The New York Review of Each Other’s
Books. Mr. Silvers could blow hot and cold on his writers, courting
them assiduously, then dropping them without explanation or apology.
After
the election of President George W. Bush and the advent of a more
interventionist American foreign policy culminating in the invasions of
Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. Silvers recast The Review as a leading
critical voice. Recapturing its militant spirit of the 1960s, he filled
its pages with long, scathing critiques of the government’s diplomacy,
its conduct of the wars and its record on civil liberties.
In a slightly astonished appreciation of the publication’s re-engagement, Scott Sherman, in The Nation, praised “the re-emergence of The New York Review of Books as a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.”
For
Mr. Silvers, The Review had never changed, only the circumstances of
the world around it. Its personality and its mission had remained
constant since the days of the newspaper strike.
“I
feel it is a fantastic opportunity — because of the freedom of it,
because of the sense that there are marvelous, intensely interesting,
important questions that you have a chance to try to deal with in an
interesting way,” he told The New York Observer in 2005. “That’s an extraordinary opportunity in life. And you’d be crazy not to try and make the most of it.”
Profile: Robert Silvers
Andrew Brown
Four
o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, a time when even the most driven
Americans are at home. Not Robert Silvers. Aged 74, he is at his place
in the offices of the New York Review of Books, the journal he helped to
found and has edited for the past 40 years. He is not just working at
the office; he is wearing a tie. Admittedly, it is pulled open so the
shirt collar is undone, in the manner of traditional newspapermen
everywhere, but even this informality is beautifully knotted. It shines
sumptuously in the flat light and plain surroundings of the paper's
conference room. There's no money wasted on display here; nor is the
splendour of the tie an expression of vanity. The perfect knot is a
demonstration of the energy and conscientiousness that makes its wearer
one of the most remarkable editors in the English-speaking world.
"There is only one story you need to know about Bob," says the writer Timothy Garton Ash. "Four o'clock on Christmas day: the family is gathered around the turkey, and the phone rings. It's Bob. 'Tim,' he says, 'How are you doing? On column six of the third galley, there's a dangling modifier.'"
Silvers' friend Charles Rosen, the pianist and writer, wrote in a Festschrift for his 60th birthday that "Bob [has not] sunk his personality into his profession; rather ... he has found a means of transforming his profession into a fundamental way of being human. Extracting reviews from writers is not, in his case, a métier, or even a way of life, but a genuine form of self-expression, and he exercises it with dignity, tact and what sometimes feels like excessive sympathy. He has made writers feel that producing articles for him is not a business transaction or even process of communication, but simply a reciprocal act of friendship."
The magazine he has produced is unique. The 900 issues of the Review to date provide a history of the cultural life of the east coast since 1963. It manages to be scrupulous without pedantry, and serious with a fierce democratic edge. The articles are written as if any intelligent reader would care about the politics of Azerbaijan or the condition of cowboys in the late 19th century, if only they knew enough about it. It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays, many two or three times the length of this profile; and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour - even the letters to the editor are footnoted - with great clarity of language.
From the very beginning it has been cosmopolitan, and this too reflects the range of Silvers' interests and the course of his life.
He was born in New York, on December 31, 1929, a birthday he still resents: "Everyone else is getting drunk and you're another year older." His father was a businessman who moved out to a farm on Long Island, where Silvers grew up. "We had many pens of chickens, big woods and so on. It was a wonderful place." Silvers started at the University of Chicago shortly after his 15th birthday - the university then allowed anyone who could pass the entrance exams to enter, irrespective of age.
"It was a marvellous school because everyone had to study the same things, in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences and mathematics. So everyone had read Plato and Freud, and Marx and St Augustine. It created an atmosphere with all these veterans coming back. I was 15; my roommate at one period was a bomber pilot who was 30. We all had to learn genetics; we all had to learn something about physics. They treated you completely as a grown-up."
Graduating at 19, he became press secretary to the governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, a liberal democrat who had made his fortune in advertising and later served as a foreign-policy adviser to JF Kennedy. But Bowles was too liberal for Connecticut (he desegregated the state's National Guard) and lost his bid for re-election in 1950, after which his young press secretary was drafted into the army.
Silvers did most of his national service at Nato headquarters in Paris. "I was doing research, and working in the library at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, doing whatever assignments they had. I had plenty of time, so I was representing a publishing house on the side, the Noonday Press. I went around the French publishing houses, and also the Paris Review, which had just started in 1954. I met George Plimpton, and we came to the idea that when I got out of the army I would be managing editor of the Paris Review."
Silvers was also studying at the Sorbonne and the École Polytechnique. While the Paris Review is mostly known now for its very long and revealing interviews with celebrated writers, it also published a great many young ones who were to become famous in their turn. In one issue could be found a long interview with Ernest Hemingway, eight drawings by Giacometti, and an early, brilliant short story by Philip Roth. They sent Terry Southern to interview Henry Green, a combination so unlikely and so successful that Silvers still chuckles at the memory.
Silvers' discovery that editing was his vocation came in the shape of something unarguable and irrevocable, he says. "It seemed to me quite a natural thing. It was something I could do without even making a choice."
His editing, he says, "is based on enormous admiration for certain writers: for their writing, and - I very nearly said - their genius; but there is also the idea that as you read something, you want it to be as clear and as telling as possible. So if you can make some suggestion, you do, almost automatically."
In 1958 he was hired by Harpers magazine and returned to New York, where he has lived ever since. In 1960 he commissioned a special issue on "writing in America", which contained premonitions of the trenchant Anglophilia that would characterise the New York Review of Books. The most influential piece was by the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, who was married to Robert Lowell, discussing the low standards of book reviewing in the US. Her target in particular was the New York Times, then the most influential paper for the publishing trade. She sneered at it for lacking the passion and brilliance to be found (then) in the New Statesman, where VS Pritchett wrote a weekly review; she was so rude that the chairman of Harpers, the publisher, which also owned Harpers the magazine, felt obliged to defend the place where he spent most of his advertising budget. Hardwick was quite unabashed: Silvers published his chairman's letter of protest alongside her rebuttal, in which she described the attitudes of the mainstream book reviewers as resembling "the polite impersonal stare of a cashier, who takes in the money without being affected in her personal life by what she does".
Silvers dreamt of a magazine that would treat books with as much passion and care as if it were the reviewer's own possessions being discussed. He did ask around about the possibility of founding such a magazine, but he was told it would be quite impossible. His chance came nearly three years later in the winter of 1962-63 when the New York Times was paralysed by a strike.
Hardwick and Lowell were having dinner with their friends Jason and Barbara Epstein - he was a publisher at Random House, and she was a writer and editor. They were rejoicing over the troubles of the Times when they realised that here was a chance to do something positive and put out their own paper, showing how literary journalism should be done. Epstein, as a publisher, knew how much the business was hurting for lack of anywhere to advertise, and he was famous for getting things done. "Jason was, like, 'kids, let's put on a show'," remembers Barbara Epstein now, and the next day one of them rang Silvers to ask if he would help them edit the new magazine. Epstein and Silvers were to be the joint editors, as they still are, and the Lowells hustled all their contacts for contributions. Silvers wrote to poet Elizabeth Bishop: "Lizzie [Hardwick] is furiously engaged and in a way making inspired use of her abilities - for God knows we need a review that at least believes in standards and can intuit excellence. The bad side is a rush around us of the excoriated and excoriating - nerves and people."
Silvers took a leave of absence from Harpers to see if a trial issue would work. His boss encouraged him and predicted it would last a month. But by the end of February, when the Times printers went back to work, the four of them had managed to publish two issues and were convinced it could be made to work commercially because the advertising was there.
The first issue, dated February 1 1963, had an astonishing range of contributors, none of them paid. Silvers remembers: "Bill Styron, Cal [Robert Lowell], Gore [Vidal], Norman Mailer on Hemingway; and then of course Lizzie [Hardwick] did a piece on Ring Lardner. We wanted to show what a paper could be."
But these were just his friends. There were a great many admirable writers left off that list. It is remarkable how little the judgments, and even the manner, of that first issue have faded. There was Mary McCarthy reviewing The Naked Lunch. "Everyone is an addict of one kind or another, as people indeed are wont to say of themselves, complacently: 'I'm a crossword puzzle addict, a hi-fi addict,' etc. The south is addicted to lynching and nigger-hating, and the southern folk-custom of burning a Negro recurs throughout the book as a sort of Fourth-of-July carnival with fireworks ... It is disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places. A reader whose erogenous zones are more temperate than the author's begins to feel either that he is a square (a guilty sentiment he should not yield to) or that he is the captive of an addict."
There was a piece by Auden on the Welsh poet David Jones, but there were some things even more unlikely than McCarthy on William Burroughs. Silvers had befriended Jonathan Miller, who was then performing in Beyond the Fringe at the Fortune Theatre in New York. They were introduced by Richard Wollheim, who had told Silvers to see the show, and when Miller came off stage one evening, "There he [Silvers] was, crumpled up and smoking in my dressing room. In those days he was a strange sort of shambles. He was overweight, and smoked a great deal, before he met Grace [Countess] Dudley."
Miller contributed a piece on John Updike to the first issue. He remains a friend and admirer of Silvers: "He isn't just conscientious beyond the call of duty. He defines what duty is. You will often find him working until two in the morning in the office, with his little assistants from Harvard around him. He never stops. He's always meeting people, and talking ... he has a wonderful capacity just to gossip endlessly - a sort of Viennese café chat (not to be confused with the chatter of café society). And then out come these wonderful ideas."
When, in November last year, the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, JM Coetzee, gave the Robert Silvers lecture in the New York Public Library (an engagement made long before he won the prize), this was merely the latest example of Silvers' ability to cultivate great writers by taking almost infinite pains himself. Looking back at the first issue of the magazine, two things are obvious even then. The first is the eye for talent. VS Naipaul was an early contributor as well as a subject of reviews. He was to become one of the most noted foreign correspondents, and the way he was nourished and encouraged is typical of Silvers' style.
In 1972, when Naipaul was on the island of Trinidad, he determined to go to Argentina, a country then deeply forgotten and unfashionable. He asked Silvers for help, and Silvers, without hesitation, borrowed Naipaul's air-fare from his friend Dudley, and sent him off. Naipaul left a wonderful description of Silvers' style in his account of a trip to Dallas, Texas. "He asked me in 1984 to go and write about the Republican convention. He thought it might be interesting for me to study the language politicians use. I was uncertain about the project; so I paid my own expenses. I thought at the end of the week that I couldn't do anything with what I had found. He was disappointed - he was almost wounded. He said: 'You've left a hole in the paper'; from his tone the hole might have been in his heart. There was no word of rebuke, though. He continued during the next week or so, after I had gone back to England, to send me books and articles and cuttings about the convention; we talked on the telephone. And I began to see that an article was possible if I wrote, not about the convention but about what had happened around it, the sideshows. Eventually, the article appeared. It really wouldn't have been possible without him."
This degree of tireless, sympathetic badgering is hardly normal in journalism. Yet Silvers, still proud of the piece, remembers the headline they gave it: "Among the Republicans", as it might be "Among the Nuer", or, in the title of Naipaul's travel book on Muslim fundamentalists, Among the Believers.
It was quite clear from the beginning that Paris, Texas, was more foreign to the paper's editors than Paris, France. The Anglophilia, however, was not blind. Eve Auchincloss was brusque and destructive about Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn ("What an assemblage of excellencies! No wonder critics broken by drink and bad novels have invoked Joyce.") The interest in English literature has continued with one very notable exception: Martin Amis. His contemporaries - Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie - have all been reviewed eight or nine times; Amis only once, for his first novel, The Rachel Papers, which Barbara Epstein's son Jacob was found to have plagiarised in 1979. Other attacks on the paper's "incestuous" tone ("The New York Review of each other's books") can be dismissed as sour grapes. But the consistent omission of a critical response to Amis's work has raised eyebrows.
The first two issues attracted a readership that would stay loyal to the Review even after the Times strike was over, as it soon was. Silvers left his job at Harpers, and devoted himself to the new magazine. The rhetoric was full of earnest uplift: in the nearest thing they published to a mission statement, the founders wrote: "This issue of The New York Review does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, has been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud. The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one." This struck a resounding chord. Epstein still laughs to remember one fan letter from a classics professor at Harvard which started, "What springs in the desert!"
By the autumn of 1963 the five of them had raised enough money to start a regular magazine, which would be commercially distributed, but entirely controlled by the founders. The first issue appeared six weeks before Kennedy's assassination. Only six shareholders had a vote on the new board: Silvers, the two Lowells, the two Epsteins, and their publisher, Will Ellsworth.
High-mindedness was underwritten by commercial shrewdness. The magazine is tabloid in format, which makes it cheap and simple to print. The pay for contributors is not vast; the staff paid themselves small salaries, and the Review was in the black by 1965, and has stayed there ever since. The audience is very precisely targeted. Starting with the University Bookstores Association in America, it has been able to reach almost every university in the English-speaking world. Anyone who really cares about books, or about selling them, has to read the Review.
Who are these people? A vivid picture is provided by the small ads. The readers seem profoundly Europhile in the accommodation section, forever wanting flats in Florence, Paris, or London (either in Hampstead or close to the British Museum), but their mating preferences are distinctly American. The kind of paragons who advertise are purely creatures of Manhattan, even if they happen to be exiled for a while. Their lives have everything but verbs. "Seriously cute and much more. Sophisticated, smart, sexy and successful. Slender figure, genuine charm, touch of whimsy, and a splash of glamour." Even the telephone sex for sale is cultured. "All fetishes, domination/submission fantasies explored by Ivy League-educated Goddess."
Both Silvers and Barbara Epstein are resolutely pre-computer age. "We use pencils," she says, "or, if we're certain, pen." But he is a monster with the fax machine and messenger service. Numerous stories are told of contributors retreating to the Alps or the Outer Hebrides to write, only to find their unlisted fax machines bursting into life as soon as they are plugged in with queries from New York. The magazine itself is available online; its website holds a searchable archive that goes back to the first, pre-commercial issues, and includes even the letters and exchanges at the back. This is not only useful, but very successful: the site gets 1.5 million hits a month.
The professional relationship between Silvers and Epstein has outlasted her marriage to Jason Epstein. She says their partnership "is like this incredible old marriage, you know, it's just, ma and pa. Well. It works, I hope." The poet and critic James Fenton, who has worked for both, says that "everything is decided jointly. A lot of the commissioning and the choice of writers is Barbara's. People don't realise how much she does." But Silvers' special strength is spotting combinations of writer and subject. Miller puts this down to his endless curiosity.
There is something like a religious vocation about Silvers' attitude to the magazine. "I was born a bachelor, and I have stayed one ever since," he says, in a polite deflection of an inquiry about biographical detail. Others will talk about his earlier girlfriends, and his long and close friendship with Dudley; but, says Miller, "It's true that he's a bachelor. He's married to his desk." This passion for his job has had one unfortunate effect. It is impossible to imagine him retiring, and there is no obvious successor to the two founder editors. Living up to their standards would be hard even for an anointed heir. But there has never been anyone anointed with significant amounts of their power.
From the beginning, the Review was unashamedly elitist: Lowell's line about "believing in standards and intuiting excellence" had wide application. The first test was in politics, where the assured liberal consensus of the early 1960s was about to be blown up. Kennedy was assassinated after three issues had appeared. The Vietnam war was soon upon them. From the beginning, Silvers approached politics in a way that made his readers feel like editors to whom had been submitted policies in urgent need of improvement: "I don't like accepting anything as having its own necessary authority. That includes scepticism about government, which is a crucial point of view we have had from the first."
In 1983 the magazine was finally sold to Rea Hederman, a businessman whose family owned newspapers in the south. The founder-shareholders had resisted all offers until then, because they prized their independence. But Hederman badgered them for months, and they came to trust his promises of non-interference. Hederman, who also owns Granta, has left the editorial side quite alone, concentrating on the commercial aspect, slowly increasing circulation from 80,000 when he took over to 130,000 now. "It is astonishing," says Miller. "What other businessman would buy a magazine and leave the editors completely alone when he had done so? And he is really proud of it."
The magazine became an early and determined opponent of the Vietnam war. What made this notable was the degree to which its coverage was based on reportage and not just bloviation from the home front. Silvers had been in Paris when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, so he had a different perspective on the dangers of the war. Early on, he ran articles by French observers, and even Buddhist monks. Later, they sent McCarthy to both North and South Vietnam. None the less, Silvers says, they were on the losing side. Though America did lose the Vietnam war, the anti-war candidate, George McGovern, was trounced in the election of 1972. This sense of exile from the American mainstream becomes more pronounced the closer you get to the magazine. Epstein, talking in her offices, seems the very epitome of the New York intellectual - animated, husky, indefatigable: "Even in the 50s, as far as I can remember, when the country was terribly pious, I don't remember that it was quite like this," she says. "It's another country out there, really," waving her hand to shroud an entire continent in darkness and religious belief.
Epstein describes the Review voice as "liberal", Silvers talks about a general scepticism. Either way, it is difficult to imagine a publication less sympathetic to the faith-based policies of the current administration. Since September 11 2001, the magazine's instinctive opposition to the Republican and neo-con agenda has been greatly sharpened, and the sense of being perched on the edge of a hostile continent deepened. That may seem ironic: it was not Republicans who attacked New York on September 11. But there are millions of people all around the world who feel less secure as a consequence of what has happened since, and the Review's readers are almost all among them. It has run a long series of eyewitness reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it has also run some of the most critical and well-informed coverage of the widening gap between Europe and the US. It has had Fenton writing about the Hutton inquiry, and the most comprehensive demolition of the lies told about Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. All of these are characterised by a passionate exactitude that reflects their editor's character: a man who believes the world can be better, and never stops trying to improve it, one sentence at a time.
Robert Silvers - Life at a glance
Born: December 31, 1929, Mineola, New York.
Educated: University of Chicago; Sorbonne; École Polytechnique, Paris.
Career: 1950 press secretary to governor of Connecticut Chester Bowles.
US Army service: 1950-53.
Publishing: 1954-58 managing editor Paris Review; '58-63 associate editor Harpers Magazine; '63- co-editor, the New York Review of Books.
Events: The annual Robert B Silvers lectures at the New York Public Library were established by Max Palevsky and started two years ago with one given by Joan Didion.
"There is only one story you need to know about Bob," says the writer Timothy Garton Ash. "Four o'clock on Christmas day: the family is gathered around the turkey, and the phone rings. It's Bob. 'Tim,' he says, 'How are you doing? On column six of the third galley, there's a dangling modifier.'"
Silvers' friend Charles Rosen, the pianist and writer, wrote in a Festschrift for his 60th birthday that "Bob [has not] sunk his personality into his profession; rather ... he has found a means of transforming his profession into a fundamental way of being human. Extracting reviews from writers is not, in his case, a métier, or even a way of life, but a genuine form of self-expression, and he exercises it with dignity, tact and what sometimes feels like excessive sympathy. He has made writers feel that producing articles for him is not a business transaction or even process of communication, but simply a reciprocal act of friendship."
The magazine he has produced is unique. The 900 issues of the Review to date provide a history of the cultural life of the east coast since 1963. It manages to be scrupulous without pedantry, and serious with a fierce democratic edge. The articles are written as if any intelligent reader would care about the politics of Azerbaijan or the condition of cowboys in the late 19th century, if only they knew enough about it. It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays, many two or three times the length of this profile; and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour - even the letters to the editor are footnoted - with great clarity of language.
From the very beginning it has been cosmopolitan, and this too reflects the range of Silvers' interests and the course of his life.
He was born in New York, on December 31, 1929, a birthday he still resents: "Everyone else is getting drunk and you're another year older." His father was a businessman who moved out to a farm on Long Island, where Silvers grew up. "We had many pens of chickens, big woods and so on. It was a wonderful place." Silvers started at the University of Chicago shortly after his 15th birthday - the university then allowed anyone who could pass the entrance exams to enter, irrespective of age.
"It was a marvellous school because everyone had to study the same things, in the humanities, the natural sciences, and the social sciences and mathematics. So everyone had read Plato and Freud, and Marx and St Augustine. It created an atmosphere with all these veterans coming back. I was 15; my roommate at one period was a bomber pilot who was 30. We all had to learn genetics; we all had to learn something about physics. They treated you completely as a grown-up."
Graduating at 19, he became press secretary to the governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, a liberal democrat who had made his fortune in advertising and later served as a foreign-policy adviser to JF Kennedy. But Bowles was too liberal for Connecticut (he desegregated the state's National Guard) and lost his bid for re-election in 1950, after which his young press secretary was drafted into the army.
Silvers did most of his national service at Nato headquarters in Paris. "I was doing research, and working in the library at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe, doing whatever assignments they had. I had plenty of time, so I was representing a publishing house on the side, the Noonday Press. I went around the French publishing houses, and also the Paris Review, which had just started in 1954. I met George Plimpton, and we came to the idea that when I got out of the army I would be managing editor of the Paris Review."
Silvers was also studying at the Sorbonne and the École Polytechnique. While the Paris Review is mostly known now for its very long and revealing interviews with celebrated writers, it also published a great many young ones who were to become famous in their turn. In one issue could be found a long interview with Ernest Hemingway, eight drawings by Giacometti, and an early, brilliant short story by Philip Roth. They sent Terry Southern to interview Henry Green, a combination so unlikely and so successful that Silvers still chuckles at the memory.
Silvers' discovery that editing was his vocation came in the shape of something unarguable and irrevocable, he says. "It seemed to me quite a natural thing. It was something I could do without even making a choice."
His editing, he says, "is based on enormous admiration for certain writers: for their writing, and - I very nearly said - their genius; but there is also the idea that as you read something, you want it to be as clear and as telling as possible. So if you can make some suggestion, you do, almost automatically."
In 1958 he was hired by Harpers magazine and returned to New York, where he has lived ever since. In 1960 he commissioned a special issue on "writing in America", which contained premonitions of the trenchant Anglophilia that would characterise the New York Review of Books. The most influential piece was by the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, who was married to Robert Lowell, discussing the low standards of book reviewing in the US. Her target in particular was the New York Times, then the most influential paper for the publishing trade. She sneered at it for lacking the passion and brilliance to be found (then) in the New Statesman, where VS Pritchett wrote a weekly review; she was so rude that the chairman of Harpers, the publisher, which also owned Harpers the magazine, felt obliged to defend the place where he spent most of his advertising budget. Hardwick was quite unabashed: Silvers published his chairman's letter of protest alongside her rebuttal, in which she described the attitudes of the mainstream book reviewers as resembling "the polite impersonal stare of a cashier, who takes in the money without being affected in her personal life by what she does".
Silvers dreamt of a magazine that would treat books with as much passion and care as if it were the reviewer's own possessions being discussed. He did ask around about the possibility of founding such a magazine, but he was told it would be quite impossible. His chance came nearly three years later in the winter of 1962-63 when the New York Times was paralysed by a strike.
Hardwick and Lowell were having dinner with their friends Jason and Barbara Epstein - he was a publisher at Random House, and she was a writer and editor. They were rejoicing over the troubles of the Times when they realised that here was a chance to do something positive and put out their own paper, showing how literary journalism should be done. Epstein, as a publisher, knew how much the business was hurting for lack of anywhere to advertise, and he was famous for getting things done. "Jason was, like, 'kids, let's put on a show'," remembers Barbara Epstein now, and the next day one of them rang Silvers to ask if he would help them edit the new magazine. Epstein and Silvers were to be the joint editors, as they still are, and the Lowells hustled all their contacts for contributions. Silvers wrote to poet Elizabeth Bishop: "Lizzie [Hardwick] is furiously engaged and in a way making inspired use of her abilities - for God knows we need a review that at least believes in standards and can intuit excellence. The bad side is a rush around us of the excoriated and excoriating - nerves and people."
Silvers took a leave of absence from Harpers to see if a trial issue would work. His boss encouraged him and predicted it would last a month. But by the end of February, when the Times printers went back to work, the four of them had managed to publish two issues and were convinced it could be made to work commercially because the advertising was there.
The first issue, dated February 1 1963, had an astonishing range of contributors, none of them paid. Silvers remembers: "Bill Styron, Cal [Robert Lowell], Gore [Vidal], Norman Mailer on Hemingway; and then of course Lizzie [Hardwick] did a piece on Ring Lardner. We wanted to show what a paper could be."
But these were just his friends. There were a great many admirable writers left off that list. It is remarkable how little the judgments, and even the manner, of that first issue have faded. There was Mary McCarthy reviewing The Naked Lunch. "Everyone is an addict of one kind or another, as people indeed are wont to say of themselves, complacently: 'I'm a crossword puzzle addict, a hi-fi addict,' etc. The south is addicted to lynching and nigger-hating, and the southern folk-custom of burning a Negro recurs throughout the book as a sort of Fourth-of-July carnival with fireworks ... It is disgusting and sometimes tiresome, often in the same places. A reader whose erogenous zones are more temperate than the author's begins to feel either that he is a square (a guilty sentiment he should not yield to) or that he is the captive of an addict."
There was a piece by Auden on the Welsh poet David Jones, but there were some things even more unlikely than McCarthy on William Burroughs. Silvers had befriended Jonathan Miller, who was then performing in Beyond the Fringe at the Fortune Theatre in New York. They were introduced by Richard Wollheim, who had told Silvers to see the show, and when Miller came off stage one evening, "There he [Silvers] was, crumpled up and smoking in my dressing room. In those days he was a strange sort of shambles. He was overweight, and smoked a great deal, before he met Grace [Countess] Dudley."
Miller contributed a piece on John Updike to the first issue. He remains a friend and admirer of Silvers: "He isn't just conscientious beyond the call of duty. He defines what duty is. You will often find him working until two in the morning in the office, with his little assistants from Harvard around him. He never stops. He's always meeting people, and talking ... he has a wonderful capacity just to gossip endlessly - a sort of Viennese café chat (not to be confused with the chatter of café society). And then out come these wonderful ideas."
When, in November last year, the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, JM Coetzee, gave the Robert Silvers lecture in the New York Public Library (an engagement made long before he won the prize), this was merely the latest example of Silvers' ability to cultivate great writers by taking almost infinite pains himself. Looking back at the first issue of the magazine, two things are obvious even then. The first is the eye for talent. VS Naipaul was an early contributor as well as a subject of reviews. He was to become one of the most noted foreign correspondents, and the way he was nourished and encouraged is typical of Silvers' style.
In 1972, when Naipaul was on the island of Trinidad, he determined to go to Argentina, a country then deeply forgotten and unfashionable. He asked Silvers for help, and Silvers, without hesitation, borrowed Naipaul's air-fare from his friend Dudley, and sent him off. Naipaul left a wonderful description of Silvers' style in his account of a trip to Dallas, Texas. "He asked me in 1984 to go and write about the Republican convention. He thought it might be interesting for me to study the language politicians use. I was uncertain about the project; so I paid my own expenses. I thought at the end of the week that I couldn't do anything with what I had found. He was disappointed - he was almost wounded. He said: 'You've left a hole in the paper'; from his tone the hole might have been in his heart. There was no word of rebuke, though. He continued during the next week or so, after I had gone back to England, to send me books and articles and cuttings about the convention; we talked on the telephone. And I began to see that an article was possible if I wrote, not about the convention but about what had happened around it, the sideshows. Eventually, the article appeared. It really wouldn't have been possible without him."
This degree of tireless, sympathetic badgering is hardly normal in journalism. Yet Silvers, still proud of the piece, remembers the headline they gave it: "Among the Republicans", as it might be "Among the Nuer", or, in the title of Naipaul's travel book on Muslim fundamentalists, Among the Believers.
It was quite clear from the beginning that Paris, Texas, was more foreign to the paper's editors than Paris, France. The Anglophilia, however, was not blind. Eve Auchincloss was brusque and destructive about Iris Murdoch's The Unicorn ("What an assemblage of excellencies! No wonder critics broken by drink and bad novels have invoked Joyce.") The interest in English literature has continued with one very notable exception: Martin Amis. His contemporaries - Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie - have all been reviewed eight or nine times; Amis only once, for his first novel, The Rachel Papers, which Barbara Epstein's son Jacob was found to have plagiarised in 1979. Other attacks on the paper's "incestuous" tone ("The New York Review of each other's books") can be dismissed as sour grapes. But the consistent omission of a critical response to Amis's work has raised eyebrows.
The first two issues attracted a readership that would stay loyal to the Review even after the Times strike was over, as it soon was. Silvers left his job at Harpers, and devoted himself to the new magazine. The rhetoric was full of earnest uplift: in the nearest thing they published to a mission statement, the founders wrote: "This issue of The New York Review does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, has been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud. The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is, in America, not only the need for such a review but the demand for one." This struck a resounding chord. Epstein still laughs to remember one fan letter from a classics professor at Harvard which started, "What springs in the desert!"
By the autumn of 1963 the five of them had raised enough money to start a regular magazine, which would be commercially distributed, but entirely controlled by the founders. The first issue appeared six weeks before Kennedy's assassination. Only six shareholders had a vote on the new board: Silvers, the two Lowells, the two Epsteins, and their publisher, Will Ellsworth.
High-mindedness was underwritten by commercial shrewdness. The magazine is tabloid in format, which makes it cheap and simple to print. The pay for contributors is not vast; the staff paid themselves small salaries, and the Review was in the black by 1965, and has stayed there ever since. The audience is very precisely targeted. Starting with the University Bookstores Association in America, it has been able to reach almost every university in the English-speaking world. Anyone who really cares about books, or about selling them, has to read the Review.
Who are these people? A vivid picture is provided by the small ads. The readers seem profoundly Europhile in the accommodation section, forever wanting flats in Florence, Paris, or London (either in Hampstead or close to the British Museum), but their mating preferences are distinctly American. The kind of paragons who advertise are purely creatures of Manhattan, even if they happen to be exiled for a while. Their lives have everything but verbs. "Seriously cute and much more. Sophisticated, smart, sexy and successful. Slender figure, genuine charm, touch of whimsy, and a splash of glamour." Even the telephone sex for sale is cultured. "All fetishes, domination/submission fantasies explored by Ivy League-educated Goddess."
Both Silvers and Barbara Epstein are resolutely pre-computer age. "We use pencils," she says, "or, if we're certain, pen." But he is a monster with the fax machine and messenger service. Numerous stories are told of contributors retreating to the Alps or the Outer Hebrides to write, only to find their unlisted fax machines bursting into life as soon as they are plugged in with queries from New York. The magazine itself is available online; its website holds a searchable archive that goes back to the first, pre-commercial issues, and includes even the letters and exchanges at the back. This is not only useful, but very successful: the site gets 1.5 million hits a month.
The professional relationship between Silvers and Epstein has outlasted her marriage to Jason Epstein. She says their partnership "is like this incredible old marriage, you know, it's just, ma and pa. Well. It works, I hope." The poet and critic James Fenton, who has worked for both, says that "everything is decided jointly. A lot of the commissioning and the choice of writers is Barbara's. People don't realise how much she does." But Silvers' special strength is spotting combinations of writer and subject. Miller puts this down to his endless curiosity.
There is something like a religious vocation about Silvers' attitude to the magazine. "I was born a bachelor, and I have stayed one ever since," he says, in a polite deflection of an inquiry about biographical detail. Others will talk about his earlier girlfriends, and his long and close friendship with Dudley; but, says Miller, "It's true that he's a bachelor. He's married to his desk." This passion for his job has had one unfortunate effect. It is impossible to imagine him retiring, and there is no obvious successor to the two founder editors. Living up to their standards would be hard even for an anointed heir. But there has never been anyone anointed with significant amounts of their power.
From the beginning, the Review was unashamedly elitist: Lowell's line about "believing in standards and intuiting excellence" had wide application. The first test was in politics, where the assured liberal consensus of the early 1960s was about to be blown up. Kennedy was assassinated after three issues had appeared. The Vietnam war was soon upon them. From the beginning, Silvers approached politics in a way that made his readers feel like editors to whom had been submitted policies in urgent need of improvement: "I don't like accepting anything as having its own necessary authority. That includes scepticism about government, which is a crucial point of view we have had from the first."
In 1983 the magazine was finally sold to Rea Hederman, a businessman whose family owned newspapers in the south. The founder-shareholders had resisted all offers until then, because they prized their independence. But Hederman badgered them for months, and they came to trust his promises of non-interference. Hederman, who also owns Granta, has left the editorial side quite alone, concentrating on the commercial aspect, slowly increasing circulation from 80,000 when he took over to 130,000 now. "It is astonishing," says Miller. "What other businessman would buy a magazine and leave the editors completely alone when he had done so? And he is really proud of it."
The magazine became an early and determined opponent of the Vietnam war. What made this notable was the degree to which its coverage was based on reportage and not just bloviation from the home front. Silvers had been in Paris when the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, so he had a different perspective on the dangers of the war. Early on, he ran articles by French observers, and even Buddhist monks. Later, they sent McCarthy to both North and South Vietnam. None the less, Silvers says, they were on the losing side. Though America did lose the Vietnam war, the anti-war candidate, George McGovern, was trounced in the election of 1972. This sense of exile from the American mainstream becomes more pronounced the closer you get to the magazine. Epstein, talking in her offices, seems the very epitome of the New York intellectual - animated, husky, indefatigable: "Even in the 50s, as far as I can remember, when the country was terribly pious, I don't remember that it was quite like this," she says. "It's another country out there, really," waving her hand to shroud an entire continent in darkness and religious belief.
Epstein describes the Review voice as "liberal", Silvers talks about a general scepticism. Either way, it is difficult to imagine a publication less sympathetic to the faith-based policies of the current administration. Since September 11 2001, the magazine's instinctive opposition to the Republican and neo-con agenda has been greatly sharpened, and the sense of being perched on the edge of a hostile continent deepened. That may seem ironic: it was not Republicans who attacked New York on September 11. But there are millions of people all around the world who feel less secure as a consequence of what has happened since, and the Review's readers are almost all among them. It has run a long series of eyewitness reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it has also run some of the most critical and well-informed coverage of the widening gap between Europe and the US. It has had Fenton writing about the Hutton inquiry, and the most comprehensive demolition of the lies told about Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. All of these are characterised by a passionate exactitude that reflects their editor's character: a man who believes the world can be better, and never stops trying to improve it, one sentence at a time.
Robert Silvers - Life at a glance
Born: December 31, 1929, Mineola, New York.
Educated: University of Chicago; Sorbonne; École Polytechnique, Paris.
Career: 1950 press secretary to governor of Connecticut Chester Bowles.
US Army service: 1950-53.
Publishing: 1954-58 managing editor Paris Review; '58-63 associate editor Harpers Magazine; '63- co-editor, the New York Review of Books.
Events: The annual Robert B Silvers lectures at the New York Public Library were established by Max Palevsky and started two years ago with one given by Joan Didion.
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