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Here But Not Here: My Life with William Shawn and The New Yorker
Release Date: 2001-03-31
Average Customer Rating:
List Price: $15.00
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Product Description
In this fascinating and beautiful memoir, the renowned New Yorker writer Lillian Ross tells a remarkable love story of the passionate life she shared for forty years with William Shawn, The New Yorker's famous editor.
"All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn. . . . I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all. It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds."
Shawn was married, yet Ross and Shawn created a home together a dozen blocks south of the Shawns' apartment, raised a child, and lived with discretion. Their lives intertwined from the 1950s until Shawn's death, in 1992. Ross describes how they met and the intense connection between them; how Shawn worked with some of the best writers of the period; how, to escape their developing liaison, Ross moved to Hollywood, and there wrote the famous pieces that became Picture, the classic story of the making of a movie--John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage--only to return to New York and to the relationship. The love of Shawn and Ross for each other made it impossible for them ever to part.
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This book is a gem, an exquisitely told real-life story more potent than fiction.
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Amazon.com Review
As John Cheever's stories from the New Yorker magazine demonstrate, in the upper-crust Northeast in midcentury, when divorce simply wasn't done, adultery was not exactly unheard of. But Lillian Ross's exposé of her own decades of adultery with her sainted boss, New Yorker editor William Shawn, still comes as a shock. It's doubly shocking because he was uniquely revered and had an upright if not asexual reputation and because members of the New Yorker family seldom spill the beans. Gossip connoisseurs will gorge on Ross's tasty tidbits. As a child in Chicago, Bill Shawn narrowly escaped murder by renowned thrill killers Leopold and Loeb, who left Bill's house and kidnapped Bobby Franks instead. Bobby died and Bill became a famously shy victim of phobias--blood, violence, heights, confinement, or darkness could make him, in his own self-imploding way, go postal. When Bill's mom hired a nurse to save him from scarlet fever, the nurse "decided he needed, in addition to nursing, some sexual education. 'To my astonishment, she provided both, but I don't think it did me any harm,' Bill told me." He was then a child of 12. It does not occur to Ross that sex might have long-term effects of any consequence. She feels zero guilt that she set up a love nest in Marlene Dietrich's old apartment 10 blocks from Shawn's family, and adopted a child, and had a phone put in by Shawn's bed, and spent Christmases with him, leaving Thanksgivings free for Shawn to spend with his wife and biological children. "Bill assured me that Cecille was going along with our arrangements. From time to time, I would think: Maybe she loves him so much she wants him to have what keeps him alive." Meow! Mrs. Shawn, as Ved Mehta notes in his 1998 book, Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, was a reporter who supported her husband when they got to New York, and even got him his fateful job at the magazine, prior to devoting herself to their family. Ross got assignments from Shawn that made her famous, but she notes, "We never experienced even a moment of 'conflict of interest' problems, for the simple reason that we never had any conflict of interest.... If I wanted to see Bill in his office, I called his secretary, like everyone else." "I have always been less inclined than most people I know to indulge in self-analysis," writes Ross. She may be a renowned reporter, but her own mind is one subject that entirely escapes her notice. Annoyed that romantic emotions were spoiling her mood when her career took off in 1950 ("I felt I should have been having a lot of fun. Instead, I was being emotionally distracted and drained"), Ross did what any disgruntled journalist would do. She spent a year and a half at company expense in Hollywood, playing tennis with Charlie and Oona Chaplin, bonding with Bogart and Bacall, and writing the classic book Picture about her dear friend John Huston's movie The Red Badge of Courage. Ross became an A-list partygoer, the first major showbiz reporter with highbrow credentials, and Huston and company handed her a story much better than the movie in question. "I thought I was the luckiest reporter in the history of journalism," writes Ross, who may be right. And no wonder she was such a hit: cute, connected, willing to listen to egomaniacs and let subjects read her drafts before publication, Ross was, like the showbiz-titan pals of Carrie Fisher that are celebrated in her Hollywood roman à clef Delusions of Grandma, "ruthless and glad." But Ross's impersonal journalism method works better with big, showy subjects such as Huston or Ernest Hemingway. Faced with the elusive Mr. Shawn, who practically had the power to cloud men's minds so that they could not see him, she fails to illuminate his heart for the reader, despite all the fascinating facts at her command. And does she know how classically, rascally masculine a lot of Shawn's lines sound? Many of them boil down to "My staff doesn't understand me." Ross notes that William Shawn's brother Mike wrote the Doublemint ad jingle "Double Your Pleasure, Double Your Fun." William clearly doubled Lillian's fun. But with Mr. Shawn, doubleness wasn't the half of it. --Tim Appelo
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 A big hat-lifter in general ( joinedhip )
Okay, let's start by saying that I'm a big fan of the New Yorker and its legendary staff from the last century. Also a big fan of Lillian Ross's PICTURE. But this book will drive you to drink, do drugs, sit in your closed garage with the car running, whatever it takes to alter your consciousness. When she sticks to briefly writing about other people - Bogart, Hemingway, Chaplin, John Huston - she's on solid ground as always - brief, effective, perceptive. When she goes back to the subject of her book - her decades-long affair with William Shawn, editor of the New Yorker - she rambles, she avoids, she loses focus, structure and sense. She keeps going on about what an animal he was in bed - you look at the pictures of him in the book and decide for yourself - while everything else she writes about him makes him sound like a whining forlorn child-man who gnashes many teeth and wrings his hands with alarming frequency. She is absolutely in denial about how carrying on this weird affair affected her emotionally - everything is always so perfect and he's so wonderful - and in denial, I think, about just who this man was and what bizarre mind games he played. I did appreciate the paragraph about how fond he was of lifting his hat (hence the name of this review, taken directly from that paragraph). This book would be stunning if it were as honest and objective as the author's other book. It's not and the fact that her talent is involved in this elaborate unformed and tortured justification makes it unbearable.
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 negation as the other woman... ( troutthouse )
Lillian Ross was a talented even gifted writer. She comes across in this book as a intelligent charming and caring person. Yet the thrust of this book is a self conscious and self serving apologia for her life long 'relationship' with William Shawn.
Bluntly put, she was his mistress -'the other woman' (just as an aside, why do you never hear of 'the other man'?). Mr Shawn, in a controlling and manipulative way, suborned her life in a way that is both appalling and pathetic. And as much as she rationalized it - and she spends many many pages doing just that, she seemed (on some level) to be aware of the basic inequality of their 'special' relationship.
So, about the book? Mr Shawn comes across as a whining self centered egotist who somehow manages to always get his way. Ms. Ross' cavalier dismissal of his shabby treatment of his wife and children borders on the obscene. Who was Mr. Shawn? Brilliant, yes without a doubt. A gifted editor, the New Yorker magazine owes much to his dedication. But does a true genuis require such slavish devotion to his ever whim?
There are some insightful moments in the book, Ernest Hemingway, Charlie Chaplin, John Huston (and others) were personal friends, the writers and editors - the behind the scenes folks that really made the New Yorker great - are covered in a slanted and biased sort of way - somehow one doubts that Mr Shawn singled handedly made them all as good as they were. And his 'enabling' talents surely came at a terrible cost, at least for Lillian Ross.
Bottom line, this is a good book on some levels but one that I had some personal difficulty with. "Being a good little woman for her (married) man" doesn't appeal to me as a life choice regardless of the glowing personalities involved. In the end I felt no empathy for her, she was just a pathetic woman trying to justify her own self negation.
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Execrable
Poor Shawn! He seems to have had impeccable taste in everything save mistresses. The misbegotten issue of their liaison is this unique instance of a grotesque lapse in editorial judgement. I cannot imagine prose as wretched as this surviving his meticulous blue pencil from anyone sufficiently detached from him to be regarded as a writer worthy of regard on the basis solely of his work.
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 Sad and disappointing
I looked forward to reading this book for some time but only recently had the chance but it was sad and disappointing. The disappointment came from the thin writing -- from a writer who has had such a rich a varied background. Endless repetitions of phrases (He said he was there and not there; he said I was his wife; I felt no guilt). Repetitions of situations, so on. This is a 20 page monologue carried on 20 times -- and with none of the details that one would like to hear from this very accomplished writer. What was it like working at the New Yorker all those years? What was it like to interview and work with people like John Huston, Francois Truffaut, Charlie Chaplin, Oona O'Neil, Frederico Fellini, so on. This book, this writer, needed an editor if anyone did. But a sequel would be welcome by me -- one that tells the other Lillian Ross story/memoir. This 'wife's lament' is, well, not a very poetic one and not one that commends Lillian Ross as a raconteur.
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 Ruth Reichl on WQXR
The man I met for lunch at La Caravelle had been going to the restaurant since I was a child. He remembered the days of the legendary chef Roger Fessaguet. He likes to dine in the corridor as you come in to the restaurant and he remembers the days where Lillian Ross and William Shawn liked to eat there too. He pointed out their table, the one in the corner. It was swell being there with him, a bit like going back in time. But what was even nicer than that was enjoying the old-fashioned solicitude of the restaurant and the new-fashioned food. No restaurant in New York has done a better job at bridging the old and the new. La Caravelle remembers the great old days of New York's French restaurants. Many of the captains working there were working in the old places. But the food is not fusty and it's not nostalgic. La Caravelle can certainly feed you the great old dishes like Quenelles de Brochet, light fish dumplings, but it can also give you modern dishes like cured salmon wrapped around mango. What did we eat? My friend began with Billibi, the creamy saffron-laced mussel soup. I stuck to a perfect platter of clams and oysters, then he had lamb. It wasn't on the menu, but they were happy to make it for him, and I had slowly roasted halibut: it was a silky piece of fish. I followed that with a slab of perfectly cooked rosy liver and a dish of lemon sorbet, and then Petit Fours. It was a wonderful meal. The service was swell, and that pink room is done up with big vases of red autumn leaves, so it's both festive and just lightly old-fashioned. Leaving I imagined that I saw Mr. Shawn sitting in the corner. He winked at me as I passed.
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Addiction
