Chicago owes a lot to New York. We don’t usually admit it, nevertheless it’s true. This place was just about began by New York land speculators. Our first mayor, William B. Ogden, was a New York lawyer checking on his brother’s actual property holdings. We nonetheless use nicknames New Yorkers gave us, like “Windy Metropolis,” describing, not our icy gales, however the blasts of ballyhoo making an attempt to snag the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
And “Second Metropolis” — the title of a three-part backhand that A. J. Liebling revealed in The New Yorker in 1952, a gleeful vivisection of Chicago as a dreary cultural backwater. Not a correct metropolis in any respect, however “a theater backdrop with a metropolis painted on it.”
Chicago rolled with the criticism. One of many many improv comedy teams sprouting within the Fifties took “Second Metropolis” as its proud moniker. And to far much less renown I took an offended line scribbled on a postcard to Liebling, “You had been by no means in Chicago,” and used it within the title of my metropolis memoir.
The New Yorker celebrates its a hundredth anniversary this month, thriving nonetheless in a hellscape of blasted mainstream publications. Whereas it’s off-brand for a Chicago newspaper columnist to notice the event, so what? We defy parochialism. Credit score the place due. What began as an arch romp for Manhattan sophisticates become an engine driving liberal American tradition, from John Hersey’s “Hiroshima” to Ronan Farrow serving to spark the Me Too motion together with his 2017 expose on Harvey Weinstein.
Too many to quote. Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” Busloads of masterful writers: Joseph Mitchell. J.D. Salinger. Humorists from Robert Benchley and Woody Allen to Ian Frazier and Simon Wealthy. Genius artists — from Saul Steinberg, no relation, alas, and Charles Adams, Bruce McCall and Roz Chast.
The New Yorker definitely was a polestar for me — I’ve lived in a home that subscribed to the journal for my total life. My father, a product of the Bronx, at all times subscribed. As a teen, I wished to be James Thurber, and modeled myself on him a lot that when school ended I didn’t trouble making use of for a job. Any person would introduce me to my E.B. White and I’d be set. As a profession technique, that labored about in addition to you’d anticipate.
Writing my first guide, a historical past of school pranks, the query arose whether or not to cowl Caltech’s Ditch Day utilizing accessible revealed articles, or spend a piece of my advance attending to Pasadena. “What would John McPhee do?” I requested, then booked a flight.
No less than that received revealed. Battering myself in opposition to the barred door of The New Yorker was the identical futile effort for me that it was for many writers who fall in need of the mark. Aside from one quick story, “Mascots Reign at Fall Present,” a parody of commerce reveals at McCormick Place. The British quarterly Granta had accepted, then rejected, it. Which emboldened me to dare ship it to The New Yorker.
An editor, Dan Menaker, phoned. The story, he mentioned, is terrific — it reminded him of Donald Barthelme. I hung up the cellphone and set free a scream. We labored collectively, enhancing it. However ultimately, editor Tina Brown didn’t prefer it. I saved sending in new work, not realizing that I’d already had my Moonlight Graham second. The remainder of the submissions received more and more formal rejections. However that one story. “It was like coming this near your goals, then having them brush previous you, like a stranger in a crowd,” as Burt Lancaster says in “Area of Goals.” “I believed, ‘There’ll be different days.’ I didn’t understand, that was the one day.”
Not fairly true. I did have two sentences revealed in The New Yorker — cartoon captions. I went to highschool with ace New Yorker cartoonist Robert Leighton, and gave him a few set-ups and captions that he kindly submitted, and had been printed. The newest reveals two mice pressed in opposition to the glass wall of a boa constrictor tank. “Hey!” says one. “How come our names aren’t on the plaque?”
That fairly effectively sums up my life — perhaps all writers’ lives. There was one different New Yorker second I cherish. The journal’s longtime fixture, Adam Gopnik, was visiting Chicago. The primary time we met was in a cab going to the Berghoff so I might introduce him to the thrill of Thuringer sausage and lager on the stand-up bar.
“So … a newspaper columnist in Chicago,” he ventured. “That’s type of the author’s dream, isn’t it?”
“Eh,” I mentioned, dismissively. “You know the way it’s.” I pointed at him..
“However you! The New Yorker’s man in Paris. Now that’s the author’s dream!”
“Eh,” he replied. “You know the way it’s.”
