May 9, 2004

FOUR o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, a time when even the most driven Americans are at home. Not Robert Silvers. Aged 74, he is at his place in the offices of The New York Review of Books, the journal he helped to found and has edited for the past 40 years. He is not just working at the office; he is wearing a tie. Admittedly, it is pulled open so the shirt collar is undone, in the manner of traditional newspapermen everywhere, but even this informality is beautifully knotted.

The magazine he has produced is unique. The 900 issues of the Review to date provide a history of the cultural life of the east coast since 1963. It manages to be scrupulous without pedantry, and serious with a fierce democratic edge. The articles are written as if any intelligent reader would care about the politics of Azerbaijan or the condition of cowboys in the late 19th century, if only they knew enough about it. It is one of the last places in the English-speaking world that will publish long essays, and possibly the very last to combine academic rigour — even the letters to the editor are footnoted — with great clarity of language.

He was born in New York, on December 31, 1929. His father was a businessman who moved out to a farm on Long Island, where Silvers grew up. Silvers started at the University of Chicago shortly after his 15th birthday — the university then allowed anyone who could pass the entrance exams to enter, irrespective of age. Graduating at 19, he became press secretary to the governor of Connecticut, Chester Bowles, a liberal democrat who had made his fortune in advertising and later served as a foreign policy adviser to J.F. Kennedy.

In 1958 he was hired by Harpers magazine and returned to New York, where he has lived ever since. In 1960 he commissioned a special issue on “writing in America”, which contained premonitions of the trenchant Anglophilia that would characterize The New York Review of Books. The most influential piece was by the novelist Elizabeth Hardwick, discussing the low standards of book reviewing in the US. Her target in particular was the New York Times, then the most influential paper for the publishing trade. She sneered at it for lacking the passion and brilliance to be found (then) in the New Statesman, where V.S. Pritchett wrote a weekly review; she was so rude that the chairman of Harpers, the publisher, which also owned Harpers the magazine, felt obliged to defend the place where he spent most of his advertising budget. Hardwick was quite unabashed: Silvers published his chairman’s letter of protest alongside her rebuttal, in which she described the attitudes of the mainstream book reviewers as resembling “the polite impersonal stare of a cashier, who takes in the money without being affected in her personal life by what she does”.

Jason and Barbara Epstein — he was a publisher at Random House, and she was a writer and editor — realized that here was a chance to do something positive and put out their own paper, to show how literary journalism should be done. Epstein, as a publisher, knew how much the business was hurting for lack of anywhere to advertise, and he was famous for getting things done.

“Jason was like ‘kids let’s put on a show’,” remembers Barbara Epstein now, and the next day one of them rang Silvers to ask if he would help them edit the new magazine. Epstein and Silvers were to be the joint editors, as they still are, and the Lowells hustled all their contacts for contributions. The first issue, dated February 1, 1963, had an astonishing range of contributors, none of them paid.

The first two issues attracted a readership that would stay loyal to the Review. The rhetoric was full of earnest uplift: in the nearest thing they published to a mission statement, the founders wrote, “This issue of The New York Review does not pretend to cover all the books of the season or even all the important ones. Neither time nor space, however, has been spent on books which are trivial in their intentions or venal in their effects, except occasionally to reduce a temporarily inflated reputation or to call attention to a fraud. The hope of the editors is to suggest, however imperfectly, some of the qualities which a responsible literary journal should have and to discover whether there is in America not only the need for such a review but the demand for one.” This struck a resounding chord.

In November last year, the 2003 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, J.M. Coetzee, gave the Robert Silvers lecture in the New York Public Library (an engagement made long before he won the prize), and this was merely the latest example of Silvers’ ability to cultivate great writers by taking almost infinite pains himself. Looking back at the first issue of the magazine, two things are obvious even then. The first is the eye for talent. V.S. Naipaul was an early contributor as well as a subject of reviews. He was to become one of the most noted foreign correspondents, and the way he was nourished and encouraged is typical of Silvers’ style.

Epstein describes the Review voice as “liberal”, Silvers talks about a general scepticism. Either way, it is difficult to imagine a publication less sympathetic to the faith-based policies of the current administration. Since September 11, 2001, the magazine’s instinctive opposition to the Republican and neo-con agenda has been greatly sharpened, and the sense of being perched on the edge of a hostile continent deepened.

That may seem ironic: it was not the Republicans who attacked New York on September 11. But there are millions of people all around the world who feel less secure as a consequence of what has happened since, and the Review’s readers are almost all among them. It has run a long series of eyewitness reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it has also run some of the most critical and well-informed coverage of the widening gap between Europe and the US. It has had Fenton writing about the Hutton inquiry, and the most comprehensive demolition of the lies told about Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the invasion of Iraq. All of these are characterized by a passionate exactitude that reflects their editor’s character: a man who believes the world can be better, and never stops trying to improve it, one sentence at a time. — Dawn/Observer News Service