Robert Silvers
Meticulous and devoted editor of New York Review of Books
ROBERT SILVERS, who has died aged 87, was for more than five decades editor of the New York Review of Books, a fortnightly magazine which became for some an emblem of radical chic; for others it kept a vigilant eye on America’s role in a world and encouraged the close and leisurely study of books.
At its best, the magazine, with lengthy articles by writers such as Gore Vidal, helped to ensure the primacy of good writing, grammar and punctuation when this felt assailed on all sides. As its editor, Silvers, a man who regarded the need for sleep – his own and others’ – as a personal affront, became widely known for making transatlantic calls to debate what he deemed a misplaced semi-colon.
Born at Mineola, Long Island, on New Year’s Eve, 1929, Robert Silvers was the son of a businessman, James, and his wife Rose, a music critic. His abilities, readily encouraged, meant that, already steeped in Montaigne, he went to the University of Chicago at 15, there completing a degree in two years.
After working as press secretary for a Democrat governor, he dabbled in Law at Yale for a year until Army service took him to Intelligence work at Nato in Paris in the early 1950s. He lived on a houseboat, scouted French publishers’ books for the Noonday Press and worked on a magazine for the World Assembly of Youth before enlivening the Paris Review and, back in New York, Harper’s.
There he might have stayed but for a typographers’ strike which closed nine of the city’s newspapers in 1963. The strike galvanised the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick to join the publisher Jason Epstein in creating a new magazine – to be edited by Silvers with Epstein’s wife, Barbara.
Founded on a loan of $4000, the New York Review of Books gained from publishers needing somewhere to advertise and from an array of contributors – from Auden to Wilson (Edmund) – who were willing, without pay, to write articles within three weeks for a first issue, which sold 100,000 copies. It was funded by shareholders of two kinds, general ones (such as Brooke Astor), and those who made editorial appointments, although both Silvers and Epstein remained in place until their deaths (hers was in 2006).
The magazine quickly became profitable, but soon found itself the object of FBI attention, for it was unstinting in its political coverage, with Silvers despatching Mary Mccarthy to Vietnam and, later, Joan Didion to Salvador. A famous 1967 cover was mistakenly taken for instructions on how to make a Molotov cocktail.
Silvers’s editorial discussions had the spirit of the rectory fireside, not least when it came to matters of vocabulary. Describing the articles’ length, he abhorred the phrase “long form” and shared with Edmund Wilson a contempt for the misuse of “massive” (a ball bearing is massive; a large empty box is not). His eye was always on the general reader, those who shared his perpetual relish of discovery.
Despite its title, the magazine was distinctly anglophile in its contributors, such as V S Pritchett, Isaiah Berlin, John Gross and, latterly, Hilary Mantel.
Silvers never married but was romantically involved with Barbara Skelton (whose husbands included Cyril Connolly and George Weidenfeld). Lady Caroline Blackwood (now married to Lowell) led him to believe that he was father of her daughter Ivana, who later sought DNA tests which, to her disappointment, and Silvers’s, showed her to be daughter of the domineering screenwriter Ivan Moffat. Silvers himself found lasting contentment with Grace, Countess of Dudley, who died last December.
Robert Silvers, born December 31 1929, died March 20 2017