I. Good afternoon, everyone, I'm Tara Steps, the academic programme director here at the rally,
and I'm delighted to welcome you all to the highlight of our literary calendar.
The Essence Hollingsworth lecture in American Arts and Letters. This event would not be possible without the continued generosity investment
homes with whom I'm very pleased to say has been able to join us this afternoon.
Today's lecture will be given by Deborah Eastman, fiction editor at The New Yorker,
and therefore holder of one of the most influential and arguably fascinating positions in American literary culture.
Having joined The New Yorker in 1997, she was appointed to the role in 2003,
the first woman to hold the position since the magazine was founded in 1925.
The second sorry, I read that online and I was going to double check the second.
Sorry. Well, I'm going to correct that when I see it. Fact check.
Sorry. Thank you. We are extremely lucky to have her, not least because until just last week,
she was busy putting together the annual two volume fiction issue of the magazine.
In addition, in addition to hosting the award winning New Yorker fiction podcast,
Deborah Triesman has also edited the anthology 20 Under 40 Stories from The New Yorker from 2010 and most recently with Andorran Walter Hopps,
The Dream Colony A Life in Art from 2017. She is additionally a recipient of the Maxwell Perkins Award for Distinguished Contribution to Fiction.
The lecture, entitled New Yorker Fiction through the Decades, will be followed by a Q&A chaired by Merv M. Ray,
associate professor of English Literature here at Worcester College, who has a particular interest herself in American fiction after 1945.
So we're in for quite a treat this afternoon. Please welcome Deborah Tracy.
Thank you, Terry, and thank you. Oh, I don't need to speak into this story. Am I good with the Mike?
OK. I have one. Yes. OK.
I need both. OK. Double double double issue.
Thank you for inviting me. It's a it's a pleasure to be here. And in some ways or in every way, Oxford is my hometown where I was born,
and it's nice to have my father here and my daughter here in the back preparing to sneak out once I get boring.
So the first thing that you find yourself thinking about when you start working in the fiction department at The New Yorker,
as I did in late Nineteen ninety seven, is the question of the New Yorker story.
This prototypical story in the magazine,
which is it's a common thing to hear in the U.S. that the people will dismiss things by saying, Oh, that's a New Yorker story,
or that's just, you know, so there's an idea of what it is,
but most people don't actually know what that idea is, and everyone seems to have a different idea.
You know, whether it's traditional or it's domestic fiction or it's women's fiction, it's all about bad marriages.
It's bad boy fiction. It's senior citizens fiction. It's self-consciously multicultural fiction.
It's yeah, some some people say that Dorothy Parker defined it.
It's very urbane and New York City based.
Others credit John Cheever, and it's all about the suburbs and the trials and betrayals of middle class family life.
As one reader wrote in Nineteen thirty three, it's whimsy is concerning frustrated little milquetoast.
Or, as James Thurber complained to Katharine White, the magazine's first fiction editor in 1938.
We've had an awful lot of the sad, drifting little men muddling gently through the most trivial and in palpable of situations,
ending up on a faint and to me, usually evasive note of resignation to it all, whatever it all is.
Or, as Lionel Trilling noted, writing in the nation in nineteen forty two,
the New Yorker publishes a kind of short story, the main characteristic of which is its moral intensity.
Every week at the barber's or the dentist's or on the commuting train, a representative part of the middle class learns about the horrors of snobbery,
ignorance and insensitivity, and about the sufferings of children, servants,
the super and superannuated and the subordinate in the 1950s, according to Jonathan Franzen.
What made a story New Yorker was its carefully wrought many comedy prose, its long passages of physical description,
the precision and the sobriety of which created a kind of negative emotional space, a suggestion of feeling without the naming of it.
And above all, its signature style of ending, which was either elegantly oblique or frustratingly coy, depending on your taste.
Outside the offices of the New Yorker,
its fiction editors were rumoured to routinely delete the final paragraph of any story accepted for publication.
By the time I got to the magazine,
the stereotype I kept hearing was that it was all stories about white men fighting their way through midlife crisis with booze, adultery and hunting.
I particularly enjoy one description of the New Yorker story that appeared in The New York Times in a review of a John Cheever story collection,
said There are 30 30 sketches in this volume.
All of them are worth at least five minutes of your time, even though the majority are exercises and marital disruption.
Hagrid dips a mania, poverty or plain and fancy jitters.
Most of them appeared between the covers of The New Yorker. Perhaps this accounts for their peculiar fse and detachment and facile despair.
The magazine introduced serious fiction in 1928, which was when it was three years old.
Since then, it's published more than thirteen thousand stories. It's probably rejected two million or more.
And over the years, the standards and conventions of storytelling and story writing have shifted many times,
and so has the editorial perception of what the magazine should publish.
In the 1930s, plot was frowned upon, as was indirection, failure to divulge location,
time period and other salient locating data in the first paragraph.
As late as the 1980s, even a little bit into the nineties, vulgarity and sexual imagery were considered problematic.
When Alice Munro wanted to publish a story in 1984 in which a woman's pubic hair was described as the rat between Diana's legs,
she was prevailed upon to rewrite the phrase as the dark, silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.
She reverted to her original in the book and in an introduction to an end.
Anthology of stories from the magazine that came out in 1940, the editor notes that in making the selections for the book,
they ruled out all reminiscences, parables, prophecies, fables, fantasies, satire as burlesque parodies and nonsense tales.
These days we publish all of those things, and if I've had any mission as fiction editor,
it's simply just to make it harder and harder for people to believe that there is a category that includes everything and everyone we want to publish.
You know, a magazine that can alternate between George Saunders and William Trevor.
Alice Munro, Zadie Smith, Jhumpa Lahiri, Haruki Murakami.
There's there's no clearly definable story. I just wanted to compare, for instance, the opening paragraphs of a handful of stories,
all of which appeared in the magazine in the last couple of years. So his one on the short walk from the churchyard to her car, Mrs. Craft Thorpe,
was aware of a profound humiliation, a lone mourner at her husband's funeral.
She had sensed it first in the modest country church he had insisted upon for what he called his obsequious.
A woman cleric unknown to Mrs. Staub, had conducted a bleak service,
had said the necessary words in an accent that appalled Mrs Cress Thorpe and then
had scuffled off the Dutch without so much as a glance and Mrs Thorpe's direction.
Or. You hop into a car race off in no particular direction and blam hit a power pole, then it's off to jail.
I remember a monstrous tangle of arms and legs and fists with me at the bottom, gouging it eyes and doing my utmost to mangle throats.
But I arrived at the facility without a scratch or a bruise. I must have been easy to subdue.
The following Monday, I pled guilty to disturbing the peace and malicious mischief reduced from felony vehicular theft and resisting arrest.
Because, well, because all this occurs on another planet, the planet of Thanksgiving.
Nineteen sixty seven or.
But nobody showed up. So he sat a while looking at the wall. It was one of those Saturdays.
It feel like Sunday. He didn't know how to explain this.
It happened intermittently, more often in the warmer months, and it was probably normal, although he'd never discussed it with anyone.
Finally, there's an urge to be good to be seen, to be good, to be seen also to be badness,
invisibility, things as they are in reality, as opposed to things as they seem death itself.
These are out of fashion. This is basically what I told Mary.
I said, Mary. All these things I just mentioned are not really done anymore.
And also, while we're on the subject that name of yours, it's not going to fly.
Nobody's called Mary these days. It's painful for me even to say your name actually, could you get the [INAUDIBLE] out of here?
So there's a special prise for anyone who names all four writers.
So the second thing you find yourself up against when editing fiction for The New Yorker is the pedestal that the magazine stands on in the US,
simply because of the weight of its history,
which makes people either want to worship at its feet or drive up the bulldozers to to knock it over, and sometimes both.
In nineteen twenty five,
the magazine sold to about fourteen thousand people a week and outreach as well over a million and print and millions more online,
which gives it the largest potential audience for magazine fiction in the world. I think I didn't fact check that, but I believe it's true.
Over the last 94 years, the fiction department has had many successes.
It has fostered the careers of such writers as William Maxwell, Alice Munro, John Updike, Vladimir Nabokov,
Donald Barthélemy and Mavis Gallant and O'Brien, Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
So many others. Some writers have come directly to the magazine, some through other advocates,
and some have been pulled out of the infamous and now viral, not viral virtual slush pile.
Sometimes viral, the fiction department has also had some notable missteps.
That's rejected stories by Gertrude Stein, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Joseph Joseph Heller,
William Styron, Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, as well as many other writers that also eventually publish.
Early in my years at the magazine,
I called a publisher to say that we wanted to publish one of the last existing unpublished stories by the late Richard Yates,
and I was told that to his dying day, Yates kept had kept a rejection letter from a fiction editor at the magazine,
telling him never to darken our door with his sentimental fiction again.
Some writers were rejected many times before their stories finally made it in.
In 1972, a story by NBT, who was then a twenty five year old English instructor,
arrived in the slush pile and eventually reached the desk of Roger Angell, who was a fiction editor at the magazine for more than 60 years.
He liked the story enough to write her personal response. These little slices and moments are often surprisingly effective, he wrote.
But the story seems to get away from you as it goes along. It seems possible that there's more form than substance here, but perhaps that's unfair.
What I most admire is your wit and quickness and self-assurance. I hope you will let us see more of your work.
So she did. And over the next two years, Roger rejected 15 more of beauty stories, writing in various letters.
I would prefer to see writing that is less dependent on effects, and that works less visibly toward a single final emotion.
I do believe this is a matter of confidence on your part.
You write so well that a slightly less fevered effort may result in fiction that is clearer and more truly moving.
I have the impression that you don't trust your own observations or your own writing to carry a story.
What would happen if you tried a story without any devices or stops or studied juxtapositions?
Next, I wish you would try a very quiet and modest story, one that relies on no devices and is content merely to bring us to its discoveries.
But whatever you do right, please continue to send it to us. This strikes me as being merely chic.
The obvious despair, heartlessness in high places, lurking violence,
it's all been done a thousand times and it's just about impossible to believe any of it or to care.
She kept sending. I truly don't know what to tell you now.
I think you're writing is controlled and personal. That is exactly what you want it to be.
I feel that your chances of acceptance here are not good as long as you continue in this vein.
And then the 17th story arrived. Roger wrote back, Oh joy.
Yes, we were taking the story, and I think this is just about the best news of the year.
Maybe it isn't the best news for you, but there is nothing that gives me more pleasure.
Well, almost nothing than at last, sending an enthusiastic yes to a writer who has persisted through his many rejections and rebuffs as you have.
It's a fine story, I think original, strong and true. Other writers took even longer to make it into the magazine.
I'll read you a letter from Cynthia Ozick that was written in nineteen sixty two, about 20 years before she actually was published in the magazine.
She writes for a number of years now, I've been sending you poems, and until very recently, I have always found you entirely reliable.
Exactly seven days after each new poem has been dropped into the mail, it has come punctually home,
accompanied by that little rejection slip of yours marked with the number one in the left hand corner.
You know, the one you have, as I say, been altogether faithful and dependable.
For example, it is never six days. It is certainly never eight or nine days. It is always seven days to the minute.
And your conscientious devotion to precision all these years has been matched to my knowledge only by the butcher's delivery boy,
whose appearance is also predicated on a seven day cycle. This time, however, you failed me.
A poem of mine reached you on December 18th, 1961, and though 18 days have already passed, a daily inspection of my letterbox yields nothing.
I have enough confidence in your hitherto clean record of never considering anything I've submitted
not to be tempted into the unworthy suspicion that the delay is caused by your liking this poem.
What has been shattered, I must admit, is my sense of serenity of certitude, nay of security, not to mention my sense of rhythm.
Does this mean you can no longer be relied relied on to conform to the seven day schedule you have consistently adhered to in the past?
Ensure it is the age of doubt, truly upon us or but I venture this with a cheery hopefulness I do not dare to feel,
is it only that you have finally gone and lost my manuscript?
I realise I'm probably being too sanguine and putting forth this rosy possibility, but I guess I'm just basically an optimistic sort.
Please reassure me that this rather than some flaw in your clockwork,
even to contemplate which disillusioned me hideously is the real nature of the difficulty.
I expect your answer in seven days, so people tend to think that editing fiction involves looking at manuscripts that
have been submitted to you and knowing instantly whether it's a yes or a no.
They usually imagine that that decision is based on either some kind of empirical scientific assessment or some mysterious form of insight,
and neither one of those is true. It's always a matter of making a judgement call, and in a situation like the current one,
where there are three or four editors who work on fiction, these judgements don't always match.
Each of us receive submissions. We read them. We decide if something's worth working with, something's worth fighting for.
We pass them around to the others, and we write notes on the pros and cons of each story.
And then we meet once a week to discuss it and battle it out. When I am just a side note, when I started at the magazine,
these notes were all typed on typewriters on the same piece of paper, and each time one editor read the story,
they would type their note, but then fold it over so the next person wouldn't read their note before reading the story and typing his or her note.
So at the end, what you got was a sort of exquisite corpse of fiction opinions.
Now, of course, it's all done by email and not to keep harping on Roger Angell.
But for a long stretch of my time at the magazine, he Roger, in his late 80s and the 90s, is now 98.
Continue reading and opining in the fiction department and in his notes on stories
were classics of the form that taught the rest of us how to have strong opinions.
So it's going to quotes him some choice lines. This is readable, all right.
It's like eating whipped cream, but it's way too folksy and sentimental for me.
We've avoided sweet dumbed down writing like this over the years, and I don't really think we should start now.
I don't think we should mess with this. It's off the charts,
pretentious beginning with the title and the Explorer and the corpse Gold Sea and going on page after embarrassing page in a tide of self-importance.
This story is already the winner of our twenty seven a.m. most mannered manuscript award.
It's no contest I quit after two pages, really couldn't go on reading, so I'm against it.
And they weren't all negative. I like parts of this very much and enjoy the childlike semi mythical tone she's established here.
She can write no doubt about it. That said, I strongly believe the great sections of this still need major work and that if we don't edit
her much farther back and try to persuade her to get rid of dozens of misconceived childish.
Not the same as childlike notions and persistent exaggerations.
We won't have come close to how good and how funny and how touching this could really be.
Please, please, let's not hurry to get this into the magazine. We owe it to ourselves into her to try to make it right.
Which gets me to the next stage, so once that once a story has actually made it through that struggle and been accepted.
That process is far from over. Some writers rewrite significantly.
Some are asked to consider taking away whole scenes or adding characters,
and others just need to fix some awkward transitions or grammatical problems.
There's virtually always some form of editorial collaboration, and although it was a surprise to me initially, it's not really anymore.
It's usually the most established and experienced writers who are the least who respond the most cheerfully and gratefully to editorial suggestions.
I used to. Alice Munro doesn't write anymore, but you know, she she used to write for The New Yorker a lot, and she I would send her proofs by FedEx.
She would call me up and she would read through my proofs saying Yes, OK, better, much better, much better.
I think I'm going to keep this one.
And then when she got to the end of a page, audibly toss it onto the floor and then sometimes we need to go back to something.
She would crawl around on the floor for a while trying to find the correct page. Most often, she anticipated edits.
Before I said anything, I would be about to call her, and she would.
A FedEx would come in the mail with rewritten pages where she had fixed exactly the problem.
I was about to point out years ago, when he was still alive, I was editing a piece by Saul Bellow,
an excerpt from a novel in which I had taken sections from lots of different places in the book.
And sort of. Intertwine them and put them together and and I thought, you know, he's going to be incredibly offended by this.
I'm going to get a call from the agent saying, How dare you do this to the, you know, the great man's work?
I got no calls, so after a little while, I sort of nervously called him up.
And I said, Mr. Bellow, did you have a chance to look at that edit I sent you?
And he said. Well, you convinced me.
Do you have any changes now? So that it's not always that way?
There was one. Celebrated British author.
Who to whom I sent a what I thought was a very light proof on a story and he he called me and said.
You know, what I sent you was not a draught. It was a finished story.
So then there's the New Yorker process of not only editing and copy editing, but also fact checking fiction,
which comes as a surprise to some people but actually can be surprisingly helpful because if you put a story,
if you send a story into the world, you want people to believe it on some level.
And if you get basic details about if you have an intersection of streets that don't actually cross.
Someone is going to be pulled out of that story and it will register as made up
and made up by someone who is not an authority on what he or she is writing about.
So in some ways, in some ways fact checking is is very helpful.
It can also cause problems. A few years ago, I was working on a story by a writer who had become famous as a film director.
It's not Tom Hanks, and it was going to be his first fiction publication, he was very anxious about it,
so he didn't really want to change anything just in case, you know, the whole thing fell apart.
You know, if you changed, a comment was made him nervous, and the story involved a little boy who liked to eat omelettes with Smucker's grape jelly.
And the fact checker got a hold of this and looked it up and found that Smucker's didn't make great jelly, so she suggested Welch's grape jelly.
So I called him up and he said, No, it has to be Smuckers. It has to be Smuckers.
So she did some research, and she found a list of every jelly that Smucker's made at that time,
and I sent it to him and I said, maybe plum jelly because same colour is grape jelly.
Might be sort of the same in this boy's sort of cosmos of jellies.
And and he called me up and he said, No, not plum daily.
It has to be Smuckers mixed berry jelly. And I said, Well, you know, this is a little boy.
What does mixed berry mean? Like children? They're going to say, I don't like blueberries.
What if there's blueberries in there? How can you get obsessed about mixed berry? It's very vague.
These are no mixed berry. So we changed it to mixed berry jelly. Story went to press.
The next day. He called me in a panic. It has to be one jelly. So there are times.
Then we put out a story moving on, expecting a huge reaction to it, and nothing happens.
And there are other times when stories generate unexpected, unexpectedly explosive responses.
One famous example of the latter was Shirley Jackson's All to Credible Story, Horror Story The Lottery,
which was published in 1948 and inspired more than 300 letters to the magazine,
which was more than any other story that have been published at that point, most of which were either.
Bewildered or quite aggressive things like I will never buy The New Yorker again, I resent being tricked into reading perverted stories.
I expect a personal apology from the author. Tell Miss Jackson to stay out of Canada.
So Jackson later wrote about this experience.
Said one of the most terrifying aspects of publishing stories and books is the realisation that they are going to be read and read by strangers.
I had never fully realised this before, although I had, of course, in my imagination,
lovingly upon the thought of the millions and millions of people who were going to be uplifted and enriched and delighted by the stories I wrote.
It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people
might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters. I was downright scared to open.
Of course, the lottery became one of the most anthologies short stories in history,
and my older daughter had to read it in her sixth grade English class a few years ago.
So you could say that the lottery coming just a few years after World War Two and in the early days of the House un-American Activities Committee,
hit a kind of nerve and so did a story.
We published a year and a half ago Cat Person by Christian Repentant, which was more or less a first published story by an unknown writer.
It's a story that simply about a first date that goes wrong, and it hit many nerves,
so it had been written and sent to me months before Harvey Weinstein's crimes and misdemeanours were exposed and the MeToo movement was launched.
But it? And it's kind of complicated dissection of communication between an older man and a younger woman who barely know each other.
And mistake. A connexion through texts for real intimacy.
It seemed it seemed for the moment, and so much so that people, a lot of readers, mistook it for memoir,
even though it was written in the third person word spread through Twitter other social networks.
And the story has now had, I think, five and a half million hits on NewYorker.com, which is more not only unprecedented for fiction,
but it's beat out every other non-fiction piece on the website in the last year and a half.
And I just thought it was interesting. That opinion echoed Jackson's thoughts 70 years later, she said.
I want people to read my stories. Of course I do. That's why I write them.
But knowing in that immediate and unmediated way, what people thought about my writing felt the word I keep reaching for,
even though it seems melodramatic, is annihilating to be faced with all those people thinking and talking about me.
It was like standing alone at the centre of a stadium while thousands of people screamed at me at the top of their lungs.
Not for me at me. I guess some people might find this exhilarating. I did not.
So I was always on some level. As a fiction editor,
you have to think when putting out first stories in particular by unknown writers
about whether you're actually doing them a favour or not doing them a favour.
And in this case it was complicated, but it wasn't anything we could have predicted.
Editing fiction in magazine form, at least, is not always a garden of delights.
I forget where you called it in your introduction and perpetually fascinating job it is,
but it on one level it sort of fundamentally thankless because there's no way to please everyone.
And editing stories is a bit like having children. They come to you with with this DNA and potential in place,
and you do what you can to help them achieve their potential and become their best possible selves.
And with stories, when you do a good job, the writer gets the credit.
If you do a bad job, you get blamed for ruining what was obviously a fantastic story before you got your hands on it.
And I've been blamed for ruining stories I didn't even edit.
And I find that when people really like a story, they tend to tell their friends about it and when they are upset by it, they write to the editor.
So the feedback, the feedback that I get is primarily of this sort.
Your fiction isn't worth reading these days. It's unappealing without interest or value.
Two paragraphs in and it's a stop. Everyone with an iPad is a writer these days, so it shouldn't be a problem finding good stuff.
How about giving it a try?
Or after finishing your most recent piece of fiction, I begin to wonder if your editors do not need some immediate intervention for depression.
So depression aside, there often comes a moment when you're working on a story,
and I am assuming this is something writers feel on a good day when something in the voice of that story becomes clear,
something that's sort of hovering just below the surface of what's actually been written.
And you see something and you see if I move that paragraph two pages earlier,
the balance of this story is going to change and readers will feel what happens.
Five pages later, much more strongly. Or if I cut this foreshadowing here, then on page 18, people will be deeply surprised.
And perhaps the ending doesn't work.
Perhaps the story wants to go in another direction, and there's kind of an energised forward motion to what you're doing,
and you enter into this story you can see in all directions within it,
and then you go to the writer with these thoughts, and most of the time he or she agrees or gives it a try.
Every once in a while, you're wrong. But if you're. Good at what you do most of the time, you're right, and the writer takes it from there.
And there's just this enormous jolt of pleasure in feeling like you've you've improved this
small piece of the world which is going to outlive you and outlive the writer as well.
So there's one person I would like to have the last word on the New Yorker's editing process, and that's Vladimir Nabokov.
Who went through it countless times with Katherine White,
who was the first fiction editor of the magazine and it was women and was also the mother of Roger Angel and married to be white.
So in an essay, Nabokov wrote a kind of mock review of his own book, Conclusive Evidence, which was later titled Speak Memory.
And he writes, part of this essay says there are discrepancies between the present text and The New Yorker,
one which are to be explained by the authors reinstating a few scattered words or
clusters of words that had been left out with his reluctant consent by The New Yorker,
either for family magazine reasons or because the New Yorker pessimistically
thought that an unusual term might bother some of its less brainy readers.
And the latter case, Mr. Nabokov did not always give in, and this resulted in some spirited fights.
Some of them, such as the Battle of the Pepperell Night Nabokov lost.
Others he won. Finally, there was the question of corrected grammar as an English writing author, and Nabokov, as always, felt insecure.
For all the dash and racy ness of his English, he has a way of lapsing into Solace isms,
some of which are rather astonishing in view of his general sophistication.
Therefore, the minor improvements suggested by the New Yorker editors the curing of an inversion, the bracing up of some awkwardly drooping term,
the splitting of a long sentence into the ritualistic transformation of witches into that's where meekly and gratefully accepted by Mr. Nabokov.
What skirmishes there were took place, usually around the editors inadvertently destroying a treasured rhythm or wrongly interpreting an illusion
or tending to tending to replaced by nouns every he she and we that had strayed into the next paragraph,
leaving the reader to scratch his little head and more. Especially there was the missing antecedent case that cropped up again and again,
leading to many tussles in the course of which Mr. Nabokov and anti antecedent of long standing often knew defeat,
but also won a few choice victories. It would seem at the very beginning of Nabokov's association with the New Yorker,
editorial attempts to clarify seeming ambiguities and trim his prose were much more carefree and frequent than a little later.
Stage howls of pain would come from the author and mutterings about the unworthiness of compliance with the magazine's tastes.
Gradually, however, the editing department realised that the labour had expended on the construction of a solid bridge to join.
Any two ideas that seemed to exceed the span of a commuters mind was a rather unnecessary, albeit well-meaning, procedure.
Since the author had taken even more trouble to destroy or lift or camouflage a bridge that spoil the landscape,
the reader, however, must now be shown the other side of the matter. Great sympathy, a delicate and loving care mark to all editorial queries.
The explanations or amplifications now and then asked for were often granted by Mr. Nabokov and resulted in some delightful new paragraphs.
Katherine White, who corresponded with the author in regard to all these matters,
took endless trouble to check every hyphen and comma and smooth the creases and
her author's ruffled temper and do everything to keep Nabokov's prose intact.
Thank you very much. We need both.
That was that was wonderful, thank you so much.
One of the things that was so fascinating to me about that talk was the way you revealed this whole shadow world of texts that orbit The New Yorker.
So the letter that the editors are sending to one another that unbelievably intense
and intimate letters Cynthia Ozick writes to who exactly is unclear and no one right?
And I'm curious if we had more of that material from today.
What would it reveal about the differences in taste or sensibility between you and your fellow fiction editors?
Well, if you circulated the notes on various stories, yeah, you would see you would see something.
I mean, I think it's I make it a point to have people in the fiction department who don't agree because if we're only catering to one person's taste,
we're not catering to the audience. And although I don't think the audience should be in a writer's mind,
I think it does need to be in an editor's mind when editing for a certain publication.
And I just think you don't need to underestimate people's ability to stretch and that we should publish things across the spectrum.
How do you think will serve Nabokov when you look at his correspondences with White?
He certainly is thinking about the New Yorker reader. In addition to The New Yorker's, Ryan White was thinking more intensely about that.
And at a time when you have twenty thousand readers or fifty thousand readers, you have less variety right than when you have millions.
So how do you think about the audience now? So.
I don't have any particular preconceived notion, I mean, I think at the magazine for a long time, especially when I first started,
there was a sense that we were going on publishing fiction every week because we
were sort of high and mighty and we believed in it and we believed in literature,
but no one was actually reading it.
And this was because people on the subway didn't often see people reading the fiction piece, you know, in any given week.
And the idea was perhaps we were just publishing for a group of twenty thousand writers so they could get jealous of each other.
Well, writers are so, so then the web happened and.
And we could have more, more insight into who was reading what and how they were reading it.
And in any given week, with the exception of a cat person, the fiction is never the most popular thing.
But the fiction has a shelf life, you know, whereas a piece about Hillary Clinton doesn't, you know,
it's not relevant to your later, not in the same way when the story has lost none of its relevance.
So, so there's that. There's also. On a more mercenary level,
the research was done and it was discovered that the readers who come to the New Yorker website to read fiction are by far
the most likely people to pull out their credit cards and pay for a subscription because they're not there for a headline.
They're there for a text, and they might prefer reading on paper.
We also started a podcast, so I had Tara mentioned by the New Yorker fiction podcast, and that was just sort of a shot in the dark.
Let's make use of our fiction archives. Let's have contemporary reader writers read stories by other people and talk about them,
and it's been a huge amount of fun to do that because these are already published stories.
I didn't edit them.
I get to dive into them with some, whether the intelligent writer who knows who has a strong opinion on what makes that story work.
And we got to kind of play around within that story.
And the writers usually like it because they get tired of talking about themselves and promoting themselves,
and they get to talk about something else.
And this went out into the world and now has something like three hundred and fifty thousand downloads a month,
which is more than twenty thousand writers getting jealous of each other. So it just was confirmation that people are really.
Reading fiction engaged by fiction, people like to be read too, and that there's a whole world out there, readers.
But you're also a sort of massive institution of taste making right. You can make a writer's career the way that you did with Propeny.
And so do you think quite we started the kinds, right?
She can write it. She can make it. Yeah.
Do you think quite actively about the kinds of careers that you want to make, the kinds of fiction that you want to see circulating in the world?
For months, you know, and it may be a little naive, especially in cases like Christian Rebellion,
but I think our focus is really on the story rather than on the writer and the writer's future.
Sometimes I have in the past felt a little anxious about first time writers.
You put out a story, they suddenly get a big large advance for a question.
They might not be ready yet. They might not have written anything else that was as good as that one story.
They might need another five years to muddle around and before they have that kind of pressure put on them.
And although. You know, as you heard Christian repenting and was not delighted by the attention now got her to a deal,
and that's wonderful, and she now can write comfortably and go on in whatever direction she wants to.
With financial security. But. It also puts so much pressure on that first book, right, because if millions of people love one story,
they open this book and they see that the 11 other stories are not like that story, right?
Then they're disappointed. Right? So and that was quite a bit of the yeah.
The reviews of that book. I was really interested to hear you talk about taking bellows, which bellow novel was that,
by the way, you know, relisted about taking that novel and making it into a story.
And I was wondering what you think the relationship is between the short story and the novel, because you guys often do excerpts.
We do novels, don't we do fewer than than you would think? I mean, usually three to five a year?
Yeah, it's really. So we have a requirement in that situation, which is whatever we publish has to at least feel like a story.
It has to feel conclusive and self-contained. It has to be a satisfying read.
It can't just be a teaser for a novel. It's going to come out not doing ads, right?
So very few novels lend themselves to that. And it's it's sometimes quite difficult.
And sometimes you have. You have writers who really only write novels that you whose work you love, you want to publish.
And and if they just don't write a novel that can be from which one part can be pulled out in a satisfying way, then you just you can't.
Well, I'm thinking of this amazing moment in Ben Lerner's novel 03:50, where he talks about How do people know this novel?
Some people, yes, where he talks about submitting a short story to The New Yorker.
And do you want to narrate this? Or should I? Were you involved in it? Because you might want to narrate it if you were involved in it?
Well, in the in the novel, he talks about submitting a short story to The New Yorker and the fiction editor asking him to make these changes.
And he gets sort of uppity and refuses, and then his agent is like,
You're turning down so much money and like writes to you guys and says, Well, sorry, he's a poet.
He didn't know what he was. You know, the money had to do with the archives. But the so yeah, so he sent a story.
And I think at that point, it was already maybe part of a novel in progress, which he didn't really mention.
Or maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just that was all he'd written. And I'm not his primary editor.
My colleague, Chris Evolutionist is primary editor in chief. Circulated this piece and.
And we really liked it, but it had this one section that was clearly about it was wasn't connected to the rest of the story,
and Crestor was more forgiving about that than I was. She didn't bother her and I said, Well, really, can't we ask him to take that section out?
And I think in retrospect, it was connecting to the rest of the novel and not to this particular segment.
So, yeah, he did. He's absolutely not. I have my standards.
I'm not going to be told what to do and I'm and went away and then a little while later came back sort of shamelessly saying,
Well, all my friends say it's better without that. So OK.
And then in his novel, he had that story, the golden vanity.
And then he had a section about submitting it to The New Yorker being told, you know, and all his friends saying it was better without it.
So it became some kind of meta fiction, but it was all true, right?
Right. Oh, OK. That really wasn't even what I was going to ask you, but thank you for confirming that it was that it was all that it was all true.
No, I was going to ask you. When you think about these, you know,
excerpts from novels or where you think about how the short story can be unfolded into or constructed from the novel,
you know, what do you think about the relationship between the kind of the kinds of short
stories that you're publishing and the kinds of novels that people read?
What is the relationship between the kind of New Yorker's taste in short stories and say the markets taste in novels?
I'm thinking about it on the spot. I don't really know.
I mean, on one level, I want to say that we work with the short story form because that's primarily what we work
with and it's a different form from the novel and you can do different things with it.
And because novels very rarely have these sort of compacted inner narratives that you can take out,
it feels like quite a different style of writing most of the time that you can be more expansive.
There's less pressure on a novel to do something in every paragraph, right?
Whereas if you're writing three thousand words you read, you need to.
It's more like a poem. You need to be doing something at all times. There's no sort of breather in there.
So I don't I just think some writers are able to do one and not the other, and some writers are able to do both.
Someone like, you know, Alice Munro, for instance, she said she used to say,
I keep trying to write a novel and then it stops after 30 pages, you know, I just can't go on and write.
And George Saunders struggled for years to to write something.
He kept starting a novel and then it would come to me as a long story and he would give up on it.
And so it took him a long time to come up with a novel form that he could work in.
Yeah. How did you think about who to include in the 20 under 40 and why?
40. Why the age for why the age 40? She asked.
What? We have done a similar issue 10 years before which because we included two 40 year olds, we couldn't call 20 under 40.
So I think we called it 20 writers for the new millennium because it was in 1999, but the oldest word to 40 year olds.
Just as a way of looking at, you know,
new developments in fiction and new voices in fiction and trying to take a quite self-conscious look at that and look at what's happening and.
Yeah, I don't know. It's been there's maybe some pressure to do another one now that nine years have passed since the last one.
And I I it makes me anxious because, you know, any time you try to judge based on early work,
you're going to get some people wrong and some people write, or you're going to miss some people that basically when we does that make you anxious?
Well, you don't want to you know, you've seen all the negative letters I get. OK.
You know, and most people it it's it's an interesting process because it's a long process because
we really try to read everything that that might be of interest by young writers.
And some writers just take till later in their lives to really develop.
And some some sort of have something fantastic when they're twenty two and then nothing.
Right? So.
Again, like I say, I try to focus on the story itself, and that's one case of not focussing on the story, that's a case of focussing on the writer.
So it's it requires a sort of mind shift in my reading.
Well, focussing on a collection or a curation of writers to write not just on the individual writer, but I'm reading something.
We weren't really thinking of it in that way and one one way.
One thing that affected the final selection was that we had to publish a story by that person so that at the time that we were,
you know, say we had an ideal list of 30 people. If there were 10 on there who didn't have any story at that time, we couldn't really include them.
And it was there was no honourable mention it. So it wasn't a competition in that sense.
Right. So there were some people who did have stories and some who didn't, and it made a difference.