As a result, the people who make the magazine have spent generations veiled by the fictitious persona of mascot Eustace Tilley-and the quasi-fictitious non-personae of the legendary editors, Mr. Ross and Mr. Shawn. They emerge from the shadows only for obituaries.

The writers at least have bylines-and since the editorship of Tina Brown, some have also had their professional credentials briefly sketched on a weekly contributors' page. But above them in the editors' offices, and below them in the research and fact-checking realms, anonymity reigns.

Nevertheless, the magazine does have a full staff-a large one, even-and the staffers do have both names and job titles. There are, in other words, all the components necessary to make a masthead. Gathering and assembling those components is another matter. Working from a variety of sources-including interviews, the News Media Yellow Book, an in-house phone list and back issues of the magazine-it was possible to pull together a piecemeal approximation of some portion of the masthead. But even the most straightforward-seeming business, that of the writers, got tricky. The contributors' notes, studied in series, raise almost as many questions as they answer: Does it matter whether Peter Schjeldahl is tagged "the magazine's art critic," or someone who simply "writes about the art world for the magazine"? Does Lillian Ross have a title other than "a longtime staff member"? Is Roger Angell a writer or "a fiction editor," as he's sometimes identified? Answers: not exactly, yes and formally neither one. The New Yorker declined to supply the names of any of its staff, but a spokesperson agreed to confirm names and to provide missing titles. The result is almost certainly approximate and incomplete. Still, it exists.

Street, just a block from a muted Times Square. Four slightly dissolute actors

in their 20's stood in a row: three men in faded jeans and ratty T-shirts, one

woman in chunky glasses with a green highlighterhanging from her mouth.

"Marxes!" shouted their dark, fuzzy-headed director, Will Frears,

and the actors sprang to life, singing:

They got guns! We got guns! All

God's children got

guns!

The foursome shimmied forward, shaking their hands and wiggling

their hips. The rest of the show's ensemble joined in:

We're gonna march all over the battlefield, 'Cause all God's children

got guns!

Mr. Frears, whose thin frame and dark hair made him look like an

old black-bristled toothbrush, crouched against a wall of the rehearsal space,

scrutinizing the performance. His face was expressionless, but four days

earlier he'd volunteeredhisap- praisal of Duck

Soup , the theatrical adaptation ofthe1933Marx Brothers war satire, released

by Paramount Pictures, that he was trying to bring to Broadway in 2001.

"At the moment, it's either going to be sort of perfect, or the

most appalling thing you could imagine," Mr. Frears had said in a vague North

London accent.

Mr. Frears first produced a stage version of director Leo

McCarey's comedy classic two years ago as a graduate student at Yale. The

adaptation, which Mr. Frears co-wrote, featured actress Dara Fisher in the

Groucho Marx role and generated a positive response. Lillian Ross then

discovered it and wrote a Talk of the Town piece about it for The New Yorker .

But now the stakes were higher, and the times had most certainly

changed. There wasn't time to dig trenches; Mr. Frears would have to buy them

ready-made. But if he ordered them deep enough, the production would be able to

save on pants.

Mr. Frears was rehearsing the cast, including Ms. Fisher, for two

backers' auditions scheduled for the Manhattan Theater Club rehearsal room on

Oct. 9 and 11. The list of potential investors who were slated to check out Duck Soup 's Broadway-worthiness on those

two nights included representatives from Miramax; producers Fran and Barry

Weissler ( Annie Get Your Gun ),

Richard Frankel ( The Producers ) and

Margo Lion ( Angels in America ); Love writer David Rosenthal; and Mr.

Frears' I.C.M. agent, the semi-retired Sam Cohn.

In an interview at his minimally furnished Nolita apartment, the

28-year-old Mr. Frears-whose father, Stephen Frears, directed High Fidelity , and whose mother,  Mary-Kay Wilmers, edits The London Review of Books -did not sound daunted by the prospect of

raising money for an extremely silly war satire just a month after the events

of Sept. 11 and less than three days after the United States bombed military

targets in Afghanistan.

Mr. Frears leaned forward in a blue-and-lavender plastic deck

chair that, along with a vintage Canada Dry refreshment stand full of booze,

was among the only furniture in his jaunty lime-green living room. Stubbing out

a Marlboro Red, he ran a hand through his unkempt dark hair.

"I did think about canceling the show and talked to various

people about it, and we all decided that we really should do it," Mr. Frears

said. "Partly [because] making people laugh in a time of trouble is good. And

also, the thing about Duck Soup in

particular is that it's about times like this."

In the movie, Rufus T. Firefly (Groucho) is named the dictator of

the mythical country of Freedonia. The story is a skeleton on which all four

brothers ( Duck Soup was Zeppo's final

film with his siblings) hang A-1 set pieces, including the "mirror scene" in

which Groucho and Harpo mimic each other with flawless accuracy.

Released at the end of the Hoover administration during the peak

of the Depression, Duck Soup was an

enormous flop, though Mussolini was moved to ban it in Italy.

"The Marx Brothers are in no

way heroes," Mr. Frears said. "They're not on the side of right; they're just

out to debunk everything Duck Soup is

not even anti-authority. The thing it makes fun of is snap decisions." And

that, he said, is the kind of message he feels comfortable sending, as the

world teeters in the liminal space between impulsive vengeance and carefully

planned action.

"I wanted to come back to

Duck Soup for a giggle …. It has no greater meaning," Mr. Frears said. It

was a statement any 4-year-old child would understand- but there were no

4-year-old children around, so Mr. Frears forged on: "I guess it does have some

greater meaning, especially at the moment."

Mr. Frears said that, like everyone else in New York, he's been

reeling since Sept. 11. He had moved into his one-bedroom walk-up only a week

before the catastrophe.

He'd grown up in London at a time when the city was under the

constant threat of I.R.A. bombings. "I know what it was like to live in a city

where there was a threat," he said. "I needed to paint the place, and I

remember thinking, 'Well, I might be going to war, but in the meantime it's

really important to keep things going.'"

So Mr. Frears painted his living room. On his walls, he hung a

reproduction of a Duck Soup lobby

card and a Sunset Boulevard poster,

which, unlike the Clash poster in his bedroom, is an original.

He also wrote a 2,000-word essay about volunteering at the World

Trade Center site on Sept. 12 for his mother's paper. Mr. Frears' piece

appeared in the Review 's Oct. 4

issue, alongside work by Frank Kermode and Edward Said.

"As I stood there waiting to be put to work, a group of firemen

put a ladder next to the antenna, braced themselves and the pole and raised the

Stars and Stripes," Mr. Frears wrote. "A man, some kind of color sergeant, I

presume, shouted: 'Present arms.' Every person on the site saluted. I was at

Iwo Jima."

When the subject of his parents' fame came up, Mr. Frears became

impish. He pulled a straight face and then an embarrassed one before joking:

"They're coal miners." Dissolving into a fit of giggles, Mr. Frears recounted

how a friend torments him by repeatedly asking him: "Do you ever feel like

you're under any pressure to succeed?"

"I moved 3,000 miles away from them," he said. Then he grinned

and qualified his statement: His mother told him that she'd rather have him

like her and live thousands of miles away than live down the street and not

speak to her.

Mr. Frears' parents divorced when he was in utero. Mr. Frears lived with his mom and spent every other

weekend with his dad. "It wasn't Kramer

vs. Kramer ," he said of having two homes and three parents, including his

stepmother.

His major rebellion was not drugs or drink. "If I'd developed a

heroin habit, my parents would have loved and supported me," he said. Instead,

since his mother had a degree from Oxford and his father from Cambridge, "it

was much more hurtful to fail high school." So he did.

Mr. Frears sees a tremendous amount of professional distance

between himself and the other director in his family. "My father doesn't

actually know what I do, in the same way I have no idea about what he does," he

said. "We operate in such different mediums that I don't feel like we're in

competition."

But they certainly don't ignore each other. The younger Mr.

Frears said that he actually gave his father notes on 1998's The Hi-Lo Country . He said that Sammy and Rosie Get Laid wasn't his

favorite of his dad's projects, though he conceded that that might have been

"because it was right after [ My Beautiful ] Laundrette , which was the most

beautiful movie." 

And Mr. Frears discovered-from his mother-that his father had not

liked his Yale production of Hamlet .

"He didn't tell me. But he didn't think I had done it the way Hamlet should be done."

Moments after he had divulged this bit of family laundry, Mr.

Frears' forehead creased with concern. He worried that he'd betrayed his

mother's confidence. "Oh, well," he laughed, and smoothly lit another

cigarette.

Four days later, Mr. Frears had assumed the crouching position

and was intently watching a scene in which Remy Auberjonois and Austin Jones,

the actors playing the spies Chicolini and Pinky (Chico and Harpo), explain

their surveillance methods to Sylvania's Ambassador Trentino.

"Sure we shadow him!" insisted Chico in a heavy Italian accent.

"We shadow him all day!"

"And what day was that?" inquired Trentino.

"Shadow-day!"

Each time Mr. Frears heard Mr. Auberjonois deliver the punch

line, he sputtered with laughter.

The multipocketed trench coat that Mr. Jones (as Harpo) would be

using to store his numerous props wasn't slated to arrive until the following

day, so he was tromping around the rehearsal stage with three horns wedged

under his belt, a folded newspaper in one back pocket of his baggy brown

corduroy pants, an old-fashioned red alarm clock in another, and a metal flask

that was doubling as a blowtorch in his side pocket. Mr. Jones was doing such a

good job of emulating Harpo that everyone in the room looked momentarily

surprised when he broke his silence to say: "I'm a really good spy!"

Bringing the bulk of the cast back was virtually a necessity,

given the complexities of the physical comedy. The mirror scene requires

painstaking synchronization: moving at exactly the same second, raising arms

and legs to the same millimeter. Ms. Fisher and Mr. Jones got it right enough

to attract the attention of Ms. Ross in her New

Yorker piece about the Yale production in 1999. Mr. Frears conceded that

the publicity probably landed him an agent, I.C.M. co-founder Sam Cohn. 

Could the agent, and the attentions of Ms. Ross, have anything to

do with the young director's lineage?

"I have a last name, but it's not as though it's Costner. Or

Hawks, or Peckinpah-" Mr. Frears said, struck by the wonderfully horrible

thought. " He must have been the worst

father ever !"

He lit another cigarette. Just a week before the Duck Soup readings, he began a job as

P.A. for Paul Schrader on his new film about Hogan's Heroes star Bob Crane. "I get coffee, do a little Xeroxing,

listen to everything he says," Mr. Frears said of the gig, which will include a

seven-week shoot in Los Angeles.

He spent the past summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival,

fleshing out a musical version of The

Outsiders with Michael Friedman, Duck

Soup 's musical director. "Nobody said, 'My God, you've written Carousel !'" said Mr. Frears. "But people

seemed to like it."

Mr. Frears, in an oversize orange button-down shirt, pulled

himself upright and gave a little feline stretch. He approached Chandler

Williams, playing Trentino. "Right, well, just a couple of dumb acting things

to go over with you," he said. Mr. Frears checked to make sure that he was

being understood before continuing. "It is so important for the straight man to

just plow forward to get what you need without stopping to react. Of course,

with luck, you'll be holding for laughs …. "

Ms. Fisher, in a threadbare pink Mozart T-shirt and

orange-and-white checked pants, was channeling Groucho even without a mustache.

"Then it's war! Then it's war! Gather the forces! Harness the horses!" she

sang, punctuating every exclamation with a pointed finger and a wiggling

eyebrow.

" Each native son will grab

a gun and run away to war! " went the song.

All seven actors piped up in unison: " At last the country's going to war! "

Mr. Frears surveyed his gleefully silly friends singing about

guns and flags and fighting. He shook his head and smiled, showing his vulpine

white teeth.

All of a sudden, the giddy marching stopped and the company

gathered center-stage, hoisting an as-yet-imaginary flag. 

"This should be the Les Miz

joke here," Mr. Friedman hollered from the piano. 

But the flag-raising looked less Cameron Mackintosh and more Iwo

Jima. In truth, it looked more recent than Iwo Jima. 

"A brave, brave, brave effort," said

the choreographer.

"It's going to be a triumph," Mr. Frears said half-reassuringly.

He was fighting for the play's honor, which was more than it had ever done for

itself.

Mr. Wolfe's biting profiles of William Shawn's New Yorker are republished for the first time since they originally appeared in New York magazine in 1965. For a person who goes in for New Yorker arcana–and who hasn't been satiated yet by the spate of New Yorker books that came out earlier this year–the two pieces are entertaining and explicate Mr. Wolfe's declaration in his foreward: " The New Yorker had become dull, dull, dull–dull and self-important."

It's not clear why Mr. Wolfe chose to re-publish the two pieces now. In a brief afterword to the two pieces, Mr. Wolfe expresses his own mixed feelings: "My biggest concern in reprinting 'Tiny Mummies' and 'Lost in the Whichy Thickets' has been that readers in the year 2000 would wonder what all the fuss was about."

Indeed, of course, there was a great deal of fuss that greeted Mr. Wolfe's then-blasphemous declarations about a perceived downward slide at The New Yorker during the Shawn era. And though his criticisms were mild compared to what's been said in the days since, Mr. Wolfe does suggest that there was another motive for the protests: "It was because [Shawn] thought my two articles revealed to the world how close he was to Lillian Ross, a matter Madame Ross, for reasons best known to herself, chose to retail in embarrassing detail recently (1998) in her memoir of Shawn's time at The New Yorker entitled Here But Not Here ." (Mr. Wolfe writes that Ms. Ross' affair with Shawn surprised him; the two, he writes, "weren't affair material.")

In the foreword, Mr. Wolfe also dishes that one evening, soon after Shawn said he wouldn't give Mr. Wolfe an interview, Mr. Wolfe happened to have dinner with a New Yorker staffer named Renata Adler, who apparently was one of Mr. Wolfe's first sources in his reporting for the piece.

In Ms. Adler's 1999 memoir about The New Yorker , she called the publication of "Tiny Mummies" the second "crisis" in her three decades at the magazine, and suggested it was in retaliation for a parody of Mr. Wolfe's writing by Ms. Ross.

Mr. Wolfe signs off on the matter with a note to Ms. Adler. "By the way, Renata Adler titled her book Gone: The Last Days of The New Yorker and opened it with the portentous sentence, 'As I write this, The New Yorker is dead.' I tried to tell her that thirty-five years ago. I tried to save her decades of dead end in her career. What else did she think 'tiny mummies' and 'the land of the walking dead' were supposed to mean?"

So, how will all this go over at The New Yorker ?

"You mean massive retaliation? I don't think so," said Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker 's senior editor. "Personally I think it was a wonderful piece in many ways. I always regarded it as a kind of job application. After reading it, I thought Tom Wolfe plus The New Yorker checking department would be a fabulous combination.

"I think he was kind of shocked when it was treated as a crime against humanity," Mr. Hertzberg continued. "Lots of people lined up to give him a severe kicking. A more urbane response would have been to offer him a job."

Mr. Hertzberg added that he still owns the original copies of New York magazine that carried the pieces.

So will Mr. Wolfe's collection be reviewed in the magazine? "I really don't know," Mr. Hertzberg said. "Call Henry Finder [the editorial director]."

If, however, two 35-year-old essays do not hold enough allure to entice one to part with $25, Mr. Wolfe tinkles back in response to the ongoing literary pissing match that has pitched him against three of the other biggest names in modern literature. Called "My Three Stooges," Mr. Wolfe responds to the blistering reviews that John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving wrote of Mr. Wolfe's A Man in Full .

Mr. Wolfe shows that he is not above ad hominem attack. Noting the effort it must have taken to pen the multi-thousand-word reviews, Mr. Wolfe writes of Mssrs. Mailer and Updike: "I was sixty-eight. I knew how it must have drained them. How could they have spent those untold hours, ground out those thousands and thousands of words–the two old codgers had gone on for pages– pages !–to review a novel? How could our two senior citizens have found the energy in those exhausted carcasses of theirs? In interviews, Updike was already complaining about his aging bladder. Mailer, I noticed, was appearing in newspaper photographs supporting himself with two canes, one for each rusted-out hip."

In the end, Mr. Wolfe shows a bit of age himself, retreading his argument from "Stalking The Billion-footed Beast," published in Harper's two years after Bonfire of the Vanities , that the novel is dead because its authors are too often staying indoors, not engaging in the rigorous social reporting Mr. Wolfe propounds. He praises directors like Oliver Stone, Spike Lee and Francis Ford Coppola, who are not afraid to take chances and to open new avenues of public discussion. Mr. Wolfe writes, "The American novel is dying, not of obsolescence, but of anorexia. It needs... food .... It needs novelists with the energy and the verve to approach America the way her moviemakers do, which is to say, with a ravenous curiosity and an urge to go out among her 270 million souls and talk to them and look them in the eye."

This summer, because of the television actors strike, Ford Motor Co. decided to stop filming new TV commercials. As an alternative, Ford has partnered with 16 different magazines to put together the "My Dream Escape" contest. Each magazine developed a prize package that it thought would appeal most to its readers; each magazine will issue a prize. Offering a clue or two to their self-image, here's what they came up with:

Esquire : "If you've ever been interested in pursuing the visionary world of writing, then we have the dream escape for you. ... you could experience the art and craft of writing far from the distractions of everyday life at the Maui Writer's Retreat and Conference."

Vanity Fair : "Enter a world where power is held with the click of a shutter. Through the Photography Escape, thanks to Vanity Fair and Ford Escape, you could be on your way to a photo shoot to spend time with noted fashion photographer Didier Gault."

Glamour : " Escape in style. Get a first-hand glimpse inside the world of fashion and design with the Fashion Design Escape.... Travel to New York City to spend a day with noted fashion designer Diane Von Furstenburg."

Rolling Stone : "Here's a chance for your band to break out of the garage and let the music move you into the recording studio. As the winner of the Music Recording Escape, you will be rewarded with your very own recording session at Electric Lady Studios in New York."

Talk : "You could step behind the scenes of an acclaimed motion picture.... you could win the opportunity to experience the working set of a Miramax film through our Filmmaking Escape. Find your motivation and learn just what it takes to create the perfect movie scene."

– With Ian Blecher

Off the Record can be reached by email at gsnyder@observer.com

Renata's book (and I'm in first-name mode because this is all very personal) centers on the moment when I replaced William Shawn as the editor of the magazine. S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr. had bought The New Yorker several years earlier, promising to consult (though with whom?) on the matter of the succession. The manner in which the change actually came about was both abrupt and unclear, and people at the magazine were violently (and naturally) distressed. Under these highly charged circumstances, just about everyone behaved at his or her worst: Shawn obfuscated, Si kept silent, and the rest of us said and did things we would rather not recall. Renata, however, has now chosen to recall, or misrecall, them-a dozen years after the event, when one would have hoped they could be seen in perspective. But polemecists are rarely interested in perspective, and in the course of her current tirade, Renata takes few prisoners and sees few people in three dimensions. One person who, oddly enough, gets off rather lightly is Si, the man who, after all, made the fateful decision. Perhaps one must take into account that he remains a powerful figure in Renata's world-and besides, his wife, Victoria, was at Bryn Mawr with Renata, who, during the Troubles, bravely admitted to her assembled co-workers, "She is my friend."

Gone sets out its thesis right away: The New Yorker ceased being The New Yorker the day William Shawn left it, early in 1987. "As I write this, The New Yorker is dead," she announces. That, of course, is a matter of opinion, and mine is hardly likely to echo Renata's. But it would have been interesting to watch her incisive critical mind analyze the contents of the magazine under the three very different editors who followed Mr. Shawn: me, Tina Brown and David Remnick. That never happens; there is only generalized assertion of an absolute. In fact, since Renata was rarely around the magazine during these years, she all too often substitutes generalization and hearsay for firsthand knowledge. On one crucial point in the preface, for instance, she is seriously wrong. The magazine, she tells us, began "from almost the moment Mr. Shawn left it, for the first time since its earliest years, to lose money." I remember the numbers clearly: In the last year of Mr. Shawn's stewardship, the magazine lost $12 million. Toward the end of 1992, the losses were down to between $3 million and $4 million, and heading toward breakeven (later, they were to escalate). But the specific numbers aren't what matter here; I cite them only to demonstrate how an experienced but agenda-driven reporter like Renata allows herself to accept without evidence-and repeat as gospel-anything that supports her thesis.

Renata begins with reminiscence (bright young woman gets job at magazine) then quickly goes on the offensive. She writes, "I had hoped to finish this book without addressing either Ved Mehta's Remembering Mr. Shawn's 'New Yorker' or Lillian Ross' Here but Not Here. " Somehow her hopes are dashed. She confides that both writers-though Lillian "to a greater extent"-have been her friends, then closes in: Friend Ved's book she dismisses with a sideswipe of disdain-it's merely "self-serving and unpleasant"; closer friend Lillian is savaged. The battleground is Shawn. He's no longer here, so his admirers can no longer vie for his immediate favor; instead, they quarrel over whose view of him is to prevail. "Mr. Mehta's Shawn is something of an unctuous, pious, humorless creep, whose distinction lies in his esteem for Mr. Mehta's work. Ms. Ross' Shawn is an unctuous, pompous, humorless creep, whose greatness is revealed in his feeling for her-and his dislike and disdain for everybody else." In fact, Renata's reading of Lillian's book is that it is "an astonishing and fierce, unremitting, though apparently inadvertent, attack on Mr. Shawn, his magazine, and virtually everything he stood for and believed."

But what is Renata's view of him? Equally harsh. She indicts Shawn for what she perceives to be the failings of The New Yorker during his later years: "A moral certitude, an absence of self-doubt-especially in political matters-that became a minor flaw and then a major flaw." And "What had been a place of originality and integrity began to publish, and defend, instances of false reporting and plagiarism. What had been a place of civility, tact, understatement, became a place of vulgarity, meanness, invasions of privacy." And "Mr. Shawn, it seemed obvious to some of us, never had the slightest intention of naming or making way for a successor." Three editors she rightly nominates as plausible successors-Gardner Botsford, William Whitworth and John Bennet-"were driven out, cast as villains, or simply passed over in the periodic charade by which Mr. Shawn attempted to persuade others, and perhaps himself, that he had any intention of permitting the magazine to survive him." Finally, she blames Shawn for what she calls the magazine's "ethic of silence.… There began to be feeling that it was vulgar, perhaps morally wrong to write." When pieces were not scheduled, or were scheduled and then shelved, "It was unthinkable to inquire about this." She does notice, though, that "blunt people, and particularly screamers, got their way," and astutely she recognizes that "Certainly a source of [Shawn's] power was the determination of non-bullies to protect his delicacy of feeling." (We call this kind of behavior passive aggression.) What she doesn't recognize is that she has echoed-in fact, being much cleverer, surpassed-Lillian with her an "astonishing and fierce," though hardly inadvertent, attack on a man she claims to love and revere.

What's it all about-the rage, the resentment, the revenge? Renata gives us a clue: "I had in my mind, by now, what I thought of as an iconography or theology of The New Yorker . Mr. Shawn was the father; Lillian Ross, the mother. The son was Jonathan Schell; the spirit was J. D. Salinger." Theology, possibly, but that "father" is in lower case. To a large extent this book is an explosion of pain and anger from someone caught up in the dynamic of a highly dysfunctional family-what must have hurt most is that there was no place in it for a daughter. Jonathan Schell had been the best friend and roommate of Shawn's son Wallace, and when Jonathan came to the magazine, he quickly became Shawn's closest associate, apart from Lillian. In Renata's account, family dysfunction and political dysfunction are linked: "[T]he magazine began to churn out volumes of what, even then, was politically correct propaganda and heavy preaching. Mr. Shawn and, to a lesser degree, Ms. Ross were spending more and more of their time with Mr. Schell." Jonathan's real crime, clearly, is that he had so much influence-influence that Renata demonstrates she had always hoped to attain.

She offers unsolicited advice, sees herself as a "hired gun," spanks her fellow writers, even protests to Shawn about material he is planning to run. In 1965-Renata is a young woman, at the magazine only two years-she goes to his office to denounce the publication of In Cold Blood . "I said I thought that the pieces violated certain fundamental principles of the magazine. They were lurid, I thought, and sensationalistic. Their structure was of only prurient interest," etc., etc. "Mr. Shawn listened.… He did not appear to agree or disagree, or even to wish I would go away." (The man was a saint!) Undeterred, months later she and several colleagues once again set out to protect The New Yorker from William Shawn by protesting another piece he was about to run. When Shawn made it clear that he couldn't permit this kind of interference, they were "taken aback." How could he object, when "the whole purpose had been to spare the magazine the embarrassment" that publishing the piece would bring? But this time Renata learned her lesson-"We never again, in his presence, criticized anything in the magazine." On the other hand, out of his presence, "One evening, Bill Whitworth, Jane Kramer, and I had gone to see Gardner Botsford at his house in Turtle Bay-to ask him to consider becoming Shawn's successor." If she can't be the Daughter Apparent, she can try to stage-manage the succession.

Her book reflects a dangerous arrogance. Whatever Renata says or does is, by definition, right. When she launches her notorious attack on Pauline Kael in The New York Review of Books , it presumably doesn't occur to her-or matter to her-that most of us don't trash our colleagues publicly, or that she might be embarrassing both the magazine and Shawn. ("Even Mr. Shawn took it hard …" she acknowledges-or boasts.) Earlier, she had panned a collection of John Hersey's pieces, including "Hiroshima," a landmark in The New Yorker 's history. Too bad: "They did not seem to me to hold up very well." Nor does she have much positive to say about most of her living former colleagues, or about the many writers David, Tina and I have brought to the magazine. (Her friend Lillian, however, has only the highest regard for Tina: "[S]urprising as it may seem on the surface," Lillian wrote, "William Shawn and Tina Brown, the current editor, are indeed similar," a notion that Renata quite properly guts; whatever Shawn's failings, she protests, "He did not deserve this." In fairness to Lillian, it should be pointed out that she produced this abominable passage while working at reinstating herself at Tina's New Yorker .)

But if there are no imaginable similarities between William Shawn and Tina Brown, there are surprising ones between Renata Adler and Lillian Ross-in their private lives (single parents of adopted sons, sporadic output), and in their methods, too. As we have seen, like Lillian, Renata undermines Shawn while ostensibly championing him. She exposes the vulgarity and mawkishness of Lillian's "revelations" about her long liaison with Shawn-the most original passage in Gone reflects Renata's intuition that Lillian is really addressing Shawn's children with these revelations; his sons "and any other competitors for his love, respect, and time." And of course she deplores Lillian's assault on Shawn's privacy. But then comes a six-page scene describing her own farewell to Shawn at the end of his editorship. "'First of all,' I rather muttered, 'it goes without saying, I love you and I hope to keep seeing you for the rest of our lives.' He had interrupted, saying 'I love you' quite firmly. When I said the words about seeing each other, he said, again firmly, 'We will keep seeing each other.' Then we were both in tears." They're in tears again later on, and finally, as she's leaving: "From behind his desk, he said again, in a tone of surprising firmness and, considering the distance, gentleness, 'I love you.' I said again that I loved him. We shared a sense, I think, that since the day I first walked in and through the years, we were by temperament, style, understanding-through Hannah [Arendt], Wally, Lillian, Mrs. Shawn, those birthday parties-family." We can imagine how Shawn would have enjoyed having these private moments dished up for us. No matter. Like Lillian, Renata is staking her claim-to being "family" (a daughter at last). Not only that: She and Shawn share temperament, style, understanding. So much for the competition!

But where Renata really trumps Lillian's ace is in the matter of inaccuracy. She gores Lillian's claims to plausibility, but her own book is riddled with errors, of varying degrees of importance and disingenuousness. (Not surprising: She was not known at The New Yorker for relishing the checking process, and there are no pesky fact-checkers in book publishing.) To begin with, many names are wrong-Phyllis Maginley for Phyllis McGinley; Wen Weshler for Ren (Lawrence) Weschler; Conrad Richler for Mordecai Richler (or could she be thinking of Conrad Richter?). Most peculiarly, the publisher of The New Yorker , Peter Fleischmann, is misidentified as Stephen Fleischmann, his son. This is the carelessness of someone who believes she doesn't need to check or be checked.

As for misstatements of fact, I'll stick to what I know about at first hand. I never fired the jazz writer Whitney Balliett, and neither, thank goodness, did anyone else. I didn't, "within weeks," name Adam Gopnik "culture editor" of the magazine-that required Tina, half a dozen years later. Shawn could not possibly have said he met me once when I was a child-my childhood was spent far from such glamorous encounters; he may have been referring to my wife, whose father was the New Yorker writer Niccolò Tucci. Renata couldn't have seen in my Knopf office "an immense white porcelain she-wolf with dugs"; perhaps her eye had been caught by an un-immense and genderless styrofoam borzoi (the Knopf emblem)-the dugs were in the eye of the beholder. And if, during the traumatic and hectic time immediately following my arrival at the magazine, I made even a few of the fatuous and self-regarding remarks she credits me with, I apologize to one and all. I'm not really stupid enough, though, ever to have said-or to have thought-"People love me. I've already weaned them from Mr. Shawn."

But at least Renata throws me a few halfhearted compliments, topped by this one: "With time" my "style and manner at the magazine improved." The person who is shown no mercy is the writer Adam Gopnik, who had come with me to The New Yorker from Knopf, and who is relentlessly portrayed as an ingratiating, manipulating self-advancer. But even if this is an accurate portrayal, why should a Sherman tank like Renata be wasting its firepower on a gerbil? Why mock Adam's physical characteristics? Indeed, why the unmistakably personal edge to the assault? I believe it's once more a matter of family dysfunction: For decades, Richard Avedon has been among Renata's closest friends; then, some years back, he more or less adopted the Gopniks. Sibling rivalry strikes again! Following her practice of quoting (or misquoting) private conversations with people she has allowed to believe are her friends-"I kissed him on the cheek"-Renata has Adam saying many foolish and embarrassing things. I can only hope she's accurate when she quotes him as saying, "It's always been my dream to go to The New Yorker . You don't think, do you, that the staff will think I'm Bob's catamite?" (That's called protecting your ass.) Let me put everyone's mind at ease: If I had ever wanted a catamite, it wouldn't have been Adam.

Gone is part wacky, part unpleasant. Renata hauls up for airing countless slights and grudges; some of them have been festering for more than 30 years. Having trashed various New Yorker writers-the late Edith Oliver, the living John Newhouse-she proceeds to trash their editors. (She fancies herself an editor, by the way; one of her old grudges is that the magazine's fiction department firmly vetoed the notion that she might join it.) She reveals: "Twice, at publications other than The New Yorker , I actually thought of going to the printer, armed with a rifle perhaps, and lying down, rather as political demonstrators used to do, and saying, They shall not print, in my name, this version of a piece." Mystifyingly, she takes issue with my habit of keeping my office door open: "Adult conversation, any real conversation," she asserts, "takes place behind closed doors." It all adds up: Closed doors, grudges, back-stabbings are standard components of a courtier society. No wonder they play so large a part in Renata's mental vocabulary.

As it happens, Renata suggests that there were courtiers at the magazine in my day. Doesn't she grasp that while under Shawn the magazine may have been some strange kind of family, it was also an extreme and destructive example of an office behaving like a royal court? There was le roi soleil ; there was la reine -Mrs. Shawn, at home raising les enfants ; there was la maîtresse en titre , Lillian, swanning around and exerting influence; there was the favorite, Jonathan, resented by numberless courtiers; there was the exhausting jostling for position and trying to interpret the actions and words of le roi ; and there was, inevitably, the resentful and clever chronicler-the Saint-Simon manqué-waiting to jump in with her self-aggrandizing account of everyone else.

But Renata Adler is no Saint-Simon. This book lacks the energy and bite even of her earlier work, let alone his; her intelligence has been undermined by her resentments and warped by her agenda. At least, though, Gone is friendly ! I'm happy to report that not only are Lillian and Ved and half her other victims either friends or ex-friends, but that, as she tells us, for the duration of my stay at The New Yorker "Mr. Gottlieb and I remained friends." Thank you for your friendship, Renata.

Hemingway has been called a lot of things over the years–vain, anti-Semitic, sexist–and now this.

This ultimate insult comes as an aside in an article on the supposed resurgence of American short fiction in the 90's. Making a case for the work of Lorrie Moore, David Foster Wallace, Denis Johnson, Rick Moody and others, the critic Vince Passaro writes: "Today's short fiction tends to be smart, and wit is an aspect of the literary art form that Hemingway couldn't master and that his followers, consciously or unconsciously, put aside. (His anti-intellectualism, perfectly American and perfectly tuned to the needs of an ever-less-educated reading public, meshed well with his own marked lack of intelligence.)"

It goes on like that for a while. Now all Harper's readers, a half-million or so quietly angry men and women with college educations, have been supplied with some heavy artillery–" marked lack of intelligence "–to fire at the greatest and whitest of the great dead white male authors.

The year 1999 could have been such a damned good time for Hemingway. In Oak Park, Ill., where he was born July 21, 1899, there was the Hemingway Fiesta, with flamenco dancing and tours of Hemingway family graves. In Ketchum, Idaho, where he killed himself July 2, 1961, the Idaho Humanities Council sponsored a Hemingway workshop for 25 high school teachers as Hemingway pilgrims visited his grave and scholars gave lectures.

But amid the centennial hoopla, Papa has taken a beating. The publication of True at First Light , probably the least of the posthumously published Hemingway books, has shot some more holes in his shaky literary reputation. And the introduction of an Ernest Hemingway collection of furniture from Thomasville furniture makers–now available at Huffman Koos and other outlets where fine furnishings are sold–hasn't helped much, either. Both True at First Light and the furniture line ("Kilimanjaro" bedside chest, anyone? or could we interest you in a "Catherine" slipcover love seat?) depend on Hemingway's rugged public image for whatever success they might have in the marketplace and have very little to do with the writer of the perfect first paragraph of A Farewell to Arms and a number of indestructible short stories.

Asked to explain why he thinks Hemingway was stupid, Mr. Passaro said: "There's a very appealing quality to the Hemingway milieu–the places and people, a very dashing and appealing sense about them. He romanticizes at a perfect pitch, but I just began to sense that he was not a very intelligent or pleasant person. After reading a lot more and a lot better people, my opinion of him just ratcheted down, down, down, down. Technically, he worked very hard. He figured out how to put sentences on the page. But he's shockingly unintelligent for a writer treated as so canonically important."

While calling Hemingway stupid may be a cheap shot, it's hard to imagine a critic taking that same cheap shot at, say, James Joyce or Henry James. At its best, Hemingway's writing was lean and brisk. He buried profundities of thought and emotion under a smooth surface of dialogue and description. James and Joyce and other writers of that more obviously intellectual ilk gave readers more to grab onto. They enjoyed showing off their erudition and the meanderings of their minds, and so they were willing to err on the side of messiness and wordiness.

"My old college professor used to say that Henry James wrote his stories on the surface of the mind," said Hemingway biographer Michael Reynolds, on the phone at the Ketchum festival. "Hemingway writes his stories on the surface of the cafe table."

But with so much important stuff buried, Hemingway leaves some critics wondering if there is really anything beneath the polish. "What is it that you learn about the world from Hemingway?" said Mr. Passaro. "Pretty girls, he can't get them–and when he does get them, they bust his balls."

The charge made by Mr. Passaro is not quite new. In a 1934 essay, a Hemingway friend and rival, Wyndham Lewis, implied that his fictional heroes, dumb in both senses of the word, reflected their creator: "Hemingway invariably invokes a dull-witted, bovine, monosyllabic simpleton, a lethargic and stuttering dummy … a village-idiot of few words and fewer ideas." Gertrude Stein, in her 1933 book The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , made a similar charge, comparing her friend Hemingway to a student "who does it without understanding it, in other words who takes training." (Both criticisms made him furious.)

Hemingway himself distrusted big ideas, grandly stated. In the work of Leo Tolstoy, he loved the storytelling, hated the philosophy: "I have never believed in the great Count's thinking," he wrote in the introduction to Men at War , a 1942 anthology. "He could invent more with more insight and truth than anyone who ever lived. But his ponderous and Messianic thinking was no better than many another evangelical professor of history and I learned from him to distrust my own Thinking with a capital T and to try to write as truly, as straightly, as objectively and as humbly as possible."

He often played the part of pugilist and sensualist to the hilt–he hit on other women even in front of his first wife, Hadley Richardson Hemingway; he beat up the poet Wallace Stevens in 1936–which must have helped bring about the idea that he was a brute. But there's no doubt he educated himself well, after joining the Red Cross ambulance corps at the Italian front instead of going to college following a high school career during which he had a 90 average.

"He was probably the best-read American writer of his generation," said Mr. Reynolds, who spent much of the last 25 years on his five-volume Hemingway biography. "His Cuban library had almost 8,000 volumes and he didn't start assembling that until 1940. He only had a high school education and he was making up for it, but he sort of overcompensated."

If Hemingway felt intellectual insecurity, or felt himself to be less talented than his literary rivals, he apparently took pride in having made up for what he lacked. In an October 1929 letter from Paris to F. Scott Fitzgerald, before his falling out with Stein, he brought up the touchy topic of who had more talent: "Gertrude Stein has never last night or any other time said anything to me about you but the highest praise.… As for the comparison of our writings she was … only saying that you had a hell of a roaring furnace of talent and I had a small one–implying I had to work a damn sight harder for results obtained.… Gertrude wanted to organize a hare and tortoise race and picked me to tortoise and you to hare and naturally, like a modest man and a classicist, you wanted to be the tortoise."

Years later, when Lillian Ross interviewed him for her 1950 New Yorker profile–just issued, as Portrait of Hemingway , in a Modern Library paperback edition–Hemingway described the virtues of not being too smart, in the form of a boxing parable: "One time, I asked Jack [Britton], speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard, 'How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?' 'Ernie,' he said, 'Benny is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he's boxing, he's thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.'"

Ms. Ross duly scribbled down such talk, but never bought the idea that Hemingway was a dummy. "He was sharp," she said. "He knew people, he knew writing, he knew fakers." She said she wasn't surprised that a critic is making the Hemingway-was-stupid argument. "I learned about critics when I was a kid," said Ms. Ross. "What they did to Keats–I never forgot that!"

Ms. Ross' profile of the author–while written with affection and published only after he himself had read it over in full–did much to knock down the myth of Hemingway as literary superman in its day. Nonetheless, Ms. Ross and Hemingway stayed in touch over the years and he showed his intellectual mettle to Ms. Ross' satisfaction in roughly 80 letters he wrote her.

In this year of Hemingway weirdness, a new book, Hemingway's Fetishism: Psychoanalysis and the Mirror of Manhood , spills more of his secrets, particularly those having to do with his intense feelings about hair, androgyny and "his lifelong fascination with lesbian eroticism." Drawing from parts of A Farewell to Arms , For Whom the Bell Tolls , To Have and Have Not , his ménage à trois (posthumous) novel The Garden of Eden and the short story "The Sea Change," the author Carl P. Eby deflates the notion of Hemingway as a pig who wanted to control women, replacing it with a Hemingway who feared women and, sometimes, wanted to be a woman. Mr. Eby has found, in an unpublished letter to his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, that Hemingway wrote, in closing, "Your girl Katherine sends her love." Yes, Hemingway was referring to himself with this phrase. He also called Mary "Pete."

Hemingway buffs know about the time he "accidentally" dyed his hair red in Cuba. Well, guess what? In another letter to Mary, Hemingway wrote that he "remembered how you used to talk about Catherine in the night and how her hair was and so decided would make red– … So now I am just as red headed as you would like your girl Catherine to be and don't give a damn about it at all."

In an unpublished bit of the Garden of Eden manuscript unearthed by Mr. Eby, the protagonist David Bourne, in bed with his wife, Catherine, says: "You're Catherine." And she replies: "No. I'm Peter. You're my wonderful Catherine. You're my beautiful lovely Catherine. You were so good to change."

Far from playing the role of great white hunter on the 1953-1954 safari that gave rise to the 800-page manuscript that got whipped into shape as True at First Light , Hemingway wanted to go native–not as a Masai warrior, but as a Masai girl. On that trip he shaved his head–which is something Masai women do. Mr. Eby calls this "inherently transvestic." He also wanted to pierce his ears. Mary said No.

So Hemingway is more psychologically complex than the feminists imagined. But does psychological complexity equal intelligence? Isn't it possible that he was a simpleton who had a knack for writing distinctive prose? Mr. Passaro compared Hemingway's mind to those of nonliterary artists: "We don't ask painters to be intelligent, or photographers, or musicians," he said, "but I, for one, do ask writers to be intelligent."

It's a view that Harold Bloom, the Falstaffian professor at Yale and New York University and author of The Anxiety of Influence and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human , disputes: "Don't underrate his intellect," Mr. Bloom warned. "His is a very sharp, discursive intelligence. There is a real limitation in his powers of imagination when he works on a large-scale book–in For Whom the Bell Tolls , he fails in his attempt to write a Tolstoyan novel–but he did not lack intellect. In the end, he wanted to be a greater writer than he was."

The Hemingway style was tough and tight–and hard to maintain over the long haul of years that ended with him shooting himself in the head with his 12-gauge Boss shotgun. The critic Leslie Fiedler paid a visit to him in Ketchum in those very last days and he was shocked, according to Jeffrey Meyers' Hemingway , to see "his doubt and torment, his fear that he had done nothing of lasting worth."

Hemingway's best work shows the impossibility of always living by the code of grace under pressure, a mode of behavior he learned from the British soldier's cheerful stoicism in the works of his beloved Rudyard Kipling. Hemingway and his most honestly rendered characters wanted to live by that code, but couldn't. In the chasm between that romantic ideal and daily life he found his true subject. Hemingway himself wanted to be a fine, masculine sportsman and writer … but then again, he wanted to be a Masai girl.

What Hemingway may not have known was that he was at his best when he showed his familiarity with the territory of weakness and doubt. True at First Light and Green Hills of Africa are rotten books because they cast the author as a macho hunter as they extol the virtues of courage and honor in the hunt. The story "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" is great, on the other hand, partly because it deals with cowardice and hesitation; in it, Hemingway questions everything he held dear in his daylight hours.

Whatever the thing is behind a story that good–if you can't call it intelligence, call it imagination or talent or inspiration–Hemingway had it. He eroded it or even destroyed it, probably just by drinking huge amounts of alcohol, but he had it at some point.

He had roughly 20 good years of apprenticeship and early success, followed by a 20-year decline during which he won the Nobel Prize but couldn't pull off what he might have been able to do had he guarded that original quality of mind that allowed him to write "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and "Ten Indians" and "Hills Like White Elephants" and "The Killers." Those stories are so clear and so beautiful that, unlike the works of Tolstoy or James, they can indeed seem like pieces of writing produced by a simpleton. That's how good they are.

So hail, Hemingway, our literary idiot. Maybe it's true that he wasn't exactly a genius–and maybe that was his secret strength.

And meantime, everyone has secretly responded to the book's splendiferous portrait of the magus of West 43rd Street. Watch as the passionate Mr. Shawn steals off to Grossinger's in lemon-yellow bathing trunks and a British racing green Triumph TR-3. "She's brought this man to life," says the writer Susan Cheever. "And you could argue that she's done a great service."

My interest here is Cheever-esque. When Susan Cheever's father's journals were published in 1991, they pained some of his intimates but did a lot to enlarge our understanding of marriage. John Cheever had made a lifetime commitment to his wife Mary, but that didn't rule out numerous passionate affairs. I hoped Here but Not Here might explore the issue from the lover's standpoint.

According to Ms. Ross, the Shawn marriage was not a happy one. Most of her references to the Shawn household are negative. The Shawn home was "hurtful," a place of "complications," a place where Mr. Shawn was "being punished." "He told me over and over again of his guilt and distress in his home with his wife … He said that his real self was not in his home," Ms. Ross writes. "He told me he prayed for Cecille to find a real life for herself."

Apparently, the "happy" marriage was to Ms. Ross. "He told me over and over again that I was, in fact, his wife"–something Ms. Ross tells us over and over again. "As in any ceremonial joining, we made sacred pledges to each other about the exclusivity of our bodies and of our spirits."

Welllll. That's where I got off the bus.

I have no romance about family life. Who can, it's so often miserable. But if you're not a child, membership is voluntary, and Mr. Shawn and his wife maintained their household for well over 60 years, till death did them part. I wondered how much of Ms. Ross' dismal report is based on the lies or half-portrait that a husband offers a mistress, telling her what she wants to hear so she'll stick around in the hope that she'll someday ease the other dame out. (Yes, Mr. Shawn.)

For another thing, this account is short on detail. Ms. Ross describes Mr. Shawn shuttling back and forth between "our" apartment and the apartment he shared with Cecille 10 blocks north, at Fifth Avenue and 96th Street, but never says just how often Mr. Shawn slept over. There are few dates in her book, and some of those dates have Thucydidean precision; her 10th anniversary with Mr. Shawn was "the 1960's." Then there are the stretchers, like the assertion that she raised her adopted son Erik with Mr. Shawn's "full parental participation," including going to long parent-teacher meetings. The New Yorker editor was then pushing 70. For all her greatness as a reporter, I wondered if Ms. Ross wasn't fooling herself.

I decided to look into it. Earlier this summer, I wrote letters questioning Ms. Ross' take on the Shawns to Cecille Shawn and her two sons, Wallace and Allen. Mrs. Shawn didn't respond, and her sons sent me polite No's. "If you were sitting next to me on an airplane & said those things, I'd probably respond in some way, but I have no desire to address the public on those topics–particularly right now–" wrote "Wallace S." in a small handwriting reminiscent of his father's.

The original's hand can be found in Chambers Street, on his will in Surrogate's Court in Manhattan. Mr. Shawn signed it in 1988, four years before his death. "I give all my tangible personal property, and any insurance on such property, to my wife, Cecille L. Shawn, or if she does not survive me, to those of my sons, Wallace M. Shawn and Allen E. Shawn, who survive me, in shares of substantially equal value," it reads, with the trademark "WS" at the bottom of each page. And nary a word about Lillian Ross or her son.

A second document was signed by the person Mr. Shawn named his executor: his widow. In petitioning the court to affirm the will, Mrs. Shawn had to state who "would take the property of the decedent if there were no will." She listed 1 spouse, 3 marital and/or adopted child or children, and put an X in the box for nonmarital child or children, indicating that there were none. So much for the happy family, 10 blocks south.

Probate took months. The court was concerned about Shawn's third child: daughter Mary Shawn, who is retarded, but was not named in the will. Lawyers had to explain the omission. A guardian reported that Mr. Shawn had established a trust for his daughter "with a lump sum payment he received upon his retirement" (presumably a reference to his firing from The New Yorker by S.I. Newhouse Jr. in 1987).

"I conclude and report … that the decedent knew the natural objects of his bounty," the guardian said.

Now Mr. Shawn was a man of great decorum. Yet if, as Ms. Ross asserts, he was married in spirit to another woman and wanted that life known to the world, might he not have left some inkling in these documents? Might not Cecille Shawn, who had the grace to summon Lillian Ross and her son to her husband's deathbed to say goodbye on Dec. 8, 1992, have named the two as people who would, absent a will, make a claim on the estate?

Other suggestive details have emerged in Ms. Ross' interviews. In the latest issue of Mirabella , she notes that she wasn't included in Mr. Shawn's funeral arrangements (in contrast, say, to François Mitterrand's mistress). And in her interview with Liz Smith, she says her book is absent any of Mr. Shawn's many love letters because his words "belonged to him." But Ved Mehta's recent book, Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker: The Invisible Art of Editing , reproduces pieces of Mr. Shawn's writing (which was wonderfully delicate and insightful) and thanks Mrs. Shawn for permission to quote material from "the Shawn papers."

Did Ms. Ross' spiritual and bodily partner fail, in death, to enable her to use his letters? How sad.

My point is not to diminish Ms. Ross' love for Mr. Shawn, or his for her. My "facts" offer only the narrowest window on what I believe to be a special loving relationship. But it's the endless "wife" talk and the hurtful life on Fifth Avenue that beg the question.

In July, I wrote to Lillian Ross asking her whether Mr. Shawn had made any financial arrangements for her. We proceeded to have several animated phone conversations, but Ms. Ross declined to be a party to this article. I can report, however, that she was energetic, buoyant and humorous. She is unpretentious. She has a splendid voice, filled with mettle.

It's no wonder that the famously phobic Mr. Shawn, nested with neurotics, was drawn to Ms. Ross. Her father had escaped twice from Siberian prisons, and Lillian inherited his bravery, going as a reporter where no one had been before. She was a smoker and a speeder, she was drawn to men of action. Meek Mr. Shawn lived a life of buried passion (and some passive aggression, too, to judge from certain stories). At the time he fell in love with his employee, he was in his mid-40's with an older wife and three young children; Ms. Ross was (my guess, the lady doesn't say) in her 30's. She was also useful. Mr. Mehta says she served as Mr. Shawn's "special eyes and ears."

Ms. Ross had the personal strength to be his longtime lover. She is a loner. She went to the movies by herself as a child and came to look on marriage as "intolerable." One of only two fights she says she had with Mr. Shawn was over President John F. Kennedy's marriage, which she felt was something of a sham, but he felt her view was unfair. As a young woman, she declined to give up her career for attachment to a doctor in the suburbs.

"I wished to go on being a selfish, quiet, dedicated, and free writer," she writes.

Ms. Ross hates the word "mistress" (and "companion" wasn't good enough, either), but her book makes a hidden argument for mistresshood. As my wife likes to say, there's surely something to be said for the mistress slot: You don't have a dependent man hanging around; you don't have to pick up his socks (or catheters), or (my wife's job) hold his hand through his emotional terrors; you have plenty of time to yourself and your career; and when he's around, he's courting you. Presents without presence. Ms. Ross' independent spirit flourished under these conditions. She didn't complain.

But Mr. Shawn's love letters now belong to the real wife. And that's not all. Famously mingy and pious about money with the staff, Mr. Shawn did not flinch at a golden handshake with the Newhouses in 1987. The principal asset listed in Surrogate's Court is a "Pension benefit on behalf of The New Yorker Magazine Inc., payable by Advance Publications Inc.," valued at $1,051,100 in 1992. That million bucks is presumably just part of the lump sum Mr. Shawn was paid on his firing. It passed to his "beneficiary," Mrs. Shawn.

Ms. Ross' bravery has taken her far in life, but the flip side of that is toughness, a lack of intellectual subtlety. The sensitive Mr. Mehta says Ms. Ross has a "touch of the bully," and that's where she should be faulted, for trying to manipulate her public. Having written a seditious book about marriage, she should have owned her job title, "mistress," and taken an honest look at its terms. In doing so, she might have changed our understanding. She might have forced us to rethink bourgeois arrangements in the way that John Cheever did–or for that matter, Quentin Bell did, describing his parents' many affairs in his delightful book, Bloomsbury Recalled .

And she might have gotten what in her later years she seems to crave, the respect of polite society.

A fictional sitcom heroine is compared to three historic women leaders and found wanting. This is news? We learn that Hollywood sitcoms-even those created by Michelle Pfeiffer's talented consort, David E. Kelley-demean women. This is given as proof that feminism is dead. The rest of the story is equally silly-featuring Spice Girl lyrics cheek by jowl with Camille Paglia-esque analyses of the "iconography" of Courtney Love, Bust magazine and the now-departed Spice, Ginger. Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem get short shrift. Neither Eleanor Roosevelt nor Hillary Rodham Clinton is even glimpsed. The Equal Rights Amendment debacle and the fortunes of contraception and abortion in America do not rate a mention. Nancy Friday-whom writers gleefully attacked in Time 's pages until her husband Norman Pearlstine became the boss-comes in for some unctuous felches. Now she is "a sex-positive feminist if ever there was one." (They used to call her a harpy). And Helen Fielding, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Deborah Garrison seem to be among the few young female writers Time has heard of.

I don't know about the guys who run Time Warner Inc. and CNN, but I thought the way to change the world was to follow in the footsteps of the suffragists, not Mary Richards. When will this kind of flimsy reasoning and intellectually vacuous reporting stop posing as cultural commentary? And when, oh when, will all the ink-stained wretches at Time (and elsewhere) let up on retrograde stories that accuse women of "self-obsession"? "Self-obsession" is code for women concentrating on women when we ought to, of course, be concentrating on men.

Time 's female journalist, Ginia Bellafante, probably doesn't even know that her employer has run scores of stories like this long before she was born. Or that she's been made part of an old shtick at Time : Find a woman to attack other women in the hopes of establishing her byline, and the status quo will remain untouched. The thing is: The trick usually works. Editors at Time and elsewhere in the media can always find benighted women journalists who are delighted for the chance to attack other women.

They just don't get it. The poor dears think they're furthering the cause of equality by trashing other women. From Clare Boothe Luce to Ms. Paglia, women writers have gotten famous for attacking other women, but it's still a cowardly and stupid thing to do. It's the way of the world. The old world. The patriarchal world. The Time -CNN world. Women are still tokens there, not chief executives. They can write, report, even edit, but the boardroom is still a men's room. The majority of people with the private jets have cocks. Let's hope they use them both for something fun.

Women think they have no choice but to trash other women in print. I myself always cringe when some sweet young journalist comes knocking at my door, telling me she loves my work and grew up reading me. I know then that I'm in for it.

Why Women Dish Women

I've thought long and hard about why so many women think they have something to gain by dishing other women. Envy only partly explains it. Susan Cheever said to me, "Women turn on women because they have nowhere else to turn. Women have all this intelligence and all this energy-but there are not enough rewards to go around. So they're like rats in a cage when there's overpopulation in the rat community. Women attacking women is a form of gender-based road rage. They're angry at men and children, but it's not safe to attack them, so they turn, out of frustration, on other women. Watch out who you lie down next to at an Upper East Side exercise class. You literally take your life in your hands at Lotte Berke."

In a world in which women are set up as tokens and rivals, our thoughtless impulse to attack each other is an evolutionary throwback we can ill afford. It merely perpetuates our second-class status, leaving us out of the club of power forever. Men don't like each other, but they know when to line up behind the alpha male and kiss his ass. They know how the world works.

Women are still in the dark ages, however, thrashing about and striking out at other women who dare to do what we wish we could do ourselves. I've been observing the kind of punitive responses automatically evoked by women writers who dare to tell their personal stories-as if a woman's story could ever be important. Watching the female firing squad-journalists from Entertainment Weekly , The Wall Street Journal , The Baltimore Sun , the San Francisco Chronicle , The Boston Globe , The New York Times Book Review , even Janet Malcolm on the Internet-line up in front of Kathryn Harrison (for The Kiss ), Lillian Ross (for Here but Not Here ) and Joyce Maynard (for a not-yet published memoir of a youth that included a sojourn with J.D. Salinger), it's impossible not to think that women are prohibited (by each other!) from telling their own stories. Ms. Maynard's memoir was attacked fully nine months before it was due to appear (which, according to the Picador USA catalogue copy, is this October). Nobody had seen it, yet already they hated it.

Critics are currently falling all over each other to trash Lillian Ross for having the audacity to present William Shawn as a lovable man. How could she expose this private person? they rage. He must be turning over in his grave . The fact that Miss Ross knew him and they didn't hardly keeps them from claiming superior knowledge. A similar cry has gone up about Ms. Maynard's memoir, At Home in the World . She knew Jerry Salinger, lived with him, in fact. Her critics never even glimpsed him. Does the story of a love affair belong as much to a woman as to the man she shared it with? Apparently not. These women have no rights to their own histories. Male memoirists spill their guts (Frank McCourt, Philip Roth, Frank Conroy) and women reviewers swoon. Why do we give so little leeway to our own gender?

Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times has had a very good year. Following her scandalous attacks on women writers, she won a Pulitzer. (The method still works). Lately, she has savaged Ann Beattie, Miss Ross and Joyce Carol Oates. What is this capo mentality? The Times finally has a woman reviewer who hates women even more than her male predecessors. This is an ancient tradition. Get a woman to do the dirty work. She'll never notice she's being used.

We Got Smart And Time Declared Us Dead

Ms. Bellafante, listed as a senior writer on Time 's masthead, dismisses 25 years of women's writing with backhanded slaps at Kate Millett, Ms. Greer and Ms. Steinem's Revolution From Within: A Book of Self-Esteem . Naomi Wolf is trashed for pointing out that sexuality for women is still not as acceptable as it is for men. Katie Roiphe-who critiqued the theory that all intercourse is rape in The Morning After -is herself raped by Ms. Bellafante for appearing in a Coach ad.

Time concludes that feminism has hit the skids and its entire literature is over, as if there had never been any books by Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Marge Piercy, Maxine Hong Kingston, Mary Gordon, Susan Cheever, Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, Edwidge Danticat, Adrienne Rich, Carolyn Forche, Ann Beattie, Carolyn Heilbrun, Annie Dillard, Alice Hoffman, A.S. Byatt, Julia Alvarez, Nadine Gordimer, Christa Wolf, Kathryn Harrison, Fay Weldon, Doris Lessing, Gail Godwin, Hortense Calisher, Joyce Carol Oates, Isabel Allende, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood-I could go on and still forget plenty.

Courtney Love's Versace shoot "proves" that Simone de Beauvoir's books have fallen on deaf ears. Current feminism is "self-involved" (a word always used about women who refuse to be victims) and petty darn tacky, too. It's also dead. The Spice Girls minus one now prove this, as Madonna plus one now proves it. Women are just in love with glitz and themselves. Where once they debated intellectual theory like Platonists, now they're "lipstick feminists" or "do-me feminists" or "material girls" or "Spice Girl feminists." All the very real changes of the last 25 years are ignored.

But the real crux of Time 's tirade seems to be that the Old Girl Network failed to trounce Bill Clinton for getting it on, or whatever he did, with Monica Lewinsky. What happened to us? Did we get so mellow our brains just fell out? Ms. Steinem defended the Big Creep in The Times , and I let him off the hook in The Observer . Soft in the head we are. We clung to the only guy with the guts to veto something misnamed "the partial-birth abortion bill" and to appoint Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court. This makes us sellouts.

For years, people wanted to know when women would get politically savvy. We got politically savvy and Time declared us dead. It doesn't take a George Eliot or an Emily Dickinson to point to a few superficial singers in sequins (and writers who strip for their book jackets) and hastily conclude that the women's movement has failed. But such reasoning is utterly specious. Every movement has its ugly excrescences and its commercial exploiters. This proves only that the world favors ugly excrescences and commercial exploitation. They always get more attention than truth and beauty. This is news?

Of course the word "feminism" has been devalued. Every word that describes something female gets devalued sooner or later. But feminism, though constantly morphing, is hardly moribund. Both its successes and its failures have changed it. We are in the midst of an unfinished revolution. The older troops are exhausted and their replacements (our daughters) are just getting the hang of it. They are about to reframe the debate and shape it to their own uses. They are about to turn the revolution around and make it new. This is good. It also takes time.

'Revenge Was Never the Purpose'

Young feminists not only have to decide what to call themselves, they have to get old enough to realize how deeply unequal our society is. "If a woman is bright, educated, able-bodied, attractive, childless and in the professions she can live very happily indeed," writes Fay Weldon, the British novelist. "And just as well, because this seems to be the kind of woman-like poor, nervy Ally McBeal; poor, all-over-the-place Bridget Jones-who these days has to do without a man." But bring a baby into the equation and suddenly equality is all over-except for those paragons of young masculinity who write endpaper essays for The New York Times Magazine . They love diapering babies and later even pat themselves on the back about it on TV. (Who's watching the baby while they do so?) Babies are still unequally cared for by moms, but many of our daughters are not moms yet. Rest assured, they will grow more radical with age (as Ms. Steinem predicted), and then we will see a feminist revolution that Time will actually have to acknowledge. Or is this merely wishful thinking? I hope not.

We won the right to speak of sexual desire (and sometimes even to indulge it-if we could find a willing partner). Naturally, the rockers and rappers appropriated this as rockers and rappers are wont to. (It wasn't the Spice Girls, but the African-American blueswomen of the first half of this century who first put female sexual power into music-Ida Cox and her contemporaries, Bessie Smith and hers.) My generation came along and won the right to enter law school in large numbers, medical school and the Supreme Court. We won the right to be mothers and also write books-something unthinkable in Virginia Woolf's day, not to mention Jane Austen's.

Of course, there are miles to go before we sleep, but it's not as if nothing happened. Above all, we've raised feisty daughters who won't take No for an answer and sons who are used to strong women-possibly even turned on by them. Those two factors may have the greatest impact of anything we've done. Time 's idiotic cover story on feminism is, in short, a symptom of what's wrong, not an analysis. Most women are not Ally McBeal and most women share Susan B. Anthony's passion for justice whether we apply the f-word to ourselves or not. Semantic slicing and dicing is the antithesis of reasoned argument.

I am actually quite sanguine about the future of feminism. What distresses me is that male bashing has become as ugly as female bashing was 25 years ago. Women now routinely mock men in public discourse and men submissively take it lying down-as if this were all that feminism meant. In order to make any progress here, we need a truce, not a war between the sexes. I find cheap attacks on men disguised as "grrl power" counterproductive (though I understand why adolescent girls may cheer). Still, this isn't what we fought for. Nor is censorship of sexuality. The spectacle of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon playing ring-around-the-rosy with right-wing opponents of free speech in the name of female purity is also not what we fought for. Claiming that all penetration is rape is certainly not what we fought for. We craved equality, not the right to treat men as badly as men once treated women. We fought to create new paradigms of power, not to turn the tables on the opposite sex until they ran screaming from the bedroom clutching their balls and their bottles of Viagra. As Fay Weldon also said, "Revenge was never the purpose of the woman's movement."

The only way to put a stop to this charade is to call it as we see it. Women attacking women is a way to maintain the status quo. Carolyn Heilbrun says that "power consists in deciding which stories shall be told." By continuing the calumnies of the Old Boy Network, we are only enforcing our own inferiority. When a woman attacks another woman, all she really proves is that she hates herself.

Erica Jong can be reached at www.ericajong.com

Mr. Coffey's first stop was at the fifth-floor office of his new boss, ABC News president David Westin, who just a week before had been given control of the network's news operation, with the reluctant exit of ABC News chairman Roone Arledge to an office upstairs. Mr. Coffey stood by Mr. Westin's side at the 9:45 A.M. news meeting, and again at the 11 A.M. gathering of producers from World News Tonight . Then Mr. Westin took him on a tour of ABC's headquarters, and Mr. Coffey got to say hello to his new colleagues Peter Jennings and Barbara Walters.

Mr. Coffey has already chalked up an impressive career–what with top editorial postings at The Washington Post , U.S. News & World Report , the Dallas Times-Herald and the Los Angeles Times etched into his résumé–but he now finds himself in a high-pressure job with loosely defined duties. The network says he will be responsible for "new business development, ABC News productions, cable program development [and] ABC News on-line activities." And even Mr. Coffey seems at a loss to be more specific.

"At this point, the first day on the job, I don't think I should say ABC News needs to do this, this and this," Mr. Coffey said. "I'm looking at the best ways to be of help to David and the organization."

Mr. Coffey starts his job at ABC with almost no television experience. He worked at The Washington Post for 17 years, first as a sportswriter, then as editor of the paper's style section and finally as an assistant managing editor for news. He left the paper for a turn as editor of U.S. News & World Report , followed by a short stint as the editor of the Dallas Times-Herald before heading to the Los Angeles Times , where he was editor in chief from 1989 to 1997. Mr. Westin, an attorney who has only recently begun to learn the ropes of the news business, recruited Mr. Coffey to shore up his scant journalism credentials.

The question is: Does Shelby Coffey have what it takes to be David Westin's shepherd?

The key to Mr. Coffey's future at ABC would seem to lie somewhere in his past. It was back when he was editing The Washington Post 's style section in the late 70's that Mr. Coffey first hit his stride. He hired the paper's erudite crank of a TV critic, Tom Shales, and mentored a young Sally Quinn. Mr. Coffey became known for quoting Aristophanes and inspiring his writers with a high sense of purpose. "He's the best editor I ever had," Ms. Quinn said. "He has a combination of fantastic news judgment, a real literary sensibility and an understanding of what's popular. From a print journalist's point of view, he has more integrity than anyone I know."

But even early on at The Post , Mr. Coffey became known for a kind of earnest corporatespeak that earned him the derogatory nickname "the man in the empty suit." He left the paper in 1986 to take the helm of Mortimer Zuckerman's U.S. News & World Report . For all his well-honed diplomatic skills, that job didn't go too well. Mr. Zuckerman named himself editor in chief of the magazine just a few months after Mr. Coffey arrived, and within nine months, Mr. Coffey had resigned. Still, he managed to exit with his game face on. Before leaving, he told a meeting of his staff, "I was proud as a lion to lead you, and I'll miss you, and I'll always remember these as the glory days."

Mr. Coffey took the editor's job at the Times Mirror Company-owned Dallas Times-Herald , a post he held for less than a year before heading to the Los Angeles Times , Times Mirror's flagship newspaper. At the Times , colleagues say, Mr. Coffey continued his slow morph into a careful corporate operator. He prodded his writers to try to empathize with their subjects in a way some felt was unseemly. "He told us that we oughta keep in mind what the subject of the story would think of the coverage, and if it was going to upset them, then we should reconsider it," said a former Times reporter.

Mr. Coffey's critics at the Times say that his cautiousness resulted in his toning down several tough investigative pieces. Staff members complain that Mr. Coffey "defanged" a tough profile of the Dow Jones Company and sat on an inflammatory story about Jerry Weintraub, a movie producer and friend of President George Bush, even though the reporters felt they had the goods. "He was consistently a force for the softening of stories, not the strengthening of them," said one former Times reporter. "It was all in the name of fairness, but from our perspective, he seemed to be more concerned with not offending the rich and powerful." Indeed, Mr. Coffey established himself as the print journalist with a television executive's social connections; he counts among his friends Walt Disney Company chairman Michael Eisner and ABC anchorwoman Diane Sawyer.

"There's always a tension between editors and reporters, and a top editor usually gets the hottest of the hot potatoes," Mr. Coffey said. "I'm sure I did look at ways in which a particular story should be reported … I don't hesitate to say, 'This is the way we go.'"

Mr. Coffey is remembered at the Times primarily for heading a major redesign of the paper and winning five Pulitzer prizes. But he is also remembered as an editor in chief who essentially plotzed when a recession in the early 90's forced him to make hard decisions about what bureaus to cut back. Colleagues say Mr. Coffey inspired the anger of his staff by being "cautious to a fault." He eventually left the Times , his friends say, because of fears that Mark Willes, the cereal company executive who was hired by Times Mirror to make its newspapers profitable or else (see New York Newsday ), would demean the paper. Mr. Coffey has maintained a carefully diplomatic stance on Mr. Willes since leaving. "We parted on friendly terms," he said, reverting to his public relations mode. "I was just interested in having a new professional chapter in my life."

Perhaps now is not the best time for Mr. Coffey to be making the jump to television. ABC's news operation is currently in turmoil. Disney, ABC's owner, has been on a tear lately, demanding stiff cutbacks in the news division; eight on-air correspondents have recently left the network. And Mr. Arledge's move will likely prompt a round of executive departures as well. To top it all off, Dick Wald, the network's 67-year-old "ethics czar," is expected to retire soon, leaving Mr. Coffey as the sole line of defense between Mr. Westin and the tough-spot news calls that can quickly imperil a network executive.

"If Shelby Coffey knows what he's doing, that would be a surprise," said one exasperated veteran ABC News producer. "There are a lot of people at ABC who don't know what we're doing."

Then there is the sticky question of leadership. Even after Mr. Arledge ceded control to Mr. Westin, ABC staff members were left confused about who is actually in charge. An ABC press release announcing Mr. Westin's promotion noted that Mr. Arledge "will continue as chairman and be consulted on all major decisions." Messrs. Westin and Coffey will have to summon all their powers of political acuity to not just fill Mr. Arledge's shoes, but to avoid tripping over them.

"There's a lot for me to learn," Mr. Coffey said.

No sooner had Lillian Ross' tell-all book about her years with William Shawn hit the bookstores than a mysterious unsigned parody started to make the rounds in the offices of The New Yorker . It soon found a home on the 16th-floor bulletin board where staff members advertise their used goods and summer shares. Entitled "Memoirs of a Sub-Mistress," the document gives few clues about its origin; it was written on a typewriter by someone with a particularly droll tone and no shortage of scorn for Ms. Ross and her book. Here but Not Here , which details Ms. Ross' lengthy love affair with the late New Yorker editor, has come under attack from those who accuse Ms. Ross of self-aggrandizement at the expense of Mr. Shawn's widow and children. The parody of the book purports to be written by Shawn's "real" mistress. Here are a few choice excerpts.

"The second time I slept with Mr. Shawn, he asked me to call him Bill," the piece begins. "I have decided to come forward and tell the story of our romance not merely to make money. I want the world to know that it was me Mr. Shawn loved, and not Miss Ross.

"Mr. Shawn presided over The New Yorker as if it were a hospice. Everything was done to keep the writers calm and to hide their true condition of mediocrity from them. A few exceptional writers, of course (Vlad Nabokov, Jerry Salinger, me) offered Mr. Shawn some relief from his depleting daily rounds of kindly prevarication.…

"We made each other happy. He loved me for my charm and attractiveness and increasing literary importance. I loved him for himself–weird shy little man that he was.

"My story is not unusual," the piece concludes. "All over the world women are being seduced by their bosses and set up in little apartments like the one Mr. Shawn set me up in, 10 blocks down from Miss Ross'. But I need to express myself and I trust that my literary gifts (and the pictures I took of Mr. Shawn in drag) will see me through and make my publisher's dreams of avarice come true."

Suspicion initially fell on New Yorker editors Roger Angell and Henry Finder, occasional authors of interoffice parodies. But both men denied involvement, and the trail went cold.

So who wrote "Memoirs of a Sub-Mistress?" Off the Record has learned the real identity of the parodist: It's long-time New Yorker scribe Janet Malcolm, who sent the piece to friends at the magazine from her home in Massachusetts. "I wrote a parody," Ms. Malcolm told Off the Record. Was it entitled "Memoirs of a Sub-Mistress?" "That's the one," she said. Ms. Malcolm didn't want to elaborate.

Faxed a copy of the piece, Ms. Ross said she was disappointed to learn that the "sub-mistress" did not exist. "Are you sure it was written by Janet Malcolm?" Ms. Ross asked. "I was so looking forward to having a drink with this woman." Asked if she was perturbed to be so mocked by a colleague, Ms. Ross said, "She's Janet Malcolm and I'm Lillian Ross. What else can I say?"

The floor plan for the new Condé Nast building at 4 Times Square was recently posted in the lobby of the old Condé Nast building at 350 Madison Avenue, resolving the initial questions of who goes where: The New Yorker gets the top floor, Self and Gourmet the bottom, and Vanity Fair , Vogue and Bride's are interspersed in the middle. Now that they know their placement on Condé Nast's architectural equivalent of a masthead, the company's employees have turned their attention to another pressing matter: the fate of Margit and Helmut.

Margit and Helmut Larsen are German immigrants who have run the newsstand in the lobby of 350 Madison Avenue for the last 15 years. From the post near the elevator bank, the Larsens have come to know many of the company's employees by name. "They're an institution," said GQ editor Art Cooper. But despite their years of service, a Condé Nast source reports, the Larsens were dismayed to learn recently that they may not be invited to operate the newsstand in the new Condé Nast building. "When the map [of 4 Times Square] was posted, Margit was really mad because there was no newsstand," said a friend of the couple. "Her face was red and she was saying, 'No one will give us an answer!'"

Over the years, the Larsens have developed close ties with many of the higher-ups at Condé Nast. The couple prepares the daily ration of newspapers and magazines for Advance Publications chairman S.I. Newhouse Jr., and are said to be as familiar with masthead rank as the maître d' at Michael's; their preferred customers maintain private accounts which, of course, are billed to Condé Nast. GQ staff members report that they have fact-checked the words to German lieder using Mr. Larsen as a source. And Vogue invited the Larsens to the magazine's Christmas party last year. (A very agitated Vogue P.R. person specified that it wasn't editor Anna Wintour herself who did the inviting, and that she doesn't actually know them.)

But the Larsens are perhaps best known for their sometimes alarming attacks on patrons who unknowingly commit the high crime of perusal without intent to buy. Getting yelled at for flipping through the Larsens' newsstand is "a right of passage at Condé Nast," said one Vogue staff member. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter said he once saw a hapless patron pick up a magazine without paying for it. "It was too horrible," he said. "I don't want to describe it."

Still, the Larsens have many boosters. "They're far better than the people who preceded them," Mr. Cooper said. "When my wife was editor in chief of Mademoiselle , she violated the 'you read it, you buy it rule,' and the guy came over and poured a bottle of grapefruit juice over her head." Indeed, Mr. Carter said he'd be "very distressed" if the Larsens weren't invited to 4 Times Square. "They're part of the soul of the whole building," he said.

Ms. Larsen refused to comment, but a Condé Nast spokesman confirmed that the couple's fate was up in the air. The newsstand at 4 Times Square will be operated by the building owners and managers, the Durst Organization, and the Larsens will have to compete with other vendors for the job. "Margit and Helmut will definitely be given consideration by the Dursts," said the spokesman. Douglas Durst said the decision would be "strictly financial." "We would not normally consider them," he added, "but Condé Nast has asked us to and we will." Mr. Durst anticipates a decision within the year.

You can reach Off the Record by e–mail at wstjohn@observer.com.

Lillian Ross, a great reporter and pathfinder of literary nonfiction, lived with Shawn and with him raised an adopted son. Their life together, written by Miss Ross as a love story, spanned more than 40 years of Shawn's married life and proceeded with the acknowledgment of Mrs. Shawn. Appearing alongside an informative but more predictable memoir of William Shawn's New Yorker by the writer Ved Mehta, Miss Ross' unexpected reporting from home buries once and for all the mild, prudish, eccentrically mannered "Mr. Shawn" of legend and ridicule, restoring to life a Bill Shawn who is far more complex, romantic, earthy, masculine and human.

Mr. Mehta's memoir will claim fresh space beside James Thurber's and Brendan Gill's yellowing best sellers, The Years with Ross and Here at "The New Yorker." However, it ultimately fails to go beyond its own boyish hero-worship. Even in death, Shawn remains in service to the needs of his writers. As Mr. Mehta's colleague Janet Flanner declared, "It's as if, Mehta, he were beyond our human conception."

But the reader has long since grown weary of that Mr. Shawn. Saintliness was only one aspect of the man. Six years after William Shawn's death from a heart attack on Dec. 8, 1992, Lillian Ross is finally taking the story in a new direction. Miss Ross' man is flesh and blood, a whole being. Hers is the first sighting of the Shawn who will claim attention in the future.

The reader of Mr. Mehta's memoir, meanwhile, may need reminding that William Shawn was a magazine editor. From the moment of his arrival at The New Yorker in 1959 to his departure 30 years later, the author attributed magical powers to the wonderful Mr. Shawn. Mr. Mehta's Shawn is mysterious, secretive, omnipotent, even "otherworldly." A mind reader, a master of concealment, he is to this memoir as Frank Morgan is to the 1939 M-G-M Wizard of Oz , appearing to our dependent, yellow-brick-road travelers in one guise of authority after another.

Under the jurisdiction of the "saintly and quiet" Shawn, the awestruck young writer is initiated into a "sacred editing process" in which he learns that "a writer and an editor had a higher calling than self-glorification-that they were partners in a search for truth." The great and powerful Shawn finds the magazine's "latest inductee" an apartment to live in, meanwhile supplying an office at the magazine and a drawing account from which to pay his rent. In addition, a charge account is established for him at an East Side grocer's. Meanwhile, as the paternal Mr. Shawn treats young Mr. Mehta's every word with deep respect, submitting his writing to "no fewer than 16 readings," it suddenly becomes clear that Mr. Mehta is telling a conversion story.

Ordained in Shawn's New Yorker , Mr. Mehta has traded not just the worlds of India and Oxford for America, but the world of blindness for the world of sight. As a nonsighted person in India, he explains, he was treated as if he were handicapped. At Shawn's magazine, he is allowed to be free of those strictures. Not only does Shawn consult with Mr. Mehta about the work of visual artists whom Mr. Mehta cannot see except through the eyes of another, but, with Shawn's approval, Mr. Mehta begins a lifelong habit of writing as if he were sighted. On these terms, it is no wonder that the living Shawn was so often understood in a biblical sense.

Miss Ross, by contrast, shows us that as the editor in chief of one of the most influential and insular institutions in American literature and journalism, Shawn was both more alive to his work and more depressed by it than we have been led to believe.

In 1952, when Raoul Fleischmann, owner of The New Yorker , chose Shawn to succeed Harold Ross as editor, Ross (no relation to Lillian) begged Shawn not to accept the offer, warning that the job would literally kill him. But Shawn, who had been managing editor since 1939, felt he had no choice. He cared deeply about The New Yorker and about its writers and artists, and he believed that he could not abandon them at that crucial turning point in the magazine's life. Characteristically, he gave no thought to his own life's needs; he did "what was best for the magazine." For the next 35 years, seven days a week, sometimes grinding all day and night, Shawn gave himself to the unending job of bringing the work of others, in his words, to a "state of something like perfection."

In truth, he had found a hiding place. "He did this work so easily, so smoothly, so quietly, so anonymously, that he could make it seem he wasn't doing anything at all," writes Miss Ross. "He could make it seem he wasn't there. He did not have to exist. He did not have to think about existing. Giving his help was a reflex action. It was life-giving-in one way-to lose himself in other creative people."

In another way, Miss Ross reveals, it was a trap. The very qualities that made Shawn a great editor were also symptoms of a lifelong problem. He could not do for himself what he could easily do for others. As a hard-working schoolboy in Chicago, he had helped his classmates with their homework. In high school, he managed the baseball team and, as president of the class of 1925, received high praise for his "extraordinary executive and administrative knowledge." Most telling of all, at age 14 Bill Shawn started and finished a novel for an older friend. Then, when he began writing another novel, this time for himself alone, he abandoned it, telling his mother, "It is not what I wish to write"-the very words he would use some 70 years later, when, after being fired from The New Yorker , he again attempted to write for himself alone.

The adult Shawn came to think of the job of editor as a form of "nonexistence." It was, he once told Miss Ross, "the ultimate cell." Imprisoned by his duties on the 19th floor at 25 West 43rd Street, he sometimes felt total despair. He grieved for a "secret self"-the writer he might have been and still sometimes hoped to be. In his marriage, meanwhile, he was even more suffocated and full of grief.

By 1952, Shawn had been married for 24 years to a woman he had met on a blind date at age 17. Cecille Lyon, a features writer at the Chicago Daily News , had given up work to devote herself to Bill and their family. She had five children in six years but only three survived: two sons, Wallace and Allen, and a daughter, Mary, who had been born brain-damaged and was sent away to a special school. The Shawns lived in an apartment at 1150 Fifth Avenue and spent summers in rented houses in Bronxville. The marriage was a shell. As Shawn later described his life at home to Miss Ross, "I am there but I am not there." He cared about Cecille and loved his children and went off every morning to edit The New Yorker , but inside he had to remind himself that he was alive.

In a voice that one associates more with Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett than with the blithe-spirited magazine that Shawn had inherited in 1952, he questioned his existence as frankly and desperately as he questioned himself: "Why am I more ghost than man?"; "Who has declared me null and void?" His own death, which he had feared all his life, "was always with him," Miss Ross writes. Each morning Shawn would marvel, "I'm still here."

This voice, which we have never heard before, helps explain, in part, how his New Yorker became the dominant moral and spiritual conscience of the cold war. A man attuned daily to his own existential doomsday would logically introduce to national consciousness the dangers of nuclear testing, American policy in Vietnam, pesticides in the ecosystem, aerosol propellants in the atmosphere, nuclear statecraft and proliferation, homelessness-subjects that often became widely recognized as crises only after appearing in Shawn's pages. His peculiar paradox was that as editor of The New Yorker , he could change the world but not himself. With no idea how to free himself from his inner turmoil, no notion of whom or even how to ask for help, he remained stuck and helpless.

Enter Miss Ross. They had been working together at The New Yorker since 1945. From the beginning there was a powerful sense of likeness between them. They were two narcissists, and instead of repelling each other, they felt profoundly whole together. Miss Ross, however, had no inkling of Shawn's agony at first. Soon, too, Shawn's torment was aggravated by the fact that he had fallen in love with her. On the day Miss Ross' soon-to-be-famous profile of Ernest Hemingway appeared in the magazine, he took her to lunch at the Algonquin; calling her "darling," he managed to hint at his feelings. Love poems and messages followed, appearing on Miss Ross' desk. Then came his first awkward declaration of love. He meanwhile made clear that he could never leave his wife and children but at the same time left them every night to stand under Miss Ross' fifth-floor apartment window. Eventually, by way of distance and indecision, the relationship deepened, and one day, needing no words between them, Shawn and Miss Ross exchanged a look, left the offices of The New Yorker , took a taxi to the Plaza, got a room and went to bed.

Miss Ross' dual gift, Shawn once pointed out, is for observation and invisibility. Her steely, stainless portraits of Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, Adlai Stevenson and Harry Winston achieved a high degree of clarity in part because of her absence from the scene. Her characterization of Bill Shawn is no less daring or sharp for her involvement in the story. As a romantic (his favorite words were "magical" and "enchanting") and as a suitor, he lives in these pages as he has nowhere before. As Miss Ross helped him let go of deeply ingrained fears and phobias, Shawn "revealed, without apology, that he yearned for a taste, just a taste, of some of the luxury items that were so often advertised in his magazine": Porthault, Pratesi, Baccarat, Scalamandré. Their adventures buying yellow bathing trunks for Shawn and then making their getaway to a Catskills resort have the wacky romantic appeal of oddball French films of the early 1970's. Their lovemaking, writes Miss Ross, was passionate, tender and inventive, their zest for each other endless. The supposedly mild Shawn had a strong sexual urge; so strong that in their first weeks together, recalls Miss Ross, she found his energy "alarming." Shawn loved women (Miss Ross' catalogue of her man's tastes is among the most memorable set pieces in her work), and though Miss Ross does not say so explicitly, it is clear that the freedom she helped Shawn to find allowed him in turn to be freer, easier, more himself with all women.

In time, the affair turned them into a couple. As a couple, they managed to live a life that, according to Miss Ross, felt "intrinsically normal" yet not "ordinary" at all. They spent every Christmas Eve together, while Shawn gave Thanksgiving and Christmas Day to Cecille and their children. Every day they met for breakfast, went to work together at The New Yorker , met again for lunch and again for supper, after which Shawn would drop Miss Ross at her apartment and go back to his family, a half-mile up Fifth Avenue. He would return to watch television: the 11 o'clock news and, at 11:30, The Saint -the series about that other master of concealment. From there, Miss Ross' account turns opaque; presumably, at some point in the night, Shawn would return to his own apartment.

Lillian Ross has demonstrated in her classic pieces of reporting that selection of fact and arrangement of dialogue and observable incident can by themselves accrue meaning. Appearing to be a cheerful, disinterested bystander, Miss Ross is, in fact, a highly judgmental reporter, formidable in her approval and disapproval; for students of journalism, her work and the principles that guided her act as a medium of instruction.

Here but Not Here depends heavily on selectivity. Miss Ross' love of her own work is stressed to the point of sternness, as are the unchanging joys of the love she and Shawn found in each other, as is their sex life, which, according to Miss Ross, "never deteriorated." Meanwhile, shopworn words like "fidelity" and "unfaithful" and "adultery" and "mistress" are omitted. Instead, Miss Ross is clear and straightforward as she describes the feelings created by the complicated arrangements governing the private lives of what in the end amounted to 11 people. She cuts straight to the bone, remembering sadness and pain and pity and rage and guilt and disappointment, and she takes honest inventory of her own anger and "explosions" when, in the early days of their liaison, Shawn would leave her to "check in a few blocks north." Ultimately, though, Shawn made theirs the love story-Cecille, writes Miss Ross, "was in truth outside of us"-and although it's strange that Mrs. Shawn never divorced her husband but instead went along with the arrangements necessary for his life with Miss Ross, it's not surprising.

Shawn never integrated himself. In "doing what was best for the magazine," he expressed a father's sense of responsibility to a family. But fathers, we have discovered a generation later, will be truly responsible to others if they are also responsible to themselves. Revived and kept alive by allowing himself to love Miss Ross, he simultaneously remained in a marriage in which he could not be real, either to himself or his family. Shawn never told his children about his new love or his new adopted son. He never truthfully explained his absences. Rejoined with Miss Ross after a night apart, Shawn sometimes admitted that he felt suicidal.

For all its remembered joy, this is a sad, sometimes tragic book. Miss Ross' description of her last supper with Shawn is haunting. His eyes, always pure sky-blue, had that night turned black. The next morning, on the private telephone line previously used only by herself and Shawn, Miss Ross learns the news from Mrs. Shawn. With her son, Erik, she races to the Shawns' apartment to find the door held only partway open by Shawn's grown-up son Wallace, who, in shock, turns away to ask his mother's permission to let in Lillian and Erik Ross. Death has suddenly reversed Shawn's families: Those on the inside are now outside.

The scene is harrowing, and not only because everyone involved tries to meet each other with dignity in Shawn's death, but because, for his survivors, the hurt in that moment seems to come as much from the life in which they've all been made complicit as from the death they must now face alone.

It is this scene, more than any other, that puts distance between Miss Ross and Mr. Mehta. When the Shawn family adopted the young Ved Mehta for Thanksgivings and other family gatherings-"I imagined that I was taken into the family fold as a fifth member"-the writer focused his already romantic feelings about the " New Yorker family" on the inner circle of Shawns, but with no further penetration or insight. It is enough for Mr. Mehta to record his pleasure, and pain, at being taken in as a young man by what seemed to him an ideal family. "I never stopped comparing myself and my family unfavorably with the Shawns," he admits, and the pathos intensifies for the reader of Lillian Ross' memoir, who now knows all too well the other, more grown-up version of the sadly dysfunctional Shawns.

While Miss Ross rather overconscientiously speaks only for herself, Mr. Mehta risks speaking for a large and disparate group of staff writers, with varying results. In rare events such as the blackout of 1965, the plural voice succeeds at re-creating the powerful feeling of family and community and collective conscience that Shawn's New Yorker engendered in its members and readers. At other times, such as when the staff split over important issues, most crucially the firing of Shawn in 1987 and his replacement by Robert Gottlieb, the first-person plural seems the least trustworthy voice for the story.

Although Mr. Mehta's text is documented with much new information about Shawn's final days, it is also tainted by bitterness. Mr. Mehta portrays the magazine's new owner, S.I. Newhouse Jr., as a brutish stepfather usurping the place of the perfect father. A snob and a sorehead, he submits Mr. Gottlieb's first Comment to the kind of nit-picking it would have received under Shawn's pencil. Covering the same period, Miss Ross restrains herself mightily, keeping her eye on the man and off the office politics, in which she herself played a dramatic role. From that point of view, the role Shawn played in his own demise becomes clearer.

Earlier, Miss Ross recalls questioning Shawn's "compulsion to be utterly forgiving and kind to people who were rude or cruel or opportunistic or destructive or insulting to him." As both she and Shawn were Jewish, she would wonder to herself, "Why is this man trying to be more Christian than a Christian?" In the early 1980's, with storm clouds forming over the business office at the magazine, Shawn failed to support a protective purchase offer from financier Warren Buffett in the name of fairness to New Yorker owner Peter Fleischmann-who later turned around and betrayed Shawn. Shawn's loyalty to Fleischmann and his ultimate regret at having turned away Mr. Buffett can be read against him. More than once as the magazine changed hands, Shawn's fair-mindedness extravagantly shortchanged not only himself, but the very writers and artists he had always fought to protect.

Lovingly re-created by Mr. Mehta, Shawn's New Yorker exists as a ship in a bottle-it seems impossible that as recently as a decade ago there was still room in the culture for a remarkably prosperous general-interest magazine that was written and edited for the reader without the influence of the publisher, the advertiser, the pollster and the publicist, much less the voting membership of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Mr. Mehta makes astute points about the paternalism of Shawn's New Yorker and the "crippling dependence" created in a certain kind of writer by an editor as selfless and idiosyncratic as Shawn. The "elusive," external "Mr. Shawn" of Mr. Mehta's page 414 is the same mysterious, selfless saint we met on page 9.

He is not the same man as Miss Ross' gifted, flawed, pained, inspired Bill Shawn, a failure in his own eyes, guilty to the point of contemplating suicide but vowing still to fight his despair. This is the leader who proves, as Abraham Lincoln did during the Civil War, that greatness lies in falling short of perfection. On his final day at The New Yorker , having lost the battle but won the war, Bill Shawn wrote a farewell letter to his staff. He chose 160 words to say goodbye; six times he used the word love. "Love," he said, "has been the controlling emotion, and love is the essential word."