Well, Valentine’s Day is in the air, and it’s probably too late to plan a tingly night on the town. Luckily, there’s an easy way to experience years of Manhattan nightlife—you know, back when it was gritty and glamorous—and all that nostalgia won’t cost you a thing. Composed of 28 stunning black-and-white photographs, the New York at Night exhibition at MoMA recalls champagne at El Morocco, and the fun of a party at Studio 54. Having access to an old boom box and some Gershwin tapes would help, but you can still make do without all that fancy stuff: The fantasy exhibit, easy to miss in the rush to get upstairs, will be around for the rest of the month.

The images, by well-known artists like Diane Arbus, Cindy Sherman, Berenice Abbott, Alfred Stieglitz and Garry Winogrand, are on display in the museum’s lobby, and all of this inspiration is gratis. “You can even see it from the outside as well … during the hours the museum is closed,” said Eva Respini, an assistant curator of photography at MoMA. Bundle up! Hung on a single wall in front of a few benches, the scope of work here is intimate and manageable. Said Ms. Respini: “We wanted to put together an exhibition from thinking about the city as a kind of muse.” For love, that is.

—David Foxley

Nursing Neuroses

Wally Go Lightly! Woody Allen might have the whole male-Jewish-neurotic thing on lockdown, but when it comes to the finer points of post-9/11 free-floating anxiety, his Manhattan co-star, playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, comes in not too far behind. He’s currently in an Off Broadway revival of The Fever, written by Mr. Shawn himself. The show was first performed in 1990, but considering its themes of war and privilege, its ideas still hold up. There aren’t many thinkers who grew up with as much N.Y.C. street cred as the loveable, homunculus-y Wallace Shawn; he’s the son of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn. And now you can meet Wally! Audiences are invited onto the stage for a glass of champagne with Mr. Shawn before the show begins. God knows we all need a drink or two these days.

The Fever might be easier to take than the New York Public Library’s latest hoo-ha, unambitiously entitled “Was the 20th Century a Mistake?” On Feb. 16, director Director Paul Holdengräber plays host to another man in touch with his anxieties, Werner Herzog. Expect tons of Mr. Herzog’s devoted following to show up, Wellbutrin and Lexapro on hand.

—Sara Vilkomerson

For Punks and Lovers: Lifetime, Explosions

Explosions in the Sky’s 2003 album, The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place, was a cascade of guitar arpeggios and rousing peaks of operatic proportions. The hardware is rock ’n’ roll, the sound is orchestral; think Mogwai meets James Horner. Cinematic without being treacly, Earth was by far the most moving music to emerge from the “prog-rock” cacophony. Now, setting out on their first real tour in many years, the Austin-based band will do several New York laps: first at Warsaw on Feb. 19, then Conan and the Wordless Music Series on Feb. 20 and, finally, Webster Hall on March 20, all to promote their new album, All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, which comes out on Feb. 20. Expect another miracle: After all, with its amazing soundtrack, the band saved the film Friday Night Lights from becoming a flaccid Varsity Blues remake.

—Jake Brooks

Early-90’s New Jersey punk superstars Lifetime officially reunited in 2005. Their latest tour--in support of their new self-titled CD, out in stores now--is only seven dates long (they sold out Bowery Ballroom on Feb. 10), but the band’s influence on the New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia punk and hardcore scenes is everlasting. In 1997, Lifetime splintered into several other minorly successful bands, but they remained legendary thanks to two seminal CD’s: 1995’s Hello Bastards and 1997’s Jersey’s Best Dancers. Now that they’ve recovered from their much-too-soon split, Lifetime’s new album promises a sophisticated synthesis of punk and hard-core roots for a fan base that has had a decade to mature in its own right.

—Nicole Brydson

Weather’s Weird, But How Are the Birds?

Nature is a four-letter word in this town. Plenty of New Yorkers love being outside, but roaming the untamed wilds is for N.Y.U. drama majors. For most of us, spending a quiet Sunday at home with The Sopranos is seclusion enough.

But the city’s sudden Great Climate Change Awakening this past year might have changed all that, too.

The coming flood has certainly put a new cast on the Annual Great Backyard Bird Count in Prospect Park. Beginning on Saturday, Feb. 17, guides will lead groups on an hour-and-a-half-long ramble through the Brooklyn green space as part of this three-day program. Sponsored by the National Audubon Society and Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology, the GBBC began 10 years ago as an easy way for scientists to collect information on migratory patterns.

Since then, the focus has shifted closer to climate change. So how bad is it really?

“The idea was to get a snapshot of what the birds are doing during the winter,” said Pat Leonard, a spokesperson at Cornell’s bird lab. “What we’re noticing is some birds are expanding their range a little further north.”

Last year, more than 60,000 people from all over North America took part in the project. “Understanding how you relate to the natural world is important,” said Paul Green, Audubon’s director of citizen science. “This is the world that supports all of us. And this time of year—especially if you’re working—you’re only outside for a few minutes.”

—David Foxley

Much of what follows below comes from looking around in the (fascinating) New Yorker Archive at the New York Public Library. I'd planned to blog it soon enough; Dame Muriel's death Friday makes me hustle this into code.

In 1957, when Spark was 39 and unknown, someone at the English publisher Hamish Hamilton sent along to a friend at The New Yorker a startling story that had lately been published (in a magazine called Botteghe Oscure) by an unknown called Muriel Spark. "The Portobello Road" is a ghost story told rather matter of factly by a dead woman, who late in the piece describes her death with a thunderclap line: "He looked as if he would murder me and he did, he stuffed hay into my mouth until it could hold no more, kneeling on my body to keep it still, holding both my wrists tight in his huge left hand."

(FWIW: Alice Sebold, whose novel The Lovely Bones is narrated posthumously by a murdered woman, too, told me via email that she had never read The Portobello Road).

The story excited The New Yorker's fiction department, and an assistant editor named Rachel MacKenzie wrote to Spark and asked to see more. Spark regarded the magazine as the best magazine in the world, and she began to submit. Over the next year and a half, the New Yorker rejected many pieces of work, including several of Spark's better stories (The Go-Away Bird; The Black Madonna; Bang-bang You're Dead; Come Along, Marjorie; and The Curtain Blown by the Breeze) and a chunk of the novel Memento Mori. Spark seems to have been too dark for the magazine. It was thrown by the shocking way she shifted moods, from comic to straight to sinister. Though even as he turned her down, editor William Shawn said, "I think this woman writes marvelously" and cited the fine turns she made from one sentence to another.

And MacKenzie (who was also nursing prospect Philip Roth) developed a keen feeling for Spark. She told Spark of her strong hope that she would become a regular contributor. She got Spark's first four novels as they came out in rapid succession, passed them around the office, and gushed over them to Spark.

In 1959 the New Yorker finally accepted a story, a fairly straight (for Spark) Austrian travel grotesque called The Ormolu Clock, and took a year to run the piece, even as it continued to reject others. At new year's 1961, MacKenzie expressed the fervent hope to Spark that she wouldn't give up on the magazine.

Then everything changed. In August Spark sent MacKenzie her sixth novel, and MacKenzie promptly telegrammed her, "I love this book." Shawn also did backflips, deciding to devote an entire issue of the magazine to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, treatment I believe it had reserved till then to Hiroshima. It paid Spark $6000 (!) and made only minor changes. Dickering ensued over the sequence of publication of the book in England and the U.S. (The Scottish National Library displays the magazine's cover, and maintains, dubiously, that publication in England actually beat The New Yorker—but who cares.)

The magazine came out in October 1961 and the effect was, as Spark wrote to MacKenzie, "miraculous." The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is a wonderful book, humorous and accessible and featuring an appealing main character, and Muriel Spark was suddenly an international star. The novel became a play and a movie (remember the Rod McKuen title song? I don't, but it was part of the film's success).

Spark soon had a $750-a-year first-refusal deal with the magazine that allowed her to quit reviewing books, and when she came to New York in January 1962, the editors put her up at the Algonquin and got her the hardest-to-get tickets on Broadway: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

Later that year, too, Spark moved to New York and got an office at the magazine. This went badly. Within a couple of weeks, Spark curtly shifted camp to the Beaux Arts hotel, from which she wrote to MacKenzie and Shawn that someone else could be using the office "more regularly than I would be doing..." This was a piece of polite hypocrisy: there had been a break. My sense is that the relationship with MacKenzie was much too emotional for cool Muriel. For instance, when she heard of Spark's father's death, MacKenzie telegrammed her, "MURIEL DARLING...."

Spark soon had a new editor, Robert Henderson, with whom she had a much more formal relationship. He pronounced himself "a little baffled as well as fascinated" by the wartime story The House of the Famous Poet, but he had the wisdom to help get it into the magazine. It's simply astonishing. Read it.

Not that things went so well. Spark didn't care much for informal America. Over the next year or two she seems to have come and gone at The New Yorker without being too impressed by the Park Avenue piano parties and Algonquin food fights that have made myths of lesser writers' lives. Before long she had moved on to Italy.

The magazine influenced her. Shawn evidently pushed her to do international fiction, and in 1965 she undertook The Mandelbaum Gate, a would-be thriller about a Catholic convert's dangerous pilgrimage to Jordan during the time of the Eichmann trial. Several parts of it were published in the New Yorker, but they have a panoramic longwinded tone that didn't become the mercurial Spark. Later it again published an entire novel, The Driver's Seat (1970), and again this was made into a film (starring Elizabeth Taylor). If I say so myself, that book is awful.

The lessons. The New Yorker did great things for Spark though it also required of her an apprenticeship she didn't really need, and then when it had created her reputation, published mostly minor work. During that apprenticeship (and a little after), it overlooked her most interesting work: The Comforters, The Ballad of Peckham Rye, The Go-Away Bird, The Girls of Slender Means. As for the flaming out of the MacKenzie-Spark relationship, that too is something oft repeated in the annals of editing. Though it has a good zing to it. (Both women, now dead, were the source of lesbian rumors). Did the New Yorker hurt Spark? You can't blame that on the magazine, she seems to have gone downhill on her own.

I wrote to Spark last month requesting an interview about this, and though Dame Muriel answered some questions flatly, via her agent, she declined to say any more about MacKenzie than the fact that she had been her editor at the New Yorker when she first contributed. "She later changed to another editor."

With Tom Wolfe it mostly goes like this: The better he is, the more powerful his pyrotechnic prose, the more you hate him–the more you hate his hard-nosed politics, his fancy personal style, his magnificently self-assured talent. Ever notice how nobody cares anymore about Wolfe the art critic? He can diss modern painting and modern architecture till the starched collar on his white shirt starts to wilt–so what? And nobody's seething about A Man in Full , though the author will insist that this second novel was a huge hit and controversial, too. They certainly seethed about The Bonfire of the Vanities –remember the howls of all those anguished liberals? Tom Wolfe triumphant is almost too bright to behold; to see him clearly, catch him when the batteries are low and the dazzle of his trademark exuberance dimmed. Catch him when he's stopped spinning at optimum speed, at the first sign of a wobble.

He wobbles early and often in Hooking Up , an eclectic collection that includes recent magazine work, a novella and his notorious two-part profile of New Yorker editor William Shawn (it's still delightful, 35 years later; still deadly). Mixed in with the expected virtuoso riffs and badass contrarian moxie, there's a nasty echo. It's the noise of a cranky old man hitting the typewriter keys too hard. He's stiff with prejudice and stuck rehearsing the same old tricks, like the sad white-suit schtick.

The introduction, a bit of fluff turned out for Tatler , is a kind of sour love letter to America, brassy and omnipotent on the cusp of the millennium: "Americans could boast of a freedom as well as a power unparalleled in the history of the world." But they don't boast enough to satisfy the rah-rah author of The Right Stuff . They feel guilty, these free and powerful Americans; they dote on youth, and the kids are sexually promiscuous, and the dot-com billionaires don't dress right, and the cultured types are all slavish in their regard for Europe. (What a moldy old chestnut, that last one: "In matters intellectual and artistic, [America] remained an obedient colony of Europe.") Mr. Wolfe, not ashamed of boasting, thinks of himself as the guy who nails down the specifics, who does the research and the ground-zero reporting; it's disappointing to see him wafting these ultra-light generalizations.

But the next two pieces–one about the birth of Silicon Valley, the other about real and illusory technological advances in the digital world and in neuroscience–remind the reader that Tom Wolfe not only knows how to tell a story but knows also which story needs to be told. They loop around, these essays; they're full of stylish swerves and unexpected connections. The reader is a pampered guest. Delicious moments are prepared and presented with flourish. A passage about the pared-down corporate structure pioneered by Bob Noyce at Intel (he did his best to eliminate hierarchy) leads to the observation that, under the Spartan Noyce, there were no "executive lunches," which leads in turn to a soaring aria about the "sumptuous," "ineffable experience" of expense-account lunches "back East" in New York City: "[I]t was Mount Olympus in mid-Manhattan every day from 12:30 to 3:00 p.m., and you emerged into the pearl-gray light of the city with such ambrosia pumping through your veins that even the clotted streets with the garbagemen backing up their grinder trucks and yelling, ''Mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back, 'mon back,' as if talking Urban Chippewa–even this became part of the bliss of one's eminence in the corporate world." That is Tom Wolfe in full.

The only substantial previously unpublished essay in Hooking Up is "My Three Stooges," the author's response to John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving, each of whom said things Mr. Wolfe didn't like about A Man in Full . In other words, we are treated to an essay about why his writing is better than his critics would have you believe. Not a pretty sight. To make his case, poor wounded Mr. Wolfe has to exaggerate the wrongs done to him by Messrs. Updike and Mailer: He claims that they declared his new novel "anathema," whereas, in fact, they praised it faintly (which was about right). And he has to inflate the literary throw-weight of John Irving, who does indeed despise Mr. Wolfe's novels. But can one accept John Irving as a judge on a par with Messrs. Mailer and Updike? According to its author, A Man in Full is an "alarmingly visible" example of "the likely new direction in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century literature." Surely, then, Mr. Wolfe has better things to do than flail at straw men and buffoons.

Things get worse: "My Three Stooges" is followed by Ambush at Fort Bragg , a novella serialized in Rolling Stone and easily Mr. Wolfe's weakest fiction. It reads like a purpose-built validation of the Updike-Mailer thesis, which is that Mr. Wolfe is good but not great, an entertainer but not an artist.

In Ambush at Fort Bragg , he certainly stirs up the old Schadenfreude : If your idea of entertainment is watching loathsome people do loathsome things to themselves and others, this is the ticket. A slimy TV executive, Irv Durtscher (the name says it all), is the producer of a gotcha! network news program called Day & Night . When we meet him, he's at work on a show about three soldiers who most likely beat to death a gay soldier in some dive near Fort Bragg. Irv entraps them with hidden cameras and microphones, then skillfully edits out the reasonable doubt and airs the package prime time. On the cutting room floor is one redneck soldier's hair-raising account of a firefight in Mogadishu, and also his forceful argument against gays in the military. The gay-bashing bad guys are in some respects noble, the crusading good guys in nearly all respects beneath contempt. The idea behind the story–its agenda–is to topple political prejudice, to turn the tables on the sanctimonious liberal media. But there are big old Wolfe tracks everywhere: The manipulations of the author, in this bit of mean-spirited realism, block the view. The story isn't told, it's set up, just like the three ambushed soldiers.

The treat at the end of Hooking Up is the first republication of "Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street's Land of the Walking Dead" and "Lost in the Whichy Thickets: The New Yorker "–a powerful pair of sucker punches thrown from the pages of Clay Felker's New York (in those days–1965–it was the Sunday supplement to the New York Herald Tribune ). Both blows landed square on the chin of William Shawn ("faithful hierophant!"), just as The New Yorker was congratulating itself on its 40th anniversary.

Mr. Wolfe fondly notes, in a foreword entitled "Murderous Gutter Journalism," that he wrote his "counter-parody, [in] a style that was everything The New Yorker wasn't: urgent, insistent, exclamatory, overstated–and fun." It's all that and more. He skewers the magazine's self-reverence, the awed hush ("the Whisper Zone ") of the offices near Mr. Shawn, the creepy incestuousness (" Overpowering eugenic advantage! "). He captures the place whole–sights, sounds, smells–down to the heft of the rag paper on which endless multi-colored internal memos were written.

But the style of the New Yorker pieces and the ambiance they evoke are easily more arresting than anything Mr. Wolfe has to say about the magazine itself, its Byzantine editing process or its soporific content. Why are Mr. Wolfe's literary perceptions so flimsy compared with the details he dishes up about Shawn (the maddening speech patterns, the nodding, the smiling, the rolling of the eyes) or the sartorial tics of the staff? And why did no one notice? Because this was Tom Wolfe at his beautiful, blinding best–the surface dazzle dumbing us down, as it would for decades to come.

Adam Begley is the books editor of The Observer.

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

Anyway, Renata knows this, and in Gone she takes–with a certain beguiling ferocity–(1) names and (2) no prisoners. She is especially mean to Adam Gopnik, a young man whose writing I have always found interesting, persuasive and elegant, hardly what would be expected from the slimy toady portrayed by Renata. Still, to paraphrase Macbeth 's King Duncan, "There's no art to find a man's construction in his prose." After all, look at Christopher Buckley, declared by his friends to a man to be, in person, the veriest prince of chaps and soul of wit, but whose attempts at humor in print assay out at 99.9 percent lead, or so is agreed by most people whose standards for risibility predate Drew Carey.

Since ad hominem is as ad hominem does, I was interested to see what form the attacks on the author would take. Direct–as to her veracity–or tangential, as to her character. A bit of each, I expected, and I frankly looked forward to the fray with a connoisseur's enthusiasm. By now, I consider myself to have as good a nose for ad hominem as Robert Parker has for red wine, based–like Mr. Parker–on years of firsthand tasting: After all, since Hanover Place , I need only declare an adverse opinion on the weather or the Mets' prospects to incite accusations of anti-Semitism from the likes of that bullet-headed cretin in East Hampton with the wife who looks like Eddie Cantor and has a voice that can open an oyster at 20 paces (a conceit derived from the immortal P.G. Wodehouse.)

If it got ugly, I even imagined that perhaps I, in my new capacity as Mr. Nice Guy 2000, might play a mediatory role. Perhaps in the style of my idol, Brook Club member Henry Kissinger, who–presumably in the belief that no peace is as profound and lasting as the sleep of the dead, and the more the quieter–employs the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse to trample down the grapes of wrath, an approach presently under review in a Cambodian war crimes trial. Indeed, since Renata would be the only one of the dramatis personae in this business whom I knew personally, my efforts to spread balm on roiled waters would flow from almost perfect ignorance of the material circumstances, as well as the personalities involved. Since postmodern theory–oh, the irony!–holds ignorance to be the only reliable basis of knowledge and therefore of truth, any mediation conducted by yours truly would be on theoretically solid ground.

Sure enough, on the heels of Bob Gottlieb's rejoinder to Gone , published a fortnight or so ago in these very pages, Renata sought my advice as to what she should do next. Mr. Gottlieb is one of the sacred cows of upper-middlebrow Manhattan culture, and as might be expected of any gored herbivore with a fat severance deal from S.I. (Si) Newhouse Jr., his wounded bellowing had focused mainly on impugning the accuracy of Gone 's account of the last days of the empire of William Shawn. I urged Renata to forswear getting into an ongoing "You say to-may-to, I say to-mah-to" dispute as to matters of allegation; one bad revival of Annie Get Your Gun is enough for any season. She sticks by her account; Mr. Gottlieb sticks by his; there the matter should rest.

In the course of our conversation, which I had hoped to reproduce in part as a Q.&A. interview, an expectation put paid to by a faulty tape recorder (the recording light shone, but sound there cameth none) Renata and I moved beyond the "who did or didn't do what" issues, including the question of Mr. Shawn's own culpability in the magazine's "decline." As we talked, a couple of thoughts came sharply into focus, notions that seem worth further reflection.

One has to do with the definition of "decline." Practically every account I have seen has had to do with a change (for the worse, as perceived by this writer or that) in the magazine's editorial culture. Post-Shawn, it became a worse place for a certain kind of writer to work, from which has flowed the presumption, in my opinion of conjectural accuracy, that a magazine's decline as a place to work necessarily equates with a magazine's decline as a magazine. I speak, of course, as a rank outsider. I have written exactly four pieces for the magazine: three Talk of the Town squibs–one of which was spiked–and a long profile (also spiked) of Heywood Hill, the eminent London bookstore on which a great many prominent Manhattan types depend for literary advice and book choice. The latter is a fine piece, or so say those who've read it, and all express mingled dismay and puzzlement that it never ran: My own theory is that Tina Brown killed it because I was unable to prove that O.J. Simpson ever bought a book at 10 Curzon Street.

I've had a subscription to The New Yorker since around 1960. Is it a worse magazine now than then? I'm not sure. I do know it's about the last magazine (after The Spectator and Gramophone ) that I'll cancel if the Council of American Book Publishers finally succeeds in its conspiracy to reduce me to absolute penury.

Sure, there are differences. There's been a notable decline in the quality of the humor it publishes, but I'm pretty certain that this isn't specific to The New Yorker . We live in a dumbed-down culture, and a culture's sense of humor is the first victim of dumbing-down. There are no Thurbers out there today, no Perelmans, Benchleys, Peter Arnos. The ecology's changed. But the critical departments remain first-rate, the fiction's O.K. if you like that sort of thing, and I know of no one who laments the passing of the editorial that gave us Charles Reich's The Greening of America or whatever that truly dreadful jeremiad by Jonathan Schell about nuclear warfare was called.

Complain all you want, but The New Yorker hasn't degenerated the way Time has, into perfect uselessness and vapidity, with Roger Rosenblatt thrown in as a final insult. Despite strenuous efforts to turn it into an advertiser-driven property (a sure formula for dumbing-down) The New Yorker remains reader-driven. The switch from full-rate to discount-rate subscriptions was a key part of that strategy (cut price subscription equals larger circulation equals more advertising) but my guess is, it backfired. It works for some magazines, but not for others; indeed, for the latter, it can be the first whorl in an economic death spiral. The fact is, The New Yorker is by its nature "unleverageable." I worked with some smart magazine people to try to buy it from Peter Fleischman in the mid-1970's, and their eyes were full of starry visions about how "the franchise" could be traded up and broadened–until they realized that what they would have to do would wreck the magazine's core profitability. Mr. Newhouse should have been given the same advice.

The New Yorker is what it is, and to a great extent, what it always has been, at least to its readers, if not to this or that generation of alumni-alumnae. But the world into which it is published every week has changed, and not for the better. If we're going to fix blame, I feel, and I think Renata would agree, it's all very well to point the finger at Bob and Tina and David and Si and various Florios, and there would be some justice in so doing, but–to be perfectly fair–we would also be advised to sneak at least a sideways peek at the mirror.

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.

Come sit for a moment, prop your chin on your hand and gaze–like Gibbon regarding the grandeur that was Rome–upon the ivy-covered ruins of the noble New Yorker . Here and there among the shapeless hummocks juts a fragment of exquisitely chiseled phrase, or the weathered bust of some vanished fact-checker. In the rising wind a scrap of paper flutters past, on which can be discerned these faded words: A friend writes …

How quaint and improbable it already seems! It was only eight years ago when Tina Brown's appointment as editor sealed the doom of the storied magazine built by Harold Ross and William Shawn, and yet already their New Yorker is one with Poor Richard's Almanac , or The Spectator of Addison and Steele. What shocks most now is not that it is "gone," but rather that it managed to survive as long as it did–coexisting, if not quite alongside the Drudge Report and Nerve.com , at least with Details and Martha Stewart.

And now Renata Adler, a still dazed and bleeding survivor, comes stumbling forth to tell the world her tale. She opens with a breathless, if belated, announcement of calamity: "As I write this, The New Yorker is dead. It still comes out every week, or almost every week.… Otherwise, not a single defining element of the magazine remains." For Ms. Adler, who joined the New Yorker staff in 1963, those defining elements included "the format, the look, the content, the humor, the level of seriousness; the ambition, at the top; the standards in the middle; the limits beneath which it would not sink."

These delicate scruples meant, in other words, no special fashion issues, no advertorials, no top-25 lists, and no photographs of naked Indians with large rocks suspended from their penises. But then, as everybody knows, Condé Nast came along, bringing with it these things and more. Ms. Adler is probably right to think that Shawn, had he lived to see them, would not have been amused.

Poor Shawn, indeed! These days, it is not just the Visigoths at Condé Nast who trample on his legacy of reticence, but also his former disciples themselves, who shanghai him into service as a mascot for their own grievances and vanities. In fact, with Ms. Adler's book following close on the heels of other memoirs by Lillian Ross and Ved Mehta, the sainted editor's afterlife has begun to resemble one of the Weekend at Bernie's movies, in which the hapless corpse gets dragged off on a series of picaresque adventures.

Ms. Adler's Shawn is a Gothic figure haunting a labyrinth of his own construction–in which, as she notes astutely, "the aversion to personal publicity for editors and writers, the increasing respect for the privacy of subjects [turned] into a reluctance to publish at all." Small wonder that the magazine's two most renowned authors of fiction and nonfiction–J.D. Salinger and Joseph Mitchell–eventually became renowned for their failure to produce.

Indeed, one of the problems with Ms. Adler's book is that her saga of decline and fall presumes the existence of a vanished Golden Age–which, however, she fails to portray with any conviction. It is all very well to declare, as she does, that "for more than 30 years, The New Yorker was not only the finest magazine of its time but probably the finest English-language magazine of all time." And she does begin her narration of her career at the magazine in orthodox mythopoeic fashion (she's the fated editorial assistant plucked by Shawn from her job sifting the slush pile). Yet aside from this, a tone of sour disillusion prevails even in her description of the Shawn years. Anyone who has worked in an office before will recognize her type: the talented malcontent, stewing continually behind closed doors over slights and betrayals.

Obscure succession crises and feuds from the 1970's are recited as gravely as if Ms. Adler were chronicling the collapse of Weimar Germany. And by the time she reaches the centerpiece of her book–her account of Shawn's unexpected ouster in 1987 and its aftermath–the level of detail is numbing, clearly taken from notes that Ms. Adler dashed off furiously at the time. (One's confidence in Ms. Adler's accuracy is undercut by several flagrant errors involving dates. On her book's first page, she says that Tina Brown took over the magazine in 1993, when it was 1992. Elsewhere, inexplicably, she twice describes Richard Nixon as having resigned the Presidency in 1976, not 1974–and Ms. Adler observed the impeachment inquiry at firsthand.)

Inadvertently, too, Gone manages to demonstrate all the deficiencies, or at least the dangers, of the famous New Yorker flat style, which presupposes the vast importance of the subject at hand. This was all well and good when it was John Hersey on Hiroshima: "There was no sound of planes. The morning was still; the place was cool and pleasant. Then a tremendous flash of light cut across the sky." It is somewhat less compelling as Ms. Adler puts it to use: "Stefan Kanfer, a friend and former colleague of Robert Hughes, called me. He had had lunch with Art Cooper, the editor of GQ . Mr. Cooper said Adam Gopnik had told him not only that Bob Hughes was recommending him as his successor at Time , but that Mr. Gottlieb as well was planning, when he left The New Yorker , to recommend Mr. Gopnik to succeed him."

What is anyone, with the possible exception of Messrs. Kanfer, Hughes, Cooper, Gopnik and Gottlieb, supposed to get out of this? And perhaps that is the point. Before it is halfway to its conclusion, Gone begins to read like one long, unsent internal memorandum, a calendar of complaint that works itself finally into a drawn-out crescendo of wild-eyed rage.

From the beginning of her book, Ms. Adler freely indulges her penchant for cutting others down to size–at first, with Shawnian delicacy (the magazine's longtime fiction editor, Roger Angell, is identified here as "a fine baseball writer"). But by the final pages she is knifing almost everyone within reach–notably the unfortunate Mr. Gopnik, a peripheral player at most in the change of regime. In a series of excruciating asides, she slits him slowly from navel to sternum. One suspects that there is no fact about Mr. Gopnik–no physical attribute, no intellectual or moral lapse–that Ms. Adler would have left unsaid if she had thought it would embarrass him.

In this gush of bloodletting, Ms. Adler loses her grip on the important question that lent her book its reason for existence: Who, or what, killed the old New Yorker ? For her, the answer is to be found in the Byzantine annals of office politics. She rejects–convincingly enough–the idea that the magazine had to change in order to keep up with the times, to meet the expectations of an impatient public: A great publication, she writes, "goes its way, and forms its audiences as it goes."

Yet The New Yorker 's cozy scribblers were probably fated to succumb to one barbarian horde or another: By the 1980's, at least, when Condé Nast's parent company began buying up shares, there were simply too many Visigoths at large in the world. And with this book, ironically, Ms. Adler has taken the once-cozy genre of the New Yorker memoir and brutalized it beyond recognition–exactly what she accuses others of doing to the magazine itself.

Anyone involved in creating or canonizing The New Yorker of the 40's and 50's will hate Mary Corey's The World Through a Monocle: 'The New Yorker' at Midcentury . That's my guess. But I found it stimulating, not just in thinking about how to think about The New Yorker but about magazines in general. The title is misleading. It suggests that you're in for another celebration of the uniqueness of the magazine. Here at 'The New Yorker' , Remembering Mr. Shawn's 'New Yorker' , The World Through a Monocle –nothing jarring in that. In fact, though, Ms. Corey has more in common with Ninotchka than Brendan Gill or Ved Mehta. A lecturer in history at the University of California at Los Angeles, she applies her synthesizing vision to questions that editors and writers don't have the time or the disposition to think about very often. What is the overall message of a magazine, including its advertising? What is its attitude toward women? What is its implicit class voice? If Ms. Corey had chosen to write about Jane Austen or the Free Speech movement, this approach would be cliché, another squirt from the cultural studies gun, but applied retroactively to The New Yorker in what she defines as its "greatest period of cultural potency," it's intriguing. She's trying to find out not only what talented writers as diverse as E.B. White, John Hersey, St. Clair McKelway and John Cheever had in common, but what readers actually took away from the magazine.

First, a warning: There are many things you won't find there. Ms. Corey has no opinion on David Remnick. She does not say whether she thinks Tina Brown destroyed William Shawn's legacy or resurrected the spirit of New Yorker founder Harold Ross. She does not care if Lillian Ross and William Shawn had a secret alliance. I suspect if you said to Ms. Corey, "meet me at the Century," she'd think, "Century City?"

Ms. Corey's heresy–the reason this book will not find a place on the New Yorker buff's shelf–is that she doesn't care about the difference between editorial matter and advertising copy. The reader takes them in, in the same way. She means nothing personal in applying this idea to The New Yorker . She tips her beret to the solidity of the famous wall that separated The New Yorker 's editors and writers from its advertising salespeople. Few magazines kept the wall intact as The New Yorker did when it came time to write about big business and pollution or the dangers of smoking. This purity, to Ms. Corey, is admirable but not material. The definition of a successful magazine is that the ads and editorial content work together, not apart. " The New Yorker served its postwar audience alternately as a shopping guide, an atlas and a Bible …," she writes. "By combining these disparate elements, the magazine was able to transmit a version of the real world that incorporated some of that world's most troubling features. Advertisements for cigarettes or whiskey or luxury liners were not seen as inimical to serious articles concerning African-American heroin addicts, unwed mothers, or the bombing of the Bikini Atoll."

Ms. Corey is not the first to point out that there was something weird about all those Tiffany and De Beers diamond ads in the pages of a magazine that championed life on a small Connecticut farm with a manual water pump. The mixed message of The New Yorker was something cultural critics such as Mary McCarthy were pointing out as early as the 40's, and by the 60's it had become a commonplace. But Ms. Corey is as far as I know the first to claim that the ads were not just reflective of The New Yorker 's success but key to it. She writes: "For socially conscious people of status and wealth, virtue was a precious commodity–a quality that made it easier to savor privilege." The guilty consumer was The New Yorker 's best customer and its ultimate product. At its peak, the magazine was third in circulation among weeklies, behind only Time and Newsweek . It was a national power.

Ms. Corey is less sure-footed when she analyzes the way The New Yorker depicted various groups in its pages, specifically communists, minorities and women. (The list seems arbitrary. Why not vegetarians?) She is often obvious. Her theorizing gets muddled. She substitutes the zinger for the larger thought. She points out, for instance, that The New Yorker took considerable risks in opposing Communist witch hunts at home but approved of America's participation in the conflict in Korea. "The magazine's approach to the Cold War [was] that Communism was indeed a threat to the United States," she writes, "but was not a threat in the United States. Anti-Communism was strictly an export good." Then she moves on to gender. She sees "a snarling contempt for women and a unequivocal disinterest in equality" in the magazine, adding that "the closer [it] got to home, the farther [it] veered from democratic principle." What about those American communists we just heard about? Or, for that matter, African-Americans? During founding editor Harold Ross' tenure, The New Yorker practiced a pointy-elbowed humor that spared no one. His was the humor of the speakeasy. As Ms. Corey points out, under Shawn, things tightened up. "'Kindly' and 'pleasant-faced' Negroes [now] seem[ed] to abound in the postwar New Yorker ," she notes, adding that even what she calls the "'Maids Say the Darndest Things' genre," "a series of humorous offerings describing servants' foolishness, illiteracy, bad grammar, and inability to decode the upper-middle-class text, entirely excluded black servants from its sizable canon."

Ms. Corey is mystified by this exclusion, which seems to me to follow the dictum that anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual classes. The Irish were fair game in The New Yorker , as were the Italians and Southerners, who to many of the magazine's writers were as exotic as Catholics. Establishment New Yorkers who were Jewish (albeit reluctantly), like William Shawn and the Fleischmann family, the magazine's owners, felt more warmly toward blacks, with whom they didn't compete and whose history of oppression felt familiar. This sort of biographical explanation is hardly foolproof, but Ms. Corey should have explored it. As it is, the J-word never appears in these pages. As a Hegelian, Ms. Corey is allergic to biographical analysis–we are all playthings of larger cultural forces. Too bad, because she might have found that the personality of William Shawn alone explained a lot to her, especially the magazine's complex attitude toward women. It hired them, while it made fun of them, yet by 1954 a majority of New Yorker readers were women.

Also, Ms. Corey mistakenly assumes that everything that is in the pages of a magazine is put there for a purpose. Cobbling together a magazine is, in fact, a semi-desperate act.

All the same, I admire this book. It has the smell of honest intellectual effort to it, a whiff of Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, two writers who overcame misgivings similar to Ms. Corey's to become important New Yorker contributors. While Mary Corey is no McCarthy or Macdonald, she's a capable writer. And reader. She uncovers The New Yorker 's ideology without trampling those cool columns of elegant prose. She fights it, but like Ninotchka, she has a taste for bright, twinkling lights.

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.

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."