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Ved mehta celebrated writer the yorker7/21/2023 And always one feels Bemelmans, slightly offstage, observing, recording, commenting, illustrated. One meets in passing a vast roster of famous figures of the international and artistic set. The scene shifts from Hollywood to the home she loved the best in Versailles. Bemelmans draws a portrait in extremes, through apt descriptions, through hilarious anecdote, through surprisingly sympathetic and understanding bits of appreciation. Lady Mendl was an incredible person,- self-made in proper American tradition on the one hand, for she had been haunted by the poverty of her childhood, and the years of struggle up from its ugliness,- until she became synonymous with the exotic, exquisite, worshipper at beauty's whrine. Ved Mehta passes away at 86 tributes pour in for the celebrated writer. And his hostess was Lady Mendl (Elsie de Wolfe), arbiter of American decorating taste over a generation. A staff writer on the New Yorker from 1960 to 1993, he has won many awards and. For Bemelmans was "the man who came to cocktails". Too admiring, perhaps-as Mehta himself admits, there were too many -long fact pieces that went unread- and the fiction too often -didn-t go anywhere.- Still, the high level of quality Shawn managed week after week is matchless, and Mehta effectively captures that era.Īn extravaganza in Bemelmans' inimitable vein, but written almost dead pan, with sly, amusing, sometimes biting undertones, breaking through. It didn-t happen, but it had a profound impact on his final years at the magazine. ![]() He also recounts inner-office power struggles that found Shawn turning in his resignation as early as 1978. He finds -tremors- as far back as the mid-1970s when mandatory retirement was instituted, displacing writers and editors intrinsic to Shawn’s style. His narrative thickens as he recounts office intrigues, the early intimations of Shawn’s eventual departure in 1987. Liebling, Penelope Gilliatt, Edith Oliver, Joseph Mitchell, Lillian Ross, whose -long affair- with Shawn he mentions only in passing. Mehta’s recollections of his colleagues are often too scant, and one can sometimes sense the damning of his faint praise, as with Roger Angell. But, as the ever- admiring Mehta sums up, Shawn’s technical ability was the least of it: -What informed and animated his editing were his judgment and wisdom, his thinking and vision.- Shawn had been at the helm since 1952, following the death of founder Harold Ross. The opening pages are remarkable in demonstrating Shawn’s ability to guide a writer from an initial idea to its shaping as a New Yorker article. Shawn (as he insists on calling him) and his day-to-day editorial process. Mehta does an extraordinary job, however, in describing what it was like to work with Mr. Curiously, as this is part of his autobiographical -Continents of Exile- series, Mehta (Up at Oxford, 1993, etc.) sometimes paints his own story with rather broad strokes. A fond remembrance of legendary New Yorker editor William Shawn and the changes that brought about his dismissal, by a former staff writer who spent three-and-a-half decades at West 43rd Street.
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