624
DWIGHT MACDONALD
it
has crystallized around the magazine a cultural community of
its own. "The pragmatics of the problem" are not "crucial" to
The New Yo-rker,
a Midcult magazine but one with a difference.
It, too, has its formula, monotonous and restrictive, but the
formula reflects the tastes of the editors and not their fear of the
readers. And, because it
is
more personally edited, there are
more extra-formula happy accidents than one finds in its Mid–
cult brethren.
9
9. This article, in an abbreviated form, was originally written for
The
Saturday Evening Post
as one of its i'Adventures of the Mind" series.
(The introduction of this series into the
Post
two years ago--it has
included Randall Jarrell, C . P. Snow and Clement Greenberg-is an
interesting symptom of the post-1945 renaissance. George Horace
Lorimer never thought his magazine needed a cultural fig-leaf. ) The
last three sentences above about
The New Yorker,
which appear
exactly as they did in the final version I submitted to the
Post,
were
responsible for the article's rejection.
In the fall of 1958, the
Post
invited me to contribute an article to
the series and since they offered $2500 for 5,000 words and promised
to let me say what I liked, I agreed. A year later-after a five-page
summary had been agreed on- I sent in the piece. They had perhaps
a dozen editorial objections, all but one of which I accepted as either
trivial or justified. The one difficulty was their suggestion that
The
New Yorker
was just another Midcult magazine and that I must
therefore criticize it in the same terms as the others. Since I did not
agree with this opinion-and had in fact evaluated
The New Yorker
quite differently, though not without criticism, in the November,
1956, Encounter- I
resisted. As the correspondence developed, it
became clear they thought I was "going easy" on
The N ew Yorker
because I worked for it, a not unreasonable assumption in a police
court but one that I somehow resented. The sentences above were my
final attempt to "place" the magazine. It was rejected and so was tp.e
article ("otherwise eminently acceptable" wrote the sub-editor I deaJ.t
with. ) I finally wrote to Mr. Ben Hibbs, the editor-in-chief (how
perfect a name, one of Norman Rockwell's covers come to life!) CQm–
plaining that I had been promised a free hand as to opinion and that
the
Post
had reneged. He was not sympathetic. "We are dealing here
with facts, not opinion," he replied, adding that unless I "came
clean" on
The New Yorker,
the piece would be "open to suspicion-'Of
insincerity." Mr. Hibbs' notion of
fact
and
opinion
seemed to memis–
taken and I wrote back citing my dictionary's definition of
fact
("a
truth known -by actual experience or observation" ) and
opinion
-
("a
