The Way the World Works: Essays (11 page)

Its tone, from the outset, was, as John Updike described it in an onstage interview with Remnick, “big-town folksy.” E. B. White was one of the early sources of the style—along with James Thurber and Joseph Mitchell, and an alcoholic named John McNulty, who wrote stories about regulars at a bar on Third Avenue. Later there was Maeve Brennan, from Ireland, who wrote beautiful unfurling paragraphs about living in cheap hotels in the city, using as her byline “The Long-Winded Lady.” Brennan was evidently a little
crazy toward the end, as writers tend to be, but in her “Talk of the Town” prose she is extremely sane and full of kind attentiveness.

And there were the cartoonists—Peter Arno, who liked drawing high-breasted showgirls, and Saul Steinberg, who made surreal black-and-white rainbows, and William Steig, whose trembly pencil seemed never to want to leave the paper, and George Booth, master of quizzically frowning brindle-eyed dogs. There were storytellers, too—J. D. Salinger, John Cheever, Updike, William Trevor, Alice Munro, and John O’Hara, who in his prime could tell a tight, bitter tale of private woe in 1,800 words. A magazine that has been around for this long pulls its own history behind it like a battered Brio train. At the front is David Remnick, gently drawing it forward, helping it over the next little blond wooden hill, hoping that the shiny domelike magnets don’t detach.

I was in the
New Yorker
offices, on the twentieth glass-sheathed floor of the Condé Nast building in Times Square, one Friday in April. The week’s issue had just closed, and the place was quiet. People stared at their screens, catching up with all the things they had put off during the recent editorial flurry. Remnick was having his picture taken, so I said hello to Pam McCarthy, the magazine’s deputy editor, whose office is next to Remnick’s. What is he like to work with? I asked her.

“He’s easygoing, and he’s not,” said McCarthy. “He likes to keep his finger on every detail. He really pushes until it’s right. He’s a great floorwalker. He circles the floor several times a day and talks to people.”

Just then Remnick came in with Alexa Cassanos, the director of publicity, and the four of us talked about earphones and earplugs. “In Maine why would you need earplugs?”
Remnick asked me. (I live in Maine.) “When I’m out of the city,” he continued, “I’m up till four in the morning because it’s so damned quiet. I think somebody’s going to jump in and strangle me. It’s not relaxing.”

We walked a few blocks to a seafood restaurant, Esca, on Forty-third Street, where Remnick goes once in a while. Mark Singer, one of the magazine’s best-known writers of profiles, wrote a piece on Esca’s owner, Dave Pasternack, who does his own fishing around Long Island and knows how to cut mahi-mahi into raw tidbits.

Pasternack himself came by the table soon after we’d sat down and told us that he’d opened up a new business—a seafood concession in center field of the Mets’ baseball stadium, where he sells crabcakes, fish sandwiches, lobster rolls, and chowders. Jeff Wilpon, the general manager of the Mets, lost a lot of money several years ago to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, but, according to Pasternack, Wilpon was upbeat about his life. “I was at a party the other day,” Pasternack said, “and I go, ‘How’re you doing?’ Wilpon goes, ‘I was rich and miserable and now I’m poor and happy.’ ”

“Are you sure about the latter?” asked Remnick.

Suddenly I had a strange and not unpleasant sensation. I’d entered the printed pages of
The New Yorker;
I was physically inhabiting a Mark Singer profile, as edited by David Remnick.

Pasternack said, of Wilpon, “This is a guy who came to me to ask if I wanted to do a concession. I said, ‘I’ll make a couple of things for you.’ I bring a lobster roll down—beautiful lobster roll, toasted bun, nice and buttery the way it’s supposed to be. He looks at me and he says, ‘I don’t like toast.’ All I could think about is: when you’re born they give you toast, and on your deathbed they give you toast. Who in
this world doesn’t like toast? When you’re sick they give you toast!”

“I get cartoons about toast every week,” said Remnick.

“Yeah?” said Pasternack.

“I got a cartoon,” said Remnick, “it was a toaster the size of the restaurant.” He turned to me. “Do you waste your time watching baseball?”

I said no, not really, I’m out of it.

Remnick said, “I’m sure that when I’m on my deathbed . . .”

“You’re going to have toast,” said Pasternack, with finality. Then he went away to fillet more fish.

I asked Remnick what his dining room was like when he was a kid. “Lots of mirrors,” he said. “We didn’t eat in the dining room.” He grew up in Hillsdale, New Jersey—“Springsteen Jersey, without the shore”—and his mother got multiple sclerosis when he was six. Some years later, his father, a dentist, became ill with Parkinson’s disease. “To be a Parkinsonian dentist is like a Buster Keaton movie,” Remnick told me. “It’s funny unless you’re living it.” In high school he edited the school paper,
The Smoke Signal,
writing articles for it under several pseudonyms. He wasn’t a devoted
New Yorker
reader then. “
Guitar Player
magazine meant more to me in high school than
The New Yorker,
” he said. “There were no chord diagrams in
The New Yorker
.”

He studied comparative literature at Princeton and took a class with the
New Yorker
writer John McPhee, who taught him that you have to be willing to seem stupid when you interview people. He spent a semester in Japan, teaching English and feeling lonely. He also went to Paris, where he wore a Leon Russell T-shirt and nine-dollar Converse sneakers and made money singing Bob Dylan songs in the
Metro. His Princeton classmates were all getting jobs as investment bankers; he got a job at the
Washington Post
, as the night crime reporter. He covered boxing for a while, and then, as he limbered up, he interviewed celebrities in their hotel rooms. He was good, something of a prodigy in fact—a natural reporter, nimble and prompt with copy.

The
Washington Post
sent him to Russia in 1988, with his new wife, where he covered, with astonishing fecundity, every phase of the disintegration of the Soviet empire. He wrote somewhere between three hundred and four hundred stories a year, watching and learning from Bill Keller, the fast-fingered Russian correspondent for the
New York Times,
later its editor-in-chief. Framed in Remnick’s office is the front page of the
Washington Post
for August 24, 1991, which has two Remnick stories. The top one begins: “Communist rule collapsed tonight in the Soviet Union after seven decades as President Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as Communist Party general secretary and ordered the government to seize all party property.”

Out of that heady period grew Remnick’s first book,
Lenin’s Tomb
. There’s a characteristic scene early in the book where he is trying to interview the last living member of Stalin’s cabinet—an old man named Kaganovich. Remnick finds out that Kaganovich, by a strange coincidence, lives downstairs from him, and he knocks on the door. He knocks for a long time. There’s no answer. Every day he knocks. He finds Kaganovich’s number and calls it. No answer. He lets it ring for dozens of rings. Finally he reaches Kaganovich’s wife, who says her husband isn’t going to talk. He keeps calling; he wants to see, he says, “what an evil man looked like.” He learns there’s a secret telephone code: let it ring twice, then hang up and call again. Kaganovich answers. Remnick
identifies himself. Kaganovich says, “No interviews! That’s it!” He dies soon after. But Remnick had at least heard the voice of the last of Stalin’s inner circle. There are dozens of scenes of poignancy and loss and upheaval in
Lenin’s Tomb;
it won a Pulitzer Prize in 1994.

By then Remnick was freelancing for
Esquire
and
Vanity Fair,
and then staff-writing for Tina Brown’s
New Yorker
, writing one telling profile after another—on Don DeLillo, on Mike Tyson, on Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s father, Remnick wrote, “has little white tufts of hair and weary, narrow eyes, the eyes of a Chinese scholar.” On Tyson’s fight with Evander Holyfield: “Incredibly, Tyson once more nuzzled his way into Holyfield’s sweaty neck, almost tenderly, purposefully, as if he were snuffling for truffles. He found the left ear and bit.” Remnick is modest about these writing successes, which he attributes chiefly to “sitzfleisch”—the capacity to sit in a chair until the work is done. “A lot of what I do is just the mental illness of persistence,” he told me.

In 1998, Remnick published his second book,
King of the World,
about one of the heroes of his youth, Muhammad Ali. Then something momentous happened: Tina Brown suddenly left her job in order to found a new magazine,
Talk
. (“Tina is more of a comet than a planet,” said Remnick. “She shines brilliantly and moves from thing to thing.”) S.I. Newhouse,
The New Yorker
’s owner, asked David to take over. When the staff heard the news they stood and applauded for five minutes. “It was an applause of relief,” according to Remnick. “It was like the inner applause when you go to the neurologist and you find out that you don’t have a brain tumor.” The job wasn’t easy at first—he lost ten pounds in the first couple of months. It still isn’t easy. “You
have to understand,” he said, “for me to be at this magazine is preposterous. I feel like a pretender.”

Actually, though, he’s the real thing: a great, omnivorous editor. He takes
The New Yorker
’s history seriously—he’s edited a series of anthologies of themed
New Yorker
pieces from earlier eras—but he is just as determined that, in the era of iPads and bloggery, he won’t be the last of the magazine’s masters of ceremonies. One of his biggest hits came in 2004: Seymour Hersh’s reporting on abuse in Abu Ghraib. He also brought Ian Frazier, a comic genius, back into the fold—Frazier had been on strike, more or less, during Tina’s tumultuous tenure—and he found and encouraged some good new writers, among them Ben McGrath, who can write deftly about anything, including football concussions and theorists of dystopian collapse.

After 9/11 Remnick had an odd (to me) burst of militancy, as so many did, writing with approval on the attack on Afghanistan, and, in a famous comment piece in “Talk of the Town,” endorsing the invasion of Iraq. “I was wrong,” he told me, about Iraq. He wants his magazine to get truths out. I asked him what he would have done if Julian Assange had offered him a basketful of WikiLeaks documents. Of course he would publish them, he said—he’d let the courts sort it out later. “I think the world is better off knowing than not knowing.”

Last year he published an enormous book about the civil rights movement and the rise of Barack Obama. He wrote it early in the morning, before leaving for work, and late at night. “Sitting next to him, if I hadn’t known he was writing a book, I wouldn’t have been able to tell,” Pam McCarthy told me. “I don’t mean to sound hagiographic, but actually he really is quite amazing. And exhausting.”

Remnick left me in his office while he did an afternoon circle of the twentieth floor. I took some pictures of his bookshelves—hundreds of works by
New Yorker
contributors past and present, books in Russian, a well-thumbed copy of the poems of Walt Whitman, and a recent run of the magazine bound in black and gold. Then I looked out of the window at a sign that said “Toshiba” in big letters, and another sign for Thomson Reuters. Down the street was the tarnished green roofline of the old
New York
Times
building, one of the seemingly few structures in the neighborhood that was there when the magazine began. I looked at a snapshot of Remnick’s wife and children, at a small plastic windup radio, at a framed photograph of Updike, at another of Ornette Coleman, at hundreds of CDs, and at a nesting doll of Vladimir Putin, whose profile Remnick wrote in 2003. On his desk was “the long”—the single big piece of paper with all the stories on it that were in the hopper, ready to go into future
New Yorker
s. I felt like a trespasser, like a spy, too high up in the Manhattan skyline for my own good. I heard the discreet bong of a ringing phone. Remnick walked me to the elevators. “Remember what Barbara Walters said at the end of the Jimmy Carter interview?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Be kind to us, Mr. President.”

(2011)

I
got a call from the Rochester Public Library, the library I used most as a child. They were getting rid of their card catalog; I had written about card catalogs at some length in
The New Yorker
. Did I want it? If I paid for shipping, they would mail it from Rochester to Berkeley—minus the cabinets, which had resale value. I said no, I didn’t want it, I wanted them to keep it. So they threw it out.

About a year later, I got some unhappy e-mails from librarians at the San Francisco Public Library. The SFPL had just moved to a new building, and the press was responding with prolonged, ecstatic coverage. Robert Hass, U.S. poet laureate, wrote that “the interior of the library is a marvel, so deeply delicious you forget your previous ideas of what a library is”; Allan Temko, architecture critic for the
San Francisco Chronicle,
likened its several inner bridges to “the visionary architecture of Piranesi.” The old card catalog, however, was, according to the librarians who wrote me, going to be destroyed—the cards recycled, the cabinets auctioned off. For now it still sat intact in the old building: an ornately carved summation of the contents of a great urban public library, “frozen” (i.e., not filed into or updated) as of
1991. “You are the only one who can save it now,” a librarian wrote me.

Because I felt I had shirked my duty as a preservationist in my hometown, I agreed to try to keep it intact. On May 21, 1996, I made a formal request under the Public Records Act to inspect the card catalog. (The Public Records Act is California’s version of the federal Freedom of Information Act.) This legalistic demarche would, I hoped, define the catalog as a public document, and temporarily prevent the administration from treating it as surplus property. The request was not unreasonable: the database conversion project wasn’t finished, and there were thousands of cards in the card catalog for books held in closed-stack areas of the library that had no match yet in the online system. (More than half the library’s collection was in closed, unbrowsable stacks.) The request was, however, denied, in a letter from the city librarian, Kenneth E. Dowlin: “We are unable to allow this at this time.”