Who Owns the New York Review of Books
Editor Non Set up to Write an Ending
Robert Silvers, the editor of The New York Review of Books, received a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Critics Circumvolve last week, and next month he will get some other, from The Paris Review. Neither honour is likely to end the kind of speculation that invariably takes place whenever too many New York intellectuals remain too long in one room: Mr. Silvers can't stay on forever, presumably, and so who is going to succeed him?
Rea Hederman, the tall, courtly Southerner who owns The New York Review, says that he has been asked the succession question practically every solar day since he bought the publication in 1984, and he all the same has no answer.
"Bob is the editor," he said recently. "When he's not the editor, so we'll look for one. It's not something nosotros discuss or plan for."
Mr. Silvers, who turned 82 last New year's day's Eve, likes to say, in typically formal syntax, that the question of who will succeed him at the "paper," as he calls The Review, is "not 1 that is presenting itself." Despite having a pacemaker installed in the past year, he said he felt as energetic equally ever.
Paradigm 
"I recollect well-nigh concentrating on doing our issues and making them equally interesting as possible," he went on. "Really, that'southward what's on my heed. If I had some reason to think that I ought to slow down or do something else, I would probably feel differently, but I don't."
The disinclination of Mr. Silvers and Mr. Hederman to identify a successor has non stopped others from doing it for them, or from studying The Review like Kremlinologists looking for fissures in the Politburo.
In truth, the publication has contradistinct very fiddling since its founding during the New York City newspaper strike of 1963, though its circulation crept to a high of 130,000 at the end of last year. Information technology maintains a lively and opinionated blog these days, overseen past a young editor, Hugh Eakin, and in that location has even been an occasional podcast. Guided past his assistants, Mr. Silvers now prowls the Cyberspace — something that would have been unthinkable a couple of years ago. But many of aforementioned people still write for The Review, and the same person is still in accuse, editing in pencil.
If in that location were a succession plan, Review watchers like to signal out, the logical moment to put it in motion would have been in 2006, when Mr. Silvers's co-editor, Barbara Epstein, died. That would accept been the moment to bring in an heir apparent and plow over some of Ms. Epstein'due south duties, which were said to exist supervising the fiction reviews, bringing in new talent and overseeing the publication'due south layout.
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Instead, Mr. Silvers but took over all her jobs and added them to his ain immense workload. The Review continues to pay attention to fiction, has recently brought in younger writers like Zadie Smith and Nathaniel Rich, and looks as crisp as ever, though sorely missing its once familiar caricatures by David Levine, who died in 2009.
Near a decade ago, when the succession question came upward, the name most often mentioned was that of Louis Menand, then a contributing editor at The Review and all but wearing the mantle, or so rumor had it. Mr. Menand, at present a New Yorker contributor and a professor at Harvard, said recently that he and Mr. Silvers never discussed succession, just that every now and then he found himself wondering what he would say if the phone call ever came.
"I realized I couldn't imagine doing it," he said. "Not simply is Bob more in touch with intellectual life than I am, but he also knows everything that'south going on in Afghanistan and Republic of haiti. I simply don't have that range."
Other names that have come up up at literary cocktail parties over the years are those of Ian Buruma, a frequent correspondent; Daniel Mendelsohn, a classics scholar with wide interests who is personally close to Mr. Silvers; Mark Danner, another frequent contributor and likewise a erstwhile Review employee; Michael Shae, who has been a senior editor at The Review for years; and Alex Star, a onetime editor at The New York Times Book Review who recently moved to Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
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They all have their virtues, though none, it goes without maxim, exactly fits the Silvers profile. Possibly a clue to Mr. Silvers's own thinking was his role in choosing a new editor for The Paris Review after the 2003 death of George Plimpton, who was as closely identified with that publication as Mr. Silvers is with his.
There was powerful in-business firm sentiment in favor of Brigid Hughes, The Paris Review's executive editor, who had been Mr. Plimpton's right hand and knew his intentions probably better than anyone, simply the search committee, headed past Mr. Silvers, instead hired an outsider, Philip Gourevitch, a gifted only un-Plimptonian author who had never been an editor and who quickly set about redesigning and rethinking the publication. What if Mr. Silvers were hit by a bus? He laughed and said: "I can retrieve of several people who would be marvelous editors. Some of them piece of work here, some used to work hither, and some are but people we know. I think they would put out a terrific paper, only it would exist different. It would be crazy to endeavour to continue what I practise, because what I practice is idiosyncratic."
There is probably no other publication in English more clearly an expression of its editor's personality than The New York Review. Charles Rosen, withal a regular contributor after more than 40 years, wrote in a little pamphlet honoring Mr. Silvers in 1990: "Extracting reviews from writers is not, in his case, a métier or even a mode of life, merely a 18-carat form of self-expression, and he exercises information technology with dignity, tact and with what sometimes seems similar excessive sympathy."
"The Review is similar a map of Bob's mind," Mr. Hederman has said, and it's a map that is unusually varied and capacious. The newest issue, dated March 22, for example, has not only manufactures on art, science, politics and literature, like practically every issue, but as well includes an essay about Howard Cosell and a review of Frederick Wiseman's documentary about the French strip society Crazy Equus caballus.
Epitome
Mr. Mendelsohn said that Mr. Silvers'south curiosity extended even to things like Xbox video games. "So yous get from level to level, shooting aliens?" Mr. Silvers once asked him in wonderment.
Similar its editor, The New York Review is elegant, well mannered, immensely learned, a little formal at times, obsessive about clarity and factual correctness and passionately interested in man rights and the fashion governments violate them. Information technology is probably less radical than it was back in the 1960s, when it published a diagram showing how to make a Molotov cocktail, but unlike many liberal publications, it was from the beginning opposed to the Iraq war.
"The smashing political issues of ability and its abuses have e'er been natural questions for us," Mr. Silvers said.
Mr. Silvers is a legendary workaholic who, putting out 20 issues a year, gets by on very niggling slumber and sometimes spends the dark in the part. His assistants work staggered shifts to accommodate his long workday. Mr. Mendelsohn remembers that one time while on a cruise ship in the Aegean, he was summoned to the bridge for an urgent ship-to-shore communication. Information technology was Mr. Silvers, calling to question his selection of the word "compelling." Mr. Buruma pointed out, laughing, "Bob has no concept of time or space." If Mr. Silvers is an ascetic in his work habits, he is as well a voluptuary of sorts. He dresses beautifully, in dark suits with a French Legion of Honor decoration sewn into the lapel. He thinks naught of flight to Europe to see the latest fine art exhibition or hear the newest tenor. And unlike many intellectuals, he has no objection at all to the company of the rich and titled. His companion for years has been Grace, Countess of Dudley, with whom he lives in a grand Upper East Side prewar apartment. In the '60s, before she married Robert Lowell, he was involved with Lady Caroline Blackwood, whose girl, Ivana, revealed in a contempo memoir that she in one case believed Mr. Silvers was her father.
His greatest pleasure, though, is simply good writing, which he talks nearly equally others talk most fine wine or skilful food. Speaking about writers he likes, he sometimes flushes with enthusiasm.
"It all starts with adoration," he said. "The whole indicate of our paper is to find people we adore and so to find books for them. I admire keen writers, people with marvelous and beautiful minds, and always hope they volition do something special and revealing for us."
He added that though he has kept a personal notebook off and on for years, he has never been tempted to write for The Review himself. "I have a terrible sense that if it comes to writing, I should find someone better, someone terrific," he said. "I'm not competing."
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/books/robert-silverss-long-reign-at-the-new-york-review-of-books.html
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