Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker

Rating:
Summary: negation as the other woman...
Review: Lillian Ross was a talented even gifted writer. She comes across in this book as a intelligent charming and caring person. Yet the thrust of this book is a self conscious and self serving apologia for her life long 'relationship' with William Shawn.

Bluntly put, she was his mistress -'the other woman' (just as an aside, why do you never hear of 'the other man'?). Mr Shawn, in a controlling and manipulative way, suborned her life in a way that is both appalling and pathetic. And as much as she rationalized it - and she spends many many pages doing just that, she seemed (on some level) to be aware of the basic inequality of their 'special' relationship.

So, about the book? Mr Shawn comes across as a whining self centered egotist who somehow manages to always get his way. Ms. Ross' cavalier dismissal of his shabby treatment of his wife and children borders on the obscene. Who was Mr. Shawn? Brilliant, yes without a doubt. A gifted editor, the New Yorker magazine owes much to his dedication. But does a true genuis require such slavish devotion to his ever whim?

There are some insightful moments in the book, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, John Huston (and others) were personal friends, the writers and editors - the behind the scenes folks that really made the New Yorker great - are covered in a slanted and biased sort of way - somehow one doubts that Mr Shawn singled handedly made them all as good as they were. And his 'enabling' talents surely came at a terrible cost, at least for Lillian Ross.

Bottom line, this is a good book on some levels but one that I had some personal difficulty with. "Being a good little woman for her (married) man" doesn't appeal to me as a life choice regardless of the glowing personalities involved. In the end I felt no empathy for her, she was just a pathetic woman trying to justify her own self negation.

Rating:
Summary: Ruth Reichl on WQXR
Review: My God, where is Shawn when we need him? Lillian Ross' paean to Bill and Tina needs Shawn's ball-pointed editor's pen like potholes need tar.

Rating:
Summary: An interesting man as written by his "great love"
Review: Oh dear but I wish this book was written by the "other woman"---in this case, William Shawn's wife. The author, well known New Yorker writer Lillian Ross comes across as a probably horrid, self absorbed user, which is not, I'm sure, what she intended. While the book is very interesting when the subject is Mr. Shawn and the workings of the New Yorker, everytime she gushes about their enduring love (which she does, endlessly) her writing is banal beyond belief. One thinks, reading much of this book, that perhaps she was only a top writer once--when he was her editor. One of the truly fascinating characters in this book in Wallace Shawn. Perhaps someday he'll write his version of this story.

Rating:
Summary: Execrable
Review: Poor Shawn! He seems to have had impeccable taste in everything save mistresses. The misbegotten issue of their liaison is this unique instance of a grotesque lapse in editorial judgement. I cannot imagine prose as wretched as this surviving his meticulous blue pencil from anyone sufficiently detached from him to be regarded as a writer worthy of regard on the basis solely of his work.

Rating:
Summary: COMPASSION OFF THE MENU?
Review: What a simple, ballsy book! - and what depths of our moral and ethical bankruptcy its publication reveals. It is gruesomely fascinating to read the torrential reviews of this modest work, the jaundiced posturing of broadsheets that queue for the standards of the New Yorker, the poison of the moralists, the lack of compassion. This is a love story, patently not written for money or influence or approbation but as a heart essay, the kind of statement of confessional honesty that confronts the nada of the "civilized" predicament and offers the innocence of humanness as a code of hope. Love and conformity rarely blend. Since recorded history, the dilemma of awkward love has chewed as much newsprint as the mystery of life itself. How inconvenient, true love. Romeo and Juliet, John and Yoko, Hef and his harem. It happens, is all we know. What is interesting about this book is Ms Ross' self-mortification in diving into the crucible from the highboard of "cultured" publishing. Obviously she knew what was coming; and yet she persevered. True love imparts courage and stupidity in equal measure, but there is more at work. Bill Shawn carries the burden of legend. Lillian Ross, one senses, felt impelled to reveal him as a man, flawed (he was the one who felt pathologically "here but not here"), and aching in his inability to express his personal truth in the novel he couldn't write. As a work of literature, even gossip, this is slight. But as a paean to Shawn it glitters with the absurdity and vitality of devotional love and the lengths partners go to maintain it.