HOW CANADIANS CHANGED THE NEW YORKER
The New Yorker, once aimed solely at Manhattan elites, now publishes publishes some of the world’s best short stories. To mark its annual summer fiction issue, Nadine Fladd chronicles the Canadians who have have expanded the magazine’s boundaries over the
It was 1984, and William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, was facing a moral quandary; Charles McGrath, a fiction editor at the magazine, was working with Alice Munro on a short story, “Lichen,” to be published in the following year. Together, they were fretting over whether or not they could print a description of a woman’s pubic hair.
Since the publication of its first issue in 1925, The New Yorker has had strict policies about what it does and does not consider appropriate for its well-heeled readership. Historically, sexual explicitness, profanity and provocative material were prohibited. As were short stories with protagonists who were writers by trade, the word “gadget,” in most instances, and the use of tripled adjectives. An internal editorial memo, “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles,” composed and circulated in 1937 by copy editor Wolcott Gibbs, lays out these and other guidelines (item 25, for instance, reads: “On the whole we are hostile to puns), for new editors joining the magazine.
Munro, who first started publishing with the magazine in the late 1970s, was generally unphased by The New Yorker’s prim history. In “Lichen,” her protagonist, David, takes his new girlfriend to visit his ex-wife and her aging father. David shows his ex-wife a nude photograph of his new mistress, whose pubic hair appears to have a mosslike quality in the fading Polaroid — hence the “Lichen” of the story’s title.
After Munro had submitted it, McGrath wrote back to express admiration for the story, but suggested she alter some of the more graphic descriptions of the photograph: “The real magic of this story, it seems to me, is the way it earns and then miraculously effects the transformation of pubic hair into lichen, but I think it should happen effortlessly and almost invisibly — as it does in the photograph — and without, say, the additional reference to the rat between Diana’s legs.”
By the time McGrath was reading “Lichen,” the magazine had built a reputation for publishing consistently exceptional work, and Munro had likewise established herself as a well-regarded writer. Today of course, Munro is widely acknowledged as the Canadian master of the short story form, a reputation cemented by the Swedish Academy in 2013, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
By 1984, Munro’s gifts were already receiving wide recognition; she had won the Governor General’s Award for literature, twice, toured Scandinavia and China to read from her work, and been a Writer in Residence at the University of British Columbia and in Australia. Her stature as a writer, paired with her immense talent, positioned Munro to play a significant role, over time, in loosening up the naughty words policy at The New Yorker.
That said, she didn’t always outright win. In the case of “Lichen,” for example, the magazine agreed to print a slightly toned-down version of the reference to “the rat between Diana’s legs” as the “[d]ark silky pelt of some unlucky rodent.”
Once the matter of the intimate portrait had been settled, Munro’s literary agent, Virginia Barber, wrote to tell her about the editorial decision-making that had taken place. Shawn had said, Barber wrote to Munro, “the central image gave me misgivings, but the writer has earned the right to use it.” She continued: “So, you’ve a dirty mind, Alice Munro, but it’s a talented dirty mind and that’s OK.” Munro had earned the right to break the rules, and “had broken new ground at The New Yorker.”
Munro’s habit of perpetually submitting work containing vulgarities — and then reinstating those vulgarities when the magazine attempted to remove them (even if she sometimes was forced to compromise) — made her one of several Canadians who have, over the years, pushed The New Yorker to expand its boundaries, both literal and figurative. At an event at Western University in January 2011, the late Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod recounted an anecdote about attending a party in New York City. Hosted by Scribner’s, the event was designed to celebrate authors who had published in the yearly anthology of The Best American Short Stories. Partygoers were provided name tags; another guest came up to MacLeod, read his name tag, and exclaimed: “Alistair MacLeod, I thought you died?” MacLeod, who had earlier lived in the U.S. for six years, responded: “No, I didn’t die; I just went back to Canada.”
While our neighbours may be less interested in what happens between our borders than we are theirs, the United States, and New York in particular, have long played a significant role in the development and nurturing of Canadian writers. Before Canada had established its own publishing industry, poets, shortstory writers and novelists often looked south of the 49th parallel to find opportunities for publication. As Nick Mount, the fiction editor of The Walrus, has argued, Canadian writing came into its own “not in the backwoods of Ontario ... but in the cafés, publishing offices, and boarding houses of late-19th-century New York.” This is especially true for one of the early prominent Canadian writers to publish in The New Yorker: Morley Callaghan.
Callaghan was born in 1903 in Toronto, and had by the mid ’20s achieved some acclaim by publishing in many of Europe’s more avantgarde magazines. A friend of the Montparnese ex-pat set, he palled around with famous American modernists like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. He also became one of the first fiction writers to regularly publish his stories in The New Yorker.
Though the magazine now has a global subscriber base, and often tackles issues of international concern, in its infancy The New Yorker had a rather parochial point of view, based on an “imaginary map of Manhattan,” which fiction editor William Maxwell defined as “wherever New Yorkers go.” In the 1930s and ’40s, the magazine’s editors would often reject stories set outside New York City, or edit pieces in order to Manhattanize them.
So while Munro sets much of her fiction in rural Huron County, earlier New Yorker authors had to fight to break through geographical restrictions that no longer existed by the time she started publishing in the magazine. Archival drafts of Callaghan’s stories, and letters from his New Yorker editors reveal that the magazine often would add New York-specific details to, or remove details that suggested a Canadian context from, his stories of urban life.
Today the magazine routinely publishes some of the world’s best fiction, including work from writers such as Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie and Junot Diaz. But it was not always so closely associated with the short story; journalist Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925 as a home for sophisticated humour, designed specifically to sell advertising space to high-end New York retailers. Although the magazine as a whole quickly established a distinguished reputation for itself, The New Yorker’s early fiction roster was sparse and consisted of lighter fare. It was Katharine Angell White who first persuaded Ross, who edited the magazine until his death in 1951, to make room for short stories; she solicited stories from Callaghan in her initial attempt to pursue serious literature for the newly minted fiction pages. In 1928, The New Yorker published “An Escapade,” the first of its many Callaghan stories. In its early days, it was The New Yorker that benefitted from Callaghan’s status as an established writer, not the other way around.
As The New Yorker’s reputation for excellence in both journalism and fiction grew, an international readership blossomed around it; this shift in subscribers’ demographics resulted in changes to the magazine’s editorial approach. The practice of only accepting fiction set in New York went out of fashion after the Second World War, around which time the magazine began regularly publishing the work of another envelope-pushing Canadian, Mavis Gallant. Virtually unknown when she published her first story in the magazine, Gallant turned to The New Yorker to launch her literary career because she considered it, according to a 1978 interview, “the best magazine in the world.” At the age of 28, Gallant left Montreal, her hometown, for Paris, where she intended to establish herself as a writer within two years. She did, and spent the rest of her career, from 1951 until her death in 2014, publishing her stories and essays almost exclusive-
with The New Yorker. Gallant called her New Yorker editor William Maxwell “an unexpected ally” and attributed much of her success to his influence. Even so, parsing the archive of her work, one comes across ample and often direct evidence of the tension and conflicts she endured during the process of editing her stories for the magazine. The prudishness Munro would later experience, and the geographical parochialism in The New Yorker’s treatment of the Callaghan stories were also evident in the magazine’s handling of Gallant’s “Orphan’s Progress.”
The 1965 story describes two Montreal sisters who are taken away from their mother’s care and sent to live with their grandmother until her death, at which point the sisters are separated. Gallant left a note in her archives introducing the story and explaining some of the changes her editors requested:
“The first paragraph was considered too sexual for The New Yorker’s readers and, after a long and bickering correspondence, I agreed to change it. It is the only major change I have ever made because of an objection of that kind, and I have always regretted having done so. The story has been anthologized more than once, but not as it was written. One of the many letters I had on the subject contained the imperishable sentence, ‘Perhaps these things go on in Canada, but no American reader would understand it.’ In fact, the incident mentioned did take place, in Connecticut, in 1938.”
Evidence of The New Yorker’s historically insular mindset appear elsewhere in Gallant’s archive; when she wrote an essay for the magazine about a French teacher who had an affair with one of her male students, her editors expressed concern about the fact that she referred to the boys’ parents as Communists. At the time, neither the editorial nor legal departments of the magazine could see how the term “communist” could be used descriptively, rather than as a libellous epithet — this despite the publication’s mostly successful efforts to become truly cosmopolitan. “It’s hard not to dream of seeing one’s self in the same font as John Cheever and Alice Munro,” Rivka Galchen recently said in an email from her residence in New York. Though born in Canada, she was raised almost entirely in the United States, and in many ways her work perfectly embodies the evolving transnational history of Canadians in The New Yorker. She is a member of the newest generation of Canadian writers to be found within the magazine’s prestigious fiction pages. Galchen, David Bezmozgis, and most recently, Sheila Heti have all seen their stories published within the magazine in the past five years.
Galchen says she has “always above all felt like the daughter of Israeli immigrants. That’s the identity that makes the most sense to me.” She feels her relationship with her editors at the magazine is less geographically contentious than Callaghan’s and Gallant’s relationships with The New Yorker. But then again, the world has changed along with the magazine. “My experience with the editorial process at The New Yorker is that they take things as they are,” Galchen says, “and they say yea or nay. It’s not like they say, ‘This would be great if only it were set in Ecuador.’ ”
David Bezmozgis, who was born in Latvia and immigrated to Canada as a child, has published stories in the magazine with overt Toronto settings, as well as the border City of Windsor, Ont. — featuring a world peopled primarily by Russian Jewish immigrants. “Tapka,” the first story in his collection, Natasha and Other Stories, is set in North York, where it introduces a young protagonist, Mark Berman, and his parents, all of whom are learning English and trying to adjust to life in a new country while their neighbours hold on to their former lives by doting on a pet dog.
In publishing Galchen and Bezmozgis’s stories, The New Yorker seems to have moved beyond simplistic distinctions between “Canadian” and “American.” Galchen’s novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and her recent collection of short stories, the somewhat-satirically titled American Innovations, have been eligible, and nominated for, American literary awards and Canadian ones, such as the Governor General’s Award and Scotiabank Giller Prize.
“The main way in which I feel Canadian or American,” Galchen explained, “is that those are both countries with large immigrant populations.” Scholars often discuss Bezmozgis’ work as part of a new generation of Russian Jewish American writers, alongside Gary Shteyngart and Lara Vapnyar, who are also New Yorker contributors.
Unlike Gallant and Munro, Galchen says she has “never been asked to tone down anything” in her New Yorker stories, though her experience of the editorial process shows that the magazine’s editors still work very closely with the writers whose bylines grace their fiction pages. “I work primarily with Willing Davidson,” she says. “Sometimes my stories change very little and sometimes they change quite dramatically. I often feel like Willing finds some door down a littledetailed hallway and suggests opening it, and then it turns out that’s where the story really was hiding.”
“There’s something about my way of writing short stories, different from writing something longer, that somehow necessitates writing in the dark,” she says, “so more than other writers I think, I rely on Willing to up the wattage at the end.” Galchen has come to especially appreciate the top line edits of The New Yorker’s fiction editor, Deborah Triesman, “often those last few word and phrase changes end up becoming the bits I value most.”
Unlike previous authors, who were bound by the guidelines set out in “Theory and Practice of Editing New Yorker Articles,” at least two of Galchen’s New Yorker stories feature writers as protagonists. “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire” depicts a novelist whose husband has left her, and who, unbeknownst to her, has been keeping a blog about their relationship. “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman” takes place at a conference in Florida, and nearly everyone in the story, including the retired actor of the title, is a writer of some kind.
The New Yorker has long had the canny ability to both support authors and leverage its own association with said authors as part of an insular, self-reinforcing literary culture. Both Galchen and Bezmozgis, for example, appeared on the magazine’s 2010 list of Top 20 writers under 40. The very first story in American Innovations — “The Lost Order” — which also appeared in the magazine, is inspired by, and directly refers to “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty,” a story by New Yorker staffer James Thurber that appeared in the magazine in 1939.
Similarly, after Munro’s 2013 Nobel win, the magazine was quick to leverage its history with Canada’s laureate. The media-shy Munro stopped taking calls from interviewers not long after the announcement, and Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, was one of the voices that helped to fill the void left by her silence. Since Munro’s win, Treisman has steadily promoted the magazine’s association with her by participating in interviews, writing columns on the magazine’s website about what it is like to be her editor and reprinting what is perhaps the author’s bestknown short story, “The Bear Came Over the Mountain,” shortly after Munro won the Nobel Prize.
Over the last 90 years, Canadian writers have generally enjoyed a reciprocal, transnational relationship with The New Yorker as an institution. Regardless of these individual authors’ thoughts about national identity — Callaghan considered himself an American in intellectual spirit while Galchen often treats the idea of a singular, stereotypical “American” identity ironically — publishers in Canada have been eager to claim them as Canadian, emphasizing Bezmozgis and Galchen’s ties to Canada in order to promote their books.
Though editorial practices at the magazine shaped the setting and the language used in every individual story — sometimes in ways that these authors didn’t appreciate — Canadian writers, from Alice Munro through to Rivka Galchen, have shaped The New Yorker’s editorial practice on its journey to publishing some of the world’s best fiction. Together, The New Yorker and its authors have slowly moved beyond the magazine’s prudish beginnings, its original geographical restrictions and beyond Canadian or American nationalism.