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New York Review of Books' Robert Silvers

San Francisco Chronicle
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, November 9, 2008
  • Robert Silvers, executive editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books / Courtesy New York Review of Books Photo: Courtesy New York Review Of Book
    Robert Silvers, executive editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books / Courtesy New York Review of Books Photo: Courtesy New York Review Of Book

 

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If Robert Silvers brings to mind the Wizard of Oz - not the man behind the curtain, but the mortal who emerges, all good-natured common sense - it's because he is wiser than most and spills over with passion for the enterprise he co-founded in 1963, a kind of serious lark that became an American institution, the New York Review of Books.

Silvers, editor of the Review, recently came to San Francisco to host a panel discussion keyed to the presidential election. (The number of the magazine's California readers rivals that of New York state, each with 15 percent of the Review's 137,000 subscribers.)

He perched briefly by the fireplace in the Big 4 Restaurant of the Huntington Hotel on Nob Hill, where his retelling of the Review's creation story was a reminder that the literary, like the personal, is always political.

It was 1963, and a citywide newspaper strike had kept New Yorkers in the dark for months. Publishers had nowhere to advertise their new books, so Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, suggested that he and his wife, Barbara Epstein, and Silvers, then an editor at Harper's magazine, fill the gap with a review of their own.

It could be a corrective! After all, Silvers had only just commissioned a series of essays for Harper's on the state of American literature. Elizabeth Hardwick's response - an essay called "The Decline of Book Reviewing" - quickly became their manifesto.

"Politics was serious," said Silvers, 79. "We started under Kennedy. Then he was assassinated. There was a revolution in civil liberties," he added, citing resistance to Brown v. the Board of Education, which had criminalized school segregation, and the march in support of voting rights in Selma, Ala. ("Elizabeth Hardwick went on that march.")

"Then the Vietnam War in '68 brought enormous change, great trauma," which inspired a political backlash. "There was Nixon, with his enemies list. The New York Times was prosecuted for publishing the Pentagon Papers," Silvers recalled. "Barbara and I were very engaged by these questions." They were an unstoppable team, editing the Review side by side until her death in 2006.

"We felt you had to have a political analysis of the nature of power in America - who had it, who was affected," he recalled. "It's hard to sum up a paper. We published thousands of articles of many kinds. But the current running through from the beginning was - here we were, editors of this paper in New York. We had control. We could do whatever we wanted, if we could pay the printer." By the third year, they were in the black.

"It struck us that in so many parts of the world - under the Shah or under Brezhnev - people could be punished for publishing what they believed," Silvers said. In response, the Review has continuously published in-depth interviews with political dissidents, including Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov and Vaclav Havel.

Today, the idea at the heart of the New York Review of Books - that a thoughtful, vigorous survey of the books of the day is more than the sum of its parts - couldn't be more bracing or more relevant. At a time when newspapers and publishers are confronting transformational changes, it is good to remember that books are still the starting point for our national conversation.

Just so, the 45th anniversary edition of the Review includes a "ferociously researched" consideration of the vice presidency of Dick Cheney written by David Bromwich, an English professor at Yale and an Edmund Burke scholar.

Pairing writer with subject is an art. And such matchmaking is "part of the excitement of being an editor," Silvers said. "We want brilliant and beautiful articles - works of criticism and imagination." From the start, he added, "if we [Barbara Epstein and himself] had one thing in common, it was this feeling of intense admiration for wonderful writers."

Should the Review's founding coterie and the New York it reflects seem a bit precious or self-contained, the pages of the 45th anniversary issue, in fact, reveal the actuality of its willfully panoramic view.

Before grabbing a handful of smoked almonds and making a dash for the door, Silvers is all excitement discussing British author Zadie Smith, who has written a powerful piece for the anniversary issue.

"She is such an exciting writer, and a fiercely independent thinker," Silvers said. And, while the new issue opens with a posthumous gem by Edmund Wilson - (a kind of bookend to a piece Wilson wrote for the inaugural issue in 1963) - it ends with the long piece by Smith.

"It's an ambitious essay, a daring and original piece by a brilliant mind," Silvers said. In it, she dismantles the status quo in the form of a review of two new novels - "Netherland" and "Remainder" - that she holds up as representing where the novel's been and where it's going.

"Some people will be slightly shaken," Silvers said, with delight.

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